Flesh and Body: On the Phenomenology of Husserl 9781472594068, 9781441147851, 9781441175236

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Ὡς γὰρ ἕκαστος ἔχει κρᾶσιν μελέων πολυπλάγκτων, τὼς νόος ἀνθρώποισι παρίσταται· τὸ γὰρ αὐτό ἔστιν ὅπερ φρονέει μελέων φύσις ἀνθρώποισιν καὶ πᾶσιν καὶ παντί· τὸ γὰρ πλέον ἐστὶ νόημα. * Parmenides

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Translator’s Introduction Joseph Rivera

Didier Franck began a long and fruitful career upon the 1981 release of his book Chair et corps: sur la phénoménologie de Husserl, which we translate here. Prior to this publication, and before he began lecturing at the University of Paris X Nanterre as a promising philosopher whose potential was evident but still incipient, he devoted himself to studying the phenomenology of his day in its original idiom, a necessary exercise if this German philosophy itself was to be truly grasped in all of its ‘teutonic’ complexity. It is no surprise, then, that the occasion of his first academic contribution was a translation of an important collection of thematic essays written by Eugen Fink (1974) (other than Heidegger, Fink was perhaps Husserl’s most accomplished student). This book would, in the end, prove not only indicative of the Husserlian path Franck would pursue in the ensuing decades, but also of the phenomenological composition of all his thinking, imparting into his work a careful and critical apprehension of the limits and possibilities of phenomenological enquiry itself.1 Even though his doctoral advisor was Paul Ricoeur, under whose guidance was written Chair et corps, early on Franck came under the decisive influence of Jacques Derrida, and much later befriended another elder statesman in the French academy, Michel Henry.2 It is also worth noting that after 1984, when he replaced Derrida at the École normale supérieure (ENS), Franck shared some lecturing responsibilities at Nanterre with a young and fledgling descendant of Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, whose work now enjoys a wide readership and is celebrated especially in America.3 Philosophical discourse in France, when Franck and Marion were just appearing

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on the scene, was beleaguered by the advent of structuralism, but is in large measure today dominated by Husserl and Heidegger and the phenomenological style of thinking they inaugurated, which for many opened up the prospect of the renewal of ‘continental’ philosophy in France. Prior to the ascension of structuralism, the French variety of phenomenology in particular was taken in highly original, if divergent, directions not only by Derrida, Ricoeur and Henry in the early 1960s, but also by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas a generation before. It is perhaps impossible to estimate, then, just how crucially fertile was the reception of Husserl in France just before and after World War II. So much of the philosophical order in France had grown weary from the excesses of either a kind of spiritualism on the one hand or, on the other, a positivism intended to rehabilitate the Cartesian paradigm of mathematics and empirical epistemology. Taking ‘lived experience’ as a departing theme, Husserlian phenomenology functions in philosophical discourse not as a moment of empirical deduction, nor as a speculative narrative about the mind’s noetic powers, but as a return to the philosophical promise to be realized upon thoughtful consideration of the basic experience we have of things ‘in the flesh’ or ‘in incarnate presence’ (leibhaftig, an expression Husserl uses that the French translate as ‘in flesh and bone’).4 Such a movement back to the ‘things themselves’ forsakes the closure of the Cartesian subject. This is because so much of phenomenology, indebted as it is to Husserl, aspires to articulate the ‘intentional’ structure of the experience that is lived out in community with others who, too, are in motion, intending and seeing objects as they are lived. As Husserl himself stated in his well-known Cartesian Meditations, Descartes’ ego, even if it is the manifestly legitimate starting point for philosophical reflection, remains an unduly sterile subject if left to its solitude – precisely because it is in isolation, the permanent expansion of the Cartesian subject beyond itself proposes to be the first step in phenomenology: The transcendental heading, ego cogito, must therefore be broadened by adding one more member. Each cogito, each conscious process, we may also say, ‘means’ something or other and bears in itself, in this manner peculiar to the meant, its particular cogitatum.5

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Intentionality is the basic movement of all consciousness, an ontological feature of the ego that enables Husserl to begin with, but also to broaden, the metaphysics of the Cartesian cogito. Levinas, Ricoeur and Derrida all translated Husserl, introducing key elements of his phenomenology of the cogito into the life of the Parisian academy. And just as thraldom to the ‘postmodern’ spell and the ‘philosophy of difference’ was taking hold amid the events that unfolded in May 1968 at the University of Paris, Husserl’s reception in France involved richly vertiginous polemics about the nature of representational metaphysics and the ‘modern subject’, controversies that were as much moral as philosophical. But Husserl had been embraced in France much earlier, in the 1930s and 40s. Levinas translated, in 1931, the lectures Husserl delivered at the Sorbonne in 1929 that became the Cartesian Meditations. Merleau-Ponty, of course, profited greatly from his close readings of manuscripts in the Husserl archives (which opened in 1939 at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) just as Sartre, no matter how far at a philosophical remove he was from Husserl, considered in his 1936 work La transcendance de l’ego how the Husserlian ‘I’, as an object for thought, opens up a space that is irremediably in relation to ‘transcendence’ and may well evoke a sophisticated discourse on the self that has nothing to do with idealism. It is in this vibrant scholarly context spanning several decades that Franck’s concise, but brilliantly executed, study of Husserl’s concept of the body struck a chord. Suffice it to say, Franck attempted to bring Husserlian phenomenology more fully into view; just so, the book was quickly recognized as both a subtle re-reading of phenomenological enquiry more broadly and a corrective to a construal of the Husserlian ego for which so much Husserl scholarship in particular was culpable: flesh and the element of the concrete, Franck contended, were not abandoned by the transcendental ego and the phenomenological reduction, but rather were operative at the most radical of levels of its constitution of the world, orienting the ego fundamentally around alterity – around the poles of temporality, spatiality and intersubjectivity. Flesh is the medium of all perception, and by force of its unity with the exterior body incorporates under its perceptual form a relation to the other body and ultimately the objective world that surrounds the ego: every cogito bears a relation to something other

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than itself, a cogitatum, and it does so on the basis of its flesh-body, its Leibkörper. Before thematizing some of the more significant interpretative moves Franck makes in his volume on Husserl, it is important to note that Franck appears in recent years to have withdrawn from its principal thesis. His work as a whole circulates in a loop, fortified by a desire to surpass phenomenology only to return to it once more. Gaining a better appreciation of the problematic concepts of space and spatiality in Heidegger (1986),6 Franck finds phenomenology at that moment, as an intellectual tradition, troubling inasmuch as it does not treat the body with the kind of precision that it ought to have cultivated after Heidegger. Franck’s ‘publication hiatus’ of 12 years was suspended with the event of his longest most theoretically demanding book, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God (1998),7 which has just appeared in English translation. In this varied but comprehensive study of Nietzsche, one finds, as an accompaniment to a multitude of close readings of Nietzsche, analyses of Heidegger’s concept of danger, an incisive consideration of contemporary debates about the shifting deployments of metaphysics, an appreciation of the conceptual power of the death of God, a critical apprehension of the Christian notion of flesh and resurrection, and mature and concise comparisons between Husserl and Nietzsche, among other topics, all of which are currently debated in contemporary philosophy of religion. There is one motif, though, that occupies the guiding theme of the whole work, whose intelligibility lends credibility to the intellectual unity of Nietzsche’s work and the Western philosophical tradition itself: the body understood as the ‘guiding thread’ (fil conducteur) of the being of the world itself. More recently Franck has engaged Heidegger once more, this time on explicitly theological grounds. In a difficult, if brief, work entitled Heidegger et le christianisme: l’explication silencieuse (2004),8 Franck focuses on the enigmatic and opaque forays Heidegger makes into the pre-Socratics (especially Anaximander) and the history of Being, and perhaps the silent and indirect explication of faith and Christian experience to which that encounter gives rise. His latest book, however, heralds a return to phenomenology. With a sustained reading of Levinas’ work, he interrogates with Levinas the very scope of phenomenological investigation of otherness and the body.9 Each of Franck’s works constitutes a

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re-reading of Husserl that filters the transcendental ego through other canonical figures, whether Heidegger, Nietzsche or Levinas, who together aid Franck in a reconsideration of the Husserlian ego in view of otherness, and in particular of the temporal structure of body. With Flesh and Body Franck adopts a vantage of flesh in Husserl that accounts for alterity, temporality and intersubjectivity, countering the tendency to reject Husserl solely on the presumption that the phenomenological reduction leads immediately to solipsism or an unpalatable subjective idealism. Franck’s sensitive re-opening of the Husserlian ego is on display most emphatically in the last four chapters of this book, the climax of which is the thesis that temporality and flesh are unified, which of necessity disposes of the notion that the ego is in timeless isolation from the alter ego and the temporal streaming of the world. Chapter 15 is especially rich in analyses of the ‘limits’ between my body and the other’s body and the phenomenological distinctions to be made between ‘shock’ and ‘caress’, the primary concrete modes of exchange between two bodies – a fecund way of looking at the bodily dimension of intersubjectivity that Derrida applauds and to which he devotes some discussion in his late work on the body, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy.10 In the final chapter of Flesh and Body, Franck announces the fundamental thesis of his interpretation of Husserl: ‘My flesh is incorporated within a body because, in itself, flesh is affected by another flesh. Its auto-affection is immediately a heteroaffection’ (p. 165). Yet in later essays on Husserl11 Franck appears to surrender this thesis by indicating that Husserl cannot help but root the ego in a timeless and invariable form, evident as a form because it is ‘pure’, without taint of temporal dilution, for the selfpresence of the ‘living-present’ is timeless subjective origin of all temporal constitution. This marked shift in emphasis regarding Franck’s interpretation of Husserl is due to a more sustained encounter with Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, where Franck thinks that Husserl at least hints at the possibility of a pure and stable ego. A kind of unwarranted egoism creeps into Husserl’s thinking in the form of the concept of ‘self-impression’, which is to be associated with the transcendental form all subjectivity – perhaps Husserl is basically ‘Cartesian’ (i.e. solitude) after all. Though Husserl hardly brings to light the solitude of the primal impression

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deep within the ego, and Franck admits that Husserl tends to ‘leave open possibilities’12 in this regard, Franck nevertheless argues that Husserl anchors the intentional life of the ego in a passive, intransitive primal-presencing – a living present that is invariable. For Franck, the living present accommodates a logic perfectly suited to explain how temporality is possible in the first place. The living present holds within itself as its most pure inner moment the unconstituted flow of temporality, the a priori form of temporality that is immovable (like the bedrock underneath a river that supports the fast flow of the water).13 Franck, naturally, wants to ‘get beyond’ such a phenomenological viewpoint insofar as the Husserlian living present, where intentio and intentum exactly coincide, renders philosophical discourse incapable of bringing into view the embodied subject, and this for obvious reasons: how can I possibly engage with the other, account for the non-ego or the givenness of the world, if I am immovable and inside a homeland without an embodied passageway through which I can step into the alien land? One may challenge whether Franck’s paradigm shift is warranted at all. Perhaps a closer study of the concept of ‘world’ (and the various intonations of that term in Husserl’s vocabulary)14 would have certainly enriched and further corroborated his central claim in Flesh and Body and, perhaps, prevented the move toward his later claim (even if it is a measured claim) that egoism pervades Husserl’s transcendental ego. In no way does this critique undermine the interpretative value of Flesh and Body, but it does call into question the completeness of its argument and highlights the lack of appreciation it has for the complexity of Husserl’s notion of the world. The world is perhaps the greatest phenomenological problem, because the phenomenologist has to look upon the obvious as questionable, as enigmatic, and of henceforth being unable to have any other scientific theme than that of transforming the universal obviousness of the being of the world – for him the greatest of all enigmas – into something intelligible.15 The concept of world, the unity of the lifeworld and the transcendental constitution of the world are all themes in Husserl to which Franck does attend in his volume, and yet they are developed only to the extent that they illumine the nature and function of the

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flesh-and-body composite. But the advantage of Franck’s singular focus on the flesh-and-body relation, we admit, is that he grants to his readers a focused point of entry into Husserl, and for that it is a welcome strategy because the body is often underappreciated or overlooked altogether in Husserl. The great value of this brief volume, therefore, is that it fills a conspicuous gap in Husserl scholarship in the Anglophone world, and further brings to light for contemporary theory the importance of the ‘body’ in all of its temporal, spatial and intersubjective texture. In reading Flesh and Body, one may well benefit from seeing it as a ‘companion’ volume of sorts to Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (and Franck explains why in the closing remarks of his Introduction). Franck devotes considerable space to this work throughout and engages, at key moments, in what appears to be an incremental reading of the Meditations that culminates in a consideration of the Fifth Meditation, where Husserl (in)famously brings his philosophical acuity to bear with meticulous focus on the alter ego. Franck engages aspects of the Fifth Meditation in Chapters 10 to 12, but especially so in Chapters 13 and 14, which are entitled ‘Here and There’ and ‘The Dynamic of the Apperceptive Transfer’, respectively. These two chapters prepare the reader for the perceptive and scrupulous evaluation of temporality and the body in the last two chapters; these chapters constitute perhaps the most fertile and original analyses of the book. The reader will also incalculably benefit from Franck’s attentiveness to the three volumes consecrated to the transcendental problematic of intersubjectivity in the Husserliana series, volumes XIII–XV. Because these invaluable manuscripts are not yet in English, the sense of the true import of them for Husserl’s (and phenomenology’s) commitment to intersubjectivity is often lost on the Anglophone reader, making their elucidation in this volume especially enlightening. Even though Franck is to be credited for carrying out a phenomenological analysis of flesh in view of these three volumes, there is no inspired reason why, to put it directly, adequate scrutiny is not paid to Husserl’s Ideas II. Franck may disabuse us of the presumption that Ideas II is the absolute key to apprehending the modes of incarnation in Husserl. He may do so by pointing out that the most significant passages in Ideas II are only those that treat the mechanics of touch; Franck does in fact discuss this well-known passage derived from §36 of Ideas II (pp. 82ff. and

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pp. 120ff.). But what of the way in which Husserl understood the soul (Seele) and the spiritual world of flesh? How might an analysis of sensation in relation to both Leib and Körper be instructive for how we approach Husserl’s concept of incarnation? These and many other questions remain outstanding precisely because Franck does not incorporate within his analysis of flesh more lessons on display in Ideas II. In other words, this gap in Franck’s book highlights an incommensurability between the ‘analytic of incarnation’ he advances and the idiomatic arrangement of Leib (subjective body) and Körper (objective body) that occupies so much of Ideas II. I am not contending that if Franck highlighted all of the key themes in Ideas II that his interpretation of Husserl would be greatly altered, or that the ‘analytic of incarnation’ would assume a fundamentally new philosophical tone. It is, instead, to maintain that any phenomenological examination of incarnation will have to be fully informed by the phenomenological articulation of the Leibkörper in Ideas II. As we have mentioned, the final two chapters cast the flesh– body relation in a temporal light, which yields some radical results: ‘The flesh – as both my own and not my own [propre et impropre] – gives rise to time. This signifies, at the very least, that flesh – the sense of flesh – does not derive from temporality’ (p. 165). What Franck indicates here, and begins to spell out only in outline form, is that the analytic of flesh is not derivative of temporality but that temporality, as the product of two fleshes’ interconnection, is derivative of flesh. Temporality, despite what Heidegger may contend, is not most basic. In recent years there have been several secondary studies of temporality in Husserl that could be read as supplements to Franck’s subtle investigation of the relation that joins together flesh and time as two mutual poles of lived experience. Nicolas de Warren’s book comes to mind, as does James Mensch’s study, both released since 2009. Mensch’s book contains a chapter on ‘Embodied Temporality’ that may promote a fruitful contrast between two established interpreters of Husserl.16 A final way in which one may contextualize Franck is to situate him within the ‘theological turn’ that has aroused considerable debate since the 1990s. Named among this cadre of French intellectuals are familiar figures such as Ricoeur, Levinas, Derrida, Marion, Henry, Lacoste, etc. Franck maintains a complicated relationship with this movement in that he is specifically not interested in

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religious questions, even though he addresses them through study of figures such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. Franck, like Levinas and Derrida, is of Jewish background, but unlike them he does not consider his Jewishness a contributing factor to his work. Not exactly an advocate of the ‘theological turn’, and certainly not sympathetic to an explicitly Christian dialogue between theological and philosophical discourse, Franck is nevertheless accommodating of a basic level of communication between those two great meta-disciplines. While personal colleagues with Marion, and at one time with Henry, who are both adamantly Catholic, Franck has remained committed to an open atheism that is aware of the profound intellectual debt the West owes to Christianity – but this is an attitude that is, to be sure, interested in releasing philosophy from its attachment to theology. This is on display best in his book Nietzsche and the Shadow of God. A few words about the translation itself are in order. First of all, the many quotes from Husserl follow the standard English translation, when available. In some cases, however, we have slightly altered those translations in an attempt to make Franck’s argument more intelligible. As for citations of texts that remain untranslated, we have provided our own English translations throughout. It should also be noted that there are a number of divergences between the French and English translations of Husserl, and we have sought to strike a balance between them that, on the one hand, remains close to Franck’s text but, on the other hand, employs as much of the English lexicon as possible. A few terms are worth noting here. The French translation of Husserl uses the term donné where the English uses ‘datum’. We have translated this usually as the ‘given’ in order to highlight its connection to ‘givenness,’ but have resorted to ‘datum’ whenever it helps to show the connection to a particular passage that is being cited in the argument. There are a couple of other divergences to mention. We have retained the prefix archi- from Franck’s text, which has the same role as the term ‘primal’ in the English translation and the prefix ‘Ur-’ in the original German text. In the context of temporality, we have rendered the French écoulement as ‘flowing’ instead of following the English translation’s expression ‘running-off’. One final note the reader may find helpful is the convention that we have employed when translating the French phrase propre. This can mean many different things; however, it has been translated

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here as ‘ownness’ or ‘sphere of ownness’ for the sake of continuity with English translation of Husserl’s expression Eigenheitsphäre, to which the French expression is related. We need to emphasize the choices made with respect to a few key terms that are central to Franck’s work as a whole: incarnation, flesh and body. Where the standard translation typically uses the expression ‘in person’ to translate the German leibhaftig, this can be translated as ‘in the flesh’ or ‘incarnately present’. Without noting this, it can become difficult to follow the thread of Franck’s argument, which is specifically based on how Husserl understands incarnation and the role of flesh. With respect to Husserl’s use of the word Leib, there is a profound difference between Husserl in the French and English translations. Typically translated in French as la chair or flesh, it is almost always understood in English as ‘animate organism’17 (as in Cairns’ translation) or Body (with an upper-case B), while Körper is translated as a simple lower-case ‘body’.18 We sought to maintain this distinction between flesh [Leib] and body [Körper] rigorously in order to make it easier to follow Franck’s argumentation. This translation is due in large part to the support lent to the project by Didier Franck himself. He has patiently and carefully read over the manuscript in its entirety and offered invaluable comments that have improved the translation greatly; his presence is felt on every page of the translation itself. Thanks go to Institut universitaire de France for the generous financial support that hastened the translation, and to Professor Franck, who is chiefly responsible for allocating such financial provisions. Special thanks are due also to Professor Franck’s patience in answering translation queries and in taking time to retrieve all required original texts from Husserl’s manuscripts in the Husserl Archives of Paris, saving valuable time. He has been available from the beginning until the end and more than liberal with his time and support. Above all, I would like express to my wife, Amanda, my profound love and gratitude for giving me the sustained time it took to complete this translation while simultaneously completing the production of my doctoral dissertation. I have the deepest appreciation for her unfailing support in all that I do, without which I would not have found the fortitude to carry out this project to its end. Finally, my thanks are due to Continuum for their support and enthusiasm for the publication of Franck’s monograph, and especially to Rachel Eisenhauer for her consistency and generosity.

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Introduction Regardless of how one defines thought – presuming that this is even possible today and is not itself precisely the greatest difficulty – and regardless of what tasks are assigned to thought – whether this is to think that we are not yet thinking, to think that what is most thought-provoking is that we are not yet thinking, or to think that thinking means nothing – the exercise of thought presupposes a deepened, renewed and continual definition of the essence of philosophy. Thinking can take place and will only ever be able to take place in memory of philosophy. Even if we go so far as to renounce or to overcome metaphysics in order to leave thought to itself (in so doing, we still retain a relation to metaphysics), this renunciation and abandonment do not lead to an abandonment pure and simple, which is to say, to vacuity. They will always entail at least some knowledge of that from which they distance themselves. Forgetfulness here is the highest form of memory. In light of the end of philosophy, the closure of metaphysics, it is necessary to recognize that thought is on its way and still to come after the completion of modern philosophy. Modern philosophy is originally and fundamentally Cartesian. Beyond the differences that separate their respective concepts of history, philosophy and the history of philosophy, Hegel and Heidegger place Descartes at the origin of the last epoché of philosophy.1 Descartes establishes the cogito as the absolute and certain foundation of all truth and then elevates method to the dignity of a theme. The paradigm of this method is mathematics, which leads modern philosophy to take the form of a mathesis universalis that is subjectively founded: the science of consciousness and formal mathesis. As a precondition, thought demands the elucidation of this ultimate figure; it thus requires a repetition. If Husserlian phenomenology constitutes

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such a repetition – the deepest and most refined one – then it is necessary to return to it continually. Husserl too has forged his own ‘poetic invention of the history of philosophy’,2 according to which Descartes is the ‘primally founding genius of all modern philosophy’.3 This is the case in two respects, due to an equivocity hidden in his thinking, which provide the rhythm and articulation of all philosophy leading up to the emergence of phenomenology. On the one hand, Descartes established a systematic rationalism, one more physical than mathematical, inasmuch as he required philosophical knowledge to be absolutely founded and to be based on an immediate, adequate and apodictic knowledge. By discovering a new ontological sphere, the ego cogito, he established an absolute transcendental subjectivity that precedes in principle every conceivable being. In other words, he brought about the possibility of a transcendental question of the world by returning and having recourse to an origin whose mode of being is non-worldly in an unprecedented sense. But on the other hand, by interpreting the ego as a mens sive animus sive intellectus, as a psyche – or, in short, as being-in-the-world – he gives free reign to psychologism, empiricism and scepticism. Descartes is at the origin of transcendental psychologism, a ‘displacement that falsifies everything’, and this ‘falsification’ only becomes perceptible from the vantage point of transcendental phenomenology. This diagnosis signifies that philosophy is a theory of knowledge, that is, of a knowing subject in its relation to a known object. But if the soul is the residue of the abstraction from the body, then after this abstraction it appears as a complement to the body and its meaning retains a reference to the physical world. One is thus led to turn the knowledge of the physical world into a physical event itself, to grant that knowledge possesses the same mode of being as its object: this is the sceptical ‘bankruptcy’ of philosophy and science. If Descartes gave rise to psychologism, this is not due primarily to identifying the soul with the transcendental ego. This identification comes from the restriction of the epoché to a doubt that is only universal as an attempt to doubt,4 since the perceiving ego is proved to be indubitable. And in the final analysis, this restriction originates from the very question posed by Descartes: how can one acquire certain knowledge of external things? Husserl poses a question that stands prior to it: how can consciousness go

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outside itself to posit things as transcendent?5 The problem is no longer to ensure objectivity but to understand it. The reduction becomes necessary through the central problem: the enigma of transcendence. This problem is announced from the very outset of descriptive phenomenology. In the context of a book review in 1903, Husserl issued the following warning: Phenomenology therefore must not be designated as ‘descriptive psychology’ without some further qualification. In the rigorous and true sense it is not descriptive psychology at all. Its descriptions do not concern lived experiences, or classes thereof, of empirical persons; for of persons – of myself and of others, of lived experiences which are ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ – it knows nothing, assumes nothing. Concerning such matters it poses no questions, attempts no definitions, makes no hypotheses. In phenomenological description one views that which, in the strongest of senses, is given: lived experience, just as it is in itself. One analyses, for example, the thing appearance, not that which appears via the appearance; and one refuses to consider the apperception in virtue of which appearance and that which appears come into correlation with the ego to which the appearing thing appears.6 Regardless of the important nuances that the opening on to the constitutive dimension may bring to this project, it is clear that phenomenology reduces all factuality and describes the pure sense of knowledge, of exteriority, etc. If one understands the theory of knowledge in the traditional manner as a problem about the reality of the external world, then phenomenology is its necessary precondition. The metaphysical neutrality of the Logical Investigations has the positive meaning of establishing the juridical priority of phenomenology over all philosophy. And, as strange as it may seem, the passage to transcendental idealism will not contradict this antecedence; quite the contrary, it will broaden its scope and confirm its validity. Phenomenological description does not have to do with the empirical, nor is its principle empirical. It involves seeing, to be sure, but the seeing and establishing of essences; it describes the pure sphere of the a priori. This requires a twofold broadening: (1) a broadening of the a priori through the recognition of a material or

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contingent a priori on the basis of which the restriction of mathesis universalis solely to the domain of the formal will be able to be raised; (2) the broadening of the concepts of intuition, perception and the object through the discovery of categorical intuition. In spite of the brevity of these indications, they are sufficient to show the degree to which Husserl’s phenomenology fulfils the modern philosophy which is its ‘secret nostalgia’,7 as he says. Husserl’s 1923–4 course on first philosophy commences legitimately with a critical history of philosophy that is teleologically guided by transcendental phenomenology. But these brief indications also suffice to offer a sense of its limitations: the project remains the same and the absolutization of consciousness re-establishes a familiar metaphysical position. Far from excusing this as a case of negligence, we see a reason to insist on this point. Does this situation not, in effect, facilitate our comprehension of the end of philosophy and the beginning of thought? The more radical the knowledge of subjectivity and its epoché becomes, the more radical the risk and the reward of leaving subjectivity behind. And what would be a better place to acquire this knowledge than where subjectivity is thematized in its most brilliant productions? To put it differently, the better we read Husserl, the better we can evaluate Heidegger. This proposition does not derive simply from the history of philosophy as a regional discipline. After having established the overall need for an interpretation of phenomenology, questions of procedure now arise. How can we embark upon such an effort? What guiding clue should be followed? What text should be kept, if most of Husserl’s books have the exemplary and programmatic status of ‘introductions’? Nothing can be done here without making decision in advance. The matter of phenomenology, its theme, is transcendental subjectivity in the full scope of its constituting work.8 This means that the Cartesian Meditations is the title for all of Husserl’s research, and moreover, he himself regarded it as his major work.9 In a letter to Roman Ingarden dated 19 March 1930, he states: This is to be the main work of my life, an abridgment of my philosophy I have developed, a fundamental work of method and of a philosophical problematic. It is for me, at least, in light of the conclusion and ultimate clarity that I have developed, something with which I can die in peace.10

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In fact, the whole of the transcendental sphere is very systematically articulated therein; its various lacunae are explored; different reductions are practised and put into relation with one another; the specificity of intentional analysis is clarified over the long course of its implementation. All of the phenomenological problems receive an architectonic and stratified delineation, even though consideration of them could have been deferred and referred to previous or subsequent elaborations. But, most importantly, the phenomenology of the constitution of the ego by and for itself coincides with phenomenology in general, and it is never taken as far as it is there. This applies mainly to the Fifth and final Meditation, which alone is almost as important as the first four together. Husserl echoes this: the aim of the Fifth Meditation is not the intentional elucidation of the other, of ‘Einfühlung’, and it especially does not seek to demonstrate the existence of others.11 Instead, the Fifth Meditation aims to give meaning to the project of elevating philosophy to the rank and dignity of a rigorous, absolutely founded science. To do this, it deploys the reduction to its most extreme limits, which leads to an ultimate determination of the transcendental field and to the intentional clarification of the objectivity of the world and of all objectivity. This commences with the objectivity of ideal objects and of ideality in general, which are so essential to phenomenology. In short, the Fifth Meditation deals with the objectivity of the object, thus raising the question of the being of intentionality. For those reasons as well as other ones that I will bring up and attempt to justify later, this interpretation will be centred on the fifth and final Meditation, entitled, ‘Uncovering of the Sphere of Transcendental Being12 as Monadological Intersubjectivity.’13

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CHAPTER ONE

Self-Givenness and Incarnate Givenness Here, as elsewhere generally, phenomenology is introduced in the gap between fact and essence. This gap gives rise to and opens its field of investigation. The initial fact is historical and describes a particular situation: the progress of the positive sciences is hindered due to the obscurity of their foundation; the meaning of philosophy is its unity, but it has fragmented and lost its unity with regard to the definition of its goals, its problems or its methods. Certainly, the label of philosophy continues to be used, but instead of a serious discussion among conflicting theories that, in their very conflict, demonstrate the intimacy with which they belong together, the commonness of their underlying convictions, and the unswerving belief in a true philosophy, we have a pseudo-reporting and a pseudo-criticizing, a mere semblance of philosophizing seriously with and for one another.1 Moreover, if religious faith is just a lifeless convention, then a new faith in an autonomous philosophy and science risks being relegated to insignificance, in turn. European humanity – and Europe is the geographic name for philosophical rationality – is in crisis. A fact has its own essence and the recognition of a fact implies the knowledge of its essence. On the basis of what definition of the essence of philosophy does Husserl provide this factual and

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historical description? Philosophy means the universal unity of the sciences based on an absolute foundation, that is to say, a foundation which is immediate, apodictic and whose evidence excludes all conceivable doubt. The intuition of an essence prescribes on its own, so to speak, a reconstruction and requires a new beginning. The eidos designates a telos.2 Despite its historicity, this situation is not unique because it reproduces and repeats the situation that Descartes faced. Husserl asks, ‘In this unhappy present, is not our situation similar to the one encountered by Descartes in his youth?’3 Without this repetition, perhaps there would be no way to provide access to the eidos of historicity. This repetition proves to be an awareness of a crisis that profoundly unites both distress and resolve.4 The return to Descartes is not the same as a return to Cartesianism, that is to say, to its metaphysical theses;5 instead it is a return of the self to itself. The Meditations provides an unsurpassable model of this return due to the radical theoretical freedom that animates that work. The turning back to the ego cogito, a true beginning, leads to a solipsistic way of philosophizing, as Husserl notes from the outset. What is the meaning of this solipsism? How can it gain the status of an objection which threatens to undermine transcendental phenomenology as a whole? These questions must first be elucidated by following the development of the first four Meditations. The ego cogito, as a beginning in principle, cannot be confused with a factual point of departure. Its point of departure is the idea of authentic science, which is borrowed from the actual sciences handed down by the tradition. And, in order not to presuppose what these sciences include, not even a scientific norm which would refer to a system of logic or a theory of science, the idea of such a science is to be retained only as a pure hypothesis and a pure possibility. This conversion of fact into possibility already initiates the series of reductions. The idea of a science with an absolute foundation is not to be confused with a scientifically constituted ideal, like the mathematical physics which Descartes and Kant take as their model. From the outset, this would cover over the transcendental motif by preventing one from seeing that, instead of being an ultimate apodictic premise for a sequential chain of deductions made ordine geometrico, the ego cogito is the name of an absolute ontological sphere open to experience and to intuition.6 Having reduced facticity in this way, this sphere remains a general

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and vague idea that needs to be brought out more distinctly. No explication in general is possible without a second act that revives it [un revivre], that is, without a subjectivity that responds to it by responding to itself. By excluding all speculative thinking, one must ‘livingly carry out this activity and determine its immanent sense on the ground of direct analysis’.7 The idea of science can only be explicated intentionally, that is, as a noematic phenomenon. What, in its pure sense, is the intention which traverses and animates scientific effort? What is the teleological idea that is constitutive of genuine science? It is the idea of a systematic series of true judgements that are founded on each other. ‘True judgements’ means that they are omni-temporal and intersubjective and, as evident, they are infinitely repeatable as the ‘same’. Evidence is the sense of science. The intentional analysis of evidence is not deployed immediately for its own sake in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, which moves rapidly toward the search for an apodictic and first evidence. Intentional analysis only begins to become a theme with the opening of the problem of constitution which concerns how lived experience [le vécu] relates to its correlate: reality. By allowing reality to be integrated into the life of the ego, evidence will confirm simultaneously solipsism and phenomenological idealism. The principle that guides all the analyses of evidence subsequent to the Logical Investigations is very clearly stated in §21 of Ideas I: ‘Every judging process of seeing such as, in particular, seeing unconditionally universal truths, likewise falls under the concept of intuitive givenness …’.8 Intuitive givenness – or the givenness of the things themselves – is the most general characteristic of all evidence, prior to the distinction between what is adequate or inadequate, assertoric or apodictic, pure or impure, predicative or pre-predicative. Judiciary evidence – the intuitive givenness of a state of affairs – always refers back to the evidence upon which the judgement is made, to the evidence of substrates. This means that the original mode of givenness of the things themselves is ultimately perception.9 But, how should perception be described? Perceptual evidence is, according to the Sixth Logical Investigation, tantamount to a fulfilled intention. The definitive and final fulfilment of the intention by intuitions thus accomplishes the true adequatio rei et intellectus. The extension of the concepts of intuition and perception to the categorical sphere allows, on

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the basis of the sensible, categorical acts to give their objects in the same way as sensible perceptions give theirs: in the flesh (en chair). ‘Any perceiving consciousness has the peculiarity of being a consciousness of the own presence “in person” of an individual Object.’10 Incarnate givenness does not apply only to real objects. Although the first edition the Logical Investigations (1900–1) did not yet characterize the givenness of transcendent things in this way and reserves adequate perception to incarnation alone, this is one of the points that Husserl systematically modified in the second edition (1913–20), which was contemporaneous with Ideas I. The latter work affirms from the outset: ‘Seeing an essence is therefore intuition; and if it is seeing in the pregnant sense and not a mere and perhaps vague making present, the seeing is an originarily presenting intuition, seizing upon the essence in its “personal” selfhood.’11 The incarnate givenness that defines evidence in general (prior to all critical reflection and thus prior to the problem of apodicticity, for example) is not to be taken as a metaphor, a way of speaking, or as something peculiar to Husserl’s style. Such a view would derive from two presuppositions whose root is perhaps the same: (1) the presupposition of trivial concepts of metaphor, of speaking, and of style, each of which neglect the role of flesh in the Husserlian analysis of language; (2) the presupposition of a phenomenological state of affairs that exists in itself and is disconnected from any relation to the flesh. Now, with respect to the latter presupposition, all of Husserl’s analyses affirm that the flesh accompanies each perception. In incarnate givenness, the flesh is always both given and giving [donnée et donatrice]. Would an adumbration, which characterizes perception of a transcendent thing, have its full sense, if the subject were not an embodied subject [sujet de chair] who is able to move around the thing, to move closer or further away from it? Would the horizon have its full sense – at least, with respect to this level of description which excludes the constitution of immanent temporality – if the subject were not an ‘I can’ and an ‘I can move’.12 Not all self-givenness is necessarily incarnated, but self-givenness in the flesh is its highest mode, its telos. In one of his few analyses of Husserlian phenomenology and more specifically to the basic constitution of intentionality, Heidegger, with respect to the perception of a thing, carefully distinguishes between self-givenness and incarnate self-givenness:

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The perceived as such has the feature of bodily presence [Leibhaftigkeit]. In other words, the entity which presents itself as perceived has the feature of being bodily-there. Not only is it given as itself, but as itself in its bodily presence. There is a distinction in mode of givenness to be made between the bodily-given and the self-given. Let us clarify this distinction for ourselves by setting it off from the way in which something merely represented is there. Representing is here understood in the sense of simple envisaging, simply bringing something to mind. I can now envisage the Weidenhauser bridge; I place myself before it, as it were. This bridge is itself given. I intend the bridge itself and not an image of it, no fantasy, but it itself. And yet it is not bodily given to me. It would be bodily given if I go down the hill and place myself before the bridge itself. This means that what is itself given need not be bodily given, while conversely anything which is bodily given is itself given. Bodily presence is a superlative mode of the self-givenness of an entity.13 And a little further, he continues: When we start from simple perception, let us reaffirm that the authentic moment in the perceivedness of the perceived is that in perception the perceived entity is bodily there. In addition to this feature, another moment of every concrete perception of a thing in regard to its perceivedness is that the perceived thing is always presumed in its thing-totality.14 There are several factors that motivate these extended quotations of Heidegger’s course in 1925. First, based on the model of the perception of a transcendent thing, Heidegger clearly brings to light a difference between two modes of givenness, that is to say, a phenomenological difference. It is, moreover, a hierarchical difference in which one of these modes necessarily implies the other. But, as with Husserl, the question of the sense of flesh is not posed. Second, to affirm that the pertinent feature of perception is incarnation – note that Heidegger does not speak here of incarnate presence – amounts to aligning himself with the transcendental idealism of Ideas I, since the perception of transcendent things was

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never characterized as incarnate before then.15 This opens on to two sets of questions. (1) The first set of questions concerns the development of Husserl’s idealism and its motivations. Is there a link between incarnate perception and the passage to idealism, and if so, what is it? It is commonly said that the discovery of a new sense of immanence – as intentional – the discovery of the irreal inclusion of the noema in the noesis made the objective term of the intentional relation phenomenologically accessible. This subsequently authorized a metaphysical ‘decision’ and the abandonment of the initial neutrality proposed in Logical Investigations. In what sense is the transformation of the concept of immanence tied to incarnate perception? How did such a transformation become necessary? It is imposed phenomenologically, which is to say under the pressure of the phenomena themselves. The first or traditional sense of immanence ‘is in me, the beginner will say at this point, and the transcendent is outside of me’.16 This definition is based on the distinction between inside and outside and not on a phenomenological difference between two modes of givenness. In a very general way, it could be said that the Husserlian analysis of consciousness replaces the concepts of internal and external perception with those of adequate and inadequate perception based solely on the distinction between different types of intuition. Phenomenology begins with the domain of evidence, understood in terms of what is actually immanent to conscious phenomena. The criterion of immanence is incarnate presence.17 An excerpt from the first edition of the Fifth Investigation attests to this and is reinforced by the changes to the second edition: The ‘self-evidence’ usually attributed to inner perception, shows it to be taken to be an adequate perception, one ascribing nothing to its objects that is not intuitively presented, and given as a real part (reell) of the perceptual experience, and one which, conversely, is intuitively present and posits its objects just as they are in fact experienced in and with their perception. Every perception is characterized by the intention of grasping its object as present, and in propria persona. [To this intention perception corresponds with complete perfection, achieves adequacy, if the object in it is itself actually present, and in the strictest sense present in propria persona, is exhaustively apprehended as that

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which it is, and is therefore itself a real (reell) factor in our perceiving of it].18 Actual inclusion and incarnate givenness are initially joined together here. But after it is recognized that, in perception, things are given to me in the flesh,19 the two notions need to be separated and the concept of immanence must be transformed. If the transcendent thing is given in the flesh, flesh itself cannot be identified with the lived experience in which the transcendent thing is adumbrated. But can one conceive the thing (res) outside of any relation to lived experience or to consciousness? And can one conceive this relation, in turn, as irreal? If the sceptical tradition (essentially Hume) responds negatively to the first question, intentionality is the solution to the second one. Put otherwise, the thing only has a sense as something intended, as an intentional relation to transcendence, and as a relation that is given in the flesh within the lived-experience itself. If this relation is identical with the lived-experience and if its objective term – the noema – is intentionally included in it, then this new sense of immanence renders the concept of incarnate perception phenomenologically conceivable. Flesh thus becomes the medium of the phenomenological regard, prior to any distinction between immanence and transcendence. As the site of all givenness, the mere recall of Husserl’s ‘principle of principles’ suffices to establish this point: No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principles of all principles: that every original presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its ‘incarnate’ actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.20 The original intuition is incarnate givenness. Prior to the opposition of immanence and transcendence – that is to say, prior to the most radical difference that exists between consciousness and the world or between lived-experience and the thing – this is verified by an eidetic law of consciousness that guides the reduction: ‘Anything physical which is given “in incarnate

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presence” can be non-existent; no mental process which is given “in the flesh” can be non-existent.’21 Indeed, if flesh is found to be on both sides of this fundamental difference, then flesh itself escapes from this difference and even makes it possible.22 Is this to say that flesh is irreducible or already reduced? Would it be located at the origin of the world itself? Would it even be responsible for the bringing to light of the world itself? Let’s set aside these dilemmas for the moment because they presuppose an understanding of the unity of the different senses of flesh. (2) The second set of questions exceeds the framework of this study, though it indicates one of its long-range goals. These questions concern Heidegger himself and, more specifically, the relation between the intentional analysis of consciousness and the existential analytic of Dasein. A brief note in Being and Time sketches this confrontation by discretely establishing the outline of an interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology. This occurs in §69 – ‘The temporality of Being-in-the-world and the problem of the transcendence of the world’ – where Heidegger writes: The thesis that all cognition has ‘intuition’ as its goal, has the temporal meaning that all cognizing is making present. Whether every science, or even philosophical cognition, aims at a makingpresent, need not be decided here. Husserl uses the expression ‘make present’ in characterizing sensory perception. Cf. his Logische Untersuchungen, first edition, 1901, vol. II, pp. 588 and 620. This ‘temporal’ way of describing this phenomenon must have been suggested by the analysis of perception and intuition in general in terms of the idea of intention. That the intentionality of ‘consciousness’ is grounded in the ecstatical unity of Dasein, and how this is the case, will be shown in the following Division.23 a. The relation between intentional consciousness and Dasein is thus a founding relation which is revealed in the section ‘Time and Being’ that interrupts Being and Time, that is, the point where everything ‘turns around’ (umkehrt).24 b. In this context, and taking into account the necessarily radical character of this foundation, the reference to perception signifies that it is taken to play a decisive role in Husserl’s phenomenology.

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c. The essential characteristic of sense perception is not, contrary to what was said earlier, incarnation but the temporal determination of its presentation. Is that to say that incarnation can be traced back to presentation, and thus that flesh can be traced back to temporality? d. It is thus no longer the position of Ideas I that is considered, but that of the Logical Investigations of 1901. As such, an interpretation of the Husserlian trajectory is suggested, which will be explicitly formulated much later by Heidegger, in 1962, in a seminar on Time and Being: ‘Husserl himself who came close to the true question of being in Logical Investigations – above all in the Sixth Investigation – could not persevere in the philosophical atmosphere of that time. He came under the influence of Natorp and turned to transcendental phenomenology which reached its first culmination in the Ideas. The principle of phenomenology was thus abandoned.’25 In this interpretation, it is the ‘atmosphere’ and the ‘influences’ that prevent Husserl that prevent Heidegger from raising the question of whether this turn – presuming that there was one – was motived by the phenomenological principle of a return to the things themselves. Let’s suppose for a moment that it is not possible to found intentional consciousness on ek-static temporality, which is the meaning of the being of Dasein. And let’s suppose that it is not possible – since intentional consciousness is essentially perceptual – to lead incarnation back to temporality. What would be the consequences then? This would challenge, first of all, the original character of the starting point of Heidegger’s question of being; second, it would question his analysis of worldhood; and finally, it would challenge the existential analytic in its entirety, both as a fundamental ontology and as the destruction of the history of traditional ontology. In short, if it does not challenge the question of being as such, at least it will challenge its form in Being and Time. Through a very complex series of questions, all of Heidegger’s meditation will gradually become involved. But to say that it is ‘involved’ is not yet to say that it is overturned, critiqued, etc. Under what conditions could incarnation be traced back to temporality? Let’s remain within the context of the existential analytic which Heidegger considers to be fundamental. The

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incarnation of Dasein is phenomenologically inseparable from its spatiality.26 Is it possible to derive the spatiality of Dasein from its temporality? §70 of Being and Time is devoted to the topic, yet it then becomes profoundly and powerfully enigmatic to note the following later remark in Time and Being: ‘The attempt in Being and Time, §70, to derive human spatiality from temporality is untenable.’27 To circumscribe this question, let’s note that Heidegger’s statements about the flesh cannot easily be gathered into a unified position. On the one hand, especially in his course on Nietzsche, the flesh is reduced to animality28 or to subjectivity29 without ever being thought on its own. On the other hand, the body is distinguished from animality.30 His understanding of the flesh is either subordinated to his understanding of life,31 or conversely, phenomenologically, his understanding of life is guided by his understanding of the flesh.32 Stranger yet is the following declaration: ‘The manner of understanding that accompanies it [the animalistic in humans] is something that metaphysics up till now has not touched upon.’33 It credits metaphysics with a ‘not yet’ that can become its future, but all of his thinking of being seeks to overcome, or even to abandon, metaphysics. The interpretation of these texts calls for a ‘repetition’ of the existential analytic that is able to understand how and in what sense ‘Dasein harbours the intrinsic possibility for being factically dispersed into bodiliness and thus into sexuality’ and ‘a primordial bestrewal [Streuung], which is in a quite definite respect a dissemination [Zerstreuung]’,34 once one accepts the irreducibility of spatiality to temporality. If transcendence discovers its origin in temporality, then this question needs to be reopened. On the one hand, the existential concept of transcendence seeks to unfold the radical implications of intentionality. On the other hand, the sense of intentionality is formed in the context of an analysis of perception, and it does not seem like the full depth of its sense can be attained without a thematization of the flesh. It thus appears to be necessary to proceed with an analysis of the sense and function of the flesh.

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CHAPTER TWO

Science as Egology The purpose of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations is to elevate philosophy to the rank and dignity of a rigorous science, that is, to the idea of true science. If evidence and its correlate – the truth – are the telos of all scientific activity in general, then it is concerned with evidence and truths that are repeatable as the same, valid once and for all and for everyone. To underscore a constitutive connection of ideality, they are both omnitemporal and intersubjective. Even when this ideal cannot actually be attained, science as a noematic phenomenon will still be oriented toward and by this idea, which is its sense. The eidos of this science is a normative and horizonal telos, one that is prescriptive. Husserl states: According to intention, therefore, the idea of science and philosophy involves an order of cognition, proceeding from intrinsically earlier to intrinsically later cognitions; ultimately, then, a beginning and a line of advance that are not to be chosen arbitrarily but have their basis ‘in the nature of things themselves’.1 As a systematic series of statements founded and accepted on the basis of having been, either immediately or not, drawn from the evidence, all science in general – and first of all, philosophy – must be rooted in one or more pieces of evidence that carry the stamp of absolute priority. What, then, is evidence? What conditions must it satisfy? Husserl seems to follow the Cartesian path: he casts into doubt all established knowledge and seeks an indubitable, fixed point.

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The differences, though subtle, are decisive. On the one hand, the reduction (to which we will return momentarily) does not operate by doubt: it never implies a negation. It is definitive and universal, inasmuch as it also includes the psyche. On the other hand, truth and reality are the noematic correlates of evidence. According to Husserl, evidence requires an immense work of clarification – which is the task of intentional analysis – that Descartes never undertook, given that he was overly assured about the sense of being and of reality. This clarification begins with a distinction between types of evidence, whose importance appears much later. The perfection of evidence can be understood in two ways: first, evidence is perfect when intuition comes to fill the intention, or conversely, when the signifying intentions do not exceed intuitive givenness; second, evidence is perfect when its object, as posited to exist, withstands the test of imaginary annihilation. Perfection can signify either adequation or apodicticity, though the latter can belong to inadequate evidence as well. The question of the beginning of science thus takes the following form: is there an evidence that is prior in principle to all other conceivable evidence and that possesses ‘at least a recognizable apodictic content, which would have to give us some being that is firmly secured “once for all”, or absolutely, by virtue of its apodicticity’?2 At the threshold of the reduction, note that Husserl drops the ‘and for everyone’. The reduction is pivotal and the permanent theme of Husserl’s entire enterprise. It is the pure origin of all meaning and opens the phenomenological ‘domain’. In contrast with other expositions of it, here it is very rapidly introduced and put to use. This is done under the constraints of apodicticity which can only be formulated on the presupposition of the pre-givenness of the field of transcendental experience.3 The reason for Husserl’s brevity here is surely to be found in his assumption of the validity of the Cartesian heritage.4 What is the first apodictic evidence? Is it the evidence of what is there, constantly given in experience, the world as the universe of objects, the world within which I exist and remain, the world to which the established sciences continually return as their ground? But the necessary existence of the world is not required by its own givenness; the argument outlined in the first Meditation faithfully reproduces the one in §49 of Ideas I. It can be the case that the flux of lived-experiences is no longer guided by the world, for ‘It is quite conceivable that experience, because of conflict,

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might dissolve into illusion not only in detail … In short, that there might no longer be any world.’5 The evidence of the world is a simple factum and thus cannot make a claim to apodicticity. Is it the case that the entirety of being is only a ‘coherent dream’? Husserl writes: At this point, following Descartes, we make the great reversal that, if made in the right manner, leads to transcendental subjectivity: the turn to the ego cogito as the ultimate and apodictically certain basis for judgements, the basis on which any radical philosophy must be grounded.6 The natural ontological belief in the world is the object of a suspension which turns the world into a phenomenon that claims to exist. What is put out of play is the thesis of the natural attitude, which is the view that the world is a reality in itself and the root of all naturalism. At the threshold of the ‘fundamental phenomenological consideration’, Husserl writes: I am conscious of a world endlessly spread out in space, endlessly becoming and having endlessly become in time. I am conscious of it: that signifies, above all, that intuitively I find it immediately, that I experience it. By my seeing, touching, hearing, and so forth, and in the different modes of sensuous perception, corporeal physical things with some spatial distribution or other are simply there for me, ‘on hand’.7 The world of the natural attitude is not a primitive world that would precede all idealization; it cannot be confused with the lifeworld. It is the Copernican–Galilean world made up of material things, situated within a homogenous and infinite spatio-temporal context. But there is also an ontology that accompanies the natural attitude, whereby the thing perceived refers to a physical truth that its sensible appearances signal and dissimulate. The reduction therefore has the historical meaning of putting out of play the traditional, modern ontology. The first consequence of this ‘great reversal’ is the ban on speaking in the plural. The epoché: affects the intramundane existence of all other Egos, so that

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rightly we should no longer speak communicatively, in the plural. Other men than I, and brute animals, are data of experience for me only by virtue of my sensuous experience of their bodily organisms; and, since the validity of this experience too is called in question, I must not use it. Along with other Egos, naturally, I lose all the formations pertaining to sociality and culture. In short, not just corporeal Nature but the whole concrete surrounding life-world is for me, from now on, only a phenomenon of being, instead of something that is.8 What could be the sense of this ban, if language and speech, as social and cultural formations, always point back to intersubjectivity and if communication is the horizon of all language? Solipsism is a word that, in order to be understood by the one who pronounces it as well as the one who hears it, always involves the pregivenness of the other. To prohibit plurality, even under the banner of a self-restriction, is to produce a statement whose sense summons the one who it seeks to exclude. And, broadly conceived, does not the ideality of meaning, as an ideality, require inter-subjectivity? This argument would lead Husserl to a form of scepticism and cannot be maintained within phenomenology itself where, on the one hand, the linguistic layer was never been taken as original, and where, on the other hand, expression is seized in its purity after reducing indication, that is to say, the relation to the other. If, for Husserl, the basic fact of delivering a lecture or of speaking does not undo solipsism, that is because the entire phenomenological analysis of language is solipsistic.9 The world as a phenomenon is irreducibly mine, and it is only on this basis that any decision about the being of the world is possible. If the reduction is forever freed from realism, this is because it delivers an apodictic ego, or in more precisely and properly Husserlian terms, a transcendental field of experience. The world as an intentional aim belongs to my pure egoic life and is irreally included within the transcendent aim. If the question of the world takes place in an absolute egology which is the basis for objectivity and which forgoes the Cartesian idea of the infinite, solipsism is the threat of a transcendental illusion and recourse to intersubjectivity is the only counter-measure to it.10 One can thus assess the magnitude and difficulty of the line of enquiry that has

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to begin with a methodological exploration of the transcendental field of the ego. Before providing a list of the general structures of this field of experience, Husserl raises a critical question and marks out a distinction. The question pertains to the scope of apodicticity: if the ego is not the premise in a chain of reasons but an ontological sphere open to intuition, then it is necessary to know what in this ontological sphere is apodictic and what is not. The question surfaced in Descartes: in order for the apodicticity of the ego to found a deductive science, it is necessary for memory to traverse the chain of reasons without error, to be infallible, and thus claim to be apodictic evidence.11 This is not the case. In general, the past temporal horizon of transcendental subjectivity is not apodictically assured, at least not immediately. The past is not given in an adequate perception, since only the core of transcendental experience is offered adequately, the core of the living presence to oneself, ‘that expresses the grammatical sense of the proposition ego cogito’. By analogy with the transcendent thing that is brought to light in perception, there in the flesh, and that is given with its infinite horizon of potential perceptions, the apodictic I am implies the opening of temporal horizons, by virtue of an essential law described in great detail in the 1905 Lectures on time. The actuality of the transcendental domain as a whole is absolutely assured, although questions about the critique of transcendental experience and about transcendental knowledge in general still remain open. Transcendental phenomenology is carried out in two steps. The first step ‘is not philosophical yet in the full sense’12 inasmuch as the phenomenologist is devoted to the evidence of experience in order to describe its pure essence. The second step is critical, but as Husserl will acknowledge in the conclusion to the Cartesian Meditations, he was only devoted to the first step here.13 Descartes neglected the question of memory in order to make the ego the indubitable foundation of an axiomatic order of reasons and thus missed the ontological transcendental sphere. Put otherwise, he too quickly interpreted the ego as a psyche. Without the distinction between the psychological ego and the transcendental ego that phenomenology alone brings to light, one descends into the ‘nonsense of transcendental realism’.14 This distinction, which harbours the possibility of phenomenology as a questioning back to the origin of the world, is just as enigmatic

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as the psycho-phenomenological parallelism which stems from it.15 What distinguishes the ‘region’ of the soul, which is privileged in relation to all other regions that are presented in it and derived from it, from transcendental consciousness as an archiregion? How can one distinguish the domain of phenomenological psychology from that of transcendental phenomenology, if their ‘extension’ is the same? Husserl’s response is brief: the soul retains within itself a relation to the world; mental life is always in the world. In what way? If ‘in essence, all objects of the world are “embodied” [verkörpert]’,16 the soul is the residual result of the abstraction of the corporeal component that is united to a psychic component, which traditionally defines the human being and does so for Husserl as well.17 After this abstraction, the soul remains a component that refers to the other component and thereby to the fundamental corporeal [Körperlichkeit] layer of the world. To access the non-psychological consciousness that carries the world as well as the psyche within itself, as an intentional unity of sense, is to liberate the transcendence of the world in order to turn it into a theme of transcendental philosophy. It is a philosophy that does not elucidate the world by reference to a being that has the same mode of being as the objective world.18 But what is the ego’s mode of being, if the transcendental ego is not different from the mundane ego which is its self-objectification and self-mundanization? Heidegger asks: ‘What is the mode of being of this absolute ego – in what sense is it the same as the factical I; in what sense is it not the same?’19 We will return later to this critical question from Heidegger in order to understand the sense of the same and this other. The epoché has opened up a new and infinite sphere of being that is offered to experience. Husserl writes in a marginal note: ‘and where there is a new experience, a new science must arise’.20 But, if this science is characterized exclusively by its theme – the field of transcendental experience – then it risks to give rise immediately to a transcendental empiricism that recites factual events for an absolute ego that is factual itself. The eidetic reduction is designed to avoid this danger. For, Husserl rightly notes, from the beginning of the establishment of the universal structures of subjectivity, that to each actual experience there corresponds a pure fiction, a quasi-experience (and ‘fiction constitutes the vital element of phenomenology as it does for all eidetic sciences’21). But

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Husserl will only explicitly convert transcendental analysis into an eidetic-transcendental analysis when it becomes a question of the self-constitution of the ego. In one way, that will suffice since the constitution of the ego by and for itself embraces all constitution in general. But there are perhaps two other important considerations: first, it is difficult to proceed to an eidetic analysis as long as one defers the question of the limits of apodicticity, and the Cartesian Meditations themselves are not concerned with this problem; second, and we shall return to this later, in order to access the eidos ego, the eidos of an ego, whose temporality has not been shown, it would be necessary to presuppose another ego in order to realize this variation and to escape from the solipsism to which the reduction constrains us. What are the structures of the transcendental field? By shifting the centre of gravity of transcendental evidence from the ego cogito to the multiple cogitationes, the phenomenologist brings out the first of these structures: intentionality. I can at any moment reflect on my conscious life, and within the reduction – where all mundane positions are suspended – it remains the case that each cogitatio carries within itself, as an aim, a relation to the world. Each lived-experience of consciousness is a consciousness of ..., regardless of the actual existence of its object. The relation to the perceived, for example, is essential to perception; it includes the cogitatum, in an irreal sense, in the cogitatio. Husserl states: ‘The word intentionality signifies nothing else than this universal fundamental property of consciousness: to be consciousness of something; as a cogito, to bear within itself its cogitatum.’22 The act of reflection no longer involves the ego exclusively but also the noema of the world. However, does this not lead it to become something secondary, against the whole original and archaeological intention of phenomenology? Does not reflection replace an originally lived and spontaneous experience with a reflexive experience that transforms what was first an act into an object? Does this method not contradict the project? No other line of argumentation than phenomenology can be used here, that is, the return and recourse to the mode of givenness. Indeed, reflexive lived experience is entirely different from spontaneous lived experience, and reflection alters [verändere] – this is Husserl’s term – the original lived experience. But it gives the original lived experience as an intentional correlate of the reflexive

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lived experience. Since reflection does not repeat the original but describes it, there is nothing in reflection that would undermine the phenomenological project at its roots, for ‘Its beginning gives pure expression of pure experience according to its own silent meaning.’23 The reflexive attitude ‘yields a new intentional process, which, with its peculiarity of “relating back to the earlier process” [Rückbeziehung auf das frühere Erlebnis], is awareness, and perhaps evidence awareness, of just that earlier process itself, and not some other’.24 From the outset, reflection has a temporal sense. The reflecting and giving lived-experience necessarily comes after the livedexperience that is given and reflected on. Without this delay, no access to the origin would be possible; without this delay that Husserl calls retention, consciousness could not be taken as an object and phenomenology as a science could not come into existence.25 But it also has the effect of splitting the ego [Ichspaltung]. Under the reduction, the ego can be described in the following way: the mundane ego has an interest in the world, and the world can only appear as such to the transcendental ego who regards the world as a noema. This ego, in turn, can only escape from anonymity (Husserl thus notes the withdrawal of the ego from its own constituting activities) through a transcendental spectator who is absolutely disinterested in the world and is attentive only to its noeses, or more precisely, attentive only to the noema as it is intentionally included and constituted in the noeses. In other words, transcendental reflection requires the reduction. The problem then arises concerning the identity of these egos, which conceals ‘the most basic insights into the architectonic of the phenomenological system’.26 We can return now to address the question raised above by Heidegger. For Husserl, what unifies these egos is the instance of the living present: ‘In the living present I coexist as a doubled I and the acts of the I [Ichaktus] are doubled.’27 It is thus necessary for retention not to alter the living present and for it to be a perception.28 Husserl oscillates on this decisive point. On the one hand, by contrasting the self-giving act of perception with reproduction, he makes retention a form of perception: But if we call perception the act in which all ‘origin’ lies, the act that constitutes originally, then primary memory is perception.

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For only in primary memory do we see what is past, only in it does the past become constituted – and constituted presentatively, not re-presentatively.29 But, on the other hand, when analysing perception as a presentation, he sets up retention as the contrary of perception: Now if we relate the use of the word ‘perception’ to the differences in givenness with which temporal objects present themselves, the antithesis of perception is the primary memory and the primary expectation (retention and protention) that occur here; in which case, perception and nonperception continuously blend into one another.30 We would not insist on this point if the analogy between the modes of givenness of the past and of the other ego were not frequently affirmed.31 If the condition of the possibility of the reduction is drawn from retention, does it not signify that the alter ego is already implied in it and that there cannot be an absolutely pure egology? Can the splitting of the ego and its alteration be conceived without the pre-givenness of the alter ego? How can it be established phenomenologically that the retentional past and the other have an analogous type of givenness? Conversely, could these questions have a sense outside of an egological approach? Is this not to say that phenomenology is condemned to contradict its initial premises? Can this be explained, and if so, in a phenomenological way?

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CHAPTER THREE

Flesh and Body in Perception The demonstration of the intentional correlation imposes a dual orientation, a correlative structure, on the analysis of consciousness.1 On the one side, it involves the intentional object in the quomodo of its modes of appearing (the noema), and on the other side, it concerns the acts of the ego (the noeses) which constitute and bestow sense on the noemata. Each particular object refers to a horizon that, ultimately, is the world itself; each noesis refers to the entirety of transcendental life. Intentional analysis is an analysis of the transcendental ego inasmuch as it includes and constitutes all possible objectivity. Husserl states: ‘Thus, when the phenomenological reduction is consistently executed, there is left us, on the noetic side, the openly endless life of pure consciousness and, as its correlate on the noematic side, the meant world, purely as meant.’2 Here phenomenology is assured of its universality. Husserl immediately provides an example of intentional description borrowed from sensible perception. Originating from his Logical Investigations and constantly repeated afterwards, this analysis responds to a very profound necessity. Phenomenology seeks to overcome transcendental psychologism, and this endeavour is its destiny. Transcendental psychologism is rooted in the definition of consciousness as a psyche, actually linked to the real world. That is to say that it is rooted in a conception of perception which is not faithful to original and intuitive givenness. The accomplishment of phenomenology requires a new analysis of

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perception and, if phenomenology is always a phenomenology of perception, this is the case for essential and profoundly historical reasons. Husserl acknowledges this: ‘Involuntarily, we began with the intentional analysis of perception (purely as perception of its perceived object) and in fact gave privileged status thereby to intuitively given bodies [Körper]. Might this not also point to essential necessities?’3 Husserl adds: For example, if I take the perceiving of this die as the theme for my description, I see in pure reflection that ‘this’ die is given continuously as an objective unity in a multiform and changeable multiplicity of manners of appearing, which belong determinately to it. These, in their temporal flow, are not an incoherent sequence of subjective processes. Rather they flow away in the unity of a synthesis, such that in them ‘one and the same’ is intended as appearing. The one identical die appears, now in ‘near appearances’, now in ‘far appearances’: in the changing modes of the Here and There, over against an always co-intended, though perhaps unheeded, absolute Here (in my co-appearing organism.). Furthermore, each continued manner of appearance in such a mode (for example: ‘the die here, in the near sphere’) shows itself to be, in turn, the synthetic unity pertaining to a multiplicity of manners of appearance belonging to that mode. Thus the near-thing, as ‘the same’, appears now from this ‘side’, now from that; and the ‘visual perspectives’ change – also, however, the other manners of appearance (tactual, acoustic, and so forth), as we can observe by turning our attention in the right direction.4 The unity of the object is first dissolved into a multiplicity of ‘adumbrations’, a concept which is at the centre of the novelty of Husserl’s analysis. The adumbration is not a sensible appearance referring to an intelligible in-itself that God, as a subject of absolutely perfect knowledge, would be able to perceive. Such a conception is absurd in that it neglects the essential difference between immanence and transcendence and bypasses the horizon structure. The adumbration gives the thing to me in its incarnate ipseity, and the unity of the thing is based phenomenologically on the agreement of the adumbrations. That is to say that it is based on a synthesis of identification whose fundamental form

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is internal time consciousness. And, like the temporal flow, the adequate givenness of the transcendent thing is an idea in the Kantian sense. This description of perception, like others elsewhere, revolves around an absolute here, the absolute here of my flesh which is ‘always co-conscious but unperceived’. Is this the reason why Husserl has only discreetly and rarely analysed the role of the flesh? The following points must be noted: (1) The fundamental Husserlian claim about perception is that things are given in the flesh, which is also to say that they are given to my flesh and through my flesh. Givenness in the flesh thus refers both to a mode of givenness and to the recipient of this givenness. It is on the basis of this claim that Husserl is able to denounce philosophical analyses that replace perception with a consciousness of signs or images, and then take sensible and secondary qualities as the signs of primary qualities.5 (2) The perception of the spatial thing is always accompanied by the perception of my flesh. As an absolute here, my flesh is not in the space of a relative and interchangeable here or there; it constitutes their origin. Flesh provides the stage for [met en scène] perception.6 But, as a non-spatial origin of space, can flesh be perceived if it is the case that ‘Where there is no spatial being it is senseless to speak of a seeing from different standpoints with a changing orientation in accordance with different perceptions, appearances, adumbrations’?7 Does the fact that flesh cannot be perceived stricto sensu by adumbrations imply that it has the purely temporal mode of being of lived experiences? If, as Husserl says, ‘flesh [der Leib] is, in the first place, the medium of all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved [dabei] in all perception’,8 then it seems that flesh cannot be purely temporal. (3) Will it resolve the problem to claim that my flesh is always also a body, one body among others? Perhaps, but this claim cannot be made without having first, in the context of pure egology, having retraced the constitution of my flesh as one body among other bodies. This would force us to abandon solipsism at a stage of the journey that still requires it. (4) We will set aside this question and later return to it at length. But, for the moment, let’s assume that my flesh is also a body. Does not the unity of adumbrations, the unity of the thing, depend on the unity of my flesh even before it depends on a temporal

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synthesis? Has Husserl not neglected a constitutive layer that allows a thing to be one-and-the-same? Each adumbration gives the thing to me in its flesh; it thus gives me what unifies it with all the other ones. Moreover, if the adumbration depends on the reciprocal relation between my flesh9 and the thing (inasmuch as the flesh is a body in the same space as the thing), then any change of this situation gives rise to a new adumbration that is unified with the previous one due by having the same origin. None of this would have purely and simply escaped Husserl. This is demonstrated by his analysis of perception in The Crisis, which takes place in the context of a questioning back to the surrounding lifeworld as a tacit presupposition of Kantian thought. After having noted that everything in the lifeworld is presented as a concrete thing (including cultural and historical objects) and has a corporeality that is given to sight and touch, Husserl writes: ‘Obviously and inevitably participating in this is our living body, which is never absent from the perceptual field, and specifically its corresponding “organs of perception” (eyes, hands, ears, etc.).’10 The subjective movements of these organs – the kinaestheses – are thus necessarily linked to adumbrations: Clearly the aspect-exhibitions [Aspekt-Darstellungen] of whatever body is appearing in perception, and the kinaestheses, are not processes [simply running] alongside each other; rather, they work together in such a way that the aspects have the ontic meaning of, or the validity of, aspects of the body only through the fact that they are those aspects continually required by the kinaestheses – by the kinaesthetic-sensual total situation in each of its working variations of the total kinaesthesis by setting in motion this or that particular kinaesthesis – and that they correspondingly fulfil the requirement.11 Flesh, at least as flesh, unifies the adumbrations. But it is also a body, extension partes extra partes, and as a body, flesh can no longer play that role. What happens then? The adumbrations turn into ‘appearances’ that require a principle of unity that is heterogeneous to them. The thing is no longer given in the flesh; instead an entirely different phenomenal situation imposes its own law. This situation is the basis for the traditional philosophical analyses of perception and the Logical Investigations of

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1901 still refer to them. If the Logical Investigations do not reach the descriptive evidence of incarnation, this is because that text obeys the descriptive evidence of another phenomenal situation with its own laws.12 After having slowed down a little bit the pace of Husserl’s argument, let’s again follow its own rhythm. What has just been found – in the exemplary analysis of perception which holds mutatis mutandis for all of conscious life – can be condensed in the following manner: the intentional object as such is conscious as an identical unity of the various modes of noetic–noematic consciousness; conscious life is essentially synthetic. And, in the final analysis, internal time consciousness is the fundamental form of this synthesis. The phenomenology of perception implies a phenomenology of temporality that joins lived experiences together in a single and unique flow. This synthesis is not, however, a pure and simple connection that unifies lived experiences one by one, instead it links them all together within an entire consciousness. This shows that the givenness of each lived experience can only appear in attention against the background of the universal conscious life that it presupposes (and this also holds for each noema which ultimately refers back to a broader noema: the world). By making internal time consciousness the fundamental form of synthesis, Husserl will encounter what he calls ‘extraordinary difficulties’, though he does not address them at length. Internal time consciousness has immanent time as its intentional correlate. This distinction is between the intra-temporal lived experience and its temporal modes of appearing that, as intentional lived experiences, are given to reflection as temporal. In other words, the lived experiences that constitute internal time appear within this internal time itself. Husserl observes: We encounter here a paradoxical fundamental property of conscious life, which seems thus to be infected with an infinite regress. The task of clarifying this fact and making it understandable presents extraordinary difficulties. Be that as it may, the fact is evident, even apodictically evident, and indicates one aspect of the ego’s marvellous being-for-himself: here, in the first place, the being of his conscious life in the form of reflexive intentional relatedness to itself.13

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The multiplicity belonging to the intentionality of each cogito is not exhausted solely through consideration of actual lived experiences. In my actual perception of a cube from a particular angle, the side of the cube that is properly perceived refers to the other sides that are co-seen but only expected and anticipated in a non-intuitive manner as future perceptions. My perception would follow another course if I decided to touch the cube or modified my position in relation to it. Each actuality implies its own potentialities. These potentialities, to be sure, depend on the free mobility of my flesh, and the constitution of the thing is grounded in the constitution of my flesh. But, Husserl does not insist on this point,14 because it raises difficulties analogous to those of temporality. First of all, my flesh can only be constituted as a body through a kinaesthetic system, a system which presupposes already that my flesh is an organ of perception. Furthermore, and importantly, the constitution of original temporality leads back to the constitution of the hyle, that is, to the sensuous data that cannot be given to me unless the flesh is already there. In some sense, Husserl was already aware of this in his 1905 Lectures on internal time consciousness. In §11, he writes: ‘“The source point” from which the “production” [Erzeugung] of the enduring object begins is a primal impression: the tone-now present “in incarnate presence” [leibhaftig] continuously changes (consciously “in” consciousness) into something that has been.’15 This is also attested by the frequent use of the expression ‘incarnate presence’ in Experience and Judgment.16 The horizon structure remains an essential feature of intentionality inasmuch as it advances a thesis about objects. In effect, every cogitatum is given within a horizon which then gives rise to new horizons, and thus the sense of the object – or, the noema – can never be given as something complete. Instead, it is illuminated through a continual and harmonious progression. The object is a pole of identity, an index of noetic and constitutive intentionalities. At the same time, intentional analysis acquires a distinctive structure. It is not a real analysis (there is not an empiricist sensualism of intentionality); instead it unfolds, distinguishes and clarifies the richness of the horizons and infinite potentialities that are harboured and concealed in each actuality.17 This means that each cogito intends more than what is actually there and, without this supplementary aim (Mehrmeinung), intentional analysis would

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not be able to take place and enquire back to the multiplicities of noetic syntheses that continually give the object to me as the same. But, conversely, only intentional analysis can provide access to this state of affairs; it begins by revealing intentionality as its basis. This strange circularity can only be accepted on two conditions, which have the same root. It is necessary, on the one hand, for the intentional object to serve as a transcendental clue for displaying the constitutive, noetic structures. This affirms a relative and methodological privilege of the constituted (in phenomenology, the question of method is sovereign). Without the guidance of the object simply given and already constituted as one-and-the-same, intentional analysis could not orient itself within the fluid multiplicity of lived experiences and transcendental subjectivity would be given chaotically. On the other hand, it is necessary for the totality of objects, whatever their type of objectivity (real or categorical), to form a universal unity, a world, as the correlate of a total, infinite, and absolute subjectivity. If each object in general is a structural rule for the transcendental ego, the world itself must be its universal rule. So, is phenomenology not based on a credit that is prior to the unity of the world, that is to say, ultimately on the possibility of a system? Without this credit would it not be bankrupt? And does not this credit belong to the level of facticity? Nothing is less certain. Husserl only deploys the pure sense of the idea of an authentic science that is absolutely founded (taken solely as a possibility); consequently, it is the idea of an essential correlation between reason and reality that is called truth.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Constitutive Analysis We can now approach the problematic of constitution in its full extension and depth. As for its extension, this ‘marvellous operation [Leistung]’ brings to light the synthetic unity of the various acts of consciousness; it delivers the object over to a pure regard and is concerned with all possible types of objects, and first of all, with the possibility of objects in general. The constitution of the object, that is to say formal ontology, is the basis for the hierarchy of the levels of the a priori; it is thus the basis for material and regional ontologies. But constitutive analysis does not only take real or ideal objects as its guide; it also examines the ‘purely subjective objects’ that are immanent lived experiences – in which transcendent objects, real and ideal ones, are constituted – as objects of internal time consciousness. Constitution thus extends as far as the auto-constitution of the ego, and constitutive syntheses define the field of all transcendental phenomenology. As for its depth, the concept of constitution permits ontology in its traditional sense to be converted into egology in the phenomenological sense; this conversion, needless to say, displays solipsism. The question of the reality of objects has not been abandoned with the reduction; it must be rediscovered there as a moment of objective sense. If it were not possible to show that being, or reality, is always completely reducible to sense, then phenomenological idealism would be absurd. It is thereby necessary to demonstrate that being and non-being, reality and irreality, are constituted in and through intentional life, such that the idea of investigating something outside of the parentheses ‘cannot occur to us within

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the sphere of phenomenological reduction’.1 It is then a question of knowing what eidetic characteristics of lived experience give me reality and of phenomenologically clarifying whether the relation to the object is valid or not. In short, it is question of clarifying the relation between reason and reality. Within the realm of the reduction, the question of reality is posed first on the noematic level. What is the relation of the noema to the object if when ‘one speaks simply of objects, one normally means actual, truly existing objects belonging to the particular category of being’?2 Let’s return to the concept of the noema. The noema is an intentional component of lived experience – ‘perception, for example, has its noema, most basically its perceptual sense, i.e. the perceived as perceived’,3 which is given in the immanence of lived experience. As a result, sense is indifferent to the reality or non-reality of the object. Does sense henceforth just provide a copy of reality? No. First, the noema is not a real component of perception, nor is it a mental copy of a real object. Second, it would be absurd to substitute the consciousness of an image for perceptual consciousness, since the consciousness of the image intends the object represented in the image and thus presupposes perception. Does the noema not have any relation to reality, then? To claim this would be to misunderstand the sense of the reduction: consciousness remains consciousness of the reality that can be described in its pure appearing. The noema thus retains the characteristic of reality. To account for this phenomenologically, it is necessary to conduct a more detailed analysis of the noema. The same tree can be given in the lived experience of very different noematic states. For example, it appears in perception as an incarnate reality, in the imagination as a fiction, in memory as a re-presentation. The object that is intended cannot be confused with the object as it is intended.4 The noema is broken down into a core and the characteristics of its being. Reality, fiction and re-presentation are characteristics that belong to the object as it is intended and that vary with the modes of givenness by which the object of consciousness itself is given.5 The characteristic of being are the noematic correlates of the characteristics of belief, or doxic modalities. Reality is thus the noematic correlate of certainty. This initial result does not come without difficulties, however. Besides the question of knowing what motivates and founds

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certainty, we have omitted an essential feature from the description above: sense, the perceived as such, is related to an object and the problem of reality is raised essentially on the level of the object. Husserl writes: The noema in itself has an objective relation and, more particularly, by virtue of its own ‘sense’. If we ask, then, how the consciousness-‘sense’ has access to the ‘object’ which belongs to it and can be ‘the same’ in manifold acts of very different content, how we see this in the sense, then new structures emerge the extraordinary significance of which is evident. For, progressing in this direction and, on the other side, reflecting on the parallel noeses, we finally confront the question of what the ‘claim’ of consciousness actually to ‘relate’ to something objective, to be ‘well-founded’, properly signifies, of how ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ objective relations become phenomenologically clarified according to noesis and noema: and with that we confront the great problems of reason.6 Let’s return to the analysis of the noema. Is not the noematic core the pure objective sense for which we are searching? And is it not through its core that the noema refers to the object? This can be shown by transposing on to the noema, as authorized by the noetic-noematic parallelism, an earlier distinction that emerged in the analysis of acts in Husserl’s Fifth Logical Investigation. There what Husserl calls the intentional matter of the act establishes a relation with an object, while the intentional quality specifies whether it is a representational act, a judging act, etc.7 The matter of the noema – its quid – is what Ideas I later calls its core; this is what puts it in relation to an object (whereas the quality corresponds to the thetic modality). But the object must be included in the noema, just as the noema is included in the noesis. And a noematic intentionality, parallel to a noetic intentionality, must be exhibited in order for the object in question to be the same as the object of the noesis.8 A more refined analysis of the core thus becomes necessary. Each lived experience is directed toward an object, and every noema has its own object. If in the description of the noema, that is to say of the object as it is intended, I abstract everything belonging to its mode of givenness, then an invariable content – a quid (Was)

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– appears. It is a pure objective sense that, in turn, can be described in the language of formal ontology and thing-determinations. This pure sense – or this objective core, properly speaking – can be explicated in a system of formal or material predicates that define it. The predicate always signifies the predicate of ‘something’, and this ‘something’ necessarily belongs to the core as ‘its most intimate moment’, its ‘central point of unity’, the ‘point of junction’ or ‘bearer’ [Träger] of the predicates. It is necessary to distinguish this ‘something’ from the predicates, even if they cannot be separated from it to the extent that they are its predicates.9 The object pure and simple – the point of identity – must be distinguished from the object in the how of its determinations.10 Husserl reserves the word ‘sense’ for the second of these concepts of the object; it is by means of this X that all sense has its object, since the object in the how of its determinations refers back to it as that which is ‘noematically identical within the continually changing noemas’.11 In the noema, there is an intentionality that is parallel to that of the noesis. But this sense has been obtained by abstraction and cannot constitute a concrete essence. The object in the how of its determinations can be given more or less clearly; the sense can either be filled or not. The complete core will be the sense that corresponds with its mode of fulfilment.12 The question of reality is reopened here. On the one hand, every intentional lived experience has a noema and the sense of this noema puts it in relation to the object. On the other hand, no object in general, no reality, and no world could be independent from the consciousness in which it necessarily announces itself.13 Is the identical X that consciousness attains through the synthesis of a multiplicity of noemas ‘really’ the same? Is the object real? Or, as Husserl puts it: ‘When, it may everywhere be asked, is the noematically “intended-to” [Vermeintes] identity of X “actually” the identity of X instead of the “merely” intended-to “identity”? And what does this “merely intended-to” everywhere signify?’14 To speak of a real or true object signifies that everything that can be said about it is capable of being founded and justified. Husserl states: ‘In the logical sphere, in the sphere of statement, “being truly” or “actually” and “being something which can be shown rationally” are necessarily correlated. This holds, moreover, for all modalities of being, all doxastic positional modalities.’15 The real and the rational are correlative. By slightly altering its sense, here it

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is possible to reiterate the Hegelian claim: ‘That which is rational is real and that which is real is rational.’16 What is the original form of rational consciousness, and what is the original form of constitutive consciousness? Let’s follow the details of Husserl’s analysis closely here. There are two classes of positional lived experiences: one class gives the posited thing originally (perception, vision), while the other class gives the same posited thing re-presentatively (imagination, memory). The analysis of the noema has already drawn a contrast between the original and the reproduced, although it did so in order to reveal a characteristic of the noema itself. In effect, the objective sense (the pure X and its determinations) can enter into consciousness through different modes of givenness that belong to the noema, since description makes them come from the noema. In contrasting memory with perception, Husserl noted that: Precisely in its own peculiar essence, memory is a ‘modification of’ perception. Correlatively, what is characterized as past in itself is presented as ‘having been present’, thus as a modification of the ‘present’ which as the unmodified, is precisely the ‘original’, the ‘incarnately present’ of the perception.17 This difference leaves the sense untouched and concerns only its mode of fulfilment. Two types of fulfilment are thus possible: original and non-original. They correspond with the previous distinction between self-givenness and incarnate self-givenness. If the fulfilment is original and intuitive – first in the foundational order – then Husserl observes that focusing on the noema we find, fused with the pure sense, the characteristic ‘in incarnate presence’ [Leibhaftigkeit] (as original fulfilledness); and the sense, with this characteristic, now functions as the basis for the noematic posited characteristic or, this being the same thing here: the being-characteristic. We find the parallel to this in focusing on the noesis.18 A position is rationally motivated if it is based on an original, incarnate and evident givenness. Evidence is ultimately what reason points to. The original form of constitutive rational consciousness is evident consciousness. This allows us to respond

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to two questions that have been left open: only evidence can motivate and found the certainty for which reality is the noematic correlate; only evidence as givenness in the flesh can assure me that the intended object is indeed a real object. As original givenness, evidence is an archi-phenomenon of intentional life, the a priori structural form of consciousness. This amounts to saying that reason is an essential and universal structure of transcendental subjectivity and perhaps already implies that transcendental subjectivity is intersubjective. To constitute an object is to return it to the synthesis of the evident acts which have given it, which do give it, and which under certain conditions will give it in the flesh. To constitute is to provide evidence of incarnate givenness. But this runs up against some difficulties concerning the constitution of flesh itself. Let it be noted, for the time being, that they are parallel to the difficulties of the constitution of time: in both cases, what is constituting must also be what is constituted. Constitutive analysis has a universal status and concerns all types of objects. So it thus takes the form of a tireless differentiation of the types of evidence that correlate with the types of objects: if the sense of the being of real objects is not the same as that of ideal objects, then the given evidence must be carefully distinguished in relation to the universal definition of evidence provided by the principle of principles: Evidence, in a maximally broad sense, is a concept that is correlated not only with the concepts being and non-being. It becomes modalized also in correlation with the other modal variants of simple being, such as being possible, probable, or doubtful – likewise, however, in correlation with variants that do not belong in this series but have their origin in the spheres of emotion and volition such as being valuable and being morally good.19 Two problems emerge from this. First, if reality is the correlate of a verification by evidence – to the extent that we would not be able to posit anything whatsoever, if the synthesis of identity contradicted an evident given – then are we not linking evidence to a reality that is valid for me (that is, a natural reality reduced to and by the solipsistic ego)? And does this not put transcendental phenomenology under the strain of

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an irreducible facticity or contingency? Only the use of the eidetic reduction would provide an escape from this problem. But this is not yet possible: how can we reach the eidos of the world or the eidos of reality without having reached the eidos of the ego? We will return to this question soon. The establishment of the eidos of the ego gives rise to a specific set of problems within the solipsistic attitude to which Husserl confines himself. Moreover, the exercise of the eidetic reduction cannot occur without imaginative variation, which presupposes that the evidence proper to the imagination has already been brought to light.20 Second, if reality is the correlate of verification by evidence, how can its character as ‘in itself’ be explained? How would it not dissolve into the presence of a singular act of confirmation? Husserl states that ‘all evidence “sets up” or “institutes” for me an abiding possession’,21 since it is always possible for me to return again to the intuited reality and to re-establish in evidence the first and founding evidence. ‘Without such “possibilities” there would be for us no fixed and abiding being, no real and no ideal world.’22 Reality can indeed be independent of actual consciousness but it cannot in any way be independent of potential consciousness. In pointing back to the infinite field of possible evidence, does not reality at the same time point back to an infinite subjectivity? The passage to intersubjectivity will perhaps transform this question. In the case of the transcendent object and ultimately of the world, evidence still refers to an infinity of evidence but in a more complex way. The transcendent thing is given by adumbrations, in a multiplicity of incarnate appearances. What is thus offered to consciousness is always more than what appears there in the strict sense, since it is the thing in its flesh, in it its totality, that appears. Each presentation of the same transcendent thing refers to a harmonious infinity of other presentations of the same thing. In other words, the adequate givenness of the thing is an Idea in the Kantian sense. More broadly, the world is an Idea correlative with complete empirical evidence, evidence which is itself an Idea in the Kantian sense. Is there an evidence of the Idea itself? Husserl answers: ‘The idea of an infinity motivated in conformity with its essence is not itself an infinity; seeing intellectually that this infinity of necessity cannot be given does not exclude, but rather requires, the intellectually seen givenness of the idea of this infinity.’23

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Everything is subsequently in place to define the tasks of transcendental self-explication of the ego, of its conscious life and its objects, which are constituted together there. We are now in a position to undertake a constitutive and transcendental analysis of real objectivity and respond to the question of the origin of the world. By taking the formal and material ontological regions as indices for the system of evidence, ‘there is need of a constitutional theory of physical Nature (which is “given” as always existing and, in being so given, is likewise always presupposed), a constitutional theory of man, of human community, of culture, and so forth’.24 At the same time, it should be noted that intersubjectivity is presupposed as soon as one speaks about the ‘real world’ and ‘real objectivity’. Is it therefore necessary to think that concrete subjectivity is intersubjectivity and that the monadic ego is abstracted from it? It is still too soon to answer this question. Husserl ends the third Meditation as follows: As we pursue this course, an extremely complicated intentional composition of the constituting evidences, in their synthetic unity, becomes apparent as regards Objects – for example: a founding by levels of non-Objective (‘merely subjective’) objects, ascending from the lowest objective basis. To be this lowest basis is the continual function of immanent temporality, the flowing life that constitutes itself in and for itself. Its constitutional clarification is undertaken by the theory of original timeconsciousness, wherein temporal data are constituted.25

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CHAPTER FIVE

Eidetic Reduction and Archi-Facticity The constitution of temporality leads back to the constitution of the ego itself. Without it, the task of constitution would suffer from lacunae. This is not self-evident, since in his 1901 Logical Investigations Husserl refused all ‘egological principles’ (on the basis of which both solipsism and the attempt to overcome it acquire a sense).1 So why is a transcendental ego, a transcendental I, considered inseparable from intentional lived experiences? If, under the reduction, we pass through the flux of lived experiences, we will never grasp the pure I as a lived or original experience. Husserl states: If an intentive mental process is actional, that is, effected in the manner of the cogito, then in that process the subject is ‘directing’ himself to the intentional Object. To the cogito itself there belongs, as immanent in it, a ‘regard-to the Object’, which, on the other side, wells forth from the ‘Ego’ which therefore can never be lacking.2 The ego can thus be taken as the source of this regard that is directed to the object; it runs through every actual cogito. Consequently, it remains identical, and, as the subject of its own predicates, corresponds noetically to the noematic X. It cannot be turned into a real moment of lived experience, a real or immanent moment. Its life unfolds in each actual cogito, but

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all of the lived experiences in the background belong to it, and it belongs to them. Everything, inasmuch as it belongs to a single flow of lived experiences, which is my own, must be able to be converted into actual cogitationes or must be able to be included in an immanent manner. In Kantian language (leaving aside the question of knowing whether it is used in the Kantian sense), ‘The “I think” must accompany all my representations.’ Husserl writes: If we retain a pure Ego as a residuum after our phenomenological exclusion of the world and of the empirical subjectivity included in it (and an essentially different pure Ego for each stream of mental processes), then there is presented in the case of that Ego a transcendency of a peculiar kind – one which is not constituted – a transcendency within immanency. Because of the immediately essential role played by this transcendency in the case of any cogitation, we must not undertake its exclusion; though in many investigations the questions concerning the pure Ego can remain in suspense. But only insofar as its immediate, evidently ascertainable essential peculiarity and its givenness along with pure consciousness extend do we propose to count the pure Ego as a phenomenological datum.3 The descriptive ‘argument’ is analogous to the one which was able to isolate the pure identical X. In both cases, it is a matter of establishing an identity, even if it is a polar and teleological one. It was not possible to unify intentional consciousness by its object. First of all, this is because the object itself is the product of a synthesis of identification, and second, because this procedure would come down to granting a privilege to what is constituted, thus contradicting the absolute character of consciousness. With regard to the synthesis of identification itself – that is, the temporal synthesis – it requires a unifying egological principle, since ‘every mental process, as temporal being, is a mental process of its pure Ego’.4 This amounts to making the ego into the temporal form of all lived experiences and indicates, at least, that the constitution of the ego and of time are correlative and allied with one another. Why did Husserl modify his position? Why has he ‘learnt not to be led astray from a pure grasp of the given through corrupt forms

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of ego-metaphysic’?5 What makes it necessary to have a unifying egological principle? In the Logical Investigations, lived experiences are unified solely on the basis of their contents and the laws that govern them. They were real contents. With the discovery of the irreal inclusion of the noema – which was necessary to explain the incarnate givenness of transcendent things in perception – it is no longer possible to unify the flow of lived experiences on the basis of these contents, a number of which must henceforth be counted as transcendent entities that emerge and are constituted within the flow itself. What unifies the flow cannot be unified by the flow. If to constitute is always to unify, then the unifying principle cannot be constituted. Instead, it will appear as something that is presupposed by all constitution and as something that is given in every lived experience as being absolutely identical, namely, absolute ipseity. To withdraw the ego from a certain type of constitution – the constitution of objects – is not to withdraw it from constitution in general. In Ideas I Husserl warns: The transcendentally ‘absolute’ which we have brought about by the reductions is, in truth, not what is ultimate; it is something which constitutes itself in a certain profound and completely peculiar sense of its own and which has its primal source in what is ultimately and truly absolute.6 Let’s repeat this: the ego lives always in these harmonious networks of intentionality that are called objects. The ego, as the source of constituting acts, thus exists on its own with continual evidence. It continually constitutes itself as a central pole of identity.7 I perceive, I imagine, I remember something – these all signify the constitution of an objective pole, and within this constitution, the ego simultaneously constitutes itself. And it is not constituted as an empty pole. Each act is actively born from the ego. This presupposes that the ego has already been affected and that a passive intentionality, which is not controlled by the actual ego, has already delivered an object that is able to affect the ego and lead it to act. The act that is initiated in this way is a lived experience that takes place in the same flow as the one to which passive lived experiences belong. This amounts to saying that the world of objects, once constituted, can continually re-affect the ego. Given that the world is an intentional

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production of the ego, it belongs to the ego under the sedimented form of a habitus. The ego is the substrate of an abiding habitus. Husserl writes: But it is to be noted that this centring Ego is not an empty pole of identity, any more than any object is such. Rather, according to the law of ‘transcendental generation’, with every act emanating from him and having a new objective sense, he acquires a new abiding property. For example: if, in an act of judgment, I decide for the first time in favour of a being and a being-thus, the fleeting act passes; but from now on I am abidingly the Ego who is thus and so decided, ‘I am of this conviction.’8 How can we define more precisely the habitus? This does not concern the noematic identity but the identity of the ego and whether it can remain in the same aim. It concerns the identity of an ego who is able to repeat the same acts. The habitus points back to a ‘first time’ and to the possibility of reactivating it. It thus points back to immanent temporality. The ego’s own historicity emerges from its habitus. Does it also indicate its finitude? ‘The I has its history and on the basis of its history it creates an I which persists for it habitually as the same I.’9 If the habitus is a permanent noetic structure – that is to say freely repeatable – then its noematic correlate is nothing other than the constituted object in the entire depth of its in-itself. The in-itself [en-soi] as a correlate of potential evidence is thus integrated into the full concreteness of the ego. Husserl states: From the Ego as identical pole, and as substrate of habitualities, we distinguish the ego taken in full concreteness – in that we take, in addition, that without which the Ego cannot after all be concrete. (The ego, taken in full concreteness, we propose to call by the Leibnizian name: monad.) The Ego can be concrete only in the flowing multiformity of his intentional life, along with the objects meant – and in some cases constituted as existent for him – in that life. Manifestly, in the case of an object so constituted, its abiding existence and being-thus are a correlate of the habituality constituted in the Ego-pole himself by virtue of his position-taking.10

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To the degree that I am always evidently given to myself as myself – in the full extension of my actual and potential intentional life, including the world manifest as a total noematic correlate – the phenomenological explication of my monad counts as the constitutive explication of the world and its origin. In conclusion, the phenomenology of monadic self-constitution merges with universal phenomenology itself. All that remains here is a project to be carried out in its infinite detail. But only the principles of this project have been defined; its possibility has been established only from within an egological framework. The absolute foundation of universal science is henceforth assured of its sense and its possibility, of its domain and method. However, an objection can be raised: the transcendental monadic ego under discussion is my ego. Is this not a de facto ego? Does it not simply describe the ‘de facto occurrences in the de facto transcendental ego’11 and in the style of a genesis and a history that are themselves de facto? Have we not proceeded by a pure and simple transfer of the empirical on to the transcendental without attaining the essential features that must be the elements of a universal science? Is that not just a more refined reinstitution of the transcendental psychologism that was previously denounced by Husserl? To be sure, this would be the case if the transcendental analysis did not become an eidetic analysis. Why did we not have recourse to the eidetic reduction sooner? Husserl seems to have asked that question12 and then to have offered this response: ‘We have delayed mentioning it only to facilitate entrance into phenomenology.’13 Pedagogical motives do not suffice to explain this delay. First of all, Husserl paved the way for the eidetic reduction by remarking from the outset of this exploration of the transcendental field that a pure fiction corresponds with all lived experiences. This correspondence opens the field of an a priori science of possibilities. Second, all of the analyses carried out up to now have been general analyses and, even if not all generalities are essential generalities,14 such generalities can nonetheless lead to what is essential. Finally, after having reduced all phenomenology to a phenomenology of the ego and after passing from the de facto ego to the eidetic ego, all constitutive investigations acquire eidetic generality. There are, however, still other reasons. How does one carry out the eidetic reduction? The point of departure is any factual datum whatsoever, a factum, that the

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imagination can freely vary. It can transform it at the same time into an example or a model for the production of an infinite multiplicity of variations. Through this multiplicity, an invariant or a general essence, an eidos, appears. It sets limits to the variations in order for them to conserve the sense of the variation of the initial factual example. The eidos is that without which the object in the free play of variation can neither be thought nor given intuitively: this a priori is accessible to intuition and does not necessarily refer to subjectivity. This operation presupposes an active identification that can reveal what is congruent in contrast with what is different. Such an identification can only occur under the condition of keeping the multiple variations under the regard; it is based on a productive, connecting unity that operates passively over the course of variations. In other words, the eidetic reduction presupposes immanent temporality. To be more precise, the imagination does not alter a self-identical datum; the imagination varies it. Husserl makes a clear distinction between variation and alteration: ‘In all alteration, the individual remains identically the same. On the other hand, variation depends precisely on this: that we drop the identity of the individual and change it imaginatively into another possible individual.’15 These brief indications are sufficient to bring to light the difficulties associated with a reduction to the eidos ego carried out within the confines of an egology. The variation leading up to the intuition of the eidos ego would presuppose that other egos can be given. As a result, either solipsism is broken without phenomenological justification, or phenomenology as a whole falls into the sceptical absurdity of a transcendental empiricism. This aporia did not escape from Husserl’s vigilance. In one of only two notes in the Cartesian Meditations, he proposes the following answer: ‘It should be noted that, in the transition from my ego to an ego as such, neither the actuality nor the possibility of other egos is presupposed. I phantasy only myself as if I were otherwise; I do not phantasy others.’16 This ‘solution’ is impossible as long as the immanent temporality of the ego has not been exhibited, since self-variation [l’auto-variation] cannot occur without reference to the sphere of immanent temporality. It is here, to be sure, that we discover the more profound reason for the late arrival of the eidetic reduction. Considered on its own, is this solution possible? Nothing could

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be less sure, and Husserl was not unaware of this fact. To imagine myself as an other might eventually be to attain my essential forms, but certainly not those of the eidos ego. These forms remain those of a de facto ego. More profoundly, the use of the eidetic reduction presupposes that immanent temporality – the temporality of the ego – has been constituted. It implies that an ego has been given; without that, the reduction to the eidos could not take place. As the condition of its possibility, the ego will always escape from variation. It thus becomes necessary either to allow a duplication of the temporal flow, which would amount to giving the other and abandoning egology, or to recognize an original fact in the ego. In a text from November 1931, Husserl explicitly recognizes that the eidos ego implies intersubjectivity and is oriented toward an archifacticity.17 Husserl states: We have here a unique and remarkable case, namely that of the relation of factum to eidos. The being of the eidos, the being of eidetic possibilities and the universe of these possibilities is free from the being or non-being of the realization of such possibilities, it is ontologically independent of all corresponding reality. But the transcendental eidos ego is unthinkable without the transcendental I as factual.18 What can phenomenology say about this original fact that is the ultimate foundation of the distinction between fact and essence, between possibility and reality – in short, that is the foundation of its discourse? At the end of its faithful descriptions, does phenomenology not encounter something that will never be capable of being described or reduced? Will the passage to intersubjectivity permit the reduction of this archi-facticity? Whatever the answer may be, it appears that the constitution of the alter ego will be responsible for the whole of phenomenology. Husserl writes in the same 1931 text: I cannot surpass my facticity and my belonging to others intentionally included in it the absolute reality. The absolute has in itself its ground, and in its being without a ground, its absolute necessity is that of “absolute substance”. Its necessity is not an eidetic necessity that leaves open contingency. Every eidetic necessity is a moment of facticity, is a mode of its function in

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relation to itself – its mode that understands or is able to understand itself.19 These questions, which are ultimate in more than one sense, are not addressed in the Cartesian Meditations. After having aligned the eidetic reduction with the necessities of an egology to which he still holds, Husserl writes, strangely, with respect to the phenomenological explication of the ego: Therefore, as eidetic, the explication is valid for the universe of these, my possibilities as essentially an ego, my possibilities namely of being otherwise; accordingly then it is valid also for every possible intersubjectivity related (with a corresponding modification) to these possibilities, and valid likewise for every world imaginable as constituted in such an intersubjectivity.20

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CHAPTER SIX

Phenomenological Idealism In his 1930 preface to the English edition of Ideas I Husserl writes: In this book, then, we treat of an a priori science (‘eidetic’, directed upon the universal in its original intuitability), which appropriates, though as pure possibility only, the empirical field of fact of transcendental subjectivity with its factual (faktischen) experiences, equating these with pure intuitable possibilities that can be modified at will, and sets out as its a priori the indissoluble essential structures of transcendental subjectivity, which persists in and through all imaginable modifications.1 This quote applies as well, once the preceding questions have been resolved, to the Cartesian Meditations (1929). By elevating the ego to an eidos ego, phenomenology attains the universal a priori. Neither the ego nor the world would be conceivable without it, since the universal a priori is the condition for all that is conceivable.2 Then and only then is it legitimate to address the universal problems pertaining to the constitution of the monadic ego. As the source of all possible experience, then, the pure transcendental ego harbours an infinity of possible forms of experience – both actual and potential – as well as the intentional objects that are constituted there. These types of experience are not all simultaneously possible. That is why, to repeat Husserl’s own example, the construction of any theory whatsoever cannot be realized through any variant whatsoever of my own ego; it can only be constructed by a ‘rational’ ego, in the mundane

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sense that one speaks about the human being as a rational animal. Moreover, this ego could not be devoted to theoretical activity in its infancy, for the eidetic intuition of infancy excludes actual theoretical construction but nonetheless contains its possibility. Experiences are thus ordered by an essential and genetic lawfulness in immanent temporality: For indeed whatever occurs in my ego, and eidetically in an ego as such – in the way of intentional processes, constituted unities, Ego habitualities – has its temporality and, in this respect, participates in the system of forms that belongs to the all-inclusive temporality with which every imaginable ego, every possibility-variant of my ego, constitutes himself as himself.3 Once again, imaginative variation allows time to be seen as the universal form of all egological genesis. If one poses the question ‘Under what conditions is the ego a unity?’ then temporality appears as the invariant form. This form is not a causal form (which would refer to nature and to mundane positions) but a motivation with an ‘If … then …’ structure. This opens an ultimate genetic dimension for a couple of reasons. First, the constitutive system of all objects in general is based on the constitution of the authority for which there are objects, namely, transcendental subjectivity. Second, the genetic constitution of the ego authorizes – as far as possible – an absolutely universal eidetic phenomenology. In effect, if ‘the beginning phenomenologist is bound involuntarily by the circumstance that he takes himself as his initial example’,4 then one can object that the ego is always found in a pre-constituted world, a world whose ontological type, as Husserl curiously says, is ‘known by all’ [allbekannten]. This world provides a guiding thread for the description of the structures of transcendental subjectivity. Here again, the risk is facticity, not in the sense of some posterior archi-facticity that would remain after any reduction, but in the sense of the fact from which the eidetic reduction is supposed to deliver us. As long as the ego has not proceeded to the self-variation that gives the eidos ego by showing that time is a universal genetic form (self-variation is not possible without this form), the world which is a correlate of the ego and of which the ego is conscious is not an eidos world. To recognize the genesis of the ego is to liberate oneself from the

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pre-constituted world and to perform the reduction to the eidos world. Strange as this may seem, the discovery of the genetic motif consolidates and confirms the eidetic motif, making it possible at the same time to thematize a historicity that escapes all forms of empiricism. If phenomenology cannot do anything otherwise than to begin from the constituted (and did Husserl ever analyse this constraint?) in order to go back to the original constituting acts, then it will always have to begin with static analyses that are analogous to those of natural history, before undertaking analyses that are properly genetic and historical.5 What are the fundamental principles of constitutive genesis? Husserl states: ‘If we enquire first about principles of constitutive genesis that have universal significance for us, as possible subjects related to a world, we find them to be divided according to two fundamental forms, into principles of active and principles of passive genesis.’6 In the accomplishment of certain acts, the ego produces new objects which are offered to intuition. Starting from the Philosophy of Arithmetic, whose analyses often transgress the psychologism which guides them,7 Husserl considered number to be the result of specific activities exercised over concrete contents. In the subsequent development of phenomenology, these initial investigations will be repeated and extended to all ideal objects, after having been removed from their psychological dimension. In this sense, phenomenology will describe the intentional products of a renewed practical reason, since logical reason is derived from it as well and the concept of constitution will have a strictly active meaning. But, on the one hand, these objects do not belong necessarily to every monadic ego at every moment in its history – a child cannot construct a theory – and the field of active genesis will thus be limited. On the other hand, anything built by activity necessarily presupposes, as the lowest level, a passivity that gives something beforehand; and, when we trace anything built actively, we run into constitution by passive generation. The ‘ready-made’ object that confronts us in life as an existent mere physical thing (when we disregard all the ‘spiritual’ or ‘cultural’ characteristics that make it knowable as, for example, a hammer, a table, an aesthetic creation) is given, with the originality of the ‘it itself’, in the synthesis of a passive experience.8

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Every activity is based on a prior passivity, and so it is already clear that the role of passive syntheses is decisive. Let’s clarify this by returning to perception. When I actively perceive a thing, I explicate its horizons, take an inventory of its properties, and proceed to inspect its details. In so doing, the thing continues to appear to me as this thing that I examine and recognize as being identical to the one that was given before this examination. There is thus an intuition that precedes all explication. It gives the object to me ‘in its entirety’, as an object of a familiar type, but with a vague sense. Given that nothing can appear unless by way of the synthetic work of consciousness, one must accept that a passive synthesis unifies the adumbrations, provides the ‘matter’9 for the synthetic acts, and finally, is able to explain my own familiarity with things. From this point of view that makes the notion of habitus explicit, the passive syntheses as well as the entire passive genesis perhaps play a similar role to that of being-in-the-world in the existential analytic. Husserl provided a very fine analysis of this simple apprehension that enables different senses of passivity to be distinguished and the passive constitution of temporality to be recognized as the precondition for all objective constitution. Husserl states: As a ready example of a simple apprehension, hearing the continuous ringing of a sound will do. Let us suppose that it is continually the same and remains invariable (in intensity and pitch) in the temporal flow and continual change of the phases of its ringing. It sounds in single phases; they are modes of appearance of the temporal object, the sound which endures, and whose duration extends continuously with every moment. It appears in the form of a concrete present with the now-point, the horizon of the continuous past, on the one side, and that of the future on the other. This phenomenon of the present is in a constant original flux, which goes from the now into an ever new now and includes a corresponding change of the horizons of the past and future. Furthermore, the sound is for the most part also given as spatially localized; it is apprehended as sounding in spatial proximity or remoteness – determinations which have reference to a spatial null-point (Nullpunkt), our own bodies (Körper), on which every here and there is oriented. In this way, the sound is passively pregiven as unity of duration.10

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In order to understand the sense of this passive pre-givenness, it is necessary first to contrast it with the active apprehending of the ringing of the sound. The latter lasts as long as the sound. It obeys the same temporal structure, because it always takes place in a living punctual now and has a double horizon of retention and protention. But it is not oriented toward the now of the sound: To lay hold of such a now, such a phase of duration, as a moment and to make it an object for itself is rather the function of a specific act of apprehension of another kind. If we apprehend the sound as enduring, in short, as ‘this sound’, we are not turned toward the momentary and yet continuously changing present (the phase sounding now) but through and beyond this present, in its change, toward the sound a unity which by its essence presents itself in this change, in this flux of appearances.11 The active apprehension coming from the ego traverses the original punctual now of the sound and extends toward the identical sound in the flowing of nows. This implies that each new original now continually and passively coincides with itself in order to remain one and the same. This implies, moreover, that this activity always maintains a hold on what is passing and what has passed. The maintaining of the now is a passivity within activity, an activity that becomes passivity in order to remain an activity. The sound in its unity is thus passively constituted in order to be given as ‘matter’ for acts of synthesis. But it is necessary to proceed further. Acts – all lived experiences in general – possess a temporal form; they enter into the flow of original temporality. This temporal form is itself constituted – the lessons on time analyse this constitution from an essentially noematic point of view – but it cannot be actively constituted, since it is the condition of the possibility and the presupposition of every act. Original temporality thus points back to an absolutely passive constitution. It provides all ‘matter’ in general and thus is connected with the constitution of the hyle. Husserl concludes the analysis in the following way: In this activity it is necessary to make a distinction between the active ray actually springing up continuously and a fixed,

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passive regularity, which, however, is a regularity pertaining to the activity itself. With the active apprehension there goes hand in hand, in a double direction and according to a double form of modification, a modified activity belonging essentially to it. Accordingly, there is not only a passivity prior to the activity, as passivity of the originally constitutive temporal flux, which is only preconstitutive, but also a passivity erected on this, a passivity which is truly objectivating, namely, one which thematizes or cothematizes objects; it is a passivity which belongs to the act, not as a base but as act, a kind of passivity in activity.12 This passive genesis is a ‘history’ to which the ego can have access. Starting from the constituted object that is described in its structure and modes of appearing as a given meaning that can be explicated, intentional analysis goes back to the acts which are originally and intentionally productive of meaning. It seeks out the origin of sense inasmuch as this act or these acts are always present in a sedimented manner in the entire intentional life correlative to the object in question. They first gave it a sense and continue to do so in a passive manner (without being reactivated).13 According to a genetic law, each intentional production refers to a first time that began its history. Everything that is known refers to an act of knowing that passively remains in all subsequent progress in knowing. The noematic correlate of this passive persistence is called the ‘in itself’. If passive genesis encompasses and, in a certain manner, precedes all active genesis, then historicity takes hold of the entirety of egological life, including its constituted objects.14 How does passive genesis operate? Husserl states: ‘The universal principle of passive genesis, for the constitution of all objectivities given completely prior to the products of activity, bears the title association.’15 What should this be taken to mean? Husserl explains very little about this in Cartesian Meditations. After distinguishing the phenomenological concept of association from the Humean concept, Husserl simply notes that ‘here belongs, for example, sensuous configuration in coexistence and in succession’.16 Once again, let’s consider perception. As an active operation of the ego, perception refers to a field of passive pre-givenness where something is already pre-given toward which the ego can turn. What is pre-given affects or ‘excites’ (Husserl often employs this

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word) the ego to perceive. What is the most general structure of this field? Consider the simplest model, a sensible field like an array of colours. It is obtained by way of abstraction, since the colours are always those of concrete and extended things. The very possibility of such an abstraction signifies that the colours – that is, the sense data – are constituted unities and can be thematized on their own. They are the products of a constitutive synthesis that points back to the synthesis of time as ‘a universal form of order of succession and a form of coexistence of all immanent data’.17 To echo Kant, it is a form of sensibility.18 Every form is the form of some content. We must return to the synthesis of contents in order to understand the structure of the sensible field. Considered on its own, it is given as a homogenous unity in a heterogeneous relation to other fields of sensibility. Within the field of an array of colours, the contrast between red and white does not exclude their homogeneity as visual data to emerge in contrast, for example, with the fields of acoustic or tactile data. This is to say that the ‘the most general syntheses of sensuous data raised to prominence within a field, data which at any given time are united in the living present of a consciousness, are those in conformity with affinity [Verwandschaft] (homogeneity) and strangeness [Fremdheit] (heterogeneity)’.19 This affinity is also referred to as an analogy [Ahnlichkeit], and it can be displayed in varying degrees, ranging from a contrast where two dissimilar data appear against the background of a community (red and white as two visual data) to the repetition of two absolutely similar data. In both cases, a synthesis of coincidence is at work, whether it is partial or total. Though similitude and analogy are offered to static analysis, they are already the work of a passive synthesis of coincidence: ‘that we denote by the traditional term association, but with a change of sense’.20 When there is a synthesis of coincidence between two contents, there is an immanent referral (renvoi) of the one to the other and this referral is a genesis (for form of these contents being temporal): the first content is evoked by the second. When the contents fuse together, association produces homogeneity. When they do not overlap with one another, association produces heterogeneity: ‘Homogeneity and heterogeneity, therefore, are the result of two different and fundamental modes of associative unification.’21 Associative genesis, as an essential law of intentionality, is operative in all passive constitution, including the constitution of

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immanent temporal objects, or, lived experiences. Consequently, it is an a priori for all constitution of an ego. The demonstration of this ‘innate’22 a priori enables phenomenology to accomplish its goal, namely, to be the theory of static and genetic constitution of the objects of all possible consciousness. In a deep sense, it seeks to make the ego comprehensible, ‘as an infinite nexus of synthetically congruous performances – at levels, all of which fit the universal persisting form, temporality, because the latter itself is built up in a continual, passive and completely universal genesis, which, as a matter of essential necessity, embraces everything new’.23 To respect the egological closure, the auto-constitution of the monad should never presuppose the alter ego and especially not on the ultimate level of passive constitution and associative genesis. But, if association operates by affinity and strangeness [Fremdheit], does it not imply the other? How can the sense of this Fremdheit be understood, if the other is not given? In the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations Husserl will say that ‘accordingly, the intrinsically first other (the first “non-Ego”) is the other Ego’.24 This statement bears weighty consequences. It comes down to affirming that the other operates at the deepest levels of the constitution of the ego, since the sense of strangeness at work in association must be derived from what is the first stranger-in-itself [l’étranger-en-soi], namely, the alter ego. More profoundly still, this perhaps implies a definition of pure temporality as the relation to the other. In effect, if the other ego is what is originally foreign to me, then the other ego is what originally affects me. Does it not merge, then, with the original temporal hyle that a 1930 manuscript describes as the ‘core of the other-than-me’?25 Unless we were to establish that the alter ego is a moment of the eidos ego (but what, then, would be the sense of alterity?), we would again be led back toward an archi-facticity. Doubtless, Husserl could only say that ‘the particular fact is irrational; but it is possible only in the a priori form-system pertaining to it as an egological fact’, or that the ‘“fact”, with its “irrationality”, is itself a structural concept within the system of the concrete Apriori.’26 The system of this concrete a priori would be based on this archifacticity. Reason and irrationality could no longer be on the scale of an archi-facticity. Instead, it would have to be interpreted in the horizon of the relation between the ego and the alter ego and

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through a development that could no longer be called phenomenology. We shall return to this point later. After having thus connected all of the constitutive analyses to the analysis of the ego and having described the style of intentional genesis, it is possible to philosophically define phenomenology and to phenomenologically define philosophy. As a transcendental theory of knowledge, is phenomenology an idealism? Certainly, but in a very novel sense. What was the theory of knowledge for Descartes, according to Husserl? After establishing that all evidence and justification of being and of truth is accomplished in me, it was a matter of understanding how mental life can acquire an objective meaning, or rather, how a clear and distinct perception can claim to be more than and something other than a pure and simple internal characteristic of consciousness. Divine veracity is the Cartesian name of the solution. Husserl writes: What does phenomenology’s transcendental self-investigation have to say about this? Nothing less than that the whole problem is counter-sensical [Widersinn]. It involves an inconsistency into which Descartes necessarily fell, because he missed the genuine sense of his reduction to the indubitable – we were about to say: his transcendental epoché and reduction to the pure ego.27 Where does this counter-sense reside? The questioning ego is already a psyche, a mundane ego; Descartes thus accepts the validity of the world that he attempts to question. The phenomenologist has access to the field of transcendental experience. In the infinite detail of intentional analysis, the phenomenologist shows that all beings, regardless of their type of being, are a formation of sense from pure consciousness and that every conceivable sense is derived from transcendental subjectivity. Husserl states: ‘The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical.’28 Phenomenological idealism is not a psychological idealism of Berkeley’s sort; intentionality prevents this from being the case. And, continually attentive to the horizonal aspect of all sense, intentionality excludes the possibility – the sense – of an in-itself

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and thus distances itself from the Kantian style of idealism. Husserl’s is an idealism without limits: an absolute idealism.29 The absoluteness of this idealism is co-substantial with phenomenology to the point that, as Husserl writes, it is its ‘proof’. This, of course, depends on the thesis that consciousness does not have any exteriority. At the same time, this gives the charge of solipsism the status of an objection that in principle threatens the totality of the phenomenological edifice. Moreover, Husserl was unable to stop himself, within the framework of pure egology, from sometimes tacitly having recourse to intersubjectivity. The problem of the intentional experience of the other is not a regional problem. Instead, it is the greatest difficulty of phenomenology, since it touches on its very possibility and its sense. It would be a grave error to consider the Fifth Meditation purely and simply as an explication of the alter ego. The question is certainly about the sense of intersubjectivity, but it concerns whether or not this sense is compatible with the sense of phenomenology. It is a test of both the other and of sense, of experience and the purified expression of its own sense, a test of phenomenology by and with itself.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The Objection of Solipsism The initial discussion of the problem of the other highlights the fact that phenomenological Idealism is in question. By defining transcendental subjectivity as something concrete, Husserl seems to forever prohibit the positing of another ego. As a result, this makes the objective world phenomenologically unthinkable and thereby undermines the philosophical project itself. Objectivity can no longer be based on divine veracity. This ‘cause of distress’1 is not only due to the fact that divine veracity appeals to a metaphysics that falls under the scope of the reduction but also due to the fact that it presupposes that which is in question: the constitution of an alien subjectivity. This occurs whether it is conceived as an infinite subjectivity or as total and infinite subjectivity that, in a Leibnizian manner, unifies all monadic subjectivities simultaneously. Under the guise of the other, it is the being of objectivity and consequently of intentionality itself that is at stake. The question is sufficiently essential to lead Husserl to envision the following retraction: Have we not therefore done transcendental realism an injustice? The doctrine may lack a phenomenological foundation; but essentially it is right in the end, since it looks for a path from the immanencey of the ego to the transcendency of the Other. Can we, as phenomenologists, do anything but agree with this and say: ‘The nature and the whole world that are constituted “immanently” in the ego are only my “ideas” and have behind them the world that exists in itself. The way to this world must still be sought?’ Accordingly can we avoid saying likewise:

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‘The very question of the possibility of actually transcendent knowledge – above all, that of the possibility of my going outside my ego and reaching other egos (who, after all, as others, are not actually in me but only consciously intended in me) – this question cannot be asked purely phenomenologically?’ Is it not self-understood [selbstverständlich] from the very beginning that my field of transcendental knowledge does not reach beyond my sphere of transcendental experience and what is synthetically comprised therein? Is it not self-understood that all of that is included without residue in my own transcendental ego?2 The first result of the reduction is to link me to the flow of my pure, conscious-lived experiences and to the unities constituted by their actualities and potentialities. Moreover, the reduction ultimately allows the profound identity of the flow and the monadic ego to appear. Henceforth, everything that can be constituted belongs to me and is inseparable from me. Or, what amounts to the same thing, the constituting egological life is an infinite life under an absolute law of closure: ‘But what about other egos, who surely are not a mere intending and intended in me [die doch nicht blosse Verstellung und Vorgestelltes in mir sind], merely synthetic unities of possible verification in me, but according to their sense, precisely others?’3 The meaning of this question entails: (1) a certain way of understanding the concept of constitution. Constitution would always have to do with the ego. In such a case, it would be necessary to conclude that phenomenology is unable to think transcendence; (2) an understanding of the other as an exceptional object whose sense would come to contradict that of constitution, a sense in rebellion against the origin of sense; (3) that the alter ego carries, in the end, the weight of all exteriority and of all transcendence. One should thus come to expect that the analysis of the constitution of the alter ego is the analysis of both the original transcendence and of the origin of transcendence. In short, it is the analysis of the origin of the world. These remarks, in turn, call forth a few questions. Where does this understanding of the sense of the other come from? According to what laws can one say that the sense of the other contradicts the sense of sense, if not the laws of pure logical grammar? Is one thus not forced to refer to the sense-giving of transcendental subjectivity in order to bring out the paradoxical

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sense of the other? And does this not indicate that the other has been constituted in me? The only way of breaking this ‘circle’ is to ‘undertake the task of phenomenological explication indicated in this connexion by the “alter ego” and carry it through in concrete work’.4 This procedure entails at least one decision: the other can only be a sense, and as such, can only have its origin in me. This decision repeats the one which inaugurates phenomenology: every conceivable object in general is a formation of sense by pure subjectivity. Does one not risk, from the outset, missing the other as irreducible to me and thereby risk carrying out one of the more subtle and violent reductions, the reduction of the phenomenon itself? Is not the other the unthinkable par excellence? But, in order to be able to denounce this operation – to say that the other has been missed and that the other is phenomenologically unthinkable – must one not have had prior access to the other? This line of thinking is based on the same erroneous principle as the theories that replace the perception of incarnate givenness with the consciousness of a sign or an image.5 If the other’s being-for-us is ‘something very strange that we all feel’, it is only at the end of an intentional analysis that it will be possible to recognize this strangeness in its full legitimacy. Or rather, only a phenomenology is able to say that the other escapes from its jurisdiction and then turn this lack of conformity into an essential and positive structure. Husserl writes: We must, after all, obtain for ourselves insight into the explicit and implicit intentionality wherein the alter ego becomes evinced and verified in the realm of our transcendental ego; we must discover in what intentionalities, syntheses, motivations, the sense of the ‘other ego’ becomes fashioned in me and, under the title, harmonious experience of someone else, becomes verified as existing and even as itself there in its own manner. These experiences and their works are facts belonging to my phenomenological sphere. How else than by examining them can I explicate the sense, existing others, in all its aspects?6 The sole point of departure for phenomenology will be, as always, the mode of givenness taken as the transcendental guiding thread. The other is a noema who is constituted in and through specific noeses; after a static analysis, genetic study

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will be able to work back toward them. The other can only be perceived, and regardless of the singularity of this perception (its noema is a noesis), it does not seem to require, at this stage of the description anyway, a transformation of principles. The other appears on the scene of perception without contributing to its establishment nor, so to speak, participating in its operation. To make the other a noema amounts to excluding the other from playing a role in the constitution of the ego. The purity of the egological–monadic closure is maintained here. We are calling attention to this point here, because it will turn out later that Husserl will be forced to alter this purity. Here is the first exemplary description: In changeable harmonious multiplicities of experience I experience others as actually existing and, on the one hand, as world Objects – not as mere physical things belonging to Nature, though indeed as such things in respect of one side of them. They are in fact experienced also as governing psychically in their respective natural organisms. Thus peculiarly involved [verflochten] with flesh, as ‘psychophysical’ Objects, they are ‘in’ the world. On the other hand, I experience them at the same time as subjects for this world, as experiencing it (this same world that I experience) and, in so doing, experiencing me too, even as I experience the world and others in it. Continuing along this line, I can explicate a variety of other moments noematically.7 The most basic characteristic of the perception of the other described above is its ambiguity. This is the case on several levels: (1) the other is given as an object in the world, in a synthetic multiplicity of adumbrations, and as a subject outside of the world derived from an entirely distinct mode of givenness. As another origin of the world, the other is given to me in the same way as I am given to myself. The human being that I am is the self-objectivation of the transcendental subject that I am. If the givenness of the other as in the world does not raise any problems, it is clear that the other’s being-given as outside of the world constitutes the entire difficulty. (2) The other is a mundane psycho-physical object, an object with two sides. On its ‘physical’ side, the other is a thing in nature, a body

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(Körper) that is individualized by its position in the homogenous continuum of space and time. On the other side, the other is manifest ‘psychically’. I cannot have direct access to that sphere, because it would then be mine. (3) The body of the other is also flesh. In the description cited above, Husserl does not yet mark this difference neatly. But, stricto sensu, the psycho-physical unity cannot be confused with the psycho-somatic unity,8 and to return to the issue of individuation, flesh is individualized differently from the body.9 It is difficult to unify all of these ambiguities immediately and under the same systematic law. At best, one can highlight the ambiguities that Husserl explicitly mentions (leaving aside for now the difference between flesh and body [chair/corps]). As an object in the world and as a physical body, the other can be directly given in intuition; as a transcendental subject and as a psyche, that is excluded in principle. The phenomenon described is ambiguous because the other is given to a fulfilled intuition in one respect but refuses it in another aspect. This is a decisive characteristic to which we will continually return. In this regard, the initial description, more or less explicitly, sets in place everything that will follow: from the operative levers to the most complex aporias. Yet, the description was intended only to establish that, in my pure and reduced conscious life, I do not only experience others but also I experience the world as intersubjective. In short, the sense of my transcendental experience of the world is an objective sense. But this objective sense belongs to ‘my’ phenomenon of the world, and if there are others, then each of them has their own phenomenon of the world. How can this presence in me of a sense that exceeds me be understood and elucidated, if all sense is the work of my intentional life? This problem could be posed in another way. The epoché yields an I that exists in solitude. The radicality of this solitude measures up to the demands of philosophy itself, which is to say that it cannot be measured by philosophy. In this sense, the I is absolutely indeclinable. However, Husserl remarks: ‘There still remains a difficulty, an incomprehensibility wherein the I itself has appeal only to itself, and just as I say I, all of the personal pronouns are already there as correlates.’10 What do I say when I say I? Husserl states: ‘In solitary speech of the meaning of “I” is essentially realized in the immediate idea of one’s own personality, which is also the

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meaning of the word in communicated speech. Each man has his own I-presentation (and with it his individual notion of I) and this is why the word’s meaning differs from person to person.’11 Husserl’s investigations of the ideality of meaning ought to prohibit such a statement. If meaning is ideal, then this means that we have to be able to understand the word ‘I’ in the absence of the one who utters it. I can only say ‘I’ and understand what I am saying against the horizon of my own death.12 If meaning is ideal, then this also means that it is omnitemporal and intersubjective. I can only say ‘I’ and understand what I am saying against the horizon of a We, that is, against the horizon of a declension of the I. The testimonial value of all meaning points back to my own death and to others. By stating the word ‘I’, I address my own death to others; I expropriate myself of it [en exproprie]. Should one think that the relation to my death merges with my relation to the other? Wouldn’t the ego then be structurally expropriated from itself? What would happen to ownness and to the egological closure? Husserl, once again, answers as follows: Therefore, in order to provide the basis for answering all imaginable questions that can have any sense here – nay, in order that, step by step, these questions themselves may be propounded and solved – it is necessary to begin with a systematic explication of the overt and implicit intentionality in which the being of others for me becomes ‘made’ and explicated in respect of its rightful content – that is, its fulfilment-content.13

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Flesh and the Sphere of Ownness The phenomenological approach always seeks to be freed from all presuppositions. Without going into a deeper analysis of the possibility and limitations of this requirement, let’s specify here the form that it takes at the threshold of the intentional analysis of the other. What is interrogated is the constitution and transcendental sense of the other, that is to say the universal stratum of the sense of the ‘objective world’. The alter ego therefore should not be either explicitly or implicitly presupposed at any moment. This calls for a new epoché of a unique kind: ‘For the present we exclude from the thematic field everything now in question: we disregard all constitutional effects of intentionality relating immediately or mediately to other subjectivity and delimit first of all the total nexus of that actual and potential intentionality in which the ego constitutes within himself a peculiar ownness.’1 This reduction does not put out of play the other as posited in the natural attitude (this would unnecessarily duplicate the phenomenological reduction), nor does it strive for a mundane solitude that, as such, refers to others; nor is it, more subtly, a reduction to the phenomenon of the human ego, which, again, refers to others but reduces them to the phenomenon of the world. Instead, an abstraction is first made of that which ‘gives men and brutes their specific sense as, so to speak, Ego-like living beings’.2 For the animal ‘has something like an I-structure’;3 animals are the subjects of a conscious life to which we can have

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access by an ‘assimilating modification of inter-human empathy’.4 The phenomenology of animality presupposes the phenomenology of intersubjectivity and so the reduction to my sphere of ownness must abstract from an egoic animality. Second, everything that is derived from culture is abstracted. Mustn’t one therefore also reduce phenomenology itself? Is not the abstraction from culture the most cultural gesture of all? Perhaps, but this point can only emerge after phenomenology, that is, after the reduction. Third, there is an abstraction of Umweltlichkeit. The surrounding world is, according to Husserl, a concept that only has a role in the world of spirit.5 As such, everything that depends on it must be reduced. Husserl also has in mind the Heideggerian analysis of worldhood. In interpreting Being and Time as a regional ontology explicating the a priori of the surrounding world,6 Husserl maintains the judicial priority of the universal a priori of constitution and thus is warranted in reducing it. Before defining positively the ‘residue’ of this reduction to my sphere of ownness [réduction au propre], still one more remark is in order: this reduction is only possible on the condition that it can be abstracted from the totality of intentional productions intending or implying the other. Given that the other is not an adequate datum capable of being abstracted from the source but a transcendence that is constituted in a synthesis that is in principle open to the possibility of discordance, it would be necessary to have completely reactivated all the intentional production in question and to have covered all of their horizons. Is this possible? Isn’t it even contradictory if there is no constitution of a horizon but only horizons of constitution? Does one not run up against, in various forms, the limits that mark the finitude of the phenomenologist?7 Husserl does not say anything about it. Husserl states: ‘In this connection we note something important. When we thus abstract, we retain a unitarily coherent stratum of the phenomenon world, a stratum of the phenomenon that is the correlate of continuously harmonious, continuing worldexperience.’8 The reduction to my sphere of ownness is not equivalent to the destruction of the world and of all experience. On the contrary, this abstraction delivers, in a certain sense, the condition of all experience of the world. In effect, no experience of the world is possible without this experience being composed of a certain alterity. The real world always signifies a world other

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than me. The syntax of this ‘other than me’ [autre que moi] already indicates that I cannot have an experience of the other (however singular or strange this experience may be) without first having an experience of what is ownmost to me.9 The experience of ownness [du propre] is the essence [le propre] of experience. This proposition is just as important for phenomenology as it is for Kantianism, which states that: ‘The conditions for the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience.’10 The layer of ownness is foundational (can it only be considered a ‘layer’, then?) in the sense that no experience of transcendence is possible that does not presuppose the experience of ownness. The condition of the possibility of experience is given to experience; this, in the eyes of Kant, would have been a monstrosity. Husserl states: ‘Let us observe more closely the result of our abstraction and, accordingly, what it leaves us. From the phenomenon world, from the world appearing with an Objective sense, a substratum becomes separated, as the “Nature” included in my ownness.’11 What is this ‘nature included in my ownness’? Since all objectivity and all idealization are put out of play, it is not a nature in the sense of physical science which abstracts everything that is mental from the lifeworld in order to deal only with an idealized corporeality. This exposure of nature (idealization, Husserl sometimes says, is a clothing) is of a pure multiplicity of perceived bodies that cannot be put into the form of objective space and time; it is a purely ‘subjective’ nature. Even if it maintains the sense of a group of extended things, it is characterized first and foremost by its heterogeneity. Husserl again writes, and we quote at length: Among the bodies belonging to this ‘Nature’ and included in my peculiar ownness, I then find my flesh [Leib] as uniquely singled out [in einziger Auszeichnung] – namely as the only one of them that is not just a body but precisely an flesh [Leib]: the sole Object within my abstract world-stratum to which, in accordance with experience, I ascribe [zurechne] fields of sensation (belonging to it, however, in different manners – a field of tactual sensations, a field of warmth and coldness, and so forth) the only Object ‘in’ which I ‘rule and govern’ [schalte und walte] immediately, governing particularly in each of its

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‘organs’. Touching kinesthetically, I perceive ‘with’ my hands; seeing kinesthetically, I perceive also ‘with’ my eyes; and so forth; moreover I can perceive thus at any time. Meanwhile the kinesthesias pertaining to the organs flow in the mode ‘I am doing’, and are subject to my ‘I can’; furthermore, by calling these kinesthesias into play I can push, thrust, and so forth, and can thereby ‘act’ somatically – immediately, and then, mediately. As perceptively active, I experience (or can experience) all of Nature, including my own flesh, which therefore in the process is reflexively related to itself. That becomes possible because I ‘can’ perceive one hand ‘by means of’ the other, an eye by means of a hand, and so forth – a procedure in which the functioning organ must become an Object and the Object a functioning organ. And it is the same in the case of my generally possible original dealing with Nature and with my flesh itself, by means of this organism – which therefore is reflexively related to itself also in practice.12 Let’s pay close attention to this long description that leads further into the sphere of ownness and gives rise to some considerable problems. The first thing that it is necessary to bring up here is that the sphere of ownness – anchored in my flesh and characterized by the distinction between flesh/body – is not homogeneous. It is not homogeneous, in the first place, because my flesh is distinct from all bodies for several reasons. We have already made clear that no syntheses giving any body whatsoever would be possible without a correlative system of dispositions of my flesh (tactile movements, ocular movements, etc.). Husserl has painstakingly analysed these dispositions ever since his 1907 course [Ding und Raum].13 In this respect, flesh is the condition of the possibility of the thing, or better, the constitution of flesh is presupposed by all constitution of things, that is to say, by all constitution of worldly [mondaine] transcendence in general. This means that flesh is the universal medium for the givenness of bodies within the sphere of ownness. Husserl writes: My flesh is a given thing in its original properties. I move originally, change originally in all such ‘movements’ and all other original changes for me constitute an existent unit that remains present to me and takes on the character of self-givenness. At its

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base it is given as originally possible and effective for me; every other thing of my original sphere is for me such that I have an original foundation, but by means of my flesh and its originality, by means of its original kinesthesis, the I is able to put into play seeing, hearing, etc.14 Always accompanying what is given to me, flesh is what is the ownmost – most my own – in the sphere of ownness. Husserl writes: Among all spatial things, my universal practical sphere is ‘my’ flesh, that which is most originally mine [das ursprünglichst Meine]. That original source of that which is my own and continuously my own, continually is my disposition and the origin; it is that which only is immediate; it is that which stands as my disposition. The one that I am (as a child) is the first and is immediately appropriated, and it is now the organ designed for the means of the appropriation of each and all.15 And what holds for ownness also holds for what is near to me: ‘My flesh is among all things the nearest, the nearest for perception and the nearest for my feeling and willing.’16 Is there anything that is more originally my own, more near and more mine than the origin of ownness, of the near and of what is mine? Ownness, proximity, and mineness are not conceivable prior to flesh. Nothing based on the pre-understanding of my sphere of ownness, proximity or mineness could be thought prior to the flesh. Flesh is their origin. If the essence of experience is the experience of ownness, then the most essential experience of ownness is my flesh. Without a thematization of flesh, phenomenology risks to lose its radicalism; it risks to contradict its most essential vocation and to support the interpretation that it is insufficient. The sphere of ownness, in the second instance, is heterogeneous because my flesh is also bodily. It is given descriptively, to be sure, but this givenness must be explained. It is thus a question of knowing how, in the purely egological sphere of ownness, my flesh can acquire the sense of a body. To do this, the analysis of its constitution as flesh is a necessary prerequisite. Husserl undertakes this analysis in the second volume of his Ideas Pertaining to Pure

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Phenomenology. There, after having noted that flesh is the organ of all perception and that it necessarily accompanies the experience of spatio-temporal objects, he turns toward the constitution of flesh itself. As his exemplar and guiding thread, he takes the perception that flesh has of itself as a corporeal flesh. The choice of this example seems to indicate that the question of incorporation [l’incorporation] is considered to be resolved. First of all, let’s set aside that which, in the perception of the flesh (as a genitive object), does not distinguish it from any other body whatsoever. For example, the seeing of my hand can be described in the same way as the seeing of the table in front of me. But it is no longer the same when it is a question of how things appear to me in tactile form. When I touch my left hand with my right hand, I have sensations of movement and tactile sensations that objectify my ‘left hand’ as a thing. These sensations belong to my right hand. Yet, my left hand also experiences tactile sensations that, without being constitutive, are ‘localized’ there. The physical thing ‘left hand’ is what I obtain after these sensations are abstracted. If I take them into account, the physical thing is not enriched, for ‘it becomes flesh, it senses (es wird Leib, es empfindet)’.17 The respective roles of the right and left hands are reversible, and they can be reversed constantly. What is important here is the self-relation of touch, the endless exchange between the organ and the object in which they can no longer be distinguished from one another. If touch is privileged, it is due to this double ‘sensation’ [sentance].18 What touches is also touched, whereas what sees is not seen and what hears is not heard. That said, we can eliminate any reference to the physical thing, to the body, and to exteriority. Flesh is pure auto-affection. Husserl says: ‘The touch-sensing is not a state of the material thing, hand, but is precisely the hand itself, which for us is more than a material thing.’19 He adds: ‘If I convince myself that a perceived thing does not exist, that I am subject to an illusion, then, along with the thing, everything extended in its extension is stricken out too. But the sensings [Empfindnisse] do not disappear.’20 It is Husserl’s conviction that this constitution of flesh through touch – in which flesh appears as the basis of Empfindnisse as well as an organ of the will and the basis of free movement – can be achieved within the egological sphere of ownness. The same does not hold for its constitution as a material thing, as a body, that is to say, as a res extensa.21 In Ideas II, when Husserl describes the

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constitution of a centre of orientation in space – an absolute here – he is not describing the body but the flesh. Bodies, by definition, occupy some place within an isotopic, homogeneous and intersubjective space. When Husserl proceeds to claim that flesh is constituted as a body in a multiplicity of concordant adumbrations but that this constitution is ‘strangely incomplete’, does he not still presuppose the other? Does he not presuppose the other’s point of view from which this completeness can be accessed and to which he refers negatively in calling it ‘incomplete’? Husserl contends, ‘My flesh, in its physical truth, is a unity of possible perceptions that all others could have of my flesh.’22 Finally, to make the flesh into the ‘turning point’ [Umschlagpunkt] in the causal nexus where free conditionality is inserted into causality is to withdraw the flesh from corporeality. If, in the closure of a reduction to the sphere of ownness, no constitution of flesh as body seems possible, then this is because the union of flesh and body [l’incorporation] presupposes intersubjectivity. Aware of this, Husserl continually returns to this question of incorporation in the manuscripts devoted to intersubjectivity. After 1921, the constitution of flesh as a physical thing is considered to be problematic when viewed from the solipsistic attitude.23 The analysis, in short, is as follows: each member of my flesh appears to be moving freely, but it can always appear to be moved ‘mechanically’ by another member. My right hand can lift my left hand. The two types of movement (subjective movement and ‘mechanical’ movement) coincide and are identified with each other, such that my flesh is constituted both as flesh and as a physical thing. But what entitles the passive movement of my left hand to be called ‘mechanical’?24 Above all, it is not the relation of these organs to one another that needs to be constituted as a body but the flesh for which they are organs (this is why the concept of organs needs to be renounced). After having shown that the movement of my flesh can never be confused with the movement of a thing, Husserl ends with the following remark: ‘Thus it is a fundamental problem to think through and clearly define how flesh is also constituted as physical flesh.’25 In some sense, what will follow afterward will be nothing more than the development of the consequences of this fundamental aporia. What is the sense of this demonstration of my flesh inside the sphere of ownness? ‘Bringing to light my flesh, reduced to what

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is included in my ownness, is itself part of bringing to light the ownness-essence of the Objective phenomenon: “I as this man.”’26 In effect, within the transcendental reduction, I carry out a further reduction to my sphere of ownness, and other people become nothing more than bodies. By contrast, the person that I am is soul and flesh [âme et chair], ‘a psycho-physical unity – in the latter, my personal Ego, who operates in this flesh and, “by means of” it, in the “external world”, who is affected by this world, and who thus in all respects, by virtue of the continual experience of such unique modes of Ego- and life-relatedness, is constituted as psychophysically united with the animate corporeal organism’.27 Let that be the case. But: (1) how can I know and say that my flesh is a component of the proper essence of the objective phenomenon ‘I-the human’, without intending this phenomenon and without it being given to me? And how can that be done when all phenomenal objectivity in general has been put out of play? Must not the other already be given, then? (2) This can be verified a second time. To identify, as Husserl does, the soul–flesh compound (in Ideas III he gives the name ‘somatology’ to the analysis of flesh) with the psychophysical compound is to take for granted the incorporation of flesh within the sphere of ownness. (3) This can be observed, once again. If in the sphere of ownness flesh cannot be body, this implies that the limits of my flesh are not those of the body. What could those limits be? We will not respond immediately to this question that Husserl never posed, because another question is preliminary: can my flesh possess, in the sphere of ownness, other limits than those of the world of the sphere of ownness, limits that may make it possible to talk about an external world, of a world external to flesh [ausserleibliche Welt], and of things external to flesh [ausserleiblichen Dinge]?28 Nothing is less sure. As the organ of all perception, as the site and means of all perception, my flesh extends as far as my perception extends: all the way to the stars.29 Flesh is co-extensive with the world of ownness, and without its incorporation, it is very difficult to understand the possible meaning of an outside-of-flesh [hors-chair]. Of course, Husserl does not raise these questions in the course pursued in his Cartesian Meditations. If some of these questions emerge in the unpublished manuscripts devoted to intersubjectivity, they all lead phenomenology, directly or indirectly, toward its condition of impossibility. So, henceforth, our approach will

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be twofold: on the one hand, we will force ourselves to follow the winding path of Husserl’s descriptions, and, on the other, we will lay out the consequences of the impossibility of incorporation. Inasmuch as Husserl himself admits that incorporation is the precondition for all ‘Einfühlung’,30 we will continually have to undo what Husserl seeks to constitute. This work would have only a limited interest, if it did not progressively point to the need for an analysis of flesh and of the carnal difference (by this we mean the flesh/body difference). If our attention is focused on the Fifth Meditation, this is due to its essential and decisive position within the phenomenological system as well as the permanent appeal that it makes to flesh and body. Without this conjunction that we shall attempt to analyse, no interpretation of phenomenology within the horizon of carnal difference would be possible. There would then be nothing more here than a monograph with almost no philosophical value. The result of the reduction to ownness comes down to this: there is a ‘world’ of ownness in which the psycho-physical ego is integrated by virtue of its corporeal flesh, and this world is the noematic correlate of a transcendental ego. What is attained, then, is monadic subjectivity in its full concreteness. My own world conserves, says Husserl, ‘the personal … who displays value predicates and predicates of “works” [Wert und Werkprädikate] as such’ and remains within a spatio-temporal form reduced to ownness in which ‘“Objects” – the “physical things”, the “psychophysical Ego” – are likewise outside one another’.31 This expression is surprising. What sense can a personal ego have in a world without others? What sense can there be in positing a value or recognizing the value of work? Are not the axiological world and the world of work essentially intersubjective? But, even more seriously, what can be the sense of a spatio-temporal form reduced to ownness? If, at least before any deeper explication of temporality, one can accept provisionally the reduction of temporal form to the sphere of ownness, it is not possible to say that the sphere of ownness, as fundamentally heterogeneous, is also subject to the same spatial form. Either the spatial form is one and the same and intersubjectivity is given, or homogeneous space is not constituted and it is impossible to say, for example, that things are external to the incarnate ego. Husserl returns frequently to this question. We cite, among other examples, a very short text dated from March

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or April 1934 that is entitled ‘The problem of the constitution of homogenous and objective space in primordiality and through Einfühlung.’ It begins by asking: ‘Is it even conceivable, setting aside others, to constitute space, in the full sense, as a form of corporeality, and to do so in such a way that my flesh has the properties of corporeality, that is, the same properties as external bodies?’32 He then quickly distinguishes between the immobility of the flesh and the body at rest, and he concludes: ‘My corporeal flesh [Leibkörper] in its primordiality (and has in consequence an exclusive meaning) is so constituted that the claim that it has locomotion, including location in space, has no meaning.’33 This response troubles him enough that he seeks in vain to resolve it by announcing analyses that are ‘not very easy to pursue’.

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CHAPTER NINE

Flesh, Ego, Psyche The world of ownness is the world of purely original experience, that is, of incarnate experiences and data. It includes nothing that is other in the strong sense, and this is the case for the following reason: the other acquires its sense in relation to the ego. That is, there can only be an alter ego in relation to my ego reduced to the sphere of ownness. The other can only be constituted in my own world; every other world already presupposes the constitution of the other: It is clear that this sphere, the sphere of my transcendental ego’s primordial ownness, must contain the motivational foundation for the constitution of those transcendencies that are genuine, that go beyond it, and originate first of all as ‘others’ (other psychophysical beings and other transcendental egos), the transcendencies that, thus mediated, make possible the constitution of an Objective world in the everyday sense: a world of the ‘non-Ego’, of what is other than my Ego’s own. All Objectivity in this sense, is related back constitutionally to the first affair that is other than my Ego’s own, the other-thanmy-Ego’s-own in the form, someone ‘else’ – that is to say: the non-Ego in the form, ‘another Ego’.1 The analysis of my own world is thus a necessary prerequisite. My psychic life remains an intentional psychic life that experiences the world. This means in particular that the putting out of play of what is foreign to me does not prevent me from having and being able to have the experience of something foreign

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to me: my consciousness of the foreign is not foreign to my consciousness. This experience rightfully belongs to it. Or rather, all of the constitution of the world is inherent to my psyche (including, as a result, the systems that constitute the foreign). The reduction to the sphere of ownness does not undermine the possibility, within my psyche, of having an experience of the other or of constituting the other. However, this can occur only in a psychological sense, unless it can be shown that my psychic life is itself integrally constituted by my transcendental ego and thereby belongs to it. The transcendental ego would then constitute the world that is internal to it, a world where the psychophysical ego would be able to have experiences of external things, of the other, and with others. We have already confronted the problem of the relation between the transcendental ego and the psychological ego – between phenomenology and psychology – the problem concerning the mundanization and humanization of the absolute ego. And we left unanswered Heidegger’s (and Ingarden’s) question about whether the ego could be transcendental and/or psychological as well as the question about the play between identity and difference that is concealed under the form of this ‘and/or’. The elegance of Husserl’s solution barely conceals (even from Husserl’s own eyes, to begin with2) its obscurity. In constituting the world as the absolute transcendental ego, I continually have a worldly apperception of myself [eine verweltlichende Selbstapperzeption] or rather a self-objectivation [Selbstobjecktivierung].3 This self-apperception is always already accomplished, since the reduction begins precisely by inhibiting it. In some sense, the proof of this apperception resides in the possibility of putting it out of play. Through this strange circularity, the reduction brings to light the difference between the transcendental ego and the psychological ego, and in so doing, goes on to confirm this apperception. Let’s try to analyse more finely this apperception though which my consciousness takes on the sense of a mundane, psychological consciousness. The mundane ego designates a consciousness and a mental life that are localized in a corporeal flesh. One can indeed ask, as Husserl does, ‘Why do we not say: the body reigns [waltet] over the soul, instead we always say: the soul reigns over the body?’4 Also, by qualifying the primordial human ego as a ‘concretely incarnated I or an egoic corporeal flesh’,5

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the traditional definition of the human being as a union of soul and body, of soul and flesh, is nonetheless presupposed. My mundane experience of myself is an experience of an incarnated and incorporated psychological ego. Through this, I have and am able to have a mundane experience of the world. Inasmuch as this experience does not resist the thought experiment of the annihilation of the world,6 it appears that a consciousness without flesh and without body is possible. It is also possible without a soul, since the soul is correlative with corporeal flesh and founded on it.7 Transcendental consciousness is thereby given as radically disincarnated and decorporealized. The worldly apperception of myself would signify incarnation and incorporation. We cannot, however, stop there. Transcendental consciousness remains an intentional consciousness related to the phenomenon of the world; it remains a perceiving consciousness. But no perception is possible without my flesh. It is thus necessary to admit that flesh belongs to transcendental subjectivity. This is the only way, besides, to give the expression ‘incarnate givenness’ its full weight and its enigmatic sense. Worldly apperception thus cannot be confused with incarnation. Once again, flesh is not something material or corporeal that would be linked to conscious phenomena by a functional dependence. Husserl indicates as much in a curious fictitious example: Let us imagine a consciousness (whether something psychically real belongs to it or not), my consciousness, say, which would stand in relation to a locomotive, so that if the locomotive were given water, this consciousness would have the pleasant feeling that we call satiety; if the locomotive were heated, it would have the feeling of warmth, etc. Obviously, the locomotive would not, because of the make-up of such relationships, become flesh for this consciousness. If, instead of the thing that I at the time call my flesh, the locomotive stood in my consciousness as the field of my pure Ego, then I could not call it flesh also, for it simply would not be a flesh.8 If it were mechanically united with the locomotive, my consciousness would not be able to perceive. What sense would

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the concept of adumbration, for instance, have under this hypothesis? Could one speak of ‘incarnate givenness’? Under no circumstances, but it remains true that my flesh is always also constituted as a body and that corporeality is the layer of the world that founds all others. Husserl writes, ‘All objects in the world are in essence “embodied”.’9 Through incorporation, flesh enworlds [mondanise] transcendental consciousness. This also implies – since incorporation refers to intersubjectivity – that neither the worldly apperception of oneself nor the reduction can take place without the other. Besides, is not the expression ‘self-objectification’ a tacit confession of this? Why does intersubjectivity increasingly appear to be primary in a framework that was initially an egology? What is it that animates phenomenology in this contradictory way? The impossibility of constituting flesh as a body within the egological sphere of ownness provides a first, but negative, indication. It requires us to investigate the positive meaning of this impossible incorporation, that is, to interrogate the sense of flesh. When Heidegger, in the aforementioned letter dated 22 October 1927, states that the pure psyche does not result from an ontology of the human as a whole, he at the same time reproaches Husserl for holding on to the traditional concept of the human being. Heidegger thus holds psychology and somatology to be derivative from the concrete totality of Dasein. But (1) since it is a question of determining the place of the transcendental and of analysing the ‘mode of being of the being in which the world is constituted’, absolute constitutive subjectivity remains untouched by this line of argumentation, unless it is identified straightaway with pure psychological subjectivity. But that would amount to misunderstanding the sense of the reduction (a reproach that Husserl continually directed against Heidegger) by interpreting the being of transcendental subjectivity only within the horizon of subsistence [Vorhandenheit]. For transcendental subjectivity is essentially temporal, a temporality that Heidegger claims in Being and Time is the first to break with the vulgar concept of time that accompanies Vorhandenheit.10 And (2), the question is to know whether one can reduce the soul–flesh relation to the soul–body relation coming from the Cartesian tradition and if one can identify flesh and body. Nothing is less sure, even for Heidegger. One could object that flesh is a living body, but the problem would not be advanced much.

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Phenomenologically, no analysis of life is possible without first accounting for flesh, through which life is shown and given. One could object further, and more pointedly, by recusing the question itself. The fact that Husserl maintains a distinction between two regions, the soul and flesh, changes nothing because flesh alone, and not the soul, belongs de jure to the constituting transcendental subjectivity, and consequently cannot be taken as regional. So, as strange as it may seem, flesh, in the sense that it is in question here (as non-corporeal), is not correlative to the psyche.11 In response to the question posed by Heidegger in the letter above, if the absolute ego is in one sense identical to and, in another sense, different from the de facto ego, it is due to the dual phenomenal status of the flesh. It is because the flesh is always also a body. In virtue of psycho-phenomenological parallelism and worldly apperception, everything that belongs to my transcendental ego’s sphere of ownness belongs equally to my psychological ego. Conversely – and in the Fifth Meditation Husserl often employs this approach, which pursues an analytic sequence in two opposite directions – starting from the soul, I can return to the transcendental ego. Everything that belongs properly to the soul will be rediscovered to belong to the ownness of transcendental subjectivity. So when, as the transcendental ego, I reduce the phenomena of the objective and intersubjective world to my ownness, and add to it what is absolutely my own – the absolute ego – all of this property, within the phenomenon of the reduced world, becomes the property of my soul. This psychological property, the mundanization of the transcendental ego, is a secondary transcendental phenomenon precisely due to this mundanization. This secondary transcendental phenomenon, however, is constituted by the absolute ego, and, if the sphere of this experience is split into a sphere of ownness and a sphere of the alien, then this division must belong immediately to the sphere of the experience of the constituting ego. The constitution of other transcendental egos is thus possible.

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CHAPTER TEN

The Alteration of Ownness The concept of ownness employed thus far has signified that which is not-alien [non-étranger]. This negative characterization depended on (and thus presupposed) the other and alterity in general. It thus becomes necessary to elaborate a positive and autonomous concept of the proper [propriété], in order to accomplish the reduction to ownness [au propre] rigorously. Again, it is by returning to the phenomenology of perception that Husserl achieves or at least seeks to achieve this. What happens in perception that might lead to a proper conception of ownness? An object, first of all, is passively pre-given. This means that it is given to intuition as the ‘indeterminate object of empirical intuition’. We have already analysed this pre-givenness or simple apprehension that founds active perception. This perception enters into the horizons of the object and leads to a pure explication of it. Let’s describe this. Phenomenologically, every conceivable object is a structural rule for the modes of givenness. This means that single apprehensions are ordered in relation to each other as apprehensions of the same object. In perceiving an object, I link up – on the basis of an identity continually given and constituted – the determinations that belong to the object itself to those which are anticipated on the horizon. So, perceiving is never merely explicating what is there, as intentional analysis reveals. Yet, how can we account for the fact that the apprehension of a new property is not the apprehension of a different object but rather of a property belonging to the same object? The structure of explication must

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be one that constitutes in a double sense: the sense of the object– substrate and the sense of the qualities. In other words, the logical categories of ‘subject’ and ‘quality’ must derive their origin from explication. Husserl writes: We observe, for example, a copper bowl which is before us: our glance ‘runs over’ it, remains fixed for a moment on the roundness, and returns to it again, attracted by a spot which stands out, a variation from the uniform roundness. Then our glance jumps to a large shiny spot and goes on a bit farther, following the shimmering glitter; then it is struck by the bosses; the cluster is thrown into relief as a unity; we run over these bosses one by one, etc.1 In so doing, the I is always oriented toward the object as a whole and each particular orientation coincides partially with the overall aim. It produces a synthesis of overlapping and coincidence. But for such a synthesis to take place, it is necessary for the I to keep the total apprehension in view and maintain the whole as something more than what is actually perceived, inasmuch the whole encroaches on this or that current perception. The presence of the thing is not to be confused with the present of giving perceptions. Having-in-grasp, as an enduring activity, constitutes the substrate, ‘on the contrary, thanks to constantly new partial coincidences, it is an always different having-in-grasp. In every step, what is gotten hold of as singular is incorporated [enverleibt] by the coincidence in the sense content of the substrate.’2 Ownness is what is explicated. That is to say that it is what is displayed by the intentional analysis of the actualities and potentialities of the flow of lived experiences. The brief analysis undertaken above focuses on the object and presupposes the identity of the ego performing the apprehension of the whole and of the ego absorbed by the progressive inspection of details. A parallel analysis is possible that touches on the ego itself, and it can provide us with the concept of ownness that is necessary for the constitution of the other. By performing the reduction, I am given to myself in a perceptual manner. It is part of the sense of this auto-perception to make me appear as given prior to this actual, intuitive and apodictic apprehension. The reduction opens me

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onto the infinite horizon of my properties that intentional analysis tirelessly explores. Husserl writes: My own too is discovered by explication and gets its original sense by virtue thereof. It becomes uncovered originaliter when my experiencing-explicating regard is directed to myself, to my perceptually and even apodictically given ‘I-am’ and its abiding identity with itself in the continuous unitary synthesis of original self-experience. Whatever is included in this identical being’s own essence is characterized as its actual or possible explicatum, as a respect in which I merely unfold my own identical being as what it, as identical, is in particular; it in itself.3 In the case of the object, if each new explication is a new perception, the same does not follow for the ego. The explication of the ego ‘is carried out largely in acts of consciousness that are not perceptions of the own-essential moments it discovers’.4 For, when reduced to the mode of givenness – that is, to what is phenomenologically determined – the essential feature of ownness can be described as such: what is one’s own is what is given to oneself in an apodictic perception. Rigorously, does this not amount to defining the property of ownness temporally, since an apodictic perception of oneself can only take place in the incarnate living present? Shouldn’t one exclude from the sphere of ownness both the past and the future of transcendental subjectivity, then? Doesn’t the immanent temporality of the ego – the form in which lived experiences are ordered – contradict the very project of a reduction to the sphere of ownness? If that were the case, then what relations would there be between temporality and alterity? Wouldn’t one have to recognize the relation to the other in temporality? We will return to these themes, which do not belong solely to the Husserlian horizon. How does Husserl fend off the objection that threatens the establishment of philosophy as a rigorous science by restricting considerably the scope of apodicticity? He responds with a line of argumentation that privileges original givenness over apodictic givenness. In this sense, he is faithful to the ‘apodictic naiveté’ that is deliberately adopted by the Cartesian Meditations, whose objective is to provide a pure description of experience rather than a critique of it. In essence, the past is only given in memory.

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Memory is the most original mode of access to the past. Memory is, in fact, always a possibility for me, an I can derived from the proper essence of my ego. In other words, the evidence of the I was or of the I will be participates in the apodictic evidence of the I am: memory and expectation are lived experiences with a complex temporal structure that is rooted in the living present. For this reason, all explication participates in apodicticity, according to a ‘formal law (which is itself apodictic): so much appearing [Schein], so much being – which is only covered up and falsified thereby’,5 on the condition of being as original as possible, that is to say, of bringing to light what is experienced in the type of self-givenness appropriate to it. The fact remains that this positive characterization of ownness on the basis of intentional analysis precludes, from the outset, a question like the following one: does intentionality not receive its innermost and deepest sense from the intersubjective relation? This is the question that we just raised with regard to time. The reasons that have paved the way for this rapprochement and this question are altogether decisive. Let’s pursue them further. If the sphere of ownness is the sphere of the flux of actual and potential lived experiences, then it also contains intentional lived experiences, which intend and constitute ‘objective’ unities, that is, lived experiences with a noetic-noematic structure. The noema is inseparable from the noesis, and so the intentional object also belongs to the sphere of ownness. Husserl contends: ‘not only the constitutive perceiving but also the perceived existent belongs to my concrete very-ownness’6 on the condition that they are concretely connected there and that the intentional explication of the one immediately implies the other. This has to do, first of all, with the pure sensible data that are constituted properly within me as ‘immanent temporalities’, and then with my habitus, and last but not least with transcendent objects, ‘for example the objects of external sensibility’, as Husserl says. These ‘objects’ must be constituted through my own sensibility, and as such, they are always given through the mediation of flesh. What indeed would be the sense of an external sensibility if flesh did not receive any assignable limits in the sphere of ownness? What indeed would be the sense of one’s own sensibility if sensibility always implies the relation to an exteriority? By extending the sphere of ownness to transcendent objects, does Husserl not open it up to alterity?

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The intentional ego is not conceivable without the non-ego. Despite its Fichtean resonances, this can be found in Husserl. In a text edited sometime between 1925 and 1928, on the concept of originality or rather primordiality, Husserl splits the original experience of oneself into that which is specifically egoic and the hyle that is foreign to the ego [der ichfremden Hyle]: ‘The I and consciousness are not thinkable without “unity”, without a subjective substrate, without a hyle …’.7 Husserl continues: ‘the concrete I continually has in its life as consciousness life a kernel of hyle, of a non-I but which essentially belongs to the I. No I is possible without a domain of pre-givenness, a constituted domain of unity that is constituted as the not-I.’8 For, and this is perhaps the most important statement in the Cartesian Meditations, ‘accordingly the intrinsically first other (the first “non-Ego”) is the other Ego’.9 How, then, are we not led to define the being of the ego and of intentionality by the relation to the alter ego? And, to the extent that the hyle that is foreign to the ego is temporal, should not the analysis of temporality take place within the same horizon? Does not thinking the ego and time on the basis of the other take us to the limits of phenomenology, to the point of turning against its own principles? Is there a phenomenal given capable of explaining this? What is there in the intentional analysis of the other that leads phenomenology to go beyond itself? All of these questions show that it would be a mistake to regard the problem of the other solely as a regional problem. The broadening of the sphere of ownness to transcendent ‘objects’ can be considered the final ‘preparatory’ stage on the way to an explication of intersubjectivity. It is the last, but not the least, because by bringing to light an ‘immanent transcendence’ that characterizes intramonadic ‘objects’, it will shift the balance of the relation between immanence and transcendence. It was actually long before the Cartesian Meditations that Husserl came across this concept. In a course from the winter semester of 1910–11 – Basic Problems of Phenomenology – Husserl described how phenomenology necessarily exceeds the domain of what is absolutely given. This opened the path for a critique of pure experience and a delineation of the field of apodicticity.10 Phenomenological perception is temporal and only the present now is given absolutely; this now is subjected to a law of retentional modification. The past transcends the present now. Is it thereby necessary to reduce this

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transcendence? If so, the reduction would be absolutely radical, but phenomenology would vanish for lack of a theme: ‘Nevertheless, we are not deterred!’11 When we doubt a memory, we place in doubt the actuality of the past to which we are returned. This presupposes that we are absolutely given what is subject to doubt. In other words, the givenness of the past is also an absolute givenness. Husserl writes: ‘In every case, doubt is the structural givenness of the intention, which is put in doubt. Thus, this perception, this lasting empirical phenomenon of givenness is given, and absolutely given, in its own individuality and duration.’12 It is thus necessary to admit a ‘transcendence’ within phenomenological immanence, for it is not only the retention as such that is received phenomenologically, but also that which is retained: ‘Each now of a retention is a retention of a not-now.’13 This ‘transcendence in immanence’ is irreducible; any attempt to reduce it at the same time presupposes it. If I want to exclude the not-now from the field of phenomenal givenness, then I can only do so by knowing what the now is and by knowing that it is the fluid limit between two not-nows: the past and the future. This knowledge, in turn, implies that the not-now is given to me. And how could it be given to me if retention as retention of … were put out of play? How could I reach the field of phenomenal givenness if ‘transcendence in immanence’ fell under the reduction? What does Husserl do by going back to this concept in order to characterize the objects that are reduced to ownness? Just as he included a not-now in a now broadened to absolute givenness, so he includes a not-me in a monadic ego. This is both an intentional inclusion as well as a real inclusion, since placing the object or the past on the side of the non-me – as what is foreign to the ego – is to place them on the side of the hyle. That is, it establishes them as the non-intentional component of the act, as its real component (at least on the level of constituted temporality).14 Here inclusion is both intentional and real. Without inclusion, ‘transcendence in immanence’ (which also characterizes, to recall, the self in its relation to the lived experiences in the temporal flow) would not be conceivable. Ultimately, phenomenology as a science would not be possible, since this ‘transcendence’ gives it a field of objects. But, at the same time, the entire system of relations between immanence and transcendence – indeed, intentionality itself – is being sought.

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Let’s show this. In the same course in 1910–11, Husserl insists on the plurivocity of the concepts of immanence and transcendence and attempts to determine their phenomenological sense. First of all, he characterizes the object of knowledge as transcendent, inasmuch as it is not present in the act of knowing. This applies to phenomenological seeing, since that which is seen is not in the act of seeing. Husserl writes, ‘But in in this respect, one does not speak of transcendence because then the contrast with immanence has no meaning.’15 This is not the case, if one contrasts being present in the flesh for consciousness with what is purely and simply intended (for example, memory as such and that which is remembered in it). The criterion of this first difference is incarnate presence. One might come to wonder if the incarnate present does not reproduce the difference between real immanence and intentional immanence. What, then would transcendence be? Can one distinguish between intentional immanence and intentional transcendence? Transcendence and immanence can be understood in another sense. It has to do with a division of individual objects, depending on whether they are given in an absolute self-presence or through appearances and presentations. If the immanence of the former is self-evident, then the transcendence of the latter is not immediately evident. Husserl affirms that, in this case, ‘every phenomenological consciousness refers to immanence’.16 In effect, consciousness intends the adumbration and not what natural consciousness posits as the thing. The transcendent, as we have already seen, is thus the object offered in a multiplicity of harmonized adumbrations. Later, Husserl will tie this notion of transcendence back to a form of immanence: ‘Transcendence of intuitive things, of that which is given to me in perception in the “flesh”, is, we can now say, only a form of immanence, an immanence in a good sense.’17 Once more, we now have two types of immanence. There is nonetheless a difference between these two pairs of concepts: the second is founded on the first. To distinguish immanence from transcendence on the basis of a distinction between objects is to presuppose the possibility of these objects themselves. Without the ‘transcendence in immanence’ that belongs to retentions, no object at all could be given. The concepts used here are those of the first pair. It is too early to comprehend why and how the concept of ‘transcendence in immanence’ comes to dismantle all of the conceptuality from which it originates. Here we can offer one indication of this, however: the

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identification of intentional inclusion with real inclusion presupposes a unity of the hyle and the morphé prior to their separation. Consequently, it points back to the original role of constitutive temporality. The primordial world belonging to the ego’s sphere of ownness does not have the sense of an objective and intersubjective world. The task is thus to understand ‘how, at the founded higher level, the sense-bestowal pertaining to transcendency proper, to constitutionally secondary Objective transcendency, comes about – and does so as an experience’.18 Of course, it is not a question here of temporal genesis but of a purely static analysis of experience. This experience of the objective world always occurs and always has the sense of an experience of something that is other than me and that totally transcends my own being. The analysis of the constitution of the other must be able to answer the question of the origin of experience in general. It is, in the most basic sense, a transcendental analysis.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Incarnation of Another Body Husserl begins by indicating, in a programmatic way, the approach that must be taken in order to arrive at an intentional elucidation of the other and of the objective world. This analysis will be stratified, and the preceding analyses have already allowed for an initial separation of the constitutive levels of the sense of the objective world. Husserl states, As the first of these, there is to be distinguished the constitutional level pertaining to the ‘other ego’ or to any ‘other egos’ whatever – that is: to egos excluded from my own concrete being (from me as the ‘primordial ego’). In connexion with that and, indeed, motivated by it, there occurs a universal superaddition of sense to my primordial world, whereby the latter becomes the appearance ‘of’ a determinate ‘Objective’ world, as the identical world for everyone, myself included.1 From this distinction of different layers of meaning, Husserl draws a consequence that we have already noted: ‘Accordingly, the intrinsically first other (the first “non-Ego”) is the other Ego.’2 From this is derived the constitution of an objective world by a monadic community that is intentionally harmonious. The possibility of an experience of the other has been established – but what would this experience be, if it were not an experience of alterity? Is alterity not the most profound sense of experience? Is

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experience not essentially a movement toward alterity? The fact that the ego can constitute other egos signifies that my own modes of consciousness are not all modes of self-consciousness or that there are constitutive intentionalities that exceed the sphere of ownness. The first task will thus be to describe the intentionality specific to the experience of the other. This description does not happen without what Husserl acknowledges to be ‘considerable difficulties’. Phenomenologically, experience is an original consciousness that gives the object immediately, in its ipseity, in the flesh. When I have an experience of the other, the other is ‘there incarnate, before me’. But this incarnation does not signify that the other is given to me in itself. The incarnate presence of the other, as first descriptively given, does not have the same sense as it does for things: a direct and immediate access to the being of what is given. If the being of the other – the other’s lived experience and the other’s own essence – were given to me immediately, then the other would be given to me in the same way as I am given to myself. The other would be nothing more than a moment of my own essence and inseparable from me. The givenness of the other, in its essence, cannot be immediate. There is no original intuition of the other. This negative definition of the other’s being contradicts phenomenological intuitionism. So, how can the other, in its sense, refuse to become the object of an original giving intuition but nonetheless be described and analysed in a phenomenology for which original intuition is the ultimate basis and has the status of a principle of principles? Under these conditions, is there even any sense in trying to provide an intentional analysis of the other? To renounce this would be to renounce phenomenology itself, since the constitution of the alter ego occupies an important place within the problem of constitution, namely, the constitution of objectivity. If that were not necessary, it would only be in virtue of a phenomenological reason. To say that the other, by virtue of its very sense, cannot be given in an original intuition, it is necessary to have accessed its sense somehow. The ‘other’ is a phenomenologically given sense, but, if all immediacy is excluded, then how is it given intentionally? Husserl addresses this: A certain mediacy of intentionality must be present here, going out from the substratum, ‘primordial world’, (which in any case is the incessantly underlying basis) and making present to

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consciousness a ‘there too’, which nevertheless is not itself there and can never become an ‘itself-there’. We have here, accordingly, a kind of making ‘co-present’, a kind of ‘appresentation’.3 How can this possibility be shown? Does appresentation only characterize the phenomenon of the alter ego? No, appresentation is already at work in the perception of the transcendent thing. In 1909, in one of the older manuscripts dealing with the question of intersubjectivity, Husserl remarks: ‘It is from the perception of the body that we know the difference between impressional presentation and compresentation (perception of ‘properly original’ and perception non-properly original: co-perception).’4 The body that I perceive is not given to me in full originality; I just originally see a face of it. It alone is impressionally present. Nevertheless, it is not simply a fragment on the surface of the body that is perceived but the body itself: ‘What does this mean? It means that the body gives itself (how I used to express myself) as present “in incarnate presence”, it stands in the original before my eyes, not as merely remembered, merely re-presented.’5 It thus becomes necessary to differentiate between two types of original givenness: primary originality (appearing) and secondary originality (non-appearing, co-present, appresent).6 This distinction, however, does not destroy the original at its root. Everything that is co-present can, in principle, become present; the hidden side can become manifest. But, if the givenness of the thing is only an Idea in the Kantian sense, does this not signify that total presence is only a purely juridical possibility? In the end, is this not to admit that nothing perceived is adequately perceived and that nothing presented is purely present? Beside the fact that the sense of such statements presupposes what they just called into question – in this case, the possibility of presence is the possibility of sense – there is a phenomenal right to speak in this way. Flesh is the condition for the possibility of things, and considered solely within the horizon of egology, flesh is always incompletely constituted. And so, this is why it is always appresented with what it contributes to presentation, and this is why presentation and perception are always altered.7 This argument, however, does not apply to the other, since appresentation will never be convertible into an originally giving presentation. Husserl asks, ‘How can appresentation of another

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original sphere, and thereby the sense “someone else” be motivated in my original sphere and, in fact, motivated as experience – as the word “appresentation” (making intended as co-present) already indicates?’8 From the outset, the problem is temporal and so we will have to explain the crossing (in a sense that is also genetic) between temporality and alterity.9 An ‘appresentation’ is a lived experienced belonging to the class of re-presentations [Vergegenwärtigung]. Here it is a matter of knowing how an appresentation can play the role of presentation [Gegenwärtigung], which is an act that belongs essentially to a radically different (if not opposed) class of lived experiences. An appresentation co-presents, which is to say that it refers to a presentation. To what presentation does the appresentation of the other refer? And how so? More precisely: to what presentation of the world does the appresentation of the other refer, assuming that we can speak of referring? In fact, this cannot be the case, because it would be to identify the consciousness of the other with the consciousness of a sign. After all, it is indeed the other that I perceive and not a re-presentation of the other. One of the difficulties of the analysis of the consciousness of the other stems from the fact that it cannot be confused with the type of consciousness that gives things to me, nor with the consciousness of signs or images. It is neither purely presented nor purely re-presented. Does it make possible the principal opposition that is constitutive of temporality itself? We will return to this issue, but first we must distinguish more finely the consciousness of the other from the consciousness of an image. In the consciousness of an image, an object appears to me in the flesh that supports an analogical relation to the ‘subject’ of the image. The consciousness of an image implies a ‘basis’. The immanent analysis of the consciousness of an image shows that a consciousness that is present to itself provides an object for another consciousness. If one were to identify the consciousness of the other with the consciousness of the image, it would be necessary to admit that my own lived experiences function as the bases and as analoga for those of the other. For example, I experience anger by perceiving it in the other. Beyond the fact that this contradicts every descriptive given, how then will I be able to distinguish myself from the other?10 Let’s restate the question. To what presentation of the world is the appresentation of the other linked, and how, to adopt Husserl’s terminology, are they interconnected [entrelacée]? The other is the

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alter ego, and the term ‘ego’ here refers to myself. In what sense and in what way? First of all, as an ego constituted within its own world, as a psychophysical unity, as an ego ruling over its own flesh and through it ruling over its own primordial world, and secondly, as an absolute constituting ego. The appresentation of the other must therefore be interconnected first with a presentation of myself. But also, and secondly, it must be interconnected with a presentation of the other’s body as a bodily ownness like any other one. We quote Husserl at length here on this very point: Let us assume that another man enters our perceptual sphere. Primordially reduced, that signifies: In the perceptual sphere pertaining to my primordial Nature, a body is presented, which, as primordial, is of course only a determining part of myself: an ‘immanent transcendency’. Since, in this Nature and this world, my flesh is the only body that is or can be constituted originally as an flesh (a functioning organ), the body over there, which is nevertheless apprehended as an flesh, must have derived this sense by an apperceptive transfer from my flesh, and done so in a manner that excludes an actually direct, and hence primordial, showing of the predicates belonging to an flesh specifically [der Prädikate der spezifischen Leiblichkeit], a showing of them in perception proper. It is clear from the very beginning that only a similarity [Ahnlichkeit] connecting, within my primordial sphere, that body over there with my body can serve as the motivational basis for the ‘analogizing’ apprehension of that body as another flesh.11 All the difficulties are concentrated in this excerpt. To begin, let’s enumerate them. (1) To bring another human being into my field of perception is to admit that the other can also not be there. Such a scenario is possible so long as I consider only the actual and present field, but it is no longer possible once I take into account its horizons. The field of experience, in all of its horizons, necessarily implies the other. Husserl repeatedly emphasizes that nothing, in fact, can precede the experience of the other, and he states: A priori, my ego, given to me apodictically – the only thing I can posit in absolute apodicticity as existing – can be a

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world-experiencing ego only by being in communion with others like himself: a member of a community of monads, which is given orientedly, starting from himself. In that the Objective world of experience shows itself consistently, other monads show themselves consistently to be existent.12 Isn’t this to recognize, considering the intentional structure of the ego, that the ego is not possible without an alter ego and that the alter ego is the condition for the possibility of an ego that is intentionally connected to the world? As a result, doesn’t the restriction of the field of perception to the field of what is actual and present reduce perception to nothing? Appresentation (which includes retention and protention, that is, the whole of temporality)13 is already at work in the perception of transcendent things. Moreover, if the sphere of ownness is the sphere as egological temporality, to reduce the field of perception to the actual present is to completely abandon the positive definition of ownness that was previously outlined. Afterwards, what sense can the rest of the analysis have? (2) In the primordial sphere, the other appears as a body. Or rather, since the sense of the other is not yet constituted, a body appears which, like all other bodies, is a component of myself, a transcendence in immanence. But Husserl should not have the right to say that in the world and in nature, where, by definition, every egoic living essence is excluded, the ‘body over there’ is grasped as flesh; if it can be, it is only after the other is given and not beforehand. (3) The ‘over there’ [dort] can have a sense only in relation to a ‘here’ and only in a homogeneous space. The constitution of this space requires the presence of the other, if only because it involves the incorporation of my flesh. We have shown that this cannot take place within the egological sphere of ownness. (4) To contrast a ‘here’ with an ‘over there’ can only occur in simultaneity, which is to say in the framework of a temporality that is common to the ‘here’ and the ‘over there’, in other words, an objective and intersubjective temporality. (5) If the body over there acquires the sense of flesh through an apperceptive transfer issuing from my ownness, then this is because it resembles my body. But, and not taking account of the problem of incorporation, what can be the sense of this resemblance between two bodies, if by body one means a res extensa? At this level, all bodies are

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alike and nothing can differentiate them qualitatively. All these difficulties can be reduced to this question: does not the constitution of the alter ego presuppose itself? These difficulties point to the question of incorporation, to the flesh/body relation [des rapports chair/corps]. So, we shall attempt to trace their effects, as well as the efforts that Husserl made to master them, by asking if it is not possible to answer them on the basis of flesh itself. At the same time, we will also try to show – which is the primary intention of this work – the need and the importance of an analytic of incarnation. Husserl’s description sought to show what presentation of myself is interconnected with the appresentation of the other and how this takes place. We know, from this point onward, that it is the presentation of my flesh. It then becomes a matter of understanding how, and why, a body over there, which is presented as an immanent transcendence, can acquire the sense of flesh, and through this sense appresent another ego whose transcendence is of a higher order. Since all sense originates in my own intentional life, it is necessary to describe the operation of consciousness whereby the body over there acquires this sense, and it is also necessary to describe its modes of confirmation, given that they do not appear directly or immediately. Husserl calls this operation an ‘apperceptive transfer’ or ‘analogical apprehension’ and the analysis of this operation will merge with the consciousness of the other. Recall that analogy and similitude were already at work in passive synthesis, that is, in the pre-constitution of objects.14 Husserl begins by going back to this in order to establish the difference between two types of apperception: those which belong to the primordial sphere of ownness and those, in contrast, that appear with the sense of the alter ego. If this division were not acceptable, this would signify, once more, the impossibility of a reduction to the sphere of ownness or that the sphere of ownness is always open to alterity [le propre est toujours impropre]. It would then be necessary to determine which phenomena impose this state of affairs. Of course, they could no longer function as phenomena in the phenomenological sense: ‘The phenomena that are in a context of closed “foreign subjectivity” that are to be additionally apprehended as foreign flesh, are not phenomena in the sense of phenomenology.’15

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Every perception of an object in the everyday world refers intentionally to an archi-foundation, to a first institution of sense that is not empirical but refers to a historicity of sense.16 In the familiar world, objects are recognized as much as perceived, if not individually at least typologically. And how can we explain this descriptive given, if not by admitting that ‘each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense’?17 In a certain manner, this analogizing transfer constitutes the possession of a habitus. The original objective sense is evoked and reactivated by that which, in a new objective sense, coincides with it, at least partially. The recalling of a sense that was previously constituted applies to the anticipation of a new objective sense. The analogical transfer thus presupposes the passive syntheses of association as ‘the purely immanent connection of “this recalls that”, “one calls attention to the other.”’18 We can now describe more carefully analogy and similitude, as noematic correlates of a comparing consciousness. I compare two objects: this means that, in grasping the first object and passing on to the second one, what is similar in the second object to the first is united to it by an overlapping of objective sense. As a result, it brings forth their similitude. This consciousness of similitude is not to be confused with a consciousness of unity in the sense of a unified apprehension of a multiplicity of objects (such an apprehension would presuppose a keeping-hold and not an overlapping of objective sense). Nor should it be confused, obviously, with the reciprocal overlapping of various moments of the sense of the same object that are apprehended as being inherent to it. Yet, similitude is not the same as analogy. How, then, do we distinguish them? We do so by recourse to the presence or absence of what Husserl calls a ‘gap’ [Abstand]. Two objects are similar when their objective sense overlaps without any gap between them, and they are analogous when one presents a gap in relation to the other one.19 But what motivates the movement of consciousness through which I compare the two objects? Only a sensible analogy or similitude that passively affects the ego can orient it toward an act of comparison. And we are thus led back to the passive syntheses of sensible data as the basis of all analogy and similitude in general. As we have already seen, ‘with regard to content the most general syntheses of

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sensuous data raised to prominence within a field, data which at any given time are united in the living present of a consciousness, are those in conformity with affinity (homogeneity) and strangeness (heterogeneity).’20 Could one speak about ‘strangeness’ [Fremdheit] if the other or alterity in general were not presupposed? Would there be a passive synthesis of sense data without alterity?21 And, to return to the Cartesian Meditations, is it not contradictory to claim that the concept of apperception belongs to the sphere of ownness? It can be taken in this way once it has been established that it is not only the passive synthesis of sense data but also their form – temporality – that evokes alterity. We will not engage that topic immediately. What does form really mean with regard to time? ‘“Form” designates here the character which necessarily precedes all others in the possibility of an intuitive unity.’22 Is this not to say that the presupposition of all unification – the archi-unification that in fact precedes all possible unity – is the unification of the present and non-present, of the now and the not-now as a past or future now? And, is it not this unity that is in question in the intentional analysis of the other that is given in the interconnection of presentation and re-presentation? We shall pursue these questions all the way to their end.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Pairing and Resemblance If we attempt to indicate the peculiar nature of that analogizing apprehension whereby a body within my primordial sphere, being similar to my own animate body, becomes apprehended as likewise flesh, we encounter: first, the circumstance that here the primally institutive original is always livingly present, and the primal instituting itself is therefore always going on in a livingly effective manner; secondly, the peculiarity we already know to be necessary, namely that what is appresented by virtue of the aforesaid analogizing can never attain actual presence, never become an object of perception proper. Closely connected with the first peculiarity is the circumstance that ego and alter ego are always and necessarily given in an original ‘pairing’.1 The constitution of the other is the centrepiece of the constitution of the objective world, which is given as a world that is always there and constantly present. So, in analysing the intentional constitution of the alter ego, one also needs to be able to determine the origin of this permanence. Husserl locates this in the constancy of the living present of my own flesh. In order for the flesh to fulfil its assigned role, then, several presuppositions must be admitted here. (1) If my flesh must be given in the constancy of a living present, then it is necessary that it is fully there and that none of it is appresented or co-presented. For, what is constantly and permanently as both living and present is my body-flesh, not simply my flesh. The presentation of a body does not ever occur without

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an appresentation. Certainly, this type of appresentation can be converted, in principle, into a presentation, but the situation of the body–flesh is an exception in this regard. It is not possible for me to modify my position in relation to my body, for example, by trying to see originally what I have anticipated. Even if flesh were only understood as a basis for the various Empfindnisse, nothing about it would be changed, since it is always and essentially incompletely constituted. (2) In order for my body–flesh to play its assigned role, it is necessary to suppose that it can neither be born nor die. As a general and explicit rule, Husserl always considered death to be a mundane accident. He devotes very few pages to the issue because, understood in this way, death does not affect the possibility of the constitution of the world. But, if that is the case, it certainly also has some relation to the absence of a thematization of flesh. In effect, after our interpretation insists on the flesh, it is no longer possible to take what Husserl calls the problems of generativity as something secondary,2 or to leave the question of finitude outside the domain of phenomenology. In a note written between 1915 and 1917, Husserl defines death as ‘the decay [Zerfall] of flesh, that is, the dissolution of the type of appearing of the thingly material’.3 That said, Husserl recognizes that death belongs to the sense of flesh, but at the same time he also recognizes that the egological constitution of the world is affected by contingency, since flesh is the ‘zero-object [Nullobjekt], the condition for the possibility of all other objects’.4 A fortiori, the disappearance of flesh annuls the appearing of an intersubjective world, because flesh performs the constitution of that world. If no constitution in the world or of the world is conceivable without flesh, doesn’t this also apply to the self-constitution of the intentional ego that contains the world as a noematic correlate within itself? And doesn’t it also apply to the ultimate constitution of temporality?5 (3) The objective world is a common world where each thing is the same for all; it has the sense of a normal world. It is thus necessary for my flesh – from which comes the apperceptive transfer that constitutes the other – to be a normal flesh. If the determination of a transcendental intersubjective normality already gives rise to formidable problems (problems Husserl engaged increasingly as he showed the historicity of intentional genesis), those that derive from an intraegological norm may well be insoluble. For it is difficult to grant a sense to the very idea of an egological normality. Normality is

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‘a certain ideal possibility that thinks of two normal individuals who exchange or can exchange their place and who are in a bodily ideal-normal state. They each discover the same appearances in his consciousness that were previously in the consciousness of the other.’6 This awkward definition, first, makes reference to intersubjectivity and then appeals to a bodily normality of the individual that is prior to any relation to the other. And, in the end, the latter is understood in relation to objectivity (my ‘normal’ vision of a thing is the one I have when I take the place of the other in an objective space that presupposes the other and I see the same thing as the other). What can egological bodily normality mean? How can it explain anomalies in solipsistic experiences? Under what conditions is it possible? Husserl has posed these questions and answered that normal experience is a harmonious experience of the same world, while an anomaly is a discordant experience.7 If the harmony in question is one that prevails over my various kinaesthetic systems – I see what I touch and it is the same thing – then the established norm is the norm of my flesh. This does not imply that my flesh itself is normal. With regard to the kinaesthetic system as a whole, this harmony can only signify a harmonizing with itself. That is to say that it is a constancy in the functioning of my flesh. In this case, the result is the same. I never achieve a norm, and moreover, birth and death become unthinkable. When the objective world is normalized, it is not possible to define the normality of flesh within the sphere of ownness. My flesh becomes the norm.8 To posit my flesh as the norm for all other fleshes, is this not, once again, to expose the phenomenology of intersubjectivity to contingency? Do we not rediscover, by another path, this archifacticity that the paradoxes of the reduction to the eidos ego forced us to admit? Can we understand this on the basis of the flesh? The other acquires its sense from an apperceptive transfer coming from myself; a bodily ownness (‘later, that of the other’, says Husserl in a strange parenthesis that intensifies the difficulty, for how can I know that the body over there can become the body of an other?9) resembles my own body, and for this reason, acquires the sense of flesh that belongs only to me. For the moment, let’s keep only the following point from the above analysis: that the ego and the alter ego are always given in an original pairing. ‘First of all, let us elucidate the essential nature of any “pairing”.10 This is an original form of passive and associative synthesis by

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which two distinct data are offered as a unity within the same consciousness. This is the basis of a unity of resemblance and constitutes them as a couple or pair. When two analogous bodies are perceived simultaneously in the same space, consciousness is conscious of a type of unity in which ‘one is not without the other’, the ‘similar refers to similar’, or, to borrow a word frequently employed by Husserl in this context, the one ‘awakens’ (weckt) the other. When I am affected by the one, this reinforces an affection by the other and vice versa. In other words, this mode of consciousness has an essential tendency of passing from the one to the other, ‘an intentional overreaching [Ubergriefen], coming about genetically (and by essential necessity) as soon as the data that undergo pairing have become prominent and simultaneously intended’.11 The members of the couple exchange their sense, the one is apprehended in conformity with the sense of the other. Two conditions are required for this pairing to take place: (1) the preliminary constitution of the objective sense of each member of the couple; (2) the purely egological constitution of temporality through associative and passive syntheses (within which a genesis is possible); for if, in passing from one objective sense to the other, I could not maintain a retentional hold on the first one, then no coincidence of sense (not even a partial one) could appear to me. In the case of the pairing association of the ego and the alter ego, can these conditions be fulfilled? To answer this question, it is necessary to commence by highlighting the constituting apperception of the other. The description of it is perhaps not always as accurate as it should be. It begins as follows: ‘pairing first comes about when the Other enters my field of perception’.12 If the other can enter into my perceptual field, then it is not a permanent and constitutive structure. How would I be able to know that it is the other that appears to me and not just any body whatsoever, unless I were to abandon the regime of the transcendental reduction and the reduction to the sphere of ownness in order to return to the natural attitude where the other is already constituted? And if the description is carried out in a more rigorous way, it presupposes nevertheless that the flesh was able to be incorporated (to possess the sense of body) within the sphere of ownness where ‘my live body (Leibkörper) is always there and sensuously prominent; but, in addition to that and likewise with primordial originariness, it is equipped with the specific sense of an flesh’.13

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When a body that resembles my own body is presented in my primordial sphere of ownness, it should at the same time acquire the sense of flesh by way of transfer, that is to say, it is a second flesh within my sphere of ownness. No alterity could thus be constituted, without considering the second property of the analogizing experience of the other flesh: that which is appresented can never, in principle, be presented. (For this argument to be wholly valid, it must presuppose that my own flesh, in contrast with the other’s flesh, can be intuitively and completely given to me, and thus fully constituted. That is not the case, however.) To be sure, in the series of intentional analyses of the other, there is no point on which Husserl insists more than the following one: the givenness of the other is irreducibly mediated; it cannot be offered in a direct intuition; it cannot present itself. The phenomenon of the other is a non-phenomenon. This is why the Fifth Meditation leads to the limits of phenomenology, and this is also the reason why we have undertaken an interpretation of it. Nevertheless, this non-phenomenality that characterizes the phenomenon of the alter ego appears and has its own style of confirmation. But confirmation generally means evidence and intuitive fulfilment. An intention is confirmed when its aim is given in an incarnate intuition. Such givenness is the basis of a rational positing and a value of being. So, in order to respect the non-phenomenality of the other, the transfer of sense must be done in such a way that the transferred sense – the sense of the flesh and of the ego – acquires a value of existence without becoming the object of an original giving intuition positing and motivating this value of being. In other words, it is a question of knowing how the analogizing apperception of the other is possible. And why does it not get crossed out or annulled by the non-intuition that defines it? There is no phenomenological difficulty here that a careful description cannot, in principle, resolve, or at least elucidate. So, Husserl states, let us look at the intentional situation more closely. The appresentation which gives that component of the Other which is not accessible originaliter is combined with an original presentation (of ‘his’ body as part of the Nature given as included in my ownness). In this combination, moreover, the Other’s animate

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body and his governing Ego are given in the manner that characterizes a unitary transcending experience.14 This is a strange description, for how can the body of the other – ‘his body’ – be a part of my sphere of ownness? How can the body that is presented to me be a body–flesh, since it is through apperception that it must acquire the sense of flesh? Everything happens here as if respect for alterity were incompatible with respect for the closure of egology, which was the required point of departure for a transcendental phenomenology. Provisionally, let’s accept what Husserl says for the sole purpose of determining the mode of confirmation of analogical apperception. The presented body is given in a series of concordant adumbrations and is confirmed by them. In virtue of the resemblance that pairs it with my flesh, it thus receives its sense as flesh and thus appresents an egoic life, another I. The harmony of presentations establishes, or ‘indicates’, a harmony of appresentations. The experience of the other is the experience of an indication; what gets confirmed here is an index, but not what it indicates. The experience of the other obtains the status of an experience through interpretation.15 It thus comes under the broadest definition of indication furnished by the first Logical Investigation: that certain objects or states of affairs of whose reality someone has actual knowledge indicate to him the reality of certain other objects or states of affairs, in the sense that his belief in the reality of the one is experienced (though not at all evidently) as motivating belief or surmise in the reality of the other.16 In phenomenology, it is absolutely exceptional that an experience can interpret its object. One might be tempted (and here we announce the direction in which we are progressively heading) to turn the exception into the basis of the rule and thus to raise the question of whether the relation to the alter ego – and more precisely, the relation of one flesh to another (which is the first constitutive layer of intersubjectivity) – is what animates and mobilizes Husserl’s entire enterprise, but at the same time escapes it. How, then, could we think a carnal relation? The scope of this question extends beyond phenomenology, if one grants that phenomenology is prior to all philosophy. If what sets

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phenomenology into motion remains outside of its grasp, then this applies a fortiori to philosophy understood as metaphysics. Under such conditions, if this thought attempts to step outside of philosophy and metaphysics, then why did it not pursue an analysis of flesh? Doesn’t thought receive its vocation from the carnal relation?17 All of these questions belong to the field of an analytic of incarnation. The apperception of the other finds its confirmation in a presentation that functions as an indication of something that cannot be presented [un imprésentable]. Husserl asserts: ‘The character of the existent “other” has its basis in this kind of verifiable accessibility of what is not originally accessible.’18 The other is henceforth determined phenomenologically by its mode of givenness. Before pursuing an analysis in which ‘the possibility and scope of a transcendental constitution of the Objective world can become evident and transcendental-phenomenological idealism can thus become entirely manifest’19 it is necessary to make two additional remarks. First, to define the other by a mode of givenness that is not original but rather originally modified amounts to turning the other into an intentional modification of myself. This is an intentional but not a real modification, since, in the latter case, the other would be purely and simply in me, as me. Second, intentionality itself carries the burden of alteriy and the intentional modification is an element that composes its sense. The same goes for my relation, within the sphere of ownness, with the past. The past is given to me through memory, that is to say, through a present lived experience that points back within itself to the past as a modified present. Husserl underscores the analogy of the other: ‘Somewhat as my memorial past, as a modification of my living present, “transcends” my present, the apprehended other being “transcends” my own being (in the pure and most fundamental sense: what is included in my primordial ownness).’20 But there is nevertheless a difference: the past that is mine was once necessarily a non-modified present offered to a direct intuition, whereas the other has never been and never will be offered in this way. In this regard, the modification is more complex when it comes to alterity. So, although Husserl frequently associated the past with intersubjectivity, this does not signify that the transcendence of the other is of the same order as the transcendence of the past. To the contrary, it is more radical and, for this reason, risks to be more fundamental. Is this to say,

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in spite of all ‘appearances’, that the past comes to the ego through its relation to the other? We have already encountered this question earlier, when we asked whether temporality was not defined as a relation to the other.21

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Here and There Let’s return to the explication of the sense of a giving appresentation by analysing what has been set aside up to now, namely, the system of potentialities in the sphere of ownness. This is a necessary task because the relativity of the world to consciousness (and thus of the other ego as a mundane ego who is appresented as another absolute origin) only has a sense in relation to a consciousness comprised of all the richness of its horizons and potentiality. As long as their role in the constitution of the other has not been made precise, the analysis will not have attained yet the status of an intentional analysis. The potentialities of my sphere of ownness that are at work in the constitution of the other are essentially ‘spatial’. In spite of his reprisal and broadening of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, Husserl, at least in his published works,1 is rarely concerned with the constitution of space. This is surprising given that extension is an essential feature of the material thing and given that the material thing is a guiding thread and an exemplary model for the eidetic analysis of perception. Husserl writes: ‘as reflexively related to itself, my animate bodily organism (in my primordial sphere) has the central “Here” as its mode of givenness; every other body, and accordingly the “other’s” body, has the mode “There”.’2 Before questioning what seems to be only a pure observation, let’s first try to understand how, and in what sense, the ego and its lived experiences are ‘localized’ by or ‘in’ the flesh. In this context, localization does not mean anything objectively spatial: ‘This localization is very specific compared to every other localization, for it has the intuitive thingly parts

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and movements of a thing. It is sensuously intuitive or physically determined. Just as joy and sorrow are not in the heart as blood is, so is tactile sensation not in the skin as fragments of organic tissue.’3 That said, how can localization be understood positively? First of all, the localization of the ego is the localization of its sensible lived experiences, its sense data and hyletic data. Husserl confirms: ‘All the sensations thus produced have their localization, i.e. they are distinguished by means of their place on the appearing Corporeality and belong phenomenally to it.’4 This applies to all types of sensation, except for tactile sensations which can be localized throughout the flesh. Consequently, when flesh is defined as the basis for localized sensation, this definition excludes the sensation of touch. Should this lead one to think that touch, initially as the contact of the self with itself, constitutes this basis? Perhaps. Husserl often returns to this point, since flesh is constituted originally in touch.5 Without this contact, no localization in general could take place. This pure proximity is at the origin of all space and distance. In other words, if the sphere of lived experience that unifies the pure ego – transcendence in immanence – is localized, then this must be due to its hyletic substrate (which is essentially the tactile data).6 From the localization of the ego by the flesh, let’s now pass to the localization of flesh itself within the world of ownness. It is given in the mode of a centralized here, as an ‘absolute here’, while all other bodies are given in the mode of a there. On this point, Husserl’s terminology fluctuates for essential reasons, but, as a general rule, the absolute here characterizes the flesh and the central here characterizes corporeal flesh. So what does the absolute here signify? It is a here by which any here and there in space can make sense. Consequently, it does not belong to the space where here and there can always be exchanged. In short, it is a here that is not within an objective and intersubjective space that is homogeneous and isotopic. Husserl confirms: ‘But flesh and its fleshly space break through homogeneity.’7 This non-spatiality of flesh is without doubt most clearly demonstrated in that great text from 1934 entitled ‘Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Original Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move’.8 Husserl, who seeks to go back to the origin of spatiality in the sense it has for the natural sciences, writes:

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Consider my flesh. In primordial experience, the flesh has no moving away and no rest, only inner motion and inner rest, unlike the outer bodies … I stand still or go; thus my flesh is the centre and ... My flesh has extension, etc., but no change and nonchange of location in the sense that an outer body is presented as in moving, coming closer or moving farther away, or as not in motion, near, far away.9 It is even necessary to radicalize this description: ‘in’ my own world, my flesh is always here; it is this absolutely unique here, such that I am an archi-immobility. To be here means to be absolutely close to oneself and no extension can be given to it. The concept of ‘internal movement’ should not even be employed, because it is impossible to think of movement without implying space in some way. All internal movement is described by analogy with external movement. But, in the world of ownness, flesh does not have any exteriority, because it has not been incorporated and because no limit has been assigned to it. This amounts to saying that the world of ownness is, rigorously speaking, a world without space.10 What, then, are the phenomenological characteristics of the absolute here? If every body in general is given as the unity of a multiplicity of perspectives, then the absolute here is the cancellation of all perspectives. And, if every body is given within an orientation, then the absolute here is also the cancellation of all orientations. These cancellations are necessarily presupposed by every particular orientation and perspective. To be given as an absolute here and as flesh is to be given as a cancelled-body [Nullkorper].11 ‘To the essence of the original perception of flesh, and to the immediate intuition (self-given) of “flesh” and the empirical Subject belongs the cancelled-appearance of flesh-bodies [Liebkörpers].’12 Flesh is the cancelled-body. Without it, no body and no world could ever appear. At the same time, the problem of the constitution of the other can take the following form: how can another flesh – another cancelled-body – appear to me? Formulated in this way, does this question risk being insoluble? This is surely the case, unless my flesh is also a body. And we thereby come back to something that is constantly admitted by Husserl without ever being phenomenologically justified. Let’s thus take incorporation for granted and continue. If my corporeal

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flesh is given in the mode of a central here, then other bodies are given in the mode of there. Here and there are relative, and there is determined in terms of here. The orientation of there with respect to here can change if I change my here: Now the fact that my bodily organism can be (and is) apprehended as a natural body existing and movable in space like any other is manifestly connected with the possibility expressed in the words: By free modification of my kinesthesias, particularly those of locomotion, I can change my position in such a manner that I convert any There into a here – that is to say, I could occupy any spatial locus with my organism.13 It is not carnally but physically that I can occupy any place whatsoever within a homogeneous space. By carrying out this unwarranted shift in meaning, Husserl presupposes everything that is supposed to be constituted: the apprehension of my flesh as being like any body whatsoever, the homogenous space where here and there are equivalent, where ‘I move myself’ is no different from ‘this body is moving’ and where subjective movement (if it has any sense) is conceived as an objective movement like any other one. The rest of the analysis will verify this in multiple ways. If my flesh can occupy any place physically, this means that if I no longer perceive from my here where I am, but from over there, where I could be, then I would perceive the same thing through different modes of appearing centred around the over there (but corresponding to and agreeing with the ones here). In addition, thanks to the possibility of changing points of view, this means that the system of appearances from here and the system of appearances from over there (any over there can be replaced by any other one) belong constitutively to each thing. In a very Leibnizian manner, the thing can be defined as a harmonized system within an infinite number of systems of possible perspectives toward spatial appearances and also, in principle, temporal appearances. The function of these ‘results’ in the associative constitution of the alter ego will emerge immediately if it is added that I do not apperceive the other as another me – my double – who has the same system of appearances that I do and who is oriented around my own here. The other is over there, at a distance and separate.

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The other is given to me as seeing the same thing that I see, because if I were over there, in the other’s place, I would see the same thing as the other. The presupposition of a common and intersubjective space is thus fully in play here. ‘Manifestly what has just now been brought to light points to the course of the association constituting the mode of “Other”.’14 How does this occur? First of all, in order to respect alterity as much as possible, this association cannot be direct or immediate. As a result, it cannot take place between a body in my world which is over there and my flesh which, in the same world, is here. Such an association would have the sense of an association with myself (the monad) and would only ever constitute a copy of myself. Generally speaking, this is the risk that Husserl tirelessly seeks to avert, although, as we will see, he is perhaps unable to do so. What appearances are associated, then? Husserl writes: The body that is a member of my primordial world (the body subsequently of the other ego) is for me a body in the mode There. Its manner of appearance does not become paired in a direct association with the manner of appearance actually belonging at the time to my flesh (in the mode Here); rather it awakens reproductively another, an immediately similar appearance included in the system constitutive of my flesh as a body in space. It brings to mind the way my body would look ‘if I were there’.15 The pairing association that gives the other has a very complex structure that we will try to untangle. Unless one grants that flesh can be separated from its corporeal aspect, the association will take place between a body over there and my corporeal flesh as if I were over there. Two questions are thus opened. (1) How, and in virtue of what, can a body over there evoke and awaken my corporeal flesh to appear as if I were over there? And (2), prior to this, how can my own corporeal flesh appear to me as if I were over there? It is only on the basis of my here that my corporeal flesh can appear to me as if I were over there. I must then be simultaneously here and over there; I am both seeing from here and seen over there. But in seeing, my corporeal flesh must be able to duplicate itself and perceive itself as something outside of itself. But, as Husserl indicates, ‘it is absurd

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to say that I see my flesh from the outside’.16 The hypothesis of a spectator ego who is completely disincarnated and who can perceive its own flesh from an external point of view would not solve anything. What would its organ of perception be? For, as we have already indicated, any splitting of the ego (and to begin with, the one at work in the reduction) implies intersubjectivity.17 If it is impossible to see one’s flesh from the outside, would it nevertheless be possible, in the world of ownness, to re-present it as something external? Although an original and intuitive presentation seems to be excluded, is there any place for a re-presentation here? To re-present my flesh from the outside is to re-present it as an external physical body that is analogous to all other bodies in one and the same homogenous space.18 In one sense, this is always the case: flesh is constituted in touch as pure contact; only touch gives flesh to itself. But it is also constituted visually, except for the fact that I cannot always see what I touch. The coincidence between tactile data and visual data is necessarily partial and incomplete: I can see my hand that I touch and touch my back that I cannot see. This incompleteness of the constitution of my own flesh can only appear in relation to the completeness of the constitution of bodies where the data of sight and touch can, and must, coincide in principle. No complete constitution of my flesh is possible, and later we will explain why this is so. It is not only the case that the re-presentation of my flesh as body entails intersubjectivity; moreover by representing it to me as a corporeal flesh over there, everything that is specific to flesh and provides the basis for the resemblance that gives rise to association disappears. If association no longer occurs between bodies that are reduced to the common denominator of extended things, then how is it even possible for intersubjectivity to appear? This leads to the second question: in virtue of what can the body over there evoke my body-flesh as if it were over there? ‘A body that resembles my flesh-body [Leibkörper] is evoked by virtue of its similarity [Ähnlichkeit] made possible by the representation [Vorstellung] as if I were there.’19 Let’s analyse this resemblance, because it is one of the major presuppositions of the entire constitution of the alter ego and because it motivates the apperceptive transfer. Can this resemblance appear without resorting to a comparison between the body–flesh of the other and my own body–flesh, as something prior to what it resembles? Husserl

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frequently returns to this ‘major difficulty’, and it seems that he was regularly forced to presuppose objective space both in order to assure the identity of my corporeal flesh and to provide a place of comparison between bodies. When he addresses the ‘problem of the apprehension of the resemblance between my own body-flesh and the alien body-flesh’ in 1914 or 1915, he initially affirms that the identity of my corporeal flesh here and over there is a necessary prerequisite for this resemblance. Indeed, if my body–flesh over there were not identical to my body–flesh here, what possible interest would there be in the resemblance between a body over there and my body-flesh as if it were over there? This identity, we have seen, can appear only in objectivity, that is to say, for the other. And does Husserl not confirm our critical analyses when he writes: But each alteration of my flesh corresponds also to my bodyflesh because it is an objectively constituted body, in the world of things, giving rise to the possibility of my flesh appearing, thanks to the constitution, of flesh being able to be seen from any place and from an objective position. I can also say: if I think of my flesh as just any there, then it seems like any body.20 This implies that an imaginative variation of my own flesh – which it is always in my power to carry out – gives my flesh to me as a body. I can vary the kinaesthetic system of appearances of my flesh but only in a very limited manner. For there is no sense in varying the absolute and unique here or of representing this here ‘in another place’. One rediscovers, under a different form, the aporias of the reduction to the eidos ego. As Husserl remarks,21 flesh is an obstacle to the full constitution of space and without space, no variation of the here is thinkable. Of course, nothing prevents me from imagining contradictory possibilities (those that are contradictory within the sphere of ownness) and from pretending to be elsewhere, that is to say, from pretending to be anywhere else. This would be a good example of what Fink identified under the name of ‘a merely signitive re-presentation’ which ‘concerns the phenomena of “representing something as-if”’. These ‘re-representations’ constitute the horizon of intuitive impossibilities.22 They would produce a resemblance between an intuitive given (the system of appearances of the

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body over there) and a fiction, a ‘re-representation-as-if’ that no intuition could ever confirm or deny. Consequently, it would be an absurd re-presentation, if absurdity is, phenomenologically speaking, the impossibility of an intuitive fulfilment. Does Husserl not admit this when he indicates that the memory of my body-flesh as if it were over there is not intuitive?23 The risk, then, would be to see the entire constitution of the alter ego, and with it all objectivity, fall into the ‘as-if’, an infinite regress of doubles, or fiction. This would mark the triumph of scepticism over its most powerful denunciation. In this intuitive impossibility, however, can one not recognize the presence of the other at the heart of the ego? And, by anchoring resemblance on a signitive re-presentation that no intention will ever fulfil, does Husserl not give himself the phenomenological right to describe the other as such? In so doing, is he not forced to grant precedence to the other over myself? If phenomenology had to lead into scepticism, would this be due to having respected alterity more and better than had ever been done before it? Even at the price of its fundamental project? As his manuscripts on intersubjectivity show, the questions raised by the concept of ‘resemblance’ did not escape Husserl. There is, however, one question that does not seem to have been addressed and that might have allowed us to understand and to explain the incorporation of my flesh. There is a condition of the possibility for the constitution of the other that is stated as follows: ‘Each flesh in a community of subjects must be apriori the same sensible type, for this is a condition for the possibility of empathy.’24 So the flesh of a child or a fool (flesh is the index of normality and abnormality)25 cannot become the object of an apperceptive transfer, unless it is considered to be a modification of adult normality. This would only have a secondary importance, if the norm – which always precedes abnormality – could be constituted egologically. We will not insist on this point. But what happens when one introduces sexual difference, which is not an abnormality but which prevents one from considering all flesh from having a priori the same sensible type? Sexual difference implies the relation of one flesh to another (for it is not the body that is gendered); it helps us to understand how the relation to the other flesh is a component of the sense of my own flesh. At the same time, when two fleshes are given, incorporation can take place. Incorporation is also the

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reduction of sexual difference. And it is probably because Husserl always considered incorporation to be self-evident that he never had recourse to sexual difference. For him, sexual difference could only be a mundane characteristic, and the mundanization of the ego is based precisely on the possibility of flesh to become body.26 To summarize, when resemblance takes place between two bodies in the physical sense, it is without interest. For, it presupposes that my body-flesh has been reduced to pure corporeality through an abstraction of my ego. In this case, the constitution of the other is impossible. If the presentation of a body over there resembles the re-presentation of my body-flesh over there, the constitution of the other is presupposed in advance. But, if the intuitive presentation of a body over there evokes, by way of resemblance, the signitive re-presentation of my body-flesh as if it were over there, then the other is my fictive double27 and phenomenology is led outside of itself. In any case, the unity of resemblance required by constitutive pairing with the other does not seem to be attainable. Two body-fleshes can never be perceived in the unity of the same consciousness, because, in the sphere of ownness, there is no means of incorporating flesh and because, by definition, no other body can be presented with the sense of flesh. As a result, one of the two conditions identified above with pairing28 – the prior constitution of the identical sense of the members – cannot be fulfilled. After we have shown that the constitution of the temporality presupposes alterity, we will have to conclude that the project of the constitution of objectivity is a ‘failure’ and then attempt an interpretation of why that is the case.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Dynamic of the Apperceptive Transfer Here we will re-establish contact with Husserl’s text in order to follow his analysis of associative pairing – the apperception that gives the other. We pick up at the point where what Husserl writes will confirm and verify our analyses: The first-awakened manner of appearance of my body is not the only thing that enters into a pairing; my body itself does so likewise: as the synthetic unity pertaining to this mode, and the many other familiar modes, of its appearance. Thus the assimilative apperception becomes possible and established, by which the external body over there receives analogically from mine the sense, flesh, and consequently the sense, organism belong to another ‘world’, analogous to my primordial world.1 If one maintains firmly the difference between the sense of flesh and body and if one sticks to the letter of this description, then it is hard to see where the sense of flesh comes from, since its origin cannot derive from my body. It follows that the other body cannot have another sense from the sense of my own body and thus that the constitution of the other cannot take place. Husserl’s use of the words Körper and Leib takes on its full sense here, even though he initially distinguished their meanings and later used them interchangeably. Further, if by receiving the sense of flesh, a body acquires the sense of being flesh in a world as well as being flesh in

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another world, then this signifies that it is through the incarnation of a body and the incorporation of flesh that there is a world.2 Once we have determined the condition of the possibility of this incarnation and of this incorporation, we will have reached the origin of the world. The analysis of the apperception that gives the other has already been initiated by the analysis of pairing as the original form of passive synthesis and by the analysis of resemblance. Husserl returns to them in order to determine the general style of an apperception resulting from association and then to specify the original traits of the apperception that constitutes the alter ego. Husserl writes: The general style of this and every other apperception that arises associatively is therefore to be described as follows: With the associative overlapping of the data founding the apperception, there takes place an association at a higher level. If the one datum is a particular mode of appearance of an intentional object, which is itself an index pointing to an associatively awakened system of manifold appearances wherein it would show itself, then the other datum is ‘supplemented’ to become likewise an appearance of something, namely an analogous object. But it is not as though the unity and multiplicity ‘thrust upon’ the latter datum merely supplemented it with modes of appearance taken from these others. On the contrary, the analogically apprehended object and its indicated system of appearances are indeed analogically adapted to the analogous appearance, which has awakened this whole system too. Every overlapping-at-a-distance, which occurs by virtue of associative pairing, is at the same time a fusion and therein, so far as incompatibilities do not interfere, an assimilation, an accommodation of the sense of the one member to that of the other.3 Two resembling data are given at the same time, or at least in the same time, and they are associated by the partial coinciding of their objective sense. It must be emphasized that no associative synthesis can occur without presupposing the syntheses of the original consciousness of time. The data can only be associated within a single temporality. The first datum belongs to a system

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of multiple appearances of an intentional object, a system whose actualization gives the thing itself in its incarnate presence. The second datum is only characterized by its resemblance with the first one; as such, it does not refer to a system of multiple and unified appearances that would be directly accessible. The first appearance is an appearance of some object, while the second one is not. On the basis of resemblance and by virtue of the intentional structure of the first datum, a transfer, a sliding of meaning, takes place by which the second given receives the sense of being the givenness of an object (it acquires a sense as such, one could say). It has a relation with the first object that is analogous to the relation between two singular data. The second datum – which was initially isolated and did not belong to a complete and identifiable system of givenness – is thus complemented by such a system. What is the principle behind this sliding of sense? How can sense pass from one given to the other? And how can it undergo a modification in this passage? The question becomes all the more difficult due to the fact that Husserl takes care to clarify that the second datum is not completed by the potential system of the first datum – which would then only be assigned to it – but by an analogically modified system. How would the second system not be purely and simply fictive? One might sum up this entire set of questions under the following formulation: what is the dynamic of the transfer of sense? In the context of a brief analysis of the constitution of the other – whose psychic life I can see expressed without, however, being able to perceive it in the proper sense – Husserl came to write: ‘There is here, as we know, a kind of original indication that draws its force [Kraft] from the perceptive presence of my flesh inasmuch as it interconnects with my psychic life, as well as with the typical resemblance of the foreign flesh, first as a corporeal being, with my corporeality.’4 What is this force? How should one understand the link between incarnate presence and this force? Is there any way at all to answer these questions in phenomenology? This is not certain. In 1927 a description of the pairing of two perceived objects clarifies: A pair has its own unity and has its peculiar unity simply as a pair. It is a subjective mode, a ‘subjectivity’ that links into a

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unity of the thing perceived, as the ‘appearance’: one points to the other, or as we say, from one proceeds the other by way of an awakening or evocation. The one affects me, or so goes the affection in the way in which I encounter the other, such that the affection from the other is reinforced and vice versa.5 There is thus indeed a certain force at work in the transfer of meaning that proceeds from one perceived object to another, or more precisely, from one datum of something to another datum that does not give the same thing. Let’s try here to determine the nature of this transfer. Husserl observes: ‘The objectivity of flesh is the foundation of all objectivity.’6 Flesh is only objective on the condition of being essentially related to another flesh. Here we rediscover the problem of incorporation that we proposed to resolve through an appeal to sexual difference. Although Husserl did not have the same recourse, some of his later notes could have authorized it, nonetheless. In a text from September 1933, entitled ‘Universal Teleology’, one can read the following observation about the sexual drives: ‘There is in the drive [Trieb] itself a relatedness to the Other as the Other and his correlative drive.’7 Can one then legitimately say that my flesh as sexualized refers to another flesh, that this constitutive reference is dynamic, and that no objectivity in general is possible without these drives that relate two fleshes to one another through the medium of their difference? If no objectivity is possible without this carnal relation, then must one not put this relation ahead of intentionality? Let’s return to the question of the transfer of meaning, which transforms an isolated given into the givenness of an object, that is, into intentional givenness. Here, it is necessary to reverse the order followed by Husserl and to no longer consider the apperception of the other as a particular case of apperception but as its most general rule. This is necessary because the flesh of the other is the first object. If the constitution of objectivity itself depends on a transfer of meaning that a force sets in motion, then a fortiori this same force is at work in the constitution of every object, and more precisely, in the pairing or association of objects.8 And if that is the mechanism of transfer, one can understand why the paired datum – which seems to function as a non-intentional hyle in relation to the original datum that would play the role of the intentional morphé

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– is completed by an analogous system of appearing that is adjusted to it and not by the correlative system of appearing of the original datum. In effect, the force in question does not proceed without a correlative force that is different from it. Husserl says this with respect to the drives, and in a general manner, every thought about force one is a thought about the difference of forces. To say that one force is behind the transfer is necessarily to introduce difference here and to make difference control the transfer. What is transferred is thus necessarily altered. Husserl does not say that the most general structure of apperception is constituted by the relation to the other, instead for him the apperception of the alter ego remains a particular case that he goes on to describe as follows: If we return to our case, that of apperception of the alter ego, it is now self-understood that what is appresented by the ‘body’ over there, in my primordial ‘surrounding world’, is not something psychic of mine, nor anything else in my sphere of ownness. I am here somatically, the centre of a primordial ‘world’ oriented around me. Consequently my entire primordial ownness, proper to me as a monad, has the content of the Here – not the content of varying with some ‘I can and do’, which might set in, and belonging to some There or other; accordingly, not the content belonging to that definite There. Each of these contents excludes the other; they cannot both exist in my sphere of ownness at the same time [zugleich]. But, since the other body there enters into a pairing association with my body here and, being given perceptually, becomes the core of an appresentation, the core of my experience of a coexisting ego [mitdaseiender ego], that ego, according to the whole sense-giving course of the association, must be appresented as an ego now coexisting in the mode There, ‘such as I should be if I were there’. My own ego, however, the ego given in constant self-perception, is actual now with the content belonging to his Here. Therefore an ego is appresented, as other than mine. That which is primordially incompatible, in simultaneous coexistence, becomes compatible: because my primordial ego constitutes the ego who is other for him by an appresentative apperception, which, according to its intrinsic nature, never demands and never is open to fulfilment by presentation.9

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Here we will not insist again on the aporias whose development we have followed; nothing in this analysis has enabled us to resolve them. Instead, let’s focus our attention on the interconnection [Verflechtung] between presentation and appresentation. If no presentation were introduced in the constitution of the other, then Husserl would have to abandon all intuition, that is to say, the principle of principles of phenomenology. If appresentation played no role, then Husserl would have to give up constituting the other as other and give up objectivity, that is, philosophy as a rigorous science. So, this interconnection takes on a vital role in the encounter between phenomenology and alterity. A body over there is presented. In virtue of its resemblance with my body, it receives from my body the sense of being a body-flesh inhabited by another ego who is appresented. The presentation of the body-flesh over there is the appresentation of the ego who rules it; the presentation of the body-flesh over there refers to another ego associated with it. The interconnection here is a form of association and, more precisely, a form of association between the present and non-present.10 Without it, the other could not appear in the flow of my lived experience. That is to say that this interconnection presupposes the other before even contributing to its appearing, since there is no association that, either directly or indirectly, does not refer to a principle of alteration whose ultimate origin is the other. This can be verified quickly by reading Husserl’s clarifications and explanations of it. Due to the interconnection between presentation and appresentation, appresented data are able to emerge and be continually renewed. They allow both for a confirmation through harmony and for an increased awareness of the alter ego. Husserl writes: The first determinate content obviously must be formed by the understanding of the other’s organism and specifically organismal conduct: the understanding of the members as hands groping or functioning in pushing, as feet functioning in walking, as eyes functioning in seeing, and so forth. With this the Ego at first is determined only as governing thus somatically [so leiblich waltendes] and, in a familiar manner, proves himself continually, so far as the whole stylistic form of the sensible processes manifest to me primordially must correspond

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to the form whose type is familiar from my own organismal governing [leibliches Walten]. It is quite comprehensible that, as a further consequence, an ‘empathizing’ of definite contents belonging to the ‘higher psychic sphere’ arises. Such contents too are indicated somatically and in the conduct of the organism toward the outside world – for example: as the outward conduct of someone who is angry or cheerful, which I easily understand from my own conduct under similar circumstances.11 What, then, is interconnected here? From the presentation of the body over there to the appresentation of the alter ego, there is a transfer of meaning from the self-presentation of my flesh to the presentation of the body over there. Appresentation thus refers to two presentations, and association turns the second of them into an appresentation. This association, as we have shown, is founded on a resemblance that presupposes the other. This implies that the self-presentation of my flesh cannot occur without a re-presentation of it as body. Let’s consider one of Husserl’s examples for an instant: I cannot identify the behaviour of the other as angry without first taking an external point of view toward my own affects, that is to say, taking them from the other’s point of view. It is on this basis that I can comprehend the carnal manifestation of the other as indicating anger. This signifies that the self-presentation of my flesh is interconnected with a re-presentation of it – once again, this is the question of incorporation. This interconnection marks the impossibility of a pure presentation, or rather, the presence of the alter ego at the very heart of the ego. In this regard, phenomenology is obligated to disentangle itself from the alter ego and to reduce it. Interconnection is thus both the resource for a phenomenology faced with alterity and the threat of an original and primary alteration of the egological sphere of ownness.

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Caress and Impact The essential objective of the Fifth Meditation is the constitution of objectivity itself, understood as monadic intersubjectivity. After having elucidated the constitution of the alter ego by my own ego, Husserl proceeds to explicate the constitution of the transcendental community of monads and the first form of objectivity: the intersubjective nature on which the higher objective levels are based, such as the world of culture, science, and philosophy as a rigorous and first science. Husserl writes: But it is more important to clarify the community, developing at various levels, which is produced forthwith by virtue of experiencing someone else: the community between me, the primordial psychophysical Ego governing in and by means of my primordial organism, and the appresentatively experienced Other; then, considered more concretely and radically, between my monadic ego and his. The first thing constituted in the form of community, and the foundation for all other intersubjectively common things, is the commonness of Nature, along with that of the Other’s organism and his psychophysical Ego, as paired with my own psychophysical Ego.1 By questioning back to the constitutive origin of this first form of objectivity, Husserl opens the way for a definition of intentionality as such, that is, of the being of intentionality. The analysis of the community of monads is thus the culminating point of the Cartesian Meditations.

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This analysis seems to run immediately into a difficulty with regard to what has been established up to now. The alien subject has the sense and validity of being another subjectivity thanks to an appresentation occurring within the limits of my own being. What, then, could be the meaning of any form of community whatsoever? More precisely: if the alien flesh that appears in my primordial sphere as a body is (as a noematic unity that is inseparable from myself as a concrete monad) only an element essentially determined within my own primordial nature, then how is the constitution of an intersubjective nature possible? When this body functions appresentively, I am conscious of the other, and first of all, I am conscious of how the other’s flesh appears to the other as an absolute here. Husserl asks: ‘How can I speak at all of the same body, as appearing within my primordial sphere in the mode There and within his and to him in the mode Here?’2 Once again, the problem of a common nature brings into play the problem of incorporation. The constitution of the alter ego has continually struggled with the impossible incorporation of my flesh. Here too it is a question of incorporation, but in the opposite sense: how can the flesh of the other also be a body? How can the other’s absolute here also, simultaneously, be my relative there? How can a body appear differently in two primordial spheres that are separated by an ‘abyss’ and nevertheless be given as the same? Is it because the two spheres are actually merged? What would happen then to the alterity of the other? The difficulty would disappear if the other’s body were given as an index of the other, as indicating and referring to the other. From this perspective, the body over there could never be given to the other as an absolute here. The other would remain, so to speak, beyond its own body. But this goes against all descriptive givenness: the experience of the other is constantly experienced in a way that attests to the fact that what I see is the other in its incarnate plenitude and not merely an index. ‘This state of affairs, is it not an enigma?’ If there is an enigma, it resides in the identification of the body over there in my original sphere with the body of the other constituted separately and given to the other as flesh in an absolute here. Put otherwise, the enigma presupposes the distinction between two spheres of ownness, that is to say, the experience of the other. But an explication of intentionality should allow us to solve this aporia.

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To do this, Husserl proceeds again in two phases: he commences by repeating the analysis of perception in general and then returns to the perception of the other. Let’s follow this order. Appresentation presupposes a core of presentation. It is a re-presentation which is founded with presentation in order to play the role of a co-presentation. This fusion is of such a nature that presentation and re-presentation ‘stand within the functional community of one perception, which simultaneously presents and appresents, and yet furnishes for the total object a consciousness of its being itself there’.3 What does this fusion (Verschmelzung) – which we have waited to examine – signify?4 Husserl defines it in the context of an analysis of homogeneity and heterogeneity to which we have already called attention.5 Homogeneity, or analogy, can have different degrees; its limit is a similarity without any gap or deviation. Husserl elaborates: At any moment where there is not a perfect similarity, the contrast is consistent with analogy (relation): the non-similarity is removed from the ground of a common element. If we pass from similarity to similarity, the new semblance is given as repetition. Its content comes into perfect coincidence, without deviation, with that of the first semblance. It is what we call fusion. Even when we pass from analogy to analogy, it also produces a kind of coincidence (Deckung), but that which is only partial, and, even in times of coincidence, there is a conflict with non-similarity. Thus, in this shift by analogy, there is also something like a fusion, but relative only to the moment which is similar: it is thus not a pure and perfect fusion as with a complete likeness.6 This fusion does not take place between the acts themselves but between their noematic correlates. The presented object merges with the appresented object without the presentive and appresentive acts themselves overlapping and coinciding. And yet Husserl mentions a presentation which is ‘at the same time’ (zugleich) presentation and appresentation (that is to say, a re-presentation). If the pure temporal flow unifies a presentation and re-presentation in succession, it is difficult to understand how the acts that phenomenology posits as irreducible to each other (presentation and appresentation) can be united in simultaneity.

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Let’s return to this difference, still remaining within the framework of an analysis of perception. Presentation is the incarnate givenness of the thing itself, while re-presentation is a modification which dis-incarnates it. That was already one of the findings of Heidegger’s analysis that we commented on earlier in this work.7 This sole text from §99 of Husserl’s Ideas I suffices to confirm this by explicating their difference in great detail: On the one hand, we have the simply reproductive modification: the re-presentation simpliciter, which in its own essence, in a way sufficiently characterized, is given as a modification of another thing. Re-presentation returns us to perception as it is in its peculiar phenomenological essence: for example, the memory of the past implies, as we have already remarked, ‘the having perceived’; consequently, the perception ‘corresponds’ (the perception of the same sense core) is intended to in the consciousness of memory, although it is not actually contained in it. The memory is precisely in its own essence a ‘modification of’ perception. Correlatively, the thing characterized as past gives itself in itself as ‘having been present’, thus as a modification of the ‘present’; as unmodified the thing is precisely the ‘original’ element, or the ‘incarnate present’ of perception.8 In perception, the object is given in the flesh, in an incarnate present. In the modification of memory – i.e. re-presentation – the object is still there and present, but as ‘having been perceived’. The object is no longer given in the flesh, which is to say that my flesh is no longer directly co-perceived with it. To be sure, one of the aims of this work is to show that one should no longer conceive the two terms in expressions like the ‘living present’ and the ‘incarnate present’ as one single feature. We will come back to this point. If incarnation differentiates presentation from re-presentation, it is thus possible to understand that presentation ‘taken in a broad sense’ is constituted of both presentation and appresentation. In effect, the flesh is never completely constituted, which signifies that it is both presented and appresented. This holds a fortiori for all of the types of constitution in which it intervenes, commencing with transcendent objects. Does not the incompleteness of all constitutive analysis, in turn, come to be clarified? Positively,

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this incompleteness signifies the infinite openness of constitution. Husserl attempts to think this incompleteness through the concept of a surplus: Therefore, in the object of such a presentive–appresentive perception (an object making its appearance in the mode, itselfthere), we must distinguish noematically between that part which is genuinely perceived and the rest (Uberschuss), which is not strictly perceived and yet is indeed there too (Mitdaseinden). Thus every perception of this type is transcending: it posits more as itself-there than it makes ‘actually’ present at any time. Every external perception belongs here – for example, perception of a house (front – rear); but at bottom absolutely every perception, indeed every evidence, is thus described in respect of a most general feature, provided only that we understand ‘presenting’ in a broader sense.9 If each adumbration of a transcendent object posits more than what is actually present, this is because it is linked to the entire kinaesthetic system – that is, to other possible adumbrations10– of my flesh. The flesh is the source of this surplus. Yet, this source always exceeds itself, since its constitution is always incomplete. If each perception transcends itself, is this not due to the fact that flesh is always involved in it? This surplus is also introduced at another site of phenomenology, where according to Heidegger ‘Husserl touches upon or struggles with the question of being.’11 The sixth chapter of the last of the Logical Investigations is devoted to categorical intuition: ‘I see the white paper, and I say the white paper; I express that which I see precisely by taking measure of it.’12 The word white intends something about the paper, and the perception of its whiteness is able to fill this intention. The expression white paper, or rather the signification white paper, is not as such fully filled. Husserl explains: ‘The paper is known as white, or rather as white paper whenever, expressing our perception, we say: of the white paper. The intention of the word white coincides only partially with the moment of the colour of the object appearing, it functions to exceed the signification, a form, which is never found in the appearance itself which it confirms. Of the white paper, that is tantamount to saying of the paper being white.’13 If the total meaning can be filled,

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then it is necessary for the ‘being’ [étant], the surplus, to become the object of an intuition extending to the categorical sphere. The relation between these two types of intuition is one of foundation – the categorical object is founded on the sensible object – and of community. Husserl writes: The relation between the broad concept and the narrow concept, the suprasensible concept (that is to say that which is constructed beyond sensibility, or the categorical concept) and the sensible concept of perception, is visibly not an extrinsic or contingent relation, but a relation which finds its founding in the thing (Sache). It is comprised within the grand class of acts located in the sphere of ownness, a sphere in which something appears as ‘effective’ and as truly ‘given itself’.14 What the two types of intuition share in common is that they give an object ‘itself’, in the flesh, as Husserl will say after the Logical Investigations.15 If sensible objects were never given (and in order for them to be given, the flesh must be given), then no ideal object, category or essence (formal or material) could be given. To put it another way, if there were no surplus in sensible perception, then there would be no surplus to sensible perception; if this perception did not transcend itself, no category could appear. And being would not be given.16 Considering the importance, in phenomenology, of the mode of givenness, it is surprising that Heidegger never interrogated the flesh as an essential characteristic of intuitive givenness. Without doubt, this is due to the fact that in Being and Time (contrary to some of his courses)17 he no longer considers intuition and perception as the only ways of presenting. Husserl took up again the analysis of perception in order to try to understand how the body which is both presented as over there and appresented as flesh absolutely here can be one and the same. Phenomenologically reduced to an analysis of its type of givenness, the question here is to know how presentation and appresentation are ‘fused together’ in order to carry out a shared role in presentation. We have sought to answer this question by claiming that it is due to the role of flesh in perception that each presentation is necessarily linked to an appresentation. Let’s return now to the case of the experience of the other. If appresentation

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can take place in a functional community with presentation, ‘from the very beginning, what this experience presents must belong to the unity of the very object appresented’.18 And conversely: what is appresented must belong to the unity of the same object as the one that is presented. The body over there appresents the other, and this appresentation does not take place without the presentation of the other. Consequently, the body over there is the flesh of the other which is given to the other in an absolute here. There is thus no separation between the ownness of the body over there and the corporeal flesh of the other. And what I see is not a sign, a portrait, or any other indirect given, instead it is the other ‘in the flesh’.19 It is therefore legitimate to speak of the same body in reference to the one which appears to me in my sphere of ownness from over there and the one which appears to the other as flesh in the mode of here.20 The enigma of intersubjective nature – the first form of objectivity – is in principle resolved: when the body over there appresents the other ego, this other appears to me as immediately ruling over its own body-flesh and mediately over a corporeal nature which is given to the other through perception. This nature is the very same one that belongs to the body over there, and consequently it is the same as my own nature. As Husserl puts it, ‘It is the same Nature, but in the mode of appearance: “as if I were standing over there, where the Other’s body is”.’21 If the possibility of this substitution had never been presupposed, if homogeneous space had never been implied by the preceding moments of intentional analysis, then one could, perhaps, concede that the Fifth Meditation had indeed arrived at the constitution of objectivity. The noema objective nature is thus constituted by two layers: the first is my own nature constituted by my ego, while the second layer comes from the experience of the other. By providing an intentional explication of all natural objects (and thus of all objects on a higher level, up to and including ideal objects), I must be able to bring out these two constitutive layers. Obviously, Husserl says, ‘first of all, the Other’s animate bodily organism [Leibkörper], which is, so to speak, the intrinsically first Object, just as the other man is constitutionally the intrinsically first Objective man’.22 Let’s dwell on this statement, because its importance cannot be underestimated. To turn the other flesh, the alien body-flesh, into the first object, is something that should be understood in the

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strongest sense of primacy, namely, as a foundation. A text from November–December of 1932 confirms this point. One of its paragraphs is entitled ‘The objectivity of the flesh as the foundation of all objectivity’.23 Objectivity signifies intersubjectivity. It is the other’s body-flesh that appears to me in the first place, and it is only through it that I can have any indirect access to the other’s egoity (or in other words, the other’s alterity). The other has no other sense than as other than me. And if the other did not appear for me or in me as a monad, it could not be an existing other. For, each being is a sense-formation of my constituting transcendental subjectivity. But, if the other’s body-flesh is constituted in me, it is there as constituted by the other. The first objectivity constituted in this way is the alien body-flesh. My own world extends as far as my flesh, since everything that is given to me is mediated by my flesh. Yet, there exists within me another flesh which sets a limit to my own incarnate world. Repeatedly, we have raised the question of the limits of my flesh. The response is henceforth established: the limit of my flesh is another flesh. This limit is not extrinsic to my flesh; on the contrary, it comes from my flesh. The entire egological constitution of alterity comes up against the notion of incorporation. Positively, this signifies that the relation to the other flesh is a component of the sense of my own flesh. It is also the only manner of resolving the difficulties of incorporation and at the same time respecting the dual phenomenal status of a flesh which is also a body. Sexual difference can thus be a name for this limit, or, for this reference of my flesh to another flesh.24 Henceforth, it is plain to see that Husserl could never confine himself to the reduction to the sphere of ownness. As we have seen, there is not a moment of the intentional analysis of the other which does not presuppose the other; there is not a single concept employed to describe the sphere of ownness which does not already refer to the other. Does not Husserl tacitly recognize this when he states that ‘the Other is phenomenologically a “modification” of myself (which, for its part, gets this character of being “my” self by virtue of the contrastive pairing that necessarily takes place)’?25 If the sense of mineness is drawn from a relation of contrast with the other, the point of departure for transcendental phenomenology – my ego – and the concept of an absolute sphere that is my own are essentially altered.26 Flesh as original ownness and as the origin

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of ownness is originally not mine [impropre] and originates from what is not my own [l’impropre].27 More precisely, if my flesh is constituted originally by way of touch – which is the first stratum in the order of constitution – then this holds a fortiori for the other flesh. The carnal relation – the reference of one flesh to another – is first a con-tact. Where does my own flesh end, if not where the other’s own flesh is felt? The question ‘Where does it end?’ can also signify ‘Where does it begin?’ My flesh is at its limit, at the point of being exceeded, when it is at the border of the other. That is to say the border of the other is the border of myself. Husserl grasped this co-belonging of two fleshes: ‘the apperception of my own flesh and the alien flesh belong essentially together’.28 The contact of oneself with oneself as one’s contact with an other (pure auto-affection as pure hetero-affection) is the contact of one flesh with another one. Let’s call this contact a caress, where incorporation is not introduced. But incorporation is necessarily derived from this relation between two fleshes, or the caress. Let’s call the encounter of bodies an impact [choc]. The caress is also an impact. This helps to explain the ambiguity of phenomenology, that is, the phenomenal duality that it describes and tirelessly seeks to master and to reduce.29 All flesh is constituted by a contact with the other; in other words, flesh is essentially con-tingent. This contingency has repercussions on the higher-level constitution of intersubjectivity and objectivity. Is this not the underlying reason why Husserl moves toward the archi-facticity that we already identified concerning the reduction to the eidos ego? If flesh is contingent and if facticity is its essence (and thus as invariant, it resists variation),30 then does it not impede the eidetic pretention of constitutive analysis, to the extent that it plays a part in the constitution of all transcendence (setting aside for now the problem of temporality)? Does phenomenology not thus require an interpretation of this archi-facticity from which Heidegger began?31 This holds for the being of intentionality as well as the being of transcendence. What does the intentional structure of consciousness mean if not the impossibility of conceiving an ego outside of any connection to the non-ego, that is, the impossibility of conceiving a subject outside of its relation with an object?32 The first non-me is the other me, and, from the other me, the flesh is the first given. If the prototypical intentional object is the flesh of the other, then the original

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intentional subject is my own flesh. Intentionality is originally a carnal pairing; sexual difference, the caress, and impact define its most general structure. This definition of intentionality provides a clarification of the status of transcendence. The phenomenon in the phenomenological sense is an intuitive, incarnate and immanent given.33 Here it would not be unjustified to reproach Husserl for remaining stuck in immanence,34 at least insofar as he does not place an emphasis on incarnation. Yet, if it can be admitted that my flesh is essentially related to alterity, then it must be said that Husserl shows the utmost respect for transcendence, since transcendence is situated at the heart of the phenomenon itself. The notion of transcendence in immanence thus acquires its full sense here. To be sure, one could object that he fails to constitute transcendence, that alterity is not a phenomenon in the phenomenological sense,35 and then conclude that transcendence is missed. But the entire question is to understand why. Sexual difference, in referring one flesh to another, incorporates them and then cancels itself out. This incorporation, however, is not symmetrical. If the flesh of the other is nothing more than a body, my flesh still remains flesh in a sense. My flesh is the medium that gives all bodies, starting with my own body and is thus coextensive with my own world. Here the phenomenal situation described by Husserl – where a body that is also flesh is presented to a flesh – is simply turned around: a body appears to a flesh that is also a body. This helps us to understand the dissolution of all exteriority and transcendence. The origin of transcendence is the caress, but by turning immediately into impact, it is also the reduction of transcendence. Does this not provide a means of understanding why the origin of the world is in the world and why psychology comes to cover over phenomenology? Just as the asymmetry of incorporation leaves open the possibility of a reincarnation of the other body, so too it preserves the possibility of a return to the origin of transcendence and to the origin of the world. In short, it is the possibility of phenomenology itself. Since the objectivity of the object is based on the carnal relation, phenomenology can give rise to what Husserl once called a ‘transcendental deduction of flesh’.36 The task of this deduction would be to analyse the limits of flesh (in this regard, finitude would be its centre), and the typical system of possible references from one flesh to the other. It would need to proceed in at least

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the following two directions: the deduction of sexual difference as a reference from one flesh to another flesh; the deduction of the ‘political body’ as the reference from one flesh to the community of all flesh. Its significance would thus be analogous to the Kantian deduction: it provides an analysis of the conditions of the possibility of the objectivity of the object. Yet Husserl never undertook this deduction, and the programme that we have outlined – which is in part an analytic of incarnation – exceeds phenomenology. One might also be surprised that the existential analytic which, among other things, unfolds the radical implications of intentionality,37 does not include any analysis of the carnal relation. It is confined to a gender-neutral Dasein.38 Could this be due to the fact that the space inhabited by the flesh is irreducible to time? Once again, it is necessary to recall that one of the reasons behind the interruption of Being and Time – at the threshold of the section which was supposed to base intentional consciousness on ecstatic temporality – was precisely this irreduciblity of space to temporality.39 If flesh is absent from the existential analytic, is this not because flesh poses a threat to the privilege of temporality, and everything that derives from it? This question will, in a certain sense, occupy us from now on.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Problem of Time The synthesis that identifies the body presented over there with the other flesh appresented in an absolute here also identifies my own nature with the other’s own nature. This give rise to the constitution of an objective nature. Husserl observes: In that way the coexistence of my polar Ego and the other Ego, of my whole concrete ego and his, my intentional life and his, my ‘realities’ and his – in short, a common time-form – is primally instituted; and thus every primordial temporality automatically acquires the significance of being merely an original mode of appearance of Objective temporality to a particular subject.1 Shared temporality, which presupposes an objective nature and objective world, appears to stem from the constitution of the alter ego. By following the explicit course of Husserl’s analysis, it would seem impossible that such a temporality would precede this constitution. We have repeatedly suggested, nonetheless, this possibility by raising the question of whether the other has not already been introduced into the self-constitution of the incarnate living present, and moreover, whether original temporality was not a relation to the other. This relation has now come to signify a carnal relation, sexual difference, caress and impact. Let’s begin by fleshing out this hypothesis. The whole intentional analysis of the other is introduced through the distinction between the here and the there. We have already tried to demonstrate the

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difficulties that this distinction raises, but we have reserved an examination of the most serious one. Here and there designate a relation in a spatial situation. For, as Husserl observes, ‘individual objects of perception have their reciprocal spatial position on the basis of their being-together in a single time’.2 What can this mean except that a shared time must be already constituted so that my flesh that is absolutely here can appear to a body that is over there, and on this basis, so that the apperceptive transfer which constitutes the other can take place? How do we reconcile what Husserl says about this shared time – namely, that it is constituted after the other and in a non-genetic sense – with the requirement of synchrony that is implied by the distribution of the places here and there? If the constitution of the alter ego already presupposes itself (a claim which we have repeatedly verified), would it not be the case that this alterity already operates more deeply within the self-constitution of time? Does not the incarnate living present, by virtue of its incarnation, refer to a carnal relation, that is, to carnal difference? It is thus necessary (due to Husserl’s insistence on bringing together the modes of givenness of the other and the past) to enquire into the original and temporal hyle. By turning toward Husserl’s lectures in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, we will ‘descend into the obscure depths of the ultimate consciousness which constitutes all such temporality as belongs to mental processes’.3 Without doing so, any interpretation of phenomenology runs the risk of being criticized as insufficient, since temporality plays the role of an archi-foundation for all intentional analyses. Husserl opens his lectures by putting objective time out of play, and in so doing he appears to exclude any implication of the other in temporality. Let’s first determine the sense and the residue of this epoché. Since the goal is to provide an analysis of the consciousness of time, the exclusion in question is ‘the complete exclusion of all transcending presuppositions concerning what exists’.4 More precisely, Husserl does not allow a pre-given objective time, for which one would then seek to establish the subjective conditions of its appearing. The problem is not to know how a constituted time appears5 but to constitute ‘an appearing time, an appearing duration, as appearing’.6 The phenomenological given is the immanent time of the flowing of consciousness. The plurivocity of the concept of immanence, however, makes it important to specify

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in what sense the term is being employed here. At the same time, we will define positively the ‘residue’ of the reduction of objective time, that is, the phenomenological datum. ‘What the suspension of objective time involves will perhaps become clearer still if we work out a parallel with space, since space and time exhibit such significant and much-noted analogies.’7 To be conscious of space is to have the contents of visual sensations [Empfindungsinhalte] that found the appearing of things situated in space. After abstracting every transcendent signification, what remains are the ‘primary contents’8 that Husserl in Ideas I calls the hyle. The analogy with the reduction of qualities becomes even more explicit: The sensed red is a phenomenological datum that, animated by a certain apprehension-function, presents an objective quality; it is not itself a quality. The perceived red, not the sensed red, is a quality in the proper sense, that is, a determination of the appearing thing. The sensed red is called red only equivocally, for red is the name of a real quality.9 If the temporal given that the analysis takes as its theme is a hyletic given, then this means that immanence is understood in the sense of actual immanence. Heidegger, in his brief preface to the German edition of On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, confirms this definition of the theme: ‘The theme that led to the present research is the temporal constitution of the pure given of sensation and, underlying it, the auto-constitution of “phenomenological time”. That which is decisive in this work is the throwing into relief the intentional character of the consciousness of time, and, in a general manner, the increasing clarity that intentionality receives as its principle.’ Husserl confirms this as well: If we give the name ‘sense’ to a phenomenological datum that by means of apprehension makes us conscious of something objective as given ‘incarnately present’, which is then said to be objectively perceived, we must likewise distinguish between something temporal that is ‘sensed’ and something temporal that is perceived. The latter refers to objective time. The former, however, is not itself objective time (or position in

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objective time) but the phenomenological datum through whose empirical apperception the relation to objective time becomes constituted.10 In other words, if the objectivity of the object (the perceived) is not constituted in the hyle, then it depends on incarnation. Intentionality has a twofold correlative structure: noeticnoematic and hyle-morphic. Let’s clarify the latter correlation. There are two classes of lived experiences: (1) sensual lived experiences, which are the contents of sensation or hyletic data such as they are given through sound, touch, etc. Although they are not moments of the perceived, they are adumbrations of these moments. They are the actual but non-intentional components of lived experience. (2) The lived experiences that bestow meaning [morphé-noesis] and that inform matter are the ones that introduce intentionality.11 As a result, the flow of lived experiences ‘the stream of phenomenological being has a stuff-stratum and a noetic stratum’.12 Phenomenology is split into a hyletic and a noetic phenomenology. In Ideas I Husserl affirms that hyletic phenomenology is subordinated to noetic phenomenology.13 But, then, how can we understand the fact that it is nevertheless within the hyle that the auto-constitution of time, as an absolute instance, takes place? The analyses of Ideas I unfold on the level of constituted temporality and only enquire into noetic acts. On this level, the hyletic is necessarily subordinate to the noetic. But, while these acts accomplish their work of unification, the passive syntheses, which are the hyle for these acts, continue to take place. If one wants to give constitution its full and radical sense as a phenomenological Idealism, then it is necessary to proceed to the constitution of a hyle that is no longer relative: an archihyle, a temporal hyle.14 If the hyle is a non-intentional passivity that enables consciousness to be intentional,15 that is to say a consciousness of something other than itself that enables intentionality to emerge; and if it is the ultimate presupposition of all active constitution, then it is from the archi-original hyle that the intentional morphé emerges. Where and how does the hyle give rise to the morphé? Where and how does this distinction – between the intentional and what is non-intentional, between the ego and the non-ego, between the ego and what originally affects it – get embodied? What is the origin of intentionality?

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This question is answered by the central question of On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, namely, the question of the origin, the essence and the possibility of a pure experience of time as the form of all experience in general. This is not a mere repetition of the Kantian approach; in Husserl’s eyes, Kant is still guided by a pre-constituted given. Nor is it a regression toward the psychological origin of the representation of time, in search of the original materials of sensation from which the objective intuition of space and time would emerge. Husserl explains: What does interest us are experiences [Erlebnisse] with respect to their objective sense and descriptive content … We seek to bring the a priori of time to clarity by exploring the consciousness of time, by bringing its essential constitution to light, and by exhibiting the apprehension-contents and act-characters that pertain – perhaps specifically – to time and to which the a priori temporal laws essentially belong.16 In order to highlight the specificity of phenomenological analysis, Husserl begins with a critical exposition of Brentano’s view.17 Brentano believes to have discovered the origin of time in ‘original associations’. Consider the flow of a melody: when one tone is succeeded by another, the first one does not purely and simply disappear. Otherwise, we could only ever be conscious of one tone and then another tone or even of a pause in between them. But we would never have the melody itself or as such. It is thus necessary for there to be a specific modification in virtue of which each sensation of a tone, after the stimulus fades away, awakens a similar representation that is enriched with a temporal determination, and does so continuously. Husserl writes: The stimulus generates the present sensation-content. If the stimulus disappears, the sensation also disappears. But then the sensation itself becomes productive: it produces for itself a phantasy-representation the same or almost the same in content and enriched by the temporal character. This representation in turn awakens a new one, which is joined to it in continuous fashion, and so on. Brentano calls this continuous annexation of a temporally modified representation to the given representation ‘original association’.18

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This analysis turns the imagination into the origin of time, but its result is that there is no perception of succession and change. ‘We believe that we hear a melody and therefore that we still hear what is just past, but this is only an illusion [Schein] proceeding from the vivacity [Lebhaftigkeit] of the original association.’19 Whatever may be the psychological character of this theory, Husserl recognizes the presence of a phenomenological core within it, before going on to criticize it. Succession and duration do appear; in other words, ‘the unity of the consciousness that encompasses intentionally what is present and what is past is a phenomenological datum’.20 But do the past, and more generally, time, appear in the mode of the imagination, as Brentano believes? If that were the case, then one would not be able to differentiate between the perception of a succession and the memory of the perception of a succession at some other time, or even an imagined succession. This difficulty suffices to call into question Brentano’s entire analysis of the original consciousness of time, and it calls for a phenomenology of time consciousness which, as always, begins by disentangling the equivocations resulting from the lack of necessary distinctions and by further scrutinizing its presuppositions. Brentano’s basic presupposition is that the apprehension of a temporal succession can only be non-temporal [intemporelle] or that the intuition of a lapse of time can only be a fixed point, but this is contradicted by what is given phenomenologically: It is certainly evident that the perception of a temporal object itself has temporality, that the perception of duration itself presupposes the duration of perception, that the perception of any temporal form itself has its temporal form. If we disregard all transcendencies, there remains to perception in all of its phenomenological constituents the phenomenological temporality that belongs to its irreducible essence.21 There is no better example to demonstrate the phenomenological constitution of temporality and to bring out the temporality of consciousness than a temporal object (Zeitobjekt), an object with its own temporal extension and that is spread out temporally. Let’s return again to a succession of tones in a melody. Husserl writes: ‘We now exclude all transcendent apprehension and positing and take the tone purely as a hyletic datum.’22 The

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phenomenological reduction is accompanied here by a reduction that abstracts the objectifying apprehension – the morphé – since it seeks to describe its temporal constitution. But, in a movement that evokes the Cartesian Meditations in which Husserl abstracted from the alter ego in order to investigate its origin in constitution, the 1905 lectures on time go back to the hyle in order to show the phenomenological temporality of acts. However, Husserl does not, at least not thematically, enquire into the passive constitution of the hyle. Given that the passage to idealism has not yet been accomplished, the radicalization of constitution has yet to be required. The pure hyletic given is descriptively given in two manners. I can focus my attention on the tone itself – the tone aimed at – which commences, remains and then ceases; it gradually fades away with the weakening of the ‘retention’ into the past. The tone has its own temporality; it is the same. In other words, its temporal unity is presupposed and the function of the apprehension is not truly inhibited. But I can also direct my attention toward the mode of givenness of the tone – the tone as it is intended – which appears to be continually different. Husserl observes: ‘I am conscious of the tone and of the duration it fills in a continuity of “modes” in a “continual flow”.’23 When the tone commences, I am conscious of the tone as present. This continues as long as I am conscious of one of its phases as present. ‘“Throughout” this whole flow of consciousness, one and the same tone is intended as enduring, as now enduring.’24 When the tone ceases, I am still conscious of it in retention. I am still conscious of the tone in the full extension of its duration, but ‘it then stands before me as something dead, so to speak – something no longer being vitally generated, a formation no longer animated by the generative point of the now but continuously modified and sinking back into “emptiness”.’25 It is thus necessary to distinguish the object that endures and flows – the tone – from the object in its mode of flowing. Husserl hesitates to call the latter consciousness of the tone because it is precisely what authorizes the relation of consciousness to an object: We will not be able to term this appearance – the ‘object in its mode of running off’ – ‘consciousness’ (any more than we will give the name ‘consciousness’ to the spatial phenomenon, the body in its way of appearing from this die or that, from near or

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far). The ‘consciousness’, the ‘experience’, is related to its object by means of an appearance in which precisely the ‘object in its way of appearing’ [Objekt im Wie] stands before us.26 The appearance ‘of the object in its mode of flowing’ is analogous to the adumbration of a transcendent body; it is not a consciousness of …, since it lacks the moment of the unity. Nor, for the same reason, is it even an appearance27 in the sense of an objective appearance.28 Instead, it is an immanent diversity that is given in a continual modification: a phenomenon of flowing. To describe how this diversity is unified is to describe the constitution of temporality and to seek the origin of form in the hyle.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Flesh and Time Phenomenological time is constituted within the flowing of phenomena, that is, by their ‘modes of appearing’ in the consciousness of time. The description here is therefore essentially noematic – it describes the acts constituting time – without ever becoming noetic and thematizing the temporal constitution of these acts themselves. This will turn out to be one of the principal difficulties raised by the lectures on time. What can one say about the object in its mode of flowing, about the flowing of the phenomena? We know that the running-off phenomenon is a continuity of constant changes. This continuity forms an inseparable unity, inseparable into extended sections that could exist by themselves and inseparable into phases that could exist by themselves, into points of the continuity. The parts that we single out by abstraction can exist only in the whole running-off; and this is equally true of the phases, the points that belong to the runningoff continuity. We can also say of this continuity, with evidence, that in a certain sense it is immutable; that is, with regard to its form. It is inconceivable that the continuity of phases would contain the same phase-mode twice or even contain it as stretched over an entire component section. Just as each point of time (and each extent of time) differs ‘individually’, so to speak, from every other one and just as no one of them can occur twice, so no running-off mode can occur twice.1

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The demonstration of the continuity of the flowing of phenomena is the first step on the way toward answering the question of knowing how, from the diversity of modes of flowing [hyle], the unity of the flowing continuity [morphé] can emerge. But, without knowing the whole of the temporal constitution of acts, how as Husserl says, can we know that the flowing of the phenomena that constitute temporal objects is continuous? Necessarily, this would come from the temporal objects themselves, whose unity is thus presupposed.2 This attests to a methodological privileging of the constituted. Can this privilege be maintained, however, on the most radical level of constitutive analysis? When it is a question of the constitution of the transcendental absolute, does one have the right to consider the object as a structural rule for a noetic series of acts? Or more precisely, can one consider the temporal object as a structural law for a multiplicity of noeses, when it is subjected to the very same temporal form that is being constituted? Does not the constitution of temporality, as the constitution of the alter ego, already presuppose itself?3 And if that is the case, how can it be explained? Let’s continue by picking up the thread of Husserl’s analysis. What must the modes of flowing be in order to provide this continuity? Husserl explains: First of all, we emphasize that the running-off modes of an immanent temporal object have a beginning, a source-point, so to speak. This is the running-off mode with which the immanent object begins to exist. It is characterized as now. In the steady progression of the running-off modes we then find the remarkable circumstance that each later running-off phase is itself a continuity, a continuity that constantly expands a continuity of pasts. To the continuity of running-off modes of the object’s duration, we contrast the continuity of running-off modes belonging to each point of the duration. This second continuity is obviously included in the first, the continuity of running-off modes of the object’s duration. The running-off continuity of an enduring object is therefore a continuum whose phases are the continua of the running-off modes belonging to the different time-points of the duration of the object.4

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What is remarkable about the structure described above is that the continuity of the modes of flowing of the duration of the object – the constituted duration [la durée constituée] – includes the continuity of these modes of flowing at each point of this duration, that is, the continuity of its own constituting phases. The constitutive hyletic diversity is included in the constituted unity of the object that endures; to put it differently, it is because the phases of the continuity are themselves in continuity that the opposition between the hyletic diversity and the intentional unity is overcome within the hyle itself. Thus, the hyle constitutes the morphé. Where does this continuity come from and how can it be explicated? Husserl answers: The ‘source-point’ with which the ‘production’ of the enduring object begins is a primal impression. This consciousness is in a state of constant change: the tone-now present ‘incarnately present’ continuously changes (scil. consciously, ‘in’ consciousness) into something that has been; an always new tone-now continuously relieves the one that has passed over into modification. But when the consciousness of the tone-now, the primal impression, passes over into retention, this retention itself is a now in turn, something actually existing. While it is actually present itself (but not an actually present tone), it is retention of the tone that has been. A ray of meaning can be directed towards the now: toward the retention; but it can also be directed towards what is retentionally intended: toward the past tone. Every actually present now of consciousness, however, is subject to the law of modification. It changes into retention of retention and does so continuously. Accordingly, a fixed continuum of retention arises in such a way that each later point is retention for every earlier point. And each retention is already a continuum.5 Retention should not be understood in an empiricist manner as a weakening of the first impression, as a kind of echo. The echo of a tone is certainly a muffled sound, but it is actually given in a now. This signifies that the tone given in the retention – the past tone as such – is not included in the now as a primary content. Husserl writes: ‘The retentional tone is not a present

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tone but precisely a tone “primarily remembered” in the now: it is not really on hand [reell vorhanden] in the retentional consciousness.’6 Retention is the original consciousness of the just passed, and thus is the consciousness of time: it includes both the present and the past as such. This unity of the present and past is not actual – then there would be no consciousness of time – but intentional. Retention is a specific kind of intentionality in that it does not proceed from the activity of the ego and in that it is not an intentionality of the will but (to employ concepts that Husserl will develop after 1905) an intentional modification taking place within the framework of pure passivity.7 How could retention be taken as an act,8 since it is constitutive of immanent temporality and thus constitutes the universal form of all acts in general? The retention thus refers to an archi-impression that precedes it. The gap between the aim itself (the retention) and that which it intends (the impression) is the gap that constitutes immanent time itself, a phase-shift [dephasage] which enables the phases of the flux to give rise to temporality. What is the nature of this archi-impression that orders the whole retentional continuum and that continually produces modifications of modifications? Husserl answers: ‘The primal impression is something absolutely unmodified, the primal source of all further consciousness and being. Primal impression has as its content that which the word “now” signifies, insofar as it is taken in the strictest sense. Each new now is the content of a new primal impression.’9 And further: The primal impression is the absolute beginning of this production, the primal source, that from which everything else is continuously produced. But it itself is not produced; it does not arise as something produced but through genesis spontanea; it is primal generation. It does not spring from anything (it has no seed); it is primal creation. If it is said: A new now continuously forms on the now that becomes modified into a not-now, or a source quite suddenly engenders it or originates it, these are metaphors. It can only be said: Consciousness is nothing without the impression.10 The retentional modification of an original impression – the way in which the pure data of sensation is experienced – describes

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the fundamental structure of temporality. And Husserl’s lectures on time will continually exploit its resources. Its power and fecundity will be shown through the analyses of recollection, waiting, simultaneity and objective time. It is not necessary to pursue every detail of these analyses in order to shed light on the essential difficulties faced by the constitution of temporality. Let’s begin with the difficulty tied to the noematic point of view adopted by the lectures on time. Husserl brings out the essence of the lived experiences of consciousness, and temporal objects, starting with immanent temporality, are their noematic correlates. The analysis does not ever become noetic and orient itself toward the temporal constitution of the flux. And it even appears that it cannot do so. For, in the flux of lived experiences that constitute time, in the flux of the noeses of duration, ‘there is no duration’.11 Duration is the form of something, the form of a constancy, and by definition, there is no constancy in the flux. By identifying this flux with absolute subjectivity,12 does Husserl not run the risk of succumbing to an a-temporal conception of consciousness13 analogous to the one he denounced in Brentano? This is not so certain, mainly because the a-temporality in question (assuming that it were governed by the same concept of time, which is not the case) does not concern the same type of consciousness and consequently does not have the same meaning. A-temporality is real for Brentano, whereas the a-temporality of absolute consciousness first signifies negatively that it is not intratemporal, and second signifies positively – this too is a problem, but for other reasons – that it is ‘the original time [Urzeit] which is not yet truly time’.14 This first difficulty is linked to another one, namely, the difficulty of the unity of the flux, or better, the duplication of it. By remaining exclusively within a noematic orientation, it is perhaps possible to unify the flux on its own, on the basis of the double intentionality of retention (the retention of an impression and the retention of a retention) without passing through an ego who performs syntheses.15 But if the analysis turns toward the lived experiences themselves and toward the ‘temporal’ constitution of the flux of lived experience that constitutes time, then the question of the unity of the flux is raised again. First of all, it is raised because the lived experiences that constitute the flux should also be ordered in a flux; the first flux thus becomes a unity that is constituted by a second constituting flux. The danger is thus

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twofold: either the constituting and the constituted coincide in the flux in such a way that the constitutive analysis is no longer possible; or, it is necessary to infinitely multiply the flux in such a way that the constitutive analysis becomes interminable. These two hypotheses attest to the impossibility of any constitution of an absolutely original temporality. From the outset, they destroy any possibility of an absolute origin and instead lead back to an archi-facticity. The question of the unity of the flux is raised a second time after we move, as the Cartesian Meditations require, to a genetic phenomenology that recognizes time as the universal form of all egological genesis and as the universal a priori of all experience.16 It is thereby necessary for the ego to constitute the time (passive constitution only has the sense of a constitution in which the ego does not actively and reflexively take part) that constitutes the ego. In other words, it is necessary for the ego to be derived from the ego that originates. Husserl clearly articulates this aporia in a manuscript from 1932: ‘The flux must be a temporal apriori in relation to the functioning ego; this temporality is itself flowing. The flow is always anterior [im Voraus] but the ego is also anterior …’.17 These difficulties can be reduced to difficulties concerning the constitution of temporal hyle to the extent that all lived experiences are impressional and are given first as impressions.18 In a manuscript from 1932, Husserl states: However, I need two things all the time: on the one hand, the flowing field of ‘lived experiences’ which constantly is linked to an Ur-impression, which vanishes in the retention and before, the protention; and on the other, the I is affected by and motivated toward action. But is the Ur-impression not already an apperceptive unity, something noematic coming from the I, and does the regressive inquiry not always lead back to an apperceptive unity?19 Is this not to say that the flux of hyletic data refers to another flux, and that this is iterated infinitely? Without, once and for all, deciding these dilemmas through which phenomenology tries to recapture its proper origin, it is possible to trace them back to a common root, to provide an account of them, and to interpret them.

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The hyle is not conceivable without reference to flesh, since it is through flesh that consciousness is linked to its hyletic infrastructure.20 This applies to human-mundane consciousness as well as to absolute transcendental consciousness. In contrast with psychological sensualism, Husserl was tempted to conceive the hyletic data independently from flesh.21 But (1) in distinguishing between Empfindung (sensation) and Empfindnis (feeling), he transformed the traditional concept of sensation as the effect of an external body.22 Subsequently, the rejection of empiricist sensualism is not equivalent to a rejection of all sensualism in general; and (2) flesh must always be given in the temporal flux. Without this flux, the now of the tone would never be ‘incarnated’, as his lectures say. And, moreover, flesh must ‘precede’ temporality if temporality is constituted in a hyletic flux. As strange as this priority of flesh over immanent time may seem, it is even stranger that it did not escape Husserl. It is already implied in the text23 in which Husserl critiques his own analysis of internal time consciousness and asks himself whether he should posit a universal intentional drive [pulsionnelle] that constitutes the original present and ensures the unity of the flux. This priority of flesh over time is expressly taken up and recognized in a manuscript from 1930: ‘In the streaming archi-presence we have an always invariable perception of flesh, and so in the temporalization of immanent time, the perception of my flesh goes through continuously this time in its entirety, constituting synthetically, identically and omnitemporally this flesh.’24 If the perception of my flesh – which can only signify here the perception of my flesh by itself (ultimately, contact) – traverses continuously and completely through time, then it is the very ‘movement’ of temporalization. It would be an absolute movement that is not temporal, because time originates from it. Flesh constitutes time. But, since all flesh refers to another flesh, this means that difference and the carnal relation temporalize time. We can thereby attempt to fill two lacunae in Husserl’s analysis of time. The first concerns the original protention. It is remarkable that the protention that constitutes the horizon of the impressional now is only introduced in the context of a description of recollection.25 This evades, however, the problem of an actual original protention, that is, the problem of the opening of a temporal horizon prior in time to the archi-impression, which is purportedly

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the origin of time. If Husserl never provides a genuine description of the protention, is this not due to the fact that the demonstration of an archi-protention runs the risk of invalidating the fundamental structure of temporality that nevertheless demands and requires this protention? Does not conceiving the original protention without contradiction presuppose an intentional drive ‘that aims to enter into another flux’ and that predisposes one toward this goal? Does this not establish the carnal relation as the principle of temporality? According to this hypothesis that there is a double origin or a duplicated origin of time, there is nothing absurd about thinking that the temporal horizon of my sensation is opened by the other. It also becomes possible to account for the second lacuna that Husserl will increasingly assign to life. The vivacity of a life can never be thematized, namely, the constitution of a new now, the constant wellspring of novelty, and the infinite originality of the now. If a new now always succeeds the now that has just passed and if in each now there is always another now that is constituted, and if ‘the Absolute is present only in being deferred-delayed [différant]’,26 this is because flesh, which is originally altered, is constitutive. The archi-source is the source of another source. This original differentiation27 is the work of carnal difference. Does Husserl not accept this claim when he writes, ‘The data of sensation themselves are not egoic, but are foreign to the ego [Ich-fremd],’28 or in other words, that the archi-impression comes from the other? Perhaps there is no longer a contradiction in the relation between the ego and time, nor an infinite regress in the constitution of the flux. The ego can draw its origin from time, even though it is the origin of time. The same flux can be both constituting and constituted, assuming that two egos are carnally linked and that absolute transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity.29 By defining time as a relation of the ego to the alter ego, as a carnal relation, we have only unpacked the sense of flesh. We have spelled out the consequences of the solidarity and reciprocal implication of the constitution of my flesh and another flesh, or more precisely, of the fact that the constitution of my flesh is immediately the constitution of another flesh and that the constitution of my own flesh [propre] is always the constitution of what is not my own [impropre]. This definition contradicts the principle of the closure of the ego, as long as transcendental subjectivity is not understood as intersubjectivity. But the carnal relation is also the relation of

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flesh to the body. My flesh is incorporated because it is affected by another flesh. Its auto-affection is thus immediately a heteroaffection. Husserl observes that ‘The functioning of my flesh … is my being-actively [Tätigsein] in operation and my being-affected [Affiziertwerden].’30 Doesn’t Husserl describe the temporalization of time here, since what originally affects me is the original hyle as the core of what is alien to the I, a core which is the first non-me, the other flesh? To conceive time as a carnal relation is to conceive it as the incorporation of my flesh. Through its incorporation, flesh gives rise to time [donne le temps]. If flesh – as the carnal relation and carnal difference – gives rise to time, then the second of the two necessary conditions for the pairing that constitutes the other – the purely egological constitution of temporality – cannot be fulfilled.31 So, all of the difficulties encountered by Husserl in his constitutive analyses of the alter ego and of time arise from the origin of all constitution in general. The universal a priori of constitution is precisely the relation to the other. And, if that is the case, it is because flesh – which, to recall, is the site of all givenness – cannot be conceived in isolation, that is, outside of an interconnection with another flesh or other fleshes. The absolute of constitution is thus con-tingent. And, to the extent that it leads to a reactivating unearthing of the most archaic layers of constitution, it moves toward its proper foundation. Phenomenology gives rise to an adversarial and anarchic foundation, a phenomenon whose phenomenality it no longer recognizes. It exposes an archi-facticity that it claimed to reduce. This archi-facticity – the original con-tingency of flesh – will never be derived from an intentional analysis. Yet, at the same time, it does seem that it can be the theme of an existential analytic understood as a hermeneutics of facticity that seeks, through an ek-static interpretation of intentionality, to displace radically the primacy of the subjectivity of consciousness. The flesh – as both my own and not my own [propre et impropre] – gives rise to time. This signifies, at the very least, that flesh – the sense of flesh – does not derive from temporality. The foundation of perceptual consciousness in Dasein – which required the temporal sense of the presentation to be retained as a characteristic of perception32 – cannot be realized. Not only does incarnation constitute the essential feature of perception but also flesh cannot be traced back

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to temporality as its principle. Flesh thus cannot find a place within the analytic of Dasein precisely because the latter is oriented by and dominated by temporality. We have sought to establish the necessity of an analytic of incarnation and to indicate its task. It cannot take place in the space of the subject–object relationship, since we have established that the flesh belongs as much, or as little, to the side of the object as it does to the side of the subject. Without this analytic, it will not be possible to determine the deep sense of phenomenology, which is also to say the sense and the essence of modern metaphysics. And, the period of subjectivity has been named and conceived as such ever since the question of being and the call for thinking. So, this passage – or leap – from philosophy to thinking and from thinking back to philosophy defines more than a historical situation. Without this analytic, it runs the risk of remaining, in turn, insufficiently understood. * Did Husserl ever reach this ultimate clarity that would allow him to die in peace? Did he ever have to acknowledge that ‘philosophy as a rigorous science, even apodictically rigorous: the dream is over’?33 But what awakening led philosophy to appear as a dream? Husserl’s wife reports that, when he was on his deathbed, she came to him one morning. He seemed to have awoken from a deep sleep. With a striking expression of joy on his face and his arms wide open, he said: ‘Ich habe etwas ganz Wunderbares gesehen. Nein ich kann es Dir nicht sagen. Nein!’ [I have seen something very wonderful. No, I cannot tell you. No!]34

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NOTES

Translator’s Introduction 1

See Eugen Fink, De la phénoménologie, trans. Didier Franck (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1974).

2

It is interesting to note here that a question from Franck to Henry about the nature of the relation between Henry’s phenomenology of ‘life’ and Husserl’s phenomenology of the ‘impression’ gave rise to Henry’s fascinating 1990 critical study of Husserl entitled Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. xii.

3

The biographical details of Franck’s academic career as well as his perceptions about the ‘Catholic phenomenology’ I discuss below have been obtained from conversations with Franck himself. A collection of interviews with Jean-Luc Marion in which his relationship with Franck is briefly discussed has just been released: see Jean-Luc Marion, La rigueur des choses: Entretiens avec Dan Arbib (Paris: Flammarion, 2012).

4

See, for example, Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), §40. Also, see that the French version of the Cartesian Meditations translates the expression ‘leibhaftig’ as en chair et en os (in flesh and bone), while the English translates it as in person. The French rendering better preserves the idiomatic emphasis of Leib in German. See Husserliana, Bd. I, p. 139; Méditations cartésiennes et les conférences de Paris, trans. Marc de Launay (Pairs: PUF, 1994), p. 157; the first translation of the Meditations into French was undertaken by Emmanuel Levinas in 1930, see Méditations cartésiennes Introduction à la phenomenology, trans. Gabrielle Pfeiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Vrin, 1930). For the English, see Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 109.

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5 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §14, p. 33. 6

Didier Franck, Heidegger et le problème de l’espace (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986).

7

Didier Franck, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, trans. Bettina Bergo and Philippe Farah (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012).

8

Didier Franck, Heidegger et le christianisme: l’explication silencieuse (Paris: PUF, 2004).

9

Didier Franck, L’un-pour-l’autre: Levinas et la signification (Paris: PUF, 2008).

10 See Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 226ff. 11 See especially the two essays ‘Au-delà de la phénoménologie’ and ‘La dramatique des phénomènes’ both in Didier Franck, Dramatique des phénomènes (Paris: PUF, 2001). 12 Ibid., p. 119. 13 Husserl appears to intimate that time, as the universal form of all egological genesis, is absolutely static: see for example Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §37, ‘Time as the Universal Form of all Egological Genesis’. He writes, ‘The phenomenology developed at first is merely “static”’ (p. 76). 14 See Bernet for a subtle reading of the various manifestations of ‘world’ in Husserl: Rudolf Bernet, ‘Husserl’s Concept of the World’, Crises in Continental Philosophy, Arleen Dallery, Charles E. Scott and P. Holley Roberts (eds) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 3–21. 15 Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §53, p. 180. 16 See Nicolas de Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); James Mensch, Husserl’s Account of Our Consciousness of Time (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2010). 17 For example, Cairns translates the German ‘einer apperzeptiven Übertragung von meinem Leib her haben’ as ‘must have derived this sense by an apperceptive transfer from my animate organism’. Husserliana, Bd. I, p. 140; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §50, p. 110. 18 For this distinction, see ‘Translators’ Introduction’, in Husserl, Ideas II, p. xiv.

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Introduction 1

Hegel writes, ‘With Descartes the culture of modern times, the thought of modern Philosophy, really begins to appear’ and ‘With him the new epoché in Philosophy begins.’ See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 3: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 217 and 223 respectively. Similarly, Heidegger writes ‘The whole of modern metaphysics, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of the being and of truth opened up by Descartes.’ He continues, ‘With Descartes, there begins the completion of Western metaphysics.’ See Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 66 and 75 respectively.

2 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, p. 395. 3

Ibid., §16, p. 73. Husserl also writes, ‘Though in a very general sense, all modern philosophy is Cartesian, and similarly, all physics is Galilean.’ Husserliana, Bd. VI, p. 425.

4

See Husserl, Ideas II, §32, p. 58.

5

See Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999), passim.

6

Edmund Husserl, Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics, trans. Dallas Willard (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1993), p. 251.

7

Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983).

8

Heidegger writes, ‘And what is the matter at stake in philosophical investigation? In accordance with the same tradition, it is for Husserl as for Hegel the subjectivity of consciousness. For Husserl, the Cartesian Meditations were not only the topic of the Paris lectures in February of 1929. Rather, from the time following the Logical Investigations, their spirit accompanied the impassioned course of his philosophical investigations to the end.’ See Martin Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ in Basic Writings: from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell, expanded edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 439.

9

Husserl writes, ‘A work currently in preparation that is to appear,

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I hope, at the beginning of next year, which in this time of haste characterized by a theory ordered by a tedious and sober objectivity, proves that a transcendental phenomenology, in my mind, embraces the universal horizon of problems of philosophy and holds the proper method.’ Husserliana, Bd. V, pp. 140–1. 10 Edmund Husserl, Briefe an Roman Ingarden: Mit Erläuterungen und Erinnerungen an Husserl, ed. Roman Ingarden (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), p. 59. 11 In 1933, Fink warns in an essay endorsed by Husserl: ‘The analysis of the “experience of the other” in the Fifth Meditation is only a development of the reduction, and not a thematic interpretation of “empathy”.’ See Eugen Fink, ‘The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism’, in The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings, ed. and trans. R. O. Elveton (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), p. 116. 12 Translators’ note: Franck’s version of this heading varies from the English translation, which we have followed here. In place of ‘Sphere of Transcendental Being’, the French heading literally reads “La sphère ontologique” [Seinsphäre]. 13 Throughout I am constantly referring to the German text, Cartesianische Meditationen, published in 1950 as the first volume of Husserliana, Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke. The French translation of G. Pfeiffer and E. Levinas, which I have not failed to consult, was published in 1931 and was not based on this definitive edition. Also, I will cite only the section numbers (§). Finally, here let it be noted once and for all that I (Franck) have often modified the available French translations, and especially the themes that are essential to the intention of my work.

Chapter one 1 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §2, p. 5. 2

This is to say a non-empirical historicity, as is shown in the Crisis of European Sciences: ‘To bring latent reason to the understanding of its possibilities and thus to bring to insight the possibility of metaphysics as a true possibility – this is the only way to put metaphysics or universal philosophy on the strenuous road to realization. It is the only way to decide whether the telos which was inborn in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy

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– that of humanity which seeks to exist, and is only possible, through philosophical reason, moving endlessly from latent to manifest reason and forever seeking its own norms through this, its truth and genuine human nature – whether this telos, then, is merely a factual, historical delusion, the accidental acquisition of merely one among many other civilizations and histories, or whether Greek humanity was not rather the first breakthrough to what is essential to humans as such, its entelechy … Philosophy and science would accordingly be the historical movement through which universal reason, “inborn” in humanity as such, is revealed.’ Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, §6, pp. 15–16. 3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §2, p. 5. 4

Husserl writes, ‘Each time, while situated in its cultural domain, there is a radical and universal reform in which resides a driving force that gives way to a deep spiritual crisis.’ Husserliana, Bd. VII, p. 7.

5

It is only because the ‘philosophical epoché’ precedes the transcendental reduction: ‘The epoché that we are undertaking shall consist of our completely abstaining from any judgment regarding the doctrinal content of any previous philosophy and effecting all of our demonstrations within the limits set by this abstention.’ Husserl, Ideas I, §18, p. 34.

6

Husserl writes, ‘Descartes himself presupposed an ideal of science, the ideal approximated by geometry and mathematical natural science. As a fateful prejudice this ideal determines philosophies for centuries and hiddenly determines the Meditations themselves. Obviously it was, for Descartes, a truism from the start that the all-embracing science must have the form of a deductive system, in which the whole structure rests, ordine geometrico, on an axiomatic foundation that grounds the deduction absolutely. For him a role similar to that of geometrical axioms in geometry is played in the all-embracing science by the axiom of the ego’s absolute certainty of himself, along with the axiomatic principles innate in the ego – only this axiomatic foundation lies even deeper than that of geometry and is called on to participate in the ultimate grounding even of geometrical knowledge.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §3, pp. 7–8. See also Husserliana, Bd. VI, pp. 406ff.

7 Husserl, Ideas I, §25, p. 46 (translation modified). 8

Ibid., §21, p. 39 (translation modified). Translators’ note: here there is a significant gap between the English and French translations of Husserl. The French text utilizes the expression ‘intuition donatrice’, while the English text employs the phrase ‘presentive intuition’. To

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come closer to the French text which shapes Franck’s analysis, then, we have opted for the phrase ‘intuitive givenness’. 9

In §59 of Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl writes: ‘Evidence, as has already become apparent to us by the above explanations, designates that performance on the part of intentionality which consists in the giving of something-itself [die intentionale Leistung der Selbstgebung]. More precisely, it is the universal pre-eminent form of “intentionality”, of “consciousness of something”, in which there is consciousness of the intended-to objective affair in the mode itself-seized-upon, itself-seen – correlatively, in the mode: being with itself in the manner peculiar to consciousness. We can also say that it is the primal consciousness: I am seizing upon “it itself” originaliter, as contrasted with seizing upon it in an image or as some other, intuitional or empty, fore-meaning.’ Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), §59, pp. 157–8.

10 Husserl, Ideas I, §39, p. 83. Translators’ note: the French reads ‘auto-présence incarnée’ for the English ‘own presence “in person”’. To remain close to Franck’s claim, we render this in his text as ‘incarnate presence’. 11 Ibid., §3, p. 10. Translators’ note: Franck’s text renders ‘personal’ as ‘incarnate’, thus explaining the transition to the next paragraph. 12 Husserl writes, ‘Originally, the “I move,” “I do,” precedes the “I can do.”’ See Husserl, Ideas II, §60a, p. 273. 13 Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 40–1. 14 Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, p. 43. Also, Heidegger writes, ‘What is characteristic of perception? A participant says, αϊσϑήσιϛ, and is then told that “with the Greeks, and precisely in the distinction between αϊσϑήσιϛ and νόησις, hell has already begun”’. What is important is the notion of “corporeality” [Leibhaftigkeit]: in perception what presences is “bodily” [leibhaftig].’ The translation is here from the seminar on Thor dated 8 September 1968. See Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 31. 15 We stick here to the texts published by Husserl himself. We know now that, from this point of view, the essential is acquired after the five lectures of 1907 published in his The Idea of Phenomenology. 16 Ibid., p. 63.

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17 This amounts to saying that initially phenomenology is hyletic and noetic without ever being noematic. The first edition of Logical Investigations distinguishes between ‘real or phenomenological content (descriptive psychology)’ of an act and its ‘intentional content’. See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York and London: Routledge, 1970) p. 112. Husserl added a note in the second edition: ‘In the First Edition I wrote “real or phenomenological” for “real”. The word “phenomenological” like the word “descriptive” was used in the First Edition only in connection with real [reelle] elements of experience, and in the present edition it has so far been used predominately in this sense. This corresponds to one’s natural starting with the psychological point of view. It became plainer and plainer, however, as I reviewed the completed Investigations and pondered on their themes more deeply – particularly from this point onwards – that the description of intentional objectivity as such, as we are conscious of it in the concrete act-experience, represents a distinct descriptive dimension where purely intuitive description may be adequately practised, a dimension opposed to that of real [reellen] act-constituents, but which also deserves to be called “phenomenological”. These methodological extensions lead to important extensions of the field of problems now opening before us and considerable improvement due to a fully conscious separation of descriptive levels. Cf. my Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie, Book I, and particularly what is said of Noesis and Noema in Section III.’ See Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 354, fn. 24. 18 Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 86. The variation between the editions is between brackets. 19 We shall see later why Husserl has not reached this descriptive evidence in the Logical Investigations. 20 Husserl, Ideas I, §24, p. 44. 21 Ibid., §46, p. 102 (translation modified), where he says ‘any experience, however extensive, leaves open the possibility that what is given does not exist in spite of the continual consciousness of its own presence “incarnately present”’. 22 A later specification of incarnate donation permits us to distinguish between immanence and transcendence: that which is given by adumbrations or not. 23 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 498, fn. xxiii. 24 Heidegger writes of this in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ when he reflects: ‘The adequate execution and completion of this other

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thinking that abandons subjectivity is surely made more difficult by the fact that in the publication of Being and Time the third division of the first part, “Time and Being”, was held back (see p. 87 in this same volume of essays). Here everything is reversed. The division in question was held back because thinking failed in the adequate saying of this turning [Kehre] and did not succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics.’ See Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, p. 231. 25 Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 44. Heidegger also writes, ‘“Phenomenology” consciously and decidedly moved into the tradition of modern philosophy but in such a way that “transcendental subjectivity” attains a more original and universal determination through phenomenology.’ See Heidegger, ‘My Way to Phenomenology’, in Martin Heidegger: Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen and trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), p. 72. 26 Heidegger writes, ‘Dasein’s spatialization in its “bodily nature” is likewise marked out in accordance with these directions. (This “bodily nature” hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here.)’ See Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 143. 27 Ibid., p. 23. 28 Heidegger writes: ‘Nietzsche declares often enough in his later years that the body must be made the guideline of observation not only of human beings but of the world: the projection of the world from the perspective of the animal and animality.’ Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1987) p. 80. 29 Heidegger observes, ‘For Nietzsche, subjectivity is absolute as subjectivity of the body; that is, of drives and affects; that is to say, of will to power.’ Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. IV: Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row 1982), p. 147. 30 Heidegger writes, ‘The bodily in the human is not something animalistic.’ Heidegger–Fink, Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67, trans. Charles Seibert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1979), p. 146. 31 Heidegger writes, ‘A human is embodied [liebt] only when he lives [lebt]. See ibid., p. 146. 32 Heidegger writes, ‘human being is a ζω῀ιον, a living being that lives only inasmuch as it “is a body” [leibt]’. See Martin Heidegger,

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Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, trans. Thomas Sheenan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 196. Heidegger also says: ‘We are not first of all “alive,” only then getting an apparatus to sustain our living which we call “the body,” but we are some body who is alive. Our being embodied is essentially other than merely being encumbered with an organism. Most of what we know from the natural science about the body and the way it embodies are specifications based on the established misinterpretation of the body as a mere natural body. Through such means we do find out lots of things, but the essential and determinative aspects always elude our vision and grasp. We mistake the state of affairs even further when we subsequently search for the “psychical” which pertains to the body that has already been misinterpreted as a natural body.’ Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. I, the Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 99–100; see also ‘The concept of chaos’ in vol. III of Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures. 33 See Heidegger, Heraclitus, p. 146. 34 Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 137–8.

Chapter two 1 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §5, p. 12. 2

Ibid., §6, p. 16.

3

Husserl writes, ‘I distinguish between this transcendental reduction or phenomenological reduction from the apodictic reduction which is linked to it. The latter has the task of making possible the phenomenological reduction. Before I put into practice the apodictic critique, I must open up a field of critique, here a sphere of experience, and this transcendental self-experience, I have it thanks to the method of the phenomenological reduction.’ Husserliana, Bd. VIII, p. 80.

4

‘I note in passing that the much shorter way to the transcendental epoché in my Ideas toward a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, which I call the “Cartesian way” (since it is thought of as being attained merely by reflectively engrossing oneself in the Cartesian epoché of the Meditations while critically purifying it of Descartes’ prejudices and confusions), has a great shortcoming: while it leads to the transcendental ego in one leap, as it were, it brings this ego into view as apparently empty of content, since there can be no preparatory explication; so one

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is at a loss, at first, to know what has been gained by it, much less how, starting with this, a completely new sort of fundamental science, decisive for philosophy, has been attained.’ Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, §43, p. 155. The distinction between different ‘paths of the reduction’ occupies, in addition to the Crisis, many unpublished manuscripts. One should not forget that, fundamentally, the principle of a reduction belongs to the Cartesian epoché of metaphysics. 5 Husserl, Ideas I, §49, p. 109. 6 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §8, p. 18. 7 Husserl, Ideas I, §27, p. 51. 8 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §8, p. 19. 9

Jacques Derrida collects and analyses the relevant texts in Husserl in order to show how indication and alterity work from an original non-presence into pure self-presence and recognize the phenomenological voice in this pure self-presence as an auto-affection. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), Chapter 3, ‘Meaning as Soliloquy’.

10 Husserl writes, ‘Apparently my (the philosophizer’s) transcendental ego is, and must be, not only its initial but its sole theme. Without doubt the sense of the transcendental reduction implies that, at the beginning, this science can posit nothing but the ego and what is included in the ego himself, with a horizon of undetermined determinability. Without doubt [it must at first parenthesize the distinction (evinced within the ego) between “me myself” with my life, my appearances, etc.; and thus, in a certain sense,] it begins accordingly as a pure egology and as a science that apparently condemns us to a solipsism, albeit a transcendental solipsism. As beginning philosophers we must not let ourselves be frightened by such considerations. Perhaps reduction to the transcendental ego only seems to entail a permanently solipsistic science; whereas the consequential elaboration of this science, in accordance with its own sense, leads over to a phenomenology of transcendental intersubjectivity, and by means of this, to a universal transcendental philosophy.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §13, p. 30. 11 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, pp. 339–40. 12 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §13, p. 29. 13 Husserl writes, ‘Meanwhile we have lost sight of the demand, so seriously made at the beginning – namely that an apodictic

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knowledge, as the only “genuinely scientific” knowledge, be achieved; but we have by no means dropped it. Only we preferred to sketch in outline the tremendous wealth of problems belonging to the first stage of phenomenology – a stage which in its own manner is itself still infected with a certain naïveté (the naïveté of apodicticity) but contains the great and most characteristic accomplishment of phenomenology, as a refashioning of science on a higher level – instead of entering into the further and ultimate problems of phenomenology: those pertaining to its self-criticism, which aims at determining not only the range and limits but also the modes of apodicticity. At least a preliminary idea of the kind of criticism of transcendental–phenomenological knowledge required here is given by our earlier indications of how, for example, a criticism of transcendental recollection discovers in it an apodictic content.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §63, pp. 151–2. G. Berger in Le cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl makes an allusion to a text in the Sixth Meditation drafted by Fink and treats it as the ‘phenomenological theory of knowledge’. See G. Berger, Le cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Aubier, 1941), p. 115. 14 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §10, p. 24. 15 Husserl writes, ‘To be sure, pure psychology of consciousness is a precise parallel to transcendental phenomenology of consciousness. Nevertheless, the two must at first be kept strictly separate, since failure to distinguish them, which is characteristic of transcendental psychology, makes a genuine philosophy impossible. We have here on of those seemingly trivial nuances that make a decisive difference between right and wrong paths of philosophy.’ Ibid., §14, p. 32. 16 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, §62, p. 216. 17 Husserl says, ‘Psychology takes itself to be at the base of the objective apperception of “man”, and assumes an abstract stance in which he has a purely physical component of corporeality is posited, and inversely, then a component of a “pure soul” is posited, but as a component only.’ Husserliana, Bd. VIII, pp. 140–1. 18 When Husserl was editing his article ‘Phenomenology’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Heidegger wrote him a letter on 22 October 1922 that ‘gives the opportunity to outline the basic trend of Being and Time as it pertains to transcendental problems’: ‘The consensus is that the being which you name the “world” cannot be elucidated by transcendental constitution, which is due to the fact that beings cannot be reduced to this type of being. But this is not to say that the place of the transcendental has nothing to do with Being – on the contrary, it gives rise to the problem: what is the

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being of beings in “world” constitution? This is the central problem of Being and Time – that is, the fundamental ontology of Dasein. It intends to show that the mode of being of human Dasein is totally different from all other beings, and that as such it involves precisely the possibility of transcendental constitution. Transcendental constitution is a central possibility of existence in its facticity as a self. Concrete man as such – never is a “real worldly fact” because he is never present, but rather exists. And the “marvel” consists in this constitution of existence [Existenzverfassung] of Dasein who renders possible the transcendental constitution of all that is positive. The “unilateral” considerations of somatology and pure psychology are only possible on the basis of concrete totality of man, and this determines the primary mode of being of man. The “pure psyche” as such is precisely not a part of the ontology of man in his totality. That is to say man does not emerge from a psychology – but from it is rooted, from the outset, and since Descartes, in the consideration of a theory of knowledge.’ Husserliana, Bd. IX, pp. 600–2. 19 Ibid., p. 602. We note that Roman Ingarden poses the same question in his remarks that accompany the German edition of the Cartesianische Meditationen: ‘But there remains a great difficulty linked to the ego, that to my knowledge, has not been signalled: how can the ego be at once a pure constituting I and real constituted I?’ Husserliana, Bd. I, p. 213. 20 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 27, fn. 21 Husserl, Ideas I, §70, p. 160. 22 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §14, p. 33. 23 Ibid., §16, p. 38. 24 Ibid., §15, p. 34. 25 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1980), p. 122. 26 Fink, ‘The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl’, p. 116. 27 Husserliana, Bd. VIII, p. 89. 28 Husserl states, ‘In it [the primordial concrete present] arise perceptions; even better, it itself is, in a sense, a perception in its totality and in every moment which constitutes its being, in the upsurge of its lived experience and of their moments.’ Manuscript C 2 I, 1932–3, cited by Tran-Duc-Thao, Phenomenology and

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Dialectical Materialism, trans. Daniel J. Herman and Donald V. Morano (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1986), p. 229. 29 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 43. Husserl also says, ‘Certainly, when I am in a situation where I use reflexion, it is the naïve perception of the self-absorbed I already passed. This I apprehend, now reflective, by resorting to that which is “still present in consciousness” held there by the so-called “retention”. It is the retentional memory [Nacherinnerung] of the original lived experience. Now in this way, through the retainingreflexive I can perceive the naïve perception and the self-absorbed I. This is a perception that is truly a retentional perception, and not quite a perception that actually records, though it is nevertheless one that records.’ Husserliana, Bd. VIII, pp. 88–9. 30 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 41. See also Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 64ff. 31 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §52; see also, Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, §54b.

Chapter three 1

Husserl writes, ‘The first breakthrough of this universal a priori of correlation between experienced object and manners of givenness (which occurred during work on my Logical Investigations around 1898) affected me so deeply that my whole subsequent life-work has been dominated by the task of systematically elaborating on this apriori of correlation.’ See Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, §48, p. 166, fn.

2 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §15, p. 37. 3 Husserl, Crisis, §46, p. 160. 4 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §17, pp. 39–40. 5 Husserl, Ideas I, §§ 40 and 43. 6

See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 9ff.

7 Husserl, Ideas I, §42, p. 91. 8 Husserl, Ideas II, §18, p. 61. 9

The description in Ideas I commences: ‘Constantly seeing this table and meanwhile walking around it, changing my position,

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changing my position in space in whatever way, I have continually the consciousness of this one identical table as factually existing “in person” and remaining quite unchanged.’ See Husserl, Ideas I, §41, p. 86. 10 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, §28, p. 106. 11 Ibid., §28, p. 106. The text continues: ‘Thus sensibility, the ego’s active functioning of the living body or the bodily organs, belongs in a fundamental, essential way to all experience of bodies. It proceeds in consciousness not as a mere series of body-appearances, as if these in themselves, through themselves alone and their coalescences, were appearance of bodies; rather, they are such in consciousness only in combination with the kinaesthetically functioning living body [Leiblichkeit], the ego functioning here in a peculiar sort of activity and habituality. In a quite unique way the living body is constantly in the perceptual field quite immediately, with a completely unique ontic meaning, precisely the meaning indicated by the word “organ” (here used in its most primitive sense).’ Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, §28, pp. 106–7; see also 107–8. 12 A. Lowit, in the preface to the translation of Husserl’s L’idée de la phénoménologie, highlights this double situation. He first shows that ‘there is no doubt that the ignorance of the leibhaftig selbst of things in perception are tied to the reasons that maintain constitutive analysis of the Logical Investigations in its metaphysical indecision’ (p. 13). Then he highlights that ‘it is not only my descriptive judgment in perception, it is not only my attention to the descriptive structure of perceptive presence of things that are changing: it is this structure of perceptive presence itself that is transformed. Such is, in effect, the discovery before which I am placed: what is in play here is a difference and an upheaval of the entire phenomenal situation’ (p. 18). If we cannot accept the interpretation that he proposes (‘by a process which one can analyse the motives and the phases, philosophical reflection on perception tends to provoke within the perceptive situation, and inevitably provoking, an upheaval that is lost to things perceives, the primary character of which things are described in flesh and bone. This leads the phenomenal presence of things to be downgraded from a “simple” phenomenal presence into something else or less than it perceived of things themselves in flesh and bone’ (pp. 18–19), it is because it implies that it has clearly established the difference between philosophical reflection and phenomenological reflection, between philosophical consciousness (worldly–psychological) and constituting consciousness, that is to say, step by step that all constituting phenomenology is given in the

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very moment where one seeks to comprehend the origin. See also by the same author, ‘D’où vient l’ambiguïté de la phénoménologie?’ in Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 2 (1971). 13 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §18, p. 43. 14 Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘The body is nothing less but nothing more than the things’ condition of possibility.’ (‘Body’ here translates the German Leib – translators’ note). See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 173. 15 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, pp. 30–1. Husserl characterizes the primal impression as ‘something absolutely unmodified, the primal source of all further consciousness and being’ and further as the ‘living source-point of being’. See Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, pp. 70 and 71 respectively. 16 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 71 and 82 where leibhafte Gegenwart is translated as ‘living present’. 17 Phenomenological explication [Auslegung] ‘makes clear what is included and only non-intuitively co-intended in the sense of the cogitatum (for example, the “other side”), by making present in phantasy the potential perceptions that would make the invisible visible.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §20, p. 48.

Chapter four 1 Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, p. 10. 2 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 326. (Chapter introduction). 3

Ibid., p. 214.

4

Husserl contends, ‘We must distinguish, in relation to the intentional content taken as object of the act, between the object as it is intended, and the object (period) which is intended.’ Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 113.

5

See Husserl, Ideas I, §§91 and 99.

6

Ibid., §128, p. 308.

7

Husserl states, ‘Quality only determines whether what is already presented in definite fashion is intentionally present as wished,

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asked, posited in judgment, etc. The matter, therefore, must be that element in an act which first gives it reference to an object, and reference so wholly definite that it not merely fixes the object meant in a general way, but also the precise way in which it is meant. The matter – to carry clearness a little further – is that peculiar side of an act’s phenomenological content that not only determines that it grasps the object but also as what it grasps it, the properties, relations, categorical forms that it itself attributes to it. It is the act’s matter that makes its object count as this object and no other, it is the objective, the interpretive sense [Sinn der gegenständlichen Auffassung, Auffassungssinn] which serves as basis for the act’s quality (while indifferent to such qualitative differences). Identical matters can never yield distinct objective references, as the above examples prove.’ Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, pp. 121–2. 8

Husserl writes, ‘Thus the noema too is related to an object and possesses a “content” by “means” of which it relates to the object; in which case the object is the same as that of the noesis; as then the “parallelism” again completely confirms itself.’ Husserl, Ideas I, §129, p. 311.

9 Ibid., §129, p. 310; §131, p. 313. In §131 Husserl writes, ‘The identical intentional “object” becomes evidently distinguished from the changing and alterable “predicates”. It becomes separated as central noematic moment; the “object” [Gegenstand], the “Object” [Objekt], the “Identical” the “determinable subject of its possible predicates” – the pure X in abstraction from all predicates – and it becomes separated from these predicates or, more precisely, from the predicate-noemas.’ Husserl, Ideas I, §131, p. 313. See also Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §69, pp. 285–6. 10 Husserl, Ideas I, §131, pp. 313–15. 11 Fink, ‘Husserl’s Philosophy and Contemporary Criticism’, p. 124. 12 Husserl, Ideas I, §132, p. 316. 13 W. Biemel writes, ‘The equating, in the Lecture on the Thing from 1907, of the term referring to what is “constituted” with what is “self-manifesting” also throws light on this matter (sich bekunden).’ (F I 13, p. 17). See W. Biemel, ‘The Decisive Phases in the Development of Husserl’s Philosophy’, in Husserl, trans. R. O. Elveton (Chicago: Quadrangel Books, 1970), p. 158. 14 Husserl, Ideas I, §135, p. 325. 15 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 326 (chapter introduction). 16 Husserl writes, ‘It has not mattered up to now, whether the objects in question were truly existent or non-existent, or whether they

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were possible or impossible. These differences are not perchance excluded from the field of enquiry by abstaining from decision about the being or non-being of the world (and, consequently, of other already-given objectivities). On the contrary, under the broadly understood titles, reason and unreason, as correlative titles for being and non-being, they are an all-embracing theme for phenomenology.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §23, p. 56. 17 Husserl, Ideas I, §99, pp. 244–5. 18 Ibid., §136, p. 327. Husserl continues: ‘Position belongs to any appearing “in incarnate presence” on the part of a physical thing; it is not just somehow one with the appearing (perhaps even as merely a universal fact – this being out of the question here); it is one with it in a peculiar manner: it is “motivated” by the appearing and again, not just somehow, but “rationally motivated”. That is to say, position has its original legitimizing basis in original givenness.’ Husserl, Ideas I, §132, p. 328. 19 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §24, p. 58. 20 Husserl writes, ‘When we take it into consideration that, for each kind of actual experience and for each of its universal variant modes (perception, retention, recollection, etc.), there is a corresponding pure phantasy, an “as-if experience” with parallel modes (as-if perception, as-if retention, as-if recollection, etc.), we surmise that there is also an apriori science, which confines itself to the realm of pure possibility (pure imaginableness) and, instead of judging about actualities of transcendental being, judges about its apriori possibilities and thus at the same time prescribes rules apriori for actualities.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §12, pp. 27–8. 21 Ibid., §27, p. 60. 22 Ibid. Husserl also writes, ‘Only an uncovering of the horizon of experience ultimately clarifies the “actuality” and the “transcendency” of the world, at the same time showing the world to be inseparable from transcendental subjectivity, which constitutes actuality of being and sense.’ See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §28, p. 62. 23 Husserl, Ideas I, §143, p. 343. Also see Jacques Derrida, Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’: An Introduction and Translation, trans. John P. Leavey Jr (Stony Brook, NY: Harvester Press, 1978), pp. 137ff. 24 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §29, p. 63; also see §22. 25 Ibid., §29, p. 64.

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Chapter five 1

Husserl writes, ‘These contents have, as contents generally have, their own law-bound ways of coming together, of losing themselves in more comprehensive unities and, in so far as they thus become and are one, the phenomenological ego or unity of consciousness is already constituted, without need of an additional, peculiar ego-principle which supports all contents and unites them all once again. Here as elsewhere it is not clear what such a principle would effect.’ Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 86. In the second edition, he writes, ‘The opposition to the doctrine of a “pure” ego, already expressed in this paragraph, is one that the author no longer approves of, as is plain from his Ideas cited above (see ibid., §57, p. 107; §80, p. 159).’ Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 352, fn. 5.

2 Husserl, Ideas I, §37, pp. 75–6. 3 Ibid., §57, p. 133. Also see Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, §8ff. 4 Husserl, Ideas I, §81, p. 194. Sartre notably writes on this issue: ‘But it is characteristic that Husserl, who studies this subjective unification of consciousness in Vorlesungen Zur Phanomenologie Des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins, never had recourse to a synthetic power of the I.’ See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), p. 39. Certainly Husserl affirms that ‘As shocking (when not initially even absurd) as it may seem to say that the flow of consciousness constitutes its own unity, it is nonetheless the case that it does. And this can be made intelligible on the basis of the flow’s essential constitution.’ He then immediately adds, ‘Our regard can be directed, in the one case, through the phases that “coincide” in the continuous progression of the flow and that function as intentionalities of the tone. But our regard can also be aimed at the flow, at a section of the flow, at the passage of the flowing consciousness from the beginning of the tone to its end.’ Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, pp. 84–5. It is on the basis of this ‘regard’ that Husserl will arrive at the pure ego in Ideas I. 5 Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 353, fn. 8. 6 Husserl, Ideas I, §81, p. 193. He continues immediately afterwards: ‘Fortunately we can leave out of account the enigma of the consciousness of time in our preliminary analyses without endangering their rigour.’

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Husserl employs the following image and asks if it possesses an ‘original meaning’ and expresses an ‘original analogy’. He writes, ‘The structure of acts which radiate out from the Ego-Centre, or, the Ego itself, is a form which has an analogon in the centralizing of all sense-phenomena in reference to the Body [Leib].’ Husserl, Ideas II, §25, p. 112.

8 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §32, p. 66. 9 Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, Lectures, Summer Semester; 1925, trans. John Scanlon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 161. 10 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §33, p. 68. 11 Ibid., §34, p. 70. 12 See the note cited in the manuscript of Cartesian Meditations in Husserliana, Band I, p. 240. 13 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §34, p. 69. 14 An excerpt from Ideas I clearly shows this as well as the link between the eidetic reduction and the transcendental reduction: ‘The unrestricted universality of natural laws must not be mistaken for eidetic universality. To be sure, the proposition “All bodies are heavy” posits no definite physical affair as factually existing within the totality of Nature. Still it does not have the unconditional universality of eidetically universal propositions because, according to its sense as a law of Nature, it carries with it a positing of factual existence, that is to say, of Nature itself, of spatiotemporal actuality: All bodies – in Nature, all “actual bodies – are heavy”. In contradistinction, the proposition “All material things are extended” has eidetic validity and can be understood as a purely eidetic proposition provided that the positing of factual existence, carried out on the side of the subject, is suspended. It states something that is grounded purely in the essence of a material thing and in the essence of extension and that we can make evident as having “unconditional” universal validity.’ See Ideas I, §6, p. 15. Elsewhere Husserl also writes: ‘First of all, it is necessary to point out that even totally free variation is not enough to actually give us the universal as pure. Even the universal acquired by variation must not yet be called pure in the true sense of the word, i.e. free from all positing of actuality.’ See Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §89, p. 350. 15 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §87, pp. 347–8. 16 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §34, p. 72. 17 See the text entitled ‘Teleology. The implication of the eidos of transcendental intersubjectivity in the transcendental eidos ego.

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Factum and Eidos.’ This text was published in the third and final volume of Husserliana devoted to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. Husserliana, Bd. XV, pp. 378–86. 18 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 385. Also see §95 of Formal and Transcendental Logic, where Husserl characterizes the I am as an ‘arch-facticity’ (Urtatsache). See Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 237. 19 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 386. At the same time, it is the question of history that is raised if ‘History is the grand fact [Faktum] of absolute being’ and the ‘ultimate question, metaphysically or teleologically ultimate, or only founded with questions of the absolute meaning of history’. Husserliana, Bd. VIII, p. 506 (texts from 1921 or 1924). Jacques Derrida notes, ‘We pass from phenomenology to ontology (in the non-Husserlian sense) when we silently question the upsurge of the stark fact and cease to consider the Fact in its phenomenological “function”. Then the latter can no longer be exhausted and reduced to its sense by a phenomenological operation, even were it pursued ad infinitum. The Fact is always more or always less, always other, in any case, than what Husserl defines it as when he writes, for example, in a formula which marks the highest ambition of his project: “fact”, with its “irrationality”, is itself a structural concept within the system of the concrete Apriori’ (Cartesian Meditations, §39, Husserl’s emphasis).’ See Derrida, Origin of Geometry, pp. 151–2, n. 184. 20 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §41, p. 85.

Chapter six 1

Husserl, ‘Author’s Preface to the English Edition’, in Ideas: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2012), p. xxxv.

2 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §41. 3 Ibid., §36, pp. 74–5. 4 Ibid., §37, p. 76. 5

Derrida writes, ‘For, of course, the reactivating reduction supposes the iterative reduction of the static and structural analysis, which teaches us once and for all what the geometrical “phenomenon” is and when its possibility is constituted. This means – by a necessity

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which is no less than an accidental and exterior fate – that I must start with ready-made geometry, such as it is now in circulation and which I can always phenomenologically read, in order to go back through it and question the sense of its origin. Thus, both thanks to and despite the sedimentations, I can restore history to its traditional diaphaneity. Husserl here speaks of Rückfrage, a notion no doubt current enough, but which now takes on a sharp and precise sense. We have translated it by return enquiry (question en retour). Like its German synonym, return enquiry (and question en retour as well) is marked by the postal and epistolary reference or resonance of a communication from a distance. Like Rückfrage, return enquiry is asked on the basis of a first posting.’ Derrida, Origin of Geometry, p. 50. 6 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §38, p. 77. 7

Husserl maintains that ‘I had already acquired the definite direction of regard to the formal and a first understanding of its sense by my Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891), which, in spite of its immaturity as a first book, presented an initial attempt to go back to the spontaneous activities of collecting and counting, in which collections (“sums”, “sets”) and cardinal numbers are given in the manner characteristic of something that is being generated originaliter, and thereby to gain clarity respecting the proper, the authentic, sense of the concepts fundamental to the theory of sets and the theory of cardinal numbers. It was therefore, in my later terminology, a phenomenologico-constitutional investigation; and at the same time it was the first investigation that sought to make “categorical objectivities” of the first level and of higher levels (sets and cardinal numbers of a higher ordinal level) understandable on the basis of the “constituting” intentional activities, as whose productions they make their appearance originaliter, accordingly with full originality of their sense.’ Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, §27, pp. 86–7.

8 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §38, p. 78. 9

Husserl writes, ‘While these are making their synthetic products, the passive synthesis that supplies all their “material” still goes on.’ See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §38, p. 78.

10 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §23, pp. 106–7. 11 Ibid., §23, p. 107. 12 Ibid., §23, p. 108. Husserl immediately follows with: ‘This formulation shows that the distinction between passivity and activity is not inflexible, that it is not a matter here of terms which

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can be established definitively for all time, but only of means of description and contrast, whose sense must in each case be recreated originally with reference to the concrete situation of the analysis – an observation which holds true for every description of intentional phenomena.’ 13 Husserl writes, ‘“Static” analysis is guided by the unity of the supposed object. It starts from the unclear manners of givenness and, following the reference made by them as intentional modifications, it strives toward what is clear. Genetical intentional analysis, on the other hand, is directed to the whole concrete nexus in which each particular consciousness stands, along with its intentional object as intentional. Immediately the problem becomes extended to include the other intentional references, those belonging to the situation in which, for example, the subject exercising the judicative activity is standing, and to include, therefore, the immanent unity of the temporality of the life that has its “history” – that is: its temporal genesis.’ Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, appendix II, §2, p. 316. 14 Husserl writes, ‘Because with the “transcendental reduction” I am convinced that the ultimately real and concrete subjectivity was won in the fullness of its being and life, in it is the universal accomplishing and not merely theoretical accomplishing life: absolute subjectivity in its historicity.’ See Husserl, Briefwechsel, ed. Karl Schumann and Elisabeth Schumann, Husserliana Dokumente, vol. 3/6 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994). 15 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §39, p. 80. 16 Ibid. 17 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §16, p. 73. 18 Husserl states for example, ‘We now understand the inner truth of the Kantian thesis: time is the form of sensibility, and thus it is the form of every possible world of objective experience. Prior to all questions about objective reality – prior to the question concerning what gives priority to certain “appearances”, to intentional objects which are self-giving in intuitive experiences, by reason of which we bestow on them the predicate “true” or “real object” – is the fact of the essential characteristic of all “appearances”, of the true as well as those shown to be null, namely, that they are time-giving, and this in such a way that all given times become part of one time. Thus, all perceived, all perceptible, individuals have the common form of time. It is the first and fundamental form, the form of all forms, the presupposition of all other connections capable of establishing unity … At the same time, the expression “form of

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intuition” has still a second sense: every individual intuited in the unity of an intuition is given in a temporal orientation, which is the form of the givenness of all that is present (Präsent) in one presence (Präsenz).’ Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §38, 164–5. 19 Ibid., §16, p. 74. 20 Ibid. 21 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §16, p. 75. Husserl also indicates another type of associative unification, to which we shall return in due course: ‘the unification of the present (Präsent) and the not present (nicht-präsent)’. 22 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §39, p. 81. Also see Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, §6, p. 30. 23 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §39, p. 81. 24 Ibid. 25 Manuscript C 6, p. 5 (August 1930). 26 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, § 39, p. 81. Husserl also writes elsewhere, ‘For phenomenology, the singular is eternally the apeiron. Phenomenology can recognize with objective validity only essences and essential relations.’ See Husserl, “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science”, in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 116. 27 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §41, p. 83. 28 Ibid., §41, p. 84. We recall here that the laws of pure grammar, ‘which govern the sphere of complex meanings, and whose role it is to divide sense from nonsense, are not yet the so-called laws of logic in the pregnant sense of this term: they provide pure logic with the possible meaning-forms, i.e. the a priori forms of complex meanings significant as wholes, whose “formal” truth or “objectivity” then depends on these pregnantly described “logical laws”. The former laws guard against senselessness [Unsinn], the latter against formal or analytic nonsense [Widersinn] or formal absurdity.’ See Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 49. Husserl would surely have found insufficient the concept of grammar at work in the Nietzschean critique of the cogito. See Friedrich Nietzsche, La volonté de puissance, trad. Bianquis, I (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1947), pp. 65–6. 29 Phenomenological idealism is without doubt closer to Hegelian idealism than Husserl himself would like to admit. Husserl would have refused to subscribe to the following proposition from Hegel: ‘Philosophy is a knowledge through notions because it sees that what

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on other grades of consciousness is taken to have Being, and to be naturally or immediately independent, is but a constituent stage in the Idea.’ See G. F. W. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), §160, p. 223.

Chapter seven 1 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, p. 294. 2 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §42, pp. 89–90. Husserl is aware of this in connection with the exposition of idealism in the preface to the English edition of Ideas I: ‘The account given in the chapter indicated suffers, as the author confesses, from lack of completeness. Although it is in all real essentials unassailable, it lacks what is certainly important to the foundation of this Idealism, the proper consideration of the problem of transcendental solipsism or of transcendental intersubjectivity, of the essential relationship of the objective world, that is valid for me, to others which are valid for me and with me.’ And yet, ‘I must not hesitate, however, to state quite explicitly that in regard to transcendental-phenomenological Idealism, I have nothing whatsoever to take back, that now as ever I hold every form of current philosophical realism to be in principle absurd, as no less every idealism to which in its own arguments that realism stands contrasted, and which in fact it refutes. Given a deeper understanding of my exposition, the solipsistic objection should never have been raised as an objection against phenomenological idealism, but only as an objection to the incompleteness of my exposition.’ Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, pp. xl–xli. 3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §42, p. 89. 4 Ibid., §42, p. 90. 5

On the difference between ‘Einfühlung’ and image consciousness, see Husserliana, Bd. XIII, pp. 187–8 and Chapter 11 in this book.

6 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §42, p. 90. 7 Ibid., §43, p. 91. 8

To designate the perception of the flesh by itself, Husserl speaks of ‘somatic perception’. See Husserl, Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences: Third Book of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans.

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Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), p. 7. In a text from 1921, he shows that somatic perception precedes in principle the physical perception of my flesh. See Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 60ff. 9

This could only be the case because flesh is the origin of space, the centre of all spatial orientation.

10 Husserliana, Bd. VI, p. 415. 11 Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. I, p. 219. Here we are following the analyses of Derrida, who is surprised precisely by this ‘individual concept’, this ‘meaning that differs from person to person’. This should probably be seen as the first attempt of a reduction to the eidos ego. See Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 94–5. 12 Derrida writes: ‘My death is structurally necessary to the pronouncing of the I. That I am also “alive” and certain about it figures as something that comes over and above the appearance of the meaning.’ Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 96. 13 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §43, pp. 91–2.

Chapter eight 1 Ibid., §44, p. 93. 2 Ibid., §44, p. 95. Husserl says elsewhere: ‘Here I mention distinctions such as living vs. lifeless things and, within the sphere of living things, the animals, i.e. those living not merely according to drives but also constantly through ego-acts, as opposed to those living only according to drives (such as plants). Among animals, human beings stand out, so much so, in fact, that mere animals have ontic meaning as such only by comparison to them, as variations of them. Among lifeless things, humanized things are distinguished, things that have signification (e.g. cultural meaning) through human beings. Further, as a variation on this, there are things which refer meaningfully in a similar way to animal existence, as opposed to things that are without signification in this sense.’ Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, §66, p. 227. We will return to the relation between drives and intentionality in Chapter 14, n. 7. 3

Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 177.

4

Ibid., p. 182.

5 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, p. 272. 6

To this end, Husserl writes: ‘As regards this, nothing prevents starting at first quite concretely with the human life-world

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around us, and with man himself as essentially related to this our surrounding world, and exploring, indeed purely intuitively, the extremely copious and never-discovered Apriori of any such surrounding world whatever, taking this Apriori as the point of departure for a systematic explication of human existence and of world strata that disclose themselves correlatively in the latter. But what is acquired there straightforwardly, though it is a system of the Apriori, becomes philosophically intelligible and (according to what was said just now) an Apriori related back to the ultimate sources of understanding, only when problems of constitution, as problems of the specifically philosophical level, become disclosed and the natural realm of knowledge is at the same time exchanged for the transcendental.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §59, p. 138. 7

When intersubjectivity is reduced, one cannot appeal to a community of phenomenologists pursuing the endless work of intentional explication.

8 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §44, p. 96. 9

Husserl contends, ‘The second ego, however, is not simply there and strictly presented; rather is he constituted as “alter ego” – the ego indicated as one moment by this expression being I myself in my ownness. The “Other”, according to his own constituted sense, points to me myself; the other is a “mirroring” [Spiegelung] of my own self and yet not a mirroring proper, an analogue of my own self and yet again not an analogue in the usual sense.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §44, p. 94. In a brief analysis dated 7 February 1927 Husserl shows that any visual apprehension of myself presupposes intersubjectivity; see Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 508–9. The Leibnizian term of ‘mirroring’ must be denounced as soon as it is stated (by an approach that evokes negative theology), both in order to respect alterity and to maintain the propriety of my sphere of ownness. If every mirroring of myself implies the other, to define the other as a reflection of myself amounts either to dissolving the sphere of ownness or to deriving egological subjectivity from monadic intersubjectivity.

10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), A158/ B197, p. 283. Heidegger writes that ‘Whoever understands this principle understands Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Whoever understands this does not only know one book among the writings of philosophy, but masters a fundamental posture of man, which we can neither avoid, leap over, nor deny in any way.’ See Heidegger, What is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967), p. 183.

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11 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §44, p. 96. 12 Ibid., §44, p. 97. This text clearly shows the absurdity of translating, as is often done for very different and divergent reasons, the word Leib as ‘corps propre’ (my own body). In the sphere of ownness, all bodies are an ‘own body’ [corps propre], and the difference is thus not between two types of body but between the body in general and the ‘Leib’. (In English, Dorion Cairns has typically translated Leib as my ‘animate organism’, which Franck would want to translate simply as ‘flesh’ or ‘chair’ in French – trans. note). 13 See Edmund Husserl, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997). 14 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 567. 15 Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 58. 16 Ibid. 17 Husserl, Ideas II, §36, p. 152. 18 Husserl calls these sensible events that belong to flesh ‘Empfindnisse’ and not ‘Empfindungen’. It is difficult to render this difference in French. Levinas has translated ‘Empfindnis’ as ‘feeling’. See Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, p. 145, fn. 25. 19 Husserl, Ideas II, §37, p. 157. 20 Ibid., §37, pp. 157–8. 21 Husserl writes ‘The material thing is essentially res extensa.’ Husserl, Ideas I, §9, p. 19. 22 Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 64. Husserl also writes ‘The same Body [Leib] which serves me as a means for all my perception obstructs me in the perception of it itself and is a remarkably imperfectly constituted thing.’ Husserl, Ideas II, §41b, p. 167. 23 See Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 75ff. See also Husserliana, Bd. XIII, pp. 282ff. and 331ff.; Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 515ff.; Husserliana, Bd. XV, pp. 259ff., 277ff., 295ff., 648ff. and 659ff. 24 Husserl states: ‘Sheer material things are only moveable mechanically.’ See Husserl, Ideas II, §38, p. 159. See also Husserl, Thing and Space, pp. 339ff. 25 Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 77. More convincing would be, perhaps, an analysis that takes forces into account. But when did phenomenology ever provide the means for describing and thinking about forces? 26 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §44, p. 97. 27 Ibid., §44, pp. 97–8.

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28 The expression comes up frequently in the manuscripts from group D. See also ‘Die Welt der Lebendigen Gegenwart und Die Konstitution der Ausserleiblichen Umwelt’ (D 12 IV), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, no. 3 (1946): 323–43. 29 Bergson, in another context, has remarked: ‘What is the “I”? Something which appears, rightly or wrongly, to overflow every part of the body which is joined to it, passing beyond it in space as well as in time. In space, for the body of each of us is confined within the distinct surfaces which bound it, whilst by our faculty of perception, and more especially of seeing, we radiate far beyond our bodies, even to the stars.’ See Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 30. 30 See Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 515ff; Husserliana, Bd. XV, pp. 648ff. and 660ff. 31 For both quotes, see Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §44, p. 98. 32 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 659. The primordial world is equivalent to the world of ownness. 33 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 659.

Chapter nine 1 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, §96a, p. 241. We quote here an interleaved sheet concerning §44 of the Cartesian Meditations and we take it from the critical apparatus of the German edition: ‘The question is not one of other people but of how we can, as the ego who is the transcendental spectator that learns transcendentally, is constituted in the distinction between the I and the other-I – a divorce that occurs in the first place in the phenomenon of the world, as a difference between my human I, the I in the ordinary sense, and the other human I, the other I.’ Husserliana, Bd. I, p. 241. 2

Husserl observes, ‘If even the self-constitution of the ego as a spatialized, a psychophysical, being is a very obscure matter, then it is much more obscure, and a downright tormenting enigma, how, in the ego, an other psychophysical Ego with an other psyche can be constituted; since his sense as ‘other’ involves the essential impossibility of my experiencing his own essential psychic contents with actual originality, as I do my own.’ Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 239.

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3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §57. 4

Manuscript K III, 18 (1936), p. 89.

5

Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 287.

6

This is an allusion to Husserl’s concept of the annihilation of the world in Ideas I, §49 – trans. note.

7

Husserl writes: ‘The psychic reality is founded in the organismal matter, but this is not conversely founded in the psyche.’ Husserl, Ideas III, p. 104.

8 Husserl, Ideas III, p. 104. (Trans. note: it is again worth noting that the English translation of Leib is ‘animate organism’ whereas the French is ‘flesh’ or ‘chair’.) 9 Husserl, Crisis, §62, p. 216. 10 Heidegger writes: ‘So far as anything essential has been achieved in to-day’s analyses which will take us beyond Aristotle and Kant, it pertains more to the way time is grasped and to our “consciousness of time”.’ (‘We shall come back to this in the first and third divisions of Part Two,’ as the first edition in 1927 indicated.) Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 501, fn. xxx. 11 The question is thus opened about whether what has always been called the ‘soul’ or the ‘mind’ does not occupy the place of carnal difference. It should also be noted that Husserl gradually comes to renew the transcendental aesthetic [‘The extraordinarily vast complex of researches pertaining to the primordial world makes up a whole discipline, which we may designate as “transcendental aesthetics” in a very much broadened sense. We adopt the Kantian title here because the space and time arguments of the critique of reason obviously, though in an extraordinarily restricted and unclarified manner, have in view a noematic Apriori of sensuous intuition. Broadened to comprise the concrete Apriori of (primordial) Nature, as given in purely sensuous intuition, it then requires phenomenological transcendental supplementation by incorporation into a complex of constitutional problems.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §61, p. 146.] Husserl speaks more and more of flesh and less and less of soul. The collection of manuscripts of group D sufficiently testify to this. Finally, note that a text from July–August of 1927 is entitled ‘The Confusion (Verwechslung) of original self-experience and the objective-psychological self-experience at the ground of metaphysical dualism’. See Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 418ff.

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Chapter ten 1 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §24c, p. 117. 2 Ibid., §24c, p. 118. 3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §46, p. 102. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., §46, p. 103. (Translation modified.) 6 Ibid., §47, p. 104 7

Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 379.

8

From January–February of 1922 Husserl declared, ‘The ego is not thinkable without the non-ego, through which it relates intentionally.’ Ibid., p. 244.

9 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §49, p. 107, already cited. 10 Long extracts of this course have been published in volume XIII of Husserliana, pp. 110–94. 11 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 160. 12 Ibid., p. 161. 13 Ibid., p. 162. 14 See Husserl, Ideas I, §§85 and 97. Husserl writes: ‘Everything hyletic belongs in the concretemental process as a really inherent component ...’. Husserl, Ideas I, p. 238. 15 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 170. 16 Ibid., p. 171. 17 Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 246. 18 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §48, p. 106.

Chapter eleven 1 Ibid., §49, p. 107. 2

Husserl writes: ‘Consequently, the constitution of the world essentially involves a “harmony” of the monads: precisely this harmony among particular constitutions in the particular monads; and accordingly it involves also a harmonious generation that goes on in each particular monad. That is not meant, however, as a “metaphysical” hypothesizing of monadic harmony, any more than the monads themselves are metaphysical inventions or hypotheses. On the contrary, it is itself part of the explication of the intentional

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components implicit in the fact of the experiential world that exists for us.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §49, p. 108. 3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §50, p. 109. 4

Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 25. In a manuscript from around 1916 in this volume Husserl replaced ‘compresentation’ with ‘appresentation’.

5

Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 25.

6

Husserl writes, ‘If we consider the non-visible components of the object, then we must say that they are consciousness in a reproductive manner (though not in an intuitive mode). But in the unity of the perception of the body, the body is perceived and not simply present originally, primarily originated as appearing. As perceived, it is the perception of it as it is in itself, as it is intended in incarnate presence, and not merely as an “actual perception”. The other sides, those which are invisible, are there-with, present-with, consist of a compresence that belongs essentially to the perception of the body; and in this function is created a consciousness of the perception of the body. Here is an originally imparting consciousness of the body, one that necessarily divides itself in primary and secondary components, or present in the source [ursprünglich präsentierende] and present after the source [nachsprünglich], which is precisely a compresenting givenness. In this motivational context, a representation assumes the function of a presentation, and even the function of permitting a present to arrive as presence of perception.’ See Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 26.

7

See Chapter 8, n. 22. We will later attempt to account for this alteration.

8 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §50, p. 109. 9

Derrida observes: ‘One would have to show, on the basis of the Cartesian Meditations, and given the reduction of every problem of factual genesis, how the question of anteriority in the relation between the constitution of other as other present and the constitution of the other as Others is a false question, which must refer to a common structural root. Although in the Cartesian Meditations Husserl evokes only the analogy of the two movements (§52), in many of the unpublished works he seems to hold them to be inseparable.’ See Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 165.

10 The above analysis followed Husserl’s text from 1910–11. See Husserliana, Bd.XIII, pp. 187ff. On the consciousness of images, see Fink, De la phénoménologie, pp. 81ff. 11 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §50, pp. 110–11. 12 Ibid., §60, p. 139.

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13 The argument is only valid if temporality implies the other. We will show this later. 14 For more on this, see Chapter 6 in this book. 15 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 433 (text is from 1918). 16 Derrida states: ‘there is no concrete historicity which does not necessarily implicate in itself the reference to an Erstmaligkeit. We said, a moment ago, that it would be impossible to substitute another fact for the unique fact of the first time. Undoubtedly. But only if other is meant to qualify essence and not empirical existence as such.’ Derrida, Origin of Geometry, p. 48. 17 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §50, p. 110. 18 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §16, p. 75. 19 Husserl writes, and we quote at length: ‘However, the coincidence of likeness must be distinguished from that of similarity [what Franck translates as “analogy” – trans. note]. Let us first remain with the former: if I apprehend A and then go to B, what in B is said to be like A is united with A in such a way that the feature [Moment] of B in question is marked out, made prominent; this takes place because the feature of B coincides with the corresponding feature of A, and coincides without any “gap”, is completely one with it, so that what is covered [in the coincidence] is seen entirely through the covering. The distinct duality of A and B, and also what they have in common, is changed into a unity, which preserves a doubling in consciousness but materially is not a separation or duality of elements “outside one another”. The two are within each other, and only to this extent are they two. They constitute a unique assemblage, which, so to speak, is present in two “editions”. On the other hand, if the relation is one of mere similarity, then there is certainly still coincidence; the feature of B in question, which is perceived originally, coincides with the corresponding feature of A, still retained in the consciousness of the “still”. But the feature of similarity of A which is seen through the feature of similarity of B, and “coincides” with it, has a “gap”. The two features are blended in a community; yet there also remains a duality of material separation, which is the separation and coincidence of what is “akin”. They do not go together to form a “like” but to form a pair, where the one is certainly “like” the other but “stands off” from it. This duality, with its unity of community, can approach more and more the unity of perfect community, which is precisely likeness and essential coincidence without disparity, and can come so close that we speak of an approximate likeness, of a similarity which is almost complete likeness, only with slight deviations. But the difference

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still remains extant, despite the continuous transitions.’ Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §44, pp. 190–1. 20 Ibid., §16, p. 74. This has already been cited, see Chapter 6, n. 19. 21 Husserl writes, ‘Thus, the sensuous data, on which we can always turn our regard as toward the abstract stratum of concrete things, are themselves also already the product of a constitutive synthesis, which, as the lowest level, presupposes the operations of the synthesis in internal time-consciousness. These operations, as belonging to the lowest level, necessarily link all others. Time-consciousness is the original seat of the constitution of the unity of identity in general. But it is a consciousness producing only a general form.’ Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §16, p. 74. 22 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §38, p. 74. This was already cited at some length in Chapter 6, n. 18.

Chapter twelve 1 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §51, p. 112. 2

Husserl indicates this when he writes: ‘But then new questions impose themselves in regard to this mankind: are the insane also objectifications of the subjects being discussed in connection with the accomplishment of world-constitution? And what about children, even those who already have a certain amount of world-consciousness? After all, it is only from the mature and normal human beings who bring them up that they first become acquainted with the world in the full sense of the world-for-all, that is, the world of culture. And what about animals? There arise problems of intentional modifications through which we can and must attribute to all these conscious subjects – those that do not cofunction in respect to the world understood in the hitherto accepted (and always fundamental) sense, that is, the world which has truth through “reason” – their manner of transcendentality, precisely as “analogues” of ourselves. The meaning of this analogy will then itself represent a transcendental problem. This naturally extends into the realm of the transcendental problems which finally encompass all living beings insofar as they have, even indirectly but still verifiably, something like “life”, and even communal life in the spiritual sense. Also appearing thereby, in different steps, first in respect to human beings and then universally, are the problems of genesis [Generativität], the problems of transcendental

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historicity [Geschichtlichkeit], the problems of the transcendental enquiry which starts from the essential forms of human existence in society, in personalities of a higher order, and proceeds back to their transcendental and thus absolute signification; further, there are the problems of birth and death and of the transcendental constitution of their meaning as world occurrences, and there is the problem of the sexes. And finally, concerning the problem of the “unconscious” that is so much discussed today – dreamless sleep, loss of consciousness, and whatever else of the same or similar nature may be included under this title – this is in any case a matter of occurrences in the pregiven world, and they naturally come under the transcendental problem of constitution, as do birth and death.’ Husserl, Crises of European Sciences, §55, pp. 187–8. 3

Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 399.

4

Ibid., Bd. XIV, p. 540.

5

Husserl once attempted to conceive of a world without flesh, but he did not do so without difficulty and some contradictions. A note from February 1927 entitled ‘disembodied world’ [Leiblose Welt] indicates the following: ‘The kinestheses are factical in my localized corporeal flesh and my flesh is necessarily bound to a zero “there”. It is thus the support of the tactile field, etc. But it is thinkable that I indeed have no flesh, that a nature, without flesh, is constituted through kinesthesis, both close and remote types of kinesthesis. I cannot see why this is not possible. And why then not each body everywhere, even in its zero point could appear perspectivally (here the zero of all perspectives) and can be given originally in a tactile way. It could even be the zero that is constituted purely kinesthetically. Certainly this question is posed outside of knowing whether I could be condemned to the state of solus. Empathy presupposes fleshly corporeality.’ Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 547. Beside the question of knowing whether one can think of kinestheses without flesh, there is the question of how nature, that is to say as an ensemble of bodies, could be constituted without flesh. A number of texts affirm that flesh, and we cite one here, is the universal medium of the original givenness of all things (see Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 567). Moreover, Husserl has shown that distance (Entfernung), and consequently proximity, has the sense of a distance (Abstand) in relation to my flesh (see Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 556). And finally, a text from January 1934 affirms that ‘it is clear that a nature without flesh and thus without humans is not thinkable’. Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 639.

6

Ibid., Bd. XIII, p. 117.

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7

Husserl writes, ‘What is “normal experience” other than the permanent and legitimate identity of the experienced thingness as it is inserted enduringly within the experience.’ Ibid., Bd. XIII, p. 364. From this point of view, one could reopen the question of the hypothesis of the annihilation of the world through the discord of the flux of lived experiences, and bring to light a normative prescription, starting from the first static descriptions of transcendental phenomenology. But the question would be raised principally in order to know whether the world can be both relative to absolute consciousness and normal for this consciousness.

8

Husserl writes: ‘My flesh in its “inner experience”, in a solipsistic sphere, is thus an arch-apperception and provides the necessary norm.’ Ibid., Bd. XIV, p. 126.

9 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §54. 10 Ibid., §51, p. 112. 11 Ibid., §51, pp. 112–13. 12 Ibid., §51, p. 113. 13 Ibid., §51, p. 113. 14 Ibid., Husserl, §52, p. 114. 15 Husserl states: ‘In a manner well-understood, it is also correct to say: it is only in interpretation that I can capture the foreign flesh, one as flesh, that is similar to my corporeal body and so as a support of an I (one similar to mine).’ Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 267. 16 Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. 1, p. 184. Derrida writes: ‘in the relation to the other perhaps there is something that makes indication irreducible’. And he thinks that this something ‘could be called the immediate non self-presence of the living present’. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 37. 17 Here, we cite Fragment 16 from Parmenides, which appears in the exergue: ‘For as each person has a mixture of much-wandering limbs, so is thought present to humans. For that which thinks – the constitution of the limbs – is the same in all humans and every one; for which is more is thought.’ Translators’ note: we follow here the McKirihan translation. 18 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §52, p. 114. 19 Ibid., §52, p. 116. 20 Ibid., §52, p. 114. See also this excerpt from the Crisis: ‘The self-temporalization through depresentation [Ent-Gegenwärtigung], so to speak (through recollection), has its analogue in my

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self-alienation [Engt-Fremdung] (empathy as depresentation of a higher level – depresentation of my primal presence [Urpräsenz] into a merely presentified [vergegenwärtigte] primal presence).’ Husserl, Crisis, §54b, p. 185. For more on this de-presentation, see Eugen Fink, De la phénoménologie, trans. Didier Franck (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975), pp. 37ff. 21 See Chapter 6.

Chapter thirteen 1

This issue is discussed, however, in great depth in the group D manuscripts and in the course from 1907, Ding und Raum, now published as BD XVI in Husserliana. (The 1907 course has been since translated into English: Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997) – trans. note).

2 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §53, p. 116. 3

Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 115.

4 Husserl, Ideas II, §36, p. 153. 5

Husserl writes: ‘The flesh [Leib] as such can be constituted originarily only in tactuality.’ Husserl, Ideas II, §37, p. 158. In a brief not from February 1927 entitled ‘Empathy. A principle that indicates each flesh as my flesh, each I as myself’ Husserl characterizes the tactile level as the archi-nodal point [Urkernschichte]. Husserliana, Bd. XIV, pp. 483–4.

6

Husserl writes: ‘Hence in this way a human being’s total consciousness is in a certain sense, by means of its hyletic substrate, bound to the Body.’ Husserl, Ideas II, §39, p. 160.

7

Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 239.

8

See Husserl, ‘Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Original Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move’, in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, eds. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), pp. 117–31. See Derrida, The Origin of Geometry, pp. 82ff. and Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours: Collège de France, 1952–60 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), pp. 168ff.

9 Husserl, At the Limits of Phenomenology, p. 123. 10 The Heideggerian analysis of the spatiality of Dasein, founded on remoteness and orientation, could be without doubt closer, in

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spite the deliberate absence of any reference to flesh (see Chapter 1, n. 26), and of what could and should be an analysis of the ‘spatiality’ of flesh. The course of 1925, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Zeitbegriffs, permits this to be seen: ‘Dasein is oriented as corporeal, as corporeal it is in each instance its right and left, and that is why the parts of the body are also right and left parts. Accordingly, it belongs to the being of bodily things that they are co-constituted by orientation.’ Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 232. 11 We (Franck) are translating the expression in this way to avoid all reference to the ‘zero’, which, as a number (and in the Philosophy of Arithmetic Husserl took it in this way), necessarily implies intersubjectivity. 12 Husserl, Bd. XIII, p. 276. 13 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §53, p. 116. 14 Ibid., §54, p. 117. 15 Ibid., §54, pp. 117–18. The French translation says: ‘Il éveille et reproduit un autre mode d’apparaître immédiatement analogue …’. The words ‘other’ and ‘immediately’ are not in the German text, nor in the critical notes that are adjoined, but are in typescript C in possession of Dorion Cairns, who has translated the English edition (it is important to note that Cartesian Meditations was first published only in French before the German edition arrived years later, after Husserl’s death – translators’ note.). 16 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 256. 17 Husserl states: ‘The “I would be over there, I would be looking as if I were over there, the I should be me over there assuming such and such a sight” is a contradictory representation and thus has as similar contradictory representations a good sense (for example, in Geometry). Namely, to have a good sense is a “doubling” of the I such that it is possible only as a doubling of an other real thing. Namely: it is by way of the accomplishment of this contradictory representation that the possibility of two subjects with two bodies becomes clear.’ Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 263. 18 See Chapter 8, fn. 22. 19 Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 498. 20 Ibid., p. 275 (Franck’s emphasis). 21 ‘Rather, flesh presents a restriction to the full and free constitution of space.’ Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 258.

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22 See Fink, De la phénoménologie, pp. 74ff. Fink refuses to consider all purely signitive representations as pure and simple intuitive impossibilities. He divides them into finite re-presentations (an absurdity like a ‘colour without extension’) and transfinite re-representations (an absurdity which holds a determinate meaning: the world outside of our world, the Cartesian deus malignus). Clearly, it is to this latter group that the re-presentation ‘as if I were over there’ belongs. 23 Husserl writes: ‘In this case too, although the awakening does not become a memory intuition, pairing takes place.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §54, p. 118. 24 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 378. 25 Ibid., Bd. XIV, p. 67. 26 See Chapter 9. If it is flesh that is sexually differentiated, and not the body, then should one not admit, contrary to what we have said above, a certain precedence of carnal difference over sexual difference? Is there a way to determine sexual difference as a structure of flesh as long as the difference between flesh/body is not given? These questions are derived from an analytic of incarnation that our work seeks to make necessary. 27 A text from February 1927 speaks of the other as a ‘re-presenting variation of my I in reflection’ Husserliana, Bd. XIV, p. 498. For all reflection or specularization of myself refers to another. See Chapter 8, n. 9. Also, Husserl notes, ‘Obviously, it cannot be said that I see my eye in the mirror, for my eye, that which sees qua seeing, I do not perceive. I see something, of which I judge indirectly, by way of “empathy”, that it is identical with my eye as a thing (the one constituted by touch, for example) in the same way that I see the eye of an other.’ Husserl, Ideas II, p. 155, fn. 28 See Chapter 12.

Chapter fourteen 1 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §54, p. 118. 2

Dorion Cairns, in recording his interviews with Husserl, notes: ‘I asked Husserl whether, if, were it impossible for the body to have reflex perception of itself (one hand touch the other, the eye see the hand, etc.) there would then be the possibility of the constitution of a world, or a body … He answered no.’ See Dorion Cairns,

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Conversations with Husserl and Fink (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 4; also see p. 6. 3 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §54, p. 118. 4

Husserliana, Bd. VIII, pp. 134–5.

5

Ibid., Bd. XIV, p. 530.

6

Ibid., Bd. XV, p. 490. We will come back soon to this crucial statement in the Cartesian Meditations, where Husserl says: ‘The Other’s animate bodily organism, which is, so to speak, the intrinsically first Object.’ Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §54, p. 124.

7

Husserliana, XV, pp. 593–4. Husserl writes the following: ‘the primordiality is a drive-system. When we understand it as a constant original stream, then it shall also penetrate other streams, and possibly, other ego subjects and their drives. This intentionality has its transcendent “goal”, transcendence introduced as a foreign element, and thus in the primordiality of its own goal. Also, this element is an arch-modal core of the intention that simply uplifts and fulfils it. In my old doctrine of consciousness of internal time I have assigned intentionality precisely as egoic, as anticipating protention and as modifying retention, but preserving unity. But I did not speak of an I nor did I characterize intentionality as egoic (in the broadest sense the intentionality of the will). Later I introduced this egoic intentionality as founded in a non-ego (“passivity”). But is the I of acts that springs from the acts of habit not itself in development? We may not or should not assume we have a universal drive intentionality that accounts for each primitive presence as permanent temporalization and from driving concretely from presence to presence. All content is content of fulfilment of drive, and is intended as its goal; even so in every primordial presence, drives are transcending higher levels and extend into every other presence, thereby combining together all monads, so that all are implied in one another – and intentionally?’ Husserliana, Bd. XV, pp. 594–5.

8

Recall that apperception is at work in all perception, whether it is the perception of a transcendent object or of an immanent lived experience (retention and protention).

9 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §54, pp. 118–19. 10 See Chapter 6, n. 21. In Experience and Judgment Husserl writes: ‘Beyond this function of unification within a presence, association has a broader one, namely, that of uniting what is separated, insofar as this was ever at all constituted within a single stream of

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consciousness, thus, of uniting the present with the not-present, the presently perceived with remote memories separated from it, and even with imaginary objects: the like here recalls what is like there, the similar recalls what is similar.’ Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §42b, p. 177. 11 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §54, pp. 119–20.

Chapter fifteen 1 Ibid., §55, p. 120. 2

Ibid., §55, p. 121.

3 Ibid., §55, p. 122. 4

See Chapter 14, n. 3.

5

See Chapter 6, n. 19.

6 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §16, p. 74. 7

See Chapter 1.

8 Husserl, Ideas I, §99, p. 244. See also §43, p. 93: ‘In perception the same object is still described as specifically “incarnate” by opposition to the modified character of “floating before us” or “re-presented”.’ 9 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §55, p. 122. 10 See Chapter 3. Also see Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §19, pp. 83–4: ‘Every perception which presents the object to me in this orientation leaves open the practical transition to other appearances of the same object, specifically to certain groups of appearances. The possibilities of transition are practical possibilities, at least when it is a question of an object which is given as enduring without change. There is thus a freedom to run through the appearances in such a way that I move my eyes, my head, alter the posture of my body, go around the object, direct my regard toward it, and so on. We call these movements, which belong to the essence of perception and serve to bring the object of perception to givenness from all sides insofar as possible, kinaestheses.’ 11 Heidegger, Four Seminars, p. 65. 12 Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. II, p. 775. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 788.

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15 See Ideas, I, already cited above: ‘The vision of the essence is thus an intuition; and, if it is a vision of a strong meaning and not a simple and perhaps vague re-presentation, it is an intuition given originarily which seizes the essence in its “incarnate” ipseity.’ §3, p. 9. 16 Heidegger writes: ‘In order to unfold the question concerning the meaning of being, being must be given in order to enquire after its meaning. Husserl’s achievement consists in just this making present of being, which is phenomenally present in the category.’ ‘Through this achievement’, Heidegger adds, ‘I finally had the ground: “being” is no mere concept, no pure abstraction arising by way of deduction.’ Heidegger, Four Seminars, p. 67. 17 In the 1927–8 course devoted to the Critique of Pure Reason Heidegger defines intuition thus: ‘What does “intuitio” mean? Intuition means the manner by which something is represented to me concretely [leibhaftig] as something. To interpret it briefly, to intuit means to allow something to give itself as the concrete thing that it is.’ See Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 58. 18 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §55, p. 122. 19 ‘It is not, and cannot be, the case that the body belonging to my primordial sphere and indicating to me the other Ego (and, with him, the whole of the other primordial sphere or the other concrete ego) could appresent his factual existence and being-there-too, unless this primordial body acquired the sense, “a body belonging to the other ego,” and, according to the whole associative-apperceptive performance, the sense: “someone else’s flesh itself”.’ Ibid. 20 Provided, of course, that one assumes to have resolved all the difficulties that intentional analysis of the other has put before us. 21 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §55, p. 123. Husserl resumes the constitution of objectivity by saying: ‘On the contrary, the identitysense of my “primordial Nature” and the presentiated other “primordial Nature” is necessarily produced by the appresentation and the unity that it, as appresentation, necessarily has with the presentation co-functioning for it – this appresentation by virtue of which an Other and, consequently, his concrete ego are there for me in the first place.’ See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §55, p. 124. 22 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §55, p. 124. See also Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, §96a, p. 241: ‘All Objectivity, in this sense, is related back constitutionally to the first affair that is

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other than my Ego’s own, the other-than-my-Ego’s-own in the form, someone “else” – that is to say: the non-Ego in the form, “another Ego”.’ 23 Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 490. 24 See Chapter 13. 25 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §52, p. 115. 26 It is without doubt possible to say the same thing with regard to Jemeinigkeit, which at the outset of Being and Time articulates the existential analytic of Dasein in light of the question of being. 27 See Chapter 8. 28 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 344. 29 See Chapter 3. We establish then that the flesh that sets into operation the synthesis of adumbrations could not do so as a body. Now, by being flesh in and through another flesh (caress), then it is immediately a body. And the body, whose parts are exterior to one another, cannot unify the adumbrations. Another principle of unification is thus required. In a short note from the 1920s, Husserl writes: ‘So much of the flesh “for oneself” is an object and so is considered as res extensa, it is nevertheless not yet fully a meaning of nature – it is presupposition of any being-in-itself and not a self who is an it-self in the original sphere of experience.’ Ibid., Bd. XIV, p. 454. 30 The eidetic determination of historicity poses the same problem. In a footnote in the Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘What is meant is that it [history] exists in the manner of the body, that it is more like body.’ See Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 81. Moreover, in the case of flesh, one cannot simply set the noetic reactivations against the noematic iterations in order to determine the invariant, since ‘the subjective is specifically united by way of flesh to an object’, and since flesh is a link [Verknüpfung] of the subject and object. See Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 237. 31 Heidegger writes: ‘The author may remark that this analysis of the environment and in general the “hermeneutic of facticity” of Dasein, have been presented repeatedly in lectures since the winter semester of 1919–1920.’ See Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 490, division one, Chapter 3. Husserl, in spite of his misunderstanding of it, characterized the Heideggerian interpretation of Aristotle as a return to Aristotle by way of a response to a question that first came from Husserlian philosophy. See Cairns, Conversations with Fink and Husserl, pp. 5ff. If there is indeed a passage from Husserl

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to Heidegger, did it not take place when, renouncing to take facts as an exemplar of essence, it is subjected to the work of interpretation. Why, then, did it not interrogate the incarnate archi-facticity? Is it because temporality is held to be the unique horizon of the question of being? 32 See the texts cited in Chapter 10, n. 7. 33 ‘It has for its own eidetic meaning to show itself from itself (φχίνομενον: the thing-perceived “leibhaftig”) is yet the foundation produced by the interconnection of the adumbrations of lived experiences, of which it is the immanent correlate’, writes G. Granel. He never interrogates this Leibhaftigkeit in his work. See Granel, Le sens du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 179. 34 On this point, see Heidegger, Four Seminars, p. 65. 35 See Chapter 11, fn. 15. 36 Husserliana, Bd. XIII, p. 375. 37 See Heidegger, Four Seminars, pp. 64ff. 38 Heidegger writes: ‘In its neutrality Dasein is not the indifferent nobody and everybody, but the primordial positivity and potency of essence. Neutrality is not the voidness of an abstraction, but precisely the potency of the origin, which bears in itself the intrinsic possibility of every concrete factual humanity.’ See Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 136–7. 39 Otto Pöggeler, La pensée de Heidegger (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967), pp. 86–7.

Chapter sixteen 1 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §55, p. 128. 2 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §36, p. 158. 3 Husserl, Ideas I, §85, p. 203. 4 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 4. 5

Dorion Cairns reports this statement by Husserl: ‘Heidegger’s analysis [of time] is ontological, not constitutive. The acts he speaks of are not zeitigende Akte (temporalizing acts) but possible ways of coming to a temporality which is already “there” as otherwise

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constituted.’ See Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 29. 6 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 5. Husserl goes on to say: ‘What we accept, however, is not the existence of a world time, the existence of a physical duration and the like, but appearing time, appearing duration, as appearing. These are absolute data that it would be meaningless to doubt. To be sure, we do assume an existing time in this case, but the time we assume is the immanent time of the flow of consciousness, not the time of the experienced world.’ 7 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 5. 8

Husserl states, ‘These latter would be the contents of “external” sensibility, which is here plainly not defined in terms of some metaphysical distinction of outward and inward, but through the nature of its representing contents, as being ultimately foundational, phenomenologically lived-through contents.’ Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. II, p. 304. See also Husserl, Ideas I, §85, p. 204.

9 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 6. 10 Ibid., p. 7. 11 Husserl writes: ‘What forms the stuff into intentive mental processes and what brings in that which is specific to intentionality is precisely the same thing as what gives the locution, consciousness, its specific sense: precisely according to which consciousness eo ipso indicates something of which it is conscious. Because, now, the locutions, moments of consciousness, awareness, and similar constructions, and likewise because the locution, intentive moments, are made quite unusable by the many different equivocations which will be distinctly brought out in what follows, we introduce the term noetic moment or, in short, noesis.’ See Husserl, Ideas I, §85, p. 205. 12 See Husserl, Ideas I, §85, p. 207. 13 He writes: ‘Naturally, the pure hyletic is subordinated to the phenomenology of transcendental consciousness. In addition, it has the characteristic of a self-contained discipline; as a self-contained discipline it has a value in itself; on the other hand, but from a functional point of view, it has signification by the fact that it provides possible guests in the intentional weave, possible stuffs for intentive formations. Not only with regard to the difficulties which it arrives at, but also with regard to the ranking of problems from the standpoint of the idea of an absolute cognition, it obviously stands

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far below the noetic and functional phenomenology (both of which, moreover, are properly not to be separated).’ See Husserl, Ideas I, §86, p. 210. 14 See Fink, ‘Husserl’s Philosophy and Contemporary Criticism’, pp. 134ff. Fink writes: ‘In truth, however, there is no dualism of heterological moments in the phenomenological idea of constitution but only relative strata within the unified constitutive disclosure of the world’s origin from within the depths of the transcendental subject’s life. Both the hyle, which is first exhibited as the act’s non-intentional moment, and the totality-form of the act itself are constituted within the depths of the intentional self-constitution of phenomenological time, a constitution which, however, does not proceed by means of acts.’ Fink, ‘Husserl’s Philosophy and Contemporary Criticism’, pp. 136–7. 15 Husserl writes: ‘that intentionality, disregarding its enigmatic forms and levels, is also like a universal medium which ultimately bears in itself all mental processes, even those which are not themselves characterised as intentive’. Husserl, Ideas I, §85, p. 203. 16 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 10. 17 In this regard, he writes: ‘An exposition of Brentano’s analysis of time can serve as the point of departure for our investigation. Unfortunately, Brentano never published his analysis, communicating it only in lectures. Marty has described it quite briefly in his work on the development of the sense of colour, which appeared at the end of the seventies, and Stumpf has also devoted a few words to it in his psychology of sound.’ Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 4. 18 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 19 Ibid., p. 14. 20 Ibid., p. 16. 21 Ibid., p. 24. 22 Ibid., p. 25. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 26. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 28. 27 Husserl writes: ‘We would prefer to avoid, then, the use of the word “appearances” for the phenomena that constitute immanent temporal

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objects; for these phenomena are themselves immanent objects and are “appearances” in an entirely different sense.’ Ibid., p. 29. 28 Husserl states: ‘Sensations, and the acts “interpreting” them or apperceiving them, are alike experienced, but they do not appear as objects: they are not seen, heard or perceived by a sense. Objects on the other hand, appear and are perceived, but they are not experienced.’ Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, p. 105.

Chapter seventeen 1 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 29. 2

In §8 of ibid., entitled ‘Immanent temporal objects and their modes of appearance’, Husserl writes: ‘What we have described here is the manner in which the object in immanent time “appears” in a continual flow, the manner in which it is “given”. To describe this manner does not mean to describe the appearing temporal duration itself, for it is the same tone with the duration belonging to it that, indeed, was not described but presupposed in the description.’ See ibid., p. 26. If the temporal identity of the tone can be given only by multiple modes of appearing, one can understand in depth what motivates the choice of example of an analysis of the constituting consciousness of time. Husserl also writes later: “Temporal objects – and this pertains to their essence – spread their matter over an extent of time, and such objects can become constituted only in acts that constitute the very differences belonging to time.’ See ibid., p. 41. G. Granel also writes: ‘The melody is thus an example that bears an evident philosophical signification: in the melody the moment of identity does not cease to be carried on the waves of its constitution, in the very time that the stream continually deploys as identity.’ See Granel, Le sens du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl, p. 57. We note, however, that the example possesses a phenomenological signification before having a philosophical one.

3

See Chapter 3, n. 13.

4

See Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, pp. 29–30.

5

See ibid., pp. 30–1.

6

See ibid., p. 33.

7

Husserl writes: ‘Retention is not a modification in which impressional data are really preserved, only in modified form: on

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the contrary, it is an intentionality – indeed, an intentionality with a specific character of its own. When a primal datum, a new phase, emerges, the preceding phase does not vanish but is “kept in grip” (that is to say, precisely “retained”); and thanks to this retention, a looking-back at what has elapsed is possible. The retention itself is not a looking-back that makes the elapsed phase into an object: while I have the elapsed phase in my grip, I live through the present phase, take it – thanks to retention – “in addition” to the elapsed phase; and I am directed towards what is coming (in a protention).’ Ibid., p. 122. In §23b of Experience and Judgment Husserl was precise about the structure of ‘fresh remembrance’, or retention: ‘[Fresh remembrance] is an intentional modification in the realm of pure passivity; it takes place according to an absolutely fixed law without any participation of the activity radiating from the ego-centre. This modification belongs to the regularity of the original constitution of immanent temporality, in which every impressional having-consciousness of an original momentary now is constantly changed into the still-having-in-consciousness of the same in the mode of the just-past (the just-having-been-now). This retention is in turn itself subject to retentional modification, and so on.’ Husserl, Experience and Judgment, §23, pp. 110–11. 8

Husserl writes, ‘Retention itself is not an “act” (that is, an immanent duration-unity constituted in a series of retentional phases) but a momentary consciousness of the elapsed phase and at the same time a foundation for the retentional consciousness of the next phase.’ Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 122.

9

Ibid., p. 70.

10 Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 106. See also where Husserl writes: ‘We regard sensing as the original consciousness of time ... Sensation is presenting time-consciousness.’ Ibid., p. 112. 11 Ibid., p. 118. 12 We cite this remarkable passage from §36 of the lectures on time, entitled ‘The Time-Constituting Flow as Absolute Subjectivity’, which gathers together all the aporias of the self-constitution of the absolute: ‘Time-constituting phenomena, therefore, are evidently objectivities fundamentally different from those constituted in time. They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully ascribed to them. Hence it also can make no sense to say of them (and to say with the same signification) that they exist in the now

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and did exist previously, that they succeed one another in time or are simultaneous with one another, and so on. But no doubt we can and must say: A certain continuity of appearance – that is, a continuity that is a phase of the time-constituting flow – belongs to a now, namely, to the now that it constitutes; and to a before, namely, as that which is constitutive (we cannot say “was”) of the before. But is not the flow a succession, does it not have a now, an actually present phase, and a continuity of pasts of which I am now conscious in retentions? We can say nothing other than the following: This flow is something we speak of in conformity with what is constituted, but it is not “something in objective time”. It is absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to be designated metaphorically as “flow”; of something that originates in a point of actuality, in a primal source-point, “the now”, and so on. In the actuality-experience we have the primal source-point and a continuity of moments of reverberation. For all of this, we lack names.’ Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 79. 13 Husserl says: ‘Subjective time becomes constituted in the absolute timeless consciousness, which is not an object.’ Ibid., p. 117. 14 Manuscript C 7 I, p. 17. 15 See Chapter 5, n. 4. 16 For more on this see Chapter 6, n. 23. 17 Manuscript C 17 I, p. 18. (Translators’ note: this text was translated from the French because the citation here is incorrect; however, Franck was unable find the proper manuscript bibliographic data). 18 Husserl writes: ‘In a certain sense, therefore, all experiences are intended through impressions or are impressed.’ Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 93. 19 Manuscript C 7 I, p. 18. 20 See Chapter 13, n. 6. 21 Husserl states: ‘Hyletic data are data of colour, data of tone, data of smell, data of pain, etc., considered purely subjectively, therefore here without thinking of the bodily organs or of anything psychophysical.’ Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, p. 128. 22 John Locke, for example, states, ‘Our Senses, conversant about particular sensible Objects, do convey into the Mind several distinct Perceptions of things, according to those various ways, wherein those Objects do affect them: and thus we come by those Ideas, we have of Yellow, White, Heat, Cold, Soft, Hard, Bitter, Sweet,

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and all of those which we call sensible qualities, which when I say the sense convey into the mind, I mean, they from external Objects convey into the mind what produces there those Perceptions. This great Source, of most of the Ideas we have, depending wholly upon our Senses, and derived by them to the Understanding, I call SENSATION.’ John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) book II, §3, p. 105. 23 See Chapter 14, n. 7. 24 Manuscript C 6, p. 7. 25 See Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, §24. 26 Derrida, Origin of Geometry, p. 153. 27 Husserl writes: ‘But ever new now is precisely new and is characterized as new phenomenologically. Even if the tone continues so utterly unchanged that not the least alteration is apparent to us, hence even if each new now possesses precisely the same apprehension-content with respect to moments of quality, intensity, etc., and carries precisely the same apprehension – even if all of this is the case, an original difference [ursprüngliche Verschiedenheit] nevertheless presents itself, a difference that belongs to a new dimension.’ Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, p. 67. 28 Manuscript C 6, p. 10. 29 See Husserliana, Bd. XV, p. 16. 30 Manuscript B III 2, p. 20 (1931). 31 See Chapter 12. 32 See Chapter 1. 33 Husserl, Crisis, p. 389. 34 Cited in K. Schumann, Husserl-Chronik, p. 489.

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INDEX

active genesis 63–6 adumbration 20, 23, 38–40, 51, 64, 74, 83, 90, 99, 116, 141, 152, 156, 208n. 29, 209n. 33 alien, sphere of 71, 91, 125, 138, 143–5, 165 analogical apperception 107–8, 116 analogical modification 130–1 analytic of incarnation 107, 117, 147, 204n. 26 anarchic foundation of phenomenology 165 animality 26, 30, 77, 78, 174n. 28, 174n. 30, 191n. 2, 199n. 2 apperceptive transfer 105–7, 112–13, 124, 126, 129–35, 150 apperceptive unity 162 appresentation 103, 135 and the body 133, 149 interconnection with presentation 104–7, 111–12, 134, 139–43 of the other 115–16, 119, 135, 137–8 similar to compresentation 197n. 4 archi-facticity 59, 62, 68, 145, 162, 165 archi-immobility 121 association and associative

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synthesis or constitution 66–8, 108, 113–14, 122–4, 134, 205n. 10, 189n. 21 associative pairing 129–30 auto-affection, and caress 145 and hetero-affection 145, 165 and pure flesh 82, 176n.9 body the body over there 105–7, 113, 122–7, 133–5, 138, 142–3, 149–50, 203n. 17 my own body 40, 75, 113, 115, 124–5, 129, 138, 142, 146, 193n. 12 Brentano 153–4, 161, 211n. 17 carnal relation 116–17, 145 caress and impact 149 existential analytic absent of 147 foundation of temporalization 163–5 and the object 132, 146 cogitatio 33, 54 cogitatum 33, 42, 181n. 17 cogito 11–12, 18, 29, 31, 33, 42, 53, 189n. 28 consciousness of an image 39, 46, 73, 104, 172n. 9, 190n. 5, 197n. 10 consciousness of internal time

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flow of time 38–41, 54–7, 59, 64–5, 72, 94, 134, 139, 152–6, 158–9, 162, 184n. 4, 213n. 12 immanent time 41, 150, 160, 163, 210n. 6, 212n. 2 intentionality of 42, 67, 97, 117, 149–53, 160, 163, 188n. 13, 205n. 7, 211n. 14 original time-consciousness 42, 52, 64–5, 102, 130, 149, 154, 161–2, 179n. 29 consciousness of the other vs. consciousness of the sign or image 104 constitution of objectivity 55, 102, 127, 132, 143, 207n. 21 in relation to the Fifth Meditation 137, 142, constitution of the other, a priori 126 constitutive genesis 63 crossing between temporality and alterity 104 death 76, 112–13 Derrida, Jacques 176n. 9, 179n. 30, 183n. 23, 186n. 19, 186n. 5, 191nn. 11, 12, 197n. 9, 198n. 16, 201n. 16, 202n. 8, 215n. 26 Descartes 11, 18, 28, 29, 31, 69, 171n. 6, 175n. 4 origin of modernity 12, 169n. 2 eidos ego 33, 58–9, 61, 62, 68, 113, 125, 145, 185n. 17, 191n. 11 Empfindnisse 82, 112, 163, 193n. 18

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existential analytic 24–6, 64, 147, 165, 208n. 26 extension partes extra partes 40 Fink, Eugen 125, 170n. 12, 177n. 13, 178n. 26, 183n. 11, 197n. 10, 202n. 20, 204nn. 22, 2, 211n. 14 flesh as absolute here 39, 83, 120–1, 138, 143, 149 constituted originally in touch 120, 145 and Dasein, 165–6 does not derive from temporality 165 incompletely constituted 103 as medium of all perception 23, 39, 80, 146, 200n. 5 non-spatiality of 120–1 process of enworlding 90 in relation to temporality 163–5 flesh of the other as first object 68, 87, 97, 101, 132, 145, 207n. 22 ‘Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Original Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move’ 120 givenness 17–26 immediate 29, 54, 77, 80, 102, 107, 121 mediate 77, 80, 87, 115, 144 of the other 102, 115, 121, 164–5 Granel, G. 209n. 33, 212n. 2 habitus 56, 64, 96, 108 Hegel, G. F. 49, 169n. 2, 169n. 9, 189n. 29

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Index Heidegger, Martin 11, 14, 20, 21, 24–6, 32, 34, 88, 90–1, 140–2, 145, 151 hetero-affection 145, 165 historicity of intentional genesis 56, 66, 112, 188n. 14, 199n. 2, 208n. 30 Hume, David 23, 66 hyle 42, 65, 68, 97–100, 150–6, 159, 162, 163, 165, 173n. 17, 211n. 14, 214n. 21 hyletic substrate 120, 202n. 6 imaginative variation 51, 62, 125, 185n. 14 immediacy of the other excluded 102 impact (choc) 145–7, 149 impressional data 162, 212n. 7 archi or Ur-impression 160, 162, 164 living present 31, 34, 67, 95, 109, 111, 117, 140, 149–50, 181n. 16, 214n. 13 primal impression 42, 159, 160, 181n. 15 related to the now 103, 163, 213n. 7 incarnate presence (leibhaftig) 21, 42, 49, 99, 102–3, 131, 172n. 10, 183n. 18, 197n. 6 incorporation 82–5, 89–90, 106–7, 121, 126, 130, 135, 138, 144–6 infinity 51, 61 Ingarden, Roman 14, 88, 178n. 19 interconnected (entrelacs) 104 of appresentation and presentation 105, 107, 134 of flesh and body 135, 165 and impossibility of pure presentation 135

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interconnection between present and non-present 134 interpretation of the other 68, 85, 116 intersubjectivity 27, 30, 50–2, 59, 70, 78, 96, 126, 164, 186n. 17, 192n. 9 caress and impact 137–47 incorporation refers to 90 and temporality 106, 117, 165 union of flesh and body presupposes 83, 103, 113, 124 intuition 18–20, 23–4, 28, 58, 64, 93, 121, 134, 171n. 8, 189n. 18, 207n. 17 categorical 141–2 eidetic intuition 62 of the other 75, 102, 115, 117, 204n. 23 two types of 142 intuitive fulfilment 115, 126 Kant, Immanuel (and Kantianism) 18, 40, 54, 67, 70, 79, 119, 147, 153, 188n. 18, 192n. 10, 195n. 10 kinaesthetic system 42, 113, 125, 141 lifeworld 29, 40, 79 lived experience 13, 19, 23, 33, 42, 46–9, 179n. 29, 201n. 7 as immanent temporal objects 68 of the other 102, 104, 134 reflexive 33–4 sensuous 120 temporal modes 39, 41, 43, 54, 65, 94–6, 117, 161–52 two classes of 152

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living present see impressional data localization 119–20 Locke, John 214n. 22 mathesis universalis 11 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 179n. 6, 181n. 14, 202n. 8, 208n.30 metaphysics 11, 14, 18, 26, 71, 117, 166, 169 n. 2, 170n. 2, 175n. 4, 195n. 10, 196n. 2, 210n. 8 monadic community 101, 196n. 2 morphé 100, 132, 152, 155, 158–9 mundane ego 32, 34, 69, 88, 119 natural attitude 299, 77, 114 noema 34, 41–2, 46–50, 55, 57, 65, 143, 173n. 17, 182n. 8 as other 73–4, 139 and time 160–2 as world 33, 85, 112 noesis 22, 37, 47–9, 74, 96, 210n. 11 noetic-noematic structure 41, 53, 96, 152 non-intentional passivity 98, 132, 152, 211n. 14 non-temporal sphere 154, 214n. 13 pairing 111–17, 127, 129–33, 165 original pairing 113 passive genesis 63–6 passive synthesis or pre-constitution of objects 64, 67, 107–9, 130, 152, 187n. 9 physical nature 30, 52 primordial sphere 105–7, 111, 115, 119, 138, 207n. 19 protention 35, 65, 106, 162–4

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psychological idealism 69 pyschologism 12, 37, 57, 63 real world 37, 52, 78, 177n. 18 reduction eidetic 32, 51, 57–60, 185n. 14 phenomenological 37, 46, 77, 155, 175n. 3 pranscendental 84, 114, 171n. 5, 176n. 10, 188n. 14, resemblance 106, 111–18, 124–7, 130, 134–5 retention 34–5, 65, 97–9, 155, 159, 179n. 29, 205n. 7, 212n. 7, 213n. 8 double intentionality 161 related to appresentation 106 as a specific kind of intentionality 160 Sartre, Jean-Paul 184n. 4 self-objectivation of transcendental subject 74, 88 sensation 79, 82, 120, 151–3, 160, 163, 164, 212n. 28, 213n. 10, 214n. 22 sexual difference 126–7, 132, 144, 146–7, 149, 204n. 26 solipsism 18–9, 30, 33, 39, 45, 50, 53, 58, 71–6, 83, 113, 176n. 10, 190n. 2, 201n. 8 soul 12, 32, 84, 88–91, 177n. 17, 195n. 10 source-point or the “now” 158–60, 181n. 15, 213n. 12 primal datum 212n. 7 spatial null-point (Nullpunkt) 64, 112 spatiality 26, 29, 122, 150, 155, 174n. 26, 194n. 1, 202n. 10 sphere of ownness 77–86, 90, 95–7, 102, 133

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Index and alterity 106–7, 109, 113–16, 119, 127, 133, 142–4, 192n. 9 splitting the ego 34–5 and intersubjectivity 124 strangeness (Fremdheit) 67–8, 73, 109 tactility 80, 82, 120, 124, 200n. 5, 202n. 5 temporality 25–6, 41, 52, 53, 56, 62, 64–5, 68, 90, 97, 104, 106, 112, 114, 127, 130, 147, 149–65 archi-foundation of all intentional analysis 150 temporalization 163, 165, 201n. 20, 205n. 7 time a priori of 153 flow of a melody 153–5 temporal object (Zeitobjekt) 154 touch 29, 40, 80–2, 113, 120, 152, 204n. 27,

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that which gives flesh to itself 124, 145 Tran-Duc-Thao 178n. 28 transcendence in immanence 98, 99, 106, 120, 146 universal teleology 132 universal a priori of constitution, relation to the other 165, 179n. 1 world 51 objective world 32, 71, 77, 87, 100, 101, 106, 111–13, 117, 149, 190n. 2 origin of 24, 31, 52, 72, 130, 146 146 pre–constituted 62–3 primordial world 100–2, 105, 123, 129, 194n. 32, 195n. 10 surrounding world (Umweltlichkeit) 78, 133, 191n. 6 world of the other 74, 129, 130, 144

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