The Genetic Origination of Truth-Toward-Being: Edith Stein’s Reconfiguration of Husserl’s Phenomenology 3031147936, 9783031147937

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The Genetic Origination of Truth-Toward-Being Edith Stein’s Reconfiguration of Husserl’s Phenomenology Jim Ruddy

The Genetic Origination of Truth-Toward-Being

Jim Ruddy

The Genetic Origination of Truth-Toward-Being Edith Stein’s Reconfiguration of Husserl’s Phenomenology

Jim Ruddy Mansfield, MA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-14793-7    ISBN 978-3-031-14794-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14794-4 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In Memoriam: Jorge Mendieta Cruz

Contents

1 Preface  1 2 Scaling the First Slopes: The Nachlass of Wall 15 3 Scaling  the Next Slopes: From Adesse to Fülle 23 Intuitive Sources  23 Sources of Relational Fullness  26 Relation qua Relation  28 History of Relational Fullness in the West  29 Getting Our Bearings  31 History of Relational Fullness Continued  32 Edith Stein’s Eidetic Methodology  33 4 Scaling  the Final Mountain: Four Box-Canyons 37 First cul-de-sac: Christening a Theory of Meaning as Nothing Other Than the Pure Form of All Possible a priori Sciences  45 Second cul-de-sac: Pure Logic Seems to Exfoliate From Its Own Purely Formal Principles and Laws; But Exactly How Can Something “flower forth” That Has Nothing Deeper Than Itself from Which to Flower Forth?  48 Third cul-de-sac: Center Stage and Right Before Your Eyes: A Wholly Spiritual Meaning-Intention That Has Suddenly Emptied Itself Out So as to Be Identical, Hybrid-Wise, Both with Itself-­as-Subject and Itself-as-Object  52 vii

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Final cul-de-sac: Relation According to Its Very Own Essence: Hegel’s Resilient and Challenging View of Essential Relation  57 5 At  the Summit: Definitions and Something Else 65 Introduction of Terms  65 Defining the Relational Limit Concepts of adesse and inesse  67 Defining the Proto-constitution of inesse Objectivity and adesse Objectivity  71 Defining Subject-Consciousness and Object-Consciousness  73 Positioning Stein’s Special Eidetic Method: Asymmetrical Elasticity  75 From Interplay to Fülle  76 A New Mountain: Along Stein’s Way Toward a Genetic Transcendental Logic  76 From Phenomenology to Pure Thought  76 Interplay-of-Method, Exemplified in a Passage in Potency and Act Where Stein Is Searching for a Mountain  77 A Preamble to Stein’s Use of Interplay Methodology  78 The Interplay Methodology in Stein’s Own Words in the Second Paragraph of the Passage About the Mountain  79 A Validation of This Special Interplay Method Coming from Edmund Husserl Himself  80 6 An Interlude: Along Stein’s Way 83 7 At  the Summit Waystation: No More Box-Canyons 87 Prolog: Transcendental Logic as Avasāna  87 Introduction: Fact and Method  89 The Threefold Division of Logic in Aquinas and Husserl: A Comparison  90 Stein’s Arrival at the Theoretical Consummation of Truth-Logic  94 The Crystallizing, Upswinging Moment Between the Game-Plan of a Theory of Multiplicities and the Gut-Desire for the Pervasive Unity of a Concrete Science  96 Describing, Beyond All Box-Canyons, a Final Plateau of Interdependencies  98

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A Technical Note Concerning the Transcendental Constitution of adesse Objectivity  99 Epilog: Re-worlding Logic and Phenomenology Itself 101 Author Index105 Subject Index107

CHAPTER 1

Preface

Abstract  In the minds of many phenomenologists, Stein’s conversion to Catholicism renders her method derisory. This chapter tries to rectify this by setting up a division between object-consciousness and divine subject-­ consciousness, paralleling Stein’s division between finite and eternal being, indicating that, in both divisions, the first state of affairs points utterly beyond itself toward the second state of affairs. The resulting notion of a special, indirect analogy of proportionality, as transcendentally constituted within pure consciousness, becomes the basis for the re-constitution of relation in its inmost essence as somehow neither mental nor real and somehow both, thus enabling a deeper and more radical view of relation and intentionality itself and opening the possibility for a subsidiary eidetic, a priori science of relation as such, which the author calls convergent phenomenology. Keywords  Relation • Being • Truth • Edith Stein • Thomas Aquinas • Edmund Husserl • Kevin Wall • Phenomenology • Intentionality • Ontology • Analogy • Convergent phenomenology Because of her conversion to Catholicism, Edith Stein’s unique phenomenological findings in Finite and Eternal Being are frequently dismissed by traditional scholars of phenomenology. Either they contend that her

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Ruddy, The Genetic Origination of Truth-Toward-Being, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14794-4_1

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theological musings distort and warp her phenomenology beyond legitimate use or else they hold that her descriptions of phenomenological material remain fundamentally obscure.1 The following pages intend to set things right. They intend to do so by establishing the following, strictly phenomenological, thesis: Hidden behind, and grounding, Stein’s ontological division, between finite and eternal being, lies a redeeming and constitutive phenomenological division between Edmund Husserl’s pure object-consciousness (otherwise known as intentionality) and the pure subject-consciousness of God as outlined within the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. In Stein’s synoptic reconfiguration of method, and in each of the above ontological and phenomenological divisions, the first state of affairs points utterly beyond itself toward the second state of affairs. If this pointing beyond is missed, then Stein’s core meaning is missed. This brings us to the second thesis that this book wishes to propose. And this thesis is simply that such a relation-like “pointing beyond” is, in both of the above states of affairs, asymmetrical. In other words, such a pointing beyond itself is real, wholly actual, out toward its term and yet wholly mental, wholly spiritual (and thus wholly “intentional”) in respect to its being, as selfsame relation, traced back into its base. Thus, this special, non-reciprocal “pointing beyond” in both cases is really related out toward a term that is not itself really related back. And furthermore, and quite generally, this unique kind of relation itself is such that it remains in essence what it is irrespective of whether either the ground in which it resides or even the term toward which it directs itself are themselves either ontologically finite or ontologically infinite. Because modern thought has more and more reduced all relationality to logical rather than real relations,2 what we are trying to communicate in this second thesis (being thus based on the belief that relations can exist out in the world and thus apart from a mind knowing them) is almost impossible to convey in a way that modern thought can then understand what is actually being expressed. It might be objected that the pointing beyond of object-consciousness to divine subject-consciousness remains an entirely intentional rather than a real state of affairs. How then could it be non-reciprocally real? However, comprehending the second thesis above demands a kind of asymmetrical reversal of meaning. Such a reversal is attempting to refer to something that, on the surface, is neither wholly mental nor wholly real yet, as pure, co-referring “super-relation,” is somehow both. This is precisely because

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the second thesis is not grounded in any empirically related states of affairs or in any intentional or logically related states of affairs. It is rather grounded in an eidetic, framework-like, indirect proportionality between any such already interrelated states of affairs. This indirect and no longer thing-like proportionality demands an intellectual effort to comprehend that few thinkers are willing to make.3 For it is a proportionality that, by its own heightened insight, remains wholly intelligible in itself, and yet by doing so, does not abrogate the infinite distance between finite being and divine being or between object-consciousness and subject-consciousness. Being a hardheaded realist, Stein was able to fearlessly reach back into the Neo-Platonist analogy of “indefinite proportionality” espoused by Pseudo-Dionysius, canonized by Thomas Aquinas, and eventually, through the hairsplitting vagaries of Nominalism, lost in the tradition.4 She did so to enhance and expand her new phenomenological method. Transcendental subjectivity, in Husserl’s sense, remains accordingly at the level of ordinary analogy among things or ideas. The special analogy of proportionality on the other hand, that Stein rescued from tradition, rises one level higher than direct analogy. This can become clear by using a simple example from mathematics: Thus, instead of seeing a similarity between the numbers two and four, since both are even numbers, the proportional analogy in question is able to focus in on the purely eidetic similarity between the manner in which the number two relationally points beyond itself to its double as four and the manner in which the number 50 relationally points beyond itself to its double as 100. Because the difference between real things and real relations is absolute, the difference between the two forms of analogies is absolute. It is a simple insight, yet it is an all-powerful insight. And, as we shall see, blinding oneself to such a purely eidetic or spiritual insight does not at all have the harmlessness that might be supposed. For clearly Stein herself must have realized that the special analogy of indirect proportions can be made methodologically active within phenomenology only if Husserlian transcendental subjectivity, already enmeshed in the “things themselves,” is, to a certain degree and as such, entirely set off in brackets and put out of operation. As she herself makes clear, if we can finally see similarities, not among things and ideas but among indirect proportions between any such interdependent states of affairs, then, as she tells us: “The infinite distance between God and the creature is thereby not diminished. This would happen only if a definite relationship or proportionality were established.”5

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Gonzales and O’Regan, in their treatment of the analogia entis, speak dramatically of such a multi-leveled, non-reciprocal “pointing beyond” in respect to the methodology of Stein’s friend, Fr. Erich Przywara, S.J. And yet, what they say below (about the dynamic of Fr. Przywara’s new method) applies even more powerfully to Stein herself, where such lofty and non-reciprocal transcendence of meaning had attained a kind of intense purity: In the metaphysical movement of Przywara’s thought there has been the continual emphasis and accentuation of the in-over or in-and-beyond dynamic. And what has become manifest in this movement is a motion of rising and dynamic intensity through which this dynamic is ever further caught up or taken up more and more in and towards the beyond. Further, this beyond is continually distancing itself from the creature. It is becoming increasingly transcendent: an asymmetrical reversal is occurring. This is due to the fact that what is being thought is relation and relationality and thus a relativization of the creature. This relation was first seen in the dynamic suspended relation between essence/existence, consciousness/being, which, far from being a self-enclosed relation (and therefore not a real relation) or oscillation within itself (à la Heidegger’s Dasein) is a genuine analogical suspended between that points beyond itself.6

Once the purity of Stein’s extraordinary and dynamic reconfiguration of both phenomenological and ontological methodology is understood, and once such a heightened analogical framework is referred back to the similar manner in which transcendental subjectivity points utterly beyond itself toward transcendental intersubjectivity, gaining thus, through the interior operation of empathy, its own intrinsic meaning, then everything Stein eventually says in Finite and Eternal Being comes into clear, systematic focus and even makes solid phenomenological sense. Thus, within Stein’s synoptic and proportionately balanced viewpoint, empathy is only humanly and personally meaningful as being already out toward its object, finite being is only ontologically meaningful as already toward eternal being, and the deeper eidetic ground of object-­consciousness is only phenomenologically meaningful as already toward divine subject-­ consciousness. In each case as well, the unfolding truths that arise from these correlative states of affairs arise interdependently. They form a kind of layered grid.7 This relation-like grid, utterly transcending thing-like similarities and thereby unfolding the heightened proportions between things rather than

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merely unfolding the Husserlian “things themselves,” supports everything that Stein affirms regarding the meaning of being itself. It is as if the evidential truth of Stein’s quite personal ascent toward the meaning of being is already forming itself into a genetically organic whole. Each layer is already interlinked with all the other layers through a mutual illumination of shared meanings.8 For Stein then, it is only according to such a wholly relational unity that the unfolding of the innermost meaning of Being Itself can be transcendentally constituted at last within the heightened co-­ referred meanings that she herself brought to bear within pure consciousness. Otherwise, what she says, especially regarding Husserlian phenomenology, makes no sense whatsoever. Indeed, this holds generally. In the case of Husserlian intentionality, for example, and guided by Stein’s purely eidetic framework, one could say that the noemata, that Husserl discovered and scientifically described, become morphologically transformed. Under this fresh aspect, they become fruitful, meaningful, and understandable solely as already pointing utterly beyond themselves toward their correlative noeses. The emphasis thus moves from Husserlian things in themselves to the much more difficult to express proportional and co-referenced spiritual relationship between Husserlian things in themselves. And, for Stein, the unfolding grid in question is none other than the transcendental constitution, within the innermost core of pure consciousness, of the famed analogia entis of scholastic thought. Stein is quite clear on this point. Moving with consummate ease through such a supportive framework, Stein tells us that the analogia entis “is shown to be the fundamental law that rules over all existents and that must therefore also determine the method of investigation, which, on the other hand, the factual analysis of existents with respect to the meaning of being leads to the discovery of the same fundamental law.”9 Suddenly viewed through such a crisscrossing, multi-leveled approach, intentional object-consciousness, in its inmost nature, and precisely as it begins to ascend to the meaning of Being Itself, can only come into its own, not as being a mental relation and not as being a real relation, but exactly as being, formally, essentially, and at its own eidetic level, utterly relation-like rather than thing-like. Surprisingly, Stein’s special, reconfigured method has suddenly uncovered the hidden core of intentionality itself as such. Stein’s gifted use especially of the classical analogy of proportionality puts her first in the ranks of Husserl’s immediate followers. Heideggerian

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Dasein, for example, seen suddenly as nothing in itself and everything toward something infinitely beyond itself, becomes, for Stein, a lot frailer and a lot more embodied within time than even her colleague Heidegger supposed. Understood in this light, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being comes itself finally into focus as equally monumental to the history of Western philosophy as was Heidegger’s Being and Time, both as an answer and as a reproach.10 One might even say that intentionality, as rediscovered and developed by both Husserl and Heidegger,11 can only truly become itself precisely as “realizing” the “what” of Relation as such. Thus, in his book, Metaphysics and the Doctrine of Relation, the Thomist/Hegelian scholar, Kevin Wall, O.P., synthesizes the findings of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas according to their evolving understanding of the nature of real relation.12 Emphasizing thereby the relational and dialectical unity of being itself, Wall sets forth the following pivotal (and, indeed, apodictic) truth as follows: “The act of thinking is relative to Relation; everything but the act of existence is relative only to essence.”13 Most of what the present author has written in these pages concerning traditional phenomenology itself, as a science of essences, as well as Stein’s stunning transformation of such a science, is simply a coda to Wall’s core insight. Thus, properly understood, Stein’s own extraordinary reconfiguration of method, remaining still at an infinite distance from the ineffable reality of the godhead, can nevertheless become itself an originative, grounding phenomenological insight precisely into the self-unfolding, transcendentally constitutive relationality of the actus purus essendi, the very actuality of the real. For any, even the slightest, interior relation, irrespective of it being either real or intentional, is already heading out on the way toward the sublime exteriority of Being Itself. Moreover, Stein, as a faithful proponent of Husserl’s general legacy, and indeed because she spent months and months talking daily with Husserl about his current, heart-felt projects, including no doubt the Chinese-box intricacy of his famed epoche, never truly abandoned the traditional phenomenological method. In a certain sense, she moved beyond it only to extend it and purify it. Two things follow from such a methodological and proportional shift in emphasis. First, and precisely from Stein’s multi-leveled standpoint and from her complete mastery of phenomenology’s many-leveled reductive methods, the inmost “whatness” of intentionality itself can only be understood by someone who is already standing within the reduced realm of

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Husserlian pure consciousness. Second, and especially from such a standpoint, it suddenly becomes clear that it is of the frail, temporal nature of intentional consciousness to be neither real nor mental and this in a completely sui generis and unclassifiable sense. Or, more precisely, intentionality is neither wholly real nor wholly mental, yet somehow dialectically both, since it is already referring itself out into its object and becoming somehow the same as its object while yet remaining somehow different from its object. Intentionality, viewed exactly as coming into its own within pure consciousness, is thus finally able to be seen, and, indeed, was seen by Stein, exactly as it is in itself, according to its innermost whatness, irrespective of whether the term that it moves us toward is ontologically finite or ontologically infinite. From such a twofold analogical perspective, it can thus be shown that, at the helm of the sublime, ascending workshop of Stein, the true, centralized meanings of her idiosyncratic descriptions of Husserlian pure object-­ consciousness are able to be posited, actualized, and described exactly as already being referred utterly outward beyond themselves toward the actus purus essendi and thus precisely toward divine subject-consciousness as it is in itself. Otherwise, they remain impenetrably obscure. From what has been discovered so far about relationality in general (real, intentional, or hybrid), it would seem clear that relations qua relations, no longer merely logical, but rather unfolding from themselves actually as such, are precisely the intended, and wholly scientific, objectivities that we are searching for in our present attempt to formalize Stein’s unique way of approach. This being the case, it would be well, at this point, to guide ourselves forward by a single, methodological fact: Husserl eventually came to believe in the following, and what he considered to be apodictically certain, truth: That, where we have a newly unfolding domain of objectivities, there also we find, correlatively, an eidetic science of the essences of such objectivities. If this is true, then the originative eidetic science, whereby all these aforementioned, proportionately balanced, objective divisions coalesce and come into focus, thus forming at their own level a kind of eidetic scaffolding, must itself exist. Such a centralizing, purely eidetic science would have to be a specialized, subalternate phenomenology of Relation Itself. Let us call this science “convergent phenomenology.” What exactly does convergent phenomenology then deal with? To discover the subject matter of convergent phenomenology, the special “to-ness” of both finite being and intentionality itself (as wholly

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conditioned and even, in a certain sense, realized by subject-­consciousness) must be brought to light. For, if real relation thus constitutively structures dependent reality, as Kevin Wall maintained, then the special, operational “pointing toward,” referred to above, is both real and relational. Husserl insisted, quite fiercely, that eidetic sciences, to keep themselves from becoming illusory sciences, should always deal exclusively with objective material. It must then follow that the entire subject matter that convergent phenomenology deals with is nothing but a special, unitary, constitutive (and yet wholly relation-like) form of objectivity as such. Otherwise, there could be no unified discourse in its regard. Stein doesn’t go so far in codifying her method as thus to arrive at the nucleus of such a secondary science, but her unfolding descriptions certainly lead us toward such an open-ended possibility. In what follows, I shall use the Latin term, adesse objectivity, to describe the fleeting “whatness” or quiddity of this special objectivity. This Latinized usage will hopefully help us to separate out Husserlian phenomenology (with its war-cry of “to the things themselves” and thus as an eidetic, frontal, and primary description of what might be called inesse objectivity) from convergent phenomenology now coming into its own as a subsidiary and subordinate eidetic description of adesse objectivity. Moving tentatively in this direction and recalling intentionality as a kind of “consciousness of…” helps us to now understand adesse objectivity as encompassing the entire eidetic domain of general intentionality within itself precisely as a “consciousness toward….” The two eidetic sciences have the same material. They diverge from each other formally because of their own indigenous reductive viewpoints taken upon such material. To be more precise: Husserlian phenomenology is arrived at by a reduction away from the real self and the real world into pure consciousness. It is a transformative upswing into the purely eidetic, and yet wholly objective and scientific, realm of transcendental subjectivity as it is in itself. It makes no ontological claims whatsoever. Within the innermost logical domain of its own correlative workspace, convergent phenomenology is arrived at by a reduction away from the entire realm of transcendental subjectivity as it is in itself (thus as inesse) into a new realm of investigable, and yet utterly relational, “super-eidetic” material now nearly infinitely more expansive and fruitful than the realm of Husserlian pure consciousness from which it took its point of departure. It, by that very fact, puts the entire area of transcendental subjectivity, as inesse, out of operation. Transcendental subjectivity still remains but solely as bracketed. The new

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domain thus unfolding into view, constitutively unfolding relation as somehow neither mental nor real and suddenly seeing relation (in its inmost essence) precisely as somehow both, is a domain achieved precisely by a kind of proto-epoche. This is because further bracketing of transcendental subjectivity as such, as inesse, can only be a relation-like rather than a thing-like bracketing.14 Such a realm, moving directly against the wind of modern theories of merely logical relations (as the only possible relations to be formalized and thought about), and unfolding thus at its own eidetic level, simply allows real relations, and thus asymmetrically real relations such as intentionality, to be essentially themselves. Only then can they be finally and, in the truest sense, phenomenologically discovered and described. When Stein talked to her friends excitedly about her “new philosophy system,”15 it was precisely this new realm of wholly eidetic material that she was referring to. At least we know that the genetically fresh domain she eventually moved through, moving with ease from phenomenology to scholastic thought and back again, can be understood as neither a wholly ontological nor a wholly phenomenological domain, yet somehow both. Being itself embedded in her intense love for phenomenology as method, what Stein tells us about objectivity, even in a most general sense, becomes intensely personal. In Potency and Act, for example, she unhesitatingly proclaims the following, to her apodictically evident, truth: “Subject and object [Objekt] are two possible forms of objects [Gegenstand]. The distinction is not logical (since both may be a logical object) but ontological. Subjectivity is the original form of spiritual object. In contrast, being a spiritual object in the sense of existing for a subject, is derived.”16 Such a crucial insight is wholly hers, wholly Thomistic, and even wholly Husserlian. For it cannot be denied that her “derived” states of affairs, either mental or real, are, by that very fact, relationally structured. Relation thereby comes into its own as a strange sort of being that is able to somehow mediate between the mental and the real both ontologically and phenomenologically. For noemata are no less toward noeses than is matter toward form, genus toward species, or even essence toward existence. Stein’s all-encompassing insight is just as crucial to a full understanding of Thomism as it is to a full understanding of Husserlian phenomenology.17 Moving forward within such a perfectly balanced equilibrium of thought, Stein is able to come herself comprehensively and sublimely to rest within the exact unfolding fullness that she intended, at first, to understand. Discovering pure subject-consciousness as such, discovering it thus

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as a subsidiary and yet entirely unified field of discourse, itself thus able to be finally and transcendentally constituted within pure consciousness, is not only constitutive as a wholly relation-like, wholly transformed phenomenological method. It is, for her, as warrior for the Truth, a special and quite profound self-discovery as well: There is indeed only one Truth but it unfolds itself to our human perspective in a manifold of individual truths which must be conquered step by step. If we succeed in penetrating to a certain depth in one direction, a larger horizon will be opened up, and with this enlarged vista a new depth will reveal itself at the point of departure.18

In her Preface to Finite and Eternal Being, she contrasts thinkers who remain within the natural, historical framework with thinkers who push forward to understand things through their own mind by simply letting the frail, layered interdependencies of the mind and the world be themselves without any ontological presuppositions. “The former … make intelligible the original historical pattern, that is, those events with which the history of ideas is concerned. The latter kind of mentality, on the other hand, is the characteristic mark of all born phenomenologists.” Of what exactly does this new, and now wholly spiritual, realm consist? Our argumentation so far has adequately demonstrated that, guided along in its own ascending journey by Edith Stein’s profound and self-effacing unfolding of an increasingly vivid organum of philosophical truth, and located thus at the inmost hub-center of Husserlian phenomenology, convergent phenomenology, operating solely within the transformative grid of the relational unity of being, can be finally and formally defined as an eidetic, phenomenological description of the supreme pointing beyond of the unfolding of adesse objectivity as it is in itself. It is thus the case that, with Stein’s reconfiguration of intentional object-consciousness, ontology as such, now newly guided by a kind of dynamic, transformative, entirely genetic phenomenology, moves closer to its own truth. Husserl saw himself as the prophet Moses, glimpsing the promised land of ontology from afar.19 Proceeding forward like a child, Stein entered that promised land and quietly set up her small waystation at the exact center. Easter Sunday, April 17, 2022

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Notes 1. Anyone who attends the usual circuit of conferences on Husserlian phenomenology can attest to the fact that, when Stein’s name comes up, participants frequently admit that they haven’t even read Finite and Eternal Being. This admission is often followed by a statement that “a few of Husserl’s students converted to Catholicism,” implying that such a philosophically wrong-­headed and unorthodox action exiles them point-blank from the “true” field of phenomenology itself. 2. For example, in his Principles of Mathematics, (#94), Bertrand Russell defines relation as a “concept.” Clearly, for Russell, and for so many other modern thinkers, a relation is something that the human mind is doing within itself rather than something that is also able to take place in the outside world apart from the human mind. 3. The Indologist, Sara Grant, in her monumental comparison between Aquinas’ and Sankara’s notions of non-reciprocal relations (ones that are real “toward” but merely intentional “in”) tells us: “The effort to pierce through the appearances and grasp the essential character of relation-in-­ itself demands an effort of pure intelligence few are prepared to make even ́ when they are alert to the possibility.” See Grant’s Sankaracarya’s Concept of Relation, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers (Delhi, 1998), p. 7. 4. Stein, Edith, Finite and Eternal Being, translated by Kurt F.  Reinhardt, ICS Publications (Washington, DC, 2002), p. xviii. 5. Ibid., p. 337. 6. Gonzalez, Philip John Paul and Cyril O’Regan, Reimagining the Analogia Entis, William B. Eerdmanns Publishing Company (Michigan, 2019), p. 85. 7. Fr. Kevin Wall, O. P., an avid scholar of both Aquinas and Hegel, tells us: “Constitutive relation is not a category of being but a cause of being. And this gives rise to a relational grid whose systematic application, much like the dialectic of Hegel, determines the Thomistic science of metaphysics.” It is the present author’s view that this selfsame grid also determines the Husserlian science of phenomenology. See Fr. Wall’s Metaphysics and the Doctrine of Relation, Veritas Publications (Oakland, 2018), p. 29. Available at: https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/kevin-­wall-­op/metaphysics-­and-­ the-­d octrine-­o f-­r elation/paperback/product-­1 2qgdjzn.html?page= 1&pageSize=4. The present author was fortunate to have Fr. Wall as the reader for his Master’s Degree in Philosophy. Most of Fr. Wall’s writings remain unpublished, although Veritas Publications is committed to eventually making them known. See also Veritas Publications—Bücher und Publikationen Spotlight | Lulu (I am especially grateful to Fr. Wall’s brother, the late Fr. Antoninus Wall, O. P., for directing me last year to a helpful website, since removed, where his brother’s entire Nachlass had been made publicly available).

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8. Stein, Edith, Finite and Eternal Being, translated by Kurt F.  Reinhardt, ICS Publications (Washington, DC, 2002), p. 1. 9. Ibid., p. xxix. 10. Her reproach is chiding and good natured. For example, apropos to the notion of Heidegger’s Verfallenheit, she has this to say: “In the knowledge that being holds me, I rest securely. This security, however, is not the self-­ assurance of one who under her own power stands on firm ground, but rather the sweet and blissful security of a child that is lifted up and carried by a strong arm. And, objectively speaking, this kind of security is not less rational. For if a child were living in the constant fear that its mother might let it fall, we should hardly call this a ‘rational’ attitude.” See Finite and Eternal Being, translated by Kurt F.  Reinhardt, ICS Publications (Washington, DC, 2002), p. 58. 11. Fr. Kevin Wall has this to say about phenomenology’s genetic resurrection of the scholastic intentio: “The tradition understood this relation as intentional and Husserl, following Brentano, and Heidegger, following Husserl, picked this up from the tradition. This is the real relation of the knower to the known and the lover to the beloved which relation, from this point of view, is at once action and relation and quality. The reverse relation from the object to the knower and the lover is, in the tradition, rational and not real. Charles Hartshorne found this a fascinating distinction and was surprised at its sophistication and that it was in the tradition and had been forgotten.” See Wall’s A Classical Philosophy of Art: The Nature of Art in the Light of Classical Principles, University Press of America (Washington, DC, 1982), p. 48. 12. Wall, Kevin Albert, Metaphysics and the Doctrine of Relation, Veritas Publications (Oakland, 2018). (See endnote 7 above.) 13. Quote is from Fr. Wall’s short, first draft of the much longer, as yet unpublished, essay entitled “Relation.” (I would like to thank Fr. Wall’s brotherin-law, Dominic Colvert, for rescuing the draft from a box in his basement.) 14. See the first chapter of my book, Being, Relation and the Re-worlding of Intentionality (Springer/Palgrave Macmillan, New  York, 2016), entitled “Convergent Phenomenology and Adesse Objectivity.” 15. Writing to Roman Ingarten in September of 1932, Stein speaks of such a new system as a special “philosophy system.” (See Briefe an Roman Ingarten, 1917–1938, Edith Steins Werke, vol. 14W xiv, Freiburg, Basel, Vienna, 1991, letter 152, p. 226.) 16. Stein, Edith, Potency and Act, translated by Walter Redmond, ICS Publications (Washington, DC, 2009), p. 123. 17. Kevin Wall certainly shared such a wide-ranging way of looking at both real and mental states of affairs. Relying also on the grid-like framework of proportional analogy, Wall brings everything into methodological focus as follows:

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“Relation, which follows upon terms already existing, is the weakest sort of being since it lies furthest from the substantial. But constitutive relation is the strongest since, lying within substance and connecting substance with God, it makes substance real. Dependent things are therefore relationally structured. This is the crucial insight of Thomistic philosophy. Wherever there is dependence, there is relational structure. And wherever there is relational structure, there is dependence. When this is systematically applied, it then reveals the real distinction of matter and form, of essence and existence and of the substantial and the accidental. This led classical and medieval thought to distinguish mental, real, and really constitutive relations and therefore to take a close look at the peculiar character of this sort of being which mediates between the mental and the real.” Metaphysics and the Doctrine of Relation, Veritas Publications (Oakland, 2018), p. 28. [I would simply add the following corollary: A special sort of objective being demands an eidetic science of the essential structures of such a special sort of objective being.] 18. Ibid., p. 1. 19. In his Preface to the English edition of Ideas, Husserl speaks of ontology as the promised land, which he, like Moses, would never enter.

CHAPTER 2

Scaling the First Slopes: The Nachlass of Wall

Abstract  By situating relation at the very center of the being/consciousness dilemma as well as the even more paradoxical problem of how relational unity-in-diversity is to be best understood (and thus transcendentally constituted within pure consciousness), this chapter turns to the radical theory of real relations as formulated by Fr. Kevin Wall, O.P., in his unpublished manuscripts. Three key texts from Wall are analyzed. The author shows how the resulting grid-like framework of Wall’s theories concerning the relational unity of being itself aids in clarifying Stein’s even more complex and radical methodology. Keywords  Relation • Being • Truth • Edith Stein • Thomas Aquinas • Edmund Husserl • Relational fullness • Kevin Wall • Phenomenology • Intentionality • Ontology • Analogy • Convergent phenomenology As we have shown in the Preface to this work, Edith Stein, through her quiet assimilation of the eidetic systems of Aquinas and Husserl, effectively unfolded phenomenology itself endlessly outward toward a divine intelligibility infinitely greater than itself. Following up these lines of thought, as we have seen, enables, as well, the correlative discovery of the sudden, genetic origination of a specially reconfigured, and thus “convergent,” phenomenology.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Ruddy, The Genetic Origination of Truth-Toward-Being, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14794-4_2

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Standing at the entrance gate1 to any new eidetic science one must face the perennial problem of the odd identity relation between consciousness and reality. Underlying this problem lies the problem of the fluctuating identity of any sort of relationship that begins to dialectically morph into a relational unity that is somehow also a unity-in-diversity. With these problems in mind, it might be advantageous to set up the following framework: In the proportionate way that ontology deals directly with Being Itself, phenomenology deals indirectly with Truth-toward-Being-Itself. In addition, and certainly throughout the ages, both in the West and in the East (and interrelated with the issue above of the unity-in-diversity state of affairs) the (perhaps asymmetrical) identity of being and consciousness remains an almost surreal identity indeed. For, as Aquinas, in a breath-taking and spectacularly mind-bending kind of super-epoche, tells us, Truth (as subject-consciousness) is wholly identical with Being which Itself, back again (if there were no divine subject-consciousness), would not be identical with Truth.2 Similarly, and though it could be terrifying to think about, Goodness (as divine love) is wholly identical with Being which Itself, back again (if there were no divine love in the world) would not be identical with Goodness. Grounded in these sorts of bewildering (yet still relation-like) considerations and located at the hub-center of traditional phenomenology, convergent phenomenology is a descriptive (albeit subalternate) eidetic science dealing with wholly relation-like objectivity (adesse) as opposed to the primarily thing-like objectivity (inesse) of traditional, or general, phenomenology. Following Stein’s favorite metaphor of ascending a mountain, this book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 states the reason for the work. Chapter 2 deals with Wall’s remarkable revival of relational theory as it was developed in the schools. Chapter 3, by unearthing such a theory historically, brings into focus the problems to be addressed. Chapter 4 shows how transcendental logic has failed, in some respects, to address the problems in question. Chapter 5 defines the terms of the new phenomenology that Stein’s synoptic descriptions of intentional consciousness demand. Chapter 6 briefly views Stein’s life in the light of her special approach. And Chap. 7 rethinks some aspects of Husserl’s transcendental logic in the light of Stein’s new method. Given that the current author was inspired to deal with the special connection between ontology and phenomenology by having many seminal

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discussions with Fr. Kevin Wall about the odd nature of relation, and given, in addition, the recent posthumous publication of Wall’s flagship work entitled, Metaphysics and the Doctrine of Relation,3 it would seem expedient to review some of Wall’s dense and powerful insights into the constitutive power of real relation as such, especially those centering around Wall’s pivotal notion of the “relational unity” of being itself. Such insights are primarily Thomistic/Hegelian, but Stein had effectively shown, through her multi-leveled power of method, how such radical, ontological insights can, as transcendentally constituted meaning, be moved over with ease into the fullness and depth of the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Everything being equal, the phenomenological reductive upswing from the real world and the real self into the realm of transcendental subjectivity thus frees itself for a similarly radical, quantum jump forward. For, once such constitutive relational fullness is at last laid bare by a kind of proto-­ epoche, it will become clear that even the absolute immanence of pure consciousness (that the basic, traditional epoche reveals) must be refracted and corrected by the very objectivity that is comprised within the relational unity of being of which Wall speaks. Through his collaboration with the famed Polish logician, J. M. Bochenski, Wall gained an extensive familiarity with modern mathematics, as well as formal logic, and, more importantly, the diverse realms of both phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Such knowledge was filtered through, and tempered by, Wall’s wholly original mastery of the mysterious nature of real relation as first discovered by Aristotle and as later used within the systematic thought of both Aquinas and Hegel. Let us begin with the first four paragraphs of Chapter 7 of Wall’s Metaphysics and Dogmatics.4 The chapter is entitled, “Re-Working of the Growth of Classical Philosophy in the Light of the Relational Unity of Being.” There are two reasons why this is a good place to start. First, the passage is a prime example of Wall’s remarkable terseness of style. Wall proceeds lucidly forward with insight after insight, reducing each to a very short sentence. Second, the consummate ease with which he moves from relational to proportional unity in the passage below clearly indicates that Wall, like Stein, had assimilated, as a pure relational method, the analogia entis, of the schools, thus transforming it into a kind of meta-level of eidetic discourse. It had become part of himself.

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In this chapter we must do two things: first of all interpret the “causes” of the preceding chapters in the light of the relational unity of being and then deal with the relational structure of beings which this elucidates. Supposing the relational unity of being, then it follows that the unity of matter and form as being is relational. Matter is to form and form is to matter. In this to-ness rather than in something absolute lies their only unity. But in it also lies their diversity since the relations are not the same. Matter is precisely what form is not and form is precisely what matter is not. Likewise, the efficient cause is to the compound of matter and form, and the compound, to the efficient cause. And this relational unity contains also their diversity. The principle of diversification need not, therefore, as Parmenides had reasoned, be sought outside of either. They are both one and many through the same principle. Thus, also, just as rational and irrational numbers cannot be directly compared, they can be related through the unity of their proportionality. In terms of the number one, the irrational number is a non-terminating fractional composite. There is no direct proportion. But there is a proportional unity between the relation of rational to rational and of irrational to irrational. This proportional unity allows them to be parts of the same realm of discourse. Only through this is mathematical thought possible at all. Without it, mathematical thought is separated into many realms of discourse—in fact, infinitely many. We are back in the situation of “atoms” which have no meaning. This is at odds with the very nature of the mathematical enterprise which seeks unity of discourse. Of course, the analogy between the mathematical situation and the situation of being is not exact. The unity which is the principle of number is radically different from the unity of being. Beings are not produced through the “division” of the unity of being. Numbers are.

What Wall says illuminates the unity of mathematical discourse, but, more importantly, it illuminates, as well, the unity of phenomenological discourse. It shows that the unity of intentionality itself is relational in a completely unique sense. Rephrasing Wall, intentional act is to intentional object, and intentional object is to intentional act. So much is this the case that in their to-ness, or adesse, lies their unity-in-diversity. It does not lie primarily in the absolute unity (inesse) of pure consciousness itself. Once this proportional unity of discourse is clearly seen, then the diversity of discourse between general phenomenology and convergent phenomenology comes into focus. The individual “towardness” of each noesis/noema, which Husserl discovered at the hub-center of each intentional act/object, also achieves, to that proportional degree, its own descriptive clarity.

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The ramifications of Wall’s insight into the relational unity of being remain clear. Only through the reconfigured and wholly constitutive power of the relational unity of Truth-toward-Being-Itself is general phenomenology possible as a unified (and unifying) discourse. Furthermore, at the beginning of any treatment of relation-like objectivity, one must first ask: What is the “whatness” of relation itself? Is it real? Is it mental? In the following chapters of this book, the current author, holding fast to the factual oneness of the inmost nature of relation, will conclude that such oneness is primarily a proportional unity-in-diversity. In more down-to-earth terms, this means that relation is somehow neither mental nor real in itself and yet somehow, proportionally, both in itself. In the quote below, Wall comes to the same surprising conclusion: Relation must be taken ontologically, epistemologically and linguistically. The last gives rise to the distinction between secundum esse and secundum dici. It seems to signify a distinction according to signifying. Thus, if I name something according to its relational beingness, that is relation secundum esse. If, on the other hand, I do not do this but name that which has a relation without naming precisely the relation, then this is relation secundum dici. In the latter case, the thing has a relation, but I do not name it according to this. We have in this case relative things which are named either according to the relations or not according to the relations. We have therefore to distinguish first relation as it is in itself and as it is in the mind and as it is in language. When we consider it this way, we have to conclude that this is the only category which in itself and specifically taken does not say either real or rational. In what constitutes its specific nature, it is in neither order or in both. And that which is in reality is either accidental (praedicamental) or essential (transcendental).5

If relation, in its own essential nature, is somehow neither mental nor real as such and yet somehow both as such, and if convergent phenomenology deals, proportionally, with relation-like rather than thing-like objectivity, then the final adesse realm of convergent phenomenology can only be reached by a kind of “proto-epoche” that puts completely out of operation the entire inesse realm of Husserlian transcendental subjectivity. If this not clearly understood, then much of what the current author says in the following pages will remain mind-numbingly obscure. The final quote from Wall, taken from Metaphysics and the Doctrine of Relation, needs a few words of explanation.

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Anyone familiar with Husserlian phenomenology knows that the very tissue of such an eidetic science is destroyed and rendered derisory if two problems are not confronted and solved: The problem of solipsism and the correlative problem of the basic nature of Husserlian “essences.” There is nothing preventing the Transcendental Ego from simply (and erroneously) fusing with an Other higher than itself, and there is nothing preventing essences from becoming fictive illusions of the mind over against the rock-solid “being-there” of empirical facts. It is also clear that Husserl, as originative thinker, struggling within the eidetic realm of his new science, solved neither of these problems to his own complete satisfaction.6 Enter convergent phenomenology. When the entire eidetic domain of Wall’s relational grid becomes available as phenomenological residuum through the proto-epoche spoken of earlier, a transformative shift is enabled within the very heart of phenomenology itself. Both above problems are resolved and relation itself, as somehow neither real nor mental, and as somehow both, becomes originatively available for phenomenological description. Truth luminously transforms itself into Truth-toward-­ Being-Itself, and relation is thus seen as a kind of newly constituting, and wholly operational, realization of being. Stein saw this. In phenomenology, and as pure gift, operation is all. Notice how the depth and translucent simplicity of Wall’s argumentation paves the way for such a transformation: A capacity to operate is relative to operation. Essence is relative to existence. Existence is not operation. Essence is not, therefore, relative to operation. This must be added to it by still another relation. Then operation actualizes that added capacity. It is by this relation. It has no relation, therefore, as essence, to anything else and therefore not to operation. But to be a capacity for operation, it must have such a relation. Therefore it is not and cannot be of itself a capacity for operation. The capacity to operate must therefore be given to it, i.e. added over and above its basic being. That this should be added follows from the fact that the creature is a similitude of God. The relationship of causality is the relation of similitude, functioning as a realizing relation. But God not only exists but also operates. Therefore he makes the creature similar to him in this. Therefore he gives it capacity to operate and actual operation. For some, the highest, the capacity for operation is capacity to think and to will. Lower creatures have lesser capacities. But ail [sic] then have the added structure to their beings of capacity for operation and actual operation.

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This is then the complete structure of dependent things and if at any point it is denied, then the relations are collapsed and the creature is made in fact to be God. It does not then stand off from God but fuses with him. In this way, Aquinas laid out the structure of the creature. Constitutive and realizing relation is at the heart. A creature thus has existence and has capacity and has operation. And the entity established by its relation to existence is fittingly named by this as essence.7

In our review of the actual grid or matrix itself of the relational unity of being that Wall discovered, we have cleared the way for the logical grounding of the new science of convergent phenomenology as presented in the following chapters. The lingering problems of solipsism and the fictive character of essences can finally head toward an eventual solution. Wall’s own unique proportionality of method, when moved over into the depth of Husserlian phenomenology, finally renders human pure consciousness inexhaustively transparent to itself as pure gift. Human thought is finally seen as both reconfigured and self-luminous in the sense that it no longer requires something inextricably deeper within itself from which to flower forth. Again, and bringing back to mind the simple manner in which Wall himself profoundly expresses it, “The act of thinking is relative to Relation; everything but the act of existence is relative only to essence.”8

Notes 1. A mantra for thinkers wishing to enter such a gate might be, “From now on, carry us.” 2. Aquinas, De Veritate, Question One, Art. 2, corpus. 3. See Wall, Kevin, Metaphysics and the Doctrine of Relation, Veritas Publications (Oakland, 2018). 4. This book is no longer available online. (See endnote 7, Chap. 1) 5. Wall, Kevin (1977), From an as yet unpublished essay entitled, simply, “Relation,” p. 22. (See endnote 7, Chap. 1) 6. One need only read my friend Donn Welton’s thought-provoking book, The Other Husserl, to realize how long and hard Husserl struggled with these very questions. 7. Wall, Kevin, Metaphysics and the Doctrine of Relation, Veritas Publications (Oakland, 2018), pp. 83–84. (Italics are my own.) 8. Quote is from a first draft of the much longer essay entitled “Relation.” (See endnote 13, Chap. 1)

CHAPTER 3

Scaling the Next Slopes: From Adesse to Fülle

Abstract  Following Husserl’s conception that a priori sciences of essential being must ground themselves by simply allowing the clear evidence of actual, wholly intuitive sources of objective reality to speak for themselves without theoretical presuppositions, this chapter proceeds forward to enact an historical study of such sources underlying what Wall calls the relational unity of being itself. The study begins with Aristotle, treats of the medieval trifold division of relation (ad aliquid) into real, mental, and hybrid (asymmetrically real/mental), continues through the pivotal and seminal notions of real relation within the semiology of Jean Poinsot, and ends with Stein’s reconfiguration of method that she synoptically derived from both Aquinas’ ontology and Husserl’s phenomenology. Keywords  Relation • Being • Truth • Edith Stein • Thomas Aquinas • Edmund Husserl • Jean Poinsot • Kevin Wall • Phenomenology • Intentionality • Ontology • Analogy • Convergent phenomenology

Intuitive Sources This book, in order to give formal ground for convergent phenomenology, eventually must initiate a special kind of rethinking of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic. Logic, as a purely intentional operation, can only take care of itself as pure gift. Such rethinking along the lines of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Ruddy, The Genetic Origination of Truth-Toward-Being, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14794-4_3

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the relational unity of being has become necessary because, primarily through the revolutionary phenomenological methodology of Edith Stein, the intelligibility of pure logic can at last be fully seen as transparent to itself precisely to the degree that it is formally and comprehensively seen as a prepredicative towardness (what Wall spoke of as “to-ness”) to an intelligibility endlessly greater than itself. The unified discourse of both transcendental logic and formal ontology can become grounded by the relational unity of being precisely as viewing both as being nothing in themselves and as becoming transparently themselves insofar as they are already directing themselves outward toward divine subject-consciousness. More than any other traditional phenomenologist Stein came to see that such relation-like towardness can best be understood as having itself an eidetic objectivity similar to the eidetic objectivity of purely a priori sciences such as algebra or geometry. Accordingly, and in the most general conceivable sense, this book eventually will be conducting a rethinking of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic neither in terms of the usual mind-numbing rehash of primary texts nor in terms of an elaborate review of recent Husserlian scholarship. Instead, it will be doing such rethinking directly according to a special eidetic objectivity referred to, throughout these pages, as adesse objectivity. And, since it is Husserl himself who insists that full definitions are not to be given at the threshold of investigative work,1 adesse objectivity, viewed most generally as wholly relation-like rather than thing-like, will thus be defined in Chap. 5 in regard to its own essential nature. In addition, such rethinking itself must be clearly understood. The only way to start afresh in the originary light of Husserl’s genius, especially in the field of pure logic, is to freely let that genius speak for itself. In a rarely understood but crucial passage in Ideas, Husserl stands free, both from the natural and the phenomenological standpoint; his positioning of himself at such a gateway enables him to arrive at a vital, wholly originative, methodological truth. It is a truth that comes forth effectively from his mind and heart. It is thus final and definitive. He tells us: The general discussion concerning essence and the science of essences in contrast with fact and the science of facts, which we have undertaken by way of prelude, concerned essential foundations for our construction of the idea of a pure phenomenology (which, indeed, as was noted in the Introduction, should become a science of the Essential Being of things), and for

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­ nderstanding its position in regard to all empirical sciences, and thus also u to psychology. But—and much depends on this point—all determinations of principle must be correctly understood.2

Similarly, whenever a beginning philosopher searches for a new realm of eidetic truth (in our case, adesse objectivity), one must, at the same time search precisely for essential and bedrock foundations that will enable similar and fresh determinations of principle. What Husserl is demanding is nothing less than a more perfect stand-alone vision of Formal Ontology newly shedding light upon the eidetic region of Being whose limits and rules are being sought. As the field of such essential insights and sources expands, one’s originary point of departure will deepen proportionally precisely as already self-referred outward toward an infinitely greater intelligibility. What this amounts to is simply that, Husserl being Husserl, one can only advance pure logic operationally by attempting to be even more Husserlian than Husserl himself. Or, to put the matter in a more general framework: One can only penetrate to the limits of an eidetic field of pure consciousness by first standing free within its intuitable sources, allowing such sources to appear according to the miraculous and self-illuminating way in which that field itself offers them to us. Accordingly, along with Husserl, we also must clearly understand how such primal sources are to be determined. Having set forth such a base in the above passage, Husserl continues, doubling down on the necessity of developing actual, intuitively understood sources. It is stressed that, in such a search: we have not been arguing academically from a philosophical standpoint fixed in advance, we have not made use of traditional or even of generally recognized philosophical theories, but on lines which are in the strictest sense fundamental have shown up certain features, i.e., given true expression to distinctions which are directly given to us in intuition. We have taken them exactly as they there present themselves, without any admixture of hypothesis or interpretation, and without reading into them anything that might be suggested to us by theories handed down from ancient or modern times. Positions so laid down are real “beginnings”; and when, as in our own case, they are of a generality that covers the all-enveloping regions of Being, they are surely fundamental in a philosophical sense, and belong, themselves, to philosophy.3

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Equally important for the rethinking of pure logic in the light of Stein’s new method is the imperative of grounding such rethinking in the real beginnings Husserl is referring to, originative beginnings that the special, relational fullness of adesse objectivity itself intuitively brings to light. We must stand free in such full sources somewhat in the manner that an expert in non-linear algebra stands free in what she knows to be both completely eidetic and yet somehow completely objective.

Sources of Relational Fullness How, then, can one bring into transparent clarity such relational fullness? An intriguing, indirect and yet proportional, analogy devised by the seventeenth-­century semiologist Jean Poinsot (1584–1644) would be a good starting point. He tells us, on the very first page of his Material Logic,4 that there is a direct and fresh similarity between the way that a physical thing changes into something else and the way that the human self labors to attain certainty regarding logical truth: More specifically, that there is a direct and fresh similarity between the part-by-part, unfolding manner whereby “accidental” changes move inward in a thing’s nature toward the final instant of that thing’s “substantial” change into something utterly diverse from its previous self5 and the similar unfolding manner in which the human mind progresses, through this or that form of partial argument, toward the final lightning-stroke of pure insight into the formal truth that it was searching for, and which, Poinsot assures us, can then be put into “a very short sentence.” As we look more closely at Poinsot’s thought-provoking analogy between things and logical truths, that very analogy can lead us onward toward a more complex analogy, a similarly indirect proportional analogy based on what, for want of better terms, might be called an analogy of the dual morphology of embodied pure consciousness as a purely relational unity in diversity. For there is indeed a special, one might almost say ethereal, analogy between physical things, as they are here and now being “bodily known,” in Husserl’s sense, and the mind’s own intentional relationship outward, and formal, wholly operational, identification with, these selfsame things “in actu.” Accordingly, saying that thoughts are actual somewhat the same way that things are actual now suddenly shines forth with its own helpful evidence. Husserl, as the introductory flight of his Ideas takes off, describes such entirely generalized intentional acts with painstaking clarity. All such

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purely intellective (or purely “spiritual”) activity, as we shall see, is included, along with such real states of affairs within what Husserl calls “the general thesis of the natural standpoint.” But our focus here is a focus of the most general possible sort. For it is not that we are then going to put such a thesis out of commission, as did Husserl. It is rather the precise “towardness-­being” of such operational activity that is here drawing our attention. And the point we wish to make is that intentional towardness that unfolds the duality of act/object cannot be fully understood until the precise towardness-character of relation is fully understood. Until this is done, the endless outwardness of the activity of transcendental subjectivity itself at the core of phenomenology cannot be easily and comprehensively offered up, purely reflectively, for investigative work. A reflective science is already a pure science unto itself only if relation qua relation has been itself clarified beforehand. In an almost Hegelian sense, pure relation already demands a proportional and, indeed, a wholly indirect, and yet wholly bilateral, understanding of itself. And at the exact moment that consciousness reflects upon itself in the light of the genetic origination of its own intuitive sources, it is already becoming an exfoliation of a kind of sui generis bi-lateral morphology that cannot objectively and completely express itself in any final sense. We are seeking, at the level of a nearly inconceivable generality, how such expression remains possible for Formal Ontology in its sudden, fierce upswing from all material ontologies. For it is a pervasive presupposition of this work that, only to the degree we already see our mind’s retentional/protentional fullness precisely as a deepening fullness that is already heading outward toward an intelligibility infinitely greater than ourselves, can we proclaim, in the radical terseness of Poinsot, that adesse objectivity is “a unity-within-bi-lateral-duality that has become aware of itself.” Such a “very short sentence” may very well bring into focus completely, not only Poinsot’s concise resting place for logical truth, but also, as Stein has clearly shown us, a transformational and re-verifying return precisely into the selfsame inmost point of departure from which we started. Husserl and Aquinas indubitably saw (and Stein certainly became, for this truth, a warrior and an embodiment) that both the outward, more and more sublime, horizons of Truth-toward-Being and the inward deepening of the actual self, then and there judging, are pure gifts. Husserl constantly retraces the science of logic itself from its beginning sources outward. He thus tries to revise and personally reinterpret such a

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science at each step. In a telling passage from one of his later lectures on logic, he tells us: Were this pure discipline realized, we would therefore be in a position to trace every case of actual judging (in the narrow sense of actual presuming or considering-probable, and so on), as well as every case of actual substantiating, actual deductive inferring and theoretical explaining, inductive inference … and so forth, back to ideal principles and, in principle, to judge in terms of its basic normality.6

The following pages, and especially when we reach the summit of our mountain in Chap. 4, will thus be presenting an expanding series of fundamental proofs to establish that such newly viewed, adesse-like or relation-­ like (rather than inesse-like or thing-like) objectivity, together with its very own special sense of interior, propositional completeness, will forthwith provide a more extensive and secure eidetic battleground for Formal Ontology than Husserlian transcendental logic has so far provided.

Relation qua Relation We are thereby relegating a final definition of adesse to a further chapter. Nevertheless, it is at the outset incumbent upon us, as faithful followers of Husserl’s formal mandate concerning intuitive sources, and thus as mere beginning philosophers, at least to explain what we mean, generally, by this special kind of relational “fullness.” Initial ambiguity about the inmost nature of relation itself is not as harmless as it may seem. In fact, on the very first page of her monumental treatment of the notion of relation in the ontology of Sankara, Indologist Sara Grant warns us that “in highly-­ developed sciences such as microbiology, physics, linguistics, ‘questions of relation’ arise and are solved in concreto, without any need being felt to raise the basic question of the nature of relation qua relation.”7 In our current age, an age more and more tuning itself, here and there, into clouds of “big data” rather than coming to rest in pure self-­understanding, the very ease itself with which the human mind algorithmically spins off an entire series of mental relations within itself conceals from us the vagueness of our thinking about the inmost nature of relation itself, and, quite often, moves us off inadvertently onto the wrong track. For example, to precipitously claim, albeit purely theoretically, that such objective fullness has to do, Heidegger-wise, with the authentic towardness of human

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consciousness’s own emergent self-reference toward the hidden region of Being Itself may be fundamentally and perhaps even ontologically the case, but such a high-flying and wide-ranging claim, untethered to intuitive sources, will neither open up, for us as beginning philosophers, an actual point of departure nor enable us to move securely forward along the chosen pathway of proof that now lies before us. We must rather allow ourselves to be more and more drawn onward by a back and forth search into such originative “beginnings.” Our search must transmute itself into a primal search into the intuitable essence of the relational fullness of adesse that will itself unfailingly fix the limits of our new field of research.

History of Relational Fullness in the West With all this in mind, let us accordingly begin in a down-to-earth, rock-­ solid fashion. It can be shown, historically, that such a unique (and quite sophisticated) sense of relational fullness was for centuries a living part of the primal Lebenswelt of ancient Greek thought. There is even an obscure and hardly noticed attempt, in Plato’s Parmenides, to turn such fullness into a purely eidetic and yet purely objective science of its own. In Plato’s aforementioned dialog, the Eleatic philosopher, Parmenides, turns to the youthful Socrates and sums up such a new and original eidetic science, a super-ontological science precisely of “the real truth itself,” in the following words: “You must look at these world’s things in relation to themselves and to anything else which you suppose either to be or not to be if you would train yourself perfectly and see the real truth.”8 It was perhaps because of these prescient hints from Parmenides that Aristotle himself eventually became a sort of undisputed grandmaster of relational fullness. His treatment of such fullness was subsequently carried forward, by way of his invention of formal logic, into medieval thought. And it is furthermore the case that, after the rise of Nominalism and Cartesianism, such a sense of relational fullness eventually became lost in the tradition. Such relational fullness accordingly had quite natural and common-­ sense beginnings in Western philosophy. Its beginnings shine forth at first through Aristotle’s logical attempts at explicating what relation-like objectivity actually was according to the precise “whatness” of its very own nature and thus considered apart from all thing-like, and especially apart from all substance-and-accident-like, considerations.

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Indeed, such historical genesis is rooted in the originative and masterly way that Aristotle doggedly attempted, for the first time in the West, to simply allow actual relations out in the real world to be themselves in their own complete towardness to their (either real or mental) terms. Aristotle’s fearsome powers of intellect are legendary, and much scholarly work has been done in regard to his remarkable discoveries in field after field of scientific inquiry. More to the matter at hand, we even find that entire books have been written about his special conception of relation. Pamela Hood’s classic Aristotle on the Category of Relation is a case in point.9 Yet, instead of giving lip-service to his discovery of this actual relational fullness, it would be very much more to the point, and much more helpful to our tentative and upward journey of proof, if Aristotelean scholars, who wish to penetrate into the origins of this rather uncanny “sub-ontology” of relation itself, cease picking apart the linguistic vagaries of ancient Greek prepositions and suddenly begin to look over Aristotle’s shoulder precisely at what he himself saw. For very few of his famed philosophical discoveries come close to the radical and tirelessly pursued discovery of relation-qua-relation, precisely as an almost surreal unity in diversity, as well as the attendant, actually sourced discovery precisely of the bi-lateral intelligibility of this suddenly-seen, almost-otherworldly relational fullness. As Aristotle clearly explained, things move and change within such fullness, but the higher-level, and, indeed, third-level, relations thus propagated are themselves not even real enough to move or change.10 It is as if such irradiating fullness, with its own superfluity (which arrives almost as if it were a divine gift), could be “thought away” without the solidly grounded universe of substance-like and accident-like entities being affected, even in the slightest fashion. Thus, in the lived-through realm of adesse objectivity, the perfection and goodness of real things lies not merely in their own absolute, substance/accident-like reality but also in the reconfigured superabundance of their inter-relations with each other, forming, as pure gift, not just a disconnected and disjointed universe, but rather a wonderfully interactive “cosmos.” Even though Aristotle spot-checked and categorized its fullness, the special uncovering of adesse objectivity, perhaps because of such a reality’s own unsubstantiality of being-neither-substance-nor-accident (i.e., of being a towardness rather than an in-ness) lacked staying power and eventually lay dormant for many centuries. However, in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas doubled down on these common-sense discoveries when he at last systematized adesse objectivity by carefully dividing relation itself

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into real relations, mental relations, and a seminal, yet non-reciprocal, relation that was real from its base to its term but only mental from its term back into its base.11 We find all three of these ontic relations (especially the odd third kind with its almost preternatural, neither completely real nor completely mental, qualities), coming to fruition both in Aquinas’ analogia entis and in the masterly way that he used the completion and fullness of such a nascent, relational ontology at the supreme height of his theological musings both on creation and on the Trinity.

Getting Our Bearings Before continuing to trace the history of the relational fullness of adesse objectivity any further, it might be advisable to pause on our current slope and get our bearings. As we are beginning to discover, adesse objectivity can be called “something” only in regard to its ground, but it cannot be called “something” according to what it is in its own innermost nature, since its whatness is to be already toward something beyond itself. Thus, adesse objectivity can be roughly, yet uniquely, characterized as a pure “towardness-objectivity.” It is the only reality that approaches the elusive character of being itself a limit concept. Thus, existent relations are the only realities that are, by their inmost, out-going essence, completely correspondent to the ineffable exteriority of Being Itself. Borrowing a metaphor from astronomy, this exteriority is truly ontological because a towardness (such as the towardness of a similar star to a similar star) can never be a towardness to a further towardness (without imperceivably fading off into the intellectual black hole of an infinite regress). Adesse objectivity accordingly comes into its own as being ultimately diverse from the foundational subject/accident objectivity characterized as pure “inness-­ objectivity,” what we have elsewhere called inesse objectivity. And since adesse objectivity circumscribes the given field of convergent phenomenology, inesse objectivity would then circumscribe the essential, frontally situated, evidential “givenness” of Husserlian intentionality—indeed, the entire field of such objectivity as uncovered and genetically exfoliated within traditional phenomenology. And this is immensely significant for the structuring out of the final battleground form of all a priori “eidetic” sciences. For hitherto lying unseen within transcendental logic, such duality—of embedded and marginal “consciousness toward…” and the more foundational (and more Husserlian) “consciousness of…”—becomes a morphological duality defining as such, as least in outline, the entire

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domain of pure consciousness generally considered, thus demanding a rethinking of the whole ensuing field of Formal Ontology itself.12

History of Relational Fullness Continued So, let us get back on the track of our historical search, now realizing that we are henceforward dealing with, not presupposed intellectual constructions, but with proportionalities having to do with the very things themselves as transcendentally constituted in their relational fullness. The most brilliant expositor of the sui generis field of relation qua relation, after Aquinas, was Jean Poinsot. Within the widening scope of Poinsot’s logical works we find a relational fullness that has at last become fully transparent to itself. And by a single, terse stroke of genius insight, Poinsot passes beyond the final, classical ground of substance/accident ontology with the following remark: “Relation, on account of its minimal entitative character, does not depend on a subject in precisely the same way as the other absolute forms [of substance and accident], but stands rather as a third kind of being consisting in and resulting from the coordination [in time] of two extremes.”13 Relation itself is then freshly and intuitively seen, in itself, as a purely formal, purely originative, yet purely bi-lateral, objectivity. Fast-forwarding to the present day, we find that the manner of dealing with such relational fullness at last achieved its own resurrected ontological/phenomenological methodology in the twentieth century precisely within Edith Stein’s scanning glance toward a synoptic fullness that eventually included, within its scope, both the general (and purely formal) relational intentionality of Aquinas and the scientifically grounded, fully delineated, and inexhaustibly productive relational intentionality of Husserl. As the phenomenologist most in tune with Husserl and as the apprentice phenomenologist most at the living, scholarly center of the phenomenology movement as it began to spread, Stein knew—more than any other thinker of her time—that a new kind of objectivity endlessly demands a new kind of descriptive eidetic science in its wake. In her actual work, she looked neither toward Aquinas nor toward Husserl, but toward the originative grounding of her own system of thought finally standing free in its own intuitive sources. As we will see, Stein’s resurrection and use of the new kind of objectivity that such relational fullness brought to light, what we have termed adesse objectivity, inexhaustively rooted in its own

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self-luminous, unfolding evidence, expanded the traditional work-area of Husserlian phenomenology to a breadth and depth almost beyond comprehension.

Edith Stein’s Eidetic Methodology How did she accomplish this eidetic breakthrough? It was a very simple, common-sense step forward, paralleling Aristotle’s own initial step forward. And it was, indeed, game-changing. As the present author explained in Being, Relation and the Re-worlding of Intentionality: Edith Stein was able to move forward into her new area of relation-like (and simultaneously both Thomistic and Husserlian) objectivity to describe it with great clarity because she suddenly saw, with a penetrative flash of insight—and exactly as a Husserlian phenomenologist—the pivotal, forward and backward method of the originative proportionality of the analogia entis of Aquinas as already there in her own ego-life as freshly describable … within transcendental subjectivity itself.14

True to her now-famous battle cry that she was entering into the ground of Aquinas’ ontology either to be bested by him or to finally best him, Stein explains the core-power of this forthright and radical interiorization of the analogia entis as the primary, effective, and original beginning of what she eventually called her very own “philosophy system”: Thus eternal and temporal being, changeless and changeable being, as well as non-being, are ideas that the intellect comes upon within itself, for they are not borrowed from elsewhere. The analogia entis also, understood as the relationship of temporal to eternal being, already comes to light at this starting point.15

Her breakthrough was a kind of relational grid: a super-intuitive dual morphology of method. The sheer, irradiating power of her descriptive investigations into a ground for formal ontology lies in her affirmation of the transcendental constitution of precisely the co-referenced reality of what the analogia entis offers up to us and what it brings in its wake. Stein makes the ancient cosmos new again as being already toward a divine reality that encompasses everything, brings everything into a relational fullness to itself, and passes infinitely beyond. And this special, non-­ mystical, methodological fact leads us to exactly what is so remarkable

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about her synoptic work. As Stein’s friend, mentor, and colleague, Husserl, says, “Facts, in themselves evident, are patient. They let theories talk about them but remain what they actually are.”16 Indeed, what moves Stein to muster together, within her new phenomenology, the hitherto-obscure structural interrelatedness between potency-­ toward-­act and noesis-toward-noema, themselves asymmetrically opposite to each other, is, as such, irreducible even to the originative, “source-­ proportionalities” involved. Rather the grounded fullness of the paradigmatic analogy itself, between the cosmic towardness of Thomistic intentionality and the similar towardness of Husserlian intentionality precisely to the selfsame—purely intellective and thus purely spiritual—objects of consciousness, had become Stein’s sole guide. And we, standing finally within such newly seen, intuitive sources, should note that the very special temporal-toward-eternal relationship of which she speaks in the above quotation comes to light within incarnate human consciousness as a personalized fullness, a kind of completion. It is a fullness suddenly coming to rest within itself. And it is thus a starting point that opens up a vista of intelligibility that is as immeasurable as its own point of departure. It is the endless, regional scope of adesse objectivity finally becoming transparent to itself. And the point of departure, seen now as a dual morphology at the very heart of Thought, is, in a certain sense, herself. Unless this is fully and functionally understood, as a kind of key to her intellective and centralized waystation, very little of what she says concerning the Meaning of Being Itself makes the slightest bit of sense.

Notes 1. Husserl, Edmund, (1913), Ideas, translated by W.R.  Boyce Gibson, Routledge 2012, p. 115. 2. Husserl, Edmund, (1913), Ideas, translated by W.R.  Boyce Gibson, Routledge 2012, p. 80. 3. Ibid. 4. John of St. Thomas [Jean Poinsot] (1955), The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas, translated by Yves R.  Simon, John J.  Glanville, G.  Donald Hollenhorst, etc., University of Chicago Press, p. 1. 5. I am using the classical paradigm of Aristotle’s conception of continuity of substance but could just as well have used the updated paradigm of the discontinuous shift between states of infra-atomic particles as postulated within the theoretical field of quantum mechanics.

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6. Husserl, Edmund. Logic and General Theory of Science (Husserliana: Edmund Husserl—Collected Works) (Kindle Locations 1583–1586). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition. 7. Grant, Sara, (1998), Shankaracharya’s Concept of Relation, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, p. 1. 8. Sternfeld and Zyskind interpret this famed passage as follows: “This construction of abstract relational theory thus avoids the ideational duplication of a previously existing world. This achievement is like the phenomenological bracketing of the natural standpoint and the opening up of the phenomenological realm of consciousness in which existence reenters as a part of a general description of essences.” See Sternfeld, Robert, and Harold Zyskind, (1987), Meaning, Relation and Existence in Plato’s Parmenides: The Logic of Relational Realism, Peter Lang, pp. 119–120. 9. Hood, Pamela M. (2004), Aristotle on the Category of Relation, University Pres of America. 10. Aristotle, Physics, 5.2.225b,11–13. “In respect of substance there is no motion, because substance has no con-trary among things that are. Nor is there motion in respect of relation: for it may happen that when one correlative changes, the other, although this does not itself change, is no longer applicable, so that in these cases the motion is accidental.” 11. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q. 28, art. 1., corpus. Cf. Summa, 1, 13, 7; 28, 1; Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia (QDP) q. 7, a. 11. I have added the actual texts themselves below for clarity. First, the distinction between real and mental relations is set forth in Q. 28, art 1 as follows: In relations alone is found something which is only in the apprehension and not in reality. This is not found in any other genus; forasmuch as other genera, as quantity and quality, in their strict and proper meaning, signify something inherent in a subject. But relation in its own proper meaning signifies only what refers to another. Such regard to another exists sometimes in the nature of things, as in those things which by their own very nature are ordered to each other, and have a mutual inclination; and such relations are necessarily real relations; as in a heavy body is found an inclination and order to the centre; and hence there exists in the heavy body a certain respect in regard to the centre and the same applies to other things. Sometimes, however, this regard to another, signified by relation, is to be found only in the apprehension of reason comparing one thing to another, and this is a logical relation only; as, for instance, when reason compares man to animal as the species to the genus. Second, the third, hybrid, both real and mental, kind of relation is described in Q13, art 7, as follows:

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Sometimes a relation in one extreme may be a reality, while in the other extreme it is an idea only; and this happens whenever two extremes are not of one order; as sense and science refer respectively to sensible things and to intellectual things; which, inasmuch as they are realities existing in nature, are outside the order of sensible and intellectual existence. Therefore in science and in sense a real relation exists, because they are ordered either to the knowledge or to the sensible perception of things; whereas the things looked at in themselves are outside this order, and hence in them there is no real relation to science and sense, but only in idea, inasmuch as the intellect apprehends them as terms of the relations of science and sense. Hence the Philosopher says (Metaph. v) that they are called relative, not forasmuch as they are related to other things, but as others are related to them. Likewise for instance, “on the right” is not applied to a column, unless it stands as regards an animal on the right side; which relation is not really in the column, but in the animal. Both translations are taken from the online Summa and are retrieved from https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1028.htm and https://www. newadvent.org/summa/1013.htm#article7. 12. Ruddy, Jim, (2016), Being, Relation and the Re-worlding of Intentionality, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, p. 80, footnote 6. 13. Quoted in John Deeley, Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought, University of Toronto Press, 1994, p, 284. 14. Ruddy, Jim, Being, Relation and the Re-worlding of Intentionality, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, p. 6. 15. Stein, Edith, (1998), Potency and Act. Translated by Walter Redmond, ICS Publications, Washington, DC, p. 11. 16. Husserl, Edmund, Ideas, Book I, #22. (My translation.)

CHAPTER 4

Scaling the Final Mountain: Four Box-Canyons

Abstract  Using the metaphor of climbing a mountain, this chapter enters into the ethereal realm of transcendental logic and discovers four seemingly insoluble paradoxes as follows. (1) The fact that pure logic attempts to construct a theory of meaning that somehow morphs into the pure form of all possible a priori sciences. (2) The fact that pure logic “flowers forth” into eternally valid principles and laws when it actually has nothing but itself to flower forth from. (3) The fact that pure logic attempts to become an entirely spiritual domain that somehow has disintegrated into itself-as-subject over against itself-as-object. And, (4) the fact that pure logic, in its final stages, appears to be nothing but a pure, Hegel-like theory of essential relation pointing beyond itself. Keywords  Relation • Being • Truth • Edith Stein • Thomas Aquinas • Edmund Husserl • Hegel • Kevin Wall • Phenomenology • Formal logic • Transcendental logic • Ontology We have reached the final mountain. For one thing, we know that Stein read carefully through Heidegger’s Being and Time when it first came out. In 1933, in a letter to her friend, Hedwig Conrad-Martius,1 we find her, with a rare sense of her own importance as a philosopher, comparing her discoveries to the special ontologies of Hartmann and Heidegger. Eventually, all the new-found, existential © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Ruddy, The Genetic Origination of Truth-Toward-Being, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14794-4_4

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traits of Being-in-the-World became, for Stein, a Being-in-the-Worldtoward-­ God. Everything deepened endlessly. Husserlian pure object-­ consciousness as intentionality branched out and came to rest in itself precisely as it began to show itself as pointing outward toward divine subject-­consciousness as it is in itself. Because of her love for Husserl’s phenomenology, there is an unpretentious quietness in Stein’s new philosophy system. She found God, constitutively, in all that is. As we have seen, our historical point of departure in the preceding chapter was, primarily, the relational unity and fullness found within the categorical logic and, eventually, the “first philosophy” of Aristotle. It led us through scholasticism and directly into a broader understanding of the sublime importance of the new phenomenological method arrived at by Stein herself. We noted how that method expanded outward as she synoptically attempted a Thomistic/Husserlian ascent toward the meaning of Being Itself. We also set down from the very first an elusive fact—though we as yet offered no proof for it—that the intelligibility of pure logic can at last be fully seen as transparent to itself precisely to the degree that it is formally and comprehensively seen as a prepredicative “towardness” to an intelligibility endlessly greater than itself. Such a fact was brought into focus by a more grounded state of affairs, namely, that Stein assimilated the famed analogia entis into her method by elevating it and viewing it as being freshly constituted within transcendental subjectivity as such. It was as if Wall’s grid as transcendent meaning became fully operational, now as pure empowerment, within Husserlian transcendental constitution. Furthermore, the endlessly greater intelligibility in question, which Stein eventually saw as a kind of purified subject-consciousness, passes through ordinary, space- and time-bound object-consciousness and transforms everything as being somehow already toward Truth-toward-Being as both creative operation and pure gift. Thus, the adesse ground from which Stein started was almost infinitely more profound and originative than the odd, temporal ground from which Heidegger started and to which he seemed eventually to return. Heidegger also began, of course, with a firsthand dismissive rejection of Husserl’s transcendental logic. Stein didn’t. This even more grounded fact has a little-appreciated but radical and far-reaching significance. For the general thesis of the natural standpoint which she adopted, which now included an objectifiable towardness to Being and which was thereby radically altered by the possibility of a broader extension of the traditional epoche, already contained a relational fullness not found in Husserl’s

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thesis. Her own suspension of that thesis drew her that much farther forward into her radically innovative descriptive work into the meaning of pure consciousness than did the traditional suspension of Husserl. A new pure logic, precisely as an Idea of a universal ideal science, stands revealed as equivalent to a new formal ontology, within such a radius. Husserl himself had already sensed this. He states: All the noematic and mathematical disciplines just now fleetingly indicated have intrinsic unity and constitute the Idea of a universal ideal science, namely, of a science of everything that can be stated with unconditional generality about knowable objectivities in general, or, what amounts to the same thing, about objectivities in general − regardless of the particularity of their content − what is in general to be valid for them, if it in general is to be able to be said that they exist. I shall speak of formal ontology in this regard.2

This being the case, we need, in this chapter, to look more fully and thoroughly into the limits of Husserl’s pure logic as a science of unconditional generality. We will try to establish how far this generality is heading and what its limits are. Once this is accomplished, the following chapter, Chap. 5, will attempt a more formal investigation into the regions of logic uncovered within the radius of adesse objectivity itself. After a brief interlude in Chap. 6, Chap. 7 will proceed with the rethinking of Husserl’s pure logic. To look into the limits of Husserlian logic, we must begin again with Aristotle. There is a good reason for this. The serene and crafted timelessness of the proven core of Aristotle’s logic, with its forms and laws constructively embedded in full, interdependent (and purely formal) relationships, has remained theoretically established, shining forth from its own invincible citadel of truth, for 2500 years. Husserl’s “real” logic, otherwise known as transcendental logic, claims to expand outward from this selfsame, radiant core. Thus, in his 1906–1907 lectures on logic, after giving us a list of several instances of particular cases of inferences, such as that if a = b, and b = c, therefore a = c, Husserl asserts the following, far-­ reaching (yet, again, purely formal) conclusion: Wherever, therefore, the Evidenz of the correctness of a proposition shines out for us “on the basis” of the given or accepted correctness of other propositions, wherever it is at the very least evident to us that this proposition is true if the premises are true, it is not a matter of a contingent, isolated incident concerning just these particular propositions, or even this momentary subjective judgment, but always inherent to the connection made is a form

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running through the thoughts of the terms and uniting them, a form that captured in concepts immediately leads to a universal law extending to an infinity of possible arguments.3

Husserl’s forthright, anti-psychologistic assertion speaks for itself. Rooting itself in the bedrock of its own intuitable sources, it concerns an evident, powerful, and wide-ranging “form,” thus being viewed as originative out from the living core of logic in general. Its evidence seems wholly transparent. And yet the precise question to ask, and one of the questions which this chapter seeks to answer, is: How can this luminous, structurally unifying form, a form giving a kind of miraculous authentication to all conceivable cases of inference, an evidential form that leads utterly beyond itself endlessly outward toward a universal law “extending to an infinity of possible arguments,” be itself intentionally objectified (and thus “constituted” in Husserl’s sense) within the endlessly expansive work-area of transcendental subjectivity as such? If we are already “capturing it in concepts,” as Husserl says, then the form’s eidetic core-location as originative becomes, by that very fact, problematic. For a traditional phenomenologist, actual origination exfoliating out from within the natural standpoint has already been bracketed and put out of operation by the epoche. We must then ask: Is this inferential form actually residing within Husserlian pure consciousness? Or is it simply a form outside of Husserlian pure consciousness altogether? Is there a further, more expansive epoche that can uncover the full, and seemingly endless, relationality of such a form toward its own material constitution? Does the form have a relational unity of its own (in Wall’s sense)? The second that we start asking ourselves such far-flung questions, we realize that we have reached a limit-concept-like boundary beyond which thought has forced itself oddly into an area of non-thought. Actually rooted evidence of a wholly objective syllogistic form appears to be seeking a wholly formal, wholly unattainable criterion of source evidence for itself. This holds in general. For if Husserl’s syllogistic form is beyond both knowing subject and known object and, precisely at such a level, has to do with the actually-lived-through, asymmetrically mental-toward-real interrelation and final, alive unification of cognitive and non-cognitive spheres themselves, then it cannot be intentionally formulated or meaningfully understood in either sphere alone.

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It doesn’t clarify the situation to assert that the form is a special kind of relation toward a rule that implies an infinity of possible assertions. Then we would have to ask, “What kind of relation?” This book assumes that all relations within transcendental subjectivity are already problematic until we have first clarified what relation is—qua relation. Wall’s grid (of somehow neither mental nor real and somehow both) doesn’t seem to apply. As Dorian Cairns cogently remarks, “The correlation between transcendental awareness and its object … is not a ‘real’ relation, i. e. not a relation in the world, but a transcendental relation, completely sui generis, to which world categories are inapplicable.”4 If Cairns is correct, then how is one to finally interpret the core-essence of such an other-worldly relation as such? More to the point: Exactly how, without losing its meaning, can such an immeasurably expansive and law-giving, wholly eidetic “form” be transcendentally constituted within Husserlian pure consciousness at all? Is such a formal content not already miraculously and endlessly overflowing the very concepts that Husserlian intentionality constructs to capture such a content and meaningfully objectify it? The self-transparency of Husserl’s form has suddenly itself become the issue, and to put this paradox, raised by such crucial questions, in bare-­ bone terms: Can logic as normative, even the entirely self-given sphere of Husserlian transcendental logic, “intend” to go beyond itself into such a purely formal area while still remaining itself? Is there a line of thought that thought can draw for itself beyond which formal and yet non-­ constitutable objectivities themselves suddenly begin to arise? How can one think the seemingly unthinkable side of such a state of affairs? As we have noted previously, the insolvability of such a problem is similar to the insolvability of the problem that phenomenology itself faces when it attempts to confront and describe the “edge” of a visual field which can only be thus “directly” described precisely by not looking at it directly. The Husserlian, logically conscious Lebenswelt claims to be a self-given field-cluster of meaning-intentions already saturated with purely intellectual or logical “objects.” When we try to look at the above form’s state of affairs from such a prepredicative point of view, we are entering a problematic that Mohanty hints at when he asserts, “A theory of consciousness has to be a universal theory of a consciousness pointing beyond itself.”5 Is there then a new way of looking into the already-being-referred-beyonditself core of mundane human intentionality at the heart of such a Lebenswelt that can perhaps help us solve such a seemingly insoluble problem?

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Indeed, a coherent mapping-out, within the most generally conceivable landscape of Husserlian pure logic itself, of this enigmatic problem as such, with its evidential grounding in the absolute Interiority of core intentionality on the one hand and with its above-formulated Exteriority of layered ascension toward the transcendent, luminous heights of logical Truth-toward-Being on the other hand, is necessary in order to follow Husserl forward into a much larger landscape, involving a originative mapping-out, a final mapping-out much closer to his heart than was the simple spot-checking and tracing out of this or that inferential form. Husserl’s final flagship project, of course, is simply the constantly revisited project of at last reaching out beyond formal logic into an utterly new field of logic that could be explored part by part: A special field-cluster of such logical forms as the inferential form now under discussion, a field-cluster grounded securely within its own final certitude, and thus rooted in such incontrovertible evidence as might allow it to flower forth timelessly within itself (as well as within human history) for all future ages to come. For infinitely higher than the present form of inference that Husserl’s above quotation assumes and which his logical Lebenswelt demands, and infinitely higher than the living substantiation of the content of this inferential form within its own final, back and forth genesis of originative evidence traced out by Husserl, lies the wholly prepredicative, architectonic “bone structures” of the purified form of all possible theoretical, a priori sciences, an elusive, primordial mode of “super-form” that Husserl himself searched for as indefatigably as Plato searched for the ideal form of the Good. In the second paragraph of Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl invokes Plato as his guide toward such an almost inconceivably expansive project: If all science was called into question, then naturally no fact, science, could be presupposed. Thus Plato was set on the path to the pure idea. Not gathered from the de facto sciences, but formative of pure norms, his dialectic of pure ideas—as we say, his logic or his theory of science—was called upon to make genuine science possible now for the first time, to guide its practice.6

Here, then, beyond the formal speculations of Mohanty and Cairns and other Husserlian scholars, we find that we are finally set on the right track. A greater intelligibility, encompassing all other intelligibilities and moving them toward itself, now lies before us. But in this journey toward the super-form of all formal sciences, a reliable guide is still needed, a kind of

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old-fashioned, astrolabic guide that can navigationally find its way through galaxies after galaxies, and constellations after constellations, of purely logical objects in order to light up the final starry pathway toward which Plato was pointing by means of his theory of forms. For anyone looking closely at the previously cited, more and more murky issue of the transcendental constitution of inferential forms, must henceforward face some unexpectantly far-flung intellectual black holes: I am referring to clusters of “limit concepts” of the kind now being brought ultimately forward by this final problematic, a problematic precisely of the transcendental constitution of the super-form of all possible a priori sciences. Let us get closer to this new problematic by using less celestial and more earthy metaphors. Husserl’s legendary journey toward the self-­ ascertained and evidential form of pure reason as such, viewed by means of the highest possible generality as a pure theory of all possible a priori sciences, itself faces several what we have already designated by our chapter title as “box-canyon”-like impasses. There are numerous impasses, but, for the purposes of brevity, we need mention only four. 1. First of all, what happens to a viable theory of meaning raised to such an ethereal level? 2. Second, can there be a kind of earthly flowering forth of logical states of affairs that are so generalized as to have no ground even within a material ontology? 3. Third, a meaning-intention that refers outside of itself and into a pure form of all possible a priori sciences can only do so by already intending itself, grid-wise, at a higher level as identical with both itself-as-subject and itself-as-object—but how on earth can this dual, unity-in-diversity morphology of subject/object bring into workable focus such a final synthesis? 4. Finally, and fourthly (and here we glance off to the side at adesse objectivity as such), there is the almost stratospherically elevated problem of the very “whatness” of relation itself, which we analyzed both historically and, to a certain degree, formally in Chap. 3. Pure logic, and especially the new mathematical logic inaugurated by Frege and Russell, endlessly spins out webs upon webs of relations without ever clarifying the ultimate ground from which such relations proceed or the ultimate terms toward which such relations have directed themselves. We have already mentioned some of the paradoxes toward which mere inferential forms seem to lead us.

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Relation is in a class by itself, however. Let us set forth a couple of notes about some crucial problems that stem from attempts to let the actual reality of relation qua relation speak for itself. First note on the fourth impasse: This final, fourth paradox, rooted in the inmost essence of Relation Itself, is really an odd kind of universal, proto-­ paradox that seems to refract away all purely eidetic attempts to express it. It is similar to the perennial problem a neuro-psychologist has who has been trying to reductively proscribe some truth-reliability to a cluster of neural synapses in her brain and who then realizes that, unless she suddenly had two brains to start with, such already “neurological” reliability cannot hope, even given an endless eon of arguments, to postulate a transcendent, non-circular argument for its own truth validity. In the same way, elaborating on this chapter’s core-problematic of isolating out mental blockades that seem to bar the way into a pure, transcendental logic, when we climb up, slope after slope, and attempt to discover the true nature of relation as an enigmatic cluster of fundaments and terms, we suddenly find ourselves standing (returning to the earthy mountain metaphor that we started from) in an endlessly reflective and preemptively final box-canyon that itself seems, circumspectively, to be displaying a hall of mirrors from all three sides. For looked at more closely, the pure logic of Relation qua Relation, even limited to the ubiquitous “relationality” of human intentionality as spot-checked and formally unfolded by Husserl, is, at its most general conceivable level, entirely neutral both as regards its fundaments in which it resides and as regards its terms toward which it refers itself, the sets of both of which can be either finite or infinite. Can an all-encompassing matrix of “perhaps neither real nor mental” aid us in some way? To keep all this in helpful, non-neurological focus requires not two brains, but, quite honestly, a super-reflective intellectual effort that few are willing even to begin to master. Second note on the fourth impasse: Moreover, this forth impasse of logically referred relationality, seemingly caught up in its own unity in diversity, is all the more tantalizing because it seems to be leading us up into the very summit of Husserl’s mountainous project, a domain wherein everything in actu is already related to everything else in actu and yet, contrariwise, where the spaciotemporal watershed line between real and intentional relations vanishes and leaves us at the brink of an unbridgeable gulf. For is not any theory of the core-essence of Relation Itself, a theory necessary to clarify not only the entirely relational character of Husserlian intentionality

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itself but also the very interrelation of propositions that reason runs through in its journey toward a purified theory of all a priori sciences, rendered void, as theory, if both these here and now posited relations’ fundaments, as well as their exterior terms, are so abstracted and formalized as to reach to a possibly infinite level, a stratified level which, at the very least, lies utterly beyond sensible experience, especially since any actual relations that we can build from, or perhaps use as models, are already inherent to, and wholly contained within, such experience? Leaving the matter of relation qua relation aside (since we intend to return in earnest to it in Chap. 5), let us now begin to deal with these four box-canyon paradoxes (we might more feasibly call them ontological cul-­ de-­sacs) each on its own terms.

First cul-de-sac: Christening a Theory of Meaning as Nothing Other Than the Pure Form of All Possible a priori Sciences In a remarkable and powerful passage in his 1906–7 lectures on logic, Husserl equates the form of all possible a priori sciences with a heightened theory of meaning, as well as with a theory of all possible, intendable Objects-in-general (Sachverhalten), and then goes on to indicate that all this ideal, logical stuff can be equated not only with the grandiose domain of formal ontology itself, but also with a non-geometrical (and thus entirely arithmetical) “pure mathematics.”7 Two things can be said about this multi-faceted, wholly unifying and synoptic, way of viewing Husserlian pure logic. To begin with: How is one to understand the looming requirement of the eventual “meta-­ signification” of the theory of meaning itself? The present author has thought about this almost meaningless matter for many years, especially when dealing as a phenomenologist with the transcendental constitution of the odd Advaita notion of a knowledge, the knowing of which everything else becomes known. When Merleau-Ponty, in his Preface to The Phenomenology of Perception, dealt with such almost meaningless limit concepts, he found that it was like trying to formally situate a not-yet-thought-­ about “thought” entirely within a special kind of surreal, meaning-neutral landscape that we have not yet thought about at all. A figure lies in a background in such a miraculous fashion that there is no way to reverse such an actual operation in actu.

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More to the point, doesn’t one need to ask what a pure theory of meaning itself means? And is this what it means, as thus objectifying itself out into thin air, formal-set-within-formal-set, to be then itself included within the theory? If so, we then approach the impending crevasse of a dizzying infinite regress, a prospect that scared the ancient Nyaya logicians of India, and even scared Husserl so much that he limited himself to describing an intentionality’s meaning-intentions that were already fully awake. Not so Ricoeur and Levinas, who fearlessly attempted to describe, in odd detail, intentionality’s wayward, cloudy meaning-intentions as they began to face their own strange, adesse-like towardness to the Other precisely as they released all clear Witness and somehow mysteriously fell asleep and somehow mysteriously awoke from sleep. Second, Husserl’s notion of meant object is itself almost incomprehensibly broad. He tells us that “It belongs to the essence of meaning to be a proposition or component of a proposition, and to harbor within an objective content.” He then expands on this: “Every proposition has ‘objects-about’ and has predicates, relations, etc. concerning them.”8 Difficulties arise immediately when we find him saturating relations themselves with his own “meanings.” We have had portents of such difficulties above when we spoke of the thorny paradox of formulating a final theory of Relation Itself in general. By his including relations in the same breath as predicates, he faces a perplexing puzzle precisely when he mentions relation as part of a meant object. For Husserl holds fast to an equating of this already-referring-beyond-itself object-in-general with an intendable state of affairs. And yet how can he include relations themselves as being intendable along with clearly intendable objects such as subjects and predicates? Aristotelean ontology as such already saw the utter futility of doing so. Intentionality itself is prepredicatively relational, and relations themselves are not strictly “states of affairs.” As one of the most comprehensive expositors of Husserlian pure logic, Joanna Maria Tito, expresses it, the substantive, correlational “link” between S and p “expresses intentionality par excellence.” All intentionality speaks forth from itself with final clarity precisely by being prepredicatively relational at its core. Tito goes on to explain this very mystery itself (which is a kind of embodiment of Relation Itself) by telling us that the above link between S and p: expresses an ego act of actualizing an object, that is to say, of bringing it to evidence; it expresses an act of objectification. It does so more fully, that is, it is a more actualized state, than the objectification that occurs on the

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prepredicative level. This does not mean that the predicative level is “more intentional” than the initial objectifying acts of the lower, prepredicative levels, or than the still lower level of time-synthesis of the stream of experience, for, as remarked earlier, intentionality properly speaking is not restricted to any one level, but is a relation between levels.9

This mysterious, Truth-toward-Being-like, grid-like, asymmetrical “towardness” of intentionality is due to the fact that Husserl, through his acceptance of Brentano’s view of relation, sets forth and spot-checks an intentionality that still has a large amount of scholastic theories of the relational fullness of adesse clinging to its roots. As both Aquinas and Avicenna discovered, relations are not in things except as already being toward something beyond themselves. We are in an extremely odd, extremely ancient, extremely truth-refracting territory indeed when we try to parse such a “beyond themselves.” For, in the entire history of human thought, no philosopher, already expanding outward and actually referring herself toward the objectivity of this truth or that truth, has yet, in the same respect, been able to be herself toward a further towardness to something else. To use a very simple, perceptual example, when she sees an actually “there,” and thus a sensible, relation of similarity between two identical yellow pencils on a table, the only Husserlian kind of “consciousness of…” is of pencils, not of an intendable, higher, founded “object.” And this doesn’t mean that the “actually-there-between-the-pencils” relation is merely mental, but simply that its seen “towardness” must clearly speak for itself alone apart from all thing-like, rather than relation-like, S and p objectifications. As the scholastics realized, and as the present author began to realize in his many talks with Ricoeur, precision here is absolutely fundamental and a modern-day phenomenologist must be extremely careful how she wishes to proceed up this hazy, pseudo-Husserlian pathway. For it is a pathway that very often doesn’t distinguish, as does Poinsot, between mental and real relations at all. Recall that we saw in this chapter’s beginning quotation, an airy pathway of formally referring seen “things” (either intentional or real) either to each other or outward beyond themselves to “an infinity of possible arguments.” Relations are not “seen” unless they are already being seen “toward…” and this itself is precisely not a thing-like state of affairs any more. Indeed—and more importantly— anyone who knows anything about Husserlian intentionality knows that a “meaning-intention,” a noetic act which Husserl pins down and describes with irrefutable, scientific clarity, cannot be directly and formally “toward”

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another meaning-intention without nonsensical (and mind-numbing) contradiction. But this is not all. For it is of the essence of any relation, either a mental relation (such as a self-identifying relation) or an empirically real relation (simply discoverable out there in the sensible world around us like the pencils example), that, even though it cannot exist apart from the state of affairs in which it meaningfully grounds itself, a relation’s own pure “whatness” lies utterly outside of the founding state of affairs in which we find it. We shall later have occasion to delve more deeply into the diverse (and rarely articulated) way in which Husserlian pure logic must self-correct itself when it attempts to objectify states of affairs as possible empty meaning-intentions toward real states of affairs and correspondingly (at a different, more ethereal level) attempts to intuitively and evidentially objectify such utterly “non-intendable” relations themselves, whose odd essence we have above been trying to articulate—even those that Husserl would class as logical relations and thus already being “meant” as logical. Any viable theory of meaning must first solve this core-problem of what any relation (purified of being either mental or real) itself means.

Second cul-de-sac: Pure Logic Seems to Exfoliate From Its Own Purely Formal Principles and Laws; But Exactly How Can Something “flower forth” That Has Nothing Deeper Than Itself from Which to Flower Forth? Often, in Husserl, the manner in which pure logic reveals itself is what might be called self-illuminating. The upsurge of such burgeoning self-­ luminosity is almost perfectly analogous to the seemingly miraculous and ephemeral self-luminosity of interior time consciousness as it incrementally unfolds from itself as precariously straddling, level upon level, this or that actually existing now-point. Indeed, the classic expositor of Husserlian intentionality, J.  N. Mohanty, suggestively compares the utterly passive self-luminosity of the protentive-retentive intentionality coming in for a landing at the hub-center of time, which erupts and flows and flowers forth from itself without requiring a second flow in which to appear, to the Advaita notion of svayamprakasa, also called svaprakasa, terms which are both roughly translated from the Sanskrit as self-luminosity.10 J. F. Stahl speaks of this odd, poised self-luminosity of pure consciousness as follows:

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“In a suggestive comparison the self-luminosity of knowledge (jnanamsvaprakasatva), rooted in the self-luminosity of the Absolute which is identical with it, is compared to the lamp used on the stage when dance or drama is performed.” Using an epoche similar to the epoches of Aquinas, Husserl, and Stein, Stahl concludes: “The lamp illuminates the actors for the audience and the audience itself, but it shines even if the theatre be emptied of all persons.”11 In Husserl’s conception of pure logic and of the phenomenological investigations performing their prepredicative “drama” ritualistically and center stage within pure logic, everything flowers forth from itself alone, and it can seemingly flower forth within the hothouse shrine of formal ontology itself wholly abstracted away from this or that material ontology. In terms of Stahl’s suggestive example: It almost seems that, even if divine reality leaves the theater, logic’s perennial lamp still shines. Apart from all the wayward antics, unconsciously hopped-up scenarios, and overly self-­ conscious narrative dramas of our all-too-human, philosophical thought, logic can—and, as Wittgenstein tells us, must12—take care of itself. Husserl’s powerful theory of meaning, based on a formal, rather than this or that material ontology, confirms this. Husserl even gives us a simple example that makes this clear: He tells us that, when the logicians, as phenomenologists, investigate the mundane scenario of arithmetical counting: It is not counting as empirical datum of a mental nature that interests them, but counting in general, therefore specifically, and numbers in general, and the question as to how the species number stands in relation to the species counting and, likewise how meaning in general stands in relation to meaning, to presenting, to judging, in connection with which it is again of no importance at all whether the act of meaning occurs in a human or a divine consciousness and is not a question of the act of meanings being a reality fitting into actual nature.13

Here, as acolytes of such an other-worldly logic, entering from the wings into the light, we have reached at last our second cul-de-sac, what we might, recalling the problematic of the “edge” of a visual field, call the edgy, refractively glimpsed impasse of self-luminosity. For if acts of meaning can themselves be, as Husserl here seems to claim, wholly neutral as to whether they are themselves real or not real, then the crucial question to ask is, of course, how can the timeless (and formally ontological!) “meaning” of pure logic (according to its own formality of essence) flower

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forth from itself alone, especially given Stahl’s seemingly empty (and even ghostly) stage-setting? Doesn’t Transcendental Logic, in such a tragic and ethereal catharsis of all catharses, lose its own evidential self-certainty if the real human voices assiduously chanting and dancing out truths at the very center of Truth’s stage cease? A final mountain stands before us. Facts arrive from the lay of the land. And in the process of human history, and in the flowering forth of Logos, real voices, voices that wake us up, are the only voices that give us a possible logical meaning that can be then eventually grounded, and even irrefutably substantiated, by primordial evidence. The obviousness of this is often missed. Not by Husserl, however, who tells us in Formal and Transcendental Logic (p. 70), “Without the definite articulation of vague judgments by means of the sensuous articulation of verbal signs, no theory of forms, no logic whatever, would be possible—and, of course, no science either.” What we have arrived at, in our reconfigured journey toward a purely formal ontology, is important enough to repeat: Real voices are the only voices that give us a possible logical meaning that can be then eventually grounded, and even irrefutably substantiated, by the originative flowering forth from itself of primordial evidence. Such evidence lies in the miraculously leveled interstices of consciousness itself. Our first cry, given seconds after we are born, wakes us up and situates us. By it we begin to sense the lay of the land. And even though phenomenology, through its epoche, shuts out from itself all original, factual genesis, and even though eventually, through the wiles of Heidegger and Hitler, Husserl became a tragic, dislocated pariah in his own beloved country, Husserl nevertheless spoke out fearlessly concerning the worst of this world’s unimaginable losses. On the world stage, Shakespeare’s ghosts prophesy such loss much the same way that the ethereal trace of Levinas’ phenomenology of the “Face” does—as a hierophantic towardness to such loss.14 Husserl’s own besieged, prophetic voice comes across to our hearts as well, tragic (and ghostly), in Formal and Transcendental Logic: The modern man of today, unlike the “modern” man of the Enlightenment, does not behold in science, and in the new culture formed by science, the self-Objectivation of human reason or the universal activity mankind has devised for itself in order to make possible a truly satisfying life, an individual and social life of practical reason. The belief that science leads to wisdom— to an actually rational self-cognition and cognition of the world and God,

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and, by means of such cognition, to a life somehow to be shaped closer to perfection, a life truly worth living, a life of “happiness,” contentment, well-­ being, or the like—this great belief, once the substitute for religious belief, has (at least in wide circles) lost its force. Thus men live entirely in a world that has become unintelligible, in which they ask in vein (sic) for the wherefore, the sense, which was once so doubtless and accepted by the understanding, as well as by the will.15

Husserl was not alone, in his age, to express this almost irretrievable loss of synoptic wisdom. Another similar voice, a voice that eventually flickers unsteadily in human history like a lamp about to be extinguished, yet whose suddenly rising light gives us nonetheless a sure and perspicuous clarity, is the voice of Edith Stein, perhaps the only phenomenologist who understood fully the “real logic” of Husserl, understood it, that is, precisely as residing at the wise heights of (and itself wholly identifiable with) a formal ontology.16 Her own (even more greatly besieged) voice is steadiest when she speaks about the purified genesis of those very “objects” themselves viewed as contained in the reconfigured and purified form of all possible a priori sciences. Such objects, shining forth from their own relational fullness, make themselves clear, level to level, by their own objectified and serenely objectifiable irradiation of evidence: “What establishes one specific scientific discipline as an intrinsically unified and coherent whole,” she says, “setting it off from all the others, is its relation to a circumscribed sphere of objects. It is conditioned by this objective sphere and receives from it its rules and methods.”17 Thus, in the midst of all the darkly obtuse and eventually meaningless ways that modern logic has attempted to view itself, within the static matrix of its adroitly constructed symbolism, as a kind of mute, stratified, and proto-formal “meaningfulness,” Stein’s very own actual voice flowers forth and rises like a clear flame from a wick. Let us again return to it: There is indeed only one Truth but it unfolds itself to our human perspective in a manifold of individual truths which must be conquered step by step. If we succeed in penetrating to a certain depth in one direction, a larger horizon will be opened up, and with this enlarged vista a new depth will reveal itself at the point of departure.18

Stein’s actual voice could have told us a great deal more about the new, purified, and expansive logic that sustained her profound (but rarely

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heeded) investigations into the Meaning of Being Itself—both according to Aquinas and according to Husserl—if her life hadn’t been cut short at Auschwitz. Let us look more closely at the preceding quotation from Stein. The “enlarged vista,” that her voice speaks of with such passionate intensity, was the inherent meaningfulness and objectivity of a special kind of transcendental logic, passing beyond Husserl and genetically formed from both Aquinas and Husserl himself, suddenly being unified and expressed within her. The “new depth” revealed by that awake voice is the self-luminosity of her actual self being held by something greater than herself. I cannot parse such a voice, but, in line with Wittgenstein’s profound insight, I can show it: A witness, Julius Markan, tells us that, on August 5, 1942, he saw Stein at the Jewish prison-camp near Westerbork, four days before she was murdered, proceeding calmly from group to huddled group, cheerfully talking to the children because their mothers were too distraught to speak.19

Third cul-de-sac: Center Stage and Right Before Your Eyes: A Wholly Spiritual Meaning-Intention That Has Suddenly Emptied Itself Out So as to Be Identical, Hybrid-Wise, Both with Itself-­as-Subject and Itself-as-Object A few years before Ideen was published, Husserl, with increasing confidence, performs his famous phenomenological reduction right before our eyes, as it were, and, in a remarkable passage—a passage at first oddly free of his usual convoluted and difficult style—points to the resulting flowering forth of transcendental subjectivity itself precisely as it appears within the swift, genetic upsurge, proportional to its own referred Truth-toward-­ Being, a wholly eidetic upsurge of its own virtually unquestionable evidence.20 Let us follow him and look over his shoulder. First, he tells us, “I suddenly want to practice phenomenology.” Accordingly, he slowly proceeds further forward: “I still continually perceive, but I call the perceived objects into question. I bracket out the positing of reality concerning them.” He then, through a kind of humbled and refractive wisdom, reflectively turns almost endlessly inward: “I merely look toward the perception as such, not even claiming it as my perception.” At this point, everything seems to change in regard to the quite-naturally-assumed meanings of the words he himself is now using. Husserl, as anyone who has listened to him

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for years knows, has, in the live event of his performance of the epoche, lost nothing. Indeed, spectacularly, he has gained infinitely more than that with which he started: “The existence of this perception is the only thing unquestionable for me here.” Later he would add a subdued yet startlingly conclusive footnote concerning precisely that which he had actually gained: “And, at the same time, the perceived as such.” Then, after a quick look at an unfolding and philosophically dramatic series of investigable fields slowly opening up within the vast domain now appearing—fields such as imagining, valuing, feeling, and, especially, judging (since, as we have seen in regard to what makes a science a science, judging would—as does perception, the perceived—include precisely the reconfigured, here and now operational, “judged state of affairs”)—Husserl asks a very simple, childlike question that, up until then, no philosopher, not Descartes, not even Aristotle, had thought to ask: “What kind of science can I do there?” Living in the deepening, point-of-departure certainty that everything has changed, we have, in consonant and heart-felt philosophical empathy with Husserl, also arrived at a point where we must ourselves quit our own objections and begin to look over his shoulder. We must hear the real, historical voice of his own actually spoken answer as a pure gift from his heart. In a sense almost infinitely more profound than Wittgenstein’s sense, his answer was, accordingly, a final—indeed, a perfect—showing: “What kind of science can I do there? I can say This! And with the ‘this,’ or the ‘this is,’ I can express an absolute positing, a positing devoid of any transcendence.” Husserl, by locating himself within the new science that he had discovered, is clearly not voicing a lone, psychic, and solipsistic quirk within his own mind. That, at the least, would have been very unwise. Rather, the radical moving forward and self-luminous flourishing of the final results of the phenomenological epoche—taken thus wholly apart from the convoluted interpretations of that very epoche that Husserl later indulged in— is, in clear and simple stages, done in that very instant. The inimitable spectrograph of Husserl’s actual voice has accordingly, like a refocused image of all formalized sciences, moved, self-illumination-wise, through the mirrored reflection of itself directly into the very things themselves. Things themselves have become transparent to themselves. A new science has discovered itself and expanded itself, thus, thereby, in the selfsame, Stein-wise action, deepening itself endlessly at its own point of departure. At center stage, Husserl’s fully dramatic, fully philosophical persona has

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stood up within itself at last. It is at once speaking and judging in a single, revelational act, an act already united with all possible real states of affairs. And in such an indicative, shown voice we discover the super-form of a clear absolute immanence being fully experienced by itself. It is as if the world itself has become awake and can thereby, through its own relational unity of being, be given re-actualizable and originatively constitutive meaning. Yet, perhaps, we—as a bemused, enlightened audience now transfixed in front of this immense, philosophical stage-setting—should not get carried away completely. For, with our increasingly problematic series of cul-­ de-­sacs barring the way toward the final summit of transcendental logic with its core-form of all possible sciences, we would do well to question this “absolutely-posited” immanence a little more closely. In a logical paper written in the seventies, duly intrigued by Husserl’s tripartite division of pure logic (and quite in line, by the way, with Husserl’s famed rallying cry, “to the things themselves”), the present author wrote the following words concerning what could be called, at the time, the “meta-­ evidence” of such an absolute positing of pure immanence: The meta-evidence within our self-intended field of work gives to itself its own going-beyond-itself—in fact, actually gives to itself the primordial, beginning foundation of its whole area of work in a special, newly self-­ discovered way that can be re-actualized at will. In this respect, the sense in which an empirical scientist must be open to the things themselves studied is a mere shadow of the infinite sense in which a philosophical thinker must be open to the actual way in which the self-as-subject and the self-as-object unfold themselves according to the deep, over-riding sythetic [sic] unity of a self capable of intending itself as both.21

This ultimate, self-luminous synthesis, carried forward and brought into line with the recent discoveries of neuro-psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, now seems to be on the spectral verge of flickering and fading out completely. But after the purely logical, purely ontological field of Edith Stein’s new and artlessly synoptic phenomenology—what she called her very own “philosophy system”22—matters have truly deepened and changed. May we not, in perfect empathy with Edith Stein, ask, “Precisely what objective sphere has transcendental logic discovered for us?” Are we not forced, precisely by the truth itself, to ask, “How is such a tripartite, yet synthetic, unity possible?” As we have already seen, Stein is

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right there personally to help us, even at these heights. She says, “Subject and object [Objekt] are two possible forms of objects [Gegenstand]. The distinction is not logical (since both may be a logical object) but ontological. Subjectivity is the original form of spiritual object. In contrast, being a spiritual object in the sense of existing for a subject, is derived.”23 What she says is incontrovertibly true, and its truth seems to have almost crossed over the famed explanatory gap between the personalism of phenomenology and the reduced factuality of cognitive science, but this very passage itself has placed on the stage for us a final paradox: How can anything so fragile and so mundane (and so earth-bound) as to be itself thus “derived” become, in the selfsame accumulative “sense,” an absolute positing of pure immanence? Perhaps, by assuming the remote possibility of a mirror opposite of such positing, we might hope for a correspondent positing of an absolute transcendence, thus a transcendence beyond even Husserl’s Transcendental Ego? The present author used to have such simple confidence akin to Husserl’s simple confidence above. On the afternoon of Saturday, February 7, 2009, he wrote the following passage in his daily journal: In the late 1960s, I remember that a friend handed me a copy of Levinas’ Totality and infinity. I read through the book in a single sitting. Suddenly, and in the midst of my own worrisome Keyre, I had discovered saving relationships in Levinas’ thought that, by force of their insistent directedness beyond themselves, compelled me to revisit and rethink the entire field of Husserlian pure consciousness. I asked myself the following question. What if the final limit-concept, gleaned by Husserl from formal ontology, the famous, purified “something about which” (that, indeed, brings the entire region of phenomenology into focus as an utterly new science of consciousness) were quite slightly altered into an even-more-radical limit-concept of “something toward…” pure and simple. I thereupon performed the quite ordinary, and readily available, shift of attention required, and immediately realized, with the enthusiasm of an explorer’s excitement, that I had an utterly new science on my hands at the very living center of transcendental subjectivity itself! All that had, before, been available through my suddenly becoming, by the traditional epoche (and thus as a working phenomenologist), the “transcendental ego,” was still there, but a great deal more was now available for descriptive research. Looking back, I saw exactly that while living as simply the transcendental ego of general phenomenology with its constitutive activity directed to “something-about-which” objectivity, I was also a transcendental-ego-toward-something-beyond-itself with its own spe-

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cial constitutive activity directed to “something-toward” objectivity—but I knew nothing about it. To paraphrase Husserl: “In order to become aware of my true being I needed to execute a new shift of attention, a new “convergent reduction,” a new, more intense epoche-at-one-further-remove.”

Husserl’s actual statement refers to the achievement of general phenomenology as follows: “I was a transcendental ego even while living in the natural attitude, but I knew nothing about it. In order to become aware of my true being I needed to execute the phenomenological epoche.”24 Must everything depend on a slight shift of theoretical attention? If one stands in Absolute Consciousness after the epoche, how can one productively rediscover within transcendental subjectivity the frail, inescapably incarnate being of the actual, empirical, intuitably evident human self? Husserl tells us in his Ideas that such Absolute Consciousness is “shut up fast within itself and yet has no boundaries which might separate itself from other regions.” I believe Husserl would be the first to admit, however, that, if we travel inward to the hub-center of the Absolute Consciousness that grounds pure logic as Formal Ontology, there may very well be another deeper, and similarly boundless, region to discover. We may ask: Is there a “this is toward…” hidden at the core of Husserl’s “this is” that, as we saw above, marshaled in the endless appearance of Absolute Consciousness as such? Hegel can help us here. His thought radiated out from the selfsame “relational fullness” that he found in the lost tradition that we traced out in Chap. 3, the tradition of categorical relation initiated by Aristotle and brought to ontological completeness by Aquinas. Kevin Wall, himself an eminent Hegelian scholar, tells us that what was unique in Hegel’s resurrection of this tradition, reaching out from Aristotle through Neo-­ Platonism to the scholastics, was Hegel’s own personal claim to adequate insight. The [Aristotelean/scholastic] tradition admitted the same relational structure in reality as he did, although it would have said that he identified logical relations with ontological relations. But it denied that it understood much more than that the relations exist, claiming to apprehend their reality only dimly. Hegel claimed to know it deeply. He claimed to know specifically why the Nous poured itself out in the world and in the empirical self. The why for him was thus accessible to reason as it was not for Aristotle and Aquinas.25

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Let us go through Hegel’s theory of essential relation and then head toward the serene workshop of Stein to find out if, indeed, there is a boundless adesse region at the core of Husserl’s pure consciousness.

Final cul-de-sac: Relation According to Its Very Own Essence: Hegel’s Resilient and Challenging View of Essential Relation J. N. Mohanty is a profound interpreter of Husserl mostly because of his own personal understanding of the supreme and almost other-worldly uniqueness of the relationality of ordinary human intentionality, shining and flowering forth from the bracketed self/world complex, thus, accordingly, caught on-the-wing. His explanation of Husserl’s use of the word, “apperception,” makes this clear: “In every apperception, the appearance of an experience A motivates a consciousness of B in the unity of a consciousness. Consciousness of A points to consciousness of B. Every motivation is an apperception.” Mohanty then concludes to an almost Hegelian conclusion. He tells us that a theory of consciousness—and thus a derivative logic based upon it—“has to be a universal theory of the relation of a consciousness pointing beyond itself.”26 Let us look more closely at the unique kind of relationality—a relationality itself lodged, level after level, at the center of Husserlian intentionality—that Mohanty’s “universal theory of relation” discloses. For recall that we have, up to now, presented Husserl’s new logic in a wholistic view as being meaning-theory, formal ontology, pure arithmetical mathematics, pure theory of all possible a priori sciences, and pure theory of absolutely any object or any state of affairs whatsoever, either real or mental, all rolled, part by part, into one single, finally objectified (and wholly self-­ realized) logical discipline that deepens itself thus to apophatically show itself as such. If we were confounded by this logical discipline’s almost inconceivably broad and synoptic scope, we may well be equally confounded by Hegel’s unique notion of Relation. Trying to be as lucid as possible, Kevin Wall provides a helpful commentary on Hegel’s final definition of Essential Relation as found in Hegel’s Encyclopedia of 1827: The second affirmation of the text is this: Essential Relation is a totally universal mode of appearance. This statement is immediately elaborated upon.

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It means that everything which exists has existence through its being contained in a relationship outside of which it cannot exist. It cannot, therefore, be an abstraction (taken away from the relationship) or a thing for itself, but must have being in itself and reference to itself (Beziehung auf sich) only insofar as being by reference or relation to another. Relation, therefore, is its truth, and is, moreover, the unity of reference to itself and to another.27

There is, in the sudden unveiling precisely of “the unity of reference to itself and to another,” an ineffable mystery flowering forth from itself in the perfect immanence of Truth, a mystery that Stein touches on which she speaks of derived objects that exist “for a subject.” It is nothing other than the above, finally “shown,” Hegelian mystery of absolute immanence, newly viewed as precisely what the relational “towardness” of Truth-toward-Being actually implies. Hegel challenges us with a supreme, all-or-nothing kind of insight: Namely that relations, at least in the innermost sanctuary of their final and pure essentiality, simply cannot be abstractions. Beyond any conscious derivation, they are real only insofar as they are not real enough to become an eventual and formal abstraction from themselves. As they locate themselves according to their either finite or infinite foundations and as they fan out toward their either finite or infinite terms (as being what we now might possibly call spectrographically self-­ luminous), actually existent relations point primordially to very exteriority of Being Itself as it is in itself beyond all possible abstractive objectification of pure consciousness itself. They are a unique balancing act of “this is” precisely as being non-reducible to a further “this-is-ness.” And, as Wall has brilliantly pointed out, that is their Truth. By such final and strangely non-reciprocal insight, we can see that Truth, as essential relation, is Being Itself, but not the other way around. Admittedly, a relation of absolute identity that holds from one side but not from the other side back again is a difficult notion to grasp. But maybe not. As we have already seen, Aquinas, in a childlike, but heightened epoche of his own making, tells us the following: “Even if there were no human intellects, things could be said to be true because of their relation to the divine intellect. But if, by an impossible supposition, intellect did not exist and things did continue to exist, then the essentials of truth would in no way remain.”28 Thus, by his including asymmetricity (real from one side, mental from the other side back again) within the very individuality of some relations, Aquinas gave formal and purely theoretical ground for a very common experience of our human stream of consciousness. For, when we look out toward an object

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and are really related thus, so much so that we and the object are totally one in actu, yet when we try to look back into ourselves from the object, we find that the selfsame relation that was expansively and even spectrographically real outward is (simultaneously) not actually coming from the object and is thus merely mental back into itself. This simple, wholly non-­ reciprocal, and thus from out-level to in-level “fact,” that happens so often in the course of our thinking about the empirical things surrounding us, helps us to understand the final truth about the neither strictly real nor strictly mental nature of actual relations apart from our derivative experience of them. The point is that actually intuited relational objectivity, seen with that special, final evidence that flowers forth from itself alone, “shows” us how this can be the case. Relation-like objectivity, more than any other kind of objectivity, simply speaks for itself as such. And we simply cannot abstractedly parse such here-and-now-being-“voiced out”from-itself asymmetry. This holds not just with knowledge relations but with empirical relations themselves. If we intuitively “see” extra-mental relations in the empirical world around us (such as in the simple example above of the similarity of two yellow pencils before us on the table), and simultaneously realize, in the same intuitive act, that such a relation’s “absolute” coming into view and remaining before us has left the pencils themselves utterly unchanged, and see, correlatively, as if in a refractive mirror, that if the pencils do change, if we remove one of them, the relation of similarity “unchangeably” isn’t there by a kind of absolute vanishing, then we can go on from such fresh, tag-end-like insights to build our new transcendental logic in its full purity. Otherwise, we cannot. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. In fact, modern thought has lost this originative process of building up a priori sciences (such as transcendental logic) by grounding such work in sheer glimpses of empirically real, but dimly glimpsed, relations out in the world, themselves seen, as much as possible, as wholly apart from our pitifully refractive consciousness-­ building of mental relations within our own mind. Jean Poinsot even went as far as to tell us that, without the self-luminous tag-ends of such real relations as shown ground for our purely theoretical sciences, such sciences themselves would perish; in fact, he says, they would remain, in truth, mere illusory sciences.29 This very blindness is the reason why modern mathematical logic, with its p’s and q’s, simply cannot be spoken. More importantly, this blindness is the final reason that we stumble into box-canyon after box-canyon in our ascent toward a new logic beyond Aristotle’s formal logic. Indeed,

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each further attempt to complete logic itself that we, as resolute moderns, attempt to symbolically construct out into thin air—and thus without a voice and base in the non-parsable, extra-mental reality of relations themselves that surround us—will fall, eventually and hopelessly, into mind-­ numbing obscurity. We don’t have to have a mystic insight into Poinsot’s earth-bound, yet revolutionary, semiology to realize that, if there were only one red rose left in the world, no amount of mental gymnastics, matrix-to-matrix, could bring about a real relation of similarity into the world. That, only the pure gift of another actually red rose could do. To express this selfsame, and purely ontological, challenge even more forcefully: An actually existent, empirically real relation, even in its inmost essence, already, high above all thematic notions of mentally judged thesis here and mentally judged antithesis there, must include, as part of itself, an extra-mental reality as well as intra-mental consciousness-of-our-ownderived-­self or we, as modern thinkers, couldn’t have lost ourselves so supremely and aimlessly and endlessly and regressively in our merely mental conceptions of such relationality, especially our abstractive conceptions of it as subject (reference to itself) or as object (reference to another). Actual relation seen from its inmost essence alone is neither Exteriority of the Other nor Immanence of the Same. As timelessly incorruptible by our own human-all-too-human, pitiful and hall-of-mirrors-like abstractions-­ onward-­to-infinity, it includes both. It is “this” (adesse), as Husserl said of his new field of phenomenology, and it is its own, resonating-out-in-­thereal-­world “this is” (inesse).30 Thus, relation, aloof in its own ontologically verifiable whatness, stands likewise in its own ethereal unity of reference and thereby remains precisely and wholly apart from all possible generalizations that we may wish to form concerning it. It may not be able to be generalized, but it certainly can refigure itself according to itself alone. Thus, the pivot point of our rethinking Formal and Transcendental Logic is to confront modern thought with the hidden truth that if we don’t intuitively see and “let be” extra-mental (and, thus, empirically existent) relations out in the real world to start with, then Husserl’s reductive epoche, as not going far enough to bracket out even such faint realities as these empirically real relations themselves in truth are, will ultimate fail in its search for those evidentially substantiating sense investigations which can eventually become an ultimate base for the full-blown flowering forth of transcendental logic as theory of all possible theoretical disciplines. As Sankara, one of the greatest theoreticians of Eastern thought, tells us: “All option depends on the notions of human knowledge: but the knowledge

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of the real nature of a thing does not depend on the notions of human knowledge, but on the thing itself.”31 Husserl affirms the same: “Self-­ evident data are patient. They let theories chatter about them, but remain what they are.”32 The challenge for us moderns is to let relation itself “show us” its own essence, which, at ground level, is everything and nothing. In other words, everything as being already “toward…” (adesse) everything else (and, yes, even beyond that into the absolute positing of absolute immanence); yet nothing as simultaneously being purely mental (and thus purely spiritual) intentionality (inesse), thus a betweenness, as Tito says, that is already within itself—and thus which (and this truth especially seems to be equally lost from our Western tradition), essentially includes both extra-mental and purely logical aspects of itself (compare the unity of reference of act/object within each intentional description launched by Husserl) at a level of intuitive realism so exterior and impalpably beyond space and time as to be thereby itself almost impossible to spot-check and describe—even within the wholly immanent realm of transcendental subjectivity opened up for us by Husserl himself. (Perhaps it is to the advantage of Truth that I lost my very own train of thought by attempting myself to affirm the preceding sentence in its entirety.) As Stein often expresses it: Inside every human self-awareness there is always going to be the self and “something else.” And, as we have come to understand, real, constitutive transcendent relationality goes right on up out of sight. The true being of the inmost self can only be the ultimate ground for a pure logic when it is seen simultaneously, at its hub-core, as both an absolute transcendence and an absolute immanence. However, the current challenge is not how the purely eidetic science of transcendental logic can be both one and two: Can thus both be itself, as an entirely theoretical discipline, and yet also be a fulsome sharing in a divine reality that is Absolute Immanence of pure subject-consciousness thinking itself. The challenge is much more simple and down to earth. Wall expresses this absolutely crucial philosophical challenge precisely, fearlessly, and finally by telling us: (The defining notion [i.e., Hegel’s notion of Essential Relation] is this: that relation is) a reference of a thing to itself and to another. It is “Beziehung auf sich” yet at the same time “Beziehung auf Anderes.” “Beziehung” is, as it were, the subject. “Einheit” [unity] is the form. Relation is this latter. It is the unity of a reference which is bilateral.

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The conception of it is a theoretical challenge. For it demands, in order to be understood, that one first understand “Beziehung;” and then that one understand how more than one “Beziehung” can be compounded into a true unity. The defining notion [i.e., of Hegel’s notion of Essential Relation] is this: that relation is the unity. If one can understand this, then he can grasp the Hegelian concept of relation. If he cannot do so, then this concept must remain obscure for him. The challenge is clear and the terms are precisely exposed.33

Notes 1. Edith Stein/Self-Portrait in Letters, translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Institute of Carmelite Studies Publications, volume v, letter 135, page 130f. 2. Husserl, Edmund, Logic and General Theory of Science, translated by Claire Ortiz Hill, Springer (The Netherlands, 2019), p 30. Henceforth LGTS. 3. Husserl, Edmund, Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge, translated by Claire Ortiz Hill, Springer (The Netherlands, 2008), pp 20, 21. Henceforth ILTK. 4. Cairns, Dorian, (2013) The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl, translated by Lester Embree, Springer Press, New York, p. 29. 5. Mohanty, J. N., (2011) Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years, 1916–1938, Yale University Press, New Haven, p. 208. 6. Husserl, Edmund, Formal and Transcendental Logic, translated by Dorian Cairns, Martinus Nijhoff (The Hague, 1969), pp. 1,2. Henceforth FTL. 7. ILTK, pp. 50–57. 8. ILYK, p. 52, footnote. 9. Tito, Johanna Maria, Logic in the Husserlian Context (Northwestern University Press, Illinois, 1990), p. 47. 10. Mohanty, J.  N., The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl, A Historical Development, Yale University Press (New Haven, 2008), p. 264. 11. Stahl, J. F., Advaita and Neoplatonism: A Critical Study in Comparative Philosophy, Madras University Press (Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 1961), p. 102. 12. Shields, Philip R., Logic and Sin in the Writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 1998), p. 19. 13. ILTK, p. 371. The italics are my own. 14. Kallendorf Hilaire, and Claire Kurtz, “Traces, Faces and Ghosts,” in Of Levinas and Shakespeare: To See Another Thus, edited by Gold, Moshe, et al., Purdue University Press, 2018, p. 148. 15. FTL, p. 5.

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16. Stein, Edith, Potency and Act, translated by Walter Redmond, ICS Publications (Washington, DC, 2009), p. 94. 17. Stein, Edith, Finite and Eternal Being, translated by Kurt F. Reinhardt, ICS Publications (Washington, DC, 2002), p.15. Italics are the author’s own. 18. Ibid., p. 1. 19. Hamans, Paul, Edith Stein and Companions on the Way to Auschwitz, translated by Sr. M.  Regina van den Berg, Ignatius Press (San Francisco, 2010), p. 83. 20. ILTK, pp. 216–217. 21. Ruddy, Jim, “Can the Judgment, ‘God is the Perfect Actualization of Pure Thought,’ be Fulfilled?” Indian Philosophical Annual, Volume 7, Madras University Press (Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 1971), p. 129. (Note: Search for this article under the Dominican religious name, “William Ruddy.”) 22. In a letter to Roman Ingarden, Stein speaks of her special philosophy system as an interdependent “give and take between Thomas and Husserl.” See Stein, Edith, Potency and Act, translated by Walter Redmond, ICS Publications (Washington, DC, 2009), p. xxviii, footnote. 23. Stein, Edith, Potency and Act, translated by Walter Redmond, ICS Publications (Washington, DC, 2009), p. 123. 24. The Paris Lectures, translated by Peter Koestenbaum (The Hague, Martin Nijhoff, 1967), p. 15. 25. Wall, Kevin, The Modern Mind, pp.  27–28. I want to thank Dominic Colvert for sending me this soon-to-be-published work, taken from Wall’s Nachlass. 26. Mohanty, J.N., Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938, Yale University Press (New Haven & London, 2011), p. 210. 27. Wall, Kevin, Relation in Hegel, University Press of America (Washington, DC, 1968), p. 10. 28. Aquinas, De Veritate, Question One, Art. 2, corpus. 29. Poinsot, Jean (John of St. Thomas), The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas – Basic Treatises, translated by Yves R. Simon, John J. Glanville, and G. Donald Hollenhorst, The University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 1955), p. 309, 608. 30. See the first paragraphs of Chap. 5 for a complete definition of these Latin terms. 31. Grant, Sara, Sankaracharya’s Concept of Relation, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers (Delhi, 1998), p. 36. 32. Husserl, Edmund, Ideas, Book One, Section 22. 33. Wall, Kevin, Relation in Hegel, University Press of America (Washington, DC, 1968), p. 11.

CHAPTER 5

At the Summit: Definitions and Something Else

Abstract  Returning to the idea of a subsidiary eidetic science of relation-­ like, rather than the frontal, thing-like, objectivities of Husserlian phenomenology, this chapter defines the following three sets of terms: the limit concepts of adesse and inesse, the corresponding concepts of adesse objectivity and inesse objectivity, and the proto-epistemological notions of subject-consciousness and object-consciousness. Using these definitions as a guide, the chapter then proceeds forward, basing itself on a seminal passage from Stein’s Potency and Act, to attempt to understand precisely what Stein means when she speaks of “the self and something else.” Keywords  Relation • Being • Truth • Edith Stein • Thomas Aquinas • Edmund Husserl • Kevin Wall • Phenomenology • Formal logic • Subject-consciousness • Object-consciousness • Ontology • Convergent phenomenology

Introduction of Terms We have come some paces forward in our attempt to establish our central thesis, namely, that, hidden behind, and grounding, Stein’s ontological division, between finite and eternal being, lies a redeeming and constitutive phenomenological division between Edmund Husserl’s pure object-­consciousness (otherwise known as intentionality) and the pure © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Ruddy, The Genetic Origination of Truth-Toward-Being, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14794-4_5

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subject-consciousness of God as outlined within the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Secondarily, of course, we began to see the need for a logical ground for convergent phenomenology as a new eidetic science of relation-like objectivity. Chapter 2 helped us to orient ourselves both in the ontological arena and in the phenomenological arena—especially over against Kevin Wall’s notion of the relational unity of being itself. In Chap. 3, we spent some time with the historical background of the concept of relational fullness, and we introduced a preliminary, yet workable, notion of adesse objectivity as a possible aid in our project of rethinking Husserl’s transcendental logic. In Chap. 4, as we proceeded forward up our final mountain, we were confronted with some formidable box-canyon-like cul-de-sacs. This was due to the problematic that arose when we attempted to ascertain if logic, especially the powerful Transcendental Logic that Stein carried forward past Heidegger, can become more fully itself by setting its sights, not only toward a new theory of meaning or a new pure mathematics or a new theory of objects themselves, but even toward the self-­ luminous heights of the pure form of all possible a priori sciences. We were helped along the way by the following clue: relations, either mental or real, or even asymmetrically both, become more fully themselves to the precise degree that they are already completely beyond themselves as already heading outward toward something else. Perhaps this very clue can help us toward a purely formal definition of adesse objectivity itself. Let us look more closely at this clue. Recall that we suggested that there might be a new way of looking into the wholly asymmetrical (thus real out into its object, mental back into itself) core of mundane human intentionality at the heart of the Husserlian Lebenswelt. In the back and forth, intermittently prepredicative world of such a Lebenswelt, logic itself constantly discovers self-given meaning-­ intentions already saturated with purely intellectual or logical “objects.” This hardly-ever-reflected-upon fact, lodged in the prepredicative stance of Husserl himself, thus a fact itself not yet being viewed from either the natural standpoint or from the phenomenologically reduced standpoint, can perhaps help us out of our perplexity. We must ourselves, as frail beings, see our way clear in order to discover the intuitive sources precisely of the formal, boundless realm, lost in the tradition of Western culture for centuries, of adesse objectivity itself. Recall that we also became aware (somewhat the way that an abandoned stage becomes aware of the ghostly voices of its vanished actors) of

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the prime necessity of resurrecting, clarifying, and deepening some dimly understood “traces” of a new theory of the essence of Relation Itself. In our struggle to find our way, we had to make use of Aquinas’ rarely-­ averted-­to and little-known distinction between what he called adesse, as a being already toward, and what he called inesse, as a being already in. Kevin Wall, in an unpublished paper entitled, simply, “Relation,” tells us precisely how Aquinas came to such a notion: Aquinas … distinguished relations into real and mental and, the real into the category of relation and that sort which he called transcendent order (respectus transcendens) and which later philosophers came to call transcendental relation--the order of accidents to substance, of matter to form and form to matter, and the order of the matter/form compound and the essence/existence compound to the prime cause. And he noted, with respect to the category of relation, that it is peculiar in that it alone of all the accidents takes its nature from its order to a term. He thus distinguishes inesse (the fact of being in a subject) from adesse (the fact of being to a term). Inesse it shares with all other accidental being. But adesse is peculiar to it alone. Thus, the specific nature and the reality of quantity and quality both come from their order to the subject in which they are found. But while the reality of relation comes from the subject in which it is found, its specific nature does not. In its specific nature it is simply order to something else. If this is in thought and only in thought, then the order is mental. If it is in reality, then it is real.1

As promised, and using these classical clues, let us now proceed forward to define, as clearly as possible, not only the unfamiliar concepts of adesse and inesse (1.1), but, more importantly, the attendant notions consequent upon such concepts. Such attendant notions include adesse objectivity and inesse objectivity, and subject-consciousness and object-consciousness.

Defining the Relational Limit Concepts of adesse and inesse In the first place, since consciousness, taken in its most general possible sense, is a “relation” toward a meant object, let us define the special, relational limit concepts, inesse and adesse, and their correspondent objectivities (see Sect. 2.2). Although we find scattered treatments of relation in Aristotle, Avicenna, Scotus, and others, Thomas Aquinas was the first

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Western philosopher to take formal notice of the odd fact that the special category of relation, or ad aliquid, is unusual in that it alone of all the accidents takes its quiddity or nature from its ethereal ordering outward into a term utterly diverse from itself. Aquinas, as Kevin Wall affirmed above, “distinguishes inesse (the fact of being in a subject) from adesse (the fact of being to a term). Inesse it shares with all other accidental being. But adesse is peculiar to it alone.”2 Therefore, within this current author’s view (which is the view of a traditional, Husserlian phenomenologist) as well as within the bygone region of Aquinas’ special thought-world (which was also this current author’s thought-world for several years while obtaining a Master’s Degree in Sacred Theology), these two notions of adesse and inesse are, as unearthed from tradition (and as thus succinctly defined), themselves endlessly more fruitful limit concepts than the more grounded limit concepts of act and potency, which, as such, remains, primarily, within the inesse paradigm. Furthermore, precisely within the a priori realm of Husserlian phenomenology, these two notions of inward in-being and outward toward-being, as thus rescued from oblivion and perforce clarified and lifted up beyond a phenomenologist’s traditional, reductive bracketing, are themselves, by equal reason, endlessly ascendent above the more grounded limitations of the accident/subject (and, deeper than that, the form/matter) aspects of noesis/noemata as employed paradigmatically within Husserl’s static and genetic descriptions of consciousness. By reason of such ascendency, and once the notion of the relational unity of being becomes functionally operative within convergent phenomenology, all such co-referenced states of affairs are brought into much clearer focus. As it stands, such formally constituted, dual aspects of noesis/noemata, viewed as aspects of Husserlian transcendental subjectivity, were founded aspects which Edith Stein, especially in her final theoretical investigations, often transcended and remained beyond, primarily by means of her profound and elevated view of the absolute, experiential, wholly genetic “ground-view” of the passive, founding constitution of the flow of time consciousness.3 By their utter exteriority, and by the nearly inaccessible height at which the far-flung “super-realm” of adesse itself encompasses and enlivens and stabilizes the ontological interplay of Aquinas’ analogia entis, these special limit concepts of adesse and inesse, as above defined, carry within themselves the awesome, unfolding, genetic power to lead us, while still within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, beyond all box-­ canyons and finally upward toward the ineffable reaches of the pure act of existence itself.

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The divine reality spoken forth with such formal strictness by Thomas Aquinas becomes “shown,” but almost completely unspoken, within the transcendental intersubjectivity of Edmund Husserl. I have used the word “almost,” because, in a revealing analogy while talking with his friends, Husserl declared (“in effect,” as Cairns tells us) that the problem of transcendental constitution “is, as I have said to Herrn Dr. Fink, none other than the problem of how God created the absolute world, and continues to create it, even as the transcendental Intersubjectivity creates its world.”4 For Edith Stein, Husserlian transcendental constitution cannot be understood except as wholly originative in both an inward and an outward sense. For this reason, I would like to hazard a guess that it was Stein’s steady familiarity with the logical contexts of both Aquinas and Husserl that enabled her to employ the leveled objectivity of both inesse and adesse—not so much directly, but certainly intuitively and spontaneously— in her stratified approach toward Absolute Consciousness and, eventually, toward the meaning of Being Itself. Origins count. Stein was constantly attempting to understand how the full “self” of human consciousness (as identifiable with the realm of the Same and the realm of the Other) could ever begin to set itself in motion, at once inwardly and outwardly, toward the necessarily objective truths that pure logic itself had to transparently master in order to constitute itself, in a purely formal sense, as a true, a priori science. It is also possible that Stein was, within such an originative, almost super-genetic method, aware of the odd asymmetry of these real-toward-­ but-merely-mental-in “reaches” of epistemological strata which become themselves uncovered when one uncovers the final, layered realm of adesse/inessse. Clearly, she worked eventually within these functionally assumed, purely eidetic layers with a method that was quite her own. Her way, as well as Wall’s way, leads us directly into convergent phenomenology itself. Origins matter, even for pure logic. Stein’s new method was not only, ab ovo, purely genetic rather than static, it also achieved, through a transcendental constitution of referred adesse, a dialectical form of what the current author elsewhere in this work calls “asymmetrical elasticity.” By doing so she was harking back to a bygone, but phenomenally rich, philosophical tradition. Recall what we said in Chap. 3: In the seventeenth century, Jean Poinsot, in his semiotic masterpiece on material logic, a work that defined and classified real, mental, and hybrid relations (the last being, even as single relations, real out toward their terms, but merely

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mental back into their foundations), declared that adesse is an extraordinary and ethereal “third realm of being,” beyond both substance and accident, thus with an indirectly proportional grid all its own. In this he was simply elaborating on Aquinas’ profound systematization of what might be called an innovative “sub-ontology” of Relation Itself, taken in its pure essence as such. Aquinas, of course, as the classic virtuoso of relatio in the Western philosophic tradition, even went so far as to actually apply the neutral, neither substance-like nor accident-like (and neither matter-like nor form-like) characteristics of adesse to the actus purus essendi itself.5 Viewed philosophically rather than theologically, this little-appreciated, stratospherically layered, onto-epistemological “fact” which Stein herself assimilated helps us to understand the sustaining power of Stein’s high-­ stake descriptions of divine, angelic, and human pure consciousness, which otherwise could be rightly dismissed as mere fruitless and fake intrusions, into orthodox phenomenology, of an inappropriate theological bias. Indeed, it was Stein’s clear and thorough familiarity with Husserlian pure consciousness that enabled her to see divine, angelic, and human consciousness, as non-theologically (and thus philosophically) interrelated, almost as if they were themselves synoptic and proportionally interrelated “domains” within a new, higher logical framework that newly worked from the top down, rather than working, as does our current mathematical logic, from the bottom up. As we have above noted: origins matter. Thenceforth these transcendentally constituted strata could be viewed within the epoche as asymmetrically (and humanly) constituted adesse—and newly describable as a higher, more purified realm of Husserlian transcendental subjectivity. This super-eidetic realm becomes especially paradigmatic for Stein in regard to non-embodied, yet still created, consciousness, and it is brought into vivid relief by her having already positioned the analogy of being of Aquinas as centered within Husserlian pure consciousness as, mutatis mutandis, a matrix that made available a completely new realm of transcendent objects for phenomenological description. It is now becoming more understandable how Stein’s genetic sense of socially intersubjective embodiment, founded by her work on empathy and set over against such an ethereal realm, retains the blossoming of its own incarnate mystery much more powerfully than the more earthy, fluid, perceptual sense of this-worldly embodiment that we find in Merleau-­ Ponty. Indeed, through her analysis of such a special, purely eidetic knowledge domain in Question Eight of Aquinas’ De Veritate, she came to see

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that such knowledge can be described wholly within phenomenology, neither as either embodied nor as non-embodied but simply as transcendental constitution of a newly meant objectivity (henceforth seen completely as nothing else than a kind of innermost unfolding of transcendental subjectivity itself) and thus, as evidentially grounded in its own intuitive sources, able to be described from its own source-origin outward. In other words, described as being, if not experienced, at least simply, humanly meant within her new theory of meaning. Theologically, it matters whether angels actually exist. Philosophically, it does not, but it certainly matters whether created, non-embodied subject-consciousness can be given transcendent and eventually transcendentally constituted meaning, perhaps within some higher possible domain of truth. Enough said, and perhaps we should leave it at that. Or perhaps this objectivity is (see Sect. 3), as Wall makes clear, a special adesse objectivity: A stratified objectivity of infinitely deep, pure “self-essence-toward-existence.”6 In Stein’s hierarchical, paradigmatic framework, angelic knowledge comes into itself perfectly through a genetic fruition infinitely deeper than human knowledge,7 since it knows itself truly, already (and perfectly) as a “to-ness,” a spiritual branching out or heading out toward the actus purus essendi as it is in itself. It is a perfect paradigm of a real relation wherein, viewed apart from existence or existent consciousness, nothing else matters but its “self.” Later we shall attempt to explain how this selfsame, self-luminous interplay of inner essentialism and outer existentialism BECAME, within the grounded source evidence of ABSOLUTE IMMANENCE, the full hub-­ center of Stein’s new synoptic method.

Defining the Proto-constitution of inesse Objectivity and adesse Objectivity As we can now begin to understand, the fact that Husserlian phenomenology flowered into a pure, a priori science of essences takes on a new meaning for Stein’s tripartite, noetically layered, Thomist-Husserlian methodology. We can also begin to understand how imperative it is to archeologically resurrect the wholly epistemic power of the lost tradition of relatio precisely according to the self-unity and full relational completeness that such a tradition implies. That lost tradition became functionally theological but, as such, remained theoretically philosophical, concerned as it was with nothing else than the innermost essential nature of relation itself in its full being out toward its term. Why is this important in our

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current journey of proof? Recall the Husserlian static and eventually genetic metamorphosis of both “substance” phenomenologically viewed as “concrete” and “accident” phenomenologically viewed as “abstract.” We, as faithful Husserlian phenomenologists, must now consequently reckon, mutatis mutandis, with two kinds of correspondent, “pure” objectivities, stemming from the above co-referential limit concepts of inesse and adesse: inesse objectivity, now defined as the exclusive object of traditional (primarily static) Husserlian phenomenology as an a priori science, and adesse objectivity, now defined as the exclusive object of an utterly new, yet subalternate, wholly genetic phenomenology, itself, by equal reason, an a priori science also. (Remember, a purely Husserlian mantra tells us: A new objectivity equals a new a priori science.) Edith Stein worked seamlessly within both levels of objects. And, although she didn’t codify it as such, the genesis of this new, more expansive phenomenology is paradigmatically exemplified in Stein’s ground-­ breaking, wide-ranging treatment of the newly co-referenced thought-worlds of both Husserl and Aquinas, coupled with her doubling down into a full identification of Husserl’s new logic with a new, wholly formal, ontology. We must henceforth see both motions as one motion. This treatment should rightly be viewed according to the sublime and operational manner according to which what she called her new “philosophy system”8 suddenly gathered together—within the formal light of their adesse-like interdependence as “shading” into each other (and streaming forth from Stein’s own ultimate, genetic interiorizing precisely of the balanced proportional co-referencing of the analogia entis)—both the classic intentio-objectivity of Aquinas, with its corresponding logic, and the modern, purely-scientifically-viewed, endlessly-open-ended intentionality of Husserl, with its own corresponding transcendental logic. Viewed thus ab ovo, both kind of objectivities come into their own as instances of “general” intentionality itself, now understood as relation qua relation. Her miraculous doubling down became, as it were, a single view out onto the newly converged realm in question. Her new elasticity of method thereby opened up, once and for all, an incomparably richer, almost infinitely broader, phenomenological (and, thus, scientific) field of able-to-be-­ newly-described, genetic material. And, as we are now beginning to see, at the core of this burgeoning, genetic material lay the almost inconceivably wide scope of adesse objectivity itself. What she described out from this core, now fully understood as the core of an entirely new a priori science, speaks for itself.

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Defining Subject-Consciousness and Object-Consciousness In the third place, let us carefully and precisely define the terms, subject-­ consciousness and object-consciousness. It must be understood that, when Stein entered into the spacious, layered thought-world of Thomas Aquinas, she found that his lifelong, wholly un-reflected-upon, epistemic Lebenswelt included God, and, infinitely down below God, angels, and, infinitely down below angels, humans. He simply lived in, and was encompassed by, this immense, hierarchical (and interdependent, yet non-­ reciprocally interdependent) stratified, three-tiered world-view all his life. His entire epistemic Lebenswelt, built up, as we saw in the previous chapter, from the mysterious, genetic non-reciprocity of Truth-toward-Being, already presupposed this tripartite thought-world and rested upon it. And whirring like a gyroscope at the intricate center of such a layered, grid-like world view was the fulcrum of the famed indirect analogy, not between things but between whole, proportionally viewed, interdependent states of affairs, both real and intentional/rational. Thus, not as a theologian herself, but quite strictly as an orthodox phenomenologist, Stein wrested, from this almost inconceivably vast, asymmetrically layered thought-world, the following, purely phenomenological, and yet decidedly twofold, genetic schema: Subject-consciousness: able to be newly described as a reduced-consciousness (which could possibly be both uncreated-as-divine and created-as-angelic) now transcendentally constituted and meant as a pure consciousness that, as wholly real, returns completely into itself by knowing itself infinitely, and Object-consciousness: likewise, an able-to-be-newly-described, reduced-consciousness, shading into the former consciousness, now transcendentally constituted and meant as a pure consciousness, interdependent and synoptically, though non-reciprocally, joined with the former as pure adesse, that is itself set in motion by exterior objects and accordingly admits of a temporal, fallible, wholly mental (and thus incomplete) return into itself. What must here be fully understood is that such a seemingly mystical division is not in the least theological but instead wholly epistemic, wholly a priori. As such, it saturates and elevates the entire domain of pure logic itself. As we shall see, this dual, monumental, co-referenced objective sphere of her suddenly stratified transcendental subjectivity is based on what she viewed, in its originative form, as a kind of meshed interplay of the outer and the inner raised up to its own functional plateau. It was almost as if the

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cosmos itself, viewed as pure gift, became a final waystation toward the infinite. Charged with such a new logical life, and placed on such a new level, it thenceforth gave a broad, prepredicative basis to an altogether innovative and fruitful phenomenological “work-place,” a worldly workplace akin to Heidegger’s and thus entirely genetic rather than static. It was, in consequence, a perfect ground for a new, transcendental logic. The exact way in which she centered her investigations into the high constitution of time consciousness as including, but rising above, the schema of noesis/noemata, eventually guided her, in her remarkable journey, into that meticulous and tireless, and often quite difficult to follow, description of the interdependent, yet asymmetrical, adesse of potency-toward-act that she conducted in her later works. Yet the setting in motion of the balance wheel of such a unique method, itself lifted beyond both subject-­ consciousness and object consciousness (and thus layered within her phenomenology as encompassing both), gains power and even constructive impetus primarily from Stein’s deliberate and radical appropriation of the analogia entis. For her, it was no longer merely being used as a hermeneutical–ontological tool helping us to speak analogically, and not merely equivocally, about God. In the superabundance of adesse objectivity, it was rather being used as a kind of immanent strata of proportioned relationships newly meant and almost preternaturally self-constituted within Husserlian pure consciousness itself. Relation as somehow neither mental nor real, and somehow asymmetrically both, became constitutive and thus, to that degree, able to be finally and transcendentally constituted within outermost reaches of the phenomenological method. She indeed, as she would have perhaps eventually phrased it, “bested” Aquinas in this respect at least. As a result, the total super-encompassing of Aquinas’ thought-world by her newly stratified phenomenological method puts in abeyance and out-of-play precisely the inesse objectivity (as well as the flowering of its intentional horizons) of that very world itself, at least to that extent. Such a world is no longer judgmentally available as a natural-standpoint thought-world, and not even as a phenomenologically available, and purely static Husserlian thought-world. In other words, the inmost Lebenswelt of that world, now within the brackets of epoche, retains its own special “to-ness” to the Truth but only as here-and-now-­ being-transcendentally-constituted, adesse objectivity. It became a silent part of herself. If this is not thoroughly and faithfully understood, then most of what her new “philosophy system” says about Aquinas’ classical ontology of potency and act makes neither Thomistic nor phenomenological sense.

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Positioning Stein’s Special Eidetic Method: Asymmetrical Elasticity Finally, in the fourth place, let us make clear, by means of an example, precisely what we mean when we say Stein used an “asymmetrical elasticity” of method. This odd phrase simply refers to a kind of asymptotic, methodological non-reciprocity which allows her to move, with supreme dialectical ease, through the layered intricacies of Aquinas’ purely logical/ ontological notions of genera, species, and the individually real—in order, as a faithful phenomenologist, to quite accurately describe their outward and inward dual constitution (or, better, “proto-constitution”) within pure consciousness. For example, in what seems initially to be an utterly mind-numbing passage in Potency and Act, Stein employs this pure elasticity of method with an almost spell-binding attention to detail, as follows: This already settles the question: the individual whose individuation principle does not lie in the species is not absolutely actual. So what sense is there to ascribe actuality to it at all? For one thing, we can describe it negatively; I mean, in contrast to the species that is not individuated [individuieren]. The being of the species in individuo [in the individual] is different from the being of the unindividuated species, and the potential being of the species is the possibility of having being in individuo wherein it is fulfilled. If we had to call the being of the species in individuo "potential" for including the possibility of nonbeing, this potentiality would in any case be different from the potentiality of the unindividuated species. We ought also to ask how these two potentialities differ. One difference is that the relation between them is asymmetrical. One being, viewed from the other, appears as the real [eigentlich] being at which the other aims.9

Thus the asymmetrical relation that she is finally pointing out, by means of her newly attained method’s precise, and entirely descriptive, genetic power in the above passage, is not at all being presupposed as part of Thomistic ontological theory. It is, for the first time, being wrested from his thought-world, spot-checked and faithfully described entirely within Husserlian pure consciousness. Indeed, it is being described as a wholly genetic rather than static (yet non-reciprocal in the special sense that we have above unfolded) towardness already residing in what might be called the “exteriority-horizon” of Being itself as such. Never forget that the frailness of adesse is a pure self-reference toward the ineffable exteriority of being itself.10

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Because we are no longer traveling within the box-canyon-bounded terrain of inesse objectivity, we now have absolute ground to proclaim that transcendental logic itself stands or falls as being either grounded or not grounded within such a fresh description. The form being described in this description is thus the “special towardness” of a single flowering, wholly self-luminous as such, and viewed thus, within the extended boundaries of her new epoche, it constructively and functionally (and completely) delineates the final, definitive adesse-constitution of Husserlian genetic intentionality at its own most-general-possible level.11 As Aquinas himself notes, all creation itself is relation, pure and simple. Stein sees this wholly, and even within the traditional epoche, she is, in a flash of insight, able to unfold Husserlian intentionality as asymmetrical: Real outward but merely mental back into itself, thus allowing such intentionality to become wholly itself as it is in re. If one re-reads the last sentence of the above-quoted paragraph, suddenly viewing it as an intended meaningfulness constituted then and there by Stein herself, one can see the alive elasticity of method coming into sudden, vibrant (and suddenly definitive) focus. She is standing in a new life.

From Interplay to Fülle The entire range of originative (and truly philosophical) “interplays” found both inwardly and outwardly, in the realities thus defined in this chapter: subject-consciousness and object-consciousness—as well as adesse and inesse, together with their respective objectivities—may hopefully enable us to proceed further forward to ground convergent phenomenology as an a priori science. Along the way, we may also discover whether a new and quite remarkable formalism of method, as ground for a new transcendental logic, can be found hidden within the freshness and fullness of Stein’s genetic system.

A New Mountain: Along Stein’s Way Toward a Genetic Transcendental Logic From Phenomenology to Pure Thought Clearly, as Stein glanced upward toward Aquinas’ philosophy, which had as its scientific object all possible adesse-like interdependencies of the human intellect’s acts—toward each other and outward toward an ultimate

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end—she must have at last realized that, rising up from the bracketing out of such a classic science, lay the vast, ascendant, phenomenologically reduced arena of additional, objective material, itself now wholly available and able to be offered up, through such a final, shading-into-each-other interplay, to authentic, orthodox, phenomenological description. Interplay-of-Method, Exemplified in a Passage in Potency and Act Where Stein Is Searching for a Mountain The way toward such a higher realm may very well lie in what Stein famously called the human mind’s own originative and empirical/intellective experience viewed as “an interplay of the outer and the inner,” respectively, what we have spoken of above as a living and wholly functional form of asymmetrical elasticity. Crudely put, noesis morphs itself out into a wholly spiritual identification with the real object while simultaneously, in the selfsame act, snapping back into the semi-essentiality of the noema of the object. “Outer” and “inner” are in fact the terms that Stein herself uses. Thus, we should perhaps begin to employ, at the start, precisely the expansive, dialectical freedom of interplay between static essentialistic Sameness “within” and genetic existential Otherness “without” that Stein herself employed. Hopefully it will become an eventual guide to finding the actual (and thus freshly describable) up-surging genesis of the higher realm in question as a perfect ground for Husserl’s transcendental logic. Such a methodology is a personally unique methodology, itself set in motion by this dual, and yet interdependent, core activation of outward and inward intentionality as such, bringing the base intentionality of Husserl suddenly into her own quite radical and lively availability of a final, utterly pure, descriptive yet theoretical achievement. As Stein forcefully expressed this inner inesse and outer adesse, “my spiritual living is in both together.”12 Accordingly, using Wall’s relational grid, at that point where it is seen as a vibrant and unique human to-ness pointing directly beyond itself toward a higher “subject-consciousness,” it can become a clear and luminous path toward the as-yet-mostly-untraveled reaches of Husserlian logic precisely as a purely formal, wholly a priori, science as such. This originative and prepredicative, exterior/interior “interplay” in question comes into singular focus in a remarkable, descriptive, two-­ paragraph passage from Stein’s Potency and Act. Here is the first paragraph:

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I am traveling in a mountainous region unfamiliar to me. Some time before I arrive at my destination something appears on the horizon. At first I cannot tell what it is, whether it is a cloud or a mountain peak. Soon sharply defined contours take shape; it is the mountain, and my journey's end lies at its foot. During my stay I learn more and more about the mountain. On my walks I come to see it from all sides; its form and color reveal themselves in all their different aspects. I learn what sorts of rock it is made of, what kind of forest covers it, what flowers grow on its slopes. From the summit I look out in all directions and from other places. When the time comes to leave, the mountain has become familiar and dear to me, and later whenever I hear its name it is as if I am reminded of an old friend.13

A Preamble to Stein’s Use of Interplay Methodology Now before we proceed to the second paragraph in order to see exactly how Stein uses this powerful, artless image of an appearing mountain to reveal, with a final flourish, the veritable core of her methodological interplay, a few things should be understood. For Stein, human object-­ consciousness becomes eventually what Aquinas used as a kind of hybrid adesse: at once actual and yet intentional: simultaneously real outward into its object, yet wholly mental back into itself. Put more technically, adesse reality itself, in its quiddity or essence, is, to that degree, the only mode of Being that floats above both substance-as-Husserlian-concrete and accident-­as-Husserlian-abstract; it is to that quite astonishing degree formally constituted as neutral in respect to whether it is real or intentional: Somehow, it can be neither and it can be both; and being thus wholly neutral in respect to its very own inesse (since its quiddity is to be “toward” rather than “in”), the hidden core of its own inmost essence remains additionally neutral both in regard to the ground in which it resides (which can be either finite or eternal) and the object-consciousness-transcending term toward which it might here and now direct itself (which also can be either finite or eternal). Keeping all this straight requires an immense effort of thought. Yet this very stratification is quite relevant to Stein’s re-working of her new method within both Potency and Act and Finite and Eternal Being. For the deeper Stein entered into the thought-world of Aquinas, the more it became clear to her that conscious adesse, as transcendentally constituted within the brackets of the phenomenological reduction as what we have called adesse objectivity simply IS relation, IS already somehow beyond the static and immanent inesse of Husserlian pure consciousness and already heading toward the vast exteriority of Being Itself. It is

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genetically at the very point of suddenly revealing itself as uncreated subject-­consciousness, and, accordingly, as the selfsame absolute immanence that Husserl pointed out as “this.” This very situation, thus CONSCIOUSLY revealed, calls for a new phenomenological science. It is Stein’s life-breath: All of this eidetic unfolding had its own immediate-­ yet-­ theoretical, diastole-systole genesis in an outer/inner interplay of Stein’s new genetic method. For, as Stein well knew (since she had learned it from Husserl himself), where there is a new objectivity (in this particular case: adesse objectivity) there also can be seen, newly appearing and rising up from within itself into a living and breathing pure form, an altogether new science. Let once more meditate on Wall’s helpful mantra now itself less a truth and more a kind of Wittgensteinian “showing”: “The act of thinking is relative to Relation; everything but the act of existence is relative only to essence.” (Wall was a firm believer in Poinsot’s “very short sentences.”) The Interplay Methodology in Stein’s Own Words in the Second Paragraph of the Passage About the Mountain Once such a high and purely intellective outpost of Relation Itself is understood in a workable way, and thus perceived as neutral both as to its ground and as to its term, we can see exactly how Stein, broadening the above metaphor of the unfolding perception of a mountain, is led by the truth itself to proceed forward in the next paragraph to “show forth” such an image to lucidly explain her own unique and alive Interplay, in other words: Her fiercely dialectical (and genetic) non-reciprocity of method. Such non-reciprocity, akin to adesse itself at its highest reaches, is either philosophically seen in a purely spiritual act of orthodox intentionality or it is lost utterly. For it is an originative non-reciprocity that rounds out the logical structure of her prepredicative states of affairs that are here and now being phenomenologically described by including, with ultimate simplicity, the “ego-life” (Ich-Leben) of a here-and-now “SHOWN” objectivity of orthodox pure consciousness while yet expanding beyond it. In a special addendum to the seeming inexhaustibility of her new mountain-­ metaphor, an addendum itself carried over into the next paragraph, we find a striking conclusion that itself sets into relief her entire “philosophy system.” Let us listen carefully as Stein reflects quite simply and starkly upon the coming-into-view reality of a mountain as follows: “My initial contact was quite simple: I notice a change in my field of vision. There is

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something over there! What is it? There is an interplay of the outer and the inner. Something outside—the change or something new appearing—stirs me inwardly and sets me in motion.”14 And there we have the heart of her special, interplay method as pure, spiritual life! For in this simple observation of an almost graphic core-­ interplay within the heart of her immediate perceptual experience, we have the upswing of a vivid clue that can eventually disclose Stein’s forceful paradigmatic and genetic interplay of outer and inner as a powerful and figurative kind of “setting of the purely formal towardness (as adesse) of the inmost self’s ‘ego-life’ in motion.” In the field of philosophy, most of all, such personal origins matter. And to the degree that it is rooted in human object-consciousness as inesse, the adesse (or the “toward-Being”) of the intellect’s prepredicative (but—most especially—suddenly [and personally] free and thus even valuational15) acts can always further be viewed as already “out beyond themselves,” heading outward thereby to find their own deep source in an elevated architectonic groundwork for an entirely new formal science. The joyfully investigated mountain described in Potency and Act has become entirely self-transformative as an ascent to the Meaning of Being Itself in Finite and Eternal Being. A Validation of This Special Interplay Method Coming from Edmund Husserl Himself One either sees, as sudden insight, this fierce interplay as purity of method and sees it along with Stein herself (and thereby follows her gaze toward what she is then and there pointing out), or one simply dismisses her entire onto-phenomenological work as simply misdirected and radically obscure. For this deepening, elastic Interplay, of the both actual and mental “membranes” of genetic pure consciousness, which originate from the above passage, grew to become a passionate part of her philosophical life. It elevated her to the role of innovator within the wide gamut of the more famous followers of Edmund Husserl. Husserl himself called attention to Edith Stein’s own quite unique, non-reciprocal dialectics of method. It was an approach centered within her instinctive, perennial, and rigorous search for the final and wholly immanent source of objective truth, an originative search of hers that she, more than any other phenomenologist, carried out utterly “ab ovum.” Husserl, more than any other friend, saw this genetic interplay as a new method. Many years after Stein had departed from her assistantship with him, we find Husserl reflecting

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on a recent photograph of her that a friend gave him. He then sums up his formative years of collaboration with Stein as follows: “It is remarkable— Edith stands on a summit, so to speak, and sees the furthest and broadest horizons with amazing clarity and detachment, and simultaneously, she looks in another direction within herself with equal penetration.”16

Notes 1. See the Preface to this work, endnote 13. 2. Kevin Wall, a brilliant expositor of relation in the Thomist tradition and the author of Relation in Hegel, is here pointing out a kind of prepredicative division of the quiditas of relation that he found in Aquinas and that seemingly resides in an epistemological thought-world itself neither ontological nor phenomenological. It is accordingly a radically final, watershed division that passes, stratospherically, beyond the seemingly final ontological division of potency and act. Wall’s words are taken from an unpublished article, entitled “Relation.” The article seems to be a short, first draft of an essay with the same title. See the preface to this work, endnote 13. 3. Not only did she master, more than any other phenomenologist, Husserl’s inmost thoughts on time-consciousness, but also her entire study of the human sciences is done from this elevated, synoptic viewpoint. See Edith Stein, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, edited by Marianne Sawicki, translated by Catherine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki, ICS Publications (Washington, DC, 2000), pp. 7–8. 4. Cairns, Dorian, Conversations with Husserl and Fink (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1976), p. 23. 5. Aquinas, Summa, Question 28, article 1, corpus. 6. Stein saw that adesse gave ethereal yet objective scope for the so-called transcendentals of matter-toward-form, potency-toward-act, substancetoward-­accident, genus-toward-species, and, in regard to the wholly intellective case in question, essence-toward-existence, which, newly viewed as the perfected “self-towardness” of angelic knowledge already referring itself outward toward the very exteriority of Being Itself, became the prime analogate for eventually understanding the other lesser and derived coreferences, especially the co-reference of noemata toward noeses, at a much deeper level. Her immediate, dialectical insight into all these eidetic strata is direct and profound: “Subjectivity,” she tells us, “is the original form of spiritual object. In contrast, being a spiritual object in the sense of existing for a subject is derived.” Edith Stein, Potency and Act: Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being, translated by Walter Redmond, ICS Publications, (Washington, DC, 2009), p. 123.

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7. It is the assumed but unspoken insight of Aquinas that one single thought-­ world of angelic subject-consciousness is almost infinitely more real and more creative and more unified than the sum total of all possible human thought-worlds, past, present, and future. Stein lived in this assumption, and thus lived (as a realist!) within the transcendental constitution of such leveled consciousness as newly meant by herself. 8. Stein indicated, in a letter to Ingarten, September, 1932, that she had finally entered into an expansive, utterly new, eidetic area of work, which she called her own “philosophy system.” It was a system that at last enabled her to discover a radically new, multi-leveled phenomenological methodology that allowed her to survey the findings of both Husserl and Aquinas within the sweeping purview of a single, unified, intuitive, purely theoretical (and hence purely methodological!) glance. Edith Stein, Briefe an Roman Ingarden, 1917–1938, Edith Steins Werke, vol. 14W xiv, Freiberg, Basel, Vienna, 1991, letter 152, p. 226. 9. Edith Stein, Potency and Act: Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being, translated by Walter Redmond, ICS Publications (Washington, DC, 2009), p. 55. 10. What is accordingly (and almost miraculously) being thereby exfoliated, as primal genesis, upsurges and flowers forth from itself both as real adesse toward the actus purus essendi of Being Itself and equally (and simultaneously) as mental adesse descending and coming to rest within its own luminous fullness (the word that Stein would use here is, of course, Fülle). It, as individual, is being suddenly described simultaneously as both itself and as a to-ness to God. 11. Intentionality, as such, in its full essence and thus neither from the Thomism side nor Husserl’s side, is thus already derivative, already strangely (and humanly) reflexive as a hybrid relation: real toward “object,” merely mental as “act.” For Stein, intentionality is pure spiritual reality because, in the flexible asymmetricality of here and now intending the object, the intellect in actu suddenly becomes nothing but the spiritualized object in actu. She was the first phenomenologist to actually see this, and, as we can tell from the above passage, to faithfully describe what she then saw. 12. Stein, Edith, Potency and Act: Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being: The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 11, ICS Publications 2009, p. 148. 13. Ibid. 14. Stein, Edith, Potency and Act: Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being: The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 11, ICS Publications 2009, p. 148. 15. Enter ethical formalism itself as part of the dramatis personae! 16. Posselt, Teresa Renata, Edith Stein: the Life of a Philosopher and Carmelite, ICS Publications (June, 2012), p. 18.

CHAPTER 6

An Interlude: Along Stein’s Way

Abstract  By delving very briefly into her journals and religious works, this chapter tries to direct itself toward the interior character of Stein and her own personal attitude toward the deeply contemplative life that she eventually chose to live. Keywords  Relation • Being • Truth • Edith Stein In the minds of many Husserlian phenomenologists, Edith Stein’s conversion to Catholicism set her off on the wrong track and rendered suspect her eventual ontological/phenomenological discoveries. This book has attempted to set things right. We have seen that, in a single stroke of genius, Stein incomparably and endlessly expanded both phenomenology and transcendental logic. She did this by showing exteriorly that the pure intelligibility of both is encompassed, in actu, by a divine subject-­ consciousness and by showing interiorly, and in the selfsame motion forward, that phenomenology is able to reconfigure its methodology utterly and miraculously and effectively through the radical, transcendental constitution of the analogy of proportionality, especially in respect to relations that are real outward but merely intentional inward. Before we proceed to Chap. 7 in order to show the effects of her method on the ground of pure logic uncovered by Husserl, let us pause and talk about Edith Stein herself.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Ruddy, The Genetic Origination of Truth-Toward-Being, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14794-4_6

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Stein’s contemplative life resounds with the mysterious conception of the “something else” that draws her serenely forward. She tells us in The Science of the Cross that whatever ascends to the divine reality “descends, by that very act, into its own center or resting place.”1 Faith, for her, is “of itself a spiritual being and therefore movement: an ascent to ever less conceivable heights and a descent into ever more immeasurable depths.”2 Both ascent and descent are a single motion forward of the full self. As being held (and as constituting itself as being held) by something greater than itself, there can be no more expansive ground for the essence of a purely genetic formalism, a cryptic formalism that branches forth into a final, a priori science. For Stein the pure form of all possible a priori sciences is a kind of baffling auto-affection similar to Malibou’s sense of auto-affection. Malibou tells us: “Auto-affection is the subject’s originary ability to interpellate (sic) itself, to solicit itself, and to constitute itself as a subject within the double movement of identity and otherness to itself.”3 Thus, Stein’s asymmetrically outward/inward method, as it moves forward toward something infinitely beyond itself, is precisely an integral (but urgently personal) genetic reconfiguration of everything that she had philosophically accomplished up to that point. Accordingly, its conscientious reach becomes eventually and timelessly productive at last for the full enterprise of traditional, Husserlian phenomenology itself. It encompasses, through such pure, spiritual empathy, the Other of transcendental intersubjectivity in such a way as to revitalize the Same of the almost solipsistic transcendental subjectivity of Husserl’s earlier system. Thus, transcendental intersubjectivity is finally revealed in its inmost essence as somehow holding individual ethical values within itself. It thereby branches out, in a Levinas-like manner, into that most rare of all sciences: A kindly, unpretentious science that tells us nothing—down from its timeless summit—unless it speaks about itself from within itself. At the risk of being misunderstood, and using one of her favorite words, one might say that divine subject-consciousness is, for Edith Stein, “bested” by the divine will and becomes an unfathomable ground for all time to come. Interdependent upon subject-consciousness, it is equally primal. She tells us that a philosopher, a true lover of wisdom, “must get down into the grounds themselves and grasp them. And this means that the grounds must grip him and best him in the sense that he decides to accept them and retraces within himself the path the other followed from grounds to conclusions, perhaps even going beyond him.”4

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That selfsame steadfast ground was the very place Stein then stood when, on August 2, 1942, the Nazis raided her cloistered convent. According to one witness, she whispered to her sister, Rose, “Let us go for our people.”5 The transcendence of her moral spirit, being perforce wholly and courageously held within such a primal resting place, had clearly become her very life. Suzanne M. Batzdorff, Stein’s niece and a devout Jew, has always contended that, if the Catholic Church canonized her aunt for being a martyr at Auschwitz, they should have canonized “all six million.”6 We can only guess what Stein herself would have thought of such a matter. Prophetically, nine years before she was arrested, Stein wrote the following in her journal: It was the eve of the First Friday in April, and in this Holy Year 1933 the memory of the passion of Our Lord was being observed with particular solemnity everywhere. At eight o’clock in the evening, we arrived for the Holy Hour at the Cologne-Lindental Carmel. A priest (It was Father Wüsten, Vicar at the Cathedral, as I learned later) gave a sermon and announced that from then on this worship service would be held there every Thursday. He spoke beautifully and movingly, but something other than his words occupied me more intensely. I talked with the Savior and told him that I knew it was His Cross that was now being placed upon the Jewish people; that most of them did not understand this; but that those who did, would have to take it up willingly in the name of all. I would do that. He should only show me how. At the end of the service, I was certain that I had been heard. But what this carrying of the Cross was to consist in, that I did not yet know.7

Notes 1. Stein, Edith, The Science of the Cross, translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., ICS Publication (Washington, DC, 2002), p. 154. 2. Ibid., p. 112. 3. Catherine Malibou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, Fordham University Press (New York, 2012), p. 42. 4. Stein, Edith, Potency and Act: Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being: The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 11, ICS Publications 2009, p. 3. 5. Lyne, Pat, Edith Stein Discovered: A Personal Portrait, Gracewing, Hereforshire, England, 2000, p. 87. 6. From a conversation the present author had with Frau Batzdorff. 7. Posselt, Teresa Renata, Edith Stein: The Life of a Philosopher and Carmelite, ICS Publications (June, 2012), p. G2. Italics are my own.

CHAPTER 7

At the Summit Waystation: No More Box-Canyons

Abstract  This chapter returns to the realm of transcendental logic in order to find out what happens when such a wholly formal, wholly purified logic begins to point endlessly toward an intelligibility infinitely greater than itself. It eventually becomes clear that, in Stein’s view, the trifold view of logic that Husserl proposed (a rudimentary morphology of judgment, a logic of non-contradiction, and a logic of truth) becomes overshadowed by, and even constitutively realized within, the trifold view of object-­ consciousness, created subject-consciousness, and uncreated subject-consciousness. Keywords  Relation • Being • Truth • Judgment • Edith Stein • Thomas Aquinas • Edmund Husserl • Phenomenology • Formal logic • Transcendental logic • Ontology

Prolog: Transcendental Logic as Avasan̄ a Our guide in our ascent up into the mountainous regions of convergent phenomenology, as a wholly a priori science of the inmost essence of Relational Being, has been the almost cryptic asymmetry of Truth-toward-­ Being, in other words, adesse objectivity itself in its own fullness and completeness. Living now in the Everest of this rarified air, we should now attempt to ask a final question: What happens to the absolute ground of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Ruddy, The Genetic Origination of Truth-Toward-Being, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14794-4_7

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transcendental logic at the moment that it begins to point outward toward something infinitely greater than itself, namely, the subject-consciousness of God as it is in itself. Sankara, dealing in the eighth century with the problem of a relational, yet somehow non-reciprocal, identification between Atman and the human self, had to deal as well with the selfsame cryptic asymmetry. As a faithful and brilliant master of the scholastic logic of the East, Sankara proclaimed that, when human knowledge comes at last to the truth, it is like arriving at avasāna.1 This is a Sanskrit term that the Indologist, Sara Grant, tells us means “a place where the horses are unharnessed.” Avasāna, more generally, can also mean a place where one builds a complete and permanent dwelling. Sankara, in this striking metaphor of a waystation on the way upward toward Reality Itself, indicates, as does Husserl, that theological notions of divine causality have no place in a purely human ascent to absolute knowledge; instead, all human knowledge needs thus to come finally to rest in avasāna, whereby we can unharness ourselves from the sacred, iconic, representational help of piecemeal images in order to let things simply be themselves. Only then can we arrive at the summit of Being Itself. His words on this point, though almost Kantian, are the words, not of an ephemeral idealist, but of a solid realist: “No option is possible as to whether a substance is to be thus or thus, is to be or not to be. All option depends on the notions of human knowledge: but the knowledge of the real nature of a thing does not depend on the notions of human knowledge, but on the thing itself.”2 The stance of absolute knowledge thus finds its ground less in the realm of substance/accident and more in the realm of intentional unity and the special, asymmetrical towardness of act/ object. Such a waystation of realism is also a waystation for Husserlian phenomenology precisely viewed as transcendental logic. As we have already noted, Husserl himself echoes the levelheadedness of Sankara when he tells us: “Facts, in themselves evident, are patient. They let theories talk about them but remain what they actually are.” With all this firmly in mind, let me end this prolog on a cautionary note: Empirical relations, actually existing out in the world around us, are not able to be simply theorized away as some sort of endless, entirely mental cloud of algorithms. As we saw in the example of two similar pencils on a table, they retain their own factuality. And their essential unity in diversity is constitutive. We should keep this in mind as we revisit the avasāna of Husserl’s logic.

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Introduction: Fact and Method The first half of Formal and Transcendental Logic comprises five chapters. Chapter 1 stratifies formal logic into three levels, the level of judgment morphology, the level of a logic of non-contradiction, and the level of truth-logic. Chapter 2 uncovers the controversial yet immensely fruitful affinity between formal logic and formal mathematics, thereby, through a special understanding of the famed “theory of multiplicities,” enlarging the former into a full-blown mathesis universalis, vindicating a return toward a purely formal ontology of “any object whatsoever”; the one-­ sidedness of universalization through species and difference becomes accordingly bolstered and even complimented by mathematical “formalization.” In Chapter 3, this entire process of expansion culminates in the ascendancy of formal logic into a perfect self-realization of itself, no longer restricted by the study of various formations within theories, but rising up to become, by its active living at the intelligible core of deductive science, a pure theory of all possible theories. Chapter 4 affirms a synoptic fact, a fact that Stein, more than any other of Husserl’s followers, made the centerpiece of what she called her “philosophy system,” namely, the fact that sense investigations into the transcendental constitution of meaning grounding a formal ontology of Being Itself are identical with the entire scope of formal logic as such. Chapter 5 gathers all that proceeded in order to finally refocus, in a new way, back into the three levels of formal logic that appeared in Chapter 1. It should be clear by now, in respect to Husserl’s tripartite stratification of logic, that Stein’s functional vision (of human object-consciousness, created subject-consciousness, and uncreated subject-consciousness) is not just a theological glitch in her phenomenological method, but rather that it “shows” us something in Wittgenstein’s sense of showing. One must then simply understand that, in its ascent, each level of logic (the level of judgment morphology, the level of a logic of non-contradiction, and the level of truth-logic) encompasses the previous level and passes endlessly beyond. If you look over Husserl’s shoulder and see this asymmetric boundlessness, actual outward but somehow logical or intentional back inward, you will thereby eventually penetrate to the inmost hub-­ center of transcendental logic itself. Otherwise, Wall-wise: If you don’t, you won’t.

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The Threefold Division of Logic in Aquinas and Husserl: A Comparison Accordingly, situating himself within the changeless and timeless citadel of Aristotelean formal logic, Husserl begins Chapter 1 with a stratification of logic into three levels: a rudimentary morphology of judgment, a logic of non-contradiction, and a logic of truth. This at first glance bears resemblance to the famed scholastic division of logic into the tripartite hierarchy that we find first in Aristotle and then, in a more sophisticated form, in Thomas Aquinas. Such a hierarchical stratification shows a motion of the plodding multiplicity of human object-consciousness moving forward into the simplicity and perfection of subject-consciousness through three gradated levels with the second founded on the first and the third founded on the second—each of which can only be intentionally (i.e., mentally) related back to that which precedes it. The source of this tripartite hierarchy is ingenious in its simplicity: for such a hierarchy starts from the simple apprehension of objects at the word level, proceeding infinitely upward to judgment (what Aquinas terms “composition and division”) at the declarative sentence level, and then proceeding, again infinitely upward, to theoretically reasoned, syllogistic discourse at the level of what Aquinas calls ratio. The analogy of proportionality reigns supreme at each level. In such a classically ontological view, truth enters the picture at the second level, thus ensuring that something of the person’s inmost ontological self is suddenly and transparently declaring itself toward reality, thus actively enabling the self to become itself in a new way, in a way that is somehow already related outward toward the things around the self, that are themselves only mentally related back to it. Accordingly, the special, originative fashion in which words are interrelated to form judgments bears not a back and forth (and thus constructively direct) similarity, but only a non-­ reciprocal, analogical similarity to the ineffable (and now clearly spiritual) fashion in which judgments are themselves interrelated within the lofty discourse of ratio. Although he would be in agreement with Husserl that philosophy is an endlessly open-ended, infinite task of purely theoretical reason, Aquinas is, in a very real sense, already working somehow beyond Stein’s and Husserl’s formal ontology, thus rising from the core-base of metaphysica generalis (dealing with Truth, Unity, Goodness, Relation, and Being itself) infinitely upward and outward toward metaphysica specialis (dealing with God, angels, humans, animals, plants, and stones).

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Looking more closely, we find that Husserl’s tripartite division is strikingly different than the above simple and tripartite division. It is not just that Husserl has remained in Aquinas’ first two levels and opened up a novel third level called the truth level. And it is not that he has collapsed the second and third level of Aquinas’ structure into one structure. What Husserl has actually done is endlessly more profound. Suzanne Bachelard attempts to explain this upswinging sea-change of motion from a logic of non-contradiction outward toward a final, third-level “truth-logic” in the following seminal passage: In truth, nothing substantial is acquired with a [third-level] formal logic of truth. Properly speaking, a new domain is not explored. Only the perspective of examination is changed. New thematic interests emerge. It is a question of exchanging “the theoretical focusing on mere judgments for the focusing on cognition” (65), that is to say, the attitude in which one is interested not only in judgments considered in themselves, but also, by means of them, in a cognition of the object.

The formal ontology of any object whatsoever, radiating out beyond all possible material ontologies, has thus opened up, somewhat the way that adesse objectivity opens up, an expansive realm to think about which, clearly, we have not thought about yet. This is a revelational opening up of a new view into the a priori science of formal logic itself. It is akin to the sudden, reductive opening up, accomplished by the epoche, of an utterly new field of investigative material, itself comprising the constitution, at last, of the absolute immanence, perfectly fulfilled, of subject-­consciousness as it is in itself. Bachelard completes her analysis by backing everything up with the following, quite astonishing claim: Hence a change of focus is called for when we pass from the logic of non-­ contradiction to the formal logic of truth. Furthermore, only reference to the corresponding subjective modes of evidence can truly ground the separation between these two disciplines. Hence, in this subjective investigation, the superiority of truth-logic to the logic of non-contradiction can be appreciated. By attaining the formal logic of truth I do not know more—I am in another way.

No wonder Stein saw both an openly infinite horizon and infinite deepening of the very departure of the inmost self toward that horizon.

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Thus Bachelard’s “I am in another way” is not an epiphany of some purely formalized cogito ergo sum. It is not even a sophisticated reworking of formal logic outward into such a formalization. Rather it is precisely a fresh, new stance to be taken at the uttermost pinnacle of traditional formal logic itself. Instead of just telling us, as did Aristotle and Aquinas, the solitary fact that the soul, as potential intellect, is “in a way, all things,” Husserl’s third strata of a purely formal logic of truth proceeds further inward and thereby gives us a startlingly self-enclosed, utterly new, and revolutionary method, a method beyond a Cartesian horizon, a method, indeed, animating a new science of sciences: A realm of possible judgments potentially able to be fulfilled by any objects whatsoever, irrespective of whether they are finite or infinite. When we enter the avasāna of this new realm, and when we let ourselves be moved along by the very lay of the land, we begin to understand that to judge is already to judge both self-wise and meaningfully, in a single, go-for-broke act, in order to know, by such absolute immanence, the inexhaustible concreteness of reality itself. As Husserl himself says: Now the judgments are thought of from the very beginning, not as mere judgments, but as judgments pervaded by a dominant cognitional striving, as meanings that have to become fulfilled, that are not objects by themselves, like the data arising from mere distinctness, but passages to the “truths” themselves that are to be attained.3

This passage given us a hint of the even more self-enclosed metamorphosis of Formal Logic into Transcendental Logic, to which Husserl was a witness. Such an eidetic morphology of one’s inmost self reminds one of the inspired lines of the poet, Jimenez: “I have a feeling that my boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing. And nothing happens. Nothing. Silence. Waves…. Nothing happens? Or has everything happened? And are we standing now quietly in the new life?”4 The new life of Transcendental Logic is nothing other than phenomenology itself precisely because it becomes the first philosophical, a priori science to speak about itself from within itself.5 What has occurred is a sudden opening up of the frail, yet somehow absolute, transcendence of adesse objectivity. For what was inesse as a wholly ontological fact in Aquinas, rooted in what he called a conformity, or, more precisely, a purely spiritual “likeness,” embedded within itself at the level of intentio secondo (a “this” in Husserl’s sense), has gained new

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life and become, in perfect freedom, a back and forth elastic interplay of method (a “this is” in Husserl and Stein). An almost infinite gap has been bridged. Put again rather crudely: The otherness of logic has encompassed the pole of the self, polarized the self within itself, and passed endlessly beyond, enabling the very elasticity of the self the “towardness-ability” to somehow “catch up.” Finally, the relational unity in diversity of Kevin Wall begins to make lived-through sense. Above we saw that, in Aquinas’ view, truth enters the picture at the second level of declarative judgments, thus allowing for the deepest possible flowering forth of the person’s inmost self-toward-Being, fundamentally enabling the self to ground itself in order to become itself in a new way. Aquinas explicitly notes that the nature of the true consists in a conformity of thing and intellect. Nothing becomes conformed with itself, but conformity requires distinct terms.6

Thus also, the “something else” of Edith Stein begins to make lived-­ through sense as well. With his profound insight into what real and mental relations actually entail, Aquinas has fashioned, on the fly, a kind of preternatural foreshadowing of Hegel’s notion of essential relation that we arrived at in Chapter 2, where fullness of life and fullness of logic are one simple fullness. In Stein, the term used to express such settled towardness is Fülle. Aquinas continues: Consequently, the nature of truth is first found in the intellect when the intellect begins to possess something proper to itself, not possessed by the thing outside the soul, yet corresponding to it, so that between the two— intellect and thing—a conformity may be found. In forming the quiddities of things, the intellect merely has a likeness of a thing existing outside the soul, as a sense has a likeness when it receives the species of a sensible thing. But when the intellect begins to judge about the thing it has apprehended, then its judgment is something proper to itself—not something found outside in the thing.

Within the new purview of Husserl, such a living fact as the correspondence theory of truth has now surged forward into the synthetic a priori of the pure truth of formal logic at an infinitely higher level and has acquired thereby a new, wholly scientific, wholly theoretical, method. Stein brought this new method to perfection.

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Stein’s Arrival at the Theoretical Consummation of Truth-Logic Stein’s method “bested” (and thus refocused) Aquinas’ bald declaration that, in knowing truth, the mind has “something proper to itself—not something found outside in the thing.” For her, there is already a kind of dramatic interplay going on between the mind and reality. For her, mental reflection inevitably and endlessly entails both self and “something else.” There literally are no boundaries at all to truth-logic. We have already had occasion to remark on this fruitful interplay of outer and inner horizons when we analyzed Stein’s reflection on the nature of Truth Itself in her masterpiece, Finite and Eternal Being, a reflection which prompted her to immediately and forcefully set forth the core of her new logical method according to the following insight: “If we succeed in penetrating to a certain depth in one direction, a larger horizon will be opened up, and with this enlarged vista a new depth will reveal itself at the point of departure.”7 Undeniably she knew exactly what she was doing when she pressed forward, as a faithful Husserlian phenomenologist, to claim the entire realm of formal ontology as a vast, newly workable “logic of truth.” Truth was her passion, and in her epic translation of Aquinas’ De Veritate, she had already decided to head toward truth as a courageous warrior might, trying, as she herself expressed it, to “best or be bested” by both Aquinas and her mentor, Edmund Husserl, whom she always referred to as “Der Meister.” But how did she start out on such a personal quest? Recall Stein’s description of the famed, sought-for mountain that we analyzed in Chapter 3. Recall, also, that the paragraph following the description is crucial to fully understanding Stein’s new method, a method based on the fact that even pure and naive self-reflection is already thinking about something other than the self. For the paragraph in question, by reflecting on the idyllic scenario of the preceding paragraph shows that, like a refocused and immensely more fruitful analytic of Dasein, seemingly following (and, somehow, eternalizing) the seminal lines from Bachelard above, “By attaining the formal logic of truth I do not know more—I am in another way,” Stein herself is searching not just for a mountain, but for an entire philosophy system, a system of the dual interplay of meaning that resonates endlessly between Truth and Being, a system beyond her colleague, Husserl, and even beyond her more formidable colleague, Heidegger. Here is the paragraph again:

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My initial contact was quite simple: I notice a change in my field of vision. There is something over there! What is it? There is an interplay of the outer and the inner. Something outside—the change or something new appearing—stirs me inwardly and sets me in motion.8

Looked at carefully, this passage, even with its mirror-clear simplicity, is not at all a psychological description of a perception or even of some real, psychic experience. Rather, especially by the phrase “something new appearing,” the passage, similar to Heidegger sense of Being as already coming to meet us, instead grounds itself in the perennial wisdom of Truth-toward-Being and suddenly finds itself speaking out of the formidable core of formal ontology itself. The “something outside” that she has so strikingly cornered and spot-checked is the same non-reiterable, somehow wholly exterior, state of affairs that Husserl speaks about in the following passage from Chapter 2 of Formal and Transcendental Logic: Every work of cognition is a multiple and unitary psychic activity in which cognitional formations originate. Now, to be sure, external Objects too are originally there for us only in our subjective experiencing. But they present themselves in it as Objects already existent beforehand (Objects “on hand”) and only entering into our experiencing. They are not there for us, like thought-formations (judgments, proofs and so forth), as coming from our thinking activity and fashioned by it purely (not, perchance, out of materials already at hand and external to it). In other words: Physical things are given beforehand to active living as objects originally other than the Ego’s own; they are given from outside.9

Standing in a new life, with the entire cosmos of things already “on hand,” we can finally ask a quite crucial question: Why is formal logic, as wholly purified and viewed, through the mathematical lens of a theory of multiplicities, as formal ontology, able to be nevertheless unitarily viewed as being somehow miraculously and originarily generated from the “outside” in such a fashion? We are given a clue by what Stein calls, in the above passage, an “interplay of the outer and the inner.” Calling it such clearly resonates within the methodology that we have spoken of as being a kind of asymmetrical elasticity. Again: Crudely put within the framework of Husserlian transcendental subjectivity, noesis morphs itself out into a wholly spiritual identification (in actu) with the real object (precisely what Stein calls “Something outside—the change or something new appearing”), while simultaneously, in the selfsame act, snapping back into the categorial essentiality of the noema

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of the object. “Outer” and “inner” are in fact the terms that Stein herself uses even at such a lofty, entirely eidetic, adesse level. Indeed, while speaking about this methodological interplay of inner and outer (which, mutatis mutandis, we may view synoptically as inner inesse and outer adesse), she declares, echoing Hegel’s notion of essential relation: “my spiritual living is in both together.”10 For her, whatever ascends toward the uttermost reality of subject-­ consciousness itself, transcendentally constituted as actus purus essendi, “descends by that very act, into its own center or resting place.”11 Because of this, a faithful search for the truth, even the purely formal truth that animates the second level of logic, is “of itself a spiritual being and therefore movement: an ascent to ever less conceivable heights and a descent into ever more immeasurable depths.”12 She has accordingly bested and extended Husserl’s sense of cognitional striving. Both ascent and descent are a single motion forward of the full self. As being held (and as constituting itself as being held) by something greater than itself, there can be no more expansive ground for the blossoming forth of Truth-toward-Being as itself indeed a final and thus both a forward-moving and backward-­ glancing a priori science of adesse objectivity. Convergent phenomenology, as a new phenomenology of adesse objectivity, living and moving in actual relations as they actually exist, in all their temporal frailty, deals with Truth-­ toward-­Being as it is in itself. Thus we should perhaps begin to employ, henceforward, precisely the expansive, back and forth, dialectical freedom of interplay between self-­ luminous and essentialistic Sameness “within” and originary and existential Otherness “without” that Stein herself employed. Hopefully it will become an eventual guide to finding the actual (and finally describable) up-surging genesis of a kind of subalternate realm of relation-like objectivity as perfect catalyst for the complete blossoming of Husserl’s transcendental logic.

The Crystallizing, Upswinging Moment Between the Game-Plan of a Theory of Multiplicities and the Gut-Desire for the Pervasive Unity of a Concrete Science In Chapter 2, Husserl ushers in the new field of formal mathematics as the ground for aiding the complete “formalization” of formal logic, so that the latter can, clothed with a theory of multiplicities, head forward into its eventual identification with formal ontology itself. However, to a certain

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degree, Husserl is as uneasy allowing formal logic to settle completely into a theory of multiplicities as he is allowing phenomenology to settle completely into psychologism. In her work on Husserl’s logic, Johanna Maria Tito sees how all of these unifying viewpoints within logic hold together. Yet she also tells us: In taking the idea of science to a theory of multiplicities, Husserl has taken the idea of a pure (analytically formal) science to its limit. But here the limit betrays a lack. It was said that it is our concern with truth, with science, that allows us to unite formal apophantics and formal ontology into one mathesis universalis. From the perspective of a theory of science, formal apophantics and formal ontology are correlates of one science—namely, logic, theory of science. But although mathesis universalis is motivated by a concern with science, mathesis universalis cannot finally be the theory of science, for it cannot account for concrete science, it cannot talk about the world. Mathesis universalis is a theory of nomological science.13

In regard to some worrisome limit betraying a lack, we should perhaps use a fairly stark example to incarnate what Tito is telling us: If a manuscript of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony were discovered in an antique Viennese chest, logical nomologists would be perfectly happy analyzing the inscribed notes of the manuscript for the rest of their lives. They may even perhaps derive a final complete, deductive system of judgments that fully comprehends the phrase-relationships between the notes. It would never come into the realm of their self-imposed and limited attention to actually listen to the symphony. Tito’s main point, and Husserl’s also, is, that, here and now, we are in fact, in reality, already living and working within a complete distinction between nomological and concrete, “worldly” sciences. Just as pure logic speaks finally from within itself alone, we already hear the “music” of it from within ourselves alone. My own main point, admittedly an almost Buddhist point, is that neither nomological nor concrete sciences can ever become fully and self-­ luminously and completely themselves unless we admit first to the possibility of a science of adesse objectivity itself based upon a final and complete understanding of real relations, and how they are transcendentally constituted, precisely as they exist, extra mentem, somewhat like an orchestrated landscape of originative “interdependencies,” out in the empirical world around us: Human-subject as nothing but a pure towardness to object and world-object as nothing but pure towardness to subject.

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Many years ago, the current author, after a talk with Wall, can recall pondering over his problematic contention that an empirically real relation is not only a direct “to-ness” to being itself but is also, in its inmost essence, somehow neither mental nor real and somehow both. At the time, it was not at all evident that such pondering would eventually lead to the discovery of a new eidetic science. But, as we can see now, such is undoubtedly the case. And, consonant with our Beethoven metaphor, we might even go so far as to say that the ultimate adesse-like self-evidence of logical truth is the very music itself as it here and now concretely performs itself striving forward from itself alone. Herein is a final lesson for us moderns: Symbolic logic in its current form of wholly arbitrary constructive symbolism must therefore do nothing further in its constructions, except, perhaps, take care of itself.

Describing, Beyond All Box-Canyons, a Final Plateau of Interdependencies In Chapter 5 of Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl deals with what might be called a reflexology of judgment theory at the highest possible level. The core of this reflexology reveals itself in a crucial paragraph on pages 132 to 133. Husserl begins as follows: Naturally the transition from a judgment (a supposed objectivity simpliciter) to a judicial meaning or opinion (a supposed objectivity as supposed) can be repeated at any number of levels. It is a reiterable process of possible reflection and of constantly changing one’s attitude or focus. At the same time it is evident that we get back to an ultimate difference here, the difference between objectivities that are suppositions and objectivities that are not suppositions. It is precisely for this reason that we speak of different regions within the formal, all-embracing region, “any objectivity whatsoever.”

Let us pause here, and ask: Can’t we get back further to an even more ultimate difference, namely, between objectivities that are inesse and objectivities that are adesse? Let us now hold off from that train of thought and let Husserl continue with his own train of thought: All upper-level suppositions surely belong themselves to the region of suppositions, of “opinions” or “meanings.” Instead of saying meaning we may say sense; and, taking statements as our starting point, we may speak of their

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significations. To ask about the signification or sense of a statement and make its sense distinct to ourselves is manifestly to go over, from the straightforward stating-and-judging attitude in which we have only the pertinent objects, into the reflective attitude in which the correspondent object-­ meanings and predicatively formed affair-complex-meanings become seized upon or posited. Hence we may designate this region also as the region of senses.

Another aside: We have seen that, though we may speak of the meaningfulness of real relations out in the world around us, there is no possibility of our moving away from our straightforward view of them. If we move from them thus to either formalize them or generalize them, they themselves have already fallen out of all meaning absolutely, since their entire meaning, as fully embodied only in themselves, is mysteriously (and yet fully) incarnated in their very towardness to something beyond themselves. But let us return to refocus on Husserl’s final, bringing-it-all-home kind of conclusion: In the case of closed predicative judgments, we have affair-complex-senses (supposed predicatively formed affair-complexes as supposed); in the case of substrate-objects, we have precisely object-senses in the narrower sense; in the case of relational complexes, relational-complex-senses; and so forth.

Another note of caution: There, of course, can be an “and so forth” only if the relational complexes in question are entirely mental or entirely real. But if some relations are simultaneously both, we have, indeed, reached a radiant limit at the uttermost verge of the very essence of Relation Itself, beyond which the entire plateau of adesse objectivity stretches out endlessly before us.

A Technical Note Concerning the Transcendental Constitution of adesse Objectivity As we are now coming to understand, adesse objectivity (if we dare to call it such) itself, in its quiddity or essence, is, to that degree, the only mode of Being that floats above both substance-as-Husserlian-concrete and accident-­as-Husserlian-abstract; it is to that quite astonishing degree transcendentally constituted within Husserlian pure consciousness as neutral in

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respect to whether it is real or intentional; and being thus wholly neutral in respect to its very own inesse (since its quiddity is to be “toward” rather than “in”), the hidden core of its own inmost essence remains additionally neutral both in regard to the ground in which it resides (which can be either finite or eternal) as well as the object-consciousness-transcending term toward which it might here and now direct itself (which also can be either finite or eternal). All this flexible, high-flying conceptualization of the entirely phenomenological descriptions of adesse itself is wholly relevant to Stein’s reworking of her new method within both Potency and Act and Finite and Eternal Being. For the deeper Stein entered into the thought-world of Aquinas, the more it became clear to her that conscious adesse, as transcendentally constituted beyond the brackets of the phenomenological reduction as what we have called adesse objectivity simply IS relation, IS already somehow beyond the static and immanent inesse of Husserlian pure consciousness and already heading toward the vast exteriority of Being Itself (a predicatively formed affair-complex that reveals itself, in the evidence of its final truthfulness, as uncreated subject-consciousness, and, accordingly, as the selfsame absolute immanence that, as we saw in Chapter 2, Husserl pointed out as “this.”). This very situation, thus CONSCIOUSLY revealed, calls for a new phenomenological science. Put more emphatically: All of the above eidetic unfoldings that attempted to center in on adesse objectivity had their own immediate, diastole-systole genesis in an outer/inner interplay of Stein’s new genetic method within which she began to live, spiritually, as pure theorist. For, as Stein well knew (since she had learned it from Husserl himself), where there is a new objectivity (in this particular case: adesse objectivity) there also can be seen, newly appearing and rising up from within itself into a living and breathing pure a priori form, an altogether new science. As we have mentioned often in this book, Kevin Wall brilliantly sums up this ethereal and paradoxically asymmetrical neutrality of adesse (at the dualistic, outerobject/inner-act, essential core of the very essence of pure consciousness as it finally upswings into an a priori science of transcendental subjectivity) as follows: “The act of thinking (here translate ‘thinking’ into the special ‘cognitive striving’ of Husserl) is relative to Relation; everything but the act of existence (in other words, everything but the actus purus essendi) is relative only to essence.”14

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Epilog: Re-worlding Logic and Phenomenology Itself It is not without reason that we began this work with three more or less introductory chapters explaining some problems and defining some terms. For now that we have delineated inesse objectivity as the scientific province of traditional transcendental subjectivity and adesse objectivity as an utterly new and equally scientific work-area, itself subalternate to the former, we are accordingly in a position to understand, much more profoundly, the astonishing move from formal logic (still at the natural standpoint) outward toward transcendental logic (suddenly, wholly within the phenomenological standpoint) that Husserl orchestrates in Formal and Transcendental Logic. Let us give a preliminary example of how our new and elevated viewpoint aids us in understanding some of Husserl’s terminology. In his introduction to Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl uses the term, “horizon,” when he speaks of the unphilosophical character of the positive sciences within the natural standpoint, sciences such as physics or even history and sociology. This character consists precisely in this: the sciences, because they do not understand their own productions as those of a productive intentionality (this intentionality remaining unthematic for them), are unable to clarify the being-sense of either their provinces or the concepts that comprehend their provinces; thus they are unable to say (in the true and ultimate sense) what sense belongs to the existent of which they speak, or what sense-horizons that existent presupposes—horizons of which they do not speak, but which are nevertheless co-determinate of its sense.15

How is this passage relevant to the new science of convergent phenomenology, as we may now call the science of the transcendental constitution of adesse objectivity? As we become more adjusted within the work-area of adesse objectivity, we begin to understand that there are horizon-like “backgrounds,” hidden at the inesse level, which become phenomenologically describable only as being mentally refocused asymmetrically. This is a subtle point but a very important point to keep in mind. It relates immediately, at the most generally conceivable level of formal ontology, to the odd “identity relation” of Truth and Being as being luminously itself only when considered as itself miraculously non-reciprocal from Being’s

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“refractive” point of view. This will become more understandable precisely as we continue, in this present chapter, to focus on the Truth side or our co-referencing paradigm of Truth-toward-Being as formal logic, in order to move, in a purely formal sense, to the Being side of Truth-toward-­ Being as transcendental logic. To return to our special point: Just as we intuitively understand Husserl’s upswing from the perspectival appearance of sensate things into the non-perspectival appearance of absolute consciousness, so, in quite a similar manner we must understand that empirically real relations, since they are not figures in backgrounds, do not emerge from horizons but from things in themselves. Husserlian “horizon” can apply to them only in a remotely analogous (and thus proportional) sense. How can this be done? In the work-area of adesse objectivity, once we have reduced and put out of action the entire thing-like objectivity of traditional transcendental objectivity as inesse, and allowed the entire relation-like objectivity of the adesse realm to emerge in all its purity, something very much akin to Husserl’s horizons become available for description not when the relation itself is being viewed in itself, but only secondarily. In other words, in a single act, we are seeing the relation essentially but the inesse fundaments and terms of the relation by a kind of off-to-the-side, asymmetrical refocusing. Using our perennial example, the similarity relation of two yellow pencils lying side-by-side on the desk is not seen as in the pencils but in the third-level towardness of each to the other. Seeing the relation means seeing the relation in re, but, from another point of view (but still within the same act), seeing the fundaments and terms of such a relation in mente. Once we have focused on the real relation of similarity out in the real world, to forthwith go on to attempt to describe that relation as emerging from the “horizon” of the pencils means simply that we are no longer seeing the relation in question. It is as if it has vanished absolutely. Actual relations present no figure-in-a-background from their own essential point of view, we simply must let them be themselves. However, Aquinas surprisingly tells us that all real relations out in the empirical world always have, secondarily, something mental about them. With that perceptive comment in mind, what I am trying to say here is akin to Aquinas’ ontological insight, but now brought within the fullness and depth of Husserlian phenomenology, namely, that logically consequent upon such pure intuition of the similarity of the two pencils as a real relation is an asymmetrical (and passively mental) reflection of the two pencils, which, because it is

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a purely mental reflection, can only analogously be called the “horizon.” The mystery is that the clear intuition of the veritable actuality of the real relation in question—coupled with the “background” of the mental awareness of the underlying structure in question—has itself a complete intellective unity. It is not only the relational unity of being of which Wall speaks but is also precisely the “relational fullness” that was defined in Chapter 1. Both the relation and the contextual, mental refocusing are somehow the same in actu. Intentionality itself, together with its co-meant horizons, can only fully describe itself from within itself when its asymmetricity is theoretically described within convergent phenomenology. Even though Husserl, in Formal and Transcendental Logic, eventually delves into the evolving and necessary prepredicative descriptions, in all their purity, of the hidden intentional acts that actively blossom forth into pure logic itself as such, yet, based on our above description of the hybrid “proto-constitution” of real relations within transcendental subjectivity, intentionality itself, being at its core a hybrid relation that includes in a lived-through way both real and mental aspects as interdependent aspects, will never be fully understood and fully described from its root outward until the deeper subterranean upsurge of the veritable and constitutive (and somehow intellective) unity-in-multiplicity of actual, lived-through relations, themselves existent out in the empirical world, are theoretically seen according to their co-­ referential “whatness,” thematized out into the light, and understood and described precisely according to their own asymmetrical, hybrid-like, simultaneously real and intentional structure. Otherwise, transcendental logic remains factually inaccessible. There is indeed, if we look closely enough, and if we, finally and actually, come to rest in our true selves, the pure, divine gift of real relations everywhere around us. And as Stein saw with great clarity, adesse, in its purely transcendental constitution, must somehow re-world itself. It must, as ontological ground, bring both phenomenology and pure logic back to the fullness of life itself.

Notes ́ 1. Grant, Sara, Sankaracarya’s Concept of Relation, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers (Delhi, 1998), p. 36. 2. Ibid. 3. FTL, p. 65.

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4. Jimenez, Juan Ramon, “Oceans,” translated by Robert Bly https://allpoetry.com/Oceans. 5. Catherine Malibou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, Fordham University Press (New York, 2012), p. 42. 6. Aquinas, De Veritate, Q1, art. 3, corpus. 7. Ibid., p. 1. 8. Stein, Edith, Potency and Act: Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being: The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 11, ICS Publications 2009, p. 148. 9. FTL, p. 81 (Emphasis my own.) 10. Stein, Edith, Potency and Act: Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being: The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 11, ICS Publications 2009, p. 148. 11. Stein, Edith, The Science of the Cross, ICS Publications (Washington, DC, 2002), p. 154. 12. Ibid., p. 112. 13. Tito, Johanna Maria, Logic in the Husserlian Context, Northwestern University Press (Illinois, 1990), p. 21. 14. Wall, Kevin, “Relation.” See endnote 13. 15. FTL, p. 13.

Author Index1

A Aquinas, Thomas, 2, 3, 6, 11, 11n3, 11n7, 15–17, 21, 21n2, 27, 30, 32, 33, 35n11, 47, 49, 52, 56, 58, 63n28, 66–70, 72–76, 78, 81n2, 81n5, 81n7, 81n8, 90–94, 100, 102, 103, 104n6 Aristotle, 6, 17, 29, 30, 33, 34n5, 34n10, 35n9, 38, 39, 53, 56, 59, 67, 90, 92 Avicenna, 47, 67 B Bachelard, Suzanne, 91, 92, 94 Baseheart, Catherine, 81n3 Batzdorff, Suzanne M., 85 Batzdorff, Frau, 85n6 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 97, 98 Bly, Robert, 104n4 Bochenski, J. M., 17

1

C Cairns, Dorian, 41, 42, 62n4, 62n6, 69, 81n4 Conrad-Martius, Hedwig, 37

D Descartes, Rene, 53 Dun Scotus, 67

F Frege, Gottlob, 43 G Glanville, John J., 34n4, 63n29 Gonzalez, Philip John Paul, 4, 11n6 Grant, Sara, 11n3, 28, 35n7, 63n31, 88, 103, 103n1

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AUTHOR INDEX

H Hegel, G. F. W., 11, 11n7, 17, 56–58, 61, 62, 63n27, 63n33, 81n2, 93, 96 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 6, 11n10, 11n11, 28, 37, 38, 50, 66, 74, 94, 95 Hitler, Adolph, 50 Hollenhorst, G. Donald, 34n4, 63n29 Hood, Pamela, 30, 35n9 I Ingarten, Roman, 11n15, 81n8 J Jimenez, Juan Ramon, 92, 104n4 K Koestenbaum, Peter, 63n24 L Levinas, Emmanuel, 46, 50, 55, 62n14, 84 Lyne, Pat, 85n5 M Malibou, Catherine, 84, 85n3, 104n5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 45, 70 Mohanty, J. N., 41, 42, 48, 57, 62n5, 62n10, 63n26 O O’Regan, Cyril, 4, 11n6 P Parmenides, 18, 29, 35n8 Plato, 6, 29, 35n8, 42, 43

Poinsot, Jean, 26, 27, 32, 34n4, 47, 59, 60, 63n29, 69, 79 Posselt, Teresa Renata, 82n16, 85n7 Pseudo-Dionysius, 3 R Redmond, Walter, 11n16, 36n15, 63n16, 63n22, 63n23, 81n6, 81n9 Reinhardt, Kurt F., 11n4, 11n8, 11n10, 63n17, 103 Ricoeur, Paul, 46, 47 Russell, Bertrand, 11n2, 43, 103 S Sankara, Adi, 11n3, 28, 60, 68, 103 Sawicki, Marianne, 81n3 Shakespeare, William, 50, 62n14 Simon, Yves R., 34n4, 63n29 Stahl, J. F., 48–50, 62n11 T Tito, Joanna Maria, 46, 61, 97, 104n13 W Wall, Kevin, 6, 8, 10, 11n7, 11n11, 11n12, 11n13, 11n17, 15–21, 21n3, 21n5, 21n7, 24, 38, 40, 41, 56–58, 61, 63n25, 63n27, 63n33, 66–69, 71, 77, 79, 81n2, 89, 93, 98, 100, 103, 104n14 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 49, 52, 53, 62n12, 89

Subject Index1

A Act/object, 18, 27, 61, 88 Actus purus essendi, 6, 7, 70, 71, 82n10, 96, 100 Adesse objectivity, 8, 10, 11, 24–27, 30–32, 34, 39, 43, 66, 71, 72, 74, 78, 87, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99–102 Analogia entis, 4, 5, 17, 31, 33, 38, 68, 72, 74 Analogy, 3, 5, 12n17, 18, 26, 34, 69, 70, 73, 83, 90 A priori science, 69, 71, 72, 76, 84, 87, 91, 92, 96, 100 Asymmetrical elasticity, 11, 75 Avasāna, 88, 92 B Bracketing, 9, 35n8, 68, 77

1

C Constitution, 5, 11, 33, 38, 40, 43, 45, 68, 69, 71, 74–76, 82n7, 83, 89, 91, 99, 101, 103 Convergent phenomenology, 7, 8, 10, 16, 18–21, 23, 31, 66, 68, 69, 76, 87, 101, 103 D Dasein, 4, 6, 94 E Epoche, 6, 9, 16, 17, 19, 20, 38, 40, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 70, 74, 76, 91

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F Formalization, 89, 92, 96 Formal ontology, 24, 33, 39, 45, 49–51, 55, 57, 89–91, 94–97, 101

O Object-consciousness, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 38, 65, 67, 73, 74, 76, 78, 80, 89, 90, 100

G Genetic phenomenology, 10, 72 God, 2, 3, 13n17, 20, 21, 38, 50, 63n21, 66, 69, 73, 74, 82n10, 88, 90

P Pure consciousness, 5, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 21, 25, 26, 32, 39–41, 48, 55, 57, 58, 70, 73–75, 78–80, 99, 100

I Inesse objectivity, 8, 11, 31, 67, 71, 72, 74, 76, 101 Intentionality, 2, 5–9, 18, 31, 32, 34, 38, 41, 42, 44, 46–48, 57, 61, 65, 66, 72, 76, 77, 79, 82n11, 101, 103 Irrational number, 18 J Judgment, 39, 89, 90, 93, 98 M Mathesis universalis, 89, 97 Metaphysica generalis, 90 Metaphysica specialis, 90 N Noema, 18, 34, 77, 95 Noemata, 5, 9, 68, 74, 81n6 Noeses, 5, 9, 81n6 Noesis, 18, 34, 68, 74, 77, 95

R Real relations, 2–6, 8, 9, 12n11, 17, 31, 36n11, 47, 48, 59, 60, 71, 97–99, 102, 103 Reduction, 8, 52, 56, 78, 100 Relational unity of being, 10, 17–19, 21, 24, 54, 66, 68, 103 Re-worlding, 11, 12n14, 33, 36n12, 101 S Secundum dici, 19 Secundum esse, 19 Self-luminous, 21, 33, 53, 54, 58, 66, 71, 76, 96 Solipsism, 20, 21 Subject-consciousness, 2, 4, 7–9, 11, 16, 24, 38, 61, 66, 67, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 82n7, 83, 84, 88–91, 96, 100 T Theory of multiplicities, 11, 89, 95–97 Transcendental ego, 20, 55

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Transcendental logic, 11, 23, 24, 42, 50, 60, 62n6, 66, 76, 87, 89, 92, 95, 98, 101, 103 Transcendental subjectivity, 3, 4, 8, 17, 19, 27, 33, 38, 40, 41, 52, 55, 56, 61, 68, 70, 71, 73, 84, 95, 100, 101, 103

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Truth-toward-Being, 16, 19, 20, 27, 38, 42, 47, 52, 58, 73, 87, 95, 96, 102 U Unity-in-diversity, 16, 18, 19, 26, 43, 44, 88, 93