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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY
Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century’s major philosophical movements, and it continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today with relevance beyond philosophy in areas such as medicine and cognitive sciences. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy is an outstanding guide to this important and fascinating topic. Its focus on phenomenology’s historical and systematic dimensions makes it a unique and valuable reference source. Moreover, its innovative approach includes entries that don’t simply refect the state of the art but in many cases advance it. Comprising seventy-fve chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook offers unparalleled coverage and discussion of the subject, and is divided into fve clear parts: • • • • •
Phenomenology and the history of philosophy Issues and concepts in phenomenology Major fgures in phenomenology Intersections Phenomenology in the world.
Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy studying phenomenology, The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy is also suitable for those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, literature, sociology and anthropology. Daniele De Santis is Assistant Professor at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Burt C. Hopkins is Associate Research Fellow at the University of Lille (UMR-CNRS 8163 STL), France. Claudio Majolino is Associate Professor at the University of Lille (UMR-CNRS 8163 STL), France.
Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy are state-of-the-art surveys of emerging, newly refreshed, and important felds in philosophy, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems, themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research. All chapters for each volume are specially commissioned, and written by leading scholars in the feld. Carefully edited and organized, Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy provides indispensable reference tools for students and researchers seeking a comprehensive overview of new and exciting topics in philosophy. They are also valuable teaching resources as accompaniments to textbooks, anthologies, and research-orientated publications. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour Edited by Derek H. Brown and Fiona Macpherson The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility Edited by Saba Bazargan-Forward and Deborah Tollefsen The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion Edited by Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer The Routledge Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy Edited by Kelly Arenson The Routledge Handbook of Trust and Philosophy Edited by Judith Simon The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Humility Edited by Mark Alfano, Michael P. Lynch and Alessandra Tanesini The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics Edited by Ricki Bliss and J.T.M. Miller The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise Edited by Ellen Fridland and Carlotta Pavese The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy Edited by Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins and Claudio Majolino The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Science of Punishment Edited by Farah Focquaert, Elizabeth Shaw, and Bruce N.Waller For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Handbooks-in-Philosophy/book-series/RHP
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY
Edited by Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins and Claudio Majolino
First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park,Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins and Claudio Majolino; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins and Claudio Majolino to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-53999-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08401-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors
xi
Introduction Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins, Claudio Majolino
1
PART I
Phenomenology and the history of philosophy
9
1 The history of the phenomenological movement Pierre-Jean Renaudie
11
2 Phenomenology and Greek philosophy Burt C. Hopkins
37
3 Phenomenology and medieval philosophy Francesco Valerio Tommasi
50
4 Phenomenology and the Cartesian tradition Édouard Mehl
64
5 Phenomenology and British empiricism Vittorio De Palma
73
6 Phenomenology and German idealism Thomas M. Seebohm (1934–2014), edited by Robert Dostal
87
7 Phenomenology and Austrian philosophy Carlo Ierna
98
v
Contents PART II
Issues and concepts in phenomenology
111
8 Aesthetics and art Fotini Vassiliou
113
9 Body Maxime Doyon and Maren Wehrle
123
10 Consciousness Walter Hopp
138
11 Crisis Emiliano Trizio
151
12 Dasein Daniel O. Dahlstrom
160
13 Ego Michael K. Shim
167
14 Eidetic method Daniele De Santis
175
15 Ethics John J. Drummond
187
16 Existence Emanuele Mariani
198
17 Genesis Pedro M. S.Alves
207
18 Horizon Saulius Geniusas
221
19 Imagination and phantasy Julia Jansen
231
20 Instinct Nam-In Lee
241
21 Intentionality Burt C. Hopkins
250
vi
Contents
22 Intersubjectivity and sociality Jakub Čapek and Tereza Matějčková
259
23 Life-world Laurent Perreau
271
24 Mathematics Vincent Gérard
278
25 Monad Andrea Altobrando
292
26 Moods and emotions Ondřej Švec
304
27 Nothingness Kwok-ying Lau
316
28 Ontology, metaphysics, frst philosophy Vincent Gérard
324
29 Perception Walter Hopp
339
30 Phenomenon Aurélien Djian and Claudio Majolino
352
31 Reduction Andrea Staiti
368
32 Synthesis Jacob Rump
376
33 Transcendental James Dodd
389
34 Theory of knowledge Emiliano Trizio
397
35 Time Nicolas de Warren
403
36 Truth and evidence George Heffernan
412
vii
Contents
37 Variation Daniele De Santis
425
38 World Karel Novotný
435
PART III
Major fgures in phenomenology
443
39 Hannah Arendt Sophie Loidolt
445
40 Simone de Beauvoir Christine Daigle
454
41 Franz Brentano Arkadiusz Chrudzimski
461
42 Eugen Fink Riccardo Lazzari
470
43 Aron Gurwitsch Michael D. Barber and Olav K.Wiegand
479
44 Martin Heidegger Daniel O. Dahlstrom
487
45 Michel Henry Paula Lorelle
499
46 Edmund Husserl Burt C. Hopkins
509
47 Roman Ingarden Giuliano Bacigalupo
522
48 Jacob Klein Burt C. Hopkins
533
49 Ludwig Landgrebe Ignacio Quepons and Noé Expósito
543
50 Emmanuel Levinas Raoul Moati
549 viii
Contents
51 Merleau-Ponty Patrick Burke
556
52 Enzo Paci Michela Beatrice Ferri
565
53 Jan Patočka Riccardo Paparusso
573
54 Adolf Reinach Marco Tedeschini
582
55 Jean-Paul Sartre Nathanaël Masselot
592
56 Max Scheler Panos Theodorou
606
57 Alfred Schutz Michael D. Barber
616
58 Edith Stein Antonio Calcagno
625
59 Trân duc Thao Jérôme Melançon
636
PART IV
Intersections
647
60 Phenomenology and analytic philosophy Guillaume Fréchette
649
61 Phenomenology and cognitive sciences Jeff Yoshimi
662
62 Phenomenology and critical theory Alexei Procyshyn
670
63 Phenomenology and deconstruction Mauro Senatore
684
64 Phenomenology and hermeneutics James Risser
690 ix
Contents
65 Phenomenology and medicine Valeria Bizzari
699
66 Phenomenology and philosophy of science Emiliano Trizio
705
67 Phenomenology and political theory Edouard Jolly
711
68 Psychoanalysis and phenomenology Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch
718
69 Phenomenology and religion Stefano Bancalari
731
70 Phenomenology and structuralism Kwok-ying Lau
738
PART V
Phenomenology in the world
747
71 Africa Bado Ndoye
749
72 Australia and New Zealand Erol Copelj and Jack Reynolds
757
73 Eastern Asia 768 Simon Ebersolt,Tae-hee Kim, Choong-su Han, Ni Liangkang, and Fang Xianghong 74 Latin America Rosemary R.P. Lerner
776
75 North America Steven Crowell and Rodney Parker
789
Appendix
807
76 Synoptic scheme of the phenomenological movement Carlo Ierna
809
Index
813 x
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Andrea Altobrando is Assistant Professor at the University of Parma, Italy Pedro M. S. Alves is Associate Professor at the University of Lisbon, Portugal Giuliano Bacigalupo is Post-Doc Researcher at University of Geneva, Switzerland Stefano Bancalari is Associate Professor at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy Michael D. Barber is Full Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, USA Valeria Bizzari is Post-Doc Researcher at Heidelberg University, Germany Patrick Burke is Full Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University, Florence, Italy Antonio Calcagno is Full Professor at King’s Western University, Ontario, Canada Jakub Čapek is Associate Professor at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Arkadiusz Chrudzimski is Full Professor of Philosophy at Szczecin University, Poland Erol Copelj is Graduate Student at Monash University,Australia Steven Crowell is Full Professor of Philosophy at Rice University, USA Vittorio de Palma is Research Fellow at the Istituto italiano per gli studi flosofci (Naples), Italy Daniele De Santis is Assistant Professor at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Nicolas de Warren is Full Professor at Penn State University, USA Daniel O. Dahlstrom is Full Professor at Boston University, USA Christine Daigle is Full Professor of Philosophy at Brock University, Ontario, Canada Aurélien Djian is Post-Doc Researcher at the University of Lille, France James Dodd is Full Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York City, USA xi
Notes on Contributors
Robert Dostal is Full Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania Maxime Doyon is Associate Professor at the University of Montreal, Canada John J. Drummond is Full Professor at Fordham University, New York, USA Simon Ebersolt is Researcher at IFRAE, France Noé Expósito is Post-Doctoral Researcher at the National Distance Education University, Madrid Michela Beatrice Ferri is Faculty Member at the Holy Apostles College, Connecticut, USA Guillaume Fréchette is Post-Doc Researcher at the University of Geneva, Switzerland Saulius Geniusas is Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong-Kong Vincent Gérard is Full Professor at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, France Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch is Professor at the University of Vienna,Austria Choong-Su Han is Full Professor at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea George Heffernan is Full Professor of Philosophy at Merrimack College, Massachusetts, USA Walter Hopp is Associate Professor at Boston University, USA Burt C. Hopkins is Associate Research Fellow at the UMR STL University of Lille, France Carlo Ierna is Lecturer at Radboud University and at the Free University Amsterdam, The Netherlands Julia Jansen is Full Professor of Philosophy at KU, Leuven, Belgium Édouard Jolly is Full-Time Researcher at IRSEM, France Tae-Hee Kim is Full Professor at Konkuk University, Seoul, South Korea Kwok-ying Lau is Full Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong-Kong Riccardo Lazzari is Full Professor of Philosophy at the Liceo “G. Parini”, Milan, Italy Nam-In Lee is Full Professor of Philosophy at Seoul National University, South Korea Ni Liangkang is Full Professor of Philosophy at Zhejiang University, China Sophie Loidolt is Associate Professor at TU Darmstadt, Germany Paula Lorelle is Researcher at UC Louvain, France Claudio Majolino is Associate Professor at the University of Lille, France Emanuele Mariani is Researcher at the University of Lisbon, Portugal Nathanaël Masselot is Associate Research Fellow at UMR STL University of Lille, France Tereza Matějčková is Assistant Professor at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Edouard Mehl is Full Professor at Strasbourg University, France Jérôme Melançon is Assistant Professor at the University of Regina, Canada xii
Notes on Contributors
Raoul Moati is Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, USA Bado Ndoye is Full Professor of Philosophy at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, Senegal Karel Novotný is Full Professor at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Riccardo Paparusso is Lecturer at the Pontifcal University Saint Thomas Aquinas, Rome, Italy Rodney Parker is Assistant Professor at the Dominican University College, Ottawa, Canada Laurent Perreau is Full Professor at the University of Franche-Comté, Besançon, France Alexei Procyshyn is Research Fellow at Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai, China Ignacio Quepons is Full-Time Researcher at the University of Veracruz, Mexico Pierre-Jean Renaudie is Associate Professor at the University of Lyon, France Jack Reynolds is Full Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University,Victoria,Australia James Risser is Full Professor at Seattle University, USA Rosemary R. P. Lerner is Full Professor of Philosophy at the Pontifcal Catholic University of Peru Jacob Rump is Assistant Professor at Creighton University, USA Thomas M. Seebohm (†) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mainz, Germany Mauro Senatore is Faculty Member at the Adolfo Ibáñez University, Santiago, Chile Michael K. Shim is Full Professor of Philosophy at the California State University, Los Angeles, USA Andrea Staiti is Associate Professor at the University of Parma, Italy Ondřej Švec is Assistant Professor at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic Marco Tedeschini is Research Fellow at the Italian Institute for German Studies, Rome, Italy Panos Theodorou is Associate Professor at the University of Crete, Greece Francesco Valerio Tommasi is Assistant Professor at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy Emiliano Trizio is Senior Lecturer at UWE, Bristol, UK Fotini Vassiliou is Post-Doc Researcher at the School of Fine Arts,Athens, Greece Olav K. Wiegand, PhD, Johannes-Guttenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany Maren Wehrle is Assistant Professor at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam,The Netherlands Fang Xianghong is Full Professor of Philosophy at Sun Yat-sen University, China Jeffrey Yoshimi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, USA
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INTRODUCTION Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins, Claudio Majolino
Paul Ricœur famously suggested, “phenomenology in the broad sense is the sum of Husserl’s work plus the heresies stemming from Husserl”. If this is correct, at least at frst sight, there is an obvious two-way strategy to measure the full extent of phenomenology’s contribution to philosophy. On the one hand, each phenomenological “heresy” should be measured against the backdrop of a thorough understanding of Husserl’s published and unpublished work; on the other hand, Husserl’s specifc variety of phenomenology should, in turn, be contrasted with the conceptual transformations and innovations of its “heretic” offspring, such as Heidegger, Reinach, Fink, Langrebe, Ingarden, Patočka, Sartre or Merleau-Ponty—to name only a few. But there is obviously more. The relevance of “phenomenology in the broad sense”, as Ricœur puts it, should also be assessed within a much larger scope.To begin, its own peculiar and variegated conceptuality still needs to be fully examined regarding its actual power both to recast and renew the understanding of traditional philosophical problems and notions, and its ability to discover new ones. As a matter of fact, since the beginning of the 20th century, issues as old as philosophy itself—time, space, world, being, existence and essence, human contingency, etc.—as well as whole philosophical areas—epistemology, ethics, esthetics, ontology and metaphysics—have singly and together been straightforwardly addressed and profoundly modifed in their structural features and defning terms by countless undertakings going under the heading of “phenomenology”.And more than a century later, scholars are still struggling to understand and evaluate the exact meaning and scope of this massive attempt to rethink philosophy as a whole. On the other hand, in order to properly spell out its relative novelty, putative breakthroughs and alleged openings, “phenomenology in the broad sense” also needs be studied within the wider context of the history of philosophy itself, and its many lines of development. Platonism and Aristotelianism, Thomism and Scotism, Cartesianism and British Empiricism, German Idealism and Austrian Realism, all merge and converge within a very complex and hardly homogeneous “movement”, as Herbert Spiegelberg once called it. A movement that, despite its constant call for “radicality”, has never ceased to explicitly problematize its relationship with the philosophical tradition.Then again, one might be tempted to ask: are we now in a better position to have a clearer view of the different ways in which such a tradition has been re-enacted and modifed such that it could be labeled, in some unifed way,“phenomenological”? But “phenomenology” is also the name for one family of positions that are engaged in contemporary philosophical debates. Thus, the value—if any—of its conceptual resources should 1
Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins, Claudio Majolino
also be compared with some of the most signifcant and relevant present-day non-phenomenological alternatives and trends.This is an urgent task. Often hastily put under the misleading and poorly defned heading “continental philosophy”, phenomenology is frequently lumped together with existentialism or hermeneutics and opposed to analytic philosophy, without the legitimacy of such a classifcation being questioned.And yet, a closer look at the contemporary discussion shows a more complex landscape.A landscape where some varieties of phenomenology are indeed very far removed from and somehow indifferent—if not hostile—to analytic philosophy; others are part and parcel of analytic philosophy itself or appear to be more keen on establishing a fruitful dialogue with it; and others tend to move beyond analytic philosophy and criticize, locally or globally, many of its defning features and distinctive methodological or theoretical claims. And the same holds with respect to other leading strands of contemporary “continental” philosophy: be it deconstruction, hermeneutics or post-structuralism. Finally, if “phenomenology in the broad sense” is not a “tradition”—as often claimed—but a “living movement”, as it were, then one should also be able to show that Husserl’s thought is still able to foster and generate from both within and thus without—all over the world—new “heresies”. Heresies of heresies, that sometimes turn phenomenology into something entirely different: adding new standpoints and conceptual needs coming from non-European cultural traditions; heresies that sometimes end up leading either to the rediscovery of the inner potential of Husserl’s original insights or move away even farther from his intrinsic limitations or putative shortcomings. Thus, phenomenology has a past, a present and—it is certainly the editors’ conviction—a future. It harbors a wide array of concepts capable of tackling an immense variety of problems (virtually all the so-called “philosophical problems”); it displays an impressive constellation of key fgures; it interacts and enters into discussions with, criticizes and is criticized by, borrows from and contributes to all the major trends of contemporary philosophy; it also attempts to engage critically with the recent theoretical challenges of science, art, religion, politics and human existence; it constantly makes its presence felt all over the world, within and beyond the Western “tradition”. In short,“phenomenology in the broad sense” is nothing but the living portrait of philosophy in the strictest sense. Is it even possible, then, to imagine drawing a tentative and incomplete portrait of such an ongoing cluster of heresies of heresies? Perhaps not—but the attempt has to be made. Without being able to fulfll the daunting and complex tasks suggested by this description of phenomenology, the Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy aims, minimally, to set the stage for the reckoning suggested by Ricœur. It is meant to be an attempt to portray—literally—phenomenology as a movement. Accordingly, the book is divided into fve parts: (I) Phenomenology and the history of philosophy (II) Issues and concepts in phenomenology (III) Major fgures in phenomenology (IV) Intersections (V) Phenomenology in the world In order to present the idea of phenomenological philosophy—i.e. how philosophy is transformed after the historical and conceptual emergence of phenomenology—in accord with its historical becoming, Part I provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of the multifarious relations between phenomenology and the Western philosophical tradition. It explores both its relation to Ancient, Medieval and Modern philosophy (entries 2–6) and the way in which it unfolds historically and engages with some of its contemporary alternatives (entries 1, 7). 2
Introduction
Part II has a twofold ambition. On the one hand, it gathers contributions exploring the depth with which phenomenology deals with traditional philosophical questions from a triadic point of view: their appropriation, their distortion and fnally also their development. Many of the entries are therefore designed to show both the continuity and the discontinuity of the phenomenological approach(es) vis-à-vis some of the fundamental issues of philosophy (entries 8–20).Yet, on the other hand, it also includes several essays devoted to the most important technical concepts that are proper to phenomenology as a philosophical tradition per se, in such a manner that a useful “dictionary” is offered to the reader (entries 21–38). Together, these two groups of entries are meant to provide a phenomenological “tool case”, so to speak, including not only their origin but also possible and future applications. Indeed, and although the notions analyzed are certainly technical ones, the main goal of each entry consists in translating—as much as possible—the technicality of the phenomenological jargon into a non-technical terminology, so as to help the reader relate phenomenology to philosophical questions in general. The path outlined in the frst two sections (Parts I and II) therefore aims to show the progressive detachment of phenomenology from the tradition(s) from out of which it stems and to which it relates, as well as its own conceptual contribution (as a tradition of thought per se) to the history of Western philosophy and its specifc problems. Part III focuses, on the contrary, upon the different confgurations of themes that can be found in some of the most important authors and fgures of the phenomenological movement (entries 39–59). From Brentano to Husserl, from Reinach to Heidegger, from Hannah Arendt to Simone de Beauvoir, each entry is meant to provide not only a synopsis of the general approach developed by the author in question, but also, more generally, a cartography of the some of the most relevant phenomenological “heresies”. This brings us to Part IV. As already pointed out, although phenomenology is undoubtedly one of the major philosophical movements of the 20th century, it is certainly not the only one. However, as Michel Henry once famously claimed, “phenomenology is to 20th century philosophy what German idealism was to 19th century, empiricism to 18th century, Cartesianism to 17th century,Aquinas or Scotus to the scholastics and Plato and Aristotle to antiquity”. How could such a bold claim be justifed? How is it even possible to imagine that such is actually the case? The only way to tackle this issue and not to dismiss from the outset Henry’s allegation is to consider not only phenomenology per se, but also the effects of its presence in contemporary debates. Indeed, it is certainly true that, over the course of both the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, phenomenology has been appropriated and criticized, modifed and applied in many different ways by a different array of philosophical traditions and disciplines other than philosophy. One could certainly distinguish between phenomenological, post-phenomenological, as well as anti-phenomenological trends—but no one in the last century, and even today, can afford to ignore phenomenology as a whole.Accordingly, it is to the multifarious, and sometimes critical, encounters between phenomenology and its “others” that the fourth section is devoted. In so doing, and to the extent that it gestures towards the manner in which other philosophical traditions (entries 60–64, 70) or other disciplines (entries 65–69) responded and continue to respond to phenomenology, this new section completes the historical trend begun in Part I and moves beyond the technicalities of Part II. PartV contributes to what could be called “geo-phenomenology”. In fact, phenomenology’s contemporary trends and prospects are now discussed by thematizing its variations as related to different geographic areas or regions of the world (entries 71–75).The individual phenomenologists that are behind these trends are thus identifed and the philosophical insights of their contributions at both the local and the global level directly assessed. 3
Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins, Claudio Majolino
The methodological guiding thread of all these sections is again the following: each contribution discusses its topic in a way that explains the technical terms, clarifes the basic concepts, employs accessible examples and unpacks critically the relevant philosophical claims. Since putative common phenomenological truths and mainstream interpretative views and trends will not be assumed by the authors as self-evident, readers from any discipline or feld, including of course philosophy, will be able to rely upon the present Handbook to situate themselves, their views or disciplinary approach to knowledge within the framework of the phenomenological tradition. Thus, the overall aspiration of the project consists not only in elucidating systematically all the basic concepts and terms, methods and claims of phenomenology in a manner that will be accessible to any reader; it also strives to gesture towards the past, the present and also the future of a philosophical research frst established by Edmund Husserl and subsequently variously modifed by his many “heretic” disciples and followers. *** It should be readily apparent now that the structure of the Handbook has been conceived and designed in such a manner that the “unitary” stance upon the history of phenomenology, as well as its relation to the history of philosophy that it proposes to the reader, does not rule out its many and diverse possible approaches.This is also a point that needs to be stressed. As a matter of fact, the attentive reader will immediately notice not only that the different parts are generally characterized by a different structure, but also that each entry mirrors and refects the specifc view, interpretation and even tradition of the author or authors behind it. The editors have in fact deliberately decided not to commit the authors to a single viewpoint or a specifc account of “phenomenology”. The best manner to provide a map of heresies is to let the heretics present themselves as the only true believers. Thus, the need for an overall and unitary, yet not homogenous, presentation of what goes by the name of “phenomenological movement”, which guided our effort as general editors of the volume, does not and cannot exclude the existence of radically different views on the same matters, problems and ideas. As a matter of fact, our task as editors consisted mostly in providing the general framework within which many different perspectives could be proposed and divergent paths taken, without the unitary horizon being broken and scattered in a multiplicity of unrecognizable pieces (just like the many different adumbrations do not exclude the dynamic unity of what is experienced through them).Thus each entry could have been written in an entirely different manner, if only conceived by another author taking his or her own “heresy” for granted, as the focal point from which the issues at stake should be discussed. Sometimes, this strategy proved to involve little risk; at other times the outcome has been less a reference entry than a truly original essay. This being said, the position of Husserl in all of this also needs to be clarifed and explained. For, if it is true that without Husserl there would be no phenomenology “in the broad sense”, it is equally true that without the many “heresies” that stemmed out of his work—to keep recalling Ricœur— there would be no “phenomenological movement.”Accordingly, if we were asked to more precisely and directly characterize our stance or perspective, we would reply by pointing out that what guided our choices, decisions and general effort was not what could be called The School of Athenssort of paradigm, but rather that of the Mosaic of the Philosophers (Archeological Museum, Naples). In the former case a few fgures (Husserl or Husserl and Heidegger) would completely dominate the scene in such a manner that all the others would be ascribed only a secondary role (supporting actors in a drama to which they would contribute only partially and superfcially). But in the case of the Mosaic of the Philosophers it is the discussion between the many members (of Plato’s Academy, here: of the phenomenological tradition itself) that is and represents the 4
Introduction
very center of the scene. As a consequence, if Husserl or perhaps Heidegger were to be given any privileged position, this would be exclusively that of the primus inter pares. Unlike the Shakespearean Caesar, this Husserl or Heidegger would not dare so much as to compare himself to “the northern star / Of whose true-fx’d and resting quality / There is no fellow in the frmament” (3, I).This is why, whereas the historic-philosophical entries of the frst part are presented chronologically from Greek philosophy to the tradition of Austrian philosophy, the third part is arranged alphabetically (so that no systematic priority of one thinker over another, or of one conception over another, would be established). Of course, as the reader will soon realize, this does not rule out that Edmund Husserl, notably, his conception of phenomenology and stance on both the history of phenomenology and that of philosophy itself, is de facto often present (sometimes explicitly, sometimes only implicitly) in the background of many entries. Husserl seems then to play the role of a reference point constantly in motion, in opposition to which the many heresies can present and defne themselves and even critically legitimize their tenets—in such a manner, however, that Husserl’s own doctrine assumes a constantly new aspect and shape as it is looked at from such and such an angle. As a consequence, the history of the phenomenological movement is also and primarily to be described as a “self-differentiating” history, a series of more or less dramatic (theoretical and even spatial) departures from Husserl, or even as the sum total of all the one-way train and air tickets away from him. The task of the future historian of the phenomenological movement will consist in describing and reconstructing a (modern) history (of philosophy) that is like no others; for, it resembles neither the allegedly circular movement of someone like Ulysses (it does not include any possible nostos back to the origin) nor any sort of diaspora (for, at stake is the very interpretation and conception of the alleged “origin” or original locus out of which the phenomenological movement sprang). The reader could also be surprised at the absence of a relevant entry on “Europe” in the last part of the text.The reason for not having any entry specifcally devoted to the geographic area in which phenomenology frst was born is not due to some sort of Eurocentric assumption upon our part. We do not at all think that there was no need to specifcally address “Europe” because de facto most of the thinkers present in the Handbook were of “European” origin. Rather, our decision derives from the urgent need for rethinking the history of phenomenology as a whole based on a pluralistic view: hopefully, one will no longer speak of European phenomenology (as if this phrase could go without saying), but rather of a European history of phenomenology. A history among many others, which might have played a factually important and crucial role in a certain moment of the development of the phenomenological tradition, i.e., at its very beginning, but which is now in need for a radical re-interpretation in light of what happened and is still happening elsewhere (as is clearly the case, for example, with entries 71 and 74). It is necessary fnally to realize that phenomenology very soon started speaking other (natural and philosophical) languages; it soon started to mingle with other and different schools of thought; it very soon began to be incorporated into cultures that were and are far different from the ones that originally harbored and nurtured it. The present Handbook wants to give expression to this deep and urgent need for rediscovering the simple fact that phenomenology was and can still be pursued in many different languages. The editors want to express their deep gratitude to Andrea Cimino, Aurélien Djian and Guilherme Riscali, without whose help this volume would have never seen the light of day. This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02. 1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). *** 5
Daniele De Santis, Burt C. Hopkins, Claudio Majolino
Given the high number of quotations from the German edition of Husserl’s works, and in order to avoid unnecessary repetitions in the reference lists at the end of each entry, below the reader will fnd the full list of the Husserliana volumes (M. Nijhoff; Kluwer Academic Publishers; Springer). Hua I: Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge Hua II: Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen Hua III/1: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch:Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie Hua III/2: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch:Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Ergänzende Texte Hua IV: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution Hua V: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften Hua VI: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie Hua VII: Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Erster Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte Hua VIII: Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion Hua IX: Phänomenologische Psychologie.Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925 Hua X: Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917) Hua XI: Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten (1918–1926) Hua XII: Philosophie der Arithmetik. Mit ergänzenden Texten (1890–1901) Hua XIII: Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil: 1905–1920 Hua XIV: Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität.Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928 Hua XV: Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität.Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929–1935 Hua XVI: Ding und Raum.Vorlesungen 1907 Hua XVII: Formale und transzendentale Logik.Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. Mit ergänzenden Texten Hua XVIII: Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik.Text der 1. und 2.Aufage Hua XIX/1: Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Erster Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis Hua XIX/2: Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Zweiter Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis Hua XX/1: Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband. Erster Teil.Entwürfe zur Umarbeitung der VI. Untersuchung und zur Vorrede für die Neuafulage der Logischen Untersuchungen (Sommer 1913) Hua XX/2: Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband.Zweiter Teil.Texte für die Neufassung der VI. Untersuchung: Zur Phänomenologie des Ausdrucks und der Erkenntnis (1893/94– 1921) Hua XXI: Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie.Texte aus dem Nachlass (1886–1901)
6
Introduction
Hua XXII: Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910) Hua XXIII: Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen.Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925) Hua XXIV: Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie.Vorlesungen 1906/07 Hua XXV: Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921) Hua XXVI: Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre. Sommersemester 1908 Hua XXVII: Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937) Hua XXVIII: Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (1908–1914) Hua XXIX: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband.Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937 Hua XXX: Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie.Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1917/18. Mit ergänzenden Texten aus der ersten Fassung von 1910/11 Hua XXXI: Aktive Synthesen. Aus der Vorlesung “Transzendentale Logik” 1920/21. Ergänzungsband zu “Analysen zur passiven Synthesis” Hua XXXII: Natur und Geist.Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1927 Hua XXXIII: Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18) Hua XXXIV: Zur phänomenologischen Reduktion.Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926–1935) Hua XXXV: Einleitung in die Philosophie.Vorlesungen 1922/23 Hua XXXVI: Transzendentaler Idealismus.Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1921) Hua XXXVII: Einleitung in die Ethik.Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924 Hua XXXVIII: Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit.Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912) Hua XXXIX: Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937) Hua XL: Untersuchungen zur Urteilstheorie.Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1918) Hua XLI: Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der eidetischen Variation. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1891–1935) Hua XLII: Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik.Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937) Hua-Mat I: Logik.Vorlesung 1896 Hua-Mat II: Logik.Vorlesung 1902/03 Hua-Mat III: Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie.Vorlesung 1902/03 Hua-Mat IV: Natur und Geist.Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1919 Hua-Mat V: Urteilstheorie.Vorlesung 1905 Hua-Mat VI: Alte und neue Logik.Vorlesung 1908/09 Hua-Mat VII: Einführung in die Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis.Vorlesung 1909 Hua-Mat VIII: Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte Hua-Mat IX: Einleitung in die Philosophie.Vorlesungen 1916–1920 Hua-Dok I: Husserl-Chronik. Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls Hua-Dok II/1:VI.Cartesianische Meditation.I:Die Idee einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre Hua-Dok II/2: VI. Cartesianische Meditation. II: Ergänzungsband Hua-Dok III: Briefwechsel 1. Die Brentanoschule 2. Die Münchener Phänomenologen 3. Die Göttinger Schule 4. Die Freiburger Schüler
7
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5. Die Neukantianer 6. Philosophenbriefe 7. Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz 8. Institutionelle Schreiben 9. Familienbriefe 10. Einführung und Register Hua-Dok IV: Bibliography
8
PART I
Phenomenology and the history of philosophy
1 THE HISTORY OF THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOVEMENT Pierre-Jean Renaudie
1.1. The lives and deaths of phenomenology Since its offcial and self-proclaimed birth in Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, published at the very beginning of the 20th century, phenomenology has been following such different paths and has undergone so many transformations that one would hardly be able to provide a harmoniously unifed account of its history. Born from an original attempt to combine the resources of Brentano’s psychology with the logical expectations inherited from Bolzano’s philosophy, phenomenology has taken many faces and endorsed substantially different philosophical claims all throughout the 20th century.As Hans-Georg Gadamer came to refect on his relation with the other members of the phenomenological tradition he had met since he was Martin Heidegger’s student, he relates that “each phenomenologist had their own understanding of what phenomenology was really about” (Gadamer 1987, 116). But Gadamer also adds an important remark, as he immediately notes: “Only one thing remained clear, which is that the phenomenological method could not be learnt from books”. Indeed, the most basic and least controversial conception of phenomenology that can be provided is that it consists in a radical way of dealing with philosophical questions, which takes philosophy as a descriptive practice rather than a systematic approach to knowledge.While philosophical systems can be suspected to rely on interpretations unable to critically interrogate the validity of the concepts they project onto reality, phenomenology as a practical description of the specifc ways in which phenomena appear or manifest themselves seeks to avoid all misconstructions and impositions placed on experience in advance. This practical aspect of phenomenological description is characteristic of its own original philosophical ‘style’, and constitutes a fundamental aspect of phenomenology throughout the historical development of this philosophical tradition, pointed out by Heidegger as he declares that phenomenology cannot be learnt “through the reading of phenomenological literature” (Heidegger 1992, 9).The most compelling evidence of this practical dimension of phenomenological philosophy is perhaps the strong lack of interest in publication manifested by Edmund Husserl himself, the undisputed founding father of phenomenological philosophy, who proved to be particularly reluctant to publish the results of his ongoing research, while he considered his lectures and his daily writing activity as quintessential to the new kind of philosophy to which he gave rise. Husserl himself frst considered phenomenology as a wide philosophical project that would not only require his absolute dedication, but also the continuing efforts of his community of 11
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students, extending phenomenology in directions that a single and isolated philosopher would not be able to explore. However, Husserl soon realized that the paths followed by his best students (in particular Martin Heidegger and Max Scheler) were leading them to philosophical positions in which Husserl would not readily recognize the results of his own methodology, and he came subsequently – though not without experiencing some bitter disappointment – to see himself more and more as a lone and secluded ‘leader without followers’ (Hua-Dok III/2, 182), eventually considering himself ironically “the greatest enemy [Feind] to the famous ‘Husserlian phenomenological movement’”(Hua-Dok III/9, 79). Such considerations allowed French phenomenologist Paul Ricœur to declare that the history of phenomenology broadly construed must include, in addition to Husserl’s works, the long and complex history of Husserlian heresies (Ricoeur 1986, 9). However, insofar as phenomenology, whether ‘orthodox’ or ‘heretic’, is based on a descriptive practice that aims at displaying the structures of experience, constantly attempting to defne its own rules and to extend its scope, one should not underestimate the strength and depth of the philosophical commitments shared by the members of the phenomenological tradition, in spite of the variety of their methods and goals.As Emmanuel Levinas notes in his remarks on the phenomenological ‘technique’, “phenomenology unites philosophers” and does not do so because of a certain number of fundamental theses that phenomenologists would be committed to and would need to uncritically accept, but only because of “a way of proceeding that [phenomenologists] have in common”. Instead of being bound to the main theses and principles formulated by Husserl, phenomenologists “agree on approaching questions in a certain way” (Levinas 1998, 91).The philosophical commitment to experience that they share unites the members of the phenomenological movement in a way loose enough to let them spread their wings and to embrace Husserl’s famous claim to bring philosophy “back to the things themselves” without being prevented from opening new paths and discovering original ways of accounting for the richness of lived experience. Consequently, rather than a school of thought, phenomenology needs to be understood as a broader philosophical movement (Dastur 2004, 208), whose nature essentially involves its transformations and constant redefnitions. Comparing the phenomenological movement to a river giving rise to various different streams, Spiegelberg emphasizes several characteristic features of the phenomenological tradition, which sprang from a common source but gave birth to several parallel currents that do not necessarily join in their fnal destination, and which is fundamentally characterized by its intrinsic dynamics and its moving and exploratory dimension (Spiegelberg 1965, 2). Spiegelberg’s metaphor stresses that, far from jeopardizing the unity and coherence of the movement, the plurality of these currents demonstrates the vitality of the phenomenological tradition, as long as the different currents do not annihilate but complement each other.The purpose of this chapter is to draw a cartography of the phenomenological movement that presents the dynamic specifc to each of its main currents as well as their systematic and historical relation to each other. In order to provide a general overview of the phenomenological tradition, this chapter will stress the constitutive role of the successive shifts that contributed to transforming the methods and redefning the scope of phenomenology throughout its historical development, manifesting an ever-reiterated attempt to recast the limits of phenomenological description (either by narrowing down or extending its boundaries) and overcome its shortcomings. Not only did these shifts take a signifcant part in the development of the phenomenological movement, but they mostly established phenomenology as a philosophical tradition of its own by constantly interrogating its legitimacy as a method and questioning its intellectual heritage.Accordingly, the two main assignments of this overview and the outline of this chapter will be the following: frst, presenting the philosophical framework within which the ‘breakthrough of a newly grounded philosophy’, namely phenomenology, was made possible, and analysing the fundamental features that characterize this philosophical breakthrough (Section 1.2.); second, examining the different 12
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shifts that contributed to renewing the meaning and scope of phenomenology and constituted it as the tradition of thought that became the cornerstone of continental philosophy throughout the 20th century (Section 1.3.).
1.2. The birth of phenomenology and its foundation as a philosophical method 1.2.1. Phenomenology and descriptive psychology (from Brentano to Husserl) The word ‘phenomenology’ has a long history that goes back through Hegel and Kant to the philosophy of Lambert.1 However, it was used in the second part of the 19th century in an intellectual context that was particularly far from the roots of German idealism, and in the wake of an attempt to bring the empirical psychology inherited from the British tradition to a higher form of completion and to give psychology its autonomy and signifcance with respect to other sciences. The word ‘phenomenology’, in this context, became associated with the work and school of Franz Brentano, who published his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1874 and who appeared as the leading fgure of this renewal of psychology as he attempted to provide it with its own criteria of scientifc legitimacy. If it is not directly from Brentano that Edmund Husserl borrowed the word ‘phenomenology’, it is nevertheless in Brentano’s descriptive psychology that the term must fnd its conceptual origin. The originality and novelty of Brentano’s psychology arises from the unexpected marriage between, on the one hand, his strong Aristotelian and neo-scholastic infuence and, on the other hand, his original attempt to defne a form of scientifc inquiry especially suited for the description of psychological phenomena. In his 1874 Psychology, Brentano establishes a strong division between psychological or ‘mental’ phenomena (Psychische Phänomene) on the one hand and physical phenomena on the other, arguing that physiological explanations cannot account satisfyingly for the ontological specifcity of the former.The famous ‘intentionality thesis’, widely regarded as Brentano’s most substantial contribution to philosophy, addresses this need to keep physical and mental phenomena strictly separated by providing a criterium of the latter that the former are unable to match. Mental phenomena, Brentano writes, are directed towards an object in a specifc way that cannot be described as a physical relation between two different things.The object towards which a mental phenomenon is oriented is not a transcendent but an immanent object, an object that exists frst and foremost within this mental phenomenon rather than an external object whose existence would be logically independent of any kind of mental activity. Being irreducible to a physical relation, this form of inclusion of the object within the mental phenomenon that is directed towards it is to be characterized as ‘intentional’, according to the scholastic terminology. Every mental phenomenon, Brentano famously writes, is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) in-existence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. (Brentano 1924, 124/68) This intentional property of mental phenomena allows Brentano to stress their irreducibility, insofar as the intentional in-existence constitutes an exclusive characteristic of mental phenomena, making intentionality the key to the defnition of psychology’s scientifc autonomy: the intentional relation between the act of perceiving and the object perceived is of a totally different kind than the causal relation between the physical object external to the mental phenom13
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enon and the eyeball.This exclusive intentional character justifes Brentano’s claim that mental phenomena require their own scientifc treatment, grounded in a methodological approach that acknowledges their irreducibility to physical phenomena.While causal explanations of physical phenomena constitute the scientifc framework of physiological approaches to the mental falling under the jurisdiction of genetic psychology, the study of the intentional character of mental phenomena demands a specifc method, which would, a few years later, be labelled ‘Psychognosie’ in Brentano’s lectures in Vienna. Drawing on Lotze’s distinction between ‘genetic’ and ‘descriptive’ science (Milkov 2018), Brentano stresses the strictly descriptive and analytic character of this new sort of psychology: whereas genetic psychology studies the development of mental phenomena and their causal relations on the basis of inductive generalizations, ‘Psychognosie’ describes the components the articulation of which is constitutive of the unity of mental phenomena and establishes on that ground the exact laws showing the necessary relations between different phenomena. This descriptive psychology provides the methodological framework for the development of the so-called ‘Brentano school’, which gathered Brentano’s best students such as Kazimierz Twardowski, Anton Marty, Carl Stumpf, Christian Von Ehrenfels, Alexius Meinong and, of course, Edmund Husserl. In the context of the intense discussions that arose between Brentano’s former students throughout their attempts to apply descriptive psychology to various domains of knowledge, the word ‘phenomenology’ acquired a technical meaning, culminating in the publication of Husserl’s Logical Investigations and their ‘phenomenological breakthrough’. The term ‘phenomenology’ was rather commonly and loosely used at the end of the 19th century, both in philosophical and scientifc discourses. Ludwig Boltzmann, for instance, used it profusely in reference to the interpretation of sensation and observation in thermodynamics, and Ernst Mach coined the phrase ‘general physical phenomenology’ to describe his attempt to purge physics of all metaphysical elements (Berg 2016, 3). After Brentano started to use the term around 1889, it became associated with descriptive psychology, and was applied in particular to psychological studies focusing on the qualitative aspects of conscious experience, such as Stumpf and Von Ehrenfels’ investigations on ‘Gestalt qualities’, which Husserl knew well.When Husserl frst published his Logical Investigations in 1900–01, it seemed consequently quite natural and uncontroversial to defne phenomenology as a kind of descriptive psychology,2 focusing specifcally upon cognitive activities and designed to account for the experiences through which knowledge is performed. At this stage of development of his philosophical ideas, Husserl still conceived phenomenology as strongly connected both to psychology understood as an empirical science and to pure logic, describing his overall philosophical project as based on a “purely descriptive phenomenology of the lived experiences concerned with thinking and knowing”.3
1.2.2. De-psychologising psychology (Husserl’s Logical Investigations) However, while Husserl did not coin the term ‘phenomenology’ but borrowed it from the scientifc and psychological studies of his time, his understanding of the relation between phenomenology and psychology diverges from his predecessors on a fundamental point. Indeed, claiming that phenomenology is a kind of descriptive psychology does not mean that they are strictly equivalent, and that phenomenology is, in its turn, tantamount to some kind of psychology. Phenomenology, in the sentence quoted above, is not merely said to be descriptive, but purely descriptive, which makes a signifcant difference between them according to Husserl, since the purity that characterizes phenomenological description is intended to grant phenomenology some methodological primacy over psychology. Phenomenology and psychology share a descriptive purpose that make them akin to each other in some respect: they both 14
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take conscious experiences (Erlebnisse) as their starting point and as the ultimate ground of their descriptions. However, the kind of description involved in descriptive psychology is not purely descriptive insofar as it presupposes the empirical nature of the conscious experiences that express mental phenomena. The phenomena described are already determined as psychological and interpreted on the basis of an ontological distinction between mental and physical phenomena that phenomenological description does not need to presuppose:“pure description, Husserl writes, is only a preliminary step to theory, and is not itself a theory” (Hua XIX/1, 24).4 Phenomenological description, insofar as it is pure, must be metaphysically neutral and faithful to the absence of presupposition that Husserl introduces in 1901 as the fundamental principle of phenomenology.5 Unlike psychology, which focuses exclusively upon mental phenomena, phenomenology is not a ‘regional’ science, whose specifc domain of objects or phenomena can be a priori delimited: it consists in the description of phenomena in general, without presupposing any ontological region to which phenomenology would be essentially bounded and committed as a science. This fundamental distinction allows Husserl to understand phenomenology as a brand new and original philosophical method that does not need to rely on any kind of psychological presuppositions. Husserl’s analysis of the relation between phenomenology and descriptive psychology is consequently particularly ambiguous and sensitive, paving the way to so many potential misinterpretations and misunderstandings that Husserl decided to completely rewrite this paragraph in the second edition of the Logical Investigations in 1913. Claiming that phenomenology is descriptive psychology would be quite paradoxical if it meant that they could simply be held to be synonymous. Indeed, the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, which constitute the frst volume of the Logical Investigations as well as the pathway to phenomenology, were devoted to the criticism and rejection of the various forms of psychologism, in response to Frege’s harsh criticisms against the Philosophy of Arithmetic, which Husserl published in 1891 and in which he defended an approach to mathematical thinking based on a descriptive psychology directly inspired by Brentano. Taking into account Frege’s highly infuential critique, the frst volume of the Logical Investigations rejects under the label ‘psychologism’ the varieties of theories that attempt to reduce logical truths to psychological laws by showing that the former rely on the activity of thinking and must consequently be grounded in psychological mechanisms. Against such psychologistic theories, Husserl’s phenomenological project is built upon the demonstration that logical and psychological laws are strictly independent from each other.The very purpose of phenomenology is to provide a description of cognitive experiences that constitutes the basic ground for any theoretical research, whether psychological or logical: One and the same sphere of description can accordingly serve to prepare for very different theoretical sciences. It is not the full science of psychology that serves as a foundation for pure logic, but certain classes of descriptions which, insofar as they constitute the step preparatory to the theoretical researches of psychology […] also form the substrate (Unterlage) for those fundamental abstractions in which logicians seize the essence of their ideal objects and connections with evidence. (Hua XIX/1, 24/176)6 Consequently, if phenomenology and descriptive psychology are strongly connected to each other, the methodology of the former entails a radicalization of the descriptive approach of the latter that maintains a fundamental difference between them. Phenomenology and descriptive psychology are still strongly related for Husserl, insofar as they both consist in the description of lived experiences. But saying this does not mean that they are strictly identical, and this is 15
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why, in response to the diffculties raised by the introduction of the 1901 edition of the Logical Investigations, Husserl strikingly takes in 1913 the exact opposite stance to his previous statement, as he decides to rewrite this paragraph for the second edition: If psychology is given its old meaning, phenomenology is precisely not descriptive psychology, its peculiar ‘pure’ description, its contemplation of pure essences on the basis of exemplary individual intuitions of experiences […] and its descriptive fxation of the contemplated essences into pure concepts, is no empirical description (as in natural sciences). (Hua XIX/1, 23/175)7 These two opposite statements are not as opposed as they seem; they only require that we understand phenomenology as a critical deepening of Brentano’s psychology, inspired by Brentano’s description of intentional consciousness, but radical enough to reject the ontological division between mental (psychischen) and physical phenomena that constituted the main goal of Brentano’s intentionality thesis. If phenomenology is descriptive psychology, as Husserl claimed in 1901, it consists frst and foremost in a philosophical attempt to ‘depsychologise psychology’8 and to describe the structures of lived experiences without being committed to any kind of presupposition regarding the ontological status of mental phenomena.9
1.2.3. The phenomenological transformation of intentionality This critical relation to Brentano’s descriptive psychology entails an in-depth reinterpretation and reassessment of the intentionality thesis that is crucial to the defnition of phenomenology. By refusing that the intentionality of conscious acts be intrinsically contingent on the delimitation of the sphere of mental (or psychic) phenomena, Husserl deeply modifes the meaning of the main concept he inherited from Brentano. Husserl retains his master’s fundamental idea that the intentionality of conscious experiences characterizes their orientation towards an object and that each mental act is directed towards its intentional object in its own specifc way.10 However, if the phenomenological (and metaphysically neutral) description of intentional lived experiences is insensitive to the ontological distinction between physical and mental phenomena, then the object of an intentional act can no longer be treated in terms of ‘mental in-existence’ or ‘immanent objectivity’, and intentionality cannot be understood as a form of mental “‘containment’ of objects in acts”.11 Instead of treating intentionality as an immanent characteristic of psychical phenomena that encloses objects within consciousness as if mental contents were to be understood as a “sort of box-within-box structure” (ibid., 98), Husserl understands intentionality as a relation that expresses the fundamental openness of lived experiences to the different domains of objectivity (existing, fctional, ideal objects …). In order to understand the depth of this reinterpretation of intentionality, one needs to stress the radical specifcity of the intentional relation as Husserl describes it: it is not and cannot be a relation in the usual sense of the word, i.e. an external relation that logically presupposes two things that enter into relation with each other.As Husserl makes immediately clear, the intentional relation is not a relation between a conscious experience on the one hand, and an object on the other hand, which would be connected together in virtue of the intentional relation: There are not two things present in experience, we do not experience the object and beside it the intentional experience directed upon it, there are not even two things 16
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present in the sense of a part and a whole which contains it: only one thing is present, the intentional experience, whose essential descriptive character is the intention in question. (Hua XIX/2, 386/98) This is the reason why, rather than a mere relation, intentionality needs to be understood as a form of ‘correlation’ (Korrelation) that ties together in a much deeper sense the lived experience and the object it is intrinsically oriented towards, as Husserl stresses much later, at the other end of his philosophical career, in the Crisis of European Sciences – the last philosophical text Husserl wrote. Emphasizing the unity of his philosophical project since the publication of the Logical Investigations, Husserl then claims that “the correlation between world (the world of which we always spoke) and its subjective manners of givenness [Gegebenheitsweisen]” constitutes the main discovery and the fundamental ground of the phenomenological breakthrough, which was able to identify for the frst time the intentional correlation as a “philosophical wonder” and to recognize that everything stands in correlation with its own manners of givenness (Hua VI, 168/165–166). Phenomenology is born from the careful examination of “the how of the appearance of a thing in its actual and possible alteration” and the description of “the correlation it involves between appearance and that which appears as such”. Consequently, instead of a psychological description consisting in an analysis of the actual contents and empirical elements that constitute mental phenomena, phenomenological description examines the structures of consciousness, i.e. the various manners in which objects are experienced by us and given to us in a way that constitutes our world and defnes the horizon of human life. This task – accounting for the how of the appearance of the things that constitute the coordinates of our world – does not only establish the specifc aim of Husserl’s philosophy. It constitutes the overarching goal of a wider philosophical purpose, giving rise to a movement rather than a school of thought: it defnes the main direction of the phenomenological movement, and sets the diffculties that the later proponents of the phenomenological tradition inherit from Husserl. Consequently, the history of the phenomenological movement can be understood and described as the history of the various ways philosophers have attempted to address the diffculties and insuffciencies of Husserl’s early breakthrough, bringing signifcant shifts in the phenomenological method while nevertheless maintaining the necessity of fulflling the original philosophical task identifed by Husserl.
1.3. The shifts 1.3.1. The transcendental shift (Husserl, Fink) Even before his inheritors would contemplate the possibility of bringing phenomenological descriptions beyond the scope that phenomenology was assigned by its founding father, Husserl himself pointed out the necessity of a radical transformation of the phenomenological method that provoked its frst fundamental shift. One of the main questions that the Logical Investigations left unanswered, and that Husserl came to consider as highly problematic only a couple of years after the publication of his ground-breaking work, was the question of the relation between the phenomenological method and the empirical ground upon which descriptions are based.The strong connexions between Husserl’s descriptive analysis of lived experiences and Brentano’s own method in psychology cast a doubt on the Logical Investigations’ claim to metaphysical neutrality. In Formal and Transcendental Logic, published much later in 1929, Husserl stresses the issues that the psychological ground upon which phenomenological descriptions are built entails: 17
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many enthusiastic readers of the Logical Investigations felt that the phenomenological analyses of the second volume, which includes the six investigations that introduce and apply for the frst time the proper method that Husserl specifcally called phenomenology, betrayed the anti-psychologist commitments of the Prolegomena to Pure Logic and signifed “a relapse into psychologism” (Hua XVII, §56, 136/152). By that stage, Husserl was indeed considering that the Logical Investigations are located at the crossroads between a sophisticated form of descriptive psychology that he had not yet entirely managed to overcome, and a properly transcendental phenomenology that required moving one step further away from psychology in order to avoid the threat of such ‘transcendental psychologism’ (ibid.). In order to radicalize the opposition between psychology and phenomenology, Husserl consequently needed a method that would guarantee the purity of phenomenological descriptions and seal their irreducibility to psychological analyses.Around 1902–03, Husserl began to make a sharp distinction between phenomenology as an eidetic science of ‘pure’ consciousness studied in ‘immanence’ and psychology as an empirical, factual science of mental states. He soon came to consider that the descriptive method set up in this second volume of the Logical Investigations was not radical enough to purify phenomenology from the ontological presuppositions inherent in psychological sciences in general and in Brentano’s empirical psychology in particular. Husserl had made a major discovery by putting forward an intuitive and nevertheless rigorous method allowing him to describe lived experiences in a way that displays the essential structures of consciousness, i.e. in terms of intentional acts, their contents and intentional objects. However, this method seemed to presuppose some kind of naïve commitment to the reality of the mental phenomena described: the psychological background of Husserl’s method in the 1901 opus is unable to stress the radicality of the phenomenological analysis of lived experiences, and the intentional structures of consciousness are only described in the Logical Investigations under the presupposition of a world within which and in relation to which such consciousness must fnd its meaning. As he was trying to strengthen the analyses developed in the Logical Investigations and struggling with such diffculties, Husserl realized that a ‘pure’ phenomenology would require a method that clarifes and emphasizes the opposition between the phenomenological and psychological approaches to intentional consciousness. In a manuscript from 1905, Husserl famously labelled this original method, specifcally designed to avoid the kind of diffculties that makes psychological descriptions dependent on the presupposition of a world within which consciousness is taken to be empirically encountered, as the ‘phenomenological reduction’. Putting aside all scientifc, philosophical, cultural and everyday assumptions that jeopardize our purely intuitive access to lived experiences, reduction operates a deactivation of the ‘natural’ attitude that constantly presupposes the world as the ultimate horizon of every intentional act of consciousness. Insofar as this bracketing of the natural attitude is expected to free phenomenological descriptions of lived experiences from the empirical background upon which psychological analyses drew, it lays the ground for a transcendental phenomenology that no longer carries the ontological implications of psychological descriptions. Suspending our naïve commitments to reality and excluding every position of transcendent existence, the method of reduction allows description to focus on the purely immanent structures and components of lived experiences, attending only to phenomena’s specifc modes of givenness.This is the reason why, after introducing reduction as the key to phenomenological methodology in the lectures he gave at Göttingen University around 1906–07 (Hua XXIV, Hua II), Husserl came to characterize phenomenology exclusively in transcendental terms, claiming ultimately that the essential structures of consciousness previously described thanks to eidetic intuition in the Logical Investigations can only fnd their proper – transcendental – meaning once they come to be uncovered by transcendental reduction. 18
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This transcendental turn in Husserl’s trajectory contributed to considerably extending the scope of phenomenological analyses, allowing Husserl to address wider philosophical questions that were left aside in his previous works, where the phenomenological method was especially devoted to epistemological investigations regarding the essential features of our acts of knowing. The transcendental radicalization of the phenomenological method made legitimate its application to any kind of lived experiences once the bracketing of every transcendence has uncovered their purely immanent components and structures. Amongst the original new perspectives that this transcendental shift opened up, the most signifcant are related to the analysis of the temporal, spatial, embodied, normative, subjective and intersubjective structures of consciousness. Although Husserl’s move towards a transcendental form of phenomenology was harshly criticized by an important number of his students, the broadening of the phenomenological themes that it made possible was greatly instrumental in demonstrating phenomenology’s ability to apply to any feld of philosophical knowledge, including ethical, social, historical, aesthetic and kinaesthetic domains. The possibility of widening the scope of phenomenological inquiry contributed greatly to making phenomenology much more than a mere theory of consciousness exclusively focused on the structures of knowledge, and to initiating a philosophical movement bound to spread way beyond the ambitions of its founding father. However, one fundamental aspect of this reinterpretation of phenomenological analysis in transcendental terms that Husserl’s students were most critical of is its strong emphasis on the egological structure of intentional consciousness and the particular kind of transcendental idealism that Husserl eventually recognized as a necessary consequence of his phenomenology. Both features contravened the realist and non-subjective orientation of the analyses Husserl had developed in the Logical Investigations, and entailed a radical transformation of the kind of phenomenology he frst introduced in his 1901 masterpiece. Instead of understanding phenomenology as a mere development of Brentano’s psychology, which originally consisted mostly in extending the boundaries of his master’s school, the transcendental dimension of phenomenological analyses allowed Husserl to place phenomenology within a much wider philosophical tradition, in which Descartes and Kant constitute the most important fgures. Discarding the criticisms of Natorp’s neo-Kantian emphasis on the ego initially expressed in the ffth Logical Investigation,12 Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology goes hand in hand with a reinterpretation of Descartes’ cogito, which stresses both the subjective character of conscious experience and the limits of Descartes’ substantial interpretation of the Ego, leading to ‘transcendental realism’ (Hua 1, §11, 63/24). In the Logical Investigations, Husserl was still following the Humean tradition that inspired Brentano’s empirical psychology, and he considered that the description of the intentional structure of the acts of consciousness and the analysis of their real and ideal contents required bracketing the ego as the source of psychic acts. However, Husserl soon came to realize that the ego played a crucial role not only as the source of the syntheses that perform the unifcation of intentional acts, but as the ‘pure’ and ‘transcendental’ origin that constitutes the meaning of conscious experience. After the transcendental turn, Husserl constantly stresses the subjective dimension of intentional experience, interpreting intentionality as a constitutive relation, thanks to which the object receives its meaning from its relation to the transcendental ego. Taking the opposite stance to that defended in 1901, Husserl takes up Kant’s famous conception of the transcendental ego as accompanying every representation in the general introduction to transcendental phenomenology he publishes in 1913 to clarify his position under the title Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (Hua III/1, §57, 123/133). For Husserl as for Kant, a ‘transcendental’ philosophy is expected to demonstrate the necessity of asking for the conditions for the possibility of objectivity and of recognizing the essential correlation between 19
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the objective world and constituting subjectivity. Drawing on this fundamental idea, Husserl proposes from 1913 on a new kind of transcendental constitutive phenomenology that studies how objects are constituted in pure consciousness, setting aside thanks to transcendental reduction any questions regarding the natural world.This characterization of the philosophical purpose that phenomenology is to achieve allowed Eugen Fink, Husserl’s faithful and trustworthy secretary at the end of his life, to propose in his own sixth Meditation to understand Husserl’s phenomenology as a continuation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy (Fink 1995). Later, in the Crisis of European Sciences, the last book Husserl intended for publication as he was nearing his death, he goes as far as to claim that phenomenology is the only philosophical way of uncovering the subjective meaning of the relation between man and world, using transcendental reduction in order to reveal the ‘functioning subjectivity’ (leistende Subjektivität) (HuaVI, 68/67) that operates everywhere ‘in hiddenness’, a subjectivity that is no longer to be understood as enclosed within the boundaries of the psychological ego.
1.3.2. The realist shift (Reinach, Daubert, Scheler, Stein, Ingarden …) For a number of reasons, not many of the students Husserl managed to gather around him in Göttingen were at frst convinced by the transformations that phenomenology underwent after Husserl gave a transcendental orientation to his research. Husserl’s most gifted students had come to Göttingen from Munich, where they had initially been studying philosophy and psychology with Theodor Lipps, whose theory was criticized by Husserl in the Prolegomena as a form of psychologism. Confronted with the lack of academic interest in the phenomenological considerations developed in the second volume of his Logical Investigations and in search of a wider audience, Husserl started soon after their publication to look for students who would be suffciently open-minded to follow him, while having a solid and rigorous training in psychology. Under the impulsion of Johannes Daubert, a group of students of Lipps (later known as the ‘Munich Circle’), including Adolf Reinach, Moritz Geiger and Alexander Pfänder, decided to align themselves with Husserl’s phenomenological method against the psychology of their former teacher, and left Munich for Göttingen around 1905 to study directly with Husserl.The circle expanded as they were soon joined by new prominent members such as Max Scheler, then Edith Stein and Roman Ingarden, giving rise to the ‘Göttingen Circle’. It is mainly within this circle that the idea of phenomenology as a ‘movement’ frst started to make sense, as phenomenology appeared for the frst time as a methodology able to gather philosophers and psychologists belonging to diverse horizons and heading towards different directions. Indeed, the differences regarding the orientation that phenomenology was to follow appeared immediately as the circle was growing. Most of the members of the circle, whose strong interest in the descriptive phenomenology sketched in the Logical Investigations had urged them to join Husserl at Göttingen University, could only be reluctant to align with the transcendental turn offcialized by their master only a couple of years after their arrival. Paradoxically, the move towards transcendental phenomenology that Husserl expected to strengthen and improve the position he advocated in 1901 ended up provoking sharp dissent between Husserl and his best students, who became quite critical of the idealist reassessment of phenomenology to which Husserl’s transcendental claims committed him. In spite of their diverging ways of practising phenomenology, all the scholars belonging to the Göttingen Circle shared a strong scepticism regarding the method of transcendental reduction and rejected the idealistic turn phenomenology was beginning to undergo. Consequently, this disagreement with their master contributed to the reinforcement of the circle’s philo20
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sophical unity, based on an attempt to maintain the realist (versus idealist) orientation of phenomenological research and to prioritize the objective (rather than subjective) orientation of phenomenological description expressed in its original motto,“to the things themselves”.Against the pervasive kind of psychologism that most members of the group had been acquainted with while studying with Lipps in Munich, phenomenology represented the opportunity to develop a logical yet nevertheless rigorously descriptive analysis of the objective structures of reality, through a universal philosophy of essences. It is Husserl himself who described the phenomenological investigations of his students as ‘realist’. If the kind of realism to which the members of the circle subscribed was the result of their anti-idealism, it is frst and foremost a phenomenological realism of essences, which draws on Husserl’s eidetic method. Under the growing infuence of Reinach, the only one of his students for whom Husserl always and only expressed his admiration until his premature death on the front in 1917, the group sought to use phenomenological descriptions in order to extend the domain of our a priori knowledge. Reinach stressed in his work the ontological signifcance of the discovery Husserl had made in his ground-breaking 1901 masterpiece when he uncovered the existence of a material form of a priori. One of the most philosophically signifcant achievements that phenomenology deserves to be granted is its ability to reveal the essential and necessary connections that occur not only in the formal structures of logic, but also in the structures of concrete material phenomena, such as the connection between the colouration of a surface and its spatial extension. Radicalizing an insight borrowed from the third Logical Investigation, Reinach showed that such essential connections (Wesenszummenhänge) are a priori properties carried by states of affairs (Sachverhalte), which in turn constitute the objects of our intentional acts. This phenomenological conception of the a priori was deeply original insofar as it allowed an ontological (rather than epistemological) interpretation of a concept that was traditionally tied, since Kant, to the subjective conditions of knowledge. If anything, realist phenomenology understands a priori knowledge as a non-inductive knowledge of the objective connections between the elements of the states of affairs judged, so that the a priori determines the ontological properties of the object (rather than the subject) of knowledge, or of any act of consciousness. This realist claim goes hand in hand with a reassessment of Brentano’s intentionality thesis, interpreted in the spirit of the Logical Investigations less as a correlation than as a relation to an object in which consciousness, so to say, absorbs and exhausts itself. Daubert dedicated a lot of effort to the analysis of this entanglement of intentional consciousness with reality, describing it in a way that makes transcendental reduction appear to be an artifcial and detrimental attempt to withdraw consciousness from reality in order to substantivize the ego. The members of the Munich and Göttingen circles extended this realist analysis of our a priori knowledge to various kinds of entities and domains, applying it in particular to the psychology of willing and motivation (Pfänder 1900), the analysis of ‘social acts’ such as speech acts (Reinach 1989),13 the ontology of communities (Stein 1922), works of art and aesthetic phenomena (Ingarden 1931) or to ethical values (Scheler 1980). Even though their investigations were broadly critical of the transcendental reassessment that phenomenology was undergoing at that time, they contributed to demonstrating the vitality and widening the scope of phenomenological studies. As evidence of this vitality, it must be recalled how infuential this anti-idealist interpretation of phenomenology was on later generations of phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, who shared these realist concerns with respect to the transcendental radicalization of phenomenology, as well as contemporary philosophers such as Roderick Chisholm, J.N. Findlay, R. Sokolowski, B. Smith, P. Simons or K. Mulligan amongst others, who drew on the realist tradition in order to build some interesting bridges between phenomenology and certain tendencies in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. 21
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One might argue that this realist approach to phenomenology consisted less in a transformative shift than in a conservative backwards move, returning to the early conception of phenomenology that Husserl presented in the Logical Investigations. However, the works of the Göttingen Circle contributed to the raising of a fundamental question about the nature of phenomenology that was certainly not absent from the Logical Investigations but was left problematically unanswered. Husserl’s transcendental turn urged phenomenologists to choose between idealism and realism for the frst time, giving rise to an alternative that would defne the philosophical spectrum of phenomenological thought for the generations to come.The realist reaction against their master that most of Husserl’s early students shared contributed to making phenomenology less of a doctrine, or even a methodology, than a broader philosophical movement encompassing different trends, and involving some unavoidable but fruitful disagreements about the metaphysical stakes and signifcance of phenomenology.
1.3.3. The hermeneutic shift (Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricœur) Like the members of the Munich Circle, though independently from them, Martin Heidegger’s attention was frst drawn to phenomenology when he discovered Husserl’s Logical Investigations. And, like the proponents of phenomenological realism, the originality of Heidegger’s personal contribution to phenomenology derives from his criticism of the transcendental method developed by Husserl from 1905 on. However, Heidegger cannot be counted as one of Husserl’s students, strictly speaking. Indeed, he and Heidegger never met before Husserl moved in 1916 from Göttingen to Freiburg, where Heidegger was already lecturing as a Privatdozent, and consequently his interest in Husserl’s phenomenology grew on a quite different ground than the students Husserl had gathered around him prior to his new appointment. Heidegger came to read the Logical Investigations while he was studying Catholic theology in Freiburg, where he soon switched to philosophy with the prospect of writing his dissertation with Heinrich Rickert, who had become by that stage a major fgure of the neo-Kantian tradition in Germany. Not only was Heidegger’s philosophical thought framed within a philosophical context strongly determined by neo-Kantianism, it must be noted that his particular interest in Husserl’s phenomenology arose through the reading of another important neo-Kantian philosopher whom Heidegger was under the infuence of during these years, Emil Lask. Lask was the only one amongst the neo-Kantians who took Husserl’s 1901 groundwork seriously enough to propose a theory of categories that acknowledges explicitly the decisive breakthrough accomplished in the Logical Investigation. Although they belong to the horizon of neo-Kantianism, Lask’s works integrate some of Husserl’s fundamental insights in an attempt to renew the neo-Kantian’s theory of knowledge and interpretation of logic.14 Lask’s positive appraisal of Husserl impressed Heidegger enough to convince him that phenomenology was able to address the questions left unanswered by his neo-Kantian training. In particular, Lask brought Heidegger’s attention to the novelty of the theory of categorial intuition developed in the sixth Logical Investigation, which eventually provided, according to Heidegger’s own words, the ground (Boden) upon which his philosophical investigation could only be established (Heidegger 1986, 378). From this moment on, phenomenology played a fundamental role in the development of Heidegger’s philosophical thought, even though Heidegger had already completed his philosophical training under the direction of Rickert and established himself as a respected scholar by the time Husserl arrived in Freiburg. Even if Heidegger was initially rather critical of Husserl’s appointment at the university where he was lecturing,15 Lask’s reading of Husserl convinced him that an in-depth appropriation of the phenomenological method would provide him with 22
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the tools he needed in order to overcome the philosophical shortcomings of the neo-Kantian framework in which his thought had emerged.16 In the years following Husserl’s arrival in Freiburg, Heidegger engaged with him in an intense philosophical relationship, leading him to become Husserl’s assistant after the end of the war, in 1919. Heidegger’s brilliant and unique ability to mould his own powerful thinking and way of questioning into the phenomenological cast fascinated Husserl to such an extent that he would eventually consider him the best candidate to succeed him as a full Professor at Freiburg University in 1928. Only a few years after he started to work as Husserl’s assistant, Heidegger had gained such recognition in the German philosophical landscape that he obviously needed to be counted as one of the leading fgures of the phenomenological movement, bringing Husserl himself to declare in the early twenties: “phenomenology is me and Heidegger” (Gadamer 1994, 18). However signifcant the differences in their philosophical perspectives were, Husserl trusted that their commitment to phenomenology made them close enough to embrace a common philosophical objective, and he consequently offered to publish Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), Heidegger’s main philosophical manifesto, in his Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in 1927. The publication of Being and Time made manifest the substantial and signifcant differences that opposed the philosophical views of Husserl and Heidegger since the beginning, and which were responsible for Heidegger’s ambivalent attitude towards his old master. To be sure, from the dedication of Being and Time17 to his last seminars (Heidegger 1986), Heidegger always recognized and even claimed explicitly the decisive infuence that the ‘phenomenological seeing’ (phänomenologische Sehen) he learnt from Husserl when he was his assistant exerted upon his own approach to philosophy (Heidegger 2007, 98/78).Yet Heidegger, who remained widely sceptical about the philosophical depth of his master’s doctrine18 and was not afraid to be at odds with the old-fashioned metaphysical framework of ‘the old man’ (der Alte),19 was an “entirely original personality […] labouring to forge his own solidly grounded approach”, as Husserl himself claimed in the letter of recommendation he wrote to Paul Natorp on Heidegger’s behalf.20 Heidegger was bound to become a phenomenologist of his own kind – one whose deeply original insights opened a new and prolifc trend within the phenomenological movement. Amongst the substantial differences that separate Husserl and Heidegger’s philosophical conceptions, three main points of disagreement need to be highlighted, as they proved to be particularly instrumental in renewing the phenomenological movement from within. 1/ It must frst be stressed that Heidegger’s questioning was, from the start, foreign to Husserl’s phenomenological perspective.True, both Heidegger and Husserl underwent the decisive infuence of Franz Brentano’s pioneering investigations. However, the Brentano in which Heidegger discovered the philosophical question that would become the most fundamental for him – namely, the question of being – was not the charismatic professor who taught Husserl in Vienna and convinced him to switch from mathematics to philosophy. Heidegger’s interest in the multiple meanings of being arose from his reading of the dissertation on Aristotle that Brentano published in 1862 (Brentano 1862), at a time when he had not yet begun to develop his psychological analysis of intentionality. The discovery of Brentano’s renewed approach to the Aristotelian question about the equivocity of being set the ultimate goal of Heidegger’s philosophical thought, and he came to consider from this moment on that the ultimate task of philosophy was to elucidate “the wonder of all wonders: that there is being (daß Seiendes ist)” (Heidegger 1976). It is in this context that Heidegger frst read Husserl – mistakenly, by his own account – hoping that the Logical Investigations would help him solve his question about the meanings of being (Heidegger 2007, 75). Heidegger’s subsequent interest in the phenomenological call to “the thing itself ” is entirely determined by and reoriented towards his focus on a question that was never Husserl’s but his 23
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own – a question that Heidegger credits himself with being the frst to raise explicitly, and that presupposes a philosophical sensitivity to the general forgetfulness of being that Heidegger claims to be the only thinker to account for. Whence and how is it determined what is to be experienced as ‘the thing itself ’ (die Sache selbst) in accordance with the principle of phenomenology? Is it consciousness and its objectivity or is it the being of entities in its unconcealedness and concealment? (Heidegger 2007, 87/79) According to Heidegger, the fundamental breakthrough operated by Husserl’s phenomenology consists less in the description of the essential structures of intentional consciousness than in the discovery of the preconceptual understanding of being, which Husserl’s analysis of categorial intuition made possible but failed to recognize as the main achievement of his phenomenology. Consequently, far from turning him against phenomenology, Heidegger’s critical reading of Husserl brought him to reinterpret phenomenology within the horizon of his own problematic. While Husserl’s transcendental turn made him vulnerable to the shortcomings of the idealist tradition that includes Descartes, Kant and Fichte, Heidegger claims that “the question of being developed in Being and Time set itself against this philosophical position” and grew on the basis of “a more faithful adherence to the principle of phenomenology” (Heidegger 1977, 363/498).21 2/ The philosophical investigation into the question of being that motivates the writing of Being and Time is consequently to be described as intrinsically phenomenological, although in an original sense. Committed to the practice of the ‘phenomenological seeing’, Heidegger reaffrms the need for an intuitive method, which guarantees, according to him, the philosophical ‘radicality’ of the phenomenological approach and demonstrates subsequently its superiority over non-phenomenological methodologies, such as dialectics (Heidegger 1988, 45–46/36). However, Heidegger rejects the theoretical approach to intuition that Husserl was never able to overcome, and emphasizes in Being and Time the temporal presuppositions at work in the famous ‘principle of all principles’ thanks to which Husserl identifes intuition as the ultimate source of indubitable evidence and legitimacy for scientifc knowledge (Hua III/1, §24). As Heidegger notes,“the thesis that all cognition has its goal in ‘intuition’ has the temporal meaning that all cognition is a making present (Gegenwartigen)”, leading Husserl to grant absolute (but phenomenologically unjustifed, according to Heidegger) priority to the present over the other temporal modes in the characterization of phenomena (Heidegger 1977, 363/498). Against the metaphysical presuppositions upon which this conception of intuition draws, Heidegger claims that intentionality of ‘consciousness’ is grounded in a temporal orientation towards the future that is fundamental, and which Heidegger calls “the ecstatic temporality of Dasein” (ibid.). Instead of understanding intuition as a privileged mode of presentation of objects to a subject in a theoretical framework, Heidegger’s philosophical project consists in showing that such intuition is always derived from a practical and more originary relation to the world that guides and orients an agent’s activity. This primordial orientation towards the world, more fundamental than any other intentional mode of consciousness, is identifed by Heidegger as Verstehen, i.e. the act of understanding (Verständnis), and is described as a future-directed projection into practical possibilities (Carman 2003, 67). 3/ This temporal reorientation of phenomenological analysis for the sake of the prioritization of the question about being is bound to overthrow the privilege granted to pure intuition in Husserl’s phenomenology, so as to highlight the concrete existential ground and hermeneutic conditions of any act of intuiting:
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By showing how all sight is primarily grounded in understanding […] we have robbed pure intuition of its privilege, which corresponds noetically to the privileging of objective presence in traditional ontology. ‘Intuition’ (Anschauung) and ‘thought’ are both already remote derivatives of understanding. Even the phenomenological ‘intuition of essences’ (Wesensschau) is grounded in existential understanding (existenzialen Verstehen). (Heidegger 1977, 147/187, modifed) Heidegger here draws the consequences of his careful reading of the sixth Logical Investigation in the light of his own interrogation of the meaning of being and his reinterpretation of categorial intuition in hermeneutic terms.This decisive shift was operated as early as 1919, when Heidegger frst coined the phrase ‘hermeneutical intuition’22 to express the experiential and pre-theoretical access to being that categorial intuition makes possible, and to encapsulate what he considered the most fundamental insight of Husserl’s analysis. Heidegger goes as far as to speak of ‘understanding intuition’ (verstehende Intuition)23 so as to stress the fundamental permeability between these two concepts, arguing that intuition always presupposes a hermeneutic situation on the only basis of which it can take place. This articulation between intuition and understanding brings Heidegger to propose a renewed conception of the phenomenological method, now understood as a hermeneutic practice in which description is not merely grounded on intuition, but is frst and foremost guided “by the understanding intention” (durch die Absicht des Verstehens) (Heidegger 1993, 240).This transformation of the phenomenological method can thus be described as a hermeneutic shift, insofar as it allows Heidegger to emphasize the hermeneutic conditions of phenomenological inquiry. Indeed, the description of lived experiences presupposes their essential permeability to our understanding: Lived experiences in the broadest sense are through and through expressed experiences; even if they are not uttered in words, they are nonetheless expressed in a defnite articulation by an understanding I have of them as I simply live in them without regarding them thematically. (Heidegger 1979, 65/48) Consequently, far from the purely descriptive discipline Husserl envisioned, Heidegger contends that phenomenology is irreducibly interpretive and hermeneutic,24 going as far as to claim that the phenomenological inquiry itself belongs to a particular hermeneutic context that needs to be accounted for.The phenomenological description of lived experiences is now to be understood as the self-interpreting process through which a factic existence comes to describe from within its own movement (Dastur 2020).This ‘hermeneutics of facticity’ that replaces phenomenological description in Heidegger’s analysis is less the job of a meditating ego taking an external stance on its own existence and functioning as the ‘impartial spectator’ of itself25 than the fundamental task taken on by a being whose relation to its very being is constitutive of its defnition – a being which Heidegger from now on calls Dasein. Dasein, i.e. the being that is in its being “concerned about its very being” (Heidegger 2007, 12), is such that it is always already related to what is sought in the question regarding the meaning of being, and must be consequently characterized by its “pre-ontological understanding of being” (ibid., 14).The ultimate task of Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology is to propose a systematic analysis of the existential modes of Dasein that characterize its ‘being-in-the-world’ (In-der-Welt-Sein). Opening the way to Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’, the ‘existential analysis’ of Dasein is substituted in Being and Time to phenomenological description and lays the ground for the ‘turn’ (die Kehre)
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that would bring Heidegger to abandon the term ‘phenomenology’ promptly after he obtained Husserl’s Professorship in Freiburg in 1929.26 The hermeneutic shift initiated by Heidegger gave rise to a new and original conception of hermeneutics developed by phenomenologists such as Hans-Georg Gadamer in Germany and Paul Ricœur in France. As Ricœur notes, hermeneutics became with Heidegger fundamentally oriented towards the ontological problem of the relation to being insofar as it is intrinsically related to the experience of understanding (Heidegger 2007, 10).27 Deeply infuenced by Heidegger’s analysis of the Verstehen, Gadamer tried to provide a systematic structure to such philosophical hermeneutics, stressing that the phenomenon of understanding must be described as a structural feature of human experience rather than a local practice exclusively focused on the interpretation of texts. Instead of dealing with the formulation of the right principles for interpretation, hermeneutics seeks to bring the phenomenon of understanding itself to light.The purpose of philosophical hermeneutics is consequently less to establish a scientifc method for investigating the meaning of texts than to account for “human experience of the world in general” (Gadamer 2013, xx).This renewal of hermeneutics constitutes the leading thread of Gadamer’s interpretation of history and aesthetics, and of Ricœur’s analysis of symbols in religion, in psychoanalysis and in literature.
1.3.4. The existential shift (Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) The impact of Heidegger’s hermeneutic shift on the phenomenological movement was strong enough to deeply modify the meaning, the scope and the goals of phenomenology. Phenomenology, after Heidegger, would never look the same. However, the aspect of this renewal that infuenced the most next generations of phenomenologists is maybe less the original articulation between phenomenology and hermeneutics that Being and Time brought forth than the specifc focus on human existence that Heidegger’s phenomenology had made possible.The shift accomplished by Heidegger’s subtle but powerful critique of the “neglect of the being of man”, which is, according to him, pervasive in Husserl’s phenomenology, contributed strongly to opening up new expectations for phenomenological practice, allowing phenomenology to move back from the ‘abstract’ study of the structures of intentional consciousness to a concrete description of human existence.28 The existential analytics of Dasein gave phenomenology, so to say, a second birth by shifting its epicentre so as to make existence the ultimate ground of phenomenological description. This is the reason why the renewal of the phenomenological style of analysis that Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity made possible opened up the space for subsequent articulations of ‘existential phenomenology’ (Ricoeur 1957), for which it became the central inspiration, even though Heidegger always vehemently resisted the label of existentialism. Indeed, not only did his approach seem to offer a greater fexibility and plasticity than Husserl’s rigorous method for grasping the meaning of our belonging to the world, it also provided a phenomenological basis for a renewed understanding of the philosophical stakes of human existence. Describing Dasein as “the being who is in its being concerned about its very being” fundamentally means that the whatness (essentia) of this being must, frst and foremost, be understood in relation to its modes of existing (existentia) (Heidegger 2007, 42). Dasein, Heidegger writes,“always understands itself in terms of existence” (ibid., 12); its essence “lies in its existence” (ibid., 42). The priority granted by Heidegger to existence over essence as well as the corollary emphasis on the ontological horizon of phenomenological description constituted the framework within which some major French philosophical fgures of the mid-20th century such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed a phenomenological approach to human fnitude and freedom, bringing phenomenology to an existential shift.29 26
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Overtly describing themselves as phenomenologists, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty stressed the decisive infuence of Husserl’s works over their own approach to philosophical inquiry. “I was ‘Husserlian’ and long to remain so”, Sartre writes, describing the context of maturation of his own thought (Sartre 1984, 183). Indeed, Sartre’s discovery of phenomenology and his frst phenomenological essays were written under the infuence of Husserl a few years before Sartre would complete his reading of Being and Time, at Easter 1939. The reason was, according to Sartre himself, that he could only come to Heidegger after he had ‘exhausted’ Husserl, which took him four years, during which he wrote La transcendence de l’Ego (Sartre 1936), L’imaginaire (Sartre 1940) and his never published book La Psyché, where Sartre developed his own realist interpretation of the concept of intentionality. However, the impossibility of providing a ‘realist solution’ to the diffculties raised by Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and to solve the impasses of his idealism turned Sartre towards Heidegger, whose infuence he described as ‘providential’, “since it supervened to teach [him] authenticity and historicity just at the very moment when war was about to make these notions indispensable to [him]” (Sartre 1984, 182). In this context, Sartre’s early hope that phenomenology would bring philosophy closer to life as it is commonly experienced30 and his anti-idealistic orientation towards reality combined into a phenomenological description of human fnitude deeply infuenced by Heidegger’s conceptuality, which led to the publication of Sartre’s “essay on phenomenological ontology”, Being and Nothingness, in 1943. Stressing the tension between the fundamental and categorical freedom that characterizes human existence and the limiting conditions that determine its necessary situation, Sartre’s account of human fnitude led him famously to endorse a few years later an atheistic form of existentialism, whose key principle states that “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself ” (Sartre 2007, 22). Merleau-Ponty, who shared Sartre’s main claims regarding the contingency of human existence and its fundamentally situated freedom, developed over the same years a phenomenological perspective on perception and embodiment grounded in a similarly ambiguous relationship to Husserl’s and Heidegger’s philosophical heritage. Stressing the importance of Husserl’s last writings, the Phenomenology of Perception (1945) proposes an ontologically oriented account of the lifeworld (the Lebenswelt introduced by Husserl in The Crisis of European Sciences) that MerleauPonty interprets in the horizon of a constant dialogue with Heidegger’s description of our Being-in-the-world. Just as much as for Sartre, the surge of interest that brought Merleau-Ponty to phenomenology resulted from the feeling of the obsolescence of French philosophy (its “perte de substance”, as J.-T. Desanti put it) (Desanti 2005, 572) and a need to rejuvenate it with concrete descriptions inspired by the reading of Jean Wahl’s book Vers le concret (Wahl 1932).31 For Merleau-Ponty as for Sartre, the ultimately ontological horizon of phenomenological description entails that the analysis of the eidetic structures of consciousness can only be accomplished through a phenomenological description of existence in its contingency. However, MerleauPonty emphasizes more specifcally the intrinsic connection between this contingent character attached to the experience of human fnitude and our necessarily incarnate existence. Refusing to separate intentional consciousness from the bodily processes that constitute our pre-objective orientation towards the world, Merleau-Ponty describes the situation of human existence as ‘being-toward-the-world’ through the body, and develops a phenomenology of perception that constantly stresses the embodied dimension of intentionality and the essential articulation between subjectivity and the body.As Merleau-Ponty puts it: If I fnd, while refecting upon the essence of subjectivity, that it is tied with the essence of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is identical with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because, ulti27
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mately, the subject that I am, understood concretely, is inseparable from this particular body and this particular world. (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 467/431, modifed) This phenomenological reassessment of the relation between subjectivity and the body goes hand in hand with a sharp critique of the intellectualist versions of the cogito, and brings an original contribution to the critical arguments against idealism developed in Heidegger and Sartre’s analyses of existence: The true cogito does not defne the existence of the subject through the thought that the subject has of existing, does not convert the certainty of the world into a certainty of the thought about the world, and fnally, does not replace the world itself with the signifcation ‘world.’ Rather, it recognizes my thought as an inalienable fact and it eliminates all forms of idealism by revealing me as ‘being in the world.’ (ibid., viii/xxvii) This embodied approach to the cogito entails an anti-idealist and rather critical reinterpretation of Husserl’s transcendental method, which accounts for reduction in existential terms and claims its solubility in the horizon of Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-Sein.32 On behalf of a greater fdelity to experience, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology refuses to presuppose that lived experiences are fully transparent to refection and contends that a faithful description of human existence demonstrates the “impossibility of a complete reduction” (ibid., viii). Our existence “is too tightly caught in the world in order to know itself as such at the moment when it is thrown into the world”. On this basis, Merleau-Ponty attempts to reconcile the eidetic orientation of Husserl’s phenomenology with the existential commitments of Heidegger’s hermeneutics: We cannot bring our perception of the world before the philosophical gaze without ceasing to be identical with that thesis about the world or with that interest for the world that defnes us, without stepping back to this side of our commitment in order to make it itself appear as a spectacle, or without passing over from the fact of our existence to the nature of our existence, that is from Dasein [existence] to Wesen [essence]. […] The necessity of passing through essences does not signify that philosophy takes them as an object, but rather […] that our existence needs the feld of ideality in order to know and conquer its facticity. (Merleau-Ponty 2005, ix/xxviii) This analysis of the relations between essence and existence allows Merleau-Ponty to combine Husserl and Heidegger’s insights into a description of the originary embodied forms of intentionality that lays the ground for a phenomenological analysis of the pre-cognitive connection to the world that perception establishes.
1.3.5. The counter-intentional shift (Levinas, Henry, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Marion …) The inner transformations of the phenomenological movement and the shifts that resulted from the anti-idealist critiques of Husserl’s transcendental method developed successively by the Munich Circle, by Heidegger and by the French existential phenomenologists, paved the way for a thorough redefnition of the limits and extent of phenomenological inquiry. Pushing this 28
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critical reconfguration of phenomenology one step further, a new approach to the phenomenological practice inherited from Husserl and Heidegger emerged in France in the second half of the 20th century, giving rise to what has been described as a ‘French moment of phenomenology’ (Marion 2002b), less characterized by its specifcally French (as opposed to German) philosophical style than by the fertile intellectual context in which it developed.33 Although this French reappropriation of phenomenology may have started as early as 1930, with the publication of Emmanuel Levinas’ thesis (Levinas 1930), followed one year later by his translation of the Cartesian Meditations, which drew some signifcant attention to Husserl’s phenomenology and introduced it to a wider philosophical audience in France, this ‘moment’ of phenomenology must nevertheless be distinguished from the rise of existential phenomenology that was due to the works of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Even though these two trends of the phenomenological movement overlap temporally, geographically and sometimes even conceptually, they fundamentally differ with respect to their relation to the phenomenological tradition. Even when Sartre and the early Merleau-Ponty (until the publication of his Phenomenology of Perception) discuss the legitimacy of the phenomenological analyses of Husserl and Heidegger, their critical relation to their predecessors remains inside the framework and within the boundaries of the phenomenological description of intentionality they owe to Husserl and Heidegger. If anything, such criticisms belong less to a negative assessment than to a positive diagnosis expected to strengthen and reinforce phenomenology.The ultimate horizon of Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s analyses is to provide a ‘phenomenological ontology’ of existence that expands the phenomenological approaches of Husserl and Heidegger and combines them so as to overcome their shortcomings.34 On the contrary, the ‘French moment of phenomenology’ initiated by Levinas and carried on successively by the later Merleau-Ponty, Michel Henry, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion (to quote a few main fgures only) takes its point of departure from a much more radical critique of Husserl and Heidegger’s main philosophical concepts, leading eventually to their dismantling, their abandonment or their complete redefnition.35 The originality and the unity of this ‘French moment’ may precisely arise from the aforementioned philosophers’ ability to base their somewhat paradoxical use of the phenomenological method on an in-depth critique and transformation of its concepts.Already in 1935, Emmanuel Levinas’ frst thematic essay “De l’évasion” (On escape) (Levinas 1935) interrogates the possibility of transcending the horizon of Being that dominates Heidegger’s phenomenology, as well as initiating Levinas’ criticism of “the primacy of theory in Husserl’s philosophy” (Levinas 1930, 1935, 1998). On this ground, Levinas started to develop a very personal approach to phenomenological description that proceeds from a powerful critique of both Husserl and Heidegger, bringing phenomenology to a signifcant new shift, which deeply impacted the practice of phenomenology in France for the following decades. For the frst time, Heidegger’s thought was no longer seen as a legitimate way to overcome the diffculties raised by the shortcomings of Husserl’s phenomenology. Moving away from existential phenomenology, Levinas proclaims the need to think beyond ontology in a way that reverses the orientation of Heidegger’s hermeneutics so as to bring phenomenological description back “from existence to the existent” (Levinas 1986), and eventually from ontology to ethics understood as frst philosophy. Although Levinas’ both extremely careful and deeply critical reading of Heidegger and Husserl attracted relatively little attention prior to the publication of his ‘thèse d’état’ (Totalité et infni, published in 1961), the shift that his reassessment of their phenomenology operated had a decisive impact on the young generations of French phenomenologists as soon as the infuence of existential phenomenology decreased.The unprecedented sharpness of Levinas’ critique had paved the way for a renewed approach to phenomenology, engaging it in a confrontation with 29
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certain phenomena that put up a resistance to the application of the methods and techniques of description inherited from Husserl and Heidegger. Not that Levinas attempted to abandon the phenomenological concepts and methods forged by his masters purely and simply, but his critical analyses made it possible to confront them – somewhat paradoxically – with experiences that exceed the boundaries of phenomenological description and seem to contradict its scope. This original gesture, characteristic of Levinas’‘unfaithful fdelity’ to phenomenology accurately described by Derrida in his tribute to Levinas as a way of being “unfaithful out of [his] fdelity to intentional analysis” (Derrida 1999, 52), contributed to initiating a new style of phenomenological investigations that widened the scope and extent of phenomenological description far beyond a strict and narrow understanding of phenomenality. Following the direction opened by Levinas from the beginning of the sixties, French phenomenologists, while working in different directions, engaged in an effort to push back the limits of phenomenological description and to redefne the concept of phenomenon on new grounds. Moving away from the existential orientation of his earlier phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty led the way with the analysis of modern painting he frst published in 1961, and through his attempt to describe in The Visible and the Invisible the ‘fesh’ of the world in its interrelation with the embodied self.36 The same year, Levinas devoted a signifcant part of Totality and Infnity to a lengthy analysis of the appearing of the ‘face’ (visage) of the other, which Levinas describes as an ethical form of manifestation of the other that cannot be accounted for in objective or ontological terms and demonstrates the primacy of ethics. Michel Henry, whose masterpiece The Essence of Manifestation was published only a couple of years later, in 1963, considers how selfaffectivity constitutes the principle of the revelation of ‘life’ through the experience of the fesh (Henry 1963). Finally, rejecting the metaphysical primacy of presence in Husserl’s phenomenology, Jacques Derrida published three major books in 1967, in which he critically interrogates the notion of phenomenality through an analysis of writing that puts forward the almost absent visibility of the ‘trace’ (Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology) (Derrida 1967a, 1967b, 1967c). In spite of their differences, these publications, which constituted decisive milestones in the feld of phenomenology, share a specifc focus on phenomena that substantially challenge the potentialities of phenomenological description.The face of the other, the trace, the experience of the fesh or the self-revelation of life, are not simply new phenomena likely to meet the expectancies and comply with the methods of Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenology without entailing some major transformations.They are hardly phenomena at all in the Husserlian sense of the word, insofar as they refuse to be constituted by intentional consciousness and prove to be essentially indescribable, ‘inapparent’ and deprived of phenomenalization. If even possible, their description is intrinsically problematic, and necessarily negative (as in negative theology), since it is frst and foremost the indescribable character of such quasi-phenomena, located at the margins of phenomenality, that constitute their essence. Levinas’ analyses of the ‘face’ are symptomatic of this negative use of phenomenological method, as they constantly draw on the limits of the intentional framework of phenomenological description in order to account for the paradoxical modes in which the human other is revealed to me, transcending all phenomenality and beingness. However, it must be noted that this operation needs, quite ironically, to maintain the intentional framework in order to reverse it, and to exhibit the specifcity of phenomena that do not ft into the framework of phenomenological description and that cannot be accounted for in terms of their intentional or ontological constitution. In order to describe the paradigmatic reversal of the intentional analysis operated by Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion coined the term ‘counter-intentionality’ (Marion 2002, 78), which he later
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appropriated as a keystone of his own phenomenology of givenness.This phrase seems rightly to encapsulate the philosophical gesture that motivated the signifcant shift from which arose the so-called French ‘moment’ of phenomenology, insofar as this shift made possible a new kind of relation with the phenomenological tradition, both radically critical and nevertheless somehow faithful to the ‘spirit’ (in Montesquieu’s sense of the word) of phenomenology: the counter-intentional shift initiated by Levinas allowed the new generations of phenomenologists to focus on phenomena (or ‘quasi phenomena’) (Marion 2002a, 53) such as the face, the fesh of the world, the trace, life’s self-affection … , which only come to appear in experiences that reverse the intentional correlation. Such a radical reorientation of phenomenology entails a new defnition of phenomenality that acknowledges its irreducibility to the objective horizon of intentional constitution (Husserl) as well as to the ontological horizon of being (Heidegger) and problematizes the intentional relation.This ‘quasi-phenomenology’ oriented towards the non-objective and non-ontological dimension of phenomenality and situated at the extreme margins of visibility engages, according to Marion, a ‘third reduction’, beyond Husserl’s transcendental reduction to objectivity and Heidegger’s ontological reduction to being.37 In order to denounce the transformations that resulted from this counter-intentional shift and the detrimental consequences of this expansion of phenomenological inquiry beyond the domain of visibility, Dominique Janicaud famously characterized this shift as the ‘theological turn of French phenomenology’ (Janicaud 1992). For Janicaud, the reorientation of phenomenological studies that followed the publication of Totality and Infnity draws heavily on metaphysical and dogmatic forms of transcendence (ibid., 46), leading French phenomenology to embrace, whether implicitly or explicitly, a theological (rather than phenomenological) discourse. However, this normative and strongly polemical characterization, designed to assess the legitimacy of the phenomenological shift that motivated French phenomenologists, hardly encapsulates the variety of their approaches and seems to do justice neither to their philosophical originality nor to their singular relation to the phenomenological tradition. As Jean-François Courtine notes, the origins of the phenomenological orientation towards the ‘inapparent’ that Janicaud castigates can be traced back to the decisive section of Being and Time in which Heidegger describes the scope of phenomenological inquiry (Courtine 2016, 30).38 The French ‘moment’ of phenomenology that arose from Levinas’ reassessment of the limits of the intentional framework maintains a strong – though complex and sometimes almost paradoxical – connection with the phenomenological tradition (as well as with the development of Heidegger’s thought of the Ereignis after the Kehre, even though Heidegger refrained from characterizing his thought as phenomenological over that period). In a discerning attempt to capture the specifcity of the phenomenological studies produced in France in the wake of Levinas’ counter-intentional shift, Jocelyn Benoist insists that their originality consists frst and foremost in their emphasis on the ‘event-character’ (caractère événementiel) of phenomena and their decision to focus on the event of appearing itself rather than the horizonal structure of phenomenality (Benoist 2001). From Levinas’ ethical account of the face to Marion’s phenomenology of self-givenness and beyond, French phenomenology drew the consequences of this redefnition of the phenomenon as “an event of spontaneous phenomenalization, which makes its irruption by itself into the intentional consciousness” (Tengelyi 2012, 302).39 Interestingly, this characterization of phenomenality echoes the terms in which Levinas interpreted Husserl’s theory of categorial intuition in a presentation published in 1940, as he came to examine the aspect of Husserl’s phenomenology that Heidegger considered fundamental for the development of his own interrogation of being.According to Levinas, Husserl’s
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analysis of categorial intuition entails that “the presence of being to thought is not an event that breaks in upon the play of thought. It is rational, that is, it has meaning” (Levinas 1998, 62, my emphasis). It is precisely this very aspect of Husserl’s phenomenology that Levinas and the French phenomenologists after him came to reject, stressing on the contrary, on behalf of the event-character of appearing, that the sense or meaning of a phenomenon cannot be reduced to a sense-bestowal by intentional consciousness (Husserl), nor be interpreted in the horizon of the ontological difference (Heidegger).
1.3.6. Contemporary developments of the phenomenological tradition Inevitably, the expansion of the scope of phenomenological studies that resulted from the successive shifts of the phenomenological movement gave rise to a split between the two main tendencies or directions that they gradually revealed.These two opposite ways of understanding the goals of phenomenology were implicitly already at play in the tensions inherent in Husserl’s rigorous defnition of the phenomenological method and the diffculties that arose from its criticisms. The frst direction consists in a radicalization of the distance that separates phenomenological inquiry on the one hand, and on the other hand the rational ideal of a rigorous science that constituted its original frame according to Husserl, opening up the space for a discussion between phenomenology and post-modern philosophy.40 The other orientation of phenomenological studies stresses, on the contrary, the logico-scientifc roots of phenomenology, and emphasizes its relation with formal and empirical sciences, giving rise to interesting confrontations between phenomenology and analytic philosophy in a broad sense.41 These two tendencies of recent phenomenologically oriented research constitute the opposite extremes of a spectrum that covers a very wide range and variety of phenomenological approaches, which occupy different strategic positions between these two ends of the spectrum. The tension between these two dimensions justifes the use of phenomenology in different contexts and its application to radically opposed domains of investigation, such as theology, cognitive sciences, social psychology or analytic philosophy of mind. Interestingly, the so-called ‘continental divide’, in the name of which phenomenology used to be labelled as strictly continental and was kept separate from analytic philosophy for most of the 20th century,42 now operates within the phenomenological movement, as a divergence between different tendencies inherent to phenomenology. The constant reassessment of the extent of phenomenological inquiry and the great variety of its uses and applications do not only illustrate its plasticity, but demonstrate its vitality as a philosophical tradition giving rise to the kind of reactions, inner transformations and external criticisms that only a strong and fertile philosophical movement is likely to provoke. If phenomenology deserves this title, it is frst and foremost because the philosophical tradition it gave rise to does not rely on the repeated and uncritical application of a narrowly defned method, but on the creative perpetuation and ever-changing reiteration of an impulse to ground philosophy in the description of experience and to maintain this phenomenological heritage. For this reason, in order to complete and refne Spiegelberg’s analogy between the phenomenological movement and a stream of water, the phenomenological tradition can be compared to a plant, the wilting of which does not necessarily prevent its growing back under a new and rejuvenated shape. Likewise, far from threatening the coherence and signifying ultimately the death of the phenomenological tradition, the many different shifts that constitute its history, though always critical and sometimes radically non-orthodox, have contributed to providing the phenomenological movement with a fexibility that has prevented its exhaustion and made possible its rebirth under new forms. 32
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Notes 1 The word appeared for the frst time in 1736 in an unpublished essay from Christoph Friedrich Oetinger, Philosophie der Alten (Ritter and Gründer 1989, 486). 2 (Hua XIX/1, 24):“Phänomenologie ist deskriptive Psychologie”. 3 (Hua XIX/1, 6):“Einer rein deskriptiven Phänomenologie der Denk- und Erkenntniserlebnisse”. 4 The text quoted is from the frst edition. 5 See section 7 of the Introduction to the Logical Investigations. 6 Text quoted from the frst edition. Findlay’s translation, modifed. 7 Translation slightly modifed. 8 The expression is borrowed from Stanley Cavell, who comments on Wittgenstein’s attempt to “undo the psychologizing of psychology” (Cavell 1969, 91), and was more recently applied to Husserl’s phenomenology by J. Benoist. See Benoist 2006, 422. 9 As will be seen further, Husserl radicalized even further this aspect of his phenomenology later in his career, by stressing its relation to a transcendental psychology that leaves aside the ontological naivety of psychological studies. 10 See §10 of the 5th Logical Investigation: (Hua XIX/2,379–2,380/95–96). 11 A detailed criticism and rejection of these phrases is presented in §11 of the ffth Logical Investigation, (Hua XIX/2, 384–388/98–100). 12 See §8. 13 In particular Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes and Wesen und Systematik des Urteils. 14 On this point, see Schuhmann and Smith 1993, 454, and Heidegger’s own analysis in 1977, §44b, note 1, 219. Lask often refers to the Logical Investigations and acknowledges his infuence in a note of Lask 1923, 37. On Lask’s decisive infuence on Heidegger, see Kisiel 1993. 15 Letter to Ernst Laslowski, January 1916. Quoted in Ott 1993, 90. 16 Martin Heidegger, “A Recollection (1957)” trans. Hans Seigfried in Sheehan 2011, 21–22 (German text in Heidegger 1972, 56); see also Heidegger, “My way into phenomenology” in Heidegger 2007 and Carman 2003, 65. 17 See also the footnote Heidegger added to Being and Time’s introduction (1997, 38n) 18 Letter to Löwith, 20 February 1923, quoted in Sheehan 1997, 17: “Looking back from this vantage point to the Logical Investigations, I am now convinced that Husserl was never a philosopher, not even for one second in his life. He becomes ever more ludicrous.” 19 Letter to Löwith, 8 May 1923; see Heidegger’s letter to Jaspers, 26 December 1926: “If the treatise is written ‘against’ anyone, it’s against Husserl”. 20 Husserl, letter to Natorp, 1 February 1922 (Hua-Dok III/5, 150), quoted in Kisiel and Sheehan 2007, 369. 21 Letter to Richardson, in Heidegger 2013, xiv. 22 Heidegger 1987, 117/98–99. 23 Heidegger 1987, 117/99. 24 See the 1919 lecture-course on “phenomenology and transcendental philosophy of value”, where Heidegger speaks of “phenomenological hermeneutics” (Heidegger 1987, 131/112). 25 Husserl famously used this phrase in the Paris Lectures, (Hua I, 30). 26 For a detailed analysis of the specifc meaning of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, see Daniel Dahlstrom’s contributions to this volume. 27 Quoted by Ricoeur 1986, 90. 28 See the criticism of Husserl’s abstraction in Heidegger’s 1925 lectures (Heidegger 1979, sections 12 and 13). 29 The pertinence and legitimacy of the label ‘existential phenomenology’ can be critically discussed, insofar as the attempt to describe our actual involvement with existing reality arguably constitutes an intrinsic feature of phenomenology that was already part of Husserl’s project (see for instance Zahavi 2003, 18). Notwithstanding this discussion about the nature of the ‘turn’ operated by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty with respect to Husserl’s phenomenology, it seems uncontroversial to claim that the specifc emphasis on human fnitude and freedom that characterizes their philosophical thought was responsible for a ‘shift’ of orientation of phenomenological inquiry. 30 See the text Sartre wrote in 1933–34 as he was studying in Berlin,“Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité” (Sartre 1939). 31 See Sartre 1986, 23. 32 “Heidegger’s ‘In-der-Welt-Sein’ [being-in-the-world] only appears against the background of the phenomenological reduction” (Merleau-Ponty 2005, ix/xxviii).
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Pierre-Jean Renaudie 33 This is the reason why, rather than speaking of ‘French phenomenology’, Bernard Waldenfels prefers to understand this phase of the history of the phenomenological movement as a moment of “phenomenology in France” (Waldenfels 1983). 34 In an introductory article from 1934, Levinas identifes Martin Heidegger’s philosophy as a “phenomenology of existence”, which in retrospect appears much closer to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological investigations than to his own philosophical thought (Levinas 1998, 39). 35 See for instance Raoul Moati’s contribution in this volume on Levinas’“de-formalization” of phenomenology. 36 Eye and Mind was published in January 1961 as an article in the journal Art de France, then reprinted as a book (Merleau-Ponty 1964a). The Visible and the Iinvisible was posthumously published in 1964 (Merleau-Ponty 1964b). 37 See the conclusion of Marion 1998, 204. 38 See Heidegger’s analysis of the “covering up” character of phenomena in (Heidegger 1977, §7, 39). 39 In their review of the recent transformations in French phenomenology,Tengelyi and Gondek widely draw on Benoist’s analysis to stress the philosophical signifcance of this original emphasis on the ‘event-character’ of phenomenality (Gondek and Tengelyi 2011). 40 Some of the works of Jacques Derrida, John Caputo and Jean-Yves Lacoste – as different as their perspective may be – can for instance be seen as representative of this approach. 41 See for instance the works of Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher, Jean Petitot, Francisco Varela or Alva Noë. 42 See for instance the proceedings of the Colloque de Royaumont in 1958, which gathered philosophical personalities as diametrically opposed as Willard Van Orman Quine and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Cahiers de Royaumont 1962).
References Benoist, Jocelyn. 2001. “Sur l’état présent de la phénoménologie.” In: J. Benoist, L’idée de phénoménologie. Paris: Beauchesne, pp. 123–159. ———. 2006. “Phénoménologie ou pragmatisme? Deux psychologies descriptives.” Archives de Philosophie 69, pp. 415–441. Berg, Adam. 2016. Phenomenology, Phenomenalism and the Question of Time. Lanham: Lexington Books. Brentano, Franz. 1862. Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles. Freiburg: Herder. English translation: On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Trans: R. George. 1975. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1924. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. Leipzig: F. Meiner Verlag. English translation: Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Trans: A. C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and L. McAlister. 1973. London: Routledge. Carman, Taylor. 2003. Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1969. Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Courtine, Jean-François. 2016. “French phenomenology in historical context.” In: Quiet Powers of the Possible, Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology. Eds. T. Dika and W. Hackett. New York: Fordham University Press. Dastur, Françoise. 2004. La phénomenologie en questions. Paris:Vrin. ———. 2020. “Phénoménologie herméneutique versus phénoménologie hylétique: Heidegger et la question de la matière.” In: Phénoménologies de la matière. Eds. P.-J. Renaudie and V. Spaak. Paris: CNRS éditions. Derrida, Jacques. 1967a. La voix et le phénomène. Paris: PUF. ———. 1967b. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Le Seuil. ———. 1967c. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1999. Adieu, to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans: P.-A. Brault and M. Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Desanti, Jean-Toussaint. 2005.“Sartre et Husserl ou les trois culs-de-sac de la phénoménologie transcendantale.” Les temps modernes, 4. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1987. Gesammelte Werke,Vol III.Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
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The history of the phenomenological movement ———. 1994. Heidegger’s Way.Trans: J.W. Stanley. State University of New York. ———. 2013. Truth and Method.Trans: Glen-Doepel revised by J.Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury. Gondek, Hans-Dieter and Tengelyi, Lázló. 2011. Neue Phänomenologie in Frankreich. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, Martin. 1972. Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1976. Wegmarken (1919–58), in GA 9. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1977. Sein und Zeit, GA 2. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. English translation: Being and Time.Trans: J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. 1962. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1979. Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, GA 20. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. English translation: History of the Concept of Time. Trans: Theodore Kisiel. 1985. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1986. Seminare (1951–73), in GA 15. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. English translation: Four Seminars.Trans:A. Mitchell and F. Raffoul. 2004. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1987. Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, GA 56/57. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. English translation: Towards the Defnition of Philosophy.Trans:Ted Sadler. 2008. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 1988. Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität), GA 63. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. English translation: Ontology, the Hermeneutics of Facticity. Trans: J.Van Buren. 1999. Indiana University Press. ———. 1992. Platon: Sophistes (Wintersemester 1924/5), in GA 19. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1993. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie [1919/1920], GA 58. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 2007. Zur Sache des Denkens, GA 14. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. English translation: On Time and Being.Trans: J. Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 2013.“Letter to Richardson.” In: Preface to William Richardson, Heidegger:Through Phenomenology to Thought. Dordrecht: Springer. Henry, Michel. 1963. L’essence de la manifestation. Paris: PUF. Ingarden, Roman. 1931. Das literarische Kunstwerk. Eine Untersuchung aus dem Grenzgebiet der Ontologie, Logik und Literaturwissenschaft. Halle: Max Niemeyer. English translation: The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art.Trans: Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson. 1973. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Janicaud, Dominique. 1992. Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française. Paris: L’éclat, 1992. English translation: Phenomenology and the Theological Turn, the French Debate. Trans: B. Prusak. 2000. New York: Fordham University Press. Kisiel, Theodore. 1993. “Why students of Heidegger will have to read Emil Lask.” In: Emil Lask and the Search for Concreteness. Ed. D.G. Chaffn.Athens: Ohio University Press. Kisiel,Theodore and Sheehan,Thomas (Eds). 2007. Becoming Heidegger. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Lask, Emil. 1923. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2.Tubingen: Mohr. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1930. Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris:Vrin. English translation: Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology.Trans:Andre Orianne. 1995. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1935.“De l’évasion.” Recherches Philosophiques. English translation: On Escape.Trans: B. Bergo. 2003. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1961. Totalité et Infni. Essai sur l'Extériorité.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1986. De l’existence à l’existant. Paris:Vrin. ———. 1998. Discovering Existence with Husserl. Trans: R. Cohen and M. Smith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1998. Reduction and Givenness, Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology. Trans: T. Carlson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002a. Being Given, Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness. Trans: J. Kosky. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2002b.“Un moment Français de la phénoménologie.” Rue Descartes 35. ———. 2002c. In Excess, Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Trans: R. Horner and V. Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964a. L’œil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1964b. Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2005. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. English translation: Phenomenology of Perception. Trans: D. Landes. 2012. New York: Routledge. Milkov, Nicolay. 2018.“Hermann Lotze and Franz Brentano.” Philosophical Readings 10 (2), pp. 115–122.
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Pierre-Jean Renaudie Ott, Hugo. 1993. Martin Heidegger:A Political Life.Trans:A. Blunden. New York: Basic. Pfänder, Alexander. 1900. Phänomenologie des Wollens: Eine psychologische Analyse. Leipzig: Barth. Reinach, Adolf. 1989. Sämtliche Werke. Textkritische Ausgabe. Eds. K. Schuhmann and B. Smith. Munich: Philosophia Verlag. Ricoeur, Paul. 1957. “Phénoménologie existentielle.” In: Encyclopédie française. XIX. Philosophie et religion. Paris: Larousse. ———. 1986. Du texte à l’action, essais d’herméneutique II. Paris: Seuil. Ritter, J. and Gründer, K. 1989. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Basel: Schwabe. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1936. “La Transcendance de l'Ego: Esquisse d'une description phenoménologique.” Les Recherches philosophiques 6. ———. 1939. “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l'intentionnalité.” La Nouvelle Revue française 304, janvier 1939, p. 129-131. ———. 1940. L 'Imaginaire: Psychologie phenomenologique de I'imagination. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1943. L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1984. War Diaries. Notebook from a Phoney War.Trans: Q. Hoare. London:Verso. ———. 1986. Questions de méthode. Paris: Gallimard. Scheler, Max. 1980. Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die matierale Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus. Bern: Francke Verlag. English translation: Formalism in Ethics and NonFormal Ethics of Values.Trans:Tr. Manfred, S. Frings, and Roger L. Funk. 1973. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Schuhmann, Karl and Smith, Barry. 1993.“Two idealisms: Lask and Husserl.” Kant-Studien 84, 448-466. Sheehan,Thomas. 1997.“Husserl and Heidegger, the making and unmaking of a relationship.” In: Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology. Eds. T. Sheehan and R. Palmer. Dordrecht: Springer, p. 1-32. ———. 2011. Heidegger:The Man and the Thinker. New Brunswick,Transaction Publishers. Stein, Edith. 1922. “Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 5. English translation: Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities.The Collected Works of Edith Stein,Vol. 7.Trans: M. C. Baseheart and M. Sawicki. 2000.Washington: ICS Publications. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1965. The Phenomenological Movement, vol. 2, Second Edition.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Tengelyi, Laszlo. 2012.“New phenomenology in France.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (2). Wahl, Jean. 1932. Vers le concret. Paris:Vrin. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 1983. Phänomenologie in Frankreich. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Zahavi, Dan. 2003.“Phenomenology and metaphysics.” In: Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation. Contributions to Phenomenology. Eds. D. Zahavi, S. Heinämaa, and H. Ruin. Dordrecht-Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 3-22. 1962. Cahiers de Royaumont. La philosophie analytique. Paris: Minuit.
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2 PHENOMENOLOGY AND GREEK PHILOSOPHY Burt C. Hopkins
Introduction Phenomenology and Greek philosophy have been framed largely in terms of the discussion of the relationship between the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle and the method and most basic phenomenon uncovered in Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenological research.The terms of this discussion were originally set by Heidegger in the 1920s and remain in effect today. Heidegger’s framing of the discussion involves the following suppositions: 1) the most fundamental philosophical question for Greek metaphysics and phenomenology is the question of the meaning of Being; 2) Aristotle’s metaphysics has hermeneutical priority over Plato’s, for reasons of intrinsic philosophical clarity; 3) Husserl’s phenomenological concept of intentionality and the related concept of categorial intuition amount to a rediscovery of what was sought in ontologies of Plato and Aristotle and is therefore a suitable guiding clue for interpreting those ontologies on the basis of their original, phenomenological intention; and 4) the ontologies of Plato and Aristotle and Husserl’s concepts of intentionality and categorial intuition privilege the cognition of beings over their radical disclosure, and they do so because the meaning of Being that governs that cognition, namely, its being present to speech (λόγος), is a derivative phenomenon. The discussion to follow frst will present and critically assess the major suppositions behind Heidegger’s formulation of the relationship between Plato and Aristotle and phenomenology (Part I). Next, it will present Husserl’s account of the historical importance of the Socratic response to sophistical skepticism for the origin of philosophy, and the systematic importance of that response for the transcendental phenomenological problem of the transcendence of the world (Part II). Finally, Jacob Klein’s phenomenological interpretation of Plato’s theory of eidetic numbers, as a theory of the possibility of the most basic structures of philosophical intelligibility, will be presented together with a discussion of its implications for Heidegger’s framing of the terms of the discussion of Greek philosophy and phenomenology.
Part I: Heidegger Heidegger credits Husserl’s phenomenological discovery of categorial intuition with breaking through to what is truly objective in entities in a manner that “arrives at the form of research sought by ancient ontology” (Heidegger 1979, 1985, 72/98). For Heidegger, “[t]here is no 37
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ontology alongside a phenomenology. Rather, scientifc ontology is nothing but phenomenology” (ibid.). Moreover, Heidegger credits Husserl’s account of pure categorial intuition, ideation, with discovering the original meaning of the a priori, a discovery that “stands in connection with or is actually identical to the discovery of the concept of Being in Parmenides or Plato” (75/102). According to Heidegger, Husserl’s “thesis that everything categorial ultimately rests upon sense intuition is but a restatement of the Aristotelian proposition: οὐδέποτε νοεῖ ἄνευ ϕαντάσματ ος ἡ ψυχή:‘the soul can intend nothing, grasp nothing objective in its objectivity, if beforehand something as such has not been shown to it’” (69/94).1 Equally signifcant is Heidegger’s also crediting Husserl, with “his concept of intentionality” (Heidegger 1992/1997, 598/413–14), as being the frst to discover again Plato’s “fundamental insight into λόγος … that λόγος is λόγος τινός [speech about something]” (ibid.). Finally, and most signifcantly, Heidegger claims that Plato “does not yet possess a real understanding of the structure and concept of the γένος [Kind]” (524/362), while Aristotle does.Thus “Plato uses γένος [Kind] and εἶδος [Form] promiscuously” (ibid.) and thereby does not achieve Aristotle’s level and clarity of understanding of γένος (Kind), as something that “refers to an entity in its Being, thus that which an entity, as this entity, always already was” (ibid.). Plato’s “term for entities in their Being is εἶδος [Form]” (ibid.) according to Heidegger, which “in its structural sense is not oriented toward the provenance of entities, toward the structure lying in them themselves, but instead concerns the way the Being of entities may be grasped” (ibid.). Hence, Heidegger maintains that “[t]he εἶδος [Form] is relative to pure perceiving, νοεῖν; it is what is sighted in pure perceiving” (ibid.). As such, Heidegger concludes that “[ε]ἶδος [Form], as a concept pertaining to the givenness of entities, basically says nothing about the Being of these entities, beyond expressing the one directive that entities are to be grasped primarily in their outward look, i.e., in their presence, and specifcally in their presence to a straightforward looking upon them” (ibid., 363/524). Heidegger’s interpretation of the act of ideation in Husserl’s phenomenology characterizes what is at stake therein as categorial acts that give their object, understood as the “species” (Heidegger 1979/1985, 91/66)—the latter merely being the Latin translation of “εἶδος [Form], the outward appearance of something” (ibid.). Heidegger’s interpretation appeals both to Husserl’s account of the “founded” (ibid., 91/67) character of ideation, its necessary givenness on the basis of a “manifold” (ibid.) of individual perceptual acts, and its abstractive character, in the precise sense that “the founding objectivity is not taken up into the content of what is intended in ideation” (ibid.). Heidegger therefore holds that, for Husserl, ideating abstraction involves “comparative considerations” (ibid.) such that “[t]hat toward which I see in comparing, with respect to the comparable, can in its own right be isolated in its pure state of affairs, and therewith I acquire the idea” (ibid.). Heidegger’s claims about the relationship of Husserl’s discovery of categorial intuition to the ontology of Aristotle and Plato, together with his critique of both the general limits of this ontology and those specifcally tied to Plato’s account of the εἶδος (Form), however, cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Moreover, it really is not the case that Husserl’s thesis about categorial intuition “is but a restatement” of a statement of Aristotle’s about the impossibility of the soul thinking without the showing to it beforehand of something. When they are compared, two very obvious inconsistencies emerge in Husserl’s account of categorial intuition and Aristotle’s account of νόνσις (intellection).
The impossibility of harmonizing Husserl’s and Aristotle’s accounts of εἴδη (forms) For Aristotle, the εἶδος (Form) cognized by the direct activity of thought (νοῦς) is emphatically not a one over many, nothing apart from the things that share in them, but a common 38
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thing.Thus, despite its being shared in (μέθεξειν) by many individuals, the conclusion Aristotle draws from this is that the soul knows the εἶδος by becoming the same as it, in the precise sense that the potency (δύναμις) of νοῦς (the direct activity of thought) to become an εἶδος (Form) of εἴδη (Forms) (ibid., 65/48) is actualized, and νοῦς (the direct activity of thought), literally, becomes one with the being-at-work (ἐνέργεία) of the εἶδος (Form) acting on it.This unity of the εἶδος (Form) and νοῦς (the direct activity of thought) in knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) composes the common thing (κιονόν) proper to the manner of being of the εἶδος (Form) for Aristotle.Thus, in the most radical contrast possible to Husserl’s account of categorial ideation, for Aristotle the apprehension of the unity of the εἶδος (Form) excludes—in principle—that unity’s relation to a multiplicity. In addition, for Aristotle, abstraction has nothing to do with the soul’s knowledge of an εἶδος (Form), which is again in marked contrast to Husserl’s account of ideating abstraction. And, while it could be argued that Husserl’s account of ideating abstraction is akin to the one context where Aristotle talks of abstraction, namely, mathematical abstraction, Aristotle presents his account of the abstracted manner of being of mathematical objects in the context of his pointed critique of the Platonic account of their one over many manner of being.This makes it impossible to harmonize Husserl’s account of precisely this mode of being proper to the εἶδος (Form) and Aristotle’s account of the abstracted manner of being of mathematical objects. Moreover, Husserl’s account of the pure categorial intuition involved in the grasping of the εἶδος (Form) both characterizes the intuiting regard as a mode of seeing and the grasped εἶδος (Form) as something that appears to this regard and is therefore something seen. For Aristotle, however, strictly speaking the cognized εἶδος (Form) is not even an appearance.What appear for him are ϕάνασματα (images), and it is through their appearances that νοῦς (the direct activity of thinking)—admittedly, somehow, since Aristotle’s texts are none too clear on this point—cognizes the indivisible and uncombined intelligible things, the εἴδη (Forms). Once cognized, as mentioned, the unity of νοῦς (the direct activity of thinking) and εἶδος (Form) can hardly be said to appear, as the thinking and what is thought—νοήσεως νόησις—are one and the same. Heidegger’s claim about the harmonious nature of the relationship between Husserl’s categorial intuition and Aristotle’s ontology is therefore problematic. What, then, about his claim that situates Husserl’s concept of intentionality within the rediscovery of Plato’s insight into the λόγος τινός (speech about something)? Husserl’s concept of intentionality emerges from his initial psychological investigations of symbolic presentations in Philosophy of Arithmetic, that is, of cognitive presentations in mathematics that do not intuitively present their object but only indirectly, if at all, refer to it. Precisely Husserl’s attempt to come to terms with the descriptive psychological status of the “symbolic” character of (what he then called) a “symbolic presentation” (later calling it a “symbolic representation”) is behind his formulation of the concept of an “empty intention,” which is arguably the most important aspect of his phenomenological account of intentionality. Heidegger’s interpretation of these matters characterizes the concept of intentionality that grows out of Husserl’s concerns mentioned here as involving “the interrelation of the modes of presentation manifested in a distinct sequence of levels ranging from mere empty intending (signitive acts) to originally giving perception (intuitive acts in the narrowest sense)” (ibid., 65/48). Heidegger goes on to characterize empty intending as “being unflled in its meaning; what is presumed in it is there in the how of its non-fulfllment” (ibid.). Addressing the functional interrelation between the modes of intentional presentation, Heidegger stresses that the intentional relation between the unfulflled intention and the fulflling intention “is always predelineated in their intentionality” (ibid., 66/49) and that “the fulfllment itself is of an intentional character” (ibid.). 39
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The question before us is whether Heidegger’s claim that Husserl’s concept of intentionality amounts to a rediscovery of Plato’s insight into the λόγος τινός (speech about something) is a claim that can withstand critical scrutiny. Both Plato’s Socrates (Phdo, 99E ff.) and the Eleatic Stranger (Soph, 260C) characterize λόγος (speech) as a kind of image (εἰδώλων) with an ἀρχή (beginning) and τέλος (end) that are inseparable from intelligible beings (νοντά), from εἴδη (Forms). And the Stranger’s account of λόγος (speech) makes it patent that the γένος (Kind) (Soph, 260A) proper to the being of λόγος (speech) is such that it is impossible for it to be and not to be about something (Soph, 262E). Hence the λόγος τινός (speech about something) Heidegger characterizes as Plato’s great insight. For Husserl’s concept of intentionality to amount to a rediscovery of Plato’s insight, the relation between the image and original characteristic of λόγος (speech) and εἴδη (Forms) would have to exhibit intentionality’s main structural features summarized by Heidegger. Not only, then, would λόγος (speech) have to exhibit the direction toward an object that is the most intrinsic aspect of Husserl’s concept of intentionality, but the character of this directedness would also have to exhibit the functional interrelation between empty and fulflled meaning intentions.
Husserl’s concept of intentionality cannot be viewed (per Heidegger) as the rediscovery of Plato’s insight into λόγος τινός (speech about something) To be sure, if by “intentionality” all that is meant is the intentional relation in the sense of its being about something, then Husserl’s concept and Plato’s λόγος τινός (speech about something) are in accord. However, if something more than this is meant, if the character of Husserl’s empty intention, its predelineation in the how of the emptiness of its meaning of the conditions for its fulfllment, is meant, then such an accord becomes very problematic. To begin with, both Plato’s Socrates as well as his Stranger understand λόγος’ (speech’s) manner of being as a kind of image. For Plato, then, the images (εἴδωλα) of things that refect the εἴδη (Forms) are somehow inseparable from what the Stranger refers to as the γένος (Kind) proper to λόγος (speech). Indeed, because of this, these images are likewise inseparable from these things’ appearances as being what they are. Moreover, because their refection in λογοι (speeches) is inseparable from the very appearances of the εἴδη (Forms), Socrates (Phdo, (99E–100A) distinguishes the image–original relationship characteristic of λόγος’ (speech’s) function to refect εἴδη (Forms) from the natural image–original relationship characteristic of perception.Whereas the relationship between image and original in perception makes it possible to bypass the original’s refected image and to therefore apprehend it directly in a perceptual apprehension, in the case of λόγος (speech) the original—the εἶδος (Form)—cannot be apprehended in any other manner than through its images refected by λόγος (speech). The Stranger’s account of λόγος (speech) (Soph, 260C) as a kind of image presupposes the Socratic account, adding to it the distinction between images whose appearance function as likenesses (εἰκόνες) and those whose images only seem like something but are really not and are therefore apparitions (ϕαντάσματα). In addition, and this is decisive for assessing Heidegger’s claim about the relationship between λόγος (speech) in Plato and Husserl’s concept of intentionality, the Stranger’s account maintains that once falsehood has been shown to mix with λόγος (speech), the very distinction between likeness and apparition cannot be established exclusively at the level of λόγος (speech).That is, the criterion for distinguishing true and false λογοι (speeches) cannot be established on the basis of an exclusive appeal to the way things look to λόγος (speech), to how they appear through its images. But, rather, the criterion for this distinction must be sought dialectically, through λόγος (speech) and therefore beyond its images in a manner that confronts the manner of appearing of the originals of these images: the 40
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εἴδη (Forms) in community with themselves, and, especially, the manner of appearance of the greatest γένη (Kinds) (Being, Motion, Rest, Same, and Other) responsible for any multiplicity of beings—sensible or intelligible—whatsoever. The question on the table, then, is whether for Plato λόγος (speech), in the sense of its functioning as an image that refers to something more original that it’s like but is not, is appropriately characterized along the lines of Husserl’s empty intention; that is, as a signitive or otherwise non-intuitively given representation of a meaning that predelineates the conditions for its fulfllment in the thing or object signifed or otherwise meant (vermeint) and therefore intended by its empty meaning intention.The answer to this question would certainly have to be “no,” if Husserl’s phenomenological characterization of an image were attributed to Plato’s account of its being.The reason for this is that Husserl’s account of the phenomenon of image leaves no doubt that its essence is intuitive, not signitive or empty. For Husserl, then, the phenomenon of image is characterized by the structural distinction between the imaged object and the image, a distinction that he maintains is immediately and therefore intuitively evident.This structural distinction, in turn, is established by the essential distinction Husserl draws between the image proper and the sensible basis required for an image to appear at all as such.Thus, the sensible basis for the appearance of the image is structurally distinct from the image itself, as the image is what appears when the sensible basis is looked at.This, in turn, guarantees that the subject of the image, that which appears through the image’s sensible basis, is structurally distinguishable from the image itself. For Husserl, therefore, the image is directly presented in what he calls “image-consciousness” (Husserl 2005, 21), and the imaged object is represented mediately, and therefore indirectly, through the medium of its perceptual basis.The image for Husserl is therefore not a sign that signifes or otherwise refers to the imaged object, but the intuitively given—albeit indirect—appearance of this very object. For Plato, in contrast, the being of an image is characterized by its manner of not being what it appears to be, not by the structural distinction between image and its original (i.e., the “subject” [ibid., 23] in Husserl’s idiom). Of the two possible modes of an image’s not being, likeness and apparition, only likeness, properly speaking, can be characterized as being structurally distinct from its original.This is the case because the not being of an apparition is characterized precisely by the inability of the soul to which it appears to distinguish between image and original.This distinction, therefore, is manifestly not something that is given with the appearance per se of an image, as it is for Husserl, but, rather, it is something that can only be made subsequently to the dialectical inquiry into the truth of the appearance of that which appears. Moreover, Plato’s characterization of λόγος (speech) as a kind of image is no more merely signitive (and therefore an empty intention) than the image is in Husserl’s phenomenological account. For in the Stranger’s account (Soph, 262A ff.) of the interweaving (συμπλοκή) and therefore community (κοινωνία) of verbs and names and therefore the whole that is irreducible to the functioning of the latter as vocal marks (σημεῖον), λόγος (speech) is likewise in community with Being—and it is so in a manner that is responsible for the manifestation of Being’s very appearance as Being.
Plato’s account of the εἴδη (forms) is guided by neither λόγος (speech) nor the meaning of Being as presence Notwithstanding the fact that Plato’s understanding of the being of an image and therefore account of the being of λόγος (speech) cannot be legitimately tied to Husserl’s concept of empty intention, it nevertheless might seem to confrm Heidegger’s ontological criticism of Plato and indeed Aristotle and therefore Greek ontology in general. Namely, that for Plato as 41
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for Aristotle, the questioning of entities with regard to their Being is guided by λόγος (speech). According to Heidegger, the explication of a given theme—even if only the sheer something in general [Etwas überhaupt]—speech is the guiding thread.This irruption of λόγος [speech], of the logical in this rigorously Greek sense, in the question of ὄν [Being], is motivated by the fact that ὄν [Being], the Being of entities, is primarily interpreted as presence, and λόγος [speech] is the primary way in which one makes something present, namely that which is under discussion. (Heidegger 1992/1997, 225/155) Precisely this understanding of Being is what Heidegger maintains is intrinsic to the natural meaning of the phenomenon of intentionality and, therefore, to Husserl’s formulation of its phenomenal structure. For the understanding of Being here to function as the basis for a criticism of both Greek ontology and Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger must presuppose two things. One, not only that such an understanding of Being is intrinsically defcient, but also, two, that so long as it is unquestionably assumed to present the true meaning of Being, both the meaning of Being that it presumes, as well as the meaning of Being as such, will remain unquestioned. Before addressing whether Heidegger’s presuppositions are warranted, the question has to be asked and answered whether Heidegger’s claim that the εἶδος (Form) for Plato is relative to pure perceiving (νοεῖν), that it is what is seen when the multiplicity of entities are reduced to one look in common, is Plato’s defnitive word on the εἶδος (Form). We need look no further than the Stranger and Theaetetus’ account of the community of εἴδη (Forms) in the Sophist (Soph, 255A–256E) to see the limits of the account of the εἶδος (Form) that Heidegger attributes to Plato.The two most salient distinctions of their account are suffcient to render untenable Heidegger’s claims about both the role of λόγος (speech) as the guiding clue for the explication of any given theme in Plato and the meaning of Being operative in Plato’s ontology being limited to what is sighted by νοεῖν (pure seeing) as present in the εἶδος (Form). Regarding the frst, it is precisely λόγος’ (speech’s) character of being about something, and, therefore, being about one thing (Soph, 237D), that is responsible for it being an unsuitable guide for the account of the manner of being of the εἴδη (Forms) or γένη (Kinds) in their community with one another. Specifcally, the one presupposed by λόγος is a homogenous unit (the kind used in counting) and therefore is unsuitable for accounting for the unity of the fve greatest γένη (Kinds) in their community, as the latter is characterized above all by the necessary opposition of the heterogenous units of γένη (Kinds) composing it.The appearances of the latter in a philosophical dialogue therefore in no way represent the fulfllment of homogeneous unity of meaning intentions, signitive or otherwise, predelineated in λόγος (speech). On the contrary, it is only with the dialectical abandonment of λόγος’ (speech’s) most basic presupposition—about the homogenous unity necessary for speech to be meaningful—that the most original γένη (Kinds) appear. They appear in community with one another notwithstanding their lack of common qualities. Their paradoxical appearance, which mixes the opposites of Motion and Rest in the appearance of Being, and the Same and Other in the appearance of Being’s sources, explodes once and for all what can now be recognized as the Heideggerian myth not only of Plato’s philosophy being limited by a prior understanding of the meaning of Being as presence, but also of it being fundamentally driven by an ontology. For if by “ontology” is understood, with Heidegger, an investigation that supposes that the most fundamental philosophical question or problem is that of the meaning of Being of entities, 42
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Plato’s account of the greatest γένη (Kinds) can be seen to be guided by the supposition of a more fundamental philosophical problem than that of the question of Being. Rather than being concerned or being guided by the presupposition that the meaning of Being is the presence responsible for entities being present, the most fundamental problem in Plato’s thought concerns the origin of the unity that is inseparable from the appearance of all multiplicities, including motion. That this problem can be reduced to neither the question of Being, nor to that of its basic meaning as presence, is apparent from both Socrates’ presentation of the idea of the Good in terms of a multiplicity of images and the Stranger and Theaetetus’ account of the γένος (Kind) proper to Being together with its ἀρχαί (beginnings).The multiplicity of images Socrates presents of the idea of the Good rules out its determination in terms of any one of them or all of them being present to the seeing that guides νόησις (intellection). Moreover, the γένος (Kind) proper to Being, as the unstable whole that encompasses the γένη (Kinds) proper to Motion and Rest, is no more capable of being present than the γένη (Kinds) the Same and the Other that, beyond Being, are responsible for the mixing of the opposites that compose Being.That is, the most encompassing opposites of the Same and the Other neither appear as present to νόησις (intellection), nor is the meaning of their appearance determined by Being.
Part II: Husserl Husserl’s phenomenological engagement with Greek philosophy is driven by his account of what can be characterized as his account of the interrelated double origin of philosophy (see Majolino 2017, 2018). This account provides an important pre-modern historical context for Husserl’s understanding of the philosophical motive behind his transcendental philosophy. Husserl articulates these origins in terms of 1) the pre-Socratic cosmologies and 2) the sophistical skeptical challenges to the rational cogency of those cosmologies, together with Socrates’ critically rational response to those challenges, especially to those of Protagoras and Gorgias. Husserl includes in 2) Plato’s theoretical extension of Socrates’ rational method that, together with Aristotle’s philosophical extension of Plato’s theoretical philosophy, expands the historical horizon of the transcendental motive behind Husserl’s phenomenology beyond that of modern philosophy, especially the philosophies of Descartes and Hume.
Sophistical skepticism and the origin of rational philosophy In Husserl’s view, sophistical skepticism is extremely important for understanding both the origins of rational philosophy and the role those origins play in his transcendental phenomenology. In Husserl’s telling, sophistical skepticism had as its target philosophy’s frst origin the collective theoretical thematization of the cosmos—and the attitude that is behind that thematization—by the men traditionally called the pre-Socratics. In Husserl’s view, however, the term pre-Socratic is, in effect, a misnomer for characterizing philosophy prior to Socratic philosophy, given that philosophy’s origin in the critique of sophistical skepticism. Socrates’ response to the threat to rationality posed by the Sophists’ attacks on both the theories of the cosmologists and the latent rationality driving the theoretical attitude behind those theories is thus what is crucial for Husserl’s understanding of Socrates’ originality as a philosopher. Husserl’s account of the Sophists’ attack on philosophy’s frst origin is as follows. On the one hand, the possibility of an objectively valid truth is challenged (Protagoras). On the other hand, and more radically, the actual existence of transcendent being as such, of external objectivities, in principle accessible to knowledge, is challenged (Gorgias) (Hua XXV, 137). For Husserl, Socrates’ response (see De Santis 2019) to this twin attack was to institute a philosophy based 43
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on critical self-refection and the Delphic injunction to “know thyself.” In the process, Husserl attributes to Socrates the thematization of the fundamental contradiction between unclear opinion and evidence, which leads him to develop a method whose fundamental meaning is a clarifying self-refection accomplished in apodictic evidence, which, in turn, implicitly discovers the intuition of essences.The latter is discovered insofar as the scope of the evidence presented by Socrates’ method exceeds that which has its basis in the subject’s refection on contingent opinions, thereby achieving general and exemplary value. The salient character of Socrates’ method, according to Husserl, is a critique of reason (ibid.). As such, it represents a response to the problems posed to reason per se by the Sophists’ attack. This response involves both concept clarifcation—in the Socratic method’s movement from empty word intentions to their meanings—and the bringing to evidence of the objects meant in these intentions on the noematic side of intuition.The latter, then, is what raises to prominence the essential characteristics of the exemplars that fulfll the noematic intuition. Husserl’s account of Socrates’ anticipatory critique of reason focuses on its exclusively practical nature.
Plato’s theoretical extension of Socrates’ practical method Husserl’s account of philosophy’s second origin supplements Socrates’ practical method with an account of Plato’s theoretical extension of that method. Included in this account is the crucial distinction that Husserl draws between Plato’s philosophical doctrines and the way of Platonic philosophy. The doctrines include, on Husserl’s telling, the separation thesis of intuitive forms, participation, and recollection.The Platonic way, in turn, is characterized by Husserl as its drive, intention to be fulflled, which is to say, its teleological idea to be followed.This way boils down to Plato’s great achievement of instituting the idea of a philosophical science, embodied by an “‘infnite academy’” (Majolino 2018, 178), as it were, in which Plato’s way, and not his doctrines, defne Platonic philosophy for Husserl. Thus, not only is there no need to return to Plato to further Plato’s philosophy, but, also, there is substantial room to criticize his thought while still remaining Platonic. On the one hand,Aristotle is presented by Husserl as thoroughly Platonic in this sense, despite his criticisms of aspects of Plato’s doctrines or even the doctrines themselves. On the other hand, there’s room for Husserl to criticize Plato while still remaining Platonic. Specifcally, Husserl criticizes Plato’s failure to appreciate the positive aspect of the Sophists’ skeptical attacks on reason, and Plato’s consequent inability to see the radical problem of reason that they thematized; the problem, namely, of the conscious constitution—in accordance with the rational structure of the subjectivity of consciousness—of transcendent objects. Thus, in Husserl’s view, despite Plato’s restoration of the objectivity of knowledge in the wake of the Sophists’ critical onslaught, his philosophy remains powerless to deal with the problem of transcendence. And it does so, because Plato failed to see that implicit in the Sophists’ attacks is the transcendental problem of the correlation between consciousness and the transcendent world.
Part III: Klein Jacob Klein (Klein 1969) effectively challenges both of the presuppositions behind Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of Plato and Aristotle; namely, (1) that Husserl’s notion of categorial intentionality is capable of providing the hermeneutical key for interpreting Plato and Aristotle’s philosophy, and (2) that Aristotle’s account of the mode of being of the Kinds (γένη) and Forms (εἴδη) is both clearer and philosophically superior to Plato’s. Klein takes issue with the suitability of Husserl’s concept of intentionality as an appropriate guiding clue for interpreting Greek philosophy generally and Plato’s thought in particular. The 44
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problem with Husserl’s concept in this regard is twofold. On the one hand, the empty intention’s rule-governed predelineation of the objective conditions for its fulfllment brings with it the semantic presupposition of the Etwas überhaupt (something in general), the formalized mathematical object that is formal ontology’s proper subject matter. This presupposition is rooted in the symbolic mathematics that is the sine qua non for the modern project of a mathesis universalis. Because both this presupposition and its mathematical basis are characteristic of a conceptuality— symbolic mathematics—whose historical inception cannot have occurred before the 16th century, the extent to which they are inseparable from Husserl’s concept of intentionality is precisely the extent to which this concept is an unsuitable guiding clue for interpreting Greek philosophy in general. On the other hand, Husserl’s concept of intentionality, as it functions in his account of categorial intuition, presupposes the Aristotelian logic of predication, and with that a whole-part structure grounded in individual objects conceived of as ontologically independent. Because the whole-part structure of Plato’s logic is grounded in an ontology whose basis is a multitude of objects, that is, a multiplicity of objects foundationally inseparable from one another, each one of which is accordingly not independent of the others, categorial intentionality is conceptually blind to both Plato’s logic and the ontology underlying it. The frst problem with Heidegger’s hermeneutical employment of Husserl’s concept of intentionality thus concerns the modern philosophical presuppositions that are sedimented in it. These presuppositions are a problem for Klein because the notion of an intuitively empty, rule-governed conceptual reference, which is determinative of the “consciousness of ” constitutive of intentional directedness, as well as the notion of a formal, materially indeterminate intentional object, are foreign to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. The second problem concerns the logical structure of the Aristotelian predication behind Husserl’s concept of categorial intentionality, which cannot but privilege Aristotle’s logic over Plato’s dialectical method. These historical and systematic presuppositions behind Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato and Aristotle are addressed in Klein’s interpretation of their philosophies. Klein does so in a manner that endeavors to neutralize them, by striving to interpret the formality proper to Plato and Aristotle’s accounts of the Kinds (γένη) and Forms (εἴδη) from its own conceptual level in each of their philosophies, rather than from the conceptual level of the formality constitutive of modern philosophy and mathematics. To accomplish this, Klein adopts a twofold strategy. First, he rejects the argument behind Heidegger’s privileging of Aristotle’s philosophy over Plato’s, that it is clearer and more scientifc, and maintains instead that Aristotle’s thought is most appropriately presented as emerging from out of its Platonic context. Second, rather than employ categorial intentionality as the guiding clue to interpret both Aristotle and Plato, and therewith—like Heidegger—to privilege in his interpretation of their thought the whole-part structure of predicative λόγος (speech), Klein employs as his guiding thread the whole-part structure of what Husserl called in his frst work the “authentic” or “proper” (eigentlich) structure of number (Hua XII/2003, ch. 1), in order to interpret both the concept and being of number in Plato and Aristotle.
The non-predicative whole-part structure of Husserl’s authentic (eigentlich) number as guiding clue for Klein’s interpretation of ancient Greek ἀριθμός (number) Number (Anzahl) in its proper sense for Husserl is not characterized by the association of a concept with a sign or by a sense-perceptible numeral, but by the immediate and “collective” unifcation of a concrete multitude—that composes its parts—by the number in question, which composes its whole.This mode of unifcation is such that the numerical unity that encompasses 45
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those parts as their whole is something that nevertheless cannot be predicated of each of the parts individually. For instance, the whole of the unity of the number two, which encompasses and therefore collectively unifes each one of the items belonging to the (smallest) multitude that compose its parts, cannot be predicated of either of these parts taken singly. Only when both are taken together can these parts be said to belong to the whole of the number that unifes them. Precisely this state of affairs, then, is behind this whole-part structure exceeding the limits of the intelligibility that is made possible by the whole-part structure of predicative λόγος (speech). For, in accordance with whole-part structure of predication, the part is a part of the whole in the sense that the whole can be predicated of it, e.g., the horse is an animal, the dog is an animal.This state of affairs is unlike the relation of the parts of a number to its structural whole, about which it cannot be said, for instance, that “one is a two,” or that “one is a three.” Moreover, from the perspective of predicative λόγος (speech), when the “being one” of the structural unity of the numerical whole that collectively encompasses the multitude of its parts is stressed, it cannot but seem to predicate mistakenly unity to something that by defnition is more than one, namely the multitude that belongs most properly to number. The non-predicative whole-part structure characteristic of Husserl’s account of the proper structure of number, which is to say with both Husserl and Klein, the structure of non-symbolic numbers, is exhibited according to Klein by the concept and being of number (ἀριθμός) in ancient Greek arithmetic and logistic. Klein’s interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy hinges on precisely this structure (Klein 1969, ch. 6), which he argues presents the key to interpreting Plato’s philosophy,Aristotle’s critical response to that philosophy, as well as the fundamental difference in concept formation in ancient Greek and early modern philosophy. Methodologically, the latter point is the crucial one, because so long as the modern, symbolic concept of number (Zahl) guides any interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy, let alone any interpretation with phenomenological aspirations, not just the problematic behind the meaning of mathematical unity and multiplicity in ancient Greek mathematics will remain inaccessible, but likewise also the problematic behind the meaning of the unity and multiplicity of being in ancient Greek philosophy. Once these problematics come into view, the entire axis not only of Plato’s philosophy but of Aristotle’s critical departure from it shifts from the standard view. Regarding the former, the real locus of the participation (μέθεξις) problem turns out to be accounting for the one and the many structure exhibited by the community of forms (κοινωνία τῶν εἰδῶν), the structure of which the participation of many sensible beings in the unity of a single form is but a derivative refection (ibid., 99).With respect to the latter, the real target of Aristotle’s critique of the Platonic separation (χωρισμός) thesis emerges to be not the one form’s putative separation from the many sensible beings but the irreducibility of the common (κοινόν) unity of the Kinds (γένη) and Forms (εἴδη) to the Kinds and Forms that they encompass and therefore with which they are in community (ibid., ch. 8). Crucial to Klein’s interpretation are the portions of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Books Alpha, Mu, and Nu) that zero in on the whole-part structure of number behind Plato’s account of the common unity responsible for the unity of a multitude that is constitutive of the participation problem. On Klein’s view, the zeal with which Aristotle criticizes what he reports is the Platonic thesis that the forms are in some sense numbers signals both the importance of the whole-part structure of number in Plato’s philosophy and Aristotle’s rejection of it as a suitable account of the mode of being proper to the Forms (ibid., 91–92). Klein’s account of the important structural difference between the unity intrinsic to the parts of a mathematical number and those of an eidetic number is the focal point of his interpretation of Plato (ibid.).This difference plays a crucial role in Klein’s interpretation of λόγος (speech) in Plato’s philosophy, or, better, his interpretation of the philosophical signifcance of the appearance 46
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of λόγος (speech) in Plato’s dialogues.And this interpretation, in turn, has profound implications for his interpretation of the relationship between the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle in general as well as for the assessment of the philosophical signifcance of Aristotle’s critical departure from Plato. Klein’s interpretation of the difference between the unity of the parts of eidetic and mathematical numbers, that is, of the difference between an eidetic and a mathematical monad (μονάς), focuses on Aristotle’s report that the unity of eidetic monads is incomparable (ἀσύμβλ ητοι) (Aristotle, Met. M, 1080a 20; Klein 1969, 89), in the sense that the intrinsic intelligibility of each Form as a singular unit is unique to that Form, and thus cannot be compared with other Forms.The unity of each singular mathematical monad, in contrast, is reported by Aristotle to be identical with that of any other, such that any mathematical monad is homogeneous—which is to say, comparable—with any other. The peculiar phenomenological character of the collective unity characteristic of the whole of the Greek ἀριθμὸς (number) that Klein uncovered manifests the structure that both λόγος (speech) and the community of Forms have in common.This focus is what is behind his argument for number’s paradigmatic function in Plato (Klein 1969, 92). For Klein, however, despite the commonality of this aspect of the arithmos-structure to λόγος (speech) and the community of Kinds, that is, despite the irreducibility of the unity of the whole in relation to its parts, the difference between the parts of eidetic and mathematical numbers is also signifcant for interpreting Plato’s philosophy. Klein’s interpretation maintains that the difference between the units in eidetic and mathematical numbers accounts for both the eidetic number’s foundational function in relation to mathematical numbers and λόγος’s (speech’s) limited ability to give an account of eidetic unity, that is, of the unity proper to the community of Forms (κοινωνία τῶν εἰδῶν) (ibid., 93–95). Regarding the mathematically foundational role of eidetic numbers, or more precisely, of the ten eidetic numbers Plato reportedly limited them to according to Aristotle, Klein (again following Aristotle’s reports about Plato) maintains that for Plato, “[o]nly because there are eide which belong together, whose community in each case forms a ‘kinship’ which must, due to the ‘arithmetical’ tie [i.e., the whole-part structure proper to ἀριθμός (number)] among its ‘members’ as eidetic numbers, be designated as the six or the ten, can there be arbitrarily many numbers, such as hexads or decads, in the realm of ‘pure’ units as well as in the realm of sensibles” (ibid., 92). Regarding λόγος’s (speech’s) limited ability to account for the eidetic unity of the forms in community, Klein maintains that for Plato there is a tight connection between the units of mathematical numbers and the limits of what λόγος (speech) can make intelligible in the following sense: inseparable from the signifying power of λόγος (speech) is the being one, two, or many of that which it discloses (Soph, 237 D).That is, behind the capacity of λόγος (speech) to disclose what it discloses and to give an account of that disclosure, is the following supposition: that the homogeneity of the unity of the referent to which it refers is inseparable from its disclosing power, such that more than one referent can be distinguished and therefore counted (ibid., 85). Because it is the non-homogeneous unity proper to the incomparably singular forms that are united in their eidetic kinship that is responsible for both mathematical numbers and for the Kinds (γένη) and Forms (εἴδη) that render intelligible the unlimited multitude of things in the sensible world, the beinghood (οὐσία) of λόγος (speech) is intrinsically limited in its capacity to render an account “with complete clarity” (Soph, 217 A–B, cf. 254 B) of their intelligibility.This is the case because of the fundamental presupposition that lies behind the capacity of λόγος (speech) to give an account of anything, namely, that it signifes the unity of what it discloses as a something that is comparable (homogeneous) with the unity of the other things it discloses.This presupposition, however, precludes precisely what is the case in the intelligibility of unities that belong to the Kinds (γένη) and Forms (εἴδη), to wit, their incomparability.To cite 47
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Klein’s primary example, in the Sophist, the Kinds of Being, Motion, and Rest, when counted by λόγος (speech), appear to signify—each one—a separate Kind, while all together they appear to signify three Kinds.Yet, because the unity of each is not comparable with the others, it turns out that the Being as a Kind does not count as a third Kind, apart from Motion and Rest, but rather it (Being) can only appear to thought precisely as Motion and Rest, both together (Klein 1969, 87). (While distinguished members of the phenomenological tradition Oskar Becker,2 Jan Patočka,3 and Hans Georg Gadamer4 appreciated early on the signifcance of Klein’s interpretation of Plato for phenomenology, until recently both Klein’s work and its phenomenological signifcance have not been recognized in phenomenological discourse.5)
Notes 1 See On the Soul, 431a16f. A more standard translation runs:“the soul never thinks without an appearance of things.” 2 Oskar Becker, whose article “The Theory of Odd and Even in the Ninth Book of Euclid’s Elements” appeared in the same volume of the journal that Klein’s two articles composing his “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra” appeared in, refers therein to Klein’s article as “a very important work” (Becker 1934, 545). 3 Jan Patočka writes: “Klein’s work is an attempt to clearly interpret the Platonic doctrine of ideal numbers.While the interpretation is not complete, nevertheless in the main points it does so well in clarifying the issues that it is possible to say that any further research must seriously take this interpretation into account. If we compare the many obscurities in a book like Brunschvig’s Etapes de philosophie mathematique about the character of ideas-numbers, we see how poorly justifed such statements are like the claim that Platonic dialogues literally do not provide any information concerning this doctrine. (In this respect, Klein’s thorough and deep interpretation of the dialogue Sophist is completely new and provides startling evidence of the philosophical wealth of this dialogue).The theory of ideas numbers is precisely not a mathematical theory, but rather an ontological, philosophical interpretation of the possibility of something such as διάνοια [thinking]” (Patočka 1934, 232/307). 4 Gadamer reports in 1968 that “J. Klein in his investigations concerning ‘Greek Logistic and the Origin of Algebra’ (Gadamer 1985, 133/129) … had pointed my own research in new directions at the time I was with him in Marburg.” Gadamer identifes the source of these directions with “the thesis which I have been advocating for more than 30 years now … that from very early on in the dialogues there are references to what in a word might be called the arithmos structure of the logos,” and he maintains, “this idea was frst elaborated by J. Klein.” By the “arithmos structure of the logos” Gadamer understands the whole-part structure of number in the proper sense, whereby the unity of λόγος as a whole makes manifest an intelligibility that exceeds the multitude of words that compose its parts. 5 See Hopkins 2011.
References Becker, Oskar. 1934. “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra.” Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik,Astronomie und Physik,Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, no. 1: pp. 533–553. De Santis, Daniele. 2019.“The Practical Reformer: On Husserl’s Socrates.” Husserl Studies (35): pp. 131–148. Hans-Georg, Gadamer. 1985. Gesammelte Werke. Band 6.Tübingen: J.C.B Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. P. C. Smith. New Haven/London:Yale University Press, 1980. Heidegger, Martin. 1979.Prologomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena.Trans.T. Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. ———. 1992. Platon: Sophistes. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Plato’s Sophist. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Hopkins, Burt. 2011. The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics. Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 2003. The Philosophy of Arithmetic.Trans. D.Willard. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 2005Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory.Trans. J. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer
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Phenomenology and Greek philosophy Klein, Jacob. 1934–1936. “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra.” Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, no. 1: pp. 18–105 (Part I); no. II: pp. 122–235 (Part II). Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. Trans. E. Brann. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969. Reprint: New York: Dover, 1992. Majolino, Claudio. 2017.“The Infnite Academy.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. XV: pp. 164–221. ———. 2018. “Husserl and the ‘Origins’ of Philosophy,” 49th Annual Meeting of the Husserl Circle, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Unpublished conference paper). Patočka, Jan. 1934. “Review of Jacob Klein, Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra I.” Ceská mysl, vol. 30: pp. 232–233. English translation by E. Manton: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 2006, vol. 6: p. 307.
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3 PHENOMENOLOGY AND MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY Francesco Valerio Tommasi
3.1. Phenomenology and Neo-Scholasticism The history of the relationship between Phenomenology and medieval philosophy is, for the most part, the history of the relationship between Phenomenology and Neo-Scholasticism. It was indeed Neo-Scholasticism that rediscovered medieval philosophy – and, to some extent, even created it as an object of the history of philosophy – in the 19th century (see MaierùImbach 1991). It is, therefore,“in”,“through”, and to some extent “against” Neo-Scholasticism that Phenomenology encounters medieval philosophy. To all initial appearances, however, enormous differences separate Phenomenology and Neo-Scholasticism, even though each of the two did come to count among the most impressive movements in philosophical thought in the 20th century. Phenomenology takes as its starting point a concern of a radically theoretical nature basically devoid of all historical points of reference; it asserts the need for a philosophical thinking without presuppositions and involves a rejection of all metaphysics. Neo-Scholasticism, by contrast, has a very precise privileged point of historical reference (namely medieval philosophical thinking, especially that of Thomas Aquinas); it is inspired above all by a religious-denominational allegiance (namely to Roman Catholicism); and it sets as its goal the re-establishment of a substantial and cogent metaphysics. It remains a fact, however, that many and diverse points of contact existed, and exist, between Phenomenology and Neo-Scholasticism which have so far been the object only of the most casual and occasional investigation by scholars and largely only with reference to fgures and aspects of the two schools of thought which possess a macroscopic relevance. One such under-considered aspect is the fact that, where Phenomenology took account of the achievements of medieval philosophy, this occurred principally through the former’s contact with Neo-Scholasticism. It is not by chance that Phenomenology’s relation to medieval philosophy is one which very often passes via Christian – and particularly Roman Catholic – theology. We fnd this, for example, in the “pre-history” of phenomenology in the work of Franz Brentano. But it is also to be found in the recent so-called “tournant théologique” of French Phenomenology; and also in the work of those principal fgures of Phenomenology in whose thinking medieval philosophy enjoys a degree of presence: from Max Scheler, through Martin Heidegger, to Edith Stein. 50
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Moreover, there is not to be found in Phenomenology – or at least there is to be found there only in a very marginal and secondary position and in a derivative form – any neutral interest in the history of philosophical thought. Phenomenology’s relationship with the history of philosophy is a relationship above all of the theoretical and speculative kind: that part alone of the past is studied that might possibly be of use in establishing philosophy “as a rigorous science”. The history of philosophy, that is to say, is not useful to the Phenomenologist as a topic in its own right.There goes to confrm this reading a particularly perspicuous testimony offered by a student and eventual academic assistant of Husserl, the founder of the Phenomenological school, namely, Edith Stein:“Husserl was not much interested in [confronting and comparing his work with that of other authors]. He was too taken up with his own thoughts to be able to devote his energies to probing into other eras […]. He used to say, laughing:‘I educate my students to become systematic philosophers and then I’m surprised when they don’t want to write works on the history of philosophy’” (Stein 2002, 219). But, looked at a little more closely, this is an orientation which partly characterizes NeoScholasticism as well, since this latter looks to the medieval past as a supposed “Golden Age”, the theoretical cogency of which is energetically deployed against the crises and the alleged directionlessness of modernity. It is on this level, then, that we might examine the possibility of a frst point of contact between the two movements. A second point of encounter, which has led in turn to at least a potential dialogue between these two currents of thought, can be frmly identifed in the approach to basic philosophical questions that is introduced by Husserl in his Logische Untersuchungen. In this work, in fact, Husserl argues for a philosophical stance that can be understood – and was in fact understood by his frst disciples – as a “realist” one in the epistemological sense of this term. Husserl propounds in this early work a vigorous critique of all psychologism and many of his students and followers have considered the more “idealist” approach displayed in Husserl’s work from the Ideen on to be a “turn” that ought not to have occurred. For Neo-Scholasticism it was precisely psychologism – and “subjectivism” in general – that represented one of the principal errors committed by modern thought as a whole, beginning with Descartes and followed by Kant. Neo-Scholasticism, therefore, advocated a return to the metaphysical realism that had characterized the medieval era. This said, however, it must be noted that some of the frst foundations of the Phenomenological project had been laid by an approach which – at least in a general sense – might be defned as “psychologistic”: namely, in the work of that thinker who inspired Husserl more than any other, Franz Brentano.
3.2. Franz Brentano It is well known that Brentano was one of the main sources of Husserl’s thinking. Having undergone a philosophical training and formation very much within the context of that rediscovery of medieval thought which stands at the origin of Neo-Scholasticism, it was highly characteristic of Brentano that he should have gone on to author a treatise which was to play a fundamental role in this latter movement’s reappraisal and renewal of metaphysics – namely, Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (1862) – at the very same time as he was developing that theory of intentionality which was to become so decisive for Phenomenology (see Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1874). In the former of these two works Brentano undertakes an analysis of that subdivision of “being” into four fundamental modes which is famously developed in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: namely, 1) accidental being (ὂν κατὰ συμβεβηκός) and being in itself (ὂν καθ’ αύτό), 2) being as true (ἀληθές) or false (ψεῦδος), 3) being as potentiality (δυνάμει) and actuality (ἐνεργεία), 51
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4) the being of the categories (τὰ σχήματα τῆς κατηγορίας). Brentano addresses his efforts to analysing whether it is possible to make out a more fundamental and original sense of being and to distinguish this sense in terms of the Aristotelian categories. The categories, in their turn, are traced back by Brentano to the most fundamental of all categories, which is substance (οὐσία). Brentano’s discussion here, and the position that he arrives at, re-open, in the modern era, a question that had been lengthily discussed in that medieval era when philosophy had been dominated by Scholasticism: namely, the question – perhaps the fundamental question of medieval thought – of the analogia entis. The Aristotelian project of constructing a science of beings qua beings is based on a delicate equilibrium between mutually opposed requirements: that, on the one hand, of escaping the conception of being as something of a single type or mode, preserving the irreducible multiplicity of this latter notion’s meanings; but at the same time, on the other hand, maintaining that continuity and univocity of sense that is a necessary presupposition of any discourse which claims to be scientifc. In order for a syllogism to be valid, one and the same term must be assumed to be being used in one and the same sense – i.e. with the same defnition – in both of the syllogism’s premises. But to claim that being is something that can be predicated of a thing entirely univocally tends indeed to make of being something of a single type or mode and to lead to ontological monism. To contend, moreover, that the predicates that apply to created things can be legitimately stated to hold true also of God Himself tends to deny all transcendence. The question of “the several senses of being”, then, has a direct theological implication. The analogia entis, or “analogy of being”, was the fragile architrave around which there came to be constructed the various edifces that attempted to establish metaphysics as the science of being: the characteristic common to these two intellectual enterprises consisted in the aspiration to maintain both that constancy and univocity of meaning that is necessary to the construction of syllogisms (and thus of science in general) and, at the same time, a recognition of the real diversity of the beings that make up the universe. In a similar way the attempt was made to establish theology as a science: one might indeed legitimately predicate something of God, while maintaining nonetheless – according to the dogmatic defnition laid down by the fourth Lateran Council – that the imperfection of any such predication must always be of a greater order than its perfection.The question was eventually to be passed down to 20th-century Phenomenology and Martin Heidegger was to state:“[The] frst philosophical writing through which I worked again and again from 1907 on was Franz Brentano’s dissertation: Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles” (Heidegger 1962, xi. Brentano was, for Heidegger,“[his] frst guide through the philosophy of the Greeks during the years at secondary school” (Heidegger 1959, 93). In 1874, however, as we have also noted, Franz Brentano published his Psychology from an Empirical Viewpoint. Here, Brentano takes issue with the approach founded on mathematics that was preponderant among the psychologists of his day and which derived principally from a rapprochement of the psychological with the physical. Psychology, at this time, was looked on as a kind of physiology of the human mind. Brentano pushed for a shift in philosophers’ attention away from that which was contained in consciousness toward the acts of this consciousness: that is to say, toward the mode in which consciousness referred to that which it contained.The operation of distinguishing the observation of the individual acts of consciousness from the passive registration of the content(s) of this consciousness is defned by Brentano as “internal perception”. Psychical phenomena differ from physical or physiological ones in being always directed to a content immanent to them: this peculiar quality of the psychical was, famously, defned by Brentano using the term “intentionality” and was, needless to say, to exert a decisive infuence on Edmund Husserl. But this apparent invention of intentionality on the part of Brentano seems, 52
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in fact, rather to have been a discovery – one which was perhaps infuenced also by his studies in the thought and philosophy of the Middle Ages (see Perler 2004). Beyond and aside, then, from the possible direct medieval infuence on the origin of this theory and on the use of the term “intentionality”, it seems certain that the reaction against the reduction of psychology to a sub-sphere of physiology treatable entirely by the mathematical method was infuenced by an approach which derived from Brentano’s broader vision of the world.
3.3. Max Scheler The anti-psychologistic arguments of the Logische Untersuchungen clearly represent an especially signifcant point of contact between Husserl’s early Phenomenology and Neo-Scholasticism. The programmatic formula: “back to the things themselves” and, more generally, the method of research based on the description of the essences intended in cognitive acts initiated a philosophical current that took precisely a certain realism as its fundamental theoretical motif and found expression above all in the work of the so-called “Göttinger Circle” among Husserl’s students and disciples: i.e. in the writings of such thinkers as Adolf Reinach, Hedwig ConradMartius, Alexander Pfänder,Theodor Haering and Dietrich von Hildebrand. Not a few among these philosophers who devoted their efforts to exploring and expanding this frst form of Phenomenology – which was not yet of a “transcendental” character – were to develop a phenomenology of religion wherein investigative attention was directed specifcally to the peculiar eidetic structure of religious experience and of its correspondent noema. This was certainly true, frst and foremost, of Max Scheler. We may say, then, that the original form of Phenomenology is characterized by a strong interest in religious questions. Although we do see in various individual cases a rapprochement with the Roman Catholic church, it is by no means always the case that these early Phenomenologists, even where they address themselves to religious questions, refer directly to medieval or Scholastic thought, since it is also a key concern of theirs to maintain the autonomy of the Phenomenological method. This fact not only provides a general point of reference by which to compare and contrast Phenomenology and Neo-Scholasticism; it also clearly brings out what is perhaps one of the most fundamental dichotomies that need to be taken into account in any analysis of the relation between the two currents of thought: if, on the one hand, the common aspiration toward understanding consciousness in terms of a certain philosophical realism opens up remarkable possibilities of rapprochement between these two schools of philosophy, a no less remarkable line of division is drawn between them by that anti-metaphysical tendency that is inherent in Phenomenology’s emphasis on precisely the “phenomenal” aspect of its method (a tendency which, not by chance, was later to lead Phenomenology to develop in a “transcendental” direction). Surely paradigmatic in this regard is Max Scheler’s book Liebe und Erkenntnis (1915). According to Scheler, in Christianity, the human state of being is the object of a love that precedes all theory, all knowledge and therefore all philosophy.The Christian lives in this love and embraces it.The spiritual revolution that Christianity represented was not, Scheler argues, followed by a theoretical elaboration truly adequate to this revolution; Greek philosophical thought immediately advened to contaminate the intuition forming the Christian message. It is only with Augustine that a frst attempt is made to give adequate expression to the utter novelty and the complete existential upheaval that the Christian experience had brought into the world.Thomas Aquinas, however, signifes for Scheler a regression into intellectualism: although he distinguishes between the vis appetitiva and the vis intellectiva, he maintains that knowledge precedes will. 53
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In the essay Ordo Amoris, published posthumously, Scheler develops these refections further, emphasizing the importance of the emotions in the process of cognition. The axiological signifcance attributed by Scheler to the ordo amoris makes it possible to found a material value-ethics upon an objective order conforming with the subjective order of human affectivity. Scheler’s descriptions of love here were clearly a source of inspiration for other thinkers of Phenomenological orientation, some of whom, as we have noted, eventually drew close to Christian theology, such as, for example, Dietrich von Hildebrand. Furthermore, in the famous text Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928) Scheler seeks to develop a new metaphysics and, in particular, a “metaphysics of the human”.The perspective outlined here, however, is neither a Scholastic nor an ontological one but rather one of a general opening to transcendence counterposed to the immanentism typical of the natural sciences. In particular, Scheler attempts to identify what specifcally differentiates human being from the being of other animals by reference to such essential human characteristics as love, will, freedom and the openness to the Absolute. In the essay Vom ewigen im Menschen (1921), Scheler explicitly describes Phenomenology as an approach capable of freeing the essential core of Augustine’s Christianity from those Greek ontological categories and Scholastic categories that had accreted around it. Scheler describes the various possible relationships that have been proposed, throughout the history of thought, as existing between religion and philosophy, and distinguishes systems of identity (be it total or partial) from dualistic systems recognizing the two to be diverse things. Thomas Aquinas is described by Scheler as an advocate of a partial identity between the two. And indeed, we do fnd in Thomas Aquinas a partial identifcation of the object of religion with the object of metaphysics or natural theology.Through philosophical reason, contends Thomas, Man can arrive at a certain knowledge of God’s existence on which it is possible to found a “natural religion”; he cannot, however, ever know the intimate essence of God except through His revelation in Christ. In Scheler’s view, both the systems advocating an identity of philosophy with religion and those advocating an absolute difference between the two are insuffcient. Philosophy and religion must be autonomous from one another but can communicate; Scheler advocates, therefore, the system that suggests a conformity without identity. A signifcant infuence on this, Scheler’s reading of the matter appears to have been exerted also by the thought of Erich Pryzwara, the frst exponent of Neo-Scholasticism to enter into a profound and important dialogue with Phenomenology.
3.4. Edith Stein Erich Przywara also undoubtedly exerted a decisive infuence on the philosophy of Edith Stein, Husserl’s frst academic Assistentin in Freiburg, who followed a path that was entirely her own, leading from Phenomenology to Neo-Scholasticism, making the explicit attempt thereby to bring Thomas Aquinas and Husserl into relation with one another. Stein, who had attended Max Scheler’s lectures during her years as a student in Freiburg and had also entered into contact with Adolf Reinach, Hedwig Conrad-Martius and Dietrich von Hildebrand (all thinkers who embraced a Christian perspective) converted to Roman Catholicism and decided to undergo baptism in 1922 following her reading of the works of Teresa of Avila. After her conversion she entered into contact with Erich Przywara, who urged her to engage also with the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Stein decided to begin this engagement at the point where Phenomenology and Thomism are usually perceived to stand at the farthest distance from one another: namely, in the sphere of epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. For this reason Stein set about translating the 54
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Quaestiones disputatatae de veritate. Initially, indeed, this engagement was a diffcult and laborious one for Stein. She had great diffculty in grasping the structure, the form and the method of medieval Scholastic thought. That this frst encounter with the thought of Thomas Aquinas was an extremely irritating experience for this philosopher whose own thought had become so closely entwined with the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is testifed to by the remarks with which she prefaces, in the manuscript of her translation, her own rendering of the frst Quaestio. It is worth citing the passage in its entirety because it is highly indicative of the enormous distance that had opened up between Phenomenological thought and medieval philosophy (and this, indeed, precisely in the work of a thinker whose thought was later to mark the point of the two currents’ greatest proximity to one another!): If one approaches it from the direction of modern epistemology it is extraordinarily diffcult to arrive even at a simple understanding, let alone at a full critical appreciation, of the epistemology propounded by Saint Thomas. Those questions which occupy for the modern epistemologist an absolutely central position – such as the Phenomenologist’s “what is knowledge, essentially?” or the Kantian’s “How is knowledge possible?” – are not, by Thomas, posed ex professo at all; one must laboriously seek out an answer to them – assuming that it is possible to answer them at all – from various remarks scattered throughout Thomas’s writings. On the other hand, questions are addressed in these writings which lie entirely outside of the horizon of the modern philosopher and appear, at frst glance, to be inconsequential […]. But I believe that one cannot rest content with such conclusions. Even if just kernels of truth are to be found here respectively on one side and the other, there must also be a bridge between these two sides. Certainly, we must follow Saint Thomas down the paths which he himself took if we are to acquire from his work something that relates to our problems. But this goal of gaining something that can indeed be applied to our present-day problems is one that we must never lose sight of.We must endeavour to discover whether, in what we fnd in Saint Thomas, there is also to be found an answer specifcally to our questions – or, if not that, then a basis for rejecting the very manner in which, in modernity, these questions have been posed.Thus, it is imperative that we examine the Quaestiones from beginning to end in terms of the guiding theme:“What is knowledge?” (Stein 2008, XI) In any case, Stein did succeed in drawing progressively intellectually closer to Aquinas and to Scholasticism and in assimilating the forma mentis of medieval thought. She undertook many other translations of Aquinas and contributed greatly to enriching the studies carried out by Neo-Scholasticism. Edith Stein’s researches into Scholasticism culminate in the lengthy 1931 draft of Potenz und Akt. It was this manuscript that she submitted, unsuccessfully, in the same year in Freiburg, as her qualifcation for a professorial position (Habilitierung) but it also went on to form the basis and point of departure for Endliches und ewiges Sein, the systematic magnum opus of this period of her thought. Very informative as regards the encounter between the two philosophical worlds is an essay that Stein submitted for a 1929 Festschrift dedicated to Husserl (Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des hl. Thomas von Aquino. Versuch einer Gegenüberstellung). A frst version of this essay, written in the form of a dialogue between the two philosophers, has been preserved but was rejected by the Festschrift’s editor, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger insisted that the piece be 55
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reworked into the traditional essay form. But quite aside from the charming “framing narrative” that she gave to the original version – Thomas Aquinas, in his Dominican habit, pays a visit to the Professor emeritus Husserl in his study – both texts treat in much the same way the six topics that counted, for Edith Stein, as decisive areas of encounter and confrontation between the two “philosophical worlds”, namely: 1. Philosophy as rigorous science; 2. Natural and supernatural reason; faith and knowledge; 3. Critical and dogmatic philosophy; 4.Theocentric and egocentric philosophy; 5. Ontology and metaphysics, empirical and eidetic method; 6.The question of “intuition” – the Phenomenological and the Scholastic method. The form of presentation of the argument here refects the thorough reading of Aquinas which had underlain Stein’s work as his translator. At the same time, we recognize the basic outlines of Stein’s own interpretation of Aquinas, the specifc character and content of which is owed, to a signifcant extent, to the comparison and confrontation with Phenomenology, which is always implicitly present in Stein’s mind. This shows forth especially in the emphasis placed on epistemological problems and on problems of phenomenological constitution, as well as on methodological questions. Likewise highly characteristic of Edith Stein’s interpretation of Aquinas’s work is the way in which this latter is read by her in strictly and consistently philosophical terms. For Stein, the necessity of reading Aquinas’s work in this way is never in doubt. Quite rightly, she emphasizes the fact that for Aquinas, no less than for Husserl, philosophy needed to be a “rigorous science”: a demand going hand in hand with the claim that it is possible to develop a philosophical worldview purely out of the resources of natural reason alone. Quite correctly, she stresses the fact that, in Aquinas, faith somehow refers to rational knowledge, which can refect on and about these acts of faith as it can about all other possible acts.The extremely nuanced treatment given to the theme of abstract and intuitive knowledge reveals the epistemological interest that had also been clearly evident in her elucidations of the epistemology-related Quaestiones in her De veritate translation.As regards, however, the questions of the substantial and formal dependence of philosophy on faith and of the necessarily theocentric foundation also of the former, she broadens the notion of a specifcally and peculiarly philosophical knowledge-claim in such a way that the thought of Aquinas himself would have thereby to be assigned not to the properly philosophical realm but rather to the theological. What Edith Stein is primarily concerned to do, however, is to sketch a general outline of Aquinas’s philosophy vis-à-vis that of Husserl, so as to be better able to bring out the differences between the two. Edith Stein maintained an original and personal approach even in her summaries and syntheses of broad bodies of thought.This is the case, for example, of Potenz und Akt, which represents an original Phenomenological re-reading of the essential categories of Thomism in the sense of a dynamic ontology, inspired by teleology and by the metaphysics of Hedwig ConradMartius. It is also the case of Endliches und ewiges Sein, which displays clear traces of her contact with Étienne Gilson and, above all, with Jacques Maritain at the conferences held in Juvisy by the Societé Thomiste on the topic of Phenomenology. The orientation that Stein gave to her thought was that of a Christian philosophy in a strong sense of both these terms: i.e. a thought in which philosophy and theology are not at all separable from one another and need both to make their contribution to the search for truth. Stein’s magnum opus opens with an intellectual exercise strongly recalling a key theme of Augustine’s: namely, that of the search for the existence of God in what we experience of the depths of our own human soul – and in particular in our inward consciousness of time in its phenomenological process of appearing. It then proceeds to an “ascent to the meaning of being”, before fnally concluding with a re-descent back into the realm of the created world, read as a model and image of the divine Trinity. In these writings, then, a Thomistic metaphysics and a certain “exemplarism” of Franciscan inspiration and tradi56
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tion are maintained side by side.There are even to be noted – for example as regards the principio individuationis – certain infuences of Scotist origin. Stein’s knowledge of medieval thought has clearly, by this point, grown and matured to an impressive extent and was later to deepen and enrich itself still further through an engagement with mystical theology and with the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagiticus.
3.5. Martin Heidegger A trajectory which might be seen as, in a sense, the “reverse” of that taken by Edith Stein was followed by Martin Heidegger, whose path of development took him from an initial intellectual formation in medieval and Scholastic studies to a thinking situated within the framework of Phenomenology. It is well known that the thesis which Heidegger submitted for his own Habilitierung was a work on Die Kategorien und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (1916), although it was later discovered that the text that Heidegger addressed himself to here, and that he took for the work of Duns Scotus, was actually authored by Thomas of Erfurt) and also that his work depended in some degree on the thought of Roman Catholic theologians like Carl Braig. Heidegger uses as an epigraph for the concluding section of this Habilitierung essay a quotation from Novalis that reads: “Everywhere we seek the Unconditioned (Das Unbedingte) but always fnd only things (Dinge)”. Clearly, a theme like this can be considered as paradigmatic for Heidegger’s later thought: a search for “Being” that, starting out from a fnite perspective, inevitably fnds always only fnite “beings”. But this theme also clearly recalls the problem addressed by Brentano of the multiple senses of being.The theme of “the categories” is plainly the theme of how the single and absolute sense of “being” tends to dissolve into multiplicity in reality; and of how it is possible to hold these now-multiple meanings of “being” together into a kind of unity after all.We are dealing here, on closer examination, with the medieval and Scholastic theme of the analogia entis, which can thus be seen as the original path or groove of thought upon which Heidegger’s speculations elaborated and built. The young Martin Heidegger was intellectually formed and moulded by a cultural context of Neo-Scholastic type and his later insistence on “the question of Being” and on ontology most likely have their deepest roots here. There has, in fact, often been noted the relationship existing between Heidegger’s thought and Roman Catholicism as well as with Christian theology as a whole. It is not by chance that the young Heidegger, at the time when he was just approaching a Phenomenological position, was also interested in certain religious themes and that, indeed, his frst courses in Freiburg were devoted to just such themes. Heidegger sought to develop a phenomenology of the religious life of the very earliest Christian congregations, something he believed could be achieved through an analysis of the Pauline corpus. He also, however, came to pay special attention to Christian mysticism, above all in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, Meister Eckhart and Luther. Heidegger appears, then, to adopt, very early on, an “intimistic” and mystical line in these matters and to reject the Scholastic tradition. Also for Heidegger, then, as already for Scheler, it is Augustine’s thought that seems to constitute an important point of reference in the elaboration of a relation to theology and religion that no longer depends upon the ontological categories of Scholasticism. In particular, the infuence of Eckhart on Heidegger appears to be very relevant here, both as regards the description of the experience of fear as a “limit experience” and as regards the fundamental tendency toward a transcending of merely representational thinking. Eckhart’s distinction, too, between God and “the divine” may have exerted an infuence on Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology. But the example of Luther too seems to have played an important role in the 57
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thought of the young Heidegger inasmuch as Luther’s writing is paradigmatic of the hermeneutics of facticity. In Heidegger’s later work, however, Luther features only as just another element in the story of occidental metaphysics’ decline into a “forgetfulness of Being”. In Heidegger’s lectures on the Grundprobleme der Phaenomenologie (1927), medieval thought was to be treated as just one of the four theses proposed regarding Being in the history of philosophy: in particular, so Heidegger claimed, what characterized this thesis was the division between essence and existence and the dichotomy between the being of the Creator and that of created beings. Nonetheless, Heidegger was to devote a specifc lecture course to the history of philosophy von Thomas von Aquin bis Kant (1926/27) and in many of his writings he was to pay special attention to the Middle Ages and to the so-called “Second Scholasticism” (to Scotism, for example, or to the role played by the thought of Suárez in the formation of the modern concept of ontology and of general metaphysics as science of the ens inquantum ens). Heidegger’s fundamental theses regarding the Middle Ages – although their evaluation of this epoch is a substantially negative one – tend to oscillate around the notion that Scholasticism and medieval thought in general did not bring any really relevant alteration to those understandings of Being, truth and metaphysics that dated back to the age of Plato and Aristotle, merely adding to these the notion of God conceived of as the Supreme Being.The technical philosophical terminology of the Latin-speaking Middle Ages seemed, in its turn, to Heidegger to be merely a kind of vulgarization of the philosophical vocabulary of the Greeks. Regarding the question of truth, as has often been noted, Heidegger took progressively greater and greater distance from the Thomist understanding of this notion, following a line which – even if, in the early phases of the German thinker’s thought, it prompted him to share the theory whereby the intellect (and thus Man in general) represents the principal locus of truth – led him, later, to place more and more sharply in opposition to one another “veritas”, considered as adaequatio and objectivization, and “alétheia”, the Greek notion of truth on which Heidegger built a theory of “unveiling” or “unforgetting” (see Esposito-Porro 2001). It is noteworthy, then, above all how Heidegger’s mature thought was to play a decisive role in prompting a thorough crisis of Neo-Scholastic thought, despite a series of authors – beginning with Karl Rahner – having sought to synthesize with one another the Thomist and the Heideggerian perspectives. In particular, it was Heidegger’s critique of so-called “ontotheology” – i.e. thought founded on the nexus between God and Being – that dealt a very heavy blow to the Neo-Thomist model.The Scholastic metaphysical tradition had, in fact, postulated “being” as a primary term – inasmuch it was the most general conceivable term, applicable to all that exists – while at the same time also referring to “God” as just such a primary term, inasmuch as God must be conceived of as eminent over all beings: it was the ambition of Scholastic metaphysics to frmly maintain both the identity of these two orders with one another (God is the being par excellence, and indeed, in a sense, the only entity really worthy to bear this denomination “being”) and, at the same time, their difference (the distance between the Creator and His creatures is unbridgeable; were it not, one would inevitably lapse into monism or pantheism) (see Vv.Aa. 1995). It can immediately be seen how – underneath the specifc terms “being” and “God” that are used here – this discourse on “ontotheology” strongly evokes that on the analogia entis. In this model, too, a fragile architrave must support a massive and ponderous structure: it is asserted that there exists a continuity and a communication between the immanent order of the world and divine transcendence, but at the same time it is claimed that there is also an unbridgeable separation and distance between the two.This, it might be argued, is to claim both too much and too little. And Heidegger, with his critique of the ontotheological constitution of metaphysics, does indeed deal a decisive blow to this model, thus throwing Neo-Scholasticism defnitively into crisis. 58
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3.6. The rapprochement between Neo-Scholasticism and Phenomenology Neo-Scholasticism, on the other hand, only very slowly discovers an interest in Phenomenology. Although, as we have noted, there is to be observed already in the course of the 19th century a blossoming of studies contributing to the rediscovery of the legacy of the medieval and Scholastic tradition, this movement really begins to gain impetus only with the promulgation of the papal encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879. Early Neo-Scholasticism was sometimes characterized by an “ideological” attitude: that is to say, by (in many respects) a closed-off attitude to, and even an outright rejection, of modernity.Very rare, at frst, were speculatively original attempts at entering into a real encounter with other intellectual currents. Among the few exceptions here were Joseph Maréchal, who set about looking for a starting point that Neo-Scholasticism might share with those thinkers who adopted a transcendental stance of the Kantian type (see Le point de départ de la métaphysique: leçons sur le développement historique et théorique de la connaissance, 1922–6) and Erich Przywara, who believed there could be made out in the question of the “analogy of being” a metaphysical principle that might unite the modern transcendentalist approach and the Scholastic one, an hypothesis in the course of the investigation of which he entered explicitly into dialogue also with Phenomenology (see Analogia entis. Metaphysik, 1932). It is only in the 1920s and 1930s that we see a change of direction in Neo-Scholasticism in which these bolder attempts acquire a greater weight within the movement and there can be seen to develop a marked interest among Neo-Scholastics also, and indeed precisely, in Phenomenology.Testimony to this are the early works of Sofa Vanni Rovighi, a pioneer of the reception of Phenomenology within the Italian Neo-Scholastic milieu (see La flosofa di Edmund Husserl, 1939), initiatives like that of the Société Thomiste, which chose precisely Phenomenology as the theme for its frst Journée d’études in Juvisy in 1932 (see La phénoménologie. Journée d’études de la Societé thomiste, 1932). This encounter, in which various prominent fgures of the NeoScholasticism of the day participated – including Jacques Maritain, Daniel Feuling, Gottlieb Söhngen, Marie-Dominique Roland-Gosselin and also Edith Stein – is highly representative. The report on the proceedings of the journée reveals both the great interest in Phenomenology that had developed among Neo-Scholastics and their caution regarding contact and rapprochement with the younger movement. The usefulness of Phenomenology for Thomism is perceived to lie rather in the new movement’s methodology than in the concrete results to which Phenomenological analysis had hitherto led. Around the same time, various developments occur that are decisive for any consideration of the relations between Neo-Scholasticism and Phenomenology. One of these is the incipient separation between, on the one hand, the systematic approach to the thought of Thomas Aquinas and, on the other, the historical-philological approach to medieval thought generally. Although these approaches were initially present side by side in many authors of the period, they were, in the course of time, to prove more and more diffcult to reconcile with one another. While historical research into medieval thought has developed into a fourishing branch of studies that manages now to do without the ideological and speculative inspiration that characterized, at least in part, Neo-Scholasticism in its early stages, the purely theoretical approach to the works of Aquinas seems to be at home now either, on the one hand, in intellectual milieus characterized by a traditionalist allegiance to certain specifc religious denominations or, on the other, in the circles of so-called analytical philosophy. Both these latter cases are instances of milieus whose approach is tendentially ahistorical. This dichotomy begins to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s. On the one hand, the debate regarding just how the theoretical value of Aquinas’s philosophy is to be interpreted enters a 59
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new and decisive phase; we see a transition from a predominance of the view that Aquinas’s understanding of “being” was basically identical with that propounded by Aristotle to an evergreater emphasis on the originality of Aquinas’s doctrine of the actus essendi. Whereas fgures such as Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Francesco Olgiati, Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges, Gallus Manser, Joseph Gredt and Aimé Forest continue to defend the former thesis, the latter thesis, to the effect that Aquinas’s doctrine of the actus essendi – according to which “being” constitutes the highest perfection and consummation, the act which realizes essence – was a philosophically innovative one, is defended above all by Étienne Gilson (with his thesis of a “metaphysics of Exodus”), Jacques Maritain and Cornelio Fabro. Likewise belonging to this latter current are Joseph de Finance, Louis-Bertrand Geiger, Louis De Raeymaeker and the more speculative writings of Gustav Siewerth, Heinrich Beck and Bernhard Lakebrink. There also arose in this period a whole series of institutions, research centres and collections of publications that were to contribute signifcantly to forming and shaping the study of the history of medieval philosophy: the Albertus-Magnus-Institut in Bonn, the Pontifcal Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, the Mediaeval Academy of America with its journal Speculum; then the Commissio Scotistica, the critical editions of Eckhart and of Nicholas of Cusa, the Bibliothèque Thomiste and the Bulletin Thomiste published by the Dominicans of Le Saulchoir, the Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge and the Études de philosophie médiévale published under the editorship of Étienne Gilson. Building on that concern for intellectual rigour that had characterized it from the start, Neo-Scholasticism developed, with time, in such centres as these a predominantly historical-philological manner of approaching its object of study. Finally, in the 1920s and 1930s, the thought of Martin Heidegger acquired a role of the frst rank. Heidegger’s recreation of Phenomenology in terms of his own project of ontology appeared, from the perspective of Neo-Scholasticism, to be a project of decidedly ambiguous value and beneft. On the one hand it seemed to open up unexpected perspectives for a thought that had always aspired to place the question of the validity of the “question of being” once again on the philosophical agenda without becoming entangled in the “transcendental question” in the sense in which it had been raised by Kant (i.e. the need to pose, before any question of knowledge, that of the conditions of possibility of knowledge). On the other hand, this new Heideggerian philosophy of Being decidedly rejected the possibility of addressing the “question of being” using the concepts of classical (and thus also of Scholastic) metaphysics. The interaction of these various tendencies with one another produces different effects. The relationship between Neo-Scholasticism and Phenomenology, which was, as we have said, just beginning to come to maturity in this period, becomes, as it were, twisted into an almost exclusive relationship between Neo-Scholasticism and the thought of Heidegger, with the original Husserlian inspiration being left out of account. A large number of authors aligned with the Neo-Scholastic current now, directly or indirectly infuenced by Heidegger, set about achieving some form of reconciliation between Aquinas’s understanding of being as actus essendi (this latter interpreted after the manner of Gilson and of other Neo-Thomists of this period) and the “ontology” of Heidegger. These include Karl Rahner, Emmerich Coreth, Bernhard Welte, Theodor Steinbüchel, Bernhard Lakebrink, Gustav Siewerth, Max Müller and Johann Baptist Lotz. The possible forms of thought opened up by this infuence are highly various and original. This group of authors, admittedly, who played an important role in Roman Catholic thought in the years around the time of Vatican II, were mostly soon forgotten. Not only did the historical-philological approach – represented above all by Cornelia de Vogel, Werner Beierwaltes, Klaus Kremer and Pierre Hadot – bring to light, in the next generation of scholarship, the degree to which Aquinas’s understanding of being had already been that of the Neo-Platonists (particularly of Porphyry, Proclus, the Pseudo60
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Dionysius and the Liber de causis), so that it was no longer possible to ascribe this understanding to him as entirely original. Heidegger’s own critique of Scholasticism’s understanding of metaphysics also became much harsher in these years, culminating in his famous critique of the ontotheological constitution of metaphysics (see Heidegger 1957, 51–79).The thesis that Heidegger advances in this essay represents a watershed in respect of relations between NeoScholasticism and a Phenomenology to which Heidegger had given an “ontological” (in all the various senses that can be ascribed here to the term “ontology”) twist.
3.7. The “tournant théologique” of French Phenomenology and Jean-Luc Marion The following generation of authors, then, appear to renounce from the very start the aspiration to reconcile Aquinas’s understanding of being with Heidegger’s and to probe even more deeply the question of how far categories like “ontotheology” can lay claim to historical validity. Highly signifcant in this sense are the writings of François Courtine and Olivier Boulnois. Those writers, on the other hand, who choose to inherit and take over this earlier problematic attempt to think it through in a manner that goes beyond both Aquinas and Heidegger: Marco Maria Olivetti runs through the “analogical” question in a manner which conceives of it as an “analogy of the subject” (see Analogia del soggetto, 1992), Bernhard Casper attempts to develop a philosophical-religious thinking that draws on the Neues Denken of Franz Rosenzweig and on the philosophy of Levinas (Casper 1981), and Jean-Luc Marion makes an explicit attempt to conceive of “God without being” (see Marion 1982) It has been, above all, this form of thought developed by Jean-Luc Marion that has proven highly controversial and given rise to passionate debates and discussions. Marion, together with Levinas, Ricoeur and Henry, is assigned the role of the “accused” in Dominique Janicaud’s polemical critique of a supposed “theological turn” in recent Phenomenology (Janicaud 1991) – an accusation, however, that only goes to confrm the importance and the interest of Marion’s work in contemporary philosophical debate.Already in L’idole et la distance. Cinque études (Marion 1977) Heidegger’s ontotheological critique – and thus that whole tradition that is conceived of by Heidegger as running from Hölderlin through Nietzsche – is used to develop an approach whereby the “theological question”, in its narrower sense, can be rethought.“The death of God” means, for Marion, rather the death of that idolatrous idea of God formed by the metaphysical tradition.The true biblical God, he argues, reveals Himself rather through a withdrawing and a distance, as a father does.This is why God can, and indeed must, be thought of without recourse to the concept of being; God reveals Himself hereby, however, as not “one” God; this is the dual meaning expressed by the title Dieu sans l’être. For Marion, it is rather only through the idea of love that the theological question can be once again taken up at all. Love, however, is also proposed by him as a philosophical theme in its own right and he explores love’s phenomenology even beyond its theological background (see Prolégomènes à la charité, 1986 and Le phénomène érotique, 2003). In this sphere, what above all characterizes and distinguishes Marion’s project is that he attempts to conceive of a singular, univocal notion of love, one which transcends and replaces the multiple and connotatively distinct forms (caritas, agape, eros) in which the tradition has attempted to think this concept. Marion does not, however, deny the dialectic of these forms but rather describes it in great detail. For Marion, the logic of love is incomprehensible; but this is not to say that it does not exist. It is simply that this logic is not the logic of the world and not the logic that the philosophical tradition, and metaphysics, have tried to think. His very recent work on Augustine (Marion 2008) confrms this theoretical line with a reading of the work of the great Church Father. If the “I” is there, where it loves, then this locus of love becomes, 61
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for the “I”, something more intimate than the “I” itself. This, on Marion’s interpretation, is the key theme of Augustine.The book can also be read as a Phenomenological reading of the Confessions. For Augustine, God is not an object of discussion but the locus itself of the discussion; he speaks always to God, never about Him, so that, even if our present epoch is just in the course of withdrawing from metaphysical discourse, Augustine, for his part, had never entered into it; this is why he can be so contemporary. A confessio is a discourse received through love, which is given back, likewise through love, to the confessing subject.That is to say, the dialectic of giving and of love is here rediscovered.This work thus constitutes a masterful synthesis of the three lines of research followed by Marcion: the philosophical-historical, the Phenomenological and the theological. To what extent is Marion – and to what extent are Casper and Olivetti – authors who can still be considered Neo-Scholastics? And to what extent are they Phenomenologists? The speculative scope and breadth of these attempts, and the long periods of time comprised by both the currents that these writers have behind them, certainly make it diffcult to classify them in terms of these categories.The aspect of the Neo-Scholastic tradition, in particular, appears to be less vital in these writers. Precisely, however, because they are freed of the burden of “defending” the speculative validity of Scholastic thinking, there is often to be observed in these authors a reference to and reliance on this thinking as something that continues to be an effervescent source of inspiration. Phenomenology, then, to which they tend to make more direct and explicit reference, is really used here as a means by which to draw out into the light a, as it were,“hidden” meaning to be found in the texts and in the thought of the Scholastic tradition. Certain recent efforts of Emmanuel Falque move in this direction, inasmuch as he exercises himself in the practice of reading also Scholastic motifs in a Phenomenological manner (see Falque 2008). Likewise, the overcoming of the tendency to accord a privileged attention to the work of Heidegger allows a rediscovery of, and a throwing of new light on, the entire heritage of Phenomenology, including its Husserlian origins. Once again it is Marion who, with his “Phenomenology of giving”, seeks a synthesis of the approaches of both thinkers (see Marion 1989). Thus if, on the one hand, Phenomenology was accused, already in the era of its frst emergence, of being an attempt to found a “new Scholasticism” and has undergone, in more recent years, what has been polemically described as a “theological turn”, (Neo-)Scholasticism itself, on the other hand, has undergone – and this above all in respect of that which remains most alive and vital in it of its speculative side – what we might, in parallel to the younger movement’s “theological turn”, call a “Phenomenological turn”.
References Vv.Aa. 1932.“La Phénoménologie. Juvisy 12 septembre 1932,” in Journées d’études de la Société Thomiste,Vol. I, Kain-Juvisy: La Saulchoir-Cerf. Vv.Aa. 1995.“Saint Thomas et l’onto-théologie.Actes du colloque tenu à l’Institut catholique de Toulouse les 3 et 4 juin 1994.” Revue Thomiste, XCV. Brentano, Franz. 1862. Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles. Freiburg i.B: Herder. ———. 1874. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Casper, Bernhard. 1981. Gott Nennen. Phänomenologische Zugänge. München:Alber Verlag. Esposito, Costantino and Porro, Pasquale. (Eds.). 2001.“Heidegger e i medievali”. Quaestio. Annali di storia della metafsica, vol. 1.Turnhout: Brepols. Falque, Emmanuel. 2008. Dieu, la chair et l’autre. Paris: P.U.F. Heidegger, Martin. 1916 Die Kategorien und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. Tübingen: Mohr. ———. 1957. Identität und Differenz. Frankfurt am Main:V. Klostermann. ———. 1959. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske.
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Phenomenology and medieval philosophy ———. 1962.“Letter to Father Richardson.” In: Through Phenomenology to Thought.Trans.W. S. J. Richardson. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1997 Die Grundprobleme der Phaenomenologie. GA 24. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 2006. Geschichte der Philosophie von Thomas von Aquin bis Kant. GA 23. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Janicaud, Dominique. 1991. Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française. Combas: Éditions de l’Éclat. Maierù,Alfonso and Imbach, Ruedi. (Eds.). 1991. Gli studi di flosofa medievale tra Otto e Novecento. Contributo a un bilancio storiografco. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura. Maréchal, Joseph. 1922–1926 Le point de départ de la métaphysique: leçons sur le développement historique et théorique de la connaissance. 5 vols. Louvain: Museum Lessianum. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1977. L’idole et la distance. Cinque études. Paris: Grasset. ———. 1982. Dieu sans l’être. Paris: Fayard. ———. 1986. Prolégomènes à la charité. Paris: Éditions de la Différence. ———. 1989. Réduction et donation. Recherches sûr Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie. Paris: P.U.F. ———. 2003: Le phénomène érotique. Paris, Grasset. ———. 2008. Au lieu de soi. L’approche de Saint Augustin. Paris: P.U.F. Olivetti, Marco Maria. 1992. Analogia del soggetto. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Perler, Dominik. 2004. Theorien der Intentionalität im Mittelalter. Frankfurt am Main:V. Klostermann. Przywara, Erich. 1932. Analogia entis. Metaphysik. München: Kösel & Pustet. Scheler, Max. 1915.“Liebe und Erkenntnis.” Die Weißen Blätter II/8: pp. 991–1016. ———. 1921. Vom ewigen im Menschen. Leipzig: Der neue Geist. ———. 1928. Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos. Darmstadt: Reichl. Stein, Edith. 2002. Gesamtausgabe 1.Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Familie. Ed. Maria Amata Neyer. FreiburgBasel-Wien: Herder. ———. 2005. Gesamtausgabe 10. Potenz und Akt. Studien zu einer Philosophie des Sein. Ed. Hans Rainer Sepp. Freiburg-Basel-Wien: Herder. ———. 2006. Gesamtausgabe 11/12. Endliches und ewiges Sein. Ed. Andreas Uwe Müller. Freiburg-BaselWien: Herder. ———. 2008. Gesamtausgabe 23–24. Übersetzeungen III:Thomas von Aquin. Über die Wahrheit, Bd. I-II. Eds. Andreas Speer and Francesco Valerio Tommasi. Freiburg-Basel-Wien: Herder. ———. 2014. “Was ist Philosophie? Ein Gespräch zwischen Edmund Husserl und Thomas von Aquino” in Gesamtausgabe 9. Eds. Beate Beckmann-Zöller und Hans-Rainer Sepp. Freiburg-Basel-Wien: Herder. Vanni Rovighi, Sofa. 1939. La flosofa di Edmund Husserl. Milano:Vita e Pensiero. .
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4 PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE CARTESIAN TRADITION Édouard Mehl
Included in the Cartesian tradition is not only the actual corpus of Descartes but also its critical reception. The philosophical debate in the 17th and 18th centuries was decisively shaped by fgures such as Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), John Locke (1632–1704) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). And, in addition to these major fgures, one should still mention those minores, some of whom (e.g. Johann Clauberg, 1622–1665) tried to combine the newfangled Cartesianism with a certain kind of Schulmetaphysik. In its long tradition – from Francisco Suárez to Christian Wolff, at least – this Schulmetaphysik struggled to ground philosophy in a general doctrine of being; independently of the Cartesian project of a “frst philosophy”, and even before it, this doctrine – that would come to be called “ontology” at the beginning of the 17th century – defned its object, the ens, as the universality of the conceivable: ens ut cogitabile, omne intelligibile; πᾶν το νοητόν (Courtine 1990, especially part 4; Carraud 1999; Mehl 2019, ch. I, §3).This is the tradition that sustains the history of Western metaphysics as well as its onto-theological constitution and which, according to Heidegger, runs in a straight line from Spinoza’s Ethics, passing through the Leibnizian constitution of the principle of suffcient reason, all the way to Hegel’s Science of Logic (Heidegger 1969, 1991). On the one hand, then, at the crossroads between the Cartesian legacy and scholastic ontology, we would fnd the core of modern “rationalism”, ascribing to subjectivity both the task of securing knowledge and the challenges involved in its foundation. On the other hand – and already in the 1930s – a completely different path of Cartesianism would arise that consisted in regarding subjectivity as free will.This path, considered by some to be more authentically Cartesian, is the one that would be followed by post-Sartrean phenomenology in its opposition to Husserl’s emphasis on theoretical reason. If, bringing the discussion back to Husserl, one wanted to assess his position in regard to the philosophical project of Descartes, the most reliable sources would be: frst, the Cartesian Meditations, a work consisting of a series of conferences delivered by Husserl in Paris and Strasbourg in 1929; and, secondly, the great historical fresco in §§16–21 of the Krisis. This relationship, nevertheless, remains inescapably ambiguous. In fact, Husserl only seems able to overcome Descartes by repeating the latter’s own gesture, i.e., by reproducing it on that strictly transcendental level that Descartes himself would not have been able to grasp. Now, since a thorough treatment of such a fundamental theme cannot be carried out here, however, this entry will focus on three specifc questions that revolve around the confrontation between phenom64
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enology and what could be deemed its modern starting point (Ausgangspunkt), i.e., Cartesian move of a beginning a primis fundamentis (AT VII, 17,6).1
I – Evidence and truth: the absolute foundation of knowledge Husserl was acquainted with Descartes since much before the 1907 “turn” and the project of a transcendental phenomenology.There are notes dating from before 1900 (Majolino 2003)2 that show an early reading of the Regulae ad directionem ingenii.This text was, for the Neo-Kantians, despite being an unpublished, unfnished manuscript, the best expression – maybe even the birthplace – of modern philosophy, as well as the cornerstone of its later criticism. Now, the origin and the consolidation of this Neo-Kantian tradition took place with the works of Paul Natorp3 (1882), Ernst Cassirer4 (1899), and, later, Heinz Heimsoeth.5 And, at least according to Natorp’s reading, the goal of the Regulae is to argue for an equivalence between evidence and truth. “All knowledge is certain and evident cognition” (Regulae, II, AT X, 362/ vol. 1, 10), as Descartes put it in that work.6 This introductory remark, as obvious or tautological as it may sound, would disclose the fundamental turning point in modern science: certitude is not in the object of knowledge – the object does not even appear in this formulation. Certitude is a modality of knowledge itself, one that we could call “subjective”, even if Descartes himself never used the term in this specifc sense.The frst consequence of this Copernican turn is that epistemic certainty does not vary according to the domain of object but is built solely on the evidence of a “clear and distinct” perception. Hence, the privilege that mathematics – or rather its two fundamental disciplines: arithmetic and geometry – has frequently enjoyed vis-à-vis the other sciences is not due to its objects having a special ontic dignity or their being abstracted from matter. It is due only to the fact that its formal object – that is, quantity, and its two species: continuous and discrete – are “so simple and easy to conceive” that it poses no resistance to our mental apprehension of it (II,AT X, 365, 14–22).This privilege, therefore, is not a monopoly; it does not have to be restricted to this specifc domain. Indeed, the Regulae claim that the subject can fnd the same character of evidence in any objectual knowledge, and this evidence will not differentiate between one and another type of knowledge:“Thus everyone can mentally intuit that he exists, that he is thinking, that a triangle is bounded by just three lines…” (AT X, 368, 21–23/vol. 1, 14). Evidence and certainty are gained in and through the exercise of doubt, whose function is to distinguish and to discriminate what is certain from what is doubtful.This equivalence between esse verum and esse certum provides the outlines of a general science that will be defned as mathesis universalis (Rule IV). Accordingly, the Regulae dictate that, before getting to know any of the objects to which the intellect is related, one must know the intellect itself (Rule VIII).And they also demand that knowledge be limited according to the representability of those objects that are “imaginable”, instead of being extended all the way to pure noumena – as one can never know whether there really are objects in experience that correspond to the latter (Rule XIV). Natorp’s work of 1882, dealing essentially with the Regulae, includes a polemic appendix against Julius Baumann (1837–1916) who, in a book published a few years before (Baumann 1868),7 had defended a purely metaphysical reading of that text and had presented his own view of Descartes’s ontology of mathematics. According to Natorp, the fundamental concepts of Cartesian philosophy, starting from space, time, and number, do not have, as Baumann suggested, a metaphysical justifcation – the famous “divine veracity” to which Baumann subjects a posteriori, so to speak, the theory of evidence in the Regulae. Natorp shows that Baumann incurs in a “countersense” when he attributes to Descartes the idea that mathematical objects must be “real” because, as they are clearly and distinctly perceived, they must be “something” instead of 65
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“nothing”. By following this faulty reasoning, Baumann would thus be misled into affrming that mathematical idealities prove the existence of their object – an assertion deemed absurd by Natorp. His objection to Baumann is, reasonably enough, that mathematical objects are expressly devoid of any existential claim and that imagination, in so far as it is a clear and distinct perception, both suffces as a criterion of reality and dispenses with any divine assurance. This is in accordance with (Princ. Phil. II, 21, AT VIII-1, 52), where it is applied to indefnite spaces; these spaces are not only “imaginary” but also “perceived as really imaginable and, therefore, real”: “vere imaginabilia, hoc est realia esse percipimus”. It is then the “theory of pure knowledge”, i.e. purifed of any metaphysical presupposition not open to intuitive verifcation, that constitutes the ground and the basis on which rests the edifce of Cartesian knowledge, including metaphysics itself. Much later, Husserl, by his turn, would make a similar move and, with surgical precision, would deliberately “purify” Leibnizian monadology, getting rid of the useless and wavering hypothesis of a creative and conservative cause of the harmony of the monads. All things considered, one of the remarkable strengths of the Neo-Kantian reading of Descartes is that it lays out the plan and the task of frst philosophy: namely, the search for and the establishing of a general criterion of truth8 – the same research, that is, as the one that guides Husserl’s Third Cartesian Meditation.9 In refusing formal logic and the usefulness of the syllogism, Descartes had excluded dialectics from “true logic”.The latter, meanwhile, had been brought down to its simplest form: a theory of the perception clara et distincta. On this point, then, Husserl was less infuenced by the discussions of the Marburgians than by the works of Kasimir Twardowski (1866–1936) – see Twardowski (1892)10 – who, like Husserl himself, had been a student of Brentano. In 1892,Twardowski had presented the basis for a general theory of evidence conspicuously exemplifed in the cogito, and it seems that Husserl’s frst appeal to the “phenomenologically grasped” pure ego, in the Logical Investigations, deliberately follows Twardowski’s reliance on evidence in opposition to Natorp’s Kantian views, according to which a “pure I” cannot be grasped (for it could not be apprehended except as this object that, by defnition, it is not) (Hua XIX/1, 372–376/91–94).11 Husserl – taking note of Kant’s radical critique toward the entire metaphysical tradition that preceded him12 – frmly refuses the argument of the “veracitas dei”, regarded as nothing more than a useless and wavering metaphysical trick.13 And in doing so, he also refuses, as a corruption of their inaugural discovery, the psychologism that, latent but inherent in their innatism, affected the Cartesians.14 In Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie, a text from 1903, Husserl had already drawn the outlines of a theory of knowledge grounded in originary evidence, while also challenging the Cartesian distinction between the subject, the object, and the mental act itself in the intuitus mentis.15 Husserl understands this mental act of the intuitus mentis rather as the “presentifcation of an intuitive sense”, and he shows how this can be referred back to a form of ante-predicative or “originary” evidence that is mixed with the absolute givenness of this object: “every sort of object has its own mode of being given according to their ipseity – they have, that is, their own evidence”. With Husserl, the phenomenological gaze will focus on the evidence of the pre-given objects as it consists in the soil or the substrate presupposed in every predicative judgment (Experience and Judgment, §4) but which is out of the narrow visual range of formal logic.This is what Husserl meant by his own endeavor of coming back “to the frst foundations” (“a primis fundamentis”) or to what he calls sometimes – in a reference to Goethe’s Faust – the “kingdom of mothers”. At the time of the Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie and the Logical Investigations,Husserl’s Cartesianism is deployed to defend the possibility of true knowledge and, working against all kinds of skepticism, relativism, or frivolous subjectivism, to provide it with foundations.The Regulae, thus, are still read and understood in a neo-critical, transcendental perspective.There is no intention here of fnding in them the traces of an unacknowledged, irresolute ontology. This will only come about with 66
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Heidegger, in his later portrayal of the Cartesian project of the Regulae as that of a “kind of formal ontology” where we could identify “something like a doctrine of the most common determinations of being in general …” – in such a way, however, that the relation between “the mathesis universalis – as the project of a formal ontology – and the rest of his work” remains, to Descartes himself,“unclear and undecided” (Heidegger 2012, 423–428).16
II – Descartes’s failure to grasp the transcendental point of view and the misunderstandings of modern “rationalism” In 1903, at this early, developing stage of Husserlian phenomenology, the philosophy of Descartes appears as an effort to provide Galilean science with stable foundations – in the sense of the opening statement of the Meditationes: “aliquid frmum et mansurum in scientiis stabilire”. Now, this Galilean or Cartesian–Galilean science17 gets rid of sensible qualities and operates only under the parameters of quantity (magnitude, fgura et motus). As such, it would constitute both the model and the intrinsic goal of all philosophical activity, even if, at this stage, the metaphysical – or, rather, meta-theoretical – interlude of the Meditationes is meant only to establish the science of nature or of bodily being in its defnite and ultimate truth. As Descartes himself had put it: my Meditations contain “all the foundations of my physics” (Descartes to Mersenne, January 28th 1641, AT III, 298, 1–2).Therefore, says Husserl: “The new and much-admired science of nature had become the prototype of authentic science in general, and that can be seen in the way we now take for granted the type of reality of spatial things as the prototype of every type of reality – including psychic reality” (Hua VII, 101). Descartes, in spite of all his efforts, cannot break free from this presupposition of the omni-validity of Galilean science:“Is Descartes here not dominated in advance by the Galilean certainty of a universal and absolutely pure world of physical bodies?” (Hua VI, §18, 81/79). In this sense, the discovery of the ego, unlike the phenomenological disclosure and exploration of a “realm of subjective phenomena which have remained ‘anonymous’ so far” (ibid., §29, 114/111), is not a goal in itself. On the contrary, it is merely a means to an end, a moment to be overcome in the task of establishing Galilean science in all its certitude and in its omni-validity. The mathematization of the science of nature stems from an act of idealization and, at the same time, of a covering up of the world of experience with that of mathematical idealities: “The mathematization of nature […] has become so much a matter of course that, already in its Galilean conception, the exact world was from the frst substituted for the world of our experience” (Husserl 1973, §10, 44). Mathematization – and, more generally, idealization – operates then as a “veil of ideas”, covering the primitive layer of sense givenness. It is a “veil” or “garment” that phenomenology must “destruct”, says Husserl, in an implicit but clear reference to the Parmenidean critique of the theory of forms. Moreover, this “substitution” (“Unterschiebung”), for its part, induces another one: Descartes would have been led to cloak transcendental subjectivity, at the very moment of its discovery, with an analogous and, indeed, perfectly symmetrical cover-up. Barely glimpsed at, the pure transcendental ego would become itself an intra-worldly theme. One can see it in Descartes’s passing from the claim that “ego sum, ego existo” to that other, different claim:“sum […] res cogitans” (AT VII, 25, 12;AT VII, 27, 18; Hua I, §10). Implicitly, and unaware of what he was doing, Descartes would lend to the reality of this res cogitans the same constitutive traits of the res extensa – even though the latter was already, at that point, suspended by doubt. Now, of course it would be a blunt paradox to accuse Descartes of being fascinated by the object of Galilean physics. All the work of the Meditations is obviously an attempt to develop, with the cogito and with the idea entis infniti, a (proto)type of reality that is not only incommen67
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surate with the reality of bodies, but also completely independent from it – and one on which the reality of bodies itself would be founded, not the contrary.18 Nevertheless – and Husserl’s opinion on this is increasingly clear throughout his texts – Descartes’s lack of radicality is due to his understanding of the ego merely as a mirror, as a counterpoint to objectivity.19 This is, in fact, the fundamental meaning of what Husserl calls “rationalism”: when Descartes defnes the ego as “mens, sive animus, sive intellectus, sive ratio” (AT VII, 27, 14), it is already the sign of having overlooked the universal transcendental ego and of having failed to see in it anything but the simple refection of the rationality of the real.
III – The monadological ego and the overcoming of the Solipsismus-Streit More than any other of Descartes’s successors, it was Leibniz20 who managed to challenge Cartesian objectivism and the pernicious way in which philosophy was made a servant of the science of the material world. This remains true even if Leibniz himself, just like Spinoza, Descartes, and Malebranche before him, would ultimately succumb to the senseless illusion of the possibility of a universal objective knowledge of the world “more geometrico” – a knowledge that would encompass both the science of bodily nature and a rational psychology.21 Moreover, and indeed as all of Descartes’s successors, Leibniz frmly disputes the thesis and the procedure of the Sixth Meditation, which intends to prove the existence of bodies and the real distinction between thinking and extended substances.22 The bewilderment that plagues “Cartesian dualism” would be the effect, rather than the cause, of a problem that was even more radically metaphysical: namely, solipsism. Leibniz thus writes, in a fragment from 1679, that “we cannot know the reality of those objects that affect our senses in any other way but a priori, insofar as we cannot be alone in the world”.23 This point defnes very precisely the program of Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation: it shows the Other to be absolutely necessary to the constitution of an “objective” world.To be objective and to be true means through and through to be there for everyone (für-jedermann-da). Now, this is not the same idea, or at least not specifcally the same, as Descartes’s objectum purae matheseos. The latter, indeed, was the object of an understanding indifferent both to the existence of the Other and to the existence of a world that would be objectively valid only to the extent that it were valid for everyone. In the Fifth Meditation, however, having reestablished the others’ being present for me as a transcendental condition, even if implicit, of every kind of objective validity,24 Husserl managed to bridge a signifcant gap created in metaphysics by solipsism – which was, as we have seen, the cause and, at the same time, the symptom of the failure of metaphysics. From now on, if the objectivity of the world is still to be understood on the basis of a predication of universality, this predication itself is not to be taken in the merely logical sense of that which is true in every case, of that which is true by means of some internal necessity, proper to the combination of its terms. It is universal, instead, in that it is the same for everyone – for me as for any other “I”. All that is shared and common “for everyone” is universal in this second sense.25 The very idea of an “objective” world has no meaning if not within a transcendental community of egos related to the same world, while the characteristic unity of this world, unifying the indefnite multiplicity of the Umwelten, is founded upon the unity of the unique community, universal and necessary, of all coexisting monads.The ego cogito would not, therefore, be enough to found objectivity, as the latter requires, aside from representation – no matter how constant – the agreeing co-representation of a common, unique nature. Hence the passage, in the Cartesian Meditations, from a transcendental egology to a transcendental monadology, and from a “Cartesian” paradigm to a Leibnizian one, where both the possibility and the sense of being of the objective world depend on transcendental intersubjectivity as its necessary precursor.26 68
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And yet, in conclusion, it must be added that Husserl’s monadological turn is not a refutation of Cartesian egology: it is a delving further into it, a course correction after the misleading interpretation that replaced the universal ego with an intra-worldly being, clad in the pseudoconsistency of a thing – an interpretation whose frst victim was Descartes himself.To put it in other words, a monadology, for Husserl, is the necessary consequence of this frst philosophy whose program and method were established by the Meditationes de prima philosophia. Husserl did not take distance from Descartes so that he could turn toward Leibniz, just as his longstanding interest for Leibnizian monadology never implied the abandoning of the Cartesian path. On the contrary, Husserl found in Leibniz, and in his defnition of the ego as monad, precisely the only way to carry out the Cartesian undertaking of a frst philosophy.27 That is the reason, despite the seeming paradox, for the crucial part assumed by the doctrine of Leibniz in these (nevertheless) Cartesian Meditations!
Notes 1 We refer to the works of Descartes in Charles Adam’s and Paul Tannery’s edition as presented by Bernard Rochot and Pierre Costabel.The volumes are indicated in Roman numerals, followed by page and line numbers. 2 Also, Husserl dedicated two seminars to Descartes in the 1890s (Sommersemester 1892 and Wintersemester 1896). 3 On the evolution of Natorp’s own interpretation of Descartes, see Dufour 2006. See also the valuable remarks in Calan 2013. 4 Following his breakthrough work,Descartes Kritik der mathematischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis (1899), Cassirer will hold a more speculative, more comprehensive interpretation than that of Natorp: instead of considering the “erkenntnistheoretisch rationalism” of the Regulae as a form of ascetism, a sort of abstinence from any metaphysical position, Cassirer reads the metaphor of the sun, in the First Rule, as a “new form of relation between thinking and being, necessarily shaping both the possibility and the value of objective knowledge”. 5 Heinz Heimsoeth was the author of Die Methode der Erkenntnis bei Descartes und Leibniz (1912). This work had a very cold reception in France, as one can see from a review in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1912), whose conclusion reads:“It is regrettable […] that the author, a disciple of Natorp, only keeps from Descartes that which can forecast Kant […] Mr. Heimsoeth’s book is marked by a systematic ignorance of everything that was not published by the Marburg masters.” 6 Reference, respectively, to the AT edition and to the English translation: Descartes 1985. 7 In 1905, J. Baumann, then a student of Hermann Lotze working in Göttingen, would oppose the appointment of Husserl as Professor at the university. 8 See Discours de la Méthode: “and I always had an extreme desire to learn how to distinguish true from false” (DM I,AT VI, 10, 9–11). 9 “Die konstitutive Problematik. Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit”. To put it more precisely, the expression “criterion” is not from Descartes. He speaks only of the search for a rule of truth (regula veritatis/regula generalis).The expression “criterion” is more likely established following (Lambert 1915). On the nonpsychological theory of the criterion of truth as the core of “rationalism”, see Couturat an Husserl, 26. VII. 1899, (Hua-Dok III/6, 28):“we realize that what constitutes the logical kernel of thought, that is, the criterion of true and false, eludes introspection and psychological analysis”. 10 On this work, see the instigating study in Starzyński 2017. 11 See also the note of the Second Edition to §6 of the Fifth Investigation (Hua XIX/1, 368/352). 12 See Kant 1999, 134:“However, the deus ex machina is the greatest absurdity one could hit upon in the determination of the origin and validity of our cognitions. It has – besides its vicious circularity in drawing conclusions concerning our cognitions – also this additional disadvantage: it encourages all sorts of wild notions and every pious and speculative brainstorm.” 13 In his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl uses the Latin expression “veracitas” two times: §1 (Hua I, 45) and §40 (Hua I, 116). It is worth mentioning that Étienne Gilson dedicated a study specifcally to this question: “La véracité divine et l’existence du monde extérieur”, collected in Gilson 1930. On the actual role of the “divine veracity” in Cartesian metaphysics (strongly contested by J.-L. Marion, according to
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14 15 16
17
18 19
20 21
22
23
24
whom the rule of evidence is never really founded, but is always – and from the start – operational), see the presentation of the debate in Olivo 2005, especially 165–210. A psychologism that is also that of Kant in his 1770 Dissertation. On this point, see Pradelle 2012, 114–121. See Schäfer 2012. On Cartesian and Husserlian evidence, see the valuable pages written by JeanChristophe Devynck in Devynck 2000, First Part, §4. On the relation between the mathesis universalis and formal ontology, see also Hua XXV, 132–135.The important text of Heidegger was not yet known when Jean-Luc Marion put forth his interpretation of the Regulae (Marion 1975) that follows along the same line of Heidegger’s commentary and sketches the outlines of this “ontology” of the ens qua objectum. Both Heidegger and Marion go against the idea of a somewhat sterile notion of evidence, such as it was understood by the Neo-Kantians and by A. de Waehlens after them, according to whom “The author of the Discourse on the Method carefully avoids any ontological problem” (de Waehlens 1938). By the time he was writing the Krisis, Husserl found out about the work his disciple and friend Alexandre Koyré had devoted to Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes (from the 1930s, there are: the frst French translation of the frst book of De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium copernicien [1934]; Trois Conférences sur Descartes delivered at the University of Cairo in 1937 [1938]; and the Études Galiléennes, which build on an essay published in 1935 – before the Krisis – Koyré 1935). On this point, see the issues of the Second Meditation: “De mente humana. Quam notior sit quam corpus.” See, for instance, how Husserl intelligently frames the problem in the project of a letter to Helmut Kuhn. In the passage, Husserl intended to warn Kuhn about the risk of understanding the reduction in a contradictory way, which would amount to “falling prey to the same mistake as Descartes, even if in a more elevated fashion”: “in this conception of epoché you mention, the I – which would have to be the transcendental I – is still the other pole of the correlation of intraworldly experience: it is the pole opposite to objects but it is, nevertheless, itself and for itself an object”. In opposition to this unfnished, fruitless epoché, Husserl insists that “the really universal bracketing of the world in its totality goes hand in hand with the opening of a new universum of ‘being’: and indeed with the opening of the dimension of transcendental subjectivity as the original location of the constitutive sense-givings of the universal sense ‘world’” (Hua-Dok III/6, 244–245). On Leibniz, see Mahnke 1917; Rabouin 2006; Pradelle 2006. Hua VI, §72: “this idea which led even Leibniz astray – is a nonsense”. On the idea of a universal science and of a pure mathematics of lived experiences, such as Spinoza considers to have developed in the third book of his Ethics, see already Hua I, §72, when Husserl poses the question of “whether a phenomenology would have to be constituted or even could be constituted as a ‘geometry’ of experiences” (the answer is negative, of course, since phenomenology can only be a descriptive science). It is also worth noting that Descartes despised geometrical order, only having employed it in the Secundae Responsiones to satisfy the pressing request of Father Mersenne. This is the double thesis of the Sixth Meditation, contested both by Spinoza and, from a different perspective, by Pascal. Husserl was not acquainted enough with the historical development of the Cartesian tradition to know exactly what in Leibniz was due to one or the other: to Spinoza, markedly, a metaphysical theory of expression – see, on this point, Deleuze 1968; to Pascal, the reading of Disproportion de l’Homme, and the theory of double infnity, that Leibniz himself considered to be the introduction to monadology. See de Buzon 2010. Quoted in Fichant 2004, 285.The diffculty and the interest of this note come from the fact that, even more than a critique of what Descartes writes in the Sixth Meditation, it is a literal reiteration of what he had written in the Third: (MM III,AT IX-1, 33). On Husserl’s relying on Leibniz to overcome the “Solipsismus-Streit”, see Gérard 2006, 35. On this point, Husserl is preceded, or maybe accompanied, by Mahnke 1917. On the notion of “objective” world as “world for everyone” – universality conquered by renouncing every form of realism – see §26, p. 24: “Only the logical form of the world is ‘objectively valid’, even if we do not want to describe it as an exterior, really existing transcendent world, but rather as a transcendental concept of the world”. For Mahnke, the sense of being of what is “really there” is grasped as a modality of the intentional lived experience. The lived character of what is really there (“den Erlebnischarakter des ‘wirklich da’”) presupposes a community of monads (or ‘living beings’) of the same species, both having the same perceptions and being conscious of this identity. On the immanence of the sense of the world – and even of the world as “really being” – in conscious life, see Hua I, §28, 97.
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Phenomenology and the Cartesian tradition 25 With a brief linguistic maneuver – the superposition of two adjectives formed by the same radical (allgemein and gemeinsam) – one could say: die allgemeinsame objektive Welt. 26 The conclusion of §55 suggests the constitution of the world and that of the intersubjective community to be concomitant and interdependent: they are, indeed, both sides of the same constitution (Hua I, 156). 27 See the exchange between Husserl and Mahnke, which deals largely with these questions (Pradelle 2016).
References Baumann, Julius. 1868. Die Lehren von Raum, Zeit und Mathematik in der neueren Philosophie nach ihrem Ganzen Einfuss dargestellt und beurtheilt. Band 1 (Suarez, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Newton). Berlin: G. Reimer. Carraud,Vincent. 1999. “L’ontologie peut-elle être cartésienne? L’exemple de l’Ontosophia de Clauberg, de 1647 à 1664: de l’Ens à la Mens”. In: Johannes Clauberg (1622–1665) and Cartesian Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century. Ed. Theo Verbeek. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 13–36. Cassirer, Ersnt. 1899. Descartes’ Kritik der mathematischen und wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis. Diss. Marburg. Courtine, Jean-François. 1990. Suárez et le système de la métaphysique. Paris: PUF. de Buzon, Frédéric. 2010. “Que lire dans les deux infnis? Remarque sur une lecture leibnizienne”; “Double infnité chez Pascal et Monade. Essai de reconstitution des deux états du texte”. In: Les Etudes Philosophiques, 4, n° 95: pp. 535–548. de Calan, Ronan. 2013.“Husserl ‘néocartésien’? La phénoménologie, le néokantisme et le motif ‘transcendantal’ dans la philosophie cartésienne”. In: Qu’est-ce qu’être cartésien? Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine (dir). Lyon: ENS Éditions, pp. 581–594. de Waelhens, Alphonse. 1938. “Descartes et la pensée phénoménologique”. In: Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie, n° 60: pp. 571–589. Deleuze, Gilles. 1968. Spinoza et le problème de l’expression. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Descartes, René. 1964–1974. Oeuvres. 11 vols. Charles Adam’s and Paul Tannery’s edition as presented by Bernard Rochot and Pierre Costabel. Paris:Vrin-CNRS. ———. 1985. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes.Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devynck, Jean-Christophe. 2000. Logique du phénomène. Étude sur les Recherches Logiques de Husserl. Sèvres: Presses Académiques Diakom. Dufour, Éric. 2006. “Descartes à Marbourg”. In: Descartes en Kant. Eds. Michel Fichant and Jean-Luc Marion. Paris: PUF, pp. 471–493. Fichant, Michel. 2004. Discours de métaphysique / Monadologie. Paris: Folio. Gérard,Vincent. 2006.“Leibniz et la mathématique formelle”. In: Philosophie, n° 92: pp. 29–55. Gilson, Étienne. 1930.“La véracité divine et l’existence du monde extérieur”. In: Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien. Paris:Vrin, pp. 234–244. Heidegger, Martin. 1969. Identity and Difference.Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1991. The Principle of Reason.Trans. Reginald Lilly. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2012. Sommersemester 1944 – Seminare: Platon – Aristoteles – Augustinus, GA 83. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Heimsoeth, Heinz. 1912. Die Methode der Erkenntnis bei Descartes und Leibniz. Gießen: Töpelmann. Husserl, Edmund. 1973. Experience and Judgment. Trans. James S. Churchill and K. Ameriks. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Correspondence.Trans.Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koyré, Alexandre. 1935. “À l’aurore de la science moderne: la jeunesse de Galilée (I)”. In: Annales de l’Université de Paris, t. X, n° 6: pp. 540–55. Lambert, Johann Heinrich. 1915. Abhandlung vom Criterium Veritatis (1728). Ed. Karl Bopp. Berlin:Verlag vom Reuther und Reichard. Mahnke, Dietrich. 1917. Eine neue Monadologie. Berlin:Verlag von Reuther & Reichard. Majolino, Claudio. 2003. “Un inedito del primo Husserl su Cartesio”. In: Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (I-II): pp. 181–189.
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Édouard Mehl Marion, Jean-Luc. 1975. Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes. Science cartésienne et savoir aristotéicien dans les Regulae. Paris:Vrin. Mehl, Édouard. 2019. Descartes en Allemagne, 1619–1620. Le contexte allemand de l’élaboration de la science cartésienne. Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires. Natorp, Paul. 1882. Descartes’ Erkenntnistheorie. Eine Studie zur Vorgeschichte des Kriticismus, Marburg: N. G. Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Olivo, Gilles. 2005. Descartes et l’essence de la vérité. Paris: PUF. Pradelle, Dominique. 2006.“Monadologie et Phénoménologie”. In: Philosophie, n° 92: pp. 56–85. ———. 2012. Par-delà la révolution copernicienne. Sujet transcendantal et facultés chez Kant et Husserl. Paris: PUF. ———. 2016.“Husserl/Mahnke. Correspondance (1917–1933)”. In: Philosophie, 2, n° 129: pp. 16–54. Rabouin, David. 2006.“Husserl et le projet leibnizien d’une mathesis universalis”. In: Philosophie, 2006, n° 92: pp. 13–28. Schäfer, Rainer. 2012.“ Les transformations de l’Erkenntnishteorie dans la critique husserlienne de Descartes ”. Les Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg, [En ligne], 32 | 2012, mis en ligne le 15 mai 2019, consulté le 18 mai 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cps/2121 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ cps.2121. Starzyński,Wojciech. 2017.“La perception et l’idée. Une double direction du cartésianisme de Twardowski”. In: Les Études Philosophiques, 2: pp. 197–204. Twardowski, Kasimir. 1892. Idee und Perception. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Untersuchung aus Descartes. Wien: Carl Konegen.
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5 PHENOMENOLOGY AND BRITISH EMPIRICISM Vittorio De Palma
1. Phenomenology is a resumption of the project of Locke and Hume, which – as Hegel writes – “have driven out metaphysics through the analysis of sensuous experience” (Hegel 1969–1971-II, 377). To the apparent evidences of formal constructions, Husserl opposes the phenomenological foundation, which goes back to the intuitive origins of abstractions (Hua XXXII, 90). For “all concepts stem from intuition and have a sense that refers to intuition” (Ms. A VII 20/20b–21a).To speculation, characterized as a bottomless thinking in mere word-meanings, he opposes his intuitionism; yet this intuitionism has nothing to do with supernatural enlightenments or mystical intellectual intuitions, but simply means that I only judge reliably when I can also exhibit what I mean, and ultimate exhibition is seeing or something exactly analogous to ordinary seeing (Hua XXXV, 288–91; Hua IX, 345; Hua XLII, 271n1). As Husserl writes to Spranger in September 1918, in phenomenology “one does not speculate about things, […] but he/she sees things”, for “speculation cannot become rectifed, one can rectify only in a domain of given things”. Phenomenology arises precisely from a radicalization of Ernst Mach’s and Ewald Hering’s method, which was a reaction against the bottomlessness of theorizing in the exact sciences by means of mathematical speculations and of concepts remote from intuition (Hua IX, 302). Whereas rationalism does not grasp the signifcant core lying behind the skeptical absurdities of empiricism and proceeds in a purely conceptual way by constructing conditions of possibility of objective validity from the top down, the empiricist method of returning to the intuitive origins of knowledge is an anticipation of the phenomenological method, which is alien to transcendentalism (Hua VII, 146, 182, 187, 382; Hua XXXVII, 197–8). British empiricism is nevertheless “an unclear and half-way intuitionism” (Hua XXXV, 290–1), insofar as it does not adhere to its own principle, according to which one must always go back to the experience, viz. to the grasping of something itself, and refrain from stating anything that is not drawn from intuition (Hua VII, 136). Phenomenology aims at realizing the empiricist program by defending empiricist intuitionism against itself and carving out genuine empiricism from the apparent one (Hua VII, 148).This amounts to liberating empiricism from its naturalistic and sensualistic limitations.
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Naturalism is inconsistent. If the assertion “there are no reasons, but only causes” were true, it should apply even to itself and it could not claim to be well founded. If all seemingly insightful ascertainments are reducible to psychophysical processes, even this seemingly insightful ascertainment is reducible to such processes. A theory that denies any primacy of evident judgment over blind judgment annuls what distinguishes itself from an arbitrary assertion (Hua XVIII, 119). “Without insight, no knowledge” (Hua XVIII, 156). Because an insight can only be questioned by another insight, the validity of evidence is presupposed, even when it is denied: the claim that seeing is reducible to a psychic feeling presupposes that one reliably sees that this is the case (Hua XXXVI, 10). For example, since “we” designates a plurality of egos, Hume’s statement that “the identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fctitious one” (Hume 1888, 259) signifes that the identity, which I ascribe to the mind, is only a fctitious one; since only an identical ego can ascribe or revoke to the mind an identity, such an ego is presupposed by its denial. 2. Husserl proposes to unite the rationalistic tendency to ground knowledge in eidetic laws with the empiricist one to ground knowledge in factual experience (Hua XXXV, 288–9), but on the terrain of experience itself: material necessity is immanent to experience, because it derives from the sensuous stuff, hence the a priori form of experience depends upon the essence of the factually given contents. Consequently, phenomenology is an eidetic empiricism. Like the British empiricists, Husserl regards experience as the ground of knowledge; yet, unlike them, he claims that it has an objective structure determined by the nature of its contents, because relations of ideas govern experience as well. Thus, he desubjectivizes the structure of experience by conceiving it as the structure of real being. Reality is sensuous, since both real contents and their real connections are sensuous. Accordingly, the inquiry into reality and its a priori structures is a descriptive one, and only sensuous or material concepts have real signifcance, i.e., ontological bearing. By arguing that philosophy can uncover, but not alter, the sense the world has for us and gets solely from our experience (Hua I, 177), Husserl embraces Avenarius’ idea of an explication of the “natural concept of world” via a description of the given exactly as it is given: since all theories refer to the world given prior to them and are legitimate only if they do not violate the sense of the immediate givenness, it is necessary to bring out the “universal sense-frame of the world in immediate experience”, by describing “the world as it gives itself to me immediately”, namely “experience with respect to the experienced as such” (Hua XIII, 196–7). It is a matter, therefore, of what is presupposed by theories (Hua III/1, 45; Hua XXXV, 476). Although the description of what is encountered in preconceptual experience can only be carried out through concepts, the material or sensuous concepts, which are drawn from experience and can be grasped in it, are quite different from exact and formal concepts. And, although sediments arising from thought-activities adhere to what is experienced, one can always distinguish what is passively given from the thinking exercised upon it and the thoughts formed therein, in order to take what is experienced just as it gives itself (Hua IX, 57–8, 95–6). It is a matter of “a most fundamental difference” (Hua XI, 291). Whereas the grasping of real objects is “a mere receiving of a pre-constituted sense” (Hua XXXI, 41), in the case of ideal objects “a pre-constituting activity precedes the objectivating grasp” (Hua XXXI, 53); things present themselves in subjective experiencing “as objects already existent beforehand”, for they are “pregiven to active living as ego-foreign, are given from outside”, while thought-formations “are given exclusively from inside, exclusively by means of spontaneous activities and in them” (Hua XVII, 85–6). 74
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3. Husserl argues that experience with its demands precedes conceptual thinking and its demands (Hua V, 34; Hua XXXII, 233). He takes up the view which Hegel, in §40 of the Encyclopedia, argues is the shortcoming of both Kant and empiricism: experience is the only ground of knowledge. For cognition draws its legitimacy exclusively from experience (Hua XXXV, 289; Hua XXXII, 142), which leads back to sensuous perception (Hua III/1, 81; Hua XV, 502; Hua IX, 193). Experience is the “access to the being itself ” (Hua XXXIX, 207) and the “measure of all other opinions” (Hua XXXIX, 685); insofar as experience uncovers the illusion and settles the doubt on whether something is or is not, it is “the source of confrmation and disconfrmation,” viz. “the self-testimony of the existent”, although it can be refuted by further self-testimonies (Ms. A VII 20/38b). “What the things are, […] they are as things of experience” (Hua III/1, 100). Since, therefore,“experience can be confrmed and annulled only by experience” (Hua XXXIX, 231), whatever questioning of an experience presupposes trust in experience. Insofar as any sensuous phenomenon can be questioned only on the basis of other phenomena conficting with it, one can doubt every single phenomenon, but not all phenomena together, i.e., the sensuous as such, otherwise the basis of validity enabling the doubt is removed (De Palma 2012, 211–6).We see the things themselves, and not images or signs of them.We can also be deceived, but it proves to be a deception on the basis of a seeing of real things themselves.To say that all seeing is a deception annuls the sense of talking about deception (Hua XXXV, 22–3). By taking up Descartes’ view, in Book IV, Ch. I, §1 of the Essay Locke writes that the mind knows things only mediately, since it has “no other immediate object but its own ideas” (Locke 1999, 515). Likewise, Hume claims that “every thing, which appears to the mind, is nothing but a perception”, for “no external object can make itself known to the mind immediately, and without the interposition of an image or perception.That table, which just now appears to me, is only a perception, and all its qualities are qualities of perception” (Hume 1888, 193, 239). Now, perception is an act, in which an object immediately appears, while an image is an object, which immediately appears and by means of which another object mediately appears. Perceived things can serve as images of things not perceived, but they do not appear via the interposition of images.There is no “veil of perception”, for immediate objects are not ideas, i.e., acts or mindimmanent contents serving as representatives of things, but things.That table is a perceived thing, and all its qualities are qualities of thing. Because external experience is “that mode of the having of something itself which pertains to natural objects” (Hua XVII, 170), “the thing perceived in perception is the thing itself in its own existence” and, “when perceptions are deceptive, that signifes that they are in confict with new perceptions, which show with certainty what is actual in the place of the illusory” (Hua XVII, 287). “Only perception unseats perception” (Hua XXXVI, 40). Since, therefore, perception is nothing to be grounded, but it is itself grounds providing (Hua XXIV, 8), it is “the ultimate measure of reality” (Hua XL, 314) and thus the source of justifcation of knowledge, although it can deceive. By embracing the world-view of modern science, Brentano claims that sensuous contents are “an illusion”, for they “are not things which really and truly exist”, but “signs of something real […]. In and of itself, that which truly exists does not come to appear, and that which appears does not truly exist” (Brentano 1924, 250, 28). By rejecting the world-view of modern science, Husserl overthrows Brentano’s antiempiricist view: the scientifc world is an ideal world constructed by the subject, whereas the real world is the world of experience, which is given prior to every theory and functions as ground of validity for every theory.The dismissal of the inferential theory of perception makes the problem of the external world senseless; sensuous phenomena 75
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are not indications of the real, but the real itself, whose modes of givenness are grounded in its ontological nature. Against the Platonic, Christian, and rationalistic “degradation of sensuousness”, Husserl claims that sensuousness is not a “misty medium, which, instead of the things in themselves, gives mere appearances of the same” (Hua-Mat III, 170, 172).Against the prejudice according to which the sensuous world does not truly exist, he argues that the sensuous world just as it gives itself in experience is the only real world (Hua VI, 397, 360, 49). For the true being of things is their itself-givenness, and not something lying beyond possible experience. Unexperienceable entities are substructions of a bottomless thinking and differ from the ghosts only in that they cannot be refuted by experience (Hua XXXII, 216). Reality is the correlate of concordant experience and can prove to be an illusion only on the basis of further experience, for illusion signifes that the course of concordant experience is other than was predelineated by the up-tonow experience (Hua XV, 49). 4. Husserl argues that Hume “indicated the way of all inquiry into origins” with the “principle of tracing back every cognition to ‘impressions’” (Hua XXXVII, 224), and understands the return to the origins just as a return from ideas to impressions (Ricoeur 2004, 301–2). Accordingly, Husserl refuses Kant’s method of transcendental deduction as a “masterpiece of top-down transcendental proving” (Hua XXXVII, 212), and adopts Locke’s empirical deduction of categories (Hua VII, 97–9; Hua XXXV, 289), which he however reinterprets in an eidetic sense: categories are neither to be traced back to the adventitious causes of their production in experience nor to the judgment forms of logic, but to sensuous what-contents. Because they can only be grasped insofar as their singularizations are sensuously pregiven, real categories are not to be deduced from a principle, but to be found in experience via a bottom-up procedure (Hua V, 25). The conditions of possibility of experience are its “ontic-a priori essential structures” obtainable through the “method of eidetic variation” (Hua XXXII, 118) and lie not in the subject, but “immanently in the essence of experience” (Hua XVI, 141).This empiricist denial of the constructive procedure in favor of the descriptive method entails a refusal of the transcendental approach (cf. De Palma 2015; De Palma 2016). If the a priori didn’t lie within experience, the latter would have no objective structure. The sensuous given can only be intellectually grasped and determined insofar as it has a lawfulness independently of thinking.The structure of experience is given in experience itself, because it is due to sensuous forms of being, which arise from contents, and not to logical forms of thinking, which are “additions of the activity of judgment and of the syntheses that arise from it” (Hua XVII, 398) and cannot bestow upon contents a material shape. As James remarks in “A World of Pure Experience”, for a radical empiricism the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted for as real. Phenomenology, which Husserl defnes as “radical empiricism” (Hua XXXV, 513), is the realization of this approach. Against the view that all relations are produced by the subject, Husserl takes sensuous contents and sensuous relations (fusions, confgurations, similarities, etc.) to the same extent to be real, for both are given independently of the subject’s intervention. He distinguishes between formal relations or categorial forms produced by intellectual activities and contentual relations or material forms, which depend upon the particular nature of the contents and, just like these, are given in experience prior to every connecting act (Hua XIX/1, 288–91; Hua XIX/2, 665–7, 714–16; Husserl 1972, 214–23). In the former case, we have a “subjective interrelating and forming of a relation”, in the latter a “real ‘relation’” 76
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(Hua XLI, 262), which yields a “material or real unity” (Hua XIX/1, 291; Hua XXXI, 105). Whereas the formal unity of a categorial set is established by thought, the real unity of a sensuous whole arises from the material contents and constitutes itself in the unity of a sensuous intuition (Hua XXXI, 101; Husserl 1972, 223, 296–7). Categorial intuition is not a genuine intuition, because formal essences are “not intuitively seizable”: properly speaking, there is intuition only of individuals and of material or sensuous essences, to which alone individual presentational contents correspond (Hua XLI, 160). The possibility of analytic judgments is more diffcult to understand than that of synthetic judgments a priori, precisely because exemplary intuition plays no role in their grasping (Hua XXXV, 445–6, 449, 452, 467). 5. The abstraction theories of British empiricism dissolve the general concept in its extension by regarding it as a representing function that we bestow proftably upon an individual moment.This is wrong, inasmuch as (1) the intuition of general objects is grounded indeed in the intuition of individual objects, but these are the foundation of abstraction, and not what is intended in it; (2) the talk of similar or equal individual objects presupposes something identical, i.e., a species, under which the compared objects come; now, if the general is dissolved in its extension, viz. in the corresponding individuals, one cannot explain what gives unity to the extension. Nevertheless, the general exists exclusively in the individual: Husserl argues not only against the psychological hypostatization of the general, namely the assumption of a real existence of the species in thought, but also against its metaphysical hypostatization, namely the assumption of a real existence of the species outside thought. Moreover, general concepts have a genesis from preconceptual experience: the sensuous similarity, which is passively pregiven and connects the contents prior to every comparison, is the condition of comparison and abstraction (Hua XXXV, 437; Hua XXXII, 153; Hua XXXIX, 457). Since there is a “consciousness of similarity without active relating” (Hua XI, 406), before any conceptual apprehension everything perceived is typically apperceived due to its similarity with other things perceived (Hua XXXII, 200; Hua XLI, 273). Husserl claims that intellect cannot exist without sensuousness (Hua XIX/2, 712–3; HuaMat III, 170–4) and rejects the Platonic conception of the general (Hua IX, 73; Husserl 1972, 397). He explains that the talk of ideal objects does not imply their equalization with real objects, because “reality has an ontological primacy over whichever irreality, since all irrealities relate back essentially to an actual or possible reality” (Hua XVII, 177) and have “manners of possible participation in reality” (Hua XVII, 163).Therefore, as he acknowledges in his later years, reality precedes possibility (Hua XV, 519; Hua XXIX, 85–6). Ideal essences exist only as structures of a factual reality. Consequently, phenomenology accomplishes an empiricist overthrow of Platonism: “Every conceptual truth presupposes experience, every conceptual content presupposes experienceable being, every being presupposes individual being” (Hua VIII, 408). 6. In Husserl’s view, a priori truths are relations of ideas, since they are grounded purely in the essence of their respective contents. Because of the “ontological turn of the concept of evidence”, the necessity of a priori laws is not a subjective incapacity to conceive otherwise, but an objective impossibility to be otherwise (Hua XIX/1, 242–3). Depending on whether essences are formal or material, the a priori is formal-analytic or material-synthetic and its negation yields a logical contradiction or a material incompatibility. Eidetic laws govern even in sensuousness (Hua XXXVII, 220–6), for there are truths of reason “based 77
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on sensuous presentations” (Hua XXVIII, 403). Not only thought, but also experience has therefore an a priori lawfulness (Hua XXVIII, 243); beside the logical laws valid for thoughtconnections there are ontological laws valid for sensuous reality (Hua XXIV, 333, 293). The material a priori is “contingent” (Hua XVII, 33) or “affective”, because “only such subjects can acquire it who have the relevant examples, and these stem from affection” (Hua XLI, 101). For material laws are grounded in the particularity of sensuous essences and these (e.g., the eidos color) can only be grasped insofar as their singularizations (e.g., an individual color) are passively pregiven (Hua XXXVI, 147–8). Accordingly, eidetic knowledge has a factual ground: everyone can grasp only those material essences whose singularizations occur actually in his/her sensuous experience, and can know only the material laws concerning such essences. Experience has a material structure presupposed by every induction, for the given is always predelineated in its ontological type, e.g., as a spatial thing. But if experience had not given me things, the word “thing” would have no sense for me (Hua XXXV, 474–5). Consequently, the material a priori depends not upon experience qua induction, but upon experience qua givenness of material essences (Hua XLI, 282–3). At the basis of Husserl’s concept of material a priori are Hume’s notions of relation of ideas and of tracing ideas back to impressions (Hua XXXVII, 224). Kant didn’t grasp the authentic concept of the a priori as an eidetic necessity: by remaining bound to the rationalistic prejudice according to which sensuousness is lawless and the true a priori is the analytic one, he misunderstood Hume’s concept of relation of ideas, which designates the synthetic a priori too, and explained the latter by resorting to subjective forms, whereas it stems from sensuous whatcontents.1 The world of experience determines the forms, in which it can be known, because it is not a conglomeration of formless contents, which would acquire a different shape depending on the conceptual scheme adopted by the subject, but has “structures, which bind us” and “place demands upon our predicative thought” (Hua XXXII, 101).Accordingly, experience is already method (Hua XV, 98; Hua XXXIX, 81–3; Ms. B I 13/37a; Ms.A VII 20/19a) and can only be rationally known insofar as “rationality” already lies in its givennesses (Hua-Mat IX, 439). If there were no steady things, logic and mathematics wouldn’t be applicable to experience. For anything can be conceptually determined, connected, and enumerated independently of its particularity, but determination, connection, and enumeration presuppose that what is determined, connected, and enumerated is identifable as the same (Ms.AVII 20/43a). Only material connections can bestow upon experience a material shape that enables the application of formal thought-determinations: one can lend to the world of experience a thought-form only insofar as it possesses an a priori structure prior to thinking. Scientifc knowledge presupposes that the sensuous world is “capable of bearing the scientifc thinking”, has “possibilities and tendencies toward idealization”, and is therefore an “anticipation” of an exact world (Hua XXXII, 97, 100–2). Consequently, contrary to what Hegel claims in the note to §442 of the Encyclopedia, the sensuous given is not “merely the empirical frst”, but “the truly substantial foundation”. 7. Husserl retrieves a classical issue of empiricism by recognizing that the laws of association underlie the formation of objectual apperceptions.2 The world is “an associative nexus” (Hua XXXIX, 9) and world-experience is “a universal synthesis of association” (Hua XXXIX, 462). Accordingly, as Hume claims at the end of the Abstract, the laws of association are “the cement of the universe”. Hume’s fctionalism, particularly in his doctrine of the origin of thing, persisting existence, and causality, contains anticipatory discoveries shrouded in absurd theories and the task of the eidetic phenomenology of association 78
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is the rehabilitation of such discoveries, by showing the a priori genesis thanks to which a real world constitutes itself for a soul in habitual validity (Hua IX, 301, 286). Hume demonstrates that the lawfulness of experience is a lawfulness of expectation, since the anticipation of future experience, grounded in past experience, goes through present experience. The induction of the non-given from the given belongs from the start to the structure of perception, in which the present feld functions as “down-payment” for a future feld (Hua XXXII, 144).Yet, there is no warrant that the course of experience will be the same as it has been until now.What kind of legitimizing ground, therefore, do the inferences of future events have? The weight of belief is determined by a priori laws, which Hume saw, but misunderstood in psychological sense: the force of expectation grows with the number of instances, and therefore with habit, but “it is not at all a question of the human mind and of the effects it experiences due to empirico-psychological laws” (Hua XXIV, 354), for “presumptions based on experience stand under principles themselves having the characteristic of relations of ideas” (Hua XXIV, 352). Accordingly, the originary form of motivation, in which the similar is reminiscent of the similar and motivates its positing, is “an originary form of reason”: since expectations arise in virtue of an analogical apprehension tracing back the ground of the propter to a post, they have a rational ground in the previous experience (Hua XIII, 356–7). Husserl thus takes up the empiricist problem of genesis from an eidetic standpoint: experience arises from experience, yet not according to empirical laws, but rather to a priori laws. If there were no material lawfulness in the factual course of appearances, no expectation, no apperception, no world could become constituted. Habit as induction is, as Hume correctly argues, the originary source of every bestowal of objective sense, but precisely for this reason it is not, as he wrongly argues, a mechanism of blind association (Hua XXXII, 146). Hume falls into a circle by explaining habit through similarity and similarity in turn through habit. It is not habit, which gives rise to lawfulness, but it is lawfulness, which enables habit.The principles legitimizing all inductions cannot be justifed in turn through inductions (HuaVII, 172). Induction can only occur insofar as experience is homogeneous and the future appearances are predelineated by the past ones (Hua XXXII, 60–6, 249–50). Not only the constitution of the object, but also that of the subject as a substrate of habitualities rests on association (Hua XI, 386). For “the ego has unity in virtue of the world, if it is an actual world, if it is the title of a realm of truths-in-themselves” (Ms. A VI 30/38b), because I preserve my personal ego only “if a world of objects remains constantly preserved for me” (Ms. A VI 30/54b). “Without object, I am not an ego” (Ms. A VI 30/54a). If things and their determinations changed lawlessly, I would be not the identical subject of my acts, but a “‘variegated’ self ”, namely a “worldless”“ego-pole” with “no personal habitual sense”, although I would preserve “the unity of my life, the multiplicity of my sensation-data in the unity of the immanent time” (Ms.A VI 30/52b). Husserl accomplishes a depsychologization of association by showing that it depends upon the “pre-affective peculiarity of the elements” and has therefore “material conditions” (Hua XI, 165). Associative syntheses occur passively, viz. independently of the subject’s intervention, because they rest on similarity, which is a relation of ideas, i.e., a nexus grounded purely in the contents (Hua XI, 185, 285, 399–400; Husserl 1972, 215). Accordingly, sensuousness has its own eidetic structure entailing the performance of acts: it is not the subjective acts that determine the material articulations of experience, but the latter that make the former possible.“What is one ‘materially’, so to speak without the ego’s participation […], also exercises an affection” (Hua-Mat VIII, 195), that motivates the turning-toward of the ego and gives rise to the intentio (Hua XI, 84–5; Hua IX, 131, 209). Since, therefore, intentional 79
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acts are a “response” of the ego to an affection (Hua XI, 166–7; Hua-Mat VIII, 184, 189, 191) and the occurring of affections depends upon homogeneity and contrast among sensuous contents, sensuous similarity and sensuous contrast are “conditions of the possibility of intention and affection” (Hua XI, 285) and constitute “the resonance which grounds all which is once constituted” (Hua XI, 406). 8. Since the actual world is the correlate of the concordant and in infnitum concordantly ongoing experience (Hua VIII, 457), its dissolution consists in the dissolution of the concordance of experience, namely in the falling away of anticipation (Hua VIII, 48–9). The legitimacy of world-belief coincides with the legitimacy of anticipation, because the world exists “only in the continually predelineated presumption that experience will go on continually in the same constitutional style” (Hua XVII, 258). Husserl’s world-annihilation hypothesis is inspired by Hume and is due to the circumstance that the validity of experience depends upon further experience, hence only evidence of anticipation can secure the becoming confrmed in infnitum (Hua XXXIX, 214): were the anticipation of future concordance constantly disappointed, there would be a conscious succession of appearances, but no objectual apperception.The world-annihilation is nothing else but the dissolution of the objective ground of association.That consciousness can exist without there being a transcendent reality means just that we can fll arbitrarily immanent time, so that a nature would be not constituted (Hua XXXVI, 78–9); since formal-temporal syntheses independent of contents can be carried out irrespective of material-associative syntheses produced by contents, consciousness would persist, even if appearances were materially unconnected and their course didn’t allow any thing-apperception. Consequently, the formal unity of consciousness is a necessary, yet not a suffcient condition for the material unity of object.A real world can become constituted only through contentual syntheses, which depend upon the particularity of the given stuff and can be performed only if “contentual conditions of association” are fulflled, i.e., if there occurs “a continuity of similarity” in the content (Hua-Mat VIII, 9).The constitution of an objective world is therefore contingent: consciousness could be completely equipped to be able to cognize rationally, but its factual content might not be rationalizable, because “a ‘senseless chaos’ is there, which in itself does not allow for a cognition of nature” (Ms. D 13 II/200b), i.e., because “conficts irresolvable not only for us but in themselves” make it impossible to maintain the positing of things (Hua III/1, 103). Since each material category “prescribes rules for manifolds of appearances” (Hua III/1, 350), constitution rests on the nature of sensuous contents: the objective peculiarity of the content determines the objective connections between it and further contents. Subjectivity is not the principle of constitution, but only the place of legitimation: whatever has to be accepted by the ego as rightful, must legitimate itself in the ego’s acts, but its existence and essence do not have their explanatory ground in the ego (cf. De Palma 2016, 316–9). Accordingly, only in a formal respect is every existent relative to transcendental subjectivity, which is nothing else but the empirical subjectivity itself, insofar as it becomes conscious of being for itself the ultimate site of any validity and legitimation (cf. Hua I, 103; Hua V, 147; Hua VI, 205;Tugendhat 1967, 198–9). 9. Husserl endorses the empiricist thesis that one can single out a purely sensuous and therefore unhistorical core of the world-experience. Sensuous fusions are indeed “unhistorical” (Hua-Mat VIII, 338). The “eidetic doctrine” or “ontology of the life-world purely as world of experience” (Hua VI, 144, 176), which aims to grasp the a priori structure of the “world of pre-scientifc intuition” 80
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(Hua IX, 56), is nothing else but the “transcendental aesthetic” (Hua XXXIX, 268, 692), in which one excludes all judicative knowing and restricts oneself to perception (Hua XI, 295), in order to bring out “the ontic in its ontic essential sort, as it is included in experience itself ” (Hua XLI, 346). At the basis of the many culturally determined surrounding worlds is a unique cultureless world of experience (Hua XXXIX, 28), which is endowed with a spatio-temporal and causal “‘aesthetic’ essential form” (Hua XXXIX, 685).What gives to the world “its identity and actuality in front of the changing manners of apperception” (Hua XV, 167) is such “absolutely identical objective structure” functioning as “substratum of all realities” (Hua XXXIX, 297–8):“material reality ultimately underlies all other realities” (Hua III/1, 354). Because the givenness of spiritual senses is grounded in that of physical bodies, the world of things is prior in itself to the world of culture (Hua IX, 119), which has a restricted objectivity and an accessibility that is not unconditional (Hua I, 160–2). For whereas cultural determinations don’t have the same content for everyone and are something “relatively objective” that changes depending on the world-view, sensuous determinations are something “absolutely objective” and enable the identifcation of the real (Hua XXXIX, 297, 295). It is the same sun, the same moon, etc., that are differently mythologized by the different peoples (Hua XXIX, 387). Everyone is aware that every particular community apprehends differently the one identical world (Hua XV, 217), and thereby presupposes that a world in itself manifests itself in the surrounding world relative to the subject.“That presupposition is not a theoretical, historical-factual prejudice, but belongs to the essential sense of world-experience of everyone” (Hua XXXIX, 684). Sensuous experience is not an accidental starting point, from which one can free oneself, as if it were a ladder that one can throw away after one has climbed up on it, because its legitimacy is presupposed, even when it becomes delimited (Hua XXXV, 475). For even the scientist uses the sensuous given “not as something irrelevant that must be passed through, but as that which ultimately grounds the theoretical-logical ontic validity for all objective verifcation […]. The seen measuring scales, scales-markings, etc., are used as actually existing things, not as illusions” (Hua VI, 129). Every scientifc formation refers back to the prescientifc world and every verifcation leads back to sensuous evidences: experience is “the source of evidence for the objective ascertainments of the sciences, which are never themselves experiences of the objective”, because the latter – just as something metaphysically transcendent – is “never experienceable as it itself ” (Hua VI, 130–1).The grounding of scientifc truths leads back to everyday truths: one can read the result of an experiment only through a perception that can become rectifed only through other perceptions. Perception is therefore the ultimate court of appeal of every theory. Sensuous objects with their sensuous structures are given before every subjective intervention, do not depend upon theoretical assumptions, and are the ground for theoretical assumptions. Since perception does not presuppose the acceptance of scientifc theories, whereas scientifc theories presuppose the acceptance of perception, the sensuous world in its sensuous givenness is epistemically uncircumventable and the alleged overcoming of sensuous relativity by objective theory is deceptive (Hua VI, 135). Science does not alter the world of experience, which “remains unchanged as what it is, in its own eidetic structure and its own concrete causal style, whatever we may do with or without artifces” (HuaVI, 51). Since theoretical entities are at the time (depending on the theory) useful to explain invariant (theory-independent) sensuous phenomena, their epistemological and ontological status cannot be higher than that of such phenomena.3 If one regards theoretical entities as real, he/she takes “the dangerous road of double truth” (Hua VI, 179) by turning empirical objects into images or signs of alleged objects causing them.Yet causal inferences presuppose a homogeneous basis of experience and cannot lead from what is experienced to what is in 81
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principle unexperienceable (Hua XXXVI, 178). Otherwise, Aquinas’ proofs of God’s existence would be well founded. Moreover, if an unknown cause of the appearances existed at all, then it would have to be possible in principle for it to be perceived via appearances, if not by us, at least by superior subjects, and so on in infnitum (Hua III/1, 111). Such a recursive character makes the explanation of the observable through the unobservable inane, as Hume already remarks in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, where he comes to the conclusion that the present material world contains the principle of its order within itself and is therefore God. 10. Husserl relates his “idealism” to British empiricism (Patočka 1999, 275–6). He ascribes the introduction of the transcendental question to both Locke and Hume (Hua VII, 279, 348; Hua XVII, 263), whose Treatise he regards as a draft of transcendental philosophy (HuaVII, 226, 241), and speaks, when referring to Mill, Schuppe, and Avenarius, of “a transcendental philosophy basically determined by English empiricism” (Hua VI, 198). The backbone of phenomenology is the empiricist equalization of the real with the sensuous, i.e., with the correlate of possible perception (Hua XIX/2, 679, 703; Hua-Mat III, 168–71; Hua XVII, 457). Precisely because the real world is sensuous, its constitution presupposes a bodily subject (Hua XXXVI, 132–45). Since things exist even if nobody experiences them, they are transcendent and in themselves, but yet constantly experienceable (Hua XXXVI, 191, 152). For they are independent of single factual appearances, but not of possible appearing (Hua II, 12): every object “is what it is whether it is known or not”, but is “in principle knowable even if it has factually never been known or will be known” (Hua II, 25), and when it comes to real objects, “knowable” means “experienceable”.An in principle unexperienceable reality is therefore a countersense. The concept of thing-transcendence is to be gathered from the essential content of perception (Hua III/1, 101).“In itself ” or “transcendent” is that which can be perceived as the same in several perceptions and whose esse does not exhaust itself in the percipi, i.e., in the momentary givenness. Consequently, being is not the actually perceived, as Berkeley claims, but the perceivable, which yet can be determined only on the basis of the actually perceived. A real but unexperienced or even factually unexperienceable thing lies in principle in the domain of possible experience, because the actual perceptual feld is a member of a continuity of perceptual felds that leads eventually to the one in which the thing would be experienced; a real possibility or nexus of experience permits the justifcation of the being of the thing starting from the actual experience.An empty or ideal possibility, which is not predelineated by the actually experienced, is a groundless fction,“just as much as the existence of satyrs or nymphs is” (Hua XXXVI, 119). The existence of things signifes the existence of real possibilities of experience. A world without subjects can exist, although its legitimation presupposes an actual subject (Hua XXXVI, 19, 141).Accordingly, the dependence of reality on the subject concerns only the legitimation of something independent of the subject. This argument entails no idealism; for the subjective legitimation of the existence-positing is uncircumventable, since even the positing of things in themselves becomes legitimated in subjective acts. And the equalization of real and experienceable denies not that things have a being in itself, but that such being is unexperienceable (Hua XXXVI, 32). It is indeed actually realistic, since if one refuses to consider the real as the given, he/she cannot help considering it as the thought and embracing idealism. Realism is nothing else than empiricism, because it argues “that things, as they immediately are, have a real existence”, whereas “idealism attributes reality to the ideas alone, by asserting that things, as they singly appear, are not something truthful” (Hegel 1969–1971-XIX, 571–2). 82
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11. Husserl’s idealism stems from Brentano’s psychologism. Despite all criticism, Husserl adheres to Brentano’s thesis that only what is psychic is properly given; he includes the sensuous contents into phenomenological research, just because he considers them immanent to consciousness in the same way as acts are (Hua XIX/2, 767–75).The sensuous object thus originates from two immanent elements: the sensation-contents, which are the formless stuff of apprehension, and the apprehension-act, which bestows upon sensation-contents the intentional form by animating them, i.e., interpreting them as appearances of a transcendent object. Consequently, constitution is governed by the psychological lawfulness of form-giving. This clashes with Husserl’s doctrine that sensuous forms stem not from the acts of the subject, but from the nature of contents. Against the view that only properties are given and things are thought-constructions or fctions, Husserl claims that things are grounded in the nature of properties and sensuously given with them: a thing consists only of properties – as Hume rightly claims – yet they form not a bundle – as he wrongly claims – but rather a whole.Therefore, substance neither lies beyond appearances nor is dissolvable into qualities, but it is the “unity of the real” (Hua XLI, 276), namely a material nexus of sensuous qualities. But, since Husserl considers the immanent sensation-contents as the properly given and the transcendent thing as a product of their interpretation, he falls back into the sensualistic approach. By adopting the content/apprehension scheme, Husserl also falls back into the inferential theory of perception. Since only immanent contents are immediately given, they are the foundations of apprehension (Hua XIX/1, 399; Hua XI, 17): they can either be merely present or – due to an interpretative act – function as images or signs of the object (cf. Hua XIX/1, 80–1; Hua XIX/2, 769–70; Melle 1983, 40–51). Contradicting his own thesis that transcendent objects are immediately given through external experience (Hua XXXVI, 178), Husserl refers to external perception as “a mediate consciousness, provided that only one apperception is had immediately, a store of sensory data […] and an apperceptive apprehension, through which an exhibiting appearance is constituted” (Hua XI, 18). Spatial objects are constituted “mediately, through ‘apperception’ of sensational objects”, which are “immediate sensuous objects” and serve as “representatives” (Hua XXXIII, 319). Husserl regards external perception as a representation, because he presumes, like Brentano, that only what is psychic has actual existence and that inner perception – in which the content is really included in the act, hence esse and percipi coincide – is the only true perception (Brentano 1924, 14, 28, 128–9; Hua XIX/1, 365–6; Hua XIX/2, 646–50, 769–71; Hua XXXVI, 21–42, 62–72; Hua XI, 16–24). Since the elements from which things arise really lie in consciousness, things are the result of a projection or inference from what is immanent (cf. Melle 1983, 50–1; Philipse 1995, 262–7), and nature is created by consciousness (Hua XLII, 170). Properly speaking, there is nothing else than minds (Hua XLII, 157–8), because everything physical is but a connection of consciousness (Hua XIII, 7). Accordingly, the transcendental attitude consists in an “introspection” (Hua XV, 23) by means of which one directs the regard to sensation and apprehension (Hua XXXVI, 129), and the method of phenomenology is the same as that of eidetic psychology (Hua XVII, 261); transcendental psychology and transcendental phenomenology are identical, for both are concerned with transcendental internality (Hua VI, 261–9), and, as psychologism claims, psychology is the place of decisions (Hua VI, 212, 218). What leads Husserl to idealism is the view that only what is immanent is truly given and actually exists. For him, idealism consists just in the reduction to absolute consciousness or dissolution of world into connections of consciousness (Ms. B I 4/15a; Hua XLII, 577; Hua XXXVI, 27, 32, 138).4 However, this characterizes Berkeley’s and Hume’s psychological or subjective 83
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idealism rejected by Husserl (Hua III/1, 120–1; Hua VII, 246–7; Hua I, 118), namely psychologism. For the latter is distinguished by the circumstance that, because objects are constituted in consciousness, “their sense as a species of objects having a peculiar essence is denied in favor of the subjective occurrences” (Hua XVII, 177–8).5 Every reduction of given objects to giving acts, viz. to consciousness, rests on a psychologistic fallacy. Hume regards difference as equivalent to separation and claims that, because I never can catch myself without a perception, I never can observe anything but the perception (Hume 1888, 10, 252). But, although we cannot grasp objects without acts, objects are distinguishable from acts, just like sounds are distinguishable from volumes, although they cannot be given apart from volume. The properties of the experienced (such as extension) are cognizable only via experiencing, but are neither properties of the experiencing (which doesn’t have extension) nor projections or fctions produced by it. 12. The ambiguity of phenomenology is connected with that of the word “appearance” or “phenomenon”, which can be understood in noetic sense as cogitatio or in noematic sense as cogitatum and therefore referred to both the appearing, namely to immanent occurrences, and to that which appears, namely to transcendent objects (cf. Hua XXIV, 405–12; Hua II, 11–14; Hua-Mat VII, 64–5; Kern 1975, 432–7). The ambiguity of reduction, which consists in a “phenomenalization” (Hua XXIV, 211) or reduction of being to phenomenon, depends thereon. If “phenomenon” is understood as that which appears, real objects are reduced to what they are in themselves, namely, regarded as sensuous objects, and what is eliminated are only the explanatory entities posited behind by the subject. Accordingly, reduction does not abandon the world, but discloses its sense (Hua VIII, 457), by enabling the grasp of “the essential connection between the idea of an existent world and the system of possible experiences” (HuaVIII, 400). If, instead,“phenomenon” is understood as appearing, real objects are reduced to consciousness, and what is eliminated is that which appears. By presenting reduction as an exclusion of the world and consciousness as a residuum, the Cartesian way makes reduction to be understood just as a reduction to the stream of consciousness, whose concern is not the world, but only the subjective acts and modes of appearance related to world (Hua VIII, 432–4). Husserl’s introspective conception of phenomenology is affected – via Brentano – by Locke’s psychological interpretation of refection as internal perception and rests upon the incorrect presumption that acts and sensations belong to sensuousness, hence immanent perception is sensuous perception (cf. Hua XIX/2, 706–9; Kern 1975, 248–54). However, immanent sensation-contents are not sensuously given and thus actual, but postulated. By dissolving the given in theoretical constructs, phenomenology falls back into the explanatory approach, from whose rejection it arises.6 If consciousness is not a box, as Husserl repeatedly asserts, it contains nothing. Sensuous contents are therefore not immanent to consciousness. When Husserl says that colors are extended or spread out and join together to make up sensuous felds, he is not speaking of really immanent contents, for these do not have extension or spreading out and do not join together to make up sensuous felds.That of which there is consciousness is not really included in consciousness, because it is “what I myself am not, but what I am conscious of in my being as a non-ego” (Hua-Mat VIII, 361). Constitution has precisely a “non-subjective core” (HuaMat VIII, 361) that consists in ego-foreign contents lying in sensuous felds (Hua-Mat VIII, 188–9, 199, 295). Accordingly, what is immediately given and functions as the empirical basis of knowledge are not immanent refection-contents and sensation-contents, but transcend84
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ent perception-contents, which are provided with an objective structure grounded in their nature. Only in this way does one get rid of psychologism, image-theory, and the problem of the external world. Like all empiricists, Husserl is – to use the terminology of Plato’s Sophist – a “son of earth”, but he is not consistent and takes ideas for truthful being.7
Notes 1 On Husserl’s conception of the a priori and his critique to the Kantian one, cf. De Palma 2014. On Kant’s misunderstanding of Hume’s conception, cf. Reinach 1989. 2 On Husserl’s theory of association, cf. De Palma 2011. 3 On Husserl’s rejection of scientifc realism, cf. Rang 1990, 373–96;Wiltsche 2012. 4 Already in the Logical Investigations Husserl suggests that the objective grounds of every speaking of physical things lie merely in lawful correlations among psychic occurrences (Hua XIX/1, 371) and that things are constituted out of the same stuff as sensations (Hua XIX/2, 764). 5 On the affnities between Berkeley’s and Husserl’s thinking, cf. Philipse 1995, 285–7. In a dissertation written under Husserl’s direction Salmon claims that Hume’s method is introspective, but he didn’t consistently carry through the phenomenological subjectivization (cf. Salmon 1929). Yet, although Husserl distinguishes between his transcendental and Hume’s bad subjectivization (Hua XVII, 263), subjectivization is undistinguishable from psychologization. 6 “In order to overcome naturalism radically, one also has to reject the principle of immanence and the epistemological problem of the external world which is implied by it” (Philipse 1995, 300). In the frst formulation of 1902–3, the transcendental question concerns precisely “sense and warrant of the assumption of an ‘external world’” (Hua-Mat III, 79). 7 I am indebted to Mario Alai, Burt Hopkins, Wolfgang Kaltenbacher, Michela Summa, and especially Daniele De Santis for their help with grammar and style. I also thank Professor Julia Jansen for permission to quote from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts.
References Brentano, Franz. 1924. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt.Vol. I. Ed. Oskar Kraus. Leipzig: Meiner. De Palma,Vittorio. 2011. “Ist Husserls Assoziationstheorie transzendental?” Phänomenologische Forschungen: pp. 91–115. ———. 2012.“Die Welt und die Evidenz. Zu Husserls Erledigung des Cartesianismus.” Husserl Studies 28: pp. 201–24. ———. 2014. “Die Fakta leiten alle Eidetik. Zu Husserls Begriff des materialen Apriori.” Husserl Studies 30: pp. 195–223. ———. 2015. “Eine peinliche Verwechselung. Zu Husserls Transzendentalismus.” Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, Special Issue n. 1, ch. 1: pp. 13–45. ———. 2016. “Subjekt und Erfahrung. Grundlagen und Implikationen von Husserls Kritik an die transzendentale Methode Kants.” Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 8: pp. 304–325. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1969–1971. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Eds. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hume, David. 1888. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. Lewis Amherst Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1972. Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik. Ed. Ludwig Landgrebe. Hamburg: Meiner. Kern, Iso. 1975. Idee und Methode der Philosophie. Leitgedanken für eine Theorie der Vernunft. Berlin: De Gruyter. Locke, John. 1999. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. State College, Pennsylvania:The Pennsylvania State University. Melle, Ullrich. 1983. Das Wahrnehmungsproblem und seine Verwandlung in phänomenologischer Einstellung. Untersuchungen zu den phänomenologischen Wahrnehmungstheorien von Husserl, Gurwitsch und Merleau-Ponty. Den Haag: Martin Nijhoff. Patočka, Jan. 1999. Texte – Dokumente – Bibliographie. Eds. Ludger Hagedorn and Hans Rainer Sepp. Freiburg/München: Alber.
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6 PHENOMENOLOGY AND GERMAN IDEALISM Thomas M. Seebohm (1934–2014), edited by Robert Dostal
6.1 Preliminary orientation in the structure of the historical contexts of German idealism and phenomenology The main task for any investigation with a title composed of a conjunction of two philosophical positions is either to fnd an historical affliation or to establish analogies between the positions. The simple case is the case of affliations or analogies between two systematic positions. The complex case is the case in which the names mentioned in the conjuncts refer to complex historical sequences in the development of philosophical positions.This is the case not only for “German idealism” but also for “phenomenology.” Systematic refections on possible historical affliations or systematic analogies (Section 6.2) presuppose frst a suffciently precise survey (Section 6.1.1) of the periods of the development of the systems of German idealism and (Section 6.1.2) of the periods of the development of the phenomenological movement in the frst half of the last century. Systematic refections presuppose secondly an approximately complete list of the explicit (Section 6.1.3) references in the different periods of the development.
6.1.1 The periods of the development of the systems of German idealism “German idealism” is a name for the historical development of a sequence of philosophical systems. Beginning with the frst edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the frst phase of this development ends with Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1794), followed by Schelling’s Philosophie der Natur (1797) and his System des transzendentalen Idealismus of 1800.1 The third phase starts with Hegel’s Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie (1801) and the introduction to his system in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807).2 The fnal steps are his Logik (1812) and the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817).3 6.1.1.1 The different meanings of “absolute” in these periods
Though Fichte claims to propose an understanding of the spirit and not of the letter of Kant’s philosophy, the Doctrine of Science implies the rejection of Kant’s thesis that metaphysics must be restricted to a transcendental doctrine of the a priori structures of experience and has no access to knowledge about things in themselves. The claim is that intellectual intuition and speculative
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thinking is able to transcend the limits of experience and to discover the Absolute that appears frst in Fichte’s system as absolute Ego. The Absolute given in intellectual intuition was for the German idealists not given as absolute indifference. Already Fichte proposed a method for the systematic explication of the Absolute.4 His outline is a frst sketch of the basic structures of the method used later by Schelling and Hegel. Schelling was the frst who used the term “dialectics” for the method of the explication of the Absolute in speculative thinking. It is suffcient for these preliminary remarks to emphasize that the foundation for these analyses, e.g., of terms like “dialectical opposition” or “dialectical contradiction” in Fichte and in Hegel can be understood as an application of what can be found in Kant’s transcendental dialectic and the logic of concepts in his lectures on logic.5 What is added is the principle of synthesis, i.e., the ability of speculative reason to determine the synthesis beyond the oppositions and the contradiction that plague the explication of the absolute as a Kantian ens realissimum. 6.1.1.2 The different meanings of “phenomena” in the periods of German idealism
According to the section “Phenomena and Noumena” of the Critique of Pure Reason, “phenomena” are objects given in experience a posteriori in sensory intuition.6 Objects given as appearances are objects of understanding only if they are given as determined by the principles of pure understanding.7 The main task of the Critique is to reject the claim of traditional metaphysics that noumena, as objects of pure understanding, are of objective validity for transcendent things in themselves. “Phenomenology” is of systematic signifcance in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, i.e., the introduction to Hegel’s system.Any consideration of the question as to what “phenomenology” means in the context of this phase of the development of German idealism should consult the section in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences titled “Phenomenology.”8 It is the phase in the development of the Absolute as the self-movement of the concept (Selbstbewegung des Begriffs) in which the Absolute appears in consciousness on the level of refection. Kant’s philosophy is, hence, a philosophy of refection and contains, therefore, only the phenomenology, not the philosophy of spirit.
6.1.2. Periods in the development of the phenomenological movement 6.1.2.1 The period of the frst edition of the Logical Investigations
In the frst edition of the Logical Investigations (LI) Husserl adopted the term “phenomenology” as a term for the method of descriptive psychology from Carl Stumpf. The phenomena of a descriptive phenomenology are, according to Stumpf, not only phenomena of psychological functions but also phenomena of the objects given in psychological functions. In the context of Brentano’s psychology, psychological functions are intentional acts and the objects of intentional acts are intentional objects. Husserl accepted Brentano’s terminology in the frst edition of the LI and Stumpf had no diffculties with this shift in the terminology. It was, in general, a welcome thesis for 19th-century positivism that research in descriptive psychology for itself is able to solve epistemological problems. 6.1.2.2. From “Ideas I” to “Formal and Transcendental Logic”
The frst step in the development of the second period of the phenomenological movement was Husserl’s distinction between positivistic psychologism and transcendental psychologism. The second step is the rejection of any type of psychologism in Philosophy as a Rigorous Science 88
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(1910) because all of them end in relativism and skepticism. Husserl provided a positive answer in Ideas I (1913), the lecture on First Philosophy (1923–24), and Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929, henceforth FTL). The new meaning of “phenomena” in this period is determined in the theory of the phenomenological reduction requiring the bracketing of the natural attitude in which the existence of the natural surrounding world together with its real and ideal objects is held in suspension.9 This bracketing or suspension implies neither a denial nor skeptical doubts about the existence of the world.The world as the sum total of objects is, after the reduction, given as the correlate of the synthetic activity of intentional acts.Therefore, the phenomenological reduction brackets also the assumption of affecting “metaphysical” entities behind the phenomena. 6.1.2.3 The period of the “Cartesian Meditations,” the “Crisis,” and the discussions in the Freiburg circle
The third period begins in 1928 with the work on the Cartesian Meditations and the cooperation with Eugen Fink and the Freiburg phenomenological circle. The new task of this period was the problem of an ultimate foundation or grounding of phenomenological research.The search for an ultimate foundation required an extension of phenomenology that was understood as a “metaphysical” extension that presupposes the earlier analyses of passive synthesis, inner temporality, the constitution of intersubjectivity, and fnally the ontological region of the “spiritual world” as the region of the human sciences.
6.1.3 References 6.1.3.1 References to Kant in periods 6.1.2.1 and 6.1.2.2
Of signifcance for the frst period are only the above-mentioned critique of Transzendentalpsychologismus and some fragments of drafts for lectures from 1903. Of signifcance for the beginnings of the second period are fragments of drafts from 1908–1914. But most important for this period is Husserl’s adoption of Kantian terms in Ideas I—terms that are of substantial importance in the Critique of Pure Reason. In his adoption of these terms in Ideas I Husserl either gives no indication of possible differences in meaning of his usage, e.g., “transcendental,” “synthesis,” and “constitution,” or he simply mentions that it is left open whether he uses the term in Kant’s sense, e.g., in the case of the adoption of the “transcendental ego” and “idea in the Kantian sense.” Husserl does emphasize, however, that there are radical differences between his phenomenology and Kant’s critical philosophy.The root of these differences is Kant’s transcendental psychologism, because the method of the metaphysical constructions in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has its foundation in Kant’s transcendental psychologism. The frst comprehensive refections on Kant’s transcendental philosophy can be found in First Philosophy I (lecture 27), at the end of extensive critical evaluations of the philosophical systems in the pre-history of transcendental phenomenology in modern philosophy.10 Further critical evaluations of Kant’s transcendental philosophy can be found in supplementary texts: a treatise on Kant’s Copernican turn of 1924, and the treatise “Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy,” also of 1924.11 There are also three lectures on Fichte from 1917 and some short remarks about post-Kantian German idealism from 1914.12 We should notice that Husserl’s source for his remarks on Hegel are not Hegel’s writings themselves but the Logical Investigations of Adolf Trendelenburg, who had no sympathy for Hegel’s Logic as a method of speculative thinking.13 Husserl shares Trendelenburg’s rejection of Hegel’s transition from consciousness to absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology. 89
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No references to intellectual intuition and other concepts that are of signifcance for German idealism in the narrower sense and their possible signifcance for transcendental phenomenology can be found in Husserl’s writings of the frst two periods of the history of the phenomenological movement. The frst passage in Husserl’s work in which the German idealists, as followers of Kant, are also recognized as predecessors of transcendental phenomenology can be found in §27 of the Crisis.14 Husserl has more to say about Fichte and Hegel and their relations to Kant’s transcendental philosophy and to transcendental phenomenology in sections §55 and §57 of the Crisis.15 Of interest for a fnal evaluation of these references are adaptations of the terminology of German idealism in the Vienna lectures of 1935, in which Husserl uses the terms “spirit” and “absolute spirit” as a designator for his transcendental absolute ground, i.e., the primal ego (Ur-Ich).16
6.2 Systematic refections There are no references with positive evaluations of German idealism in the frst period of the phenomenological movement.There are positive but also critical references to Kant in the second period.The presupposition of an interest in post-Kantian German idealism in the third period is Husserl’s transition from what Fink called the “naïve” phenomenological reduction of Ideas I to an ultimate grounding of phenomenology in “metaphysical”—perhaps better,“ontological”—speculations about the primal ego, the Ur-Ich, as “absolute Being.” Disregarding the problems connected with Husserl’s later adaptation of the term “absolute spirit” in the Vienna lectures, Husserl’s transition from “naïve” phenomenology to “metaphysics” can be understood as an analogy of the transition from Kant to Fichte’s absolute Ego.
6.2.1 Husserl’s critique of the methods of the constructions of German idealism An analysis of the analogy between the transition from a “naïve” phenomenology to a metaphysical phenomenology and the transition from Kant to Fichte and German idealism in general (Section 6.2.2) must be postponed, because not only Husserl’s but also Fink’s critique of the constructions of the German idealists implies serious consequences for determining the scope and the limits of the analogy. Answers to questions concerning the reasons behind the phenomenological critique of the constructions of post-Kantian German idealism presuppose an account of Husserl’s critique of the constructions in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. 6.2.1.1 Husserl’s critique of Kant
According to the references mentioned in Section 6.1.3.1, Husserl, in the frst edition of LI, criticized logical psychologism and psychologizing ideal objects in general as Transzendentalpsychologismus. The psychologism of empiricism recognizes only empirical universals of real objects. Kant’s Transzendentalpsychologismus is, according to the second edition of the LI, a transzendentalen Psychologismus or transzendentaler Anthropologismus. Transcendental psychologism or anthropologism recognizes a priori structures but reduces these structures to a priori structures of human understanding and reason. This understanding of the a priori presupposes the metaphysical constructions of a nonempirical “rational” psychology. Kant’s analysis of the “presuppositions of the possibility of experience” presupposes frstly, by way of general metaphysical constructions, the powers of sensible sensory intuition, imagination, understanding, and reason. It also presupposes, secondly, the con90
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structions of a metaphysical “in itself ” as the “cause” of sensory affections and then the in itself of the spontaneity of the unity of transcendental apperception in its synthetic activities. The method of phenomenology in the frst two periods presupposes strictly descriptive accounts of eidetic intuitions. It is incompatible with constructions that presuppose the formal and material structures of modern dogmatic rationalism or other types of theoretical constructions. Modern philosophical traditions can be considered as predecessors of transcendental phenomenology only to the extent to which they offer descriptions of structures of consciousness that are evident with additional applications of constructive methods. Such descriptive contents can be found in Kant after eliminating his transcendental psychologism and its presuppositions in the metaphysical constructions of dogmatic rationalism. 6.2.1.2 The Kantian background of the speculative constructions of post-Kantian German idealism
Formal logic in Kant’s sense and, hence, also metaphysical constructions presupposing this logic, was for the post-Kantian idealists not acceptable for conceptual explications of the Absolute given in intellectual intuition in speculative thinking.Their account of the method of speculative thinking presupposes, nevertheless, basic elements of conceptual structures of the Kantian doctrine of the concept (Lehre vom Begriff) because the contradiction that emerges in the assumption of the highest genus is precisely the logical foundation of the contradiction in the ens realissimum that Kant discovers in the “Transcendental Dialectic” of the Critique of Pure Reason. This “most real being” of Kant can be found in Fichte’s philosophy, i.e., the frst period in the development of the post-Kantian idealism, the absolute ego. Of basic signifcance for the development of post-Kantian ontological and metaphysical idealism—not transcendental but absolute—are the concepts of identity, as opposed to non-identity, and indifference, as opposed to difference.The absolute indifference in the identity of the absolute I and together with it the absolute difference of non-identity of the absolute Not-I is given in intellectual intuition.This opposition is understood as contradiction. Fichte recognizes explicitly that his “deductions” of the acts, the Tathandlungen, of the absolute I imply the “laws of refection,” i.e., the basic principles of formal logic.17 These “laws of refection” are frstly relevant in their application to the logic of concepts.They are secondly relevant in their application to the categories, frst of all of reality, negation, and limitation, and only in last place as laws of refections for empirical judgmental syntheses.18 The laws of refection are also the determining ground for the third principle, guiding the third step, i.e., the deductions of speculative syntheses. The strict disjunction between analytic judgments and synthetic judgments based on experience does not hold for the deductions of speculative thinking in “intellectual intuition.” Fichte did not use the term “dialectic” for the method of the “deductions” of the Doctrine of Science. The term was introduced by Schelling, but there are no changes in the refections on the origins of the basic concepts that applied in his account of the dialectical method before 1809. Schelling’s merits are only the adaptation of the term “dialectic” from contemporary interpretations of Plato and then the consideration of the Absolute not as absolute Ego but as Subject–Object/Object–Subject, i.e., as the identity of difference and indifference. Hegel’s Logic starts with thinking the dialectical opposition of Being and Nothing, and considering Becoming as the synthesis in the transition from Being to Nothing and vice versa. To think the Absolute in intellectual intuition in the beginning as the dialectical contradiction of Being and Nothing means, however, according to Hegel, only to think it as immediately given in itself and not in and for itself in the form of refection and the laws of refection. Intellectual intuition does not think in concepts; it is rather the immediate result of the elevation of the 91
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representations of empirical consciousness to the level of speculative thinking.The next defnition of the Absolute uses the concepts of qualitative infnity, of dialectical oppositions and contradictions and the principles of synthesis as the principle of synthetic dialectical “deductions.” The fnal step of the methodologically signifcant steps of the Science of Logic begins with the explication of indifference and difference.19 6.2.1.3 The signifcance of Husserl’s mathesis universalis for his rejection of the dialectical constructions of German idealism
Research interested in analogies between phenomenology and German idealism must keep in mind that Husserl’s conception of logic and Kant’s conception of logic (and with it the conception of logic of post-Kantian idealists) are different. Husserl understood his system of formal logic and ontology as a realization of the Leibnizean program of a mathesis universalis, i.e., as the sum total of deductive systems and the principles of consistency and completeness.20 Kant tolerated the frst steps of Leibniz and others in the development of modern logic as interesting without being bothered by the differences between his conception of logic and the new type of logic. Hegel, however, condemned the conception of logic of Leibniz, Plouquet, Euler, and Lambert as talk about concepts without concepts (begriffose Weise über den Begriff zu reden). Such talk, for Hegel, is empty calculating thinking and is utterly useless in philosophical refections in general and especially for attempts to explicate the method of speculative thinking and its task to think the self-movement of the concept, the Selbstbewegung des Begriffs.21 Crucial differences between logic as mathesis universalis and basic logical structures that are implicitly presupposed in the method of dialectical constructions are the concepts of opposition and contradiction, of identity and non-identity, and of indifference and difference. The reason behind the principal consistency, i.e., of non-contradiction, for deductive systems in mathematical logic for Hilbert as well as for a Husserlian mathesis universalis is the possibility of deducing all other possible propositions and their negations according to the laws of logical deduction from pre-given contradictory propositions. It is a gross misinterpretation of the meaning of “contradiction” in post-Kantian idealism and especially in Hegel to use this modern understanding of contradiction in investigations asking “What is dialectic?”22 It is, however, also obvious that the reason for Husserl’s “inability” to understand Hegel has its roots in Husserl’s inability to give a meaningful explication of the concepts “contradiction” and “opposition” that are presupposed in the explication of Hegel’s dialectical method.
6.2.2 Phenomenological ultimate grounding and the Absolute of German idealism Critical refections (Section 6.2.2.3) on analogies between Husserl’s transition from the phenomenological reduction of Ideas I to a metaphysical understanding of ultimate grounding between 1930 and 1937 on the one hand, and the transition from Kant’s critical transcendental philosophy to the Absolute in post-Kantian idealism on the other, presuppose frstly (Section 6.2.2.1) an interpretation of a phenomenological transition to metaphysics and secondly (Section 6.2.2.2) an interpretation of the transition from Kant to post-Kantian German idealism. 6.2.2.1 The “metaphysical” turn in phenomenology
Though the term “metaphysical” does not occur in §53 of the Crisis, Husserl’s refections on the paradox of subjectivity and its solution can be called “metaphysical.” What is said there marks the transition to a phenomenology as the science of Being qua Being. Subjectivity (Subjektsein) is 92
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given in oblique intention as being a subject of the world and also as being an object (Objektsein) in the world.The emphasis on being in the frst part of the formula implies that subjective consciousness, as a necessary being, is the subject of the contingent being of the world as the totality of objects.The second part says that subjective consciousness has itself and its objective correlates as being only because it is given to itself as a contingent being among other contingent beings in the world. Husserl’s way out of this paradox is his ontological interpretation of the paradox in the Crisis, i.e., the interpretation of the frst horn as referring to the primal ego and the interpretation of the second horn as referring to the mundane ego.The problem is whether the subject behind the paradox that experiences the paradox can be the ego as pole of the synthetic activity of intentional acts as the ego of Ideas I. In the last instance are presupposed two abstractive phenomenological reductions, the egological and the primordial reduction, within the residuum of the frst “naïve” phenomenological reduction. Of signifcance for the development leading to these abstractive reductions are the reductions determining the distinction between the natural world as the world of the natural sciences given in the naturalistic attitude and the life-world or the “spiritual world,” i.e., the cultural world given in the attitude of the human sciences, i.e., spiritual sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) in Ideas II.23 The constitution of the world of the natural sciences presupposes an abstractive reduction. Left in the residuum of this reduction is only the givenness of the world in intersensory, i.e., intersubjective, perceptions. The cultural and intercultural spiritual world is constituted as the cultural life-world of concrete intersubjective communities. Intersubjectivity is, in this case, pre-given as a necessary structure of the world given in the natural attitude as life-world, i.e., the transcendent that is the foundation for all further methodological reductions.The spiritual world has, therefore, priority over the natural world. The phenomenological analysis of the constitution of intersubjectivity requires the reduction to the givenness of the Other as living body in the passive syntheses of the egological sphere.A phenomenological analysis of passive syntheses requires, in turn, the primordial reduction to the primordial sphere of passive syntheses and its temporal structures, i.e., the temporal structures of the living present.The transcendental ego in the residuum of the “naïve” phenomenological reduction is only given as the identical pole of the active syntheses in the process of intentional acts.This ego is an abstract moment in the region of the immanence of active syntheses as the pole of these syntheses and their intentional correlates in the life-world as intersubjectively given intentional objects in the world. Phenomenological refections of these structures end in the paradox of subjectivity. The analysis of this paradox and its solution has to re-trace the ultimate ground, the primal ego (Ur-Ich), as the “absolute” activity behind the emergence of the contents and the passive syntheses of the structures in which contents are given in the actual now and its horizon of passive retentions in the living present. It follows that the primal ego is the phenomenological ultimate metaphysical ground. 6.2.2.2 The transition from Kant to post-Kantian German idealism
According to Fichte’s interpretation of Kant’s transcendental deduction, consciousness (as the experience of objects) has its ultimate condition of any possible experience in the unity of transcendental apperception, the transcendental ego, an ultimate condition that is itself not given as an object of experience.24 The other necessary condition and ground for the experience of objects in consciousness, i.e., the experience of the objects that are given for consciousness and as such outside consciousness, is for Kant the thing in itself. According to Fichte, Kant’s transcendental ego qua unity of transcendental apperception goes beyond Kant’s claim that transcendental unity of apperception is merely the “I think that must 93
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be able to accompany all of my thoughts.” For Fichte, the transcendental unity of apperception of the frst Critique is identical with the transcendental ego of the Critique of Practical Reason and can be understood as an indicator of the absolute Ego given in intellectual intuition. Further, for Fichte, Kant’s thing in itself as the transcendent condition of the experience of objects in sensory intuition is the non-Ego.The non-Ego is given in an op-positing, that is, the logically necessary correlate of the self-positing of the absolute Ego.This contradictory opposition of positing and op-positing given in intellectual intuition is the ultimate ground for the chain of the deductions of syntheses and the further contradiction of speculative thinking in the Doctrine of Science. The absolute Ego was, as mentioned in Section 6.2.1.2, replaced by Schelling’s absolute subject–object and then by Hegel’s absolute spirit.The method of Fichte’s deductions was transformed and refned frst in Schelling’s dialectic and then in the explications and applications of the dialectical method of German idealism in Hegel’s Science of Logic. 6.2.2.3 The signifcance of German idealism for understanding the idea of ultimate grounding in Husserl’s phenomenology
The frst task for a search for such analogies is to determine which period in the development of German idealism is of central signifcance for the analogy. Reading the Vienna lectures of 1935 tempts one to assume that Husserl recognized in his last years something like a Hegelian interpretation of the phenomenological solution for the problem of an ultimate grounding (Letztbegründung). Of interest in this respect are the adoptions of such terms as “spirit” and “absolute spirit revealing itself ” in “absolute history.” However, closer considerations indicate clearly that the immediate source for these terms in the Vienna lectures is not Hegel but Dilthey and Windelband and their respective accounts of the human sciences, i.e., the Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of the spirit).25 The fnal word in Husserl in this regard is what he says about German idealism in the Crisis.26 Hegel, though he represents a weaker version of the original power of Kant’s project, can be recognized as a predecessor of transcendental phenomenology according to the references in the texts of Husserl’s last decade only because he is the last follower of Kant. No references to Schelling that are relevant for the basic problem (Section 6.2.2) can be found in the writings of Husserl. What is left according to Husserl is that the writings of Schelling and Hegel may include descriptive contents that can be of interest for phenomenological analyses. According to Fink, Husserl’s position can be compared with the late philosophy of Fichte, but Husserl was not able to grasp Hegel’s thought.27 Thus, only Fichte’s transition from Kant’s transcendental ego as the ultimate “condition of the possibility of experience and self-conscious experience” to an absolute ego is of interest for any critical evaluation of the analogy between the transition of German idealism to the Absolute and the phenomenological transition to ultimate grounding presupposing a primal ego. However, the descriptive phenomenological elements of Fichte’s attempt to restore the aims of traditional metaphysics on the level of intellectual intuition and speculative thinking beyond Kant’s critical deconstruction of traditional metaphysics are not acceptable.The descriptive basis of Fichte’s constructive account of the transition from Kant’s transcendental ego to the absolute positing and op-positing Ego has its descriptive foundation in refections on “Fichte’s own empirical ego.” Fichte’s explication of the self-positing, op-positing, and synthetic positing of the absolute Ego as the underlying pattern of the construction of the deductive sequences of speculative thinking is, seen from the viewpoint of phenomenology, only the indicator of his hopeless entanglement in the dilemmas of the paradox of subjectivity. Fichte’s transition is, seen from the viewpoint of Husserl, the general foundation for the step beyond Kant toward a metaphysical explication of the Absolute in intellectual intuition and 94
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speculative thinking of German idealism.This step beyond Kant’s critique of metaphysics leads to the highest level in the development of the methods for metaphysical constructions because it presupposes as its foundation the method of “dialectical” deductions in the explication of the self-movement of the Absolute in German idealism after Fichte. 6.2.2.4 The signifcance of Hegel for members of the Freiburg circle
Before Fink developed his interpretation of the “metaphysical” turn in Husserl’s thought in the Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis, French existential phenomenology showed an interest in Hegel, but this interest was restricted to applications of Hegel’s early theological writings and his Phenomenology for phenomenological descriptions of practical existential engagements in human experience.28 Hegel’s Phenomenology was not of interest as an introduction to his system and the explication of the self-movement of the concept in the Science of Logic. Fink was not interested in work in the feld of phenomenological refective analyses. He was frst of all interested in the problems of a transcendental phenomenological critique of the method of such refective analyses, i.e., the ultimate grounding of phenomenology that was considered by Husserl already in 1924 in his First Philosophy. Fink’s solution for these problems requires that one go beyond phenomenological analyses to speculative constructions. Such methods are already required for a phenomenology of primal temporality, Urzeitigung, because primal temporality is prior to and the ground of the subjective inner temporality that is still accessible for naïve refective phenomenological analyses. It is with this phenomenological speculation about primal temporality that one is confronted with the “question of Being” and discovers beyond this question the absolute ground of primal temporality in the me-on.29 An essential aspect of Fink’s interpretation of German idealism was his interest in Hegel, which was originally infuenced by lectures of Heidegger.30 The absolute spirit is, for Fink, an absolute extramundane “consciousness” that has no being at all.31 Of basic signifcance for Fink’s position is his interpretation and critique of Hegel’s conception of the absolute spirit in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The Phenomenology considers the stages of the development of the appearance of the Absolute in the human mind.The reader is left with the impression that the Absolute can still be understood as absolute subject.That the Absolute is beyond any difference of fnite beings and of subject/object can only be seen in the beginning of the Science of Logic. But on this point the analogy between Hegel and Fink’s idealism breaks down.The Absolute is for Fink the Absolute as being Other, the Nothing in which all ground falls away, and it can be thought only in the “via negationis” of a “me-ontology.”32 Though Fink characterizes his own speculative approach as “constructive,” he rejects Hegel’s dialectical construction of the Absolute and ends in the me-on, the negation of being. Urzeitigung (primal temporality) could perhaps be understood as Hegel’s “Becoming”, but there are no dialectical constructions in new dialectical oppositions and syntheses in the self-movement of the concept in Hegel’s Logic.
Notes 1 Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is referred to in this paper under the title Doctrine of Science (Fichte 1970). For the translation of these two works by Schelling, see Schelling 1978 and 1988. 2 Hegel 1977 and 1978. 3 Hegel 1969 and 2010. 4 Doctrine of Science, Parts I and II, especially §§1–4. 5 Critique of Pure Reason, Book II, Chapter III,The Ideal of pure reason, Section I,The Ideal in general. For Kant’s logic lectures, see Kant, Logic 1974. 6 Critique of Pure Reason, B 211.
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Thomas M. Seebohm 7 Critique of Pure Reason, B 298; see also B 33. 8 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §§413–439 (Hegel 2010). 9 Ideas I, Second Section, Chapters 1 and 2. Ideas I was frst published in 1913 (Hua III/1).There have been three English translations of Ideas I; the most recent is Husserl 2014. 10 Hua VII, Section I, Chapter 4 and Section II, Chapters 1–3. 11 Hua VII, 208f; and sections VI–VII. 12 For the Fichte lectures, see Hua XXV, 267–293.The short remarks on German idealism from 1914 can be found in Hua VII, Supplement XXII. 13 Trendelenburg’s anti-Hegelian Logische Untersuchungen from 1840 is a defense of Aristotelian logic against Hegel’s Logic. 14 Hua VI, §27; See Husserl 1970. 15 On Hegel, see §56; on Fichte §57. 16 The Vienna lectures of 1935 can be found as a supplement to the Crisis, Hua VI, 314–348/269–299. 17 Wissenschaftslehre, Part I, §§1–3. 18 See the end of §3, and §8. The laws of refection appear only on this level as judgmental, i.e., in the context of modern logic as “propositional” opposition, contradiction, and consistency. For a comprehensive account see Seebohm 1994, 17–42. 19 See the retrospective considerations in the Logic: Book II, Section One—Essence as Refection Within Itself, especially Remark 3,“The Law of Contradiction” (Hegel 1969, 439–443). For a comprehensive account, see Seebohm 2004, 333–352. 20 Hua XVII, §31. 21 See, for example, in the Logic, Volume Two: Subjective Logic or The Doctrine of the Notion, the “Remark” in Chapter 1 on “The Common Classes of Notions” (Hegel 1969, 612–618) and also the Remark in Chapter 3,“The Common View of the Syllogism,” 681–686. 22 Popper 1963, 312–335; Popper 1965, 257 ff. 23 Hua IV, Part III. See Seebohm 2013, 125–140. 24 See Seebohm 1994, 21ff. and especially the references there. 25 Seebohm 2013, 125–140. 26 See section 6.1.3.2. 27 See Fink’s comments on a lecture by A. Schutz (1957) with references to the late Fichte (Schutz 1966, 84–87). 28 See Courtine 1997 and Kirkland 1997. 29 Bruzina 1997, 253f; and the extensive interpretations of Fink’s VI Cartesian Meditation and other writings in Bruzina 2004, especially Chapters 5–7. 30 Bruzina 2004, 147ff. and 570 footnote 110. 31 Bruzina 2004, 152. 32 Bruzina 2004, 405ff, 450.
References Bruzina, Ronald. 1997. “Eugen Fink.” In: Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Eds. L. Embree et al. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 232–237. ———. 2004. Edmund Husserl & Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology 1925–1939. New Haven:Yale University Press. Courtine, Jean-François. 1997.“France.” In: Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Eds. L. Embree et al. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 246–250. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1970. The Science of Knowledge.Trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs. New York: AppletonCentury Crofts. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1969. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Humanities Press. ———. 1977. The Phenomenology of Spirit.Trans.A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1978. The Difference Between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy. Trans. J. Surber. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview. ———. 2010. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline: Part One, Science of Logic. Trans. K. Brinkman and D. Dahlstrom. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Phenomenology and German idealism Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2014. Ideas I.Trans. D. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kant, Immanuel. 1974. Logic.Trans. R. S. Hartman and W. Schwarz. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Kirkland, Frank M. 1997.“Hegel.” In: Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Eds. L. Embree et al. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 292–298. Popper, Karl. 1963. Conjectures and Refutations. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1965. Logik der Sozialwissenschaften. Ed. E.Topitsch. Köln/Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Schelling, Friedrich. 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism.Trans. P. Heath. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ———. 1988. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature.Trans. E. Harris and P. Heath. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schutz, Alfred. 1966. Collected Papers III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Seebohm, Thomas. 1994. “Fichte’s Discovery of Dialectic.” In: Fichte: Historical Contexts/Contemporary Controversies. Eds. D. Breazeale and T. Rockmore. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, pp. 17–42. ———. 2004. “Die logische Struktur der Hegelschen Dialektik.” In: Metaphysik und Kritik. Eds. S. Doye, M. Heinz, and U. Rameil. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, pp. 333–352. ———. 2013. “Husserl on the Human Sciences in Ideen II.” In: Husserl’s “Ideen.” Eds. L. Embree and T. Nenon. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 125–140.
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7 PHENOMENOLOGY AND AUSTRIAN PHILOSOPHY Carlo Ierna
Neither phenomenology nor Austrian philosophy have clearly defned boundaries,1 hence it is somewhat futile to try to assess how these two movements are related, historically and systematically, without at least some preliminary, pragmatic defnitions.The idea of an “Austrian philosophy” as a distinct historiographical category in the history of 19th- and 20th-century philosophy has been advanced and formulated in increasing detail since the 1970s.While it makes little sense to defne “Austrian” philosophy purely on the base of geographical notions,2 neither as “philosophy in Austria” nor as “philosophy by Austrians”, it can nevertheless serve as a starting point.3
Austrian philosophy Rudolf Haller has tried in his works to establish both the historical as well as the systematical coherence of Austrian philosophy as a “more or less homogenous development”, providing a list of “essential traits” (Haller 1979, 7).The frst main trait that Haller brings to the fore is the opposition to Kantianism, since Austrian philosophy did not follow Kant’s “Copernican revolution”.4 By aligning itself with pre-Kantian thinkers, it is an anti-idealistic, and specifcally antiHegelian, current.5 Haller points to Herbart and Bolzano as early representatives of Austrian philosophy that exemplify such traits. One of the most infuential groups, and the frst actual school in Austrian philosophy, however, was born in the wake of Franz Brentano’s program of doing philosophy as science.6 Haller identifes a set of core rules of Brentano’s method, which at the same time picks out central traits of Austrian philosophy: First, to pursue philosophy as a scientifc discipline, second, to acknowledge experience as a source of knowledge about facts [Tatsachenerkenntnis], and accordingly to consider the evidence of inner perception as foundation for the perception of facts [Tatsachenwahrnehmung]. Finally, in accordance with the Aristotelian goal of clarity, the application of methods of linguistic analysis and critique [sprachanalytischer und sprachkritischer Methoden] to discover and overcome illusory problems [Scheinproblemen]. (Haller 1979, 12)7 Not only would the School of Brentano then count as the school of Austrian philosophy, it also mediated between the earlier representatives and later movements. Indeed, Zimmermann, both 98
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a student of Bolzano as well as infuenced by Herbart, was the other professor of philosophy in Vienna during Brentano’s time there and taught several of his students.8 With Brentano and his students it becomes clear that one of the defning characteristics of Austrian philosophy is a specifc form of empiricism, inspired by (Neo-)Aristotelianism, British empiricism, and (Comtean) positivism, entailing a strong opposition to the speculative “degenerations” of rationalism (Haller 1979, 16–17; 1986, 36). After the caesura of WWI, in which many philosophical currents found their end through the death or displacement of their representatives, this tendency would morph into something much more extreme, i.e. the complete rejection of any metaphysics at all in the context of the Vienna Circle. Nevertheless, according to Haller, the Vienna Circle still stands in a suffciently continuous connection to the earlier Austrian philosophy that it can be viewed as part of the same tradition (Haller 1986, 39; 1991, 41). As Barry Smith claimed, in an even more encompassing sense: The most important and typical Austrian thinkers, from Bolzano to Wittgenstein, were not advocates for a big system-building “philosophy from above” of the Fichtean of Hegelian stamp, but for an empirical, concrete, and anti-systemic “philosophy from below”, a philosophy rooted in examples and painstaking description and analysis of individual cases. (Smith 1993, 95) Smith also proposed a similar set of criteria to classify philosophers as “Austrian”: a continuity of philosophy with the natural sciences, empiricism, a concern with (ordinary) language, a decided rejection of the Kantian “revolution” understood as a source of relativism and historicism, a special relation to the a priori, a concern with ontology and mereology, and with the relation of macro- to micro-phenomena without reductionism (think e.g. of the notion of Gestalt). This is accompanied by the caveats that, on the one hand, of course none of the Austrians shared all of these features, and on the other that many shared a majority of them without being in any relevant sense “Austrian”. Beyond loose geographical and historical constraints, a defning characteristic is the opposition to what is considered as “German” philosophy In sum, while there are gray areas and debates about which individual philosophers should or shouldn’t be included, there is a general consensus about the central characteristics of Austrian philosophy, following Haller:“the emphasis on psychology, language, science, analysis and empiricism”.These would then pick out “Brentano, Meinong, the great Vienna Circle of this century, and the enigmatic fgure of Wittgenstein” as some of the main fgures (Lehrer and Marek 1997, ix). This broad description would put Austrian philosophy in opposition to “the tradition of Kant, Hegel and Heidegger in Germany characterized by metaphysical extravagance”.Yet such an approach might be too simplistic to accommodate the great diversity of authors and positions that have been associated with Austrian philosophy. One cannot straightforwardly take Austrianborn authors or trending philosophies in Austria in a specifc historical period as a yardstick. After all, Brentano was born in Germany and worked in Vienna for just two decades, Bolzano had limited infuence in his own time,Wittgenstein’s philosophy developed and had its fortune mostly outside of Austria, etc. Hence, if we take the criteria of Austrian philosophy as just being “scientifc, analytic, and empirical”, it becomes nearly co-extensive with theoretical philosophy at large. Moreover, with the possible exception of the School of Brentano, there is little actual historical and systematical unity to be found in such a broadly defned Austrian philosophy. What we can fnd, however, is a relatively clear-cut list of candidates that could be categorized as German or Austrian philosophers respectively.According to Smith: 99
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The main line of the frst consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. (Smith 1994, 1) Also, for Smith, the “central axis” of Austrian philosophy is the School of Brentano (Rollinger 2008). Indeed, having been receptive to a broad spectrum of authors, including the British empiricists and Bolzano, and having been infuential in a variety of contexts, from early analytic philosophy to Gestalt psychology, Prague linguistics, and Polish logic, it is easy to see how the School of Brentano, and in particular Brentano himself, could function as the glue that holds Austrian philosophy together. Smith argues that there are both historical as well as systematical reasons for this choice: Brentano and his pupils occupied the most important chairs in philosophy in the Austro-Hungarian empire, founded lasting schools and institutions, and spread their theories far and wide (Smith 1994, 21). Moreover, by and large they ticked all the boxes of the main features of Austrian philosophy (of course with some exceptions and changes over time). Yet, this is a narrow basis for such broad claims. Brentano, after all, besides being German, had a host of problems politically and institutionally in Austria, including being denied funding for a psychological laboratory (which would have anticipated Wundt’s by fve years) and being denied re-appointment to his chair (Albertazzi 2006, 23–24). In part due to such a strained relationship with the authorities, he left Vienna and Austria after barely two decades. Of his more prominent students, only Marty, Meinong, and Von Ehrenfels had lasting academic careers in the Habsburg empire. In particular, Marty spread Brentanism for three decades in Prague, originating the second generation of orthodox Brentanists, including Kraus and Kastil. However, Stumpf, Twardowski, and Husserl found their fortune and had their infuence mostly outside of Austria. In particular, turning to Husserl and his phenomenology, we can see how this leads to a very distinct problem of categorization. In what sense could he be considered an Austrian philosopher? Even if we would agree that his phenomenology developed at frst in the context of Austrian philosophy, did it later maintain (some of) its typical features? Husserl was active as a philosopher in Vienna for much less time than Brentano: barely two years. While he did complete his dissertation in mathematics in Vienna before that and then gained a second layer of Brentanism under the supervision of Stumpf in Halle, his categorization as an Austrian philosopher on these grounds (or on birthright alone) would be tenuous at best. Yet, if we take into account that through Brentano he also came into contact with Bolzano’s thought and that through Zimmermann he acquired some familiarity with Herbart, he starts to look more embedded in the context of the typical Austrian thinkers listed above. Moreover, thanks to his technical background in mathematics, he was perhaps best equipped to investigate the connections between the a priori and empiricism in the context of the philosophy of mathematics (although nearly all the members of the School of Brentano worked on this (Ierna 2011, 2017a)). Indeed, it was the issue of the link between “the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of knowledge” (Hua XVIII, 7) that pushed him further and further in his research and ultimately to positions that would seem quite distant from those of Brentano’s particular strand of Austrian philosophy. Indeed, if we look at the later developments of phenomenology, we cannot but notice that Heidegger, Husserl’s most prominent heir, is classifed as a representative of precisely the opposite orientation: German philosophy.9 We must not forget, however, that the term “phenomenology” itself did not originate with Husserl.10 Indeed, the core of Brentano’s approach lay in his “descriptive psychology”,11 on which he lectured in Vienna in 1887–88 while Husserl was studying with him. The next 100
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year, Brentano changed the title to “Descriptive psychology or descriptive phenomenology” (Brentano PS 77). Up to 1903 Husserl would still regard his own phenomenology as a kind of descriptive psychology.12 Famously,Alexander Pfänder wrote his habilitation on Phänomenologie des Wollens (The Phenomenology of Willing) in 1900, independently from Husserl, but partially infuenced by his reading of Brentano (Schuhmann 1988, 99).
Phenomenology Independently from the term itself, in what sense would Husserl’s phenomenology be a part or a continuation of Austrian philosophy? We are now confronted again with the same problem: the lack of a clear defnition of what phenomenology is. Can we give a comprehensive, unambiguous, and useful defnition?13 Are we even entitled to speak of the one and only universally agreed upon phenomenology, or should we rather say that we can speak of phenomenology in various senses, e.g. a broad and a narrow sense? In the narrowest sense it would be a very specifc discipline, as elaborated by Husserl in a select few works: Husserl is the founding father of phenomenology but it has often been claimed that virtually all post-Husserlian phenomenologists ended up distancing themselves from most aspects of his original program.Thus, according to [one] view, phenomenology is a tradition by name only. It has no common method and research program. It has even been suggested that Husserl was not only the founder of phenomenology, but also its sole true practitioner. (Zahavi 2008, 661) In the broadest possible sense, the phenomenological movement would include most of the School of Brentano, Munich phenomenology, all of Husserl’s phenomenology, French phenomenology, and perhaps even some analytical philosophers. a future historian of ideas might perhaps maintain that there cannot have been any single philosophical movement called phenomenology, for too many different and even contradictory things are said in the documents about it.There might seem to be as many phenomenologies as there are phenomenologists. (Hintikka 2010, 91) There is not just one phenomenology, but rather many phenomenologies.14 Even if we would restrict ourselves purely to the doctrines elaborated by Husserl himself, we can distinguish at least two: before and after the transcendental turn. Updating Merleau-Ponty’s remark in the preface to his Phénoménologie de la perception, more than a century after the publication of Husserl’s core works a univocal defnition of phenomenology is still missing (Zahavi 2008, 663). How should we deal with this? One option would be to avoid biographical and historical references and to confate any variations into a unifed picture (Crowell 2002, 419–420). Volens nolens this would lead to defending one distinctive position within the wider feld of phenomenology and hence becoming part of the problem rather than solving it.The other option would be to provide detailed analyses in the style of e.g. Spiegelberg’s Phenomenological Movement, presenting the history of phenomenology in a certain sense as “the history of Husserlian heresies” (Ricoeur 1987, 9), acknowledging biographical and historical relationships as well as philosophical conficts, working as an impartial historian. Ideally we would like to gain a comprehensive defnition of phenomenology based on an evaluation of the many phenomenologies: “Even if there 101
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were as many phenomenologies as phenomenologists, there should be at least a common core in all of them to justify the use of the common term” (Spiegelberg 1982, 677). In Husserl’s time as well as today, in both the primary as well as the secondary literature, there is no clear agreement about what phenomenology is. Given the plurality of phenomenologies, “the major need is that for providing historical background, especially when the texts no longer appear in their contexts” (Spiegelberg 1975, 21). How did this plurality come about? Phenomenology does not only have an endless task, but also many beginnings, or, using another metaphor, besides splitting into many branches, it also has many roots.15 At various stages there are signifcant changes in Husserl’s position, leading to repeated attempts to “introduce” phenomenology anew. Consider also that the two major works introducing phenomenology, the Logical Investigations and the Ideas, were unfnished. The Logical Investigations were not originally meant to be published in their current form (as Husserl himself stated in a letter to Natorp) (Hua-Dok III/5, 76; Hua XIX/2, 783), and were actually intended just as the frst of two series (as Husserl remarked in a letter to Meinong) (Meinong 1965, 105; Hua-Dok I, 63), while the 1913 Ideas was originally meant as just the frst book of three, of which the second and third never appeared during his lifetime. Hence, his works cannot be taken simply and straightforwardly as “adumbrations” of the same coherent doctrinal whole.16 Unsurprisingly, those who were infuenced by Husserl at one stage did not always follow him uncritically to the next (Moran 2000, xiii). No wonder that there is still a need of scholarly works analyzing Husserl’s relationship to his teachers, colleagues, and students.17 Before any attempt to fnd the origin and unity of phenomenology could conceivably be made, all these phenomenologies and phenomenologists have to be put in context. This does not imply a mere catalog of infuences or a side-by-side comparison of almost randomly picked philosophers, but the search for a red thread.What is it that ties these phenomenologies together and that even makes them into phenomenologies and not rather other kinds of philosophies?18 Such a search for a comprehensive defnition and systematic unity could be articulated as a kind of “phenomenology of phenomenology”19 (at this point still an obscurum per obscurius), since it would be certainly too reductive to defne phenomenology as a unitary whole just on the base of a historical, contingent relation to Husserl and his works, as this would indeed be a quite extrinsic and inessential criterion. Phenomenology cannot be defned just as “Husserlism”; returning to the earlier metaphor, the trunk is not the tree. For some Husserl scholars it has become too much of a habit “to view Husserl as a highly original philosopher who blazed his own trail” (Rollinger 1999, 7),20 as if he had been operating in isolation. Both the relations to his predecessors and peers as well as to his own former positions are often neglected. The opposite excesses are just as silly, e.g. portraying Husserl as being converted to anti-psychologism overnight by Frege or merely as a (bad) copy of Brentano; Husserl was neither an isolated, solitary pioneer, nor a purely passive victim of circumstances. When comparing two positions, both have to be taken seriously, and we should not make the analysis of one functional to the explanation of the other.When comparing early and late Husserl, we should neither dismiss early stages as immature, nor consider them interesting only as precursors of later stages. Such reverse chronological interpretations of Husserl tend to produce an equally unbalanced assessment of those that infuenced him or were infuenced by him at various stages, leading rather to excluding them from phenomenology in the narrow sense than to including them in phenomenology in the broad sense. Such teleological tendencies are made obvious in labels such as “pre-phenomenological” or “pre-transcendental” to indicate periods in Husserl’s development, which show that who applies them has already a clear criterion to decide what qualifes as “real” phenomenology, a criterion that Husserl himself did not 102
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have or could likewise only apply retrospectively. Later positions depend on earlier positions, not the other way around; hence we might as well (and perhaps even more appropriately) label him as “post-realist” after the transcendental turn. What qualifes as phenomenology is certainly not arbitrary, but the historical authors that contributed to establish the phenomenological movement were entitled to provide their own defnitions, as opposed to current interpreters and historians trying to defne what they were doing.When Husserl at one stage called “phenomenology” a kind of “descriptive psychology”, we should take that just as seriously as his later dismissal of such terminology. And if some of his students after that still kept doing “phenomenology” as “descriptive psychology”, this cannot be simply dismissed as an aberration or misunderstanding. If we were to do so, then we would indeed deny that there is something like a “phenomenological movement” as phenomenology would be restricted to Husserlian phenomenology at a specifc stage.We cannot therefore choose one single defnition as historically given by one single phenomenologist as the true and only criterion, but must perforce look at the broader context of the phenomenological movement.21 If we were defning in the systematical sense, we would have to articulate and stress differences in methods and topics to arrive at a delimitation of phenomenology (Spiegelberg 1982, 2–3). However, in this way we risk making arbitrary choices. We could e.g. arrive at a separation based on the scientifc dignity of phenomenology, with the School of Brentano, Munich phenomenology,22 and most of Husserl on one side and the “geniale Unwissenschaftlichkeit” of Heidegger (Hua-Dok III/2, 184)23 and many French phenomenologists on the other. What additional criteria could we possibly cite to make our choice, if choosing is at all meaningful or possible? A historical-genealogical examination of the context in which phenomenology developed would rather preserve a neutrality and objectivity not unlike those advocated by phenomenology itself. This can yield a quite detailed periodization and consequent delimitation that is not quite as arbitrary. Various phenomenologies can be defned and separated without value judgments or pretensions of having found the one true criterion to defne all phenomenology. Coherent with its endless task and its character of a work-philosophy, we can then also defne phenomenology, among other things, as being still a work-in-progress.
The phenomenological movement and Austrian philosophy Having sketched the problems and possibilities of defning or at least circumscribing phenomenology and Austrian philosophy, we can now approach the issue of the connection between the two. Besides Husserl himself belonging to both groups (Ierna 2017b, 25 ff.), it is not only the case that the other Austrian philosophers from the School of Brentano infuenced him, but also infuenced his students. Indeed, what would become “Munich phenomenology” started out as a reading group in which many works from the School of Brentano were prominently discussed, particularly Anton Marty’s (Schuhmann 1990, 198, 209, 214; Smith 1990; Schuhmann and Smith 1991, 313). Hence, one prominent reason for the development of Munich phenomenology is that Brentano’s Austrian philosophy had already paved the way for Husserl’s, as Schuhmann points out: One of the reasons for the fertile ground in Munich and for the origination of the phenomenological movement precisely there, was that here there was a generally congenial atmosphere. Throughout the years the people in Munich, more than at any 103
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other German university, had engaged very positively with Brentano and his School; i.e. with that circle of thinkers to which Husserl himself also belonged. (Schuhmann 1988, 97) Following Spiegelberg (Spiegelberg 1982, 165), while there might not be a precise date for the foundation of the “phenomenological movement”, it is only with the physical movement of the Munich invasion of Göttingen that we can speak of a broader philosophical movement beyond the circle of Husserl’s direct students (Schuhmann and Smith 1991, 304). Moreover, beyond constituting the “frst branch” of phenomenology (Schuhmann 2004b, 82), the Munich phenomenologists played an important role in its early development. It was during the historical encounter with the Munich phenomenologists Alexander Pfänder and Johannes Daubert in Seefeld in 1905 (Schuhmann 1973, 23, 131–132) that Husserl began at frst to develop the notion of the transcendental ego, which, ironically, would then lead also to the ultimate break with the more realist Munich phenomenology (Spiegelberg 1981, 72). It is also together with the Munich phenomenologists Daubert, Geiger, Pfänder, Reinach, and Scheler that Husserl would come to found the main publishing organ of the phenomenological movement: the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. It is in the joint editorial statement preceding the frst volume in 1913 that we fnd clear indications of shared views and ambitions between the School of Brentano and the Phenomenological Movement, which, moreover, place them squarely in the feld of Austrian philosophy: Increasingly we are pushed towards phenomenological clarifcations and analyses of essence, not just for the sake of properly philosophical problems, but also with the aim of a foundation for the non-philosophical sciences. […] This journal is meant to serve such needs. It shall frst and foremost unite in shared work those who hope that the pure and rigorous application of the phenomenological method will enact a fundamental reform of philosophy – setting it on the road to a securely founded, progressively developing science. […] It is not a school-system that unites the editors and that is to be required from all future collaborators; what unites them is rather the shared conviction that only through a return to the originary sources of intuition, and to the essential insights to be drawn from it, can the concepts and the problems of the great traditions of philosophy be appraised, that only on this path can concepts be intuitively clarifed and problems framed anew on an intuitive basis and then solved in principle. They have the shared conviction that to phenomenology belongs an unlimited feld of strictly scientifc and highly consequential research, which, as for philosophy itself, has to be made to bear fruit also for all other sciences – wherever questions of principle are at stake in them. Hence, this journal shall not be a playground for vague reformatory ideas [nicht ein Tummelplatz vager reformatorischer Einfälle], but a place for serious scientifc work. (Hua XXV, 63–64)24 The connections to the earlier project of doing philosophy as science in the School of Brentano are unmistakable.25 A new foundation is needed to reform both philosophy as well as the other sciences, enabling “strict” and “earnest” scientifc research, but not by imposing a new system from above.The focus is on a rigorous method, capable of founding and reforming all sciences, philosophy included.26 The materia prima is to be found by returning to intuition as “original source”. The same ideas and wordings appear in multiple programmatic writings by Brentano and his students. Famously, Brentano had advanced his idea of philosophy as science, based on 104
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commonality of method, already in his habilitation theses in 1866: “Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est” (Brentano 1929, 136–137). He aimed at “the renewal of philosophy as science”, not by conjuring up “proud systems” out of thin air, but by humbly “cultivating fallow scientifc ground”. In such a project there was no room for “taumelnde heroen” like the speculative philosophers of German Idealism (Brentano 1929, 130–131).27 Brentano considered only one source of knowledge to be indubitably evident: inner perception, sharply distinguished from introspection (Brentano 1874, 35, 119). Moreover, even though Brentano did try (and fail) to enforce orthodoxy from his students, nevertheless the school as such fts the modernist idea of scientifc progress as a collaborative achievement (Richardson 1997, 434). The phenomenological side of the story is slightly more complex.We have seen above that one of the characteristics of Austrian philosophy is its anti-Kantian and anti-idealistic tendency, which can easily be found in many of Brentano’s works, lectures, and manuscripts. Husserl, however, came progressively closer to Kant,28 famously re-defning his phenomenology from a kind of descriptive psychology into a transcendental idealism (with the caveat not to read other theories into his terminology). Despite important critiques, Husserl ultimately reserves a central role for Kant in discovering a new sense of scientifcity: The Kantian system is the frst attempt, and one carried out with impressive scientifc seriousness, at a truly universal transcendental philosophy meant to be a rigorous science in a sense of scientifc rigor which has only now been discovered and which is the only genuine sense. (Hua VI, 102/99) Husserl still credits Brentano with important contributions to the study of consciousness and intentionality, but considers him, retrospectively, as still working under naturalistic presuppositions (ibid., 236, 346). Indeed, Brentano accepted the existence of external causes of sensation29 (the most fundamental psychic phenomena and the prime source for all others), denying only their knowability (in a quite Lockean and Comtean fashion). Where Brentano was aiming at the same kind of scientifcity for psychology and philosophy as the one of the natural sciences, later Husserl endorses a wholly new kind of scientifcity, much more in line with Kant’s “Copernican revolution”. Brentano assigned an epistemic privilege to internal perception, but did not make the limited validity of the sciences based on external perception completely and directly dependent upon it. Husserl, however, makes all knowledge and validity ultimately dependent on the constitutional activity of the transcendental ego: no object without subject.30 The encompassing project of doing philosophy as science is present both in the School of Brentano as well as in phenomenology.Where Brentano aimed at establishing philosophy and psychology along the natural sciences, as primus inter pares, sharing the same empirical method (broadly understood), Husserl is much more radical. As we can read in Fink’s notes of Husserl’s lectures on Natur und Geist: All sciences obtain their ultimate meaning and apriorical foundation in the universal foundational science of transcendental philosophy, whose most important forerunners are Descartes and Kant, and whose current representative is phenomenology. (Hua XXXII, 267) It is not Husserl’s aim to merely establish one new scientifc discipline alongside the other sciences, but as he says in the Crisis, “[to subject] the scientifc character of all sciences to a serious and quite necessary critique” (Hua VI, 3/5). From the initial aim in Brentano’s Austrian 105
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philosophy of rendering philosophy and psychology scientifc through the empirical method of the natural sciences, in Husserl we move to the foundation of philosophy as rigorous science on ideal, apriorical grounds.31 This makes it problematic to include “post-realist phenomenology” among Austrian philosophy.32 Husserl’s later position is perhaps most succinctly and emphatically stated in his inaugural lecture in Freiburg, immediately after WWI, where he underscores the radically new nature of his approach: “A new philosophical foundational science has arisen, pure phenomenology. … It has a methodological rigor that is not inferior to any of the modern sciences. … It makes philosophy as rigorous science at all possible” (Hua XXV, 69).With his fundamental distinction between pure phenomenology and descriptive psychology, Husserl is clearly moving beyond Brentano (ibid., 74–75). In the transcendental-idealist phase, pure phenomenology is defned as an apriorical science of consciousness in the sense of being concerned with the possibility rather than with the facticity of experience (ibid., 79). Instead of the inductive method of the natural sciences as Erfahrungswissenschaften, Husserl looks to the deductive and pure arithmetic and geometry as inspiration. If we abstract from the themes of transcendental constitution and the pure ego, the metaphysical questions of solipsism and the reality of the external world, we nevertheless could still see how, with respect to the ideal of philosophy as science, Brentano’s and Husserl’s aims can be considered as part of a cohesive and central current within Austrian philosophy.
Notes 1 “Austrian philosophers are an assorted bunch” (Simons 2006, 180). 2 “The independence of Austrian philosophy did not come from the soil it grew on, but the combination of infuences that shaped it” (Uebel 2000, 107).All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. 3 Compare the “extensional” approach in Binder, Fabian, Höfer and Valent 2005, 54: “For the IBÖP, ‘Austrian Philosophy’ is defned through a list of names.These names represent the Austrian philosophers, where we count as ‘Austrian’ the following persons: (1) those born within the current borders of Austria, except when they work(ed) exclusively abroad; (2) those born within the borders of Austria before 1918, under the condition that their philosophical activities belong to Austrian philosophy (compare the preface to IBÖP 74/75); (3) foreign nationals, only if they have worked and gained infuence during longer periods as philosophers in Austria. Of course, there still remains a series of open cases that is neither simple not straightforward to determine.”This approach is essentially unchanged since the early publications in the series. 4 Also see Haller 1991, 50.Also consider the critical account in Morscher 2006, 261. 5 Haller 1979, 8; Haller 1986, 38, considers as hallmarks of Austrian philosophy its Anti-Kantianism, Anti-Idealism, and Anti-Irrationalism. 6 “In him we see the actual founder of Austrian philosophy” (Haller 1979, 10) and Haller 1986, 36: “if we wanted to exaggerate, we could indicate the year 1874 [the publication of Brentano’s Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkte] as the year in which Austrian philosophy was born.” 7 Compare Haller 1986, 38: “First, the requirement of scientifcity of philosophy and the recognition of the natural scientifc ideal of science [naturwissenschaftlichen Wissenschaftsideals], second, empiricism as epistemological and methodological heuristic, third, the language-critical attitude [sprachkritische Einstellung], that aids an analytical method of philosophizing and avoids a metaphysics that operates with postulates.” 8 See especially the excellent Varga 2015 on Zimmermann’s infuence on Husserl. 9 This is not just a result of recent historiography, but an assessment made by his contemporaries as well, see e.g. Conrad Martius 1959a, 175: “Heidegger and his large following have in the end, even though not in the beginning, distanced themselves the most from Husserl’s intentions.” I’d like to thank Kimberly Baltzer Jaray for helping me fnd the relevant texts of Conrad Martius. 10 See the extensive analysis in Schuhmann 2004a.
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Phenomenology and Austrian philosophy 11 (Brentano PS 76). In the Husserl-Archives Leuven a copy of the lecture notes by Hans Schmidkunz is preserved with the signature Q 10. 12 In 1903 he clearly denied it in his review of Elsenhans:“All natural scientifc or metaphysical objectivations remain completely excluded. Phenomenology therefore should not be designated as “descriptive psychology” without further qualifcation. It is not, in the strict and proper sense. Its descriptions do not concern lived experiences or classes of experiences of empirical persons; because it does not know or presume anything about persons, about me and others, about mine and others’ experiences; regarding these it does not pose any questions, attempts no defnitions, makes no hypotheses. Phenomenological description looks at what is given in the strictest sense, at the lived experience as it is in itself.” (Hua XXII, 206–207/251). 13 Compare Spiegelberg 1982, 1, and the sources quoted at footnote 1 therein. 14 Consider Conrad Martius 1959a, 175: “It surely is a unique situation in the history of ideas [geistesgeschichtliche Situation], that from a great philosophical teacher have sprung not only such varied, even almost opposite, philosophical movements […], but that these movements each have obtained for themselves a quite conspicuous weight in the history of ideas.” However, given the immediately preceding example of Brentano and his school, the situation does appear slightly less “unique”. 15 Compare the picture in Spiegelberg 1982, 2, point 3. 16 This problem was already noticed by his students, see e.g. Conrad Martius 1959a, 177: “It has often been understood as if it [the opposition between the transcendental and the ontological] were simply different phases in Husserl’s own philosophy. Indeed: already the second volume of the Logical Investigations, but all the more the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy appeared to us direct students as an incomprehensible return of Husserl to transcendentalism, subjectivism, and even psychologism.” 17 See Spiegelberg 1982, 149 on the need for works on “Husserl and …”. 18 See Spiegelberg 1975, 10: “Considering the variety of phenomenologies which have thus issued directly or indirectly from Husserl’s inspiration, it is not easy to fnd a common denominator for such a movement beside its origin.” 19 Which could contribute to mitigate the problem “that philosophical ideas are deformed […], particularly when they are interpreted from the outside” (Wolenski 1997, 46). 20 Compare Moran 2000, 2. 21 See also Spiegelberg 1982, 3–4; 1975, xxii. 22 As well as the work of many Göttingen phenomenologists, e.g. those of the Bergzabern circle. Indeed, the term “München-Göttinger Schule” has been used as well, see e.g. Conrad Martius 1959a, 175. 23 Also Smith 1997, 1: “Heidegger […] all but terminated the previously healthy scientifc line in phenomenology”. 24 Facsimile in Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, facing p. 110. Based on a partial translation in Moran 2005, 28. 25 As well as the continuity with earlier representatives, e.g. for Reinach and Bolzano see Jaray 2006. 26 Also see Ierna 2014a; 2014b. 27 The expression (literally “tumbling heroes”), is clearly meant in a disparaging manner, i.e. dismissing convoluted metaphysical speculation as overblown antics. 28 Consider Conrad Martius 1959b, 43: “With this starting proposition of Husserl [that for pure consciousness nulla re indiget ad existendum] transcendental idealism, which had been riding high since Kant, surely reached its crest.” 29 Compare Conrad Martius 1959b, 50: “What is meant by realistic? It is the blending of the two functions, of which the frst task is to go beyond empirical relationships to real, fully valid causes that are not included in the immediate data. […] To real, fully valid causes!” 30 This was criticized by many of his earlier students, who pursued “phenomenology pure and simple, investigation of essence without exclusion or limitation” (Conrad Martius 1959b, 47) and accepted “an ‘absolute’ world, one standing all by itself and for itself ” in a “pre-Kantian, and above all pre-existentialist” sense (ibid., 45–46). 31 This approach was not shared by all his students:“What can philosophy do here? Are we trying to go back to a priori methods […]? Are we again conjuring up the spectre of falsifying speculation […]? Certainly not.Who would dare do so today? […] It is impossible for the results of phenomenology to contradict those of natural science or vice versa” (Conrad Martius 1959b, 48–49). 32 Or among Austrian phenomenology (Rollinger 2008, 12).
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References Albertazzi, Liliana. 2006. Immanent Realism.An Introduction to Brentano. Dordrecht: Springer. Binder, Thomas, Fabian, Reinhard, Höfer, Ulf, and Valent, Jutta (Eds). 2005. International Bibliography of Austrian Philosophy. IBÖP 1991–1992. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Brentano, Franz. PS 76, Deskriptive Psychologie. (unpublished manuscript from the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Franz Clemens Brentano Compositions, 1870–1917, MS Ger 230). ———. PS 77, Deskriptive Psychologie oder beschreibende Phänomenologie.(unpublished manuscript from the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Franz Clemens Brentano Compositions, 1870–1917, MS Ger 230). ———. 1874. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. ———. 1929.“Thesen” (1866). In: Über die Zukunft der Philosophie. Ed. Oskar Kraus. Leipzig: Felix Meiner. 133-141. Conrad Martius, Hedwig. 1959a.“Die transzendentale und die ontologische Phänomenologie”. In: Edmund Husserl 1859-1959. Ed. Herman Leo van Breda and Jacques Taminiaux Den Haag: Nijhoff, pp. 175–184. ———. 1959b.“Phenomenology and Speculation”. In: Philosophy Today 3/1, pp. 43–51. Crowell, Steven Galt. 2002. “Is there a Phenomenological Research Program?”. In: Synthese 131/3, pp. 419–444. Haller, Rudolf. 1979. Studien zur österreichischen Philosophie. Variationen über ein Thema. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 1986.“Gibt es eine Österreichische Philosophie?”. In: Ed. Rudolf Haller Fragen zu Wittgenstein und Aufsätze zur Osterreichischen Philosophie.Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 31–43. ———. 1991.“On the Historiography of Austrian Philosophy”. In: Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle. Ed.Thomas Uebel. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 41–50. Hintikka, Jaakko. 2010.“How can a Phenomenologist have a Philosophy of Mathematics?”. In:Phenomenology and Mathematics. Ed. Mirja Hartimo. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 91-105. Ierna, Carlo. 2011.“Brentano and Mathematics”. In: Revue Roumaine de Philosophie 55/1, pp. 149–167. ———. 2014a. “Making the Humanities Scientifc: Brentano’s Project of Philosophy as Science”. In: The Making of the Humanities.Volume III:The Making of the Modern Humanities. Eds. Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn.Amsterdam:Amsterdam University Press, pp. 543–554. ———. 2014b. “La science de la conscience selon Brentano”. In: Vers une philosophie scientifque. Le programme de Brentano. Ed. Charles-Edouard Niveleau. Paris: Démopolis, pp. 51–69. ———. 2017a.“The Brentanist Philosophy of Mathematics in Edmund Husserl’s Early Works”. In: Essays on Husserl’s Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. Ed. Stefania Centrone. Berlin: Springer. pp. 147–168. ———. 2017b. “Einfüsse auf Husserl”. In: Husserl-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Ed. Sebastian Luft and Maren Wehrle. Stuttgart: Metzler, pp. 22-32. Jaray, Kimberly. 2006.“Reinach and Bolzano”. In: Symposium:The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 10/2, pp. 473–491. Lehrer, Keith and Marek, Johann Christian. (Eds). 1997. Austrian Philosophy Past and Present. Essays in Honor of Rudolf Haller. Dordrecht: Springer. Meinong, Alexius. 1965. Philosophenbriefe. Ed. Rudolf Kindinger. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt. Moran, Dermot. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2005. Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Morscher, Edgar. 2006. “The Great Divide Within Austrian Philosophy. The Synthetic a Priori”. In: The Austrian Contribution to Analytic Philosophy. Ed. Mark Textor. London: Routledge, pp. 250–263. Richardson, Alan. 1997. “Toward a History of Scientifc Philosophy”. In: Perspectives on Science 5/3. pp. 418–451. Ricœur, Paul. 1987. A l’école de la phénoménologie. Paris:Vrin. Rollinger, Robin. 1999. Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano. Phaenomenologica 150. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 2008. Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, and Others on Mind and Object. Frankfurt: Ontos. Schuhmann, Karl. 1973. Die Dialektik der Phänomenologie I. Husserl über Pfänder, Phaenomenologica 56. Den Haag: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1988.“Brentano und die Münchener Phänomenologie”. In: Brentano Studien 1, pp. 97–107. ———. 1990. “Contents of Consciousness and States of Affairs”. In: Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics:The Philosophy andTheory of Language of Anton Marty. Ed. Kevin Mulligan, Primary Sources in Phenomenology 3. Den Haag/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 197–214.
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Phenomenology and Austrian philosophy ———. 2004a. “Phänomenologie. Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Refexion”. In: Karl Schuhmann: Selected Papers on Phenomenology. Eds. Cees Leijenhorst and Piet Steenbakkers. Dordrecht: Kluwer. pp. 1-33. ———. 2004b. “Die Entwicklung der Sprechakttheorie in der Münchener Phänomenologie”. In: Karl Schuhmann: Selected Papers on Phenomenology. Eds. Cees Leijenhorst and Piet Steenbakkers. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 79–99. Schuhmann, Karl and Smith, Barry. 1991.“Neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology:The Case of Emil Lask and Johannes Daubert”. In: Kant-Studien 82(3), pp. 303–318. Simons, Peter. 2006. “Austrian Philosophers on Truth”. In: The Austrian Contribution to Analytic Philosophy. Ed. Mark Textor. London: Routledge, pp. 159–183. Smith, Barry. 1990. “Towards a History of Speech Act Theory”. In: Speech Acts, Meanings and Intentions. Critical Approaches to the Philosophy of John R. Searle. Ed. Burkhardt. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, pp. 29–61. ———. 1993. “Von T. G. Masaryk bis Jan Patocka: Eine philosophische Skizze”. In: T. G. Masaryk und die Brentano-Schule. Eds. Josef Zumr and Thomas Binder. Graz/Prague: Czech Academy of Sciences, pp. 94–110. ———. 1994. Austrian Philosophy:The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1997. “The Neurath-Haller Thesis: Austria and the Rise of Scientifc Philosophy”. In: Austrian Philosophy Past and Present. Essays in Honor of Rudolf Haller. Eds. Keith Lehrer and Johann Christian Marek. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 1–20. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1975. Doing Phenomenology. Essays on and in Phenomenology, Phaenomenologica 63. Den Haag: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1982. The Phenomenological Movement, Phaenomenologica 5/6, 3rd edition. Den Haag: M. Nijhoff. Uebel, Thomas. 2000. Vernunftkritik und Wissenschaft. Otto Neurath und der erste Wiener Kreis. Wien/New York: Springer. Varga, Peter Andras. 2015. “Was hat Husserl in Wien außerhalb von Brentanos Philosophie gelernt? Über die Einfüsse auf den frühen Husserl jenseits von Brentano und Bolzano”. In: Husserl-Studies 31/2, pp. 95–121. Wolenski, Jan. 1997. “Haller on Wiener Kreis”. In: Austrian Philosophy Past and Present. Essays in Honor of Rudolf Haller. Eds. Keith Lehrer and Johann Christian Marek. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 45–54. Zahavi, Dan. 2008. “Phenomenology”. In: The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Ed. Dermot Moran. London: Routledge, pp. 661–692.
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PART II
Issues and concepts in phenomenology
8 AESTHETICS AND ART Fotini Vassiliou
The dawn of phenomenological aesthetics in the work of Edmund Husserl It is often said that Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of the phenomenological movement, notoriously neglected the thematics of aesthetics and art. But while he did not propose a fully developed aesthetic theory, Husserl did provide signifcant insights that inspired and defned subsequent attempts to articulate a phenomenological aesthetics. In his own writing, Husserl parallels aesthetic experience with the phenomenological attitude. Both presuppose a kind of epoché from the natural naïve stance and reveal the givenness of their objects as phenomena when the issue of existence is under suspension. Echoing Kant, Husserl describes aesthetic experience as a disinterested state disconnected from the object’s being or non-being and free from all theoretical and practical interests. In aesthetic contemplation we don’t think about the object or turn toward it to determine it conceptually and describe it by means of predications (see, e.g., Hua XXIII, 591/709–10; see also the famous letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal written in January 12th, 1907, published in Hua-Dok III/3, 133–136. It is also expressed at several points in Husserl’s working notes gathered in Hua XXIII). Furthermore, we do not desire the object in order “to take delight in it as something actual” (Hua XXIII, 145 n.1/168 n.6). Husserl calls feelings like delight, love, or desire that presuppose belief object-feelings, which are clearly distinguished from the aesthetic feelings involved in aesthetic experience (Hua XXIII, 391/463–464). Aesthetic feeling-intentionalities are always constitutively founded.This means that aesthetic contemplation always presupposes an already constituted objectity toward which it is directed.At the undermost level of transcendent experience, aesthetic pleasure (or displeasure) is founded on simple perception, which is not itself a founded act.Analogously to “perception” (Wahrnehmung), Husserl names this originary aesthetic experience “value-(re)ception (Wertnehmung)” (Hua IV, 9/11). This gives us, “in immediate ‘intuitability’” (Hua IV, 25/27), perceptual spatio-temporal objects charged with value-characters, with some kind of “aesthetic coloration” (Hua XXIII, 389/462). For Husserl, then, beauty is frst given in the originary intuitional act of valuereception as an objective character of the object itself (Hua IV, 14/16). Aesthetic pleasure (or displeasure) is an intrinsically intentional mental phenomenon directed to its own transcendent correlate, namely the aesthetically signifcant object.
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Aesthetic experience may be existence-indifferent, but at the same time it is a turning toward. In this sense it involves an “aesthetic interest” (Hua XXIII, 586/704) directed, particularly, toward the how of the object’s appearance.What matters is “what appears as it appears,” (Hua XXIII, 587/705) “the presented object in the How of its presentedness” (Hua XXIII, 586/704), the “objectivity in its How” (Hua XXIII, 591/710). Let us see how this idea works in the case of taking the aesthetic attitude toward a painting. Husserl delineates here the following intentional nexus: (a) the perceptual constitution of the physical substrate (e.g., the colored piece of canvas); (b) the quasi-perceptual constitution and appearance of the image-object (Bild-Object), the painting as a depiction, which Husserl calls “a nothing (ein Nichts)” (Hua XXIII, 46/50); and (c) the either positing or non-positing consciousness of the image-subject (Bild-Subject), namely of the object that has been represented. In image-consciousness, the image-subject is the prevailing aim of our intention.The aesthetic dimension, however, emerges when the mind leaves the primary object of its ordinary intention and remains captured in the image-object and its subjective givenness. We live, then, in the aesthetic pleasure or displeasure which the How of the appearing awakens. For Husserl, “the manner of appearing alone is aesthetic” (Hua XXIII, 391/463); it alone is the “bearer of aesthetic feeling-characteristics” (Hua XXIII, 389/462). So, when Husserl rigidly claims that “(w)ithout an image, there is no fne art” (Hua XXIII, 44/41), he is actually pointing to a necessary presupposition of the aesthetic attitude, namely the movement of consciousness from its primary object to its image, considered as the primary object’s mode of appearing.This also holds for objects in nature, where our consciousness moves from direct perceptual correlates to their manner of appearing and remains aesthetically captured therein. The constitution of an aesthetically valuable object on the basis of image-consciousness and its aesthetic dimension, however, does not suffce for the constitution of a work of art in the full sense. Works of art as cultural objects are constituted by historically formed, intersubjective communions of persons, who operate within the personalistic attitude of everyday life. The analyses Husserl offers in the second book of his Ideen (Hua IV) are illuminating on this signifcant issue.
Aesthetics and art among early phenomenologists Waldemar Conrad (1878–1915) was the frst of Husserl’s disciples to apply the eidetic phenomenological method to the feld of aesthetics. In his long essay “Der ästhetische Gegenstand: Eine phenomenologische Studie” (1908–9), and on the basis of a presuppositionless attitude that would overcome existence-related determinations of the spatio-temporally extended realizations of artworks, Conrad sought to grasp the ideal essence of literary, plastic, and musical pieces of art and, ultimately, the aesthetic object in general. In the same vein,Theodor Conrad (1881–1969), in his dissertation titled “Defnition und Forschungsgehalt der Ästhetik” (Munich, 1908), objected forcefully to the reduction of aesthetics to psychology and argued instead that aesthetics is a science of value. On his part, Moritz Geiger (1880–1937) placed special emphasis on the existential meaning of art and believed that aesthetics can provide a crucial point of access to the essence of human existence (see Geiger 1913 and the posthumous Geiger 1976). Undeniably, though, the most systematic attempt among early phenomenologists to articulate a phenomenological aesthetics is found in the work of Roman Ingarden (1893–1970). As a realist interpreter of Husserl with respect to both the external world and universals, Ingarden insisted on an ontological reading of phenomenology and sought to unearth the a priori necessary structure and essential laws of pure consciousness itself. Within this context he came to grips with the thematic of aesthetics, which “was intended as preparation for unraveling the problem of reality” (Ingarden 1962, viii/x).The outcomes of his thorough scrutiny of the work 114
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of art and its ontology, on the one hand, and of the cognitive acts involved in aesthetic experience, on the other, were meant to contribute to his fght against transcendental idealism. A genuine phenomenological aesthetics, according to Ingarden, must overcome distorted objectivist or subjectivist approaches to the aesthetic phenomenon and carry out the twofold task of investigating the correlation between constitutive intentional acts and constituted aesthetic formations. Ingarden does not construe aesthetic experience as some kind of momentary feeling of pleasure or displeasure; instead he explicates it in terms of its composite structure and phases of development (see Ingarden 1961, 295). As regards works of art, Ingarden clarifes that they are not identical with the material objects of what he describes as empirically and transcendentally mind-independent physical reality, even if works of art always presuppose some real substrate (Ingarden 1961, 294). Neither are they ideal timeless beings like the objects of mathematics.Works of art are intentional, which means they are constituted, like all social and cultural objects, by acts of consciousness. Artistic objects are, thus, doubly founded.Their existence and essential structure depend on real beings and the intentional acts of their makers and receivers. Ingarden is mostly known for his treatment of the literary work, in which he delineated four constitutive strata: (a) the phonetic stratum of the oral or written linguistic formations; (b) the semantic stratum of meanings that arise as word sounds are ensouled by ideal concepts; (c) the stratum of schematized aspects by means of which the subject matter of the artwork is represented; and (d) the subject matter itself, namely the objectivities that are represented in the artwork (see Ingarden 1931). But Ingarden also dealt in depth with painting, music, architecture, sculpture, and flm, investigating the pertinent layered structure of each. The distinction between the work of art and the aesthetic object occupies a central position in Ingarden’s phenomenology. The work of art, the product of the artist’s intentional acts, is a self-same entity that contains points or areas of indeterminateness (Ingarden 1931, §38). It is a “schematic creation” (see, e.g., Ingarden 1964, 199) that has qualities that appear schematically but also several components or features in potential. It is the interpretative reconstruction by the individual observer, listener, or reader that completes the artwork and renders it concrete. Each such concretization is an aesthetic object.The process of concretization is permeated by a kind of imagination-driven creativity and, besides the reconstruction of what is actually present, consists in flling out the schematic elements of the work of art and actualizing its potential. One work of art can thus be differently, more or less faithfully, and according to the guidelines offered by the work itself, concretized in its different viewings, readings, or hearings. Each aesthetic concretization is characterized by a certain dependent freedom, guided by the artistic object’s potentialities. Being part of the intellectual ferment of early phenomenology, Ingarden was also concerned with the thematic of values. He believed that the material substratum of an artwork is valueneutral. But he also argued that an intentional artwork possesses value-neutral qualities whose combinations can found artistically valuable moments pertaining to the artwork’s different strata. Moreover, the artwork possesses potentially aesthetically valuable qualities that become intuitively manifest in its aesthetic concretizations (Ingarden 1964, 205). Upon these aesthetically valuable qualities rest aesthetic values that characterize the concretized artwork as a whole (see, e.g., Ingarden 1975, 268).As several relations of one-sided or mutual dependence hold between the strata, their pertinent values are in a constant interrelation so that new values may arise and an overall polyphonic harmony may be accomplished.According to Ingarden, true works of art exhibit higher order metaphysical values, such as the sublime, the tragic, the sinful, or the comic, which pertain to the stratum of the represented objectivities and reveal the deeper meaning of life. Ingarden’s approach thus shows that a work of art can be evaluated in a compound manner as to its distributed merits and demerits. And the fact that different aspects of the overall value 115
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stratifcation may be emphasized explains how the artwork can be met with varied or even discordant evaluative judgments.
Martin Heidegger on aesthetics and the work of art While Ingarden stayed faithful to basic Husserlian problems of phenomenological analysis in his theoretical treatment of artworks, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Husserl’s most promising student, approached art from a new perspective. This was dictated by the crucial question of his fundamental ontology, namely the question of the meaning of Being (see Heidegger 1977a, 73/86). On this approach, what should be investigated in discussing art is what determines works of art as works of art and thus allows them to show themselves on their own terms. Famously, Heidegger repudiated traditional aesthetics and its preoccupation with “aesthetic” experience and beauty. For him, the problem of art is not a problem of aesthetics since the aesthetic approach to art adopts a Cartesian metaphysical framework, which Heidegger strenuously rejected in his early magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (1927).There, he denounced the subject–object dichotomy prevalent in modern thought as an outcome of theoretical and scientifc projections, taking Dasein’s everyday life and the world of its practical concerns as his starting point. Under this view, in the Heideggerian treatment of art, human beings are not thematized as feeling subjects who experience pleasure when encountering artistic objects.That would wrongly reduce art to a mere matter of human physiology. But neither is the work of art posited as a presentat-hand thingly object supposedly loaded with characteristic value properties. Heidegger argues that such a view presupposes the notion of thingness in one of the following traditional ways: (a) as substance with properties; (b) as unity emerging out of a sensuous manifold; or (c) as matter shaped by form. He shows that all three are derivative of and rooted in the primordial way entities are given as ready-to-hand for our practical concerns and tasks. Heidegger actually points to a more authentic engagement with works of art, which can be best illuminated if we consider his interpretation of the notion of disinterestedness. In the frst of his Nietzsche lectures (1936–37), “Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst,” Heidegger underlines a common and fatal misinterpretation regarding the defnition of Kant’s “disinterested delight,” which “leads to the erroneous opinion that with the exclusion of interest every essential relation to the object is suppressed” (Heidegger 1996, 110/110). In fact, Heidegger tells us, “(t)he opposite is the case” (Heidegger 1996, 110/110). He claims that Kant, by negatively delineating disinterestedness, proceeds with a path-breaking methodology in order to bring to light the essence of aesthetic beauty itself. By excluding all cognitive and practical interests,“the essential relation to the object itself comes into play” (Heidegger 1996, 110/110). Free from any interest in possessing, controlling, or using the object to achieve something else, we attend to it in an unconstrained way, “purely as it is in itself,” and let it “come before us in its own stature and worth” (Heidegger 1996, 109/109). In such engagement with the object, this “letting the beautiful be what it is” (Heidegger 1996, 109/109), a human being arrives at the “fullness of his essence” (Heidegger 1996, 113/113). When we authentically encounter an artwork, we do not turn to it and its subject matter with any theoretical or practical concern; we rather let it disclose the beings it sets forth as what they truly are.The work of art opens up a space for beings to shine forth, to reveal themselves. Heidegger, thus, speaks of art in terms of a “happening of truth” (e.g., Heidegger 1977b, 45/57). And by “truth” he does not mean a correspondence between assertions and facts. He means truth in its most original sense of aletheia, as the coming-out-of-oblivion (of lehte). In the famous phenomenological description of Van Gogh’s painting Boots with Laces (1886), Heidegger articulates this idea vividly.The Being of a pair of shoes, as shoes, cannot be manifested to us as long 116
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as we depend upon their equipmental reliability, as long as we use them in an unobstructed way in our everyday lives.Van Gogh’s painting, though, is the site where the world of the worn-out shoes, taken to belong to a peasant woman, is opened up so that we see the equipmentality of the shoes; we see “what shoes are in truth” (Heidegger 1977b, 21/35). In other words, the world of the shoes is not itself an object or an aggregate of objects; it is rather the horizon of intelligibility according to which this example of equipment is meaningfully given to us.And this is what reveals itself in the work of art. The truth-revealing function of art is not accomplished by the representation or imitation of reality.The artwork does not function as a sign pointing beyond itself toward the represented objects or states of affairs. It is the artwork itself that embodies the disclosed world. But every disclosure is, at the same time, concealment. Heidegger uses the notion of earth (Erde) in order to refer to all those hidden elements of beings that remain ungraspable and elusive, to “that which is by nature undisclosable” (Heidegger 1977b, 33/47). An artwork opens up a world but also presents the earth, the dark ground out of which the world springs forth. Part of the earth is the material of the artwork, the pigment, stone, or wood from which it is made.The artwork, unlike the artifact or the tool, presents those material elements in their materiality; it “lets the earth be an earth” (ibid., 32/46). Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of the world and earth of a Greek temple clarifes paradigmatically the antagonistic but complementary relation between the tensions of disclosure and concealment that essentially characterizes works of art. Importantly, Heidegger places poetry at the center of his conception of art. Poetry is meant, though, in a broad sense as poiesis, as bringing into being. He says that “(a)ll art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry” (Heidegger 1977b, 59/72).Through their works, artists speak poetically.They do not use language instrumentally for communication; they rather set forth the poetic speech of authentic thinking, language in its primary function of bringing “what is, as something that is, into the Open for the frst time” (Heidegger 1977b, 61/73). Phenomenology also belongs in this category. As the philosophical method of revealing the concealed and normally forgotten, phenomenology, like art, brings the Being of beings to light (Heidegger 1977a, §7 C). Not surprisingly, Heidegger associated his thought with Hölderlin’s poetry and Cézanne’s painting. In one of his pilgrimages to Cézanne’s homeland (in March 1958), Heidegger is even reported to have said that he has found Cézanne’s path, “the path to which, from beginning to end, my own path as a thinker corresponds in its own way” (see Petzet 1993, 143).
The French contribution Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) played a leading role in the reception of German phenomenology in France. He was heavily infuenced by Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of intentional consciousness, but he also embraced Heidegger’s existential approach and focused his philosophical interest on the concrete human being and human condition. Contrary, though, to Heidegger’s insight about the revelation of the truth of Being independently of Dasein’s volition, Sartre praises consciousness’ radical, unconstrained freedom and its total responsibility to shape the world through its sense-giving activity.With their acts, humans, as “directors of being,” (Sartre 1948, 46/39) relentlessly make the world reveal new faces and orderings.This same theoretical framework determines Sartre’s attitude toward art. Artistic creation, but also aesthetic contemplation, is thus seen as an expression of our power of unconditional choice. The role of imagination is crucial in this respect. In the eyes of Sartre, imagination, in its mental and pictorial variations, denies what is actually given and animates some psychic or physical intermediate respectively, the analogon, as he calls it, aiming intuitively at the imagined as 117
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something irreal situated in an irreal context. Such imaginary irrealities are the aesthetic objects of our aesthetic attitude. Aesthetic pleasure, which Sartre clearly distinguishes from the enjoyment we take from sensory experience, is precisely a manner of apprehending imaginary objects (Sartre 1940, 362–73/188–94). Importantly, in the Sartrean approach, perception and imagination exclude each other. In a painted portrait, for example, the material and analogical dimensions of the painting are surpassed as soon as we envision the imaged person. The painted canvas and the picture in its representing function are left behind, neglected; they are no longer given, no longer perceived (e.g., Sartre 1940, 232/120). Furthermore, the irreal aesthetic object, insofar as it is not posited as actual, is itself absent; it is a form of nothingness (néant) appearing in the work of art. In his own interpretation of aesthetic disinterestedness, Sartre claims that, in the aesthetic attitude, we imaginatively nihilate beings and aim at the nothingness of the imagined. Sartre explains taking the aesthetic attitude toward nature in a similar way. A real thing, he urges, is never beautiful. We apprehend natural beauty by adopting an imaginative attitude toward reality. The real thing then stops being perceived and becomes an analogon of itself, permitting the manifestation of an aesthetic image of what the object is or could be. It is the ensemble, the confguration of the elements of the irreal object, that is beautiful. Indeed, the contemplation of beauty is accompanied by a “painful disinterest” in the real object, since the withdrawal of reality cancels any desire toward it (e.g., Sartre 1940, 372–3/193–4). What will become emblematic of Sartre’s phenomenological aesthetics is the importance he reserves for literature.The core idea here is that in paintings, sculptures, and pieces of music, the aesthetic object and the aesthetic senses it carries cannot but be seen in the real substratum of the artwork. Colors, clay, and musical notes always point inwardly to something that is present in them. They embody aesthetic sense and communicate moods or feelings, but they cannot refer to anything beyond themselves.The yellow color in the clouds of Tintoretto’s Crucifxion (1565) does not signify anguish; the yellowish sky is itself anguish (Sartre 1948, 15/9). In this, Sartre points out that painting, sculpture, and music do not make use of language and cannot communicate conceptual meanings; they don’t say anything. Even poetry emphasizes the material qualities of language, which leads to the reduction of its signifcative function. Poets are thus “mute” because they use words the way painters use colors, creating language objects. Prose writers, however, use words as signs that point to objects, persons, and events beyond themselves. Through words, situations in the world are disclosed (Sartre 1948, 13ff/7ff). In his later writings Sartre attenuated his dismissive attitude toward poetry, but he never stopped praising the distinct signifcative function of prose literature. In Sartre’s view, it is precisely this that means literature can be engaged and committed, which is the point where Sartre’s aesthetic, ethical, and political insights meet. Not bound by the medium, the writer enjoys the privilege of fully and unrestrictedly controlling language and conveying his or her intended meanings. This literal creation is offered generously as a gift and an appeal to readers, who choose freely to respond not only aesthetically but also morally and politically. Sartre’s contemporary and philosophical interlocutor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), was also infuenced by both Husserl and Heidegger. In his Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty investigated our primordial being-in-the-world, which precedes all dualisms imposed by the objective thought of common sense and science. He showed that, primordially, we live as incarnate subjects within the world of perception and action.The later Merleau-Ponty radicalized this theory of incarnate subjectivity and attempted to reveal a deeper ontological structure. In his unfnished manuscript of Le Visible et l’Invisible, and in his research notes, we fnd elements of an ontological circuit between man and nature, an ontological net of wild or brute Being (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 234, 251/183, 200). Man and worldly things share the same 118
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ontological fesh (chair), the primordial “weaving” of which is expressed in perception, language, philosophical logos, and art. For Merleau-Ponty, art, especially painting, thus acquires a special ontological weight. It is shown to be an “authentic language” that re-discovers and expresses our primordial being-in-the-world. Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty describes the artistic aesthetic attitude in terms of a reduction in the feld of primordial experience. By this peculiar epoché, the artist suspends both common and scientifc knowledge and works “in full innocence” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 13/161). He or she “peels off ” sedimentations of human praxis, evaluation, and theoretization in an attempt to re-constitute the process of perceiving, to capture the essence of how the primordial world comes to being in its appearing. Merleau-Ponty claims that it is precisely by rendering manifest the essence of perception that painting and art in general can be seen as giving access to perceptual truth, that it is “the actualization of a truth” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, xv/lxxxiv). For Merleau-Ponty, Paul Cézanne became the paradigmatic case of an artist who, as a quasiphenomenologist, reveals perception and the world at the moment of their becoming in a painterly way (Merleau-Ponty 1948, 15–44/121–49). To illustrate this, Merleau-Ponty looks at how Cézanne’s paintings, against the academism of his time, do not call on us to see them from a single point of view as if our eyes were cameras. By combining views from varying angles, objects are presented as if seen from multiple points of view. Furthermore, the different superimposed planes manage to depict different levels of depth.The synthesis of these different aspectual elements gives “voluminosity” to the painted objects and depth to the painting itself. Perspective and depth in Cézanne’s works are not constructions of geometrical projections. They are rather lived dimensions of primordial perception. This is further enhanced by the way Cézanne presents the atmosphere of the impression without losing, as with Impressionism, the thing itself in its reality. And he achieves this by neither abolishing outlines nor by tracing just one; in his paintings, modulated colors indicate multiple outlines to delineate the painted fgures and hint at their inner horizons. Distorted, swollen things, disjoined perspectives, multiple outlines, and discordant parts all contribute to the revelation of the hidden logic of visual perception, to the presentation of the thing in its making, in its emergence as a product of a lived process.According to Merleau-Ponty, the artist, the painter par excellence, grasps the “nascent logos” (Merleau-Ponty 1947, 133/25) of perception, the intuitive logos that, without the mediation of concepts, rules the “emerging order” of the sensuous presence of the world. And by exercising his or her “secret science” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 14/161), the painter actually rearranges the world of things, like the poet rearranges language, creating another order, a “new system of equivalences which demands precisely this particular upheaval (and not just any one)” (Merleau-Ponty 1960, 71/56). Art’s essential function is thus to approach the unthinkable and, functioning as “speaking speech (parole parlante)” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 229/202), bring it to being for the frst time. This is how, for example, Cézanne “speaks as the frst man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before” (Merleau-Ponty 1948, 32/69). The French philosopher who most systematically and extensively dealt with phenomenological aesthetics was Mikel Dufrenne (1910–1995). His Sorbonne thesis, the Phénoménologie de l’Expérience Esthétique, was published in 1953 in two volumes devoted, respectively, to the aesthetic object and aesthetic perception. Inspired by Husserl, Dufrenne conceives these as poles of a noesis–noema intentional correlation. In constant dialogue with Ingarden, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne thus attempts to trace a phenomenological path distinct from subjectivist and objectivist aesthetic theories. Similar to Ingarden, he distinguishes between the intersubjectively self-identical work of art and the aesthetic object that is given once the work of art is aesthetically perceived. He objects, though, to Ingarden’s radical separation of perception and aesthetic experience directed toward purely intentional objects. 119
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Likewise, Dufrenne rejects Sartre’s accentuation of imagination and the sharp exclusion of perception from the realm of aesthetic experience. For Dufrenne, the aesthetic object is not cut off from perception, either as a purely intentional object (Ingarden) or as an imaginary irreal being (Sartre). More in accord with Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne argues that the aesthetic object “is still a perceived object” (Dufrenne 1953, 273/212). However, this is not about the reduction of the aesthetic object to the “brute sensuousness” (Dufrenne 1953, 187/138) of ordinary percepts. Due to its inner logic of organization, the aesthetic object is permeated with meaning (sens), but this meaning never transcends the realm of the sensuous (le sensible). Carrying its immanent aesthetic meaning, “(t)he aesthetic object is nothing other than the sensuous appearing in its glory” (Dufrenne 1978, 403) In Dufrenne’s view, then, the pivotal point is the claim that the aesthetic object is capable of expressing its inherent meanings. It does not function as a sign that points to something beyond itself, and its purpose is neither to depict, nor to knowingly demonstrate, nor to inform us of anything. The purpose of art is to express. Dufrenne grounds his insistence on the autonomy of art in this point.The aesthetic object is self-luminous and not, as Ingarden had it, heteronomously determined. It is, in Sartre’s terms, both in-itself and for-itself, or, in Dufrenne’s exact words, a “quasi-subject” (Dufrenne 1953, 488/393) with which the spectator is, so to speak, intersubjectively and empathically related. The expressive aesthetic object reveals its own depth, its self-suffcient and unitary affective world. And precisely because of the world it opens, the aesthetic object is true. Truth here is not related to ordinary perception, which “looks for a truth about the object” (Dufrenne 1978, 403) and ends in some objectifying act of knowledge or some practical act. Dufrenne parallels aesthetic experience with phenomenological reduction, where belief in existence is suspended, as are intellectual and practical concerns.Aesthetic experience, as lived by spectators, is directed toward the object for its own sake and “seeks out the truth of the object such as it is immediately given in the sensuous” (Dufrenne 1978, 403). It is the truth that pertains specifcally to the realm of the affective.Through an involved, performative, and gradually unfolding attitude, the spectator reads the object’s expressive character as given in a non-conceptual language.The constituents, more particularly, that compose such an attitude, what Dufrenne calls aesthetic perception, are: (a) sensuous perception that presupposes the subject’s concrete bodily presence; (b) representation that is closely related to a restrained imagination; and (c) a “sympathetic refection” (Dufrenne 1953, 488/393, 490/395) that culminates in aesthetic feeling. In aesthetic perception, the subject experiences the resonance of its own existential depth with the inner logic of the aesthetic object in its very being. Dufrenne’s aesthetic insights thus shed light on the intimate relation between man and world. This project is complemented by the fnal part of Dufrenne’s Phénoménologie de l’Expérience Esthétique, where a critique of aesthetic experience provides, in a Kantian spirit, an investigation into the conditions of possibility for the correlation of aesthetic experience and the aesthetic object.According to Dufrenne, it is the affective a priori that governs this correlation (see Dufrenne 1953, 455–56; see also Dufrenne 1959). More specifcally, regarding its subjective or existential dimension, the affective a priori is a “pre-understanding actualized in experience” (Dufrenne 1978, 408). Regarding its objective or cosmological dimension, it is “that which gives it (the object) form and meaning, that by which it is constituted as capable of a world” (Dufrenne 1978, 408). These affective categories render the subject sensitive to the affective meaning that emerges from the lawfully ordered organization of the aesthetic object. Following a similar path to that of the later Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne radicalizes his view and in his Le Poétique (1963) seeks the ontological source of both subject and world. He claims there that Nature, with a capital N, is “the a priori of the a priori linking man to the world” (Dufrenne 120
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1963, 181) at the most fundamental level. Poiesis of Nature is what grounds all artistic creation and expression. Dufrenne’s view about the preeminent status of poetry is crucial, as poetic language brings us closer to the upsurge of language itself and expresses the original affective communion between man and world in a paradigmatic way.
References Dufrenne, Mikel. 1953. Phénoménologie de l’Expérience Esthétique, 2 vols. Paris: PUF. Trans. E. Casey, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. 1959. La Notion de l’A Priori. Paris: PUF. Trans. S. Casey, The Notion of the A Priori. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966. ———. 1963. Le Poétique. Paris: PUF. ———. 1978.“Intentionality and Aesthetics.” Man and World, 11/3–4: pp. 401–410. Geiger, Moritz. 1913. “Beitrӓge zur Phӓnomenologie des ӓsthetischen Genusses.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phӓnomenologische Forschung 1: pp. 567–684. ———. 1976. Die Bedeutung der Kunst. Eds. K. Berger and W. Henckmann. Munich:Wilhelm Fink.Trans. K. Berger, The Signifcance of Art.Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1986. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Gesamtausgabe 6.1. Nietzsche. Band I. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. Trans. D. F. Krell, Nietzsche I.The Will to Power as Art. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991. ———. 1977a. Gesamtausgabe 2. Sein und Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Trans. J. Macquarie and E. Robinson, Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. ———. 1977b.“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.” In: Gesamtausgabe 5. Holzwege. Ed. F.W. von Herrmann Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann, pp. 1–74. Trans. and ed. A. Hofstadter, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In: Poetry, Language,Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 15–87. Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2005. Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1901).Trans. J. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer. Ingarden, Roman. 1931. Das Literarische Kunstwerk. Eine Untersuchung aus den Grenzgebiet der Ontologie, Logik und Literaturwissenschaft. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1931.Trans. G. Grabowicz, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. 1961.“Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 21/3: pp. 289–313. ———. 1962. Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst. Musikwerk, Bild,Architektur.Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Trans. R. Meyer and J. Goldthwait, Ontology of the Work of Art:The Musical Work, the Picture, the Architectural Work, the Film.Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989. ———. 1964.“Artistic and Aesthetic Values.” British Journal of Aesthetics 4/3: pp. 198–213. ———. 1975. “Phenomenological Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33/3: pp. 257–69. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945. Phénoménologie de la Perception. Paris: Gallimard.Trans. D. Landes, Phenomenology of Perception. London/New York: Routledge, 2012. ———. 1947. “Le Primat de la Perception et ses Conséquences Philosophiques.” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 41: pp. 119–53.Trans. J. Edie,“The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences.” In: The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays. Ed. J. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 12–42. ———. 1948. “Le Doute de Cézanne.” In: Sens et Non-Sens. Paris: Nagel, pp. 15–44. Trans. M. Smith, “Cézanne’s Doubt.” In: The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Ed. G. Johnson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993, pp. 121–49. ———. 1960. “Le Langage Indirect et les Voix du Silence.” In: Ed. M. Merleau-Ponty. Signes. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 49–104. Trans. R. McCleary, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” In: Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 39–83. ———. 1964a. L’Oeil et l’Esprit. Paris: Gallimard. Trans. C. Dallery, “Eye and Mind.” In: The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays. Ed. J. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 159–90. ———. 1964b. Le Visible et l’Invisible. Paris: Gallimard.Trans.A. Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
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9 BODY Maxime Doyon and Maren Wehrle
Introduction Of all the important contributions phenomenology has made to philosophy, it is perhaps the thematization of the role of the body in experience that is the most decisive one. Descriptions of the specifc functions of the body feature in all phenomenological analyses of perception and action, as it is exemplary in the case of the pioneering work of Edmund Husserl (Hua XVI/1997), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012), and Martin Heidegger (1927/2008). The body also has a central role to play in various other areas of phenomenological research, including some that might at frst glance appear as thematically more remote, like for instance Max Scheler’s (1913/1970) conception of social relations, Merleau-Ponty’s investigations of arts and aesthetics (1964a), Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1943/1956) refections on politics, and Emmanuel Levinas’s (1961/1969) thoughts on ethics and religious experience. For classical phenomenologists, the body was by no means a topic among others (cf. for a comprehensive overview of phenomenological thinking on embodiment, Alloa et al. 2012); not only does it occupy a central place in their exploration of most if not all dimensions of experience, but their refections on embodiment also led some phenomenologists to draw important epistemological and even ontological conclusions about human experience and reality (Hua XXXVI; Merleau-Ponty 1964/1968). In the contemporary philosophical landscape, phenomenological analyses of embodiment have recently returned to the forefront of philosophical research, either as combined or in critical dialogue with other philosophical or scientifc approaches, such as analytic philosophy of mind (Zahavi 2002), cognitive and neuroscience (Gallagher 2017), developmental psychology (Zahavi and Rochat 2015), feminist theory (Heinämaa 2003, Weiss 1999, De Beauvoir 1949) queer theory (Ahmed 2006), transgender theory (Salamon 2010), and post-colonial theory (Fanon 1952), to name but a few. The phenomenology embodiment is now bolstering, as it provides important insights to other philosophical and scientifc disciplines, and proft, in return, of ideas borrowed from other areas of research (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012). Since they provide most of the methodological and conceptual resources of all the phenomenological analyses of embodiment, including those that aim at radically modifying, expanding or criticizing their works, this entry will focus on the phenomenology of embodiment of Husserl (section 9.1) and Merleau-Ponty (section 9.2). Each section has the same tripartite structure: we frst (i) introduce the basic concepts and distinctions, before turning our attention to two more specifc sets of problems, namely their account of action and perception (ii), and 123
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their descriptions of social relations and intersubjective constitution (iii). We conclude with a brief survey of some important ideas at the heart of the so-called enactive view (section 9.3), which has incorporated a lot of important phenomenological insights into a more holistic conception of embodiment that also draws on empirical sciences and other philosophical traditions such as Anglo-American philosophy of mind and Buddhism.
9.1. Husserl I. The double constitution of embodiment as ‘Leib’ and ‘Körper’. One of the most well-known and neat introductions of the concept of the lived body (or embodiment) can be found in Husserl’s Ideas II, section II, chapter three: “the constitution of psychic reality through the body” (the respective manuscripts were written in 1912). Husserl’s aim in including the body into the philosophical debate was not primarily – as it is often assumed – to overcome the Cartesian mind–body dualism, but rather to show that and how bodily experience plays a key role in the philosophy of the sciences. In this regard, Husserl differentiates between a naturalistic and a personal attitude, the frst belonging to the natural sciences, while the latter is characteristic of the so-called humanities. In this context, the structure and essence of human embodiment is crucial, namely in that the body functions as a turning point between the interior and the exterior (Hua IV, 161, 285f./Husserl 1989, 168, 299). By this Husserl means that one can perceive the body in a twofold way, namely from a personal (or frst-person) perspective, i.e. as the subject of perception (Leib), or else from a naturalistic (or third-person) perspective, i.e. as a physical thing (Körper).This twofold nature of human embodiment as Leib and Körper also serves as the necessary background of our ability to address worldly ‘things’ either as “causal-thingly” parts or as “motivational-expressive” wholes (Heinämaa 2012, 230). The ‘double constitution’ (Hua IV, 144ff./Husserl 1989, 152ff.) of the body, as sensing subject and extended matter or object, characterizes its mediating position between the thinking I, soul and nature on the one hand, as well as between humanities and natural sciences on the other (cf. Hua IV, 175, 183f./Husserl 1989, 184, 193). This essential two-sidedness shows itself in Husserl’s famous description of the so-called ‘double sensation’ of the body: If we touch our left hand with our right hand, both hands can, dependent on our attitude or attention, appear as either the executing instance of touching or the object of touching.We can perceive the touched hand according to its physical or objective attributes, in its smoothness or roughness; it is then the object of perception or touch. But as soon as the localized sensations of the left hand enter the picture, this does not merely add to the characteristics of the physical thing ‘body’; in this very moment, it turns into a lived body (Leib) that itself senses (cf. Hua IV, 144f./Husserl 1989, 152). As Husserl repeatedly emphasizes, the naturalistic attitude, which presents the body as physical Körper, presupposes the personal attitude or mode of apprehension. For if I apprehend the objective characteristics of my left hand, I have to abstract from the sensational qualities that enable its givenness as an object in the frst place.The personal mode of apprehension is thus primary, while the naturalistic apprehension is secondary or derivative (cf. Hua IV, 144ff./Husserl 1989, 152ff.). In the same way that the naturalistic apprehension presupposes the personal, the experienced Leibkörper presupposes a primary experiencing Leib. While the body in the naturalistic attitude appears two-layered, as a physical and psychological stratum, from a personalistic perspective the very same body appears as an expressive whole, i.e. a unity of body and spirit (cf. Hua IV, 203-206, 236-247/Husserl 1989, 214–216, 248–259). If we describe the body from the ‘interior’ or as the subject of perception, it appears as a feld of localized sensations (Lokalisationsfeld der Empfndungen, sometimes also Empfndnisse).1 As such, 124
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it is conceived as the organ of the will and the seat of free movement. But there is more to it still: this subjective body or bodily self (cf. Waldenfels 2000) accompanies every experience, and is even regarded as the foundation of all intentionality and every cognitive act.The body as subject incorporates all our practical capabilities, skills and habits; it is the mobile centre or “zero-point of orientation” (Hua IV, 158/Husserl 1989, 166), in reference to which all other spatial objects are oriented as either left or right, above or beneath, near or far, etc. If, however, we take a look at the body from an exterior viewpoint, it appears as material, extended and embedded in the causal relations of nature; it is a visible, touchable and measurable object. But in contrast to ‘normal’ things, our body can only be perceived incompletely.We cannot look at it from a distance or from different perspectives:“The same body which serves me as means for all my perceptions obstructs me in the perception of itself and is a remarkably imperfectly constituted thing” (Hua IV, 159/Husserl 1989, 167). The body thus has a twofold status: it is on the one hand an organ of the will and perception, an “I can” (Hua XI, 14/Husserl 2001, 51) that provides our practical horizon of freedom, while on the other hand, as a material and feeling Leibkörper, our body, in being visible and touchable, is vulnerable, as it is easy to hurt, manipulate or attack. II.The body and perception. If Husserl fnally came to fully recognize the importance of the body for his analysis of perceptual experience, it was not immediately central to his philosophical endeavour. In his groundbreaking Logical Investigations, the phenomenological analysis of the body is at best indirectly implied by the concept of ‘fulflment’, on which much of his early analysis of perceptual experience turns. Perception is here described as a fulflling experience that involves the consciousness of a coincidence between an emptily intended sense and its corresponding intuitive content. When the intuitively given object is consciously presented as it has been emptily intended, the empty intention is said to be ‘satisfed’ or ‘fulflled’. Given the irreducible one-sidedness of every particular perception – viz. the fact that objects are always perceived under a certain aspect (cf. Hua XIX/2, 589ff./Husserl 2001, 220f.) – perceptual fulflment can only ever be partial or incomplete. This generates what is today called the problem of perceptual presence (cf. Noë 2004), which is brought about by the constitutive discrepancy between what is meaningfully intended (the object) in experience and what is sensibly given (the profle). For Husserl, this is unproblematic, however, for we are directed through the profle toward the object:“consciousness reaches out beyond what it actually experiences. It can so to say mean beyond itself, and its meaning can be fulflled” (Hua XIX/2, 574/Husserl 2001, 211). Husserl’s idea is that the unthematically co-intended profles are integrated in perceptual consciousness and thus contribute to the constitution of objects because perceptual consciousness is by its very nature transcendent. As such, it always stretches beyond itself and intends more than what is sensibly given. It is in the context of explaining the implications of this intending operation – which he will later call ‘Über-sich-hinaus-meinen’ (Hua I, §20, 84/Husserl 1960, 46) or sometimes simply ‘Hinausdeutung’ – that he implicitly refers to the body in the Logical Investigations. Husserl develops his thought on this by means of a phenomenological description of a perception of a piece of furniture covering up a carpet: “If I see an incomplete pattern, e.g. in this carpet partially covered up over by furniture, the piece I see seems clothed with intentions pointing to further completions – we feel as if the lines and coloured shapes go on ‘in the sense’ of what we see – but we expect nothing. It would be possible for us to expect something, if movement promised us further views” (Hua XIX/2, 574/Husserl 2001, 211). The thesis advanced here – which counts as the very frst appeal to bodily movement in Husserl’s published works – states that the object’s seen profle intentionally refers to other profles or aspects of the thing that could become visible via movement. But then Husserl adds that the kind of “occasions for possible 125
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expectations” that movement can generate “are not themselves expectations” (Hua XIX/2, 574/ Husserl 2001, 211). What Husserl is hinting at here is that the visual experience of the carpet does not imply any concrete expectations, and therefore does not command any concrete movements either, because that experience is not – or does not have to be – oriented toward its future realization. Such an experience does prescribe possibilities of fulflment; but these possibilities are mere logical possibilities, as it were; they do not command anything concrete. This explains Husserl’s early distinction between intention and expectancy: “Intention is not expectancy” (Hua XIX/2, 574/Husserl 2001, 211), which means that all intentions do not necessarily require fulflment. Intentions open up the possibility of fulflment, but, strictly speaking, they do not “command” anything, since “it is not of its essence to be directed to future appearances” (Id.; see J. Benoist 2016, 128ff.). Husserl’s view on this will rapidly change, however. After the discovery of the intrinsically temporal nature of consciousness (cf. Hua X/Husserl 1964), Husserl will come to realize that all possibilities anticipated in perception are necessary real, motivated possibilities.That the carpet will most likely continue according to the same pattern is itself motivated by my present experience of the carpet’s pattern and genetically by my habituated experience of carpet patterns continuing in a regular style (cf. Hua XXXIII, 13, 38; Hua XI, 186/Husserl 2001, 236). Both actual and past experience motivate specifc perceptual possibilities which are not just logical, but real or motivated ones (cf. Hua XX/1, 178ff.). In perception, intentions are motivated possibilities, and so they do demand fulflment, by their very essence. Qua intentions, they are empty (to differing degrees), but that emptiness is teleologically oriented toward fullness (cf. Bernet 2004). It is this very idea that Husserl starts to develop in the 1907 lecture-course Thing and Space, and which will be refned in the so-called ‘genetic’ phase of phenomenology in the early 1920s. From 1907 on, Husserl thus constantly stresses the fundamental role of movement in perception.The sensibly given side of the perceived object carries a sense of the whole object and includes indications of possible future locations of my body under which other aspects of the object could be given.The horizon of the co-intended but momentarily absent profles of the object is correlated with my kinaesthetic horizon, i.e. with my capacity for possible movement. The absent profles are experienced in an intentional ‘if–then’ relation: my relation to them is characterized by my awareness that if I move in this way, then this or that profle will become accessible (cf. Hua XVI §55/Husserl 1997, 159ff.; Hua XI §3/Husserl 2001, 47ff.). In Husserl’s view, this intentional law – which he calls the law of motivation – is rooted in ‘kinesthetic experience’, which is an expression Husserl uses to refer both to our capacity to move, the ‘I can’ that belongs to the body (Leib), and to the Ego’s capacity to experience the sensations resulting from the movement of one’s own body (Leib). Husserl calls these sensations ‘kinaesthetic sensations’, and they belong to our sensing Ego-Body.The specifcity of Husserl’s approach to perception is to argue that both kinds of kinaesthetic experience play an indispensable role in the constitution of perceptual objects (cf. Drummond 1983). It is not only our capacity to move freely our own bodies that is required for experiencing spatiotemporal objects, but kinaesthetic sensations are just as crucial. Husserl’s point is that my awareness of my kinaesthetic system, thanks to which I am horizontally aware of the absent profles of objects, is itself based on the tacit experience of my bodily position and of the relative positions of my bodily parts. This is why Husserl mentions in Thing and Space that the very possibility of the presentation of material things supposes a feld of kinaesthetic sensations:“The sensations of movement […] play an essential role in the apprehension of every external thing […] without their cooperation, there is no body there, no thing” (Hua XVI, §46, 160/Husserl 2011, 136). The most important function of kinaesthetic sensations is that they motivate the fow of appearances of perceptual objects, and they do so by generating a more or less defnite set of 126
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expectations. (For a criticism, see Crowell 2013, 136ff.) Perceptual experience is so constituted that I am always implicitly aware that if I perform a continuous bodily activity, then a corresponding series of appearances must unfold as motivated.According to Husserl, there is a covariance relation that holds between the sensations by which one is aware of the movements of one’s own body, and the appearances of the object.The kinaesthetic system does “not simply run parallel to the fow of appearances there; rather the kinaesthetic series [...] and the perceptual appearances are related to one another through consciousness” (Hua XI, §3, 14/Husserl 2001, 50f.).The correlation that obtains between the sensations of movement and the appearances of the object is responsible for the unity of the object, which is an intentional synthetic unity that Husserl conceives as an objective sense (ein gegeständlicher Sinn). In Husserl’s eyes, this process of constitution is teleological in the sense of being oriented toward a “limit”, namely the “consciousness of the most proper givenness.” (Hua XVI, §36, 126/ Husserl 1997, 105) This experience is “the goal of the perceptual movement” (Id.), and it is one for which “no further fulflment” (Hua XVI, §35, 125/Husserl 1997, 104) is needed. Husserl thus calls this an experience of the optimum and conceives it as the end or the goal (Ziel) of the perceptual process. Specifcally, the “thing itself ” is said to be given optimally when it manifests itself “in its saturated fullness” (Hua XI §4, 23/Husserl 2001, 61), that is to say, when it admits no more fulflment.The notion of ‘optimal givenness’ thus refers to something like a maximum of richness and differentiation, a peak in clarity and distinction. Such an optimum is a permanent possibility of perception (cf. Ms. D 13 III, 151a). By making the necessary psychophysical adjustments (changing our location, modifying the lighting, etc.), it is in principle always possible to optimize our experience and gain more determinate content. In this context, Husserl contends that the kinaesthetic paths themselves have their own laws and should be regarded from the point of view of the optimum as well (cf. Ms. D 13 I, 63a). Unless a hurdle surfaces or a particular diffculty arises, we, as perceptual agents, automatically tend to opt for the optimal path and move our body so as to optimize our perceptions.This is possible because our habitual body provides our experience with some kind of basic, but still norm-sensitive, orientation or direction (cf. Doyon 2015;Wehrle 2015).The kind of kinaesthetic freedom I enjoy in this context is therefore not total liberty, since of all the things ‘I can’ do, only some will resonate with my habitualized tendencies and appear suited or appropriate with regard to my perceptual goal (cf. Doyon 2018). III.The body and intersubjectivity. Embodiment is also crucial when it comes to what Husserl thematizes as the perception of the other people (‘Fremderfahrung’). In this regard, the internal split within human embodiment between a lived and a material body can be interpreted as a precondition for every form of empathy, i.e. the experience of other human (and to some extent also non-human) beings as living and conscious subjects with similar psychological or cognitive abilities. Although what we actually perceive is only the visible and external side of the body, the feeling, emotions and sometimes even the thoughts of the other can be virtually perceived by the behaviour and expression of this very body. This is possible because we ourselves have experienced this intertwinement of the exterior, material site of embodiment with an internal/ subjective side (notably in the phenomenon of the double sensation). In his lectures on intersubjectivity (Hua XIII–XV; cf. Kern 2017) as well as in his Cartesian Meditations (Hua I/Husserl 1960), Husserl describes in great detail the necessary function of the body for the perception and understanding of other subjects. It is a real puzzle to explain how we can apprehend other (human or non-human) bodies as the subjects of their own experiences (that is, as thinking, feeling, moving and sensing bodies) given that what we subjectively experience are only our own sensations. Husserl’s solution is to suggest that the sensations of other bodies can be apperceived. In perceptual experience, we automatically add something to our actual perception without having to explicitly posit anything mentally.What is ‘added’ (or 127
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ap-perceived) is indicated or motivated by this perception, but it is not itself actually perceived. In contrast to normal object perception, this specifc object, namely the lived body as that of another subject, can never come to an actual presence (like, when moving around it, I come to see the back side of a house). Rather, the ‘interior’ or the experiences of another animal body can only be ‘indicated’ by its visual appearance and behaviour.This limit is not a failure, but a phenomenological fnding: it is what makes the Other an other, that is, an Ego fundamentally different from myself.2 Husserl’s refections on this cluster of issues go back to 1910–11 (cf. Hua XIII,Text Nr. 8). While he frst thought that for experiencing an alien body as a sensing human being with similar capacities it was suffcient to imagine one’s own corporeal appearance ‘here’ as an external appearance over ‘there’, i.e. to think of oneself as physically moved to another place (Hua XIII, 253, 263), he later criticized his own approach for being too constructive or intellectual. Instead of thinking or imagining oneself in the place of the other, Husserl’s more mature analyses focus on the concrete expressions of the embodiment of others. He emphasizes in this regard that one perceptually experiences the body of the other as a sensing Leib similar to mine without having to infer such a similarity (cf. Hua XIII,Text Nr. 2). Contrary to contemporary inferentialist approaches to social cognition such as Theory of Mind (Carruthers 2015) or the Simulation Theory (Dennett 1987, Gallese 2014), Husserl – thereby clearly anticipating the enactivist view (see section 9.3 below) – thought that the perception of the other takes place in an immediate and direct way. It is based, he thought, on a passive process of association he called ‘coupling’ (Paarung). In this associative coupling, our own body functions as the instituting ‘original’, who initiates a passive process of identifcation between our body and the body of the other. Husserl describes this process as “a primal instituting, in which an object with a similar sense became constituted for the frst time” (Hua I, 141/Husserl 1960, 111). Other people are thus accessible to us through our bodily perception but only in a kind of “verifable accessibility of what is not originally accessible” (Hua I, 144/Husserl 1960, 114). More specifcally, others’ bodies are perceived as of the same type as ours: they, too, are seen as visible and touchable (objects) as well as perceiving and sensing (subjects). But this passive ‘assumption’ – namely that what we perceive is not only a physical body but also a lived body with soul, spirit and ego – has to be proven right, or better it must confrm and demonstrate itself in further sensuous experience or communication.The experience of others is therefore never originally or even fully given to us, but it is still directly accessible through our experiences of and with them, through the behaviour and gestures of their expressive body (Hua XIII, 234). In brief, through empathy (Einfühlung), we are able to experience the other directly: the facial expressions are seen facial expressions, and they are immediately bearers of sense indicating the other’s consciousness (Hua IV, 235/ Husserl 1989, 247). In its duality as material and animate, the body is therefore the concrete precondition not only of the constitution of space and perception, but also of every form of intersubjectivity and empathy.
9.2. Merleau-Ponty I. Body and world.While the body in Husserl still is in the service of consciousness or the Ego, and thus appears as an – although imperfectly – constituted thing, Merleau-Ponty tries in his Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de la perception, 1945) to bring this view, which he takes to be standing on its head, back on its feet: the body itself is now conceived as a subject in its own right and not as a mere medium of an ego or egoic will.The body, in its inalienable relation to the world, stands for our most primary mode of existence as a concrete and situated subject: “the subject that I am, understood concretely, is inseparable from this particular body 128
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and from this particular world” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 431). Our bodily existence thus combines consciousness and world, or, in Sartre’s words, the being ‘for itself ’ and the ‘being in itself ’ (cf. Sartre 1956). Merleau-Ponty’s ‘phenomenology of the body’ is in this sense an existentialist answer to Husserl’s approach and a critical comment on Sartre’s theory developed in Being and Nothingness.3 Basing himself on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty describes the body as a factual existence, i.e. as something that is in the world, and emphasizes the primarily practical character of our relation to the world. In contrast to Heidegger, who focuses on the formal description of the structures of Dasein and does not develop an explicit theory of embodiment, Merleau-Ponty is more interested in the concrete actions of the embodied subject. In this sense, the embodied subject is not just in the world, but (behaves) toward the world (which Merleau-Ponty captures by translating Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-sein as être-au-monde). As embodied subjects, we are on the one hand situated in the world in a spatial, temporal, natural, biological as well as historical and cultural way; on the other hand, we fnd ourselves in-situation with the world as the locus of our engagements and commitments. These two levels of situatedness are refected in the “two distinct layers” of the lived body, “that of the habitual body and that of the actual body” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 84). Our lived body (and the world) are always already there, even before we explicitly perceive or refect on them.An embodied and situated subject therefore possesses an individual (past experiences) as well as an over-individual (natural, cultural, generative) pre-history.The latter shows itself in dispositions and acquired habits that represent biological, historical and social developments and meanings, and of which the embodied subject is mostly unaware. Moreover, the subject does not only comprise of a personal horizon of beliefs, explicitly remembered events or decisions; as embodied, it is also determined by a “pre-personal horizon” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 261, cf. Al-Saij 2008) of events or processes the subject never actually experiences or knows about. Our own birth is, for example, a past that never has been present (to us), and our death is a future that will never appear to us. Nonetheless, both the over-individual pre-history as well as the pre-personal dimension are the foundation for every bodily existence and shape every concrete experience. Embodiment is thus not only twofold (Leib and Körper), but being a concrete bodily subject already comes with the prize of anonymity and ambiguity. According to Merleau-Ponty, the inherent ambiguity of the lived body that fnds itself between past and present, pre-personal and personal, natural and cultural dimensions, is not a defcit but rather a necessary condition for a concordant and unifed experience of the (transcendent) world and others (cf.Trigg 2017, Dillon 1988). II. Bodily perception. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is the primary mode of our relation to the world. Moreover, “perception is not a ‘mental’ event, for we experience our own sensory states not merely as states of mind, but as states of our bodies” (Carman 2012, xiv). It is in precisely this sense that Merleau-Ponty affrms that intentionality is frst and foremost a practical and motor intentionality. In this regard, Merleau-Ponty adopts the term ‘operative intentionality’ from Husserl, which he found in his late manuscripts (fungierende Intentionalität, cf. Merleau-Ponty 2012, 441). Operative intentionality, in contrast to act intentionality, does not mentally refer to an already constituted single object (thinking of a house), but describes a bodily aiming or reaching at, a general mode of practical directedness toward something. Like Husserl, Merleau-Ponty thus ascribes a specifc (motor) intentionality to the body: consciousness is originally not an ‘I think’, but rather an ‘I can’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 139; cf. Morris 2008, 116). Motor intentionality is characterized by kinaesthetic sensations or proprioception, as well as a bodily awareness of the surrounding environment and of worldly things that are relevant for the current action. It operates on a pre-refective or even a pre-personal level, in which we 129
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are not fully or explicitly aware of all the single operations involved, like when we carry out certain actions while our attention is directed elsewhere, such as when driving or walking while talking to a friend. But this does not mean that our action is a kind of subliminal or mechanical process that lacks any kind of consciousness. Rather, it is guided by a pre-refective form of self-consciousness by means of which we are at the same time aware of the sensory qualities of outer things (cf. Legrand 2006). Merleau-Ponty argues in this regard that motor intentionality is characterized by what he calls an “intentional arc” (2012, 137f.). Bodily movement points always beyond itself, spatially as well as temporally.While engaged in a bodily movement, we are ‘here’, but also already ‘there’, intending the thing or the action that drives our intentional project of activity:“The gesture of reaching one’s hand out toward an object contains a reference to this object, not as a representation, but as this highly determinate thing toward which we are thrown, next to which we are through anticipation, and which we haunt” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 140). In every current action the body thus synthesizes the past, present and future in an ‘intentional arc’. Merleau-Ponty illustrates the ‘normal’ functioning of motor intentionality and embodiment through a contrasting analysis of pathological cases. Throughout the Phenomenology of Perception, he refers several times to a patient of the German neurologists Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein named Schneider. Due to a war injury, Schneider has severe brain injuries and shows functional distortions in visual perception, movement, memory, thinking and social behaviour. Schneider is, for example, not able to point to his nose when asked to do so, although he perfectly ‘knows’ where his nose is when this movement is embedded in a practical or operative action, like sneezing or in shooing away a fy that sits on his nose. Schneider can thus ‘grasp’ his nose whenever this grasping is a part of a current action or situation, but he cannot ‘point’ to his nose on demand.The same problem occurs when Schneider is asked to show where one of his doctors lives: although he has visited the place several times before and ‘knows’ where it is, he is not able to ‘indicate’ its location on cue. Again, it seems that things and events have no meaning for him when they are too ‘abstract’, viz. when they are not integrated in a ‘concrete’ situation. For this reason, Merleau-Ponty affrms that Schneider is conscious of his own body and of its surroundings as an “envelope of his habitual action but not as an objective milieu”, which is why he is only able to act habitually, but not spontaneously (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 106). In short, Schneider has lost “the power to reckon with the possible” (Romdenh-Romluc 2011, 100), that is to say, he has lost the ability to put himself in a possible position and act accordingly. Instead, he is bound to the immediate present.The intentional arc has lost its elasticity, it went “limp” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 137; for a detailed analysis and critical discussion, cf. Jensen 2009). This affects not only perception and movement, but all domains of existence. For the intentional arc does not only temporarily synthesize movements and perceptions, but also links current actions and objects with past ones, thereby providing us with a temporal continuity and a continuity of meaning.This explains why Schneider also lacks an affective relation to the world and others, and why he is also no longer interested in erotic relations. According to MerleauPonty, sexuality cannot be reduced to a physical function, be it instinctive or refexive; sexuality addresses our whole way of existing (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 160). Having an interest and desire for someone or something implies a certain connection between past, present and future events; without such a connection, neither an affective tension nor a meaningful relation can be built up. One could say that Schneider is still situated, but no longer in-situation, that is, he is not engaged in a current situation or action. He does not desire any more, because he cannot project himself into an erotic situation. Although the future-oriented engagement with the world is disturbed, Schneider is still embedded in the world and perfectly able to operate within the world in a habitual way.This 130
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points to the necessary role of habits for every normal perception and action. Acquired habits, practical know-how and bodily abilities provide us with orientation and skills that do not need constant attention or intellectual interference (cf. recent research in philosophy, cognitive sciences and neurosciences that supports this: Dreyfus 1996, 2002; Milner and Goodale 2006). For Merleau-Ponty, it is the body schema that mediates between our current engagements and the body’s habits.‘Body schema’ is a concept Merleau-Ponty takes over from the psychology of his time (cf. Henry Head 1926, Paul Schilder 1923, Gelb and Goldstein 1920, Gallagher 2005) and re-formulates in the language of gestalt-theory. In contrast to a purely associative understanding of the body schema as a mere sum of information regarding different bodily functions (for example tactile and kinaesthetic sensations), Merleau-Ponty defnes the body schema as a holistic form of organization that is directed toward an environment.The single limbs of our body are not merely loosely connected; instead, “I hold my body as an indivisible possession and I know the position of each of my limbs through a body schema (schéma corporel)” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 100f.).The body schema thus expresses the unity of the body, a unity that is not static or pre-given, but has to generate and actualize itself constantly anew. Because of the body schema, we have an immediate ‘knowledge’ about our localization, size and position within an intersensorial world.We know, for example, whether we will ft through a particular door, whether we will be able to lift a certain object and how to move or behave in a given situation. Such practical knowledge literally has its locus in our body; it is not thematic as such, but is automatically retrieved in situation. Moreover, the body schema is dynamic because it is constantly enriched and extended by current interactions with the world and others. New motor senses, habits and abilities are being acquired and external objects, tools or prostheses are integrated within the body schema. The body schema is thus far from being the mere sum of actual information about the body; rather, it points beyond its current state as well as its material boundaries.The body schema mediates in this regard constantly between the currently performing body, which behaves and projects itself toward the world, and the habitual body, which determines the practical possibilities of this very body through already acquired skills and know-how. In this sense, the body more than a ‘zero-point of orientation’; it creates a feld of action or a situation: it is “the anchoring of the active body in an object, and the situation of the body confronted with its tasks” (MerleauPonty 2012, 103). Merleau-Ponty thus goes beyond the conception of a spatiality of positions toward a spatiality of situations, in which we do not merely occupy a spatial position, but actively inhabit a milieu. The body, which acts as the medium or spatial starting point for perception, is just as well a body of action, which is polarized according to its practical tasks. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty contends that the body schema is a “manner of expressing that my body is in and toward the world” (Id.). The body schema is thus what situates us in the world and at the same time guarantees a smooth interaction with this very world. It thereby facilitates an optimal perception or action in that it synchronizes the body with its environment to enable a ‘maximum grip’ (cf. Dreyfus 1996) on the world. As Merleau-Ponty states, for each object (he refers to the example of a picture in an art gallery), “there is an optimal distance from where it asks to be seen – an orientation through which it presents more of itself – beneath or beyond which we merely have a confused perception due to excess or lack” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 316).This tendency ‘toward the maximum of visibility’, which according to Merleau-Ponty every bodily subject has, is concretely realized through the body schema (see also Kelly 2005 and Taipale 2014, 121f.) In this sense, the maximum of visibility is not an objective norm, but a norm developed through the interaction between the subject and the object.What Merleau-Ponty points out is not the ideal of an adequate perception (independent of specifc perceivers) as, for example, Husserl some131
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times does (cf. Doyon 2018), but an optimum that fts with the general or individual abilities of bodily subjects.The object can only ‘ask to be seen’ in such or such a way if there is someone who is able to witness. Moreover, what an optimal perception or grip concretely adheres to must be relative to the respective interested actions and the overall environment. As Merleau-Ponty argues in his earlier work The Structure of Behavior (La structure du comportement, 1942), what an environment or object shows us or affords us is also highly dependent on our respective skills and habits (Merleau-Ponty 1963, 168f., cf.Wehrle and Breyer 2016, 45). The individual body schema thus facilitates optimal perception or action, but can also restrict and limit it, depending on the situation and the point of reference. For every ‘I can’, there is also an ‘I cannot’, but this general limitation characterizes more obviously still the body schemas of female, colonial and disabled people due to their respective social and political situations. (See on this the analyses of De Beauvoir 1949;Young 1980, 2015;Weiss 1999, 2015; Fanon 1952.) III. Intersubjectivity as intercorporeality (and the fesh). Because of our bodily situatedness, we are immediately connected to other (situated) bodily beings. Therefore, the Husserlian problem of how the experience of other subjects is even possible, i.e. how one ego can reach the other, is not really an issue within Merleau-Ponty’s framework. I do not have to put in an effort to be empathic, to understand what she/he/they feel: this is immediately expressed in the bodily expressions and gestures themselves. His gestures are not referring to a hidden psychological fact behind what can be seen:“The gesture does not make me think about anger, it is the anger itself ” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 190). But this only holds true for subjects who are situated in the same world and share a situation, i.e. interact personally with each other (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 469). In his later works, Merleau-Ponty speaks in this regard about an ‘intercorporeality’, in which bodies are co-existent, act together and synchronize their movements and gestures (cf. MerleauPonty “The Philosopher and his shadow”, in: Merleau-Ponty 1964b; Fuchs 2016,Weiss 1998). Merleau-Ponty illustrates this with the example of a mutual handshake. He describes this as a mutual incorporation, in which I experience the hand of the other as an extension of my own hand:“he and I are like the organs of one single intercorporeality” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 168). Such an immediate bodily understanding is possible, because we both belong to one and the same world, and are incarnated in the same way. We, and the others, are always already there, not as material bodies of perception, not even as spirits, egos or psyche, but in the way we affectively come in contact with others. Our bodies are intertwined, Merleau-Ponty contends, and this leads to a reciprocal experience of embodied communication:“Communication or the understanding of gestures is achieved through the reciprocity between my intentions and the other person’s gestures, and between my gestures and the intentions which can be in the other person’s behaviour. Everything happens as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body, and mine his” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 191; transl. modifed).The other’s body extends onto my own, and my own overlaps with his; this is what Merleau-Ponty calls intercorporeality, and he conceives of it as a form of primary social understanding. In his posthumously published working notes,The Visible and the Invisible (Le visible et l’invisible, 1964), Merleau-Ponty no longer addresses the individual or concrete living body as subject of perception, but embeds it within a broader structural description of being. In this regard, he uses Husserl’s example of the touching and touched hand to describe the essential relation between two ontological spheres, the visible and the invisible. The human body belongs to both realms: on the one hand, it is visible and tangible (it is an object), while on the other, it can acquire a view of itself (as a subject).While Husserl is still concerned with the experience and constitution of the body, Merleau-Ponty wants to characterize the ontological essence of the body. From such an ontological perspective, the body doubles itself up and unifes itself at the same time: the subjective (Leib) and the objective body (Körper) “encroach upon one 132
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another” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 117). The same holds true for the relation between body and world. From an ontological perspective, these two are no longer two separate entities that relate to each other; they rather belong to the same situation or milieu, they are of the same fesh (chair). Flesh is thereby the ontological element of the visible, which links the seeing (subjects) with the seen (objects). From this perspective, intercorporeality is founded in a common dimension of fesh, a “generality of the sensible” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 139), which then differentiates itself from within. In this ontological framework, embodiment is no longer haunted by its ambiguity; it also loses its concrete or existential signifcance.Within the dimension of the fesh, the phenomena of ‘touching and being touched’ are reversible. If one wants to describe experiences of alienation and empathy, explain pathologies and disabilities or investigate the social and political impact on embodiment, one still needs concrete phenomenological descriptions of specifc and situated forms of embodiment.These topics are especially central to debates in Feminist Philosophy, Gender/Queer and Transgender studies, Medicine, Health Care, Disability Studies as well as Post-Colonial and Critical Race Studies. Within these debates, phenomenological perspectives are becoming more and more infuential. Feminist phenomenologists, drawing on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty as well as Simone de Beauvoir (who developed in The Second Sex (Le deuxième sexe, 1949/1953) the frst account of female embodiment) have applied, discussed, extended and transformed the concept of embodiment in fruitful ways (cf. Ahmed 2000, 2006; Alcoff 2006; Al-Saij 2010; Dolezal 2014; Heinämaa 2003, 2010, Rodemeyer and Heinämaa 2010: Slatman 2014, Weiss 1998, 2015; Young 1980, 2005; Zeiler 2013, Zeiler and Folkmarson Käll 2014).
9.3. Enactivism Whereas Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s refections on the signifcance of the body in the production of meaning (in general) led them to draw important metaphysical and ontological consequences about the nature of experience (cf. Hua XXXVI; Merleau-Ponty 1964), the enactivists’ interest in embodiment is usually motivated by the attempt to better understand the nature of perception, or how action is involved in perception. This is paradigmatically the case in the so-called ‘sensorimotor enactivism’ developed by psychologist Kevin O’Regan and philosopher Alva Noë (2001; Noë 2004). In their view, objects appear as present thanks to the fact that we (implicitly) understand the kind of sensorimotor relation involved in experience. Take a tomato and look at it at some distance.You see the front, and yet you have a visual sense of the whole. How is this possible? In O’Regan and Noë’s view, we unproblematically grasp the object as a perceptual whole in virtue of the fact that we have an implicit understanding of the patterns of sensorimotor dependence that govern our relation to the object. Unlike Husserl, for whom the “appearances are kinaesthetically motivated” (Hua XI, §3/Husserl 2001, 47ff.), Noë and O’Regan’s theory is that skilful perceivers understand how experience is responsive to sensorimotor changes, and this know-how is brought about by the coordinated function of our cognitive and bodily skills: “The world shows up for perceptual consciousness in so far as it is available […] thanks to the perceiver’s knowingly and skilfully standing in the right sort of sensorimotor relation to things” (Noë 2012, 22). In this story, there is no consideration whatsoever for the more passive aspects of experience. Perception is a form of action all the way down. Recently, the sensorimotor approach has been criticized within the enactivist camp for operating with a too narrow conception of embodiment.The critique is justifed. Not only does Noë explicitly deny the importance of somaesthetic factors (cf. 2012, 12), but he never acknowledges the theoretical relevance of affective and emotional aspects of experience either.The sensorimotor approach thus needs to be enriched and updated. Moods, emotions and bodily states such as 133
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hunger, fatigue and pain inform perceptual experience insofar as they motivate and stimulate the agent to perceptually engage and explore its surroundings (Bower and Gallagher 2013; Colombetti 2013).Affects can also infuence our emotional and behavioural responses to perceptual situations, as well as explain shifts of attention (cf. Husserl 2004).This is a two-sided relation: not only are we, in virtue of our body, sensitive to perceived emotions, but our response is embodied as well. It shows in our bodily sensations, postures, movements and gestures, as well as in our blood pressure, respiration and circulatory system (cf. Gallagher 2017, Ch. 8). Building up on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality, Fuchs (2016) has coined the concept of ‘bodily resonance’ to highlight the fact that there are no affective and emotional responses without this kind of embodied resonance.The body is the medium of our affective relation to the world, and even if the complex ensemble of affective and emotional factors usually operates below the threshold of conscious awareness, it still has a profound and pervasive impact on conscious life as a whole. Emotions and affects as embodied phenomena command that we conceive of the brain and the body in a new, enactive way. Rather than representing or processing information, the enactivists regard the brain as part of a larger dynamical system that includes the rest of the body and the environment. The brain–body–environment is the most basic explanatory unity for conscious phenomena, and, as active members and enablers of the system as a whole, the brain–body activities and interactions are best described as efforts to constantly attune to changing circumstances in their environment.This is an idea that goes back to the pioneering work of Francesco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, who, already in 1991, described the behaviours of all organisms – from the simplest bacteria to the most complex forms of life such as human beings – as engaged in a constant process of sense-making called autopoeisis. Since its inception, enactivism has grown into a variety of related positions – from Thompson’s (2007) autopoietic enactivism to Noë and O’Regan’s (2001) sensorimotor approach and Hutto and Myin’s (2013, 2017) so-called radical enactivism. Despite the theoretical differences these various models display, all enactivists agree on the fundamental role of body to account not just for perception, but more generally for conscious life, including cognition.This insight, which comes with a strong anti-representationalist commitment, is one of the many traces of the powerful infuence that the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty has left on the enactivist movement.
Notes 1 Husserl differentiates between the sensations as they are given in frst-personal perspective (Empfndnisse) from the content of sensations (Empfndungsinhalt), like, for instance, the roughness or the form of the touched hand (cf. Hua IV, 149/156). 2 In this sense, Husserl sees our own bodily experience as a necessary condition for intersubjectivity.The foreign lived body is the “frst intersubjective datum, and my apprehension of it as a lived body is the frst step on the way toward the constitution of an intersubjective world in common” (Zahavi 2001, 36; cf. Hua XIV, 110; Hua XV, 18, 572). 3 For Sartre embodiment is essentially paradoxical and binary, if we consider the body as living and moving subject (as being for itself) then it only operates but cannot be experienced as such. But as soon as we experience (feel, perceive) the body, it turns into an object or Körper that is perceivable for everyone and is thus a ‘being-for-others’.That means that we always experience our body (for itself) in the way it is seen and evaluated by others (cf. Moran 2010, 44; Dillon 1998, 126). For a more detailed account of Sartre’s theory of the body cf. Morris 2010, or the role of the body in the early and late philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas cf. Ciocan 2013, 2014.
References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Body ———. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality. London/New York: Routledge. Alcoff, Linda Martin. 2006. Visible Identities, Race, Gender, and the Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Alloa, Emmanuel; Bedorf, Thomas; Grüny, Christian; Klass, Tobias Nikolaus (Eds.). 2012. Leiblichkeit.Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Al-Saij, Alia. 2008. “A Past Which Has Never Been Present. Bergsonian Dimensions in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of the Prepersonal.” Research in Phenomenology, 38: pp. 41–71. ———. 2010. “Bodies and Sensings: On the Uses of Husserlian Phenomenology for Feminist Theory.” Continental Philosophy Review, 43: pp. 13–37. Benoist, Jocelyn. 2016. Logique du phénomène. Paris: Harmann. Bernet, Rudolf. 2004. “Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism Revisited.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 4: pp. 1–20. Bower, Matt and Gallagher, Shaun. 2013.“Bodily Affectivity: Prenoetic Elements in Enactive Perception.” Phenomenology and Mind, 2: pp. 108–131. Carman,Taylor. 2012.‘Foreword’. In: Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Carruthers, Peter. 2015.“Perceiving Mental States.” Consciousness and Cognition, 36: pp. 498–507. Ciocan, Christian. 2013. “Le problem de corporéité chez le jeune Levinas.” Les études philosophiques, 2: pp. 201–219. ———. 2014.“La phénoménologie Levinassienne du corps dans totalité et infni.” Les études philosophiques, 1: pp. 137–151. Colombetti, Giovanna. 2013. The Feeling Body. Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press. Crowell, Steven. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Beauvoir, Simone. 1953. The Second Sex. London: Jonathan Cape. Dennett, Daniel. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dillon, Martin C. 1988. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dolezal, Luna. 2014. The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body. New York: Routledge. Doyon, Maxime. 2015. “Perception and Normative Self-Consciousness.” In: Normativity in Perception. Eds. Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 38-55. ———. 2018.“Husserl on Perceptual Optimality.” Husserl Studies. Forthcoming., Vol.34/2, pp. 171-189. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1996.“The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment.” The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4 (Spring 1996). ———. 2002.“Intelligence Without Representation. Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Mental Representation: The Relevance of Phenomenology to Scientifc Explanation.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1/4: pp. 367–383. Drummond, John. 1983.“On Seeing a Material Thing in Space.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 40/1: pp. 19–32. Fuchs,Thomas. 2016.“Intercorporeality and Interaffectity”. Phenomenology and Mind,Vol. 11, pp. 194–209. Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. Enactivist Interventions. Rethinking the Mind. London: OUP. Gallagher, Shaun and Zahavi, Dan. 2012. The Phenomenological Mind (2nd Edition). London: Routledge. Gallese, Vittorio. 2014. “Bodily Selves in Relation: Embodied Simulation as Second-Person Perspective on Intersubjectivity.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 369/177: pp. 1–10. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0177. Garland Thompson, Rosemarie. 2011. “Misfts: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia 26/3: pp. 591–609. Gelb, Adhémar and Goldstein, Kurt. 1920. Psychologische Analysen hirnpathologischer Fälle. Leipzig: J.A. Barth. Head, Henry. 1926. Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech. London: Cambridge University Press. Heinämaa, Sara. 2003. Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference. New York/Oxford: Rowman and Littlefeld. ———. 2010. “Sex, Gender, and Embodiment.” In: The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. Ed. Dan Zahavi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 216-242. ———. 2012. “The Body.” In: The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology. Eds. Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard. New York: Routledge, pp. 222–233. Heinämaa, Sara and Rodemeyer, Lanei. (Eds.) 2010. Feminist Phenomenology. Special Issue of Continental Philosophy Review 43/1.
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Maxime Doyon and Maren Wehrle Husserl, Edmund. Manuscript D 13 III 151a. (Husserl Archives Leuven) Hutto, Daniel and Myin, Erik. 2013. Radicalizing Enactivism. Cambridge: MIT Press. Jensen, Rasmus Thybo. 2009. “Motor Intentionality and the Case of Schneider.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8/3: pp. 371–388. ———. 2017. Evolving Enactivism. Cambridge: MIT Press. Kelly, Sean. 2005. “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty.” In: The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Eds. Taylor Carman and Mark Hansen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 74–110. Kern, Iso. 2017. “Phenomenologie der Intersubjektiviät.” In: Husserl-Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung. Eds. Sebastian Luft and Maren Wehrle. Metzler Verlag: Stuttgart, pp. 222–230. Legrand, Dorothee. 2006. “The Bodily Self: The Sensori-Motor Roots of Pre-Refective SelfConsciousness.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5/1: pp. 89–118. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961/1969. Totality and Infnity.Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1963. The Structure of Behavior.Trans.A. L. Fisher. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ———. 1964a.“Eye and Mind.” In: The Primacy of Perception. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159-190. ———. 1964b. “The Philosopher and His Shadow.” In: Signs. New York: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159-181. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception.Transl. D. E. Landes. New York: Routledge. Milner, David and Goodale, Melvyn A. 2006. The Visual Brain in Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moran, Dermot. 2010. “Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Embodiment, Touch and the ‘Double Sensation.’” In: Sartre on the Body. Ed. Katherine Morris. New York: Palgrave McMillan, pp. 41–67. Morris, David. 2008. “Body.” In: Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts. Eds. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 111–121. Morris, Katherine. (Ed.). 2010. Sartre on the Body. New York: Palgrave McMillan. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. ———. 2012. Varieties of Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Noë, Alva and O’Regan, Kevin. 2001. “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness.” Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 24: pp. 939–1031. Romdenh-Romluc, Komarine. 2011. Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Salamon, Gayle. 2010. Assuming a Body. Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness. New York:Verso. Scheler, Max. 1970. The Nature of Sympathy.Trans. P. Heath. New York:Archon Brooks. Schilder, Paul. 1923. Das Körperschema. Berlin: Springer. Slatman, Jenny. 2014.Our Strange Body. Philosophical Refections on Identity and Medical Interventions.Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Taipale, Joona. 2014. Phenomenology and Embodiment. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trigg, Dylan. 2017.“On the Role of Depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 16/2: pp. 275–289. Varela, Francisco J.,Thompson, Evan, and Rosch, Eleanor. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2000. Das leibliche Selbst.Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Leibes. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wehrle, Maren. 2015. “Normality and Normativity in Experience.” In: Normativity in Perception. Eds. Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 128–139. Wehrle, Maren and Breyer,Thiemo. 2016.“Horizonal Extensions of Attention:A Phenomenological Study of the Contextuality and Habituality of Experience.” Phenomenological Psychology, 47/1: pp. 41–61. Weiss, Gail. 1999. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York/London: Routledge. ———. 2015. “The Normal, the Natural, and the Normative: A Merleau-Pontian Legacy to Feminist Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Disability Studies.” Continental Philosophy Review, 48: pp. 77–93. Young, Iris Marion. 1980. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality.” Human Studies, 3: pp. 137–156.
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Body ———. 2005. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2001. Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity.Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 2002. “First-Person Thoughts and Embodied Self-Awareness: Some Refections on the Relation Between Recent Analytical Philosophy and Phenomenology.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1: pp. 1–26. Zahavi, Dan and Rochat, Philippe. 2015. “Empathy ≠ Sharing: Perspectives from Phenomenology and Developmental Psychology.” Consciousness and Cognition, 36: pp. 543–553. Zeiler, Kristin. 2013.“A Phenomenology of Excorporation, Bodily Alienation, and Resistance: Rethinking Sexed and Racialized Embodiment.” Hypatia, 28/1: pp. 69–84. Zeiler, Kristin and Folkmarson Käll, Lisa. 2014. Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine. New York: State University of New York.
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10 CONSCIOUSNESS Walter Hopp
Consciousness is phenomenology’s fundamental subject matter. According to Husserl, phenomenology is a descriptive, eidetic or a priori science of “pure experiences.”1 That characterization, however, is only part of the story. Consciousness, as we will see, exhibits intentionality; it is directed upon the world and the objects in it. Describing its intentional achievements requires that we also discuss the contents, including meanings, in virtue of which it is about them, and the objects meant. As he expresses it, “To elucidate these connections between veritable being and knowing and so in general to investigate the correlations between act, meaning, object is the task of transcendental phenomenology” (Husserl 2008, 434). There could be no understanding of consciousness itself without understanding the nature of its relation to ideal meanings and real objects, neither of which are literally parts of it. As he writes,“To the extent … that every consciousness is ‘consciousness-of,’ the essential study of consciousness includes also that of consciousness-meaning and consciousness-objectivity as such.”2
10.1. Some essential features of consciousness In Ideas I, Husserl discusses a number of essential features and structures of consciousness that are peculiar to it.This section goes over some of the more salient ones.
a. The mode of givenness of consciousness One of the frst noticeable features of consciousness is that it is presented and presentable in ways unlike anything else. Husserl identifes four features of the givenness of consciousness that, jointly, are unique to it. First, conscious experiences are immanent rather than transcendent. Second, they are adequately given.Third, they are indubitably given.And fourth, they are capable of being given in refection. According to Husserl, the objects of “outer” perception are “transcendent.”This means that they are given to consciousness by appearing, at any given time, in one of a number of possible ways of appearing.To use his example, as I perceive the table, the table is given as a unifed object over against a changing fow of perceptual experiences of it (Husserl 2014, §41, 71).This is not only true of the table, but of each of its properties, including its “secondary” qualities such as color (ibid., 72). Consciousness itself, however, is not given by way of appearances or profles (Husserl 2014, §42, 75). 138
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Rather, experience, and experience alone,“has the intrinsic property of being perceivable in immanent perception” (ibid., 74). Because of this, physical objects can only ever be given inadequately.“A thing can be given only ‘one-sidedly’ in principle” (Husserl 2014, §44, 77). Conscious experiences, by contrast, do not have hidden parts or sides that would come into view with changes in our experience—quite obviously not, since a change in our experience would be a change in the properties of the experience. “It is,” writes Husserl, “an essential property of immanent givenness to afford something absolute that cannot display itself in sides and profles at all” (Husserl 2014, §44, 79). It would be a mistake to conclude from these claims that in ordinary experience we confront two objects: the experience and, over against it, its object. On Husserl’s view, all of the components of consciousness are, while occurring, experienced or conscious. They are not, however, typically objects of experience (Husserl 1970a, 537).When I see a red apple, I do not see my own experience or its parts. In non-refective awareness, “we know nothing of the processes of intuition itself or the essences and essential infnites inherent to it, nothing of their materials and inherent noetic aspects” (Husserl 2014, §150, 300).This does not mean we are unconscious of them.As he writes later,“there is also consciousness of every act. Every experience is ‘sensed,’ is immanently perceived (internal consciousness), although naturally not posited, not meant” (Husserl 1991, 369). In fact, they are not really objects of non-refective consciousness at all, not even marginal or background objects (Zahavi 1999, 61). Rather, his view seems to be similar to Sartre’s, according to which every consciousness is both the positional or objectifying awareness of its object, and the non-positional awareness of itself (Sartre 1956, 13; Zahavi 2003a). Nevertheless, each conscious experience is “intrinsically ready to be perceived” (Husserl 2014, §45, 81; also §78, 142). Moreover, experiences are ready to be perceived no matter our orientation to the world. I do not need to fnd my way to an experience through bodily adjustments or through “continuously and coherently motivated series of perceptions” (ibid.).A simple turn of attention is all that is required. Moreover, this ability to be perceived in refection is an essential feature of experiences.When made thematic, they are given to us as having been “already there” (Husserl 2014, §45, 81). It is, however, not an essential feature of a background object in perception that as long as it exists, it is “already there” for attentive consideration.A couch can fall out of the feld of consciousness altogether, in which case it is not simply there to be attended to, without in any way losing its being as a couch.
b. The temporality of consciousness A further feature of consciousness is that each experience is part of, and is itself, a temporally extended fow. “Every experience is in itself a fow of becoming” characterized by “a constant fow of retentions and protentions mediated by a phase of an originary sort, that is itself fowing” (Husserl 2014, §78, 143).When I dribble a basketball, for instance, I am conscious of it hitting the pavement. But it would radically underdescribe the experience to stop there. I am aware of it hitting-the-pavement-after-hitting-my-hand. The awareness of it having just hit my hand is also something of which I am aware at the time it hits the pavement. I do not, moreover, have a reproductive memory of it having hit my hand, but a “retention,” a perception of what has just passed as having just passed,“of what has just been” (Husserl 1991, §12, 34).At the same time it hits the pavement, I also anticipate it bouncing back up to my hand. I have, that is, a “protention” of the future (see Husserl 1991, §40, 89).
c. The attentional structure of consciousness3 Paradigmatic acts of consciousness are those in which we are attentively aware of something— acts which Husserl designates with the term “cogito” (Husserl 2014, §35, 62). Not all conscious 139
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awareness is in the mode of the “cogito,” however. For instance, I may focus on part of a basketball to determine whether or not the grip is too worn. In doing so I am not only aware of the basketball and its surface. I am also aware of a background of co-perceived objects.This is true, moreover, in every case of perception;“Each perception of a thing thus has a halo of background-intuitions,” each of which is also a consciousness-of something (Husserl 2014, §35, 61). Husserl regards this structure as essential to all types of consciousness.As he puts it,“The stream of experience can never consist of actualizations alone” (Husserl 2014, §35, 62). Furthermore, both actual or focal and non-focal experiences are convertible into one another. Given in the background of my basketball-perception, for example, is the pavement. But it belongs to the essence of my basketball-perception that the basketball can sink into the background, and that my perception of the pavement can become “actional” or attentive (ibid.).
d. Relation to the ego “Every ‘cogito’,” writes Husserl, “is characterized in a pre-eminent sense as an act of the ego” (Husserl 2014, §80, 153). That is, attentional experiences are those in which the ego takes part, in which it “lives” (ibid.). In seeing a basketball, I undergo a visual experience. My visual experience of the basketball does not perceive the basketball, however. Rather, “I perceive it” (Husserl 2014, §80, 154). As for the background experiences, they “form the general milieu for the actuality of the ego.”While they lack the “pre-eminent relatedness to the ego” possessed by each cogito, they are still related to it.The pavement on the ground is part of my “background of consciousness” (ibid.).
e. The “two-sidedness” of consciousness4 Each conscious experience has “a subjectively oriented side and an objectively oriented side” (Husserl 2014, §80, 155). This does not, Husserl insists, mean that the experience is directed at both an object and the ego. Rather, it means that the experience presents an object to or for the ego. In Donn Welton’s terms, consciousness has a “for-structure” (Welton 2000, 22). In being of an object, and presenting it as being a certain way, experience at the same time presents it to or for a perceiving subject.
10.2. Consciousness and intentionality Now we turn to the feature of consciousness that has arguably captured the most philosophical interest: intentionality. In his attempt to distinguish physical from mental phenomena, Franz Brentano articulated one of the most well-known theses in the philosophy of mind: Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call … reference to a content, direction toward an object … or immanent objectivity. (Brentano 1973, 88) Perception is of the perceived; love is directed toward the beloved, and so on in other cases. Brentano adds that intentional inexistence of an object is exhibited by all mental phenomena, and that “No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it” (Brentano 1973, 89). Like Brentano, Husserl rigorously distinguishes acts and their objects. But on Husserl’s view, merely distinguishing acts and objects, and being mindful of the intentional “relation” that binds 140
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them, sheds very little light on the nature of consciousness. Husserl’s position is that conscious experiences are internally complex phenomena that instantiate a wide variety of distinctive properties, both intentional and non-intentional, and which bear law-governed and complicated relationships to one another. The distinctive “relation” that consciousness bears to its objects cannot be made intelligible without appealing to those features. All of the aforementioned features belong to consciousness and help explain its achievements. But it is intentionality that is “the main theme of phenomenology” (Husserl 2001, 161). Not everything making up the fow of consciousness is a bearer of intentionality.The stream of consciousness also contains sensory or “hyletic” components, which only acquire the feature of presenting us with corresponding qualities of objects by being “interpreted” (Husserl 1970a, Investigation 5, §§ 2, 9, 14, 15b).This is one signifcant point of dispute between Brentano’s view and Husserl’s. Nevertheless, it does appear to be Husserl’s view that while not all of the parts and components of consciousness are intentional, the non-intentional components are, in the case of a genuinely “psychical” subject, typically bound up as parts or moments of intentional experiences.5 In ordinary experience, as we have seen, many of the components of the stream of consciousness are not objects of experience. Moreover, most objects of experience are not components of the stream. It is clear that not all objects of consciousness exist in the mind, for the simple reason that we can direct our thoughts to nonexistent objects, and they do not exist anywhere (Willard 1995, 156). I can think of or imagine the god Jupiter, but since Jupiter does not exist at all, he does not exist as a real component in my stream of consciousness (Husserl 1970a, 558–559). Neither, for that matter, do most objects of consciousness, including all “external” or physical objects.The red apple I see is not a constituent of the stream of consciousness any more than the god Jupiter is.“Is it not obvious that an object, even when real (real) and truly existent, cannot be conceived as a real part of the act which thinks it” (Husserl 1970a, 352)? Nor is there an additional “immanent” or merely “intentional” red apple in my consciousness.The perception of a red apple has, as its object, the red apple, and this object is identical with the act’s intentional object (Husserl 1970a, 595). For Husserl this point is purely phenomenological. Whatever the precise ontological status of a red apple, it is a phenomenological mistake to try to identify it, or anything at all like it, with any real components of anyone’s stream of consciousness. For starters, none of the four features of the givenness of experiences is true of apples or any of the properties of apples. When we are conscious of Jupiter, a red apple, or anything else, what is really in consciousness is the intentional experience, along with its parts and features. Furthermore, the presence of such an experience is suffcient for us to be conscious of the corresponding object.“If this experience is present, then, eo ipso and through its own essence … the ‘intentional relation’ to an object is achieved.”6 So while the red apple is nowhere “in” the mind which is conscious of it, what accounts for the fact that the act is of the red apple is. So what does make up the intentional experience itself? Its “content,” certainly. Husserl, however, distinguishes a number of senses of the term “content.”The most important ambiguity to clear away is that between the “intentional” content and the “descriptive” or “real” content. By “intentional,” Husserl means the intended “content,” what we are conscious of—that is, the act’s object.7 As we have seen, that “content” need not be, and usually is not, a real content of consciousness. In part, no doubt, to curb the temptation to suppose otherwise, Husserl adopts the helpful practice of not calling the object of consciousness its “content” (Husserl 1970a, 580). Within the real content of an act—the content which literally resides in and makes up the act—we fnd three distinct kinds of components. First, there are the act’s aforementioned sensory components. Second, there is the act’s matter, which determines both which object is meant and how it is meant (Husserl 1970a, 589). Finally, there is the act’s quality.The quality or “act-character” 141
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is that moment which “stamps an act as merely presentative, judgemental, emotional, desiderative, etc.” (Husserl 1970a, 586). I can believe that an apple is red, but I can also doubt it, desire it, merely represent it, value it, and so on. The matter and quality together comprise an act’s “intentional essence” (Husserl 1970a, 590). Despite calling it an “essence,” Husserl is quite clear that the intentional essence is part of an act’s real content:“[W]e can mean by ‘content’ … its meaning as an ideal unity … To this corresponds, as a real (reelles) moment in the real (reellen) content of the presentative act, the intentional essence with its … quality and matter” (Husserl 1970a, 657). Finally, as the last quotation makes clear, “content” can refer to an act’s ideal content—for instance, a meaning. Meanings can be made thematic objects through an “ideational abstraction” of an act’s intentional or semantic essence (Husserl 1970a, 590). This sort of content is shareable among numerically distinct acts.An act’s ideal content is not its intentional object.When I think that a certain apple is red, the proposition or meaning is not what I am thinking about.8 Rather, I think about the state of affairs of the apple’s being red. Nor is the ideal content a real component or part of the act.When twenty people believe , there are twenty acts, with twenty intentional essences, involved, but only one proposition. Rather, the ideal content is instantiated in the act (Husserl 1970a, 330). Everything, for Husserl, instantiates ideal properties (Husserl 1970a, 11), and intentional acts are no different.What they instantiate are ways of being of something, and that is what meanings are (B. Smith 2000, 294).
10.3. Consciousness and knowledge One of the most important distinctions among intentional acts is between those which are intuitive, such as perception, imagination, image-consciousness, and the “seeing” of essences, and those which are “signitive” or empty. One can merely think about an object. But that object can also, in many cases, be given.The distinction here is not between the objects of consciousness, but between their modes of givenness. Two notable differences between intuitive and signitive acts immediately stand out. First, intuitive and signitive experiences are very different phenomenologically. There is a self-evident phenomenological difference between merely thinking of a red apple and perceiving one. Second, the two types of experience are radically different epistemically. Merely thinking that a given apple is red does not, in itself, provide any evidence at all that it is. Perceiving an apple to be red, however, provides excellent, though defeasible, evidence that it is red. When it comes to empirical objects and states of affairs, perception is the “originary” mode of intuition (Husserl 2014, 9), that mode in which they are not merely presented, as may occur in memory or even imagination, but presented “in person” (Husserl 2014, 93). Intuition itself comes in degrees.The highest grade is immanent or adequate intuition. In adequate intuition, an object is completely given in a non-perspectival way. In such acts, “different perceptions have different objects” (Husserl 1997, §10, 22). Among the possible objects of adequate intuition, as we have seen, are one’s own “pure” experiences—that is, experiences grasped without any positing of natural realities. Physical objects, by contrast, cannot be given adequately, and neither can any of their parts or properties.They are transcendent to any act of perceiving them insofar as no experience of them is complete or fully disclosive. For any such entity, there are many possible perceptual experiences of it, each of which is originary but inadequate.This is true, Husserl insists, even with respect to the “secondary” qualities such as color; the appearance of any physical object or property “can and must continuously change in the course of ostensive experience of it” (Husserl 2014, §41, 72). Husserl, as we have seen, holds that conscious acts intend their objects in virtue of their own internal parts and features.This is equally true in the case of transcendent objects.To characterize 142
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an object as transcendent is not just to register the fact that there is more to it or that further experiences of it are possible. Rather, a transcendent object is also intended as having more to it in an experience that is, on its own terms, incomplete (Husserl 1969, §94, 233; also see A.D. Smith 2008, 324). When we perceive an apple, for instance, there is an intended surplus to the object.This sense of the object’s transcendence is due to the act’s horizons.“Every momentary phase of perception is in itself a network of partially full and partially empty intentions,” writes Husserl, and these empty intentions help constitute the act’s horizon (Husserl 2001, 44).Thanks to their intentionality, which exceeds that of the intuitive content of the act, we are aware of something on the side of the object that exceeds what is given. Naturally an act’s horizon does not merely specify that there is “more” to a perceived object, but intends the object’s features with varying degrees of determinacy (Husserl 2001, 42).As he puts it,“It is an emptiness that is not a nothingness, but an emptiness to be flled-out; it is a determinable indeterminacy. For the intentional horizon cannot be flled out in just any manner” (Husserl 2001, 42).When I see an apple, I anticipate that it will be approximately the same color on the unseen side, and that its interior will be, well, appley rather than hollow or flled with molten rock. Intuitive acts can and normally do function as constituents of more complex acts of fulfllment. In fulfllment, an object is not merely intuited and not merely thought of, but “is seen as being exactly the same as it is thought of ” (Husserl 1970a, 696). I can merely see a red apple. But I can also verify the proposition that the apple is red on the basis of such a seeing. In such a case, the state of affairs of the apple’s being red is intended by both the intuitive act and the conceptual act. Furthermore, the two acts must be synthesized in such a way that the object perceived is recognized as the object which is meant. This can fail to occur. One can perceive a B-fat without conceptualizing it. One can even perceive a B-fat while simultaneously thinking about a B-fat without recognizing the heard note as a B-fat. And one can veridically perceive a B-fat while misconceiving of it or misidentifying it as an F. In none of these cases is anything wrong with one’s hearing.9 Fulfllment, then, is a much more complicated type of act than mere intuition. It is a “union of the conceptualizing act with the object, on the basis of a corresponding intuition of that object together with a recognition of the identity of the object of the concept and of the perception” (Willard 1995, 152). The epistemic importance of fulfllment ought to be clear. The single best way to verify a proposition is by directly confronting the objects or affairs with which it is concerned. If I want to know whether I left my car lights on, for example, I will go check. If they are on, then my thought that the lights are on will be fulflled by my perceptual experience, and my belief that they are on will have acquired justifcation.According to Husserl’s “Principle of all Principles,” [W]hatever presents itself to us in “Intuition” in an originary way … is to be taken simply as what it affords itself as, but only within the limitations in which it affords itself there. (Husserl 2014, §24, 43) Because the state of affairs of my lights being on is given in an originary (though inadequate) way in perception, I am rationally permitted—perhaps even obligated—to take my lights to be on. My justifcation that the lights are on is not infallible, nor can it be made so. But this is not cause for complaint. To demand a higher degree of evidence for empirical propositions than can possibly be delivered by the acts in which their objects are originarily given is absurd (Ideas I §79, 151). Neither ordinary life nor science demands any such thing. As Husserl puts it, “To reduce evidence to an insight that is apodictic is to bar oneself from an understanding of any scientifc production” (Husserl 1969, §60, 161). 143
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Regarded in one way, acts of intuition and fulfllment are simply species under the more general heading of intentional experiences. But this obscures the fundamental priority of intuition and fulfllment—of Evidenz and with it of knowledge—to empty thinking (Moran 2000, 15). First, empty acts provide by themselves no evidence whatsoever for the truth of their own contents. Nor do they, by themselves, provide any evidence for other contents.10 Merely thinking that (a) P and (b) If P, then Q provides no evidence at all for Q.Without acts of fulfllment, our beliefs would be entirely ungrounded. The reason is that empty acts do not bear within themselves an authentic relation to their objects.They are “only called presentations in an inauthentic sense; genuinely speaking they do not actually present anything to us, an objective sense is not constituted in them” (Husserl 2001, 113–114). Secondly, objectifying acts—those which depict how things are—are not simply oriented toward beings and, with them, to truth. “Thanks to evidence,” writes Husserl, “the life of consciousness has an all-pervasive teleological structure” (Husserl 1969, §60, 160).What that “teleological structure” is oriented toward, in the case of objectifying consciousness, is not only truth but also the immediate consciousness of truth in fulfllment.11 Finally, for any object of which we are or can be conscious, there are intentional structures in virtue of which we are conscious of it in the way that we are.This is what A.D. Smith calls Husserl’s “transcendental insight” (A.D. Smith 2003, 28).As Husserl puts it,“every sense that any existent whatever has or can have for me … is a sense in and arising from my intentional life” (Husserl 1977, §43, 91).Again, he writes that “Nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness” (Husserl 1969, §94, 234).These actual and potential conscious performances “constitute” the object for us, and the main task of phenomenology is to examine the conscious contents, structures, and relations in virtue of which objects of varying types are constituted (Husserl 2001, 269). Among these constituting intentionalities, however, the givenness of objects in Evidenz occupies a position of decided privilege. What things are—the only things that we make assertions about, the only things whose being or nonbeing, whose being in a certain way or being otherwise we dispute and can rationally decide—they are as things of experience. (Husserl 2014, §47, 85) Because of this, the idea of an evidentially ungrounded noetic structure is an absurdity.Without a grounding in evidence, not only knowledge but intentionality itself would be impossible (Husserl 1969, §86, 209).The sense of any concept or meaning is best explicated with reference to its fulflling sense, the intuitive acts which present what it represents.12 Intuition does not merely confrm judgments; it provides them, ultimately, with their sense and intentional reference.
10.4. Consciousness and being Intentional acts are oriented toward beings, and understanding what those beings are is bound up with some sort of understanding of how they manifest themselves to consciousness.13 “The real cannot be conceived apart from its manifestation to subjectivity” (Sokolowski 1964, 219). Husserl is well aware that not everything we think about does or even can, as a matter of fact, present itself to our consciousness. But while not every object can in fact be given to us, Husserl holds that any object whatsoever could present itself to some possible consciousness. To every region and category of alleged objects there corresponds not only a basic kind of senses or posits but also a basic kind of consciousness originally affording such 144
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senses and, inherent to it, a basic type of originary evidence, that is essentially motivated by the originary givenness of the specifed kind.14 So, even if quarks or black holes cannot be given with Evidenz to us, they could in principle be given in such a manner to some possible consciousness. Objects beyond the possible reach of intuitive consciousness, while logically possible, are “material absurdit[ies].”15 Nothing could count as a rational motivation for believing in them.16 A further interesting feature of Husserl’s view is that objects are not merely contingently or accidentally related to their modes of appearing to consciousness. Squares cannot be given in the way that violin sonatas are, and the ongoing fow of consciousness could not be given in the way external objects are. Of course, it is compatible with Husserl’s view that some things may superfcially resemble others. And it is compatible with his view that there are more ways that squares—to say nothing of persons or galaxies—could possibly present themselves to conscious creatures over and above the ways that they present themselves to us. But the totality of ways in which squares (and persons and galaxies) present themselves could not present something else. This is, arguably, equally true of natural kinds and individuals. Something might resemble water superfcially. But there is no possible stuff, distinct from water, all of whose actual and possible ways of manifesting itself to any possible consciousness are identical with those of water. Not only could there be no rational motivation for believing in such a thing, but we cannot form any contentful conception of such a thing. Such a supposition is as implausible as supposing that something could feel exactly like pain but not be pain.The only difference is that water is given, in any single presentation, much less adequately than pain.17 No doubt Husserl’s view on the relationship between consciousness and its objects will strike some as a version of metaphysical idealism, and this impression is only aggravated by his talk of “constituting” objects through conscious acts. But there is a realist reading of his view. [S]eeing consciousness… is just acts of thought formed in certain ways, and things, which are not acts of thought, are nonetheless constituted in them, come to givenness in them. (Husserl 1999, 52) Here constitution is identifed with bringing objects to givenness, which may or may not involve any actual making of them. And Husserl does not seem to think it is a case of making. As he puts it, Even God is for me what he is, in consequence of my own accomplishment of consciousness [Bewusstseinsleistung] … Here too, as in the case of the other ego, productivity of consciousness will hardly signify that I invent or make this highest transcendency.18 Immediately afterwards he writes: “The like is true of the world and of all worldly causation” (ibid.). Dallas Willard interprets Husserl’s position in realist terms as follows: “The connection between the act and the object is not, in general, an existential one, but is one of essences.”19 Any possible object is essentially such that it could be apprehended with Evidenz. Each essentially has an appearance, the manner in which “it is known or apprehended” (D.W. Smith 2004, 17). But it does not thereby owe its existence to consciousness. Similarly, salt is essentially soluble in water without thereby owing its existence to water. One could not tell the total story of salt without mentioning that it is soluble in water, and specifying how and under what conditions it enters into such a solution.This would be true even in a world that did not contain any actual 145
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water. Similarly, no account of the world and the objects, properties, relations, and states of affairs therein could be complete which neglects to mention, and indeed spell out in detail, their ability to be known and the types of conscious acts in which they could be known.This is part of the total story of everything, including salt, even in worlds with no actual consciousnesses. Of course, when it comes to appearances, most sciences do not say anything at all about this dimension of an object’s being. One cannot and should not expect a chemistry book to contain any statements about salt’s wonderful power to present itself to consciousness in knowledge and fulfllment, much less a developed account of how that happens. Nevertheless, the chemistry book itself stands as a testimony to salt’s capacity to do exactly that. Just like anything whatsoever, salt can only be given to us through our mental activities. But mental activities do not make salt, but make salt an object for us, something of which we can be consciously aware (Drummond 1990, 270). Our natural attitude is one of “infatuation” with objects at the expense of the “constituting multiplicities belonging essentially to them” on the side of consciousness (Husserl 1970b, §52, 176).This does not make the natural attitude defcient—infatuation with the world is exactly what is called for if we want to know about it (see Hardy 2013, 63). It does, however, mean that the natural attitude and the sciences taking place within it are incomplete and at the constant risk of misconstruing themselves and the nature of their subject matter (Husserl 1969, 13).
10.5. The mystery of consciousness Finally, we turn to the “mystery” of consciousness. Consciousness is widely agreed to be among the most puzzling phenomena in existence. Husserl agrees, in part. Consciousness lies at the heart of what he calls the “enigma of subjectivity” or, more radically, the “enigma of all enigmas” (Husserl 1970b, §5, 13), namely “the essential interrelation between reason and what is in general” (ibid.). But that enigma is not insoluble. Indeed, Husserl’s account, as sketched above, provides the beginnings of an intelligible solution to it. Consciousness has an intelligible structure and nature that can be given to us and described as it is given to us, and what such descriptions uncover, among other things, are the essential relations that consciousness and its objects bear to one another. What is noteworthy, however, is that Husserl’s reasons for fnding consciousness enigmatic are not those that grip most contemporary philosophers. From a broadly naturalistic perspective, which of course has no shortage of adherents, consciousness appears to be a problematic outlier, a nonconformist in an otherwise intelligible, objective, and exclusively physical world.This gives rise to the mystery of just how “consciousness arises from the physical” (Chalmers 1996, 243). Even if we think we know that it does, any conceivable attempt to explain how leaves us with an apparently unbridgeable “explanatory gap” (Levine 1983). This is a mystery to which Husserl devotes surprisingly little attention. No doubt part of the reason is that Husserl was unencumbered by any felt need to make consciousness “ft” into a preferred ontology. More importantly, though, Husserl does not think that the physical world investigated by the sciences is made ultimately intelligible by those sciences alone. Instead, he holds that the only way to make anything ultimately intelligible is by exhibiting how it is related to conscious intentionality (Husserl 1970b, §49, 168; also see §55, 189). At the very least, as we have seen, that means that no account of the world could possibly be complete that fails to spell out the appearances of things and the conscious acts in virtue of which they appear.As Dermot Moran puts it,“Subjectivity must be understood as inextricably involved in the process of constituting objectivity” (Moran 2000, 15). And objectivity itself can only be completely understood as something that gets constituted or brought to givenness in subjectivity.“For,” as Zahavi points out,“how things appear is an integral part of what they really are” (Zahavi 2003c, 55). 146
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It is also customary among many contemporary philosophers to draw a distinction between the intentionality of mental states and their phenomenal or qualitative or experiential character, which determines “what it is like” to undergo such an experience (Nagel 1974). For those who think that these features can come apart, there is an additional mystery: why is there consciousness, and in particular experiential consciousness, at all? What function might it serve if information processing, learning, the detection of features in one’s surrounding environment, and the regulation of action can occur without it? As Chalmers expresses this “hard problem,” “even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioural functions … there may still remain the unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” (Chalmers 2004, 621). This mystery is one which Husserl simply did not consider. It is arguably an artifact not only of a naturalistic metaphysics to which Husserl claimed no allegiance, but of what, on his terms, surely amounts to a radically fawed description of consciousness itself (Zahavi 2003b; Ratcliffe 2007; Fasching 2012). If not the only type of intentionality, for Husserl, it is clear that conscious phenomenal intentionality is the paradigmatic type.20 One obvious reason for this is that on Husserl’s view, as we have seen, intuitive intentionality grounds the whole structure of intentionality. But intuitive acts are essentially conscious. Detecting features and objects or extracting information from an environment is not at all the same as being intuitively conscious of anything. I believe Fasching makes this point best with respect to machines:“Regardless of how elaborate its computations may be, in whatever causal relations they may stand to the environment and how ‘intelligent’ its output may be …for the computer itself nothing is there at all, since no ‘thereness’ (consciousness) occurs in the frst place” (Fasching 2012, 127). Since non-intuitive acts borrow their intentionality from their capacity, or the capacity of their components, to be intuitively fulflled, it becomes diffcult to make sense of their intentionality in the absence of consciousness either.
10.6. Conclusion After reviewing some of the central tenets of Husserl’s conception of consciousness, it should be clear that if it really does possess most of the features discussed above, that suffces to mark off consciousness as a distinct region instantiating essences unique to it. Insofar as a science of objects must be grounded in experiences in which those objects are given, a science of consciousness must be grounded in refection.“Refection” is “the name for consciousness’ method of knowing consciousness at all” (Husserl 2014, 142). For this reason, Husserl criticizes the “modern exact psychology” of his time, whose “ubiquitous fundamental trait … is to set aside any direct and pure analysis of consciousness” (Husserl 1965, 92), largely because of “its naturalistic point of view as well as its zeal to imitate the natural sciences and to see experimental procedures as the main point” (ibid., 101–102).That criticism may still have some validity. Understanding just how consciousness fts with everything else in the natural world remains, I think it is fair to say, a task so far unaccomplished. Nevertheless, it seems certain that a necessary condition of achieving such an understanding is to investigate consciousness on its own terms, and to allow those investigations to proceed without any imperative to ensure that the results conform to a favored set of metaphysical commitments.Whether the place of consciousness in the world is best captured by monism, dualism, materialism, idealism, naturalism, or some -ism not here mentioned or even yet conceived, the rich philosophical insights of the phenomenological tradition are in large measure explained by Husserl’s willingness to investigate consciousness as it shows itself, and a corresponding resistance to allowing premises from other disciplines, much less metaphysical theses from overarching worldviews, to override what is given in phenomenological refection. 147
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Notes 1 Husserl 2014, §75, 134; also Husserl 1970a, 862. 2 Husserl 1965, 90.This supports Dan Zahavi’s claim that “only a complete misunderstanding of the aim of phenomenology leads us to the mistaken but often repeated claim that Husserl’s phenomenology is not interested in reality or the question of being, but only in subjective meaning-formations in intentional consciousness” (Zahavi 2003c, 63). 3 Watzl (2017, 2) defnes attentional structure as “organizing the mind into parts that are central or prioritized and those that are peripheral.” Husserl’s view on attention is helpfully discussed in Jacobs 2010 and Dicey Jennings 2012, 541–543. 4 Husserl 2014, §80, 154. 5 “A real being deprived of such experiences, merely having contents inside it such as the experiences of sense, but unable to interpret these objectively … would not be called ‘psychical’ by anyone” (Husserl 1970a, 553). 6 Husserl 1970a, 558. In Husserl 2014, §36, 63, he writes: “The essence of experience itself entails not only that it is consciousness, but also of what it is the consciousness.” 7 See Husserl 1970a, 559:“These so-called immanent contents are therefore merely intended or intentional, while truly immanent contents, which belong to the real make-up of the intentional experiences, are not intentional: they constitute the act, provide necessary points d’ appui which render possible an intention, but are not themselves intended, not the objects presented in the act.” 8 Husserl 1970a, 332; also see Willard 1984, 182. 9 See Peacocke 2001, 240.Also see A.D. Smith 2002, 75-76. 10 A point also made by Paul Moser (2011). 11 Willard 1984, 231; Bernet 2003, 159; Dahlstrom 2001, 60ff. also see Husserl 1970a, 726. 12 First Logical Investigation, §14; also see Benoist 2003, 22 and Willard 1984, 207. 13 Husserl 2001, 113;Willard 1984, 206. 14 Husserl 2014, §138, 276; also see Husserl 1969 §60, 161. 15 Husserl 2014, §48, 87. See Ameriks 1977, 506. 16 Such entities might, nevertheless, be possible. See Yoshimi 2015. 17 Crowell 2008, 346. 18 Husserl 1969 §99, 251, translation modifed; also see Mohanty 1989, 151. 19 Willard 1984, 236. For two of the clearest and most compelling expositions of a Husserlian realist position, see Willard 2002 and Willard 2003. 20 This thesis has been recently defended by a number of philosophers. Some of the more prominent proponents are Siewert (1998, Chapter 7) Horgan and Tienson (2002), Loar (2003), Zahavi (2003b), and Kriegel (2011).Also check out the articles in Kriegel (ed.) (2014). One of the earliest explicit defenders of the view of which I am aware is David Woodruff Smith (1989, §4.1).
References Ameriks, Karl. 1977.“Husserl’s Realism.” The Philosophical Review, 86: pp. 498–519. Bayne,Tim and Montague, Michelle. 2011. Cognitive Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benoist, Jocelyn. 2003.“Husserl’s Theory of Meaning in the First Logical Investigation.” In: Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Ed. Daniel Dahlstrom. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 17–35. Bernet, Rudolph. 2003.“Desiring to Know Through Intuition.” Husserl Studies, 19: pp. 153–166. Brentano, Franz. 1973. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.Trans. A. C. Rancurello, D. B.Terrell, and L. McAlister. London: Routledge. Chalmers, David. 2004.“Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness.” In: Philosophy of Mind: A Guide and Anthology. Ed. John Heil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 617–640. Crowell, Steven. 2008.“Phenomenological Immanence, Normativity, and Semantic Externalism.” Synthese, 160: pp. 335–354. Dicey Jennings, Carolyn. 2012.“The Subject of Attention.” Synthese, 189: pp. 535–554. Drummond, John J. 1990. Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Fasching,Wolfgang. 2012.“Intentionality and Presence: On the Intrinsic Of-ness of Consciousness from a Transcendental-Phenomenological Perspective.” Husserl Studies, 28: pp. 121–141.
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Consciousness Hardy, Lee. 2013. Nature’s Suit: Husserl’s Phenomenological Philosophy of the Physical Sciences. Athens: Ohio University Press. Horgan,Terence and John Tienson. 2002.“The Intentionality of Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of Intentionality.” In: Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Ed. David Chalmers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 520-533. Husserl, Edmund. 1965.“Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.” In: Q Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Ed. Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, pp. 71–147. ———. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic.Trans. Dorion Cairns.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1970a. Logical Investigations.Two volumes.Trans. John Niemeyer Findlay. London: Routledge. ———. 1970b. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.Trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1977. Cartesian Meditations.Trans. Dorion Cairns.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1991. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917).Trans. John B. Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1997. Thing and Space.Trans. Richard Rojcewicz. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1999. The Idea of Phenomenology.Trans. Lee Hardy. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis.Trans. Anthony J. Steinbock. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2005. Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory.Trans. John B. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2008. Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge: Lectures 1906/07.Trans. Claire O. Hill. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2014. Ideas I: Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy.Trans Daniel Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett. Jacobs, Hanne. 2010. “I am Awake: Husserlian Refections on Wakefulness and Attention.” Alter. Revue de Phénoménologie 18: pp. 183–201. Kriegel, Uriah. 2011. The Sources of Intentionality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (Ed.). 2014. Phenomenal Intentionality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levine, Joseph. 1983.“Materialism and Qualia:The Explanatory Gap.” Pacifc Philosophical Quarterly, 64: pp. 354–361. Loar, Brian. 2003. “Phenomenal Intentionality as the Basis of Mental Content.” In: Refections and Replies: Essays in the Philosophy of Tyler Burge. Eds. Martin Hahn and Bjørn Ramberg. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press. Mohanty, Jitendra Nath. 1989. Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. Moran, Dermot. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. New York: Routledge. Moser, Paul and Paul Pardi. 2011.“Interview with Dr. Paul Moser: On Knowing God.” Available at: http: //www.philosophynews.com/post/2011/02/02/Interview-with Dr-Paul-Moser-On-Knowing-God .aspx (accessed May 31, 2015). Nagel,Thomas. 1974.“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, 83: pp. 435–450. Peacocke, Christopher. 2001.“Does Perception Have a Nonconceptual Content?” The Journal of Philosophy 98: pp. 239–264. Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2007.“The Problem with the Problem of Consciousness.” Synthesis Philosophica, 44: pp. 483–494. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness.Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York:Washington Square Press. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1963. Science, Perception, and Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Siewert, Charles P. 1998. The Signifcance of Consciousness. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith,A. David. 2002. The Problem of Perception. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Smith, A. David. 2003. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. New York: Routledge. ———. 2008.“Husserl and Externalism.” Synthese, 160: pp. 313–333. Smith, Barry. 2000.“Logic and Formal Ontology.” Manuscrito 23: 275–323. Smith, David Woodruff. 1989. The Circle of Acquaintance. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2004. Mind World. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Sokolowski, Robert. 1964. The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Watzl, Sebastian. 2017. Structuring Mind: The Nature of Attention and How it Shapes Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Walter Hopp Welton, Donn. 2000. The Other Husserl:The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Willard, Dallas. 1984. Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge.Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1995.“Knowledge.” In: The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Eds. Barry Smith and David W. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 138–167. ———. 2002. “The World Well Won: Husserl’s Epistemic Realism One Hundred Years Later.” In: One Hundred Years of Phenomenology. Eds. Dan Zahavi and Frederik Stjernfelt. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 69–78. ———. 2003.“The Theory of Wholes and Parts and Husserl's Explication of the Possibility of Knowledge in the Logical Investigations.” In: Husserl’s Logical Investigations Reconsidered. Ed. Denis Fisette. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 163–182. Yoshimi, Jeff. 2015. “The Metaphysical Neutrality of Husserlian Phenomenology.” Husserl Studies, 31: pp. 1–15. Zahavi, Dan. 1999. Self-Awareness and Alterity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2003a. “Inner Time Consciousness and Prerefective Awareness.” In: The New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Ed. Donn Welton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 157–180. ———. 2003b.“Intentionality and Phenomenality.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 33: pp. 63–92. ———. 2003c. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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11 CRISIS Emiliano Trizio
What is wrong with our sciences? What is wrong with our philosophy? What is wrong with our culture? These questions played a fundamental role in Husserl’s thought from its earliest stage, if it is true that, since at least the 1890s, his self-conscious aim was to react to the unsatisfactory current cultural situation by renewing the classical ideal of philosophy as a systematic theoretical endeavor encompassing all special sciences, culminating in metaphysics, and providing answers to all fundamental questions concerning the world and whatever might exist beyond it (see, for instance, Hua-Mat III, 223–55). It would not be an exaggeration to say that Husserl’s entire life-long effort could be characterized, to resort to the word fguring in the title of the famous Kaizo articles, as one of renewal: renewal of our scientifc spirit and of the mission of science and philosophy as the guide and the driving force of human individual and collective existence. Ultimately, what is stake is nothing else that a refoundation of rationalism in an age that has seen its apparent demise, and, consequently, a widespread weakening of our belief in the value and possibilities of reason. If such a negative appraisal of the present cultural situation is a constant feature of Husserl’s thought, it is undeniable that, through the years, it became more and more radical in content and bleaker in tone. If one excludes some exceptions, only during the last years of his life, to be precise after 1935, does Husserl make a sparse and limited use of the German terms “Krise” and the more formal “Krisis” (and, increasingly so of the latter) in relation to the current state of European (i.e.,Western) culture, of philosophy, and of the positive sciences.Yet, the infuence on Husserl’s thought of the political situation of the 1930s and the widespread use of the term “crisis” in the German-speaking philosophical, scientifc, and political literature of the time (see Graf 2010) should not be overstated. The late use of such terms (which do not belong to Husserl’s technical vocabulary) does not mark any substantial philosophical novelty, precisely because, as we shall see, the concepts and ideas behind them were developed by Husserl much earlier and belong to the essential core of his entire philosophy. Indeed, precisely in order to avoid the numerous misunderstandings that have surrounded (and still surround) the very notion of crisis, it is useful to begin this analysis by showing how such conceptual framework can be discerned already in the Kaizo articles (written in 1922–23) and in Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929). In particular, in the Kaizo articles, we fnd a clear characterization of the notion of health of a cultural formation, and more specifcally, of a scientifc-philosophical civilization, as well as a frst characterization of the reasons why our culture has fallen into a pathological state.The crucial evaluative notion that Husserl employs in those articles is that of 151
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Echtheit (genuineness, or authenticity). In order to understand the role of such notion, however, it is necessary to stress that, since the entire problematic horizon of such questions is cultural (or “spiritual”) in character, a scientifc, i.e., philosophically rigorous, clarifcation will be made possible only by an insight into the essence of culture and, correlatively, of the scientifc knowledge of it. Such an insight, as is always the case for Husserl, is possible if and only if the sphere of spirit is not misunderstood on the basis of analogies derived from the sphere of nature. In very succinct terms, Husserl lists a number of essential features of spiritual reality. 1) Space and time have a peculiar non-naturalistic sense, 2) intentional life is referred to an ego and unifed by a motivational nexus, 3) the different subjects connect to one another by virtue of specifcally “social” intentional acts that give rise to an internal form of unifcation of spiritual reality, and 4) to the intentional acts pertaining to the theoretical, practical, and evaluative life there belong also normative and not only descriptive aspects (Hua XXVII, 8). Only taking these essential features as a starting point is it possible to hope to develop for the region spirit the kind of eidetic cognition necessary to any scientifcally rigorous knowledge, and that, according to Husserl, the pure mathematics of spacetime has already afforded in the case of the sciences of nature. Such eidetic cognition, which is by and large still missing, will result in a science of the essence of the spiritual aspect of humankind (Hua XXVII, 10), and, thus, in a discipline fundamental to all sciences of spirit. It will allow understanding not only the essence of human personal life and all its possible forms in general, not only the essences of social formations and their infnite ramifcations including cultural institutions, forms of state, religions, etc., but also the essence of a good, genuine, true, or ethical human life, and, likewise, the essence of a good, genuine, true, or ethical social and political life.The normative eidetic science of spirit details the conditions that a human society must meet in order to be genuine or authentic.This, however, does not mean that such eidetic cognition would outline a static utopian ideal that we would thereafter have to approximate. Rather, the situation is the one described in the section “Die höhere Wertform einer humanen Menschheit” (Hua XXVII, 54–9) of the unpublished Kaizo article Erneuerung und Wissenschaft. Let us now consider the higher value-form of a genuinely humane humanity (einer echt humanen Menschheit) that lives and develops by shaping itself towards genuine humanity (zu echter Humanität). It is the one in which philosophy has assumed as world-wisdom the form of philosophy as rigorous and universal science, in which reason has shaped and objectifed itself in the form of the “Logos.” (Hua XXVII, 54–5) Since philosophy itself does not consist in the static possession of a fnite body of knowledge, but in the infnite exploration of a likewise infnite feld of truth, subject in turn to a constant form of self-criticism, the resulting picture is that of a humanity that evolves toward an ideal that itself evolves (Hua XXVII, 55–6). In other words, humanity must fulfll the task of its endless reform under the guidance of ideals whose progressive clarifcation is itself an infnite task. A genuine humanity is one that lives in an effort of clarifying as well as achieving a state of humanity of higher and higher value, and, consequently, follows the commandments of an “ethical technology” that stems from the aforementioned normative eidetic insights:“the technology of the selfactualization of genuine humanity” (Hua XXVII, 56). Now, we do not have to lose sight of the fact that philosophy qua rigorous and universal science encompasses all special sciences, whether factual or eidetic. Since genuine humanity is guided by a community of scientifc philosophers whose insights establish the norms to which any aspect of individual and collective life must conform, philosophy as rigorous science establishes the ideal norms of all scientifc activities too 152
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(including itself) and it does so as Wissenschaftstheorie (which ultimately requires transcendental phenomenology, and in particular, the phenomenology of reason).Thus, all sciences themselves, as branches of universal philosophy, undergo an endless process of critical development and revision and constitute so many activities endowed with a high degree of value for the life of a rational humanity. Therefore, The development of the universal theory of science (theory of reason and logic) is an organ and at once a stage of the development of humanity towards a humanity that raises itself to a higher self-actualization. (Hua XXVII, 56) This small section contains also an indication of the signifcance (“Bedeutung”) that a genuine science has for humanity. Husserl here lists three different levels, stressing the importance of the third one. 1) The totality of theoretical cognitions, once properly elucidated within the unity of philosophy, brings with it a kingdom of values whose correlate is what Husserl calls “Erkenntnisfreude” (Hua XXVII, 84). 2) Under the guidance of both natural and social sciences, we develop techniques able to shape our environment according to our needs and goals. 3) On the basis of the clarifcation of the being investigated by the sciences afforded by philosophy it is possible to understand the ultimate sense of the world (Hua XXVII, 57).The third point, which, let us insist, is the most decisive of the three to bestow upon genuine sciences a signifcance for human life, is somehow cryptic, and we will have to go back to it. For the moment, however, we have acquired the needed insight into what Husserl considers the ideal “healthy” (genuine) cultural form for which we should strive. These last considerations connect Husserl’s ethical ideal to the problematic of a phenomenological foundation of all sciences.The jargon of “echtheit” highlights this continuity. A genuine humanity is one that strives toward the realization of its full rational nature under the guidance of philosophy as rigorous science.Within the unity of the latter, all sciences are genuine in that they acquire an increasing level of rationality, i.e., of scientifcity, qua components of such philosophy.As is well known, according to Husserl, it is the specifcity of European culture to have given rise to the ideal of universal philosophy, and to have been shaped by it. European culture is defned by the very fact that it carries within itself the telos of a genuine humanity enlightened by the systematic unity of genuine sciences within a genuinely scientifc universal philosophy (Hua XXVII, 109). If then we turn to the actual historical trajectory of European culture, we discover that they are governed by the vicissitudes of the genuine scientifcity of European sciences. Although Husserl often seems to evoke a stark opposition between echte/unechte Wissenchaft, genuine scientifcity too is a dynamic concept and admits of degrees. To be sure, a body of knowledge such as Babylonian astronomy is not a real/genuine science, since, in spite of its internal interconnectedness and its intersubjective character, it still relies on religious and mystical beliefs that belong only to a given cultural tradition (Hua XXVII, 76). Presocratic philosophy and science, instead, deserve to be called “genuine” at least in so far as they already presuppose the process of de-mythologization and the resulting emergence of what Husserl calls the theoretical attitude. Its results are based on evident insights and, thus, appeal to operations that are not conditioned by traditional beliefs (Hua XXVII, 77–9). However, a higher level of genuine scientifcity is achieved only as soon as, within the unity of Plato’s philosophy, science loses the character of an investigation naïvely directed toward its objects and becomes a critical enterprise guided by logic and by the theory of science (Hua XXVII, 81–3). Genuine scientifcity, thus, requires embeddedness in a general philosophy able to elucidate the rationality of its operations. Two points must be stressed concerning this frst philosophization of the sciences. 1) It arises as 153
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a response to the sophistic skepticism concerning the legitimacy of Presocratic cosmology.The sophists, by denying the possibility of the kind of knowledge sought for by the early physiologists, had for the frst time made scientifcity itself into a problem. In other words, the pretension of early Greek cosmology to be providing rationally compelling insights into the nature of reality was questioned, so that the philosophical grounding of science became necessary. It is noteworthy that what is, to my knowledge, the frst occurrence of the word Krise in Husserl’s corpus in which it appears with the sense that it would acquire in the last years of his life appears in a text written in 1919–20 and it refers to the situation of early Greek philosophy in the wake of the Sophists’ criticism (Hua-Mat IX, 194). Early Greek philosophy is there characterized as being in crisis because its scientifcity had be brought into question.This fully agrees with Husserl’s later characterization of the outbreak of the crisis of philosophy with the modern skeptical empiricist denial of its scientifcity. 2) No past rationalistic philosophy (neither ancient, nor modern) has found the correct way of developing philosophy as a rigorous science and to rescue the different sciences from their naïveté. To be sure, a science embedded into a philosophical system is still animated by the kind of teleological project that characterizes European culture; thus, in a way, it enjoys a certain kind of genuineness. However, already in the Kaizo articles, Husserl mentions the process of technization of the scientifc method occurring after Plato as an antagonist of genuine scientifcity (Hua XXVII, 83). To be more precise, technization is the opposite of philosophization.The more the former prevails, the less genuinely scientifc science is.The failure of Europe to follow its inner teleology, the opacity of the scientifcity of the positive sciences, and, fnally, their failure to contribute to a meaningful human existence are all mentioned by Husserl already in these years. In Formal and Transcendental Logic, especially in the introduction, we fnd a much sharper focus on the failure of our sciences to be genuine (“echte”) sciences and, thus, to occupy the place that belongs to them in the life of a “genuinely humane” humanity. In the introduction, Husserl clarifes what in the Kaizo lectures was only hinted at, i.e., that genuine science is a task set by Plato, rather than an achievement of his reform of philosophy.The merit of Plato is to have established, for the frst time, logic as a discipline “… exploring the essential requirements of ‘genuine’ knowledge and ‘science’” (Hua XVII, 1). Plato is not the founder of genuine science; rather he has, for the frst time, contrived the idea of genuine science as a task.1 The idea of a genuine science is that of a science able to justify its claims in an absolute way, i.e., to a level beyond which no further doubt or investigation makes sense. Husserl calls it “radical self-responsibility.” But, of course, a science can approximate this ideal only within the unity of a rational all-encompassing science (philosophy) that is able to warrant this self-responsibility. Now, this is precisely the path that modernity has abandoned due to the fact that the different sciences have become independent (Hua XVII, 2). “Thus modern science has abandoned the ideal of genuine science that was vitally operative in the sciences from the time of Plato; and, in its practice, it has abandoned radicalness of scientifc responsibility” (Hua XVII, 3–4). Such a unitary grounding of the different sciences requires, in the frst place, a logic that is itself not developed in a naïve, uncritical way; that is, a science of the essence of science in general (Hua XVII, 4, 9); and, in the second place, an investigation into the essence and sense of being of their specifc objective domains (Hua XVII, 6, 13, 17). These investigations would jointly provide the “absolute grounding of the sciences” that Descartes envisaged, but failed to achieve, and that only transcendental phenomenology can assure (Hua XVII, 7). Instead, due to the demise of the idea of a universal scientifc philosophy, the different sciences, and logic along with them, have become “theoretical techniques” (Hua XVII, 3). Once more, we observe the antithesis between genuine science as philosophical, as rooted in a universal philosophy, and technized, independent sciences. Logic, which was meant to lead science to the path of genuine 154
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scientifcity, has itself become a positive science, unphilosophical in character.This by no means implies that logic as well as the special sciences are unable to yield evidently true or (in the case of the empirical sciences) evidently probable theories. Sciences qua theoretical techniques are still positive sciences that can be developed by the rigorous method of their specialists. What is missing in this positivity is, rather, their genuinely philosophical scientifcity, the character of being episteme, sciences of being in the ultimate sense: The unphilosophical character of this positivity 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 genuine being-sense (Seinssinn) of either their provinces or the concepts that comprehend their provinces; thus they are unable to say (in the true and ultimate sense) what 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 codeterminant of its sense. (Hua XVII, 13) This passage, as we shall see, condenses the very idea of the crisis of European sciences. Positive sciences (including logic) are unable to justify their method because they are blind to the constitutive operations of transcendental subjectivity that produce their objective domains (Hua XVII, 15). The result is, thus, that the de facto existing positive sciences “… are clues to guide transcendental researches, the aim of which is to create sciences for the very frst time as genuine” (Hua XVII, 14). Moreover, only by virtue of the clarifcation offered by transcendental phenomenology, qua science of constituting intentionality, the positive sciences can be rescued from their unphilosophical state: Only by virtue of such clarifcation, moreover, does the true sense of that being become understandable, which sciences has labored to bring out in its theories as true being, as true Nature, as the true cultural world. Therefore: only a science clarifed and justifed transcendentally (in the phenomenological sense) can be an ultimate science; only a transcendentally-phenomenologically clarifed world can be an ultimately understood world, only a transcendental logic can be an ultimate theory of science, an ultimate, deepest, and most universal, theory of the principles and norms of all the sciences. (Hua XVII, 16) This passage, instead, contains the indication of how transcendental phenomenology is able to provide a remedy to the crisis of European sciences. Now we have gathered all the elements necessary to understand correctly Husserl’s later use of the word “crisis” in relation to philosophy, to the special sciences, and to European culture as a whole. The notion of crisis of European humanity (or culture)2 is developed at length for the frst time in the Vienna Lecture delivered in 1935.The very beginning of the lecture connects the theme of the European crisis, which, as we know, was extremely popular at the time, with the considerations Husserl had developed already in the Kaizo articles concerning the defning role of philosophy for Europe.3 Husserl’s argument is, at bottom, quite simple.There is a consensus that our culture is ill, but there does not seem to be a scientifc rigorous account of the illness, of its cause, and of its remedies (which is, itself, an aspect of our very illness).What is necessary in order to clarify these issues is, frst, to characterize the spiritual shape of Europe, to clarify the “phenomenon Europe” in terms of its inner teleology, i.e., of its guiding idea.The frst section of the Vienna Lecture provides 155
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a famous and extremely dense account of how European culture is defned by the guiding role of philosophy, which, through the praxis of the different sciences and their application, extends to all aspects of individual and collective life.The second section, instead, provides an even more succinct account of what went wrong in the development of European culture, one that will be developed at length in Part II of the Krisis.The account revolves around the role played by the misunderstandings concerning the being of nature and spirit. In other words, the crisis of European culture is ultimately explained in terms of the failure to develop natural and cultural sciences as genuine scientifc disciplines, precisely according to the account of genuine science that we have found in the introduction to Formal and Transcendental Logic. In outline: the development of modern mathematical physics has produced an objectivistic interpretation of material nature, which, in turn, has produced a naturalistic interpretation of the being of spirit, whereby the latter is 1) a fragmented being dependent on the material level; 2) a being to be investigated with methods akin to that of physics.This psychophysical world-view (Hua VI, 342/294) has replaced what, instead, should have been the right way to make sense of the domains of investigation of natural and cultural sciences, i.e., by elucidating their rootedness in the “surrounding life-world” (HuaVI, 342/295).As a result, no genuine science of spirit could be developed, and in particular, not that transcendental, eidetic science of spirit that is necessary to provide the norms for any rational position-taking, any evaluation, and any practical activity. In short, consciousness could not be understood in its constituting function and philosophy could not establish itself as a rigorous science and become the guiding force of European humanity.Thus, once the phenomenon “Europe” is “grasped in its central, essential nucleus,” and European culture is defned in terms of “the teleology of the infnite goals of reason,” then,“… the ‘crisis’ could then become distinguishable as the apparent failure of rationalism” (HuaVI, 347/229). Husserl’s train of thought is very linear: if we want to understand what this “crisis of Europe” everyone talks about is, we need frst to understand what Europe is. This can be done by recognizing that Europe is defned by the teleological idea it carries within itself. Its crisis, then, consists in the fact that it has lost faith in that idea.We can appreciate the continuity between the Vienna Lecture and Husserl’s earlier writings. In it, Husserl explicitly identifes the genuine and healthy state of European culture with the correct functioning of philosophy, and the word “crisis” appears immediately associated with the world “illness” (Hua VI, 315/270). More importantly, Husserl here clearly indicates that it is because of the objectivism derived from modern physics that the essence of subjectivity has been missed, and, thus, modern rationalism has failed its mission.4 One can say that the objectivism stemming from the technized, non-genuine modern physics has played the role of the pathogen agent in the illness of European humanity. We have now gathered the elements necessary to approach the frst part of Husserl’s last work, the Krisis, where Husserl speaks not only about a crisis of European humanity, but also, explicitly, about a crisis of European sciences, and a crisis of philosophy. The considerations developed up to now already indicate that the latter crisis plays the pivotal role in Husserl’s entire critical enterprise, although the title of Part I of the Krisis does not mention it explicitly (“The crisis of the sciences as expression of the radical life-crisis of European humanity”). Let us briefy follow the development of §§1–5 of the Krisis, where these notions are introduced. In §1, Husserl acknowledges that the notion of a crisis of European sciences might seem odd. A crisis of our sciences as such: can we seriously speak of it? Is not this talk, heard so often these days, an exaggeration? After all, the crisis of a science indicates nothing less than that its genuine scientifc character (ihre echte Wissenschaftlichkeit), the whole manner in which it has set its task and developed a methodology for it, has become questionable (fraglich). (Hua VI, 1/3) 156
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In this short passage, Husserl provides already a defnition of what the crisis of science amounts to: it is the fact that its scientifcity becomes to say the least “questionable” or “doubtful.”What is, ultimately, the scientifcity of a science? It is the way in which it has developed a method for its task, i.e., to determine theoretically a certain domain of objects. Obviously, the positive sciences, both natural and cultural, given their incredible theoretical and practical success, do not seem to be in a state of crisis at all. Husserl mentions that only psychology appears more problematic in this respect, but concludes that such science can be granted a certain level of scientifcity too. Such positive sciences, together, must be contrasted with philosophy, Husserl adds, whose “unscientifcity” is unmistakable (Hua VI, 2/4).The problem is, thus, what the crisis of the positive sciences really amounts to. On the basis of the preceding analyses, in particular of the above reading of Formal and Transcendental Logic, we can already anticipate that the solution is based on the recognition of “the unphilosophical character of their positivity”, i.e., of the lack of clarity concerning the being of their domains of investigation.This lack of clarity is precisely due to the demise of the idea of a philosophy in the unity of which the rationality of such sciences would be completely elucidated (as to both their task and method). However, this time, Husserl follows a more complex path, whose aim is to highlight the full signifcance of the positive sciences’ original rootedness in a universal philosophy.To the philosopher, who is conscious of such inprinciple rootedness, the inadequacy of positive scientifcity is clear, but to the general public, as well as to the “scientists who are sure of their method” (Hua VI, 3/5), it is far from being so. Thus, Husserl addresses the reader by appealing to a phenomenon, that, instead, is universally acknowledged at the time he is writing, i.e., that the sciences have lost their meaning for life, as the title of §2 states.5 Husserl calls this phenomenon “crisis” between quotation marks, to signal that he is referring to a use of the word that is not yet the one he is seeking, but rather a common one.This phenomenon is for Husserl undoubtedly real and derives from the “positivistic reduction of the idea of science to mere factual science” as, once more, we read in the title of §2.The idea is the following. Given that we only believe in the kind of rationality that reveals matters of fact, the insights they produce, do not mean anything for our human existence. Piling up theories about natural phenomena, or discovering countless historical and cultural facts, cannot give full meaning to our existence in the absence of a rationality that is able to evaluate them. As we have seen above, scientifc insights cannot guide our existence and be meaningful to us unless they refer to values and norms. If scientifc rationality provides only facts, then a form of nihilism is inevitable; values and norms will be considered merely as contingent facts. Ultimately, this undermines science itself. This situation, however, does not yet tell us what is lacking in the scientifcity of, say, physics, or psychology. Its function here is to trigger the historical considerations that we fnd in §3, where Husserl briefy recalls that during the modern era, and, in particular, within the philosophy of the rationalists (such as Descartes and Spinoza), the notion of science was much broader. Even what we consider today positive sciences were still branches of philosophy conceived as the universal science of being. Such universal philosophy aimed at addressing scientifcally not only questions of facts, but all problems pertaining to the sphere of reason.These, in turn, include the determination of the norms of theoretical, evaluative, and practical reason. They include also the so-called highest and ultimate questions that concern the sense of the world, human existence, and God; in short, the classical metaphysical questions.Within such universal philosophy, the factual sciences could also receive a signifcance for life. In §§4–5, Husserl outlines the “process of dissolution” of such philosophical ideal; in other words, he outlines the crisis of philosophy as the collapse of the project of a truly scientifc philosophy.The decisive moment of this crisis is Hume’s skeptical onslaught against metaphysics. This characterization is fully compatible with the general defnition of a crisis of science that he has provided in §1.The crisis of philosophy as universal science of being consists in the fact 157
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that we have stopped believing in the possibility of a scientifc philosophy; the scientifcity of philosophy, as it was developed during modern rationalism, has become not just “fraglich” but totally bankrupt (as explained in §23). However, now it is also possible to provide the defnition of the crisis of the sciences that we were looking for, i.e., in terms of their philosophical (and not merely positive) scientifcity: Yet the problem of a possible metaphysics also encompassed eo ipso that of the possibility of the factual sciences, since they had their relational meaning (Sinn)—that of truths merely for areas of what is—in the indivisible unity of philosophy. Can reason and that which-is be separated, where reason, as knowing, determines what is? (…) ultimately, all modern sciences drifted into a peculiar, increasingly puzzling crisis with regard to the meaning (nach den Sinn) of their original founding as branches of philosophy, a meaning (Sinn) which they continued to bear within themselves.This is a crisis which does not encroach upon the theoretical and practical successes of the special sciences; yet it shakes to the foundations the whole meaning of their truth (ihre ganze Wahrheitssinn). (Hua VI, 9–10/11–12) This passage is in line with Husserl’s early characterization of the non-genuine character of our science. In Krisis II, Husserl will provide a detailed account of how the objectivism resulting from the misunderstandings surrounding modern mathematical physics has produced the psychophysical world-view that has crippled modern philosophy from the start; while in Krisis III, he will lay the ground for an understanding of the being of nature and spirit, based not on objectivistic, metaphysical hypotheses, but on the original intuitive experience of the life-world. We are now able to give an answer to the questions with which this entry began.The results of this analysis suggest that the crisis of philosophy is the place to begin. The crisis of philosophy consists in the fact that its scientifcity is bankrupt: our philosophy is not scientifc, and we are skeptical about its possibility to ever become so. Due to the crisis of philosophy, we are unable to render our sciences genuine sciences of being: the sense of their objective domains remains obscure and the method whereby they acquire knowledge about them cannot be completely justifed. This is the crisis of European sciences. Furthermore, the sciences, reduced to theoretical techniques have also lost the aforementioned three aspects of their meaning for life: 1) In the absence of a philosophical Wissenschaftstheorie, the “cognitive joy” they provide cannot be complete, due to their mutilated scientifcity. 2) In the absence of a philosophical theory of values and practical norms, they cannot act as reliable means for improving our surrounding natural and cultural world. 3) In the absence of a correct account of teleology and of the“highest and ultimate” metaphysical questions, they fail to give a sense to human existence and to reveal a world that has itself an ultimate sense, a world whose teleological source is God. Finally, since Europe is defned by the teleological idea of a humanity guided by philosophy and science, the crisis of philosophy implies the loss of faith of European humanity in what defnes its true being, the crisis of European culture.
Notes 1 “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 on to make genuine science possible now for the frst time, to guide its practice” (Hua XVII, 2). In this sense, his establishment of logic has on science the effect that, at a more general level, his Republic has on the life of humanity: to generate spiritual formations that strive for an ideal having universal validity. Plato is, more than anybody else, the father of Europe.
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Crisis 2 A letter written by Husserl to Roman Ingarden in 1935 makes clear the equivalence between “European humanity (Menschentum)” and “European culture (Kultur)” (Hua VI, XIII). 3 “In this lecture I shall venture the attempt to fnd new interest in the frequently treated theme of the European crisis by developing the philosophical-historical idea (or the teleological sense) of European humanity. As I exhibit, in the process, the essential function that philosophy and its branches, our sciences, have to exercise within that sense, the European crisis will also receive a new elucidation” (Hua VI, 314/269). 4 “Precisely this lack of a genuine rationality on all sides is the source of man’s now unbearable lack of clarity about his own existence and his infnite tasks” (Hua VI, 345/297). 5 I have already argued that the Krisis §2 has been often mistakenly taken to contain Husserl’s own defnition of the crisis of European science as the loss of their meaning for life (Trizio 2016).This is refected in a number of interpretations that either identify the two phenomena or do not clarify their difference and mutual relation. See Stein (1937, 327), Gurwitsch (1956, 383), Paci (1972, 3), Bohem (1979, 27), Ströker (1988, 207; 1992, 107), Carr (1974, 46; 2010, 86), Bernet, Kern, and Marbach (1993, 220–5), and Dodd (2004, 29–30). In a long and detailed response to my article, George Heffernan (Heffernan 2017) has tried to formulate an alternative reading able to salvage the essential elements of the traditional interpretation. Some of the reasons why I believe his interpretative solutions do not withstand a close scrutiny of Husserl’s texts, nor a critical examination in light of Husserl’s general view of science, can be found in this entry. The only author that, to my knowledge, avoided the “trap” of §2 was Jan Patočka, who in his 1937 review of Husserl’s Krisis wrote: “Husserl begins his exposition with the statement that science is at present undergoing an acute crisis of its scientifcity.The crisis frst appears to the eye as a loss of the meaning of science for life; science has nothing to say to us about the diffculties and anxieties of our existence” (Patočka 2015, 21, italics added).The remaining part of the review adds further details about the unsatisfactory scientifcity of both natural and cultural sciences.
References Bernet, Rudolf, Kern, Iso, and Marbach, Eduard. 1993. An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Bohem, Rudolf. 1979. “Husserls drei Thesen über die Lebenswelt”. In: Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls. Ed. Elisabeth Ströker. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann, pp. 23–31. Carr, David. 1974. Phenomenology and the Problem of History. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2010.“The Crisis as Philosophy of History”. In: Science and the Life-World. Eds. David Hyder and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 83–99. Dodd, James. 2004. Crisis and Refection: An Essay on Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Graf, Rüdiger. 2010. “Either-Or: The Narrative of ‘Crisis’ in Weimar Germany and in Historiography”. Central European History, 43(4), pp. 592–615. Gurwitsch, Aron. 1956. “The Last Work of Edmund Husserl”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 16(4), pp. 380–399. Heffernan, George. 2017. “The Concept of Krisis in Husserl’s the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”. Husserl Studies, 33(3), pp. 229–257. Paci, Enzo. 1972. The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man. Evanston: Northwestern Universty Press. Patočka, Jan. 2015.“Edmund Husserl’s Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transcendentale Phänomenologie”. In: The Phenomenological Critique of Mathematisation and the Question of Responsibility. Eds. L’ubica Učník, Ivan Chvatík,Anita Williams. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 17–28. Stein, Edith. 1937. “Edmund Husserl. La crise de la science et de la philosophie transcendantale”. Revue Thomiste, 42–43, pp. 327–329. Ströker, Elizabeth. 1988.“Edmund Husserls Phänomelogie: Philosophia Perennis in der Krise des europäischen Kultur”. Husserl Studies, 5, pp. 197–217. ———. 1992. Husserls Werk. Zur Ausgabe der Gesammelten Schriften. Hamburg: Meiner. Trizio, Emiliano. 2016.“What is the Crisis of Western Sciences?”. Husserl Studies, 32, pp. 191–211.
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12 DASEIN Daniel O. Dahlstrom
Dasein is one of the most basic concepts of Heidegger’s philosophy, beginning with the phenomenology that he develops in his major work, Being and Time (Heidegger 1967), as the method necessary for fundamental ontology. Heidegger’s phenomenology aims to make explicit what is hidden, what does not show itself initially and for the most part, namely, the being of beings.To this end, it begins with an analysis of what is defned by having an understanding of being, albeit a tacit, pre-ontological understanding: Da-sein (1967, 13, 15, 35). Although Heidegger maintains that Da-sein, as he understands it, cannot be translated (Heidegger 1989, 300), he himself exploits the term’s etymology, composed of da (typically meaning ‘here,’ ‘there,’ or ‘since’) and sein (the infnitive of ‘to be’). For this reason at least, Da-sein is often translated ‘being-here’ or ‘being-there.’ Yet Heidegger repeatedly stresses that the da (‘here’) of Da-sein (hereafter used interchangeably with ‘being-here’), far from designating a particular place – as in ‘here or there’ (da oder dort) – designates the clearing (Lichtung) in which the being of particular beings is disclosed. From the fact that Dasein itself is the clearing, Heidegger infers: “Being-here is its disclosedness” (1967, 132–3).1 Even if it is not a particular place, the metaphorical sense of a space persists in Heidegger’s use of da, which he designates as “an open place,” a “parameter,” a “sphere,” an “open expanse” in which things present themselves, albeit only partially and only for a time (1977, 216; 1996, 136–7; 1986, 380).As Heidegger puts it in a 1938 lecture: “The ‘here’ signifes that clearing in which beings stand respectively as a whole, in such a way, to be sure, that in this here the historical being (Seyn) of the open beings shows itself and at the same time withdraws” (1984, 233).The passage just quoted echoes basic features of the conception of being-here articulated in Being and Time. According to the latter work, too, Dasein’s manner of being is such that it is the site in which the manners of being of this or that sort of being – itself, others, tools, things merely on hand – are disclosed. Regardless of how the spatial metaphor is to be parsed out, Heidegger’s construal of beinghere in terms of the clearing and the disclosedness of being constitutes its fundamental phenomenological signifcance for his thinking, early and late.Although Heidegger abandons the project of fundamental ontology after 1930, the concept of Dasein remains – as the cited passage from 1938 suggests – at the center of his subsequent efforts to think the meaning of ‘being’ in historical, non-transcendental terms. Nevertheless, with this shift in Heidegger’s thinking, he accentuates different aspects of being-here. In Being and Time the existential signifcance of being-here takes center stage of the analysis. In later writings Heidegger focuses on its historical signifcance, 160
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relative to his idiosyncratic conception of the history of being. The remainder of the present entry is accordingly divided into two parts: a review of the existential analysis of being-here in Being and Time, followed by a gloss of the historical signifcance of the concept in his later writings.
12.1. Being-here and fundamental ontology Dasein enters into German philosophical terminology by the early eighteenth century as the equivalent for the Latin derivative, Existenz. Both terms traditionally stand for what Heidegger equates with “being on hand” or “present-at-handness” (Vorhandensein), typical of both naturally occurring things that, at least prima facie, appear useless or obtrusive, impediments to use, and decontextualized objects of (allegedly) purely theoretical investigations. In Being and Time Heidegger departs from this traditional usage, introducing both terms – Dasein and Existenz – as words of art that designate what is roughly equivalent to a human being, but cannot be identifed with what philosophy or positive science (including history and theology) traditionally understand by it, namely, something occurring in nature like other things on hand. (To have an understanding of being is essential to being-here, not to being on hand.) To be sure,‘Dasein’ and ‘human being’ may refer to similar phenomena (e.g., affectivity, understanding, conformity, the use of language, scientifc research); indeed, existential analysis (analysis of being-here) can only get off the ground by presuming as much (1967, 11).Yet even when they refer to similar phenomena, they do so in quite different ways. So, too, what existential analysis uncovers is essentially different from historical investigations of human affairs, theological pronouncements on the human condition, or the results of scientifc inquiry into all things human. Consequently, the tendency to substitute the meaning of one term for that of the other, as necessary as it is at the outset, is ultimately misguided. Mention has already been made of being-here’s fundamental phenomenological signifcance as the clearing for the disclosedness of things’ being. This signifcance is intimately connected, Heidegger maintains, to the ways of existing inherent to being-here. In Being and Time he conceives Dasein, quite fundamentally, as the entity that exists (and, it deserves iterating, is not simply on hand) insofar as it possesses an understanding of being, an understanding that matters to it. This passionate understanding is not to be confused with an understanding of natural kinds allegedly already on hand (e.g., animality, rationality). To the contrary, there is a decided if, to be sure, not unqualifed open-endedness to this understanding, since it brings with it Dasein’s understanding of itself in terms of the possibility of being or not being itself. Dasein exists by relating itself to – or, alternatively, behaving toward (sich verhalten zu) – its existence as this possibility. It essentially does so, moreover, in the frst person, from that standpoint that each Dasein respectively can alone call “mine.” Dasein’s passionate understanding of being is of a piece with the fact not only that its existence (“mine” or “yours” respectively) is at stake for it in all it does, but also that its existence is in a fundamental sense up to it. Existence is mine to be, yours to be, and, hence, it can be authentic or not. Or, to put the matter more formally, saying that Dasein is the entity with a passionate understanding of being is equivalent to saying that it relates to its existence as a possibility that it is its own to be. Heidegger’s conception of Dasein in terms of this mutual entailment accounts for the existential signifcance of Dasein. Assuming the fundamental phenomenological signifcance of Dasein glossed above, Heidegger analyzes this existential signifcance but he does so in the service of fundamental ontology, the task of determining the meaning of ‘being’ as the necessary foundation of any other ontological investigation. Precisely because Dasein has a passionate understanding of being and relates to its existence as a possibility, it is ontically distinguished by its ontological or, better, pre-ontological 161
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character. Being-here has this character precisely because it exists with and as an understanding of being. For this same reason (again, in tandem with its fundamental signifcance), being-here allegedly enjoys a privileged status as the point of departure for pursuing the objective of fundamental ontology (1967, 13).Thus, the frst part of Being and Time is entitled “The preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein” – the frst step of fundamental ontology.The analysis of Dasein aims, as he also puts it, at “freeing up the horizon for an interpretation of the sense of being in general” (1967, 15).As discussed below, that horizon is time, albeit of a particular sort. The existential analysis unpacks several existentials, ways of existing that are disclosive of the various manners of being of beings.Among these existentials, Heidegger singles out certain “basic existentials” – attunement, understanding, talk or discourse, fallenness – that are equiprimordial.That is to say, they are joined at the hip – a point already intimated by the mention earlier of ‘passionate understanding.’ For Dasein to understand being is for being to matter to it (attunement) and vice versa. Nor is the attuned understanding isolated from the fact that beinghere, we share it with others – who are also here (Mit-dasein) – by talking and listening to them. So, too, we share a heritage and a world as a complex of meanings grounded in that heritage.To be sure, for the most part, we fnd ourselves swept up into the modes of conforming to generally accepted attunements, ways of understanding and speaking, without questioning them.This proclivity to conformity is, as the term suggests, a way of falling prey to an anonymous, selfalienating conception of others – the They (das Man) – lending its own unity to the other basic existentials that make up being-here. Just as traditional ontology, with its emphasis on the onhandness of things in nature, mistakenly overlooks the fundamental phenomenological signifcance of being-here, so, too, it “jumps over” the latter’s worldliness, epitomized by the work-world and the concerns (Besorgen) that dominate its everyday, worldly existence. Heidegger accordingly stresses the need to investigate being-here in terms of its essential constitution of being-in-the-world and with an eye to understanding ‘being-in’ existentially, i.e., not as something on hand in another thing on hand in nature (1967, 54, 65) but as a form of immersion in and engagement with the surrounding world or environment (Umwelt) – “the most proximate world of everyday being-here” – and the things within it (1967, 54, 56, 61, 66).2 The analysis reveals a meaningful complex of implements, meaningful both because use of each implement complements the use of other implements and because the complex as a whole is for the sake of being-here. But what, if anything, is being-here for the sake of? In that complex there is, in principle, a suitable place for everything, but is there such a place for beinghere, a place where it is “at home”? And, if not, does that not entail the lack of signifcance (Unbedeutsamkeit) of everything within the world (1967, 186–7)? Of course, being-here may try to avoid these questions by living in the inertia of absorption in the everyday work-world. It is aided, moreover, by the fact that, in its fallenness (its proclivity to conform), being-here has always already accepted some semblance of meaningfulness from the ideology of the crowd. But these ways of living are futile attempts to escape the truth of being-here.“The immersion in the They and the ‘world’ of concerns reveals something like a fight of being-here in the face of itself as its authentic possibility-of-being itself ” (1967, 184). Because the question of being-here’s meaning presents itself in the experience of Angst as the experience of not being at home (unheimlich), Heidegger refers to Angst as a “basic attunement” and the “eminent” form of disclosedness of being-here (1967, 184, 188–9). But Angst is also eminent because, unlike a fear of something within the world, it is precisely about being-here, about being itself and being at all. In this capacity it reveals the being of being-here as care (Sorge). Being-here, we experience Angst because we care and we care because we project something for ourselves and, in that respect, are always ahead of ourselves. But we are ahead of ourselves, not in 162
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the abstract, but precisely by virtue of already being in a world, thrown into it, and caught up in concerns with what is handy within the world and the possibilities that it affords us.The being of being-here is care, understood as “being-ahead-of-itself-(while)already-being-in-(the world) as being-amidst (entities encountered within-the-world)” (1967, 192). As is often the case for Heidegger, this characterization of care as the being of being-here contains a clumsy sequence of hyphens for the sake of maintaining the unity of the existential structure. ‘Being-ahead’ is meant to capture the existential sense of the understanding, conceived as a potential-to-be (Seinkönnen) that coincides with a projection on the part of beinghere (hence, too, understanding is an “overstepping,” “transcending”); ‘being already’ is meant to capture the existential sense of attunement, conceived as the thrownness of an affectivity; and ‘being-amidst’ is meant to capture the absorption in everyday life and work that Heidegger characterizes as fallenness. Being-ahead (vorweg) of oneself, being-already (schon) disposed, and being-amidst (bei) things – in obvious parallel to what’s coming, what was already but is even now, and what is present, respectively – are inseparable, inherent parts (Momente) of care as a whole. The conclusion that care is the meaning of being for being-here serves as the pivot on which the second half of the existential analysis in Being and Time turns.Whereas the frst half concentrated on “the inauthentic being of being-here,” the foundation for elaborating the ontological basic question requires an analysis of being-here “in its possible authenticity and totality” (1967, 233). To this end, Heidegger articulates existential conceptions of death (as the culminating possibility of being-here) and of conscience (as the silent discourse of being-here, calling itself to project this possibility as its ownmost possibility). Anticipating nothingness resolutely, facing rather than feeing it, is the mark of being-here authentically. On the basis of an account of being-here authentically, Heidegger demonstrates that time-liness (Zeitlichkeit) is the ontological sense of care.3 Being-here can be resolute, anticipating its ownmost potential-to-be, only because it can come to itself and “this way of letting itself come to itself (sich auf sich Zukommen-lassen) is the primordial phenomenon of the future (Zukunft)” (1967, 325). But by coming to itself in this way, it takes over its thrownness and is its having been, while also disclosing the situation and making things present.The senses of having been and making present, together with the coming to itself in anticipation, make up the three, jointly necessary elements of time-liness (Zeitlichkeit). This time-liness – time in a primordial sense, not to be confused with clock time or world time – constitutes, Heidegger contends,“the sense of authentic care” (1967, 326).With this contention, he adds, the frst crucial steps are taken toward establishing “the thesis that the sense of being-here is time” (1967, 331).The establishment of this thesis then serves as the template for the unfnished project of fundamental ontology, namely, that of demonstrating that time-liness – labeled, in this respect, temporality (Temporalität) – is the condition for understanding being at all (1975, 389).
12.2. Being-here and thinking being historically determined In Being and Time, analysis of being-here dominates, as Heidegger attempts to demonstrate that time, suitably interpreted, underlies and ultimately gives meaning to its being. After 1930 the center of Heidegger’s focus shifts from being-here to the history of being (including, prominently, the history of ontology). However, being-here – not least as the clearing for beings and their being – remains fundamental to that history. Some of Heidegger’s most sustained treatments of being-here in the latter context are to be found in his Contributions to Philosophy, the subject of the rest of this entry. 163
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Heidegger’s attempt to think being historically in the late 1930s allegedly breaks with traditional forms of metaphysics (onto-theology) that, he submits, mistakenly think of being in terms of some particular being as the ultimate, suffcient ground of other beings. In the process they overlook the fact that even gods are in need of being and, indeed, being in a sense that is not, on pain of regress, correspondingly grounded. Heidegger frequently uses Abgrund to signify this groundlessness and Seyn, an archaic spelling of being, to characterize this sense of being that is an Abgrund, an abyss. He also uses this archaic spelling to signify the historical character of being, in contrast to any traditional reductions of it to some primary being (Seiendste, ens primum) as well as any pretentions to its transcendence or universality. I translate Seyn as ‘historical being’ to signal this difference, though it is historical in a primordial (and thus highly fgurative) sense, one that underlies any other sense of history because it is what happens, in the most basic sense, in being-here at all. Underscoring this primordial sense, he characterizes historical being as Ereignis, a term ordinarily signifying an event, but here signifying, more precisely, historical being’s appropriation or owning of being-here. Against the background of this attempt to thinking being historically, two central features of Heidegger’s later conception of being-here emerges.“Historical being appropriates being-here and yet is not its origin” (1989, 471). In turn, as what is thus appropriated (das Ereignete), beinghere clears the ground, as it were, and thereby grounds the truth of the abyss of historical being (Heidegger 1989, 294–9, 447, 452, 455, 460, 470f, 485–7, 490). I designate these two features – being appropriated by historical being and grounding the truth of it (namely, its lack of ground, its abyssal character) – the ‘appropriated’ and ‘grounding’ characters of being-here, respectively. Historical being’s appropriation of being-here is not an event in any ordinary sense of the term. Instead it coincides with historical being’s withdrawal (epoche, Entzug) and self-concealing (Sich-verbergen). If, for example, being is taken in the traditional sense of the presence of what is present, it can’t be similarly present but must withdraw in order for the entity to be present. In its withdrawal, it does a turn (a U-turn of sorts as the term Kehre often signifes) and it does so in the course of appropriating being-here, refusing itself (1989, 293).Thus, we don’t merely lack access to being in the way that we have access to entities; being is strictly speaking not “given” at all.There are hints (Winke), to be sure, and without it, beings would not be, but being itself escapes us.The emphasis is on the active voice here; being turns from us. Heidegger accordingly speaks of the “turn in the appropriation” (Kehre im Ereignis)4 and the appropriation characterized, in itself, by this turn (das in sich kehrige Ereignis) to which the abyss (the lack of ground mentioned earlier) belongs (1989, 185). But there is no such turn without being-here. Being-here is, as already noted, the ground of the truth of historical being, but being this ground is necessitated “by the basic experience of historical being as the appropriation” (1989, 294). Being-here’s founding experience is that of being what historical being – as the appropriation, the primordial owning – appropriates. Insofar as it is appropriated, it guards historical being’s refusal, its self-concealing (1989, 488). Heidegger characterizes being-here accordingly as “the clearing for the self-concealing (historical being),” “the clearing … in which historical being conceals itself,” and “the clearing of the historical being itself ” (1989, 298–99). In apposition to ‘clearing,’ he sometimes mentions the ‘open,’‘free,’‘unprotected’ – all metaphors of places and states.The expression “clearing for the self-concealing” in particular can appear paradoxical, but perhaps no more so than any registration of an absence. Each of these expressions re-inscribes the fundamental phenomenological signifcance of being-here, introduced in Being and Time (being-here as the “clearing”). In this respect, the third central, identifying feature of being-here (in addition to its appropriated and grounding characters) is a familiar one. But the difference in accentuation is also patent. Although the clearing in Being and Time encompasses both being in the truth and in the untruth, 164
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Heidegger’s later conception of being-here stresses that it is the clearing precisely for historical being’s self-concealing. Above I stressed the active character of historical being’s appropriation, withdrawal, and concealment.Whereas the center of gravity of the existential analysis in Being and Time was in many ways being-here’s projecting (Entwerfen), in the Contributions he stresses that being-here is “thrown, appropriated by historical being” (1989, 304; see also 259). By opening up an open region, the one projecting reveals that it is thrown and “achieves nothing else than taking up the swing back in historical being, i.e., moving back into the latter and thereby into the appropriation and in this way frst becoming itself, the preserver of the thrown projection” (1989, 304). Being-here participates in the appropriation’s refusal by insisting on it and renouncing any attempts to ignore it. That is to say, with its appropriation, being-here has “for its own the guardianship of the refusal.” Heidegger stresses that being-here’s appropriation takes the form of a “renunciation,” a renunciation that “allows the refusal (i.e., the appropriating) to surge into the open.”Yet far from being simply a negating and a negated, renunciation in this sense is a way of standing “primordially” as it were, “unsupported in the unprotected (the steadfastness of beinghere).” Indeed, it is “the mark of being-here, so to ‘stand’ … (peering) down into the abyss and in this way to surpass the gods” (all quotations from 1989, 487). In Being and Time, as noted above, Heidegger takes pains to differentiate his existential analysis, centered on being-here, from studies of human nature, whether in the form of psychology, anthropology, or biology. Still, he acknowledges that several analyses in Being and Time coincide with undertakings of a philosophical anthropology.5 So, while being-here is not identical to human being, it is in some contexts equivalent. In the Contributions, Heidegger frequently calls attention to the resulting ambiguity and faults his existential analyses for remaining in the grip of subjectivity.“In Being and Time being-here still stands in the guise of the ‘anthropological,’ ‘subjectivistic,’ ‘individualistic,’ and so forth, and yet with the opposite of all that in view.”6 But if Heidegger’s later conception of being-here is supposed to bracket, even more fundamentally, all traditional conceptions of the human, the question remains of how being-here relates to being human. Without completely dispelling the ambiguity of the earlier account, Heidegger introduces a new wrinkle in the form of a human transformation on the basis of the status of being-here. While being-here grounds the human being, the latter makes its essence (the guardianship of historical being) its own “insofar as it grounds itself in being-here” (1989, 489).7 True to his original insight – the way being-here is at once in the world, always already disposed to other entities and relating to them, on the basis of an understanding of being that coincides with being the clearing – both human self-understanding and understanding of beings ride on this transformation.“Only in being-here – which the human steadfastly becomes through the transitional, essential transformation – does a preservation of historical being succeed in what thereby frst appears as an entity [Seiendes]” (1989, 489).
Notes 1 This inference fagrantly confates epistemology and ontology or sagaciously locates the sweet spot where they coincide. 2 Each existential is ontologically signifcant, disclosing Dasein’s manner of being and whatever it encounters, in tandem with an ontic signifcance. For example, when I use a hammer, I understand it (ontically) as a means of fastening something; but this use and understanding coincide with understanding/disclosing it (ontologically) as being-handy or ready-to-hand (Zuhandensein). 3 A temporal reading of the adverbs and prepositions (vorweg, schon, bei) used to characterize care already suggests that some sense of time underlies being-here.
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Daniel O. Dahlstrom 4 See Heidegger 1989, 34, 57, 64, 262, 320, 407; exploiting appositive genitives, he refers, too, to the “turn of the appropriation” and the “appropriation of the turn” (1989, 36, 64, 231, 258, 267, 269, 311, 342, 351, 354, 409); also, the turning of historical being (1989, 412). 5 These references may have abetted Husserl’s critical assessment of the work as a failed phenomenology, lapsing into anthropology (see “Martin Heidegger” entry in the Handbook). Notably, two prominent works in philosophical anthropology by Scheler and Plessner appear shortly after the publication of Being and Time, perhaps contributing to Heidegger’s subsequent attempt to distance his work unequivocally from philosophical anthropology. 6 1989, 295 and, for further such criticisms, 87–8, 300, 305, 318, 455, 489. 7 Being-here is also said to ground “future human-being” (1989, 300).
References Heidegger, Martin. 1967. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1975. Gesamtausgabe 24: Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Sommersemester 1927). Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (2nd edn. 1989, 3rd edn. 1997). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1977. Gesamtausgabe 2: Sein und Zeit (1927). Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1984.Gesamtausgabe 45. Grundfragen der Philosophie.Ausgewählte “Probleme”der “Logik”(Wintersemester 1937/8). Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (2nd edn. 1992). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1986. Gesamtausgabe 15: Seminäre (1951–1973). Ed. Curd Ochwadt (2nd edn. 2005). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1989. Gesamtausgabe 65: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–1938). Ed. FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann (2nd edn. 1994). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1996. Gesamtausgabe 27: Einleitung in die Philosophie (Wintersemester 1928/9). Eds. Otto Saame and Ina Saame-Speidel (2nd edn. 2001). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
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13 EGO Michael K. Shim
The “ego” is a polysemous notion in Husserl. By it, he can mean (1) the empirical self, (2) the numerically identical self, (3) the transcendental self, or (4) “monad.” For each notion, I will provide a brief account and address its reception among some of Husserl’s successors in the phenomenological tradition. At the centre of my discussion is the following historical fact.The Husserl of the frst edition of the Logical Investigations was avowedly Humean about the self: i.e., there is no such thing as personal identity over time. By the time of Ideas I (and the second edition of Logical Investigations), Husserl reversed his position. In the latter period, he introduced the notion of the “pure ego,” a Kantian self that remains numerically identical despite psychological changes in time.
13.1. Empirical ego In the Fifth Logical Investigation, the “empirical ego” is identifed with a Humean notion of consciousness. In the frst edition of the Logical Investigations, Husserl writes that consciousness is “the phenomenological ego as ‘bundle’ or nexus of psychical lived experiences” (Hua XIX, 356). In the second edition, in which the phrase “empirical ego” is explicit, Husserl offers the following slight revision:“the empirical ego [is] the nexus of psychical lived experiences in the unity of the stream of lived experiences” (Hua XIX, 356). In this sense, the empirical ego is the psychological self, consisting of a stream of ever-changing psychological states. Thus, your empirical ego is a “bundle” of whatever perceptual and cognitive experiences, along with nonintentional sensations. For example, right now, your empirical ego consists of seeing the computer screen, hearing the police helicopter hovering over your neighbourhood, thinking that it’s a nice day for a long walk, while feeling hungry and itchy. Over time, this empirical ego will change constantly as various intentional states and experiences come and go. For a better grasp of what Husserl means by “unity” in the Logical Investigations, he advises consideration of the above Humean conception of consciousness in conjunction with the conception of consciousness “as inner awareness of [one’s] own psychical experiences” (Hua XIX, 356), which Husserl claims is “more primordial” and “in itself prior” to the frst conception (Hua XIX, 367). In this light, consciousness is to be regarded as unifed in the relevant sense by virtue of exclusive or privileged access. Intuitively, it seems to make sense that the privacy of
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your consciousness is what individuates you from everyone else. Personal individuation, in other words, is a function of exclusive access. Accordingly,“unity” in the relevant sense seems to be a function of what individuates you—what distinguishes you—from everyone else. However, there is no contradiction between Husserl’s Humean conception of consciousness and his assertion of “unity” in this sense. Not even Hume would deny that your experiences are exclusive and, therefore, de facto individualizing. Unlike Locke, what Hume recognized is that personal individuation—what makes you different from anyone else—is insuffcient for personal identity, the numerical identity of the self over time.1 Consider a pocket universe consisting solely of three particles at any given time. Let each particle be individuated from the other two by colour and location. However, let there be constant change in colour and location of any particle over time without continuity of movement. Under these two sets of constraints, there is no reason for you to think that any one of these particles is numerically identical to any earlier particle in this universe. Consequently, the constraints allow for individuation of particles at any given time, but this criterion of individuation does not suffce to establish numerical identity of any of the particles. As far as you are concerned, any change in location and colour can signify the extinction of one particle and its replacement by an entirely new particle. Just so, the fact that I can’t have access to your lived experiences does not mean that either one of us remains numerically identical over time. For the claim of personal identity, some additional argument is required. Therefore, there is no contradiction between Husserl’s claim of the unity of consciousness and his explicit disavowal of any Kantian “pure ego” in Logical Investigations. In Logical Investigations, Husserl writes: I must now openly admit that I am entirely unable to fnd this primitive ego as the necessary centre of relations. What I am in a position to recognize, thus perceive, is solely the empirical ego and its empirical relationship to whatever its own lived experiences or external objects. (Hua XIX, 374) The empirical ego may be unifed by virtue of exclusive access, which individuates that psychological self from all other selves; but such unity does not entail that there should be an underlying, unchanging self. However, in the second edition, Husserl adds in a footnote that: “Since then I have learned to fnd [the pure ego]” (Hua XIX, 374). In one popular account of the difference between Husserl and Heidegger, Husserl is regarded as some kind of “internalist” while Heidegger is portrayed as a kind of “externalist” (Dreyfus 1991; Carmen 2003). Later, in my rendition of Husserl’s notion of the self as “concrete ego” or “monad,” I will challenge this account as ultimately misleading about Husserl. However, when it comes to Husserl’s conception of the empirical ego from the period of Logical Investigations, the internalist interpretation is hard to reproach. Indeed, on the clearly psychological conception of the self in Logical Investigations, the empirical ego consists exclusively of mentalistic lived experiences.
13.2. Pure ego One of the most signifcant differences between the early Husserl of Logical Investigations and the mature Husserl of Ideas I is that the mature Husserl accepts the Kantian idea that there is an underlying self, which is numerically identical over time—i.e., the “pure ego.” Let me start off with a gloss of Husserl’s characterization of the pure ego in §57 of Ideas I. First, 168
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13.2.1. The pure ego is opaque Husserl writes: after the performance of [the phenomenological] reduction to the fow of manifold lived experiences, nowhere will we hit upon the pure ego as a lived experience among other such experiences; nor as a proper component of any lived experience, which arises and dissipates with that lived experience of which it is a part. (Hua III/1, 109) In other words, the pure ego itself is not a lived experience—a thought, a perceptual episode, a feeling or the like—of which you can be aware. Nor is the pure ego an immanent or genuine feature of any particular lived experience. It does not come and go as the experiences do. Instead,
13.2.2. The pure ego is numerically identical over time As a matter of fact, heading 13.2.2 is an explanation of heading 13.2.1. All that is transparent to the self are its lived experiences. But if the pure ego itself were an experience or a part of an experience, which comes and goes, then over any period of time you would have as many pure egos as you have experiences. Since Husserl insists that the pure ego is “something in principle necessary and absolutely identical between all actual and possible changes of lived experiences” (Hua III/1, 109; see also Hua IV, 98, 103–105), while all that is ever transparently available to us are the constantly changing experiences, the pure ego must be opaque. Further, since the pure ego is neither itself an experience nor a part of an experience, the pure ego is transcendent to any individual intentional act.The pure ego is not a genuine (“reell”) constituent of any individual experience. If it were then the self would come and go with whatever experience it is attached to—which would then lead to a relapse into the disavowed Humeanism of Logical Investigations. As Dan Zahavi explains: “it is necessary to distinguish the self from any single experience, as the self can preserve its identity whereas experiences arise and perish in the stream of consciousness, replacing one other in a permanent fux” (Zahavi 2005, 131). Nevertheless, Husserl notoriously insists on what, at face value, may appear to be a paradoxical formulation:
13.2.3. The pure ego “offers itself with a peculiar—not constituted— transcendence, a transcendence in immanence” (Hua III/1, 109–110) At this point, it is entirely fair to ask, since the pure ego is transcendent to any individual intentional episode, to what then is it “immanent”? As even Kant himself concedes, there is a kind of analytic emptiness to the claim that the “I think must be capable of accompanying all my presentations” (Kant 1996, 177–179). For, as we saw above, the exclusiveness of frst-personal access is simply insuffcient for any robust claim of personal identity.Again, individuation does not imply—without circularity—numerical identity over time. Nevertheless, the unity of consciousness—from the intuitive sense that there exist some experiences that are distinctive by virtue of their being mine and no one else’s—does offer an entity to which the pure ego can be immanent. In §33 of Ideas I, Husserl suggests as much when he writes that, under the phenomenological reduction, what remains is “‘pure conscious169
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ness’ with its pure ‘correlates of consciousness’ and, on the other side, its ‘pure ego’” (Hua III/1, 58; my italics). Similarly, in a research manuscript from 1921, Husserl writes of the “monad”—the later Husserl’s preferred term for “pure consciousness”—that it “steadfastly bears within itself the absolutely identical ego-pole” (Hua XIII, 43; my italics). From these passages we can infer the following: in addition to the individual lived experiences that constitute your unifed consciousness, that same consciousness features a pure ego that is neither itself any of the lived experiences nor a part of any such lived experience.Thus, the pure ego is transcendent to any individual lived experience but immanent to that unifed consciousness. Although Husserl repeatedly denies any accusation of solipsism, Merleau-Ponty (1958) and Levinas (1969, 1998) both suggest some reason to believe that Husserl’s commitment to the pure ego implies commitment to an epistemological version of solipsism. On the metaphysical version of solipsism, there is in fact no one else but oneself. In general, there is no good reason to believe in metaphysical solipsism; and certainly there is no reason to believe that anything Husserl claims commits him to metaphysical solipsism. By contrast, according to epistemological solipsism, other selves may exist but one cannot know that they, in fact, do exist. In order to know that p, one must at the very least be able to think or conceive of that p. Accordingly, in order to know that some other self exists, one must be able to conceive of that other self. Let S conceive of the existence of some other self, non-S. What makes non-S an other self is that non-S possesses a unifed consciousness comparable to S’s. The conception of the consciousness of some other, Husserl calls “analogical appresentation” (Hua I, 138–145; see also Hua XIII, 249). On analogical appresentation, the conception of non-S’s consciousness is simply to conceive of some consciousness from some spatio-temporal location other than one’s own. However, according to the doctrine of the pure ego, S cannot think of anything without accompaniment by that pure ego particular to S.Thus, in attempting to conceive of non-S’s consciousness, S cannot help but conceive of her own consciousness. Since S can have no access to non-S’s pure ego, and any conceivable consciousness inhabited by S’s pure ego is S’s consciousness, it is impossible for S to conceive of any other self. Since S cannot conceive of any other self, S cannot thus know that any other self exists. A plausible reply to this objection, on behalf of Husserl, is this.There is, in general, no good reason to believe in metaphysical solipsism. So no one must think that no other self exists. Epistemological solipsism does not entail metaphysical solipsism: just because you cannot know that any other self exists does not entail that, therefore, no other self in fact does exist.Thus, even if Husserl winds up committed to epistemological solipsism, nothing keeps him from asserting the existence of other selves. In Husserl’s account, then, in perceiving the living body of nonS, S can ascribe to non-S some consciousness that is a lot like S’s. Of course, S cannot know with certainty that non-S does possess such consciousness. But there is no reason for S to think that non-S doesn’t either. Further, Levinas in particular suggests that since S cannot conceive of non-S’s consciousness, S has thus no right to ascribe to non-S any “universal” phenomenological features based solely on her own (Levinas 1969, 220–221; 1998, 110–111, 116–118). In response, the Husserlian can simply reply that, nor is there reason to think that non-S doesn’t possess such a consciousness. Although personal individuation over time is insuffcient for personal identity, if there is such a thing as a pure ego that is immanent to consciousness, then such a pure ego would suffce as an account of how anyone is individuated from anyone else over time: e.g., only you—your pure ego—can enjoy access to your consciousness. However, a notorious problem in Husserl’s account of the pure ego is that he nowhere provides an explicit argument that there should be such a thing at all. Since, in the frst edition of Logical Investigations, he offers classical Humean reasons to be suspicious of the existence of any such pure ego, an argument is owed. Fortunately, we can 170
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piece together some skeletal argument by focusing on a role that Husserl ascribes to the pure ego.According to Husserl, the pure ego is also transcendental (Hua IV, 121).
13.3. Transcendental ego In at least one sense, S is “transcendental” for Husserl if S is constitutive of anything transcendent. In §97 of Ideas I, Husserl is about as clear on this point as he is anywhere; he writes: The designation of the phenomenological reduction and, similarly, the sphere of pure lived experiences, as “transcendental,” consists precisely therein, that we fnd in this reduction an absolute sphere of qualia (Stoffen) and noetic forms, to whose determinately predisposed nexus belongs—in accordance with immanent eidetic necessity— that remarkable consciousness of any determined or determinable [thing], which is given. (Hua III/1, 204) Pure consciousness, which is the “residuum” of the phenomenological reduction, consists of some ever-changing “nexus” of lived experiences. However, pure consciousness can be considered transcendental insofar as it is consciousness of some “determined or determinable” transcendent object. Husserl continues: In contrast to this consciousness stands something fundamentally other, non-genuine, transcendent. And herein lies the source of the only conceivable solution to the most profound of epistemological problems, pertaining to the essence and possibility of objectively valid cognition of what is transcendent.The transcendental reduction exercises the epoché in view of reality. However, to that which remains left over [from the reduction] belong the noemata, with the noematic unity that lies within them, and therewith the means by which the real is given to consciousness itself. (Hua III/1, 204; see also Hua III/1, 104–108, 178) To that bundle of numerically diverse lived experiences appear, as noemata, external objects that are transcendent to any such lived experience. What is distinctive about these noemata is that they represent objective unity despite the subjective diversity of lived experiences. Accordingly, F is transcendent to an intentional act if that intentional act is not exhaustive of F (Hua III/1, 68–69, 73–78, 85–87; Hua XI, 330–331). For example, you see at t1 the front side of this table.The table, however, is not just its front side. And barring some strong version of phenomenal idealism, nor is the table just your experience of it.There are further features to that table: e.g., its backside, its inside, etc.You see at t2 the back side of the table. If, like Brentano, you believe that intentional objects are immanent to their intentional acts—i.e., that intentional objects are “in-existent”—you must now conclude that between t1 and t2, you have seen two objects (Brentano 1995, 88). By contrast, Husserl insists—along with common sense—that between t1 and t2, you have seen just one object, that the two sides are merely two different profles of the same object (Hua III/1, 186; Hua XIX, 386–387).The object of consciousness, in other words, is a “noematic unity.” Nevertheless, there is no denying that the experience of seeing at t1 and the experience of seeing at t2 may be very different from one another. So how are these two different experiences “synthesized” with one another to determine the numerical identity of the intentional object, i.e., the table? Husserl ascribes this transcendental role of 171
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constituting the act-independent transcendence of the intentional object to the pure ego. Hence, the pure ego is also transcendental. To the question, how can the pure ego establish the identity over time of the transcendent object despite the diversity over time of its own experiences of that object, we can infer a Kantian reply. It is because the pure ego is itself numerically identical over time that it can, so to speak, hold on to the diversity of its experiences in the same stretch of time as those of a numerically identical object. In order to constitute the numerical identity of some transcendent intentional object, you have to yourself be numerically identical over time. Or, as Henry Allison somewhat fippantly puts it in his well-known commentary on Kant’s Transcendental Deduction: “the unity of consciousness is correlated with the consciousness of unity (it takes one to know one)” (Allison 1983, 139). According to this argument, then, if S can identify F as the same table over time, it is because S itself is numerically identical over time. To this kind of Kantian argument, Sartre (1991) suggests the following objection. It is not the self that constitutes the numerical identity of any transcendent object. Instead, the “object is transcendent to the consciousnesses that grasp it, and it is in this object that the unity of the consciousnesses is found” (Sartre 1991, 38). In other words, it is because the transcendent object itself is numerically identical that the variety of diverse lived experiences about the object wind up united with one another as experiences of the same object. On this view, S can identify F as the same table despite the diversity of its experiences of F over time because F is, in fact, the same table. F’s own numerical identity is what forces S’s consciousness about F to be unifed over time. To evaluate this objection, let me return to the conceptual distinction between personal individuation and personal identity that I discussed in sections 13.1 and 13.2. As a matter of fact, Sartre is aware that numerical identity of the self over time is not necessary to establish personal individuation (Sartre 1991, 39–40). Thus, individuation does not imply identity. Nevertheless, consider the following example. S walks around table F while looking at it. In Sartre’s account, it is because F itself is numerically identical over time that F can combine S’s various experiences of it. But, while walking around F, let S have thoughts and sensations irrelevant to the visual cognition of F: e.g., during the same stretch of time, let S think about the current political situation in the Middle East while feeling sad. In this case, F surely cannot also be credited with combining the F-irrelevant thoughts and sensations. Regardless, just intuitively, the F-irrelevant thoughts and sensations are also united in S. One account simply appeals to personal individuation: what the visual experience of F, the F-irrelevant thought and sensation, all have in common with one another is that they are available only to S. But this appeal to individuation is not only rather thin but it also does not eliminate Husserl’s preferred account, which is that the three different intentional episodes are united by virtue of S’s numerical identity over time.As I pointed out in section 13.2, although not necessary, something like a pure ego would be a suffcient explanation of personal individuation.
13.4. Monad In some of his later writings, Husserl uses the Leibnizian term “monad” for “the ego taken in full concreteness” (Hua I, 102). At face value, the Husserlian monad is largely equivalent to what, in the period of Ideas I, he meant by “pure consciousness.” In Ideas I, pure consciousness is the “phenomenological residuum” of the epoché, that about the self which survives the phenomenological reduction (Hua III/1, 59, 94).The later Husserl characterizes the monad as “the residuum of the phenomenological reduction” (Hua XIII, 52), such that he even equates
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the phenomenological attitude with the “reduction to my pure monad” (Hua XIII, 52, 262). However, on this face-value equivalence of the “monad” with “pure consciousness,” it seems we must renounce any ready internalist or strictly psychological interpretation of what the mature Husserl means by “consciousness.” For, according to the later Husserl, the monad consists not only of the pure ego and its lived experiences, but can also consist of an “environment” [Umwelt] composed by garden-variety objects, whose appearances are constrained by some subject’s psycho-physical constraints (Hua XIII, 47, 246–254, 276–277, 287–291). That this is not a new position, or a reversal of his position in Ideas I, can be gleaned from the following considerations. First, I take for granted the standard, majority view that what Husserl in Ideas I calls “noema” is just some intentional object. In particular, I agree with John J. Drummond that, in perception, the noema is not ontologically different in kind from some garden-variety object of perception: e.g., the noema of seeing a table just is, ontologically, the table itself (Drummond 1990, 94). Nevertheless, Husserl also insists throughout Ideas I that the noema is also immanent (Hua III/1, 182, 202–205, 220–221; see also Hua XIII, 411). Now, if we keep in mind the antiBrentanianism that I touched upon in section 13.3, if some perceptual noema is an ordinary object then that noema cannot be immanent to any intentional act. But then to what would the noema be immanent? In a remarkable parallel to Husserl’s conception of the pure ego, the best answer seems to be that, although the noema is transcendent to any particular lived experience, the noema is immanent to that personal unity of various lived experiences.That is, the noema is immanent to unifed consciousness. Notice, this interpretation dovetails with Husserl’s conception of the monad: the monad partially consists of some environment, the “same numerically identical nature” that any monad shares with any other monad (Hua XIII, 267). In this light, we are now confronted by another puzzle: namely, what must be the nature of Husserlian “consciousness” that it can consist of ordinary objects like chairs, tables and walls that make up some environment? The best answer seems to be the rejection of the sort of internalist interpretations of Husserl advanced by commentators like Dreyfus (1991) and Carmen (2003). For Husserl, consciousness cannot be some kind of purely mental or soul-like entity. Instead, by “consciousness,” it seems Husserl has in mind a kind of place in the world—literally, some location in space-time—the appearance of which is constrained by some set of psycho-physical circumstances (Hua XIII, 253–254, 291). And surely, there is nothing clearly internalist about such a conception of consciousness.
Note 1 By contrast, Locke writes: “since consciousness … [is] that [which] makes every one to be, what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational Being” (Locke 1975, 335; my italics).
References Allison, Henry E. 1983. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven: Yale University Press. Brentano, Franz. 1995. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. London: Routledge. Carman, Taylor. 2003. Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dreyfus, Huber L. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division One. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Drummond, John J. 1990. Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Critique of Pure Reason. Indianapolis: Hackett.
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Michael K. Shim Locke, John. 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infnity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1998. Otherwise than Being. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1958. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1991. Transcendence of the Ego. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Zahavi, Dan. 2005. Subjectivity and Selfhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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14 EIDETIC METHOD Daniele De Santis
When the frst book of the Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie was released in 1913, the main goal that Husserl aimed at achieving was to lay the foundations of what he labeled “an essentially new science” (Hua III/1, 3), a “new eidetics” (Hua III/1, 164), phenomenology as a “science of Ideas” (Hua III/1, 4–5) or, in a more emphatic way, as an eidetic science of transcendental phenomena belonging to the region of pure consciousness (Hua III/1, 6–7). Husserl’s chief burden was not only to ensure the possibility of such a new science by disclosing a new feld of investigation (“pure consciousness”), but frst and foremost to legitimize its methodology in opposition, on the one hand, to science of facts (e.g., empirical psychology) and, on the other hand, to already established eidetic sciences (e.g., geometry and mathematics). Since, as Husserl explains, there is an “object-province that corresponds to each science as the domain of its research and since for all correct statements there is a corresponding primal source of the grounding which alone can validate their legitimacy” (Hua III/1, 10–11), we will, frst, have to bring to the fore what kind of (eidetic) knowledge this new science is expected to convey and then, secondarily, what its methodology and validating procedure properly amount to. A remark is however needed: for in what follows we will be discussing what is usually called the method of eidetic or phantasy variation. As, indeed, the recently published Husserliana XLI (text 4, Der Wesensunterschied in den Wesensbegriffen und ihrer Bildung. Anschauungsbegriffe als Typenbegriffe gegenüber exakten Begriffen als Ideen) shows, Husserl used the technical phrase eidetische Variation for the frst time in a 1912 manuscript to indicate a method employed to attain (vordringen) “knowledge” of essential laws and their mutual connections. In this early context— rather than meaning an exclusively intuitive procedure to bring universals to the fore as eide accomplished in the realm of pure phantasy—the eidetic variation works to determine and spell out in statements the Wesengesetze that rule over the elements of “consciousness” and their relations. Rather than relying exclusively on a purely intuitive operation, here the phenomenologist has to consider both an intuitive and a propositional component: the former confrming and giving validity to the states of affairs and laws articulated and expressed by the latter. In the following presentation, we will focus our attention on the method of variation and strive to clarify its meaning and role within the more general problem of eidetic knowledge and method. In order to do so, we will have to explain what such “knowledge” and “method” are (Sections 14.1, 14.2) and then discuss the methodological signifcance of eidetic variation (Section 14.3).1 175
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14.1. The structure of eidetic knowledge: some basic notions As Husserl succinctly puts it, the phenomenologist’s goal is to achieve “scientifc cognition”, i.e., to work out “a system of concepts and statements of laws that have their source in the pure intuition of essences” (Hua III/1, 331).The quote perfectly expresses the three notions at stake in any eidetic knowledge: (i) there must obtain an articulation of concepts into a statement (ii) spelling out a law (iii) validated by the so-called intuition of essence. The clarifcation of the three elements just mentioned will provide us with all the basic notions we need to understand once and for all both the possibility and sense of eidetic knowledge and method. (i) In terms of propositions, there is a difference between so-called “judgments about essences” and “judgments having eidetic universal validity”. Whereas the former directly bear upon essences, e.g., “the essence ‘color’ is different from the essence ‘sound’”, the latter—even without “positing” any individual—judge in the mode “in general” (im Modus des Überhaupt) “about the individual, even though purely as a single particular case of the essence (Einzelheit des Wesens)” (Hua III/1, 18):“A color ‘in general’ is different from a sound ‘in general’”.This difference being recognized, Husserl immediately states what we might indicate as a sort of translatability between them: “any judgment about essence can be converted into an equivalent unconditionally universal judgment about single particular cases of such an essence” (Hua III/1, 19). The translatability might then be represented as follows (with J meaning judgment, ε standing for essence and c referring to the particular case of ε):
The translatability relation
Yet, as Husserl goes on to say, the mere direct relationship between J and ε, or the indirect one via c, does not complete the survey of our eidetic activity. In order to provide a more satisfactory account, we need to consider the objectual (i.e., ontological) correlate of the proposition as a result of our propositional activity:“It is now apparent that the following ideas belong together: eidetic judging, eidetic judgment or asserted eidetic proposition, eidetic truth (or true proposition)”.The correlate of the latter notion is the eidetic state of affairs (as obtaining in the eidetic truth), whereas the correlate of the proposition is the state of affairs as meant (Vermeintheit), in the sense of what is judged in the judgment and that can either obtain (true judgments) or not obtain (in the case of false judgments) (Hua III/1, 19). Let us make all of this clear by drawing a further diagram:
Eidetic knowledge
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The purpose of any eidetic inquiry, i.e., the pursuing and establishing of eidetic truths, consists of two steps: there is frst a signitive, or mere judgmental activity, delineating a possible state of affairs as intended and still in need of eventual confrmation (transition from a via b to b’); there is then, in the case of true propositions, a given state of affairs confrming the corresponding state of affairs and validating (by fulfllment) the relevant proposition, which now turns out to be establishing what we have been after, notably a so-called eidetic truth (from b’ via c to c’). Yet, if in the light of that diagram we know what a truth properly is, i.e., a proposition’s intended state of affairs being confrmed and validated by a given state of affairs, we do not at all know what would make such a truth precisely an eidetic one, a truth belonging to the feld of eidetic science. In other words: what does eidetic mean in the phrase eidetic truth or eidetic law? (ii) In a nutshell, Husserl describes “eidetic truths” as those truths “valid in an unconditional universality and necessity for everything possible as well as for everything authenticating itself as actual in actually occurring experience” (Hua V, 42).“Unconditional” universality and necessity seem to be the two primary features of any eidetic truth.Yet, as Husserl hastens to remark, even if the notions of “universality” and “necessity” are correlates, they are not to be confused: “An eidetic particularization (Besonderung) and singularization (Vereinzelung) of an eidetically universal state of affairs, in so far as it is that, is called an eidetic necessity” (Hua III/1, 19). If, then, the aspect of universality primarily applies to universal states of affairs, necessity pertains to the “propositional” consciousness to which a “state of affairs” is given precisely as a particularization of the universal one:“The consciousness of a necessity, more particularly a judging consciousness in which there is consciousness of a state of affairs as a particularization of an eidetic universality, is called an apodictic consciousness”.The situation might be illustrated as follows:
Apodictic consciousness
Our propositional consciousness (A) is aware—through the relation to a particular state of affairs (B)—of the universal one (C) of which B itself is only a particularization. In turn (by following the dotted line), the universality of C, being singularized in a particular—and thereby necessary—state of affairs (B), makes our propositional consciousness apodictic (A). It is worth pointing out that if, on the one hand, our judging consciousness is in a direct relationship only to (B), the particular and necessary state of affairs, it is, on the other hand, universality (C) that has priority over necessity: indeed, it is only by particularizing a universal state of affairs that B can be described as necessary and, therefore, our consciousness of it as apodictic. It is necessity to be primarily experienced by our propositional consciousness and the feature of universality is only indirectly given via necessity. The argument above allows us to take a further step in order to better understand the relation between “eidetic judging about individuals” and “the factual positing of something individual”. The eidetic universality can be applied, say, or transferred to something individual posited as “existing”. In so doing,“The state of affairs posited as actual is then a matter of fact insofar as it is an individual and actual state of affairs (individueller Wirklichkeitsverhalt); it is, however, an eidetic necessity insofar as it is a singularization of an essential universality” (Hua III/1, 20). 177
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(iii) Since, as has already been mentioned, universality seems to have priority, if we inquire into what is meant by Wesensallgemeinheit and how it is possible, the answer will be, to quote from the German text, that es sagt aus, was rein im Wesen gründet:“it expresses what is purely grounded on the essence” (Hua III/1, 20). Husserl speaks then of Wesenswahrheit and Wesensnotwendigkeit, Wesensallgemeinheit, Wesensmöglichkeit, and Wesensgesetz. Not only the two “modal” notions of necessity and possibility, but also universality, truth and law are determined in the light of the key concept of “essence”. Essences or eide,2 as Husserl urges over and over again, are new sorts of objects (Gegenstände), by “object” meaning—“in the necessarily broadened sense proper to formal logic”—any subject of possible true predications (jedes Subjekt möglicher wahrer Prädikationen) (Hua III/1, 15). This is why—being “states of affairs” (Sach-Verhalte), the objectual correlates of predications3—Husserl tends to speak, more and more frequently, not just of essence (Wesen), but of Wesen-Verhalte, that is, of “essential states of affairs” (he refers indeed to die originäre Gegebenheit des Wesensverhalte, (…) den jener Satz ausdrücklich hinstellte, “the originary givenness of the essential state of affairs explicitly set down by that proposition”) (Hua III/1, 20–21). Contrary to what a certain tradition has always—and misleadingly—taken Husserlian essences and eidetic intuition to be, notably, the intuition of concepts thought of as “crystallized in a splendid isolation”, for Husserl the highly dreaded notion of intuition of essence does refer to the intuition of (eidetic) states of affairs. Now, to expand upon the response to the question “what does eidetic mean in the phrase eidetic truth?”, one might uphold that if these truths are “valid in an unconditional universality and necessity for everything possible”, it is because they express states of affairs rooted in a relevant essence. Or, to put it better, because of the essence being “explicable” in propositions shaping Sachverhalte, which hence are essential states of affairs (Husserl speaks of the states of affairs “included” (beschlossen) in the essence (Hua III/1, 24)). Husserl hastens to point out that “no intuition of essence is possible without the free possibility of turning’s one regard to a corresponding ‘individual’ and forming an exemplary consciousness—just as, conversely, no intuition of something individual is possible without the free possibility of bringing about an ideation and, in it, directing one’s regard to the essence exemplifed in what is individually sighted” (Hua III/1, 15–16). Let us propose a fourth diagram to illustrate the argument.
Exemplary consciousness
The methodologically key moment is represented by the exemplary consciousness (following the upward movement) by which we regard an individual as exemplifying an essence. In this respect, the very same individual can be taken as exemplifying, alternatively, different essences and hence giving rise to different intuitions of essence and eidetic analyses: the “book” on my table might 178
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be regarded as an example of the essence “spiritual formation” (geistiges Gebilde) or of the essence “material object”, in so doing opening up the possibility of different lines of inquiry (and indeed, to put it as a slogan, die Differenzen zu sehen ist die Leidenschaft der Phänomenologie).4 Yet, Husserl speaks of “a system of concepts and statements of laws that have their source in the pure intuition of essences”.That is, the intuition of essence, by offering different (essential) states of affairs to our “gaze”, can either confrm and validate the states of affairs meant in and shaped by our judgmental activity or contradict and prove them wrong.
14.2. A Socratic procedure 14.2.1. The purpose of the method Let us start by providing an overview of the different levels, and corresponding goals, that we can aim at fulflling with the eidetic method.They can be grouped and listed as follows. (I) The frst level concerns what Husserl calls relation between “particular” and “universal” (Hua XXXI, 80–81) or, better, between a τόδε τι and a relevant essence.This can be done (I’) Either by subsuming an individual under an essence (Hua III/1, 33); or (I’’) By applying, so to say, the essence to the individual (Hua XXXV, 210). In so doing (see previous Figure) we move from our consciousness of something individual to the exemplary consciousness in which the individual is regarded as exemplifying an essence. In judgmental terms, the basic form is “This is … an α”. Such a relationship in which, as Husserl points out,“A is grasped through α” (A ist begriffen durch α) can be either framed as “A is an individual of the universal α” (emphasis on exemplifcation) or “α belongs to A” (emphasis on application) (Hua XXXV, 210). At this point it might be interesting to briefy discuss what a former Göttingen student of Husserl, Roman Ingarden, maintains in his essay Essentiale Fragen. In his view, the starting point of any eidetic investigation is what he calls the “frst essential question”, the one asking “What is this?”.To this question there corresponds, as an answer, a judgment that he refers to as an “identifcation judgment” (Bestimmungs-Urteil).5 If then the question reads “What is this?”, the answer will have the form “That is … an α”. For example: “that is a triangle”,“that is a rose”,“that is an intentional experience”.What is such an identifcation judgment about? In order to answer the question Ingarden refers to the Munich phenomenologist Alexander Pfãnder, who, in his Logic, describes identifcation judgments as those judgments that “determine the subject by stating its ‘what’ (Was)”:6 “In identifcation judgments, therefore, the copula not only carries out the general function of relating the predicatedetermination to the subject […] but posits, at the same time, that material unity (sachhaltige Einheit) which exists between the object and its ‘what’. Identifcation judgments are thus understood correctly only when this unique, material unity is co-posited along with them”. By following Pfãnder’s analysis and Ingarden’s one might then urge that (I) consists precisely in the possibility of forming “identifcation judgments”. (II) On a second level we meet with the explication of what Husserl refers to as “the relationship of an eidetic genus or species to its eidetic particularization among the relationships of ‘part’ and ‘whole’” (Hua III/1, 31–32). This can be seen as a further development of (I) in which we regard an individual in the light of the higher species and genus which are—according to the mereological terminology employed here—“directly” or “indirectly” “included” in the individual in question as exemplifying such or such a higher essence: 179
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“The eidetic singular essence thus implies collectively the universals lying above it and which, for their part, level by level, ‘lie one inside another’, the higher always lying inside the lower” (Hua III/1, 31). (III)By leaving off the realm of individuals, we face the problem to which Husserl refers in terms of “subordination of an essence to its higher species or to a genus” (Hua III/1, 33). In opposition to (II), where we focus the attention on the relationships species–genus only as they are exemplifed in a relevant individual, here we consider those relationships per se. Here too, Ingarden’s analysis might turn out to be helpful. Once we answer the frst question and get to know what this, as a τόδε τι, really is—for instance: “this is an hawk”, “this is an intentional experience” or, to quote his favorite example, “this is a square”, we could further investigate and ask “what is the hawk?”, “what is the intentional experience?”, “what is the square?”. The answer, in this case, cannot be another “identifcation judgment”; rather, it is what Ingarden refers to as a judgment of essence (Wesensurteil), whose general form is: “α is β with the properties a, b, c…” and spells out the relationship-articulation between the “genus” and one of its “species” regardless of them being exemplifed in a corresponding individual.7 Considering Ingarden’s example, if the question is “what is then the square?”, the response will sound like this: “The square (α) is the parallelogram (β) with four equal sides and four right angles (a, b, c…)”. Unlike “identifcation judgments”, where an individual is grasped and seen as exemplifying a lower species or a higher genus, in the case of “judgments of essence” we exclusively deal with essences and their relationships, as Husserl would say, of “including” and “being included”. (IV)At this point we reach the fnal level where, upon the basis of the more pregnant concepts of non-independence and independence, we work out all the “connections” of containedness, unity, and synthesis (Verknüpfung) “in a more proper sense” (Hua III/1, 35; likewise Hua XXXV, 83).This is the very moment, exclaims Husserl, in which we need to Sehen, Erfassen, Analysieren, to see, to grasp, to analyze in a very strict and rigorous sense (Hua III/1, 153). In other words, we need to see the essences (or Wesensverhalte), grasp the mutual essential relations (Wesenszusammenhänge) and analyze them by eventually giving them “conceptual expressions” (begriffiche Ausdrücke). In this sense, as Moritz Geiger once put it, phenomenology is the attempt “to let the givennesses speak freely, in the whole fullness of their being” (die Gegebenheiten rein als solche sprechen zu lassen, in der ganzen Fülle ihres Seins8). It is here that we can describe our “judgmental activity” as Gesetzes-Urteilen and the judgments themselves as establishing a Gesetz-Gebung. As Husserl emphatically points out, “the realm of universal judging” (das Reich des allgemeinen Urteilens) is “the realm of legislation” (das Reich der Gesetzgebung) (Hua XXXI, 83).The essential possibilities turn out, then, to be truly “necessary possibilities” (notwendige Möglichkeiten), i.e.,“forms of union of compatibility that are prescribed in the essences and delimited by laws of essence” (Hua III/1, 356; likewise Hua XXXI, 83). Such forms of union and compatibility, as determined and delimited by laws of essence, might be formulated in two different ways.We can either focus on the general law and say, for instance, that:
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•
“A is in general given along with B; in general then, if any A whatsoever is, so is B” (Überhaupt ist mit A B gegeben; überhaupt ist, wenn etwas A ist, es auch B) (Hua XXXV, 227). In so doing, we frame “general laws” expressing “necessary” connections and syntheses in the form of hypothetical judgments bearing exclusively upon essences, that is to say, upon their “essential connections” and mutual implications (Hua XXXV, 233); yet, one might also say: • “If any X is A, it is necessarily also B” or, even better,“if any X falls under A, it necessarily falls under B”. In this new case,“single particulars falling under one essence cannot exist without being determined by essences which at least share a generic community with other essences” (Hua III/1, 35). Hypothetical judgments assume now the possibility of something individual exemplifying the essence, or essences in question, hence their mutual connections.9 If identifcation judgments are πρότερον πρός ἡμάς, namely “frst for us” because they determine the individual as “exemplifying” such or such an essence, only judgments of essence are πρότερον φύσει—being judgments that express the essential connections and syntheses that can be rephrased in the form of hypothetical judgments (giving a defnite form to the above laws).
14.2.2. The method of the method Husserl himself speaks of a “Socratic procedure” (Hua V, 100); of course, it is not just a matter of “fxing linguistic usage, but rather, in such coinciding, it is one of making an […] essence stand out in what is intuitively given, and of fxing it as that which is meant by mere word-meaning”. Am Leitfaden der Wortbedeutungen, namely “following the guiding thread of word-meanings”—this is how the method might be properly presented.Yet, as Husserl himself hastens to explain: “Only in a clarifying intuition can it become apparent to us, through a purely expressive ftting of the word-meaning, the logical one, to the essence given in the intuition, whether the expression with its sense actually fts onto that which is unclearly meant” (Hua V, 87; likewise Hua-Mat IX, 27, where this procedure is explicitly compared to Socrates’ mode of inquiring).10 Before we embark upon a discussion of the method, it is necessary not to overlook the distinction between the following two notions and procedures: •
•
Making Distinct (Verdeutlichung): “Making a concept, what is meant by a word as such, distinct, is a procedure that occurs within the mere sphere of thought (Denksphäre). Before the least step toward clarifcation is taken […], what lies in the meaning can be considered: for example, in the ‘decahedron’, a body, a regular polyhedron with ten congruent lateral surfaces”. Clarifying (Klärung):“With clarifcation, we go beyond the sphere of mere word-meanings and signifying thinking; we bring the signifcations into congruity with the […] intuition, the […] object of the former with that of the latter” (Hua V, 101).
Once we go beyond the sphere of mere thought or meaning and look for a fulflling intuition, three possibilities can occur: the given state of affairs can (i) either confrm in toto the state of affairs as it was originally intended in the judgment; (ii) or disprove it in toto or, (iii) fnally, confrm some of the elements of the intended state of affairs while contradicting the remaining ones.While then (ii) will simply force us give up on the concept as it was semantically expli-
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cated in the intended state of affairs, (iii) calls for a re-elaboration (Husserl speaks of “producing anew” (Hua V, 102)) of the concept originally explicated and meant in the state of affairs. Of course, and Husserl could not be clearer on this point, (iv) one cannot rule out the possibility of different intended states of affairs that nevertheless fnd their confrmation in the same intuitively given state of affairs. Now, the application of the method follows three distinct steps, by Husserl sharply distinguished. (α) Let us say that we want to make clear the concept “material thing” and what it really “means”. To this end, we start making the concept distinct by defning it and formulating a state of affairs, spelling out, in a purely signitive manner, what a material thing is supposed to be; (β) At this point, given the state of affairs as it is meant in a judgment, we proceed from examples that “represent unquestionable applications of the word ‘thing’, e.g., stones, houses and the like, but are not content with merely snatching these up, so to speak, through the name, i.e., with ‘thinking’ by mere word-meanings. Rather, we proceed to intuition” (Hua V, 100); (γ) In so doing, we can make comparisons between the various given objects so as to bring to the fore “differences” and “commonalities”: “We look rather to that which in the intuitively given is, so to speak, brought out, covered, conceptually meant by the word-concept [and] which essential moments there are of the intuitively given, for whose sake the fact is precisely so ‘called’”. Now, if (α) corresponds to the operation of making a concept distinct (in this case by defning what a material thing is supposed to be), (β) includes what we have previously called “identifcation judgments” (“this is an (unquestionable) example of material thing”) on the basis of the defnition of the concept previously provided; after we compare all the examples at our disposal, (γ) will end up formulating judgments of essence, i.e., judgments stating not simply what “material things” are supposed to be, but what they actually and essentially are (“X is Y with the properties a, b, c…”), and see whether the judgment of essence confrms the defnition provided in (α). We can now further develop one of our previous Figures and propose the following schematization:
The full structure of eidetic knowledge
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14.3. Hic sunt phantasmata: phantasy (variation) and the method of eidetic knowledge In order to appreciate the role assigned to phantasy and phantasy “variation” within the framework of eidetic knowledge, thereby its methodological place in our last Figure), we will distinguish three arguments concerning their relation: (A) Indifference Argument. Since the “eidetic” or “essential truths” state pure possibilities and not solely factual or mere contingent connections, “they can be exemplifed for intuition in experiential givennesses—in data of perception, memory and so forth”; but they can be “equally exemplifed in data of mere phantasy” (Hua III/1, 16).The argument does not yet entail any gnoseological relevance, nor does it consider phantasy as playing any methodologically key role. It is based on the “ideal linkage between perception and phantasy” (Hua XIX/2, 645), according to which to each perception corresponds a conversion into a possible phantasy.This leads us to: (B) The so-called truth-conditions argument. If we take into account the difference between the “truth-conditions” of Daseins-Urteile, judgments as to matters of fact, and Wesens-Urteile, essential judgments or judgments bearing upon essences, it is apparent that in the former case the position of actual realities is included in their own propositional sense. Hence the defnition: a “judgment” is a “judgment as to matters of fact” iff its validity can be exemplifed and exhibited (ausweisen) only in data of perception and experience (Wahrnehmung und Erfahrung) (Hua XXVI, 121–122). An hic sunt phantasmata blocks the way to the “possibility” of exemplifying in phantasy the truth of judgments supposed to bear exclusively upon actual realities—in so doing giving us a negative criterion so as to discriminate judgments on matters of fact from essential judgments. In this sense, a judgment is not a judgment as to matters of fact if its validity can be exemplifed also in data of phantasy (likewise Hua V, 26–27). (C) Variation Argument. Upon the basis of (B), the hic sunt phantasmata represents a “necessary” yet not “suffcient” condition for the eidetic method to exclusively work with data of phantasy. In this respect, Husserl underlines both vantages and disadvantages of the act of phantasy: •
•
The “well-known” disadvantage of phantasy is that “it does not stand frm, even if it is clear; it quickly loses its fullness; it sinks into the semi-clear and the dark” (Hua V, 54)— in so doing making it very hard for the “scientifc investigator” to fx and describe what is intuitively given. In this sense, perception, not phantasy, owns methodological priority (Ideas I, §70); Yet, there are several reasons by virtue of which in phenomenology, as an eidetic science, “free phantasies acquire a position of primacy over perceptions” (Hua III/1, 161–162); the main being that the phenomenological Wesensgestaltungen or “formations” to be investigated, described, and then eidetically fxed, are infnite: to our end, namely in order to investigate as many formations as possible, we “can use the resource of originary givenness only to a limited extent”.
From both (B) and (C) it follows that the key and “unavoidable” role assigned to phantasy in the course of our eidetic investigations and clarifcations is due not only to its ability to “negatively” discriminate between Daseinsurteile and non-Daseinsurteile, but also to its contriving a potentially infnite amount of data (larger than that provided by perception) to either confrm or disprove the states of affairs as they are intended at the outset in our judgments. 183
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Now, if we want to locate the process of variation in our last Figure, it would appear between (b’’–c) and (c’), between the identifcation judgments, which yield us an unquestionable application of the starting states of affairs, and the establishing of judgments of essence. Let us try to explain it better. In order to make a concept distinct, we defne it by formulating a state of affairs (b’), which is merely meant in a judgment.Then we point to an individual that can assume the role of unquestionable application of the state of affairs; on the basis of this individual we formulate an identifcation (b’’) judgment, which hence takes it as exemplifying the essence and confrming the initial state of affairs (c). Here phantasy comes into play with its ability to contrive, by varying on the given exemplifying state of affairs, potentially infnite new ones. It is worth emphasizing the twofold task that the variation can be called for to accomplish: •
•
As suggested by (γ) we need to look to a multiplicity of exemplars in order to compare and bring to the fore commonalities as well as differences. In this sense, the variation is simply asked to yield a multiplicity of variants of the starting example as confrming the original state of affairs as it was meant in the judgment.The phenomenologist employs here the variation, as already said, in her way to bring about judgments of essence; Nevertheless, the variation can be also appealed to in order to determine the limits of application and the conceptual boundaries of a judgment of essence already formulated.To this end, we operate in the opposite way: we make that judgment of essence (“X is Y with the properties a, b, c…”) our new starting point and frame alternative states of affairs (“X is Y with the properties a, b, d…” and “X is Y with the properties a, b, e…”). Now, by going back to (b’’), we make use of phantasy (variation) to come up with a case that can be held as an example of the new state of affairs. If this is not the case, namely, if the variation turns out to be unable to yield the example, it means that the property was essential to the state of affairs and limits its application. If, by contrast, the variation yields such a case exemplifying the new state of affairs, the latter obtains validity and the original concept has been modifed according to one (or more) of its properties.11 ***
Unlike Husserl’s later development of the method of variation as a purely intuitive procedure, here the eidetic or phantasy variation is construed as a part of the method of eidetic knowledge characterizing phenomenology as an eidetic science. Rather than being used in order to bring about the intuitive “apprehension” of universals as eide, here the eidetic variation operates, say, in collaboration with different judgmental forms (identifcation judgments, judgments of essence) to either provide the basis for the establishing of eidetic truths, or validate (by fxing its boundaries) an already established one.12 This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02 .1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).
Notes 1 For a general and overall work on phantasy, see Volonté 1997. 2 For the sake of clarity we are not making any distinction between the notions of essence as Wesen and pure essence as eidos in this context. In Ideas I Husserl takes the notion of “pure essence”, not just essence, to mean the same as eidos. On the difference between essence and eidos, Sowa 2007, 88:
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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12
“Essences in the pregnant sense demanded by Husserlian descriptive eidetics are pure essences, which Husserl also refers to as eide. Eide or pure essences, however, are not correlates of any general concepts; rather, they are exclusively correlates or pure general concepts. These pure concepts especially occur in pure material laws or material eidetic laws, and are presupposed by these laws”; and Majolino 2010, 595:“‘Eidos’ n’est donc pas un autre nom pour ‘essence’, une essence étant, en un sens très général, tout ce dont un individu donné (un tode ti, concret ou abstrait) peut être l’exemple. L’eidos husserlien est en revanche une ‘essence pure’, c’est-à-dire une essence dont l’intuition […] se fonde sur l’apparaître d’un individu qui peut être autant le corrélat d’un acte positionnel (perception, mémoire, attente, etc.) que d’un acte positionnellement neutre”. “In the judgment a state of affairs ‘appears’ before us, or, put more plainly, becomes intentionally objective to us” (Hua XIX/1, 461). Geiger 1933, 5. Ingarden 1925, 148 (§6). Pfänder 1963, 47–48. Ingarden 1925, 220–263. For a detailed analysis, De Santis 2014. Geiger 1933, 4. For a phenomenological analysis of the different meanings of the hypothetical proposition in relation to ontological problems and eidetic analysis, see Ingarden 1958, 443–446. This aspect was already emphasized by Wilhelm Pöll (1936, 112–114), a former student of Pfänder. We agree with Sowa 2010, 548, when he claims:“along with Austin, we give the ‘initial word’ to everyday language and its often already very subtle conceptual articulations of certain domain of phenomena, although we already know at the outset that it will not be ‘the fnal word’.The (provisional) ‘fnal’ word will be the result of descriptive analyses provided in the form of an ensemble of eidetic laws through which the everyday concepts that we began the analysis with gain new, intuitively deepened, and intuitively calibrated signifcations”. See also Mohanty 1991, 267–268, on the necessity of a preliminary acquaintance with the meaning of the concept at stake. Sowa 2010, 547–548, describes the process as an attempt to “proceed from frm exemplars to frm counterexamples of the thematic universal and from there to limit-cases in which the application of the concept becomes dubitable”. Lohmar 2005, 71, correctly speaks of “justifcation” of our concepts “on the basis of a fulflling intuition” (die Berechtigung von Begriffen auf dem Grunde der erfüllenden Anschauung) (see also what he says on pages 83 and 86 on the Grenze unserer Begriffe). Only in this sense one can also speak of a method employed to “clarify” “vague concepts” (see page 78), according to the distinction between Verdeutlichung and Klärung.
References De Santis, Daniele. 2014.“L’idea della fenomenologia come fenomenologia della Idee. Su di un Peri Ideon tra Gottinga e Monaco.” In: Di Idee ed essenze. Un dibattito su fenomenlogia e ontologia (1921–1930). Ed. Daniele De Santis. Milan: Mimesis, pp. 7–139. Geiger, Moritz. 1933. “Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung.” In: Neue Münchner Abhandlungen. Festschrift für Alexander Pfänder. Hrsg. Ernst Heller, Friedrich Löw. Leipzig: Barth, pp. 1–16. Ingarden, Roman. 1925. “Essentiale Fragen. Ein Beitrag zu dem Wesensproblem.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (7): pp. 125–304. ———. 1958.“The Hypothetical Proposition.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (18): pp. 435–450. Lohmar, Dieter. 2005. “Die phänomenologische Methode der Wesensschau und ihre Präzisierung als eidetische Variation.” Phänomenologische Forschungen: pp. 65–91. Majolino, Claudio. 2010. “La partition du réel: Remarques sur l’eidos, la phantasia, l’effondrement du monde et l’être absolu de la conscience.” In: Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences, Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl. Eds. Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, Filip Mattens. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 573–660. Mohanty, Jitendra Nath. 1991. “Method of Imaginative Variation in Phenomenology.” In: Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy. Eds. Tamara Horowitz and Gerald Massey. Savage: Rowman & Littlefeld, pp. 261–272. Pfänder, Alexander. 1963. Logik. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer. Pöll, Wilhelm. 1936. Wesen und Wesenserkenntnis. Untersuchungen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Phänomenologie Husserls und Schelers. München: Ernst Reinhardt.
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Daniele De Santis Sowa, Rochus. 2007. “Essences and Eidetic Laws in Edmund Husserl’s Descriptive Eidetics.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (7): pp. 77–108. ———. 2010. “The Universal as ‘What is in Common’: Comments on the Proton-Pseudos in Husserl’s Doctrine of the Intuition of Essence.” In: Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences, Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl. Eds. Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, and Filip Mattens. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 525–557. Volonté, Paolo. 1997. Husserls Phänomenologie der Imagination. Zur Funktion der Phantasie bei der Konstitution der Erkenntnis. Freiburg, München:Verlag Karl Alber.
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15 ETHICS John J. Drummond
The term “ethics” in the phenomenological tradition is used in a broad sense, encompassing (1) ethics considered as the discipline that investigates the nature of the good life and the notions of character and virtue; (2) moral philosophy considered in the Humean sense as the discipline whose subject matter is the human as born for action; and (3) morality considered in its broadly accepted contemporary sense as the discipline that investigates, most often with a view to our relations with others, the right and the wrong, the obligatory, non-obligatory (permissible), and the impermissible. On contemporary understandings, in other words, moral philosophy is the philosophical discipline concerned with the question:What is the right thing to do? The term “ethics,” by contrast, denotes the philosophical discipline concerned with the questions: What is the good life—the fourishing life—for humans? And:What sort of character must I develop in order to realize that life? In the phenomenological tradition, however, the term “ethics” has been used in relation to all these and other questions as well, such as: What is the ground of ethical life? What is it to act morally? And: How does practical reason come to know what to do? Indeed, to put the matter as briefy as possible: for phenomenologists “ethics” refers to every form of moral experience, from grounding experiences to recognizing goods to be pursued and bads to be avoided to choosing what to do. Speaking most generally, then, phenomenologists are concerned to clarify the intentional structures at work in (1) our varied experiences of valuing, choosing, planning, trying, striving, and acting in ways that have moral signifcance; (2) our experiences of persons, actions, situations, and events as good or bad and right or wrong; and (3) our experiences of institutions and social structures as benefcial or harmful or as liberating or imprisoning.1 These varied experiences include moral perceptions encompassing not only the use of one’s perceptual faculties but also one’s affective responses to what is sensibly given. Such perceptions involve the appearance of an instantiated moral attribute2 as presented in one’s perceptual/ emotional experience. Moral perception underlies moral judgment, i.e., the formation of a proposition explicitly asserting the belongingness of a moral attribute to one’s actions (present, past, or in prospect) or to one’s character (present, past, or future) or to the actions or character of another. Moral judgments can be spontaneous judgments of the value of a thing, action, or person, or they can be the result of moral deliberation, i.e., the process of formulating moral propositions in which one mulls over their plausibility, thinks about reasons for and against, entertains other options, and so forth, all of this with the aim of reaching a moral verdict of some 187
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type about some course of action or issue. Moral deliberation often takes the form of weighing competing goods and recognizing the priority of one good over another, a recognition that underlies the experience of an obligation to realize the higher good. Arguably, however, the experience of obligation can be direct and absolute, for example, in the experience of another person as, say, making (spoken or unspoken) demands of various sorts upon an agent. Moral emotions, we have suggested, are already at work in moral perception’s presenting things as good or bad and in our judgments of value and obligation. Moreover, moral emotions, both positive (e.g., gratitude, respect, admiration) and negative (e.g., embarrassment, shame, guilt), besides having a robust and complex phenomenal character, have ethical signifcance insofar as a well-ordered and balanced emotional life, both personally and in our interpersonal relationships, is a constituent of a fourishing life (see, e.g., Drummond 2010; Ozar 2010; Hermberg and Gyllenhammer 2013; Steinbock 2014, 2016; Drummond and Rinofner-Kreidl 2017). All these categories and aspects of moral experience are facets of our moral agency and part of the subject matter of moral phenomenology. Moreover, they are porous; they blend into and separate from another in ways that are themselves subject to phenomenological investigation and description. In what follows, I shall not explicitly discuss where and how moral phenomenology intersects different approaches to normative ethics and contemporary discussions in metaethics, but I do hope to illustrate them.
15.1 Axiology and ethics The porous character of moral experiences is most evident in the moral phenomenology of the early phenomenologists—those working (roughly) in the frst third of the twentieth century, such as Edmund Husserl (see 1988; 2004), Adolf Reinach (1912–13), Edith Stein (1989; 2007), Max Scheler (1973), Nicolai Hartmann (1963), and Dietrich von Hildebrand (1916; 1922; 1953a)—who adopted an axiological approach to ethics.These phenomenologists agree that values and the signifcance that attaches to them are dependent for their disclosure on subjects capable of feelings and emotions.They agree that intentional feelings (or emotions) grasp value-objects independent of those feelings, at least in the sense that a thing’s being valuable is not reducible to its being felt valuable. To that extent, they are all value-realists. Furthermore, they agree that the emotions have moral relevance and that our choices are in some manner rooted in the emotional disclosure of the value of both the ends at which the agent aims and the actions considered conducive to those ends. The simple statement of these agreements, however, obscures signifcant differences among their views. In particular, there is disagreement about the nature of value as experienced, a disagreement best exemplifed in the difference between Husserl, on the one hand, and Scheler and Hartmann, on the other. For Husserl, to experience a value is to have an intentional feeling or emotion grasp an object (e.g., a thing, state of affairs, action, event, person, institution) as valued. The value of the object is grounded in particular, non-axiological properties possessed by the object, which, relative to the physiological constitution, interests, concerns, and commitments of the subject, are valuable in the current experiential context. This is a “weak” value realism insofar as the value attribute is understood as a dyadic attribute dependent upon both features of the object and subjective structures at work in the subject’s evaluatively intending the object. Husserl characterizes this experience of value as a type of perception; he uses the term wertnehmen (1989, 12)—a modifcation of wahrnehmen, to perceive or take as true—to denote the taking of “objects, things, qualities, and states of affairs that stand there in the valuing as valuable (im Werten als werte)” (Husserl 2014, 190). Such value-perceptions underlie both value-judg188
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ments and the identifcation of the a priori “values as objects themselves” [Wertgegenstände or Wertobjektitäten (Husserl 2014, 190–1)], which involves the identifcation of the non-axiological properties and the subjective interests, concerns, or commitments necessary for an object to have that value. Given his view that the value is frst and foremost the valued object (a thing, event, or situation) perceived or judged, Husserl adopts a version of Franz Brentano’s idealized utilitarianism, one that views ethics as a thoroughly rational and objective discipline comparable in its rigor and universality to logic and whose laws underlie choices that seek to maximize the good. The rationalism of Husserl’s ethics is tied to the views (1) that our ethical judgments are grounded in an evidential insight into axiological and practical truths and (2) that the laws governing our axiological and ethical reasoning are a priori laws. Ethical norms are grounded in a theoretical science whose claims about the rules governing the contents of moral thinking are necessary and universal. In this vein, Husserl articulates a version of the categorical (but not Kantian) imperative inherited from Brentano: “Do what is best among what is attainable within your entire practical sphere” (Hua XXVIII, 142, 221). Husserl reformulates this subjective formulation in more objective terms:“What is best among what is achievable in the entire practical sphere is not only comparatively the best, but the sole practical good” (Hua XXVIII, 221). Husserl also identifed two other fundamental laws: (1) the laws of the summation of goods [“the existence of a good alone is better than the simultaneous existence of a good and a bad”; “the existence of a good and a bad at the same time is better than the existence of a bad alone”; “the existence of two random goods together is better than the existence of one of them alone”; and “for every summative composite of values, the sum of goods is better than an individual good belong to the summation or any reduction of it” (Hua XXVIII, 93–4, 97)] and (2) the law of absorption [“In every choice, the better absorbs the good, and the best absorbs everything else that is to be valued as a practical good in and of itself ” (Hua XXVIII, 136)].Taken together, these laws entail a consequentialism aimed at acting so as to achieve the greatest summative good. Husserl subsequently considered an objection, raised by Moritz Geiger, to the laws of the summation of goods (Hua XXVIII, 419–22). Geiger objected that not all values are comparable. Hence, they cannot be summed in a simple calculation. Husserl considered the example of a mother faced with a choice between rescuing her own child or another person, even when that other person is of exceptional character and whose continued life would maximize the good of the greatest number.The mother, Husserl concedes, need not even consider saving the other person. The mother’s love for her child demands that she protect her child from harm even when sacrifcing her child is a lesser good for the aggregate or when saving her child leads to harm for others. Central to Husserl’s new position is the recognition that the same objective value can become an “individual, subjective value of love,” i.e., that “the same value can be infnitely more ‘signifcant’ for one person than another” (Hua-Mat IX, 146n.). Hence, Husserl came to favor the view that “absolute loves” (commitments) generate “absolute oughts” (HuaMat IX, 146; 2014, 391–2).This does not entail a subjective relativism; instead, the idea is that an object valued by a subject with certain commitments (loves) unconditionally binds that subject to honor those commitments regardless of what any purely objective calculation might require (Hua XLII, 391–2). Such absolute loves motivate an agent to adopt an ethical life-project and to undertake those actions necessary to realize that project, a project that is “the deepest ground of [her] personal identity and individuality” (Melle 1991, 131; see also 2002, 243–4).3 Scheler (1913–16), in contrast to Husserl, adopts a stronger version of value realism. He identifes an emotive intentionality through which values are directly apprehended a priori. The experience of value in an intentional feeling or emotion is prior to the experience of an object as a bearer of value.The prior apprehension of the value underlies the grasp of the object as a good.The value-perception, in brief, apprehends the instantiated value as the good-making 189
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characteristic of the object valued as good, but, contra Husserl, the value does not depend on any non-axiological properties of the bearer or any psychological features of the subject experiencing it.While valued objects (goods), considered as objects of desire, are empirical, variable, and subjective, the values themselves are not; they are a priori, immutable, and objective ideals. Whereas, for Husserl, values are a priori (necessary features of objects possessing that value) but not epistemologically prior to goods, they are, for Scheler, ontologically and epistemologically prior to goods.And whereas for Husserl value attributes are dyadic, value-objects are for Scheler monadic. Scheler further believes that there is an a priori hierarchy of values, a fact that has moral signifcance.The lowest level comprises values of the pleasant and unpleasant. Next are the vital values, such as the fne and the vulgar; then the spiritual values, such as the beautiful and the ugly, correctness and incorrectness.At the highest level are the values of the holy and unholy. It is noteworthy, however, that the list does not itself include any moral values. Scheler views moral values as attaching to the actions that realize the values listed in the hierarchy. This view is rooted in Scheler’s distinction between the purely ideal ought-to-be (the value) and the moral ought-to-do (Scheler 1973, 203ff.). In opposition to Kant’s formal, categorical imperative, Scheler claims that insight into the ideal ought-to-be serves as the basis for willing and for realizing the moral ought-to-do. But there is no clear account in Scheler of the transition from the insight into ideal value-possibilities to the experience of moral imperatives, for the experienced value must be grasped in a feeling, i.e., it must strike one as desirable or lovable prior to the experience of the moral ought-to-do. Because the relation between the desire for the value itself and the experience of the imperative is not elucidated, it is not clear how, or even whether, the moral ought would be recognized were one not to experience the feeling or emotion directed to the value itself. Scheler’s imperatives, therefore, would, in Kant’s terms, be only hypothetical imperatives. Hartmann, like Scheler, maintains that feelings and emotions access a priori values. Hartmann stresses to a greater degree than Scheler the universality of values, although he tacks back toward Husserl in recognizing that values can have a different importance to different persons. Hartmann, more interested in metaphysics than in epistemological matters, discusses less the nature of value-consciousness and more the nature of value itself. He advances the view that ideal values are experienced as universal demands, but he acknowledges that personal and universal values confict in ways that can never be fully resolved.To do what everyone should do in the same circumstances is, in effect, to say an agent is replaceable by anyone, and this is to deny the agent’s individuality as a person (Hartmann 1963, 357). Indeed, Hartmann argues an even stronger point. Appeals to universal principles depend upon a typicality among the situations in which we are called upon to act, but any maxim of action must be tied to a particular situation and to a particular agent in that situation. Hence, the universality of a principle undercuts its own applicability to a particular situation that, owing to the uniqueness of persons and their interests and commitments, is itself unique (Hartmann 1963, 358–60). Universal principles, in a paradoxical way, just insofar as they fail to heed the individual personalities of agents, do not, and cannot, offer moral guidance.
15.2. An ethics of freedom Martin Heidegger was a critic of the then-prevalent theories of value (see, e.g., 2010, 97). He argued instead that the experience of value depends upon the prior disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) of being-in-the-world. Disclosedness, for Heidegger, is a function of three, equally primordial, dimensions of our being-in-the-world: understanding, disposedness (Befndlichkeit),4 and discourse. Being-disposed to the world is to fnd oneself immersed in the world in a particular 190
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affective state. Disposedness, to put the matter differently, “manifests itself as affect: mood, feeling, emotion … [I]t is through mood that the world as a whole—the context of signifcance co-structured by my projects—is opened up as mattering in a certain way” (Crowell 2013, 70–1). Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety, however, reveals that the context of signifcance can break down such that what previously mattered no longer does. Such a breakdown reveals a subject who is called to give meaning back to the world and responsible for the meaning given. It is disputed whether Heidegger commits himself to a “decisionism” (see, e.g., Tugendhat 1986; Okrent 1999) or a “deep deliberation” (Burch 2010, 212; Crowell 2007, 55–6, 59–62; 2013, 206–13).Whichever view is correct, for our purposes we need note only that Heidegger does not develop an explicit theory of value beyond his discussions of Befndlichkeit or of ethics beyond his discussions of conscience (Gewissen) and resoluteness (Entschlossenheit). Subsequent phenomenologists develop the idea of decision or choice as constitutive of value more systematically. Jean-Paul Sartre (1992), Simone de Beauvoir (1948), and Maurice MerleauPonty (2012) all believe that values are created in the exercise of human freedom. Sartre, for example, attributes the reality of values to the fact that the freedom defnitive of human beings can consciously and freely transcend what exists in their own situation and grasp a non-existent possibility as the object of their desires and choices. Human autonomy, in other words, is the sole source of value, including the value of human existence itself. On Sartre’s view, an autonomous agent recognizes and values his or her existence as it is: free, gratuitous, and lacking transcendent values to justify it (Sartre 1992, 76–8). Although there are factical circumstances that serve as obstacles to the (morally) solipsistic agent’s exercise of freedom—obstacles that are to be overcome—freedom itself is unconstrained by objective values or principles. Sartre, in brief, affrms an anti-realist axiology. Simone de Beauvoir follows Sartre both in placing freedom and transcendence at the center of her ethical refections and in recognizing the obstacles freedom faces in its exercise and in transcending the limitations of the human situation. Indeed, this is, for de Beauvoir, the fundamental ambiguity that characterizes human existence.A human being, identical with its freedom and unconstrained by objective principle, chooses freedom as its end. However, the goal at which freedom aims “is not fxed once and for all” but rather “is defned all the along the road which leads to it” (de Beauvoir 1948, 153). De Beauvoir also believes, moreover and now moving beyond Sartre, that one must not merely tolerate the freedom of others; the other’s freedom cannot be viewed simply as an obstacle to one’s freedom. Rather, one’s own freedom and the realization of one’s projects requires the (cooperative) freedom of others. For Merleau-Ponty, moral agency is analogous to artistic expression insofar as it attempts to institute value within the limitations of a given situation.Whereas Sartre thinks that meaning—and not only value—is constituted in the free, even if unconscious and non-deliberated choices of agents, Merleau-Ponty believes that persons are born into a world already permeated with meaning and that freedom is exercised in this context. Moral agents take the world as a task to be completed, a task of instituting meaning and value wherever and whenever possible (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 32).To create value consists in actively taking up our situations of chance, making something out of contingency, establishing communicative relationships, and creating and recreating values by working to change the world such that values may truly be instantiated (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 464–73, 480–1).
15.3. An ethics of obligation Values are often experienced as confronting us, that is, as prescriptions, norms, imperatives, obligations, demands, requirements, and so forth. But since, in the views discussed above, values 191
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are largely experienced as arising in relation to our interests, our feelings and emotions, or our choices, it would seem that we are always (at least somewhat) free to value and choose otherwise, precisely because our interests, feelings, and choices can vary. It is, in other words, diffcult to understand in what sense the values we encounter as the objects of our feelings, emotions, interests, desires, and choices can be thought to impose obligations. Hartmann, we have seen, adopts a skeptical attitude toward the possibility of universal ethical rules (although not universal values). This attitude is for him rooted not merely in the fact of freedom but in the very structure of individual personhood itself.Von Hildebrand, by contrast, seeks to address this problem of accounting for obligation from within the axiological approach. Thinking that Scheler’s view allows for the spontaneous love of value as heteronomously motivating action, von Hildebrand insists that moral obligation has not hypothetical but categorical force (although he avoids Kant’s formalism). Von Hildebrand speaks of the “importance” (Bedeutsamkeit) of objects, where importance is understood as that “property of a being which gives it the character of a bonum or a malum” (von Hildebrand 1953b, 24) and, hence, what enables the being to awaken a person’s interest and motivate her to act.Von Hildebrand distinguishes three “categories” of importance: the “subjectively satisfying” to or for a person; the “objective good for the person”; and the “important-in-itself ” (von Hildebrand 2016, 14). Since the second category presupposes the third, these in practice collapse into two (see, e.g., von Hildebrand 1953b, 34–43, 53–9), and von Hildebrand concludes,“Only that which is important-in-itself is a value in the true sense” (von Hildebrand 2016, 16).Von Hildebrand argues that any attempt to ground an imperative in the experience of the subjectively satisfying determines the will only contingently and heteronomously, and he identifes a group of intrinsic values that “challenge” (rather than “invite”) the agent apart from any relation to subjective interests, emotions, desires, needs, and wants (von Hildebrand 1953b, 42). If, however, he gains a ground for obligation in so doing, he does so at the expense of divorcing these values and their attendant challenges from their importance to or for an agent. This, in turn, raises questions concerning whether things having intrinsic value can by themselves motivate action. It is the problem of making the transition from the experience of value to the experience of obligation that provides the context for understanding those phenomenologists, chief among them Emmanuel Levinas, who seek to ground the notion of obligation independently of the notion of value. Levinas claims that the experience of obligation is prior to all acts of evaluation, all choices, all projects, and all dictates of reason. Hence, Levinas considers ethics to be wholly non-teleological in character.This is expressed in his opposition to “totalizing” views of ethics that organize all our ethical experience under a single ego-centered overarching set of values or hypergoods or an objective hierarchy of goods. Obligation arises for Levinas, as it does for Kant, from beyond all “inclinations.” Unlike Kant, however, Levinas turns his attention to intersubjectivity to fnd the ground of obligation.Whereas the phenomenological axiologists and advocates of a freedom-centered ethic stress the frst-person perspective, Levinas adopts a “second-person perspective” (cf. Darwall 2006) in which moral demands are experienced in encountering the “face” of the Other. Levinas’s ethics begins from the fact that intersubjective life begins when another addresses me, summons me, and commands me.The “face” of the other is pure expression (Levinas 1969, 66), and this expressive face,“exceeding the idea of the other in me” (Levinas 1969, 50), carries the summons and the command. The other and I are in an asymmetrical relation; the other’s ethical superiority outweighs my egoism (Levinas 1969, 215). The other approaches from on high, disconcerting my conscious intentionality and contesting my freedom, calling both into question in such a way that I have no choice but to respond.The other’s address, summons, and command awaken in me a sense of responsibility such that my concerns must transcend the 192
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merely egoistic in the direction of the other (Levinas 1969, 43, 50–1; 1998, 181). Encountering the face of the other in a face-to-face relation gives rise to transcendence in the response to the summons and the recognition (implicit or explicit) of the command. Only because I have already acknowledged this command do I live in a world with the other and become a person myself. Morality begins, then, neither with my feelings and emotions nor with my freedom, but with the recognition that my freedom is arbitrary.The other challenges my identity by presenting itself as a face that exceeds any idea I can have of him or her. In confronting me in this manner, this radical alterity obligates me to give more of myself than I can expect from the other. The experience of the other is thus from the start an experience of obligation. The question raised by this account is similar to the one raised by von Hildebrand’s account. I can encounter moral obligation as my obligation only insofar as what I encounter is referred back to my moral concerns. As Hartmann recognizes, obedience to the moral imperative apart from any reference to inclinations depersonalizes the action—whether in Kant, von Hildebrand, or Levinas—insofar as the action is divorced even from the agent’s will to fourish precisely as a moral agent through obedience to the moral imperative and in fulflling her own moral commitments. The will to fourish is entirely displaced in Kant by obedience to law, in von Hildebrand by obedience to the call of the important-in-itself (value), and in Levinas by the presence of the Other. The question arises whether this is satisfactory as an account of moral motivation.
15.4. Other developments It would be misleading to leave the impression that these are the only issues discussed by phenomenological thinkers or that these thinkers are the only ones by means of which connections to developments in contemporary moral (and political) philosophy can be established. One need note only (1) Hannah Arendt’s attempt to retrieve the Aristotelian notion of the polis (1958; 1968) and to synthesize notions of radical freedom with the excellences of the Greeks, the virtù of Machiavelli, the virtues of Montesquieu, and Jefferson’s notion of citizenship, or (2) Gabriel Marcel’s discussion of the virtue of fdelity and of the manner in which it imposes unconditional obligations on the faithful agent (1964), or (3) Adolf Reinach’s discussions of the a priori foundations of civil law (1983) and of deliberation (1989), or (4) Herbert Spiegelberg’s attempt to establish a value-based foundation of natural law (1935; 1937; 1986), or (5) Paul Ricoeur’s discussions of the nature of justice (1992; 1995; 2001). Nor are phenomenological approaches to ethics (in the broad sense outlined at the beginning) of mere historical interest. There has recently been an explosion of interdisciplinary research into the emotions, including work by phenomenologists. Although not all of this research is concerned with the evaluative role and ethical signifcance of the emotions, much of it revives the axiological and teleological approaches of the early phenomenologists. For example, Íngrid Vendrell Ferran has explored the work on the emotions by early, realist phenomenologists (2008), and she has explored the implications of their work for contemporary metaethics and theory of value (2013) and for the analysis of individual moral emotions (see, e.g., 2017). Ullrich Melle (e.g., 1991; 1992; 1997; 2007) and Henning Peucker (2011), in addition to editing Husserl’s ethical writings, have offered careful commentary on those writings. Sonja RinofnerKreidl, developing ideas found in Husserl and Scheler, has explored the ethical signifcance of a number of emotions (e.g., 2011; 2014a; 2014b; 2017). Sophie Loidolt (e.g., 2010; 2011; 2018) has developed ideas from both Husserl and Arendt. Sara Heinämaa (e.g., 2014; 2017),Anne Ozar (e.g., 2009; 2010; 2017), and Michael Kelly (e.g., 2016a; 2016b; 2016c) have analyzed morally relevant emotions, and Paul Gyllenhammer (e.g., 2010, 2017) has tied his analyses of emo193
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tions to the virtues (see also Reynolds 2013). John Drummond (e.g., 2006; 2010; 2013; 2015; 2017) has modifed Husserl’s understanding of the founded character of intentional feelings and emotions and developed a eudaimonistic account that also addresses the issue obligation from within an axiological framework. Janet Donohoe (2004) and James Hart (e.g., 1992; 1997) have explored Husserl’s later ethical thought, and Anthony Steinbock (e.g., 2014; 2016) has developed a view of moral emotions grounded in Scheler’s views.William Smith (2012), Irene McMullin (forthcoming), and Steven Crowell (e.g., 2007a; 2007b; 2013; 2015) have addressed the question of moral normativity from a Heideggerian perspective. Similarly, there have been many commentators who have developed Levinas’s insight into ethics as frst philosophy (e.g., Cohen 1985; Bernasconi 1989; Bergo 1999; 2002; 2011). This recitation of both previous and current phenomenologists, incomplete as it is, is suffcient, I believe, to reveal the liveliness, breadth, and importance of phenomenological refection on the ethical.
Notes 1 In what follows, I shall use the term “ethics” in this broad phenomenological sense, and I shall use the expression “moral phenomenology” as coterminous with “ethics.” One caveat: the expression “moral phenomenology” in the contemporary philosophical world is used in several senses. It can refer simply to the refection upon the “what-it’s-like” of different moral experiences involving feelings of some sort, or it can refer to a refection upon the character and content of moral experiences that are available to a frst-personal, psychological introspection. The latter view would include in the scope of moral phenomenology a consideration of not only the what-it’s-likeness of the experience but its representative content. Finally,“moral phenomenology” can refer to the study of the structures of frstpersonal experience and its intentional object, where that intentional object is not a psychological or mental content. It is in the last sense that I use the expression; cf. Drummond 2007. 2 For the use of the term “attribute” rather than “property,” see Geach (1956), Williams (1993), Drummond (2005). 3 This idea is similar to Charles Taylor’s (1989, 63) notion of “hypergoods” as “goods which not only are incomparably more important than others but provide the standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, decided about.”The orientation to such a good,Taylor says,“comes closest to defning my identity, and therefore my direction to this good is of unique importance to me.” 4 Befndlichkeit is one of Heidegger’s many neologisms and is diffcult to translate. It captures something at play in the ordinary greeting Wie befnden Sie sich? This is most commonly understood as “How are you?” or “How are you feeling?” when this last question refers not so much to one’s physical health but to one’s psychological state, one’s “state of mind,” as Macquarrie and Robinson translate Befndlichkeit (1962, 172).Translated literally, the expression says “How do you fnd yourself?” and Haugeland (2000, 52) adheres closely to the literal when he translates Befndlichkeit as “sofndingness.” Blattner (1999, 45) translates the term by “affectivity,” saving “attunement” for the ways affectivity manifests itself. Crowell (2013, 70) uses “affectedness,” and Dahlstrom (2013, 62–3) “disposedness,” which Blattner now prefers (http://faculty.georgetown.edu/blattnew/heid/Heidegger-jargon.html).
References Arendt, Hanna. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1968. Between Past and Future. New York:Viking Press. Bergo, Bettina. 1999. Levinas Between Ethics and Politics: For the Beauty that Adorns the Earth.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. 2002.“Remarks on Emmanuel Levinas’s Contribution to Classical and ‘Situated’ Justice”. Theoria, 100, pp. 38–63. ———. 2011.“The Face in Levinas:Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution”. Angelaki, 16, pp. 17–39. Bernasconi, Robert. 1989.“Rereading Totality and Infnity”. In: The Question of the Other. Eds.A. Dallery and C. Scott.Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 23–34.
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Ethics Blattner, William. 1999. Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burch, Matthew. 2010. “Death and Deliberation: Overcoming the Decisionism Critique of Heidegger’s Practical Philosophy”. Inquiry, 53, pp. 211–34. Cohen, Richard A. 1985. Face to Face with Levinas.Albany: SUNY Press. Crowell, Steven. 2007a. “Sorge or Selbstbewußtsein? Heidegger and Korsgaard on the Sources of Normativity”. European Journal of Philosophy, 15, 315–33. ———. 2007b.“Conscience and Reason: Heidegger and the Grounds of Intentionality”. In: Transcendental Heidegger. Eds. S. Crowell and J. Malpas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 43–62. ———. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015.“Why is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context”. European Journal of Philosophy, 23, pp. 564–88. Dahlstrom, Daniel. 2013. The Heidegger Dictionary. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Darwall, Stephen. 2006. The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1948. The Ethics of Ambiguity.Trans. B. Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library. Donohoe, Janet. 2004. Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology. Amherst, MA: Humanity Books. Drummond, John. 2005. “Value-Predicates and Value-Attributes”. In: Erfahrung und Analyse/Experience and Analysis: Proceedings of the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Eds. J. Marek and M. Reicher. Vienna: öbv&hpt, pp. 363–71. ———. 2006.“Respect as a Moral Emotion:A Phenomenological Approach”. Husserl Studies, 22, pp. 1–27. ———. 2007.“Moral Phenomenology and Moral Intentionality”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7, pp. 35–49. ———. 2010. “Self-Responsibility and Eudaimonia”. In: Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences. Eds. C. Ierna, H. Jacobs, and F. Mattens. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 411–30. ———. 2013. “The Intentional Structure of Emotions”. Logical Analysis and the History of Philosophy/ Philosophiegeschichte und logische Analyse, 16, pp. 244–63. ———. 2015. “Neo-Aristotelian Ethics: Naturalistic or Phenomenological”. In: Phenomenology in a New Key—Between Analysis and History. Eds. J. Bloechl and N. de Warren. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 135–49. ———. 2017. “Having the Right Attitudes”. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 15, pp. 142–63. Drummond, John and Rinofner-Kreidl, Sonja. (Eds.). 2017. Emotional Experiences: Ethical and Social Signifcance. London: Rowman & Littlefeld International. Geach, Paul. 1956.“Good and Evil”. Analysis, 17, pp. 33–42. Gyllenhammer, Paul. 2010. “Sartre on Shame: From Ontology to Social Critique”. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 41, pp. 48–63. Hart, James. 1992. The Person and the Common Life: Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1997. “The Summum Bonum and Value-Wholes: Aspects of a Husserlian Axiology and Theology”. In: Phenomenology of Value and Valuing. Eds. J. Hart and L. Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 193–230. Hartmann, Nicolai. 1963. Ethics.Trans. S. Coit. New York: Humanities Press. Haugeland, John. 2000. “Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism”. In: Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity, vol. 1. Eds. M.Wrathall and J. Malpas. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press, pp. 43–78. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time.Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 2010. Being and Time.Trans. J. Stambaugh, rev. D. Schmidt.Albany: SUNY Press. Heinämaa, Sarah. 2014. “Husserl’s Ethics of Renewal: A Personalistic Approach”. In: New Perspectives to Aristotelianism and Its Critics. Eds. M.Tuominen, S. Heinämaa, and V. Mäkinen. Leiden: Brill, pp. 196–212. ———. 2017.“Love and Admiration (Wonder): Fundaments of the Self—Other Relations”. In Drummond and Rinofner-Kreidl, (Eds.), 2017, pp. 155–74. Hermberg, Kevin and Gyllenhammer, Paul. (Eds.). 2013. Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics. London: Bloomsbury. Husserl, Edmund. 1988. Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 1908–1914. Ed. U. Melle. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution.Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
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John J. Drummond ———. 2004. Einleitung in Die Ethik:Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1924. Ed. H. Peucker. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 2012. Einleitung in der Philosophie.Vorlesungen 1916–1920. Ed. H. Jacobs. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2014. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte Metaphysik. Späte Ethik.Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937). Ed.T. Sowa and T.Vongehr. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2014. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.Trans. D. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kelly, Michael. 2016a.“Grief: Putting the Past Before Us”. Quaestiones Disputatae, 7, pp. 156–77. ———. 2016b. “Envy and Ressentiment, a Difference in Kind: A Critique and Renewal of Scheler’s Phenomenological Account”. In: Early Phenomenology: Metaphysics, Ethics, and the Philosophy of Religion. Eds. B. Harding and M. Kelly. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 49–66. ———. 2016c. “Phenomenological Distinctions: Two Types of Envy and Their Difference from Covetousness”. In: Phenomenology for the Twenty-frst Century. Eds. J. A. Simmons and J. E. Hackett. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, pp. 157–77. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infnity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Loidolt, Sophie. 2010. “Husserl und das Faktum der praktischen Vernunft: Anstoss und Herausforderung einer phänomenologischen Ethik der Person”. In: Philosophy Phenomenology Sciences. Eds. C. Ierna, H. Jaccobs, and F. Mattens. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 483–503. ———. 2011. “Fünf Fragen an Husserls Ethik aus gegenwärtiger Perspektive”. In Mayer et al. (Eds.), 2011, pp. 299–334. ———. 2018. Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. New York: Routledge. Marcel, Gabriel. 1964. Creative Fidelity.Trans. R. Rosthal. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Company. Mayer,Verena et al. (Eds.). 2011. Die Aktualität Husserls. Freiburg/München: Karl Alber Verlag. McMullin, Irene. 2019. Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melle, Ullrich. 1991.“The Development of Husserl’s Ethics”. Etudes phénoménologiques, 7, pp. 115–35. ———. 1992.“Husserls Phänomenologie des Willens”. Tijdschrift voor Filosofe, 54, pp. 280–305. ———. 1997.“Edmund Husserl:Wert des Lebens,Wert der Welt. Sittlichkeit (Tugend) und Glückseligkeit”. Husserl Studies, 13, pp. 201–35. ———. 2002.“Edmund Husserl: From Reason to Love”. In: Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook. Eds. J. Drummond and L. Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 229–48. ———. 2007.“Husserl’s Personalist Ethics”. Husserl Studies, 23, pp. 1–15. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception.Trans. D. Landes. New York: Routledge. Okrent, Mark. 1999.“Heidegger and Korsgaard on Human Refection”. Philosophical Topics, 27, pp. 47–76. Ozar, Anne. 2009. The Moral Signifcance of Sincerity. Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University. Available at https://fordham.bepress.com/dissertations/AAI3353775. ———. 2010. “The Value of a Phenomenology of the Emotions for Cultivating One’s Own Character”. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 10, 303–17. ———. 2017.“Trust as a Moral Emotion”. In Drummond and Rinofner-Kreidl, (Eds.), 2017, pp. 137–53. Peucker, Henning. 2011. “Husserls Ethik zwischen Formalismus und Subjektivismus”. In Mayer et al. (Eds.), 2011, pp. 278–98. Reinach,Adolf. 1983.“The A Priori Foundations of Civil Law”.Trans. J. Crosby. Aletheia, 3, pp. 1–142. ———. 1989.“Die Überlegung: ihre ethische und rechtliche Bedeutung”. In: Sämtliche Werke.Textkritische Ausgabe. Eds. K. Schuhmann and B. Smith. Munich: Philosophia Verlag, pp. 279–312. Reynolds, Jack. 2013.“Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics: Complementary Antitheoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories?”. In: Hermberg and Gyllenhammer, (Eds.), 2013, pp. 113–31. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another.Trans. K. Blamey. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995. Le Juste 1. Paris: Éditions Esprit. ———. 2001. Le Juste 2. Paris: Éditions Esprit. Rinofner-Kreidl, Sonja. 2011. “Motive, Gründe und Entscheidungen in Husserls intentionaler Handlungstheorie”. In Mayer et al. (Eds.), 2011, 232–277. ———. 2014a. “Neid und Ressentiment: Zur Phänomenologie negativer sozialer Gefühle”. In: Die Dimension des Sozialen: Neue Philosophische Zugänge Zu Fühlen,Wollen Und Handeln. Eds. J. Müller and K. Mertens. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 103–26. ———. 2014b.“Neid. Zur moralischen Relevanz einer ‘Outlaw Emotion’”. In: Affektivität Und Ethik Bei Kant Und in der Phänomenologie. Ed. I. Römer. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 173–204.
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16 EXISTENCE Emanuele Mariani
In the course of the phenomenological movement, the concept of existence refers prima facie to the “existential analytic” that Heidegger elaborates in Being and Time (1927). “Existence” is thus intended in the light of Dasein, as “human existence”, and represents a key notion in the fundamental ontology that permits Heidegger to formulate the “question of being” (Seinsfrage), whose sense is at once conveyed and hidden by the history of metaphysics. As part of a conceptual plot constituted by related notions like “transcendence”, “world”, “freedom”, “responsibility”, “authenticity” and so forth, the concept of existence occupies an even more relevant position in existentialist philosophy through an appropriation of the phenomenological method that generally stands in critical opposition to the rationalism of Western tradition.This raises the related issue of the affnity between these two multifaceted forms of thought, phenomenology and existentialism, giving way to composite interpretations that have been tending to antithetical outcomes: the association that, on the one hand, legitimates a form of “existentialist phenomenology” and the differentiation that, on the other hand, does not allow phenomenology for compatibility with the so called “philosophies of existence”. Heidegger, for his part, openly rejected such a combination as evidenced by the Letter on humanism (Heidegger 1976); instead, Sartre did not hesitate to claim a convergence, by redefning his phenomenological proposal in terms of “existentialist humanism”. Further examinations concerning the concept of existence, mostly sympathetic with the motifs of the phenomenological inquiry, between the frst and the second half of the twentieth century, are in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers, in the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler and in other authors that, beyond the feld of philosophical studies, addressed the problematic nature of the human condition under the concepts of paradox and of crisis. In literature, Sartre himself is one such example, together with Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir; in religious studies, Martin Buber, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich are enumerated among the most illustrious scholars. Original meanings of the concept of existence should also be noted in the “School of Brentano” aside from the existential as well as existentialist approaches, in a philosophical context characterized by issues of an entirely different order. The categories’ deduction proposed by the young Brentano in his 1862 dissertation on the several senses of being in Aristotle; the ontological nature of intentional objects faced with the phenomena classifcation into “mental” and “physical”; the understanding of existential judgements; and, beyond Brentano, the method198
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ological suspension of the thesis of existence about the world of the natural attitude elaborated by Husserl following the transcendental stage of phenomenology. The plot of related notions of which the concept of existence is here systematically part, is as follows: “being”, “reality”, “essence”, “substance”, “fact” and “fction”; a philosophically wide-ranging plot placed at the intersection of logic and ontology, whose sense radically changes when exposed to the various requirements of the phenomenological research.
Existence’s modes of being On the basis of this preliminary consideration, a distinction may be drawn between two different understandings of the concept of existence: existence is philosophically conceived as the way of being particular to man or, more generally, as a certain way of being.Therefore, two are the sections to be introduced in order to phenomenologically illustrate the concept of existence following a chronological order: (i) from the young Brentano who, since the 1862 dissertation, makes existence (ἔξω τῆς διανοίας,“outside the mind”) one of the criteria to defne substance as the leading meaning of being, (i.i) up to the issues concerning the “intentional in-existence” of mental contents and the equivalent debate between some of Brentano’s pupils (Husserl and Twardowski) about the ontological status of intentional objects; (ii) from Heidegger, who initially addresses being’s polysemy in the light of Dasein, conceived as the “privileged entity”, whose essence coincides with existence, (ii.i) up to Sartre and the subsequent project of an existentialist phenomenology that frmly asserts the primacy of existence over essence.
Historical background The reference to Aristotle, even though ideally shared by both sections, does not entail an exact correspondent of the term “existence” in Aristotle’s lexicon.The Greek ὐπάρχειν, which translates to the Latin “existere”, is associated with existentia as a result of a long series of historical transformations. Being, for Aristotle, is always being of a certain essence; and the distinction between “essence” and “existence” made in Posterior Analytics (see for instance Aristotle 1991, 5: I, 2, 72a 23–24) cannot be equated with the doctrine of the “real distinction” established in medieval philosophy since the thirteenth century; a doctrine that was designated to articulate an even more metaphysically and theologically relevant distinction, on the basis of which existence, contrary to Aristotle’s conception, shows a specifc determination that is not contained in the predication of essence. “Essence” (esse essentiae) and “existence” (esse existentiae) would thus be separated in creatures and identical in God.Two different arguments connected by a unique principle: all that exists, exists by participation to being and this being – as paradigmatically stated by Thomas Aquinas – is God. The philosophical roots of the concept of existence lie in the Christian appropriation of the term existo (a compound of ex and sisto from stare, “stand”), that in the classical Latin of Cicero (De Offciis: I, 30, 107) or of Lucretius (De rerum natura: II, 871) simply means:“step up”, “come forth”,“arise”.The semantic reconfguration of the concept steams from the encounter between the dogma of Christian theology and the philosophical grammar of Greek ontology, Platonic and especially Neoplatonic, in response to another crucial distinction: between the οὐσία-substantia, whose mode of being is determined by accidents, and being purely and simply, without determination, relating to ὕπαρξις (“existence”) that specifes the pre-existing subsistence of an origin.The neologism existentia introduced by authors like Marius Victorinus (fourth century A.C.) hence allows us to express the indication of a provenance, as evidenced by the prefx ex; a provenance back to which anything that exists is referred (Adversus Arium: I, 199
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30, 1062 c 18 sq.). Existere, as Richard of Saint Victor states among others, means nothing but ex alio sistere: to receive one’s own substantial being from someone else, that is to say from an origin (De Trinitate: IV, 12 937C–983); an origin that is subsequently interpreted as a cause, the effect of which is existence. The basic outcomes of this historically composite transformation become established in the thesis of Suarez: the real entity is what exists extra suas causas et extra nihilum – “beyond its causes and beyond nothingness”. Eventually, it is along this way of thinking that Leibniz and Wolff come to superimpose the concepts of “cause” (causa) and “effect” (effectus) over “power” (potentia) and “act” (actus), thereby translating existentia into the semantic domain of effciency and actuality (Leibniz: Theodicy, art. 87; Principles of Nature and Grace, art. 1; Wolff: Philosophia prima sive Ontologia, §174). For Kant, the link between existence and causality is continued within the moral law as regard to the idea of freedom understood in terms of autonomy; as Dasein, “existence” belongs to the category of modality in the Critique of Pure Raison’s table of categories, between “possibility” and “necessity”, and on the ground of the second postulate of empirical thought it means that which is “real” (wirklich).
Objective existence, real existence, intentional in-existence In 1862 the young Brentano, in line with the exegetical tradition of the Aristoteles-Renaissance of nineteenth-century Germany, aimed at demonstrating against Kant’s and, partly, Hegel’s criticism that the number of the Aristotelian categories respects a clear criterion of ordering. The strategy of the 1862 dissertation is as follows: to trace the several senses of being back to the fgures of predication (τἀ σχήματα τῆς κατηγορίας), by electing substance (οὐσία) as the leading meaning of being and reconfguring the Aristotelian ontology as an “ousiology”. All that exists is either substance or is depending on substance and substance, according to Aristotle’s Categories, is defned as “frst substance”, the synolon of matter and form that denotes sensible reality (Aristotle 1991, 3: Cat. I, 1b25-2a4).The criterion of ordering is so established: the object of metaphysics properly concerns that which exists per se (ὄν καθ’αὐτὀ), outside the mind (ἔξω τῆς διανοίας), whose existence is “real”, contrary to that which exists only by accident (ὄν κατἀ συμβεβηκός) in connection with something else (in alio).The different modes by means of which the categories relate to the substance express the substance’s modes of being; and substance is determined in accordance with “quantity”, “quality”, “relation”, “place”, “time”, “position”,“state” and “action”.The remaining ontological meanings mentioned by Aristotle – the accident, the true and the false and to a certain extent that which is potentially or actually (Aristotle 1991, 85: Metaph. E 2, 1026a34) – are excluded from the metaphysical inquiry. Saying that something is does not result, indeed, in saying that something exists.“Is” in the sense of “it is true” merely signifes the copula that is applied to all that can be thought: one may claim, for example, that the centaurs are mythological monsters, that Jupiter is a false god, etc.As Brentano argues:“every mental construct [Gedankendingen], i.e., everything which in our mind can objectively [Alles, insofern es objectiv in unserem Geiste existierend] become the subject of a true affrmative assertion, will belong to it [i.e. to being as truth]” (Brentano 1862, 37). Two modalities of existence should therefore be distinguished since 1862: “objective existence” that refers to the objects of thought and “effective existence” that corresponds to the reality of transcendent things. A frst testing ground for the nascent phenomenology will concern, and it is not coincidence, the understanding of this relationship between “immanence” and “transcendence”, in an attempt to reorganize the concept of intentionality under an equivalent distinction between the “content” and the “object” of a consciousness act. Indeed, if being, as Kant asserted, is not a real predicate, what about the ontological character of objects that exist 200
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only by virtue of an act of thinking? Should a residue of reality (Realität) be attested in spite of the non-existence of such objects? Objective existence – Brentano replies – is mental existence, to wit, an “in-existence” (Inexistenz) that is relative to our mind. “Objectiv” is consequently to be understood as a modifying adjective that shows the conversion of an existing object into the “in-existence” of a mental content. Drawing inspiration from the Aristotelians of the Middle Ages, Brentano, as is well known, employs the word Objekt not in the modern sense, but as synonymous to “intentional”, as opposed to the physically characterized thing, the object, to which the mental act is referred, continues to be conceived in the 1867 Psychology of Aristotle in terms of Inexistenz (“existing in”). “Materially, as physical quality, coldness is in the cold thing. As object, i.e., as something that is sensed, it is in him who feels the cold” (Brentano 1876, n. 6, 80). The theory of the intentional reference – as we read in a footnote of Psychology from empirical standpoint – has its roots in this passage from Aristotle’s De Anima (III 2, 425b, 25) where Aristotle asserts that “in actuality the sensible is in the sense” by virtue of an identity relationship (ὁμοίωσις) that makes the one who perceives similar to what is perceived (Brentano 1867, 80).While being perceived, sounds and colours are objects of an act that we are immediately aware of; by hearing a sound, we experience the hearing regardless of whether the sound, physically understood, really exists or not.There is a communion between the act and the mental object, the “proper sensible” as Aristotle would have said, that Brentano in 1874 rephrases in terms of an “special connexion” (eigentümliche Verwebung) or a “fusion” (Verschmelzung) among the “immanent objectivity” and the “intentional reference”: “in presentation something is represented, in judgment something is affrmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on”. (Brentano 1874, 68).The epistemological primacy of inner perception that constitutes the methodological principle of empirical psychology acquires legitimacy on the account of this “connection” that leads to a complete overturning of the initially established relationship between the two modalities of existence (intentional and real). If a sound can in principle be thought, irrespective of the awareness concerning the hearing of the sound, it is nevertheless the hearing that one should address so as to grasp the difference between that which is really given and that which is announced through apparitions. Contrary to “physical phenomena”, Brentano defnes as “mental” all those phenomena that intentionally have an object whose existence, thanks to the support of inner perception, is true and evident beyond any doubt.
The several senses of existence But if an object is intentionally contained in a mental act, how are representations to be interpreted in relation to non-existing objects? In this respect, Bolzano was talking about “objectless representations”, whose meanings – one may think of the squared circle example – cannot intuitively be fulflled. The diffculty, in such cases, is determining the reference of the mental act, given that the object of representation is separate from the act of presentation. “It is not the stone which is in the soul” – as Aristotle would have asserted – “but its form” (De An. III 8, 432a). The controversy between Husserl and Twardowski essentially focuses on this issue in view of Twardowski’s threefold distinction of “act”,“content” and “object”, initially presented in his 1894 work, On the Content and Object of Presentations; a threefold distinction on the ground of which the two aforementioned meanings of existence (intentional and real) are associated with Brentano’s mental phenomena classifcation into presentation [Vorstelllung], judgement and phenomena of love and hate. It would thus be up to the act of judging to accept or reject the existence of that which is represented, as opposed to the phenomenal or intentional existence pertaining to the object of representation. Representing, as Twardowski in turn argues, is neces201
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sarily representing something; and even if the object does not exist per se, that which is presented is there as “mental content” (Twardowski 1894, 28). Husserl’s criticism directly addresses the character of this threefold distinction, by denouncing the danger of an “ontological duplication” inherent to Twardowski’s argument. “If a round square” – Husserl affrms in a text on Intentional objects contemporary with Twardowski’s work – “is immanent in the representation in the same sense as the intuited color, then there would be a round square in the representation”. (Hua XXII, 310).Two meanings of the same thing should be instantiated under these circumstances, “immanent” and “transcendent”, two meanings that would problematically claim the right to existence; and when the object does not really exist, there would at least be its content which, like a mental image, would serve as an ersatz object. By criticizing the Brentanian division of phenomena into mental and physical, Husserl refuses by the same token to provide the mental content with an existential character and conceives of transcendence – to which intentionality is systematically oriented – in an ontologically wider sense than that of what is regarded as real. “Representation [Vorstellung]” – we read in a draft of a letter to Anton Marty – “is not the mere being-there [Dasein] of a content in consciousness – that is, its presence in the real context of psychical processes. Rather, representation is an intentional process, a certain minding [Meinen], whereby an object appears […]” (Hua-Dok III/1, 75).The objective reference of the intentional act, for Husserl, can be determined regardless of the temporal existence of the object itself; and “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit) – as attested by the Second Logical Investigation – is a suffcient mark of “reality” (Realität) as opposed to the “timeless ‘being’ of the ideal” (Hua XIX/1, 124). “If this experience is present” – Husserl asserts in the Fifth Logical Investigation – then, eo ipso, and through its own essence (we must insist), the intentional “relation” to an object is achieved, and an object is intentionally present […]. And, of course, such an experience may be present in consciousness together with its intention, although its object does not exist at all, and is perhaps incapable of existence. (Hua XIX/I, 372–373) The debate with Twardowski achieves this result: any representation represents something, but it does not necessarily contain an existing object. “Existence” and “nonexistence” are neither determined by the objective of the intentional reference, nor by the acceptance or by the rejection resulting from an act of judgement in accordance with Brentano’s theory, but by an act of fulflment that intuitively confrms or possibly contradicts a related intention of meaning. The object, phenomenologically speaking, is in conclusion to be understood in several senses: as spatiotemporal and hence existing, as timeless or, which is tantamount, as ideal, as singular or general, as empirical or eidetical; as real or ideal, following the methodological principle of intuition, the reach of which is extended by Husserl far beyond the limits of sensible perception. We should note that the link between “existence” and “reality” is maintained in the transcendental stage of phenomenology where “existence” continues to be mainly intended as spatiotemporal. “Factually existent” is that which belongs to the world as a totality of objects traceable, directly or indirectly, to the feld of sensible perception; a totality of objects available by means of the various activities we are capable of (theoretically, practically and axiologically). “The world” – Husserl states – “is always there as an actuality [Wirklichkeit]” (Hua III/1, §30). This is the sense in which the “thesis of the natural attitude” is defned; a thesis that the phenomenological attitude aims at suspending in order to reveal a new region of being,“transcendental consciousness”, conceived as “the primal category of all being”, as “the primal region in which all other regions of being are rooted” (Hua III/1, §76, 141). 202
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Existence, existentiell, existential and existentiality In his Sketches for a History of Being as Metaphysics (1941), Heidegger openly acknowledges the restriction dictated by Being and Time to the concept of existence: the existentia of the philosophical tradition that was originally grounded on the Greek substance (οὐσία) and led to “effective reality” (Wirklichkeit) by way of the Latin “actuality” (actualitas), in 1927 is conceived as “existence” (Existenz) that is the basic character of human being, notoriously renamed Dasein. From existentia to Existenz, from the mode of being relative to all that there is to man’s mode of being, such a restriction – as Heidegger says – only apparently follows Kierkegaard’s enterprise at the crossroads between philosophy and Christian theology, in an attempt to make coincide the human existence and the quest for the self; an enterprise that is explicitly recovered by Jaspers through analysis of the existential situation, the distinctive aspect of which is man’s relation to transcendence. Being and Time’s originality is rather in the interpretation of existence in the light of the ontological question that, according to Heidegger, has nothing in common with Kierkegaard’s Christian philosophy or Jaspers’ philosophy of existence. Dasein’s existence essentially relates to being inasmuch as Dasein is the privileged entity in view of which the question of being has to be formulated. Dasein, the entity that in its being has this very being as an issue for it, is in an intimate relation with its own being; a relation that is made explicit by means of its ontological constitution: the possibility of being or not being itself that presupposes, at the same time, a relation to being in general.“Understanding of being” – as §4 of Being and Time reads – “is itself a defnite characteristic of Dasein’s being”; as opposed to any other entity, Dasein “has to be” (zu-Sein) on the account of the possibilities that constitute its existence. In a famous formula Heidegger establishes that “the essence of Dasein lies in its existence”, thereby complementing the ontological question with the “who” question (Werfrage) that Dasein responds to in a frst-person perspective as “an entity which is in each case I myself ” and “its being is in each case mine” (Heidegger 1927, §9, 25). Dasein’s understanding of itself is also part of a context of relations that specifes another essential characteristic of Dasein’s existence: “being-in-theworld” – “Thus Dasein’s understanding of being pertains with equal primordiality both to an understanding of something like a ‘world’, and to the understanding of the being of those entities which become accessible within the world” (ibid., §4). The initial restriction serves as condition for overturning the categories of classical ontology: the “what” is understood in the light of the “who”; existentia is translated into “present-at-handness” (Vorhandenheit) of things, the quidditas, whose properties can in principle be enumerated as it is the case, by way of example, for a “house”, a “tree” or “a piece of bread”;“present-at-handness” of things that designates a modality of being that is depending on a certain interpretation of being’s entity as performed by Dasein. Dasein, on the ground of its existence, bears an understanding of any being’s entity that it is not itself; an understanding of any entity that for Dasein, as being-in-the-world, becomes accessible within the world.This explains the fundamental character of the 1927 ontology, to which any other ontology has to be traced back, to wit, any attempt of understanding the world that sciences – as Dasein’s behaviours or ways of being – address to all entities that are not like Dasein. By the same token, this explains the defnition of Being and Time’s fundamental ontology as “existential analytic”; a defnition that is based on a double priority: the ontic priority of Dasein as an entity whose being has the determinate character of existence; the ontological priority as a result of the relationship that Dasein, contrary to any other entity, has towards being. It is an ontico-ontological priority that allows an equivalent articulation between the two modalities, by means of which Dasein relates to its own existence: “existentiell” (existenziell) that specifes the way Dasein understands itself through existing; “existential” (existenzial) that specifes the 203
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understanding of the ontological structures of existence or, to put the matter more formally, of “existentiality” that constitutes the state of being of the existing entity (Heidegger 1927, §4). Yet another crucial feature of Being and Time’s existential analytic lies in the “destructive method” that organizes the historical interpretation of the ontological categories. Indeed, Heidegger aims at revealing the not suffciently thematized presuppositions that preside over the constitution of Western philosophy’s leading concepts like, inter alia, the Cartesian cogito and the idea of substance in the wake of the Greek conception that would hiddenly direct the modern idea of the “subject”. These are concepts that, by way of the “destructive method”, ought to be traced back to their origin; that is to say, back to the “primordial experiences” – as Heidegger asserts – that the tradition, through its transmission process, problematically conceals. “Primordial”, following Being and Time’s lexicon, has to be regarded as synonymous with “existential”:“demonstrating the origin of our basic ontological concepts” – as §6 of Being and Time reads – is nothing but displaying “their ‘birth certifcate’”; “birth certifcate” is relative to Dasein’s temporal dimension by reason of the systematic equivalence that Heidegger establishes between “being” and “temporality”.“Temporality” constitutes “the horizon for all understanding of being and of any way of interpreting it” as well as “the meaning of the being of that entity which we call Dasein” (Heidegger 1927, §5).Taking the example of substance, the objective of the destructive method is detecting the “ontologico-temporal” indication concerning the concept of οὐσία (“substance”) as παρουσία (“presence”), which concerns a specifc Dasein’s mode of being; a temporally characterized mode that, according to Heidegger, eventually imposes “present-at-handness” as the general pre-understanding of being as such, thus preventing the revealing of Dasein’s proper existential dimension. Beyond Being and Time, it should be noted that the concept of “existence” becomes increasingly scarce in connection with the Heideggerian project of overcoming metaphysics and the corresponding enhancement of the ecstatic character of human being. Existence is then understood in terms of “ecstaticity” under the metaphor of the “clearing” (Lichtung), conceived as the stance (da) from where Da-sein opens up to “the truth of being”:“the occasional use of the concept of existence” – as Heidegger himself retrospectively points out in 1941 – “serves only to prepare for an overcoming of metaphysics” (Heidegger 1961, 71). In response to Sartre’s existentialist phenomenology according to which “we are precisely in a situation where there are only human beings” (Sartre 1946, 36), Heidegger, at the request of Jean Beaufret, can consequently comment upon the supposed equivalence between “humanism” and “existentialism” as follows: “we are precisely in a situation where principally there is being” (Heidegger 1976, 165).
Existence and existentialism “Existence precedes essence”: the principle of Heidegger’s existential analytic lies at the heart of the phenomenological ontology that Sartre realizes in Being and Nothingness (1943). Existence, according to Sartre, is defned as the mode of being pertaining to Dasein that translates to “human reality” on the basis of an articulated analysis of consciousness that explicitly requires a recovery of the Cartesian cogito. Consciousness, phenomenologically conceived as “consciousness of something”, involves a form of self-consciousness that Sartre understands in terms of pre-refective self-awareness: being self-aware is thus the necessary condition for consciousness to be intentionally directed towards something other than itself.And it is in view of the “other” to which consciousness is primordially oriented that consciousness may become consciousness of the self; not like an object of knowledge, but, as Sartre specifes, pre-refexively, as a result of an immediate relationship to itself of non-cognitive nature. Consciousness exists as being consciousness of what it is not, in connexion with the “other than self ”; its way of being – as 204
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Sartre stresses – is “for-itself ”, which means that consciousness does not properly exist as separated from the world; in this sense, consciousness is understood as “distance from the self ” and contrary to being that is “in-itself ” (en-soi), the “for-itself ” (pour soi) of consciousness – as Sartre concludes – has always to strive to be its own being. Accordingly, human reality turns out to be fundamentally projected “out there”, “in the world”, whose structure is phenomenologically described as transcendence (Sartre 1936, 1943). The existentialist primacy of existence over essence implies nevertheless, in contrast to Heidegger, a basic opposition between these two notions: the understanding of human reality is, for Sartre, resistant to any aprioristic approach; there are no concepts that can be applied to man, the entity that exists, so as to establish his essential properties.“Man”, strictly speaking,“is nothing”; he “is nothing other than what he makes of himself ” (Sartre 1943, 22). Sartre’s existentialism is grounded on this very principle, whereby the meaning of existence is achieved in terms of “project” and of “responsibility”, which are the expressions of a primordial freedom; a freedom that refects, from the ethical perspective, the nihilating relationship (néantifcation) that man has towards being. “Existentialism” – as Sartre affrms – “is a doctrine that makes an authentically human life possible” (Sartre 1946, 18).Abandoned to his freedom, man is burdened with having to choose himself, with having to be his own legislator. The notion of existence, as MerleauPonty has for his part the opportunity to specify, serves as key to conceive of the human condition in a radically new way on the cultural scene of post-war Europe, where existentialism, once codifed as a doctrine and disseminated beyond the feld of philosophical studies, ends up being an alternative to the overriding views inherent to the Christian or to the Marxist doctrines.The need expressed by existentialism, according to Merleau-Ponty, is for combining the material with the spiritual aspect of man, which is not regarded as a thing among the things of the world, neither as a detached entity from the world itself, but rather as an existing embodied subjectivity ineluctably “condemned to be free” (Merleau-Ponty 1948).
Concluding remarks Following the French reception of Heidegger’s reorienting shift in philosophy known as the “turn” (die Kehre), the concept of existence tends to become peripheral within post-war phenomenology, in favour of other notions allegedly considered as more relevant, like, for instance, “alterity” or “ethics” for Emmanuel Levinas, “fesh” or “revelation” for Michel Henri, “event” or “givenness” for Jean-Luc Marion. A critical tension appears to be registered between existence and the context of ontology in line with the project of overcoming metaphysics renovated by French phenomenology, in spite of divergent views on both Heidegger’s own project and Sartre’s existentialism (see, for instance, Levinas’s Existence and Existents). This tension is even more noticeable if we consider that the frame of reference for the composite realization of such an overcoming is no longer the problem of the categories that prevailed, though not steadily, in the German tradition of phenomenology: starting from Brentano, passing through the overturning of the two basic meanings of existence (real and intentional) established by empirical psychology, through the descriptive and transcendental reconfguration of the categories proposed by Husserl up to the existential analysis of the ontological question formulated by Heidegger in Being and Time.
References Aristotle 1991. The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation. Ed. J. Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Volumes One and Two (Electronic Edition)
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Emanuele Mariani Brentano, Franz. 1862. Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles. Freiburg: Herder. English translation: On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Trans: R. George. 1975. Berkeley: University of California. ———. 1867. Die Psychologie des Aristoteles. Insbesondere seine Lehre vom nous poietikós. Nebst einer Beilage über das Wirken des Aristotelischen Gottes. Mainz: F. Kirchheim. English translation: The Psychology of Aristotle (in particular his doctrine of the active intellect).Trans: R. George. 1977. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1874. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. 2 Bde. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Trans: A. C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrel, and L. L. McAlister. 2009. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 1991. On Duties. Eds. M.T. Griffn and E. M.Atkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Sein und Zeit, Gesamtausgabe II. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1986. Being and Time. Trans: J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. 1967. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1961. Nietzsche. Pfullingen:Verlag Günther Neske. Nietzsche.Trans: D. F. Krell. 1982. San Francisco: Harper and Row. ———. 1976. Brief über den Humanismus, Gesamtausgabe, IX. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Letter on Humanism, in Pathmarks.Trans: Frank A. Capuzzi. 1998. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. The End of Philosophy.Trans: J. Stambaugh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Critique of Pure Reason.Trans: P. Guyer and A.Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge Press. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1952. Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil. Ed.A. Farrer. New Haven:Yale University Press. ———. 1968. General Investigations Concerning the Analysis of Concepts and Truths. Trans: W. H. O’Briant. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ———. 1989. Philosophical Essays.Trans: R.Ariew and D. Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1998. Principles of Nature and Grace. In: Philosophical Texts.Trans: R. S.Woolhouse and R. Francks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1947. De l’existence à l’existant. Paris: Fontaine. English translation: Existence and Existents. Trans:A. Lingis. 1978.The Hague: Nijhoff. Lucretius. 1987. De rerum natura.Trans:W. H. D. Rouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1948. Sense et non-sens. Paris: Nagel. Richard of Saint Victor. 2012. On the Trinity.Trans: R.Agelici. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2012. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1936. “La transcendance de l’ego. Esquisse d’une description phénoménologique”. In: Recherches philosophiques, (VI): pp. 85–123. ———. 1943. L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard. Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.Trans: H. E. Barnes. 1992. New York:Washington Square Press. ———. 1946. L’existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Les Editions de Nagel. Reprint: Gallimard, 1996. Existentialism is a Humanism.Trans: C. Macomber. 2007. New Haven/London:Yale University Press. ———. 1948. “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi”. In: Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, XLII, n. 3, pp. 49–77. Reprint:Vrin, 2003. Suárez, Francisco. 1999. Disputationes metaphysicae. Hildesheim: George Olms Verlag. Twardowski, Kasimir. 1894. Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellung. Eine psychologische Untersuchung. Wien: Hölder. On the Content and Object of Presentations. A Psychological Investigation. Trans: R. Grossmann. 1977.The Hague: Nijhoff. Victorinus, Marius Caius. 1981. Adversus Arium, in Theological Treatises on the Trinity. Trans: M. T. Clark. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Wolff, Christian. 1997. Deutsche Metaphysik. Halle, Germany, 1751. Reprint: Hildesheim, Germany: Olms.
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17 GENESIS Pedro M. S. Alves
17.1. The frst characterizations of phenomenology: descriptive psychology and transcendental philosophy As is well known, in its global development, phenomenology underwent several metamorphoses. It began as a “descriptive (eidetic) psychology,” later becoming a “transcendental phenomenology.”1 When Husserl used the label “descriptive” in 1901 to classify the kind of psychology that was at issue, the term had a clear Brentanian resonance. For Brentano, a descriptive psychology, or psychognosy, was opposed to a “genetic” psychology, which would have a physiological basis and would explain the laws of “generation, coexistence, and succession” of mental phenomena (Brentano 1995, 9). In contrast to the hypothetical character of genetic psychology and its dependence on a still embryonic physiology, the frst part of the system of a full-fedged psychology would be a description, based on inner perception, of mental phenomena as they are present to the mind. Descriptive psychology “does this by listing fully the basic components out of which everything internally perceived by humans is composed, and by enumerating the ways in which these components can be connected” (Brentano 2002, 4). For Brentano, such a descriptive endeavor does not depend on any genetic investigation; there is only a relationship of mutual help, even though “the services which psychognosy provides to genetic psychology are incomparably more valuable” (Brentano 2002, 10). As a matter of fact, for Brentano, “psychognosy is prior in the natural order” (Brentano 2002, 8), so that the explanation of the occurrence, coexistence, and succession of mental phenomena in the stream of conscious life enters neither into the pure classifcation of these phenomena nor into the determination of their internal laws of connection (for instance, how a presentation motivates a judgment, and so on). Indeed, as descriptive, psychology would prepare the way for a future explanatory theory of the psychic realm. Now from Husserl’s point of view, this Brentanian independence of description from a causal explanation will have an even more radical consequence: for Husserl, such independence will allow the emergence of a purely descriptive theory that would be free from any connection with naturalistic investigations of the genetic, physical, and physiological origins of mental phenomena.2 In a sense, from the Brentanian title “descriptive psychology” Husserl retained the idea of description while extricating it from the framework of a full scien-
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tifc psychology, where description precedes, prepares, and then gives way to explanation.3 Husserl’s frst debt to Brentano was thus the rejection of “genesis” and “explanation” in favor of a pure and independent descriptive approach, whether or not this is still to be understood as a variety of psychology. The turning point in this somewhat unstable frst characterization of phenomenology was the great discovery that the radical science of consciousness is not a kind or a modifcation of psychology, but rather a transcendental philosophy. In 1906, Husserl drafted a letter to Cornelius where he declared that “I grossly misunderstood myself when I identifed phenomenology and descriptive (immanent) psychology.” He then continues, “For four or fve years now, I have constantly warned my students against this big mistake” (Hua XXIV, 441). However, the introduction of the transcendental reduction in the frst fve lectures of the Thing and Space course of 1907 (published as The Idea of Phenomenology) and then in Ideas I in 1913 clarifes the whole issue. By means of the method of reduction, phenomenology will consider “purifed phenomena,” now free from any mundane apperception, and will develop as an eidetic theory of the region “pure consciousness and its lived-processes” (Erlebnisse), along with its noematic correlates.The noetic–noematic correlation will be the feld of phenomenology from now on. Relations of foundation between intentional acts and their correlative objects will accordingly be exhibited; key descriptive concepts such as “horizon,” “actuality,” and “potentiality,” “ego-polarization,” “mode of givenness,” and “doxic character” (and its modifcations) will be introduced; and fnally, the whole endeavor will assume the form of a doctrine of object-“constitution,” while the self-constitution of consciousness as a stream will be announced but not addressed. As Husserl famously says in Ideas I, “Luckily, in our preparatory analyses we can dispense with the enigma of time-consciousness without jeopardizing their rigor” (Hua III/1, 182). Despite its Brentanian inceptions, then, phenomenology was not a psychology, but a transcendental philosophy, and rather than being a matter of empirical (immanent) research, it was instead an eidetic theory. Roughly speaking, by choosing the side of a descriptive psychology, Husserl rejected any genetic approach and explanatory investigation from the very outset; moreover, by later rejecting the label psychology, Husserl put his descriptive endeavor in an entirely new realm: the non-natural region of pure consciousness and its intentional correlates.
17.2. The move toward a genetic phenomenology: the concept and the program A “genetic” (genetische), “dynamic” (dynamische), or “explanatory” (erklärende) phenomenology is the fnal version of Husserl’s theoretical project, put forth in the Freiburg years, especially from the 1920s onward. How can one understand this sudden return of such concepts as explanation and genesis, concepts against which phenomenology has defned itself? Indeed, what will a genetic phenomenology (or perhaps a phenomenological “description” of genesis with an “explanatory” import) add to the apparently self-contained feld that emerges from Ideas I as a realm of “absolute being”? Where does genesis stand in the realm of consciousness? How is it traceable and brought to “evidence”? Is not the phenomenological system already complete with a taxonomy of intentional acts, several ontological regions (along with their relations of foundation), and a doctrine of object-constitution? What is still missing? In a nutshell, doubts arise whether genetic phenomenology is a necessary complement for the completion of the system, or whether it is the expression of another point of view and another approach to pure consciousness. Some of Husserl’s most general statements provide some guidelines concerning the nature and scope of genetic phenomenology: 208
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1. The frst version of transcendental phenomenology was merely “static”;4 2. The most universal form of static phenomenology is the type ego-cogito-cogitatum, where the unity of the object intended functions as an ontological “transcendental leading clue”;5 3. In contrast, the most universal form of phenomenological genesis is the self-constitution of immanent temporality;6 4. Intentional genesis concerns the self-constitution of the concrete ego as a “monad” in the unity of a history;7 5. The key concepts for the self-constitution of the monad are the concepts of motivation, original institution of sense, and sedimentation (habituality);8 6. Genetic phenomenology is a phenomenology of the several forms of “apperceptions,” or of the several processes according to which consciousness arises out of consciousness;9 7. For the highest general eidetic form of a genetic phenomenology, there are no objectivities of whatever type (natural, intersubjective, social, cultural—in short, a world) given in advance (hence no “transcendental leading clues”), since the self-constitution of one monad in a space of varying possibilities of the ego is at the same time the constitution of a corresponding world with several kinds of objectivities;10 8. Here there are only systems of compossible and incompossible types of formations of consciousness, eidetically arranged as sets of pure possibilities linked by systems of motivations in their order of coexistence and succession—however, the huge transcendental problem within a genetic framework is the constitution of the individuality of the monad itself (of its “facticity”);11 9. A phenomenology of genesis thus understood is an explanatory phenomenology, in contradistinction to a merely descriptive and static one, so that there are three levels comprising a universal theory of consciousness: 1) general theory of the structures of consciousness, 2) constitutive phenomenology, and 3) phenomenology of genesis.12 What is truly new in this project? There are both points of continuity and points of cleavage, so that doubts about the relationship between the two versions of transcendental phenomenology are not immediately decidable. More precisely, the issue is whether the new version is a continuation of the former program, or whether it must be understood as a kind of transcendental recovery and reinstatement of an approach that phenomenology initially left aside in the process of its own formation: that is, a transcendental explanatory theory of the very genesis of consciousness in its factical stream of lived-processes, now reinstated as a self-constitution. Indeed, from now on the central theme is the transcendental subjectivity that has constituted itself, by way of primal institutions of meaning and sedimentations, as a concrete monad “in the unity of a history.” Genesis is now a transcendental concept, and points to the most fundamental (or “concrete”) part of phenomenology itself. As Husserl surprisingly declares to Paul Natorp in 1918 (surprisingly, if we take into consideration Husserl’s long-standing refusal of the very idea of genesis from the Logical Investigations to the Ideas13),“For more than a decade [sic], I have already overcome the stage of static Platonism and have framed the idea of transcendental genesis as the main theme of phenomenology” (Hua-Dok III/5, 137).14 For Husserl, and contrary to Natorp’s concept of a “genetic theory” as developed in the latter’s Allgemeine Psychologie (see Natorp 1965), the genetic self-constitution of transcendental subjectivity is only comprehensible as based on an ultimate self-temporalization, so that the monad is conceived as a “unity of becoming.” In a strong sense, the initial description of noetic–noematic structures gives way to a dismantling (Abbau) of experience in its formative elements of sense, and then to a post hoc reconstruction of these elements. Instead of disclosing relations of foundation among strata of sense in a “static” way, this procedure is tantamount to bringing to light relations of derivation 209
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linked by motivational connections. The most basic strata are no longer seen as providing an ultimate foundation of validity (Geltung), but function instead as an effective origin according to essential genetic laws that must be brought to light. In a way, as Steinbock has emphasized (Steinbock 1998, 133), with its descriptions of structures guided by ontological clues, static phenomenology is now the leading clue for genetic phenomenology itself. This is so because the latter opens a systematic regressive questioning (Rückfrage) into the origin (Ursprung) of the structures that static phenomenology encounters as ready-made. As Husserl points out, the general task of genetic inquiry is to illuminate (aufzuklären) “every given formation according to its origin” (Hua XI, 339). The reconstruction of such a genetic process would thereby have a real explanatory signifcance: it will not simply describe what is but will show how and why it is so. Since both descriptive and explanatory investigations are directed to the exhibition of eidetic laws, it follows that laws of foundation, relative to validity and static constitution, would be overdetermined by laws of derivation, relative to origins and genetic constitution. The very concept of “constitution” will be split into two strata. In this regard, the further elaboration of the concept of constitution— a genetic one and a static one, or rather, the move from a static to a genetic constitution as “the constitution of this [i.e., the static] constitution” (Hua XXXV, 407)15—would be where the static and genetic dimensions of phenomenology intersect. Indeed, as early as 1916 or 1917, while determining the several senses of the phenomenological concept of origin (Ursprung), Husserl sketched the double orientation of this constitutive research. He writes: Sense of the questions concerning the origin: 1) What I elsewhere also (inappropriately) named static phenomenological constitution: the “object” in the how of its original modes of givenness, as a noematic unity of original-noetic multiplicities.The a priori necessary system of appearances in which its unfolded perception consists. 2) A frst go at the doctrine of genesis according to general principles. Genetic constitution. (Hua XIII, 346n)
17.3. Pondering the novelties: the reference to Brentano It is open to debate whether this transition from static to genetic phenomenology is tantamount to an unbroken addition of elements that were already pre-contained (but provisionally left behind) in the frst transcendental approach to pure consciousness. Moreover, every one of the words that characterize this fnal version of phenomenology—explanation against description, genesis against being, dynamic against static—recalls authors that belong to Husserl’s milieu, along with the corresponding theoretical debates he had with them.This suggests a complex move that combines both the internal development of the initial point of view and the inclusion of new themes, or better yet, a development by inclusion that does not leave its very starting point intact. Indeed, when one puts these concepts in their proper Husserlian framework, Natorp, or even Dilthey, not to mention Brentano once more, are unavoidable references.Thus, Husserl’s concept of a genetic phenomenology will best be understood when it is also set against the backdrop of these authors and doctrines.The coherence of Husserl’s own theses and their internal development can certainly be understood by themselves. Nevertheless, it is helpful to pay attention to the oppositions, debates, and criticisms by which concepts like “genesis,” “explanation,” or “dynamism” were brought to the forefront in Husserl’s thought. A zigzag between systematic and contextual elements is therefore the best way to shed light on Husserl’s project of a genetic, dynamic, or explanatory dimension of transcendental phenomenology. 210
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For example, one can wonder about the connections that this new point of view has both with the preceding version of phenomenology and with Brentano’s program of a “genetic, explanatory psychology.” Viewed against the initial Brentanian framework, will not a genetic phenomenology be the transcendental recovery of a genetic psychology, that is, of the quest for the laws that underlie the “generation, coexistence, and succession” of mental phenomena? However, the recovery in question institutes a non-naturalistic concept of genesis (non-physiological, and in fact constituting the physiological) after having developed a non-naturalistic concept of description. The very frst symptom that Husserl’s fnal move was more than a simple continuation of the former program of the Ideas, since it amounts not only to an addition of something new but also to a self-transforming assimilation, is the fact that it is hard to see a strict continuity in the central theme of phenomenology. First of all, intentional structures were initially abstracted from the complexity of the fow so that they could be described as essential morphological types (“perception,” “judgment,” and so on), regardless of their intricate and fused instantiation in a concrete, factical life. Now, however, it is the Strom itself in its complexity and in the very process of its becoming that is brought to the fore. Accordingly, instead of Bewusstsein-von, Husserl will increasingly speak of subjektives Leben. One can argue that this transition can be construed as a passage from an abstractly isolating approach to a concrete approach, or from the “simplest” to the “most complex” descriptive themes. But Husserl’s move amounts to a reversal of the relationship between static and genetic approaches. It is now the genetic analyses that provide a leading clue for the formation and then description of structures. In addition, it also amounts to a change in the focus of phenomenological analysis.The “abstraction” in which phenomenology remained was not an arbitrary one; it was necessary in order to circumscribe its very theme. Just as the descriptive psychologist abstracts from the concrete, natural genesis and becoming of subjective life, so also the phenomenologist puts into brackets the concrete, subjective stream of life in its causal insertion into nature, for the sake of the pure description of the structures of the consciousness of objects and their respective modes of givenness. Additionally, abstracting from the complexity of the concrete, factical stream is not incompatible with a description of the constitution of immanent time. Indeed, the description of time-consciousness—which was done by Husserl in a rather “static” way—is one thing; investigating the material concretion of the stream—returning to its supposedly most elementary elements, which are not given by themselves, and reconstructing the processes of its formation and the growth of its complexity—is quite another thing. In other words, this feld of inquiry into limit-phenomena that are not given by themselves but are only accessible by a method of dismantling (Abbau), a feld that was initially left behind, now returns and assumes the place of a leading theme. Certainly, in a transcendental stance, the dependence of the stream of a concrete subjectivity on physiological and physical bases is put into brackets, instead of serving as a passage (as in the scientifc-psychological stance) from descriptive to genetic-causal research. However, in my view, this move is not suspended, but is simply reformulated. The reinstatement of such naturalistically oriented research in a transcendental theory will now assume the form of a regressive inquiry aiming at the “reconstruction” of the complex processes through which subjectivity “constitutes itself for itself ” as an individual monad, processes arising from the depths of its “unconscious” and “passive life.” Indeed, if we look, for instance, at the fundamental concepts of passive and receptive genetic constitution, we fnd Husserl going beyond the structural opposition between intentional morphe and sensual hyle. He talks about awakenings, sensible prominences, stimuli, affections, and so on. And he describes them from the side of transcendental consciousness, as noetic processes only, putting methodologically into brackets 211
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the natural-causal mechanisms that are the determining factors within a psychological genetic approach.What is at stake from now on is a phenomenological description of the self-arising and self-growth of consciousness according to the internal, “material laws” that sustain both the concrete unity of the stream and the increase of noetic complexity that comes with the corresponding noematic constitution of higher orders of objects. The exhibition of these basic internal laws of the self-unity of the fow (for instance, that one affection motivates another affection, or associatively recalls a former one, and so on), in the very place where the psychological approach only saw the intersection between the psychological and the physiological, will be one of the great discoveries of the genetic approach. There is an internal “because” (weil) for the factical being of the stream, one that was hidden by investigations of its physiological underpinnings under the heading “genetic-causal psychology.” Indeed, in a research manuscript about the senses of the concept of phenomenological origin, Husserl distinguishes “psychological” and “phenomenological” origins. Psychological origin is conceived in terms of the ancient problems of genetic psychology.16 Then he analyzes the connection between both concepts, and in a later revision, he symptomatically replaces the term “psychological origin” with the term “genetic origin.”The former opposition between the psychological and the phenomenological concepts of origin accordingly becomes the opposition between “genetic origin and phenomenological-static origin,”17 a distinction that is now internal to transcendental phenomenology inasmuch as it absorbs the theme (but not the method) of genetic-psychological inquiry (the search for what he names the Werdenfaktoren of the stream). The last section of the manuscript, initially titled “Psychological and phenomenological origin,” will consequently be amended to “Thoughts for a genetic phenomenology” (Hua XIII, 354).18 The crucial point is that in this passage Husserl begins to understand that “the a priori lawfulness of genesis, the reference of any present experiential motivation back to a past consciousness to which it is related as the origin of its being [Seinsursprung], hang together with reason [Vernunft],” so that “consciousness is not an arbitrary fux of facts that could arbitrarily be different: the earlier consciousness motivates possibilities for the later one a priori, in such a way that the latter […], in its facticity, is necessarily motivated through the corresponding earlier consciousness” (Hua XIII, 357). This has two important consequences: 1. From a naturalistic stance, the layer of sensibility cannot be construed as a simple causal interaction between a physical reality and the mind: the mental has internal laws of organization, even at the passive level—laws that are almost always associative laws—along with patterns for the internal confguration of the sensible felds (fusion, prominence, and contrast stand at this basic level). 2. The principle of a strong connection among lived-processes is expanded to all layers of objective constitution, either “horizontally,” i.e., among lived-processes of the same layer, or “vertically,” i.e., as motivations that go from the lower strata to the upper strata (or vice versa: for instance, a practical or cognitive interest motivates a selection of affections in the receptive feld). Hence, as well as being seen as an internal development of the former program (the flling in of “a big gap”—Hua I, 100), Husserl’s move to a phenomenological theory of genesis focusing on the self-unity of the Strom can also be construed as a more complex absorption of a set of problems that phenomenology (and Brentano’s descriptive psychology) had necessarily left behind in presenting itself as a descriptive, eidetic theory of the non-natural region “pure consciousness and its intentional correlates.” And this absorption entails more than an extension. It is tantamount 212
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to redefning the leading theme of transcendental phenomenology: the self-constitution of the monad in its autarchic unity.As Husserl emphasizes, There are also laws that positively prescribe what necessarily belongs to the formal structure of a monad, and that moreover prescribe what must become when a certain individual content is already there.Thus, the primal law of genesis is the law of original time-constitution, the laws of association and reproduction, the laws through which the monad constitutes itself for itself as a unity, and so on. (Hua XIV, 39)
17.4. Still pondering the novelties: the monad has “windows” As another symptom of the complexity of the transition, it must be observed that eidetic laws of foundation and eidetic laws of origination do not inevitably overlap, forming a coherent system of complementation and mutual reinforcement. As Husserl puts it, static phenomenological constitution is the quest for the validity (Geltung) of objectual formations. This entails the search for their original modes of itself-givenness as being-there in the fesh (leibhaft da); for the corresponding modifcations; and for the relations of foundation on other layers of objectual formation. This threefold investigation circumscribes the concept of static constitution. The leading vectors are the inquiries into origin and foundation: more precisely, into validity-origin (Geltungsursprung) and validity-foundation (Geltungsfundierung). Here the prototype of itself-givenness is the apodicticity of the self-presence of the ego in the living present, while the global issue is the clarifcation of the whole-structure of the experience of a world. As Lee has pointed out, the validity-structure is non-temporal (Lee 1993, 24).19 The founding strata are not earlier than the founded ones, and they cannot be spread over time as a process of becoming, as if they could account for the history of a living monad. Rather, they are an ideal architecture of layers of sense in the constitution of objects. Husserl stresses this very point with great clarity when he writes that “with the verifcation of validityfoundation, it is not the genesis of the higher senses of being that is in question—namely, as if the founding senses in subjective-immanent temporality would have awakened the founded ones” (Hua XV, 615).Thus “to pursue the constitution is not to pursue the genesis” (Hua XIV, 41). However, the quest for validity is not abandoned in genetic constitution, nor is the guiding principle according to which experience (Erfahrung), in the broad sense of original givenness, has a privileged status (Husserl writes that this principle encompasses both static and genetic constitution—Hua XVII, 317).They are nevertheless thrown into a different framework. Searching for origin is now tantamount to searching for a frst beginning (Anfang); searching for foundation is tantamount to establishing temporal relations of “earlier” and “later,” establishing a relationship of consequence (more precisely, of motivation, as the “causality” proper to conscious life) in the constitution of objectual formations.The new framework is subjective life as a unity in becoming, or the temporal self-constitution of the monad in its concrete life. The experience that serves as a leading clue for the investigation is now traceable in a concrete subjective life as an original institution of sense (Urstiftung). And validity now refers back to the motivations according to which, in subjective life, something is posited because something was posited in the present or in the past of the life-stream. Genetic foundation (Genesisfundierung) and genetic origin (Genesisursprung) are therefore different from the concepts of foundation and of origin in static phenomenology, for they point in a different direction. Ultimately, the genetic approach tends to absorb the static approach by transferring the problems of validity and original givenness into another framework. 213
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For measuring to what extent the genetic approach is an ordered, internal development of the static approach on the one hand or an expansion entailing a new formulation on the other, one traditional thesis must be briefy examined—namely, the view that for moving from static to genetic phenomenology, what is needed is only the addition of the time variable. In his classic study,Antônio Almeida states that “the theme of static phenomenology is, materialiter, the same as that of genetic phenomenology” (Almeida 1972, 7). According to him, the theme of phenomenology simpliciter would be the stream of lived-processes (Erlebnisstrom), and this will then furnish the objectum materiale, so to speak, of both the static and genetic versions of phenomenology. They would be distinguishable by means of the “formality” under which their unique material object would be considered. As Almeida points out, static phenomenology would be like a cross-section (Querschnitt) of the stream, while genetic phenomenology would be like a longitudinal section (Längsschnitt) of the very same stream. Both analyses display “a complex system of syntheses” (Almeida 1972, 7). However, in focusing only on a punctual moment of the stream, static phenomenology would not be able to consider the “processual character” of intentionality and would be led to a fnal opposition between sensual content (Inhalt) and sense (Sinn). In contrast, genetic phenomenology would consider the very “lawfulness” (Gesetzmässigkeit) that underlies the production of content—namely, the depths of timeconstitution—and on that basis will be able to account for the institution of sense as a dynamic “subjective power” of an “active, productive subject.” Sokolowski’s account goes slightly in the same direction when he says that “once [Husserl] adopts this theory of genetic analysis, reconciliation of temporality with objective constitution becomes possible” (Sokolowski 1964, 183). More recently, Donn Welton has used a rather similar (albeit more complex) explanatory model for capturing the difference between static and genetic analyses (see Welton 2003, 263). His point is that “the difference between static and genetic analysis cannot be construed simply as a contrast between synchronic and diachronic analysis,” as the metaphor of the cross-section and longitudinal section of the stream would suggest, because static analysis “also has a diachronic side” (Welton 2003, 263–264). Nevertheless, he concludes that the transition from static to genetic accounts is based on deepening the analyses of time. In other words, the analyses evolved from a (static) concern with the “temporal form” of the constitution of objects to an account of the internal streaming of the living present that encompasses the production of content. However, pace Almeida, we have argued that the self-temporalization of the stream as the fundamental theme of phenomenology is an achievement of genetic phenomenology.The transition cannot be accounted for by means of the too simple difference between punctual and processual analyses. As Welton points out, issues of “time-form” and “time-syntheses” also enter static analysis. In addition (here too borrowing from Welton’s later explanations), the crucial point is that the direction of the phenomenological inquiry underwent a dramatic change. As he put it, “genetic analysis deals not with the distinct temporal character attending various modalizations of different types of experiences, for this is handled in constitutive analysis, but with the becoming of the horizon itself. In the fnal analysis, it accounts for the historicity of intentional life” (Welton 2003, 277, my emphasis). I believe that this is the key issue. In a well-known text, Husserl characterizes the specifcity of the genetic inquiry. It is worth quoting it here: Genetic intentional analysis is directed to the whole concrete nexus [Zusammenhang] in which each particular consciousness stands, along with its intentional object as intentional. Immediately the problem becomes extended to include the other intentional references, those belonging to the situation in which, for example, the subject exercising the judicative activity is standing, and to include, therefore, the immanent unity of 214
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the temporality of the life that has its “history” therein, in such a fashion that every single process of consciousness, as occurring temporally, has its own “history”—that is: its temporal genesis. (Hua XVII, 316) More than time alone, the genetic point of view also entails the following: 1. The consideration of the whole nexus in which each lived-process stands; 2. The consideration of all of the intentional references that belong to the situation in which the subject stands; 3. The consideration of the temporal unity of life, to whose internal development the whole situation refers back; 4. The recognition that every single lived-process is now explained in its occurrence as the carrier of a sense having a historical density; and 5. The recognition that to pursue this history is to question genetically. Where does this regressive questioning lead? The key to the bewildering unity of Husserl’s genetic inquiry, regardless of its apparent dispersion throughout disparate themes, depends on a clear answer to this question. First, it leads from the intentional act to its receptive and ultimately passive, pre-objective dimensions.This “downward” inquiry gives rise to the project of a “transcendental aesthetics.”The interplay between acts and their foundations in pre-predicative experience opens the task of phenomenological research into passive and active syntheses. Second, it leads to horizons of progressively unclear and eventually obscure life, horizons that surround the intentional acts of the ego-form.These horizons are contained in the subject’s present situation and point back to its past life, be they prior achievements that remain productive under the unclear form of habituality and sedimentation, or earlier experiences expressly evoked in a clear remembrance, or fnally, primal institutions that are now lost in a forgotten past. This paves the way for a phenomenological theory of “unconscious” life.Third, taking a step forward, such inquiry leads to ultimate questions of birth and death, which Husserl calls “generative problems” (see Hua XV, 171; Hua XLII, passim). Last but not least, it leads to the transcendental horizons of intersubjectivity—of community—and to the historicity of the monad in its living with others.20 Suddenly, but not incomprehensibly, the pursuit of the history of sense within one monadic life also leads to original institutions that transcend this very monadic life and can only be explained within the broader horizons of community (Gemeinschaft) and of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), with its modes of institution, transmission, and reinstitution of sense (Urstiftung, Nachstiftung—Hua IX, 212).As Husserl writes, every present of life stands in its historical nexus, which is partially open, partially concealed. It has “historical presuppositions” that one can pursue in a regressive questioning, in a pure turning inward, in a pure refective direction of the regard to concrete life and to what has sense and validity from tradition. (Hua XXIX, 344) These ultimate original institutions must be reinstated by means of a reconstructive historical anamnesis.This, however, does not have a factual, empirical signifcance. Just as in the theory of genesis in general, factual historical genesis and phenomenological historical genesis certainly have complex relationships, but are not defnitively the same.The history of sense develops in the realm of idealities and is grasped by means of eidetic laws; from this point of view, empiri215
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cal facts, by themselves, are only instantiations of eidetic possibilities.21 Husserl has offered three splendid applications of this method in his essays concerning the sense-origins of Galilean science, geometry, and Europe as a spiritual phenomenon (Hua VI, 20–60, 365–386, 314–348). Yet is this fnal part of the genetic-historical inquiry, working out the inter-monadic horizons of community and historicity, just an internal development of the static phenomenology of Ideas I? Regarding this ultimate horizon of a transcendental theory of inter-monadic community and historicity, I believe that instead of being a merely linear development, it is not only an ordered self-transformation of phenomenology itself, but a complex assimilation of Dilthey’s project for a descriptive and analytic psychology as a foundation for the human sciences, as put forth in his Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie from 1894 (see Dilthey 1924). Indeed, I believe that it was an attempt Husserl made in order to include a domain that had remained at the margins of transcendental philosophy as long as it developed as a “Cartesian” theory of an isolated transcendental subjectivity.The double step forward was frst to come to intersubjectivity as the absolute subject of world-constitution, and then, by means of the theme of the historicity of inter-monadic life, to replace the fawed psychological foundation with a transcendental account of the historical world. As a matter of fact, Husserl expressly stresses that as compared with Brentano’s descriptive psychology, Dilthey’s most important advantage consists “in having, from the very outset, his regard stretched beyond the single subject of historical life, and having been directed to historical life itself, [which is] in each human being inwardly unitary, and yet trans-individual.” This puts at the forefront the “personal subject in communal life, and this in its unitary history, which is naturally a communal history” (Hua IX, 355). In a further contrast, Husserl emphasizes that, contrary to Brentano’s concern with isolated lived-processes, Dilthey always looked at “the wholeness of the stream of lived-processes, and in general, at the concrete whole of the pure psychic subject” (Hua IX, 355). Dilthey’s concept of an Erlebniszusammenhang (rather than a sheer, abstracted Erlebnis) has not only an individual dimension, but communal and historical dimensions as well, so that the self-remembering of the monad is like an open window to dimensions that transcend it, while constituting it in its very individuality. Thus, for Husserl, the attention paid to the “interior-exterior sphere” (Innen-Aussen Sphäre—Hua IX, 361), to the intertwining between subjectivity and the intersubjective, communal, and historical, marks the superiority of Dilthey’s descriptive psychology over Brentano’s. However, Dilthey’s psychological foundation of the historical world was just a frst attempt. He remained at the level of an unresolved opposition between explanatory and descriptive or analytic psychology, tributary of a dualistic naturalism. For Dilthey’s approach, explanatory methods are “only possible in psychophysics,” while descriptive psychology based on inner perception reaches no more than an understanding of individual types in the framework of their communal and historical horizons.Thus,“according to Dilthey, a descriptive and analytic psychology is not different from, and should not and could not be more than a descriptive natural history of human psychic life, of the ‘developed typical human being’” (Hua IX, 16). For Husserl, the point is to employ an eidetic approach to the internal laws of streaming, historical life in order to reach essential necessities that overcome the level of empirical generalities and inductions.This was Dilthey’s “radical lack” (Hua IX, 13).And this is, for Husserl, the point where Dilthey’s psychology must be absorbed into and transformed by a transcendental phenomenology that for its part has transformed itself, thereby receiving its theoretical legacy.At the transcendental level of a phenomenological genetic approach to inter-monadic, historical life, the reconstructive understanding of individual life under essential laws is the complete comprehension of its being, and this complete comprehension is tantamount to a full explanation of it. 216
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Thus, in the end, a full-fedged transcendental phenomenology takes the form of an explanatory theory. Nothing more is left over as a residuum of opacity, because “to understand a historical nexus is its unique meaningful explanation” (Hua IX, 10, my emphasis). In a manuscript where he considers the opposition between home-world and alien-world, Husserl goes so far as to risk speaking of understanding our world “genetically-historically” (Hua XV, 214).
17.5. By way of a conclusion: Husserl’s contribution and some glimpses beyond Putting it all together, I would say that the initial project of a transcendental phenomenology as presented in Ideas I underwent two dramatic reformulations.These two changes were strategic moves to absorb issues that the earlier phenomenology—now conceived as “static”—necessarily left behind in order to delimit its own feld of investigation. However, these changes cannot be conceived as a simple ordered extension of the initial project. First, there was the issue concerning the factical stream of subjective life. Following Brentano’s distinction between two types of psychology, this required inquiring into the genesis, coexistence, and succession of lived-processes understood as the theme of a genetic-causal approach, a psychophysics, which should be left aside in a purely descriptive psychology. Husserl’s great discovery was that the stream had internal laws of unifcation, so that a phenomenological account of the processes through which it constitutes itself as a unity is now the new horizon of phenomenological inquiry. The frst layer is the very process of self-temporalization. Now, however, this layer is not simply formal: it is closely connected with the constitution of primitive content by means of basic noetic processes such as confgurations of the sensible felds, stimuli, and affections. Starting phenomenologically at the very level where the old division had located the feld of a genetic psychology, the new endeavor assumed the form of a genetic phenomenology. It developed as an investigation into passivity, receptivity, and the spontaneity of judgment—in short, as an inquiry into passive and active syntheses.This was the very core of genetic phenomenology, and it entailed not only an extension, but a reorganization of the initial project. Second, since his demolishing critique of “historicism” as a variety of relativism in his Logos article from 1911, history was for Husserl a distant, even forgotten continent. However, Dilthey’s project for a descriptive psychology as opposed to the emerging psychophysics, which he called “explanatory,” was the promise of a psychological foundation of supra-individual dimensions of subjectivity, such as the various forms of “objective spirit” and ultimately the very historicity of life. Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity could not embrace this domain. The leading clue for an extension of phenomenology to this entire domain was the concept of the historicity of meaning and its reference back to an original institution.The processes of institution, tradition, and reinstitution of sense now appeared, in this new light, as the fundamental form of the “a priori of historicity” and as the clue for researching the communal and historical dimensions of monadic life. Although it was proposed, this new dimension of phenomenology was only sketched in Husserl’s works, in contrast to the genetic investigation of passive and active syntheses within the framework of the project of a transcendental logic. Nevertheless, even if this may be a controversial view, I believe that this fnal dimension—that of the communal and the historical—still falls within the scope of the concept of a genetic phenomenology. The issues concerning this fnal part of Husserl’s inquiry were isolated by Anthony Steinbock under the Husserlian title of “generative phenomenology” as a “transcendental phenomenological philosophy of the social world.”As Steinbock puts it in his book Home and Beyond, a generative phenomenology “means both the process of becoming—hence the process of “generation”—and a process that occurs over the “generations”—hence specifcally the process of ‘historical’ and social becoming” (Steinbock 1995, 3).The views Steinbock has developed concerning the opposition 217
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between the experiences of the “home-world” and the “alien-world,” of “normality” and “abnormality,” along with other related issues, are borrowed from Husserlian concepts and themes, but do constitute in and of themselves a fresh and very interesting extension of Husserl’s ultimate legacy. Finally, it is worth pointing out an interesting project for an “experimental phenomenology” that crosses the bridge between description of mental phenomena and observation of psychophysical events, instituting a proftable dialogue between the two branches of psychology that Brentano (and Husserl too) distinguished. This project (developed by Liliana Albertazzi and others) roughly coincides with Husserl’s “passivity-receptivity” domains, and for now, it is almost exclusively centered on the study of visual phenomena. As Albertazzi stresses, the basic tenet of “experimental phenomenology” is the exclusion of any “reduction of phenomena to physical or neuronal correlates” (Albertazzi 2013, 6). In keeping with one of Husserl’s results emphasized above, she expressly declares that “qualitative phenomena are irreducible to stimuli” (Albertazzi 2013, 8), so that the description of the qualitative aspects of experience opens a “science of appearances” that correlates them with, but never reduces them to their neural and physical underpinnings. While inspired by Husserl’s views about the autonomous confguration and meaningfulness of the sensible felds, this “experimental phenomenology” also opens a new and interesting expansion of Husserl’s legacy of a genetic phenomenology.
Notes 1 The contrast between the notes in section 6 of the Logical Investigations is a clear expression of how Husserl’s characterization of phenomenology shifts. In 1901, Husserl wrote: “Phenomenology is descriptive psychology. Epistemological criticism is therefore in essence psychology, or at least only capable of being built on a psychological basis.” However, by 1913, the text was replaced by the following: “If our sense of phenomenology has been grasped, and if it has not been given the current interpretation of an ordinary ‘descriptive psychology,’ a part of natural science, then an objection, otherwise justifable, will fall to the ground, an objection to the effect that all theory of knowledge conceived as a systematic phenomenological clarifcation of knowledge is built upon psychology. […] We naturally reply that […] phenomenology is not […] empirical, scientifc description” (Hua XIX/1, 23). Note that in some cases I have relied on published English translations of Husserl’s works, albeit with occasional minor modifcations; all other translations from Husserl are my own. 2 In the same note of section 6 quoted above, Husserl even rejects the title of “psychology” for his descriptive approach.The text reads as follows:“It is not the full science of psychology that serves as a foundation for pure logic, but certain classes of descriptions which are the step preparatory to the theoretical research of psychology. These, in so far as they describe the empirical objects whose genetic connections the science wishes to pursue, also form the substrate for those fundamental abstractions in which logic seizes the essence of the ideal objects […]. Since it is epistemologically of unique importance that we should separate the purely descriptive examination of the knowledge-experience, disembarrassed of all theoretical psychological interests, from the truly psychological researches directed to empirical explanation and origins, it will be good if we rather speak of ‘phenomenology’ than of descriptive psychology” (Hua XIX/1, 24, my emphases). 3 Both the difference from Brentano’s understanding of description as a preparatory step and the difference between description qua psychological and qua phenomenological (eidetic) are clearly stated by Husserl in his Urteiltstheorie of 1905 (Hua-Mat V, 43–46). 4 “The phenomenology developed at frst is merely ‘static’; its descriptions are analogous to those of natural history, which concern particular types and, at best, arrange them in their systematic order” (Hua I, 110). 5 “The most universal type within which, as a form, everything particular is included is indicated by our frst universal scheme: ego-cogito-cogitatum.The most universal descriptions […], which we have attempted in a rough fashion concerning intentionality, concerning its peculiar synthesis, and so forth, relate to that type. In the particularization of that type, and of its description, the intentional object (on the side belonging to the cogitatum) plays, for easily understood reasons, the role of ‘transcendental clue’ to the typical infnite multiplicities of possible cogitationes that, in a possible synthesis, bear the intentional object within themselves (in the manner peculiar to consciousness) as the same meant object” (Hua I, 87).
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Genesis 6 “The universal essential form of intentional genesis, to which all others are related back, is the constitution of immanent temporality” (Hua XVII, 318). 7 “The ego constitutes itself for itself in, so to speak, the unity of a ‘history’” (Hua I, 109). 8 “The eidetic laws of compossibility (rules that govern simultaneous or successive existence and possible existence together, in the fact) are laws […] of motivation in the transcendental sphere” (Hua I, 109);“In all phases, we also have the sedimented history of these respective phases, in each one the monad had its concealed ‘knowing,’ its habitual structure” (Hua XIV, 36); “Experience is the primal instituting of the being-for-us of objects as having their objective sense” (Hua XVII, 173). 9 “Thus, it is a necessary task to establish the universal and primitive laws under which stands the formation of an apperception arising from a primal apperception, and to derive systematically the possible formations, that is, to clarify every given structure according to its origin.This ‘history’ of consciousness (the history of all possible apperceptions) does not concern bringing to light a factical genesis for factical apperceptions or factical types in a factical stream of consciousness […]. Rather, every shape of apperception is an essential shape and has its genesis in accordance with essential laws; accordingly, included in the idea of such apperception is that it must undergo a ‘genetic analysis.’ […] Thus, the theory of consciousness is directly theory of apperceptions” (Hua XI, 339). 10 “Transcendentally he fnds himself as the ego, then as generically an ego, who already has (in conscious fashion) a world of our universally familiar ontological type, with Nature, with culture (sciences, fne art, mechanical art, and so forth), with personalities of a higher order (state, church), and the rest. […] This, moreover, is a necessary level; only by laying open the law-forms of the genesis pertaining to this level can one see the possibilities of a maximally universal eidetic phenomenology. In the latter the ego varies himself so freely that he does not keep even the ideal restrictive presupposition that a world having the ontological structure accepted by us as obvious is essentially constituted for him” (Hua I, 110–111). 11 “The phenomenological eidetic reduction places me on the footing of a possible monad in general, but precisely not of a monad thought as individual and identical and under the charge of circumscribing the individual identity according to its possibilities and necessities. But I can also set this new task, and of course do so by using the doctrine of the essence of acts, of structures being constituted, etc. One can even say that I can also describe individuated geneses and laws of genesis without systematically tackling the problem of the universal genesis of a monad and the nature of its individuality. […] Finally, we have the phenomenology of monadic individuality, including the phenomenology of a genesis integral to it, a genesis in which the unity of the monad arises, in which the monad is by becoming” (Hua XIV, 37–38). 12 “Phenomenology: 1) universal phenomenology of the general structures of consciousness; 2) constitutive phenomenology; 3) phenomenology of genesis. […] In a certain way, we can therefore distinguish ‘explanatory’ phenomenology as a phenomenology of regulated genesis and ‘descriptive’ phenomenology as a phenomenology of possible essential shapes […] in pure consciousness and their teleological ordering, in the realm of possible reason, under the headings ‘object’ and ‘sense.’ In my lectures, I did not say ‘descriptive,’ but rather ‘static’ phenomenology” (Hua XI, 340). 13 For a survey of the improper senses of genesis Husserl used up to the time of Ideas I, see Bernet, Kern, Marbach 1996, 182–184. 14 In his response to Husserl’s letter, Natorp comments, perhaps ironically, that he is happy with the fulfllment of his “prediction” (Hua-Dok III/5, 139). Natorp is referring to his former statement (in his review of Husserl’s Ideas, published in the journal Logos, 1917/18) that Husserl’s eidetics in Ideas is only a static “classifcation,” in a somewhat Aristotelian vein, of the sciences according to separate “regional ontologies.” Instead, he affrms that what must be promoted is their “logical genealogies” (Natorp 1973, 45). He then expresses the wish that Husserl’s “defects will be corrected, in whole or in part, in the later implementation.”The statement I quoted in Husserl’s letter is a direct response to Natorp’s criticism about a static comprehension of the Platonic “doctrine of ideas” in Ideas I. Here I cannot explore the profound impact Natorp had on Husserl’s idea of a genetic, reconstructive theory. This is a complex issue that deserves an independent treatment. See Kern 1964, 321–374;Welton 2003, 266–270; Staiti 2013, 71–90; Luft 2016, 326–370. 15 “With this, the static is here described as what has become an as-always in the ‘history’ of the ego, a frmly-formed habituality, and a type of perception associated with it, a type of apperception.The genetic analysis is the comprehension and elucidation of the genetic constitution, i.e., the constitution of that constitution” (Hua XXV, 407). 16 In the passage in question, Husserl characterizes the issues of psychological origin as follows: “The question concerning psychological origin is related to mental acts, states, living-processes, capabilities, and
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other real properties, in a word, to real mental events of all types and levels of complication, thus especially to ‘presentations,’ living-processes of consciousness in which ‘objects’ are conscious. This is the question of how, in the ‘life of the mind’ [Leben der Seele], i.e., in the real becoming of this life—which integrates itself into the world’s becoming—they have arisen, and especially the question concerning from which psychic factors of becoming […] they arose. […] The idea of a psychological origin has its determinate sense: it is a causal question related to the ‘reality’ of the psychic” (Hua XIII, 346). The title “Zusammengang zwischen psychologischem Ursprung und phänomenologischem Ursprung” is rewritten as “Zusammenhang zwischen genetischem Ursprung und phänomenologisch-statischem Ursprung” (see Hua XIII, 351–352n.). Thus Husserl writes, “Gedanken zu einer genetischen Phänomenologie” instead of “Psychologischer und phänomenologischer Ursprung” (Hua XIII, 354). Lee puts this even more strongly in speaking of the “supra-temporal structure of validity-foundation.” I do not subscribe here to Steinbock’s thesis according to which these issues are not conceivable as genetic because genetic issues are, he says, restricted to individual monadic life and to a synchronic intersubjectivity. Accordingly, he isolates them under the title of “generative phenomenology.” For instance,“In distinction to a genetic analysis that is restricted to the becoming of individual subjectivity as founded in an egology, generative phenomenology treats phenomena that are historical, geological, cultural, intersubjective, and normative from the very start” (Steinbock 1995, 178). For a detailed discussion of the “historical turn” within genetic phenomenology, see Ferencz-Flatz 2017.
References Albertazzi, Liliana, ed. 2013. Handbook of Experimental Phenomenology:Visual Perception of Space, Shape, and Appearance. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Almeida, Guido Antônio de. 1972. Sinn und Inhalt in der genetischen Phänomenologie E. Husserls. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Bernet, Rudolf, Kern, Iso, and Marbach, Eduard. 1996. Edmund Husserl. Darstellung seines Denkens. Rev. ed. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Brentano, Franz. 1995. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.Trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B.Terrell, and Linda McAlister. London: Routledge. ———. 2002. Descriptive Psychology. Ed. and trans. Benito Müller. London: Routledge. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1924. “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie.” Gesammelte Schriften. Band V: Die Geistige Welt. Stuttgart: B.G.Teubner, pp. 139–240. Ferencz-Flatz, Christian. 2017. “Zur geschichtlichen Wende der genetischen Phänomenologie. Eine Interpretation der Beilage III der Krisis.” Husserl Studies 33: 99–126. Kern, Iso. 1964. Husserl und Kant. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Lee, Nam-In. 1993. Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Luft, Sebastian. 2016.“Reconstruction and Reduction: Natorp and Husserl on Method and the Question of Subjectivity.” Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 8: 326–370. Natorp, Paul. 1965. Allgemeine Psychologie.Amsterdam: E.J. Bonset. ———. 1973. “Husserls ‘Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie.’” In: Husserl. Ed. Hermann Noack. Darmstadt:Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 37–60. Sokolowski, Robert. 1964. The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Staiti, Andrea. 2013. “The Ideen and Neo-Kantianism.” In: Husserl’s Ideen. Ed. Lester Embree and Thomas Nenon. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 71–90. Steinbock, Anthony J. 1995. Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1998. “Husserl’s Static and Genetic Phenomenology: Translator’s Introduction to Two Essays.” Continental Philosophy Review 31: 127–134. Welton, Donn. 2003. “The Systematicity of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology.” In: The New Husserl. Ed. Donn Welton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 255–279.
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18 HORIZON Saulius Geniusas
The philosophical background: the history of the concept The concept of the horizon derives from the Greek verb horizein, which one could roughly translate as “to divide,” “to delimit,” or “to mark off by boundaries.” In Antiquity, this concept was employed primarily in astronomy. One can trace the specifcally philosophical applications of this term to Neo-Platonism and its doctrine of emanation. We come across the concept of the horizon in The Book of Causes (Liber de causis), which in the middle ages was falsely assumed to have been written by Aristotle. This work, whose content derives from Proclus’ Elements of Theology, contends that the human soul fnds itself in the horizon of eternity, under and above time. Such a metaphysical interpretation of the horizon remained central in medieval philosophy until the 13th century.The situation changed with Thomas Aquinas, who was the frst to interpret the concept of the horizon anthropologically. For Aquinas, the nature of a human being is both spiritual and physical, and thus a human being is said to have the limits of both natures in itself. While medieval philosophy determined the concept of the horizon either metaphysically or anthropologically, in modern philosophy the horizon became an epistemological concept. With the advent of modernity, it was no longer a question of metaphysically determining the soul’s or the human being’s place in the order of the cosmos, which presumably had been set in advance and which one could only subsequently identify, although by no means modify. Modernity introduced new distinctions between true and apparent horizons, as well as individual and universal horizons.With modernity, the horizon became a matter of refection and self-determination. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, as well as Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, employed the concept of the horizon in their pursuit of the rational and historical limits of human knowledge. The task of determining the breadth and limits of human knowledge remained the central task that guided Immanuel Kant’s use of the concept of the horizon. It was especially the synthesizing powers of Kant’s philosophy that rendered his refections on the horizon highly outstanding. In post-Kantian philosophy of the 19th century, and especially in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Wilhelm Dilthey, we face a growing philosophical interest in cultural, individual, and historical horizons.1 221
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Thus, in the history of philosophy, the horizon has received a number of complementary and conficting determinations, the chief of which are metaphysical, anthropological, epistemological, historical, and cultural. Nonetheless, in all these diverse frameworks, the concept of the horizon remained a metaphorical term, whose signifcance was only marginal and which never reached a clear determination. Edmund Husserl was the frst not only to transform the horizon into a notion of central philosophical importance, but even more notably, to uncover its full-blown problematic and signifcance.2
The psychological background: William James’ Principles of Psychology In phenomenological literature, the concept of the horizon originates in the frst volume of Husserl’s Ideen. Such at least was Husserl’s own view, which he expressed in Formal and Transcendental Logic.3 In Ideen I, the concept of the horizon refers to a non-intuitive context, which co-determines the sense of any object consciousness might be contemplating.4 To obtain a more precise understanding of this concept, one needs to address Husserl’s relation to William James. As is well known, Husserl did not receive formal training in philosophy, but rather in mathematics and psychology. It should therefore come as no big surprise that his use of the concept of the horizon has more affnities with James’s psychology than with any philosopher, who has used the concept of the horizon before him.As Husserl himself has repeatedly observed, James’ concept of fringes of consciousness, which we come across in the Principles of Psychology, marks the psychological basis of Husserl’s concept of the horizon.5 In his Principles of Psychology, James uses the terms “fringe,” “halo” and “horizon” interchangeably. James employs these terms in the framework of his argument that there is no such thing as a purely thematic consciousness. As James puts it, “into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting -with-it” (James 1950, 240). Just as to be conscious of a sound is to be simultaneously aware either of other sounds or of silence that precede and follow it, so to be thematically and explicitly conscious of any perceptual, affective, or conceptual object is to be simultaneously aware, although only non-thematically and implicitly, of other objects that surround and escort it. According to James, any thematic consciousness whatsoever is always “fringed” or “suffused” with emptiness “that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and fesh of its fesh” (James 1950, 255). Following James, Husserl employs the notion of the horizon still in the lecture notes and research manuscripts that precede the publication of Ideen I. However, in these early writings, the notion of the horizon is not yet employed in the phenomenological sense, which the term was subsequently given in Ideen I. In the earlier works, Husserl uses the terms horizon (Horizont), background (Hintergrund) and halo (Hof) interchangeably, while he repeatedly acknowledges that he takes all three terms from James and understands them psychologically, as qualifcations of experience (what James calls the “inner world of consciousness”) and not determinations of objects themselves.The situation changes in Ideen I, where Husserl for the frst time employs the concept of the horizon as a transcendental notion. In Ideen I, Husserl draws a distinction between the horizon, on the one hand, and halo and background, on the other. In §28 of this programmatic work, he argues that for consciousness transposed into the arithmetical “world,” the natural world is “a background for my actconsciousness, but it is not a horizon within which an arithmetical world fnds a place” (Husserl 1983, 55). Husserl continues to employ the terms “background” and “halo” as James had done before 222
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him, that is, as equivocal terms, which can determine either the “inner” or the “outer” world of consciousness. By contrast, he employs the concept of the horizon as a concept meant to cover only the phenomenon’s essential determinations, that is, those determinations in the absence of which the object would no longer be the object that it is.With this in mind, one could qualify the horizon as a notion that is meant to cover those dimensions of sense that consciousness implicitly co-intends in a way that the sense of what is co-intended is inseparable from what makes an object into what it is. Thus, while pre-Husserlian history of philosophy provides us with metaphysical, anthropological, epistemological, historical, and cultural determinations of the horizon, and while James enriches this arsenal of senses with a psychological determination, Husserl was the frst to transform this notion into a specifcally transcendental concept, which was eventually meant to account for the world’s constitution.
Husserl’s static phenomenology of the horizons As far as Husserl’s static phenomenology of the horizon is concerned, the most elaborate analysis is to be found in Ideen I. Here Husserl thematizes the horizon as a necessary dimension of intentionality. For Husserl, the horizons belong neither to the natural world, nor to consciousness as it is conceived from the natural standpoint.The horizons are not components of nature and natural things, but essential aspects of intentional consciousness, which in Ideen I lends itself to a noetic and a noematic analysis.6 In virtue of noematic horizons, the explicit and thematic appearances are always already intentionally tied to implicit and non-thematic appearances. Due to these intentional ties, what appears explicitly and thematically is apperceived as an appearance of this and no other object of experience. For example, to hear a melody is to hear a particular tone explicitly as well as a number of other tones implicitly—tones one has already heard in the past or tones one expects to hear in the future. If other past and future tones were to accompany the tone I hear at the moment explicitly, one would in effect hear a different melody. Thus, to hear a melody, one needs to hear not only tones, but also relations between tones—to hear how the tones are bound to each other, in what harmony or disharmony. Insofar as appearances are appearances of an intentional object, they have their noematic horizons. This insight gains its central signifcance in the framework of Husserl’s refections on constitution.To account for how an intentional object is constituted is to clarify the implicit totality of references, which binds a plurality of noemata into an intentional unity. The horizon-consciousness thereby proves to be an empty-consciousness, which renders pure presence a sheer impossibility.The horizon-consciousness initiates a play between presence and absence, between what is given thematically and non-thematically, in virtue of which an appearance becomes an appearance of this and no other object of experience. While noematic horizons signify the intentional bond that ties appearances to each other, noetic horizons are formed by intentional references that bind explicit acts of consciousness to implicit intentional relations, made up of sedimented retentions and protentions.These implicit relations contribute to the apprehension of the object that consciousness thematically intends. To return to the example of the melody, consciousness of the tone carries with it its past and future noetic horizons: when it intends a tone, consciousness also intends its own past actualities as well as future possibilities.This necessary overlap of what Husserl calls “transverse intentionality” and “longitudinal intentionality” highlights the fact that noetic horizons are essentially temporal: each act of consciousness carries with it the horizon of the before and after, and just as what is given before, so also what might be given after co-determines the intentional content of consciousness and transforms the present content into a momentary phase of consciousness. 223
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Besides offering a noetic and noematic accounts of the horizons, Ideen I further thematizes horizon-intentionality in terms of the intentional object’s inner- and outer-horizons, which can be clarifed both noetically as well as noematically. From a noematic standpoint, the inner-horizon refers to the cogivenness of those implicit and non-thematic appearances, which, taken along with explicit and thematic appearances, constitute the intentional object’s inner determinations. From a noetic standpoint, the inner-horizon stands for the references that bind the explicit and thematic act of consciousness to those implicit and non-thematic acts, through which the inner determinations of the intentional object are constituted. Due to the noetic and noematic references that constitute the object’s inner-horizon, the cup of coffee that lies on my desk has a side unseen. I must be conscious of this unseen side if I am to identify this object as a cup of coffee. The intentional object’s outer-horizon also calls for both a noetic and noematic clarifcation. From a noematic perspective, the outer-horizon covers those intentional references that bind the explicit and thematic appearances of this particular intentional object to the implicit and non-thematic appearances of other intentional objects. From a noetic standpoint, the outerhorizon binds the explicit and thematic acts of consciousness with those other implicit and non-thematic acts, through which other intentional objects are constituted. If what appears intentionally is to be qualifed as an object, it must have both an inner- and an outer-horizon. Thus the cup of coffee of which I just spoke is on my desk, to the left of the book, in this study, and so on. Besides spatial objects, temporal objects also have their inner- and outer-horizons.To return to the melody: it is given to me not only in the now, but also in the past and the future that I now intend.This implicit givenness of the melody in the past and future qualifes the melody’s inner-horizon. So also, temporal objects have an outer-horizon.Thus while I hear this melody in the concert hall, I can also hear someone coughing, or I can keep comparing the present performance to other performances of the same piece I have heard in the past, or, fnally, I can anticipate the applause I will hear after the performance comes to its end. These implicit references to the givenness of other temporal objects constitute the non-spatial object’s outerhorizon. Different types of objects, be they conceptual or affective, also have their inner- as well as outer-horizons. It is crucial not to overlook that Husserl’s discussion of the noetic and noematic, as well as inner- and outer-horizons, takes place in the framework of his transcendental analysis. For Husserl of Ideen I, it would be an error akin to psychologism to reduce the horizons to merely psychic properties. For Husserl, the horizons are essential determinations of intentional consciousness and one of phenomenology’s central tasks is to clarify the role they play in the intentional object’s constitution. Building on the basis of Husserl’s analysis of the horizon in Ideen I, one could further qualify horizon-consciousness as a peculiar form of self-consciousness, which is just as characteristic of transcendent as it is of immanent perception. Horizon-consciousness is a type of self-consciousness in three different senses. First, horizon-consciousness can be conceived as the consciousness of the “I can,” which entails the awareness of what one can do if one does the things one can do. In the words of Ludwig Landgrebe, the consciousness of the horizon is the “more or less dark awareness that ‘I can continue in this direction and thus gain experiences that will confrm or correct my previous experiences’” (Landgrebe 1973, 10). Secondly, for each act of consciousness to be a unifed act, the now-point of the act must be experienced along with references to a system of retentions and protentions, in the absence of which the act of consciousness would lose its unity and, thus, could not be qualifed as an act at all.Thirdly, each act of consciousness is experienced as bound not only to retentions and protentions, but also to the outermost limit of all acts, namely, the stream of consciousness itself. What unfolds beyond this limit (i.e. the 224
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experiences that belong to other streams of consciousness) does not play a constitutive role in determining the sense of one’s transcendental experiences.
Husserl’s genetic phenomenology of the horizons: the horizons of subjectivity When the further development of Husserl’s phenomenology of the horizons is taken into account, one can identify two chief limitations of Husserl’s static phenomenology of the horizons. First of all, this analysis misses the phenomenon of the world. Secondly, it also misses the horizons of transcendental subjectivity.The reason for both shortcomings is methodological: it concerns the reduction, as it is understood and practiced in static phenomenology in general, and in Ideen I in particular.The alternative paths to the reduction (especially the paths through psychology and through the lifeworld), have signifcantly enriched Husserl’s phenomenology of the horizons, so much so that the horizon could be qualifed as a specifcally genetic theme, which in its emergence appears dressed in static garb. While this section will concentrate on Husserl’s genetic phenomenology of the horizons of subjectivity, the next one will turn to the world-horizon. For Husserl, horizon-intentionality is a characteristic of horizon-consciousness. However, static and genetic methods determine horizon-consciousness in signifcantly different ways. As we saw, in static phenomenology, horizon-consciousness is understood in terms of the object’s inner- and outer-horizons, each of which lends itself to a noetic and noematic clarifcation. By contrast, genetic phenomenology addresses it as “the horizon of typical pre-acquaintance in which every object is pregiven” (Husserl 1973, 150). The latter qualifcation suggests that consciousness is horizonal insofar as it typifes appearances, due to which it can anticipate the phenomenon’s subsequent modes of appearances.The awakening of typical pre-acquaintance is the awakening of the horizons of anticipation, that is, of the other possible manners of givenness, which consciousness prescribes in advance to the appearing phenomena. Husserl further qualifes the horizons of typical pre-acquaintance as the horizons of determinate indeterminability, which means that the projections of sense that the horizon-consciousness gives rise to can lead both to fulfllment and disappointment.The horizons could thus be said to be defning, yet not defnite; determining, yet not determined. On the one hand, because of the pregivenness of horizon-consciousness, each and every appearance is always already apperceived as an appearance of a particular intentional object. On the other hand, new experiences, insofar as they do not lead to pure fulfllment but bring about some kind of disappointment, transform the horizon’s anticipatory schema. This means that horizon-consciousness originates in experiences themselves, or more precisely, in the sedimentations of experience. Experience itself generates habitualities, which in its own turn guides subsequent experiences. One might wonder if phenomenology of the horizons does not land in a vicious circle when it maintains that just as experiences are determined by the horizons, so the horizons are determined by experiences. For Husserl, this apparent tension is inherently productive: it proves that there are no fully formed horizons; that is, that the horizons are always in the process of formation. Moreover, this tension points toward deeper levels of genetic constitution, which phenomenology of the horizons is meant to clarify.To conceptualize horizon-consciousness genetically is nothing other than to inquire into the rudimentary sense-accomplishments that make up the horizonality of the horizon. More precisely, for Husserl, the tension in question originates in the syntheses of homogeneity and heterogeneity. The horizon of typical pre-acquaintance “has its ground in the passive associative relations of likeness and similarity, in the ‘obscure’ recollections of the similar” (Husserl 1973, 150). 225
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The awakening of the horizons of typical pre-acquaintance is possible only as far as consciousness retains its past accomplishments as sedimented capabilities. The horizons thereby reveal themselves as the “mirroring” of the whole life of consciousness within each lived-experience. Horizon-consciousness, once taken in its concreteness, proves to be a horizon of subjectivity. That subjectivity itself possesses its own unique horizons can be considered one of the most fundamental accomplishments of Husserl’s genetic analysis of horizon-intentionality. The horizon of subjectivity proves to be the thematic feld of genetic phenomenology itself: to thematize the origins of sense-formation is nothing other than to delineate the crystallization of the horizons. The genetic references that bind different appearances to each other is exactly what makes up the horizonality of the horizon.This basic fact enables one to single out the frst sense of the genetic concept of the horizon: the horizon is the implicit system of references (Verweisungshorizont), which embraces all appearances, due to which an actual appearance is an appearance of a particular objectivity. As we have already seen, it is primarily potential appearances that are entailed in the actual one.The implication of potentiality within actuality highlights the second sense of the genetic concept of the horizon: the horizon is the horizon of validity (Geltungshorizont). That is, only in virtue of the implicit references that bind the actual appearance to potential appearances does my actual appearance become an appearance of a particular intentional object. The horizon thereby turns out to be the unity of validity,7 which in its own turn designates the homogeneous style of the forward streaming experience.
Husserl’s genetic phenomenology of the horizons: the world-horizon In some of his research manuscripts, which are meant to clarify the concept of the world-horizon, Husserl draws an intriguing distinction between world-consciousness (Weltbewußtsein) and world-experience (Welterfahrung).This distinction suggests that the world-horizon can be thematized at least at two fundamentally different levels of transcendental experience.The worldhorizon, as it is given through world-consciousness, could be further qualifed as the world, conceived as the wherefrom of experience. By contrast, the world-horizon, as it is given through world-experience, could be further determined in two complementary ways: as the wherein and the whereto of experience. When it comes to determining the horizons of things, conceived as singular realities, one must distinguish between the core appearance, given directly and immediately, and the horizons of typical pre-acquaintance, which enable consciousness to apperceive various other modes of the object’s appearance and thereby to transform the actual appearance into an appearance of this and no other object.Yet as Husserl maintains in some of his research manuscripts, “one should not overlook that the world is not constituted the way singular realities are constituted” (Hua XXXIX, 83). So also, in his Crisis Husserl qualifes the being of the world as unique and further suggests that “there exists a fundamental difference between the way we are conscious of the world and the way we are conscious of things or objects” (Husserl 1970, 143). In contrast to things, the world is not given through horizons; it is rather given as a horizon.With this in mind, one can determine the world-horizon, conceived as the wherefrom of experience, in the following way: the world-horizon, insofar as it is given to world-consciousness, and not worldexperience, is a background without foreground, a halo without any kind of intuitive core.8 We are faced here with the world’s non-objective, non-thematic, and non-intuitive givenness. Despite such a threefold negative determination, the concept of world-consciousness remains a phenomenological concept in that it forms a necessary counterpart of the appearance of existent things.Thus the “universal ground of belief in a world which all praxis presupposes” (Husserl 226
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1973, 30) forms the necessary basis that underlies all consciousness of singular realities. The world as ground of experience, conceived as the intentional correlate of the universal passive belief in being, is nothing other than world-consciousness itself. In contrast to world-consciousness, world-experience presupposes the same background/ foreground schema that characterizes the consciousness of singular realities. In this regard, it is crucial not to overlook that Husserl qualifes things in terms of “existence-in” (Inexistenz): “the existence of anything real never has any other sense than that of existence-in” (Husserl 1973, 34).The qualifcation of things as existences-in calls for a correlative qualifcation of the world as the wherein of the experience. While real intentional things are qualifed by their being-insomething, the world needs to be qualifed as the wherein-of-everything: “everything is in it, and it itself is not an in-something” (Husserl 1973, 137). Husserl identifes such a notion of the world-horizon as the totality of nature. “The totality of nature is also ‘experienced’” (Husserl 1973, 137): it is experienced as the bond that ties all individual and plural substrates to each other. Such is the meaning of the world-horizon, conceived as the wherein of experience. Yet Husserl himself admits that the notion of the world as the totality of nature is an abstraction: “but the world of our experience, taken concretely, is not only the totality of nature” (Husserl 1973, 138). This is because the world conceived as the totality of nature does not include founded, but only founding objects of experience.The concept of the world-horizon as the whereto of experience is meant to overcome this shortcoming.While the frst two notions of the world-horizon refer to sensuous experience taken in its unmodalized manifestation, the third concept is meant to describe in its essential features the enrichment of sense the worldhorizon undergoes due to modalization and non-sensuous experience. Modalization is genuinely productive in that it generates essentially new types of experience. According to Husserl,“with each new object constituted for the frst time (genetically speaking) a new type of object is permanently prescribed” (Husserl 1973, 38). This generation of a new typology of experience brings with it new horizons of anticipations, which guide subsequent experience.Thus, while unmodalized experience merely brings to fulfllment what was entailed in the previous horizons of anticipation, modalization gives rise to new horizons of anticipation, which do not overlap with the previous ones.Thus, the experience of the new transforms not only the subject’s understanding of concrete objects of experience; it also transforms the “horizon of all horizons”—the world-horizon. We come to face here “an enrichment of the world through new intentions and acquisitions” (Hua XXXIX,Text Nr. 41), which derives from modalized experience. Due to modalization and the generation of new types of experience, “our pregiven surrounding world is already ‘pregiven’ as multiformed, formed according to its regional categories and typifed in conformity with a number of different special genera, kinds, etc.” (Husserl 1973, 38). The world-horizon, conceived as the whereto of experience, is an accomplishment of intersubjective historicity.To suggest that the world-horizon is inherently historical is to recognize that it is always in the process of constitution.Taken in its historical concreteness, the world-horizon embraces not only what is constituted in founding unmodalized experiences, but also what is given through founded and modalized sense formations. In this way, the world-horizon, conceived as the whereto of experience, proves to be the lifeworld itself, taken in its concreteness. Thus, even though scientifc theories and logical constructs are not things like stones, houses, or trees, they nonetheless “belong to this concrete unity of the life-world, whose concreteness thus extends farther than that of ‘things’” (Husserl 1970, 130).To emphasize this point, Husserl speaks of indentation (Einrückung) that founded objectivities leave on the world-horizon. Just like the sea indents the coastline, so the streaming-in of new experiences continuously indents the world-horizon, thereby transforming its “pregivenness.” For Husserl, when the constitutive 227
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effects of such “indentation” are taken into consideration, the lifeworld proves to be a universal philosophical theme. Thus, as a genetic concept, the horizon is simultaneously a horizon of subjectivity and the world-horizon. This does not mean that Husserl’s phenomenology of the horizon takes one in two opposite directions. Rather, such a state of affairs corroborates one of Husserl’s central claims he has argued for ever since Ideen I: the horizon is a fgure of intentionality.
Post-Husserlian phenomenology of the horizons The horizon, conceived both as a phenomenological concept and a phenomenological theme, does not exclusively belong to Husserl’s phenomenology. We come across this concept in the works of virtually all other phenomenologists, who implicitly or explicitly derive it from Husserl’s writings. Heidegger employs the concept of the horizon most frequently in Being and Time, and especially in the context of his account of temporality. Part One of his monumental study is titled “The Interpretation of Dasein in Terms of Temporality, and the Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of Being” (Heidegger 2008, 65). Of central importance is the distinction Heidegger draws between the horizon of vulgar temporality and the ecstatic-horizonal unity of temporality. Just as in Husserl’s writings, so in Being and Time as well, the horizon is understood in two complementary ways: it concerns the transcendental determination of Dasein as well as the determination of transcendent entities. Such a two-sided determination of the horizon leads to the realization that the factical Dasein necessarily understands itself in the horizon of transcendence—a realization that, in its own turn, lies at the basis of Heidegger’s account of authenticity and inauthenticity.After Being and Time, Heidegger rarely employs the notion of the horizon, arguably due to the concept’s epistemological connotations. In Heidegger’s later writings, the notion of the horizon is replaced with that of releasement (Gelassenheit), which in contrast to any kind of horizonal projections of sense, is meant to let things be in whatever way they may be. Just like Heidegger, so also Merleau-Ponty derives the concept of the horizon from Husserl’s writings. Just as Husserl, so also Merleau-Ponty understands the horizon as a fgure of intentionality. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty employs the concept of the horizon in the framework of his analysis of the lived-body, which has its counterpart in the natural world, conceived as “the horizon of all horizons” and “the style of all styles” (Merleau-Ponty 1976, 330). For Merleau-Ponty, the horizons are essentially open, which means that the horizonal synthesis is a temporal process and that this synthesis merges with the moment of the passage of time. According to Merleau-Ponty’s main contention, the horizons one inhabits can never be made fully explicit (Merleau-Ponty 1976, 332–333). This realization underlies the central role that ambiguity plays in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.With the discovery of the concept of fesh in his late works, Merleau-Ponty re-conceptualizes the horizon as a pre-egological “syncretism,” which he also calls a “polymorphic matrix” and a “new type of being” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 220–221). While for Heidegger the horizons are frst and foremost temporal, and while for MerleauPonty they are primarily perceptual, for Hans-Georg Gadamer, the horizons characterize the essence of understanding. Borrowing the concept of the horizon from Nietzsche and Husserl,9 Gadamer transforms this concept into a central hermeneutical theme, which concerns the relation between the universal and the particular. According to one of Gadamer’s most famous defnitions of understanding, “understanding is the fusion of the horizons, supposedly existing by themselves” (Gadamer 2004, 306).This defnition suggests that in the hermeneutical frame-
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work, the horizons are always already “fused” (verschmolzen) from the outset, although not “fused enough” to abolish the differences between cultures, languages, or individuals. The horizon turns out to be a concept that embodies the living unity of identity and difference, and this unity in its own turn is conceived as a necessary condition of hermeneutic understanding. While Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer have appropriated Husserl’s concept of the horizon and have sought to develop it in different frameworks of analysis, in more recent French phenomenology, we also come across attempts to abandon this concept. According to Jean-Luc Marion, the horizons of anticipation transform the unseen into the pre-seen, thereby erasing the phenomenon’s “fundamentally irreducible novelty” (Marion 2002, 186). For Marion, the horizon is a “visual prison,” “a panorama without exterior, forbidding all genuinely new arising” (Marion 2002, 186). The task of Marion’s phenomenology becomes that of freeing givenness from the horizon and that of demonstrating that certain phenomena exceed their horizon.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9
For a more extensive historical overview of the concept of the horizon, see Scherner 1974. See in this regard Kuhn 1940 and Kwan 1990. See Husserl 1969, 199. See Gander 2010, 133. For instance, in the Crisis, Husserl observes: “as much as I know, James was the only one who, under the heading of ‘fringes,’ became aware of the phenomenon of the horizon” (Husserl 1970, 267). See Drummond 2007, 96 and Gander 2010, 134. See Hua VIII, 147. Or, as Husserl puts it in one of his research manuscripts,“to make the world thematic and, in a certain way, to direct to it a thematic regard, to want to know the world ‘experientially,’ to want to bring the world to intuition as the universe of possible experience … the unthematic world-horizon precedes all this” (Hua XXXIX, 83). See Gadamer 2004, 301.
References Drummond, John J. 2007. Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method. Trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. London: Continuum. Gander, Hans-Helmuth. (Ed.). 2010. Husserl-Lexikon. Darmstadt:Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Heidegger, Martin. 2008. Being and Time. Trans. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought. Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic.Trans. Dorion Cairns.The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.Trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973. Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Trans. J. Churchill and K. Ameriks. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology.Trans. F. Kersten.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. James, William. 1950. Principles of Psychology, vol. I. New York: Dover Publications. Kuhn, Helmut. 1940.“The Phenomenological Concept of the ‘Horizon’.” In: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl. Ed. Marvin Farber. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 106–123. Kwan,Tze-Wan. 1990.“Husserl’s Concept of Horizon:An Attempt at Reappraisal.” In: Analecta Husserliana, vol. XXXI. Ed.Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 361–399. Landgrebe, Ludwig. 1973.“The Phenomenological Concept of Experience.”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 34(1): pp. 1–13.
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19 IMAGINATION AND PHANTASY Julia Jansen
Not all philosophical handbooks require an entry on imagination.The handbook of phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy, however, does. Husserl considered imagining one of the key elements of his phenomenological method. His meticulous analyses of what exactly it is we do when we imagine, and of the nature of imagined objects, led him to important ontological discoveries and to valuable insights into the complexity of intentional consciousness. Some of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century who drew from Husserl’s phenomenology as at least one of their sources, even when they largely parted ways with him, still retained some of the key philosophical lessons to be drawn from his scrupulous analyses of imagination: for example, that imagining need not involve the manipulation of mental images and thus challenges a representationalist account of the mind. That imagining enables us, frst of all, to distinguish between the real and the unreal and thus is constitutive both of a sense of reality and of a sense that we can reach beyond it, to consider alternative realities and pure possibilities, that is, of a sense of freedom. And, not least, that philosophical thinking cannot rely on empirical observations, concepts, and inferences alone, but equally requires the philosopher to be imaginative and creative. In what follows, I attempt to give an overview of some of the most important themes that have emerged and have been explored by phenomenological research into the imagination.This is, of course, a selection. Given the signifcance of the imagination for phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy as a whole, it is not surprising that there is a wealth of sources in the tradition as well as in contemporary thought – especially if one looks for relevant ideas beyond the name “imagination” to include relevant analyses of images and of creative thought. There is no way to do justice to this wealth within the constraints of this article. I have thus chosen to highlight certain coordinates or ‘nodes’ that I hope will also illuminate, by way of infuence, connection, or opposition, some of the positions that I cannot mention explicitly here.
19.1. Imagination, image consciousness, and representation Husserl begins his efforts to re-examine imagination in his 1904/05 lectures on “Phantasy and Image Consciousness (Phantasie und Bildbewusstsein)” (Husserl 1983, 2005, Text 1). From the start, he leaves aside the classical Aristotelian model that places the imagination (phantasia) between perception and thought, as well as the Kantian notion of a transcendental imagination 231
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(Einbildungskraft) as a faculty that is geared towards judgment and, in its name, carries an unquestioned link to images (Bilder). Instead, Husserl, in an attempt to avoid traditional preconceptions, begins afresh with his analysis of “phantasy (Phantasie),” a term that is also common in everyday German language use. For ease of expression and to highlight the connections between the different positions outlined in this article, I will drop ‘phantasy’ in what follows and instead use the verb ‘imagining’ to express that Husserl is investigating an act of consciousness, not a faculty or mental state.1 Genuine cases of imagining (as opposed to, for example, cases of ‘mere supposing,’ or of ‘imagining that’) are, for Husserl, cases of sensory imagination. Imagining is, in the language of German philosophy, “intuitive (anschaulich).” Given the correlative nature of intentionality, according to Husserl, we do not simply imagine something, we imagine seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and/or touching something.An imagined object or scene is imagined as being seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and/ or touched.An object that (de iure, not de facto) cannot be experienced in at least one of these modes is ‘un-imaginable’ in the relevant sense. Hence, the distinction between imagining and perceiving does not depend on the absence or presence of such sensory contents, nor, as Hume would have it, does it depend on their comparative vivacity. Instead, it depends on the distinct mode in which they are experienced: namely, in the mode of “non-actuality” or “irreality.” To say that an imagined object is experienced as ‘non-actual’ or ‘irreal,’ rather than as ‘unreal,’ is meant to avoid the impression that only a particular set of objects are imaginable, namely those that are unreal, or non-existent.We may, but need not, imagine unreal, non-existent objects, such as unicorns and golden mountains.We may just as well imagine objects that in fact exist, such as an idyllic beach, or a cold beer; or we may imagine the possibility of being at that beach, or having that cold beer. Imagining, for Husserl, does not involve a relation to objects of a special ontological category, e.g., non-existent or fctional objects, but rather involves a particular mode of relating to objects. Referring to imagined objects as ‘non-actual’ suggests that they are experienced as objects that could be actual (because they are, to speak with Kant,‘possible objects of experience’); they are not, or at least not in the present environment of the person imagining. Referring to imagined objects as ‘irreal’ suggests that the person imagining is indifferent towards their ontological status, real or not; the usual positionality, which, according to Husserl, accompanies other acts (in perception, objects are posited as actual; in memory, objects are posited as having been actual, etc.), is neutralized. The senses of both ‘non-actual,’ which points towards imagining as awareness of possibilities, and ‘irreal,’ which points towards its ontological neutrality, are combined in the sense of the German unwirklich.’ In Husserl’s terminology, imagining is “quasi-perceptual”; a “phantasy” is a “quasi-perception (Quasi-Wahrnehmung).”Whereas in perception “the object appears to us, so to speak,‘in person,’ as itself present”; the imagined object appears as merely represented or as only possible (but not actual):“it is as though it were there, but only as though” (Husserl 2005, 18). However, Husserl does not merely gather his fndings. His analyses also contribute to a change in his approach. Continuing to come back to the issue of imagining, he also draws from it in his turn towards transcendental phenomenology.With respect to imagining specifcally, this involves an increasing skepticism towards a model of consciousness as a mind, i.e., an entity that in some sense ‘contains’ representations that can stand-in for external objects. This positions Husserl against philosophers who insist on the need for such representations in the case of imagining, even if they may have non-representationalist convictions concerning other modes of cognition. Historical examples may come to mind here. Think of Locke and Hume, or remember, for example, Kant’s defnition of imagination as “the power of presenting an object even without the object’s being present” (Kant 1996, B 151), which prima facie seems to require that the object’s presence be replaced by the presence of a mental image.You can also fnd many advocates of 232
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such views in contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind and cognition science. For example, even in circles that otherwise advance alternatives to representationalist models (such as extended or enactive approaches), imagining has been described as “representation-hungry” (Clark and Torribio 19952). Husserl effectively rejects all such views in an anti-representationalist move that seeks to overcome what he calls the “image theory” of consciousness. Instrumental in his move is Husserl’s analysis of what he calls “image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein).” Image consciousness involves an awareness of a perceptual object (for example a photograph, canvas, or computer screen), which lets us ‘see’ the object that it depicts. According to Husserl, this may involve three distinct moments: (1) the physical image, such as the black-and-white patches on an old photograph, the paint distributed on the canvas, or the pixels on the screen; (2) the image object, i.e., the fgure, which is confgured by a certain distribution of colors and shapes; and (3) the image subject, the object, person, or scene depicted or represented by the picture (Husserl 2005, 20f.).The physical image is indispensable for image consciousness. Therewith, according to Husserl, image consciousness is ‘essentially’ different from imagining, which requires no such image (physical or mental), but instead aims directly at its imaginary object. Only image consciousness involves this peculiar tripartite structure.3 Consequently, Husserl vehemently rejects the “erroneous image-theory” which assumes “that: ‘Outside the thing itself is there (or is at times there); in consciousness there is an image which does duty for it’” (Husserl 2001a, 125; 5th Log. Inv., Appx. to §11 and §20). It is not an act of viewing of mental images that characterizes imagining, but an act of simulating possible experiences, including experiences of image consciousness (I may, of course, imagine [seeing] an image). Imagining makes us thus, implicitly or explicitly, aware of perceptual possibilities, regardless of whether they were or ever will be actualized.This modal capacity of imagining depends on and makes evident a ‘parallelism’ between perception and phantasy, which remains a leading systematic idea throughout Husserl’s work (cf. Husserl 2001a, 285 f., 6th Log. Inv. §47; Husserl 1969, 183; Husserl 1973, 28 §6) and bears great methodological signifcance. This culminates in Husserl’s renewed efforts to approach the phenomenon of imagining in the context of his later genetic analyses, which are meant to uncover the ‘history’ of those relations and the complex interconnections in which they are generated (Husserl 2001b).This illuminates the depths of imagining much further, including its original temporality and its modal functions. In this context, Husserl is increasingly interested in the capacity of imagining to generate consciousness of possibilities. Such consciousness relies on the possibility of switching between the position of the imagining ‘I’ and the ‘I’ of the imaginatively simulated experience. In other words, when I immerse myself in my imaginings, I live in the ‘as if.’When I instead consciously hold the position of the one who is imagining herself experiencing something in such imaginings, they manifest possibilities to me, namely, possible ways of experiencing something, and, correlatively, possible objects to experience (see Husserl 2005,Text 19). Of critical importance for Husserl, also methodologically, is the distinction between “real possibilities,” which are motivated by actual experience and, more generally, by the ‘real’ world of the individual who is imagining. By contrast, a “pure possibility” would be a possibility in which no individual reality is co-posited as actual; a pure possibility is therefore anything objective that becomes constituted exclusively by imaginative quasi-experience. (Husserl 2005, 661; trans. slightly modifed)4 Husserl’s investigations into the capacity of imagining to make manifest possibilities also supports his insistence on its epistemic function. Imagining provides intuitive evidence, above all evidence 233
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of possibilities, and is thus, to use the language of Ideas I, a “legitimizing source of cognition” (Husserl 1983, 44). Of course, the evidence imagining provides may only be accepted “within the limits” (ibid.) appropriate to it. Insofar as it is an intuitive act, imagining yields evidence, even though as a presentifying (vergegenwärtigender) and not directly presenting (gegenwärtigender) act, the evidence it can give us is limited. Obviously, we cannot, without further ado, believe in the existence of whatever we imagine (think of hallucinations, for example), nor in the very ways something presents itself in our imagination (think of illusions, for example). However, as long as we keep in mind that we are imagining something, and not perceptually observing or logically deducing something, it is, according to Husserl, appropriate to say that we learn something from imagining.We even learn from it something that we cannot learn by other means, we learn about possibilities that are not already implicit in the ‘status quo.’ Not everyone agreed with Husserl on this pronounced opinion on the evidential force of imagining, nor on the possibility of (becoming aware of) pure possibilities. Here it is not irrelevant that by the time Sartre, for example, famously maintained that “one can never learn from an image what one does not know already” (Sartre 2004, 10), the life-world of most phenomenological philosophers had radically changed. In a world that is oversaturated by images of all kinds, their seductive distracting and distorting nature is often foregrounded, even though our (e.g., neuro- and medical) sciences rely on “imaging”5 more than ever.That said, even though Sartre was skeptical of the epistemic, i.e., evidential, powers of imagining, he also saw in it the locus of possibility, as well as of negativity and lack. In his existentialist phenomenology, imagining explicitly becomes an expression of human freedom.
19.2. Imagination, being, and freedom For Sartre, then, the imagination shows the way towards what we might call the ‘existentialist stance,’ from which consciousness comes to be seen not any longer as a certain kind of being, but as the opposite of being, that is, the ‘nothingness’ that fings itself out towards any being. From this perspective, “transcendental philosophy” appears like the idealist reminder of a ‘digestive’ consciousness philosophy that needs to be overcome so badly. For Husserl, on the contrary, a proper account of imagining inevitably challenges ‘natural’ assumptions about consciousness and thus contributes in a signifcant way towards his ‘transcendental turn’ (Jansen 2005). It should be noted, however, that Sartre’s existentialist and Husserl’s transcendental stance converge, despite fundamental oppositions, on the following point: consistently remaining true to the intentional nature of consciousness requires giving up, once and for all, the idea that consciousness can somehow be thought as a mind whose inner inventory (e.g., mental states and representations) and whose inner workings can be reduced to causal relations (e.g., psychological or neurological ones). In that sense, the phenomenological analysis of imagining leads to a liberation of phenomenological philosophy for a ‘de-naturalized’ (Jansen 2018) approach. While much of what is truly original and most philosophically valuable of Husserl’s work on imagining can be found only in his later research manuscripts, it is also true that even there Husserl holds on to some of his earliest convictions. One of the most important of these is Husserl’s commitment to ‘eidetic’ inquiry, or to inquiry into what is essential about something. This involves Husserl’s general ontological thesis that reality, in the all-encompassing sense of ‘everything there is,’ is irreducible to ‘real’ objects stricto sensu, namely to objects in space and time. As Husserl already lays out in the Logical Investigations, there are also ideal objects, which are irreducible to real ones, such as psychological events or nominalist constructions. Ideal objects, for Husserl, are objects at which consciousness can be intentionally directed and which
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have their own ontological nature, such as, for example, meanings, which remain irreducible to their real linguistic expressions, or species (like the color ‘red’), which remain irreducible to their real exemplifcations (like any red object, which is necessarily of a particular shade of red). By the time of the publication of his Ideas I in 1913 as well as in the second edition of the Logical Investigations (published around the same time), Husserl develops this thought into his doctrine of eide, or essences. Since an essence (the essential ‘what’ or something as opposed to its contingent particularities) is irreducible to a mere concept, it can, according to Husserl, not just be thought, but intuited. Since an essence is irreducible to any real object or event (e.g., a psychological one), it is intuited not by empirical, but by eidetic intuition. Eidetic intuition has been very controversially discussed, with many doubting that there even is such a thing. For Husserl, it is the intuitive fulfllment of a thought that is directed at something general or abstract. It is that, in other words, which gives us the experience of not only thinking it, but seeing that it holds and what it means. For him, the question is not whether there is such an experience (one mode of which would be a certain ‘aha’ experience), but rather how it can be kept from missing its mark because the researcher is, for example, merely projecting, or illegitimately, as we would put it today,‘essentializing.’ Given that the whole purpose of Husserlian phenomenology is to fgure out the essential features of consciousness in its different modes and with its different objects, this remains a methodological issue for the rest of his life. Husserl sets the bar increasingly high. While initially he does not seem to think much of it when he maintains that we ‘see’ the species ‘in’ its particular real instance (e.g., the species ‘red’ in any red thing), he soon realizes that a more rigorously methodic form of ideation is required in order to avoid, as much as possible, the pitfalls of empirical induction or generalization for the sake of gaining ‘essential,’ i.e., necessary, insights. It is here that imagining acquires a privileged position. Imagining, methodically trained, helps circumvent contingency by enabling the “arbitrary variation” of an arbitrarily chosen sample of whatever essence we are trying to clarify (Husserl 1973 §87). By thus releasing the researcher (at least to a certain extent) from habitual preconceptions concerning that essence, imagining does not yet itself yield eidetic insights, but it does provide as rich a tapestry of samples as possible, which, insofar as it is produced by acts of imagining, has only slackened ties to the reality a researcher is habitually familiar with. On the basis of this, and not on the basis of contingently chosen examples, can researchers methodically and rigorously reach insights into the overlaps and boundaries of that tapestry of variations: they can grasp what is essential to it, and, importantly, what falls outside it, thus what is inessential to it. With this, the imagination moves center stage in phenomenological ontology. Other philosophers within the phenomenological tradition, even those who, like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, oppose Husserl’s prioritizing of eidetic analyses in favor of existential ones (after all, “existence precedes essence!” and not the other way around), retain the outstanding position Husserl ascribes to it. Not having access to Husserl’s later research manuscripts, they take their clues from what they knew. Sartre picks up on the issue of imagination already in response to Ideas I and to the Lectures on a Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (which he read during his research stay in Berlin in 1933/34). Merleau-Ponty takes inspiration from additional, at the time unpublished, sources, such as the material that was later edited under the title Ideas II (which he read during his visit to the newly founded Husserl Archives in Leuven in 1939). Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, far from being followers, rethought those Husserlian ideas concerning the imagination in their own ways, which of course also refected other philosophical infuences, such as, for example, the Bergsonian notion of “image” (Bergson 2005) and the French idealism represented by Brunschvicg, which was dominant when they were students.Their ‘rethinking,’ in different ways, also betrays their shared suspicions towards an old-fashioned ‘subject-philosophy.’
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For Sartre, the “imaginary,” not the ‘imagination,’ becomes central to an ontology of human existence and central to his existentialist account of freedom in particular.6 Sartre picks up on Husserl’s point that both imagining and image consciousness share a “non-positing” character. He is as convinced as Husserl was that ‘images’ cannot be found ‘in’ consciousness. However, while Husserl asserts an essential difference between image consciousness and imagining as two fundamentally different modes of consciousness, Sartre investigates “the image family” (Sartre 2004, 17), or the feld of “the imaginary.” This ranges from concrete pictures (a photograph of Pierre), to more abstract ones (portraits, caricatures, impersonations, drawings, hypnagogic images, even things seen in coffee grounds and crystal balls), and mental images. In all these cases the respective image is ‘no thing’, but “nothing other than a relation,” namely “the relation of consciousness to the object,” or an “act” (Sartre 2004, 7, 9). In fact, the misappropriation of an image as a thing, as something objective and static, is one common source of human self-subjugation.The self-identifcation with a certain image of oneself (as, to use Sartre’s famous example, a waiter) denies one’s own transcendence of any being ‘in itself ’ and displays that existential attitude which in Being and Nothingness Sartre calls “bad faith” (mauvaise foi) (Sartre 1978, 47–70). As he astutely observes, we are not only creators of images, we are also held captive by them. However, understood as a creative act of the ‘for itself,’ imagining is more than just one way of asserting one’s freedom among others.The ability to imagine is the ability to negate par excellence.To imagine, Sartre explains, one must be able to deny the reality of the picture, and … deny this reality … by standing back from reality grasped in its totality.To posit an image is to constitute an object in the margin of the totality of the real, it is therefore to hold the real at a distance, to be freed from it, in a word, to deny it. (Sartre 2004, 183) It is only by being able to (imaginatively) negate and hold at bay what actually impinges on us that we become able to step back and grasp our surroundings, i.e., our world, as a whole. And only then do we gain an awareness of ‘the world,’ set before us as a particular situation to which we can respond and which we can change. Given the fundamental importance of these considerations, Sartre might very well be called “a philosopher of the imaginary,” for whom the imagination, properly understood, reveals itself both as constant threat of self-objectiviation and as the “the locus of possibility, negativity and lack, articulated in creative freedom” (Flynn 2014, 76). For Merleau-Ponty, especially in his late working notes on The Visible and the Invisible, the imagination is rethought in terms of an ontology of the rich lived fabric of reciprocal intertwinings of lived body and world that he will eventually call “the fesh” (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1968). Thus, on the one hand, Merleau-Ponty is keen to dispel the impression that his phenomenology of perception confnes consciousness to the real. On the basis of what I have said, one might think that I hold that man lives only in the realm of the real. But we also live in the imaginary, also in the world of ideality.Thus it is necessary to develop a theory of imaginary existence. (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 40) On the other hand, he also wants to challenge too simple a conception of what ‘the real’ amounts to: “The same creative capacity that is at work in imagination and in ideation is present, in germ, in the frst human perception” (Ibid.).Thus Merleau-Ponty denies the common
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dichotomy between the real and the imaginary. What we call ‘the real’ is much more instable than we tend to believe. Rather than being made of a totality of objects that knows no gaps or jumps and that is exhausted by what is causally explicable, the real is dynamic and open. It has imaginary dimensions and oneiric qualities.The imaginary, then, is not the ‘other’ of reality. It is the stuff of reveries and nightmares, of poetic and artistic creations, of feverish fantasies and pathological aberrations, of childhood plays and dreams. In a certain sense, Merleau-Ponty here blends the Husserlian insight that reality cannot be reduced to the real narrowly conceived with the Kantian claim that imagination is “a necessary ingredient of perception itself ” (Kant 1995, A 120 n.) with his own ontology of the fesh. The real of this ontology is shot through with the imaginary and also demands ontological inquiry that attempts to make out the ‘essential’ linings of reality imaginatively, in an “exploration of an invisible and the disclosure of a universe of ideas” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 130). Such an inquiry learns from current science as much as from Cezanne, Klee, and Proust. It also requires and generates the awareness that these explorations and interrogations are reciprocated by being, and that the philosopher is summoned and interrogated just as much. Thus imagining is not anymore to be thought necessarily as the activity of an individual ‘consciousness’ (of an imagining philosopher even); and the ‘imaginary’ is not “a mere fgment of my imagination, a mental entity that I could still possess in the very absence of its object” (Dufourcq 2015, 33). It becomes a “fundamental dimension of the real” (Dufourcq 2012, 187–189, 342–398), which is part and parcel of the intricate “intertwining (entrelacs)” of things and ideas that “institutes” being (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 262). Like “fesh,” it thus is, for Merleau-Ponty,“a ‘general thing’ between the individual and the idea that does not correspond to any traditional philosophical concept, but is closest to the notion of an ‘element’ in the classical sense” (Toadvine 2016; Merleau-Ponty 1968, 139; Jansen 2018). It was, of course, Heidegger who had strongly infuenced French existentialist in their disavowal of idealist ‘subject-philosophy.’ However, curiously, his stance towards imagination signifcantly differs from theirs. Although, even after his ‘turn’, Heidegger remains indebted to a language of essence (Wesen),7 he, unlike his estranged philosophical ‘father’ Husserl, never considers the imagination central to letting essences come to the fore. On the contrary, any preoccupation with the imagination appears, from his perspective, symptomatic of those idealist philosophies he calls on us to overcome. He does, however, already early on, acknowledge the signifcance of the imagination for precisely such philosophies. His chosen example in this respect is the philosophy of Kant, who, according to Heidegger’s controversial reading in his so-called Kant-Buch of 1929, “shrinks back” from the fnal consequences of his notion of the ‘transcendental imagination’ and thus fails to recognize that he is really grappling with the “common root” of the faculties, thereby anticipating but falling short of Heidegger’s account of temporality (Heidegger 1997). Heidegger never makes reference to Husserl’s extensive research on the imagination, even though we have to assume that he was well aware of it. This overt eclipse of the imagination notwithstanding, one may consider Heidegger’s post-turn refections on art and, in particular, on poetry as his post-subjective rethinking of imagination: Art “works” to “gather” being (Heidegger 1971); poetry articulates language as the “house of being” beyond conventions; man is free to “let things be” without having to reify or dominate them, and thus to “dwell” in an otherwise alienated world (Heidegger 1993, 393–426). The freedom we fnd here is the freedom from the technocratic “framing (Gestell)” and the utilitarian “machinations (Machenschaften),” or the freedom from the forgetting of being (Heidegger 1993, 307–342).
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This line of thinking is, in different ways, taken up in the distinct original philosophical refections of, for example, Eugen Fink, one of Husserl’s closest assistants who, however, is at least as much indebted philosophically to Heidegger. Fink develops a phenomenological metaphysics, which expands the idea of simulation into the idea of ‘worlds’ of phantasy and which remains relevant in contemporary discussion (Fink 1930).At the beginning of the 21st century, Marc Richir explicitly returned to a phenomenology of phantasy, as part of a new transcendental philosophy, in order, on the one hand, to radicalize the constitutive role of imagining for reality, and, on the other hand, to tie it back to its “image producing” function (Richir 2004). In a way that is much more directly inspired by Heidegger’s ‘poetics,’ John Sallis (2012) continues to expand the horizons of the imagination, in two directions, towards the elements and towards the cosmos. Within the more recent rediscovery of a phenomenological metaphysics, phenomenological challenges meet ‘new realist’ (post-)phenomenological approaches in the attempt to do justice to the ‘surplus’ of being that allegedly transcends any intentional correlation. In the work of Alexander Schnell, for example, imagining acquires renewed signifcance within a new ‘constructive’ phenomenology that helps connect the two sides of reality that cannot simply be presupposed: on the one hand, the concretely real, which is always moving in a process of phenomenalization, and, on the other hand, the ‘material a priori,’ which always requires schematic appropriation (see Schnell 2015, 20f.).This leads him also to anthropological conclusions.The human is here seen as ‘homo imaginans’ with three “forming” or “imaging” (bildende) functions: representation, refexion, and phantasy.
Conclusion: imagination, phenomenology, and phenomenological philosophy Looking back, much begins with Husserl’s insistence on the freedom of imagining. He did not think of this as a (surely naïve) assumption concerning the factual freedom of anyone’s capacity to imagine. Rather, he thought of the ideal freedom of the imagination as a philosophical and existential imperative – namely, the imperative perpetually to work towards liberating oneself from traditional, disciplinary, and other preconceptions and habits.Tracing this imperative from Husserl through the later phenomenological philosophers towards the discussions of today, on the one hand highlights the existential dimensions of phenomenological philosophy already present, but not yet released, in Husserl. On the other hand, it helps, in my view, to dispel a common reductive understanding of phenomenology (promoted also by some phenomenologists) as nothing more than a matter of methodic description of the many aspects of consciousness, or of lived experience, from a frstperson perspective. The signifcance of the imagination for phenomenological philosophy also brings out the attempt to fnd new creative modes of engagement with whatever being it investigates and is challenged by, new creative modes of being, new creative interventions in the real. Following the line of thought traced in this chapter, it would appear that the worst kind of philosopher is the non-imaginative one.This is not only because there is simply a need, let’s say, to ‘imaginatively’ explore Being as it is and to be ‘creative’ about it. It is also because, as Nietzsche (1968), and, more recently, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) have reminded us, genuine philosophical thinking is productive. Far from merely describing the given or merely refecting (on) it, it interferes with, crosses out, and adds to the possibilities of being by means of the concepts it produces and the evidences it seeks; it generates realities as much as it encounters them.Taking imagining as a leading clue in one’s tracing of trajectories through phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy begins to bring this into focus.
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Notes 1 The next two paragraphs are taken from Jansen 2016. 2 For a critical discussion of these views from a Husserlian perspective see Jansen 2014. 3 An image subject, in contrast, is not required for image consciousness, as is evident in images that do not depict anything.Think of highly abstract paintings. Even objets trouvé, or ready-mades, are images and correlate with image consciousness, according to Husserl’s model.They become, by virtue of being placed in a gallery, irreducibly distinct from the physical objects that they also are (thus opening the gap between physical object and image object), but openly resist the idea of depiction. 4 Husserl is well aware that there is a difference between the freedom of ideal phantasy, to which researchers can only aspire, and the real constraints of the empirical capacities of real researchers. For Husserl, this does not disqualify phantasy in the slightest; it only makes the efforts required to approximate that freedom an infnite task. See his Revisions to the 6th Logical Investigation. 5 Here it is interesting that ‘imaging’ in contemporary sciences most of the time does not involve ‘images’ in the sense in which many people understand images, namely visual representations. 6 Note here the transition in title from his 1936 book L’imagination to his 1940 study L’imaginaire. 7 See, for example, Heidegger’s inquiries into “the essence of truth,” or into “the essence of technology” (Heidegger 1993), etc.
References Bergson, Henri. 2005. Matter and Memory.Trans. N. M. Paul. New York: Zone Books. Clark,Andy and Torribio, Josefa. 1995.“Doing Without Representing?” Synthese 101: pp. 401–431. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1994. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Dufourcq, Anne. 2015. “The Fundamental Imaginary Dimension of the Real in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy.” Research in Phenomenology 45 (1): pp. 33–52. ———. 2012. Merleau-Ponty: Une Ontologie de l’Imaginaire. Dordrecht: Springer. Fink, Eugen. 1930.“Vergegenwärtigung und Bild.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung XI: pp. 239–309. Flynn,Thomas R. 2014. Sartre.A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, Language,Thought.Trans.A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1993. Basis Writings. Ed. David Krell. New York: Harper Collins. ———. 1997. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.Trans. R.Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic.Trans. D. Cairns.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1973. Experience and Judgment.Trans. J. Churchill and K.Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern. ———. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy.Trans. F. Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher. ———. 2001a. Logical Investigations, vols. 1 and 2.Trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. D. Moran. London: Routledge. ———. 2001b. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis.Trans.A. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2005. Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925).Trans. J. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer. Jansen, Julia. 2005. “Husserl’s First Philosophy of Phantasy: A Transcendental Phenomenology of Imagination,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2): pp. 121–132. ———. 2014. “Imagination, Embodiment and Situatedness: Using Husserl to Dispel (Some) Notions of ‘Off-Line Thinking’.” In: The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity. Eds. D. Moran and R. T. Jensen. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 63–79. ———. 2016.“Husserl.” In: Routledge Handbook of Imagination. Ed.A. Kind. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 69–81. ———. 2018. “Imagination De-Naturalized: Phantasy, the Imaginary, and Imaginative Ontology.” In: Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology. Ed. D. Zahavi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 676–695. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. W. S. Pluhar, Introd. P. W. Kitcher. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett. ———. 1964a. The Primacy of Perception.Trans. C. Dallery. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible.Trans.A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power.Trans. F. Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Richir, Marc. 2004., Phantasia, Imagination, Affectivité. Grenoble: Millon.
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20 INSTINCT Nam-In Lee
Edmund Husserl frst addresses the issue of instinct in the Fifth Logical Investigation and develops the phenomenology of instincts in his later phenomenology as the deepest layer of genetic phenomenology.This development can shed new light on the basic character of his phenomenology as a whole. Moreover, it has the potential to be developed further in many different directions. In order to understand the phenomenology of instincts properly, one has to begin by clarifying the ambiguity of the concept of instinct itself.
Two concepts of instinct: instinct as instinctive behavior and as innate drive As Max Scheler points out, instinct is a “very controversial and unclear concept” [ein seiner Deutung und seinem Sinne nach sehr umstrittenes dunkles Wort].1 It is ambiguous in many respects. Among the various concepts of instinct, the following two are the most important: 1) instinctive behavior; and 2) the innate drive that is specifc to a species.2 First, instinct as instinctive behavior means the “distinct behavior pattern”3 of a species such as the nesting of birds or the copulation of animals. Instinct is something that every entity of a species is innately equipped with, like a kind of automaton. Its operation is completely determined, just like the operation of a machine. Whereas instinct in this sense plays a decisively important role in an animal’s life, it does not play any important role at all in human life.The reason for this is because the various instincts that have been decisively engraved in an animal’s life have been reduced in human life so that their activity has become insignifcant.This is precisely the central point of Arnold Gehlen’s theory of “instinct-reduction,” implying that there is a “surprising defciency in genuine instincts”4 in the case of humans. The concept of instinct as instinctive behavior is used in some natural-scientifc disciplines, such as evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and animal psychology, as well as in some disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, such as philosophical anthropology and theology. It was frst widely used in the theory of the animal mind in the Christian theology of the Middle Ages. Creatures were considered to be endowed by God with instinct through the act of creation.This concept of instinct was handed down to the empirical sciences of the nineteenth century, even though the latter took a critical stance toward the notion of the divine origin of instinct.5 241
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Second, instinct as innate drive means the innate power that propels an organism belonging to a species to head toward specifc types of objects. It is a power working inside the organism. Therefore it is different from a physical force that can be transferred from one object to another. Yet it is not just animals who possess instinct as innate drive; humans do as well, and, indeed, possess more instincts than animals do. Humans possess most of the instincts that animals possess, such as the slumber instinct, the hunger instinct, the sexual instinct, and so on. But in addition, humans have instincts that are inherent only to humans and that animals do not possess. Representative examples are the knowledge instinct, the artistic instinct, the moral instinct, the religious instinct, and so on. One could certainly not propose the idea of instinct-reduction with respect to this concept of instinct. Instead, the number of instincts is enlarged in humans, and the idea of instinct-reduction should be replaced by that of instinct-enlargement. Instinct as innate drive manifests itself through the organism’s behavior. In this respect, there is no essential difference between humans and animals.The difference between them simply lies in the kind of behavior through which each respective type of instinct is manifested.Whereas instinct in animals manifests itself through behavior without deliberation, instinct in humans manifests itself in many cases after having gone through rational deliberation. This concept of instinct has a long history. One can fnd it, for example, in Aristotle, who opens his discussion in Metaphysics with the remark that man desires to learn.6 The desire [orexis] that Aristotle mentions there is instinct, since it is the innate drive that propels humans to pursue knowledge in general. In addition to Aristotle, there are many proponents of this concept of instinct, such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who deals with an innate moral drive as the central concept of moral philosophy;7 Friedrich Schiller, who deals with an innate aesthetic drive as the central concept of aesthetics;8 and William James, who deals with “special human instincts”9 that are inherent only to humans.
The phenomenological concept of instinct Among the two concepts of instinct discussed above, it is the concept of instinct as innate drive that could qualify as a phenomenological concept of instinct.The phenomenological concept of instinct differs from the natural-scientifc one.Whereas the latter is established through “observation from the outside” [Aussenbetrachtung], the former is established through “observation from within” [Innenbetrachtung].10 The concept of instinct as instinctive behavior is a natural-scientifc concept, since instinctive behavior is experienced through “observation from the outside” [Aussenbetrachtung]. In contrast, the concept of instinct as innate drive is a phenomenological concept, since instinct as innate drive is experienced in “observation from within” [Innenbetrachtung]. It is the phenomenological concept of instinct that Husserl relies upon in developing his phenomenology of instincts.11 Instinct as innate drive is a kind of intentionality, and as such, it has the structure of a noetic–noematic correlation. On the one hand, it has the noesis as a kind of intentionality that Husserl calls “instinctive intentionality.”12 On the other hand, it has the object toward which it is directed, namely, the noema. In this case, noema means the “specifc types of objects” toward which the instinct is heading. For example, in the case of the hunger instinct, food becomes the noema, and in the case of the slumber instinct, sleep becomes the noema. Since diverse types of instincts exist, the noema too will differ in correlation with the different types of instinctive intentionality. The phenomenological concept of instinct can be clarifed in two different attitudes, namely, in the phenomenological-psychological attitude and in the transcendental-phenomenological attitude. Correspondingly, the phenomenological concept of instinct takes two different forms, 242
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namely, the phenomenological-psychological concept or the “psychological concept of instinct” (Hua XLII, 119) on the one hand and the transcendental-phenomenological concept of instinct on the other.The former is the basic concept of the phenomenological psychology of instincts, whereas the latter is the basic concept of the transcendental phenomenology of instincts.
Phenomenological psychology of instincts It is the task of phenomenological psychology to clarify the “essential forms” [Wesensformen] of the various kinds of lived experience.13 It is the task of the phenomenological psychology of instincts, as a sub-discipline of phenomenological psychology, to clarify the essential forms of instincts. The preliminary analysis of the phenomenological concept of instinct carried out above is in part a phenomenological-psychological analysis of instinct. Husserl’s analysis of instinct as a topic in phenomenological psychology has its beginning in the Fifth Logical Investigation from 1900/1901. The phenomenology developed there is a phenomenology of the natural attitude, and as such, it is a phenomenological psychology, not a transcendental phenomenology. As the title of the Fifth Logical Investigation—“On intentional experiences and their ‘contents’” [Über intentionale Erlebnisse und ihre ‘Inhalte’]—shows, there Husserl attempts to analyze the structure of intentionality. He makes a general distinction between intentional experience and non-intentional experience. Intentional experience contains as one of its constitutive components an objectifying act as “the conscious representation of its goal” [die bewußte Zielvorstellung],14 whereas non-intentional experience does not contain such an act. After Husserl establishes the distinction between intentional experience and non-intentional experience in the sphere of perception, he raises the question whether it is possible for us to make such a distinction within the “sphere of natural instinct” (Hua XIX/1, 409/Husserl 2001, 111). He gives a positive reply to this question: It is also possible for us to make a distinction between an intentional instinct that has “the conscious representation of its goal” and a non-intentional instinct that does not have such a representation. He interprets the “conscious representation” contained in an intentional instinct as one carried out in the mode of “indeterminateness” [Unbestimmtheit] (Hua XIX/1, 410/Husserl 2001, 111). In his later philosophy, however, Husserl no longer follows this line of investigation in his intentional analysis of instincts, and he drops the idea that instinct is founded on an indeterminate conscious representation.The invalidation of this idea leads him to characterize the genetically lower instincts—which would be characterized as non-intentional experience in the Fifth Logical Investigation—as intentional wherever they display the trait of “directedness-toward.”And, as can be gathered from the extensive manuscripts written after the 1920s, in his later philosophy Husserl does actually ascribe intentionality to the lower instincts. Thus, for example, he characterizes “inborn instincts as an intentionality that belongs to the original essential structure of psychic being” (Hua-Mat VIII, 169). After the shift in the concept of instinctive intentionality, the instinctive intentionalities are divided into those that are not interwoven with conscious representations and those that are. The former represent the less developed form, whereas the latter represent the more developed form. Thus the distinction between “intentional” and “non-intentional” instinct made in the Fifth Logical Investigation turns out to be merely a distinction between two different genetic modes of intentional instinct. In addition to the task of clarifying the possibility of defning instinct as either intentional or non-intentional experience, there are many other tasks of the phenomenological psychology of instincts. For example, one of its important tasks is to clarify the essential structure of each of the 243
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various kinds of instinct such as the instinct for nourishment, the sexual instinct, the maternal instinct, the social instinct, the instinct of curiosity, the instinct of objectifcation, the instinct of self-preservation, and so on. On the basis of the clarifcation of the various kinds of instinct, one can then try to clarify whether there are “layers of instincts” [Stufen von Instinkten] (Hua XLII, 118). Another task of the phenomenological psychology of instincts is to clarify the distinction and the relationship between instincts and “acquired drives” [erworbene Triebe] (Hua XLII, 83), as well as the relationship between instinct and habituality [Habitualität] (Hua XLII, 93).The relationship between instinct and “reason” is also an important topic of the phenomenological psychology of instincts, as Husserl unexpectedly defnes “reason itself ” as “a transformed instinct” [Vernunft selbst verwandelter Instinkt] (Hua XLII, 134). Now, as we have seen, the phenomenological-psychological analysis of instincts forced Husserl to withdraw some basic assumptions that guide the intentional analyses of the Logical Investigations and Ideas I. This withdrawal results in a radical change of his phenomenology in his later philosophy. As already mentioned, one assumption is that there is a sharp distinction between intentional and non-intentional experience. But there are also two other assumptions—namely, the second assumption that “Each intentional experience is either an objectifying act or has such an act as its ‘foundation’” (Hua XIX/1, 514/Husserl 2001, 167, trans. altered), and the third assumption that there is a sharp distinction between cognition, emotion, and volition. Let me consider the second assumption.As indicated above, the genetically lower instinct that is not founded on an objectifying act as a conscious representation is nevertheless called intentional experience, since it is directed toward some object. Contrary to what Husserl thought in the Fifth Logical Investigation, it is directedness toward something that is the essence of intentional experience. Thus, the assumption that the intentional experience is either an objectifying act or has such an act as its “foundation” is withdrawn. And once this assumption has been withdrawn, Husserl can speak of the “intentionality” (M III 3 II 1, 29) of mood or of “unconscious intentionality,”15 even though they are neither an objectifying act nor have such an act as their foundation. I will now consider the third assumption that there is a sharp distinction between cognition, emotion, and volition. The clarifcation of the structure of any experience reveals that such a distinction cannot be made. Let us take the experience (E) of tasting a meal (M) carried out by a person (P) who wishes to satisfy the instinct of nourishment. E has cognition as one of its components, since E could not take place if P does not know that M exists. Moreover, E has will as another of its components, since P strives to satisfy the instinct of nourishment, and this striving is nothing other than a will. Finally, E has feeling as a third component, since in tasting M, P experiences satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and this is nothing other than the feeling.Thus E turns out to have at least three components—cognition, will, and feeling—and is a mixture of these components. But since E has all of these components, it could be named after any one of them; it could be called cognition or will or feeling.This implies that there is no sharp distinction between cognition, will, and feeling, and Husserl accordingly maintains “that reason allows for no differentiation into ‘theoretical,’ ‘practical,’ ‘aesthetic,’ or whatever” [daß Vernunft keine Unterscheidung in ‘theoretische,’ ‘praktische’ und ‘aesthetische’ und was immer zulässt] (Hua VI, 275/Husserl 1970, 341).
Transcendental phenomenology of instincts It is the aim of transcendental phenomenology to clarify the structure of the transcendental constitution of the world and worldly objects. Husserl conceives of his transcendental phe244
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nomenology as a systematic whole comprising both static phenomenology and genetic phenomenology. It is the aim of static phenomenology to clarify the structure of the foundation of validity [Geltung] in transcendental constitution, whereas it is the aim of genetic phenomenology to clarify the structure of the foundation of genesis [Genesis] in transcendental constitution.16 As blind intentionality, instinct cannot be the origin of validity, but is the genetic origin of the various kinds of consciousness. This implies that the transcendental phenomenology of instinct is a discipline of genetic phenomenology; it is the most original among the various felds of genetic phenomenology. It is thus the aim of the transcendental phenomenology of instincts to clarify the constitutive function of the different kinds of instinct in the different layers of transcendental genesis. In order to develop the transcendental phenomenology of instincts systematically from the perspective of transcendental genesis, we have to distinguish different layers within the unity of transcendental genesis, such as the scientifc layer, the pre-scientifc layer, the sensual layer, and the pre-sensual layer, and we have to analyze the transcendental function of different kinds of instinct on each of these layers. Let us begin with the analysis of the pre-sensual layer as the most original layer of transcendental genesis. The pre-sensual layer of transcendental genesis is devoid not only of scientifc intentionality, but also of the different kinds of intentionality at work in the constitution of the pre-scientifc lifeworld and the sensual world, since it is a layer that we get by dismantling the scientifc, the pre-scientifc, and the sensual layer of transcendental genesis.This does not mean, however, that it is a layer totally devoid of intentionality. In fact, it is a layer equipped with different kinds of instinctive intentionality. Let us clarify this point by taking as an example of this layer the transcendental genesis of a subject in the state of sleep. A subject in the state of sleep is different from an inanimate thing without any intentionality. In order to survive, this subject has to be in constant exchange with the world and worldly objects, and this exchange is carried out through different kinds of instinct working unconsciously, such as the instinct for breathing, the instinct for self-preservation, and so on.The instincts at work on this layer are not objectifying instincts, but non-objectifying ones. As such, they are directed to the world and worldly objects, and for this reason they are called “instincts of worldliness” [Instinkte der Weltlichkeit] (AVI 34, 34). It is through these non-objectifying instincts that the pre-sensual world is constituted unconsciously as the most original form of the world. Let us move from the pre-sensual to the sensual layer. The sensual layer of transcendental genesis comes into being on the basis of the pre-sensual layer. It has all the components of the pre-sensual layer. However, in contrast to the pre-sensual layer, it is also equipped with new types of intentionality—namely, different kinds of sensual intentionality such as visual, auditory, haptic, and so on. Moreover, it is equipped with the lowest level of consciousness, since sensual intentionality requires that the subject is conscious of the sensual objects. It should be noted that these new types of intentionality and the lowest level of consciousness on the sensual layer function because the subject has the striving to “know” the different kinds of sensual objects. The striving to know the different kinds of sensual objects is called the “instinct of ‘objectifying’” [Instinkt der “Objektivierung”] (Hua-Mat VIII, 258) or the “instinct of curiosity” [Instinkt der Neugier] (AVI 26, 60ff.).Thus, the instinct of objectifying or curiosity turns out to be the origin of the transcendental constitution of sensual objects in general. Let us move from the sensual to the lifeworldly layer.The lifeworldly layer has new types of intentionality that could not be observed on the sensual layer, types such as memory, expectation, imagination, picture-consciousness, judgment, inference, intersubjective intentionality, moral intentionality, aesthetic intentionality, religious intentionality, and so on. These new types of intentionality are different from sensual intentionality in that they are directed to life245
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worldly objects that go beyond the scope of the “here and now,” whereas sensual intentionality is directed to the sensual objects that are confned to the “here and now.”Various kinds of instinct function as the genetic foundations of various kinds of intentionality observable on the lifeworldly layer. As the instinct of objectifying repeatedly comes into play on the sensual layer, different kinds of objectifying intentionality come into being. Similarly, as different kinds of non-objectifying instinct such as the instinct of nourishment, the sexual instinct, the aesthetic instinct, the religious instinct, and the moral instinct repeatedly come into play, the different kinds of non-objectifying intentionality come into being. The different kinds of instinct and the different kinds of intentionality founded on them are the constitutive origin of the different types of world such as the world of meals, the aesthetic world, the religious world, and the moral world as partial worlds within the pre-scientifc lifeworld. Finally, let us move from the lifeworldly layer to the scientifc layer. The scientifc layer consists of the different kinds of scientifc intentionality. There are as many types of scientifc intentionality as there are different scientifc disciplines.The act of carrying out transcendental refection is also a kind of scientifc intentionality.All the different kinds of scientifc intentionality have their genetic origin in the instinct of curiosity discussed above. It should be noted, however, that the instinct of curiosity that is at work on the scientifc layer has a different mode than the one at work on the sensual and the lifeworldly layer. It is a habitualized and systematized instinct.The instinct of curiosity and the different kinds of intentionality based on it are the constitutive origin of the different kinds of scientifc world. The following points should be added with respect to the transcendental phenomenology of instincts. First, the different layers discussed above are the layers of the transcendental genesis that is carried out in the present horizon of transcendental subjectivity. However, each of them is something that has been built up in the past horizon and is still at work in the present horizon. For this reason, it is a further task of the transcendental phenomenology of instincts to clarify the process of “building up” each of the layers in the past by taking into account the role of various kinds of instinct in building up each of these layers. Second, each of the different kinds of instinct is teleological, since it is directed to its object as the “telos” or the end that could satisfy it. Not only the individual instinct, but also the totality of the different kinds of instinct is teleological, since the latter is directed to the selfpreservation of transcendental subjectivity as its telos. Since the totality of the different kinds of instinct is teleological, Husserl speaks of “the total instinct that comprises all the individual instincts” [der Totalinstinkt, der alle Sonderinstinkte umfasst] (E III 9, 18) or “the universal instinct that synthetically unifes all the individual instincts” [der universale Instinkt, der alle Sonderinstinkte synthetisch vereinheitlicht] (A VI 34, 37). There is thus a teleological tendency running through the total instinct or the universal instinct, and Husserl calls this tendency the “transcendental instinct” (Hua-Mat VIII, 260).Transcendental instinct is a teleology that runs not only through each individual transcendental subjectivity, but also through intersubjectivity as the totality of the individual subjectivities. This is why Husserl calls the transcendental instinct a “universal teleology” (Hua-Mat VIII, 260). Third, the transcendental phenomenology of instinct shows that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology has “two faces” [Doppelgesicht] (Hua XV, 617).Transcendental phenomenology is often considered to be a kind of Cartesianism, a philosophy of consciousness, or an intellectualism. However, it should be noted that this assessment represents only one of its two faces.There is another face that is represented by the phenomenology of instincts and genetic phenomenology. As the phenomenology of instincts shows, the other face of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as universal teleology is a voluntarism that emphasizes the decisive role of instinct 246
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for the constitution of the world and worldly objects. As such, it is a “scientifc philosophy of life”17 that aims to clarify the structure of life by having recourse to the clarifcation of instinct as the origin of life.
Phenomenology of instincts in post-Husserlian phenomenology and future tasks The different types of post-Husserlian phenomenology do not address the issue of the phenomenology of instinct. The main reason for this might be that Husserl’s manuscripts on this topic were not published during his lifetime and remained unknown to phenomenologists after Husserl. Max Scheler could have dealt with the phenomenological concept of instinct as one of the important topics of his phenomenological material ethics as well as his philosophical anthropology and his sociology of knowledge. Unfortunately, he does not deal with the phenomenological concept of instinct as a basic concept of his philosophy. This is due to the fact that in his analysis of instinct he is guided by the concept of instinct as instinctive behavior. In this context, confessing that instinct is a very unclear concept, he attempts to cope with this diffculty by defning the concept of instinct “exclusively from the so-called behavior of the living being” [ausschliesslich vom sog. Verhalten des Lebewesens aus].18 Then, guided by the concept of instinct as instinctive behavior, he speaks of “reduced instincts” [zurückgebildete Instinkte]19 in a manner similar to Arnold Gehlen. In Sein und Zeit, clarifying the structure of “care” [Sorge], Heidegger addresses the issue of “urge” [Drang],20 which is closely related to the phenomenological concept of instinct. However, he considers “urge” to be a mere derivative mode of “care” and does not deal with the related issue of the phenomenological concept of instinct. If he had paid attention to the fact that instinct has the power of revealing the world and the existence of Dasein, he could have analyzed the phenomenological concept of instinct in a detailed manner. As the founder of the phenomenology of freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre does not deal with the issue of instinct as the origin of moral value in L’être et le néant.21 However, in his later phenomenology, he holds the view that “the root of morality is in need.”22 If he had clarifed “need” in a more detailed manner, he could have dealt with the phenomenological concept of instinct as the origin of value. In La structure du comportement, Maurice Merleau-Ponty addresses the issue of instinct in order to clarify the structure of behavior, but he is guided by the concept of instinct as instinctive behavior.23 He does occasionally address the issue of instinct in Phénoménologie de la perception. But here too he is guided by the concept of instinct as instinctive behavior.24 Even though he was decisively infuenced by Husserl in developing his phenomenology of perception, he was infuenced by Scheler rather than by Husserl in employing the concept of instinct as instinctive behavior. His phenomenology of perception could have been enriched in many respects if he had adopted the phenomenological concept of instinct and utilized it for the clarifcation of various topics in phenomenology of perception. Let me conclude with two remarks concerning the future tasks of the phenomenology of instincts. First, if phenomenologists after Husserl had had a chance to become acquainted with Husserl’s phenomenology of instincts, the various types of phenomenology they developed could have been enriched in many respects. Husserl’s phenomenology of instincts provides plenty of resources for such enrichment. It is one of the future tasks of the phenomenology of instinct to promote a dialogue between post-Husserlian phenomenology and Husserl’s phenomenology of instincts. 247
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Second, there are various felds within the phenomenology of instincts that Husserl himself did not explore.Typical examples include the phenomenology of moral instinct, the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct, and the phenomenology of religious instinct. In recent years, there have also been concrete investigations of other types of instinct such as the language instinct, the art instinct, and so on.25 It is another task of the phenomenology of instincts to develop different areas within the phenomenology of instincts through a dialogue with research on instinct conducted outside of the phenomenological tradition.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
Scheler 1976, 17.All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. I have dealt with this issue in a more detailed manner in Lee 2015. Gehlen 1974, 25. Gehlen 1974, 34. Funke and Rohde 1976, here 414ff. Aristotle 1924. Fichte 1971. Schiller 1962. James 1981. Hua XLII, 98. See Lee 1993; Mensch 1997; Hart 1998; Hua XLII, xix–cxv; Moran 2017. Hua-Mat VIII, 169. Hua IX, 259/Husserl 1997, 111–12. Hua XIX/1, 409/Husserl 2001, 111. Hua VI, 240/Husserl 1970, 237. Hua XV, 615–17. Hua XXXII, 241. Scheler 1976, 17. Scheler 1976, 21. Heidegger 1972, 195–6; Heidegger 1962, 240–1. Sartre 1943. Jean-Paul Sartre, Lecture given in Rome, May 1964, at the Gramsci Institute, cited in Anderson 2002, 381. 23 See e.g. Merleau-Ponty 1942, 178–9, 196; Merleau-Ponty 1963, 164–5, 181. 24 See e.g. Merleau-Ponty 1945, 92–3; Merleau-Ponty 1962, 77–8. 25 For example, Dutton 2009; Pinker 1994.
References Anderson,Thomas C.2002.“Jean-Paul Sartre:From an Existentialist to a Realistic Ethics.” In:Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook. Eds. J. J. Drummond and L. Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 367–89. Aristotle. 1924. Metaphysics.Trans.W. D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dutton, Denis. 2009. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1971. Fichtes Werke. Band IV. Zur Rechts- und Sittenlehre II. Berlin:Walter de Gruyter. Funke, Gerhard and K. Rohde. 1976.“Instinkt.” In: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Eds. J. Ritter and K. Gründer.Vol. 4. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe, pp. 408–17. Gehlen, Arnold. 1974. Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt. Frankfurt am Main:Athenaion. Hart, James G. 1998. “Genesis, Instinct, and Reconstruction: Nam-In Lee’s Edmund Husserl’s Phänomenologie der Instinkte.” Husserl Studies, 15: pp. 101–23. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time.Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1972. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.Trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
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Instinct ———. 1997. Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927– 1931).Trans. and ed.T. Sheehan and R.A. Palmer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2001. Logical Investigations. 2 vols.Trans. J. N. Findlay. Ed. D. Moran. New York: Routledge. ———. Manuscripts A VI 26 (1921-1931),A VI 34 (1931), M III 3 II 1. (1900-1914) James, William. 1981. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lee, Nam-In. 1993. Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2015. “Phenomenological Clarifcation of the Concept of Instinct Through a Criticism of A. Gehlen’s Theory of Instinct-Reduction” [in Korean]. Cheolhaksasang, 56: pp. 163–88. Mensch, James R. 1997.“Instinct—A Husserlian Account.” Husserl Studies, 14: pp. 219–37. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1942. La structure du comportement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception.Trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1963. The Structure of Behavior.Trans.Alden L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon. Moran, Dermot. 2017. “Husserl’s Layered Concept of the Human Person: Conscious and Unconscious.” In: Unconsciousness between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. Eds. D. Legrand and D. Trigg. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 3–23. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York:W. Morrow. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard. Scheler, Max. 1976. Späte Schriften. Gesammelte Werke.Vol. 9. Bern: Francke. Schiller, Friedrich. 1962. Schillers Werke. Band 20, Philosophische Schriften, Erster Teil. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger.
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21 INTENTIONALITY Burt C. Hopkins
Introduction: phenomenological origin of the problem of intentionality Intentionality is the term used by Edmund Husserl to characterize, initially, the structure of a certain class of experiences that he called “lived.” In line with the phenomenological design of Husserl’s thought, the structure in question on his view is emphatically not empirical. Its structure is therefore neither contingent nor something that can be made manifest by the appeal to the sensible components of experience. Rather, the structure of intentionality is essential, in the precise sense that that term expresses 1) the invariant directedness to an object other than that directedness and 2) the object itself of that directedness. Points 1) and 2) taken together are determinative of the most basic element of the class of lived-experiences:“By ‘intentionality’, we understand the distinguishing property of lived-experiences:‘being consciousness of something’” (Husserl 2014, 162). Lived-experiences involve a particular self-relation of the subject undergoing the experience to the manifestation of the experience itself. All my lived experiences are related to me, as the same I, but also by my lived experiences all objects which are constituted in them as object-poles are related to me. Of course every refection which I relate to myself and every synthesis of refections in which I fnd myself as identical is itself a lived experience and makes me objective— objective for me. (Husserl 1977, 159) For both Husserl and those either working in or critical of the philosophical tradition he initiated, the precise character of the self-relation determinative of lived-experience is controversial. Specifcally, what is controversial is whether the self-relation is intrinsic to the conscious moment of lived-experience or whether what is required for this self-relation is a distinct act of self-refection upon lived-experience’s givenness. The status of this self-relation as the sine qua non for experience to manifest itself as lived, however, is uncontroversial. Intentionality, then, is the term introduced by Husserl to characterize the phenomenological structure, which is to say with him, the phenomenological “essence” of the class of conscious lived-experiences whose subjective mode of consciousness is characterized by the correlation of an original directedness to an object and the object of that directedness. 250
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Contemporary philosophical discourse about intentionality in both the analytic and continental traditions, in addition to its systematic preoccupations, recognize intentionality as a fundamental philosophical concern in Ancient and Mediaeval philosophy, but not in the modern period. Both discourses credit Franz Brentano with reviving the terminology of intentionality in the late 1800s and acknowledge Husserl’s development and criticisms of Brentano’s account of the phenomenon.This discourse, however, is misleading. Prior to Husserl the terminology of intentionality was not ubiquitous.The word “intentionality” (intentionalitias) frst appears in the 14th century in the work of Hervaeus Natalis (Doyle 2009).There, intentionality is a relation of a knowable or known object to an act of the intellect’s understanding.The relation intrinsic to intentionality for Natalis is, as such, “a being of reason” (Doyle 2009, 269). Natalis situates his account of intentionality within the more prevalent Mediaeval terminology of frst and second intentions, wherein a frst intention is a concept directed to a thing in rerum natura and a second intention is a concept understood by the intellect insofar as it is known in an act of its understanding. Second intentional concepts include intentionality according to Natalis, regardless of whether its object is frst or second intentional. Intentionality itself therefore becomes known for Natalis in the intellect’s refection upon its own act together with its relation to frst and second intentional objects. In Brentano, there is no talk of intentionality but only that of the inexistence of the intentional object that is characteristic of every mental phenomenon, which he calls variously “relation to a content, direction upon an object (which is not here to be understood as a reality) or immanent objectivity” (Brentano 1973, 88). In both Mediaeval philosophy and Brentano, then, what counts as intentional is exclusively either the relation of an object to an act of the intellect or the relation or direction to an immanent (mental) object. Both of these formulations contrast with Husserl’s account of intentionality, which, while related to the notion of mental relation, introduces a novel account of that which makes possible something like a mental relation in the frst place. For Husserl, then, intentionality exhibits the essential structure originally responsible for the correlation between the mind’s directedness to an object and the object in which that directedness terminates. Crucial to what is exhibited by this structure is what Husserl will call the “noetic” awareness proper to consciousness, which is patently not a conceptual or mental relation but a mode of “seeing”—which is irreducible to seeing in the sense of visual perception—that is responsible for a concept or something mental manifesting a relation to something objective in the frst place. Signifcant in this regard are three radical departures from the Mediaeval concept of intentionality and Brentano’s intentional inexistence. One, the direction of the relation determinative of intentionality is reversed from its direction in Natalis, as for Husserl it moves from the mind and the noetic awareness responsible for its directedness to the object.Two, Husserl’s account of the non-conceptual (noetic) awareness responsible for the intentional relation characteristic of intentionality is completely novel and has no precedent in the Mediaeval account of intentionality or Brentano’s account of the intentional object.And, three, the articulation of intentionality in terms of the invariant correlation between its moment of non-conceptual awareness and the object of that awareness again is completely novel and therefore unprecedented in the tradition that precedes Husserl. The Husserlian origin of intentionality’s formulation as the correlation between a nonconceptual directedness and the object of that directedness means that the contemporary philosophical discourse’s positing of “intentionality” as a problematic in traditional philosophy has its basis in an unacknowledged and distorted interpretation of Husserl’s novel formulation, which it then projects back into the putative traditional accounts of intentionality.These putative accounts of “[t]he problem of intentionality [which] is the problem of explaining what it is in general for mental states to have content, as well as the particular conditions responsible 251
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for specifc variations in content” (Caston 2008, §2), claim that the problem can originally be found in the Pre-Socratic philosophers and then traced in Ancient philosophy’s subsequent development (Caston 2008, §§3–6). In line with this, however, it has to be stressed that before Husserl there is no account of a non-conceptual origin of intentional directedness, but only the Mediaeval “being of reason” status of the intentional relation of the object to act of the intellect or Brentano’s reference to an immanent (mental) content characteristic of the intentional object. Husserl’s non-conceptual formulation of the intentional directedness as that which is responsible for the intentional relation or reference is therefore reconfgured in contemporary discourse in terms of the related but not identical problem of an objective reference or relation. One signifcant result of the unacknowledged appropriation and distortion of Husserl’s account of intentionality is that both Husserl’s phenomenological formulation of intentionality and the resources of the phenomenology he developed in order to address it philosophically are passed over in silence.What is overlooked are the three major aspects constitutive of intentionality that remain constant in Husserl’s phenomenological account of it from his early logical investigations until his fnal writings on the intentionality of historical meaning.
Three aspects of the original problem of intentionality overlooked in contemporary discourse The frst and most important aspect of Husserl’s account of intentionality that is overlooked in most contemporary philosophical discourse—non-phenomenological as well as phenomenological—is the non-equivalence of the consciousness of which it is the essential structure and the mind.The mind, whether conceived ontologically in terms of the inner object determinate of the interiority of inner perception (or of the terminologically equivalent object of introspection), or psychologically as a dimension of empirical nature, is rejected as the source of intentionality by Husserl from start to fnish. It is so because the phenomenon of consciousness proves to exceed that of specifcally mind-dependent phenomena by encompassing both psychological and physical phenomena. This is to say that for Husserl the intentionality of consciousness is composed by an original directness to intentional objects that manifests the appearance of both mental and physical phenomena (Husserl 1970a, Appendix 4). As such, intentionality is in essence coincident with neither of one of them as it—minimally—encompasses them both. The second aspect of Husserl’s account of intentionality that is overlooked by most contemporary philosophical discourse is the non-conceptual nature of both the intentional directedness element of intentionality and the conditions inseparable from this directedness’ origination. These conditions, like the directedness that issues from them, are manifestly not conceptual. That is, they are no more conceptual than the vision in which visible objects appears is itself a visible object. Rather, both these conditions and the intentional directedness that issues from them are in essence self-referential phenomena. As such, they can only appear when the very same non-conceptual intentional directedness apprehends itself in a refective modifcation that redirects the direction of its intention 1) away from its intentional object to 2) itself as the source not of that object but of the explicit consciousness in which it is made manifest.The systematic, which is to say with Husserl, rigorously scientifc, articulation and execution of the refective method operative in the self-referential character of the apprehension of intentional directedness and its conditions, together with the articulation of its non-conceptual essential structure, represents a crucial task of the phenomenological investigation of intentionality. “[R]efection is a name for acts in which the stream of lived-experience with all its manifold manifestations (inherent [reellen] aspects of lived-experience, intentional elements) will be able to be grasped and analyzed in an evident way” (Husserl 2014, 142). 252
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And, fnally, the third aspect of Husserl’s account of intentionality frequently overlooked in contemporary discourse is its transcendental dimension. As a transcendental phenomenon, intentionality is responsible for the unity of the manifold stream of lived-experience. “It is intentionality that characterizes consciousness in the precise sense of the term and justifes designating the entire stream of lived-experience at the same time as a stream of consciousness and as the unity of one consciousness” (Husserl 2014, 161). As such, the transcendental dimension of intentionality is responsible for the unity of both consciousness’ directedness toward aspect and that of the object of this directedness. Because both of these aspects of intentionality are inseparable from consciousness before and after the transcendental reduction that exhibits intentionality’s transcendental dimension, a crucial aspect of Husserl’s phenomenological account of intentionality is his answer to the question of how transcendental consciousness is distinguished from psychological consciousness.At issue in this absolutely crucial distinction for Husserl is the difference between the intentional structure of psychological and transcendental consciousness. What is at stake in it for Husserl is nothing less than providing a philosophical foundation for the unities of both intentionality’s directedness and the object of its directedness.This is the case because, absent the making of the fundamental distinction between psychological and transcendental consciousness, the unities of the multiplicities manifested by intentionality cannot but not be understood to have the status of the mental being proper to psychological reality. To be sure, pure psychology of consciousness is a precise parallel to transcendental phenomenology of consciousness. Nevertheless the two must at frst be kept strictly separate, since failure to distinguish them, which is characteristic of transcendental psychologism, makes a genuine philosophy impossible. (Husserl 1960, 32) Thus, insofar as the unities in question are the objectivities determinative of the exact sciences or ontological unities discovered by the natural sciences, the psychological understanding of the intentional consciousness in which they are given results in what, for Husserl, is the biggest challenge faced by phenomenology: psychologism. “[T]he expression psychologism is more appropriate to any interpretation which converts objectivities into something psychological in the proper sense; and the pregnant sense of psychologism should be defned accordingly” (Husserl 1969, 169). In what follows, the discussion of Husserl’s account of intentionality is divided into three phases that track the development of his thought.Thus, his psychological, pure transcendental, and genetic-historical formulations of the problem of intentionality are discussed.The discussion concludes with a brief account of Heidegger’s critique of the phenomenological originality—in the sense of its philosophically foundational claim—of Husserl’s account of intentionality.
Husserl’s psychological account of intentionality The core of Husserl’s descriptive psychological account of intentionality focuses on a crucial phenomenological distinction internal to the structure of lived-experience, which characterizes its intrinsic (reell) and non-intrinsic (irreell) aspects. Lived-experience for Husserl is a temporal whole composed of parts that intrinsically belong to that whole, in the precise sense that “they can be found in its immanent temporality” (Husserl 1977, 132). Husserl characterizes this intrinsic relation of belonging in terms of the parts’ intrinsic inclusion in the temporal unity characteristic of the whole of the lived-experience.This means that the manifold of those parts, which he characterizes in terms of 1) hyletic data (“data of color, data of tone, data of smell, 253
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data of pain, etc., considered purely subjectively, therefore here without thinking of the bodily organs or of anything psychophysical” [Husserl 1977, 128]), 2) the “intentional characters” (Husserl 1977, 133) of that hyletic data, and 3) the synthesis of those intentional characters into appearances of objectivities, “have an intrinsic [reell] unity of lived-experience and a certain peculiar species (Art) of being bound to one another, which is called the synthesis of appearances” (Husserl 1977, 132). The phenomenal relation between these intrinsic parts, which are “ever new” (Husserl 1977, 132) and “temporally separated” (Husserl 1977, 132) contrasts with the phenomenal relation between the appearing object that appears in and through them.The latter, despite its appearance in the manifold parts intrinsic to lived-experience, is not manifold but maintained by Husserl to be “one in numerical identity” (Husserl 1977, 132).Thus, while no intrinsic (reell) part can be identical with another, owing to its temporal discreteness as a phase belonging to the manifold whole of a lived-experience, the appearance of the object manifest in each part, as a phase of that manifold, is not intrinsic to that manifold, a status Husserl captures with the word irreell (non-intrinsic). It is so in the precise sense of its identity being maintained despite the manifold manner of its appearance. Husserl puts it this way: But if we restrict ourselves to what is exhibited and shown within the streaming perception itself, we see, then: the synthesis of streaming appearances in the same object [im selben Objeckt] … has the marvelous specifc property on the one hand of being a intrinsic [reell] synthesis and on the other hand containing in every phase something non-intrinsic [irreell], namely, of having “in” itself in separated phases evidently the same numerically identical object which is called non-intrinsic [irreell] in relation to the immanent synthesis of lived-experience. It could also be called ideal in this relation because it is evidently the same, whereas the separate phases of lived-experience cannot intrinsically [reellen] contain anything identical. (Husserl 1977, 134) That is, the intentional object is constituted as something that is not intrinsic (reell) in the precise sense that: 1) it does not share the non-identity of the subjective phases of the intentional manifold that composes the temporal unity of lived-experience, and 2), unlike the intrinsic (reell) inclusion of those phases in that temporal unity, the intentional object is not an intrinsic part of that unity.The phenomenal result of 1) for Husserl is the invariance inseparable from objectivity, in the exact sense of the appearance of the intentional object that manifests it remains one and the same throughout the variations of the “fowing” or “streaming” synthesis of the nonidentical intrinsic (reellen) phases of lived-experience that exhibit the appearing of the object’s appearance.And the phenomenal result of 2) is the transcendence inseparable from the objective appearance, in the exact sense of its not being an intrinsic (reell) part of the lived-experience in which it nevertheless appears. Husserl’s psychological account of the distinction between the intrinsic and non-intrinsic parts of the unity of lived-experience, which was frst formulated in his logical investigations at the turn of the 20th century, forms the basis for both his initial and all subsequent accounts of intentionality. Husserl characterizes the source of the non-identity of the unity of the intrinsic (reellen) parts of the immanent dimension of lived-experience as the intentional act, from which issues precisely the peculiar directedness aspect of intentionality.The non-identity of the fowing manifold of those parts, together with the immanent temporal character of their unity, is what is responsible for the non-conceptual nature of its intentional directedness. It is also responsible for Husserl’s use of metaphors in its descriptive characterization. In addition to the metaphors of “fowing” and “streaming” used by him to capture the non-conceptual temporal unity intrinsic 254
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(reell) to the manifold aspect of lived-experience, he also uses the metaphor of a “ray,” as in “ray of regard” (Blickstrahl), to describe the intentional directedness that issues from the intentional act and terminates in the object of which it is conscious. The intentional object, in virtue of its not being an intrinsic part of the immanent unity of lived-experience, is likewise for Husserl not an intrinsic part of the intentional act that is the source of that unity. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the transcendent status of the intentional object’s non-intrinsic (irreell) unity vis-à-vis the intentional act, that unity still belongs—in some sense—to lived-experience in Husserl’s view. It does so precisely insofar as its intentionally objective unity is something that appears, and indeed, can only appear nowhere else other than to the ray of regard characteristic of the intentional act’s directedness, which is also to say, with Husserl, to its intentionally peculiar “consciousness of.” It is, however, a triviality to characterize Husserl’s account of intentionality in terms of its invariant “consciousness of.” In addition to the distinction between the intrinsic and transcendent parts of lived-experience, Husserl’s psychological account of intentionality distinguishes the quality of the intentional act from the matter of its intentional object.The quality of the intentional act is characterized by its kind, with the most original kind being perception, followed by memory and anticipation. In addition, there are the act qualities of judging, signifying, phantasizing, symbolizing, wishing, willing, as well as affective act qualities like emotion and valuing, etc.The intentional matter characterizes both what appears as the intentional object and the how of its appearance. The same act matter, in terms of what appears, can appear in different kinds of acts; for example, the frst volume of the Logical Investigations can appear in the perception of a copy on my desk, in the memory of having read it once, in the anticipation of reading it again, in the valuation of it as profound, in the judgment that it represents a pre-philosophical phase of Husserl’s thought, etc. In the kinds of acts other than perception, the act matter presents its object in what Husserl calls an empty intention. In such acts, the intentional directedness of the act refers to an intentional object that itself appears in a way that its very appearance refers beyond what appears to the acts that give it originally.The latter acts according to Husserl intuitively fulfll the meaning intended by the intentional object’s empty intention in what he characterizes as a synthesis of overlapping (Husserl 1970a, 199). In such a synthesis, the meaning of the emptily intended “what” determinative of the act matter extends over the act that originally presents the content of that meaning. The extent of the synthetic overlapping is measured by Husserl in terms of the degree of adequation that ranges between the poles of completely adequate and inadequate overlapping, or, equivalently, of adequate and inadequate evidence. In line with Husserl’s initial account of the intentional essence of lived-experience in accordance with the protocols of a phenomenological psychology, he distinguished that aspect of the intentional object that is an intrinsic part of the intentional act from the aspect transcending it. That part intrinsically belonging to the act he characterized as the “intentional content” and that which transcends it he reserved the term “intentional object.” This distinction, however, proved problematical, as it highlighted an ambiguity in Husserl’s methodological self-understanding of psychology. On the one hand, he radically distinguished the descriptive aspect of its method from the method of explanatory psychology. He did so on the basis of the latter’s cognitive concern with the causally determined contingent reality of the psycho-physical reality and the former’s concern with the intentional essence of lived-experience. Because the latter essence, however, includes both intrinsic (reell) and non-intrinsic (irreell) parts, the status of both the distinction between and the character of the intentional content and intentional object is ambiguous. It is so, depending on whether their meaning is correlated, respectively, to the act’s intrinsic (reell) or non-intrinsic (irreell) parts or, again respectively, to the whole of the act’s parts and that which is external to those parts and thus transcends them. 255
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Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological account of the intentionality of pure consciousness Husserl sought to resolve this ambiguity with the phenomenological epoché and reduction, which in his view methodologically transforms the psychological immanence of intentionality into an immanence that is transcendentally phenomenological. Husserl believed this is accomplished with the recalibration of intentional immanence, from that which is intrinsic to the intentional act to that which is evidently manifest in the whole of the intentional structure of lived-experience. Immanence so reconfgured now includes for Husserl both the intrinsic (reell) and non-intrinsic (irreell) parts of lived-experience, which means that, when considered transcendentally, the non-intrinsic (irreell) transcendence of the intentional object has the phenomenological status of a “transcendence in immanence.” It also means that there is no longer any methodological basis for distinguishing intentional content from the intentional object, as the latter is transcendentally reduced to its givenness in the former. Husserl’s transcendental account of intentionality no longer characterizes it in terms of the essential structure of a class of lived-experiences but rather as the essential structure of the transcendentally phenomenologically reduced region of pure consciousness. In line with this and in accordance of the latter’s correlation not just to the manifold of intentional objects but also to the phenomenon of the world within whose horizon such objects appear, Husserl’s account of the intentionality of transcendental consciousness introduces fundamental distinctions not found in his psychological account of intentionality. The frst and most important distinction is that between “actual” (aktuell) and “non-actual” (inaktuell) modes of intentionality. We again recognize then that inherent in the essence of all lived experiences—taken always in a completely concrete way—is that remarkable modifcation that converts consciousness in the mode of a currently actual (aktuell) turn toward something into consciousness in the mode of non-actualization and vice versa. (Husserl 2014, 61) The former is characterized by its intentional regard actively thematizing the intentional object, such that the appearance of the latter is made explicit. For Husserl, then, in its actional modality,“the lived experience is so to speak ‘explicit’ consciousness of something that is, for it, objective” (Husserl, 2014, 61). Husserl explicitly identifed intentionality’s actual modality with the structure of the Cartesian term “cogito” (Husserl 2014, 62). Henceforth, Husserl’s use of the term “act” in connection with intentionality refers to its actual mode, or what is the same, to the cogito. The latter, non-actual mode of intentionality is characterized by its intentional regard’s non-thematizing consciousness of its intentional object and the latter’s consequent non-thematic appearance. This intentional mode is initially invoked by Husserl to characterize the how of the appearance of the world-horizon and then, eventually, the non-thematic horizon that structures, essentially, the background of the actual mode of intentionality. In line with this, Husserl comes to articulate the inner and outer horizon of the cogito: the inner refers to the non-thematic feld of intentional objects that, in accordance with essential necessity, can be made thematic by a shift in the direction of the thematizing intentional regard; the outer refers to the world-horizon whose non-objective mode of appearance, in accord with essential necessity, does not lend itself to thematic givenness.This is the case because the world-horizon appears as the non-objective background within which the multitude of individual objects belonging to the world appear. 256
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Husserl’s genetic-historical account of intentionality Husserl’s transcendental account of intentionality introduces the Greek terms “noesis” and “noêma” to characterize, respectively, the whole of the actual and non-actual intentional directedness and the thematic and horizonal aspects of the intentional object. In line with the restriction of the intentional act to intentionality’s actual (cogito) modality, Husserl extends his account of intentionality’s source beyond the thematizing act coincident with this modality of livedexperience to include its non-actual and therefore “passive” aspect in his account of its origin as a whole. Husserl characterizes the systematic transcendental phenomenological investigation of the non-actual and therefore passive structure of intentionality as “genetic,” including its correlative non-thematic horizonal intentional object. More precisely, he characterized the passive and non-thematic modality of intentionality as playing a genetic role in the “constitution” of its actual and thematic modality, which he characterized as “static.” Insofar as the passive aspect of intentionality enjoys what Husserl characterized as a “motivational” priority over its actual dimension, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological analysis of intentionality is characterized by the “zig-zag” movement of its methodological regard. Specifcally, it’s characterized by the methodical movement from genetic to static considerations, and back again, as the constitution of actual intentionality’s static structures is exhibited from out of its non-actual, and in this sense “functionally” genetic aspect. In his last fragmentary works, which are collected in the posthumously published volume Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl 1970b), Husserl’s analysis of the transcendental structure of intentionality penetrated beyond the dynamic of genetically functional and static intentional structures to the intentional structure of the passive reception of traditional and, in that sense, historically transmitted meaning. In the confrontation of what Husserl presented as the unrealized foundational demands of transcendental phenomenology’s project to ground scientifc cognition with various strands of intentionally historical meaning uncovered by his analysis, a way is adumbrated on his telling to restore the original integrity of knowledge characteristic of the Greek philosophical establishment of Episteme as a cultural norm.And, while Husserl didn’t live long enough to pursue that way in any detail, he was nevertheless able to suggest that the telos of the unity determinative of the Greek establishment of universal science needs now to function as the telos of the fatefully fractured European sciences, if the peculiar intentionality structuring the latter is to overcome the crisis attendant its unity-less multiplicity. In other words, in his last works Husserl uncovered both the historicity inseparable from the origins of intentionality and the unitary telos of those origins’ intentional object that is likewise inseparable from them.
Heidegger’s ontological critique of the phenomenological originality of Husserl’s account of intentionality Heidegger’s critique of intentionality in Husserl is focused on the question of its phenomenological originality.According to that critique Husserl’s account of intentionality, for all its philosophical originality, was nevertheless phenomenologically limited (Heidegger 1985). Rather than disclose the original phenomenon of phenomenology, on Heidegger’s telling Husserl’s account of the essence of intentionality articulated the structure of the derivative phenomenon of perceptual uncovering. For Heidegger, this phenomenon is derivative in three interrelated ways. One, the region of beings uncovered by its intentional structure, perceptually given natural being, is not ontologically fundamental.Two, its refective mode of access to those ontologically unoriginal beings is cognitive in a way that conceals their proper ontological grounding in the 257
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world. And, three, the intentional structure of their uncovering, which renders them thematic, limits their uncovering to a single, non-original mode of time: the present. Husserl’s account of intentionality, in short, presents, in Heidegger’s view, the essential structure of an ontologically non-fundamental region of beings, and it does so while being guided by an understanding of the meaning of their being that is limited to their temporally derivative mode of being present. Apart from the explicitly ontological formulation of Heidegger’s critique, what is most striking about it is that it is limited exclusively to Husserl’s presentation of intentionality’s actual modality. That is, Heidegger’s critique is limited to Husserl’s account of the intentionality of the cogito. Husserl’s account of its non-actual modality, and the non-thematic articulation of the horizonal structure of that modality’s intentional object, therefore, does not fgure at all in Heidegger’s critique. The fateful reception of Heidegger’s critique by the phenomenological tradition as a largely convincing immanent critique proves not only that a great many of that tradition’s followers are not careful readers of at least one of Husserl’s major texts (Husserl 2014), but also that they, like Heidegger, were unable to keep Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology distinct from Descartes’ philosophy of the cogito.
References Brentano, Franz. 1973. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. London: Routledge. Caston, Victor. 2008. “Intentionality in Ancient Philosophy.” In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta.Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/intentionality-an cient/. Doyle, John. 2009.“Hervaeus Natalis on Intentionality: Its Direction and Some Aftermath.” In: Philosophical Debates at Paris in the Early Fourteenth Century. Eds. Stephen Brown, Thomas Dewender, and Theo Kobusch.The Netherlands: Brill, pp. 261–286. Heidegger, Martin. 1985. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Trans. T. Kisiel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic.Trans. D. Carins.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff ———. 1970a. Logical Investigations.Trans. J. N. Findlay.Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press. ———. 1970b. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy:An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.Trans. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1977. Phenomenological Psychology.Trans. J. Scanlon.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 2014. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.Trans. D. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis, IN/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
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22 INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND SOCIALITY Jakub Čapek and Tereza Matějčková
In a common understanding, the term “intersubjectivity” refers to the way individual “subjects” relate to each other (e.g. Zahavi 2014, 97), be it in sympathy and understanding (seeing the worries on the face of someone else) or in diverse confict-ridden emotions, such as shame or hatred. What is characteristic of phenomenology is not just the fact that it undertakes a description of the different forms of inter-individual encounters, but that it develops a sustained inquiry into what makes these encounters possible. Moreover, this inquiry systematically appeals to the experience of the one involved in these encounters. Even though it does not lessen the signifcance of a more sociological approach that observes relations among individuals from the third-person perspective (see Merleau-Ponty 2014, 467), phenomenology prioritizes the frstand second-person perspective. The phenomenological discussion on intersubjectivity, lasting for over a century, can be retrospectively structured along several lines. One of them is the distinction between the theories of intersubjectivity based on experiences oriented towards individual others and the theories based on being-with others (on co-existence). While the former theories (Husserl, Scheler, Stein, Levinas, Sartre) claim that intersubjectivity (in a more restricted I–thou meaning) is a precondition of sociality, the latter (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Fink) affrm the opposite: our concrete encounters are possible only because we already live in a shared (social) world, which implies that we understand another not primarily as a concrete “thou”, but as “anyone”. The exposition in this entry takes this distinction as its guiding line. As we show in the concluding part, this distinction does not exhaust possible modalities of the relation of I and the Other. A concept of renewed importance, the group or plural subject, enters the discussion, casting new light on classic phenomenologists and opening new perspectives on intersubjectivity.
22.1. Experiencing the other (intersubjectivity) Early phenomenologists such as Stein (1980), Husserl (1960), and Scheler (1973) offer very detailed accounts of the way we refer to other selves and try to understand their behavior. As different as their positions may be, they meet in one general claim: we do experience others.There is the “experience which an ‘I’ as such has of another ‘I’ as such” (Stein 1980, 11).When encountering another person, we do not form a judgment which, at its outcome, substantiates our belief that we have a real person in front of us. Phenomenology is bound to state more precisely what 259
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this fundamental type of experience consists in, and why other accounts, e.g. the argument from analogy, are invalid or insuffcient. The argument from analogy and its criticism is a recurrent topic of early phenomenological accounts (see Scheler 1973, 232–235; Stein 1980, 26–27; Husserl 1960, 111). According to the argument, what is immediately given is our own self (“Ich”) and its experiences (“Erlebnisse”), and furthermore, our own bodily movements, and the bodily movements of another person. The inference goes, in Scheler’s rendering, as follows: “on perceiving expressive movements [Ausdrucksbewegungen] similar to those which we experience in ourselves in consequence of our own individual self-activity [Ichtätigkeit], we infer a similar self-activity in others” (Scheler 2017, 238; 1973, 232).The phenomenological criticism does not deny the possibility of taking recourse to deduction or inference in some special cases (such as when facing completely unintelligible behavior; Scheler 1973, 254; 2017, 260; Stein 1980, 29), but it does deny that our relation to others is based upon inference. First, the expressive movements of others, such as a friendly smile, are understood or grasped [erfasst] from a very early stage of a child’s development, prior to any capacity to form analogical judgments. Secondly, my experience of my body and of the body of the other cannot be compared and cannot serve as the basis for the analogy.Thirdly, the argument from analogy does not attain its goal: if there are similar expressive movements to the ones I make, it follows that “it is my own self that is present here as well—and not some other and alien self” (Scheler 2017, 240).The analogical inference would entail that I localize myself also in the other body; thus, it would not uncover another self, different from myself. Consequently, the presence of the other in front of us is not something we arrive at by an act of thinking (deducing, inferring), it is something we experience.Yet, what kind of experience is this elementary grasping of the other?
a) Appresentation, empathy, and related phenomena (Husserl and early phenomenology) In phenomenological descriptions, authors often emphasize that it is through perception that we relate to others.According to Scheler,“I do not merely see the other person’s eyes, for example; I also see that ‘he is looking at me’ and even that ‘he is looking at me as though he wished to avoid my seeing that he is looking at me’. … in certain circumstances I can directly perceive [unmittelbar wahrnehmen] his lying itself, the very act of lying, so to speak” (Scheler 2017, 261; 1973, 254–255, English transl. modifed; see also Scheler 1973, 21). Such a claim presupposes, nevertheless, a specifc notion of perception. If we understand by perception a complex composed of simple sense data (of color, shape or sound), then there is no perception of the other. Nevertheless, we can distinguish sensations from perceptions and claim that perception is not a simple result of the—so to say “incoming”—sensations, but an act, an (intentional) awareness of something. In perception, sense data are “taken” (“gefasst”) or “grasped as” (“aufgefasst als”) presenting to us the perceived object, event or person (Husserl 2001, 103). Consequently, if I say “I hear”, this does not mean, “I am having sensations”, but “I am perceiving”, i.e. I relate to something. “I do not see colorsensations but colored things, I do not hear tone-sensations but the singer’s song, etc. etc.” (Husserl 2001, 99). In a similar way, in our perception of other people, we can perceive “the anger or the sadness” that we “read on someone’s face” (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 25). Or, as Scheler puts this:“it is in the blush that we perceive shame, in the laughter joy” (Scheler 2017, 10).Thus, the question is: what makes this particular type of perception specifc, i.e. different from other cases of perceptual experience, such as hearing a melody or seeing a chair? The classical answer was elaborated by Husserl in his theory of appresentation. Husserl calls appresentation an operation by which consciousness makes co-present something that is not 260
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immediately present. When perceiving an object, I understand the unseen back side of it as being co-present with its front side. When encountering a body, I transfer the meaning “lived body” from my own body to another one, i.e. I grasp the other body as capable of feeling pain, of seeing the same objects as I do, and of executing voluntary movements. This “apperceptive transfer” is based on the similarity between the two bodies, of “that body over there with my body” (Husserl 1960, 111–112). The other body is grasped as a lived body precisely because I make another ego co-present to that body.There is a similarity at the basis of the transfer (two bodies) and its outcome (my ego—the other ego).This is why Husserl speaks about assimilative apprehension (“verähnlichende Apperzeption”; Hua I, 141). The other I encounter is another self, alter ego; the “frst” ego being myself. This is not a judgment based on analogy,“not inference, not a thinking act”, because the other is apprehended immediately,“at a glance” as another person standing in front of me (Husserl 1960, 111).Appresentation is the way the other is given to me in my experience. Nor is appresentation to be confused with empathy.When encountering someone else, we do not transpose ourselves into the other self; we do not need to put ourselves in the shoes of the other.While empathy tends to abolish the difference between myself and the other, appresentation maintains both the presence and the distance of the other: the pain and the joy of the other can never become my own pain and joy, and yet I can perceive his or her pain and joy. It follows, for Husserl, that the experience of the other has its own kind of verifcation or falsifcation: the experience of the other is an experience that can never be “fulflled”; it is a “transcending experience” (Husserl 1960, 114), an experience that “never demands and never is open to fulfllment by presentation” (Husserl 1960, 119). Scheler, in a similar way, decisively refuses to assimilate the experience of the other to empathy:“we not only know that there are other individual mental selves, but also that we know we can never grasp these adequately in their unique individual essence” (Scheler 2017, 242; 1973, 236; also 1973, 20–21).True, empathy is an experience that is closely connected to the experience of the other, yet it is not through empathy that the experience of the other is possible.What Husserl calls “appresentation” is a more primordial experience of the other and it is on the basis of this experience that both empathy and analogical inference are possible. By his phenomenology of intersubjectivity, Husserl intends not only to describe interpersonal encounters, but to account for the conditions of objective knowledge. I perceive the world as accessible for anyone, as being “actually there for everyone” (Husserl 1960, 91). This “thereness-for-everyone” (Husserl 1960, 92;“das Für-jedermann-da,” Hua I, 124) is implied in the very concept of objectivity. This is a deep conviction of Husserl: objectivity presupposes intersubjectivity.To be clear, in this idea of intersubjectivity, the other is not just another person I encounter in the world. It is another subject for whom the world exists, for whom objects have their meaning as natural objects, cultural objects, and so forth.The other is an other transcendental ego. Consequently, the intersubjectivity Husserl has in mind is a “transcendental intersubjectivity” (Husserl 1960, 130; Zahavi 2001).
b) Being exposed to the Other’s gaze (Sartre) Sartre’s reception of Husserl’s work is ambivalent. He admires Husserl’s attempt to evade solipsism in conceiving the Other as “the indispensable condition for the constitution of a world” (Sartre 1978, 233).Yet he immediately fnds fault with this conception: solipsism can be defeated only on condition of showing that the transcendental feld itself is affected by the Other. Not only did Husserl not take this path, he retained the transcendental ego. In this context, Sartre highlights Hegel’s solution as superior: in this conception, the very feld of consciousness, its genesis, depends on another consciousness. “Thus Hegel’s brilliant intuition is to make me 261
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depend on the Other in my being” (Sartre 1978, 237). Despite criticizing Hegel’s conception of the self as a “barren and abstract” identity (Sartre 1978, 239), he does adopt the insight that the relation to the other creates an indispensable layer of consciousness. Hegel’s infuence is apparent in two respects: as to the confictual nature of intersubjectivity and as to the essential role of the other for the self. By qualifying the relation to the other as confictual, Sartre safeguards the possibility of the self ’s freedom vis-à-vis the other.The I and the Other share “no common measure” (Sartre 1978, 60, 240 et al.), and thus both of them are free in essence, or they are free as long as being what they are, i.e. consciousness. Freedom means, for Sartre, primarily the impossibility of a consciousness being subdued by another, since consciousness is essentially a negating activity:“I am my own nothingness” (Sartre 1978, 260). Despite this essential freedom stemming from the fact that “nothingness” cannot be subdued, as shown in the “key-hole scene”, the relation to the other is essential, nonetheless. Moved by jealousy or curiosity, the protagonist of this philosophical narration spies through a keyhole (Sartre 1978, 259). Being completely one with his action, the spectator is pure consciousness without ego, a “non-thetic consciousness”. Once the other emerges behind the spying fgure, disclosing his or her illicit behavior, an ontological catastrophe occurs: Consciousness, this free, translucent being-in-act, petrifes into an object, and henceforward owes its foundation to someone else:“I am pure reference to the Other” (Sartre 1978, 260). The situation of the consciousness caught in the act is that of “shame”. Shame is a selfrefective emotion, but it is self-refective as related to the other. Only now, in this self-refecting vis-à-vis the other, the ego emerges, the ego being this self-relation as witnessed by the other, a self-relation that robs the consciousness of its transparent, translucent and, therefore, free activity. Shame, itself a “relation of being” (Sartre 1978, 261), introduces a new ontological region, the being-for-other, a region that is essential to any self, while at the same time beyond its control. This fact that the other’s gaze is alienating and uncontrollable leads to the discovery of a “backstage” (Sartre 1978, 262) of one’s freedom, of “a shadow” (Sartre 1978) essentially belonging to me while thwarting my freedom. In this sense, others might be conceived even as “hell” (Sartre 1989). More importantly, shame is the key testimony for solipsism to be wrong. If the other was not present, I would not feel ashamed. In Sartre’s understanding, then, while solipsism cannot be answered on the level of knowledge, it is refuted on the level of being. In later years, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre sets himself, inter alia, the objective of formulating a non-alienating conception of intersubjectivity. It is noteworthy that he revokes none of his theses in Being and Nothingness. Instead, he uses the fgure of the third (le Tiers) as a mediating link between the I and the Thou, a mediating link that constitutes a feeting but nonetheless suffciently stable shared dynamic.Two people form a dyadic relation, but a group, the elementary social unit, is constituted only once a third emerges; this dynamic stands at the beginning even of the unit Sartre calls a “group-in-fusion”, a plural subject he illustrates with the storming of the Bastille (Sartre 2004, 351–363). Once every member of a crowd feeing the police realizes that “the other two” feeing the police with him not only engage in a shared activity but share a common objective with which he or she as the third identifes, a group, a positive reciprocity is formed.This perspective totalizes the group without objectivizing it (Sartre 2004, 370).Thus, the group is transformed qualitatively from a mob into a revolutionary group, and a fight is transformed into a free act opening up a new horizon of a possible co-existence.
c) Transcendence of the Other (Levinas) The problem of intersubjectivity motivated Levinas to challenge the Western history of philosophy in its entirety. If Heidegger conceives of the history of philosophy as a history of the forget262
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fulness of being, Levinas captures it as a history of the forgetfulness of the Other, a forgetfulness with fatal consequences (Levinas 1990, 291). The Other is subsumed, in a Husserlian manner, either under the concept of the self (ego) or, in a Hegelian vein, under a universal social We. Either way, the basic philosophical effort is “an egology” (Levinas 1979, 44).While the other is viewed from the frst-person perspective singular or plural, Levinas introduces what has recently been characterized as a second-person phenomenology (Crowell 2016). In both cases of the frst-person perspective, the otherness of the Other is destroyed (Levinas 1990, 292). Destruction is neither a symbol nor a metaphor. For Levinas, war and philosophy share a common principle (Levinas 1979, 21): both dynamics aim at an assimilation of the Other into one’s own categories.With this emphasis, an ethical dimension enters Levinas’ project: philosophy is to be conceived of not as an ontology, thus not as a discipline fnding (frst-person) universals to subsume the individual, but as an ethics whose aim is to maintain a vigilance to the absolute transcendence of the Other. This primacy of ethics is not a natural vocation. Originally, consciousness is born of the world and its nutrients. Its original being is a joyous submersion in the process of satisfying its drives. Against Husserl’s concept of intentionality, which Levinas criticizes for its “intellectualism” (Levinas 1990, 292), and against Heidegger’s conception of the Dasein as care, he takes consciousness to be originally a desire, a desire that takes a double form. Consciousness is a bodily desire that takes the form of a need or a drive: as such, it strives for the satisfaction of its needs by “living from” the world (Levinas 1979, 110); it is, however, even more potently, a desire for transcendence or infnity; in this form, consciousness is a “metaphysical desire” (Levinas 1979, 34). This type of desire does not amount to a need waiting to be satisfed. The desiring consciousness does not strive to be integrated into anything that could be captured in a social category. Rather than striving towards a We, consciousness is the “power of rupture, the refusal of neutral and impersonal principles” (Levinas 1990, 293, cf. Bernasconi 2002).The transcendence that consciousness seeks is vertical; it is an “opening to Highness” (Levinas 1990, 294). What is the corresponding phenomenological experience of this Other? In Levinas’ conception it is the face, the face of the Other being something that resists the reduction to the immanence of my consciousness, something that thus cannot be captured by any form of intentionality.“A face is present in its refusal to be contained” (Levinas 1979, 194). Instead, the face is what radically precedes the consciousness as to the formation of basic categories of intelligibility and thus it is a “primordial signifer”. Due to its radical precedence and transcendence, Levinas calls the face an “epiphany” (Levinas 1979, 197).This “numinous” (Levinas 1979, 195) experience is an “experience par excellence” (Levinas 1979, 293), and, therefore, Levinas capitalizes the Other which testifes to the intimate relation to what philosophers traditionally consider God (Levinas 1979, 293). Paradoxically, the Other’s power stems from his or her nakedness, the naked face being a testimony to human vulnerability. Levinas illustrates this point by a scene from Tolstoy’s War and Peace: a crowd about to lynch a soldier with “defenseless eyes” recoils the moment he raises his head (Levinas 1990, 293). We are thus subdued by the power of the other’s vulnerability, and thus the relation to the other is marked not by mutuality but asymmetry. From this asymmetry, “moral consciousness” emerges. Being moral means going beyond one’s limits, be it in hospitality, attentiveness, or love. In its moral form, consciousness is heightened, deepened, amplifed. Thus, the desire for transcendence is not meant to reintroduce a “false infnity” of an “empty beyond”, something unknowable that is only negatively characterized with regard to the presence of positive but fnite phenomena, and thus entailing a dualism of two separated spheres. Quite to the contrary, what Levinas has in mind is, in fact, a phenomenon “within experience” (Levinas 1979, 23), a phenomenon reached by the capability of a vigilant passivity: facing the 263
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other, we are originally both passive and responsive.The passivity often emphasized in Levinas’ work does not amount either to muteness or to indifference but to a weakness that excludes cowardice. As “weakened” by the attentiveness to transcendence, the consciousness is amplifed to perceive phenomena that would otherwise remain hidden from it, and thus it is able to perceive the other in its otherness; it is a transcendence in the presence, not an anticipation of an otherworldly transcendence. The hierarchical, asymmetrical nature of the moral relation opens up numerous questions, one of which was posed by Derrida (Derrida 2002, 97–192). In Derrida’s view, the Other must not only resemble God, it must be God himself, since among human beings a hierarchical relationship tends to degenerate into violence. Despite problems related to a submission to the Other, Levinas does point to a problem often neglected. The other human being is radically other insofar as his or her individuality can never be shared. Despite his emphasis on the asymmetrical relation, he does not deny that our life depends on universals (in the form of language, social categories, and related institutions, etc.).To be free, a form of a Hegelian institutionalized we is indispensable (Levinas 1979, 241). However, according to Levinas, we live as responsive to the other before we systematize; and it is here that we encounter the asymmetry that refects the other’s unalienable individuality.
22.2. Being with others (sociality) It is far from evident that the theories of intersubjectivity we have discussed so far can be brought together as making part of one type of approach. If the other is appresented by me as the alter ego (Husserl), he or she cannot be reduced to a gaze which objectifes me (Sartre), and neither of the two accounts (the appresentation, the objectifying gaze) can be easily reconciled with the idea that the primary experience of the other is one of being addressed by the other and of having to respond to his or her claim. Still, as different as these key experiences are, they presuppose a concrete encounter with the individual other (as transcendent or evasive as he or she may be). Against this line of thinking, an objection has been repeatedly raised: it is because we already live in a shared (social) world that our concrete encounters are possible. Consequently, the other is not primarily “Thou”, but any other, anyone. Sociality precedes and makes possible the I–Thou intersubjectivity, not the other way around.This idea was developed in different ways by thinkers such as Heidegger (2010), Merleau-Ponty (2014), and Fink (1987).
a) Heidegger (Mitsein) Heidegger shares with the authors mentioned above the assumption that a phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity has to appeal to an experience of the other. In the approach represented by Husserl or Stein, the question was: how does my experience of, say, a chair in front of me differ from my experience of someone standing in front of me? Despite obvious differences, according to Heidegger the experience of a chair is in a sense also an experience of the other. We are acquainted with others not only because we perceive other people (their facial expression etc.), but also because we are able to see and use objects in a way other people see and use them. Before others become an object of our experience, they are implicitly present in our daily behavior. When sitting down on a chair or grabbing a cup, others are implicitly present. They are not individual others, whose names and faces I would know, they are anyone. Moreover, in my handling of the objects of daily use, I myself am anyone. This suggestion developed by Heidegger substantially reframes the debate. The account of intersubjectivity can thus take for its starting point the analysis of everyday objects which are 264
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accessible or “available” (“zuhanden”) to others as well as to myself. According to Husserl or Stein, others are distinct from myself, i.e. others are “everybody else but me” (as Heidegger rephrases this).As opposed to this, for Heidegger, others are “those from whom one mostly does not distinguish oneself, those among whom one also is” (Heidegger 2010, §26, 115).The “beingwith” (Mitsein) is a constitutive feature of the Dasein itself;“an isolated I without the others” is thus inconceivable (Heidegger 2010, §25, 113). Despite this emphasis, Heidegger does not ignore explicit interpersonal encounters, in which the other becomes a thematic, explicit “matter of concern” for us (“Fürsorge”, Heidegger 2010, §26, 118).When describing the “positive modes” of this concern, Heidegger mentions two extreme cases. In the frst extreme scenario, I can “leap in” for the other, i.e. I can put myself in his or her place and attend to some practical matters instead of the other in the way e.g. an overprotective parent does. By this type of concern, the other can become “dependent and dominated” by myself. Or, I can leave to him or her to care for his or her own existence, which means also that I help the other “to become transparent to himself in his care and free for it” (Heidegger 2010, §26, 119). Beyond these modes of the I–Thou concern, there are other modes of the concern based on a common involvement in the same cause, the “authentic alliance” (“eigentliche Verbundenheit”, Heidegger 2010, §26, 119). In all these modes of interaction, our being with others is not based on the knowledge of the other, but on practical activities, be they a common goal to be attained, the life ambition of an individual, or our typical everyday dealings: others “are what they do” (Heidegger 2010, §27, 122; also Heidegger 2005, 226). At frst, Heidegger presents the claims that we are together with others already in our daily use of objects (we use objects the way anyone does) in a neutral, descriptive language.Yet in the next move, Heidegger adds that on this everyday level of being (with others), we do not grasp our being as or own, and he concludes: the Dasein in this everyday mode of being with others does not exist as itself.“It itself is not; the others have taken its being away from it” (Heidegger 2010, §27, 122). Heidegger believes that this entitles him to call this a “domination by others”. True, when taking public transport or buying a new pair of shoes, we are one just like another. The question is, nevertheless, whether this can be labeled as social conformism. For Heidegger, living with others implies a “constant temptation” (Heidegger 2010, §38, 170) for the individual never to become him or herself, to let “anyone”, “the they” (“das Man”), decide in his or her place. Heidegger capitalizes on his description of the daily use of cultural objects in order to claim that there is a “dictatorship” of the others, of “the they”, who prescribe our ways of conduct: “We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves.We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge” (Heidegger 2010, §27, 123). The others rob us of the possibility of an authentic existence.The question is, nevertheless, whether everydayness does indeed imply conformity, social dictatorship, and inauthenticity, as Heidegger suggests. Heidegger’s account of being with others has several important advantages. The claim that others are a constitutive feature of our own being (which is “being-with”; Mitsein), and the claim that we encounter others when pursuing our daily, practical concerns, enable him to refuse the initial problem of the Husserlian approach. If we ask how to provide the “bridge from one’s own subject, initially given by itself, to the other subject, which is initially quite inaccessible” (Heidegger 2010, §26, 121), we are on a wrong track. As compelling as Heidegger’s account may be, it offers little space for the description of concrete forms of interpersonal encounters. Philosophers such as Sartre or Buber believe this to be not a mere omission, but a fundamental mistake. For both of them, the concept of “being-with” (Mitsein) cannot account for real encounters, precisely because it is still an a priori structure of my own being. As such,“it does not constitute the slightest proof of the Other’s existence, nor the slightest bridge between me and the Other … The ‘being-with,’ conceived as a structure of 265
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my being, isolates me as surely as the arguments for solipsism” (Sartre 1978, 249). Or, according to Buber:“the man of ‘selfbeing’ … is not the man who really lives with man … the man who now knows a real life only in communication with himself ” (Buber 2002, 199).
b) Merleau-Ponty: the common world “undivided between my perception and his” According to Merleau-Ponty, the problem of intersubjectivity should not be conceived of as a problem of my knowledge of another self.The hidden assumption of such an approach is that self-knowledge is immediate, or that it is at least easier to acquire than knowledge of others. Nevertheless, such a self-knowledge is precisely something that is not available for a being that is embodied and that only gradually discovers its own bodily capacities and social commitments (already at work in each perception and movement). Such a being is “given to himself as something to be understood” (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 362, see also lxxiii), and consequently, it discovers or fnds itself in a way that is not substantially different from the way it fnds others:“We fnd the other the same way we fnd our body” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 138). What does this imply for the description of the way we encounter other (embodied) beings? What is that which I encounter? According to Merleau-Ponty, the key phenomenon is the bodily movement that has an expressive meaning, which is a behavior or a comportment (I see “a living body performing an action”; Merleau-Ponty 2014, 369; 1964, 170). Merleau-Ponty draws on examples of early transitivism: a child asks his mother “to console him for the pains she is suffering” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 174). But an adult expressive movement can also be analyzed along similar lines: a man who fell asleep in the sun wakes up and picks up his hat to protect himself from the sun.This gesture, oriented towards the world (the sun and its heat), is immediately understood by myself as referring to the same sun:“the world exists not only for me but for everyone in it who makes gestures toward it.There is a universality of feeling” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 137). Merleau-Ponty often appeals to this type of experience in which the difference of individual perspectives does not stand in the foreground: “this world can remain undivided between my perception and his”,“the other’s body and my own are a single whole, two sides of a single phenomenon” (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 369f.). The key experience of the other in Merleau-Ponty is a perceptual one. Nevertheless, it is not, strictly speaking, a perception of the other, but a perception with the other, a “coperception” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 170). This is what gets lost once we overemphasize the face-to-face encounter. For Merleau-Ponty, “the other is never present face to face”. He or she is moreover “near me, by my side”, or “behind me”.The “otherness” of the other consists in the shared, yet slightly different view of the same world (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 134). The underlying phenomenon of intersubjectivity is thus commonality; sharing of the world and of the same corporeity. Against this approach to intersubjectivity, objections of at least two kinds were raised. First of all, Merleau-Ponty seems to solve the problem of the other by dissolving both the self and the other in an undifferentiated generality. Second, Merleau-Ponty misses the transcendence of the other when comparing it to the transcendence (alterity) within myself. According to the frst objection, the I–thou intersubjectivity was abandoned in favor of a commonality (sociality). As Renaud Barbaras claims: “Merleau-Ponty is right against Husserl and Sartre in emphasizing the experience of harmony … yet he seems to go too far in this direction, since he dissolves the harmony in generality, in which no one encounters anyone, since no one is able to recognize himself ” (Barbaras 1999, 43). Interestingly enough, MerleauPonty himself articulates this worry. By the emphasis on the sharing of an experience, “we 266
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introduce the impersonal into the center of subjectivity, and we erase the individuality of perspectives”; as a result, both the alter Ego and the Ego disappear. He replies by showing that e.g. an experience of anger or grief of the other lends itself to a double interpretation: (1.) we can share the experience of anger or grief, since they are “variations of being in the world” that can “settle upon” the behavior of the other as well as upon my own behavior; (2.) and yet they are individual experiences no one else can have:“The other’s grief or anger never has precisely the same sense for him and for me. For him, these are lived situations; for me, they are appresented” (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 372). Both interpretations are true.The frst emphasizes the generality of the body that enables us to share emotions; the second introduces what Merleau-Ponty calls the “generality of my inalienable subjectivity”: each of us is an “indeclinable ‘I’” (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 375). The second emphasis—that my emotion cannot be shared by anyone—does not nevertheless mean that it cannot be understood by another: if I suffer because a friend of mine has suffered a personal loss, we relate to each other, yet our experience is not identical. It is on this level that the experience of “appresentation” has its proper place, as well as the concept of solipsism, and even the Sartrean idea of intersubjectivity as struggle. For Merleau-Ponty, none of this refutes the primordial acquaintance with others. Moreover, plurality of perspectives, solipsism, struggle do not exclude others, they presuppose others: solipsism is a “lived solipsism” (“a solipsism shared-by-many” (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 376); the Sartrean struggle and objectifying gaze is a refusal to communicate and as such, it “is still a mode of communication” (MerleauPonty 2014, 378).The fact that we have experiences that cannot be shared by others does not make the existence of others a theoretical problem.As Taylor Carman puts this,“Others are not a problem, but they are trouble” (Carman 2008, 150). The second objection was aptly formulated by Zahavi:“Merleau-Ponty lays such enormous stress on the presence of alterity that one occasionally gets the impression that there is no decisive difference between my relationship to myself, my relationship to the world and my relationship to the other” (Zahavi 2001, 155). It is true that in Merleau-Ponty, different forms of alterity or transcendence are dealt with in a parallel way: the transcendence of my body, of the world, of my past, of my birth and death (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 381). From Levinas’ point of view, there is an important difference between the alterity within myself, e.g. the alterity of my own body (“proper alterity”), and the “radical alterity” of the Other (Tengelyi 2004, 92–98). MerleauPonty, indeed, does not seem to admit such a distinction. If certain phenomena “transcend me”, they “nevertheless, only exist, to the extent that I take them up and live them” (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 381). For Merleau-Ponty, the transcendence of the other is not radically different from the transcendence of my own death: I am open to both, they color my experience and the world I live in, and yet they transcend me. Merleau-Ponty would defnitely agree that the structure of experience of these different forms of transcendence is in each case specifc (birth, death, past, world, others, body), but he would not see a reason to introduce the concept of a radical transcendence restricted to but one of them.
22.3. Beyond the distinction of intersubjectivity and sociality: the group The distinction between intersubjectivity (Husserl, Sartre, Levinas) and sociality (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) used as a basic scheme to structure the discussion should not conceal the importance of another modality of being with others—that of the plural subject or group. This modality fails to be satisfactorily comprehended either by the label of intersubjectivity, most often involving a dyadic structure, or by a social, usually anonymous, realm. Formulating a phenomenological concept of the group, plural subjects, and collective intentionality, thinkers in the tradition of phenomenology join in a renewed interest in what can be generally 267
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captured as “We”, a concept developed recently primarily by social scientists, political thinkers, or, in philosophy, by thinkers mainly of an analytic background (e.g. Searle 1995, Gilbert 2000, Tuomela 2016), and thus it is especially here, in the context of collective intentionality, that phenomenologists seek an intensive dialogue with analytic philosophers refecting on the social realm (see Chelstrom 2013). Phenomenologically oriented thinkers, such as Carr, De Warren, or Szanto, who formulate the concept of the “We” on a phenomenological foundation, move beyond classical phenomenology without failing to emphasize that an understanding of phenomenology as largely ignoring the social realm is misleading or downright wrong (Moran and Szanto 2016). Rather than abandoning the classical phenomenological tradition, they cast new light on the respective theories, fnding here new motives to elaborate. David Carr’s procedure is illustrative of this endeavor. In his treatment of the plural subject, he draws on Husserl, but orients himself primarily towards Husserl’s treatise of being with others as developed in later texts.The fact that Husserl has come to seek new ways of capturing being-with-others in confronting the “European crisis” is fundamental.The conception of plural subject is often linked to a confrontation with historical events, shared trauma, or social transformation, and, most importantly, it is related to the experience not merely of subjective time, but of the phenomenological experience of history. “Through the we-relation historical reality enters directly into our lived experience and becomes part of our identity” (Carr 2014, 55). Throughout his treatment of the constitution of the plural subject, Carr refrains from claiming that a group ontologically precedes the individual. In a phenomenological manner, he applies to the plural subject a classical concept of intentionality.“Like the we, the I exists as the unity of a multiplicity of intentional experiences and actions, a unity not postulated in advance but constituted in and through that multiplicity” (Carr 1986, 532).The group thus forms from the inside, not from the outside (Carr 2014, 50), or the We, having a shared experiential basis, arises from multiple individuals—from the joint intention of individuals involved in forming a collective endeavor. This procedure lends itself to a comparison with Heidegger’s “authentic alliance” or Sartre’s group-in-fusion. In his book Experience and History, Carr in fact uses Sartre’s concept positively, emphasizing that it can be read as a phenomenon, and not as a reifed super-subject (as a “largescale I”; Carr 1986). In this sense, Nicolas de Warren follows a related path, in his analyses of the We drawing explicitly on Sartre’s concept of a group-in-fusion. De Warren has shown that the constitution of the group is not exhausted by revolutions but can be applied to phenomena such as the aftermath of September 11 or the movement Occupy Wall Street (de Warren 2016, 313–326). Most importantly, we fnd in de Warren’s treatment of Sartre’s groups-in-fusion a re-introduction of the “Third” into contemporary discussions, and a nuanced phenomenological typology of groups ranging from the group-in-fusion to fraternity groups with a tendency towards violence.With this, rituals forming the essence of these shared praxis come into view. In his account of “collective actions”, Hans Bernhard Schmid focuses on more mundane activities than storming the Bastille; for instance, taking a walk together, and everyday cooperation. He takes a different perspective from Carr or de Warren in explicitly refusing subjective individualism, i.e. the position that only individuals have intentions. Such an assumption fails to account for normativity and collective action. Schmid tries to formulate a position that neither ascribes intention to individuals nor to collective subjects.“Collective intentions are not intentions of the kind anybody ‘has’—not single individuals, and not some super-agent. For collective intentionality is not subjective. It is relational” (Schmid 2011, 44). People act in relation to each other as they orient their agency on commitments made in the past. For Schmid, committing to 268
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a project shared with others means that we limit our self-governing, i.e. we act not primarily in view of what we wish as individuals but act as members of a group. Notably, Schmid has used his theory to re-interpret the traditional view of the Milgram experiment, uncovering its cooperative structures (Schmid 2011, 215) that, by being ignored, caused the experiment to be incorrectly assessed. His evaluation focused on those who, according to the traditional interpretation, failed the test, i.e. who were willing to comply with an authority fgure and to administer potentially fatal electroshocks to another person. According to Schmid’s evaluation, they did not fail because of a lack of moral integrity. Rather, they were obedient because they understood themselves as part of a project they shared with the scientist, and they incorrectly evaluated, i.e. overstressed, the collective structure of the experiment. The Milgram experiment was deliberately parasitic upon cooperative structures indispensable to leading a good life that inevitably include a collective dimension. Rather than refusing any collectivity as alienating (as the traditional interpretation has it), Schmid understands collective structures, in this case being part of a scientifc project purportedly analyzing memory, as key to understanding basic human praxis of both those evaluated as succeeding as well as those that turn out to be failures. Schmid’s enlightening analysis of the Milgram experiments provokes several questions.Above all, it seems that considering collective intentions as separate from individuals might lead to problems even if we do not attribute intentions to a super-object but merely to a shared praxis transcending individual intentions. Chelstrom has argued that separating collective intentions from intrinsic individual intentions endangers the concept of collectivity itself: “Denying subjective individualism makes collectivity something bereft of a kind of relation to individuals— thereby eliminating a feature that appears to be essential to collectivity” (Chelstrom 2014, 125). The emphasis on groups and plural subjects has introduced topics so far neglected in phenomenological research. The experience of history, of trauma, of violence, and of social transformation, as well as of thoroughly mundane cooperative activities, has appeared at the center of discussions. Other questions, long studied by philosophers, e.g. the phenomenon of obedience, of promise making, of conformity, and of self-centeredness have been discussed from new angles. Signifcantly, this leads to a broadening of the scope of possible phenomenological research and opens it to an interdisciplinary horizon.
Acknowledgments Funding information: this article is a part of a research program funded by the Czech Science Foundation (project “Personal Identity at the Crossroads: Phenomenological, Genealogical, and Hegelian Perspectives”, GACR 18-16622S).
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23 LIFE-WORLD Laurent Perreau
Life-world (Lebenswelt) is the world directly experienced by the intentional life of the subjectivity. The life-world, as such, is “our” world, i.e., my own world and the world of others in the everyday life.As such, it is the ground and the horizon of every subjective life; it is also the world that is presupposed by every practical or theoretical activity. The concept of life-world is one of the more ambiguous and complicated in phenomenology. Nevertheless, the concept of the life-world remains crucial to show how consciousness is embedded in a world of activities, meanings, judgments, and theories that are socially, culturally, and historically constituted. Under this perspective, the phenomenology is not only the methodic study of the various structures of the transcendental ego, but also the analysis of an experience in context, lived in a pre-found world.
23.1. The project of a phenomenological science of the life-world Life-world is a key notion of Husserl’s late philosophy, even if Husserl frst used the concept of the life-world in the 1920s. Husserl did not invent the term. It was already present in Georg Simmel’s or Rudolf Eucken’s writings. The proximal source of the Husserlian conception of life-world is actually Richard Avenarius’s “natural concept of the world” (natürlicher Weltbegriff). According to the founder of empirio-criticism (with Ernst Mach), there is a “pre-found” world of experience that precedes every conceptualization or every theorization. In his Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung) (Avenarius 1890), Avenarius argues that we encounter things in a constant stream of changing appearances. By means of a “principle of co-ordination”, we may experience consistency in this “natural world” and attach signifcances and values to things.We may also experience this world as the world of others as having similar experiences to ourselves and sharing them. In this sense, the “natural concept of the world” discovers the basic structures of experience. It clearly has a critical function, as it gives us a chance to remedy to various metaphysical falsifcations. In his Basic Problems of Phenomenology lecture course of 1910/1911 (Husserl 2006, §§8–10, 12–28), Husserl takes up this concept again.The “natural concept of the world” is “the world in the natural sense” or “the world of the natural attitude”. It may be seen as “that infnite object of the natural and psychological sciences” (ibid., 15) but, in fact, it is the world of an experience that is always found in advance, always already here. In the second book of his Ideas Pertaining 271
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to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (Husserl 1989), Husserl uses the term “life-world” to name on one side the “personal” and socio-historical world thematized by the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), and on another side the descriptive a priori of a transcendental-aesthetical world conceived as an essential, universal, and intuitional structure. This ambiguity remains in the 1920s, for example in the lecture courses Nature and Spirit (Natur und Geist, 1919, 1921/1922, 1927) and Phenomenological Psychology (1925–1928) (Husserl 1977, Hua XXXII, and Hua-Mat IV). Facing new types of challenges, Husserl’s late philosophy opens new dimensions to the concept of life-world. This also gains new signifcations. In his Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl shows that the advent of modern objectivism was the beginning of the crisis of the European sciences and reason. Due to its forgetfulness of the lifeworld, modern science has lost its signifcance for life. For this reason, it seems urgent and necessary to recover the life-world as a “meaning-fundament” for the objective sciences. Moreover, it is the only way left to reveal the internal teleology of life and the ethical responsibilities of the subject. Husserl sees the life-world as a “new dimension” of subjective life (Husserl 1970, §32, 119) that has “remained hidden through the ages”. Life-world must then be rediscovered and explored because it has been forgotten and is still not well understood. Life-world appears prima facie obscure and unintelligible. It is the name of “a set of world-enigmas which were unknown to earlier times” (Husserl 1970, §2, 5) and fnally recognized as “the enigma of the enigma” (Husserl 1970, §5, 13).As such, the concept of life-world remains, without any doubt, as one of the most equivocal concepts of phenomenological tradition.According to Husserl, this concept was more a “title” (Titel) covering a large variety of questions (Husserl 1970, §34, 124): it is, in fact, a “universal problem for philosophy” (Husserl 1970, §34, 132). Consequently, the aim of Husserl’s late philosophy is the correct comprehension of the essence of the life-world. Husserl sees the life-world of everyday life as a valid subject for a “scientifc” investigation, in a renewed sense. In other words, he calls for a specifc philosophical science of the life-world, that is, the phenomenology of the life-world. The frst step of this methodical research on the life-world is a regressive inquiry conceived “as thoroughly intuitively disclosing method, intuitive in its point of departure and in everything it discloses” (Husserl 1970, §30, 115–116). Life-world is the world of things taken for granted, a sedimented ground that is always pregiven, found in advance, and which must be analyzed by an intentional description. This pregivenness (Vorgegebenheit) of the life-world shall not be interpreted as a pure antecedence, as if the life-world was always here before every theorization.The pregivenness of the life-world is not only a matter of temporality. It refers to a constitutive presupposition implicated in every donation of a phenomenon.What is given is necessarily grounded in an experience that was already there. The pregivenness discovers its priority in the constitutional process of the intentional consciousness. For this reason, life-world encompasses all the mundane conditions of constitutional activity, all that is presupposed in the subjective life and in its relationship with the world. The life-world, as a pregiven, pre-found world, should not be confused with the world of the natural attitude. In the natural attitude, we take every object of consciousness as if it were a factual item.The natural attitude relies on what Husserl calls the “general thesis” (Husserl 1982, §30, 56), i.e., the unrefected and naive belief in the existence and transcendence of the world. The general thesis is the positing of the world as independent of my experience, as extending in space and time.The content of this general thesis is the following one: “The world is”.The world, as a correlate of the natural attitude, is then viewed as a “natural surrounding world” and as a “nature” existing independently of every subject.According to Husserl, a phenomenological 272
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“Epoché” remains necessary if we want to rediscover the world anew.To put the natural attitude out of action, we have to bracket the general thesis of the actual world. Under this condition, the phenomenological thematization of the life-world becomes possible. For this reason, the life-world is not the natural world as a correlate of the natural attitude, but the ground and the horizon of transcendental subjectivity.The life-world is a common, subjective structure underlying the natural attitude. Consequently, the life-world includes in itself the natural attitude and the world of science based upon it. Thus, life-world is the realm of a pre-scientifc life that is at the foundation of theory and sciences. In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl argues that the life-world exists before every scientifc or philosophical theory that takes it as an object of refection: “The life-world was always there for mankind before science, then, just as it continues its manner of being in the epoch of science” (Husserl 1970, §33, 123).The world conceived by sciences always presupposes a life-world.This is not only a question of historical genesis, as if the life-world were always here, but a constitutional presupposition. That is the reason why the pre-scientifc life-world is what is left to appeal to when a crisis or a confict occurs in sciences. We have a common world that is the object and the result of specialized pre-scientifc interests and motivations arising from our subjective projects and vocations.The life-world is from the outset a practical world made by our individual and collective actions.As Husserl argues in his last work, the lifeworld […] is always there, existing in advance for us, the “ground” of all praxis, whether theoretical or extratheoretical.The world is pregiven to us, […] always somehow practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal feld of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. (Husserl 1970, §37, 142) The discovery of the existence of the life-world may provide a critical insight into the processes of scientifc naturalization and idealizations of the life-world. According to Husserl, the lifeworld plays the role of a meaning-fundament (Sinnesfundament) that has been forgotten by every scientist and every philosopher. In contrast, the world of science may now appear as a “garb of ideas” (Ideenkleid) or as a “garb of symbols” (Kleid der Symbole) (Husserl 1970, §9, 48). The socalled objectively scientifc truths conceal the life-world that they presuppose in their methodical constructions. They have made us blind to the very nature of the world that surrounds us. According to Husserl, the crisis of sciences and, within it, the crisis of reason originate in this structural oversight of the reality of the life-world.
23.2. The life-world as a perceived, intuited world A new philosophy of the life-world may now appear as an alternative to the naturalistic stance taken by modern sciences and modern philosophy. Nevertheless, the life-world can’t be the theme of any particular scientifc research project. It has to be the specifc theme of a phenomenological research unveiling the universal a priori structures of transcendental subjectivity. Among these structures, the perception is of some signifcance. Life-world is “the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception” (Husserl 1970, §9, 49). The pre-scientifc life-world, as manifested in our according intuitive acceptance, is a world of perceived bodies and a world in which I live as a living body. Husserl points out that, from the perspective of the knowledge theory, the life-world is given “in everyday sense-experience” (Husserl 1970, §9, 23). More specifcally, it is the “everyday surrounding world” (Husserl 1970, §28, 104), the 273
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“world of sense-intuition” (Husserl 1970, §28, 106). Husserl borrows from the philosophical trend of the Lebensphilosophie the opposition between concepts and intuitions. The life-world is, in principle, completely intuitive and intuitable. In contrast, the logical substructions and the mathematical idealizations are “nonintuitable” (Husserl 1970, §34, 127). The cardinal role of the perception must be stressed, as the perception, according to Husserl,“is the primal mode of intuition (Anschauung); it exhibits with primal originality, that is, in the mode of self-presence” (Husserl 1970, §28, 105). Thus, the experience of the life-world is immediate and vivid. That is the reason why the life-world, says Husserl, is lived “in the plain certainty of experience, before anything that is established scientifcally, whether in physiology, psychology, or sociology” (Husserl 1970, §28, 105).As Husserl puts it in the §34 of the Crisis,“the life-world is a realm of original self-evidences” (ein Reich ursprunglicher Evidenzen) (Husserl 1970, §34, 127). The “selfevidence” refers here to the presence of the thing in itself, in a fulflled intuition experienced in the accomplishing life of the subject.The recognition of the validity of these self-evidences plays a critical role in the identifcation of the hidden sources of the self-evidences of objectivelogical accomplishments. In a way, this “self-evidence” of the life-world is so strong that it remains in the natural attitude as a presupposition immediately accepted by everyone.The lifeworld encompasses all that is “taken for granted” (selbstverständlich).Therefore, Husserl points out that the life-world is characterized, as a whole, by “the naïve obviousness of the certainty of the world (die naive Selbstverständlichkeit der Weltgewiβheit), the certainty in which we live” (Husserl 1970, §25, 96). The life-world is primarily a perceived world, which means that I am an integral part of it as a perceiving subject and as a living body. Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty after him, have focused on the specifc role of the body in our constitution of the life-world. Our only way of perceiving the world around us is through our fve senses and through the various positions and moves of our body.The kinesthesis of the living body anticipate and open constantly new possibilities of perception. Against the familiar dualistic conception body–soul, the body is not a tool or a complex of organs. On the contrary, the living body is the very origin of my experience of the surrounding world. In the common experience of the life-world, the “soul” or consciousness cannot be separated from the body: I have a pre-objective consciousness of my living body. Furthermore, I have a pre-objective consciousness of intersubjectivity, as I perceive immediately the other bodies as living bodies and as subjects.
23.3. The life-world as the world of everyday life Husserl points out that the life-world is to be understood as the world of everyday life. As such, the life-world is once again distinguished from the objectivism of modern sciences. The objective and naturalized world of science obscures its own origin in the life-world.Thus, the everyday life may seem devoid of any relevance from the scientifc perspective.The life-world is, however, immediately and directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life, i.e., life lived day after day and day by day. More specifcally, the everyday life refers to the practical world familiar to us. Husserl explains that the life-world is the world constituted in which we feel “at home”.The everyday life is not only the result of repetition but the world that is typically familiar or normal.We constantly rely on it for the effcacy of ordinary actions.The life-world has a specifc cognitive style, as it is familiar to us through types and habits.The genesis of this familiarity may be explained by a genetic phenomenology that will unveil the signifcance of the unthematic reserve of our potential experiences. Indeed, what is familiar to us relies on the surreptitious work of passive synthesis, associations, and habituations. But, the phenomenological theory of the life-world takes into consideration the familiarity that life already has with 274
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itself.Therefore, the familiarity of everyday life must be understood as the result of a constant style of a common, normal life. For this reason, the concept of life-world is not an empty abstraction but a general title for various contents. If the life-world is the world of everyday life, then it is made of various “objects:” living bodies, values, cultural objects, institutions. As Husserl explains in the Crisis, “the world of life […] takes up into itself all practical structures (even those of the objective sciences as cultural facts, though we refrain from taking part in their interests)” (Husserl 1970, §51, 173). The everyday praxis belongs to life in the life-world. For this reason, the life-world constitutes a sphere of social and cultural practices. In its concrete manifestations, the life-world exists as a life-world. As Husserl argues: “the world of which I speak, the world of which the Chinese speaks, of which the Greek of Solon’s time, the Papuan speaks, is always a world having subjective validity” (Husserl 1970, Appendix III, 325).The life-world is the only real world for an individual person or for a community of persons and due to this relativity, the life-world exists in countless varieties.That is not to say that the phenomenology of the life-world would lead to a mere relativism. On the contrary, this theory overcomes this risk as the plurality of cultural worlds is built on a general common structure.
23.4. The life-world between subjectivity and intersubjectivity Even if the life-world always has social, historical, and cultural dimensions, its general meaning is valid for a specifc subject.The life-world has its own general structures but those structures are the universal a priori structures of transcendental subjectivity. In that sense, Husserl notes that “prescientifcally, in everyday sense-experience, the world is given in a subjectively relative way” (Husserl 1970, §9, 23). The life-world in the phenomenological sense is a universal basis for every mundane experience.We are fnally returning to our starting point: the life-world is the world of a life that is not transindividual but refers to the life of a subject and to the potential life of all subjects.This is precisely what the objectivism of modern sciences had made us forgotten. The world that surrounds us is not a world of physical laws, causalities, and natural objects. It is only valid for a subject and it remains tied to subjectivity. The modern scientifc objectivism cannot escape the universal correlation between objectivity and subjectivity. In the famous Appendix IV of the Crisis, Husserl reasserts: the world is never given to the subject and the communities of subjects in any other way than as the subjectively relative valid world with particular experiential content and as a world which, in and through subjectivity, takes on ever new transformations of meaning. (Husserl 1970,Appendix IV, 337) Against the scientifc view of an objective world without any perspective, Husserl rehabilitates the life-world as a subject-relative horizon.That is not to say that the life-world is nothing but a private and solipsistic world, or a world valid only for me. On the contrary, the life-world in the phenomenological sense is a world “for us all”.The structures of transcendental subjectivity are both individual and universal. Intersubjectivity, understood in a broad sense as an open and plural community of subjectivities, is not derived from transcendental subjectivity but directly implied by it.The phenomenological investigation of my own life-world will apply to all individual subjects alike. There is a universal sense of the world and this does not mean that the world is the same for all of us.The life-world is defnitely a pluralized, diversifed world and a world for us all, where we have to live together. In this sense, the phenomenological theory of 275
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the life-world offers an ethical dimension and the objective of Husserl’s late philosophy is to remind us that we are sharing a world pregiven to us.
23.5. Ontological and transcendental approaches to the life-world Conducting the project of a new phenomenological science of the life-world, Husserl has distinguished two main tasks (Husserl 1970, §§37, 38, 51): one of an ontological description of the life-world and one of a transcendental clarifcation. The life-world ontology is a phenomenological investigation of the main structures of the life-world, structures that are common to the world thematized by modern sciences and to the pre-scientifc world of everyday life. Disclosing the invariant structures of the life-world, this phenomenological and eidetic ontology reveals the “universal life-world a priori” (Husserl 1970, §36, 140). In methodological terms, the life-world ontology relies on a regressive analysis and is carried out “without any transcendental interest, that is, within the ‘natural attitude’ (in the language of transcendental philosophy the naive attitude, prior to the epoché)” (Husserl 1970, §51, 173).The various aspects of the life-world that we have identifed until now are relevant under this heading. In a certain way, the Husserlian posterity has explored the multiple potentialities of this task of an ontological description of the main structures of the life-world. At this point, it must be stressed that Husserl has also conceived the task of a transcendental phenomenology of the life-world. Whereas the ontology treated the life-world as a synthetic totality, the life-world is now understood as a set of constitutive conditions of experience.This treatment of the life-world does not refer back to the natural attitude. It has to be analyzed from a transcendental interest. One the one hand, the life-world may be regarded as the horizon of experience. As such, the life-world is the general condition for the appearance of objects but it won’t appear as an object.The concept of horizon names this signifcant paradox:“The world is pregiven to us […] not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal feld of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon” (Husserl 1970, §37, 142). On the other hand, the life-world has the transcendental character of a “ground”, i.e., a pregivenness of the validity of the world constitutive of experience. Husserl points out that “the pregiven world is still valid as a ground” (Husserl 1970, §38, 147). The life-world, correctly understood by the transcendental clarifcation, appears as a primordial “ground”, as what is always pregiven to the subjective constitution.
23.6. Beyond Husserl Husserl’s theory of the life-world was clearly infuenced by Heidegger’s analysis of the Being-inthe-world (In-der-Welt-Sein) in the frst division of Being and Time (Heidegger 1962).According to Heidegger, the Dasein is immersed in a world that is already there, and the Dasein exists not as a thing among things but literally as a “Being-there”. We are “thrown” into the world and this “thrownness” has remained unnoticed by metaphysics. Heidegger described then the mode of Dasein’s everydayness (Alltäglichkeit) grounded in a pragmatic and largely inarticulate understanding of things.We use things as “ready-to-hand” tools within the projects we are planning. For this reason, our relation to the world has to be characterized as a “concern”.This description of the Being-in-the-world was a phenomenological challenge that Husserl took up in his own theory of the life-world. After Husserl, the phenomenological thematization of the life-world was further developed by Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty sees “the ‘natürlicher Weltbegriff ’ or the ‘Lebenswelt’” as “the central theme of phenomenology” (Merleau-Ponty 1962,VIII). Giving up the Husserlian,
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transcendental approach to the life-world, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis has famously focused on the role of perception understood as the origin of the world. The concept of life-world also has a cardinal role in the philosophy of Alfred Schutz. His phenomenological analysis of the “structures of the life-world” opens toward an action-oriented perspective (Schutz and Luckmann, 1974). Based on a refective analysis of the natural attitude, his description of the main structures of the life-world has stressed the importance of the paramount reality of everyday life.
References Avenarius, Richard. 1890. Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. Leipzig: Reisland. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1977. Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925.Trans. J. Scanlon. Den Haag: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1982. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology.Trans. F. Kersten.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1989. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2006. Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures,Winter Semester, 1910–1911.Trans. I. Farin and J. G. Hart. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception.Trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Schutz,Alfred and Luckmann,Thomas. 1974. The Structures of the Life-World.Trans. R. M. Zanner and H.T. Engelhardt. London: Heinemann.
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24 MATHEMATICS Vincent Gérard
In his presentation of Dietrich Mahnke and Oskar Becker’s correspondence, Paulo Mancosu expressed his disappointment by saying that “the relationship between phenomenology and exact sciences in the 1920s is still an unexplored area.”1 The purpose of this paper is to offer an overview of phenomenological refections on the foundations of formal mathematics during the 1920s, and of the philosophical discussions these refections triggered. Among the main protagonists of these discussions, some were mathematicians that were interested in phenomenology such as Hermann Weyl. Some were philosophers, former students of Husserl, either in Göttingen, such as Dietrich Mahnke, or in Freiburg, such as Oskar Becker. Finally, others were philosophers, who, without having been, strictly speaking, ‘students’ of Husserl in the academic sense of the word, did nevertheless play the part of intermediaries between the “phenomenological movement” and other philosophical schools, such as Felix Kaufman with the Vienna Circle at the beginning of the 1930s. It is these philosophers interested in mathematics that will be the object of this paper, as well as what Husserl at the time still called their “σvμφιλοσοφειν”, although the time of disillusionment and of the “great disappointment”2 was getting near.
24.1 Husserl: formal mathematics and material mathematics (1927) This overview of the structure of the mathematical feld as it was conceived by Husserl will focus on the Natur und Geist course during the 1927 summer semester, which allows a comprehensive view of what mathematics is in its unity and its difference, based on a refection on the classifcation of sciences, in particular on their classifcation according to formal criteria resulting from the characterization of the very idea of science;3 because mathematics is a “science in the pervading sense of the word” [Wissenschaft im prägnanten Sinne], a science that is itself made of a number of mathematical disciplines that are all interconnected to a certain extent. For instance, plane geometry and 3-D geometry are interconnected, as are also, on the margins of the mathematical feld, optics and electric theory. But geometry and pure Analysis can also be brought together from a further unifying perspective. Husserl’s method here is very different from the one used at the same time by his student Oskar Becker (see the fourth part of this chapter), because Husserl considers that there is no point in thinking about mathematics exclusively as a “historical tradition” [historische 278
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Überlieferung], in remaining bound by the contingency of facticity, and in doing no more than bringing together what already exists: A philosophical classifcation should be a classifcation of actual and conceivable sciences in general, which implies that it has to follow the pure Idea of science—and to overlook its facticity—or in other words to follow the pure and unconditionally universal sense of a science as such in general, and it must be characterized by an apodictic necessity based on the latter.4 Becker’s method is very different. His ontological refections on the being-sense of the mathematical objects are not eidetic, and do not aim to be: For we will try to elucidate—while also interpreting it—the meaning of some mathematical phenomena (that have happened in the history of mathematics). However, we will not ask ourselves if, in addition to of the factual development [neben dem faktischen Verlauf] of the history of ideas, other “pure possibilities” [reine Möglichkeiten] might have happened otherwise.5 This chapter will not analyze the consequences of this rejection of eidetics on the classifcation of mathematical sciences, and on the confguration of the feld itself.6 Mathematics, as Husserl conceives it, is an a priori science (or a science of essences), not an empirical science; for mathematical propositions are not about either facts or factual beings. They do not even teach us anything about facticities [Faktizitäten], about temporal existence. Mathematical propositions are about pure possibilities [reine Möglichkeiten], or about ideal objects around which pure possibilities are organized. Mathematics is thus an a priori science, because it constitutes an a priori system of a priori propositions or judgments (geometrical judgments on ideal fgures, arithmetical judgments on numbers as ideal objects) which, given their inner rational, have to be true judgments, have to be truths—and namely mathematical truths, and thus have to be a priori. But a priori sciences can be formal (analytical), if their judgments and concepts leave the concrete specifcity of their objects in total indetermination, or material (synthetic), if these judgments and concepts include in their conceptual content this concrete specifcity. Concepts such as human beings, stones, pictures, etc. have a material content, but if we are concerned about object, propriety, state of affairs, relation, totality, similarity, identity, difference, etc. we are dealing with formal and empty concepts. Judgments that only include empty, formal concepts—and contain no concepts that have any concrete specifcity—are called “logico-formal judgments” by Husserl: these judgments constitute a universal a priori science that is related, in an empty generality, to objectivity in general and to its derived forms. Hence the distinction, within a priori sciences, between mathematical and purely logical disciplines that are united under the umbrella of a general logic, or a mathesis universalis, and that a priori sciences that have a material content, such as geometry, the pure doctrine of time, a priori mechanics etc.—a distinction that Husserl sees as being “of the utmost importance.”7 Sciences are furthermore to be divided into abstract sciences and concrete sciences, depending on whether they focus upon a group of concrete individuals, or even a single determined individual taken in its full concreteness, or whether they limit themselves to specifc, non-autonomous moments of entire objects and of their concrete essentiality. Zoology and botany are concrete sciences, and so is natural science as far as it is concerned with concrete nature in its totality. Rational mechanics is an abstract science that is relatively autonomous within natural sciences, because 279
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it considers bodies as mere substrates for movements and for driving forces. However, universal physics could itself be seen as abstract, if it turned out that material nature is nothing more than a non-autonomous structure of the fully concrete world. The opposition between abstract and concrete reveals itself here as relative, without this implying anything ambiguous at all regarding the meaning of these concepts.Taken at a general enough level, geometry as the science of space and of spatial fgures is abstract, relative to the concrete feld of the objects from which its concepts were abstracted, but it is concrete with regards to the theory of conic sections. However, the distinction between what is abstract and what is concrete, and the use that can be made of this distinction as a tool of universal classifcation (all sciences are either concrete or abstract) poses problems for mathematics, as the concepts of the abstract and the concrete are not unequivocal with regards to a priori material sciences and a priori formal sciences. In order to retain the universal value of this distinction, a terminological clarifcation is required—one that will allow us to understand why some mathematical disciplines that are neither abstract nor concrete can be said to be “abstract” in an improper sense of the word.To be sure, every concrete object possesses its own complete essentiality, and as a component of the concreteness, it possesses its own parts and its own moments (length, extension, form, situation, sensory qualities, physical properties, etc.) with their different levels of generality. With this division, we remain in the sphere of material content, which is actually in conformity with the distinction between abstract and concrete. Nevertheless, every object in general, because it is something, also possesses its empty form: it is, for instance, the totality of its parts.The empty form of the totality, with all the variety of relations that relate to it, is reached through the process of “abstraction” of all its material content, in other words through formalization. It is thus only in an improper way, and in order to follow common usage, as Husserl had already highlighted in Ideas 1, that it can be said about the disciplines of the mathesis universalis that they are abstract: Similarly, universal analytics (mathesis universalis) is categorized amongst abstract sciences, while strictly speaking, as a science of what is formal in every object (and also in every proposition, in every truth, in every science) it is above all sciences, and should not fnd itself caught in the opposition of the abstract and the concrete.8 Phenomenology, with regards to its methodology, is undoubtedly closer to the intuitive approach of geometry as it operates with ideal fgures, than to the formal deductions of mathematicians who proceed axiomatically, because phenomenology belongs to the family of material eidetic sciences;9 hence the signifcance of Becker’s contribution toward the phenomenological foundation of geometry and its physical applications, beyond even what it brings from the strict point of view of a theory of geometrical knowledge.10 Dietrich Mahnke believed, however, that, in contrast to numerous modern philosophies of life and of intuition that rightfully arise suspicions of lack of scientifcity amongst mathematicians and scientists used to logical rigor, it is essential for phenomenology to recognize the fundamental value of formal mathematics as “the ideal storeroom of the forms of theories of all exact sciences.”11 Hence the decisive importance of a phenomenological elucidation of formal mathematics, whose historical source lies in Leibniz, and that Hilbert had just brought to its fullest and most complete expression in the developments of his proof theory at the beginning of the 1920s.
24.2. Hilbert and the axiomatic method (1922) We will now consider Hilbert’s axiomatic method as it was presented at the Copenhagen and Hamburg 1921 conferences that were published in 1922 under the title Neubegründung der 280
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Mathematik;12 for, as it was noted by Dietrich Mahnke, it is in this presentation that Hilbert is the closest to Husserl’s account of the phenomenological foundation of formal mathematics, which constitutes a good omen about the accuracy of results reached by means of very different considerations.13 Each area of formal mathematics—whether it is arithmetic or a non-Euclidean geometry, the logical structure of Euclidean geometry or an aspect of theoretical physics—is defned as a multiplicity of “things” [Dinge], of which we can have no intuition, of which we know nothing besides the fact they have a certain number of purely conceptual relations, described by a fnite number of axioms: axioms of connection, of order, of continuity, etc. Such a multiplicity “exists” (in the mathematical rather than the physical sense of the word) when its axioms are mutually compatible, in other words when it is not possible to derive from some axioms a proposition that would contradict another axiom of the same system, or one of its consequences, via a fnite series of inferences. Hence, it follows that one of the main tasks of the axiomatic method is to give out “proofs of existence” by establishing that a given axiomatic system is non-contradictory. As far as Euclidean geometries, non-Euclidean geometries and physics are concerned, these proofs are achieved by reducing them to areas of mathematical Analysis that are “formally equivalent” or “logically isomorphic” within each system. In other words, the constitutive elements of each follow the same axioms when they are considered in their purely logical and conceptual form, without taking into account their intuitive content.Thus, for example, in the Grundlagen der Geometrie,14 Hilbert had solved the problem of the non-contradiction of axioms in plane Euclidean geometry, indirectly and relatively, by reducing it to the problem of the non-contradiction of the axioms that defne the set of real numbers as a maximal Archimedean ordered feld.This reduction was made possible by the Cartesian co-ordinates method, through which each point on a plane equipped with a Cartesian coordinate system can be associated objectively with a pair of real numbers.The same can be said about proofs of consistency of axioms in thermodynamics, in the theory of radiation or in other physical disciplines,15 which can be reduced to the question of consistency of axioms in Analysis. The direct proof of consistency of the axiomatic system of Analysis, or even of arithmetic or of set theory represented, at the beginning of the 1920s, an unsolved problem that some saw as unsolvable. For instance, Alessandro Padoa had declared about Hilbert’s second problem that it was no more than a “conversation that should be done away with” [une causerie qui se pouvait supprimer].16 Hilbert should refrain from all attempts to use methods used in irrational number theory on the problem of direct proof of the non-contradiction of axioms in arithmetic because of a constitutive dissymmetry.While contradictions or dependences between propositions can only be proved by “deductive arguments” (or in other words “syntactically”), the non-contradictions or independences between propositions can only be proved by “observations” (or in other words “semantically”):“It can be observed,” wrote Padoa,“that each chosen interpretation can or cannot verify the specifed.”17 Hilbert had long been convinced that a “simultaneous construction” [simultaner Aufbau] of arithmetic and formal logic was a necessity, since paradoxes relating to the use of arithmetical notions (concept of number, of set …), when explaining logical laws that were expected to serve as a foundation to arithmetic itself, needed to be avoided.18 This vicious circle was not only to be seen in logical principles as they were customarily presented, according to Poincaré; it could also be found in Russell’s logic, which referred to the notion of sets (although he used the word “classes” and considered this notion as a logical one).19 But in this second stage of the theory, the requirement to construct arithmetic and formal logic simultaneously means more. It means that “a strict formalization of the entire mathematical theory, inclusive of its proofs, so that— following the example of logical calculus—the mathematical inferences and conceptualizations 281
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[Begriffsbildungen] become a formal part of the edifce of mathematics”20 should be carried out. Or, in other words, that mathematics, when rigorously formalized, turns into a “stock of formulae” that can be proved by using, on top of the usual mathematical signs, a number of logical signs (the implication that is written→, the universal quantifer, written () with a variable inside these brackets, and later the negation, written¬ which Hilbert thought at the time he could do without). As far as the consistency of elementary arithmetic is concerned, Hilbert shows that it can be developed on the intuitive basis of concrete signs. He starts by introducing a number of signs (numbers) that constitute the very objects of mathematics, but that do not mean anything: 1, 1 + 1, 1 + 1+ 1, etc.: “These number-signs, which are numbers and completely make up the numbers, are themselves the object of our consideration, but otherwise they have no meaning of any sort.”21 Besides these number-signs, Hilbert introduces a number of signs that have a meaning and that we use to communicate.The signs 2 and 3 are the abridged written forms of 1 + 1 and 1 + 1 + 1 (they are signs of signs, signs that refer to other signs); the signs = and > are used to communicate statements.The series of signs 3 > 2 is not an arithmetic formula,22 but it is only used to communicate the fact that the number 3, the abbreviation of 1 + 1 + 1, is greater than the number 2, the abbreviation of 1 + 1, or in other words that the latter is part of the former. Similarly, the series of signs a + b = b + a is not a formula (in the strict meaning of the word according to formal mathematics), but only the communication of the fact that the sign a + b is the same as the sign b + a. It is possible, says Hilbert to “discern [einsehen] the correctness of the semantic content [das inhaltliche Zutreffen] of this communication.”23 It can indeed be supposed that b > a, or in other words that the number-sign b is greater than the number-sign a; and be written that b = a + c, where c is a sign used to communicate a number-sign. What remains to prove is thus that a + a + c = a + c + a, or in other words that the two number-signs on each side of the equals sign are the same, which is the case if a + c = c + a.Yet this expression is reached from the preceding one by having at least one 1 disappear through a procedure of dissociation of a, and this procedure of dissociation can be continued until the summands agree with each other; because each number a is by defnition composed by assembling signs 1 and +. It can similarly be decomposed by a procedure of dissociation of the signs that compose it. Arithmetic, when it is thus practiced, does not include axioms and cannot lead to a contradiction. It is made of concrete signs on which operations are performed and about which contentual statements are formulated. However, the whole of Analysis cannot be founded this way, because this intuitive contentual procedure does not allow the formulation of statements about an infnity of numbers or of functions: for when an infnity of numbers is concerned, neither all the relevant number-signs can be written down nor all the required abbreviations can be introduced. In the end we face the incoherencies that Frege highlighted in his attack on the established defnitions of irrational numbers.24 This is why Hilbert moves to a higher level, where axioms, formulae, and proofs of mathematical theory are themselves taken as the objects of a contentual investigation. To achieve this, the contentual arguments that are often used in mathematical theories frst have to be replaced by formulae and rules; in other words, they have to be reproduced by formal structures. Hence the “strict formalization” that we mentioned earlier, which gives all its meaning to the requirement of simultaneous construction of arithmetic and formal logic. The axioms (a = a, 1 + (a + 1) = (1 + a) + 1, etc.), formulae and proofs that thus constitute the formal structure of mathematics are exactly what the number-signs were empty of any sense in the former construction of elementary arithmetic; and they now become, just as was the case for the arithmetical signs, the theme of contentual arguments or, in other words, of proper thoughts. Hence the strict distinction between the level of formal arguments and formulae and that of 282
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contentual arguments. The ultimate foundation of mathematics is thus reached, according to Hilbert, through a critique of proof, analogous to the critique of reason: “Just as the physicist examines his apparatus, the astronomer his position, just as the philosopher engages in critique of reason, so the mathematician needs his proof theory, to secure each mathematical theorem by proof critique.”25 Husserl’s analysis had taught us that mathematics is not a science of facts, and that it even tells us nothing about facts: how is it, then, that the signs that Hilbert introduces into elementary arithmetic to produce contentual arguments regarding simple numerals do evoke facts? How can we understand for instance that they are used to communicate “the fact that 2 + 3 and 3 + 2 are the same number-sign” [die Tatsache dass 2 + 3 und 3 + 2 dasselbe Zahlzeichen sind], or “the fact that the sign 3 extends beyond the sign 2” [die Tatsache dass das Zeichen 3 über das Zeichen 2 hinausgeht]? It is worth mentioning here that the challenge is not only a verbal one, as the “facts” that are communicated through arithmetical arguments are not, according to Husserl, facts, but a state of affairs. In other words, they are objects of higher order that bear the mark of predication, and the “fact” that the sign b is greater than the sign a, because the later contains at least one extra 1 than the former in the way they are written, is not a simple “fact” that (once a and b are high enough) can be apprehended via a sensory perception, just as we cannot perceive that the earth is larger than the moon. Such issues lead, however, to a debate about the status of “things” and of signs. In Dietrich Mahnke’s words, they challenge the philosopher to further the work.
24.3. Dietrich Mahnke and the phenomenological elucidation of the axiomatic method (1923) In his article “From Husserl to Hilbert” (1923), whose purpose is to introduce readers with a science background to phenomenology and to its method, starting with the example of the phenomenological analysis of axiomatized arithmetic, Mahnke endeavors to elucidate, from the point of view of the theory of knowledge, the meaning of the axiomatic method and of its objects. What, for instance, are these “things” that Hilbert refers to? Naturally, they are not physical realities, nor are they ideal concepts as those of intuitive geometry. They are rather “mere conceptual skeletons without the covering of sensory material”;26 they are forms of things comparable to variable functions with empty positions f(*), forms that are introduced by Hilbert along with individual signs to constitute the formal structure of mathematics.These simple supports for relations can be compared to the “purely grammatical categories” such as unity and plurality, the whole and the part, the subject and the predicate, that Husserl refers to in his Logical Investigations. For, just as in the formula “S is p,” S and p can be replaced by any terms, with the frst term as a subject and the second as a predicate; similarly, very different things in terms of their content can be introduced within the propositions of formal arithmetic, as long as in their mutual relations, they validate the laws of commutativity, of associativity, etc., such as segments, times, energy, frequencies, etc. The system of formal arithmetic is thus not a specifc scientifc discipline, but merely the logical form of theories that is used as a “common deductive scaffolding” in all “logically isomorphic” or “formally equivalent” disciplines. The whole of formal mathematics collaborates, according to Husserl, with pure logic as a theory of all nomological theories, insofar as it works out the form of the essential types of possible theories or felds of theory, and investigates their legal relations with one another.All actual theories are then specializations or singularizations of corresponding forms of theory, just as all theoretically worked-over felds of knowledge are individual manifolds.27 283
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The constitution of a theory of the forms of possible theories is not only of the highest importance on a theoretical level, but also on a practical one, as the possibility to classify a theory within its formal class can be very useful on a methodological level. It then thus becomes possible to solve some problems that arise within the framework of a theoretical discipline, or of one of its theories, by a recourse to the categorial type, or to the form of the theory, or even by going over to a more comprehensive form or class of forms, and to its laws. Examples of this could be the theory of n-dimensional manifolds, which arises from generalization of geometric theory, Lie’s theory of transformation-groups, etc. This elucidation of the nature of “things” in axiomatic mathematics shows that it is a philosophical error to state that intuitive numerical signs are the true objects of arithmetic; however, Mahnke asserts that this erroneous statement contains a “deep truth”28 that phenomenology can help to elucidate.What leads Hilbert to this statement is that he considers that simple arithmetic formulae are not enough to prove the consistency of arithmetic, and that intuitive operations such as composition and decomposition of signs, and contentual inferences, are necessary. From that perspective, mathematics, just like metaphysics, does not accept “purely conceptual proofs of existence,” even if the concept of existence is not univocal with regards to mathematics and metaphysics. On this point, Hilbert agrees with Husserl’s fundamental idea that ultimately all scientifc statements can only be justifed by being referred to an adequate intuition, in which the object of knowledge is given just as it is reached for. Husserl, however, draws a distinction between the objects that are given in a sensory intuition and those that can only be given through evidence in a rational act of a different kind, in a categorial intuition: The “a” and the “the”, the “and” and the “or”, the “if ” and the “then”, the “all” and the “none”, the “something” and the “nothing”, the forms of quantity and the determinations of number, etc.—all these are meaningful propositional elements, but we should look in vain for their objective correlates in the sphere of real objects, which is in fact no other than the sphere of objects of possible sense-perception.29 But on the basis of this sensory perceptions, higher rational acts are built: colligation, counting for instance; and it is precisely in these logical experiences, which are nevertheless founded on sensuous experiences, that collectiva and numbers are given. In other words, what we think when we use the words “and” or “or” is flled by the corresponding categorial intuition. Hilbert is thus right to say that the foundation of mathematics requires “extra-logical discrete objects”30 to be given beforehand. Hilbert also agrees with Leibniz when he chooses to use as extra-logical discrete objects not natural things, but artifcially created numerical signs; like all good mathematical symbols or characters, these signs “express” the purely arithmetical relations that exist between countable things, such as order and connection, without having to bring into play material determinations foreign to the question: “There is in the characters,” wrote Leibniz in his Dialogus de connexione inter res et verba, “some relation, some arrangement that is the same that the one that exists between the things, especially if these characters are well imagined.”31 Similarly, in geometry, characters have to be substituted to geometric shapes, as stated in the fragments of the 1679 Geometric Characteristic to which Mahnke refers here,32 because shapes are far too often too intertwined and confusing for those who look at them.Yet, Descartes’ analytical geometry cannot totally be freed of shapes, because it only shows relations of magnitude in its calculations, thus assuming that the relations of situation are known from the observation of shapes; hence, the project of a geometric characteristic that would rely exclusively on the use of characters 284
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that would also convey the situation, or in other words the relation the geometric shapes have with each other. Following up from these comments, Mahnke will write in his thesis on Leibniz: Leibniz’ point of view is in total agreement with Hilbert’s current perspective as in his latest texts he undertakes (against former attempts of a purely logico-formal foundation of mathematics, but also against Brouwer’s and Weyl’s “intuitionistic” attempts to only tolerate mathematical concepts that can be constructed intuitively in a determinate number of stages) a new grounding of the whole of mathematics up until to his works, which holds on to the formalizing and axiomatizing method but which, in order to produce a proof of existence, also and essentially mobilizes intuitive operations with extra-logical and intuitively given signs of numbers and of formulae.33 But Hilbert is wrong to deduce from this that “these signs are themselves the objects of arithmetic,” and that they have no other meaning, because the sign 1 + 1 has a meaning, just as much as the abbreviated sign 2, which according to Hilbert has a meaning:“It is the sensible representation (Versinnlichung) of a purely logical relation: the collective combination.”34 The true objects of arithmetic are precisely these logical relations, and the true value of numerical signs lies in the fact that they are the more appropriate sensory foundations for categorial intuitions of numbers. Hilbert himself recognizes indirectly that the signs of formulae also have a meaning as he accepts that next to the “formal inferences” of mathematics in the narrow sense of the word, and so that he can prove its consistency, there are also “inferences that have a semantic content” belonging to metamathematics. Mahnke, however, notices that the distinction between simple symbols and signifcations in the strict sense of the world intersects another one: the distinction between ideal object and real acts of mathematical thought. The sign → means there exists a relation involving two propositions, but there is necessarily a match between the perceptible sign, as well as the logical consequence it expresses, and the act of the mind that aims at the objective state of affairs, or in a signitive way on the basis of a subjective perception of a sign, or on the basis of a categorial intuition in which the intended object is self-given. Just as it is shown by Husserl in §14 of the Sixth Logical Investigation, a “signitive intention” always has an “intuitive support” [intuitiver Anhalt]—in this case the sensuous side of the expression—but for all that, it still does not have an “intuitive content” [intuitiver Inhalt]. It still needs to be articulated to an intuitive act, while both remain specifcally different.35 In this correlation between rational objects and objectifying rational acts, between the noema and the noesis, it is noematics which, according to Mahnke, fnds its foundation in noetics. Is it possible, however, to deduce the objective existence of the set of numbers, as Hilbert suggests, from a study of human, subjective inference procedures? Are things in conformity with our thought process? Mahnke answers positively, because the “things” of formal logic and mathematics are mere “categorial forms of things” that cannot be found in the sensory material, but are only constituted within form-giving, rational acts. In this operation, the sensory contents of things remain unchanged, and the same goes for their fgural qualities:“Categorial forms do not glue, tie or put parts together, so that a real, sensuously perceivable whole emerges.They do not form in the sense in which the potter forms.”36 This is why the course of the world can neither contradict nor confrm ideal laws of formal logic and mathematics:“Laws which refer no fact,” writes Husserl in §65 of the Sixth Logical Research,“cannot be confrmed or refuted by a fact.”37 Categorial forms blend into the essence of reason, which gives form. Is it possible, in these conditions, to grant to procedures of logical inference a general logical meaning rather than just a simple individual, psychological meaning? Once more, Mahnke answers positively, because the fact that these founded acts “inform” the sensual object, which is conse285
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quently constituted as a modifed objectivity, does not mean in any way that these actions falsify the reality into a phenomenal world that would only have a psychological, individual validity, or at the most a typically human one. Categorial forms do not change reality; which does not mean, however, that they only have a personal and limited value, or that they only have a value for human souls for instance.They have a value for any mind that possesses reason in general, or in other words that does not just have moments of sensory experiences, but that is also able to grasp a scientifc truth, i.e. to grasp an objectivity that is formed by categorial functions: The truly “objective” noematic laws of form, those which alone give rise to objectivity, are grounded not in empirical-psychological laws of fact which have subjective validity, or at best anthropological validity, but rather in phenomenological-noetic laws of essence which have objective universal validity.38 The noeses of reason, in general, are not real lived experiences of an individual psyche, but they “reside” in these lived experiences more or less like geometrical circles “reside” in physical ones. The noesis is, relative to the mental experience, what the noema is to the physical “thing” and the idea to reality. Mahnke rediscovers here the idea that had been developed by Natorp, and that he believed he could trace to Heraclites,39 according to which all individual psyche, all “animate monad” could perceive in its own innermost depth the eternal “Logos” common to all; it is in this context that Natorp quoted Schiller’s line:“Es ist nicht draussen, da sucht es der Thor; Es ist in dir, du bringst es ewig hervor.”40 Hence the criticism of what we could call the “Heideggerian point of view”41 in the philosophy of mathematics, which only recognizes as “existing” those objects that are accessible to a human consciousness.42 This will be precisely the point of view of Becker, who will try to promote an “anthropological” conception of knowledge against the “absolute” one, in full awareness of Husserl’s former criticisms of logical anthropologism, and hoping nevertheless to give an deeper ontological meaning to Husserl’s doctrine of categorial intuition.
24.4. Oskar Becker and the criticism of Hilbert’s axiomatic formalism (1927) In the sixth and fnal section of Mathematische Existenz, Becker offers an “hermeneutical analysis of demonstrative mathematics and deductive mathematics.”43 To what extent, asks Becker, is the existence of mathematical objects expressed as a particular guise of the care [Sorge] and of signifcance [Bedeutsamkeit]? How should we understand the opposition between formalism and intuitionism, between mathematical existence understood as a non-contradiction and mathematical existence understood as constructability? Which guise of the care of signifcance is hidden behind this opposition? The history of mathematics teaches us that demonstrative (intuitive) mathematics is, in all respects, the most original. Strictly speaking, purely deductive mathematics was only established at the end of the nineteenth century (around 1870), even if it was anticipated in various of its former branches (since Leibniz).Thus, Becker sees it as a “late bloom,” a “degenerated form.” The non-contradiction requirement has, according to Becker, a very specifc meaning. It is the condition that allows the indefnite extension of a purely formal deduction. It articulates “the care to extend the formal deduction itself indefnitely”, Becker 1927, 629. in other words, “the care to preserve the guise of care that exists specifcally within academics whose feld is formal mathematics.”The deductive mission [Betrieb der Deduktion] has to be guaranteed, whatever, on the other hand, the things or problems in question or that could be in question. Reassigning the sense of mathematical existence to the non-contradiction of the “existing” formation means 286
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ignoring the sense of being of the formation. It implies a deliberate hindrance to any questioning of the mode of being of the formations. Formal mathematics thus somehow represents the triumph of the “aphaeretic tendency” [aphairetische Tendenz] that Becker believes he can discern in the history of mathematics: “The expression ‘signs that signify nothing’ [Zeichen, die nichts bedeuten] used by Hilbert (for the archobjects [Urgegenstände] of mathematics) is not correct, even if, in all appearances, it targets, albeit confusedly, something that is right.”44 For, undoubtedly, mathematical objects are in no way given “in a signitive manner” (in an empty intention), for they are given in a categorial intention. But this also implies that the tension between the empty intended object [Leerintendiertem] and what flls it [Erfüllendem] between the sign [signum] and the meaning [signifcatum] disappears. Signs that signify nothing are precisely signs that are freed from indicative function; in other words, signs that are not signs at all. Hilbert’s incorrect expression nevertheless contains something correct, because it allows us to get rid of the idea that, because of the noetic–noematic parallelism, mathematical objects (the contents) and the intentionalities that aim at them (the relations) allegedly belong to the same ontological level.Yet this is not the case, for just as the being-a-sign is created in the indicative relations, the “archontic” sign of the relations (or the ontic accent), in the global phenomenon of “the mathematical,” is to be found, so to say, on the relations themselves. The ontic priority belongs to the noesis, the noema being secondary to it, and it is exactly the reverse that happens in the case of the sensory perception, as shown for instance by Kant’s narrative of the “receptivity” of sensibility and the “spontaneity” of the understanding. Synthetic activity thus somehow “produces” mathematical objects of higher order.They are not “encountered” as ideal objects in the world of ideas. What is the consequence of this acknowledgment that the ontic weight of mathematical phenomena resides in the sense of the relation [Bezugssinn]? Becker notes that the relation [Bezug] as such is never ontically independent. What provides it with its facticity is always the completion [Vollzug] of mathematical synthesis (syntaxes).This simple observation has an astounding use within the ontological controversy between formalistic and intuitionistic defnitions of mathematical existence; for the ontic force of the mathematical has to reside in the completion of syntaxes, which have to be factual [faktisch] in the strict sense of the term, or in other words, which have to be effectively completed. However,“transfnite” syntaxes cannot be so. Hilbert’s transfnite axioms articulate the need for syntheses that are factually unattainable, such as Cantor’s continuum. Becker concludes from this that “phenomenological analysis as Hermeneutics of the Dasein settles the controversy about the defnition of mathematical existence in favor of intuitionism.”45 For the intuitionistic requirement according to which all existing mathematical objects should be able to be “presented” [dargestellt] in a construction that is both in concreto and de facto attainable (almost in the sense of the chemical “synthesis” (Darstellung) of a pure body) does not imply anything more than this postulate:“All mathematical objects should be able to be obtained via factually ineffectual synthesis”; which furthermore means that “authentic (existing) mathematical phenomena ‘are’ only to be found among factually attainable synthesis.” Mathematics thus acquires an anthropological foundation, but with this quasi-operative meaning of concepts, mathematical phenomenology reveals itself as compatible with a kind of “operationalism” as it was defned by Bridgman in the 1920s; and it is this double heritage, both operationalist and phenomenological, that is characteristic of Felix Kaufmann’s philosophy of mathematics.
24.5. Felix Kaufmann: phenomenology and logical empiricism (1930) Becker’s criticism fnds an interesting development in Felix Kaufmann’s Das Unendliche in der Mathematik und seine Ausschaltung, published in 1930.46 In its Chapter 2, “Symbolism and 287
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Axiomatics,” Kaufmann maintains a double thesis which seemingly contradicts Hilbert’s theory of proof, while he nevertheless considers this theory as the most important discovery in the research on the foundation of mathematics. According to Kaufmann, the concept of a “senseless sign” is a contradiction in terms, because the assertion according to which visual or sound phenomena are “signs” already contains the assertion that through these signs something can be understood, that through these signs the thought of others can be grasped; which corresponds with what Carnap calls the “expression relation” [Ausdrucksbeziehung],47 or, in other words, the relation that fnds itself at the foundation of the inference through which something psychic is deduced from a physical process. For instance, a physical movement expresses a state of the psyche. It is, however, not necessary that every single visual or sound phenomenon that is temporally or spatially independent has an independent sense. It is even possible that the sense does not increase until a series of psychic phenomena are somehow connected. It is not totally rigorous, in that case, to use the expression “dependent signs,” because there is no sign, in the proper sense of the word, until this relation happens, and thus to which the “meaning relation” happens.These should rather be described as “incomplete symbols,” an expression that has been accredited by Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica:“By ‘incomplete’ symbol we mean a symbol which is not supposed to have any meaning in isolation, but is only defned in certain contexts.”48 Thanks to its sense—in other words, thanks to its connection with thought, which is Kaufmann’s second thesis—a sign is indirectly connected to the thing that constitutes the object of thought. Consequently, it is essential that each sign should mean something; in other words, that it should precisely mean what constitutes the object of thought it expresses. This is what corresponds to what Carnap calls the “designation relation” (Zeichenbeziehung), in other words, the relation that “holds between those physical objects which ‘designate’ and that which they designate.”49 For instance, the written sign “Rome” designates the city of Rome.Yet, because any object of conceptual knowledge could, in principle, be designated in any arbitrary way, whatever the category it fts into, it belongs to “the converse domain of the designation relation.” These two points seem to contradict Hilbert’s theory of proof, whose fundamental idea, as we saw in the second section, was that “all the propositions that constitute mathematics are converted into formulae, so that mathematics proper becomes an inventory of formulae.These differ from the ordinary formulae of mathematics only in that, beside the ordinary signs, the logical signs → (implies), & (and), γ (or), (not), (x) (all), (Ex) (there exists) also occur in them.”50 Hence the “critical correction” [kritische Berechtigung] suggested by Kaufmann, which is not directed against the theory of proof as such, and about which Kaufman asserts, with a slight lack of caution, that its very important mathematical and epistemological scope “will become increasingly clear in years to come.”51 But against Hilbert’s and Bernays’ philosophical interpretation of their own theory, he states:“Whenever concepts are missing, a sign is introduced at the right moment. This is the methodological principle of Hilbert’s theory.”52 Kaufmann sees this observation as typical of the kind of blindness that can plague scientists when they offer spontaneous epistemologies of their own scientifc practice.As a matter of fact, according to this interpretation, proofs are intuitively given fgures totally lacking in meaning.Yet, the rules that preside on the use of signs in the formulation of “fgures of proofs” themselves contain the sense that belongs to logical transformations as such.This appears very clearly, when considering that, in the proof fgures, different groups of signs are also used. Individual and variable signs are thus defnite, but also the types of individual signs (the signs 1, +, which constitute parts of numbers; the signs =, ≠, >, which are the mathematical signs of the formal structure; the sign →, which is a logical sign) and also the types of variable signs (basic variables a, b, c, etc.; variable functions f(*), g(*); variable formulae A, B, C, etc.). 288
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Hilbert’s theory of proof represents, according to Kaufman, the most radical formalizing project that can be conceived. Thus, if therefore we accept that the signs and formulae of the theory of proof have a sense, we have also to accept that the implicit defnitions upon which the axiomatic system of Euclidean geometry is based have a sense too.The axioms of geometry are thus to be understood as judgments about particular arithmetical or logical relations between random objects, or in other words, that they are “a logico-arithmetical (relational) schema that can be variously flled in by intuitive or pseudo-intuitive objects.”53 There are, within Hilbert’s axiomatization of geometry, exactly three systems of things between which a specifc relation of order etc. is specifed; here is what constitutes the semantic concept of the axiomatic system. These questions lead us to the issue of the phenomenological elucidation of material mathematics. However, we will not tackle them in the context of this presentation, whose aim was only to present the phenomenological discussions of the 1920s on the foundation of formal mathematics. By April 1933, the “σvμφιλοσοφΕιν” had been washed away by history. Husserl had been removed from his University position and was more alone than ever, relegated to a “spiritual ghetto” where the racial laws had excluded his works from the spiritual history of Germany, like “a poison from which we need to be protected and that needs to be extirpated.”54
Notes 1 Mancosu 2005, 229. 2 On the “συμφιλοσοφειν” see Hua-Dok III/3, 457; and his Letter to Felix Kaufmann, 16. XII. 1931 in Hua-Dok III/3, 187. On the “great disappointment,” see Husserl’s letter to Mahnke, 8. I. 1931 (Hua-Dok III/3, 473).Translations of all texts are mine unless otherwise noted. 3 Hua XXXII 30–65. 4 Hua XXXII, 31. 5 Becker 1927, 622. 6 See the draft classifcation elaborated by Becker 1923, 388–396. 7 Hua XXXII, 35. 8 Hua XXXII, 42. On the distinction between abstract sciences and concrete sciences, Hua III/1 §72. 9 Cf. Hua III/1, 150/161. 10 Becker 1923. 11 Mahnke 1923, 34; Mahnke 1977, 75. 12 Hilbert 1922, 157–177. Republished in Hilbert 1935; Hilbert 1996, 1115–1134. 13 On Dietrich Mahnke’s reading of the relationship between Husserl and Hilbert, cf. Hartimo 2017. 14 Hilbert 1899; Hilbert 1902. On the axiomatization of Euclidean geometry, see Geiger 1924. 15 On the proof of consistency of the axioms of the elementary theory of radiation, and their compatibility with the elementary laws of optics, see Hilbert 1914, 275–298; Hilbert 1935, 252–257. 16 Padoa 1903, 85. 17 Padoa 1903, 90. 18 Hilbert 1905, 176; Hilbert 1967a, 131. 19 Cf. Poincaré 1906, 17. 20 Hilbert 1935, 165; Hilbert 1996, 1123 (slightly modifed). 21 Hilbert 1935, 163; Hilbert 1996, 1122. 22 It is not a “formula” in the narrow sense of formalized mathematics; but it could be said, in Paul Bernays’ words, that it is a “formula with meaning” if we give a broad sense to this term. 23 Hilbert 1935, 164; Hilbert 1996, 1122 (modifed). 24 Cf. Frege 1903. 25 Hilbert 1935, 170; Hilbert 1996, 1128. 26 Mahnke 1923, 35; Mahnke 1977, 79. 27 Hua XVIII, 251/157. 28 Mahnke 1923, 36; Mahnke 301977, 80. 29 Hua XIX/2, 667/346.
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Vincent Gérard 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
Hilbert, 1935, 162; Hilbert 1996, 1181. Leibniz 1890, 191. Leibniz 1858, 141–168. Mahnke 1925, 507. Mahnke 1923, 36; Mahnke 1977, 82 (slightly modifed). Cf. Hua XIX/2, 586/305. Hua XIX/2, 715/365. Hua XIX/2, 728/373. Mahnke 1923, 37; Mahnke 1977, 83. Heraclite, Fragment 101:“διζησαμην εμεαυτον” (I have looked for myself). Schiller 1838, 405. We do not mean by this a philosophy of mathematics that could be reconstructed on the basis of various analyses spread through Heidegger’s works. For a project of that kind, see Souan 2006. On what we call here the “Heideggerian point of view” in philosophy of mathematics, see Gethmann 2002; Gethmann 2003. See on this point Mahnke’s criticism in his Letter to Becker, 8. IX. 1927; see Peckhaus 2005, 262 and Mancosu 2005, 238–239. Becker 1927, 621–637. Becker 1927, 633. Becker 1927, 636. Kaufmann 1930; Kaufmann 1978. On the distinction between “expression” and “meaning,” see Carnap 1928, 24; Carnap 2003, 33. Russell and Whitehead 1910, 69. Carnap 1928, 24; Carnap 2003, 34. Hilbert 1928, 66; Hilbert 1967b, 465. Kaufmann 1930, 47; Kaufmann 1978, 46. Bernays 1922, 16; Bernays 1998, 215–222. Kaufmann 1930, 49; Kaufmann 1978, 47. Husserl’s Letter to Mahnke, 4/5.V. 1933 (Hua-Dok III/3, 491–492).
References Becker, Oskar. 1923.“Beiträge zur phänomenologischen Begründung der Geometrie und ihrer physikalischen Anwendungen.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 6: pp. 385–571. ———. 1927. “Mathematische Existenz. Untersuchungen zur Logik und Ontologie der mathematischer Phänomene.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 8: pp. 439–768. Bernays, Paul. 1922.“Über Hilberts Gedanken zur Grundlegung der Arithmetik.” Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker Vereinigung, 31: pp. 10–19. ———. 1998. “On Hilbert’s Thoughts Concerning the Grounding of Arithmetic.” In: From Brouwer to Hilbert. The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in the 1920s. Ed. P. Mancosu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 215–222. Carnap, Rudolf. 1928. Der logische Aufbau der Welt. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 2003. The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy.Trans. R.A. George. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Frege, Gottlob. 1903. Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Band 2. Jena: Hermann Pohle. Geiger, Moritz. 1924. Systematische Axiomatik der euklidischen Geometrie.Augsburg: Benno Filser. Gethmann, Carl Friedrich. 2002.“Hermeneutische Phänomenologie und Logischer Intuitionismus. Zu O. Beckers Mathematische Existenz.” In: Die Philosophie und die Wissenschaften. Zum Werk Oskar Beckers. Eds. A Gethmann-Siefert and J. Mittelstrass. Munich: Fink Verlag, pp. 109–128. ———. 2003. “Hermeneutic Phenomenology and Logical Intuitionism: On Oskar Becker’s Mathematical Existence.”Trans. M. Brainard, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 3: pp. 143–160. Hartimo, Mirja. 2017. “Husserl and Hilbert.” In: Essays on Husserl’s Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. Ed. S. Centrone. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 245–263. Hilbert, David. 1899. Grundlagen der Geometrie. Leipzig: Teubner.
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Mathematics ———. 1902. The Foundations of Geometry. Trans. E. J. Townsend. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company. ———. 1905. “Über die Grundlagen der Logik und der Arithmetik.” In: Verhandlungen des 3. Internationalen Mathematiker-Kongresses in Heidelberg vom 8. bis 13. August 1904. Ed. A. Krazer. Leipzig: Krazer, pp. 174–185. ———. 1914. “Zur Begründung der elementaren Strahlungstheorie.” Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Mathematisch-physikalische Klasse, Heft 3: pp. 275–298. ———. 1922. “Neubegründung der Mathematik. Erste Mitteilung.” Abhandlungen aus dem mathematischen Seminar der Hamburgschen Universität, 1: pp. 157–177. ———. 1928. “Die Grundlagen der Mathematik.” Abhandlungen aus dem Mathematischen Seminar der Hamburgerischen Universität, 6: pp. 65–83. ———. 1935. Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Band 3. Berlin: Springer. ———. 1967a. “On the Foundations of Logic and Arithmetic.” In: From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Trans. B. Woodward and Ed. J. van Heijenoort. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 129–138. ———. 1967b. The Foundations of Mathematics.Trans. S. Bauer-Mengelberg and D. Follesdal. In: From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Ed. J.Van Heijenoort. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 464–479. ———. 1996. “The New Grounding of Mathematics. First Report.” In: From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics.Volume 2.Trans. and Ed.W. Ewald. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1115-1133. Husserl, Edmund. 2001a. Logical Investigations. Volume 1. Prolegomena to Pure Logic. Trans. J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge. ———. 2001b. The Shorter Logical Investigations.Trans. J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge. Kaufmann, Felix. 1930. Das Unendliche in der Mathematik und seine Ausschaltung. Eine Untersuchung über die Grundlagen der Mathematik. Wien: Deuticke. ———. 1978. The Infnite in Mathematics. Logico-Mathematical Writings.Trans. P. Foulkies. Dordrecht: Reidel. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1858. Leibnizens mathematische Schriften, Zweite Abteilung, Band 1. Ed. C. I. Gerhardt. Halle: Schmidt. ———. 1890. Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Band 7. Ed. C. I. Gerhardt. Berlin: Weidmann. Mahnke, Dietrich. 1923.“Von Hilbert zu Husserl. Erste Einführung in die Phänomenologie, besonders der formalen Mathematik.” Unterrichtsblätter für Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften, 29: pp. 34–37. ———. 1925. “Leibnizens Synthese von Universalmathematik und Individualmetaphysik.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 7: pp. 305–611. ———. 1977. “From Hilbert to Husserl: First Introduction to Phenomenology, Especially that of Formalized Mathematics.”Trans. D. L. Boyer. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 8: pp. 71–84. Mancosu, Paolo. 2005.“‘Das Abenteuer der Vernunft’: O. Becker and D. Mahnke on the Phenomenological Foundations of the Exact Sciences.” In: Oskar Becker und die Philosophie der Mathematik. Ed.V. Peckhaus. München: Fink Verlag, pp. 229–243. Padoa,Alessandro. 1903.“Le problème n°2 de M. David Hilbert.” L’enseignement mathématique, 5: pp. 85–91. Poincaré, Henri. 1906.“Les mathématiques et la logique.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 14: pp. 17–38. Russell, Bertrand and Whitehead,Alfred North. 1910. Principia Mathematica,Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schiller, Friedrich. 1838. Schillers Sämmtliche Werke, Band 1. Stuttgart: Gottascher Verlag. Souan, Olivier. 2006.“Heidegger et les mathématiques.” In:Heidegger. Ed. M. Caron. Paris: Cerf, pp. 361–416. Volker, Peckhaus. (Ed.). 2005. Oskar Becker und die Philosophie der Mathematik. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
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25 MONAD Andrea Altobrando
25.0. Introduction The term “monad” has a possibly irreducible metaphysical favor. More than three-quarters of a century have passed since the frst publication of the Cartesian Meditations in French.As a result, we have become accustomed to the idea that this term can be associated with phenomenology. However, it is still diffcult to understand how and why a discipline that is based on the “principle of all principles” can make use of a word that almost unavoidably leads us to a fundamentally speculative discourse. The principle of all principles certainly does not forbid that we develop the content of our intuitions beyond the limited space of intuitions themselves, but does this mean that we can reach a point where the meaning of our statements is fully out of sight, if not even in contradiction with the intuitions that its meaning is supposedly derived from? And should we really make use of a word which suggests that there are only mirrors and their images? Can we use a word which implies that each subject is eternal, and in her infnite profundities she has traces of the entire infnite universe? Can we make use of a word that, willingly or not, is partially indebted to Cartesian dualism? And can we accept a word that, ultimately, connects with an invocation of an almighty God, in order to make sure that the universe is what we all perceive in all of its glorious harmony? Husserl, who was certainly not unaware of the metaphysico-speculative burden that the word “monad” carries, thought we should make use of it, although we have to “purify” its meaning.1 In what follows, we will see if and how this purifcation can be achieved.
25.1. The (phenomenological) birth of a monad One can schematically summarize the train of thought that seemingly gives birth to the idea of monad within the phenomenological framework in four steps.These steps roughly mirror the initial effective historical birth of a monadological view in Husserl’s thought, the development of which can approximately be dated between 1908 and 1918.2 Moreover, they also correspond to four fundamental reasons one can fnd in the phenomenological refection for taking the plausibility of a monadological stance into consideration.
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25.1.1. The remains of the reduction Historically, the frst appearance of the term “monad” in the writings of a phenomenologist is probably in a manuscript, dated 1908, in which Husserl refects upon the results of the phenomenologico-transcendental reduction (henceforth simply “reduction”). Husserl writes: The development of the world is the development of consciousness, and anything physical is itself only a relationship between consciousnesses, the essences of which are of such a kind, that we, in our thinking, have to posit them in the form of physical matters, forces, atoms, etc. In this way, we would fundamentally renew the Leibnizian monadology.3 After achieving the reduction, all one is left with is the realm of consciousness, and this looks like a Leibnizian monad, because it somehow encloses everything one can make sense of and nothing else besides this seems to be needed. In brief, the transcendental consciousness one gains by means of the reduction looks like an enclosed, and epistemically self-suffcient, unity.Thus, one could derive that everything, i.e. the world, is nothing more than a system of transcendental consciousnesses. Although, in the above quoted manuscript, Husserl eventually judges that speaking in such a way would mean engaging a metaphysical discourse that exceeds the phenomenological framework, the independence of the transcendental feld of consciousness, aka transcendental subjectivity, remains one of the main issues that leads Husserl to plan to construct a phenomenological monadology. Moreover, here we can already fnd the idea that transcendental and empirical subjectivity ultimately coincide.We cannot question such an identifcation here, nor spell it out in all its aspects. Either way, this identifcation constitutes a fundamental element for the Husserlian understanding of the monad.Therefore, we will provisionally assume it, although, in the end, we will show some of its biases within this very monadological framework. Until we point out such biases, whatever is said about the transcendental subjectivity or the transcendental subject should be considered as referring also to the empirical subjectivity and subject – as well as vice-versa.
25.1.2. The concreteness of the subject A further motive to adopt the term “monad” to refer to subjectivity is that an understanding of subjectivity as a mere pole of experience, or as a set of more or less transcendental functions and habits, shows itself to be too abstract.The concrete subject is a unity of life, i.e. of lived experience, and it includes both the noeses and the noemata of a subject. In this regard, Husserl really does seem to follow Leibniz in the latter’s revision of the Cartesian ego: once one has gained a dimension of apodictic certainty, if one were to look more carefully into what one is left with, one would fnd that one does not simply have one’s pure ego. Rather, one is left with the farreaching whole of which the references to the world are an essential part. One is not merely a set of perceptions, emotions, desires, thoughts, etc., but rather a whole made of such lived experiences and their internal, reciprocal relationships, as well as their relationships to their intentional references.To put the matter in simpler terms, a full account would include memories-of-thisand-that, perceptions-of-this-and-that, emotions-towards-one-or-another, beliefs-in-such-andsuch, convictions-that-this-or-that, etc., as well as all the relationships between such experiences and their elements.
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25.1.3. One world for many subjects At the end of the lecture course of 1910/11 on The fundamental problems of phenomenology,4 after having stated and acknowledged the plurality of the experiencing subjects, and the irreducibility of their respective streams of consciousness to one, Husserl poses the question about how to constitute the objective world. In order to deal with this issue, Husserl invokes a monadological framework.A full-fedged account of objectivity should work as a kind of algorithm of a function in which the factors are all the different subjects, with all their “really” (reell) immanent as well as all their intentional elements, including the ones which pertain to the relationships between the different subjects, and, fnally, all the relationships between all, both immanent and intentional, elements of all subjects.5
25.1.4. Dynamism – the temporal, the modal, and the gradual being of the subject The fourth piece of evidence in favor of a monadological account of subjectivity derives from the dynamic structure of subjectivity. This dynamic structure has three layers: a fundamental temporal structure, on the basis of which we have two modal structures. 25.1.4.1. Following his phenomenological refections on time-consciousness, Husserl comes to the conclusion that there can be neither a beginning nor an end of time-constitution. Since time-constitution is a fundamental structure of subjectivity, there can neither be a beginning nor an end of subjectivity.This result is evidently problematic. Although, in this chapter, we cannot consider the several issues concerning time-consciousness and the transcendental subject, later on we will see one reason to partially reject the claim concerning the temporal infnity of the subject. As for now, we can accept the more modest claim that one fundamental structure of subjectivity is temporality, and that any manifestation of both the world and subjectivity itself occurs in a temporal distension. Subjectivity manifests itself to itself according to the structures of temporality.The same applies to the world. 25.1.4.2. The temporal structure of subjectivity also impinges on its synchronic constitution. Indeed, subjectivity must, because of its temporal structure, be understood in terms of “sedimentations” of experiences of various kinds. These sedimentations lie at the basis of habits. Habits constitute the subject as something that can suitably be understood as a system of “I can” (Ich kann).6 One is not simply what one experiences, but also what one can, could, and will be able to experience.This means that to account for concrete subjectivity, one has to consider both its actualities and its potentialities, including not only the present ones, but also the past and the future potentialities. 25.1.4.3. Finally, what is given to consciousness is given with different degrees of clarity and distinctness.The movement between empty, fulflling, and flled intentions constitutes one of the main features of Husserl’s theory and phenomenology of knowledge, and is strictly related to the temporal structure of subjectivity and manifestation. According to Husserl, after the reduction, although the evidence for what we intend from time to time is given with different degrees of clarity or obscurity, distinctness or confusion, anything that one can know is potentially given – and there is nothing one can absolutely not know. In other words, we cannot know anything that is not, in some at least very obscure way, already there, in the present. At the same time, there is nothing which epistemically counts beyond the sphere of apodictic evidence achieved by means of the reduction. Rather, within the very 294
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feld of experience, there are pre-confgurations of whatever lies beyond the intuitively clear and distinct given. Moreover, whatever is will endure in the past, and will never fully disappear. Finally, confused and obscure states of mind, which we would normally hardly consider as conscious at all – such as drives and impulses – are now considered to belong to the transcendental sphere of apodictic evidence. To put it briefy: what appears has always appeared, and will always appear; everything is always given, although mostly in an extreme obscure way. With these three steps, Husserl manages to extend the jurisdiction of the feld of evidence: it now subsumes intentional and non-intentional experiences, as well as their references. Both the experiences and their references can also be situated far away, both in terms of space and time, as well as from a “qualitative” point of view, because they can be distant from the actual core of intuitive clear evidence one has from time to time.Whatever can meaningfully exist for me, internally as well as externally, is in some way implied by my actual sphere of evidence.
25.2. The adolescence of a “phenomenological” monad The feld disclosed by the reduction, and the refection upon it, lead us to “see” that the feld itself, aka transcendental subjectivity, cannot be created or destroyed. Moreover, although with different degrees of clarity and distinctness, it includes everything. The consideration of the dynamism of subjectivity apparently leads us to affrm the scope of subjectivity as spatio-temporally unlimited, as well as modally complete, and as including also the as good as unconscious life of a subject. What term is more apt than the one of monad to express such astounding features? In order to answer this question, and to take the very term “monad” phenomenologically seriously, we have to more carefully assess its validity within the very phenomenological dimension. Husserl initially uses the term “monad” in a kind of vague, evocative way. The time, however, comes when one must check whether all one has conjured has all the necessary requirements to legally remain inside the phenomenological realm, and, in the positive case, what it can meaningfully do within it.
25.2.1. From subject to substance Husserl notoriously expressed the epistemic autarchy of consciousness, aka transcendental subjectivity, as quod nulla “re” indiget ad existendum.7 As is well known, this description derives from Descartes’ defnition of substance in the Principles of Philosophy.8 However, as we have seen, after this frst declaration of independence, which seemed somewhat to follow Leibniz’s path, Husserl realized that a merely “subjective” understanding of the transcendental sphere is too abstract. The transcendental sphere of evidence must also include all the references of one’s lived experiences.The concept of monad is here particularly ftting, because it allows Husserl also to express the non-properly objectifed life of a subject, without dispelling its reference to something else than itself.At this point, Descartes’ substance seems not to suffce. Once one becomes independent, one needs a constitution, in order not to defne oneself only via negationis. As such, after considering several historical defnitions of substance, Husserl fnally opts for a Spinozian one: quod in se et per se concipitur.9 This is, according to Husserl’s interpretation, the defnition that best fts the realm of transcendental apodicticity disclosed by the reduction.Within this realm one fnds everything that one would need to understand both oneself and the world with which one is in relation. Indeed, one has all empirical materials, 295
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and all the both formal and logical laws one requires to build up an edifce of absolute and allencompassing science. That nothing less than such an ambitious science is the main aim of Husserl’s refections is blatantly shown by the continuous hints at a mathesis universalis throughout his writings, from the Philosophy of Arithmetic to the Crisis.10
25.2.2. The monad and the totality Once we have arrived at this point, we have to highlight a feature of the monad that, despite being undoubtedly present in the few published works in which he makes use of the concept, are not explicitly highlighted by Husserl: although the monad is subjectivity concretely understood, the domain of the monad does not correspond to the domain of intuitive evidence one has concretely at one’s disposal at any given time.This is even the case as it relates to oneself.The total domain of what pertains to a monad is not an object of intuition.Put briefy,the monad does not possess a total self-intuition, and, thus, does not have a total and direct self-knowledge. Husserl, in the Cartesian Meditations, tries to overcome this impasse by saying that apodictic does not mean adequate.11 I am apodictically given to myself, but my self-intuition is not fully clear, distinct, and adequate.As a matter of fact, if I were to accept the aforementioned “monadic” extension of the feld of evidence, I would just have a quite clear and distinct epistemic core, surrounded by immense confusion. To better understand and assess this point, let’s try to schematically portray the train of thought which has led us from a sphere of intuitive clear evidence to a universe of overwhelming obscurity. Next, we will check whether the “lighting” at disposal is working correctly. Inference I I.i.There is an actual feld of apodictic evidence, disclosed by the reduction. I.ii.The evidences one has at disposal in, and as, the transcendental feld come and go. However, one can gain insight into the laws that rule the structures of whatever appears. I.iii. One can also gain evidence concerning logical laws, i.e. the laws governing the forms of correct thinking, and, more specifcally, correct inferring. I.iv. Following the reduction, whatever claim we fnd concerning the existence or the specifc structure of something that does not intuitively appear within the domain of the reduction has to be evaluated according to the total body of intuitive evidence, and the application of the formal and material laws approved so far within the very domain of the reduction. I.v.The structures of transcendental subjectivity can also be intuitively grasped. I.vi.The transcendental subjectivity therewith also shows itself how to validly comprehend itself beyond the sphere of actual, clear, and distinct evidence. I.vii. By means of the same reduction, one becomes, or rather discloses oneself to oneself as, the constituting transcendental subjectivity. ergo I.viii.The transcendental structures are also the structures of the refecting subject. et I.ix.The transcendental structures allow one to rationally infer how one is when not performing the reduction, i.e. beyond the apodictic core of actual, clear, and distinct evidence. In other words, the transcendental structures apply also to the empirical subject. 296
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We cannot consider all the passages of this “inference” in detail. It contains, however, more or less all the elements that support, or which are implied by, a phenomenologico-transcendental understanding of the monad. We must now limit ourselves to the consideration of two main issues related to these conclusions, which are crucial for the monad. In this way, we will also see some parts of Inference I that are possibly unsound. 25.2.2.1. The temporal distension of the monad
Among others, Inference I seemingly allows, and maybe requires, the following further inference. Inference II II.i.The structure of the constituting time-consciousness is such that it has neither a beginning nor an end. II.ii.The structure of the constituting time-consciousness is an essential structure of the empirical subject. ergo II.iii.The empirical subject is innascible and immortal. This second conclusion follows more or less automatically from that of Inference I.This is why Husserl goes as far as to entertain the idea of the “eternity” of the monad, and he goes back to this topic multiple times.12 Although Husserl does not explicitly mention it in his published writings, the reason is probably not that he is afraid of attracting the scorn of other philosophers, but rather because he is himself quite unconvinced of its “logical” soundness. We seem, in any case, to be in front of a dilemma: either we give up the identifcation between empirical and transcendental subjectivity, or we admit that the empirical subjectivity is immortal. One could perhaps advance a third option, namely that the transcendental subjectivity was born and will die. Now, even in the case that one were ready to maintain that the (meaningful) world begins and ends with subjectivity, the very impossibility to constitute the beginning and end of subjectivity on behalf of the subjectivity itself would necessarily oblige one to give up its epistemic self-suffciency – and thus its alleged transcendentality tout-court. The very project of a universal, apodictical science would thus sink into some kind of more or less moderate empiricism – at least according to (the post-1906) Husserl. It is probably for this reason that, for Husserl, this third option is a tertium non datur. To overcome the impasse, in some manuscripts, Husserl surmises that the temporality of the individual monad is, at least also, an intersubjective matter.13 Specifcally, (at least) one’s beginning and end are constituted by others. More generally, the ultimate constituting timeconsciousness is that of a plurality of monads, aka transcendental intersubjectivity. But would this not mean that the immortality of the individual monad is transferred to the community of the monads? Before answering this question, we must clear up one of the main ways of communication between monads. 25.2.2.2. The monad’s windows
One of the features of Husserl’s monad that has almost always been pointed out in the literature available on the topic, is that Husserl’s monad differs from that of Leibniz, insofar as Husserl’s 297
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monad has windows. However, this is not totally correct. Indeed, in different manuscripts, and sometimes even within the same manuscript, Husserl affrms both that the monads have windows, and that they do not have windows.14 This could give the impression that Husserl’s account of the concept of monad is not consistent, but this is not the case – at least concerning the window-problem. Indeed, the two apparently contradictory defnitions concern two different meanings one can ascribe to the metaphor of the window. On the one hand, Husserl affrms that the monad does not have windows because he wants to stress that a part of the monad, i.e. one of its lived experiences, cannot really enter, i.e. become part, of another monad, and vice-versa. A possible phenomenological reason for not accepting such a hypothesis is that the very experience which allows me to be aware of “me” and “you” apodictically shows me that we are two different subjects, two different streams of consciousness.This is also true concerning the so-called Einfühlungen, i.e. more or less emotive or cognitive experiences of the others. Even if one can have a deep sympathy for someone else’s pleasure or suffering, one does not have within itself the numerically identical emotive experience the other is going through. Another’s toothache is another’s toothache, and not mine, even if I deeply suffer for and with her.The same goes for her pleasure. For this reason, Husserl affrms that monads have no windows. This does not rule out, though, that we can see other subjects, and that we can share something with them. Empathy, indeed, is an effective experience, which allows us to see “from within” that other subjects are “outside there” and to both feel and understand them, exactly, as others.What we “share,” following, can only be what is outside both of us, i.e. the references of our experiences.This is why empathy can be considered as a window. It is a window as far as perceptions are windows: they allow one to see something (usually) different from oneself – but they do not enable any mind-reading, or mind-transfusion.The difference between perception and empathy is in the kind of “stuff ” I see, not in its position of exteriority with respect to my sphere of immanence. 25.2.2.3. And cellar
Now that we have roughly cleared up the matter of the windows, let’s come back to the problem of the transference of immortality from the individual monad to the monadic community. This issue is fundamental to the monadological project as a whole, because it does not simply concern the ultimate bearer of the perpetual life, but also both the constitution of the objective world and the plurality of the monads itself.These issues are, indeed, strictly related to one another. After we have acknowledged that the temporal limits of a monad could possibly stretch beyond its epistemic capacities, we should recognize that this is valid also for the individual monadic capacity to account for the alleged pluralism of the monads. By itself, the manifestation of a plurality of subjects does not imply, and does not apparently require, that they are independent entities. The evidential core that one can use to affrm such a pluralism consists in the lived experience of otherness. However, one cannot prejudicially rule out that, beyond such a manifestation, the subjects are reducible to some other, perhaps larger, entity. This does not mean that one has to endorse a form of phenomenalism concerning other subjects. Rather, we can simply observe that a monad is a (relatively) independent entity as long as it is conscious and self-conscious. What becomes of it when consciousness fades away cannot be told solely on the basis of her intuitive evidences. These evidences must certainly not be excluded, but they should not be taken as a basis for an immediate judgment, but rather for sound reasoning, possibly founded also on other information that does not derive from one’s sphere of intuitive evidence. Indeed, now, we fnally have other sources of information: the reports concerning the 298
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experiences of other subjects, which do not only concern their inner life, but also their experiences of the world we share, and where they “empathize” with us. Of course, the situation here is particularly tricky, because one cannot have any other direct witnessing of one’s “inner” consciousness besides oneself.We cannot discuss this issue further here. It suffces to remark that, even granting the apodicticity of one’s “inner” self-evidence, and of one difference from the others, this evidence is limited, and it has a quite blurred horizon. Individually, no monad can account even for its own identity – and existence – beyond wakefulness.15 Are we perhaps, in the end, led from Leibniz to Locke? Or, maybe, considering the aforementioned defnition of substance endorsed by Husserl, should we rather go further with Spinoza? This question must be left open here.
25.3. The adulthood of the monad From all that we have seen up to this point, we can surmise that the term “monad” has, in the end, been employed for (at least) two related but distinct issues: one concerns the territory of phenomenological evidences, and of the refections and analyses founded thereupon, their rules, their epistemic potentialities, etc.; the other regards what we could simply call, for the sake of brevity, personal identity, or the empirical subject as such.The equation between oneself as transcendental thinker and transcendental subjectivity tout-court has, however, lead to a confation of the two issues. In other words, from a larger perspective, the monad appeared extremely attractive to Husserl, because he hoped it could aid him in unifying all the results of his phenomenological refections, on the one side, and therewith to attain a kind of “metaphysical” point on the basis of which to systematically project such results onto a large canvas, thus realizing the mathesis universalis. However, as we have seen, there are some problems that, so far, block this unifcation.
25.3.1. The vices of the monad We have seen that the individual monad does not respond to the requisites for obtaining the title of transcendental subject, for it cannot fully constitute itself. In the end, if we reject Inference II, and if we also acknowledge the monad’s incapacity to account for one’s absent-mindedness, we could save the use of the term “monad” for subjectivity only if we endorsed an ontological understanding of the term.This, however, would imply that the subject that carries out the reduction can no longer identify itself with the transcendental, self-constituting, and world-constituting subject.This means that the empirical subject is not the transcendental subject. Indeed, in this way, we block the entire path of thought which has taken us here, at the latest at point I.vii. of Inference I.The ontological way out, though possible, is moreover, de jure et de facto, a full exit from the phenomenological feld as such.We have seen, indeed, that one has no evidence in support of such a claim that properly respects the principle of all principles. We could transfer the burden of transcendental constitution, and thus also justify the ontological claim about the monadic nature of the individual subjects, to the monadological society.16 However, this implies quite a big epistemological shift, because it would then be diffcult to claim that we are still abiding by the principle of all principles. Indeed, who has ever had an intuitive evidence that the intersubjective community endures beyond oneself, and that it moreover achieves the universal constitution we are striving for? Who could have such an intuition? The transcendental community as such? Is it a kind of super-subject, aka super-monad? Although Husserl mentions some similar views, and he speaks of a “total monad” in some manuscripts,17 it is debatable as to whether or not he fnally wanted to endorse it. What is 299
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more, it is also questionable as to whether or not it is still compatible with a phenomenological perspective. Is it not rather the case that, in order to not give up the idea of monad, and its substantial characterization as something that constitutes itself in itself by itself (also known as causa sui), we invent subjects ad hoc? It seems that, in the end, we are put in front of the decision whether to keep the monad within the realm of phenomenology, but at the price of deeply changing the laws and the principles of the realm, and ultimately even surrendering the government to a super-powerful super-entity, or we have to throw the monad out of the window.
25.3.2. The correction of the monad And yet, this time there could be a tertium datur.We “simply” have to accept the monad together with the limits it effectively presents itself with when it frst appears in the phenomenological feld.This means, frst of all, that we must get rid of the constitution of the monad as substance – a constitution which, as a matter of fact, was not properly realized within the phenomenological domain, but rather imported from a decisively ontological domain. In brief, as regards Inference I, we must give up I.vii., as well as the conclusions I.viii. and I.ix.; we must keep I.i., I.ii., I.iii., and I.iv.; we must suspend I.v. and I.vi.These last premises, indeed, should at least be revised, given that the transcendental subjectivity is, in the case it still exists, plural, and, in any case, cannot fully comprehend itself in all its parts.This implies that, if the mathesis universalis must be possible, and we still want it to be founded on the phenomenological core of evidence, i.e. if it still relies on the principle of all principles, its realization probably cannot depend on the “existence” of a transcendental subject, neither individual nor collective. Rather, the structures we discover thanks to the reduction are the structures of the references, not of the “constituting” subject. It is, in other words, a matter of what is manifested, and not of the manifestation as such; of the given, and not of its givenness. Whether or not such a perspective can still be called “transcendental” is an issue we cannot develop further here. For us, what is important is that we have effectively cleansed the monad – as a whole, and not only its windows – as Husserl wished for in his lectures on First Philosophy.18 However, we could ask, how can we use such a weakened concept, which is no longer transcendental, nor, provisionally, ontological? We fnd, indeed, quite a good use; indeed, a phenomenological one.
25.3.3. The virtues of the monad First of all, the monad has descriptive virtues. It enables a more concrete consideration of subjectivity. More precisely, the concept of monad becomes a device to account for the concrete, let’s plainly say empirical, subjects, by considering all of their “stuffng,” summarily listed at 25.1.2 and 25.1.3 above. More than anything, the inclusion in the monad of possibilities and potentialities allows a more fully fedged account not simply of the individual monad, but also of the objective world inter-monadically considered: some of my impossibilities are the possibilities of another monad; there are possibilities on the side of several monads, the actualization of which are mutually exclusive.There are experiences of the others that also depend on the consciousness one has of their capacities, and possibilities; and so on and so forth. Moreover, the monadic intercourses do not merely speak of “minds” and “mental states,” or “events,” but rather also, and fundamentally, of bodies – both animated and not. One can thus have a rough intuition of how important the monadological understanding of subjectivity is for realizing the mathesis universalis Husserl had not simply been dreaming of, but that he had actually held as really possible. Only 300
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a monadic account of subjectivity, which in the end in Husserl’s thought kept as the ultimate forum of fundamental evidence, enables the execution of the “universal calculus” of objectivity. Besides this descriptive-methodological role, we can see that the enlistment of the monad into the phenomenological troops confers upon it a normative role as well.The monadic perspective somehow enforces and strengthens the oft-recalled principle of all principles. The monad prescribes that I can, from the very point of view of phenomenology, claim validity only for ideas supported by a conspicuous amount of intuitive and clear evidence, and their logical, and ontological, developments.These developments, however, are not a properly monadic issue, because they do not happen within the scope of one’s interiority, nor of one’s intuitive domain. They are rather, de jure et de facto, public. The evidence we achieve by abiding by the principle of all principles tells us – in principle, each of us, and any possible member of our monadological community, which is ultimately the effective bearer of the task of the mathesis universalis – that the evidence one gets within oneself has blurred limits, and allows no enduring result about the ultimate identity of any of us, as well as of the world we share. If we make hypotheses, formulate theories, make judgments of some kind that go beyond the sphere of more or less direct intuition, we clearly enter a domain of thinking and refecting that cannot receive enlightenment by a simple “look!”19 Moreover, by also keeping within the sphere of intuitive immanence, we have to acknowledge that, though our intuitions do possibly not require concepts to happen, any statement about them needs them to go through a sort of conceptual bath. Statements are not only a matter of “direct” intuition. Hence, every time one states something also about one’s intuitions, if one also claims some minimal kind of validity for such statement, even only in front of oneself, one has to realize that such statement can, and indeed should, be exposed to a public examination. Otherwise, one should just admit that one does not know what one intuits. And we certainly do not need to recall Wittgenstein’s recommendation here.
25.4. Conclusions: the monadological contract In the end, the monadological approach to subjectivity, perhaps quite surprisingly, commits us not to keep isolated in an outwardly self-referential, and self-guarded, phenomenological realm, but rather to enter the philosophical agora as such, where everyone is by right a monad with an inner phenomenological domain, regardless of their tribal membership.The domestic economy, however, should not rule public affairs. Fundamentally, as monads, we should abrogate a kingdom with many monarchs, and establish, or join, a monadological republic.
Notes 1 For Husserl’s knowledge of, and confrontation with, Leibniz, see van Breda 1971; Ehrhardt 1971. Although present, as we will see, at least from 1908 in Husserl’s manuscripts, among the works published during Husserl’s lifetime, the word “monad” appears no earlier than in Formal and Transcendental Logic, although only towards the end of the work and as merely mentioned. However, this appearance is extremely relevant, because it clearly shows the importance of the notion of monad for the very creation of the mathesis universalis. As for the manuscripts, the ones which specifcally deal with the concept of monad, are mainly to be found in: Hua XIII; Hua XIV; Hua XV; Hua IV; Husserl 1989, §§26, 29, 30, 32, 63, 64; Hua XLII; Hua-Mat VIII. 2 I indicatively put 1918 as end of the gestation period because we can quite clearly see through the manuscripts that from ca. 1918/19 onwards Husserl more actively engages in the development of a systematic phenomenological monadology. 3 Hua XIII, 7. My translation.
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Cf. Hua XIII, 111–195. Cf. Hua XIII, 183–191. See e.g. Hua IV, 253. Cf. Hua III/1, 104/110. See René Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, Pars Prima, LI. Husserl has added the inverted commas to the word re, and he has deleted the word alia following it. Cf. Baruch Spinoza, Ethica, Part I, Defnition 3. For more on this fundamental goal of Husserl’s philosophy, and on its affnity to that of Leibniz, see Hopkins 2013;Tieszen 2012. Cf. Hua I, 55f. See Hua XI, 377–381; Husserl 2001, 377–381, 466–471; Hua XIII, 399; Hua XIV, 53f., 156f., 244f., 256; Hua-Mat VIII,Texts n. 21, 43, 94–97. See also Ms. B III 10 II, p. 1a, where Husserl even mentions the doctrine of “reminiscence” proposed in Plato’s Meno; Hua XXXVIII, 368, where Husserl refers to another Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus, and to the ideas of the immortality of the soul and of metempsychosis therein exposed. For an opinion about the agelessness of the monad different from the one proposed here, see MacDonald 2007. Cf. Hua XI, 377–381. For instance, they have windows in Hua XIII, 470f.; Hua XIV, 295.They do not have windows in Hua XIII, 7; Hua XIV, 258f., 357f. This issue is also clearly related to the one of the body. It is clear, indeed, that, if the monad were to survive death, it had, in the end, to be identifed either with a bodiless soul, or with some kind of microscopic stuff. Husserl seems to be inclined towards the frst direction.That’s why he can, as I will explicate further in the next footnote, claim that monads are eternal, and, at the same time, that universal constitution is not an individual matter.The same can be said about the unconscious moments of one’s life. In this regard, it should be mentioned that, when Husserl envisages the hypotheses concerning the transcendental subjectivity as the ultimate ground of the absolute, eternal temporality, he seems to still maintain that all subjects are unborned and immortal, though when they are in the big sleep, they require the help of other subjects in order to be wakened. See Hua XI, Hua XIV, 166–167, 171, 180, 478; Hua XV, 604. In this last manuscript Husserl writes: “The living ones waken the unliving ones” [Die Lebendigen wecken die Unlebendigen]. See e.g. Hua XIV, 299f. Another alternative would be to go in the direction of what Husserl discusses under the title of Ur-Ich. Leaving aside the extremely speculative, and indeed neo-platonic, taste of such a concept, it is arguable that it can really solve the problem – at least on a phenomenologically legitimate ground. For an attempt to phenomenologically understand and legitimize the concept of Ur-Ich, see Taguchi 2006. See Hua VII, 196f. In the well-known lectures of 1907, where Husserl formulates the not unproblematic, and indeed quite misleading, motto “as little understanding as possible, as much pure intuition as possible (intuitio sine comprehensione),” he also states “Intuitive knowledge is that form of reason that sets itself the task of bringing the discursive understanding to reason” (Hua II, 62–63; Husserl 1999, 46–47). Whatever the “reason” meant here is, it clearly does not deny discursive understanding, but it rather presupposes it in order for such reason to work at all.
References Ehrhardt, Walter. 1971. “Die Leibniz-Rezeption in der Phänomenologie Husserls.” Studia leibnitiana. Supplementa, 5: pp. 146–155. Hopkins, Burt. 2013. “Leibniz and Husserl on Universal Science.” Discipline Filosofche, 23/2: pp. 89–106. Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1999. The Idea of Phenomenology.Trans. L. Hardy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic.Trans.Anthony J. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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Monad Husserl’s Manuscripts: Ms. B III 10 II. MacDonald, Paul. 2007. “Husserl, the Monad and Immortality.” The Indo-Pacifc Journal of Phenomenology, 7/2: pp. 1–18. Taguchi, Shigeru. 2006. Das Problem des ‘Ur-Ich’ bei Edmund Husserl: Die Frage nach der selbstverständlichen ‘Nähe’ des Selbst. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Tieszen, Richard. 2012.“Monads and Mathematics: Gödel and Husserl.” Axiomathes, 22/1: pp. 31–52. van Breda, Hermann Leo. 1971.“Leibniz’ Einfuss auf das Denken Husserls.” Studia leibnitiana, 5: pp. 12–125.
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26 MOODS AND EMOTIONS Ondřej Švec
Since the main task of phenomenology concerns the various modes of givenness in which things manifest themselves, it unavoidably has to come to terms with the phenomena of moods and emotions that shape the way the world is revealed both in its overall meaning and in its most salient features.To be more precise, what shows up in moods and emotions is not the world of objects standing in opposition to subject or consciousness, but the world as the ultimate horizon of signifcance in which we are involved, as well as various possible ways in which things matter to us. Drawing on joint insights from the phenomenology of Heidegger and of Merleau-Ponty, I claim that moods are to be understood as fundamental ways of disclosing our current existential situation(s), while emotions are to be redefned as emotional conducts through which we act out and display the way we feel about relevant matters of concern. Such an approach allows us not only to differentiate between moods and emotions, but also to understand better how emotional experiences come about on the basis of our ubiquitous attunement to an already signifcant world, manifested through moods.The latter make up the background that shapes, orients and regulates the range and the intensity of specifc emotional conducts through which we reply to the solicitations of our environment. Furthermore, I contend that emotions are neither internal mental states, nor hard-wired reactions occurring in our brains. From the phenomenological point of view, they are experientially manifest as wholes that can be only ex post decomposed in what seem to be – once we adopt an objectivizing perspective – their components, such as cognitive appraisals, inner feelings, motor reactions, physiological arousals, etc.Against the strong impulse to decompose emotion into such empirically identifable components, phenomenology points to the impossible task of reconstructing our affective life in its full sense out of determinate component-entities and provides the means to grasp emotional experience simultaneously in its primary indistinction and implicit articulation. In short, my contribution on the one hand presents the original insights brought by phenomenology into the unifed structure of emotional experience and, on the other, deals with the relevance of affective life and its investigation for phenomenology itself.
Affective disclosure of meaning and value Since Husserl’s Logical Investigations, phenomenology has been concerned with the interrelated ways in which the world manifests itself as the meaningful and value-rich environment in which 304
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we dwell. The frst thing to note in this regard is that the appearing of things should not be confned to the thinking I and its capacity to grasp matters of fact. If our basic encounter with things and situations is one of affective attunement to them and of interested engagement with them, cognition cannot pretend to serve as a mediator. On the contrary, the attitude of merely seeing something objectively present, or its “pure beholding”, to use Heidegger’s term, is to be explained on the basis of our prior affective involvement with the world. However, the legacies of both Husserl and Heidegger concerning feelings, moods and emotions are ambivalent, since their many merits in the study of affective life consist of providing essential conceptual and methodological tools rather than extended analysis of the affective phenomena themselves. Moreover, these merits are most visible in their substantive disagreements about the ontological and epistemic status of affective life, so that Heidegger’s strengths illuminate Husserl’s weaknesses and vice-versa. Husserl’s contribution to the study of affective phenomena notably includes the following claims whose short enumeration will serve as a declaration of principles behind our subsequent investigation of affectivity. Husserl’s emphasis on a priori correlation between acts of consciousness and various modes of givenness: •
•
•
•
rejects the modern assumption of the representation of the external world within the private realm of consciousness, since our intentional openness to the world cannot be seen either as a mirroring of exteriority within interiority, nor as a causal relation between external stimuli and their inner counterparts. opens a new feld for the systematic investigation of lawful relations between various intentional acts and experienced objects, allowing one to recognize the essential characteristics of phenomena precisely as they are given in the perception, memory, imagination or emotion. provides the means to understand the role of the lived and living body in the genesis of affective states. Most notably, it permits to appreciate the contribution of kinesthetic feelings to the monitoring of how one’s body is positioned with regards to the requirements of the perceptual feld, articulated according to “I can” or “I can’t” rather than “I think”. fnally, it prevents one from regarding experiences as a mere succession of mental states, causally linked to each other or somehow “produced” by their physiological counterparts. As part of intentional fow, even the most simple affect, feeling or emotion is a temporally extended and internally structured whole that entails the retention of our past experiences and the anticipation of what is likely to happen.
All these claims are crucial for questioning the many objectivist assumptions that led the larger part of both modern philosophy and empirical psychology to treat the emotions as entities occurring within our heads, and that prevented those theories from grasping the specifcity of affective intentionality. However, if one looks more closely at how these innovative Husserlian claims apply within his concrete analysis of emotional life, one cannot but feel at least a bit dissatisfed. To be sure, already in his famous Fifth Logical investigation, Husserl recognizes that the role of the feelings (Gefühle) does not boil down to providing some affective “coloration” to an already encountered object.1 Feelings transform our perceptual experience into a special class of intentional acts of their own, in which our consciousness is directed at the values of a given. Nevertheless, Husserl is far from recognizing the fundamental role that our affectivity plays on its own in world-disclosure and he does not departure from the intellectualist account of feeling. Since the everyday notion of feelings is equivocal, Husserl proposes to distinguish between intentional and non-intentional feelings. Intentional feelings, which Husserl exemplifes by the 305
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joy we experience in front of a beautiful landscape, are dependent upon a more basic intentionality, provided by “presentative acts”, such as perception or belief. Drawing in this regard on Brentano, Husserl fails to acknowledge the possibility of affective, prethematic and non-objectifying openness to a meaningful world.2 And yet, in opposition to Brentano, Husserl emphasizes the crucial function that non-intentional feelings perform within a complex, stratifed phenomenon of emotion that entails both sensory and intentional layers of sense. In the terminology of the Logical Investigations, these non-intentional feelings include both sensuous feelings (sinnliche Gefühle, such as sharp sound, soft or rough touch) and affective sensations (Gefühlsempfndungen, closely related to proprioceptions such as visceral feelings or a pang in the heart). In Husserl’s later view, these non-intentional feelings can function as presentative contents and thus give rise to fully fedged intentional acts through which we disclose our value-rich surroundings. However, even from the partly reversed perspective presented in Ideas II, where Husserl speaks of sensuous feelings as a fundamental stratum for the constitution of values, the intellectualist assumption prevails in the claim that feelings would remain blind if they were not consciously “taken up” by an act of apprehension. In short, bodily feelings play the same role for the acts of valuing that “hyletic”, sensuous data (Empfndungsdaten) play for the acts of perceiving: they provide material ground to be animated by an act of meaning-giving or “animating” apprehensions.3 Though he recognizes here that experience of value implies an irreducible feeling, Husserl nevertheless still strives to found any value-apperception worthy of its name upon the intuition of the value in question. Such a stance is consequent with Husserl’s commitment to provide a rationalist account of our practical world-orientation, where any evaluative positiontaking has to be based on some kind of cognitive element. At the same time, it leads Husserl to provide an overly intellectualized picture of affectivity. The Husserlian account illegitimately decomposes the unifed structure of our emotional life, since within the limits of experience we never witness anything like the mere sensory feelings that would have to be “animated” by an act of interpretation. Husserl’s analysis introduces, praeter necessitatem, distinctions that our experiential life does not support.Wouldn’t it be much more consequent to recognize that an important and even fundamental part of our openness to the world does not have the character of objectifying acts and does not rely upon doxic, conscious acts? Is it necessary to presuppose that the fow of feelings, in order to disclose our situation in the world meaningfully, is to be “animated” by conceptual apprehension, as Husserl claims?
The phenomenological primacy of affectivity This is precisely where Heidegger’s emphasis on the fundamental role of the affective disclosure of the world offers a welcome antidote to Husserl’s intellectualism. In contrast to Husserl, the disclosure of the world as the horizon of my being does not primarily result from objectifying acts, be they representations, judgments or other epistemic “acts of consciousness”. Instead, moods constitute the fundamental lenses through which we experience the world.We do not always form explicit judgments about everything we encounter, but we are always already attuned to the world through a mood. Prior to any objectifying act directed at things and their determinate qualities, we feel we are a part of a meaningful whole and the allure of such belonging is revealed in our being attuned. That is why phenomenology cannot start by establishing our epistemic access to the world and regard its affective tones and values as founded upon this relation of knowledge. On the contrary, the attitude of “simply seeing” should be explained on the basis of our affective involvement in the world.4 Then, if we are to overcome the intellectualist position, we have to acknowledge that our openness to the world exceeds the a priori correlation between constituting subjectivity and 306
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constituted objectivity.The a priori correlation itself is to be reformulated in terms of the fundamental inextricability between self-understanding and the disclosure of the things that matter or that have to be dealt with. Depending on our attunement, things and situations manifest themselves as pressing or tedious matters; they are enticing or fascinating in the mood of elation, threatening in anxious attunement, simultaneously repulsive and attractive when we fnd ourselves in what Spinoza called fuctuatio animi, associated with envy, jealousy and the like.Things always show up within a certain “tonality” or “feel” to which we are responsive. If they did not, not even their most rigorous scientifc uncovering would be of any relevance for us.Any search for specifc meanings thus always presupposes our affective openness to world-signifcance, which includes not only the possibility of being addressed by meaning, but also the possibility of losing meaningfulness, as will become clear when we turn to consider “basic attunements” such as Angst or profound boredom. Prior to engaging with these Grundstimmungen, let us frst consider several examples of what Heidegger calls the “ontic side” of the ontological structure of affectivity. On the ontic level, our affective disposedness mostly manifests itself in our passing moods, affects and feelings such as grief, eagerness, feeling blue, puzzlement, elation, exasperation, mourning, wariness, satisfaction.5 Already in paying attention to these and similar ontic modes of attunement, we can observe that the things and the situations are not merely given, but are something that we care about: a love has been lost, the joyful blue of the sky above is inviting us for a walk, the fridge is empty again. Because of the ubiquity of moods, our relation to “matters of fact” is never one of indifference. All these everyday feelings are indicators of how well we are faring in our dealings with worldly matters and social interactions.“Mood makes manifest ‘how one is and is coming along.’ In this ‘how one is’ being in a mood brings being to its ‘there’” (Heidegger 2010, 131). Feelings are thus not inward; they are ways of disclosing our current standing in the world. Unlike the most common examples of everyday feelings and passing moods mentioned above, the so-called “ground attunements” do not regard specifc states of affairs to be concerned with, but rather disclose the overall situation of our factual, unchosen being-there.To be sure, it does not mean that “merely being in a mood” will illuminate by itself the relevant ontological structure of Dasein (see Heidegger 2010, 132).And yet, while particular “ontic” feelings and moods disclose the salient features of objects or situations, fundamental attunements such as Angst or deep boredom disclose our being-in-the-world as a whole.Why is it so? First of all, what these “existential feelings” make manifest is the unitary structure of our being in the world, the inextricability of who (as attuned to one’s own being at stake), being-in (as belonging to a whole that can never be grasped by representation) and world (neither as particular this or that, nor the sum of it, but the ultimate existential horizon of any positioning). It is precisely because they disclose both the world as a whole and our situatedness within it that moods are of utmost importance for fundamental ontology, understood as a method of discovering the meaning of being. It might even be said that one has to be in a mood for angst if one is to develop a precise description of Dasein’s ontological condition. Secondly, this disclosive function of moods passes inconspicuously most of the time, but is activated in radical shifts in deep attunements.This point is never explicitly stated by Heidegger himself, but convincingly developed by Ratcliff (2008).While passing from one shallow mood to another is noticed only incidentally, extreme changes in moods allow us to become aware of what was taken for granted in our absorbed coping with things up to now. Our situatedness as such becomes conspicuous precisely to the extent to which our background orientation has eroded or drained away in angst. Only during such drastic shifts might we become aware of the tacit, but fundamental role that our previous attunement played in structuring the meaningfulness of our world. 307
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Thirdly, basic attunements disclose the radical ungroundedness of existence, the fragility of our everyday meaningfulness that we have taken for granted as well as the contingent and indeterminate character of our shared form of life. This third “function” of Grundstimmungen is convincingly stressed and developed in all its ambivalent political consequences in a recent paper by Slaby and Thonhauser (2019). Once our angst or deep boredom discloses the world as such, a world in which no aspiration and no activity appears more meaningful than any other, one might ask: what comes next? Since nobody can prolong the moment of confrontation with nothing, and since all previous signifcance seems to have been dissolved by the corrosive effects of Angst, the resoluteness opens a variety of political choices, including the most disastrous. This is surely not the only criticism that might be addressed to Heidegger’s account of affectivity. Apart from the notorious neglect of body to which we will turn shortly, it has been also criticized for the “sloppiness” of its conceptual distinction (see Freeman 2015, 249–252). Heidegger not only uses the concept of Stimmungen rather loosely so that it is unclear if he speaks about their ontic manifestations (i.e. moods in the everyday use of the world), or about our fundamental, pervasive and ubiquitous attunement to the world, but after having delineated moods as precisely “modes of Befndlichkeit” in §29, he goes on in §30 to exemplify their focal role in world-disclosure with the example of fear, also called to be “a mode of Befndlichkeit”, i.e. an instance of mood.To my mind, this particular issue identifed by Freeman (2015) can fnd its solution in the following differentiation: Heidegger is right to call fear “a mode of Befndlichkeit” providing that we do not confate such a denomination exclusively with moods, but rather treat it as one suited for all various modes of affective disposedness including emotions, feelings, sentiments and even “ground moods” such as those with implicit disclosive power.What seems more unfortunate is the subsequent identifcation of fear as “anxiety which has fallen prey to the ‘world’” (Heidegger 2010, 183) and its characterization as “inauthentic mode of attunement” in Division II (Heidegger 2010, 325), since it supposedly makes one turn away from one’s existence. Freeman is right, however, in pointing out that Heidegger owes us a more precise differentiation between various modes of Befndlichkeit.All these omissions and dubious distinctions make it diffcult to grasp in concreto the basic relationships that bind moods and emotions as various ontic manifestations of our affective disposedness.The only way to exonerate Heidegger from this charge is by his own acknowledgment that the fundamental task of his investigation lies elsewhere, to wit, in the clarifcation of the meaning of being.6
Moods as a pre-intentional background of emotions Even though Heidegger does not offer a robust theory of affectivity, he surely provides powerful conceptual tools to develop an account of various modes of attunement, as we experience them in our everyday lives. On this ontic level, it is possible to differentiate moods from emotions at least in three fundamental respects: 1) It has been often stressed that moods are not intentional, but rather diffuse, atmospheric and pervasive. For instance, Lormand (1985) and Sizer (2000) explicitly claim that moods lack intentional object.This seems to be confrmed by Heidegger’s insight that moods or attunements disclose the tonality of the whole world (2010, 133–134). However, moods are not devoid of any intentionality, since they entail a certain position vis-a-vis one’s overall existential situation or the more specifc milieu to which one belongs: one might feel generally threatened by one’s competitive work environment, in control or vulnerable in one’s relationship, overwhelmed not only by this or that particular task, but by the overall multiplicity of requirements one has to face. Moods are thus not devoid of content, even 308
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though they are objectless in the strict sense of the word.What they disclose is not “this” or “that” in particular, but rather the existential or social context in general, appraised through the lens of one’s coping potentials.That is why it is best to qualify moods as pre-intentional, rather than non-intentional. 2) Moods are not necessarily expressed in overt conduct. Heidegger even states that a person overcome by grief might not alter anything in her comportment, so that “everything remains as before, and yet everything is different” (Heidegger 1995, 66).This point is closely tied to the previous one; since moods typically lack discrete intentional objects, they do not feature a particular purpose to be accomplished either. However, the motivational aspect is not completely missing, since moods function as a background, giving my emotional experiences their general orientation, as developed below. 3) We have much less control over moods than over our emotions.“Mood assails” (Heidegger 2010, 133). It comes uninvited and resonates inconspicuously through all our being due to its intrusive nature.To be sure, it would be an exaggeration to pretend that we control or even choose our emotions.7 In comparison with moods, however, emotions are undoubtedly more malleable insofar as they are expressed in overt gestures and conducts. In fact, these latter surely come under our responsibility, if for no other reason than for the commitments that we manifest through our conduct and for which we are accountable to others. It might be then suggested that while we fnd ourselves in a mood, often without being able to justify why, emotions are something that we enact and that we overtly express both spontaneously and for all kinds of strategic purposes. These distinctions seem better ftted to various affective phenomena than the usual stereotypical differentiations between short-term intense emotional episodes and lingering and calmer moods.8 However, other nuances might be advanced and those presented above questioned with counterfactual cases, since it is ontologically misguiding to differentiate moods from emotions as if they were natural kinds or two categories in a given set of all affective states. Whenever we attempt such classifcations within the experiential complexity of our affective life, we run the risk of treating our moods and emotions again as if they were occurrent entities, i.e. we transform them into various kinds of objects that would be juxtaposed against each other in our minds. Rather, we need to explain how they are bound together in our overall engagement with the world and, more specifcally, how emotional episodes emerge against the backdrop of our ubiquitous and pervasive attunement. Heidegger points us in the right direction when he claims “Mood has always already disclosed being-in-the-world as a whole and frst makes possible directing oneself toward something” (Heidegger 2010, 133). Since being affectively attuned to the world is necessary for things and situations to matter, our general moods constitute the ground-foor dimension of intentionality insofar as they pre-structure all of our specifcally directed comportments, be they affective (emotions), cognitive (judgments and beliefs) or behavioral (goal-oriented acts as well as the taking of stances). Concerning emotional life, we can say that pervasive moods are preconditions of experiencing object-directed emotions, insofar as they delimit the space of possibilities against which we deem certain emotional conducts as relevant, worthy or out of the question. My anxiety thus motivates me to restrain my social interactions, while elation leads me to seek more experiences likely to bring me joy. In reverse, when deeply depressed, no joke, novelty or positive news has enough motivational force to bring me joy or laughter. In all such cases, being in a mood tends to shape the way one reacts emotionally to particular things and situations. Moods function here as a pre-intentional, tacit background that codetermines the range, intensity and style of possible emotional conducts. Moreover, it has to be stressed that Befndlichkeit is closely tied up with the past dimension of 309
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our temporal situatedness. Our affective familiarity with the (social) surrounding is rooted in our past experiences, their reciprocal confrmations and traditionally sanctioned ways of coping to which we are also affectively attuned, as can be seen in our feeling of guilt in cases of transgression.
Embodiment as ontological basis of affectivity It has been stated and repeated that Heidegger’s account of Befndlichkeit illegitimately brackets the embodied nature of our affective openness to the world (Freeman 2015). Unlike the other charges mentioned above, the neglect of body cannot be explained away by the different orientation of Heidegger’s investigation, since he does not merely omit a particular or “ontical” domain of interest, but fails to acknowledge the ontological relevance of the body for a proper account of our belonging to the world and our spatial orientation within it. If we restrict this criticism to the present subject-matter, we clearly see that our attunement to the world cannot be explained apart from our bodily capacity to “be in tune” with its environment. In this regard, the antidote to Heidegger’s disembodied account of affectivity consists partly in the reappropriation of the Husserlian lesson from Ideas II concerning the contribution that kinesthetic experiences constantly bring to the implicit self-awareness that we have about our practical involvement with the perceptual feld.The Heideggerian approach is thus to be combined with Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the subjectively felt, living body that is continuously synchronizing itself with worldly solicitations. It is through and from within our body that we are opened and responsive to something in the world (in emotion) or attuned to our current existential situation as such (in moods such as boredom, anxiety or joy). It is precisely our lived body that ties us to our “here and now” from where we have to perform each one of our earthly moves. At the same time, my lived body is also a habitual body that evaluates all present and future affordances according to the range of its acquired skills. My attunement to a meaningful, soliciting world would not be understandable if I did not have a pre-refective, non-observational sense of what sorts of actions are available within the space I inhabit with my body.As part of this implicit sense, kinesthetic sensations provide the embodied subject with an appropriate evaluative feedback about “how one is and is coming along” that Heidegger’s analytic attributes to moods (Heidegger 2010, 131).The link between action-control and kinesthesis, developed in detail in Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception, has thus to be applied to affective experiences too. The frst thing to observe is that emotions are closely tied to felt variations of our capacity to meet the requirements, novelties and disturbances of our environment. I am affectively responsive to all kinds of tugs and pulls of the world proportionally according to what “I can” or “can’t”; I am affectively sensible to certain matters as threatening when I tacitly see my bodily capacities restricted (typically in dark places or other cases of momentary sensory impairment), as frustrating when I perceive others as obstacles on my path, and as exciting when I hope with uncertainty to be capable to live up to some rare occasion.All such threats, promises, hindrances and other solicitations are continuously appraised according to my body’s capacities, skills and habits allowing me to meet them. As an integral part of this synchronization, kinesthetic experiences contribute to one’s implicit background awareness about one’s current standing in the world. Bodily feelings tacitly shape and articulate worldly matters into relevant, recalcitrant, attracting and otherwise existentially signifcant objects or situations. Drawing on such insights about the lived body’s responsivity to the world, a new current in phenomenological investigations of affectivity has reappropriated the Jamesian notion of the body as a “sounding-board” (James 1884) pointing toward the body’s capacity, including 310
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its most visceral sensitivity, to make us aware of features relevant for our being. Fuchs (2000) thus proposes to re-describe Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on “body-schema” in terms of “bodily resonance” (leibliche Resonanz). This notion can be developed, to my mind, in three interconnected directions: a) in order to explain our successful synchronization with the salient features of our natural surroundings perceived in their expressive physiognomy (“sensing” understood as “living communication with the world” in Merleau-Ponty (2012, 53)); b) in order to provide a convincing account of shared emotions that is not reduced to mirroring each other’s emotions, but encompasses more complex forms of emotional coordination between agents receptive to each other’s gestures and postures (Fuchs 2013; Slaby 2013); c) most of all, to provide the means for an alternative approach to the emotional dimension of depressive disorders in terms of defciency or even loss of bodily resonance which alienates the self from the world and from others (Svenaeus 2013). Even though Merleau-Ponty emphasizes mostly the successful cases of such attunement and limits the scope of his investigations to the perceptual synchronizing of my body’s posture to the perceived solicitations, his account can be applied as well to the cases when we are “out of tune” with our surroundings. It is precisely when our felt body registers some breakdown in the customary harmonious coordination with its Umwelt that we experience our most unsettling emotions. Conventional harmony is unsettled and the felt disarray motivates our body to search for any means available to recover its grip on things. Moreover, such an account can serve to provide an ontologically embodied ground for depressive disorders too. In a way analogical to ground attunements of angst and deep boredom, in the cases of most severe depression, it feels as though the universe is devoid of any familiarity and there is no alternative to reestablishing a meaningful association with it. As we slip into boredom, weariness and gloom the affective background of intelligibility – which was tacitly presupposed by all experience – vanishes; our Stimmung becomes Verstimmung. Our lived body still serves as a “resonance board”: it incessantly evaluates goings-on as potential threats, poles of attraction or repulsion, or affordances through the lens of its own capacities to cope with them. In cases of depression, however, such bodily resonance becomes less sensitive, out of tune or completely defcient, with a broad spectrum of frailties including physiological alterations as possible causes of such defciency (Svenaeus 2013).
Emotional conducts Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor of “living communication” between the self and the world further points to the inextricability of activity and receptivity in our affective engagements with the world.The best concept available to grasp this mutual dependence between “moving oneself ” and “being moved” is that of emotional conducts. It allows the recognition that we are guided and oriented by various affective pulls, but not without guiding ourselves, i.e. not without continuous monitoring, assessing and reorienting our grip on the situation. In this last section, I claim that felt evaluations or appraisals of one’s situatedness that are constitutive of our emotions cannot be separated from the activity we perform. Since our felt evaluations unfold – and are subject to revision – according to our more or less successful coping with the emotional situations, it is impossible to deal separately with evaluative and agentive “components” of our affective life. Our emotions do not consist merely in perceiving values, as was suggested by Döring (2007), Tappolet (2010) and many others, but rather in attending to affective affordances practically. It is insofar as we unfold our emotions within conducts that we bestow a determinate signifcance and weight to affective qualities of a given situation. To date, most theories regard emotion as existing in principle prior to and independently of emotional conduct, which is conceived as something arising out of already given and deter311
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minate emotion. Even though most contemporary approaches recognize “action readiness”, “motivation to act”, or another motor component as part of emotional experience, they still operate a dichotomy between the emotion itself and the “action out of emotion”, as if the latter was the end-product of the former (Griffths 1997; Elster 1999; Goldie 2000). However, emotional conducts are not simply fnal outputs, succeeding already full-blown emotional states, since they constitute the emotions’ directedness, determine their intensity and mold their content. In this fnal section, I will briefy discuss the most signifcant reasons why emotions cannot exist independently of their behavioral manifestations and why they should not be severed from their expression in action in their empirical studies. First, only when our feelings are acted out within a specifc interaction can we be sure that the affect results in the entire involvement of the person and that it does not fade out as a feeting sensation with no consequences. For instance, mere startled reaction (as well as other refex mechanisms described by affective neurosciences) does not count the emotion of fear that becomes fully fedged only insofar as we fee, hide or remain in a frozen posture. Attending to one of these possibilities will undoubtedly affect the specifc way in which I experience my fear and perceive the threat. However, we should not overemphasize the seemingly paradigmatic case of fear that secretly leads to the wrong assumption that the emotions are mostly individual feelings directed at a single object. Because of the interaffective nature of most of our emotions, it matters less how I feel inside than what affective solicitations I grasp as relevant through my conduct and what affordances I myself bring to the shared situation. In a face-to-face encounter, my own emotions unfold into a specifc shape to the extent in which the soliciting presence of other(s) summons me to reveal the way I feel about the situation in question. If honest, I would have to acknowledge that in most cases, I am unable to provide an explicit answer by means of introspection. I learn what I feel through acting it out. The ambiguity of the perceived and emotionally felt has to be unifed through our conduct. When frustrated by a partner’s indolence, there is no one stimulus giving rise to one precise emotion, but rather a complex situation that I partly constitute in its meaning through overtly hostile or merely grumpy conduct and self-expression. Through our emotional conduct, we enact one of the possible interpretations of what is at stake in our current and existentially open-ended situation. Secondly, when emotions are evaluated as appropriate or inappropriate, it is not only a matter of evaluating that the judgment sustaining them is correct. I can acknowledge that an offense has been committed or even agree with the reasons behind someone’s anger, and still deem that his anger – precisely as it is expressed in his loud shouting and insulting gestures – is an inappropriate conduct given the situation and the relational links between its participants. Once expressed in our overt conducts and acknowledged by relevant others, our emotions become our commitments and only then are they morally signifcant and rationally assessable for their appropriateness. Others expect me to hold to commitments displayed by my emotions and they put pressure on their coherent expressions by all kinds of normative sanctioning. For example, one is expected to feel relief when escaping a dangerous situation, to display “obligatory” happiness after having successfully given birth to a child or to display sorrow when losing a close parent. And yet, there are cases of emotional disconnection that might be puzzling for one’s surroundings, analyzed both by existential literature (think of Camus’ Meursault) and current critical sociology.Taylor (1996), for instance, tells the story of how post-partum and other maternal depressions, contrary to societal requirements associated with motherhood, led to the formation of self-help groups, aiming frst at changing the mother’s moods and emotions, but ending up by transforming the parameters of the role itself and the range of emotions that might be associated with it. 312
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Thirdly, acting out the emotion shapes or alters both its intensity and its content.9 Regarding the variations of intensity, they can be clearly evidenced in our ability to suffer, suppress, endure or enjoy the affect through its canalization into a particular behavior; the vivacity of our gesture or conduct increases the intensity of the felt affect. Concerning the content, what matters is the transformation of the affect into a goal-oriented movement that resolves an ambivalent situation through its unilateral taking-over. Merleau-Ponty’s claim about the ambivalence of the perceived world, applied to emotionality, amounts to the rejection of one-to-one correspondence between a myriad of affective solicitations and the limited range of value-judgments and conceptually identifed emotions. Situations are ambivalent, our fellow beings not entirely predictable, the outcomes of our involvement uncertain. Which salient possibilities offered by an affective situation are to be actualized and developed in their consequences largely depends upon the action performed, the gesture expressed, the tone, the intensity or the smartness of the reply provided. Fourthly, only if we adopt the above-mentioned redefnition of emotions in terms of conducts can we explain why it is possible to perceive someone’s anger directly in his clenched fsts and threatening posture, the joy in his laughter, the disgust in his spitting or the wrinkling of his nose without recourse to any theory of his mind or inference of the best explanation (Scheler 1954, 260; Merleau-Ponty 2012, 372).The emphasis on the direct perception of another’s emotions was largely discussed within the phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity in order to disqualify “the problem of other minds” in its diverse Cartesian reformulations.What was still lacking, however, was the requalifcation of emotions themselves in terms of expressive conducts through which we a) determine their content and intensity; b) manifest our commitments and make ourselves accountable; c) disclose to others what we care about; and d) engage in shared sense-making of the present emotional situation through our interaffective reciprocity.All these aspects fnd their synthesis in the notion of emotional conducts, which allows me to conclude with a reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty’s claim about the intrinsic relation between thought and speech. Emotion tends toward its expression in conduct as toward its completion.10
Acknowledgments This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (reg. no.: CZ. 02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).
Notes 1 “We do not merely have a presentation, with an added feeling associatively tacked on to it, and not intrinsically related to it, but pleasure or distaste direct themselves to the presented object, and could not exist without such a direction” (Husserl 2001, 108). 2 For Brentano, each mental act is a presentation or is itself founded on a presentation (Brentano 1924, 112). However, in his manuscripts dating from 1909 to 1911, Husserl recognizes that feelings are by themselves oriented toward experienced objects or situations. Based on an analogy between Wahrnehmung (perception) and Wertnehmung (value-reception or apprehension of value through feeling), Husserl acknowledges that affective and cognitive dimension are fused within a single emotionalevaluative experience whose content cannot be defned by a core of objective determinations of entities to which the feeling would add its “value” properties. See Husserl (2018) and the detailed account of Husserl’s manuscripts about Gefühl und Wert in Jardine (2020). 3 Husserl (1989, 160). 4 Heidegger calls our basic ontological condition of “being attuned” Befndlichkeit, and its specifc manifestations “moods” (Stimmungen) that are best translated as “attunements”. As noted by Elpidourou
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5 6 7 8
9 10
and Freeman (2015) and many others, there is no ideal English equivalent for Heidegger’s neologism. Befndlichkeit connotes both our situatedness (we fnd ourselves situated without being given a choice) and our feeling about such a situation (how do we fnd ourselves regarding our current standing). In order to prevent the confusion resulting from the fact that both Befndlichkeit and Stimmung were translated into English as “attunement” (compare Heidegger 1995 and 2010), I decided to leave Befndlichkeit untranslated for the purposes of this text and to redescribe it, when necessary, in terms of affective disposedness. This ontic side of Befndlichkeit is equated by Heidegger with “phenomena [that] have long been familiar ontically under the terms of affects [Affekte] and feelings [Gefühle]” (Heidegger 2010, 134). “The various modes of attunement and their interconnected foundations cannot be interpreted within the problematic of this investigation” (Heidegger 2010, 134). Such attempts might, however, be found in Nussbaum (2001) and most notably in Solomon’s Not Passions’ Slaves (2003). See Parkinson and al. (1996). Solomon rejects differentiating between moods and emotions in terms of duration and ascertains the existence of long-lasting emotions such as love, “lasting even for years or a lifetime and occupying several levels or dimensions of consciousness” (Solomon, 2006, 303). For further development of various affective phenomena in their mutual bonds and differences, see Švec (2013). See also Slaby and Wüschner (2014) who emphasized the active momentum of emotions in a way convergent with my own approach in Švec (2013). Cf.“Thought tends toward expression as if toward its completion” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 182).
References Brentano, Franz. 1924. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt I. Leipzig: Meiner Elpidorou,Andreas and Lauren Freeman. 2015.“Affectivity in Heidegger I: Moods and Emotions in Being and Time.” Philosophy Compass. 10(10): pp. 661–671. Elster, Jon. 1999. Alchemies of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeman, Lauren. 2015. “Defending a Heideggerian account of Mood.” In: Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology. Eds. A. Elpidorou, D. Dahlstrom, and W. Hopp. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 247–267 Fuchs, Thomas. 2000. Psychopathologie von Leib und Raum: Phänomenologisch-empirische Untersuchungen zu depressiven und paranoiden Erkrankungen. Darmstadt: Steinkopff. ———. 2013. “Depression, Intercorporeality, and Interaffectivity.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20: pp. 219–238. Goldie, Peter. 2000. The Emotions:A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Griffths, Paul E. 1997. What Emotions Really Are:The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1995. Basic Concepts of Metaphysics:World—Finitude—Solitude.Trans.W. McNeil and N. Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010. Being and Time.Trans. J. Stambaugh, revised by D. Schmidt.Albany: SUNY Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book. Trans. F. Kersten. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2001. Logical Investigations.Volume II.Trans. J. N. Findlay. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2018. Gefühl und Wert. Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Band II.Texte aus dem Nachlass. Eds. U. Melle and T.Vongehr. Dordrecht: Springer. James,William. 1884.“What is an Emotion?” Mind, 9 (34): pp. 188–205. Jardine, James. 2020.“Husserl.” In: The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions. Eds.T. Szanto and H. Landweer. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 53–62. Lormand, Eric. 1985.“Toward a Theory of Moods.” Philosophical Studies, 47: pp. 385–407. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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Moods and emotions Parkinson, Brian,Totterdell, Peter, Briner, Rob and Reynolds, Shirley. 1996. Changing moods:The psychology of mood and mood regulation. Harlow, England:Addison Wesley Longman. Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2008. Feelings of Being. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. “Why Mood Matters.” In: The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Ed. M. Wrathall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 157–176. Scheler, Max. 1954. The Nature of Sympathy.Trans. P. Heath. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sizer, Laura. 2000. “Towards a Computational Theory of Mood.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 51(4): pp. 743–770. Slaby, Jan. 2013. “Emotions and the Extended Mind.” In: Collective Emotions. Eds. M. Salmela and C. von Scheve. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 32–46. Slaby, Jan and Thonhauser, Gerhard. 2019. “Heidegger and the Affective (Un)Grounding of Politics.” In: Heidegger on Affect. Ed. C. Hadjioannou. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 265-289. Slaby, Jan and Wüschner, Philipp. 2014.“Emotion and Agency.” In: Emotion and Value. Eds. S. Roeser and C. Todd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 212–228. Solomon, Richard C. 2003. Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. “Emotions in Phenomenology and Existentialism.” In: A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Eds. H. Dreyfus and M.Wrathall. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 291–309. Švec, Ondřej. 2013. La Phénoménologie des émotions.Villeneuve-d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires de Septentrion. Svenaeus, Fredrik. 2013. “Depression and the Self: Bodily Resonance and Attuned Being-in-the-World.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20(7–8): pp. 15–32. Tappolet, Christine. 2000. Emotions et Valeurs. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Taylor, Verta. 1996. Rock-a-by Baby: feminism, self-help, and post-partum depression. London/New York: Routledge.
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27 NOTHINGNESS Kwok-ying Lau
In the history of Western philosophy, the notion of nothingness or non-being has been excluded from the core of its thematic refections since the very beginning by Parmenides. In his famous poem commonly known as “The Way of Truth”, Parmenides, the frst philosopher of being, judges that it is impossible to think of nothingness or non-being, since it is contradictory in terms to say that “that which is is not”.1 Considered as synonym of error or falsity, the term nothingness or non-being should not be retained in rational discourse. Parmenides’ position-taking has exercised a prolonged infuence in the history of Western philosophy and is still visible in the contemporary Western philosophical scene.2 One of the famous examples is Rudolf Carnap, leader of Logical Positivism, who, in his article “Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language”, mocks Heidegger’s thematic rehabilitation of the concept of nothingness in the latter’s 1929 inaugural lecture on “What is Metaphysics?”.3 Even Husserl himself, whose phenomenological approach is diametrically opposed to that of Carnap’s positivism, seems to have adopted a similar position.While recognizing in the 1907 lectures on Thing and Space that “all in all, the world—in its existence and in what it is—is an irrational fact”,4 Husserl judged nonetheless that “naturally, it is self-evident that there cannot be nothing”.5 Husserl ruled out without giving any further explication the need or the signifcance to ponder on nothingness or non-being: the latter is not the source of wonder to the father of phenomenology. However, Plato, the greatest disciple of Parmenides, has already surreptitiously reintroduced refections on nothingness or non-being in philosophical discourse. This is done through the conversation on the meaningfulness of the talk of “what-is-not” between the young Theaetetus and the Stranger in the later part of the dialogue Sophist.6 It is the Stranger who argues, explicitly against Parmenides, that “what-is-not” can be intelligible and exist as some form of being. By introducing nothingness or non-being into the understanding of being, Plato, through the mouth of the Stranger, shows that he is not a naive thinker of identity. As the frst thinker of dialectic, Plato is aware of the difference between being and nothingness, both epistemologically and ontologically speaking. But since the very notion of nothingness is introduced by someone who has the status of a stranger, this brings about at the same time the relation with alterity. Thanks to this anonymous Other, Plato comes to the awareness of nothingness. Here the ethical dimension of the question of nothingness comes forth: the openness to the question of nothingness owes to the vision of the Other who brings in a perspective from elsewhere. Thus, if philosophy is thaumazein—wonder—in front of all that is, i.e., in front of beings, the question 316
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of nothingness opens the dimension that is hidden by beings and is beyond beings. Beyond the question of beings thought within epistemological and ontological terms, there is the ethical dimension unveiled by the questioning in the direction of nothingness. Plato’s brief excursion into the discussion of nothingness in Sophist shows that nothingness can be thought and spoken of in different ways: the logical-epistemological, the ontological, and the ethical.The logical-epistemological way is closely related to the linguistic medium in which the thought on nothingness and non-being is expressed in the form “S is P” (subject copula predicate).To assert at the same time that something is its contrary is logically contradictory. But can we have the experience of something in itself prior to ascribing to it any divisible properties? Eastern philosophers, who do not necessarily express their thoughts in the linguistic form “S is P”, have also different modes of experience of nothingness. For example, in the classical Chinese language, it is not necessary to affrm existence by a copula. Daoism, Buddhism and the Kyoto School are well-known representatives of Asian schools of thought which theorize different ways of expressing the experience of nothingness.That is why meontology, the philosophical study of nothingness or non-being, is underdeveloped in the Western tradition, while it fourishes in Asian philosophies since antiquity to modernity from India and China to Korea and Japan.7 In his lecture “What is Metaphysics?”, Heidegger draws our attention to a mode of experience of nothingness that, beyond the ontic level, is not expressible in the form “S is P” in which “S” stands for an individual thing. Heidegger is thus the frst phenomenological philosopher to have rehabilitated the thematization of nothingness by recognizing the possibility of experience of nothingness, to be followed by Sartre.
Heidegger’s rehabilitation of nothing Though Heidegger’s lecture on “What is Metaphysics?” proceeds by unfolding a certain way of metaphysical inquiry and attempting a response to it, the author of Being and Time declared in the 1949 “Introduction” to the reedition of the lecture that “Nothing is the unique theme of the lecture”.8 Heidegger undertakes from the very beginning of the lecture the deconstruction with respect to two traditional ways of inquiry into the problem of nothing: the scientifc way and the formal-logical way. The lecture begins as if it has anticipated the refutation by the positivistic scientifc position. To a scientist, it is impossible to inquire into nothing understood as “that which is not”, as science has its object of inquiry only on beings. By fxing her eyes of inquiry onto beings, a scientist does not know where she can encounter nothing in order to begin her inquiry. It is thus the metaphysician in the Heideggerian sense who shows the scientist the way: a scientist is unable to encounter nothing except by the complete negation of the totality of beings. But this, in turn, requires that the totality of beings is given beforehand such that it can be negated, and “in this negation nothing itself would then be manifest”.9 The givenness of the totality of beings is not only the pre-requisite of metaphysical questioning, it is also the foundation of any scientifc inquiry. Thus, Heidegger has shown that metaphysical inquiry into the question of nothing is the basis for any scientifc inquiry. Heidegger then proceeds to the deconstruction of the formal-logical way.The formal-logical thinker argues that our conception of nothing comes from the negation of the totality of beings. But this act of negation is enacted on the representation in our mind of the totality of beings. What such an act of negation aims at is merely the formal concept of nothing represented in our imagination, but never the nothing itself.This formal concept of nothing will remain indeterminate and indistinct with respect to its content to which nothing corresponds, and the talk about it has no validity.This formal concept of nothing will gain its validity only when it bases itself 317
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on experiential encounter with nothing. Again, the formal-logical way of inquiry into nothing presupposes the fundamental experience of nothing itself. 10 After the deconstructive unfolding of the two defcient modes of inquiry into nothing, Heidegger proceeds to undertake a phenomenological description and analysis of the experience of nothing. Already in Being and Time, Heidegger sketches out briefy a discussion of nothing on the way to the thematization of the experience of dread (Angst). In the experience of uncanniness that takes upon us in our awareness of our being-thrown into the world, we are assaulted by dread, which, different from fear, is objectless. In dread,“the Dasein fnds itself face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence”.11 In the uncanniness of dread, the Dasein is even being “thrown in the ‘nothing’”.12 The being-thrown of the Dasein shows that it lacks any foundation in itself. Its incapacity to provide any foundation for itself is constitutive of its ontological character of being-thrown.That is to say, the beingthrown of Dasein into nothing reveals that there is a certain nullity in the very foundation of Dasein as lacking foundation. And this nullity in foundation as lacking of foundation is ultimately “the being-thrown into death” of Dasein.13 In short, the being-thrown into nothing unveils the ontological character of the specifc ontical existence, which is the Dasein as being-toward-death. In “What is Metaphysics?”, Heidegger pushes the analysis further to show the entire ontological bearing of nothing and the ontological difference between beings and the Being of beings. Here, nothing is unveiled through the experience of dread in which the totality of beings retreats out of our hold. Originary dread can assail us at any time.We are entirely passive before dread. Thus, nothing is experienced through a certain kind of attunement (Stimmung) or affectivity and not by way of conceptual comprehension. Precisely in dread there is nothing to grasp.Thus, the experience of dread is incomprehensible to a pure intellectualist mind.14 To try to understand nothing as a consequence of negation is to understand nothing as a result of an active intellectualist act. This is precisely not the case. Heidegger explains: “The ‘not’ does not originate through negation; rather, negation is grounded in the ‘not’ that springs from the nihilation of the nothing”. 15 The unveiling of nothing is brought about by the retreat of the totality of beings. It has nothing to do with any specifc being, not even God as the supreme being (summun ens) or the uncreated being—the creator (ens increatum).16 Rather,“the nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but unveils itself as belonging to the being of beings.”17 Thus nothing and being belong together, yet they are not the same.There is the possibility of the manifest of being of beings “only in the transcendence of a Dasein that is held out into the nothing.”18 Again, the transcendence of Dasein is not an intellectualist act, but an ontological character: its ontological character of being held out or thrown into the nothing is the origin of the movement of transcendence of Dasein.The transcendence of Dasein is not grounded from the Dasein itself, but from the “nihilation [Nichtung or nichten] of the nothing”.19 By showing that nothing belongs to the Being of beings and not any specifc being,Heidegger brings into view the thought of ontological difference between beings and the Being of beings, though the very expression of “ontological difference” (“ontologische Differenz”) is introduced only in the treatise “On the Essence of Ground” (“Vom Wesen des Grundes”) written at the same time as the lecture “What is Metaphysics?”.20
Humanization of nothingness in Sartre21 The two modes of thematization of nothing by Heidegger in Being and Time and in “What is Metaphysics?” witness the transition from the ontological characterization of Dasein to the 318
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thinking of ontological difference. In a certain way it already marks Heidegger’s turn away from the phenomenological anthropology still dominant in Being and Time to the thought of Being in his later works. However, we can still ask the following question: if the key to the manifestation of ontological difference resides in the movement of nihilation rooted in the being-thrown of Dasein, should we not inquire further into the relation between the movement of nihilation and the mode of existence specifc to Dasein? If nothing as the movement of nihilation is unveiled only in the experience of dread of the Dasein, is nothing not grounded also in the specifc mode of existence of Dasein, which is itself the movement of nihilation? Dasein, which nihilates itself in order to transcend itself toward others and toward the world, is precisely the mode of existence unique to the human being as subject. It is entirely different from all other modes of beings of things in the world as object. Sartre borrows the Hegelian terms of “for-itself ” and “in-itself ” to name these two modes of being as subject and being as object respectively.While Heidegger is reluctant to equate Dasein with the human subject, Sartre never hesitates to translate Dasein as “human reality”, following the frst French translator of Heidegger’s work, Henry Corbin. Sartre simply declares:“Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world.” 22 Sartre’s humanization of nothingness (néant) serves not only to make the phenomenological distinction between the two modes of being—the in-itself/object and the for-itself/subject, but also to explicate the condition of possibility of the appearance of the in-itself as mode of being of things or intra-mundane beings. Against Heidegger, who abandons the language of consciousness in Being and Time, Sartre retains the term consciousness to describe the for-itself. Since it is only as appearing to consciousness as the for-itself that all in-itself appears as phenomenon, the for-itself is no more a phenomenon, but the transphenomenal condition of possibility of phenomenon, or simply the “transphenomenality of being”.23 “Consciousness is not a mode of particular knowledge which may be called an inner meaning or self-knowledge; it is the transphenomenal dimension of being in the subject.”24 How does consciousness as the for-itself emerge amid the in-itself such that the in-itself can appear as phenomenon? This is the task of phenomenological ontology in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It is in undertaking this task that Sartre carries out very rich and original phenomenological descriptions of consciousness as nothingness or the for-itself, these two terms being interchangeable in Being and Nothingness. Following Heidegger, Sartre also understands nothingness as act of nihilation (néantisation). It is by this act of nihilation that consciousness is a being which can return to itself and to refect on itself, thus establishing a relation to itself as ipseity. But at the same time, consciousness is also a being that establishes an internal distance with itself, that digs a fssure with itself.25 In other words, consciousness is a being with internal difference and contains elements of alterity inherent in itself. By equating consciousness with nothingness, Sartre wants to highlight the aspects of spontaneity, non-substantiality, and non-positivity of the for-itself as subject. Already in his earlier article on “Transcendence of Ego”, Sartre, starting from the Husserlian doctrine of intentionality of consciousness, arrived at the conclusion that the mode of being of consciousness is nothingness. Since consciousness is necessarily consciousness of something, it must relate itself to a certain “thing” in order to exist. In other words, in daily life, consciousness exists in a pre-refective manner by relating to things in the world in conformity with its ontological character as being-in-the-world. Even in its refective mode of being as a self-refective consciousness, consciousness is never deprived of the object it is conscious of; this object is precisely consciousness itself in its pre-refective mode.This pre-refective mode of consciousness is often designated as the “ego” by philosophers, including Husserl. Against Husserl, Sartre points out that this “ego”, being the object of refective grasping of consciousness, is the intentional object of the refective consciousness. This “ego” has the same status as a transcendent 319
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being in the manner of a thing in the world, and not a being living in the immanence of a consciousness. For this reason, consciousness does not exist in the form of a “thing” nor as a “being”; it is rather something non-substantial, transparent, trans-lucid: it is a no-thing. In other words, consciousness is nothingness. The “ego” is merely the object constituted by the refective consciousness, but not consciousness itself. Consciousness is impersonal. By understanding consciousness as nothingness, Sartre proposes a “non-egological” conception of consciousness against Husserl’s doctrine of transcendental consciousness as transcendental egology in Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations.26 In Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues that our language use shows that we have experience of nothingness, and thus nothingness is some kind of being, but in a different modality. In our language use, there are affrmations and negations. Even when we express affrmation, it already implies negation:“A is B” implies that “A is not ~B”.Yet the possibility of negation in language use resides precisely in that we have originary experience of nothingness. Sartre explains this by his famous example of the experience of the absence of a close friend.When one day he enters a coffee shop which is the habitual meeting place with his friend Pierre, he fnds that Pierre is not there.To say that “Pierre is not there” is not merely to express a logical possibility as the negative statement of the expression “Pierre is there”. This is because the linguistic meaning of both of these two logical statements has nothing to do with the fact that Pierre is present or absent. It even has nothing to do with whether there exists really someone called Pierre.To say that “Pierre is not there” is to point out the absence of a person, which is nothingness with ontological implication. When the author of this sentence enters the coffee shop, he sees that all the settings of shop are there as usual, and the waiter is also serving other clients as usual. The only thing unusual is that his friend Pierre, whom he is expecting to see, is absent: he is not there.The absence or lack of Pierre is nothingness in the ontological sense.This shows that nothingness is not merely the negation of the logical possibility that Pierre is in the coffee shop, but that it is an object to be given in intuitive experience. The absence of Pierre as object of experience is unveiled in the experience of the non-fulfllment of the expectation of Pierre. For this reason, nothingness is “an original and irreducible event”.27 By using the example of the event of the absence of a close friend to illustrate that nothingness is given in intuitive experience, Sartre helps us to understand the situation in which the presence of something reminds us of the absence of somebody: for example, the presence of a relic shows the disappearance or even the death of someone. The kind of intuitive experience of non-presence and absence is the experience of nothingness. It is a common but important part of human experience. The tradition of Western philosophy, by paying attention merely to beings or to Being, is unable to understand the intuitive experience of nothingness. In fact, in the Conclusion of his earlier book on The Imaginary published in 1940, Sartre has already shown, through the discussion of the ontological status of image, that nothingness is a mode of being different from a natural thing or reality. In distinction to perceptual objects, image is used to indicate or to express things that do not exist in reality, that are things belonging to the order of irreality.Through the act of nihilation, our imagination or imaginary consciousness represent things absent by means of imagery.The usage of image is an eminent example of the inhabitation of nothingness in our mental life.28 Not only activities of artistic creation are enacted through imagination and imagery, but cognitive activities too. For example, the usage of imagery and imagination is necessary in historical knowledge to provide or project a historical scene of the past that is no more present. Modern scientifc cognition, in particular mathematical operation, depends basically on the usage of signs and symbols.These latter deploy in the space of imagination and image consciousness, and thus actively invite the visit of nothingness in our mental space. 320
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Sartre’s understanding of consciousness as nothingness develops Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality of consciousness into a philosophy of difference. Since consciousness is an intentional being that necessarily relates itself to something other than itself, this implies that this intentional being is not a self-identical being, but a being that can draw a line of separation with itself and establish an internal distance and internal difference with itself. It is this movement of internal distance and internal difference that renders possible that consciousness can turn back onto itself to become self-consciousness. In other words, with this internal distance and internal difference, consciousness can transform itself from the pre-refective state to the refective state.The character of refexivity of consciousness marks its specifcity as for-itself in distinction to a thing as in-itself.To Sartre, it is precisely the refective character of consciousness that renders possible its presence to itself in spite of the fact that it is projected to the world in the midst of things. Sartre says: “Actually presence to always implies duality …. If being is present to itself, it is because it is not wholly itself. Presence is an immediate deterioration of coincidence, for it supposes separation”.29 Consciousness as a being that separates with itself and cannot be coincided with itself is a heterogeneous being.Thus, consciousness is not a positive and substantial being like a thing; consciousness is nothingness. Sartre has very a clear explication on the ontological signifcance of consciousness as nothingness: The being of consciousness qua consciousness is to exist at a distance from itself as a presence to itself, and this empty distance which being carries in its being is Nothingness. Thus in order for a self to exist, it is necessary that the unity of this being include its own nothingness as the nihilation of identity.30 Consciousness as nothingness that is constantly separated with itself and can never be in complete coincidence with itself: this ontological character of consciousness shows that it is a being of lack. It is precisely owning to the fact that consciousness is a being of lack that consciousness is a being of desire. Being a being of desire and a being of lack, consciousness projects what it desires as valuable in order to fll up what is insuffcient and lacked in its being.Thus, it is only as consciousness of desire which desires the flling up of what it lacks in itself that consciousness becomes consciousness of value.This is a consciousness that aims at the realization of the fulfllment of the insuffciency arising out of its being of lack.31 Thus, Sartre’s phenomenological-ontological explication of the consciousness as a being of lack and being of desire is not a psychological doctrine of desire, but a theory of the ontological foundation of a phenomenology of value. It is an important tentative to construct a theory of value from the phenomenological approach after Max Scheler.Thus, Sartre’s humanization of nothingness has also the merit of bringing into view, beyond the ontological dimension, the ethical dimension of consciousness as nothingness, on the basis of which is built the mature philosophical work of Lévinas.
Notes 1 Kirk, Raven and Schofeld 1983, 245–247. Cf. Cornford 1939, 30–31. 2 There were still efforts to think of non-being at the margin of the history of being in the West. Cf. the excellent documentary work done under the direction of Laurent and Romano 2006, 563. 3 Carnap 1959; in particular, 69. 4 Hua XVI, 289/250. 5 Hua XVI, 288/249. 6 Plato 1993, 50–54 (256d–259b). Cf. Conford 1935, 288–296. 7 For a contemporary assessment of the great varieties of meontology in Asian philosophy, see Liu and Berger 2014.
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Heidegger 1978, 376–377; Heidegger 1998, 290. Heidegger 1978, 109; Heidegger 1998, 86. Heidegger 1978, 109; Heidegger 1998, 87. Heidegger 1927, 266; Heidegger 1998, 310. Heidegger 1927, 277; Heidegger 1962, 322. Heidegger 1927, 308; Heidegger 1962, 356. Heidegger 1978, 111; Heidegger 1998, 88. Heidegger 1978, 115; Heidegger 1998, 92. Heidegger 1978, 118; Heidegger 1998, 94. Heidegger 1978 , 118–119; Heidegger 1978, 94. Heidegger 1978, 119; Heidegger 1998, 95. Heidegger 1978, 115; Heidegger 1998, 92. Heidegger 1978, 123–173; Heidegger 1998, 97–135. The expression “humanization of nothingness” is inspired by Vincent Descombes who uses the term “l’humanisation du néant” to capture Alexandre Kojève’s anthropogical reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Descombes 1979, 21; Descombes 1980, 9. Descombes discusses Sartre’s notion of nothingness only in the appendix to the chapter on Kojève, betraying his somewhat biased judgment that the author of Being and Nothingness is merely a marginal fgure in the contemporary French philosophical scene. Sartre 1943, 59; Sartre 2003, 48. Sartre 1943, 16; Sartre 2003, 6. Sartre 1943, 17; Sartre 2003, 7. Sartre 1943, 115–116; Sartre 2003, 101–102. Sartre 1965, 74; Sartre 2004a, 43. However, James Mensch has drawn our attention to the fact that Husserl in the manuscripts recognized that the egolocal life of an individual is constituted passively in internal time consciousness.This points toward the phenomenological study of the pre-egological life of consciousness.This position draws Husserl nearer to Sartre. See Mensch 1996, 108. Sartre 1943, 45; Sartre 2003, 35. Sartre 1940, 229–239; Sartre 2004b, 180–188. Sartre 1943, 115; Sartre 2003, 101. Sartre 1943, 116; Sartre 2003 , 102. Sartre 1943, 123–134; Sartre 2003, 109–119.
References Carnap, Rudolf. 1959.“The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language.”Trans. A. Pap. In: Logical Positivism. Ed.A. J.Ayer. New York:The Free Press, pp. 60–81 Cornford, Francis Macdonald. 1935. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1939. Plato and Parmenides. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Descombes, Vincent. 1979. Le même et l’autre. Quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933-1978). Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. ———. 1980. Modern French Philosophy. Trans. L. Scott-Fox and M. Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. ———. 1962. Being and Time.Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1978. Wegmarken. Frankurt am Main:V. Klostermann. ———. 1998. Pathmarks.Trans.W. McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1997. Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907.Trans. R. Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kirk, Geoffrey Stephen, Raven, John Earle, and Schofeld, Malcom. (Eds.). 1983. The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laurent, Jérôme and Romano, Claude. (Eds.). 2006. Le néant. Contribution à l’histoire du non-être dans la philosophie occidentale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Liu, JeeLoo and L. Berger, Douglas. (Eds.). 2014. Nothingness in Asian Philosophy. New York/London: Routledge.
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Nothingness Mensch, James Richard. 1996. After Modernity. Husserlian Refections on a Philosophical Tradition. Albany: State University of New York Press. Plato. 1993. Sophist.Trans. N. P.White. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1940. L’imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1943. L’être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1965. Transcendance de l’ego. Paris:Vrin. ———. 2003. Being and Nothingness.Trans. H. E. Barnes. London/New York: Routledge Classics. ———. 2004a. The Transcendence of the Ego.Trans.A. Brown. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2004b. The Imaginary.Trans. J.Webber. London/New York: Routledge.
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28 ONTOLOGY, METAPHYSICS, FIRST PHILOSOPHY Vincent Gérard
Each of these terms assumes a very particular meaning in phenomenology. Emptied out of their traditional meaning, they are fully redefned, in accordance to the teleological idea related to their corresponding disciplines, within the more general teleological idea of a theory of science. Finally, all these notions are to be grasped in an intuition of essences. As for the expression “frst philosophy,” Husserl claims that it should be freed from its traditional historical meaning so as to preserve only its strictly literal sense.The latter suffces already to indicate the leading theoretical intention of the discipline at stake: In reviving the term in its Aristotelian sense, I derive from the fact that it has fallen out of common usage the highly welcome advantage that it arouses in us only its literal meaning, and not the various sediments of historical tradition, which, as the vague concepts of metaphysics, allow memories of the manifold metaphysical systems of earlier times to become confusedly intermingled with one another. (Hua VII, 3) Taken in the strictly literal sense, the expression dubs a certain “philosophy” as “frst,” insofar as other philosophies (in particular “metaphysics” and “ontology” as Husserl understands them) appear as “second” to or “derived” from it, within the unity of philosophy itself.Thus, according to this literal sense,“frst philosophy” is not “frst” in worth or dignity, as if it carried within itself, as it were, the sancta sanctorum of philosophy, while the remaining “second” philosophies would only represent the necessary frst steps, the antechamber as it were of such a holy place. (Hua VII, 4) First philosophy is “frst” only with respect to the order of philosophy, which is governed by a distinctive teleological idea. In the First Philosophy lectures (1923/1924), the title “frst philosophy” goes to phenomenology itself as the scientifc discipline of the beginnings: “I am convinced that, in the breakthrough of the new transcendental phenomenology, a frst breakthrough of a true and genuine frst philosophy has already been accomplished” (Hua VII, 6).The challenge of these 324
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lectures is thus to broaden this idea into a genuine “universal theory of science” (universale Wissenschaftslehre). It is to be noted, however—and this is crucial—that phenomenology has not always been “frst philosophy”. We can even date quite precisely the moment in which phenomenology turned into “frst philosophy”. In the “Draft of a Preface to the Logical Investigations”, written in 1913, Husserl claims that, while having avoided the use of the term because of its bad reputation, he had frst conceived phenomenology as something akin to a “rational psychology”. However, he also adds an important clarifcation: Only much later (around 1908) the important insight was gained that a distinction between transcendental phenomenology and rational psychology has to be made which (…) is of the greatest signifcance for transcendental philosophy in the genuine sense and specifcally for the role of phenomenology as the true “frst” philosophy (wahre “erste” Philosophie). (Husserl 1939, 337–338/59) As a matter of fact, in Husserl’s published texts and lectures prior to 1908, phenomenology was never presented as “frst philosophy”. Following a Neo-Kantian conception borrowed from Edouard von Hartmann, the title “frst philosophy” was rather granted to “theory of knowledge”, while phenomenology was defned as “the universal science of pure consciousness” (Hua XXIV, 219/215). As for “formal ontology”, the frst time the expression appears in Husserl’s published texts is in Ideas I (1913). However, the idea was already present in the frst volume of the Logical Investigations (1900) though under a different name, i.e. “pure theory of objects as such” (reine Theorie der Gegenstände als solcher).At the time, Husserl refused to take up the old word “ontology”, which was traditionally used to designate the “a priori science of what actually is”. Understood in this very specifc sense, “ontology” had been—rightfully—banned from philosophy during the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the criticisms of Kantians and empiricists alike. But the “ontology” whose idea was renewed in the Logical Investigations did not have any historical tie to the metaphysical ontologies of the past.As Husserl puts it: In my investigations [scil. my “old mathematical and logical investigations of the years 1886–1895”] the idea of ontology in a peculiar form was revived without any historical allusions and thereby also free from radical obscurities and errors which adhered to the old ontologies and which justifed the opposition to them. (Husserl 1939, 320/41; on the topic see Gérard 2010) In what follows we will take the concept of “frst philosophy” as a guiding thread and address two tightly related although different questions: (1) In what sense should philosophy be understood as “frst” philosophy? Or, differently put, what is the meaning of such “primacy”? (2) To what extent could phenomenology legitimately claim the title of “frst philosophy”? These two questions will eventually take us to specify the different meanings that the concepts of “metaphysics” and “ontology” acquire in the phenomenological tradition.
28.1. The primacy of philosophy The question of whether phenomenology could rightfully claim to be frst philosophy is related to the broader problem of the “primacy” of philosophy as such with respect to sciences. Is phi325
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losophy somehow “prior” to each and every particular science? The answer clearly seems to be negative, as the “emancipation” of modern science from the authority of philosophy readily suggests.And this was all the more true at the beginning of the 20th century, when phenomenology was taking its frst steps: if philosophy was certainly not dead, frst philosophy defnitively appeared to be on its deathbed.
Husserl and the revival of frst philosophy (1906–1907) Husserl was well aware of the historical process of emancipation of particular sciences with respect to philosophy. However, in his view, far from jeopardizing the project of frst philosophy, such emancipation was precisely what made the realization of “frst philosophy” possible—and even possible for the frst time.Thus, in some sense, philosophy could not gain clear conscience of its role—or what Husserl took to be its role—and disclose itself, in an unprecedented way, as frst philosophy, as long as sciences did not clearly turn away from philosophy itself. So Husserl could write, in the lectures of Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge of 1906–1907: It is in any case important to be made clear and to recognize that it is only destructive for philosophy to burden itself with theories belonging in the sphere of natural sciences. This segregation is the result of philosophy’s whole historical development […]. Only after breaking away from all natural theories does the philosophical task stand out in its purity. (Hua XXIV, 165/162–163) As long as sciences carried out in the natural attitude (syllogistic, sociology, psychology, etc.) were not capable of producing their own epistemology (or, as Husserl says, their own “methodology”); as long as they had to ask philosophy to do so, their separation from philosophy itself was neither necessary nor possible. Philosophy and sciences stood in the same plan: that of the natural attitude. And even when philosophy glanced at the transcendental perspective, it was only to close it up immediately, through a wrong-headed form of “transcendental realism”, bringing philosophy back to the natural attitude—as, for instance, in Descartes’s presupposition of geometry. This is how psychologistic (descriptive, genetic, even biologizing) or metaphysical theories of knowledge came about, unable to live up to the expectations of a genuine frst philosophy. But as soon as sciences developed their own “epistemology” or “methodology”, philosophy could fnally open the space for a different form of discourse; always related to sciences but now standing “in a whole different plan” (in einer ganz anderer Linie).The theory of knowledge could achieve a frst methodical step, i.e. the epochê, the suspension of judgment, which consisted in abstaining from using any knowledge given beforehand, letting all knowledge, as it were, suspended “up in the air”. But this frst step also called for a second one—the phenomenological reduction, which did not add or take anything away from the system of knowledge, but delivered the world of phenomena. Transcendental phenomenology had now other problems to face than the problems of theory of knowledge.And though not conceived to deal with such epistemological issues, it could still make its methods—almost accidentally—fruitful for the purposes of theory of knowledge. Supported by the new “universal science of pure consciousness”, the theory of knowledge could now fulfll its task and secure the ultimate foundations of the sciences. In this cooperation, phenomenology thus presented itself merely as a servant:“Phenomenology occupies this useful position (diese dienende Stellung) not simply in relation to critique of knowl326
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edge, but also in relation to the critique of practical and, in general, of axiological reason” (Hua XXIV, 217/213). But frst philosophy, and sciences through it, would fnd in the “universal science of consciousness” a rather shrewd and quite troublesome servant. It is to be noted that, according to Husserl, criticizing the so-called “metaphysical” theories of knowledge does not entail the exclusion of metaphysics from the edifce of the theory of science. Metaphysical questions are fully legitimate and ask for answers that sciences are unable to give.These are precisely the questions about the ultimate meaning of reality. Metaphysics is in fact redefned by Husserl, precisely, as the science of ultimate reality: It suffces to see that above and beyond the merely relative sciences of Being, there must be a defnitive science of Being that alone has to satisfy our highest, ultimate interests in Being, that has to investigate what has to be considered as Real in the ultimate, defnitive sense. This radical science of Being, the science of Being in the absolute sense, is metaphysics. (Hua XXIV, 99/96) There is, then, in Husserl, a quite explicit metaphysical tendency in the theory of knowledge; and it is precisely such metaphysical tendency that will keep Husserl away—still for a couple of years—from simply identifying phenomenology as frst philosophy.
Cavaillès’s critique (1942) The most radical critique of such project of frst philosophy came from outside the—strictly speaking—“phenomenological movement”. It was Jean Cavaillès, who, in a single shot, would somehow reshape the phenomenological movement itself, turn upside-down its apparently harmonious order, and redesign its borders. Cavaillès was indeed (along with Emmanuel Lévinas, Gabriel Marcel and Alexandre Koyré) one of the representatives of the young generation of philosophers who attended Husserl’s conferences in Paris, in February 1929. Having received a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation, Cavaillès visited Germany several times, especially Freiburg, where he followed Husserl’s and Heidegger’s seminars. An important meeting with Husserl took place in 1931, in Saint-Märgen. Cavaillès left Saint-Märgen saddened and disappointed:“There is something a bit touching and a bit sad in his [scil. Husserl’s] pride”, he wrote to his sister: he compares himself to Galileo and Descartes:“In ffty years, maybe in only a hundred years … I don’t want to overestimate it—one single philosophy will be studied: phenomenology.And all scientists will begin right there before their special works since, as universal wisdom (sagesse universelle), it should provide the foundations of all sciences. What has been done so far is, moreover, ludicrously small—but it is only a matter of time and patience”. (quoted in Ferrières 2003, 107) While Husserl’s 1906–1907 lectures equated “frst philosophy” and “theory of knowledge”, in Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) such primacy seems to belong, at least at frst sight, to “formal logic”. A formal logic now clarifed as the theory of apophantic judgments (formal apophantics) enlarged into a theory of deductive systems. Conceived in such a way, “formal apophantics” appears to settle everything which, by its form alone, is constitutive and determinant for a valid statement prior to any relation to a concrete object. Accordingly, as Cavaillès 327
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puts it, logic would be nothing but frst ontology:“Since knowledge of the object is expressed by judgments, [scil. formal apophantics] states the necessary preface to every knowledge, it is frst ontology” (Cavaillès 1994, 530). Such conclusion, however, should clearly be rejected. For, independently from all logical development, one should also acknowledge the existence of a spontaneous general ontology, namely “formal mathematics”, enlarged by Leibniz into a mathesis universalis, investigating the formal properties of any object whatsoever. Such thematic separation between formal apophantics and formal ontology should not, however, conceal their innermost bond. In fact, according to Husserl’s theory of judgment, a judgment is nothing but the expression of a “state of affairs” (Sachverhalt).To put it differently, a judgment does not fnd its meaning and its justifcation immediately in itself, but in a relationship that is external and prior to it, which the judgment has the task to express. Such is the relation to something that is intended through the judgment itself as being “somewhere else”, as it were,“in another place”—the “place” of the world:“The primacy of the Sachverhalt is the primacy of the object” (Cavaillès 1994, 532). Any act of judgment, whatever its syntactic transformations might be, is thus fundamentally oriented toward the object and, through it, toward the state of affairs in the world that it expresses. The manifold nominalizations, thanks to which one property or one part of a stated relation—that originally fall out of the thematic level—are ultimately thematized thanks to a higher-order refection (for instance, plurality as property of plural judgments, singularity as property of singular judgments, etc.), cannot do without the constant objective polarization of the judgment itself, which remains unchanged all through the various modifcations of thematic level. What is at work here is something like a “principle of reducibility”, analogous to the axiom of reducibility in Russell’s ramifed theory of types (see Russell 1908); a principle thanks to which all judgments are fnally traced back to relations between primary objects, restoring the homogeneity among judgments of different levels. Such principle of reducibility, however—pointing back to “ultimate substrata” (absolute subjects that are not, themselves, predicates or nominalized relations), “ultimate predicates”, or “ultimate relations”—is still not enough to bring us to the phenomenological ground. Only the reference to the “primacy of consciousness” could fnally grant some unity to the movement of knowledge by which mathematics can be carried out in physics: “Consciousness is the totality of being” (Cavaillès 1994, 537–538). It is absolute being:“An absolute being is being in the form of an intentional life—which, no matter what else it may be intrinsically conscience of, is, at the same time, consciousness of itself ” (Hua XVII, §103, 241/273 modifed). As a result, transcendental logic itself has to be the material logic of phenomenological science. But, if this is the case, what is the logic regulating the transcendental investigations themselves? Husserl stipulates that there is one single absolute logic setting the rules for the constitution of both constituted and constituting being. But, according to Cavaillès, this is clearly a way of “begging the issue”. Phenomenology ultimately fnds itself before the following dilemma: “If transcendental logic is actually the foundation of logic, then there is no absolute logic (namely one that presides over absolute subjective activity). If there is an absolute logic, it cannot draw its authority but from itself, thus it is not transcendental” (Cavaillès 1994, 547; on the dilemma see Derrida 1990, 207–214/124–129).
From frst philosophy to vagrant philosophy: Desanti (1975) Jean-Toussaint Desanti belongs to that strand of French phenomenology described by Michel Foucault as moving not “in the direction of a philosophy of the subject, striving to radicalize 328
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Husserl and soon running into the questions of Sein und Zeit” (as in Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego), but “coming back to the founding problems of Husserl’s thought, those of formalism and intuitionism” (Foucault 1994, 764). A path that, as Foucault also rightly points out, was opened already “in 1938, by Cavaillès’s two theses on the Axiomatic Method and on the Formation of Set Theory” (Foucault 1994, 764). One could say, then, that on the basis of a distinctive reading of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, Desanti draws the most radical consequences of Cavaillès’s critique. Transcendental phenomenology represents for Desanti the last historical attempt to “incorporate” or “interiorize” sciences within the philosophical discourse. Even if, from Plato to Husserl, the strategies to achieve such “interiorization” have been quite different (interiorization to the eidos in Plato, to the intellectus in Spinoza, to the subject in Kant, to the concept in Hegel, to consciousness in Husserl, etc.), the fundamental theme is always the same:“The implementation of an essential and frst discourse, capable of setting up all the possibilities of knowledge and disclosing, in a single movement, its content and foundation” (Desanti 1975, 8). Now, the strategies to “interiorize” sciences through the recourse of a transcendental consciousness entail specifc risks and diffculties. And Desanti recognizes both the earnest of Husserl’s project and the risks that come with it. The earnest of the project has to do with the way in which Husserl manages (for instance, in the frst section of Formal and Transcendental Logic) to dive into its object—logical ideality—and describe it faithfully, according to his agenda of “returning back to the things themselves”. As for the risks, they appear already together with the époché, which, as we have seen, inaugurates the most distinctive philosophical moment of Husserl’s inquiry.What Husserl is looking for is, in fact, an opening path to implement, in a Cartesian style, a philosophy that is “free of presuppositions”. But should such freedom be understood? According to Desanti, what is presupposed by those who live in presuppositions (be it mathematicians, philosophers or poets) is precisely knowledge (savoir), in its received positivity and showing itself in the following form:“there is meaning in what has already been said” (il y a du sens dans ce qui s’est déjà dit). Such meaning (sens), however, can be either the one embedded in the received true statements of science, or that of the imaginary, as it is conveyed in aesthetic productions, or even the one found in the belief laying at the core of the natural attitude. In short,“what is presupposed is the ‘always already there’ (toujours déjà là) of a non-mute experience (expérience non-muette), that takes out from itself, as it were, its forms of expressivity and, in doing so, elicits consent and refusal” (Desanti 1975, 73). As for the beginning philosopher, he or she has neither to defnitely give up nor refuse his or her consent.The philosopher simply suspends it, waiting for the moment in which he or she will summon,“before the court of his consciousness”, the neutralized, silenced experience. One recognizes here the infuence of Gaston Bachelard and his critique of the purported mutism of experience: In the face of this ramifcation of epistemology, is there any justifcation for continuing to speak of a remote, opaque, monolithic, and irrational Reality? To do so is to overlook the fact that what science sees as real actually stands in a dialectical relationship with scientifc reason.After centuries of dialogue between the World and the Spirit, it makes no more sense to speak of a mute experience. (Bachelard 1934, 8/12) Now, as Desanti maintains, there are many ways one could claim to be “free from presuppositions”.The frst consists in tearing up the fabric of experience, as it were:“Such was, in his time, 329
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Nietzsche’s brutality. And then we fnd ourselves before the mute abyss where all philosophical machineries burrow, and the sciences with them” (Desanti 1975, 73).The second is the path of cunning (ruse). Cunning does not tear anything apart; it only feigns and waits: We need to stay “free” of every presupposition, without ever tearing up this fabric where all the presuppositions are chained. It is a fundamentally covetous approach, as it consists in setting up as guardian and holder of a thing whose price we refuse to pay, this price which we call “natural naïveness”. (Desanti 1975, 73) Such was, for example, the approach of Merleau-Ponty, of whom Desanti was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, at the beginning of the 1930s, and who had made him discover phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty, indeed, phenomenology was precisely a way to “bring the pure and, in a way, still mute experience to the pure expression of its own signifcance” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 253–254/254–255).Yet, for Desanti, experience is never mute, or it is mute only as long as the philosopher has not spoken yet, i.e. as long as the primordial silence has not been broken by the philosopher’s originary speech. This brings us to a frst diffculty related to Husserl’s idea of a presuppositionless philosophy. The diffculty has to do with Husserl’s idea of an eidetic reduction, which is closely tied to the absolute époché. In fact, in order to be able to bring the still mute experience to the pure expression of its meaning, phenomenology needs to somehow “displace” it. For instance, if the phenomenologist wants to provide mathematics, provisionally affected by mutism, with foundations, he or she has to “displace” it and “relocate” it in the very place in which the phenomenologist dwells and is able to utter his or her authentic speech. But mathematics does not let itself easily be displaced, for it always operates in its own feld and in the double movement by which its object domains become always more general, and its own operations turn into theoretical objects (group theory, etc.). Mathematics is not an available totality, a form which would reveal itself. As a result, in order to “displace” it and turn it into a more manageable object, the phenomenologist has to put another object in its place.The name of such object is “formal ontology”. It is precisely with such a substitutive object that is, as it were,“phenomenologically tamed” (phénoménologiquement aprivoisé) (Desanti 1975, 107), that the phenomenologist ends up dealing. The second diffculty is related to the circumvention of language, which is never reduced. The evidences carried out in the feld of phenomenological consciousness require expression. And they can only be expressed in the natural language, according to the latter’s expressive possibilities.As a result, in one single blow, phenomenology settles into the feld of the evidences of consciousness and into the feld of the expressive possibilities of language (in which it can only operate the displacements of meaning judged necessary to the expression of evidences). Against the positivism of the Vienna School, Merleau-Ponty wrote already that “in the silence of primary consciousness can be seen appearing not only what words mean, but also what things mean: the core of primary meaning round which the acts of naming and expression take shape” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, X/XVII).Thus, phenomenology cannot but let itself be led by the structure of the semantic feld proper to a natural language (langue): “The speech (parole) that exposes the phenomenon is forced to insert itself in a non-reduced system” (Desanti 1975, 76). Hence Desanti’s assessment of the failure of Husserl’s project of a frst philosophy and, more generally, of any attempt to “interiorize” sciences into the philosophical discourse: 330
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Neither from the side of the Subject, nor from the side of the Concept, nor from that of Nature we fnd today a way to nourish or bring about a totalizing discourse. It is better to acknowledge it and refrain from engaging, on this ground, in an anachronistic rearguard action. (Desanti 1975, 133) It is worth noticing that the four forms of integration examined by Desanti are not the only ones. There are others. There are also philosophical discourses about sciences that are not totalizing and self-founding. Desanti mentions only two of them, without giving much explanation on this point: “It is quite clear, he writes, that our analyses could not be applied, for example, neither to Aristotle nor to Auguste Comte” (Desanti 1975, 67). Desanti explains elsewhere the reasons for such Aristotelian exception (Desanti 1975, 241–263). However, if the founding father of “frst philosophy” is not affected by the critique of frst philosophy in the Husserlian sense, i.e. as the science of the ultimate foundations of knowledge, it is frst of all because he leaves mathematics outside the feld of ontology. Resulting from a process of abstraction, mathematical beings are for Aristotle no longer per se intelligible and subsisting realities. Moreover, Aristotle’s logic was conceived as an autonomous discipline and his project was not to build a logical system capable of retrieving, in its own feld, all the protocols of demonstration at work in the mathematics of his time, thus assuring their foundations. In short, Aristotle dismembered the beautiful Platonic totality of logic, mathematics and philosophy.
28.2. What kind of primacy? Critique of ontology, metaphysics of separation and ethics as frst philosophy in Lévinas (1961) By its radicality and its way of practicing the absence of presuppositions, Lévinas’s thought has something of what we have called the “Nietzschean brutality”, tearing up the fabric of experience where the norms of science are always already incorporated. As a matter of fact, Lévinas champions the idea of “a dislocation of the Greek logos: the dislocation of our identity, and perhaps of identity in general” (Derrida 1967, 122/102).Accordingly, he intends to break off with the dominant category of “totality”, which has long prevailed in Western philosophy. On this point, one could say that Lévinas takes up the philosophical heritage of Rosenzweig, whose Star of Redemption (1921) denounced the Hegelian attempt of explaining the totality of reality by a single principle (the “Spirit”); a principle of which everything else should be understood as an expression. Thus, not unlike Rosenzweig, Lévinas is opposed to all enterprise of totalization a “new way of thinking”—a way of thinking in which the concept of Revelation plays a major role. According to Lévinas, Western philosophy has been mostly understood as ontology, i.e. as the “reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension (intelligence) of Being” (Lévinas 1990, 33–34/43). In classical idealism such middle term was the concept. Correlatively, the concept of “knowledge” is not conceived as a way to respect Being in its alterity. It is rather “betrayal”, an action thanks to which an external being is held captive by a series of “intermediaries” (intermédiaires). Things are reduced to the same, and surrender, dominated through their conceptualization.The same holds for men. A man surrenders to another man, and through terror a free man falls into another man’s domination. 331
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In Heidegger’s phenomenology, the mediation toward truth is accomplished by the Being of what exists.Truth about existing beings thus presupposes the previous opening of Being. Now, to affrm the priority of Being over existents is to already decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent, (the ethical relation) to a relation with the Being of existing beings, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents (a relationship of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom. (Lévinas 1990, 36/45) In sum, Heidegger’s ontology asserts the primacy of freedom over justice—freedom consisting in standing ground against the Other and, in the relation with the latter, ensuring the autarchy of the Self.The “I think”, understood as an exercise of freedom, ultimately refers to the power of the “I can”, paving the way for the appropriation of what is and vouchsafng the exploitation of reality. Thus, as Lévinas (1990, 37/46) puts it, “Ontology as frst philosophy is a philosophy of power”. But there is also another way to approach Being in theoretical terms. For ontology does not exhaust all the resources of theoretical thinking. In fact,“knowledge” (le savoir) or “theory” (la théorie) also mean—and maybe chiefy mean—“a relation with being such that the knowing being lets the known being manifest itself while respecting its alterity and without marking it in any way whatever by this cognitive relation” (Lévinas 1990, 32/42). This way of relating to being while respecting his or her alterity is what Lévinas calls metaphysics. Metaphysics is “theory understood as a respect for exteriority” (Lévinas 1990, 33/43), in contrast with ontology, that designates “theory as comprehension (intelligence) of beings”. Such relationship with being allows being to show itself in its alterity, is accomplished in what Lévinas calls the “metaphysical Desire”. Such metaphysical Desire has been constantly neglected by the philosophical tradition, or misunderstood as a form of “need” or “craving”, a desire originated by a certain lack which the possession of an object, or its appropriation in work, could eventually fll. But our sexual, moral or religious needs, or even the need of love itself, are something entirely different from and not to be confated with the metaphysical Desire. What they only share with the latter is the disappointment of the satisfaction and in the exasperation of the desire itself. But metaphysical Desire is transcendence, and transcendence as desire and inadequacy is, following a term borrowed from Jean Wahl (1944, 34–38/25–28) “transascendence”. Such radical transcendence points to a distance that is unlike any other distance.A distance that is not the distance of a term with respect to another, but enters into the way of existing of the exterior being:“Its formal characteristic—writes Lévinas—is to be other” and it is precisely such otherness that “makes its content”; an otherness with respect to which “the metaphysician is absolutely separated” (Lévinas 1990, 24/35). But metaphysics also includes a critical aspect.An aspect thanks to which it escapes the limitations of theory and the naïve exercise of freedom, and reaches over its properly ethical dimension.Thanks to the critical import of metaphysics, theory itself, as intelligence of being, discovers what is dogmatic and arbitrary in ontological knowledge and in the blind exercise of freedom as forms of identifcations of the Same thanks to the work of thinking.Thus, theory strives to come back to the very origin of the arbitrary dogmatism of ontology. But this would lead to an infnite regression if such “coming back” were to remain an ontological move and an exercise of freedom. As a result, the critical intention that livens up theory ultimately leads theory beyond—or before—ontology.Theory is no longer the reduction of the Other to the Same (as in ontology), 332
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but a way to call into question the exercise of the Same.A “calling into question” that could not be performed by the Same in its spontaneity, but can only carried out by the Other. Lévinas calls “ethics” this “calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of an Other”. This metaphysics, conceived by Lévinas as transcendence, as reception of the Other by the Same, of Other by Myself, is then concretely understood as the calling into question of the Same by the Other, i.e. as ethics accomplishing the critical essence of knowledge: just as “as critique precedes dogmatism, metaphysics precedes ontology”. From this new account of metaphysics follows that neither theology nor theory of knowledge could legitimately claim the title of “frst philosophy”. Theology is not frst philosophy, since the metaphysician is an atheist. The metaphysician’s atheism is the condition of a truthful relationship with a true God in itself—a relationship that is equally distant from both the objectivation of the religious as the lived participation in religion.The metaphysician’s atheism means positively that “our relation with the Metaphysical is an ethical behavior and is not theology, it is not a thematization—not even a knowledge by analogy—of the attributes of God” (Lévinas 1990, 76/78). Thus, Metaphysics takes place in social relations and, removed from the kinship with men, there can be no knowledge of God. But the primacy of ethics also means that “theory of knowledge” is no longer able to bring about the critical essence of knowledge, as Husserl and the Neo-Kantians believed. For the calling into question of objective knowledge cannot consist in addressing to knowledge itself the very same questions once addressed to understand the things intended by the naïve act of knowledge.To identify the problem of foundations with some form of “knowledge of knowledge” is to forget the arbitrariness of that freedom to which, precisely, we seek to fnd foundations. A knowledge whose essence is critical cannot be achieved as knowledge of knowledge. It can only lead toward the Other—the one who calls my freedom into question.
Derrida’s critique (1964) In his essay on the philosophy of Lévinas, published in 1964 as “Violence and Metaphysics”, Jacques Derrida highlights the misunderstandings of Lévinas’s critique of Heidegger’s ontology. To begin with, Derrida claims, against Lévinas, that Heidegger’s idea of ontology, introduced in §3 of Sein und Zeit,“taken in its largest sense, unbent towards any ontological orientation or tendency”, has nothing to do with the traditional concept of ontology; nothing except a mere relation of homonymy.This is also confrmed by the fact that, after having tried to resume the ontological intention latent inside metaphysics, after having awakened the idea of “fundamental ontology” dormant under the traditional project of a metaphysical ontology, Heidegger fnally abandons the terms “ontology” and “ontological”. In his 1935 course, for instance, Einführung in die Metaphysik, Heidegger writes: But since until now this question [of Being] has found neither an accord nor even a resonance, but instead it is explicitly rejected by the various circles of academic philosophical scholarship, which pursues an “ontology” in the traditional sense, it may be good in the future to forgo the use of the terms “ontology” and “ontological”. (Heidegger 1952, 31/43–44) Moreover, Heidegger also claims that the mode of thinking that “now addresses the question of the truth of being, and determines the essential sojourn (Aufenthalt) of man”, is no more an “ontology” than it is an “ethics” (Heidegger 1946, 42/259). Derrida concludes that “the question of Being is not submitted to any ontology” (Derrida 1967, 120/397 modifed). 333
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In addition to this, Derrida also discusses Lévinas’s claim according to which “the primacy of ontology for Heidegger does not rest on the truism:‘to know the existent it is necessary to have comprehended the Being of the existent’”. Derrida understands Lévinas’s claim as if it meant that the primacy of Heidegger’s ontology did not rest only on this truism, but also on something else—namely on the subordination of justice to freedom:“Not only would the thought of the Being of the existent have the impoverished logic of the truism, but it escapes this poverty only in order to seize and to murder the Other” (Derrida 1967, 120/397). If this is the case, then the fact that such a “criminal platitude” is a truism should be the least of our worries. Yet “truism” can be understood in two different ways. It can, at frst, designate “faithfulness to truth” (truism, true, truth). In this case the claim Lévinas refers to is indeed a truism, but Heidegger would be right in founding his “thinking of being” on it. In fact, for Heidegger, the thought of being does not foster any theoretical or practical intention, no more than it intends to totalize theory or practice: “the deed of this thinking”, he writes in Letter on Humanism,“is neither theoretical nor practical, nor is it the conjunction of these two forms of behavior” (Heidegger 1946, 46/263). Now, this move of “going over above” or “under below” the opposition between theoretical and practical corresponds precisely, according to Derrida, to Lévinas’s approach in Totality and Infnity, where metaphysical transcendence is thought of as a not-yet-practical ethics. But “truism” can also designate a tautology, an analytic judgment, the repetition of the subject as the predicate. In this case, the claim discussed by Lévinas is not a truism. Indeed, it is the least tautological of all claims, for it does not express a judgment at all; it does not have the form of a judicative proposition: it is an “ante-predicative” truth that founds every possible judgment, analytic or synthetic. The Being of an entity does not belong to the domain of predication, because it is implied in every predication and is that which allows for any predicative judgment. The Being of the entity is neither essence nor existence, neither being-there nor being-such, neither subject nor predicate. One could certainly reply to Derrida that Heidegger’s backward movement toward Being, which precedes predication as well as the articulation between essence and existence (see, for instance, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) is indeed “ontological”, though in a very particular sense. It would be “ontological” in the sense of Husserl’s second-level formal ontology, i.e. an ontology that is not concerned with the eidos object-in-general, but deals with the eidos worldin-general. And in this case, it would fall under the scope of Cavaillès’s critique, developed and detailed by Desanti (cf. section 28.1 above). This brings us to the second part of Lévinas’s critique, according to which the relation to any entity (ethical relation) would be submitted to the relation to the Being of the entity (knowledge relation), while justice should not be subordinated to freedom. But Derrida maintains that one cannot speak of a “priority” of Being with respect to entities, since there cannot be an order of priority except between two determinate things, two entities. Now, since Being is nothing outside the entity, it could not precede it anyway, neither in time or dignity. Accordingly, one cannot speak of a “subordination” of entities to Being, neither for the ethical nor for the ontological relation. For the only “oppressive neutrality” is that of the conceptual generality, of the principle. But Being is not a general concept, nor a principle to which the entity (the Other, for instance) could be subjected (subsumed, subordinated). Moreover, Lévinas himself had previously stressed this point in an earlier essay on Heidegger: “Precisely because Being is not an entity, it is not necessary to understand it per genus et differentiam specifcam. The fact that, at each moment, we grasp its meaning proves that we can understand it in a whole different way” (Lévinas 1949, 47).
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In sum, Derrida’s critique of Lévinas has shown that Heidegger’s question of Being is not “ontology”. But one should also add that it is neither a “frst philosophy” nor a “philosophy of power”. In fact,“if every “philosophy”, every “metaphysics”, has always sought to determine the frst existent, the excellent and truly existent, then the thought of the Being of the existent is not this metaphysics or frst philosophy” (Derrida 1967, 200/171).
Jacques Rolland’s interpretation (1998) Derrida’s article allowed for a better understanding of Heidegger’s question of Being with respect to Lévinas’s critique of ontology. But it also opened the space for a reassessment of Lévinas’s own positive account of “frst philosophy”. The expression of such reassessment can be found in the attempt of clarifcation suggested by Jacques Rolland, in his Preface (1998) to Lévinas’s conference Ethics as frst philosophy. In Rolland’s account, the misunderstanding related to the idea of a priority of ontology over ethics in Heidegger seems to have breached the thesis of the primacy of ethics itself. Against Heidegger, Lévinas had in fact defned ethics as frst philosophy. But since Derrida had shown that Heidegger’s thought was not a variety of ontology, there is no reason left to claim that ethics itself has to be frst philosophy. Ethics, according to Rolland, is in fact reluctant to play the role of frst philosophy. If this were the case, it should be considered as “a ‘discipline of the beginnings’”, as suggested by Husserl in his reappraisal of Aristotle’s term.Accordingly, it would be “forced as such to oppose itself to another [frst philosophy], i.e. the ‘ontology’ to which, in this case, [Heidegger’s] thought of being is violently reduced”, despite the fact that “Derrida has shown clearly enough (1963) that the latter is neither ontology nor frst philosophy” (Rolland 1998, 44). Yet Lévinas—as clearly suggested by the very title of his 1982 conference—has nevertheless thought appropriate to take the title of “frst philosophy” away from ontology and award it to ethics. But did not Heidegger speak of “fundamental ontology” in Being and Time? And hadn’t he abandoned the terms “ontology” and “ontological” afterward? Then, in the same vein, Lévinas, after having talked of ethics as “frst philosophy”, will progressively reject this way of speaking. As Rolland puts it, “it is to be noted, besides, that the term had totally disappeared from the lexicon of Autrement qu’être, and we would be surprised to see it return in 1982 before disappearing again—forever, as far as I can tell” (Rolland 1998, 45).
Jean-Luc Marion or the other frst philosophy (1996, 2001) The fact that phenomenology has renounced the position of frst philosophy is the starting point of Marion’s own refection on phenomenology; a refection leading to the question of whether another frst philosophy is possible. Marion’s question fnds its best expression in the text of a conference, held October 9, 1995 at UNESCO and published under the title “The Other First Philosophy and the Question of Givenness” (Marion 1996a). The original text of the conference was further expanded and developed and a second version (cf. the considerations “On the Use of Givenness in Theology”) appeared the same year (Marion 1996b), translated three years later into English. A third unmodifed version was published as the opening chapter of In excess, under the new title “Phenomenology of givenness and frst philosophy” (Marion 2001, 1–34/1–29). In the frst published version, Marion realizes that both Heidegger and Lévinas not only rejected the ontology of metaphysics, but also the idea of “frst philosophy”, throwing away the
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baby with the bathwater, as it were. Thus, if phenomenology wants to restore frst philosophy, this could can only be done in spite of and maybe even against Heidegger and Lévinas. Didn’t Heidegger, who, more than any other, tried to disentangle phenomenology from metaphysics, also give up a claim to the title “frst philosophy”? And if Lévinas brought to the fore the doubtfulness of ontology’s claim to fundamentality, he did not carry to the end his own claim to the title “frst philosophy”, nor did he impose its renewal. (Marion 1996a, 75; Marion 1996b, 37/790–791) But this latter claim should be nuanced. For, as Marion puts it, it seems to be at odds with the repeated usage of the expression by Lévinas himself: “Despite the title of the collection Emmanuel Lévinas: L’éthique comme philosophie première, ed. Jean Greisch and Jacques Rolland (Paris, 1993), I remain more hesitant about Lévinas’ uses of this phrase” (Marion 1996a, 75; Marion 1996b, 37/791). The hesitation will disappear in the version of the text published in In excess (2001), where, under the infuence of Jean Greisch, Marion will recognize Lévinas as an exceptional fgure in French philosophy and an example to be followed: “Lévinas, in his own way, explicitly took up Husserl’s claim. For, while directly questioning ontology’s fundamental dignity, or rather to threaten it even more, he fnished his demonstration in these terms: ‘Moral is not a branch of philosophy, but frst philosophy’” (Marion 2001, 17). Lévinas’s example—after Husserl’s—shows us, then, that there is no intrinsic incompatibility between phenomenology and frst philosophy. Thus, the key question for Marion is not to establish whether philosophy can still legitimately claim the title of frst philosophy.The question is settled from the outset: if philosophy were not to claim such primacy, it would deteriorate to the rows of “derived” and “second” sciences and renounce itself. The critique of the philosophies of consciousness (Kant and Husserl) put forth by Cavaillès and, more generally, the critique of the forms of interiorization of sciences in philosophical discourse, prompted by Desanti, are thus utterly ignored. Marion dismisses them at once for being “ideological” (2001, 17/15). Moreover, the alternative forms of “philosophies” that they propose are nothing but symptoms of the degeneration of thought in times of nihilism and end of metaphysics. “Epistemology”, trying to establish itself, in the wake of sciences, as a “secondorder knowledge”, and “analytic philosophy”, trying to establish itself as a mere “survey of forms of the correct use of language”, not only renounce frst philosophy.They also renounce philosophy as such (2001, 17/15). Hence the shift in the question: one should not be concerned with the question of whether frst philosophy remains conceivable. One should rather try to fnd out which kind of primacy could actually be assumed. Now, metaphysics can no longer be of any use for frst philosophy. It has come, down this path, to exhaust its own possibilities, for every attempt to determine some “metaphysical” kind of primacy has been historically disqualifed. Philosophy can no longer guarantee its primacy through the primacy of the ousia (see Aristotle’s Met. E 1), for the concept of substance has been subject to Descartes’s, Kant’s and Nietzsche’s critiques: substance remains unknown, except in its epistemological dependence with respect to its attributes and accidents. Moreover, it also turns into a category of understanding whose validity is limited only to phenomena, that is to say, limited to precisely that which, in Aristotle, was a matter of overcoming. As a result, all that Nietzsche had to do was to get rid of it once and for all, just as he did with any other metaphysical idol. 336
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But philosophy can no longer rest on its primacy over that of causa, the object of prima philosophia according to Aquinas—distinguished both from the science of the divine (theologia) and the science of the entity (metaphysica in the strict sense, which will result in ontologia). For the concept of cause, in turn, has to “fnd shelter” out of the things themselves, and take its place between the concepts of the understanding, whose transcendental usage, beyond the limits of experience, is supposed to be illegitimate. Not only can this concept no longer reach the divine, it is not even capable of raising any primacy at all, since Descartes has shown the possibility of reversing the priority between the cause that “explains” and the effect that “proves it” (Discours de la méthode,VI). Finally, philosophy can no longer earn its primacy on the noetic primacy of consciousness, as in Descartes and Kant (and, one could add, in Husserl himself). For the relocation of primacy to the only noetic instance rests entirely on the primacy of a transcendental I, purifed of every empiricity, incapable of individualizing itself in time and space, and unable to open itself to the Other. What is left, then—following the examples of Husserl and Lévinas—is the task to explore the possibilities of phenomenology as a new way to be frst philosophy, for phenomenology is deemed to be external to metaphysics and its history. But in order to avoid any metaphysical form of frst philosophy, phenomenology has to provide a new principle:“as much reduction, as much givenness”.The given phenomenon holds in itself, with the experience of its givenness, the experience of its certitude.The given is indubitable: for either we consider it as given and, whatever its mode of givenness might be (sensible intuition, imagination, vision of essences, etc.), it is always well given; or we experience a disappointment in it, but that simply means that, because of a lacking of reduction, we took for given what did not authentically give itself, actually giving itself in a different mode not yet distinguished in its specifcity. It follows that there is no exception to givenness, not even nothing, death or absence, which always designate a “specifc absent” and makes it appear for me as such.The principle of phenomenology has, then, nothing to do with a foundation or a frst principle. It consists rather in a fnal principle, in that it awards priority to the phenomenon:“The last principle takes the lead to hand it over to the phenomenon” (Marion 2001, 30/27).
References Bachelard, Gaston. 1934. Le Nouvel esprit scientifque. Paris: PUF (10e éd. 1968).Trans. A. Goldhammer, The New Scientifc Spirit. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Cavaillès, Jean. 1994. Sur la logique et la théorie de la science. In: Œuvres complètes de philosophie des sciences. Ed. B. Huisman. Paris: Hermann, pp. 473–657. Derrida, Jacques. 1967. L’Écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil.Trans. A. Bass, Writing and Difference. London/ New York: Routledge, 2001. ———. 1990. Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. Paris: PUF.Trans. M. Hobson, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Chicago/London:The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Desanti, Jean-Toussaint. 1975. La philosophie silencieuse. Paris: Seuil. Ferrières, Gabrielle. 2003. Jean Cavaillès. Un philosophe dans la guerre, 1903-1944. Paris: Les éditions du Félin. Foucault, Michel. 1994. Dits et Écrits, tome IV. Paris: Gallimard. Gérard,Vincent. 2010. “La théorie de la relation et la genèse de l’ontologie formelle.” In: Husserl. Eds. J. Benoist and V. Gérard. Paris: Ellipses, pp. 39–76 Heidegger, Martin. 1946. Über den Humanismus. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Trans. F. A. Capuzzi in collaboration with J. G. Gray, Letter on Humanism. In: Basic Writings. Ed. D. F. Krell. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1977, pp. 217-265. Heidegger, Martin. 1952. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven/London:Yale University Press, 2000. Husserl, Edmund. 1939. “Entwurf einer ‘Vorrede’ zu den ‘Logischen Untersuchungen’.” Tijdschrift voor Philosophie, n°1: pp. 337–338.Trans. P. J. Bossert and C. H. Peters, Introduction to the Logical Investigations. A Draft of a Preface to the Logical Investigations (1913).The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1975.
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Vincent Gérard ———. 2008. Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge. Lectures 1906/07.Trans. C. Ortiz-Hill. Dordrecht: Springer. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1949. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris:Vrin. ———. 1990. Totalité et infni. Essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Le Livre de Poche (First edition La Haye: M. Nijhoff, 1961). Trans. A. Lingis, Totality and Infnity. An Essay on Exteriority. The Hague/Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1979. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1996a. “L’autre philosophie première et la question de la donation.” Philosophie, n°49: pp. 68–83. ———. 1996b.“L’autre philosophie première et la question de la donation.” In: Le statut contemporain de la philosophie première. Centenaire de la Faculté de Philosophie. Ed. Ph. Capelle. Paris: Beauchesne, pp. 29–50. Trans. J. L. Kosky,“The Other First Philosophy and the Question of Givenness.” Critical Inquiry, n°25/4, 1999: pp. 784–800. ———. 2001. De surcroît. Études sur les phénomènes saturés. Paris: PUF.Trans. R. Horner and V. Berraud. In Excess. Studies on Saturated Phenomena. New York: Fordham U.P., 2002. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945.Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard.Trans. C. Smith,Phenomenology of Perception. London/New York: Routledge, 2002. Rolland, Jacques. 1998.“Surenchère de l’éthique.” Preface to: Emmanuel Levinas, Éthique comme philosophie première. Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, pp. 7–63. Russell, Bertrand. 1908. “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types.” American Journal of Mathematics, n°30/3: pp. 222–262. Wahl, Jean. 1944. Existence humaine et transcendance. Neuchâtel: Les éditions de la Baconnière. Tans. W. C. Hackett, Human Existence and Transcendance. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016.
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29 PERCEPTION Walter Hopp
One of the tasks of phenomenology is to identify the ways in which various types of intentional states and acts relate to and depend upon others. No type of act has a better claim to fundamentality than does perception.1 In this entry I will discuss some of the defning features of perception, and the various ways in which other kinds of intentional acts depend on or refer back to it. I will also defend Husserl’s views on the fundamentality of perception against the objection that his theory is a version of the “Myth of the Given” (Sellars 1997).
29.1. Perception and intentionality The frst and possibly the most obvious feature of perceptual experiences is that they are intentional; each perceptual experience is of something. One might think that perception is distinguished from all other intentional experiences by the nature of its objects.This, however, is not the case.While not all kinds of objects can be perceived, each type of thing that can be perceived can also be thought about emptily.2 This is true even if it turns out that perceptual experiences are of something like sense data; obviously sense data can be thought about, as the existence of an extensive literature on them shows. What distinguishes perceptual experience is the distinctive manner in which its objects are given (Husserl 2001, 140). In Husserl’s account, perceptual experiences uniquely possess the conjunction of the following features. First, they are intuitive as opposed to signitive or empty. Second, they are positing or positional. Third, they are intentionally direct. And fourth, they are originary.3
(a) Perception is intuitive Perceptual experiences are intuitive experiences. Intuition is a mode of consciousness in which an object is present to consciousness. Perception itself serves as the paradigm of intuitive consciousness, and, as is often the case in phenomenology, we can grasp the nature of its intuitiveness best by contrasting it with other co-directed sorts of acts (see Levinas 1995, 65). If I think that my basketball is infated while in my living room, I am conscious of my basketball. But I am not conscious of it the way I am if I see, feel, and dribble the ball. In the latter case, the basketball,
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and the state of affairs of its being infated, is present to me in a way in which it is not when I merely think about it. Perception is not, however, the only type of intuitive act.There are also “intuitive expectations” (Husserl 2001, 111), “intuitive remembering”, and generally all forms of nonperceptual “presentifcations” (Husserl 2001, 110). Image-consciousness, in which we see or otherwise intuit one object by means of an image of it, is also an intuitive act. A picture of my basketball presents me with the object in a way completely different from “empty” thinking. Phantasy or imagination is also often intuitive as well, though not necessarily so. I can imagine—in fact I just did imagine—perceiving my living room while emptily thinking that my basketball is infated. In this case, the basketball is an object of phantasy, but is not intuited. Because perception is essentially intuitive, it is a type of phenomenally conscious experience. No matter how intimate the causal or informational connection between some chunk of the world and one’s mind may be, if one is not consciously aware of that chunk of the world, one does not intuit it (Fasching 2012, 126–7). Nor, for that matter, could one be unconsciously or non-phenomenally emptily aware of something either. Emptiness is not merely the lack of intuitiveness, but is a positive phenomenological feature of experience in its own right.An act that is intuitively empty is also essentially conscious and equipped with a phenomenal character of its own. In emptily thinking of something, the object is, to use a phrase of Alva Noë’s, “manifestly absent.”4 The distinction between intuitive and empty acts can only be drawn in the sphere of consciousness.
(b) Perception is positing When I come to perceive my basketball to be infated, I take the basketball to exist, and the perceived state of affairs to obtain.The most basic or “primordial” positing character of perception is that of “straightforward, naive certainty,” but this mode is “variable” (Husserl 2001, 75). In perception I take things to be simply there, but there is always the possibility of an experience’s content being “overwhelmed by stronger counterforces” (Husserl 1997, 251). To give Husserl’s often-used example, if I frst experience something as a human, and then discover that it is a mannequin, the original “human” perception is “suppressed and put out of commission” (Husserl 2001, 73). Note, though, that even a suppressed perception is a positing act, but one that has undergone a “modifcation in [its] mode of validity” (Husserl 2001, 75). It is overwhelmed because it conficts with other, more secure experiences, but only a positing act can confict with other positing acts. If the “mannequin” perception were in turn overwhelmed, the original “human” perception would be ready to reassert itself. Perception is not the only positing sort of act, of course. Empty or signitive thinking can also be positing. Nor is perception the only intuitive experience that is positing. Memory, which can be but need not be intuitive, is also essentially positing. In it, the past is posited as having been. Other presentifcations can be positing as well. If I presentify to myself the rain that I know but do not perceive to be falling outside, my act is positing. Image-consciousness can be either positing or non-positing.5 Seeing an image of a centaur is not positing, but seeing an image of Barack Obama is. Phantasy, by contrast, is non-positing. It is not just that phantasy acts fail to posit their objects in the mode of certainty.They do not actually posit them at all in any of the modes of positing, not even as being overwhelmed or as doubtful.What I present in phantasy, which is a sort of “neutralized” consciousness, is beyond “reason’s jurisdiction” (Husserl 2014, §110, 214), and also beyond the possibility of confict with the sphere of genuinely positing acts. I am not rationally required to alter my phantasy of a centaur in light of what I presently believe or perceive about the actual world. 340
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(c) Perception is intentionally direct “[P]erception is characterized by the fact that in it, as we are wont to express the matter, the object ‘itself ’ appears, and does not merely appear ‘in a likeness’” (Husserl 1970a, §14a, 712). When I perceive something, such as my basketball, I am directly aware of it.This is a contentious point in the history of philosophy. According to many familiar accounts of perception, things such as basketballs cannot be directly perceived.Typically in such accounts, only ideas or sense data or mental representations can be directly perceived, while such things as basketballs can only be perceived indirectly.This is not Husserl’s view. Not only does he think that such things as basketballs can be perceived directly but, more to the present point, he denies that perception can ever be indirect (see Husserl 2014, §43, 76–77). This point is purely phenomenological—that is, one that can be established prior to determining the ontological status of what we do in fact perceive. There are few forms of indirect consciousness, but they have a distinctive phenomenological character that gives them away, not only in refection but in the course of unrefective experience itself. Image-consciousness is by far the clearest case of indirect consciousness (Aldea 2013, 374).When I see Mt. Everest in an image, I see Mt. Everest in virtue of seeing an image that, in its own nature, differs radically from Mt. Everest. More generally, in image-consciousness, one indirectly sees or apprehends the depicted thing—the image-subject—while directly seeing another, the image-object (see Husserl 2005, §9, 21).The image-object, moreover, is “immediately felt to be an image” (Husserl 2005, §12, 28).To confuse it with the thing itself would not be image-consciousness but illusion. When we are indirectly conscious of something via some representation, we must be aware of both the representation and, via it, what it represents. Moreover, we must take the representation to be a representation (Husserl 1970a,Appendix to §§11 and 20, 594). One is not indirectly aware of the age of a tree simply by seeing the rings in its trunk, for instance, nor is one indirectly aware of a tumor just because one sees a radiographic image of one.The reason is that if one cannot interpret those signs or images, one is not aware of what they indicate or depict at all. It is clear from this that perception is not a kind of image-consciousness.When I undergo the kind of experience we would naturally describe as “seeing a basketball,” there is no object distinct from the terminal object of my experience—the basketball, if our natural description is correct—such that I am directly perceptually aware of it, and feel or take it to be a representation, much less a likeness, of something else. But since the presence of such a thing, functioning in that way, is a necessary condition of image consciousness, my experience is not a form of image consciousness. There are other forms of what might be called indirect consciousness, but they are even less plausible candidates for perception. I might, for instance, be aware of something by means of directly perceiving a sign that designates it, or a state of affairs that indicates it, or a fact from which I infer it. But none of those forms of consciousness can qualify as perception of the designated, indicated, or inferred object, since they do not require that the terminal intentional object be intuited at all—and typically only take place when and because it is not (see A.D. Smith 2002, 77).This point alone by no means establishes that what I see directly is a basketball, or that things like basketballs can even be seen directly.What it does establish is that if things like basketballs cannot be directly seen, they cannot be seen at all.
(d) Perception is originary The single most important feature of perception is that it “affords [its objects] in an originary way” (Ideas §1, 9).That is, in perception the perceived object is present “in the fesh” (Husserl 2001, 341
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140). Perception is the act in which objects become manifest as opposed to merely meant or intended,“the act that places something before our eyes as the thing itself, the act that originally constitutes the object” (Husserl 1991, §17, 43).This feature of perception does not follow from the three aforementioned features.An act can be direct, positing, and intuitive without presenting something in the fesh. I might, for instance, intuitively remember how my basketball looked fve minutes ago, or form a present mental image of it. Nevertheless, the originary character of perception seems to depend on the other three conditions holding. It would not, it seems, be originary were it not intuitive, positing, and direct.
29.2. The foundational roles of perception The originary character of perception explains two fundamental roles it plays in the overall life of consciousness. First, perception is evidentially fundamental. Indeed, it is diffcult to distinguish “Evidenz” from perception itself. Ordinarily, by “perception” we mean the originary experience of sense-perceptible individuals and their features, as well, perhaps, as “inner” perception of our own conscious experiences. But on an expanded conception of perception, upon whose legitimacy Husserl insists (Husserl 1970a, 785), perception encompasses a much broader swath of categories of objects, including states of affairs and ideal objects such as universals and “universal states of affairs” (Husserl 1970a, §45, 786). Perception, on this broad conception, is any sort of experience in which “something appears as ‘actual’, as ‘self-given’” (Husserl 1970a, 785). And that is just how Husserl frequently characterizes evidence. Evidence, he writes, is “the giving of something itself ” (Husserl 1969, §59, 156), the “mode of consciousness … that offers its intentional objectivity in the mode belonging to the original ‘it itself ’” (Husserl 1969, §63, 168). In its broadest sense, then, perception is a kind of evidence; or, to avoid confusing the evidence of which we are aware and our awareness of it, for something to be given perceptually is for it to be given evidentially or with evidence.6 Because perception is the type of state in which something is presented with evidence, it is capable of conferring epistemic justifcation on certain beliefs, namely those whose contents the experience’s own content “fulflls.” Husserl’s account of fulfllment is an account of how that occurs. In fulfllment, “the object is seen as being exactly the same as it is thought of ” (Husserl 1970a, 696). For example, I might think that my basketball is orange on the basis of my perceptual experience of it. Here, the thought and the perception are two independent acts, each trained on the same state of affairs, which unite in a higher-order act. Dallas Willard’s characterization of fulfllment reveals its complexity; it is a “union of the conceptualizing act with the object, on the basis of a corresponding intuition of that object together with a recognition of the identity of the object of the concept and of the perception” (Willard 1995, 152). Acts of fulfllment are of immense evidential importance. It is through them that we graduate from perception to conceptually and propositionally formulated knowledge. There is a strong case to be made that Husserl is a kind of (moderate) epistemic foundationalist.7 First, his “principle of all principles” appears to be a principle specifying how perception, or originary intuition, provides noninferential justifcation for beliefs. It reads, in part, that “whatever presents itself to us in ‘Intuition’ in an originary way … is to be taken simply as what it affords itself as” (Husserl 2014, §24, 43). He also appears to hold that all inferentially justifed beliefs derive their justifcation, whether immediately or mediately, to such self-giving perceptual acts.“Every mediated justifcation leads back, as is well known, to an unmediated, i.e. immediate justifcation.”8 In the same chapter he writes that “only originary evidence is the ‘original’ source of legitimacy” (ibid., 282). What makes Husserl’s foundationalism moderate is that not all intuition is an infallible source of evidence. Immanent perception, in which each part and property of an object is given intuitively, 342
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is an infallible guide to what exists.“Each immanent perception guarantees necessarily the existence of its object” (Husserl 2014, §46, 82). But not all perception is immanent.The most familiar kind, the perception of “external” spatio-temporal objects, is not only inadequate, but essentially so. “Inadequate modes of givenness belong essentially to the spatial structure of things; any other way of givenness is simply absurd” (Husserl 2001, 58).We cannot perceive all the parts and features of a thing, much less apprehend all of its countless “looks” or profles, in any single experience.To each perceived worldly thing there are unperceived parts and sides, which are intended but not given by means of that experience’s horizons.As Husserl puts it,“every external perception harbors its inner and outer horizons, regardless the extent to which perception has the character of self-giving; this is to say, it is a consciousness that simultaneously points beyond its own content” (Husserl 2001, 108).The horizon of my experience of the basketball points towards other, unseen sides of it, providing me with a sense of how further experiences of it might unfold. The inadequacy of perception is what makes the perception of external objects possible. If my perception of the basketball were adequate, I would take the seen side—or rather, the side exactly as it appears from here—as the thing (Husserl 2001, 41). But if I did that, I would not perceive a basketball, since I would then take any alteration in my experience to be a presentation of a different thing.Thanks to horizons, I do not do that. By rendering experiences inadequate to their objects, horizons allow experiences to encompass a much vaster range of objects than they otherwise would—a range of objects far more extensive than sense data or “ideas.” That Husserl saw this so clearly stands as one of his most important contributions to philosophy. The downside of inadequacy, however, is that the beliefs based on such experiences are fallible. I may discover, through further experience, that what I see is other than I perceived it as being, or that it does not exist at all; “every experience” of an “external” or “transcendent” thing “leaves open the possibility that the given does not exist” (Husserl 2014, §46, 83). Perception is not only epistemically foundational. It is also, and more fundamentally, intentionally foundational.We can obviously carry out intentional acts without perceiving the objects of those acts; thinking, and especially scientifc thinking, is carried out largely in “empty” acts, acts which are neither themselves intuitive nor fulflled by acts which are. Nevertheless, such empty intentions do not have their intentionality primitively. All of the acts which Husserl classifes as “objectifying” are oriented towards objects, and owe whatever relation they have to those objects to the possibility of being synthesized with acts in which those same objects are presented originarily.9 Empty meanings or concepts derive their sense, and thereby their reference to or direction upon their objects, from their relation with those perceptual experiences that present those objects in an originary manner. “What things are—the only things that we make assertions about, the only things whose being or nonbeing, whose being in a certain way or being otherwise we dispute and can rationally decide—they are as things of experience” (Husserl 2014, §47, 85). Because perception presents us with objects themselves, and just the same objects that we think and theorize about, it is the fnal authority in determining just what our signitive or empty intentions refer to. Husserl goes so far as to say that we would not be able to speak at all of empty presentations and to attribute to them the character of having a relation to an object if it did not belong essentially to each empty presentation … that it could enter into a synthesis with a corresponding intuition. (Husserl 2001, 113) This should not be taken to mean that we must actually carry out such a synthesis. Rather, we must have some understanding of what that would involve. We must grasp at least some por343
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tion of the “fulflling sense” of a concept in order to possess that concept fully and authentically, where the fulflling sense of a concept is the totality of the contents of possible experiences which intuitively present what it represents.10 As Dallas Willard expresses Husserl’s position, “Whenever we think … a certain thing exists or is qualifed in such-and-such a manner, we always have some idea of what it would be like to determine whether it really is as it is thought to be.”Without such an idea, he continues, “there is little point in insisting that our thought is of any defnite thing at all, or that it is even a thought” (Willard 1984, 206). Finally, perception is genetically primary to every other form of intuition, such as phantasy, memories and presentifcations generally, and image consciousness. “Perception is the primordial mode of intuitiveness.”11 Memory, when intuitive, is experienced as a reproduction of a former perceptual experience; “a remembering in itself manifests itself as a presentifcation of a perception.”12 In image-consciousness, the image-subject—that is, what the image is taken to depict—is present to me in a way that partly resembles the way it would present itself in person, without actually being present in person or seeming to be present in person (see Husserl 2005, §12, 27). Phantasy, when intuitive, is a modifcation of actual positing perception into “as-if ” or quasi-perception.“Phantasy consciousness,” Husserl writes,“is a modifed consciousness”. In it, “One is conscious of what is phantasied ‘as if [it were] existing’.”13 It belongs to the essence and sense of these modes of consciousness that they are modifcations of perception. Each is intuitive, but none is originary.
29.3. The Myth of the Given? Husserl’s account of perception and its relation to other intentional states might appear to be a version of Wilfrid Sellars’s “Myth of the Given.” Sellars devotes the majority of his attention, of course, to empiricist versions of the myth, but he did intend his argument to bear upon “the entire framework of givenness” (Sellars 1997, 14).And indeed it does, if it works.The basic argument is a dilemma.14 Either perception has propositional/conceptual content or it does not. If it does not, then it cannot confer justifcation on any beliefs. And if it does, then it cannot be foundational. The argument for the frst horn is simple and strong. If perceptual states do not have conceptual or propositional content, then they cannot stand in logical or inferential relations with the contents of other kinds of mental states such as beliefs. But in order for the content of one state to justify the content of another, those contents must stand in logical or inferential relations to one another.15 A brute sensation, for instance, might cause us to have beliefs. But it is not made of the right stuff to justify any of them (Davidson 2001, 143).As McDowell puts it, the believer in the nonconceptual given must hold that justifcation terminates in “pointing to a bare presence” (McDowell 1994, 39). But what possible epistemic signifcance could such an act have? One promising response to this argument is to equip perceptual states with conceptual content. If my perception has the content “the basketball is infated,” then it can obviously stand in inferential relations with the contents of beliefs. Now, however, we face the second horn. According to the versions of the Myth that Sellars attacks, givenness “presupposes no learning, no forming of associations, no setting up of stimulus-response connections” (Sellars 1997, 20). But according to Sellars, in order to know something as simple as that a patch is green, one must not only have a whole battery of color concepts, but one must also know which conditions are favorable for determining whether something is indeed green (Sellars 1997, 43). But in order to know that, one must know quite a lot of other things. One must know, for starters, that there are different lighting conditions and that these affect the way an object’s color appears. Imagine, then, how much knowledge must be presupposed to know that something is an infated basket344
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ball, that someone has carried out a speech act with a given content, or that a certain event is a wedding ceremony. If givenness presupposes no prior learning, no possession of concepts, and no other knowledge, then it appears that none of these can be examples of givenness. How might a phenomenologist respond to this dilemma? One possible response is to claim that this does not affect Husserl’s conception of givenness since he was not in the business of appealing to it as a foundation for knowledge. Gail Soffer, despite her incisive and, to my mind, devastating criticisms of Sellars’s conception of intentionality as fundamentally linguistic and his neglect of the “experiential dimension” of subjectivity (Soffer 2003, 318), appears to make such a concession. As she puts it, Husserl appeals to the given for reasons different from the philosophers Sellars targets. For Sellars, the point is to found empirical knowledge, to identify the noninferential bases for inferences. By contrast, for Husserl the category of the given serves to thematize the subjective elements of experience (the immanent) and to show how what is taken by us to be knowledge presupposes and emerges out of these subjective elements. (Soffer 2003, 310) Certainly part of the job of phenomenology is to show how all of the immanent elements in experience—including, crucially, the intuitively empty intentions that are so critical in all thinking—function in the production of ordinary and scientifc knowledge.This is all part of a more general descriptive enterprise of identifying the immanent or subjective components in virtue of which any conceivable object could be meant, whether in knowledge or not. Nevertheless, the category of the given in Husserl is a decidedly epistemic one, and one of its primary functions, for Husserl, is precisely to serve as a foundation of knowledge, whether that knowledge is empirical, a priori, or phenomenological. It is not phenomenology’s task to provide the givens for each area of scientifc inquiry or ordinary life.Things are given to non-phenomenologists too, and they know lots of things thanks to that. Phenomenology’s task is to understand how the givenness of things, whether immanent or transcendent, confers epistemic justifcation on our judgments and beliefs, whether empirical or a priori (see Husserl 1970b, §55, 189).And, of course, phenomenology has its own proprietary feld of givenness from which it legitimizes its own assertions. Knowledge, for Husserl, both in phenomenology and in general, must “leave the last word to the things themselves” (Husserl 1970a, 45), and they can only provide that “last word” when they are originarily given. Sellars’s dilemma, then, remains. It would seem that the frst task in responding to it would be to determine whether perceptual experiences have conceptual content or not, and then try to respond to one of the horns of the dilemma.That frst step is no easy task. It is far from clear whether Husserl himself endorsed conceptualism about perception at various positions of his career.The most sophisticated treatment of which I am aware is offered by Donn Welton, who argues that Husserl’s early understanding of “epistemic perception” (Welton 2000, 185) as the “interpretation” of intrinsically non-intentional sensations by meanings or concepts was gradually corrected and deepened by a genetic analysis of “originary perception” (ibid.). Originary perception, in turn, is explained in terms of the “interlocking associative, spatial, and temporal syntheses” presupposed by conceptual, epistemic perception (ibid., 183). But even if we get the right story about Husserl’s own thinking about perception—and I think Welton largely does—there remains the diffcult task of determining the truth about perception itself. Naturally, Husserl can help us here, but the fnal word must, if possible, be left to perception itself. 345
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Fortunately, we do not need to resolve that diffcult issue to handle Sellars’s dilemma, since Husserl’s theory gives us the resources to answer both horns. And that is a good thing, since Husserl’s commitment to the justifcatory power of perception very probably runs much deeper than his commitments to its precise composition and structure—as can be seen from the fact that it plays roughly the same evidential role throughout the changes and developments that Welton documents. Beginning with the frst horn, suppose, as I strongly believe, that perception does not have conceptual content. Does it follow that it cannot justify beliefs? I see no reason why it could not. The assumption that only states with propositional or conceptual content could justify beliefs is plausible provided we think that only states with such content could have conditions of satisfaction—that is, be correct or incorrect—or have facts or states of affairs as their intentional objects.16 But both claims are far from obvious.17 Consider the various physical, conventional representations at our disposal. Sentences can depict states of affairs and have conditions of satisfaction. But so can maps and pictures (Crane 2009, 458). Maps and pictures are not, however, types of sentences. In fact it’s not clear that they have propositional content at all. For example, every proposition has a negation. But maps and pictures do not have negations (Millikan 2004, 93).You can draw a picture that depicts something contrary to what another depicts, but you cannot draw the contradiction of another. Despite that, sentences and maps can be compatible or incompatible with one another. A map which depicts Texas as being smaller than Ohio conficts with the sentence “Texas is bigger than Ohio.” It is not, for all that, a kind of sentence. If conventional representations can represent states of affairs despite not having propositional content, it seems eminently plausible that non-conventional bearers of intentionality can too. Moreover, what makes mental states with propositional content capable of supporting or defeating one another is not specifcally their content, that is, the way in which they represent their objects. What makes them relate to one another lies, rather, in the objects themselves. The object of a proposition is a full state of affairs; propositions don’t just represent things, but represent them as being some way or other.18 Propositions are consistent, or not, in virtue of representing states of affairs which are mutually compatible, or not. If there are other experiential contents that can also represent states of affairs, then they will also be compatible or incompatible with propositions thanks, again, to the nature of their objects. And if they can do that, then it is diffcult to see why they could not stand in justifcatory relations with propositionally contentful states. If a mental state M whose content is the proposition that the basketball is infated can, under certain conditions, confer justifcation on a belief with the content that it will bounce if dribbled, then a mental state whose object is identical with M’s but whose content differs—a perceptual presentation of that state of affairs, for one—should also be able to perform that function. I think a strong case can be made that perceptual experiences have nonconceptual contents which have full states of affairs as their objects. But we can settle for another, more modest claim here, and that is that whatever the nature of the content of perception turns out to be, it at least is suffciently rich in its intentionality to have states of affairs among its objects. Perception is not confned to the traditional “givens” of empiricist epistemology. It takes in individuals that bear properties and stand in relations to other individuals and to those perceiving them.What I perceive now is a basketball on the foor.That is, I don’t perceive a patch of orange whose bearer is unspecifed or unseen, nor do I perceive the basketball to be unrelated to the foor. I perceive a basketball as being orange, and as being on a foor. The second horn of Sellars’s dilemma can also be answered. Suppose that perceptual experiences do have conceptual content.And let us also grant right away that there are many states of affairs that can only be meant, or even perceived, on condition that the subject has a consider346
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able store of background knowledge and conceptual abilities (see Willard 2000, 42–43). Even the nonconceptualist about perception has to admit that concept possession, and the knowledge that such possession requires, is required for many acts of fulfllment. I cannot verify the proposition that the basketball is infated without having the concepts “basketball” and “infated.” If acts of fulfllment are cases of noninferential knowledge, as I think they are in Husserl’s view, we have to answer this horn of the dilemma no matter what our views on perception itself. The frst thing to point out is that the possession of concepts and prior knowledge helps rather than hinders our access to actuality.As Dallas Willard puts it, Since the concept is a property of the act, it does not intervene between the act and its object, and does not close the mind off from the very objects or world that it was supposed to make accessible. It does not encapsulate the mind or its contents, any more than the properties of other things or events encapsulate them. (Willard 2002, 74) Not only do concepts not prevent us from reaching the things themselves, they need not prevent us from having immediate and noninferential knowledge of them. There is no indication that Husserl regards them as doing so. His principle of all principles, after all, states that givenness is a suffcient condition for justifcation, and nowhere, to my knowledge, does he insist that one must lack certain concepts or bodies of knowledge in order to have something given to one. And what an odd proposal that would be. I think we would have diffculty fnding anyone who seriously thinks that ignorance is a more favorable initial condition for having things given to one than knowledge, despite the fact that this might follow from the familiar view that our concepts and theories stand between us and the world. Husserl, I think, gets it right with the simple reminder: “givenness is givenness” (Husserl 1997,300). That is, no matter what the conditions might be for something to be given to me, when it is given, it is given. I likely acquired the concept only by having frst acquired a vast amount of knowledge—knowledge not just of colors and shapes and various platitudes of folk physics, but knowledge of cultural practices, including the practice of playing the game of the same name. One could conceivably have acquired that concept in very different ways—through a divine gift, evolution, ideology, or appropriately installed neural implants. But no matter what the story behind my acquisition of the concept , when a basketball is given, it really is given. A “genetic” account might be critical for a full account of how we came to possess the ability to direct our minds to basketballs, but nothing that such an account unearths can undo the fact that what is now given is given. And if it is given, there is no need to consult other sources about its presented features and existence.We can consult it, the thing itself.The conditions in virtue of which something is given don’t compromise its givenness.They enable it. William Alston has made a very similar point. My knowledge that the basketball is infated might presuppose other knowledge in two ways. It might depend on other pieces of knowledge for its existence, or for its warrant or “epistemization.”19 Only the latter kind of dependence would undermine its noninferential status, however. “Immediate knowledge is knowledge in which the belief involved is not epistemized by a relation to other knowledge or epistemized belief of the same subject” (Alston 1989, 63).What the defender of Sellars’s second horn would have to establish is that my belief that the basketball is infated—and all perceptual beliefs—are inferentially justifed by other beliefs or pieces of knowledge, not just that they depend for their existence on other beliefs and knowledge. But that is exactly what, phenomenologically, does not seem to be the case.That is, while it seems clear that I could not have basketball-thoughts fulflled on a perceptual basis without a rich stock of concepts and knowledge, and probably a 347
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conventional language, this knowledge is what enables me to be in the right condition to have basketballs given to me, not something that somehow undermines their givenness. For instance, I do not use my knowledge of the English language as premises in my reasoning about everything I think about, even though knowing English is, for me, a condition without which I would not be able to reason. Or, to give Alston’s example,“If one tried to teach a child that 2 + 3 = 5 while keeping him ignorant of, for instance ‘1 + 1 = 2’, he would fail miserably” (Alston 1989, 63). Despite that, one can know noninferentially that 2 + 3 = 5. Similarly, I do not use the knowledge I possess in virtue of possessing concepts—including, critically, my knowledge of what sorts of experiences fulfll them—as premises when I apply concepts to what is given. Rather, I use them as tools to apprehend what is given.And doing that does not render perceptual beliefs inferential or perception itself anything less than an originary manifestation of objectivity. As Evan Fales puts it,“The application of a learned concept to an experience, so long as it does not involve any present inference, can infuence the character of that experience, without thereby in any way destroying the givenness of what thereby appears” (Fales 1996, 123). Indeed. And not only can it “infuence the character” of such an experience without destroying the given, it might make the experience of givenness possible in the frst place. Perhaps it would help to think of the acquisition of a conceptual scheme and a body of knowledge in relation to the possibility of having things given as similar to practice in the acquisition of bodily and cognitive skills. A basketball does not just have intellectual signifcance for those who know how to play. For those with skill, it is not just a middle-sized orange spherical object customarily used in a certain sporting event. It also possesses what Merleau-Ponty calls a “motor physiognomy,” thanks to which it has a “living signifcation” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 217) that speaks to us not only as intellects but as embodied persons.Thanks to repeated interactions with basketballs, skilled players know how much force to exert to dribble, catch, pass, or shoot (see Dreyfus 2014a, 95).They can immediately and unrefectively handle it in ways in which a complete novice could not.This rich background of know-how, founded on extensive practice, does not make the expert’s actions or practical knowledge mediated, indirect, inadequate, or inauthentic. Exactly the opposite is the case. The skilled player acquires the ability to perform smoothly and immediately what a novice can only do clumsily, refectively, and in a step-wise fashion. And with that facility in action comes facility in perception. The basketball shows up immediately for the skilled player as something to be handled in accordance with those skills. The same goes for other, more intellectual forms of skill. Someone who has played thousands of games of chess, and has thought deeply about the game, is capable of perceiving chess-related states of affairs to which a novice is blind.As Hubert Dreyfus puts it,“a chess grandmaster, when shown a position that could occur in an actual game, almost immediately experiences a compelling sense of the current issue and spontaneously makes the appropriate move” (Dreyfus 2014b, 234).The reason is that the grandmaster perceives things that the rest of us do not, and perceives them because of, rather than in spite of, her extensive body of knowledge (see Haugeland 1996, 274). No doubt the same is true of other experts. Expert doctors, physicists, and geologists are simply capable of seeing and immediately verifying more than the rest of us, not, obviously, because they are infants with a pristine, concept-free apprehension of a world of pure experience—a condition diffcult to distinguish from blindness—but because they are knowledgeable agents with a sophisticated battery of concepts and an imposing body of knowledge and skill honed and perfected over time (Siegel 2012, 201).This is exactly how we can think of the possession of concepts and knowledge in their relation to the givenness of things.We, but not babies or bats, can see a $20 bill, a computer, or a wedding ceremony, and see them as what each of them is. The background knowledge and conceptual skill that such seeing obviously
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requires does not compromise the immediacy of such experiences. Rather, it enables it. Just as practicing a skill makes one capable of automatic and seamless execution, so the possession of concepts and knowledge make one capable of immediate perception and fulfllment that might be otherwise impossible.
29.4. Conclusion Perception is completely unlike any other type of intentional act, and virtually every other kind of act refers back to it in some manner. Every form of nonperceptual intuition is, and is experienced as, a modifcation of it. Nonintuitive acts refer back to perception insofar as they require it for their sense and, in the case of judgments, for their epistemic status. Husserl’s account of perception and its role in knowledge does not, moreover, fall to Sellars’s arguments against the Myth of the Given.Whether perception has conceptual content or not, Sellars’s dilemma can be avoided. And while it is clear that many perceptual acts and acts of fulfllment require that one possess concepts and prior knowledge, those possessions are ontological enabling conditions for various objects to be perceptually given, not evidential intermediaries that prevent things from being given.
Notes 1 2 3 4
5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19
See, for instance,Welton 2000, 176. Husserl 1970a, 728; Husserl 2001, 113. For an excellent discussion, see Romano 2015, Chapter 2. See Noë 2008. He uses that phrase to describe the status of the image subject in image consciousness. But the phrase also applies nicely, though for different reasons, to the unseen parts and sides of a seen object, and, as here, to its being intended in its absence.Also see Pietersma 1973, 96,Willard 1984, 227 and Bernet 2003, 156. Husserl 2005, 564; also see Kurg 2014, 35–36. On the difference between Evidenz and evidence, Heffernan (1998, 7) writes: “there is a signifcant difference between the accepted Anglo-Saxon view that evidence is a body of data by means of which one sees that something is so-and-so or such-and-such and the prevailing Teutonic perspective that “Evidenz” is the actual activity itself of seeing and letting be seen that something is so-and-so or such-and-such.” I hope this distinction is preserved by treating perception, not as evidence, but as the consciousness of evidence. See Erhard 2012,Wiltsche 2015, and Berghofer 2017 for defenses.Also see Hopp 2012. Ideas §141, 280.This passage is helpfully discussed at some length in Berghofer 2017, §2.3, 14–15. Husserl 2001, 113; also see Willard 1984, 206, Fasching 2012, and Kasmier 2015. See Husserl 1970a, Investigation 1, §14; also see Husserl 1970a, 692. Husserl 2001, 110; also see Husserl 1969, §86, 209. Husserl 2001, 110; also see Husserl 1969, §59, 158. Husserl 2005, 546; also see Brough 2005, LV). See Bonjour (1978, 11) and Steup (2000, 90–91) for exceptionally clear presentations. The clearest formulation of this familiar argument is due to Bill Brewer (2005, 218). See Searle (1983, 41) for an argument that visual experiences have propositional content because they have conditions of satisfaction. See Noë (2004, 183) for an argument that perception has propositional content since it “presents the world as being this way or that,” which requires that “one must be able to appreciate how the experience presents things as being,” which in turn “is just to say that one must have concepts of the presented features and states of affairs.” As I have argued elsewhere. See Hopp 2011, Chapter 2, section 2. Husserl 1970a, 579.Also see Smith and McIntyre 1982, 6–9. Epistemization is what accounts for the difference between true belief and knowledge. See Alston 1989, 58.
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References Aldea, Andreea Smaranda. 2013. “Husserl’s Struggle with Mental Images: Imaging and Imagining Reconsidered.” Continental Philosophy Review, 46: pp. 371–394. Alston,William. 1989.“What’s Wrong with Immediate Knowledge?” In: Epistemic Justifcation: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge. Ed.W.Alston. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 57–80. ———. 2002.“Sellars and the ‘Myth of the Given’.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 65: pp. 69–86. Berghofer, Philipp. 2017. “Why Husserl Is a Moderate Foundationalist.” Husserl Studies, Online First. doi: 10.1007/s10743-017-9213-4. Bernet, Rudolph. 2003.“Desiring to Know Through Intuition.” Husserl Studies, 19: pp. 153–166. Bonjour, Lawrence. 1978.“Can Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?” American Philosophical Quarterly, 15: pp. 1–13. Brewer, Bill. 2005. “Perceptual Experience Has Conceptual Content.” In: Contemporary Debates in Epistemology. Eds. M. Steup and E. Sosa. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 217-230. Brough, John. 2005.“Translator’s Introduction.” In: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925). Ed. Edmund Husserl. Dordrecht: Springer, XXIX-LXVIII. Crane,Tim. 2009.“Is Perception a Propositional Attitude?” The Philosophical Quarterly 59: pp. 452–469. Davidson, Donald. 2001. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dreyfus, Hubert. 2014a. “Todes’s Account of Nonconceptual Perceptual Knowledge and its Relation to Thought.” In: Skillful Coping. Eds. H. Dreyfus and M.Wrathall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 92–103. Dreyfus, Hubert. 2014b. “Merleau-Ponty and Recent Cognitive Science.” In: Skillful Coping. Eds. H. Dreyfus and M.Wrathall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 231–248. Erhard, Christopher. 2012. “Husserls moderater empirischer Fundamentalismus und das Verhältnis zwischen Phaenomenologie, Ontologie und Metaphysik. Kommentar zu Christian Beyer.” In: Welt der Gruende. Eds. J. Nida-Ruemelin and E. Oezmen, Hamburg: Meiner, pp. 48–62. Fales, Evan. 1996. A Defense of the Given. New York: Rowman & Littlefeld Publishers, Inc. Fasching,Wolfgang. 2012.“Intentionality and Presence: On the Intrinsic Of-ness of Consciousness from a Transcendental-Phenomenological Perspective.” Husserl Studies, 28: pp. 121–141. Haugeland, John. 1996. “Objective Perception.” In Perception. Ed. Kathleen Akins, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 268–290. Heffernan, George. 1998. “Miscellaneous Lucubrations on Husserl’s Answer to the Question ‘was die Evidenz sei’: A Contribution to the Phenomenology of Evidence on the Occasion of the Publication of Husserliana Volume XXX.” Husserl Studies, 15: pp. 1–75. Hopp,Walter. 2011. Perception and Knowledge:A Phenomenological Account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. “The (Many) Foundations of Knowledge.” In: The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. Ed. D. Zahavi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 327–348. Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic.Trans. D. Cairns.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1970a. Logical Investigations.Two volumes.Trans. J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge. ———. 1970b. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.Trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973. Experience and Judgment. Trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1977. Cartesian Meditations.Trans. D. Cairns.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1991. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Trans. J. B. Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1997. Thing and Space.Trans. R. Rojcewicz. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Trans. A. J. Steinbock. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2005. Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory.Trans. J. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2014. Ideas I: Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. D. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kasmier, David. 2015. “Knowability and Willard’s Reality Hook.” Presented at the Conference in Honor of Dallas Willard, Boston University, November 2016. Kurg, Regina-Nino. 2014. Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Image Consciousness, Aesthetic Consciousness, and Art. Fribourg: Dissertation, University of Fribourg.
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Perception Levinas, Emmanuel. 1995. The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, Second Edition. Trans. Andre Orianne. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception.Trans. Donald A. Landes. New York: Routledge. Millikan, Ruth Garrett. 2004. The Varieties of Meaning. Cambridge:The MIT Press. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge:The MIT Press. ———. 2008.“Life is the Way the Animal is in the World.” Edge Magazine. Available at https://www.edg e.org/conversation/alva_no-life-is-the-way-the-animal-is-in-the-world Pietersma, Henry. 1973.“Intuition and Horizon in the Philosophy of Husserl.”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34: pp. 95–101. Romano, Claude. 2015. At the Heart of Reason.Trans. M. B. Smith and C. Romano. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Searle, John R. 1983. Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Siegel, Susanna. 2012.“Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Justifcation.” Noûs 46: pp. 201–222. Smith,Arthur D. 2002. The Problem of Perception. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Smith, David Woodruff and Ronald McIntyre. 1982. Husserl and Intentionality: A Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language. Dordrecht: Reidel. Soffer, Gail. 2003. “Revisiting the Myth: Husserl and Sellars on the Given.” The Review of Metaphysics, 57: pp. 301–337. Steup, Matthias. 2000. “Unrestricted Foundationalism and the Sellarsian Dilemma.” Grazer Philosophische Studien 60: pp. 75–98. Welton, Donn. 2000. The Other Husserl. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Willard, Dallas. 1984. Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge.Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1995. “Knowledge.” In: The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Eds. B. Smith and D. W. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 138–167. ———. 2000. “Knowledge and Naturalism.” In: Naturalism: A Critical Analysis. Eds. W. L. Craig and J. P. Moreland. New York: Routledge, pp. 24–48. ———. 2002. “The World Well Won: Husserl’s Epistemic Realism One Hundred Years Later.” In: One Hundred Years of Phenomenology. Eds. D. Zahavi and F. Stjernfelt. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 69–78. Wiltsche, Harald. 2015.“Intuitions, Seemings, and Phenomenology.” Teorema, 34: pp. 57–77.
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30 PHENOMENON Aurélien Djian and Claudio Majolino
The idea of phenomenology has a quite long history, going back at least to the 17th century (Spiegelberg 1981, 7; Schuhmann 1984). A decisive turning point, however, occurs at the end of the 19th century. No longer a particular branch or a part—though important—of philosophy in general (as still in Lambert, Herder, Kant and even Hegel), phenomenology has now the ambition to renew philosophy as a whole and modify the very way in which philosophy deals with its most fundamental questions. Brentano’s “descriptive”, Husserl’s “transcendental”, Heidegger’s “hermeneutical” phenomenology and their offspring, all share—despite major differences—the same ambition. Each of these projects, however, rests on a distinctive concept of “phenomenon”, determining the meaning, scope and resources of its corresponding form of phenomenology. Charting such concepts and their relevant varieties is thus of paramount importance to identify, let alone assess, both similarities and differences among philosophical projects variously called “phenomenology”.
30.1. Phenomenology of true phenomena: Brentano One of the main claims of Brentano’s Psychology from an empirical standpoint (1874) is that “descriptive psychology” is not just an empirical science among others. Because of its higher theoretical (Brentano 1874, 29/15), practical (Brentano 1874, 30/15) and metaphysical value (Brentano 1874, 37/19), psychology is, in fact, superior to and more fundamental than any other science. Yet this superiority is not in the least self-evident. For its scientifc character is not secured from the outset. Kant, for instance, claimed that psychology is neither a rational “science of the soul” (for this would entail all sorts of paralogisms) nor an empirical “science of the phenomena of the internal sense” (for being temporal and having no spatial dimension, the latter cannot be observed and measured) (Brentano 1874, 94/49). Brentano responds to Kant by making three claims: (i) psychology (as opposed to natural science) is not the science of the soul (as opposed to the science of bodies), but of psychic phenomena (as opposed to the science of physical phenomena), whose main distinctive feature is the so-called “intentional in-existence” (Brentano 1874, 124–125/68); 352
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(ii) both phenomena (psychic and physical) are empirically given, each having its own form of perception; as a result, natural sciences are ultimately grounded on the experience of “outer” perception, while psychology is grounded on “inner” perception; (iii) however, only phenomena given to “inner” perception are truly perceived, whereas phenomena given to “outer” perception do not appear as they actually are (Brentano 1874, 28–29/14–15). If (i) and (ii) show that psychology is “epistemologically” equal to natural science, (iii) points already towards its “theoretical” superiority. Psychology is in fact the unique science based on “the only perception in the strict sense of the word” (Wahr-nehmung) (Brentano 1874, 128/70). Unlike physical phenomena, psychic phenomena are perceived not as “signs” (Zeichen) of something whose actual being is unapparent, but as manifestations of something that truly is (Majolino 2008, 165–170). Thus, strictly speaking, only psychic phenomena are phenomena in the true sense, i.e. they truly are as they appear to be, and they appear to be as they truly are. Quite consistently, in his 1888/89 Vienna lectures, Brentano suggests calling the science of psychic phenomena “descriptive phenomenology” (deskriptive oder beschreibende Phänomenologie). In fact, if “to be a phenomenon, something must exist in itself ”; if “phenomenon” names something that “is perceived by us in the strict sense of the word” (i.e. something for which the principle holds that appearance = existence); and if this “is not the case for the external world”—then “only psychic realities are phenomena in this strict sense” (Brentano 1888/89, 129/137). Accordingly, only psychology, i.e. the science dealing with phenomena in the true sense, deserves to be called “phenomenology”. According to Brentano then—and pace Kant—psychology is indeed an empirical science. Moreover, qua “phenomenology”, it is the only science of phenomena in the strict sense, i.e. the only science of something whose existence is tantamount to its appearance and vice-versa. Hence, its theoretical superiority.
30.2. Phenomenology without phenomena? Husserl (I) In Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–1901),“phenomenology” has already a slightly different task. It has to ground pure logic, which, in turn, delivers the essential theoretical foundations for the “theory of science”. This, Husserl continues, can only be achieved thanks to a twofold clarifcation: (i) of the meaning of logical concepts and laws (Hua XIX/1, 10/168); (ii) of “the essence of clarifcation itself ” (Hua XIX/1, 13/170). This second point leads to the study of consciousness in general, and of conscious acts in which logical meanings are constituted and fulflled in particular. Now, Husserl’s project is built on an explicit rejection of Brentano’s account of “phenomena”. More precisely he rejects: (i) the talk of “phenomena” to describe “lived experiences” (Erlebnisse): “We will neither talk of ‘psychic phenomena’ nor of phenomena in general”, he writes, for such language “is fraught with the most dangerous ambiguities, and insinuates the quite doubtful persuasion, expressly professed by Brentano, that each intentional experience is a phenomenon” (Hua XIX/1, 384/97), i.e. object of an internal consciousness; (ii) the distinction between phenomena qua mere signs (existence ≠ appearance) and true phenomena (existence = appearance); for intentional lived experiences (roughly corresponding to Brentano’s psychic phenomena) are not more “phenomenal” or “truly existing” than nonintentional ones; 353
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(iii) the confation of intentional and immanent objects; for all lived experiences (intentional, non-intentional) are sharply distinguished from their transcendent objective correlates (Hua XIX/1, 411–413/112–113). By putting all lived experiences on a par (ii), denying their eo ipso phenomenal status (i) and emphasizing the transcendence of intentional objects (iii), Husserl dismisses the key tenets of Brentano’s phenomenology. What is phenomenology then? And what does “phenomenon” mean? Though still dealing with Erlebnisse in general (and intentional Erlebnisse in particular) (Hua XIX/1, 411/112), phenomenology is no longer the “factually descriptive” investigation of actually existing lived experiences. It is rather, Husserl says, a “purely descriptive” enterprise (Hua XIX/1, 24/177).Why purely descriptive? Because its descriptions refer to something that is indifferent to factual existence, to the “here and now” of the lived experiences described (Hua XIX/1, 114/240).What “pure” descriptions describe are “instances” (Einzelfälle) or “arbitrary examples” of ideal lived experiences,“to be grasped through them” (Hua XIX/1, 114/240). It is precisely because the phenomenology of the Logical Investigations is—ante litteram— “eidetic”, i.e. indifferent to factual existence, that it can precede and ground not only logic but also theoretical philosophy, including all empirical sciences and even metaphysics (Hua XIX/1, 26–27/178).Thus, when it comes to “phenomena”, one has not to decide about or rest upon the distinction between what truly exists and what not. Hence, although Brentano’s phenomenon is what appears as it truly is, something whose existence is tantamount to its appearance, Husserl’s is rather what appears beyond existence and non-existence, something whose existence is indifferent with respect to its appearance. Admittedly, both phenomena, Brentano’s and Husserl’s, are meant to ground theoretical sciences and philosophy in general—yet their corresponding “phenomenologies” couldn’t be more different.
30.3. Phenomenology of correlative phenomena: Husserl (II) In the Idea of Phenomenology (1907), the task of phenomenology appears already to be wider than in the Logical Investigations. No longer limited to the foundation of logic and, ultimately, theoretical philosophy, phenomenology’s new task is to carry out a “critique of reason” in all its forms: theoretical, practical and axiological (Hua II, 52/39–40). Such wider scope implies a profound modifcation in Husserl’s concept of “phenomenon”; a modifcation related to the introduction of two key concepts: the “phenomenological reduction” and the idea of “constitutive correlation”. The “reduction” is introduced through the so-called “riddle of transcendence” (Hua II, 43/33).“Immanence” and “transcendence”, Husserl says, are ambiguous terms.Among its manifold meanings, “transcendence” can be used also to refer to something whose givenness is not absolutely evident—i.e. an object whose knowledge cannot exclude doubt as for its being (“there is x”) or being-so (“x is A”). But “how can knowledge posit as existing something that is not directly and genuinely given in it”? (Hua II, 35/27–8). Such “riddle” cannot be solved within what Husserl calls the “natural attitude”. For the latter is characterized precisely by the fact of positing the existence of objects for which doubt is not excluded, beginning with the world (Hua II, 17/15). Everything in the world can be doubted— at least in principle. Following Descartes, one should therefore suspend the validity of the world (Hua II, 29/23) and search for a knowledge that does not suffer of the lack of evidence proper to transcendence. Unlike Descartes, however, one should neither truly doubt about the existence 354
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of the world, nor confate “immanence” intended as absolute evidence with another meaning of “immanence”, i.e. the real (reell) presence of a lived experience within the stream of consciousness (cogitationes). The “phenomenological reduction”, as it were, follows Descartes’s lead in a non-Cartesian way. By “bracketing” the position of existence proper to the natural attitude, it unfolds the difference between a “pure phenomenon in the phenomenological sense” and a merely “psychological” one (Hua II, 45/34).Whereas the latter—i.e. the object of psychology as empirical science—is still a worldly fact, the former is nowhere to be found in the world; and while psychological phenomena are as doubtful as any other “transcendent” being, only phenomena “in the phenomenological sense” appear as given beyond any doubt (Hua II, 43/33). Husserl’s use of the word “phenomenon” here has thus two distinctive features: (i) its meaning is equivocal, for all “phenomena” are not “phenomena in the sense of phenomenology”; (ii) its object is somehow ambiguous, for the difference between “phenomena” (in the sense of phenomenology or not) depends on the way in which they are “seen”: in the “natural” or in the “phenomenological” attitude; by embracing transcendence or bracketing it etc. But a second equivocity is nested within the frst, showing the actual scope of the domain of absolute givenness reached in the phenomenological attitude. (iii) “The meaning of the word ‘phenomenon’ (Phänomen)”—Husserl writes— “is twofold because of the essential correlation between appearing (Erscheinen) and that which appears (Erscheinendem)”; accordingly,“the phenomenology of knowledge is a science of the phenomenon of knowledge in a twofold sense: of (acts of) knowledge as appearances (…) [and] of the objectivities themselves as objects that present themselves in just such ways” (Hua II, 14/69); (iv) fnally, what is also given absolutely in the phenomenological attitude are the essential forms of such constitutive correlations, granting for the scientifc status of phenomenology (eidetic science vs. factual science) and its method (intuitive-descriptive vs. formal or exact) (Hua II, 47/36). In (i) and (ii), the reduction tells us that what is “absolutely given” is not a “factual phenomenon” but a “phenomenon in the sense of phenomenology”; in (iii) the idea of constitutive correlation explains that the latter is a unity of sense constituted by a multiplicity of intentional/ non-intentional conscious lived experiences (see Majolino 2012, 155–182); something that can be investigated in its essential structures and forms by a fully fedged eidetic science called “phenomenology”, as in (iv). The whole pattern could be summarized by the diagram sketched in the following page (Figure 30.1). Thanks to this refned understanding of phenomena, Husserl is now able to solve the “riddle” of transcendence. Phenomenology is now the eidetic science of phenomena in a “phenomenological sense”, i.e. constitutive correlations of consciousness (appearing/that which appears) accessible thanks to the phenomenological reduction. Since the latter are given absolutely and could be described eidetically, phenomenology can also fulfll the task of grounding the whole of philosophy (theoretical, practical and axiological). And it can do so by fxing the boundaries of its inner object domains and corresponding methods, clarifying the various ways in which any consciousness as intentional consciousness comes to constitute the sense of beings, goals and values. 355
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(i) “Phenomenon” (Phänomen)
(ii) Reduced (transcendance bracketed) PURE PHENOMENON
(ii) Non-reduced (transcendance embraced) FACT
(iii) Appearing (Erscheinende)
(iii) That which appears (Erscheinende)
(iv) Eidetically-considered ESSENCES (Idea of Phenomenology)
Constitutive correlation
(iv) Eidetically-considered ESSENCES (Logical Investigations)
Figure 30.1 Husserl’s account of phenomenon in the Idea of Phenomenology
30.4. Phenomenology of transcendental phenomena: Husserl (III) A further development occurs in Ideas I (1913), where phenomenology is defned as “the eidetic doctrine, not of phenomena that are real, but of phenomena that are transcendentally reduced” (Hua III/1, 6/xx).This defnition introduces a further sophistication, a new problem, and a radical modifcation within Husserl’s previous account of “phenomenon”. The sophistication results from the refnement of the technique of reduction, adding to the phenomenological reduction, spelled out in the Idea of Phenomenology, a series of “transcendental reductions” (Hua III/1, 69/66), whose main task is to guarantee the radical independence of the Urregion (Hua III/1, 159/171) “transcendental consciousness”.Thus, in addition to the transcendence of the factual world, one should also reduce the transcendence of God, the eidetic domain of pure logic and all formal and material ontologies in order to avoid any risk of “metabasis” (Hua III/1, 130/139). The phenomenon of phenomenology is now “transcendentally” reduced insofar as it appears at the end of the series of reductions, whereas all domains of existence with which it could be confused and mistaken are carefully excluded. This new transcendental dimension goes hand in hand with the appearance of a new problem, related to the concept of “ontological region” and revolving around the formal ontological notion of “individual”. The new problem is that of the unity of the world in the diversity of its regions, nature and spirit (Majolino 2015, 33–50). Such unity cannot be granted ontologically, as if the world were itself a sort of “super region” including all sorts of entities, ultimately traced back, by means of some logical variation (part–all,particular–universal,matter–form) to certain paradigmatic individuals.The problem of the “whole of the world” (Weltall) can only be soundly addressed as that of a transcendental unity, as a transcendent phenomenon correlatively constituted in its own specifc sense of being (as Wirklichkeit, Realität) (Hua III/1, 159/171).The unity of the world is thus rooted in the principles of transcendental phenomenology grounding, in their sense of being and beingsuch, the whole of eidetic—material and formal—and empirical sciences (Hua III/1, 159/171). Finally, a modifcation in the concept of phenomenon occurs with respect to its “metaphysical” character.The transcendental account of phenomenology in Ideas I is, in fact, inseparable from the idea that the mode of being of pure consciousness is in principle distinct from that of the world. Husserl is now explicitly addressing—though with entirely new means and after having previously excluded it—Brentano’s problem of the true phenomenon (see Section 30.1 above).Thus, unlike the Logical Investigations and the Idea of Phenomenology, Ideas I presents phenomenology as the true eidetic science of what is originally and absolutely given, not only with respect to its essence, but also with respect to its existence (Hua III/1, 97/101), i.e. the only science of “phenomena” for which appearance is tantamount to existence, as opposed to the “phenomena” of the natural attitude, which could be otherwise as they appear, and even could not be at all (Hua III/1, 97/101). 356
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30.5. Phenomenology, phenomena and the “realism” of essences: Reinach Reacting to Ideas I, Adolf Reinach’s account of “phenomenon” in Concerning Phenomenology (1914) bears undeniable similarities with Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Such similarities, however, should not prevent us from acknowledging its undisputable originality. Reinach presents phenomenology as “a method of philosophizing which is required by the problems of philosophy” (Reinach 1914, 531/2, 546/24) to provide the foundations of positive sciences (Reinach 1914, 549/29). By “method”, however, one should neither understand a “practical” course of action (Reinach 1914, 535/8), nor a deductive “system of philosophical propositions and truths” (Reinach 1914, 531/2).The phenomenological method is rather “a way of seeing” that “allows us to see what was, indeed, there already, but without our being conscious of it” (Reinach 1914, 532/3) and to do so in “an ultimate and absolute evidence” (Reinach 1914, 545-546/24). It is meant to bring us, beyond any “theories and constructions” (Reinach 1914, 550/30), to the “things themselves” with which “we are always dealing with, right from the beginning”, thus “overcoming” the “natural distance from objects” (Reinach 1914, 532/4). But what are the “things themselves” that phenomenology aims at bringing us closer to? According to Reinach they are the “what” (Was) (Reinach 1914, 532/3, 535/8, 536/9), i.e. the “essences” (Washeiten, Wesen) (Reinach 1914, 542-543/19-20) of objects. Thus, by changing one’s attitude, it is possible to shift from existence to essence (Reinach 1914, 533/5, 534/6), from “the individual experience” which “refers, as sense perception, to the singular, to the ‘that-right-there’ (Diesda)” to “intuitive acts of a wholly different sort” grasping general and non-contingent objects for which “no sense perception is required” (Reinach 1914, 543/20). For the latter,“pure imagination suffces” (Reinach 1914, 543/20), for the “viewing and knowing of essences” is not bound to actual existence. This holds for the essence “consciousness” (grasped in a non-psychological way) (Reinach 1914, 547/25-26), but also for “numbers” (Reinach 1914, 538-541/13-18) or “nature” (Reinach 1914, 549/28). In short, it holds for all “phenomena”, i.e. for everything that, in the phenomenological attitude, is grasped “purely”, indifferently to its existence, only as a possible arbitrary example.And this happens whenever we work out “its essence without preconceptions and prejudgments”. Thus, there will be as many phenomenologies as eidetic sciences, i.e. sciences following the phenomenological method: a “theory of psychological essences” founding “empirical psychology”,a theory of physical essences founding empirical physics etc.(Reinach 1914,548/27). Reinach’s “phenomenology” rests on three conceptual decisions: (i) it rejects its status as a science, and limits itself to a merely methodological function (phenomenology = eidetic reduction); (ii) it explicitly equates “phenomenon” and “arbitrary example of an essence”; (iii) it characterizes the phenomenological–eidetic attitude as opposed to the natural–factual attitude. Because of (i) and (iii), Reinach’s “phenomenology” differs from psychology, precisely because of its eidetic character. However, because of (ii), it also differs from Husserl’s Logical Investigations, for it openly widens the object domain to which the concept of “phenomenon” applies: not just to (pure) Erlebnisse, but to every object to be grasped in their essence. Moreover, Reinach is also able to reorganize philosophy by simplifying its plan: empirical sciences are grounded on eidetic sciences (operating phenomenologically).There is no need for a “fundamental science”, be it Brentano’s descriptive phenomenology or Husserl’s phenomenology as eidetic psychology or his constitutive-transcendental phenomenology. 357
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This fnally leads to Reinach’s critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. If “phenomenon” simply means “arbitrary example of an essence”, the only “phenomenological reduction” needed is the eidetic one, i.e. the one directed towards essences; essences being “real” in the sense that they are what they are independently of our thoughts and knowledge, but also of any empirical contingency.Thus, if no transcendental reduction is required, phenomenology is eo ipso “realist phenomenology”.
30.6. Genetic phenomenology of phenomena “in an absolutely unique sense”: Husserl (IV) The genetic “turn” of phenomenology, especially in the Cartesian Meditations (1927), somehow diffracts the account of “phenomenon” pictured so far. Husserl remarks that the reduction brings us in front of “phenomena in the sense of phenomenology” that still present the world with all the familiar structures encountered in the natural attitude (things, living bodies, persons, communities, cultural objects, etc.) (Hua I, 109– 111/75–77). The appearance of such structures, however, is not constituted in one blow. It is rather the results of a complex intentional history (of receptivity, constitution of the feld of passive pre-donation, habituality, active synthesis, etc.). Phenomenology should thus be able to describe the eidetic laws of the historical constitution of such structures in any possible world and their parallel forms of correlation. As a result, the phenomenological attitude is now diffracted in two directions: static and genetic.The latter deals with the eidetic laws of the historical constitution of any possible world and world structures; the former classifes systematically, clarifes and tests the eidetic laws thanks to which objects, having already been historically constituted, are identifed and re-identifed (Hua I, 110/76). The concept of “phenomenon” thus undergoes a parallel diffraction: understood genetically, phenomena now embed a historical-constitutive dimension. Moreover, in the Krisis (1935–1936) Husserl makes a distinctive use of the concept of phenomenon understood genetically, and provides some remarks as to its historical origin and critical role. In “Galileo’s mathematizing reinterpretation of nature”, Husserl says,“phenomena are only in the subjects; they are there only as causal results of events taking place in true nature, which events exist only with mathematical properties” (Hua VI, 54/53–54).Thinking nature as something that is objectively mathematical in its “true being-in-itself ” is thus related to a merely subjective account of “phenomena”. Here lies one of the roots of the crisis. Rejecting “phenomena” as merely subjective with respect to the rational objectivity of mathematized nature is tantamount to ignoring that reason is the subjective correlate of being and truth. And this prevents European sciences from addressing the problems related to mathematical substruction, as the apparently unbridgeable gap between the world in itself (non-phenomenal) and the world-in-which-we-live (phenomenal). Transcendental philosophy, by contrast, deals with a concept of “phenomenon” having “a quite peculiar sense”, a “new concept of ‘phenomenon’, arising the frst time—although still insuffciently spelled out—with the Cartesian epoché” (HuaVI, 155/152). Such new concept is neither to be understood in an empirical naïve sense (as a pre-given fact) nor in a rationalistic sense (as a merely subjective event), but rather in a genetic-constitutive sense. In the transcendental reduction—where “being” is bracketed—the world does not appear as “pre-given” or as “already there” but, precisely, as constantly unfolding itself, constituted in the “subjectivity as pregiving the world” (Hua VI, 150/147). Only a philosophy grounded phenomenologically—i.e. on the basis of a genetic understanding of that “transcendental” concept of phenomenon, frst introduced by Descartes, as opposed 358
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to naïve-objective and rationalistic-subjective conceptions of phenomena—could fnd its place within the teleological movement of reason (Hua VI, 275–276) to which European humanity had ceased to believe.And, accordingly, play a critical role in fnding a remedy to its crisis.
30.7. Phenomenology of the world as transcendental phenomenon: Fink On phenomenology (1933) and What does Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology want? (1934), are two essays in which Eugen Fink introduces a novel concept of phenomenon. According to Fink, Husserl’s phenomenology is characterized by a twofold opposition. On the one hand, it is opposed to “the naivety of daily epistemic praxis and positive scientifc research” (because of its blindness to the problem of the possibility of knowledge) (Fink 1966, 95); on the other, it differs from criticism (for, although aware of the problem of knowledge, it tries to solve it thanks to the relation between transcendental apperception and “apriori form of the world” (Fink 1966, 100). In fact, despite their differences, both positions occur within the “natural attitude”, i.e. they share the same “belief in the reality of the world” (Fink 1966, 114), where all entities that we refer to exist only on the basis of the “non-thematized foundation” (Fink 1966, 117) of the world.As a result, the fundamental problem of “the origin of the world” (Fink 1966, 101) or of “the being of the world” (Fink 1966, 116, 119) remains unnoticed. Thanks to the transcendental reduction, Husserl’s phenomenology delivers us from our status of “prisoners of the world” (Fink 1966, 111, 179) and turns the world itself into something “questionable as such” (Fink 1966, 123); into a “phenomenon”. Fink’s concept of “phenomenon” now extends to the following two correlated meanings: (i) the world—understood not as in the distinction between phenomenon and thing-in-itself, but as “being-for-the-transcendental-subjectivity-of-the-world” (Fink 1966, 128), i.e. as the “transcendental phenomenon of the world” (Fink 1966, 118); (ii) transcendental life itself (Fink 1966, 126)—understood as the “origin of the world”, as the “original-phenomenon” (Ur-phänomen) in which the being of the world is constituted (Fink 1966, 168). The phenomenology inaugurated by Husserl is therefore a science in an entirely new sense: more fundamental than any naïve science of the world (Fink 1966, 103–105); but also more radical than criticist philosophy, grounded on “the opposition between world and representation” (Fink 1966, 127). Now, though literally in agreement with the late Husserl’s views, Fink’s specifc understanding of the concept of “phenomenon” is nevertheless quite original; for the concepts of “constitution” and “reduction”, essential to Husserl’s account of phenomena, appear to be fully reinterpreted. To begin with, Husserl’s “constitution” as synthetic “unity of multiplicity” is recast in terms of a transcendental creation. Such peculiar shift is made possible, on the one hand, by collapsing Kant’s “phenomenon” (as the psychological receptive correlate of the intuitus derivatus) and Husserl’s (for in the natural attitude, the psychological noema is “the sense of experience in which the object existing in itself is in itself accessible through some infnite relativity in the course of the fulflling identifcation”) (Fink 1966, 132–133); on the other, by overcoming the latter into a “transcendental phenomenon”, i.e. “the world itself ”, “being itself (…) in the innermost and still unknown depths of its hidden sense of being” (Fink 1966, 133), as the correlate of a creation (Fink 1966, 143) understood on the basis of the Kantian model of the intuitus originarius. 359
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As for the concept of the transcendental “reduction”, it undergoes an even deeper modifcation. By bracketing the position of existence of the world and turning it into a question of sense-constitution, Husserl’s reduction accedes to the transcendental feld and, at the same time, quits the feld of facts, leaving aside—at least preliminarily—all metaphysical issues, including the one of the creation of the factual world.Accordingly, Husserl’s reduction opens the phenomenological problem of the origin of the world, by shifting from the question of its being to the question of its sense; Fink’s reduction, by contrast, addresses right away the metaphysical problem of the origin of the world, by shifting from the question of its being received, to the question of its being created by a subject.
30.8. Hermeneutic phenomenology and the exceptional phenomenon of being: Heidegger Heidegger’s account of “phenomenon” in §7 of Being and Time (1927) represents a decisive moment in the history of phenomenology. Having reminded us that the question of Being is “the fundamental question of philosophy in general”, Heidegger asks about the method of ontology. Unlike “historically transmitted ontologies” (Heidegger 1927, 27/24), he adds, such method needs to be drawn “from the objective necessity of particular issues and procedures asked by the ‘things themselves’” (Heidegger 1927, 27/24). Thus,“phenomenology” is not the name of a science (the science of phenomena), i.e. a discipline defned by its “what” (Was). It is precisely a method, and has to do with the “how” (Wie), i.e. the way in which things show themselves. Hence the phenomenological maxim “to the things themselves!”,“opposed to free-foating constructions and accidental fndings; it is also opposed to taking over any conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated; and likewise to pseudo-questions which are often spread abroad as ‘problems’ for generations” (Heidegger 1927, 27–28/24). Any science carrying out its quest following such maxim follows a “phenomenological” method—and this also applies to ontology. Yet ontology is unlike any other “science”, and its bond to phenomenology appears to be more intimate. Consequently, in order to refne this preliminary understanding of “phenomenology”, Heidegger turns to the original meaning of the formal concepts of “phenomenon” and “logos” (Heidegger 1927, 28/24). Though the word “phenomenon” (Phänomen) has different meanings—for it can be understood as “semblance” (Schein),“appearance” (Erscheinung),“mere appearance” (bloße Erscheinung)”, etc.—such “confusing multiplicity” (Heidegger 1927, 31/27), Heidegger says, can be traced back to one “original” (Heidegger 1927, 29/25) or “basic” meaning (Heidegger 1927, 32/28): “what shows itself, the self-showing, the manifest” (Heidegger 1927, 28/25). As for the concept of “logos”, it originally means to “make manifest ‘what is being talked about’ in speech” (Heidegger 1927, 32/28). Putting together the two concepts, one fnally gets what Heidegger calls the formal pre-concept of phenomenology:“apophainesthai ta phainomena: to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself ” (Heidegger 1927, 34/30). Such original concept of phenomenology, however, is still “merely formal”, for it leaves undetermined whether “that which shows itself ” is Being or an entity (Heidegger 1927, 31/27). As long as the pre-concepts of (i) “phenomenon” and (ii) “logos” are not deformalized according to the ontological difference, the uniqueness of ontology remains undecided. (i) The deformalization of the formal pre-concept of “phenomenon” happens in two ways: either by an entity, i.e. something that “initially and for the most part” shows-itself in the world, right from the outset; or by the self-showing of Being, i.e. something that is not only “initially 360
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and for the most part” but also “essentially” concealed (verborgen). In the frst case, we have what Heidegger calls the “vulgar concept of phenomenon” (der vulgäre Phänomenbegriff) (Heidegger 1927, 27/31), shared by all science following the maxim “to the things themselves” as to investigate this or that kind of entity; in the second, we reach the “phenomenological concept of phenomenon” (Phänomenologische Begriff von Phänomen) (Heidegger 1927, 28–31) proper to ontology. In fact, only a “phenomenon in a distinctive sense” (in einem ausgezeichneten Sinne), concealed in an “exceptional sense” (in einem ausnehmenden Sinne), requires a “phenomenology”, i.e. a method to wrestle from its concealment what essentially does not show itself (Being) and yet is fundamental with respect to the immediate and unproblematic self-showing of worldly entities (Heidegger 1927, 35–36/31). (ii) As for the deformalization of the formal pre-concept of “logos”, it is also twofold. Since the structure of the “falling prey” (Verfallenheit)—characterizing the Dasein in its everydayness—triggers the tendency to understand Being from the standpoint of entities “ready-tohand” (Heidegger 1927, 21/18–19),“the way of encountering Being and the structures of Being in the mode of phenomena” (Heidegger 1927, 36–37/32) requires a method that is “opposed to the naïveté of an accidental, ‘immediate’ and unrefective ‘beholding’” (Schauen) (Heidegger 1927, 37/32). In other words, neither intuition (Heidegger 1927, 147/138) nor everyday understanding are suffcient to “make manifest ‘what is being talked about’” if the latter is the most exceptional phenomenon of Being. The only “way of encountering” such phenomenon is by “making explicit” (Auslegung) the articulation of the historically pre-structured meaning from which what is understood is precisely understood as such—what Heidegger calls the “hermeneutical als” (Heidegger 1927, 149/139–140). Thus, in accordance with the ontological primacy of Dasein, such explication has the “philosophically primary meaning” of an analytic of the Dasein (Heidegger 1927, 38/34). But it also has the more general meaning of a “‘hermeneutics’ in the sense that it works out the condition of the possibility of every ontological investigation” (Heidegger 1927, 37–38/33). By bringing together (i) and (ii), Heidegger fnally reveals the necessarily hermeneutical nature of a “phenomeno-logy” focused on the self-showing of the most exceptional phenomenon of all. Hence, an entirely new concept of “hermeneutical phenomenology”—irreducible to Brentano’s or Husserl’s phenomenologies—comes to the fore: the “explication” of the meaning of Being in general, required by the latter’s essentially concealed character and fundamental role with respect to entities, and primarily grounded on an analytic of the Dasein, as opposed to the “vulgar phenomenology” of all ontic sciences whose phenomena are not exceptional (as they show themselves “initially and for the most part”).
30.9. Varieties of exceptional phenomena: French phenomenology Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology of exceptional phenomena has been extremely infuential. Though often rejecting the idea of an analytic of the Dasein, the priority of ontology and even the label “hermeneutics”, many—though not all—French phenomenologists have extensively drawn from the idea of a “phenomenological phenomenology” focused on the most exceptional phenomenon of all, i.e. the most concealed and at the same time the most fundamental with respect to everyday phenomena and ordinary objects of science and knowledge. What Heidegger considered as the only truly phenomenological deformalization of the formal pre-concept of phenomenon—i.e. Being—is now emptied of its content, as it were, and somehow re-formalised as to allow new varieties of more exceptional “phenomenological” phe361
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nomena. Emmanuel Levinas, Henry Michel and Jean-Luc Marion are examples of such trend (for further details see Djian-Majolino 2018 and Djian 2018).
30.9.1. The exceptional phenomenon of the Other: Levinas At least at frst sight, Totality and Infnity (1961) seems to openly reject Heidegger’s account of phenomenon. According to Levinas, the “ontological imperialism” dominating Western philosophy (Levinas 1961, 6/21) cannot but understand the encounter with “the Other” (Autre) from within the model of totality, i.e. as someone who is considered as “another self ” (un autre moi) rather than as “other than me” (un autre que moi, i.e. Autrui) (Levinas 1961, 9/24). However, in the original face-to-face, the Other manifests itself, breaking the yoke of totality, in the mode of a “revelation” (Levinas 1961, 12/26; 56/62; 61/66) or an “expression” (Levinas 1961, 43/51; 61/65). And the self-showing of a “revelation”, according to Levinas, is precisely the opposite of the self-showing of a “phenomenon”. In fact, if—following Heidegger’s lead—we call “phenomenon”“the being that appears, but remains absent” (Levinas 1961, 197/181), the Other is rather “he who signals himself by a sign qua signifying that sign (…), delivers the sign and gives it” (Levinas 1961, 92/92). Differently put, the Other “is not, with respect to the phenomenon, the hidden” (Levinas 1961, 198/181), but rather “the principle of phenomena” (Levinas 1961, 92/92), and its “expression” in the word is the fundament of the phenomenon itself.The Other, Levinas says, is the one who “manifests itself in speech by speaking of the world and not of himself; he manifests himself by proposing the world, by thematizing it” (Levinas 1961, 98/96). So Levinas’s “expression” is literally meant to overcome Heidegger’s “phenomenon”, just as his “ethics” aims at challenging the role of “ontology” qua “frst philosophy”. However, despite such explicit opposition, the “expression” of the Other displays all the structural features distinctive of Heidegger’s most exceptional phenomenon of all. (i) The Other is (initially and for the most part) essentially concealed. Indeed,“the soul (…) is naturally atheist”, and atheism, defned by its egoism, is nothing but “separation” (Levinas 1961, 52/58), i.e. the ordinary relativization of the Other to another self (alter ego).And “the ontology that grasps the being of the existent is a spontaneous and pre-theorical work of every inhabitant of the earth” (Levinas 1961, 170/158). (ii) As the principle of the phenomenon, the Other is the original foundation of whatever shows itself, be it the phenomenon as a given sign, or its degraded “appearance” (see “the anarchy of the spectacle” [Levinas 1961, 90–92/90–92]). (iii) Given (i) and (ii), a philosophy of the Other cannot but be a phenomenology, “to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself ”. And such self-showing of what is essentially concealed and the foundation of whatever shows itself happens precisely in the mode of withdrawal: in its “event” or “epiphany” (Levinas 1961, 43/51; 54/60). Thus, the self-showing of the Other-that-is-not-an-Entity “overfows the thought that thinks it” (Levinas 1990, 10/25), indicating “the essential incompletion of that self-presentation, and (…) the always possible break-up of the ‘synthesis’ that sums up the sequence of its ‘aspects’” (Levinas 1961, 91/90–91). Levinas’s self-manifestation of the Other qua revelation/expression thus appears as a variety— though allegedly more fundamental—of Heidegger’s (reformalized) “phenomenological phenomenon”.Accordingly, his “ethics” qua frst philosophy could soundly be seen as an alternative 362
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to the ontology-focused account of “phenomenology” spelled out in Being and Time, and therefore—strange as it might sound—also as a variety of phenomenological hermeneutics (in a reformalized sense).
30.9.2. The exceptional phenomenon of Life: Michel Henry Michel Henry’s The essence of manifestation (1963) is also presented as a challenge to Heidegger’s ontology. Confronting the presuppositions of the “ontological monism” which “since its origin in Greece (…) ruled the development of Western philosophical thought” (Henry 1963, 91/74), Henry maintains that the latter has always thought of “the essence of manifestation as origin” in terms of transcendence (Henry 1963, 368/296).This entails a very specifc concept of “phenomenon” understood “as something which shows itself within the horizon of light within which all things can become visible” (Henry 1963, 51/40); an horizon, namely Being, which is projected by the Dasein in accordance with its own temporal transcendence. Such account of the phenomenon, however, is “one-sided”. In fact, there is also another phenomenon, whose mode of manifestation is “irreducible to the ‘how’ of the manifestation of transcendent phenomena” and their horizon (Henry 1963, 51/40). An explicit account of this alternative, non-transcendent phenomenon would fnally pave the way for an alternative phenomenology, more fundamental than the phenomenology of the “ontological monism”. This second “how” is the mode of manifestation proper to immanence, also called “revelation” (Henry 1963, 52/40). Henry’s arguments go as follows: if Being in general manifests itself in the transcendence of Dasein—as indicated in Being and Time—how does such transcendence manifest itself? It cannot be as a transcendence itself (Henry 1963, 258/210; 279/226) for otherwise one would fall into a circle. It has to be a mode of manifestation that is more original than transcendence itself. And this brings us back to a more fundamental concept of phenomenon (Henry 1963, 54/42). Now, unlike transcendent phenomena, immanent phenomena do not show themselves intuitively as put-at-a-distance within the horizon of the transcendence of the Dasein. They rather show themselves in the self-revelation of the ego to itself (Henry 1963, 279–280/226–227), without distance, affectively immediately, non-intuitively (Henry 1963, 57/44). And this is precisely the immanent affective self-manifestation of the fundamental phenomenon of life, irreducible to and more original than the transcendent hetero-manifestation of worldly and ontological phenomena, proper to the Western tradition. It is readily apparent that Henry’s account of “phenomenon” is unambiguously opposed to Heidegger’s. Moreover, as Henry puts it, unlike Being in general, which “initially and for the most part” (Henry 1963, 54/42) remains concealed, Life constantly and originally reveals itself (Henry 1963, 54/42–43).The self-manifestation of Life, however, is still a variety of (a suitably reformalized) Heidegger’s “phenomenological phenomenon”. Though Life reveals itself to itself, Henry also adds that “whatever is most simple and most ‘obvious’, we have long known to be also that which is the most ‘diffcult’” (Henry 1963, 55/43). And that which is the simplest, the most obvious and also the most diffcult to “let show itself from itself ”, notwithstanding its constant self-manifestation, is precisely Life.The ego’s everyday life, Henry repeats at length, continually falls into “the temptation of beings” (Henry 1963, 25/20; 483–484/383–384), so that Life conceals itself (Henry 1963, 479/380). And such “fall” is not accidental. Indeed, being the heterogeneous condition of the manifestation of all transcendence— i.e. of the world and of the worldly beings—Life does not manifest itself worldly or in the world (Henry 1963, 480/380). It is therefore “invisible”. 363
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Henry’s Life thus displays all the distinctive features of the “most exceptional phenomenon of all”: (i) though originally and constantly showing itself to itself, because of the tendency of the ego to be absorbed within the transcendence of the world (of Being and entities), Life “initially and for the most part” remains concealed to us; (ii) the original self-appearance of Life is nevertheless the (immanent) foundation of what ordinarily shows itself (transcendently) in the world; (iii) given (i) and (ii), a philosophy of Life cannot but be a phenomenology. Since Life is an immanent phenomenon, both intuition and everyday conceptuality (geared on transcendence) are excluded. Phenomenology’s task is precisely “to bring what it [=Life] spontaneously says of Itself, in the truth of natural language” (Henry 1963, 489/388); to make explicit what Life has always been “saying”, without us being able to “hear” it, because of our commitment to transcendence (Henry 1963, 691/552). In this sense, not unlike Levinas’s “ethics”, Henry’s project defnes an alternative and more fundamental phenomenology than the “ontological” one of Heidegger. Such an alternative is nevertheless a variety of the formal model of “hermeneutical phenomenology” spelled out in Being and Time, suitably deformalized on the basis of a more original variety of “exceptional phenomenon”, i.e. the phenomenon of Life.
30.9.3. The exceptional phenomenon of Givenness: Marion While Levinas and Henry oppose Heidegger’s exceptional “phenomenon” of Being, right from the outset, with the ethical call of the “expression” of the Other and the self-affective “revelation” of Life, J-L. Marion’s Being Given (1997) follows an entirely different strategy. Instead of criticizing Being and Time §7c, Marion positively draws from Heidegger’s distinction between “being-phenomenon” and “being-concealed”.The frst, he says, defnes the mode of “what shows itself from itself as pure self-appearing without rest” (Marion 1997, 303/184), “auto-manifestation” (Marion 1997, 359/219). It names the givenness as the foundation of what is given, or the being-given of the given (Marion 1997, 61/35–36), i.e. the “phenomenon” itself (Marion 1997, 197/119).The second, which Marion calls “appearance”, is only a debased form of phenomenon, occurring within the “objectifying representation” (Marion 1997, 22/13; 83/49; 85/50–51), and according to the “privilege of perception and subjectivity (metaphysics)” (Marion 1997, 13/8). In short, while the “phenomenon” shows itself in itself, the “appearance” is a phenomenon that shows itself for us (Marion 1997, 12/7–8). Marion’s reference to Being and Time, however, includes two distinctive features. (i) On the one hand, it squarely identifes “phenomenon” and “exceptional phenomenon”. Accordingly, only “saturated phenomena”, characterized by the excess of intuition over intention (the event, the idol, the fesh, the icon, the revelation, etc.), are actually “phenomena”; by contrast, “poor” (essences) and “common” (objects of physics and natural sciences, technical objects) phenomena are only “appearances” (Marion 1997, 22/13). (ii) On the other, since its Givenness occurs in “the natural attitude” (Marion 1997, 188– 189/114), “phenomena” are “initially and for the most part” concealed. Accordingly, their manifestation is ordinarily limited within a “narrow (borné) possibility of phenomenality”, i.e. the one of “fnite objectivity” (Marion 1997, 324/196–197). 364
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The natural attitude’s priority, however, is only “temporal”, not “original”. In other words, as Marion puts it, if phenomena are derivatively limited and bound, originally the Givenness of the phenomenon is unlimited and unbound, i.e. the intuition is in excess with respect to the intention. Hence, one has “to reverse the common defnition of the phenomenon” (Marion 1997, 324/197), taking as paradigm not ordinary phenomena (i.e. appearances), but the most extraordinary ones, i.e. the saturated phenomena. Marion’s Givenness fnally appears as a new variety of “phenomenological phenomenon”: (iii) it is “initially and for the most part” concealed by the limitation of phenomenality within the “natural attitude” or the “objectifying representation”; (iv) givenness is the foundation of what ordinarily shows itself as “appearance”; (v) given (iii) and (iv), a philosophy of Givenness cannot but be a phenomenology, “to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself ” in a logos that Marion explicitly qualifes as “hermeneutical” (Marion 1997, 187/112). Marion’s project, however, if compared with the ones spelled out by Levinas or Henry, clearly has an original trait. Having identifed from the outset “phenomenon” and “extraordinary phenomenon”—as we have seen in (i)—Marion does not present Givenness merely as another variety of “phenomenological phenomenon”, next to Levinas’s Other and Henry’s Life. He also endows it with a threefold systematic character. (1) All “poor” and “common” phenomena can be brought together thanks to their common reference to the original concept of Givenness (as the Givenness of a Given that withdraws itself) (Marion 1997, 59–62/34–36); (2) the same holds for “saturated” phenomena, each of which (apart from “revelation”) systematically corresponds to actual varieties of “hermeneutical phenomenologies”: of the event (Ricœur), of the idol (Derrida), of the fesh (Henry), of the icon (Levinas); (3) fnally, Givenness appears to be the ultimate “exceptional phenomenon”, the one that, at the same time, overcomes and makes explicit the general architecture of all previous phenomenological projects (Marion 1997, 521/321–322). As a result, Marion’s account of “phenomenon” somehow turns his phenomenology of Givenness into the ultimate variety of “phenomenological hermeneutics”.
30.10 Two phenomenologies, two phenomena: Sartre and Merleau-Ponty Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) are often presented as parallel projects, having similar goals and comparable scopes. Both providing an original synthesis of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s insights, they oppose phenomenology (based on the notions of intentionality and being-in-the-world) to various forms of naïve realism and psychologizing philosophies inspired by Descartes and Kant.The two projects, however, operate with entirely different concepts of “phenomenon” and, therefore, lead to very different forms of phenomenology. For Sartre,“phenomenon” names the methodical guiding thread to reach the “trans-phenomenal being” of consciousness (the “for-itself ”) and the world (the “in-itself ”). More precisely, (i) thanks to the concept of “phenomenon”, Sartre says, it is fnally possible to overcome all dualisms (inner/outer, being/appearing, act/potency, appearance/essence) and trace them back to one single original distinction, i.e. that of the fnite and the infnite. In fact, qua “phenomenon”, the existent turns out to be nothing but the infnite series of its fnite appearances (Sartre 1943, 11–13/xlv–xlvii); 365
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(ii) on the other hand, if the existent-phenomenon has “its own being” (Sartre 1943, 14/ xlviii), and the actual relation between “phenomenon” and “being” has nothing to do with a Kant-like opposition between “phenomenon” and “thing-in-itself ”, one has to conclude that Being itself can manifest itself as a phenomenon.And, here, the phenomenon of Being plays a crucial role to obtain what is at stake in Being and Nothingness, i.e. the Being of the phenomenon. Given (i) and (ii), Sartre’s arguments go as follows: though Being is “the condition of all unveiling” (dévoilement) (Sartre 1943, 15/xlix), as soon as it appears —and “it somehow manifests itself to all of us, since we can speak about it and have some understanding of it” (Sartre 1943, 14/ xlxiii)—Being is also unveiled (dévoilé). And it refers, in turn, to the Being of the phenomenon, i.e. the ultimate term of the regression that, as unveiling (dévoilant), is no longer phenomenal, but trans-phenomenal (Sartre 1943, 16/l).Thus, Sartre concludes, the phenomenon of the percipi refers to the being for-itself of consciousness that, as “pure appearance” (Sartre 1943, 23/lvi), manifests itself in a pre-refexive, non-positional way; as for the being in-itself, as objective reality, it manifests itself in an entirely different way, through the intentional/transcendent character of consciousness (Sartre 1943, 28/lxi–lxii). Sartre’s ontology is thus wholly “phenomenological”; for the trans-phenomenal Being of the phenomenon—i.e. the ontological distinction “being-in-itself ” and “being-for-itself ”—is entirely drawn from the methodic role of the phenomenon of Being (Sartre 1943, 33/xlvi– xlvii). Merleau-Ponty’s account is quite different. Unlike Sartre, his aim is not to distinguish two beings, but rather to “rediscover (retrouver) phenomena” as such (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 84/57). The concept of “phenomenon” thus loses the methodical function it played in Sartre, and turns into the proper object of phenomenology. Correlatively, phenomenology is needed not for the sake of ontology, but because “phenomena”, i.e. our perceptual living relationship to the world, are structurally concealed. The reason of such “concealment” is twofold: (i) since living un-refected perception has the function of manifesting the world, it does not manifest itself in the course of its functioning (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 84–85/57); (ii) within the “natural” or “dogmatic” attitude (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 64/39), our frst-personal living experience is not only supplemented but also replaced by a refexive (i.e. common sense) and cognitive (i.e. science) third-personal objective description (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 82/55). Consequently, “phenomena” are the terminus ad quem of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological project. Though essentially concealed, they could and should nevertheless be “revived” by a phenomenology which, participating “in the facticity of the un-refected”, has the ambitious task of dealing with “the appearance of being to consciousness, instead of assuming its possibility as given in advance” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 88/61). Thus, while Sartre’s account of “phenomenon” leads to the horizontal correlation between being in-itself and for-itself, Merleau-Ponty’s heads instead towards the vertical distinction between an original and a derivative mode of appearance. Accordingly, despite their outward similarities, Sartre’s phenomenological ontology appears to be closer to Husserl’s, whereas MerleauPonty’s task of reviving phenomena, bringing to self-showing the essentially concealed fundament of what appears in an objectifed manner (i.e. the perception of the world), is manifestly closer to Heidegger’s most “exceptional phenomenon of all”. 366
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References Brentano, Franz. 1874. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. Erster Band. Hamburg: Felix Meiner 1973 (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. London/New York: Routledge). ———. 1888/89. Deskriptive Psychologie. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1982 (2002. Descriptive Psychology. London/New York: Routledge, 2002). Djian, Aurélien. 2018. “L’horizon et le destin de la phénoménologie”. Revue Philosophiques, 45(2): pp. 343–364. Fink, Eugen. 1966. Studien zur Phänomenologie (1930-1939). La Haye: Nijhoff. Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Sein und Zeit.Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006 (Being and Time.A Translation of Sein und Zeit. New York: SUNY Press, 1996). Henry, Michel. 1963. L’essence de la manifestation. Paris: PUF (The Essence of Manifestation. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). Husserl, Edmund.Hua I. Cartesian Mediations.An Introduction to Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer, 1960. ———.. Hua II.The Idea of Phenomenology. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1999. ———.. Hua III-1. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology.The Hague/Boston/Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983. ———.. Hua VI. The Crisis of European Sciences and the Transcendental Phenomenology. An Intro-duction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. ———.. Hua XIX/1. Logical Investigations.Volume I and II. London/New York: Routledge, 1970. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961. Totalité et Infni: Essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1990 (Totality and Infnity.An Essay on Exteriority.The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979). Majolino, Claudio. 2008. “Des signes et des phénomènes. Husserl, l’intrigue des deux psychologies et le sujet transcendantal”. In: Lectures de la Krisis de Husserl. Eds. F. De Gandt and C. Majolino. Paris:Vrin, pp. 161–195. ———. 2012. “Multiplicity, Manifolds and Varieties of Constitution: A Manifesto”. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophie: pp. 155–182. ———. 2015. “Individuum and Region of Being: On the Unifying Principle of Husserl’s ‘Headless’ Ontology”. In: Commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I. Ed.Andrea Staiti. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 33–50. Majolino, Claudio and Djian, Aurélien. 2018. “What Phenomenon for Hermeneutics? Remarks on the Hermeneutical Vocation of Phenomenology”. In: Hermeneutics and Phenomenology: Figures and Themes. Eds. P. Fairfeld and S. Geniusas. London/Oxford/New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 48–64. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1997. Étant donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: PUF, 2013 Being Given. Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 2016 (Phenomenology of Perception. London/New York: Routledge, 1981). Reinach, Adolf. 1914. “Über Phänomenologie”. In: Sämtliche Werke. Textkritische Ausgabe in zwei Bänden. München: Philosophia-Verlag, 1989, pp. 531–550 (“Concerning phenomenology”, http://www.dwillard.org/articles/individual/concerning-phenomenology-trans.-of-adolf-reinachs-ueber-phaenomenologie, pp. 1–32). Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’Être et le Néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard, 2009 (Being and Nothingness:A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. New York: Pocket Books, 1978). Schuhmann, Karl. 1984. Selected Paper on Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1981. The Context of the Phenomenological Movement. Den Haag: Martin Nijhoff.
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31 REDUCTION Andrea Staiti
Husserl introduces publicly the term “phenomenological reduction” around the year 1907 (Hua XXIV, 211) to designate the methodological procedure that is necessary in order to gain access to the feld of phenomenology, i.e., transcendentally purifed consciousness.The demarcation of a proper feld of inquiry for philosophy, distinct from and yet related to the felds of inquiry of the empirical sciences, addresses directly what has been called an identity crisis of philosophy beginning in the mid-nineteenth century in the wake of positivism and reaching well into the early twentieth century. Rather than construing philosophy merely as a second-order discipline that refects on the methods and concepts of the sciences, as the (early) Neo-Kantians would have it, or as an ancillary discipline whose sole task is to organize systematically the deliverances of scientifc research, as the positivists would have it, Husserl presents phenomenology as the breakthrough into a new intellectual space for philosophical questioning, one in which the problems of philosophy can be posed anew and handled in a truly scientifc fashion for the frst time in history. One can legitimately argue that Husserl’s turn toward pure consciousness as the proper ground of philosophy and knowledge more generally is “not original” (Lavigne 2016, 36) in its historical context. Before and parallel to Husserl, key fgures of empirio-criticism such as Richard Avenarius (1888; 1890) and the spearhead of the ‘philosophy of immanence’Wilhelm Schuppe (1878; 1894) advocated for a return to pure experience or immanence as the necessary move to secure a foundation for philosophy and scientifc knowledge.They both construed pure experience as a ‘domain’ free from all metaphysical assumptions that the philosopher must reach or attain in the frst place. Husserl was undoubtedly infuenced by both Avenarius and Schuppe on his path toward the discovery of the phenomenological reduction; however, what is original about Husserl and nowhere to be found among his contemporaries is the explicit refection on the method that needs to be established and deepened in order to secure a genuine ‘standpoint of immanence’ (to echo a phrase by Schuppe), i.e., one that is truly free of metaphysical and naturalistic assumptions. One could therefore argue that the phenomenological reduction and the untiring refection on its possibility and scope mark Husserl’s originality in the context of the various philosophies of ‘pure’ consciousness of his time. Husserl was very well aware of this point; therefore, as Sebastian Luft argues, he often refers to the reduction as a “pars pro toto for his mature philosophy” (Luft 2012, 5). “Phenomenological reduction” is a shorthand term for a two-step operation that includes a moment of suspension of belief, the epoché, and a moment of leading back (reducere) the unities 368
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of meaning found in the feld of transcendentally purifed experience (numbers, ideal logical relations, physical things, living bodies) to the manifolds of consciousness in and through which such unities are constituted, such as, for example, the manifold profles of a physical thing. Precisely in light of this move from transcendent unities of meaning to immanent manifolds of consciousness, Husserl also dubs the phenomenological reduction “transcendental reduction” or, more rarely, epistemological (erkenntnistheoretische) reduction (Hua II, 37; 43), i.e., a leading back of transcendent unities of experience (things, numbers, other subjects, cultural artifacts, institutions, etc.) to the transcendental conditions of possibility of their constitution in the immanence of conscious experience. Such transcendental conditions of possibility are not, as in Kant, a set of a priori principles but rather the factual lived-experiences in and through which transcendent objects manifest themselves to a subject. The cup on my desk is one transcendent unity of meanings (‘cup’, ‘white’, ‘hot’, ‘smooth’, ‘fragile’, and all the properties pertaining to it in their interrelation) that manifests itself in and through an immanent manifold of appearances in my consciousness.This manifold of appearances and the (pure) consciousness in which they inhere are transcendental, i.e., they make the cup as transcendent unity possible in the frst place. If I didn’t have a manifold of appearances fowing in my consciousness, no cup as a transcendent unity would be possible or even conceivable. Therefore, Husserl talks of a constitution of objects in consciousness. Studying the essences of appearances and the laws governing their orderly interrelation, as well as their object-correlates, is the task of phenomenology as a science. The frst occurrence of the term ‘phenomenological reduction’ in Husserl’s published work is in chapter four of the second section of Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (Hua III/1). Here, Husserl speaks of a set of phenomenological reductions that are necessary in order to delineate the proper feld of inquiry of phenomenology. In order to do so, the phenomenologist has to become aware of her immersion in the natural attitude, i.e., the naïve attitude common to both everyday life and science that takes the being of the world for granted (see Staiti 2015). By contrast, phenomenology begins where the naïve positing of being that characterizes the natural attitude is suspended via epoché, and consciousness is thus no longer viewed as an empirical fact woven into the causal-inductive regularities of nature (natural sciences), or as a product of its historical-cultural milieu (positivistic human sciences), but as the feld of manifestation in which the right of our claims about being and non-being of things in the world becomes accessible to phenomenological scrutiny. Instead of presupposing the being of the world, i.e., carrying out intellectual operations on a dimension of being that is always already ‘posited’ as such (Straiti 2016), the phenomenologist suspends being and studies the processes of constitution in consciousness that make it possible for an existing world to be there for us in the frst place.Together with the being of the world, the phenomenologist has to suspend all the sciences that lay claim to various provinces of worldly being, such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (Hua III/1, 122), the formal and material eidetic sciences that lay claim to domains of ideal being, such as the spatial shapes of pure geometry (Hua III/1, 126–128), as well as, at least temporarily, all claims about a transcendent God and a pure or transcendental ego as distinct from the stream of its experiences (Hua III/1, 124–125).The only domain of being that remains ‘unaffected’ by the decision to suspend all naïve positings of being is thus pure consciousness (as a ‘residuum’ of the reduction), whose essences are the proper subject-matter of phenomenology as a new science. In addition to the phenomenological reduction, Husserl speaks occasionally of an eidetic reduction (Hua III/1, 6; Hua IX, 284, 321; Hua XIV, 37, 307; Hua XXV, 123), i.e., the leading back of an individual to its corresponding essence(s), such as, for instance, leading back a perceived triangular shape to the essence ‘triangle’ or an individually occurring act of perception to the essence ‘perception’.The phenomenological and the eidetic reduction are thus individually 369
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necessary and jointly suffcient to defne the method of phenomenology; however, unlike the phenomenological reduction, the eidetic reduction is not a move from transcendent unities to immanent manifolds, but rather a move from factual unities (individuals) to ideal unities (essences), i.e., from the domain of empirical being to the domain of ideal being (see Lavigne 2009, 18–21). While this sense of reduction is consistent with the scholastic notion of reductio and is thus less idiosyncratic, it designates a methodological procedure that only bears a familyresemblance relation to the phenomenological reduction as described above (i.e., the move from a domain of being to another), thus possibly introducing an equivocity in Husserl’s usage of the term (see Lohmar 2002, 755). In order to avoid confusion, it is therefore advisable to speak of ‘reduction’ only with respect to the phenomenological reduction and refer to the intellectual operation that constitutes essences more generically as eidetic method, eidetic procedure, or, more simply and in Husserlian idiom, eidetic intuition. Later in life Husserl continued to work to better understand both scope and philosophical status of the phenomenological reduction.This was at least partly motivated by the cold reception of the phenomenological reduction by Husserl’s contemporaries and students. Philosophers practicing or working in dialogue with empirical psychology thought that Husserl was exaggerating the importance of the phenomenological reduction and the ensuing difference between phenomenology and psychology. For instance, in a critical discussion of Ideen August Messer argues: “I recognize that in light of its characteristic ‘bracketing’ of all positing of reality, phenomenology must be distinguished from psychology […]; however, this distinction has a merely theoretical signifcance; it fades into the background where the praxis of research is concerned” (Messer [1914] 2018, 251). In a similar vein, Henrich Gustav Steinmann accuses Husserl of an “exaggeration that seeks to attribute metaphysical truth to the basic methodological fction at the foundation of phenomenology” (Steinmann [1917] 2018, 281). On Steinmann’s construal, the phenomenological reduction is nothing more than a methodological fction that, as such, proves nothing about the status of consciousness in its relationship to natural reality: “There is only one consciousness and it is either absolute or bound up with the real world” (Steinmann [1917] 2018, 280).The fact that one can methodologically suspend the being of the world and turn to investigate consciousness as ‘pure’ does not mean that consciousness is in fact independent of the being of the world.To counter these objections Husserl has to show that the phenomenological reduction has more than merely ‘theoretical signifcance’, that it must be upheld in order for phenomenology to be possible as a philosophical science, and that, contra Steinmann, it reveals something fundamental about consciousness and is thus unlike a pair of colored glasses that make consciousness appear as if it were independent of the being of the world, while it in fact isn’t. Husserl’s students, such as Roman Ingarden and Edith Stein, found the reduction to be inevitably bound up with a kind of transcendental idealism that they shunned. Accordingly, they set out to articulate something like a ‘realist’ phenomenology without reduction, as early phenomenologist Herbert Spiegelberg presents the view years later (Spiegelberg 1973). Husserl began to think that such cold reception was due to misunderstandings, but also to a certain pedagogical defciency and unclarity in his early presentations of the phenomenological reduction. His ensuing attempts to strengthen and defend the necessity of the phenomenological reduction can be roughly categorized as follows: (1) an account of the possibility of the phenomenological epoché and reduction through a study of the conscious acts through which the reduction is implemented, i.e., a phenomenology of the phenomenological reduction; (2) an effort to connect the discovery of the phenomenological reduction to the history of Western philosophy; (3) a consideration of the pedagogical diffculties connected with the performance of the phenomenological reduction and a motivation of the necessity of its execution; (4) the 370
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endeavor to dispel the charge of solipsism and show that the scope of consciousness revealed by the phenomenological reduction is intersubjective. (1) Husserl focuses his attention on the peculiarities of refection, and on the phenomena of intentional iteration and implication in acts of presentifcation (imagination, recollection, expectation, empathy). It is an essential characteristic of refection to make it possible for the refecting subject to thematize the belief of an act refected upon without necessarily participating in that belief (Hua VIII, 97). The phenomenological epoché draws on this essential feature of refection that enables the phenomenologist to retain the naïve belief in being characterizing the natural attitude but in brackets, as it were, i.e., without participating in that belief. Moreover, the suspension of being required by the epoché can stretch into past, future, and alien experience thanks to the essential features of presentifying intentionality of iterability (I can imagine to recall an expectation of a certain object) and implication (when I experience another experiencing X, the intentionality of my experience can be redirected toward X, thus ‘stretching into’ the intentionality of the other’s act, as it were) (see Hua VIII, 123f.). This means that although it is accomplished in a single act occurring in a defnite moment of the streaming life of consciousness, the suspension of being required by the phenomenological reduction can extend to encompass the totality of this life.Therefore, the phenomenological reduction is not an act that confnes the philosopher to the point-like immediacy of a momentary experience, as one might be inclined to think, but rather opens up a genuine feld of inquiry that encompasses the totality of subjective life. (2) Husserl’s endeavor to connect the phenomenological reduction to key moments in the history of philosophy is documented in the lecture course on a critical history of ideas (HuaVII) and in the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Hua VI).While he never attenuates his understanding of the phenomenological reduction as a genuine breakthrough and as the discovery that fnally put philosophy of the path of becoming a science, Husserl sees important precursors of phenomenology in early modern thinkers such as Descartes and Hume, as well as Kant. Far from being an idiosyncratic method, the reduction is thus presented as the philosophical device that fulflls the “secret nostalgia” (Hua III/1, 118) of all modern philosophy in its struggle to ground objectivity in subjectivity. (3) Husserl progressively recognizes that the introduction of the phenomenological reduction in Ideas was too abrupt (Hua XXIX, 425–426; Hua XXXIV, 122–124; Hua VI, 157), thus potentially misleading beginners into thinking that phenomenology is committed to solipsism and Cartesian foundationalism.While in Ideas Husserl insisted exclusively on the difference between phenomenology and psychology (Hua III/1, 5), he later introduces the notion of a genuine “phenomenological-psychological reduction” (Hua IX, 260) geared toward establishing a purely descriptive eidetic psychology, whose function is propaedeutic vis-à-vis transcendental phenomenology (see Staiti 2012). Phenomenological psychology is then presented as one of the paths toward transcendental phenomenology and it is associated with the work of precursors such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Franz Brentano, as well as with the attitude characterizing the Logical Investigations. It should be noted that for Husserl, however, such phenomenological psychology remains trapped in paradoxes due to its continuing permanence in the natural attitude and if coherently developed it must “by necessity” turn into a genuine transcendental phenomenology (Hua XXXIV, 125–139). It is in this context that Husserl begins to assess strengths and weaknesses of different paths to the reduction, traditionally identifed as the Cartesian, the psychological, and the life-worldly path (see Kern 1962; Drummond 1975; Staiti 2010; Perkins 2017). 371
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(4) As for the charge of solipsism, the locus classicus for Husserl’s attempt to dispel it is the ffth Cartesian meditation. Here Husserl introduces what he calls a “reduction to the sphere of ownnness (Eigenheitssphäre)” (Hua I, 124–129) that is necessary in order to reconstruct the complex intentional structure of our experience of other embodied subjects.While Husserl never gives up the methodological preeminence of the frst-personal perspective, i.e., the necessity to start from one’s own experience, and proceeds from there to thematize other subjects (in this respect Hua talks about “solipsism in a good sense” in Hua VIII, 65), he intends to prove that this methodological preeminence does not trap the phenomenologist in a kind of intra-mental space that blocks all access to others. By contrast, properly understood, the phenomenological reduction is from the very outset an intersubjective reduction, i.e., one that discloses pure consciousness as an intersubjective community of subjects. The reduction to the sphere of ownness or primordial reduction staged in the Cartesian Meditations has the purpose of making visible the appearance of other subjects within the narrow sphere of one’s own sensory experience. Husserl describes the reduction to the sphere of ownness as a “limitation of the describing and analyzing gaze to the dimension of a thing (and of whatever else is ‘valid’ as world) that is really perceived” (Hua XV, 129). Focusing exclusively on the fux of present sensibility, the primordial reduction creates the conditions to see how, as soon as something in one’s sensory feld is apprehended as a living body, a transfer of sense on the basis of analogy takes place (analogisierende Auffassung: Hua I, 140), through which the living body is experienced as governed by another subject who henceforth counts as on par with myself.The reciprocity (I see myself as seen by the other) and iterability (I see the other as seeing others) of this experience, which Husserl dubs ‘empathy’, sets the basis for the constitution of an open community of reciprocally connected subjects, whose acts of consciousness jointly constitute the world as valid ‘for anybody’, i.e., as the correlate of a transcendental intersubjectivity, rather than a solus ipse. In the 1930s Husserl’s research on the phenomenological reduction assumes at times ‘existential’ tones, stressing how the performance of the reduction inaugurates a new life for the phenomenologist, i.e., the access to a “dimension of depth” (Hua VI, 121) that is necessarily concealed to those living in the natural attitude.The awareness of one’s “transcendentality” (Hua XXXIV, 244) amounts to a transformative experience (Hua XXXIX, 215), one that Husserl often compares to an “awakening” (Hua XV, 389–390).The transcendentally awakened human being is aware of its “ontological dignity” (Hua XIV, 257) vis-à-vis the rest of nature and has thus defnitively overcome the debasing picture of human life delivered by naturalism.Thus, as Edith Stein argues in one of her manuscripts, without being itself a Weltanschauung, via the phenomenological reduction Husserl’s phenomenology also assumes a ‘weltanschaulich’ meaning or signifcance: Without pursuing this goal, Husserl de facto arrived with his method to a coherent picture of the world. He acknowledges an absolute being, to which everything else refers back, and on the basis of which everything else has to be understood: a plurality of human beings, that is, of subjects, each of which builds up her own world in her acts, but who also stand in a relation of mutual understanding and, in the exchange of their experiences, build up an intersubjective world. Everything else that exists beyond these monads is constituted through their acts and is relative to them. (Stein 1962, 12) By conclusion, let us turn to post-Husserlian phenomenology for a brief assessment of the history of the phenomenological reduction after Husserl.As anticipated above, the frst generation 372
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of phenomenologists, including fgures as prominent as Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, Edith Stein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, expressed skepticism about the possibility and even the desirability of a reduction as envisioned by Husserl. One could get the impression that, after Husserl, phenomenologists simply jettisoned the reduction. Alternatively, as Jacques Taminiaux has argued (2004), one can speak of a series of metamorphoses or shifts of the phenomenological reduction that occurred in the phenomenological movement after Husserl. Heidegger, for instance, while never mentioning the word ‘reduction’ in Being and Time, writes in his lecture course on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology in 1927: We call this basic component of phenomenological method—the leading back or reduction of investigative vision from a naively apprehended being to being—phenomenological reduction.We are thus adopting a central term of Husserl’s phenomenology in its literal wording through not in its substantive intent. […] For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed). Like every other scientifc method, phenomenological method grows and changes due to the progress made precisely with its help into the subjects under investigation. (Heidegger 1982, 21) The ‘phenomenological reduction’ thus comes to designate the move that inaugurates the problem of fundamental ontology as defned in Heidegger’s Being and Time. It no longer designates a move from transcendent unities to immanent (transcendental) multiplicities but the fundamental-ontological move from beings to being as such. In a similar way, Max Scheler, in his 1928 groundbreaking work Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Scheler 2008), uses the phrase ‘phenomenological reduction’ to designate the uniquely human capacity to suspend reality and free oneself from the pressure of vital needs, thereby gaining access to the dimension of Geist, i.e., the ideal domain of the essences of things (Scheler 2008, 35–38).Thus, in Scheler, Husserl’s sharp distinction between the phenomenological and the eidetic reduction becomes blurred. The phenomenological reduction is eo ipso eidetic, in that suspending the reality of things amounts to unveiling a new dimension that is no longer factual, but rather spiritual or ideal. Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously wrote in the preface to his masterpiece Phenomenology of Perception: “The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, xv). Rather than seeking in intentional consciousness the ultimate source of constitution in Merleau-Ponty’s hands, phenomenology ought to unearth unthought-of dimensions of constitution (history, language, the fesh, the Other) that exceed the scope of refectively accessed consciousness and through which consciousness itself is constituted.This conception of phenomenology’s task remained strong in the French philosophical landscape, and continued in the work of fgures such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry and, more recently, Renaud Barbaras. Despite the glaring differences, one could argue that post-Husserlian phenomenologists did retain the fundamental impulse driving the phenomenological reduction in Husserl, i.e., the quest for an original ground of meaning that remains invisible to both common sense and empirical science. Finally, let us remark that in the recent present Husserl’s notion of the phenomenological reduction has re-gained philosophical visibility and reputation through the work of phenom373
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enologists such as Jean-Luc Marion and Dan Zahavi. Marion (1998) connects the notion of reduction to the notion of givenness and argues that, far from entrapping thought in the selfcontained immanence of consciousness, the reduction is the philosophical device that enables us to see phenomena as given, thus making givenness as such available to philosophical scrutiny. In a very different spirit, Dan Zahavi has argued that the phenomenological reduction has the merit to fnally overcome the problematic metaphysical neutrality characterizing the Logical Investigations (Zahavi 2002), thus opening phenomenology to an investigation of the world itself (Zahavi 2009, 88–89) and providing a helpful tool to challenge the naïve realism that undergirds much contemporary philosophy and science (Zahavi 2016).
References Avenarius, Richard. 1888. Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. Erster Band. Leipzig: Reisland. ———. 1890. Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. Zweiter Band. Leipzig: Reisland. Drummond, John. 1975.“Husserl on the Ways to the Performance of the Reduction”. Man and World: pp. 47–69. Heidegger, Martin. 1982. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kern, Iso. 1962. “Die drei Wege in die transzendentalphänomenologische Reduktion in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls”. Tijdschrift voor flosofe: pp. 303–349. Lavigne,Jean-François 2009. Accéder au transcendental? Réduction et Idéalisme transcendantal dans les Idées I de Husserl. Paris:Vrin. ———. 2016. “Introduction: Husserl et la ‘philosophie immanente’, contribution à la préhistoire de la réduction phénoménologique”. In: Monde, structures et objets de pensée. Recherches de phénoménologie en hommage à Jacques English. Eds. Jean-François Lavigne and Dominique Pradelle. Paris: Hermann, pp. 9–37. Lohmar Dieter. 2002. “Die Idee der Reduktion. Husserls Reduktionen und ihr gemeinsamer, methodischer Sinn”. In: Die erscheinende Welt. Festschrift für Klaus Held. Eds. Heinrich Hüni and Peter Trawny. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 751–771. Luft, Sebastian. 2012. “Von der mannigfaltigen Bedeutung der Reduktion bei Husserl. Refexionen zur Grundbedeutung des zentralen Begriffs der transzendentalen Phänomenologie”. Phänomenologische Forschungen 2012/1: pp. 5–29. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1998. Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. London/New York: Routledge. Messer, August. 2018. “Husserl’s Phenomenology in its Relation to Psychology. Second Essay. (1914)”. In: The Sources of Husserl’s Ideas. Eds. Andrea Staiti and Evan Clarke. Berlin/New York: DeGruyter, pp. 239–254. Perkins, Patricio. 2017.“A Critical Taxonomy of the Theories About the Paths into the Reduction”. Husserl Studies 33/2: pp. 127–148. Scheler, Max. 2008. The Human Place in the Cosmos. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schuppe, Wilhelm. 1878. Erkenntnistheoretische Logik. Bonn: Weber. ———. 1894. Grundriss der Erkenntnistheorie und Logik. Berlin: Gaertners. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1973.“Is the Reduction Necessary for Phenomenology?” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 4/1: pp. 3–15. Staiti,Andrea. 2010.“Cartesianischer Weg/Psychologischer Weg/Lebensweltlicher Weg”. In: H.-H. Gander (ed.), Husserl-Lexikon. Darmstadt:WBG, pp. 50–55. ———. 2012. “The Pedagogic Impulse of Husserl’s Ways into Transcendental Phenomenology. An Alternative Reading of the Erste Philosophie Lecture”. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 33/1: pp. 39–56. ———. 2015. “The Melody Unheard. Husserl on the Natural Attitude and its Discontinuation”. In: Commentary on Husserl’s Ideas. Ed.Andrea Staiti. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 69–93. ———. 2016. “Positionality and Consciousness in Husserl’s Ideas I”. Research in Phenomenology 46/2: pp. 277–295. Stein, Edith. 1962.“Die weltanschauliche Bedeutung der Phänomenologie (1932)”. In: Gelber, L./Leuven, R. (eds.), Werke, Band 6:Welt und Person. Louvain: Nauwelaerts, pp. 1–17.
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Reduction Steinmann, Heinrich Gustav. 2018. “On the Systematic Position of Phenomenology (1917)”. In: The Sources of Husserl’s Ideas. Eds.Andrea Staiti and Evan Clarke. Berlin/New York: DeGruyter, pp. 267–298. Taminiaux, Jacques. 2004. The Metamorphoses of the Phenomenological Reduction. Milwaukee,WI: Marquette University Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2002.“Metaphysical Neutrality in Logical Investigations”. In: One HundredYears of Phenomenology. Eds. Dan Zahavi and Frederik Stjernfelt. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 93–108. ———. 2009. “Husserl and the Absolute”. In: Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences. Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl. Eds. Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, and Filip Mattens. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 71–92. ———. 2016. “The End of What? Phenomenology vs Speculative Realism”. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24/3: pp. 289–309.
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32 SYNTHESIS Jacob Rump
In phenomenology, “synthesis” refers to the intentional process through which the content of experience is combined by and thereby constituted for consciousness, a process that involves contributions from both the subject and the world. In examining the various syntheses through which the content of experience becomes present to us, we are uncovering the origins of the senses or meanings that make up the world of our lived experience—senses or meanings understood phenomenologically not as simply “found” in the world but as synthetic accomplishments that involve a contribution of subjectivity in some respect (e.g., consciousness or the ego in Husserl; Dasein in Heidegger; the lived body in Merleau-Ponty). In claiming that the content of consciousness is “made” and not simply “found” in the world, the classical phenomenologists reject both naïve-realist conceptions, according to which the world is already there as meaningful, independent of the imposition of schemas by the subject, and naturalistic views that may recognize the schematizing role of subjectivity in some respect but ultimately locate that subjectivity in a prior order of natural, causal-empirical reality. The notion of synthesis is central for the transcendental claim (fully endorsed by Husserl and recognized in a more or less modifed way by most later phenomenologists) that meaning as an accomplishment of subjectivity is a condition of the possibility of all experience, even the experience of nature, and thus that the objectivity of the world and its status as an object of knowledge can only be gained by going through an analysis of the structures of subjectivity and meaning. Insofar as, outside naturalistic presuppositions, the synthetic, meaning-bestowing function of consciousness cannot be presupposed to be empirically “located” in the head or brain, the notion of synthesis also leads the phenomenologist to recognize the role of the lived body as a whole as a “site” of the synthesis through which the meaningful world is constituted.
32.1. Historical precursors Two different but related conceptions of synthesis in the history of Western philosophy are of major relevance for phenomenological usage of the term: those of Aristotle and Kant.1 Aristotle uses the term “synthesis” to describe the logical process of combining while also preserving discrete elements under a common notion “which cannot be thought of without the components.”2 In this sense,“synthesis” is roughly the opposite of the process of analysis (diairesis). As 376
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the term appears in phenomenological thinkers, whereas analysis involves drilling down to the most basic structures through which we experience the world, synthesis describes the multilayered building up of those structures; the individual steps involved in the process of constituting our world of experience. There are important relationships to Husserl’s conception of genetic phenomenology here, and (as noted below), this Aristotelian source for the notion is especially important for Heidegger. Perhaps the most direct precursor to the phenomenological conception of synthesis, however, is Kant. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant saw synthesis, the action of “putting different representations together with each other and comprehending their manifoldness in one cognition,”3 as central to the determination of the origin of cognition.4 In the transcendental deduction of the categories, Kant argues that the sensible intuition of objects necessarily requires both the transcendental unity of apperception (that the “I think must be capable of accompanying all of my representations”5) and the categories: pure concepts of the understanding which Kant derives from a classifcation of the forms of judgment (a classifcation that can itself be traced to Aristotle). In this sense, the Kantian conception of synthesis is linked to an account of judgment by means of the concept. This intellectual conception of synthesis and the associated notion of conceptual judgment will become central to Husserl’s account of active synthesis in the guises of categorial intuition and predicative judgment. But equally important for phenomenology is Kant’s notion in the frst Critique of the productive synthesis of the imagination or fgurative synthesis, especially as it appears in the frst (A) edition of the transcendental deduction.6 Whereas intellectual synthesis takes place by means of concepts, the fgurative synthesis is attributed by Kant to the productive function of the imagination and results in a corresponding intuition.7 In the A-deduction, the imagination is framed as a separate type of synthesis, distinct from both sensibility and intuition.8 In the phenomenological tradition, this A-deduction notion is of special importance because it is taken to suggest a domain of conscious experience consisting neither of mere passively given sense-data (sensibility), nor of full-blown conceptual syntheses and predicative judgments, but a domain that that is nonetheless still synthetic (insofar as it is still constituted in our experience and thus involves a contribution from the side of the subject). In this version of the deduction, Kant places greater importance on the role of subjectivity in synthesis (though he would reject a psychological-empirical conception of that subject as much as a purely formal one) and emphasizes the contribution of sensible intuition to synthesis independently of the work of the categories.9 For Heidegger, the role of synthesis in the A-deduction will also be interpreted as the key to the phenomenological account of temporality (temporal synthesis).
32.2. Husserl Since Husserl’s notion of synthesis is a highly developed part of his system and sets the stage for later uses of the term in phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the majority of this entry will be devoted to his employments of the term. Husserl uses the vocabulary of “synthesis” and “synthetic acts” and distinguishes his own conception from that of Kant as early as the Philosophy of Arithmetic,10 and the notion is developed and expanded as a technical term in his phenomenology throughout his career. The phenomenological inquiry into conscious experience reveals two sides or poles of intentionality, which Husserl will call (as of the Ideas) the noetic and the noematic, and which belong inseparably together in a structure of correlation. Synthesis refers to the process of consciousness itself bringing together the two sides of this correlation, the “unity of a consciousness combining consciousness with consciousness.”11 377
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Synthesis, intentional fulfllment, and knowledge In the sixth Logical Investigation, the basic functioning of intentionality is characterized in terms of intention and fulfllment, and this is said to be synthetic insofar as it consists in bringing together an act of consciousness and an act of intuition. The intention-fulfllment structure results in either a synthesis of identifcation (in the case of intentional fulfllment—when the object intended emptily coincides with the object given with fullness in intuition12) or in a synthesis of distinction (in the case of intentional frustration—when the intention does not encounter such coincidence13). On this basis, knowledge is described in terms of the synthesis of recognition (Erkennen), which Husserl defnes as the unity of a thought (meaning-intention) and an intuition in a synthesis of identifcation—my fnding the world as I think it to be. This is a static unity that overlays a consciousness of fulfllment as the original, dynamic experience of coincidence.14 In the synthesis of recognition, I not only experience the fulfllment of an intuition but thereby experience it (and through it the object) as “fxed,” with the “character of being valid henceforth.”15 This account of the synthetic structure of intentionality allows Husserl to account for direct perceptual knowledge of “the things themselves”16 while also explaining the epistemic role played by more complex structures of meaning and predicative thought. In this sense it also sets the stage for his more complex account of categorial knowledge. Since the basic idea of an operation of synthesis was so central to Husserl’s conception of consciousness, intentionality, and knowledge, and thus the phenomenological project generally, he used the term in sometimes overlapping ways to identify a wide variety of processes and phenomena, identifed several different but closely related distinctions between different types of syntheses, and revisited the conception at multiple points in his career. My further explication of Husserl’s conception of synthesis will proceed by surveying some of these major distinctions and their implications, roughly following the chronological order of discussions of them in major texts.
Discrete vs. continuous synthesis Many commentators attribute a major shift in Husserl’s conception of synthesis to the period surrounding the publication of Ideas I, generally for reasons having to do with the recognition of the importance of passive synthetic structures for what would come to be known as genetic phenomenology.17 In Ideas I, Husserl distinguishes between Discrete and Continuous Syntheses. Discrete syntheses are active and articulated, and discrete acts become unifed in higher-order unities, which Husserl then refers to as “structured” or “polythetic” syntheses.18 Looking forward to something on behalf of another person, for example, is a structured, polythetic act of a higher order encompassing the ordered, lower-level discrete acts directed to 1) the thing looked forward to, and 2) the other on whose behalf I am looking forward. Ideas I also discusses “another and in a certain sense universal group of syntheses” that fall within the category of discrete syntheses, which Husserl relates to the “pure forms of synthetic objectivities”: collective synthesis, disjunctive synthesis, explicative synthesis, and relational synthesis. These discrete syntheses align with Husserl’s notion of categorial synthesis (see below), and through this are used to give an explanation of fundamental distinctions in logic and thus basic categories of objectivity.19 In continuous synthesis, by contrast, there are no acts of a higher order: “the unity belongs to the same level of order as what is united.” Husserl’s primary example of this type of synthesis is the everyday object, which is perceived as unitary despite its adumbrated appearance across 378
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space and time. Husserl also categorizes the constitution of phenomenological time, which is neither active nor discrete, as a form (indeed the most basic form) of continuous synthesis.
Aesthetic vs. categorial synthesis In Ideas II, Husserl distinguishes between Aesthetic (or sensuous) and Categorial Synthesis. Through aesthetic synthesis, the object is presented (noematically) “as something which is suchand-such, even if no concepts, no judgments in the predicative sense, are mediating.”20 Through a series of continuous syntheses, the object is presented as, e.g., having profles, sides, or other “partial meanings” that refer to previous partial meanings maintained via “secondary passivity.”21 Such secondary passivities are ultimately “determinative of sense” for the sensuous object, in that they “motivate” (in Husserl’s technical sense of the term22) the further course of perception in the ongoing process of aesthetic synthesis and thereby help to determine the future intentional horizons of the object. Husserl also includes, under the rubric of aesthetic synthesis, synthetic background conditions or “correlative ‘perceptual circumstances’,”23 including, on the noetic side, the embodied kinaesthetic functions of the subject that help to co-determine an object’s sense. Husserl insists that these latter aspects of the aesthetic synthesis are ignored in the natural attitude, which focuses only on the object of the perception and not the synthetic act as a correlative noetic– noematic structure through which the object is constituted in and by consciousness. These background syntheses involve a “plurality of theses” determinative of a variety of possible but not always compossible future meanings.Thus they are not united in a separate, categorial synthesis, but rather by means of a continuous synthesis that guarantees the endurance of the object of perception over time (hence the name “aesthetic” or “sensuous” synthesis, where aesthetic is used in the sense of the transcendental aesthetic in Kant’s frst Critique). Categorial synthesis, by contrast, is discrete, active, and spontaneous. In the most technical sense, “categorial synthesis” refers to the third and fnal step in the process of categorial intuition.24 A categorial synthesis is typically25 accomplished in a higher-order act that takes as its object the “synthesis of coincidence” or “covering synthesis” in which the perceptual object frst appears with a certain categorial property or “as-structure.” In a categorial synthesis I see, e.g., not simply a blue door, but that the door is blue.26 This form of synthesis is especially important for the phenomenological account of the way in which, via certain acts of judgment, new meanings or senses may arise as “givens” in lived experience in a manner at once founded in but not reducible to prior senses resulting from prior syntheses at the perceptual level.This helps to explain the way in which meanings arise in perceptual experience but transcend or exceed their presentation in that experience.This is a central insight for classical phenomenology’s transcendental stance (as discussed in the introduction to this entry), and distinguishes it from an empirical or naturalistic position according to which all content of experience is derived directly via sensibility.27 Categorial syntheses result in collectives, disjunctives, and states of affairs,28 and fall under the rubric of discrete syntheses as discussed above. Husserl claims that “aesthetic synthesis … in the higher strata of the constitution of a thing” is “the only one Kant has in mind when he speaks of synthesis.”29 In Husserl’s view, Kant cannot properly account for categorial synthesis, since for him the categorial function is attributed exclusively to the faculty of the understanding, whose forms are derived from the forms of judgment at a higher level. For Husserl, by contrast, categorial synthesis provides the frst step in an account of the categories and fundamental forms of judgment through which experience becomes meaningful. In this sense, Husserl’s account of synthesis can be seen as an attempt at a deeper elaboration not only of the Kantian conception of a transcendental logic (a term which 379
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Husserl adopts for his own theory), but also of the Aristotelian notion of synthesis as the combinatory function of judgment. In Husserl’s view, Kant misses the “lower strata” of aesthetic synthesis because his account of the origination of meaningful experience in space and time as the a priori forms of intuition is explanatory only at the level of an empirical science concerned with physical objects: [H]is question is only this:What kinds of syntheses must be carried out subjectively in order for the things of nature to be able to appear, and thus a nature in general. But lying deeper and essentially preceding this is the problem of the inner, the purely immanent objectlike formation and the constitution, as it were, of the inner-world, that is, precisely the constitution of the subject’s stream of lived-experience as being for itself, as the feld of all being proper to it as its very own. […] [T]he constitutive problems of the world presuppose the doctrine of the necessary, most general structures and the synthetic shapes of immanence that are possible in general. Hence, we are to seek here in immanence what are in principle the most general syntheses, especially, as we said, the syntheses concerning content that extend beyond the transcendental synthesis of time, and which as such, according to their general character, are discernible as transcendentally necessary.30 In addition to reconceiving Kant’s notion of a transcendental logic, then, Husserl also seeks to extend the Kantian account of the “transcendental aesthetic” to this “lower strata” of synthesis, which includes the purely formal temporal synthesis but also the synthetic constitution of passively pregiven content. This expansion of the transcendental aesthetic is accomplished via Husserl’s account of passive synthesis.
Active vs. passive synthesis The most important distinction within the Husserlian conception of synthesis is that between active and passive forms. Husserl’s engagement with the notion of synthesis in his early work is primarily concerned with active synthesis (though there are traces of the notion of passive synthesis as early as the Logical Investigations).31 Husserl defnes active syntheses as active accomplishments of the ego, through which the formations of the genuine logos come about, [which] operate in the medium of an attentive turning toward and its derivatives. Turning our attention toward is, as it were, the bridge to activity, or the bridge is the beginning or mis en scene of activity, and is the constant way in which consciousness is carried out for activity to progress.”32 The hallmark of active synthesis is thematic grasping. This is an activity of consciousness in which intentionality is self-consciously aware of its synthetic activity, and which results in an explicit, thematic object toward which intentionality is actively directed. It is the means by which the ego actively “forms its world.”33 Active syntheses include categorial syntheses and the explicit predicative judgments they allow for, as well as the thematic grasping of a perceptual object, as when, e.g., I focus my attention on the bird outside my window (as distinguished from the merely passively pregiven, non-thematic background or horizon in which the bird appears, including the bird itself when it is merely a part of this horizon and not yet the object of an active, thematic intentional act). Over the course of his career, however, Husserl became increasingly interested in aspects of synthesis that he saw as extending below the active functions of consciousness to more basic 380
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non-thematic perceptual structures that he understood as pre-predicative,34 and that he at times even considered to be forms of the “unconscious.”35 While Husserl’s analyses often begin from the active modes of synthesis and then move to the passive, because the active ones are taken to be “exemplary,”36 by the period of his later writings he was convinced that the ultimate origin of active syntheses must be sought in the pre-predicative, passive sphere. Without this level of inquiry, the theory of judgment simply “hangs in the air,”37 since it has not been adequately grounded in descriptions of experience at the level of our original simple perceptual interests in the course of ongoing experience: If one goes back from theory that is dead, so to speak, and has thus become objective, to the living, streaming life in which it arises in an evident manner, and if one refectively investigates the intentionality of this evident judging, deducing, etc., one will immediately be led to the fact that what stands before us as the accomplishment of thought and was able to show itself linguistically rests upon deeper accomplishments of consciousness.38 Insofar as passive synthesis is conceived as a structure arising from the ongoing patterns of our pre-theoretical, everyday lives, there is clear overlap with the aesthetic and continuous forms of synthesis identifed in the distinctions discussed above. The distinction between active and passive synthesis also provides a useful way of understanding Husserl’s much-discussed shift from static to genetic phenomenology: if static phenomenology allows us to explain the workings of structures analogous to Kant’s “bringing of intuitions under concepts” (intuitive contents that we can always actively convert to a nominalization or predicative judgment, but which are not thereby themselves in essence linguistic or apophantic), then genetic phenomenology seeks to uncover both the origins of those concepts, and the content of intuitions that must already be in place pre-predicatively in order for active syntheses in the form of predicative judgments to occur.The Kantian account of judgment, rooted ultimately in a theory of the categories derived from basic forms of judgment, does not adequately ground the logical categories in the pre-predicative sphere.39 As Husserl puts it,“passivity is what is in itself frst because all activity essentially presupposes a foundation of passivity as well as an objectlike formation that is already pre-constituted in it.”40 This is also called “pre-fguring,” and Husserl admits that, in a sense, a purely passively synthesized object with absolutely no active accomplishments is actually an abstraction or limit-concept, though “a necessary one.”41
Distinctions within passive synthesis In line with his insistence on the necessity of this deeper level of inquiry, in his later work, Husserl identifes a number of different structures and levels within passive synthesis. Perhaps the most obvious function of passive synthesis in providing the preconditions for meaningful perceptual experience is the “synthesis of identifcation.” In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl calls this the fundamental form of synthesis. It is responsible for our experience of an appearing object as unitary, identical, and continuous in time, despite changes in its appearance or position. The frst synthesis within identifcation—and ipso facto, “in the constitution of all objectivity given to consciousness”42—is correspondingly the most basic presupposition of the continuity of time as such, the “continuous synthesis of internal time.”43 While it is given new emphasis in the context of Husserl’s later focus on passive-synthetic structures, this function of synthesis is discussed by Husserl as early as 1905.44 While it might be thought that the givenness of time itself must be somehow prior to consciousness, in line with his 381
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broadly Kantian transcendental idealism Husserl insists that it is still to be considered a (passive) synthetic accomplishment, taking place within the two-sided or correlative structure of intentionality,45 “a unity of a consciousness combining consciousness with consciousness.”46 But passive synthesis encompasses much more than temporal synthesis.As he further developed his account of genetic phenomenology, Husserl came to realize that a purely formal account of passivity in terms of time consciousness, while necessary, would not be suffcient to explain the constitution of specifc, differentiated experiential content.While the further syntheses Husserl seeks to uncover are not limited to the Kantian syntheses responsible for the constitution of physical objects or the objects of explicit judgments, they are nonetheless a form of synthesis resulting in a content. Husserl is concerned not only with the content apprehended in natural scientifc inquiry but with the wider project of grounding meaning and knowledge as such, with an eye to the structures of their genesis, and thus his radical rethinking of the character of the feld of intuition or expansion of the transcendental aesthetic from the conditions for empirical objects to the broader domain of intentionality itself—ultimately, down to the level of the “sense-form of time and senseshape of space”47 that lie at the basis of the constitution of the whole of our lifeworld.48 Within passive synthesis, then, are found not only temporal syntheses, but also, at the level of passive-synthetic content, associative syntheses, and affective syntheses (including kinaestheses). Associative synthesis is the manner in which, prior to thematic conscious awareness, the most basic data of the perceptual feld are combined into intentional unities on the basis of essential associative laws.49 In this sense, there is a precursor to the Husserlian account of associative synthesis in the associationist psychology of early modern empiricists such as Hume.50 Unlike early modern accounts of association, however, Husserl’s is conceived as explicitly transcendental rather than empirical, since empirical psychological approaches to association ultimately explain it as “a course of events similar to natural ones, [only] occurring in the quasi-space of consciousness,”51 amounting to, in Husserl’s view, “naturalistic distortions of the corresponding genuine, intentional concepts.”52 Husserl’s account of associative synthesis instead looks to the conditions of possibility immanent to the feld of conscious experience in order to describe relations of meaning bound by essential laws. It describes associations as given to consciousness in the form of synthetic unities of meaning or sense. For example, in the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl discusses the phenomenon of “pairing” or forming a plurality as a “primal form of that passive synthesis we designate as ‘association’” in which two data are given intuitionally, and with prominence, in the unity of a consciousness and that, on this basis—essentially, already in pure passivity (regardless therefore of whether they are noticed or unnoticed)—as data appearing with mutual distinctness, they found phenomenologically a unity of similarity.53 The account of the associative synthesis of pairing is important not only for the genetic description of the constitution of everyday objects for individuals, but also for the role it plays in Husserl’s account of our experience of and co-constitution with others (“monadal intersubjectivity”) in the ffth Cartesian Meditation.54 To mark this difference, Husserl distinguishes between passive synthesis occurring on the basis of my individual lived experiences alone (primary passivity) and passive synthesis occurring on the basis of intersubjective, linguistic, and historical structures (secondary passivity).55 This notion becomes especially important in Husserl’s later work for further explorations of synthesis, as not only an intersubjective, but also an historical phenomenon involving the “sedimentation” of meaning. Husserl insists that it is the operation of synthesis at both primary and secondary levels, and not merely for me as an isolated subject, that ultimately allows for the constitution of shared horizons that make up the lifeworld.56 382
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Associative synthesis is closely tied to another form of passive synthesis: affective synthesis. Husserl insists that the inquiry into passive synthetic structures must ask not only how intentional objects come to prominence via acts of associative synthesis understood in isolation, but also how they are frst able to do so within the context of a multiplicity of polythetic acts—for in lived experience, what is frst for us is typically not solitary objects but multiplicities: structured “felds of sense.”57 Even the sensuous data taken up in perception is “already the product of constitutive syntheses” in this sense.58 Husserl introduces the notion of affective synthesis as that function of consciousness that allows for gradations of interest or “allure” by means of which certain aspects of sense felds come to prominence while others remain in the background. Affection is thus a structure of passive synthesis that operates via what we might call an “indirect” or “orientational” relationship to passive synthetic content.The notion of affective synthesis allows Husserl to capture the fact that, in the context of passivity, not only is there content (the existence of which is explained by associative syntheses); a subset of that content comes to matter for me as an embodied consciousness confronted with an otherwise unmanageably vast horizon of possible intentional data. Indeed, Husserl argues, affective synthesis is necessary in order for a world of objects to be constituted in subjectivity at all.Without its function of “allure” vis-à-vis consciousness, there would be no objects for consciousness and ipso facto, no content.59 Perhaps the clearest examples of affective syntheses are those arising from the movements of my own body (a form of synthesis already introduced above under the rubric of aesthetic synthesis). Insofar as my lived body is the medium through which the world is constituted for me, the movements (real and possible) and capacities of that lived body determine the way in which the world shows up for me, and thus what comes to prominence for consciousness.This embodied conception of synthesis has become especially important in recent work engaging debates in enactivist conceptions of the philosophy of mind.60 It is also central for the development of the notion of a “synthesis of my own body” in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, itself a frequent reference for such contemporary work. While the very notion of passive synthesis might be seen as paradoxical from a Kantian perspective, Husserl argues that a precursor to his notion of passive synthesis can be found in Kant’s notion of productive synthesis in the A edition of the frst Critique as discussed above, but that Kant was “not in the position to recognize the essence of passive production as intentional constitution.”61 In more contemporary terms, passive syntheses might be understood as the domain of the “precognitive” functions of consciousness, including embodied kinaesthetic or “sensorimotor” aspects of consciousness and knowledge.62
The synthesis of the lifeworld The Husserlian account of synthesis is wide-ranging and complex, and was a subject of constant rethinking and development throughout his career. It maintains throughout, however, the same central idea concerning the combinatory power of embodied consciousness as the mode through which the world as an objective, meaningful whole is constituted for the subject.The overall importance of synthesis for Husserlian phenomenology is perhaps best expressed in Husserl’s claim, in his last great work, the Crisis, that All the levels and strata through which the syntheses, intentionally overlapping as they are from subject to subject, are interwoven form a universal unity of synthesis; through it the objective universe comes to be … through this constitution, if we systematically uncover it, the world as it is for us becomes understandable as a structure of meaning formed out of elementary intentionalities.63 383
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In this sense, the ultimate and greatest form of synthesis for Husserl is the constant, intersubjective, embodied synthesis resulting in the continuous constitution of the lifeworld.
32.3. Synthesis in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty While the usage of the notion of synthesis among the classical phenomenologists is most prominent in Husserl, it also appears as an important term in several later phenomenologists. I thus conclude this entry with a very brief look at synthesis in the work of Heidegger and MerleauPonty, each of whom took up the Husserlian account of synthesis in its basic contours but modifed and radicalized it in important ways
Heidegger Although he largely adopts Husserl’s account of synthesis as presented in the Logical Investigations and Ideas I, for Heidegger, the notion of synthesis draws directly upon Aristotle as well as Kant. Using the distinction between synthesis and diairesis, Heidegger distinguishes between Aristotle’s approach—which, he insists, is already phenomenological—and a “superfcial theory of judgment” limited to concepts and propositions.64 Heidegger is interested in what he calls the “existential-hermeneutical ‘as’,” the sort of understanding that arises from our everyday lived experience in which we always already fnd ourselves, in the frst instance independently of the explicit propositional and conceptual structures introduced via assertion and judgment (the apophantical “as”).65 Heidegger’s conception of the hermeneutic “as” is, in essence, an appropriation and careful re-working of the Husserlian account of categorial synthesis (and the process of categorial intuition generally) within an existential-hermeneutic framework.66 According to Heidegger’s hermeneutic approach to synthesis, despite a conception of the priority of experiential over conceptual understanding similar to Husserl’s, the character of the “pregiven” cannot be straightforwardly ascribed to intuition or perception. Heidegger re-casts Husserl’s epistemological conception of synthesis in terms of ontology, and treats it as an act of interpretation, via the Aristotelian conception of synthesis as part of the hermeneutic understanding of “letting something be seen in its togetherness [Beisammen] with something—letting it be seen as something.”67 Thus, unlike Husserl, for Heidegger even the most basic forms of synthesis will be understood as acts of interpretation, for which—even if propositional or conceptual—the structures of language and discourse are in a certain sense preconditions. Heidegger’s account of synthesis owes much to his interpretation of imagination as the “third root” in Kant, and like Husserl he preferred the A-edition formulation of the transcendental deduction. For Heidegger the imagination is seen as adding time to the synthesis of intuitions and concepts, and thus, ultimately, the temporal synthesis via the transcendental imagination is the root of subjectivity, not vice-versa.68 Heidegger’s account of synthesis thus emphasizes, contra Husserl’s transcendental-idealist-inspired privileging of consciousness, our radical thrownness in an always-already temporalized world.
Merleau-Ponty Merleau-Ponty’s account of synthesis can be seen as a taking up of the Husserlian account within a broadly existential framework that deepens the interpretation of perceptual synthesis by further clarifying the primordial constitutional role played by the lived body and kinaesthetic syntheses. For Merleau-Ponty, “The synthesis of the object is accomplished through the synthesis of one’s own body.”69 In his view, the Kantian account of synthesis is ultimately still a form of “intellectual384
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ism” that, in its focus on logical categories and concepts, fails to fully recognize the role of the lived body as the site of originary synthesis.70 In this sense, Merleau-Ponty’s project can be framed as a re-emphasizing or even radicalizing of the Husserlian prioritization of passive synthesis: we are not asking the logician to take into consideration experiences that reason takes to be merely non-sense or contradictory, we simply wish to push back the limits of what has sense for us and to put the narrow zone of thematic sense back into the zone of non-thematic sense that embraces it.71 For Merleau-Ponty (as, arguably, for the later Husserl72), meaning and even logic originate frst and foremost not in the predicative, conceptual, or semantic structures of language, but in the broader feld of our habitual and often unnoticed embodied ways of making sense of the world. Insofar as Husserl shares this insight, Merleau-Ponty considers him to have overcome the intellectualist nature of Kant’s account of synthesis. But in another sense Husserl remains guilty of similar problems in his insistence on the active nature of consciousness or the I in constituting the context of its world: [W]hat we criticize in the Kantian idea of synthesis and in certain of Husserl’s Kantian texts is precisely that it presupposes, at least ideally, a real multiplicity that it must overcome.What is for us originary consciousness is not a transcendental I, freely positing in front of itself a multiplicity in itself and constituting it from top to bottom; rather, it is an I that only dominates diversity thanks to time and for whom even freedom is a destiny … against the notion of synthesis, we prefer the notion of synopsis that does not yet indicate an explicit positing of diversity.73 Merleau-Ponty is concerned that the Husserlian epistemological account of the active structures of synthesis results in a picture in which the world is overdetermined by an active conception of consciousness and subjectivity, thereby failing to refect the ways in which we fnd ourselves already intertwined in an embodied milieu of space and time that precedes any active or thematic meaning-making. For Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, the notion of synthesis is central in the project of elucidating the structures of subjectivity by means of which we encounter the world as objective and meaningful.The continued relevance of their accounts, especially in the context of contemporary work in mind, epistemology, cognitive science, and consciousness studies, is a testament both to the historical importance of the notion in Western philosophy and to the innovative developments of it in the phenomenological tradition.
Notes 1 A case could also be made for the Hegelian dialectical conception of synthesis as important precursor for phenomenology, in its way of conceiving of phenomenological thinking if not in its usage of the term.While there is some truth to this claim in the case of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and, perhaps more directly, for the phenomenological existentialism of de Beauvoir and Sartre, there is less of a case to be made for this infuence with regard to Husserl, whose more directly epistemological conception is the primary focus of this entry (for a useful overview of Hegelian-dialectical conceptions of the notion of synthesis in Husserl, see Lampert 1995, 28–33).
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Aristotle, De Interpretatione 16b25 Kant 1998,A 77 Kant 1998,A 78/B 103. Kant 1998, B 132 Kant 1998,A 84–130 Kant 1998,A 124 In the B edition, by contrast, while Kant acknowledges that the productive imagination shares characteristics with both the faculty of sensibility (insofar as it issues in intuitions) and that of the understanding (insofar as it still is governed by the categories), he places the emphasis on the logical, categorial character of the experiential synthesis, and casts the transcendental unity of apperception in formal terms. Cf. Crowell 2013, 13–14. Hua XII, 38ff./39ff. Hua III/1, §118. Hua XIX/2,VI §8. Hua XIX/2,VI, §11 Hua XIX/2,VI, §§7–8 Husserl 1964/1973, §71. Cf. Hopp 2009, 213f Cf. Lampert 1995, 27 Hua III/1, §118; Cf. Mohanty 2011, 166. See Hua XVIII, §67; Cf. Ricouer 1996, 153; GA 20, 89/Heidegger 1992, 66. Hua IV, §9 For a detailed account, see Biceaga 2010, ch. 3. See also the discussion of primary vs. secondary passivity below. See Rump 2017, 97ff; Cf.Walsh 2017. Hua IV, §15c. Hua XIX/2,VI, Ch. 6. This description would not apply in the case of collectives. In this case, while we still have a categorial synthesis, it is not one that takes the form of a synthesis of coincidence, because members involved in the collective need not have anything in common (Lohmar 2006, 122f). Lohmar 2006; Sokolowski 1981. “[T]he synthesis of coincidence is somehow imposed on us in a passive manner, even if it occurs in the framework of an actively performed activity. The content (the datum) is given to us—we must accept this seemingly paradoxical formulation—in a ‘sense’ which has nothing to do with sensibility, but which is an irreducible relation between the intentional moments of acts. […] Syntheses of coincidence are non-sensible representing contents” (Lohmar 2006, 120). Hua IV, §9 Hua IV, 20, n. 1/ 22, n. 1. Hua XI, 125/171. Mohanty 2011, 165. Hua XXXI, 4/276. Hua XXXI, 15/288 Husserl 1964/1973, §14 Hua XI, 154/201; cf. translator’s introduction to Husserl 2001b, l-li. Husserl 1964/1973, §14 Husserl 1964/1973, §21d Hua XVII, 373/32 Husserl 1964/1973, §24a Hua XXXI, 3/276. As the quote suggests, for Husserl the products of passive synthesis include not only objects (as for Kant) but also pre-predicative “objectlike formations” [Gegenständlichkeiten]. In the inquiry into the absolutely most basic contentful level of passive synthesis, we cannot presuppose already constituted objects, since passive synthesis is precisely that which is supposed to frst explain the constitution of objects:“concrete objects are not what is elementary here, but rather object phases, sensible points, so to speak” (Hua XI, 165/213). See also Husserl 1964/1973, §§13, 17, n. 1. Hua XXXI, 15/288. Hua XI, 125/170.
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Hua I, §18 See Hua X, 3–134. Hua I, §17 Hua III/1, §118 Steinbock, translator’s introduction to Husserl 2001b, xxiii Rump 2017. Husserl 1964/1973, §16 See Lampert 1995, 3–4 Hua V, 156/423 Hua I, §39 Hua I, §51. Hua I, §§42–62 Husserl 1964/1973, §67b; Hua XV, 203.Also see the above discussion of aesthetic synthesis. Hua XV, 207–209. Hua XI, 120/165; Hua XI, 145ff/193ff; cf.Welton 1977. Husserl 1964/1973, §16. Hua XI, 162/210 See Rump 2018 Hua XI, 276/410. See, e.g., Noë 2004; 2012 Hua VI, §49 GA 2, 211/Heidegger 2008, 202. GA 2, 210/Heidegger 2008, 201. GA 20/Heidegger 2008, §6c GA 2, 44/Heidegger 1962, 56. GA 3/Heidegger 1962, §§32–35 Merleau-Ponty 2005, 247/2013, 212 Merleau-Ponty 2005, 160, n. 2/2013, 522, n. 67 Merleau-Ponty 2005, 325/2013, 287–288. See Rump 2018. Merleau-Ponty 2005, 326, n. 1/2013, 544, n. 60.
References Aristotle. 1985. “De Interpretatione.” In: Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Biceaga,Victor. 2010. The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer. Crowell, Steven. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 1977. Gesamtausgabe. Band 2: Sein Und Zeit. Ed. F. von Herrmann. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1979. Gesamtausgabe. Band 20: Prolegomena Zur Geschichte Des Zeitbegriffs. Ed. P. Jaeger. Frankfurt a.M:Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1991. Gesamtausgabe. Band 3: Kant Und Das Problem Der Metaphysik. Ed. F. von Herrmann. Frankfurt a.M.:Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1992. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Trans. Theodore Kisiel. Midland Book Edition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2008. Being and Time.Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Reprint edition. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Hopp, Walter. 2011. Perception and Knowledge:A Phenomenological Account. New York: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorian Cairns. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1964. Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchung zur Genealogie der Logik. Ed. Ludwig Landgrebe. Hamburg: Claassen Verlag.
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Jacob Rump ———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.Trans. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973. Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution.Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 2001a. Logical Investigations.Trans. J.N. Findlay. New York: Routledge. ———. 2001b. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic.Trans.Anthony Steinbock. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2003. Philosophy of Arithmetic.Trans. Dallas Willard. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 2014. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.Trans. Dan Dahlstrom. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Eds. Paul Guyer and Allen W.Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lampert, Jay. 1995. Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. (Phaenomenologica; vol. 131). Dordrecht: Springer. Lohmar, Dieter. 2006. “Categorial Intuition.” In: A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Eds. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 115–126. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2005. Phénoménologie de La Perception. Paris: Editions Gallimard. ———. 2013. Phenomenology of Perception.Trans. Donald Landes. 1st edition. Abingdon, Oxon./New York: Routledge. Mohanty, Jithendra Nath. 2011. Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938. New Haven:Yale University Press. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2012. Varieties of Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1996. A Key to Husserl’s Ideas I. Ed. Pol Vandevelde. Trans. Bond Harris and Jacqueline Bouchard Spurlock. Milwaukee,WI: Marquette University Press. Rump, Jacob. 2017. “The Epistemic Import of Affectivity: A Husserlian Account.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41, no. 1, pp. 82–104. ———. 2018.“Making Sense of the Lived Body and the Lived World: Meaning and Presence in Husserl, Derrida and Noë.” Continental Philosophy Review 51, pp. 141-67. Sokolowski, Robert. 1981. “Husserl’s Concept of Categorial Intuition.” Philosophical Topics 12, no. Supplement, pp. 127–141. Welton, Donn. 1977. “Structure and Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology.” In: Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals. Eds. Frederick A. Elliston and Peter McCormick. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, pp. 54–69.
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Introduction Refection on the meaning of philosophical concepts with a long history is often illuminating, not only because of the continuities, but also the contrasts it makes apparent.This is very much the case when considering how the term “transcendental,” with its long history (see Aertsen 1998), is understood in the phenomenological tradition.There are four major points of contrast that are relevant: the medieval or Scholastic roots of the term; its transformation in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and further development in the Neo-Kantianism of the nineteenth century; its appropriation in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938); and fnally, the critique of transcendental idealism in Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and post-Husserlian phenomenology.
Medieval origins In use since at least the thirteenth century and commonly associated with Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280), though perhaps most rigorously articulated in Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308) and his followers, the term “transcendentals” (or transcendentia) refers to concepts such as “being,” “one,” “true,” and “good” that are said of beings in general, irrespective of their articulation in the Aristotelian categories such as substance, quality, and relation (Aertsen 1998, 1360–1364). Transcendentia are thus “transcendent” in the sense of trans-categorial. The development of the concept of transcendentals has its roots in Aristotle’s discussion of the distinction between the concepts of “being” and “one” in Metaphysics IV, chapters 1–2 (Aristotle 1979).Aristotle argues that even though the concepts of “being” and “one” (or unity) are distinct, nevertheless, what is a being cannot be said to be distinct from what has unity.The implication is that the distinction cannot be understood in terms of contrasting genera or kinds of things, but must instead be taken as determinations that are held in common for all being qua being. Accordingly, in the Scotist tradition (Kobusch 1996; Aertsen 1998, 1365–1372) the transcendentals are described as the “most common” (communisimus) among all being qua being; likewise, for the Scotists (here infuenced by Avicenna) the transcendentals count among the most basic determinations (prima) of being as such. Though the fact that the transcendentals “transcend” the categories as communisimus and prima established for the Scholastics the possibility of a universal ontology, the principal moti389
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vations behind the development of the concept in fgures such as Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) were decidedly theological. Scotus, in this vein, formulates in a systematic way the idea of the being of God as “above” the categories, an essence wholly unconstrained by categorial determination, and who thus stands in a uniquely original relation to all beings as such.The theme of the transcendental thus expresses the being of God as origin, or the original being of the creator, the fundamental determination of which rests on a notion of the ontologically or metaphysically “prior” (see Aertsen 2012).
From Kant to Neo-Kantianism Though a core of the original Scholastic sense of “transcendental” arguably remains intact— above all in its association with universal ontology and the apriori—the meaning of the term nevertheless undergoes a fundamental transformation in the philosophy of Kant.This is perhaps most dramatically illustrated when considering its relation to ontology.Though Kant still identifes his transcendental philosophy as ontologia (Kant 1999, A 845/B 873f), it is no longer an ontology that purports to yield immediate cognitions of things, but instead to determine the conditions under which the cognition of things is at all possible: “I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible apriori” (Kant 1999, B 25). In Kant, the Scholastic–Aristotelian orientation to the knowability of things thus remains in place, thereby meriting the title of ontologia, but the emphasis shifts from the concepts proper, through which things are thought, to the subjective conditions, in which such concepts can be said to yield true knowledge of things.This is coupled with another shift, this time in the relevant sense of the logical.To the extent to which “our mode of cognition of objects” is governed by the forms and principles of pure or general logic, the relevant domain of inquiry is “logical” in character. However, the emphasis again shifts, this time from the logical forms themselves to the determination of the “origin, domain, and objective validity” of cognitions that relate to objects apriori (Kant 1999, B A 57/B 81). Taking these two shifts of emphasis in tandem illuminates Kant’s transformation of the sense of the “transcendental”: ontology takes on a decidedly epistemological orientation, and logic becomes transcendental logic.The result is that while transcendental cognition remains apriori, it is limited to a much more circumscribed sense of the prima than had been the case in the Scholastic tradition: not every apriori cognition must be called transcendental, but only that by means of which we cognize that and how certain representations (intuitions or concepts) are applied entirely apriori, or are possible (i.e., the possibility of cognition or its use apriori). Hence neither space nor any geometrical determination of it apriori is a transcendental representation, but only the cognition that their representations are not of empirical origin at all and the possibility that they can nevertheless be related apriori to objects of experience can be called transcendental. […] The difference between the transcendental and the empirical therefore belongs only to the critique of cognitions and does not concern their relation to their object. (Kant 1999, B 80f) Whereas in medieval philosophy the transcendental is contrasted with the categorial—the transcendentals “transcend” the categories qua predicable without restriction—the contrast in Kant is instead between the transcendental and the empirical, where transcendental is understood to 390
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designate a non-empirical origin of cognition. Again, something here is preserved while being transformed: as non-empirical in origin, the apriori status of the transcendental is preserved, but it is in turn restricted to its applicability within the domain of sensibility. Ironically, Kant appropriates Aristotle’s categories, with some signifcant revisions, in his elucidation of the apriori concepts of the understanding (Kant 1999, A 76f/B 102f), thereby designating as “transcendental” what had traditionally served as a point of contrast to the transcendental. The idea that there are conditions under which concepts of things fnd applicability apriori implies of course a restriction, and with that a different sense of “transcendence” that further deepens the contrast between Kant and Scholasticism.The region delimited by transcendental logic as the sole domain of the objective validity of the (now) transcendental categories of the understanding takes on the character of a transcendental immanence. Kant contrasts this with what he calls the “transcendent” deployment of the concepts of the understanding, namely when such concepts are used to think objects that can in principle never be encountered in a properly empirical experience (i.e. intuitively or sensibly given; Kant 1999, A 296f/B 352f). The result is a transvaluation of the Scholastic concept of the transcendental: it remains “transcendent” in the sense of non-empirical (or ideal) in origin, but it nevertheless fnds its legitimacy, its truth, solely within the immanence of empirical experience (or the real), in contrast to a new sense of “transcendent” that designates the misapplication of the pure concepts of the understanding, leading only to transcendental illusion. Kant’s conception of transcendental philosophy was transformative. It inspired, above all, a renewed engagement with the idea of experience as fundamental to philosophy. Here Kant’s thinking both advances and critiques the traditions of British empiricism, above all the work of John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776), who had also sought to grasp the origins of the understanding and its concepts in a refection on the interface between mental processes and concrete encounters with things in the world (Locke 1964; Hume 2003). In contrast to the British philosophers, Kant introduces a more radical emphasis on the essential discursivity of empirical cognition: the encounter with things in experience is no longer something simply given and interpreted through ideas equally given or furnished by the history of the subject, but inwardly fashioned apriori in accordance with fundamental principles introduced by the subject itself apriori.This fgure of a self-fashioning subjectivity, the forward, spontaneous movement of which establishes the very trajectory of the being of understanding, became the fundamental leitmotif of an even more radical transcendental idealism in the philosophy of J.G. Fichte (1762–1814), which in turn provided a key point of contrast for the absolute idealism of F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854) and G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) (see Hegel 1977). However, it is the waning of the infuence of absolute idealism after the deaths of Schelling and Hegel that, arguably, sets the stage for the kind of Kantianism, and with that a conception of transcendental philosophy, that is most pertinent to the phenomenological tradition (Willey 1978).There are two main elements to emphasize in this history.The frst is an emphasis on a psychological reading of Kant, an approach that appeared early in the work of J.F. Fries (1773– 1843), who argued that Kant’s turn to the subject must be understood in terms of empirical psychology (Fries 1807). In conjunction with but not necessarily equivalent to this turn to psychology are a series of attempts, in the work of fgures such as J.F. Herbart (1776–1841) and Hermann Lotze (1817–1881), and to some extent Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848), to re-engage the principal themes of logic foundational to the Kantian enterprise, though now with a decidedly naturalistic or materialistic orientation. In the background of all of this—and which continues to be the case in the Neo-Kantianism proper of the Marburg and Southwest schools (Köhnke 1986), above all in the work of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)—is the 391
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dominance of materialism and positivism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the resurgent epistemological realism that accompanied it. Transcendental philosophy in this context was understood by the Neo-Kantians to be locked in a critical dialogue with positivist conceptions of science, against which the Neo-Kantians tended to emphasize either the logical necessity of apriori principles for scientifc understanding (Cohen 1885) or the constitutive role of subjective activity and valuation in cultural formations more generally (Rickert 1899; Cassirer 1923–1929). Kant was also frequently called upon to mediate the debate between an idealism that would emphasize the constitutive importance of the logical functions of the understanding, and a realism that would insist on reducing all cognitive phenomena to psycho-physiology. Nineteenthcentury Neo-Kantianism itself, as a recognizable philosophical program, arguably arises out of an attempt to gain ground in the idealism–realism debate that was emerging mid-century, and which was being driven by an ever closer intertwining of logic and empirical psychology. One of the earliest polemical texts in this vein is Otto Liebmann’s Kant und die Epigonen (Liebmann 1865), which takes as its point of orientation precisely the impasse between idealism and realism, and argues for the necessity for a more fundamental appraisal of the master himself, with the recurring cry “back to Kant!”
Edmund Husserl The tensions characteristic of the uneasy blend of logic and psychology in Neo-Kantianism, not to mention in the more unabashed psychologism of fgures such as John Stuart Mill (1806– 1873), provide the most immediate context of the development of Husserl’s phenomenology, both prior to and after Husserl’s explicit embrace of his version of a “transcendental idealism.” It is important to emphasize that Husserl’s phenomenology began as neither a transcendental philosophy nor an idealism.The ideality of pure logic, the argument for which lay at the core of Husserl’s critique of psychologism, was not meant in the sense of a transcendental ideality (Husserl 2001, 144–162). Nor was Husserl’s eventual embrace of transcendental idealism, announced in his 1913 Ideas I (Husserl 2014) and further elaborated in Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl 1969) and Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1982), welcomed by others in the phenomenological movement, such as Adolf Reinach (1883–1917), Max Scheler (1874–1928), or much of the circle of young philosophers that had gathered around Husserl during his years in Göttingen (Ingarden 1975). It is also important to emphasize that, even within the horizon of Husserl’s mature philosophy, properly “transcendental” phenomenology remains a sharply delimited thematic feld. This can be illuminated by way of a contrast with Husserl’s idea of a “pure phenomenological psychology.” Analogous to pure mechanics, pure psychology for Husserl is an eidetic science of the fundamental forms and structures of psychic life (Husserl 1997, 86f; Hua IX). Like any science, pure or phenomenological psychology is defned on a proper object domain, in this case mental life that has been revealed after the suspension or bracketing (epoche) of all naturalizing presuppositions or judgments, and the reduction of the objects of experience to their givenness as pure phenomena of mental life. Despite the obvious methodological parallels (see Husserl 2014, §§27–32, 56–62) the eidetics of pure consciousness does not, however, amount to a properly transcendental phenomenology, but stands as a self-suffcient apriori science of its own: Phenomenological or pure psychology as an intrinsically primary and completely selfcontained psychological discipline, which is also sharply separated from natural sci392
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ence, is, for very fundamental reasons, not to be established as an empirical science but rather as a purely rational (“apriori,” “eidetic”) science (Husserl 1997, 92) Transcendental phenomenology, by contrast, treats specifcally the problem of understanding, or the objects of experience, with regard to their evidential character. For Husserl, transcendental philosophy in this sense is only possible as a science that does not assume evidence as a positive given, but instead seeks its origin or ground in the constitutive accomplishments of pure consciousness. In this sense a “transcendental” science stands in contrast with all “positive” sciences as such that take their evidential ground as given within the horizon of the world: A psychology could not [Husserl’s example here is Locke] be the foundation of transcendental philosophy. Even pure psychology in the phenomenological sense, theoretically delimited by the psychological-phenomenological reduction, still is and always will be a positive science: it has the world as its pre-given foundation. […] Like every positive science, this pure psychology is itself transcendentally problematic. (Husserl 1997, 96–97) And again:“All positive sciences are sciences [that function] in transcendental naivete” (Husserl 1997, 98).What is required for phenomenology to operate on a properly transcendental register is a properly transcendental reduction, thanks to which pure subjectivity is revealed as the ground of all possible validity. As transcendental, subjectivity is no longer “positively” determined on the basis of the pre-given horizon of the world: “What remains [after the transcendental reduction] in validity is exclusively the universum of ‘transcendentally pure’ subjectivity and, enclosed within it, all the actual and possible ‘phenomena’ of objectivities, all modes of appearance and modes of consciousness that pertain to such objectivities” (Husserl 1997, 97). There is thus for Husserl a double sense of “phenomenon” that provides an axis of coordination between pure phenomenological psychology and pure phenomenology, and thanks to which both sciences coincide “proposition for proposition” (Husserl 1997, 98; 1969, Chapter Six). Their bond consists in their mutual rootedness in experience, or better the possibility of experience being revealed in refection as a universum of manifestation (Husserl 2014, §§77–79). Thanks to refection and what, in its various modes, can be intuitively apprehended within it, the experiential feld can be explicated either positively, its world-validity naively operative, in pure eidetic psychology, or transcendentally, as the origin of the “sense and existential validity of the naturally accepted world” (Husserl 1997, 98). It is in the latter case that pure consciousness reveals itself as properly sense-bestowing (sinngebende), and where the manifestation of objectivities becomes the theme of a series of studies of how different kinds of beings are “constituted as” objectivities of such and such a kind (Husserl 2014, §§149–153; see Sokolowski 1970). All of this yields a unique sense of “experience” or “lived experience” (Erlebnis) that contrasts with the concept of empirical experience in Kant, something that in turn separates Husserl’s conception of the transcendental from many Neo-Kantian approaches. For Kant, experience is understood essentially as embodied in empirical knowledge, and subjectivity as a set of cognitive functions, the principles of which are necessary for establishing the objective validity of empirical knowledge. Kant’s manner of investigation is thus distinctly regressive, tracing objective determinations in empirical judgments back to the subjective conditions that rest in the cognitive capacities of the thinking mind. Husserl, by contrast, proceeds not regressively but descriptively, because any given intentio of consciousness and its intentum represents for him a given unity of experience available for intuitive apprehension (Husserl 2014, §§70–75). A phenomenon, pre393
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cisely in its determinateness and structural complexity, is for Husserl not an index for a set of functions thanks to which representations are combined in accordance with apriori principles of the understanding and forms of intuition, as in the Kantian tradition. A phenomenon for Husserl is the manifestation of something itself, given within the horizon of the intentional experience in which its appearance is possible. Both the pure eidetics of intentional life and its parallel transcendental explication of constitutive validity remain within the immanence of pure experience in this sense. In this way, transcendental philosophy is, for Husserl, grounded not in a genetic psychology of our cognitive faculties, but in a properly transcendental experience, methodologically secured in refection by the reductions: “The transcendental reduction opens up, in fact, a completely new kind of experience that can be systematically pursued: transcendental experience” (Husserl 1997, 98; Hua VIII, 69–81). In this way, the transcendental for Husserl is not so much contrasted with experience as it is with a naively apprehended experience. The emphasis on description and its rootedness in the intuitivity of lived experience is operative also in Husserl’s “genetic” phenomenology, which tracks the emergent, even historical character of objectivity, though here it comes under considerable strain (Hua XI, 336–345). Nevertheless, however complex the theme of transcendental subjectivity becomes in genetic phenomenology, the analysis never shifts back to Kant’s regressive strategy, and the leitmotif of validity, itself a very Kantian theme, is never pursued in the manner of a transcendental deduction, but always in terms of intuitively apprehended modes of givenness. Instead of “back to Kant!”, the battle cry of transcendental phenomenology remains “back to the things themselves!”, the intuitive givenness of which always remains the fnal court of appeal for any claim concerning the transcendental constitution of validity and sense. In parallel with Kant’s transcendental philosophy but with the important differences already noted, transcendental phenomenology also merits the title of an ontologia.The universum of transcendental subjectivity, the accomplishments of which establish the experiential foundations for the very cognizability of things, yields in turn for Husserl a universal ontology—or the sum total of possible legitimate ontological concepts that provide the conceptual bases for the positive sciences: In this way transcendental phenomenology, once realized, encompasses a universal ontology in a broadened sense: a full, universal, and concrete ontology in which all correlative ontological concepts are drawn from a transcendental originality that leaves no questions of sense and legitimacy in any way unclarifed. (Husserl 1997, 99)
Heidegger and post-Husserlian phenomenology “Ontology,” as Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, “is possible only as phenomenology” (Heidegger 1996, 31).Yet not in the form of Husserl’s phenomenology. Heidegger is sharply critical of Husserl’s embrace of Descartes in his understanding of phenomenological philosophy (see Husserl 2014, §§27–32, and Husserl 1982). Husserl’s trenchant Cartesianism, Heidegger contends, distorts the phenomenological feld in ways that disrupt the possibility for a genuine ontological questioning: the assumption that the basic structures of consciousness or intentional life take the form of the Cartesian cogito posits a decidedly intellectual orientation that neglects a more fundamental questioning of the being of the subject, a neglect that is compounded by Husserl’s uncritical embrace of methodological principles that demand a delimitation of being in terms of clarity, distinctness, and certainty.All of this, Heidegger contends, is the apotheosis of a philosophical tradition in which the being of the subject, or in the case of Descartes the being 394
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of the ego sum, has been consistently obfuscated, and with that the entire ontological problematic (Heidegger 2005, §§46–50). Yet even in the wake of this critique, Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology, grounded in an analytic of Dasein, however distant it may otherwise be from the transcendental subjectivity of either Husserl or Kant, nevertheless remains decidedly “transcendental” in character. The basic reason for this is that the subject or Dasein for Heidegger remains the being of an understanding, the existential explication of which fxes the horizon for the determination of the sense of being in general (Heidegger 1996, 10–11). Dasein is that being that exists, or that is an issue for itself, to the extent to which it is an understanding of what it means to be; and if this understanding, its intentionality and basic structures as a mode of comportment towards itself and beings as a whole, is determined essentially as an understanding of time, then it is precisely time or temporality that will be revealed as the “transcendental horizon of the meaning of being” (Heidegger 1996, 34–35). Despite the fact that, at least in his writings just before and including Being and Time, Heidegger continued to understand phenomenology as transcendental philosophy even after its purifcation from Descartes, the anti-Cartesianism of much of post-Husserlian phenomenology tended to associate the theme of the transcendental precisely with Cartesianism and, by extension, Kantianism. The broad acceptance of these critiques, such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego (Sartre 1960), led many phenomenologists to avoid the term altogether. The “phenomenological ontology” expounded in Sartre (1992), likewise the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1962), keep transcendental philosophy at arm’s length, and Jan Patočka’s project of an “asubjective phenomenology” (Patočka 1991) attempts explicitly to re-articulate the basic gestures of phenomenological philosophy in a precisely non-transcendental mode. It would seem, in short, that the very idea of a “transcendental phenomenology” began and ended with Edmund Husserl. Yet, at the same time, as Rudolf Bernet has recently argued (Bernet 2015), there is a risk in the current situation, in which there seems to be little interest in assessing either the cogency of Husserl’s conception of transcendentalism and its attendant idealism, or the trenchancy of the classical critiques levelled against it. Not to engage these problems risks undermining one’s grasp of the meaning and promise of phenomenological philosophy generally, and Husserlian phenomenology particularly. More, one could in turn argue that it risks misunderstanding the relation of the phenomenological moment to the history of philosophy, for the theme of the transcendental ties phenomenological thought to some of the oldest and most formative tendencies of philosophy itself, ancient or modern.
References Aertsen, Johannes. 2012. Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought: From Philip the Chancellor (ca. 1225) to Francisco Suarez. Leiden: Brill. Aertsen, Johannes; Cesa, Claudio; Hinske, Norbert; Honnefelder, Ludger; König, Gert; Leinsle, G. Ulrich; Lembeck, Karl-Heinz; Möhle, Hannes; Niquet, Marcel; Ollig, Hans-Ludwig; Poggi, Stefano; Trappe, Tobias. 1998. “Transzendental; Transzendentalphilosophie.” In: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Volume 10. Ed. Karlfried Gründer. Basel: Schwabe Verlag. Aristotle. 1979. Aristotle’s Metaphysics.Trans. Hippocrates George Apostle. Grinnell: Peripatetic Press. Bernet, Rudolf. 2015. “Transcendental Phenomenology?” In: Phenomenology in a New Key: Between Analysis and History. Essays in Honor of Richard Cobb-Stevens. Eds. Jeffrey Bloechl and Nicolas de Warren. Dordrecht: Springer. Cassirer, Ernst. 1923–1929. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. 3 Vols. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer. Cohen, Hermann. 1885. Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. Berlin: Dümmler. Fries, Jakob Friedrich. 1807. Neue oder anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft. Heidelberg: Winter.
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James Dodd Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy. Trans. Henry Silton Harris and Walter Cerf.Albany: SUNY. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time.Trans. Joan Stambaugh.Albany: SUNY. ———. 2005. Introduction to Phenomenological Research. Trans. Daniel Dahlstrom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hume, David. 2003. A Treatise of Human Nature. Minerola: Dover. Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic.Trans. Dorion Cairns.The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1982. Cartesian Meditations.Trans. Dorion Cairns.The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1997. Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (19271931). Eds.Thomas Sheehan and Richard Palme. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 2001. Logical Investigations.Volume I.Trans. John Niemeyer Findlay. London: Routledge. ———. 2014. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.Trans. Daniel Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett. Ingarden, Roman. 1975. On the Motives Which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism. Trans. Arnór Hannibalsson.The Hague: Nijhoff. Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Critique of Pure Reason.Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kobusch,Theo. 1996.“Das Seiende als transzendentaler oder supertranszendentaler Begriff. Deutungen der Univozität des Begriffs bei Scotus und den Scotisten.” In: John Duns Scotus: Metaphysics and Ethics. Eds. Ludger Honnefelder, Rega Wood, and Mechtild Dreyer. Leiden: Brill, pp. 345–366. Köhnke, Klaus Christian. 1986.Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Liebmann, Otto. 1865. Kant und die Epigonen. Stuttgart: Carl Schober. Locke, John. 1964. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Signet. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception.Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Patočka,J.1991.Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz.Phänomenologische Schriften II.Jan Patočka:Ausgewählte Schriften. Eds. Klaus Nellen, Jiří Němec, and Ilja Srubar. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 267–309. Rickert, Heinrich. 1899. Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft. Freiburg im Breisgau: Mohr. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1960. The Transcendence of the Ego.Trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. 1992. Being and Nothingness.Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York:Washington Square Press. Sokolowski, Robert. 1970. The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution.The Hague: Nijhoff. Willey, Thomas E. 1978. Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860-1914. Detroit:Wayne State University Press.
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34 THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE Emiliano Trizio
The nature of knowledge is a theme that has been approached in a variety of ways throughout the phenomenological tradition. However, only within Husserl’s work does such theme lead to the development of a systematic theory of knowledge grounded in phenomenology. Heidegger, in particular, developed extensive considerations concerning the concept of knowledge and its relation to truth, but in view of moving beyond the theory of knowledge itself as well as beyond all formulations of the so-called “problem of knowledge”.1 Heidegger’s interpretations of Kant further develop this attempt to privilege the question of being as the ultimate horizon of philosophy at the expense of the theory of knowledge.2 That the theory of knowledge, instead, appears from early on as the horizon of Husserl’s thought, can be understood in light of his intention to revive the ideal of philosophy as a discipline encompassing the different sciences as its branches and culminating in metaphysics.3 Husserl came very early to believe that only a theory of knowledge lacking any metaphysical presuppositions could provide a suitable basis for philosophy thus conceived,4 and that the impasse of the traditional philosophical efforts of modernity were ultimately due to the failure to develop such pure theory of knowledge. Ultimately, this kind of quest led to the development of transcendental phenomenology. The conceptual path connecting metaphysics to the most fundamental questions concerning the possibility of knowledge, and from the latter to transcendental phenomenology, can be best illuminated by foregrounding Husserl’s notion of theory of science (Wissenschaftstheorie). If the positive sciences are to be able to contribute to the kind of universal cognition of being that metaphysics tries to achieve, they need to be rescued from their theoretical insuffciency. The theory of science is called to overcome these limitations by developing a systematic critique of scientifc rationality; in other words, by elucidating the uncritical presuppositions of the positive sciences. After the so-called transcendental turn, Husserl came to his mature conception of the different disciplines that such theory of science would comprise. In the frst place, we encounter two families of “objective” a priori disciplines: formal ontology (also called mathesis universalis) and the group of material or regional ontologies. Formal ontology is the formal theory of science, and it can be supplemented by the formal theory of multiplicities and by the a priori theory of probability required by empirical knowledge.5 It investigates what pertains a priori to the essence of science regardless of the specifc domain of investigation, and, correlatively, what pertains to any possible object in general. Regional ontologies instead investigate the material a priori that characterizes the different domains of 397
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the various empirical sciences.6 According to Husserl, the origin of both can be traced back to the work of Plato and his school.7 The different material ontologies, too, can be called logic or Wissenschaftstheorien,8 because they provide a critique of the reason at work in the corresponding empirical disciplines. In short, so far, the theory of science appears articulated in a formal and in a material part, which both deal with the objective contents of science. However, the theory of science, and, along with it, the critique of reason, are far from being exhausted by these “object-directed” a priori disciplines.What is necessary is an authentic and radical critique of reason, where reason is conceived as a structural function of the subject accomplishing any scientifc endeavor.9 In this way, we reach the ultimate and most fundamental questions pertaining to the very possibility of knowledge. We fnd a preliminary characterization of this type of investigation in the following historical remark: We meet in antiquity, in Parmenides and, above all, in an effective negative form in the Sophistic, the frst seeds of the authentic problematic of the critique of reason, into which, to start with, we have to gain some insight, a problematic that is not directed to truth and being, not to theory and science in the sense of a theoretical system, but to rational consciousness itself.The sophistic skepticism in regards to truth and to being as correlates of truth has its parallel in a skepticism in regards to knowing, that is in regards to the possibility of a knowledge directed towards being in the sense of an objectivity that transcends consciousness.10 Under Husserl’s reading, the problematic of an authentic critique of reason (not of a theory of the a priori components of scientifc theory, which are the objects of formal and material ontology) was already prefgured in the ancient world by the contrast between Parmenides’ thesis of the identity between thinking and being, i.e., that there is a correlation between rational thought and what is ultimately real, and Gorgias’ skepticism. Gorgias’ skepticism concerns not only the correlation between truth and being, i.e., not only the possibility for a true judgment to express what is real, but also, and more fundamentally, the very correlation between consciousness and being, i.e., the possibility for consciousness to grasp a transcendent being at all. According to this type of skepticism, no matter what different components can be distinguished within consciousness, no matter the character of evidence that may belong to them, what is found within consciousness remains inherently immanent to the subject and unable to warrant access to an objective, i.e., transcendent domain. In this way, we come to the formulation of the problem of transcendent knowledge, the problem that has motivated the development of the theory of knowledge itself. No matter how much more precisely these differences may be grasped, they are by all means differences within subjectivity. But how can immanent lived experiences or immanent characters of lived experiences, and let them be called also character of “rationality” – in modern terms, “feelings of evidence, of necessity of thought” etc. – legitimately signify something beyond the immanent sphere?11 This formulation of the problem of transcendent knowledge already presupposes the ground of consciousness as absolutely given and amenable to an immanent description, whereby its Erlebnisse, along with their components can become objects of knowledge.12 In other words, the very question about the possibility of transcendent knowledge (a term that has been intended as extra-subjective, “außersubjektive”13 in a way that transcendent phenomenology denounces as misleading) presupposes the possibility of immanent knowledge. 398
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Fundamental in this context is the distinction between “the anthropological and the radical formulation of the problem of transcendence”.14 The anthropological or psychologistic formulation consists in asking how a human being (or, equivalently, I as a human being) can obtain knowledge of what is transcendent with respect to consciousness, while the radical formulation consists in asking:“how is it possible that in the knowing consciousness something transcending it becomes knowable?”15 The radical formulation demands that the problem of transcendent knowledge (or, equivalently, the problem of transcendence) be referred to consciousness as purifed by any apperception in virtue of which it is apprehended as a part of nature, as annexed to humans or animals.The anthropological formulation, which is in its own right legitimate and must be scientifcally pursued according to its own methods, fails to address the fundamental problem of transcendence, because it presupposes the existence of at least part of what is transcendent.A simple way to realize why this approach does not respond to genuinely philosophical concerns is to think about how any other radical skeptics would object to it:“How can I, in the frst place, come to know that I am a human being, which in turn implies the existence of my body as well as of the spatiotemporal nature of which my body is a component?” According to Husserl, this radical formulation has never been completely understood before the breakthrough of transcendental phenomenology. It is clear, though, that the reason for this is not that all previous philosophers have been unable to go beyond the anthropological or naturalistic formulation, but that they have failed to do so in a complete or radical way. This was the case of Descartes, who indeed questioned the transcendence of nature and of the subject as human being endowed with a body, but not the transcendence of the “empiricalpersonal subject”, of the “mens sive animus” which is the consciousness of the “empirical Ego”. As Husserl says in the Cartesian Meditations, he identifed the pure Ego of the cogitationes with a part of the human being, a part that, in contrast to the body, does not fall under methodic doubt.16 Descartes’ subject, therefore, while not a human being, is still a “surviving part” of a human being, and thus a part of the transcendent world.The correct ground of the problem of transcendence was missed also by classical empiricism. Whereas Locke’s theory of knowledge relapsed into a full-blown naturalism,17 Hume’s fctionalism, which indeed questioned the being of nature in a radical way, was still based on psychological transcendences such as the “fundamental psychological faculties characterized by psychological laws as that of the association of ideas and habit”.18 Finally, even Kant’s formulation of the problem of knowledge is affected by the limitations resulting from the fact that “He constantly operates with transcendent presuppositions that stem from the natural conception of the world (‘natürlischen Weltauffassung’)”.19 Kant’s transcendent presuppositions are, to be sure, subtler and less evidently related to the dogmatic “naturalistic” standpoint of most formulations of the problem of knowledge, but they are no less harmful. they are transcendencies that, under the title affecting thing in itself, are derived from the natural thesis of the extra-subjective world, in part from the material external world that is naturally given, in part, under the title transcendental faculties and functional laws, from the natural reality of the subject, as a subject of faculties that manifests itself in the actual behavior of consciousness, of a human person.20 As is clear from this quotation, Husserl believes that the very notion of thing in itself is derived from the natural positing of an extra-subjective, i.e., transcendent world. Kant, of course, does not equate the thing in itself to what is taken as real by common sense, but his notion of the thing in itself is a philosophical construction grown out of the things of common sense, once the problem of the correspondence between representation and object is raised. Likewise, Kant’s 399
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use of transcendental faculties and functional laws derives from the natural apprehension of the human subject. These examples are meant to highlight that the pure formulation of the problem of transcendent knowledge becomes possible only if the natural attitude, i.e., the attitude based on the thesis of the existence of spatiotemporal reality, is made thematic and suspended. The key to understanding the possibility of overcoming the natural attitude is found in refection. By refecting on our conscious life, we realize that all objects, from the things of immediate perception to the highest theoretical products of scientifc thought, are unities corresponding to a multiplicity of acts of consciousness intending them. By refecting on our conscious life, we bring to light these interlocked systems of intentional Erlebnisse along with their various components that constitute transcendent objects. Conversely, we realize that any object confrms its self-identity in a multiplicity of manifestations that can be brought to a refective scrutiny. Moreover, we realize that such multiplicity of manifestations (of ways of appearing) is specifc to each determined region of being. Now, it becomes clear that the authentic notion of reason refers to these constituting multiplicities of consciousnesses.The fundamental theory or critique of reason consists in a systematic investigation of the essence of these multiplicities of consciousnesses.The main difference between Husserl’s critique of reason and Husserl’s consequent radical formulation of the problem of knowledge, on the one hand, and the classical formulations just mentioned, on the other, lies in the new form of appeal to refection on which the former rests. Indeed, since knowledge consists always in an Erlebnis,21 the problem of the possibility of knowledge makes sense only when correctly referred to the relation between Erlebnisse and their objects.22 Refection, to be sure, is not a novelty in the history of modern philosophy, but the inability of completely overcoming the anthropological or naturalistic formulation of the problem of knowledge was a consequence of the inability to purify the refective analysis from all transcendencies, whether causal-external or internal (under the guise of psychic faculties and corresponding laws). Furthermore, shortly after writing the Logical Investigations, as is well known, Husserl came to realize that even the purely descriptive study of the essence of the acts of knowledge practiced there, even purely descriptive psychology, was unable to secure the authentic ground of the theory of knowledge, even though no explicit claims about transcendent realities were in play. So long as these analyses concerned the essence of psychological Erlebnisse, their object was still, in principle, a part of the world, whose (material) a priori form was in question. Only the transcendental reduction (the suspension of the natural attitude) and, consequently, the transformation of psychological refection into phenomenological refection could open up the feld of an investigation into the essence of consciousness conceived, not as a part of the world, but as the absolute ground of manifestation of the world including human and animal subjects. Such an advance was made possible, as, again, is well known, by the realization that the object of refection includes not only the noetic side of consciousness but also the noematic side, the side of the intended objects as intended.The world becomes included in the feld of phenomenology as phenomenon, and the transcendental subject appears as the subject that not only has before it, so to speak, all transcendencies, but also, in a specifc sense, includes them as synthetic units of sense. At this point, the analysis of knowledge carried out by psychological refection acquires the character of a legitimate but partial and derivative feld of investigation.23 It is now possible to give a list of defnitions clarifying the relation between transcendental phenomenology and the theory of knowledge. The rational consciousness, conceived as the structured totality of the constituting acts of consciousness, which has been in question up to now, was doxic or theoretical consciousness, the one that is at work in the specifcally cognitive accomplishments. Along with doxic rational consciousness, one must frst consider axiological 400
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consciousness as constitutive of values and practical consciousness as constitutive of the objects of will. Even these three spheres of rational consciousness (that according to Husserl make an inseparable unit24) do not coincide with consciousness in general.25 Consciousness in general also includes, to be sure,“unreason” or irrationality, and also the sphere of neutral consciousness such as the sphere of phantasy with its correlated quasi-worlds.26 Accordingly, transcendental phenomenology, or the eidetic science of transcendental consciousness requiring the pure, or transcendental, or phenomenological apperception27 will frst investigate the most general structures of consciousness, those that are common to all the aforementioned species of consciousness. For instance, a general account of the essence of any intentional act and of its inseparable components will fall in the general part of phenomenology. Such general part is required for the development of phenomenology of reason with its three different components. As for the relation between transcendental phenomenology and the theory of knowledge: The legitimate problems of the theory of knowledge, this is the sense of all these considerations, can be posed only on the terrain of phenomenology. All radical problems of the theory of knowledge are phenomenological, and all other problems, that can further be ranked under this title, among which the problems of the correct “interpretation” of factual nature and of the results of natural sciences, presuppose the pure problems of the theory of knowledge, i.e., the phenomenological – unless they are not absurd problems, in which case, however, the important task is to dissolve these absurdities and to guide absurd thinking to the way of clarity.28 This means that the part of the theory of knowledge that concerns the fundamental and general problems of the “correlation between pure, knowing reason and reality”29 is absorbed by transcendental phenomenology; more specifcally, by the phenomenology of reason.30 The more applied problems that stem from the interpretation of the factual sciences, which, as Husserl says, are also considered as belonging to the theory of knowledge, will be addressed on the basis of the eidetic insights provided by the phenomenology of reason. It is also important to notice that the theory of knowledge of transcendence is only a part of the general theory of knowledge that will extend to all objects in general, including the immanent ones.31 Consequently, Husserl extends the use of the term “transcendental” beyond the thematic of the constitution of transcendence to include all authentic problems concerning the possibility of knowledge.32 Finally, in light of these conclusions, it appears that transcendental phenomenology can be considered as a Wissenschaftstheorie, and precisely as that Wissenschaftstheorie that consists in a study of the functions of consciousness at work in all scientifc accomplishments, including phenomenology itself.33 In this way we reach the most fundamental level of problems pertaining to knowledge, one that is necessary also for elucidating the totality of the a priori cognitions belonging to the formal and material disciplines making up the “objective” part of the theory of science.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
See Heidegger 1962, especially §§ 13, 31–33, 44–45. See Heidegger 1967, 1997. Hua-Mat III, 223–255. Hua-Mat III, 84. Hua XVIII, 256. Ideas I, §9. Hua XXV, 126 and 32. Hua XXV, 133.
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References Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1967. What Is a Thing? Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. ———. 1997. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations:An Introduction to Phenomenology.Trans. D. Cairns.The Hague: Martinus Nijoff. ———. 1999. The Idea of Phenomenology.Trans. L. Hardee. Dordrecht: Springer.
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35 TIME Nicolas de Warren
Introduction It does not require any special knowledge or instruction to recognize how essential time proves to be for human existence. This essential bearing of time becomes acutely felt when we have not enough of time at our disposal, when we regret bygone days never to be regained, when we dread future days beyond our control, or when we seem to have too much time on our hands, not knowing what to do with ourselves. Ordinarily, even as we are continually preoccupied with the time of our lives, rare are those instances when we are bluntly confronted by the question “what is time?”We might indeed become attentive to time due to practical considerations, not having enough or having too much for our doings; we might become attentive to time given its varied rhythms, when we languish in boredom without end or stand amazed at how “fast” the time has fown; we might become attentive to time given our embodied existence, with the weariness of fatigue or unwelcome signs of aging; we might become attentive to time when we calculate the origins of the universe, discover prehistoric footprints of hominids, or visit Ancient Greek temples; we might become attentive to time with birth and death, or in those decisive transitions in between, days of crisis or nights of transformation, or with the daily hiatus from our waking lives in sleep and dreaming. Throughout these manifestations of time’s essential bearing for our lives, however time is experienced, calculated, managed, and represented, we still take it for granted, that time passes, and we along, and the world, as well. If time can be problematic for us in so many ways without ever having us question the fundamental sense in which time passes, what it would mean to question “what is time?”, rather than, more familiarly, what to do with time, how to calculate time, or where to get more time? In contrast to engagements with the problem of time (calculating time, managing time, narrating time, etc.), what distinguishes a philosophical engagement with the question of time is the attempt to think through constitutive paradoxes of time that otherwise remain in our common experience of time unaddressed and, in this regard, unspoken for. We are able meet life’s incessant challenges as well as tackle the manifold problems of the world without ever having to worry about what it is for human life to exist, along with things of the world, in time. As Augustine formulated in the Confessions, to ask “what is time?” is to fnd oneself arrested in a questioning for which knowing how to deal with time in our everyday affairs does not inform us about how to respond. In this unknowing stance before 403
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ourselves (as Augustine famously states: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know”), our routine and rote abilities to decide, to calculate, to represent, to act, or simply: to wait – ways in which we deal in problems with time – seem to be of no avail.We fnd ourselves in a situation of questioning in which there is nothing else for us to do but think. Among 20th-century philosophers, it is arguably Husserl and Heidegger, in their contrasting phenomenological efforts (transcendental for Husserl, ontological for Heidegger), who most substantially and infuentially engaged time’s constitutive paradoxes in their questioning, thus making of their efforts a still unequalled thinking of time in its essential bearing for human existence.Although Husserl and Heidegger are comparable and contrastable in many ways with regard to method, terminology, aims, philosophical framework, and historical references, their respective discussions of time can be proftably seen as engaging four fundamental paradoxes of time, the constellation of which delineates and motivates what we should properly understand as a phenomenology of time. Let us briefy identify these four paradoxes. First: What makes time ubiquitously familiar is temporal passage, often expressed as “fowing” or “streaming.” No matter how and what we experience in time, to be in time is to be articulated temporally as past, present, and future. What is paradoxical about temporal passage (neither the future nor the past exist; the present exists only to no longer exist) is not fully captured with the commonplace intuition that “all things fow.” More signifcantly, the paradox of temporal passage resides with how time is just as much “the destroyer of all things” as well as the “creator of all things.”Time is both “order” and “disorder,” “bringing together” and “taking apart.” In Aristotle’s terminology, the past, present, and future structure time as taxis and diaeresis. Second: It is a truism that we cannot create time in the sense that we could have more of time than afforded by the fnite span of life allotted to each of us as mortal beings; we are created beings with a beginning and an end.We cannot reverse or undo time, nor halt its incessant passage; the past is irreversible, the future is unpredictable.Yet, it seems equally true that we necessarily constitute the sense of time’s passage: in our nostalgia for the past, we acutely sense the past as irreversible; in our anxiety before the future, we acutely sense the future as unpredictable. To sense time as passing is constituted by us, and yet it conditions us in a manner that we cannot unconstitute, or constitute otherwise.We would not be nostalgic if we could not constitute the sense of the past as irreversible while at the same time fnding ourselves conditioned, and hence constituted by this very irreversibility. Third: Much of our dealing with time centers on our concern with the world in the mirror of caring for ourselves. Our sense of uniqueness as living beings, the axis about which our concerns and cares turn, would seem intuitively to be intrinsically bound to time. And yet, although we have but one life, we are able to live in many ways, and exist stretched across the time of our lives in such a manner that we might question whether within the oneness of life we are able (indeed: whether it is desirable) to achieve a sense of life as a whole, such that we might claim our life to have been one. Fourth:The protean ubiquity of time’s presence is marked by the peculiarity that time itself, in contrast to things or persons in time, does not seem to appear distinctly: we cannot perceive time as we see colors, hear sounds, or touch surfaces. As Aristotle proposed, although our sense for time would seem to be common to all sensory modes of perception, time itself is not a specifc property of sensory perception or kind of sensory awareness.We see things in time, not time itself. The paradox of time’s palpable invisibility equally invokes a paradox of description. What are we describing when we speak of time? Are metaphors (and narratives) indispensable for any description, theoretical or otherwise, of time? Can we directly see the time of which we are speaking and thinking? Can we speak of time directly without having to see and think something else? 404
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Husserl Husserl’s phenomenology of time inherits a traditional casting of the question “what is time?” reaching back to Augustine’s Confessions. In this mold, the question “what is time?” implies the question “who am I?” Cashed out in phenomenological terms, our perception of time is inseparable from our awareness of ourselves in time; to ask how we experience time is to ask in the same breath how we experience ourselves in time. Husserl’s point of departure is this ubiquitous experience of temporal passage: we hear music in time much as we perceive trees in time. How do we perceive temporal succession as a unifed phenomenon (the melody as a melody as opposed to random notes or a chord)? How does the consciousness of temporal succession form within the temporal succession of consciousness itself? As any form of consciousness, the perceptual experience of time must be understood along the lines of intentionality. As Husserl stipulates, however, consciousness of an intentional object is at the same time a consciousness of itself, an experiencing of itself as perceiving an object.The way in which perceptual objects are manifest to consciousness is inseparable, yet distinct from how consciousness is manifest for itself. Both aspects – the object I perceive as well as the experience I have of myself as perceiving – are temporal; but, are they temporal in a similar sense? Both are structured by the passage of time, and yet, the experiencing of consciousness is distinct from the object of experience (a tree, a melody). Husserl reserves the term “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit) to speak of the former, while the term “time” (Zeit) refers the latter.Time is founded on temporality.The meaning of the temporal distinctions “past,” “present,” and “future” are founded in experiencing ourselves as past, present, future; to wit, through the temporal passing of our own awareness. Given that consciousness always experiences itself in a temporal manner, the consciousness of time cannot represent a particular kind of intentionality (as, for example, perception), but establishes the form of every form of consciousness whatsoever; whether we dream, perceive, imagine, remember, or think, we do so in a manner whereby our consciousness relates to its intentional objects as well as to itself in a temporal manner.What Husserl dubs “inner time-consciousness” is a fundamental form of consciousness within every form of consciousness, insofar as every form of intentionality, as other-related and self-related, is structured as time-consciousness. In this manner, “inner time-consciousness” is deemed the genuine “absolute” of transcendental subjectivity: the irreducible condition of possibility for experience as such. It is neither “subjective” or “objective,” but the structure in which intentionality, and hence, the relatedness of mind and world, becomes itself constituted.Absolute inner time-consciousness undergirds Husserl’s principal insight into consciousness as “transcendence in immanence.”The paradox here, however, with which Husserl never found philosophical peace, is how transcendental subjectivity is both constituting and constituted, or, in other words, world-constituting as time-consciousness as well as itself constituted in the world of time. If inner time-consciousness is the absolute form of every form of consciousness (i.e., intentionality), what distinctive phenomenological characteristics does it possess? Indeed, how can we speak, let alone see the phenomenon of time as such, as the intentional object of consciousness, given that time itself is nothing we can see, touch, or feel? What does it mean, with regard to time-consciousness, to “return to the matters themselves?” Kant argued that time is a pure form of appearance (not an appearance itself). Aristotle defned time as the number of motion with regard to the before and after on the basis of a noetic (cognitive) apprehension of temporal succession. Each rejects that time itself can be seen; for both, time is, strictly speaking, not a phenomenon, but the order of manifestation for phenomena (and for Kant: the a priori structuring of how consciousness forms for itself ordered and intelligible appearances). Contrary to this tradition, it is methodologically critical for Husserl’s phenomenological approach that time can 405
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be rendered into a phenomenon, or, in other words, that a description of time as the form of all forms of manifestation must be based on a description of the manifestation of time. Although time itself cannot be seen, the perception of things in time allows for a manner of seeing how time is nonetheless manifest in experience, not in terms of those properties of objects like color, sound, etc., but as the manner in which objects become manifest. The manifestation of time is overlooked to the degree that time (or more accurately: time-consciousness) is the transparent form in which any object achieves a form of manifestation, but which itself does not become manifest as any given form of object. In this respect, the traditional question of what time is becomes transformed into the genuinely phenomenological question of how time becomes manifest in the consciousness of how the world becomes given. Husserl’s primary concern is therefore not ontological, but transcendental, as an inquiry into conditions of givenness – conditions that are themselves retrievable from experience through a distinctive phenomenological method of refection. Towards this end, Husserl deploys the method of epoché and transcendental reduction to recover the constitutive functioning of inner time-consciousness within experience.This analysis takes the parallel form of an archaeology of the structuring of time-consciousness and a genealogy of structured experiences in time-consciousness. Husserl’s descriptive language combines re-minted metaphors (time-consciousness as fowing, the past as fading-away, etc.), phenomenological concepts (intentionality, hylé, etc.) and mathematical terms, with a marked proclivity for geometric fgures (point, line, plane), as well as a series of time-diagrams. Throughout, Husserl insists that we must see the structures of temporalization brought into view through such descriptive means. Such descriptions are shaped by the signature method of eidetic variation and Wesenschau.Within the process of eidetic variation, the constitutive principles of retrieval, repetition, and forecasting makes of Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness an exemplifcation of the self-temporalization of consciousness under (its own) description. The analysis of time-consciousness in this manner performs the “object” of its inquiry: the activity of thinking time-consciousness realizes the self-temporalization of inner time-consciousness itself. In this manner, Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness is a νοήσεως νόησις. Phenomenology only realizes itself fully as thinking in the phenomenology of time-consciousness, not as divine intellect, but as transcendental Besinnung. No wonder, then, that Husserl repeatedly remarked that time-consciousness represented the most diffcult, yet most fundamental problem for phenomenological thinking. On the basis of a description of the commonplace experience of hearing a melody (or what Husserl calls a “time-object,” i.e., an object intrinsically constituted through time), Husserl argues that the duration of an object (the sense we have of the object as passing in time) is not based on the co-ordination of memory, perception, and anticipation. Already within the act of perception, yet without any reference to memory (as recalling what has already elapsed) or expectation (as anticipating what is not yet elapsing), Husserl discovers a temporally differentiated structuring of time-consciousness. In hearing a melody, I perceive in terms of what Husserl terms a “traverse-intentionality” the temporal extension of three notes as a unifed time-object. Each note of the melody is perceived in the temporal sequence of before and after on the basis of the temporal distention of consciousness in terms of what Husserl calls “length-intentionality.” Inner time-consciousness is a double-intentionality: I hear the melody in time and experience myself (temporally) as hearing the melody.This living present of a perceptual act of consciousness is structured in terms of retention, original presentation, and protention. Every original presentation (consciousness of the now) is necessarily modifed through a retention, or retentional consciousness; every now must necessarily pass away into the immediate past as just-now. Likewise, every original presentation forecasts a protentional consciousness awaiting, as it were, 406
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a not-yet-now. While hearing a note as now, an earlier note becomes retained in consciousness as no longer present.“Retention” does not mean “holding onto something that is moving away,” but constituting the moving away, or passage, of the now: consciousness “absents” or “de-presences” itself in withholding itself from a presence that would not pass away. Husserl in this regard characterizes retention as a “de-presentifcation” and “emptying” of an original presentation. An original presentation is likewise characterized in terms “novelty” as the fulfllment of a forecasting protention.The genial insight here is that the passage of the now must itself be constituted in consciousness, even as consciousness itself, in its constitution of temporal passage, must suffer its own temporal passage. Consciousness both constitutes itself as time and becomes itself constituted in time; we have a sense for the passing away of the world because we ourselves are passing away. Composed through the three-fold imbrications of retention, original presentation, and protention, the temporality of time-consciousness is neither circular nor linear. Within the perpetual streaming of time-consciousness, consciousness comes to have stand (i.e., intentionality) with regard to the world and itself. Husserl thus speaks of the living present as “standingstreaming” (die stehende-stromende Gegenwart). Life is “standing-streaming” in its self-presence and self-absence.This “standing-streaming” of time-consciousness must not be confated with a “stream” or “fow” of chronological or mathematical time, both of which are in fact constituted within this more primordial temporality. Moreover, time-consciousness is neither activity or passivity: consciousness is not passively in the steam of time nor does the stream of time gush forth from consciousness. Consciousness “temporalizes itself ” in temporalizing a world other than itself to which it is necessarily bound and directed.The intelligibility of the world, as constituted through – not “in” or “by” – time-consciousness does stand against the passage of time, but endures through the passage of time, but always with the intrinsic transcendental risk that crisis and ruptures of the world (and the constituting accomplishments of consciousness) are always possible, against which time itself offers the promise of renewal and retrieval. In addition to Husserl’s refections on historicity, the implications of the standing-streaming of timeconsciousness are apparent in his ethical thought. An ethical person is both a task or challenge (Aufgabe) and a drive (Trieb): an ethical life must strive to defne and shape itself under an Idea of itself in such manner that life strives to attain consistency and unity among its beliefs and actions. Such ethical self-temporalization requires, on the one hand, habits and habitualizations and, on the other hand, constant readiness for self-renewal and self-bracketing (or what Husserl calls an “ethical epoché”). An ethical life strives to achieve wholeness from its temporal streaming, yet this wholeness always remains an Idea – an infnite task – which thus perpetually keeps open a remainder, or surplus, in which life either measures itself as (nearly) fulflled or as (nearly) divided from itself.
Heidegger The meaningfulness of the world has always been intuitively grasped as inseparable from the manifold ways in which the world becomes in time. In its most basic form, what it means for something to be, whether ourselves, others, or things of the world, would seem to be bound up with what it means to be present. According to Heidegger,Western philosophical thinking, broadly subsumed under the heading “metaphysics,” has consistently defned the different senses of being (what it means to be) in terms of different senses of temporal presence (what it means to be present). One might divide what there is into beings that have beginnings and endings, beings that have neither beginnings or endings, beings that are created, or beings that are uncreated. Regardless of how many are the ways in which being can be said, the fundamental sense of 407
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what it means to be remains understood as some form of “to be present.” Metaphysical thinking remains beholden to a metaphysics of presence.Yet, it is precisely this assumption that “to be” means “to be present,” and likewise, that “to be present” means “to be,” that Heidegger contends has in fact remained unthought, that is, unquestioned, despite a robust philosophical tradition dedicated to understanding what it means to be.The history of metaphysics is predicated on a forgetting of the question of being, but by the same token, a constitutive forgetting of the question of time. Heidegger’s thinking is driven by the attempt to retrieve and reanimate the question regarding the meaning, or meaningfulness, of being (die Frage nach dem Sinn des Seins) from its metaphysical forgetting. Hence the title of Heidegger’s magnum opus: Being and Time. The emphasis must be seen neither on either being or time taken either separately in relation to each other, but on the “and,” which designates less a conjunction of two distinct themes, as it marks the thematic locus for thinking anew the temporality of being and the being of temporality. Rather than address the question concerning the meaningfulness of being directly, Heidegger proposes that the question must frst be turned upon itself. We should not take the question of the meaningfulness of being as an historical or experiential given, but should begin instead by inquiring into who is that being for whom the question of being is at all meaningful, not in terms of already possessing an answer, but in the more questioning sense of there being at all a question of being.That being for whom “what it means to be” is at all a question is called Dasein, where the term “da” does not mean in the frst instance “here” or “there,” but openness in being (In-Sein) and to being (Zu-Sein), not just its own being (as Dasein), but to being whatsoever (as Da-sein).The aim of Being and Time is thus to develop an ontological understanding of Dasein as a preliminary stage towards posing and pursuing the question of the meaningfulness of being. The aim of Being and Time, in other words, is not to answer the question of being; it is to understand how frst to arrive at the question of being by way of an understanding of who that being is for whom being is at all in question.The argument proposed by Heidegger is here that the fundamental way in which Dasein exists is structured and delimited by temporality (Zeitlichkeit). Temporality is the horizon for how Dasein understands itself as being-in-the-world and, hence, the horizon for its understanding of what it means that there is being.As suggested by the term horizon, temporality belongs to Dasein in the structuring of its existence as openness to being but also circumscribes the disclosure of being for Dasein. As “two in one,” Dasein’s horizon of temporality both brings together and separates the “and” of being and time. Given Heidegger’s gambit of retrieving a forgotten line of questioning from an obscuring history of philosophy, Heidegger’s efforts are keenly attuned to the problem of language. How one speaks in philosophy cannot be taken for granted given that our inherited modes of speaking are predicated on answering a question that remains fundamentally obscure. At the time, this obscurity could not be detected and silhouetted within the historical remembrance of philosophy without this remembrance, unable to remember what it had forgotten. History is haunted by the remembrance of what it could never have thought, the unthought. Heidegger’s analysis must therefore in same breath “destroy” or “dismantle” inherited ways of thinking (and speaking) while uncovering the primordial (i.e., ontological) dimensions of Dasein’s manner of existence in its temporality. With specifc reference to temporality, Heidegger’s discussion eschews any reliance on metaphors of time as well as any claimed touchstone of “lived experience.”This reconfguration of how to speak about time philosophically likewise strives to break the inherited grammar of time as sequentially structured in terms of “past, present, future.” The implicit geometry of time (whether as a line, a set of points, a spiral, or circle) within traditional philosophical accounts (from Aristotle to Hegel to Husserl) is equally conspicuously absent in Heidegger’s thinking.This does not represent a disconnection or divorce of spatiality from temporality. On the contrary, it represents a re-thinking of both spatiality and temporality 408
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through an ontological understanding of Dasein’s existence as a “spatializing” and “temporalizing” ex-static movement, where movement (ex-stasis) structures “possibilities” and “actualities.” Many of the terms employed in Heidegger’s thinking must be read in their literal and etymological sense (Zu-Kunft, Ge-Wesen, Gegen-wärtigen, etc.) Moreover, although opaque at frst sight, much of Heidegger’s idiosyncratic vocabulary plays on idiomatic or intuitive meanings, often closely bound to possessing an ear for a given term.The point of this ingenious vocabulary is in keeping with the basic contention of Heidegger’s approach, namely, that he seeks to bring into thinking what is most self-evident and taken for granted, and thus, in that very condition, what is most distant and remote from us.Temporality is both that which most near to our being, in our being, and that which seems most distant from our being, insofar as our being is in time. Methodologically, this employment of a distinctive kind of discourse is coupled with an equally distinctive structure of argumentation in Being and Time. After having launched his enterprise, Heidegger examines Dasein as being-in-the-world and concludes with the discovery that the fundamental sense in which Dasein exists is “concern” (Sorge). The constitution of Dasein as concern is composed of multiple ways of being as well as “stretched out,” given that Dasein exists as a being with a beginning and an end to which it relates, imbued for its existence with either meaning or apparent lack thereof.The structure of “concern” does not deliver a primordial understanding of the wholeness of Dasein’s existence, which, in fact, must be discovered as grounded in its primordial temporality: the temporality that Dasein “exists” or “is.”This requires a repetition of the analysis of Dasein as “concern,” now uncovered from its ground in its own existential temporality. This repetition is, however, forecasted already, such that the encounter, or uncovering, of primordial temporality enacts the temporality of its own discovery. Being and Time is itself ex-statically structured by the ex-static temporality it itself uncovers and, in this sense, thinks. Heidegger’s analysis becomes deployed in two installments. As a frst installment, Heidegger undertakes an ontological analysis of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. The guiding thought is to understand the various senses in which Dasein exists “in” the world.What it means for Dasein to be “in” leads to an encompassing discussion of the “worldliness” of the world, which includes how Dasein engages with things of the world, how Dasein is always related to others (Mitsein), and how Dasein is always involved with itself (Selbstsein).Three important insights emerge from this ontological analysis in view of the issue of temporality. First: a defning manner of Dasein’s existence is to be both self-obscuring and self-revealing. In Heidegger’s vocabulary, Dasein loses itself to the world and in the They (das Man). In the condition of everydayness, Dasein exists outside of itself: it defnes its own being through its worldly concerns and engagements, rather than defne itself in the world with respect to its own singular being. Lost to the world, Dasein can nonetheless recuperate itself and resolutely reveal itself to itself in terms of what characterizes the singularity of its own being: its mortality. Rather than speak of time or consciousness as “fowing” or “streaming,” Heidegger instead characterizes the ontological meaning of Dasein’s existence as fuctuating between self-obscurity and self-revelation, or, in his language, “inauthentic” and “authentic” manners of being. Second: in dealing with things of the world, things of the world come to make sense in terms of Dasein’s projection of possibilities ahead of itself as well as always fnding itself inscribed and involved with the world.What it is to understand is to continually encounter things of the world within this fold of possibilities; the ability to fuently handle the hammer attests to an understanding in situ and in actu in which I understand what the hammer “is” as a function of what a hammer is for, how I have already used it, and what situation I presently fnd myself in.Third: Heidegger identifes three existential manners of being within the constitution of Dasein’s being-in-the-world: Befndlichkeit (poorly and misleadingly given in English as mood or temperament), Verstehen (loosely: “understanding”) and Rede (speech, 409
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discourse).This three-fold structure represents the many existential ways in which Dasein can be said to be in the world. By way of an analysis of what Heidegger calls the “foundational temperament” of anxiety (die Grundbefndlichkeit) – the way in which Dasein becomes anxious of its existence as a whole (rather than fearful of any determined object in the world) – we arrive at the insight that the fundamental sense of Dasein’s being is concern (Sorge).What it is for Dasein to be is to be concerned with things of the world, with others, and with itself in the world. Dasein is “stretched along” in its existence as concern, but not in terms of spatial extension or temporal succession, but in a two-fold sense of “self-obscuring” and “self-revealing” as well as constituted in terms of the three-fold existential manners of being. Dasein is “stretched along” in its concern with the world. As “stretched along,” Dasein’s existence not only spans a whole, but within that whole, is stretched along away from itself, fallen into the world through its everyday concerns (with things and others). Concern with the world amounts to a manner of existence in which Dasein does not defne its being resolutely from and for itself, but from the world and for others. As self-obscuring, Dasein renders itself present to the world in giving of itself – literally: its own time – to the world: in fnding things of the world interesting and caring for itself in the world, Dasein temporalizes itself as present to itself in the world.What Heidegger designates as “clocktime” or “world-time” defnes time as an ordering of things in relation to the before and after of numerically distinct now-points.The basic form of world-time is to be present in the now. As the experience of compulsively checking our time-telling devices makes evident, chronological time is couched within the fundamental structure of Dasein’s being in the world as concern.We look to our watches because we are concerned with the world. In an ingenious turn of argument, Heidegger re-casts the image of temporality as the standing-streaming of consciousness into an existential manner in which Dasein has left itself behind in its own temporal self-manifestation as present to the world. Dasein has strung itself along in the time of the world, and exists in a “stretched now” (the now of the evening) that passes along without Dasein taking any notice of itself in its temporal existence. In dispersing itself in the world, Dasein is made to stand on par with the things of the world in the form of presence. The being of Dasein as concern does not, on Heidegger’s argument, uncover the fundamental ground for Dasein’s wholeness or the sense in which Dasein exists as a being with a beginning and, most saliently, an end.An analysis of Dasein’s original temporality – the temporalization that Dasein “is” – promises to uncover the ground, or fundamental meaningfulness for the sense in which Dasein exists in its being-in-the-world as “concern.”What abides, or stands out, as both exceptional and forgotten, within Dasein’s in-streaming concern with the world, is the possibility of its own impossibility – an horizon of being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode) that lines from within every possibility of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, even as this horizon remains external to Dasein’s everyday concerns insofar as mortality is not owned up to as Dasein’s ownmost possibility for being. The possibility for the “whole-being” of Dasein remains unclear without an analysis of “being-towards-death” and original temporality. To be concerned with the world is ontologically to be concerned until death. Heidegger identifes three “moments” or “ex-stasis” within Dasein’s original temporality. These three “ex-stasis” are “equi-primordial.” Each is, strictly speaking, neither before or after the other; each is contained in the other, that is, implied. The ex-static moment of what Heidegger terms Zu-kunft (literally: to or towards what is coming or arriving), on the basis of which Dasein can be ahead-of-itself in projecting possibilities, is emphatically characterized as not meaning a now that is not yet. Rather, it designates the “coming” (die Kunft) in which Dasein comes towards itself in its own-most being to be (Seinskönnen).A genuine sense of the future is not waiting for something to arrive, but frst arriving at ourselves in our own-most, namely, our 410
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running-head-long (Vorlaufen) towards death. In this sense, the “future” is the most originary and authentic temporality. The ex-stasis of “das Gewesen” (literally: “the has been” but also a tacit play on “essence” as “what is it what was, or has been”) likewise does not designate the past that we have left behind, retained, or abandoned. Dasein is only as having been, and in having been thrown into its own existence, Dasein can come back to itself in coming into its own-most, the future.The ex-stasis of what Heidegger terms Gegenwärtigen refers to the situation or encounter in which Dasein fnds itself, straddled, as it were, within a future that has been and a has been that remains oncoming.The unity of these three ex-static moments composes Dasein’s temporality as two and one: as both the originary structure of being-outside itself, strung along in the world, and as returning for itself in deciding for itself in owning up to the possibility of its impossibility, or being towards death. In coming back to oneself as the singular death that Dasein can only be for itself, Dasein can encounter the whole once more in the assuredness of a meaningfulness that neither the world nor others can rob from it nor be responsible for it.
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36 TRUTH AND EVIDENCE George Heffernan
36.1. Essential distinctions Evidence differs from Evidenz. The epistemic meaning of the English evidence refects its legal sense as what enables someone to see that something is the case. The German word for this is Beweismittel. The German Evidenz refers to the seeing or showing that something is so: not a given but a giving, not an entity but an activity, not a product but a process. The “problem of evidence” (Hua XXIV, 153–6) is a “problem of givenness” (Gegebenheit) – “the myth of the given” notwithstanding (Soffer 2003). Evidence is an “experience” (Erlebnis: Hua XXIV, 316) of “givenness” (Gegebenheit) involving “insightfulness”, not “blindness” (Hua XXIV, 155). Insightfulness is not intensity, which is not veracity (Hua XXIV, 7–8). Nor is evidence an index, a criterion, natural light, feeling or taste (Hua XXIV, 155–6).These cannot ground knowledge (Hua XXIV, 166–78). Evidence involves ideal-normative connections between knowing acts and known contents (Hua XXIV, 16–21, 138, 140–1, 158). Givenness is an encompassing concept (Hua XXIV, 155).Types of evidence correspond to types of givens (Hua XXIV, 172).“Of varying perfection” (Hua XXIV, 322), evidence is a matter of degrees; which are achievable, is a function of the evident (Hua XXIV, 214–16, 220–30, 309–25, 344–8). Evidence is said in many senses (Hua XXIV, 316, 351). What evidence is depends on what is evident; analogously for truth and what is true.
36.2. Before Husserl: rationalism, empiricism, psychologism Descartes seeks to demonstrate that everything that one clearly and distinctly perceives is true by proving that God exists and guarantees the connection between evidence and truth (Descartes 1984, 9, 11, 24, 31–2, 43, 45, 48).Yet it seems that one can know that what one clearly and distinctly perceives is true only if one knows that God exists and does not deceive, and that one can know that God exists and does not deceive only if one knows that what one clearly and distinctly perceives is true. Descartes denies the circularity (Descartes 1984, 100–1, 103–4, 171). Hume argues that all reasonings concerning experience are founded not on reason but on custom (Hume 1975, 26–47). Such reasonings are based on “feelings” that enable human beings to distinguish between beliefs and conceptions (Hume 1975, 47–55). Evidence emerges as a feeling that attaches to belief and differentiates it from conception (Hume 1975, 48–50). Belief 412
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“is nothing but a peculiar feeling, different from the simple conception” (Hume 1978, 624). The only difference between belief and conception is the feeling that accompanies belief (Hume 1978, 623–39, 645–62). Psychologistic theories of evidence clouded nineteenth-century logic (Heffernan 2000, 97–118). Mill defnes logic as “theory” or “philosophy of evidence” (Mill 1878, 462, 473, 475–6, 478). Sigwart sees logic as focused on “[the] subjective […] inner feeling [Gefühl] of evidence” (Sigwart 1889, 16). Höfer and Meinong argue that logic articulates the psychological laws of evidence (Höfer and Meinong 1890, 16–17, 129–36).Wundt views the psychology of thinking as more basic than the logic of thought (Wundt 1893, 91). Elsenhans claims that logic investigates the psychological aspects of its objects (Elsenhans 1897, 203) and that justifcation involves “feelings of evidence” (Evidenzgefühle) (Elsenhans 1912, 289 ff.). Husserl rejects Descartes’s “theological theory of evidence” as circular (Hua I, 3, 43, 63–70, 116–21; Hua II, 9–10, 45; Hua VI, 76–85, 92–3; Hua VII, 63–9, 79, 86, 116–25, 341; Hua IX, 330; Hua X, 353; Hua XVII, 234–8, 286–8; Hua XXIX, 112; Hua XXX, 323; Hua XXXV, 63, 71–4; Heffernan 1997). He criticizes Hume’s affective account of evidence as unreliable (Hua II, 20; Hua III/1, 132–4; HuaVI, 68–9, 88–100, 233–5; HuaVII, 157–81; Hua XVII, 174–5, 177–8, 217–18, 262–73; Hua XVIII, 94–5, 190–5, 197–200; Hua XXIV, 348–55; Hua XXX, 374–81). He deconstructs the views of the psychologistic logicians, especially Wundt, Sigwart, Erdmann, and Lipps (Hua XVIII, 131), arguing that the notion that evidence is a psychological phenomenon relativizes and subjectivizes absolute and objective logical laws (Hua XXII, 132–3, 135, 141, 203–9, 212, 217, 220, 224–35). He agrees with Brentano’s position that evidence is not a feeling (Brentano 1930, 61–9; Brentano 1969, 66–71, 103–6) but disagrees with his claim that evidence knows no degrees (Brentano 1925/1970, 170, 175–6, 178; Brentano 1930, 148–50; Brentano 1968/1974, 25, 27–31; Brentano 1978, 111).
36.3. Phenomenological description of evidence and truth The chief sources for Husserl’s description of evidence and truth are Logical Investigations (including Prolegomena to Pure Logic), Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (I), and Formal and Transcendental Logic.
36.3.1. Evidence as experience of truth Prolegomena to Pure Logic (1900/1913) describe knowledge as evident true belief (Hua XVIII, 27–37). In psychologism, “evidence”, “a feeling of evidence” (Hua XVIII, 183–4, 194), designates “a unique feeling [that] guarantees the truth of the judgment to which it is attached” (Hua XVIII, 183), “the experience” in which one becomes aware of “the correctness of one’s judgment […], its approximation to the truth” (Hua XVIII, 188–9). In phenomenology, “evidence” is not “an accessory feeling that follows certain judgments”, “a psychic character […] attached to every [‘true’] judgment” (Hua XVIII, 192), but rather “the ‘experience’ of truth” (Hua XVIII, 193): Truth is experienced […] in no other sense than that in which […] something ideal can be an experience in the real act. […] Truth is an idea whose single case in an evident judgment is an actual experience. […] The experience of the concordance […] between the actual sense of the assertion and the self-given state of affairs is evidence, and the idea of this concordance, truth. (Hua XVIII, 193–4) 413
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This concept of evidence, as “a seeing of, an insight into, a grasping of, the self-given” (Hua XVIII, 193), posits a distinction between the “experience of truth” and truth itself (Hua XVIII, 194– 5). Evidence has a “psychological character” (Hua XVIII, 69) but is not a “psychic character” (Hua XVIII, 183). The validity of logical laws depends not on feeting feelings but on constant contents; the psychologistic interpretation of evidence as an accessory feeling that inductively supports assertoric statements misunderstands the apodictic evidence that demonstratively validates these laws (Hua XVIII, 73–6, 92–101, 108–9, 129–30, 141–2, 166–7, 188–9, 231–2, 239–41).
36.3.2. Evidence as transition from empty intention to fulflling intuition Logical Investigations (1900/1901, 1913/1921) clarify evidence and truth by combining the distinctions between empty intentions and fulflling intuitions (Hua XIX/1, 30–110) and between static and dynamic fulfllments of intentions (Hua XIX/2, 544–81). Two approaches emerge (Hua XIX/2, 533–775).The frst, following “the levels of knowledge” (Hua XIX/2, 596–631), emphasizes the loose concept of evidence in the relative sense: “Then it makes good sense to speak of degrees and levels of evidence” (Hua XIX/2, 651). The second, pursuing “the ideal of adequation” (Hua XIX/2, 645–56), emphasizes the strict concept of evidence in the absolute sense: “But the pregnant sense of evidence in the critical epistemic sense concerns exclusively […] this most perfect […] fulfllment, which gives […] the absolute fullness of content […] to the intention” (Hua XIX/2, 651). Husserl distinguishes four senses of truth and evidence: (1) Truth is “the full agreement between the meant and the given”; evidence, the “experience” of “truth” (Hua XIX/2, 651–2). (2) Truth is “the idea that belongs to the form of the act […], the idea of the absolute adequation”; evidence, the “unity of coincidence” between the “epistemic essences” of the real “acts of evidence” (Hua XIX/2, 652). (3) Truth is “the given object in the manner of the meant object […] as truth-making”; evidence, the corresponding “experience” (Hua XIX/2, 652). (4) Truth is the “correctness of the intention […], e.g., correctness of the judgment […], as its being-adequate to the true object”; evidence, a “relation” between the intention and the state of affairs (Hua XIX/2, 653). Evidence is not a feeling attaching to an act of cognition (Hua XIX/2, 656), but an experience conforming to the content of the act (Hua XIX/2, 652, 656) as determined by its quality, matter, and essence (Hua XIX/1, 377–440). “A is evident” means “A is not merely meant, but rather exactly as that, as which it is meant, also truly given; it itself is present in the strictest sense” (Hua XIX/2, 656). Truth and evidence are said in different senses; knowledge is aimed at adequacy and apodicticity (Hua XIX/1, 24–9; Hua XIX/2, 646–50). The quest is for absolute, adequate, and apodictic evidence; the question concerns which truths yield these values. Identical meanings and ideal species demand adequate givenness (Hua XIX/1, 97–101, 104–6, 136, 173, 175–8, 208–10). Distinctions between dependent and independent objects and meanings require apodictic evidence (Hua XIX/1, 237, 239, 243, 326, 334–6, 342–51). Some acts and contents of consciousness yield adequate and/or apodictic evidence (Hua XIX/1, 367–71, 455–61, 508). The distinction between adequate and inadequate perceptions does not coincide with the distinction between categorial and sensuous intuitions (Hua XIX/2, 667–85) or between internal and external perceptions (Hua XIX/1, 24–9, 35, 199–206, 365–71, 455–61; Hua XIX/2, 751–75); the perception of physical objects defes the ideal of adequate evidence (Hua XIX/2, 646–50). Husserl calls Logical Investigations a “breakthrough” to solutions to problems blocking his philosophical clarifcation of mathematics (Hua XVIII, 5–16), but he does not use the work to make logical evidence and truth the measure of all evidence and truth. 414
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36.3.3. Evidence as eidetic intuition Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy I (1913) describe phenomenology as a pure, not factual, science seeking truth based on eidetic, not empirical, evidence (Hua III/1, 10–55). Against empiricism, which reduces evidential experience to sensuous experience, and idealism, which elevates evidence to a “feeling of truth”, Husserl demarcates a concept of evidence encompassing facts and essences (Hua III/1, 41–7). He argues that […] every intuition that presents [something] in an originary way is a legitimate source of knowledge, that everything that offers itself to us in “intuition” in an originary way […] is to be accepted simply as what it presents itself as, but also only within the limits in which it presents itself there. (Hua III/1, 51) This principle of evidence guides research into truths discovered by means of the shift from the natural attitude, which presupposes the reality of the world and the validity of assertions about it, to the phenomenological attitude, which clarifes the objects of the world in relation to the acts of consciousness that intentionally constitute them (Hua III/1, 56–134). The question concerns the evidence of phenomenological investigations (Hua III/1, 156–8) – some immanent perception seems absolute, all transcendent is relative (Hua III/1, 77–9, 86–99, 103–10, 118–21).The horizonality of evidence holds for the perception of physical things: “A thing is necessarily given in mere ‘manners of appearance’ […] necessarily a core of ‘what is actually presented’ is apprehensionally surrounded by a horizon of inauthentic ‘co-givenness’ and […] vague indeterminacy” (Hua III/1, 91). It also holds for categorial perceptions of acts and contents of consciousness; experiences in which they present themselves are surrounded by other experiences not given (Hua III/1, 73).Things “shadow forth” (Hua III/1, 83–8), and experiences do not (Hua III/1, 88), but experiences are not absolutely given without further ado: “An experience […] is never completely perceived; in its full unity, it is not adequately graspable” (Hua III/1, 93).This holds for “the whole stream of experience” (Hua III/1, 94) with its noetic and noematic structures (Hua III/1, 135–294). Noesis (thinking) is the act that belongs to the real (reell) contents of consciousness; noema (thought), the intentional object including its background (Hua III/1, 202–32). The horizonality of givenness raises the question whether adequacy and apodicticity are essential features of absolute evidence (Hua III/1, 56–60, 71–3, 91–4, 99–103, 135–7, 145–8, 180–9, 258–62). “Phenomenology of reason” (Hua III/1, 314–37) defnes evidence as “the unity of a rational positing with what essentially motivates it” (Hua III/1, 316), identifying eidetic evidence as “a peculiar mode of positing”, “an ‘originarily’ presenting seeing of an essence” (Hua III/1, 334). “Phenomenology of evidence” (Hua III/1, 333–7) specifes scientifc evidence as not of “facts” but of “essences” (Hua III/1, 3–55), not of the naïve world of the natural attitude but of the reduced consciousness of the phenomenological (Hua III/1, 56–134). Ideally, such evidence is not inadequate but adequate (Hua III/1, 13–16), not dubitable but apodictic (Hua III/1, 19–20), not relative but absolute (Hua III/1, 91–4, 96–9, 103–10, 118–19).Actually,“perfect evidence” is the exception that proves the rule (Hua III/1, 65, 205, 226, 322). Evidence is not only immediate, originary, and pure, but also mediate, derivative, and impure (Hua III/1, 314–37). One cannot say that facts are many-sided and essences are one-sided (Hua III/1, 93–4). Not all essences are one-dimensional; some are multi-faceted (Hua III/1, 125–30). As in the natural attitude, so in the transcendental, “perfect clarity” is “the universal task and the most encompassing ideal, although it lies in infnity” (HuaV, 104). Self-givenness is a function of the given (HuaV, 103–4). 415
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The question is whether eidetic evidence is necessarily and universally adequate evidence.There are different kinds of eidetic sciences; mathematics deals with ideal laws that govern exact essences and phenomenology works with regional types that order morphological essences (Hua III/1, 23–38, 148–56; Hua XIX/1, 248–52). The horizonality of consciousness pervades the phenomenology of evidence (Hua III/1, 3–9, 184–5, 326–9).The task is to accommodate the quest for adequate evidence within the limits of horizonal consciousness.
36.3.4. Evidence as intentional achievement of self-giving Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) emphasizes the importance of the distinction between intention and fulfllment for the clarifcation of evidence (Hua XVII, 170). Husserl observes that the “possibility of deception” attends but does not negate “each and every evidence”: “Even an evidence that offers itself as apodictic can reveal itself as a deception and yet presupposes for doing so a similar evidence, on which it ‘shatters’” (Hua XVII, 164; Hopp 2009a/b; Heffernan 2009a/b). Evidence is not “an absolute apodicticity”,“an absolute criterion of truth” (Hua XVII, 165), but rather “the intentional achievement of self-giving [die intentionale Leistung der Selbstgebung], […] the universal distinctive form of ‘intentionality’, the ‘consciousness of something’, in which there is consciousness of the intended objective something in the manner of its being grasped itself ” (Hua XVII, 166). Evidence and intentionality are inseparable: “Intentionality in general – experience of a consciousness of anything – and evidence, intentionality of self-giving, are essentially correlative concepts” (Hua XVII, 168). “The basic lawfulness of intentionality” and the “universal function of evidence” are connected; the comprehensive concept of evidence indicates that “evidence [is] a universal manner of intentionality, related to the whole life of consciousness”; evidence gives consciousness “a universal teleological structure” (Hua XVII, 168–9). The general defnition of evidence does not imply an identical structure of evidence: “Category of objectivity and category of evidence are perfect correlates. To every fundamental species of objectivities […] [corresponds] […] a fundamental species […] of evidence” (Hua XVII, 169). “To speechify from above about evidence” – to reduce it to an “insight […] apodictic, absolutely indubitable […], absolutely fnished in itself ” – obfuscates knowledge (Hua XVII, 169, 284, 286).Traditional concepts of evidence with untenable demands for absolute, adequate, and apodictic truth are unhelpful (Hua XVII, 184–238, 262–83). “The usual theories of evidence”, “misled by the presupposition of absolute truth”, interpret evidence as an “absolute grasping of the truth”, and “absolute evidence” as a “psychic character of some experiences of judgment, one that absolutely guarantees that the judicative belief is not mere belief, but rather a belief that brings the truth itself to actual givenness” (Hua XVII, 283–4). These theories miss “the relativity of truth and its evidence” in everyday experience, practical affairs, and technical enterprises – similarly for the interdependence of relative and absolute truth and truth as an infnite idea (Hua XVII, 284). Phenomenology critiques “the presupposition of absolute truth and the dogmatic theories of evidence”, the notion that evidence is “a subjective-psychic character” or “feeling”, and the expectation that evidence be absolute, adequate, and apodictic (Hua XVII, 286–7). It legitimizes imperfect evidence:“Experience [Erfahrung], evidence, gives something existent, and gives it itself: imperfectly, if the experience is imperfect, and more perfectly, if […] the experience becomes perfected” (Hua XVII, 287).To understand evidence and truth is to recognize their “relativity” (Hua XVII, 284–5, 288). “A transcendental theory of evidence” sketches “the essence of evidence” as an “intentional achievement” (Hua XVII, 289). Even God cannot render the evidence of external experience absolute, adequate, and apodictic (Hua XVII, 289–90). For the evidence of internal experience,
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an isolated perception never yields complete evidence of anything existent (Hua XVII, 290–1). Given inner time consciousness, all evidence is temporal (Hua XVII, 291–5), so that “evidence, as self-giving, has its variant forms, its gradations of perfection in self-giving” (Hua XVII, 293). Not “an isolated special datum” inductively connected to psychic life by causal laws, evidence is “an apriori structural form of consciousness” (Hua XVII, 295).Thus “a life of consciousness cannot exist without evidence”; but “evidence achievements stand in […] coherent connections with non-evidences”, and “essentially necessary modifcations occur continuously”; therefore a life of consciousness cannot exist without such modifcations of evidence into “non-evidences”, for example, sedimented retentions (Hua XVII, 295). As Husserl’s awareness of “the horizonal intentionality of consciousness” grows (Hua XVII, 17–18, 207–8, 254–5, 274–5, 286–7), so his recognition of a relativity theory of evidence and truth fourishes. Logical Investigations emphasize the perfections of evidence – absoluteness, adequacy, and apodicticity; Formal and Transcendental Logic stresses its imperfections – relativity, inadequacy, and dubitability (Hua XVII, 207–8).
36.4. Development of Husserl’s phenomenology of evidence and truth As Husserl’s phenomenology of evidence and truth evolves over many essays, the issue of the relation between adequate evidence and apodictic evidence emerges (Himanka 2005, Cai 2013).
36.4.1. Association of adequate evidence and apodictic evidence In The Idea of Phenomenology (1907), Husserl claims that the phenomenological reduction yields the contents of consciousness in “absolute self-givenness” (Hua II, 8) – “unquestionably given […], in the strictest sense adequately self-given” (Hua II, 60). Absolute evidence and apodictic evidence are associated:“The foundation of everything […] is the grasping of the sense of absolute givenness, of the absolute clarity of being-given, which precludes every meaningful doubt, […] of the evidence that absolutely sees and grasps the thing itself” (Hua II, 9–10). Evidence in the “pregnant” sense is understood as absolute, adequate, and apodictic: […] absolute and clear givenness, self-givenness in the absolute sense.This being-given, which precludes every meaningful doubt, and which is a straightforwardly immediate seeing and grasping of the meant objectivity itself, and so as it is, constitutes the pregnant concept of evidence […] understood as immediate evidence. (Hua II, 35) Thus adequacy defnes evidence:“The fundamental thing is […] that evidence is […] a seeing consciousness that […] directly and adequately apprehends, that it signifes nothing other than adequate self-givenness” (Hua II, 59). Absolute, adequate, and apodictic evidence are inextricably linked, and adequate evidence,“the pregnant concept of evidence” (Hua II, 59), dominates all evidence (Hua II, 65–76). Here Husserl asserts that “givenness is everywhere” (Hua II, 74) but ignores its horizonality.
36.4.2. Distinction between adequate evidence and apodictic evidence Eventually (1910/1911), concerns with horizons (Hua XIII, 154–94, 211–13) prompt the question: “Is absolute givenness ever to be reached?” (Hua XIII, 156) “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (1911) still describes absolute evidence as adequate (Hua XXV, 6–7, 16–17, 28–34, 41–5,
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60–2). Gradually (1917–1918), however, adequate evidence wanes (Hua XXX, 74, 351, 532) and apodictic evidence waxes (Hua XXX, 311–30). Subsequently (1922–1925), Husserl acknowledges that apodictic evidence is easier to obtain (Hua XXXV, 374–411). In 1922/1923, he characterizes adequacy and apodicticity as different features of the same evidence (Hua XXXV, 119), although he anticipates their separation (Hua XXXV, 130). In 1924, he argues that all adequate knowledge is apodictic but not all apodictic is adequate (Hua XXXV, xxxiv). In 1925, he wonders whether one should “retain the talk of adequation” (Hua XXXV, 404). Consequently, in First Philosophy II (1923–1925), he expresses doubts about the feasibility of adequate evidence: Perhaps […] there lies in each and every evidence […] a certain relativity of such a kind that, whenever we speak of an ‘adequate evidence’ […], there is only a […] process of enhancement of relative evidences, […] a […] constant and free approximation to a goal relative to consciousness, which as such […] remains unattained. (Hua VIII, 34) He describes the indubitability of adequate evidence: “If I attempt […] to approach [an adequate evidence] as doubtful, the impossibility that the evident […] be doubtful jumps out at me, and again in adequate evidence.” (Hua VIII, 35) He adds: We can also designate this property of adequate evidence as its apodicticity. Vice versa, every apodictic evidence is clearly adequate.Therefore we can employ both expressions as equivalent, and […] prefer the one or the other, depending on whether we are placing special emphasis […] on the adequation or the apodicticity. (Hua VIII, 35) Yet this is not a viable solution to the problem: “Must cognitions be apodictic […]? […] And now even adequately!” (HuaVIII, 396–7) If adequate evidence is apodictic and vice versa, and if adequate evidence is unattainable, then so is apodictic (Hua VIII, 472–9).Thus the connection between adequate evidence and apodictic evidence remains vexed (Hua VIII, 33–4, 310–12, 333–5, 336–55).
36.4.3. Dissociation of adequate evidence and apodictic evidence In Cartesian Meditations (1931), Husserl asserts that evidence “can be more perfect and less perfect” (Hua I, 52), articulates adequacy and apodicticity as its two perfections, and attributes “a higher dignity” to apodicticity than to adequacy (Hua I, 55–6). He argues that, because evidence may be apodictic but not adequate, adequation and apodicticity “need not go hand in hand” (Hua I, 62). For example, the evidence of “the living self-present” is apodictic and adequate (Hua I, 62); that of the “I am”, merely apodictic (Hua I, 58–61); that of the existence of the world, neither (Hua I, 57–8). In any case, evidence is “self-givenness”: In the widest sense, evidence designates a universal primal phenomenon of intentional life, as opposed to another consciousness-of, which can a priori be empty, fore-meaning, indirect, inauthentic; it designates the wholly distinctive manner of consciousness of the self-appearance, of the presenting of itself, of the giving of itself of a thing, a state of affairs, a universal, a value etc. in the fnal mode of itself there, given immediately intuitively, given originaliter. (Hua I, 92–3) 418
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In the comprehensive sense, evidence encompasses experience: Experience in the usual sense is a special evidence; evidence in general […] is experience in a broadest and yet essentially unitary sense. Evidence is, of course, with respect to whatever objects, only an occasional occurrence in the life of consciousness; it designates, however, […] an essential basic feature of intentional life in general. Every consciousness in general either has itself the character of evidence […] or is essentially oriented toward [it]. (Hua I, 93) Yet the ideal of adequate evidence is unrealizable for external experience and its objects (Hua I, 96–7).Thus claims of a “total evidence”, an “absolutely perfect evidence”, an “adequate fulfllment”, and an “absolute evidence” are tempered: Not to actually produce this evidence – for all objective-real objects that would be a non-sensical goal, since […] for them an absolute evidence is an idea – but rather to lay clear its eidetic structure or the eidetic structure of the dimensions of infnity that systematically build up its ideal infnite synthesis according to all internal structures, is a very defnite and huge task. (Hua I, 98) The aim, then, is not to realize the ideal (Hua I, 114–21) but to refect on the given within its horizons (Hua I, 53, 62, 67, 69, 81–3, 85, 87–8, 91, 95–100, 102, 105, 107, 118).
36.4.4. Confrmation of dissociation of adequate evidence and apodictic evidence In Experience and Judgment (1938), Husserl expressly rejects the notion that logical evidence is the measure of all evidence:“One believed […] that one could measure every cognition against an ideal of absolute, apodictically certain, cognition, and did not realize that this ideal of cognition […] could […] require a justifcation” (Husserl 1972, 10). He recognizes both the adequate evidence of formal logic and the inadequate evidence of material experience: Thus the talk of “evidence”, “evident givenness”, here signifes nothing other than self-givenness [Selbstgegebenheit], the manner in which an object in its givenness can be characterized, relative to consciousness, as “there itself ”,“there in the fesh”, in contrast to its mere presentifcation, the empty, merely indicative presentation of it. (Husserl 1972, 11–12) Evidence in this sense is inclusive:“As ‘evident’ […] we designate consciousness of any kind which is characterized with respect to its object as giving this object itself, without any question concerning whether this self-giving is adequate or not” (Husserl 1972, 12).Thus absolute-adequate-apodictic evidence is not the standard for all evidence:“By this, we deviate from the customary use of the term ‘evidence’, which as a rule is employed in cases which, correctly described, are those of adequate givenness […] and apodictic insight” (Husserl 1972, 12). So every kind of given gets its own style of giving: But every kind of object has its own manner of self-giving [Selbstgebung], that is, evidence, and an apodictic evidence is not possible for every kind, for example, spatio-temporal 419
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objects of external perception. Even they, however, have their own kind of original self-giving and thus their own kind of evidence. (Husserl 1972, 12) Hence experiential evidence, knowledge, and truth are as legitimate as logical evidence, knowledge, and truth (Husserl 1972, 339–47). The shift in Husserl’s thinking about absolute, adequate, and apodictic evidence is a function of his recognition of the horizonality of intentionality. The Idea of Phenomenology ignores it and identifes absolute evidence as adequate and apodictic, but Cartesian Meditations studies it and distinguishes absolute evidence into adequate and apodictic. Formal and Transcendental Logic and Experience and Judgment confrm this.
36.5. Evidence and truth in the later Husserl The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) focuses on the “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) as “a realm of original evidences” and truths (Hua VI, 130). Scientifc evidence (Hua VI, 131, 143–4, 203–4, 237, etc.) and life-worldly evidence (Hua VI, 131–3, 143, 232, etc.) are related insofar as the abstract, deductive, and objective evidence of the scientifc world is founded on the concrete, intuitive, and subjective evidence of the life-world (Hua VI, 133).“Evidence”, a diverse concept (Hua VI, 367),“is not an empty universal, but rather differentiates itself according to the species, genera, and regional categories of being” (Hua VI, 169). Evidence varies with the evident (Hua XXIX, 116, 124, 283–4, 346, 402, 407, etc.). Life-worldly experience exhibits structures, for example, horizonality (Hua XXXIX, 67–144, 332–4), situationality (Hua XXXIX, 145–206), historicity (Hua XXXIX, 409–556), and temporality (Hua XXXIX, 557–602), which indicate the relativity of life-worldly truth and being (Hua XXXIX, 673–733). Where evidence involves the self-giving of something life-worldly (Hua XXXIX, 234), there is no adequate evidence (Hua XXXIX, 317–18); there is no complete, fnal, and perfect experience of any such thing (Hua XXXIX, 212, 725, 785). Life-worldly truth has no “absolute fnality” or apodicticity (Hua XXXIX, 191–2); it is contingent on confrming experience (Hua XXXIX, 209–10, 214, 224–30).“The relativism of life-worldly truth” (Hua XXXIX, 704–9) means that truth remains truth so long as experience confrms it: “The relative relativism has become an absolute relativism” (Hua XXXIX, 706).Yet “absolute truth” retains its relative meaning for human beings (Hua XXXIX, 725–33).The horizonality of experience assumes primacy over the adequacy of evidence. According to Formal and Transcendental Logic, the concept of horizonality is missing in Logical Investigations and emerges in Ideas I (Hua XVII, 207; Geniusas 2012). Gradually, Husserl moves from an attraction to the ideal of absolute, adequate, and apodictic evidence and truth to a concentration on the reality of relative, inadequate, and dubitable evidence and truth (Heffernan 2015).The all-encompassing applications of phenomenology of evidence and truth to the investigation of intersubjective relationships (Hua XIII–XV), to ethical, practical, and religious questions (Hua XXVIII, Hua XXXVII, Hua XLII), and to “metaphysical” (or “existential”) “limit problems of phenomenology” (Hua XLII, 137–263), confrm this evolution (Hua XLII, 425–49 [“the universal theory of evidence”]).
36.6. Phenomenology of evidence and truth after Husserl In Introduction to Phenomenological Research (1923–1924), Heidegger credits Husserl with recognizing that evidence is a matter of the evident but criticizes him for conceiving evidence in 420
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terms of theoretically comprehending and determining objects (Heidegger 1994, 272–3, 317). In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger acknowledges his debt to Husserl but argues that evidence is not only theoretical but also existential for that entity (Seiendes) for whom being (Sein) is a question, namely Dasein (Heidegger 1977, 59, 115, 136, 218, 265, 288, 312). He articulates evidence as disclosure (Erschlossenheit), the process whereby truth discovers itself to Dasein; as there is no truth without Dasein, so there is no evidence either (Heidegger 1977, 200–30). This is consistent with Husserl’s transcendental idealism (Hua I, 114–21; Hua III/1, 120–1; Hua XVII, 239–42; Hua XXXVI, passim).Yet Heidegger’s concept of truth also evolves, from an uncovering “disclosure”, through the hiddenness and openness of the “clearing” (Lichtung), to the occurring of the “event” (Ereignis) (Heidegger 1989, 2004a/b; de Waelhens 1953; Tugendhat 1967; Sheehan 2015). In Theory of Intuition in the Phenomenology of Husserl (1930), Levinas argues that Husserl overestimates adequate eidetic evidence and underestimates inadequate experiential evidence (Levinas 1930, 50–7, 114–15, 119–20, 162–3). In Totality and Infnity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), he argues against Husserl that an encounter with and account of the relation with the Other (rapport de face à face) cannot be scientifcally or suffciently based on evidence (Levinas 1961, 62, 67, 127–9). Husserl’s detailed accounts of the varieties of evidence, including the evidence of and for others, suggest otherwise (Hua I, 121–77; Hua XIII–XV; Lee 2007). In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty argues that the primacy of the body in perception requires a new conception of evidence and truth.A “vehicle for being in the world” (véhicule de l’être au monde), the body emerges not as an object of consciousness but as the “view point” (point de vue) of perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 93–241). Its kinesthetic functions determine the constitution of worldly things before they become bearers of meanings for the understanding (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 243–424). Because each person lives in a world, interacts with others, speaks a language, and has a history, all of which generate experiences and determine meanings (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 425–96), evidence is tentative, truth is provisional, and neither is presuppositionless (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 17, 434, 455–61).Yet Husserl investigates the evidence and truth of the life-world, embodiment, existence, et cetera in his extensive research manuscripts (e.g., Hua XXXIX on the fallibility of worldly knowledge); Merleau-Ponty’s analyses are generally consistent with his phenomenology of evidence and truth in these areas. In Speech and Phenomena (1967), Derrida insists that Husserl’s phenomenology represents the latest iteration of “the metaphysics of presence” (la métaphysique de la presence), which defnes being as presence (Derrida 1967, 6–7, 9, 27, 60, 70, 83–4, 111, 114–15). Derrida claims that between Logical Investigations and Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl’s philosophy remains essentially the same (Derrida 1967, 1).Yet the defning development in Husserl’s phenomenology of evidence is the emergence of the horizonality of intentionality (Hua III/1, 59–60, 91–4, 110–16, 144–5, 180–7; Hua XVII, 207–8; Hua XXXIX, passim). It enables his shift from a fxation on absolute, adequate, and apodictic evidence and truth to a focus on relative, inadequate, and dubitable evidence and truth.The development also shows that Husserl’s phenomenology is not merely a metaphysics of presence, because it is also a hermeneutics of absence. Empty intentions and fulflling intuitions, and absent objects and present objects, are correlative and collaborative concepts.The alleged “logocentrism” of phenomenology is another issue. In The Archeology of Knowledge (1969) and The Postmodern Condition (1979), Foucault and Lyotard respectively question the grand narratives about modern science and society, but they hardly mention phenomenology of evidence and truth. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Habermas suggests that it is impossible to advance reasoned arguments in intersubjective communication without appealing to evidence and truth.Yet, endorsing Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenology as logocentric (Habermas 1985, 203–11), he claims that evidentiary 421
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experience in Husserl’s sense has only subjective validity and lacks objective (intersubjective) legitimacy (Habermas 1984, 35–59, 154–6).Whether he analyzes truth in terms of coherence, correspondence, consensus, or “pragmatic realism” (Habermas 1999, 7–64), Habermas fails to understand phenomenology on its own terms (Habermas 1984, 127–83). In his “trilogy” (Marion 2001, xxii), Reduction and Givenness (1989), Being Given (1997), and In Excess (2001), Marion investigates “saturated phenomena” – where givenness overflls intentionality. In Reduction and Givenness, a historical study of the phenomenological method and its limitations as practiced by Husserl and Heidegger, Marion indicates further research regions. In Being Given, a conceptual investigation of givenness, the given, and “the gifted” (the one to whom the given is given), Marion investigates phenomena for which intuitions surpass intentions. In In Excess, a collection of detailed descriptions of particular phenomena, Marion examines saturated phenomena: the event, the idol, the fesh (the self), the icon, and revelation. Applying the principle of “as much reduction, as much givenness” (“autant de réduction, autant de donation”), or “the more strictly the reduction is applied, the more givenness is increased” (Marion 1989, 303–5; Marion 2001, 20–3), Marion argues that reducing phenomena to their givenness prevents “the gifted” from getting “to the things themselves”, although his notion of givenness is simultaneously enhanced and complicated by the suggestion of a “giver” beyond the given, the giving, and the “gifted”. In any case, Marion thematizes phenomena that Husserl bracketed out of his rigorous descriptions in his published works, for example, God (Hua III/1, 109–10, 124–5, 175).Yet Husserl’s posthumously published writings show that phenomenology encompasses phenomena that cannot be treated within the bounds of the reduction, namely “limit problems of phenomenology” (Hua XXXIX, 875–6; Hua XLII, xix), for example, questions of metaphysics, or monadology, teleology, and philosophical theology (Hua XLII, 137–263). Leading work in phenomenology of evidence, knowledge, and truth is currently being done not in the “continental” but in the “analytic” tradition (Berghofer 2018a–2020).
36.7. “Limit problems” of phenomenology of evidence and truth Husserl concentrates on epistemic justifcation in the theoretical realm, but phenomenology of evidence and truth recognizes that human beings are not only transcendental egos but also natural selves: persons (Hua IV, 172–302). Evidence is only one of the many factors that motivate human belief. Grounds of beliefs include authority, character, culture, education, embodiment, emotion, ethics, habit, ideology, power, religion, tradition, and tribe (this is a short list). Citizens are not always informed; leaders, not always enlightened; investors, not always rational. Evidence is often not the chief factor in the formation of belief. Genetic analysis uncovers many grounds of beliefs, but it does not convert all of them into reasons for believing. This is an elementary lesson of the phenomenology of evidence and truth. Given his passionate commitment to philosophy as rigorous science, Husserl does not emphasize it. His rationalism without regrets posits that knowledge of truth requires experience of evidence: “so far evidence […], so far […] knowledge” (Hua XVIII, 29).
References Berghofer, Philipp. 2018a. “Husserl’s Conception of Experiential Justifcation:What it is and why it matters.” Husserl Studies 34: pp. 145–70. ———. 2018b. “Husserl’s Noetics – Towards a Phenomenological Epistemology.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 50: pp. 120–38. ———. 2018c.“New Ways to Transcendental Phenomenology:Why Epistemology Must be a Descriptive and Eidetic Study of Consciousness.” Horizon 7: pp. 121–36.
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Truth and evidence ———. 2019a. “Husserl’s Project of Ultimate Elucidation and the Principle of All Principles.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40: pp. 1–12. ———. 2019b. “On the Nature and Systematic Role of Evidence: Husserl as a Proponent of Mentalist Evidentialism?” European Journal of Philosophy 27: pp. 98–117. ———. 2020. “Towards a Phenomenological Conception of Experiential Justifcation.” Synthese 197: pp. 155–83. Brentano, Franz. 1925/1970. Versuch über die Erkenntnis. Ed. Alfred Kastil and Franziska Mayer-Hillebrand. Leipzig/Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1930. Wahrheit und Evidenz. Ed. Oskar Kraus. Leipzig/Hamburg: Meiner. ——— 1968/1974. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Dritter Band: Vom sinnlichen und noetischen Bewußtsein. Ed. Oskar Kraus and Franziska Mayer-Hillebrand. Leipzig/Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1969. Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis. Ed. Oskar Kraus. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1978. Die Lehre vom richtigen Urteil. Ed. Franziska Mayer-Hillebrand. Hamburg: Meiner. Cai, Wenjing. 2013. “From Adequacy to Apodicticity: The Development of the Notion of Refection in Husserl’s Phenomenology.” Husserl Studies 29: pp. 13–27. Derrida, Jacques. 1967. La voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Descartes, René. 1984. Meditations on First Philosophy, Objections, and Replies. In: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II. Ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elsenhans,Theodor. 1897.“Das Verhältnis der Logik zur Psychologie.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 109: pp. 195–212. ———. 1912. Lehrbuch der Psychologie. Tübingen: Mohr. Foucault, Michel. 1969. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Geniusas, Saulius. 2012. The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1985. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1999. Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Heffernan, George. 1997.“An Essay in Epistemic Kuklophobia: Husserl’s Critique of Descartes’ Conception of Evidence.” Husserl Studies 13: pp. 89–140. ———. 2000.“A Study in the Sedimented Sources of Evidence: Husserl and His Contemporaries Engaged in a Collective Essay in the Phenomenology and Psychology of Epistemic Justifcation.” Husserl Studies 16: pp. 83–181. ———. 2009a.“On Husserl’s Remark that ‘[s]elbst eine sich als apodiktisch ausgebende Evidenz kann sich als Täuschung enthüllen […]’ (Hua. XVII, 164: 32–33): Does the Phenomenological Method Yield Any Epistemic Infallibility?” Husserl Studies 25: pp. 15–43. ———. 2009b. “An Addendum to the Exchange with Walter Hopp on Phenomenology and Fallibility.” Husserl Studies 25: pp. 51–5. ———. 2015. “Phenomenology of Evidence: Promises, Problems, Prospects.” Dialogue and Universalism XXV: pp. 9–24. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1989. “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles.” Dilthey-Jahrbuch 6: pp. 235–74. ———. 1994. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 2004a. “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit”. In: Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9: Wegmarken. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, pp. 177–202. ———. 2004b.“Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit”. In: Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9: Wegmarken. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, pp. 203–38. Himanka, Juha. 2005. “Husserl’s Two Truths: Adequate and Apodictic Evidence.” Phänomenologische Forschungen 2005: pp. 93–112. Höfer,Alois, and Meinong,Alexius. 1890. Logik: Philosophische Propädeutik, I.Theil.Vienna:Tempsky. Hopp,Walter. 2009a.“Phenomenology and Fallibility”. Husserl Studies 25: pp. 1–14. ———. 2009b.“Reply to Heffernan.” Husserl Studies 25: pp. 45–9. Hume, David. 1975. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon.
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George Heffernan Husserl, Edmund. 1972. Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik. Ed. Ludwig Landgrebe. Hamburg: Meiner. Lee, Nam-In. 2007.“Experience and Evidence.” Husserl Studies 23: pp. 229–46. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1930. Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris:Vrin. ———. 1961. Totalité et infni: Essai sur l’extériorité.The Hague: Nijhoff. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1989. Réduction et donation: Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 1997. Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 2001. De surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Mill, John Stuart. 1878. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in his Writings. London: Longmans. Sheehan, Thomas. 2015. Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefeld. Sigwart, Christoph von. 1889. Logik, Band I: Die Lehre vom Urtheil, vom Begriff und vom Schluß. Freiburg im Breisgau: Mohr. Soffer, Gail. 2003. “Revisiting the Myth: Husserl and Sellars on the Given.” The Review of Metaphysics 57: pp. 301–37. Tugendhat, Ernst. 1967. Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger. Berlin: de Gruyter. Waelhens, Alphonse de. 1953. Phénoménologie et vérité: Essai sur l’évolution de l’idée de vérité chez Husserl et Heidegger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Wundt, Wilhelm. 1893. Logik: Eine Untersuchung der Prinzipien der Erkenntnis und der Methoden wissenschaftlicher Forschung, I. Band: Erkenntnislehre. Stuttgart: Enke.
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37 VARIATION Daniele De Santis
Among all the methodological tools introduced by Husserl to establish phenomenology as an eidetic science of transcendentally reduced phenomena belonging to the region of pure consciousness, the method of eidetic variation—also said method of “free” or “phantasy” variation— has been for years the subject matter of divergent interpretations. Scholars seem to be far from reaching an agreement on both the method’s purpose and its operating principles.1 Before we embark on our analysis of this method, it is important to acknowledge the distinction between two different senses that characterize the general methodological notion of variation in the writings of Husserl. On the one hand, there is what can be called the functional notion of variation: for example the “double variation” of §20 of the Fifth Investigation, employed in order to bring to the fore the functional dependence between the two moments that make up any intentional act (i.e.,“quality” and “matter” (Hua XIX/1, 428)). On the other hand, there is what we would label the systematic notion of variation: the one having a structural position and role within the framework of Husserl’s eidetic investigation. In what follows, we will focus our attention on the systematic notion of variation, i.e., the so-called eidetic variation. Nevertheless, even within this latter concept one should not overlook the distinction between three different sub-notions that derive, so to say, from the three different “objects” (loosely construed) to which the method itself applies: (α) The method of eidetic variation (sic et simpliciter); (β) What we might characterize as the method of “co-variation”; (γ) What Husserl himself refers to as “self-variation”. Let us immediately warn the reader against taking (β) and (γ) as two specifc differences of a more general one, and thereby encompassing the method of variation (which would be represented by (α)). Even if they all aim at the same “goal”—which for the sake of brevity could be described as an intuitive bringing to the fore of the eidos2—and (α) contributes to lay out the general coordinates of the method, two differences must be recognized: (i) the eidos that is to be grasped is a different one, depending upon what the method is applied to; (ii) such a diversity basically follows from the relation in which both the method and the eidos stand to the “transcendental” domain. Preliminarily stated: (γ) brings to the fore the eidos of the transcendental ego as a “concrete” one, i.e., the “monad”; (β) brings to intuition the eidos of such and such a specifc “co-relation” within the transcendental sphere; (α), on the contrary, provides the eidetic scientist 425
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with eide endowed with no transcendental bearing.While (β) and (γ) exclusively belong to the methodological “equipment” of a very unique eidetic scientist, i.e., the transcendental philosopher (= the “phenomenologist”), for (α) this is not at all the case. In order to do justice to such differences, and to all the nuances of the method itself, our analysis will be divided into three parts, which will correspond to the three different “varieties” at stake. In section 37.1 there will be not only a general description of the method, but also of some “formal-ontological” concepts, which will turn out to be decisive to understand the difference between (α), (β) and (γ); section 37.2 will be on what in Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl calls mit-variieren (a methodological notion usually overlooked by scholars); fnally, in section 37.3 we will describe the method of self-variation, and then elaborate on the “methodological” implications of the eidetic variation (α) being applied to what the Cartesian Meditations call “concrete ego” or “monad”.
37.1. Eidetic variation and τόδε τι Let us start by assessing (α). Husserl presents and divides the performance of the general method of variation into four steps that lead the eidetic scientist to intuitively grasp the universal as an eidos. For the sake of our analyses, the following distinctions will suffce. (a) The starting-point is the consciousness of a given “individual” (perception) or quasiindividual (phantasy). As Husserl immediately writes, “the universal which frst comes to prominence in the empirical given must from the outset be freed of its character of contingency.”3 Accordingly, (b) The “individuality” is no longer regarded as this individuality, but as entailing an “exemplary” value whose consciousness is a “consciousness of exemplarity” (Exempel). (c) The Exempel is hence a Vorbild, “the starting point for the production of an open and endless multiplicity of variants.” In Husserl’s words, the passage from (b) to (c) can be so described:“every color occurring in actuality is certainly, at the same time, a possible color in the pure sense: each can be considered as an exemplar and can be changed into a variant.”4 To put it in a nutshell: an initial quicumque individual this (a), regarded as an Exempel (b), is then turned into a “variant” of a multiplicity of variations (c). In the methodologically strict sense of the term, only (c) represents the actual process of variation. (d) Eventually, the relevant eidos comes to the fore as the underlying “unity” of the manifold of variations:“it is the eidos, the ἰδέα in Platonic sense.”5 The sequence can be easily represented as follows: (Δ) (a) This individual ® (b) This as an Exempel and Vorbild ® (c) Variations r ® (d) Eidos Now, in order to fully appreciate the difference between (α) and (γ), a series of remarks bearing on both this individual and what Husserl refers to as Stufen der Allgemeinheit is necessary. As Husserl explains in §84 of Erfahrung und Urteil, If we start from the experience of individual objects, then the lowest universal (…) is that which arises from the mere “repetition” of individuals capable of being expe426
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rienced as independent and completely alike. We designate it a concretum. (…) Every individual is an individual particular of its concretum.6 What Husserl has in mind is what Ideas I (to which this very same text refers) calls—with an Aristotelian sounding term—a τóδε τι: “A this-here, whose material essence is a concretum, is called individuum” (Hua III/1, 36). If this is the case, then this individual7—providing the startingpoint for the method of variation (a)—can be understood in relation to the notion of τóδε τι (and of “essence”).What, then, is a τóδε τι? As has been pointed out,8 Husserl distinguishes what could be called a narrow concept of essence (henceforth: NC)—which refers to the lowest species itself (die niederste Spezies) as something that an individual object has in common with any other individual object of the same “kind” (Husserl also calls it: ein Wiederholbares9)—and a broad concept of essence (henceforth: BC), including the “bearer” as what “individualizes” the lowest species itself. Ontologically, this individual (a) is an essence in the narrow sense of the term (τι) individualized hic et nunc (τóδε). To put it as a formula: Individual = NC + Individualization Methodologically speaking, this individual can be turned into an Exempel (b) by disregarding its “individualization.”The Exempel or Vorbild—which leads the process of variation—is obtained by disentangling NC from the τóδε: it is the lowest species or lowest universal (τι), that is to say, what Ideas I calls “eidetic singularities,” species that cannot be further specifed but only individualized, or exemplifed in such and such an individual (Hua III/1, 36). As Husserl goes on to explain in §15 of Ideas I, every eidetic singularity present in an individuum leads to a specifc tree-like system of species and genera, thus also to a relevant highest genus (Hua III/1, 36). If we take, for instance, the eidetic singularity “perception of physical things” (Hua III/1, 172), then the relevant “tree-like” system of species and genera can be represented in his way (the reader should keep in mind that the following diagrams are supposed to display the structure of the “Porphyrian tree,” so to say, with each level including specifc “downward” bifurcations): (Δ’) Highest Genus: Erlebnis in general Genus: Intuition Species: Perception Eidetic Singularity: Perception of Physical Things --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Tóδε Tι:This Perception of a Physical Thing Here the eidetic singularity is NC, the τι that can be repeated and, thus, individualized hic et nunc (τóδε). Given this individual perception (a), we can turn it into an Exempel (b) by disentangling the τι from the τóδε: the eidetic singularity, now regarded as repeatable, can function as a Vorbild and thereby guide the variation (c). The process can be further carried on and, depending on 427
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the system of species and genera, one can rise from lower generalities (e.g.,“perception”) to the higher genera (e.g.,“intuition”) up to the highest one (e.g.,“Erlebnis in general”).10 Husserl does not fail to recognize that the one and the same individual can also include different “eidetic singularities,” each of which leads to a separate Stufenbau of “genera” and “species.” Here is how Husserl’s example of a “phenomenal thing” (Hua III/1, 36–37) could be represented: (Δ”) Highest Genus: Geometrical Form in General Highest Genus: Quality in General
Genus: Polygon
Genus:Visual Quality
Species: Triangle
Species: Color
Eidetic Singularity: Equilateral Triangle
Eidetic Singularity: Ruby Red
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Tóδε Tι: This Phenomenal Thing… Presented in this way, i.e., with the help of the notion of τóδε τι, the method of eidetic variation obtains a rigorous ontological foundation. Yet, before we move on to investigating the method of co-variation, a question arises and needs to be taken into consideration: what did we mean by the claim that the method presented here (i.e., the general method of eidetic variation) does not exclusively belong to the “phenomenologist”? In what sense do the eide so obtained have no transcendental bearing? To put it better: in what sense do the phenomena, whose eidetic structure we are investigating based on the method of eidetic variation, display no “transcendental” value? If Husserl can switch from examples such as color and sound to Erlebnisse because the feld of “application” of the method is not limited to the “transcendental” domain of “pure consciousness,” the method of eidetic variation, whose goal is to bring to the fore the eidos of a relevant set of phenomena, can be used—and is de facto used—by a different array of “eidetic scientists,” such as pure chromatologists (as we may call those who investigate the eidetic structures of the chromatic feld), pure phonologists (those who investigate the eidetic structures of the auditory feld), or pure psychologists (“pure psychology” being for Husserl the eidetic science of the psyche).The latter case is the most interesting one: for, the subject matter of pure or eidetic psychology is a domain (“pure psyche”) “parallel” to that of transcendental phenomenology (“pure consciousness”); the difference being that pure psychology investigates the same phenomena (e.g., Erlebnisse and their immanent structure), but exclusively to the extent that they belong to the “real” domain of the psyche, namely, prior to the opening up of the region “pure consciousness” by means of the method of transcendental reduction. The investigation of the transcendental value of the “co-relation”—which Husserl himself presents as a relation between subjective (or constitutive) a priori and ontic a priori—is the subject matter of phenomenology, and the relevant method of variation meant to bring to “intuition” its eidos is what we may properly designate as “co-variation”.
37.2. Co-variation and transcendental co-relation(s) Bluntly stated: by mit-variieren, or “co-variation”, Husserl means the method of eidetic variation as applied to such and such an intentional and transcendental experience; accordingly, what the 428
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“co-variation” brings to the fore is neither the eidos of a specifc ontic domain (be it that of “colors” or “sounds”), nor that of the pure psyche, but such and such a specifc transcendental co-relation.The text to be considered is §98 of Formale und transzendentale Logik, dedicated to explaining in what sense the phenomenological “constitutive” investigations are “a priori”. As Husserl contends, any “constituted objectivity” (for example: a “natural object” (Naturobjekt)) points back, according to its “peculiar essence” (Wesensart), to a “correlative essential form (eine korrelative Wesensform)” of what he calls a multiplicity of actual and possible intentionality, which is “constitutive for that objectivity” (Hua XVII, 253). As is immediately evident, here the method of variation hinges upon—and directly exploits—the “transcendental” (i.e., “constitutive”) co-relation between (objective) Wesens-Art and (subjective) WesensForm, which applies to all kinds of objects and corresponding modes of consciousness: “the modes of consciousness that can make one aware of some ideal objectivity or other (…) have a defnite style, essential to this sort of objectivity.” By writing “this sort of objectivity”, diese Art Gegenständlichkeit, Husserl proves to be following (Δ): as is the case with (α), here, too, the starting-point is represented by a τóδε τι; nevertheless, unlike in the case of (α), the singling out of the τι does not directly convey the Exempel to be varied (b), but frst points back to a corresponding system of intentionality (i.e., a subjective “essential form”). With respect to (Δ), what is then required is an additional intermediate methodological step: (Δ1) (a)This individual ® (b) NC ® (c) Co-Relation between Wesens-Art and Wesens-Form W as an Exempel and Vorbild ® (d) Variations ® (e) Eidos Given this individual object (a), the phenomenologist disentangles the τι from the τóδε (b): the eidetic singularity—regarded as a repeatable—is assumed as the correlate of a peculiar Wesensform, and hence points back to a corresponding mode of consciousness: it is such a “co-relation” that now stands out as the Exempel (c) to which the operation itself of variation properly applies (d). As Husserl puts it, Everything that we have stated in our observations concerning constitution can, in the frst place, be made a matter of insight on the basis of no matter what exemplars (Exempeln) of no matter what sorts of already-given objects—that is: in a refective explication of the intentionality in which we simply and straightforwardly “have” a real or an ideal objectivity. We have made a signifcant advance when we recognize that what obviously holds good for the factual single cases of actuality or possibility still holds good necessarily when we vary (variieren) our exemplars quite arbitrarily, and then inquire retrospectively for the correlatively co-varying (korrelativ mitvariierenden) “representations.” (Hua XVII, 254) To each “ontic essential form” (ontische Wesenform), with its own a priori, corresponds a system of actual and possible intentionality with its own “constitutive” a priori: when one turns one’s regard refectively from the ontic essential form (…) to the possible constitutive experiences, the possible manners of appearance, one sees that 429
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these necessarily co-vary (sich mitvariieren) with it, in such a way that now a two-sided essential form (zweiseitige Wesensform) shows itself as invariant. (Hua XVII, 255)11 As Husserl concludes, it becomes apparent that an ontic a priori is possible only as the “correlate” of a subjective a priori, and such is then the transcendental “co-relation” whose eidos the “co-variation” is meant to bring to direct intuition: It is very necessary to lay hold of this genuine sense, of this universality of the a priori and, in so doing, to grasp in particular the just described retro-relatedness of every straightforwardly derived a priori to that of its constitution, as well as that of the a priori apprehensibility of the co-relation between object and constituting consciousness. (Hua XVII, 255). Here, again, a problem arises and has to be immediately faced. Does Husserl himself not maintain that phenomenology, as an eidetic science, is nothing else but the “uncovering of the allembracing eidos transcendental ego as such” (Hua I, 105)? If this is the case, and the so-called “co-variation” applies only to such and such a specifc transcendental “co-relation”, how are we to “uncover” what Husserl presents as the eidos of the transcendental ego as such? What is such an ego? And how do we obtain it? Only by moving on to the next paragraph can we provide the answer to this question.
37.3. Self-variation and the monad As Husserl maintains in the Cartesian Meditations, the problem of explicating the monadic ego— i.e., the transcendental ego as a concrete one—phenomenologically “coincides with phenomenology as a whole” (Hua I, 103). If phenomenology is to be possible as an eidetic science, then there must be a method able to bring its subject matter to the fore: such being the goal of what Husserl labels Selbst-Variation.The method of self-variation is then fundamental in that it makes phenomenology scientifcally possible by conveying what the latter, as a science, is about: the eidos transcendental ego.As Husserl puts it: After transcendental reduction, my true interest is directed to my pure ego, to the uncovering of this factual ego. But the uncovering can become genuinely scientifc, only if I come back to the apodictic principles that pertain to this ego as exemplifying the eidos ego. (Hua I, 106) Since the method of self-variation does not simply bear on specifc transcendental Erlebnisse, but on the concrete ego as such, then the question turns out to be: what is a “concrete ego”? And how does the method of self-variation operate with respect to both (α) and (β)? In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl describes the concrete ego in opposition to both the ego as an identical pole and as a person. As he presents it:“From the ego as identical pole and a substrate of habitualities, we distinguish the ego taken in full concreteness.” What Husserl calls concrete ego is obtained by including all objects as correlates of actual and potential forms of consciousness: it is not simply the ego as a pole, nor just as a person with abiding bleibenden Erwerbe gained from and built upon previous experience, but also as embracing die Umwelt mit ihrem Horizont of already known and still unknown “objects” (Hua I, 102). Now, since the 430
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concrete ego includes “all objects as correlates of actual and potential forms of consciousness,” the method of self-variation does not apply to just such and such “a” correlation, or mode of consciousness as “a” correlate of a specifc “ontic a priori” (as in the case of co-variation), but to the totality of them. This leads us to the most important feature of the monad as a concrete ego: what might be called its “intrinsic individualization” or also “self-individualization.”12 As Husserl bluntly puts it, when it comes to the monad,“the lowest concrete universality”—i.e., the eidetic singularity concrete ego—“individualizes itself.” Or, as a late manuscript points out:“dieses Eidos [the concrete ego] hat das Merkwürdige, dass jeder seiner eidetischen Singularitäten ein einzelnes transzendentales ich (als Möglichkeit) ergibt” (Hua XIII, 383). It is important to remark that Husserl is not at all maintaining that the concrete ego has no “eidetic singularity” (or, better, that there is no such a thing as the eidetic singularity “concrete ego”), or that there is no distinction between the latter and its “individualization”: rather, Husserl is claiming that the eidetic singularity “concrete ego” is its own individualization (as he writes, they zusammenfallen or “coincide”13). Accordingly, also BC and NC zusammenfallen; and this means that the eidetic singularity “concrete ego” cannot be considered merely as a Wiederholbares (“Das Ego kann nicht wiederholbar werden”) that would be “individualized”— as an “identical” essence (τι)—hic et nunc (τóδε). Rather than representing the situation by distinguishing the eidetic singularity concrete ego as something that would stand “over and above” its many individualizations (or “exemplifcations” in such and such a plurality of individual and concrete egos): Eidetic Singularity: Concrete Ego ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Tóδε Tι:This Individual Concrete Ego… This Individual Concrete Ego… we could simply confne ourselves to what follows (with each individual and concrete ego being the Zusammenfallen of “eidetic singularity” and “individualization”): Tóδε Tι:This Individual Concrete Ego… This Individual Concrete Ego… Now, if eidetic singularity and individualization “coincide”, then the phenomenologist cannot take an individual concrete ego and turn it into an Exempel by disentangling the τι from the τóδε; but if NC cannot play the role of Vorbild guiding the variation, how is then the process to be carried out? As Husserl points out, the “beginning phenomenologist” is bound by the circumstance that he/she takes himself/herself as an “initial exemplar” (Hua I, 110). Hence, we can think our factual ego “to be freely varied” (frei variiert) and set “the problem of exploring eidetically the explicit constitution of any transcendental ego in general.”As he remarks: It should be noted that, in the transition from my ego to the ego in general, neither the actuality nor the possibility of other egos is presupposed.The scope of the eidos ego is here determined by self-variation of my ego. I feign only myself as if I were different; I do not feign others. (Hua I, 106) My own factual ego is not simply a factually existing τóδε τι whose “individuality” can be disregarded in order for the eidetic singularity to stand out as an Exempel, and thereby play the role 431
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of Vorbild in the process of variation. In a nutshell: my own factual concrete ego is itself the Exempel to be varied. Methodologically speaking, the situation can be presented as follows: (Δ2)
( a + b ) My concrete ego assumed as the Exempel and Vorbild ® (c)) Variations ® (d) Eidos Since my own concrete ego is the Zusammenfallen of eidetic singularity and individualization, the variations so produced cannot be taken as different individualizations (τóδε), or exemplifcations in such and such a plurality of individuals, of one and the “same” lowest concrete universality (τι) that has been previously singled out or disentangled: this being the deep, and highly problematic sense of Husserl urging that “The scope of the eidos ego is here determined by self-variation of my ego.” If this is the case, can phenomenology still claim—as Husserl says—to become a science, namely, the universal science of the concrete ego as such? Let us try to make ourselves clear. If the problem of explicating the monadic ego “coincides with phenomenology as a whole,” and yet the “scope” of the eidos “ego,” Husserl urges, is “here determined by self-variation of my ego,” does not this end up affecting, and hence limiting, the universality of the eidos itself “ego überhaupt”? As we know, if self-variation is to be held as an essential tool of phenomenology, it is precisely because of its ability to convey what the latter, as an eidetic and intuitive science, is about: not the eidos of just such and such an ontological objectuality, nor simply of such and such a “corelation,” but the eidos monadic ego in general. And yet, we have to ask: can phenomenology really aspire—as a science—to “universality”? Would not such universality, and the method that should lead to it, embrace the self-constitution of my concrete ego, yet not that of the concrete ego as such (being the “scope” of the eidos in question determined by self-variation of my own concrete ego with its own habitualities and sedimentations)? These are the issues that any future investigation of the relation between variation (as co-variation and self-variation) and monad, phenomenology as a monadology and its aspiration to being a universal and eidetic science, will have to explore and clear up. This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02 .1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).
Notes 1 For an overall discussion of the method, as well as of the relevant problems concerning its mode of working and goals, see De Santis 2011. 2 It is important to understand that, as a part of what Husserl himself calls “spiritual method of ideation” (die geistige Methode der Ideation), the purpose, or the goal of the method of eidetic variation is not to “achieve knowledge of eide.” Indeed, in Husserl’s understanding, “knowledge” requires propositions and their fulfllment by a “categorially shaped” objectuality (what is usually called “state of affairs”); in other words, it involves a discursive as well as an intuitive side, namely, the so-called “categorial intuition.” 3 Husserl 1972, 410. 4 Ibid., 426. 5 Ibid., 411.The question naturally arises as to what Husserl himself means by eidos, or by “universal” as an eidos in opposition to “empirical universalities.”Without getting into a detailed discussion of a problem
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that goes far beyond the objectives of this text, let us simply point out that the two kinds of universal differ with respect to (i) “extension” (Umfang); (ii) mode of “exemplifcation”; and (iii) the “modal” character they exhibit, “contingent” or “open” necessity (what Husserl calls Zufälligkeit) in one case, eidetic or strict necessity in the other.That empirical universals present an “extension” of real or really possible individuals means their being necessarily acquired on the basis of actual experience, therefore their referring to a “limited and, so to speak, denumerable extension of actual particulars” experienced up to now (Husserl urges that they involve the “co-positing of an empirical sphere in which they have the place of their possible realization in particulars”). The horizon of their validity is to be said “presumptive” because it is open to further confrmation as well as to possible “cancellations.” By contrast, in the case of eide, we confront an a priori necessity that prescribes “rules” for the later course of our experience and that “[rules] out a sudden change, a cancellation.”That their extension embraces “purely possible individuals” means their not being acquired on the basis of actual experience (they are not “dependent generalities”) and the possibility to contrive possible exemplifcations in the realm of pure or free phantasy. See Husserl 1972, 409–410. Ibid., 403. We should always keep in mind that “individual” is a concept broader than individuum (understood as a “this-there, whose material essence is a concretum”). Indeed, if every individuum is a τóδε τι, not every τóδε τι is an individuum: for example, an individual color is a τóδε τι whose essence is nevertheless an abstractum. In what follows, we will mainly employ the term individual, in order to cover both abstracta and concreta (thus, without the necessity of explicitly distinguishing between them in the course of our analyses). Majolino 2015, 33–50. “Die Essenz, das Was des Substrats, ist einerseits konkretes spezifsches Wesen, das ein ‘Wiederholbares’ ist und wiederholbar an verschiedenen Individuen mit verschiedenen Substraten und möglichen Vereinzelungen dieses spezifschen Wesens, und andererseits das τóδε τι. Das τóδε τι ist das, was das Spezifsche, und zwar die niederste, nicht mehr spezifsch differenzierbare Spezies, individuell vereinzelt” (Hua XXXIII, 299–300). The reader should regard this only as an example meant to shed light on the mode of working of eidetic variation and of its relation to the ontological Stufenbau of “genera” and “species.”As we will see in the next section, the application of the method of variation to the “transcendental” domain of pure consciousness is what Husserl labels “co-variation,” and its methodological structure and procedure are more complex than the one discussed here. Accordingly, since the difference between (α) and (β) is that between an ontological and a transcendental domain of application of the method of variation, also the corresponding “eidetic” laws are different.Without getting into a nitty-gritty analysis, let us simply remark the following: while the eidetic laws brought to the light with the help of the method of variation discussed above should be better described as ontological (i.e., ontological laws), those obtained by means of application of (β) might be easily labeled transcendental (i.e., transcendental laws). In addition to this, it is important to notice that whereas (α) bears on the Was of such and such a type of objectuality, (β) on the contrary—by focusing on the co-relation, thus on the mode of appearance of such and such a type of objectuality—primarily bears on the Wie. “Allgemeinbegriff der Art, wie wir ihn als absolutes Konkretum früher defniert haben, nicht hat. Das Ego kann nicht wiederholbar werden als eine Kette von rein möglichen koexistenten und absolut gleichen Egos (…). Darin liegt: das Ego hat die merkwürdige Eigenheit, dass für es absolutes Konkretum und Individuum zusammenfallen, dass die niederste konkrete Allgemeinheit sich selbst individuiert” (Hua XXXV, 62). For a more detailed discussion of the relation between concrete ego and variation, see De Santis 2020. How are we to understand such an “intrinsic individualization” of the monad if it is not to be taken as though there were no distinction between the eidetic singularity and its being exemplifed in an individual monad or “concrete ego”? Now, in order to provide a satisfactory answer, what should be taken into account is the problem of individualization (as Husserl assesses it in the “Bernau manuscripts”), which is a “transcendental” question, and includes the constitution of both space and time. Since the topic would take us far beyond the scope of this entry, let us confne our observations to the following. In Ideen… II Husserl makes a clear distinction between Individualität of Dinge (“Kein Ding hat in sich selbst seine Individualität”) and the one proper to die geistige Welt (“Die absolute Individuation geht in das personale Ich ein”) (Hua IV, 297–302). If this is the case, then the distinction between the two forms of individualization (“extrinsic” and “intrinsic”) is to be traced back to the transcendental-constitutive
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References De Santis, Daniele. 2011.“Phenomenological Kaleidoscope: Remarks on the Husserlian Method of Eidetic Variation.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (11): pp. 17–42. ———. 2020. “Selbst-Variation. A Question of Method in Husserl’s Phenomenoloy.” Husserl Studies (forthcoming). Husserl, Edmund. 1972. Erfahrung und Urteil. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Majolino, Claudio. 2015. “Individuum and Region of Being: On the Unifying Principle of Husserl’s ‘Headless’ Ontology.” In: Commentary on Husserl’s “Ideas I.” Ed. Andrea Staiti. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 33–50.
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38 WORLD Karel Novotný
The world as “the genuine matter of phenomenology”—to cite a contemporary author, Klaus Held (Held 1992, 130)—is linked with one of Edmund Husserl’s most important philosophical inceptions, one still living today even if in its contemporary form it is associated, as usual, with revisions, reversals, and heresies.Thus Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and other philosophers who have critically contested Husserl’s transcendental-philosophical point of departure in considerable detail have taken the problem of the world in new directions, at times amounting to a kind of cosmological turn. But the productive engagement with such challenges—challenges that persist to this day, as in, for example, the work of Renaud Barbaras—has also certainly led to attempts to renew Husserl’s phenomenological approach to the world, and thereby to reinstate the world as a phenomenological problem.
38.1 Husserl For Husserl, the access to the problem of the world is linked with a very central concept—that of the horizon. As he tells us in his later work, “to systematically explicate the constitution of the pregiven world is to systematically explicate its horizonal structure” (Hua XXXIX, 125). But with this, other equally central motifs are indicated.The frst is the character of pregivenness, which is essentially suited for the phenomenological concept of the world as described on the basis of the horizon-structure of experience. And the second concerns the way in which we are to go about elucidating the sense of this world in its pregivenness: what is at stake is a systematic explication of the constitution of this sense, which points to the transcendental-phenomenological method that relates any sense—even the “pregiven” sense of the world, which is not itself an object, but encompasses all objects—to its correlative sense-institutions and senseformations in consciousness.1 Let us briefy sketch Husserl’s concept of the horizon, which he actually discovered quite early in his analyses of perception and time-consciousness, then frst systematically presented in Ideas I. His analyses showed, among other things, that no consciousness of something can be experienced as isolated, for it always already points to two distinguishable nexuses of sense. One concerns the currently given object itself (the so-called inner horizon of its further determinations), and the other concerns the object’s situatedness in relation to other objects as its outer horizon (for example, its spatial surroundings). Horizons are, moreover, implied both on the 435
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side of the noesis (the act of consciousness itself) and on the side of the noema (the objectivity meant). All these inner and outer, noetic and noematic nexuses and references in their reciprocal, interlocking connections can be grasped as horizons and can be brought to light in principle in the analysis. A determination of the world can already be phenomenologically demonstrated in terms of these analyses; namely, the world can be addressed as the horizon of all horizons standing in correlation with the acts of consciousness of individual (although always already communalized) subjectivities.Yet this is merely one essential determination of experience: what we are actually conscious of constantly stands out against the background of implicit nexuses of sense, and since these are always co-given, they can be explicated as potentialities for actual consciousness. Here we can already speak in a certain sense of a “pregivenness” of the horizons encompassing individual experiences. In connection with the theme of the epochē and transcendental reduction, which Husserl frst publicly presented in Ideas I, an essential determination of the world itself is also revealed: namely, the function of a general thesis through which the world is always already co-posited and presupposed along with positings of individual objects. Since all “naive” beliefs held in the natural attitude about the being of objects to be known are now to be bracketed or set out of play as a whole, what the epochē that is to accomplish this comes up against is a more fundamental, unthematic, and general certainty of belief in a whole: the world as basis and ground. (It is above all within the framework of the later genetic transcendental phenomenology emerging since the mid-1920s that this function of the world is further investigated and interpreted.) In this way the pregivenness of the world becomes visible in its unmodalizability; although any individual experience can be modalized if, for instance, it turns out in the course of experience that the object is an illusion, world-experience as such is “not modalizable” (Hua XXXIX, 246).What comes to light here is the irreducibility of the “general thesis” of the world (indeed, of the primal facticity of having a world), since it is not a specifc act “explicitly performed at some time or other”; instead, the “primal fact” that from the start and “quite as a matter of course” we live in a world functions as “the foundation for all such specifc acts” (Landgrebe 1963, 44/127). This characterization of the pregivenness of the world as a primal fact indicates that even in the genetic analysis, this world-positing—like the horizons concretely co-comprising our currently lived surrounding worlds—is not derived from individual experiences with objects (leading, for example, to an acquired habituality), for “all habitualities, whether inborn or acquired in the course of life, are habitualities of a human being who already stands on the ground of worldbelief and knows him/herself as an entity among other entities” (Landgrebe 1963, 45/127). However, while it is the case that this belief is distinguished from the formation of horizons per se (although it is through the latter that every experience is experience in-the-world), where does the world-belief come from in lived experiencing? As the primal fact of world-relatedness, this very belief is also a lived experience; the question of the genesis or origin of world-belief must accordingly be posed here as well. Thus as Husserl writes in his last work, the Crisis, From the beginning, the phenomenologist lives in the paradox of having to look upon the obvious as questionable, as enigmatic, and of henceforth being unable to have any other scientifc theme than that of transforming the universal obviousness [Selbstverständlichkeit] of the being of the world—for him the greatest of all enigmas— into something intelligible [eine Verständlichkeit]. (Hua VI, 184/180) 436
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That this is not an isolated formulation can be seen from another passage that likewise casts the “taken-for-grantedness” or obviousness of the world as the “enigma of all enigmas” (Hua VI, 208/204).2 Similarly, in his 1933 Kant-Studien article, Eugen Fink speaks of the “mystery” of our constant world-acceptance, or our fundamental and all-pervasive belief in its being (Fink 1966, 115ff.).3 And in “The Philosopher and his Shadow,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to “the mystery of a world-positing prior to all positing” (Merleau-Ponty 1960, 207/163)4. But for Husserl, when the pregivenness of the world is described and interpreted within a transcendental-philosophical framework, such a “mystery” is no obstacle. Instead, the analysis inquires back into ever more original strata of the genesis of the experience in order to elucidate the origin of our having a world in terms of a genetic clarifcation of world-apperception as it is concordantly articulated, on the basis of affection, in the processes of sense-formation and sense-institution. And as already mentioned, these clarifcations proceed from the description of our natural possession of the world.5 This, then, is the transcendental-genetic interpretation of the pregivenness of the world that can be understood as Husserl’s answer to the question of the origin of the world:6 the world is (pre-)constituted as a “formation” of transcendental subjectivity.7 And this subjectivity is so closely linked with the world that, without the world, subjectivity would have no content (Inhalt) at all, and without subjectivity, the world would have no ongoing sense-content (Bestand). The world is the correlate of a universal world-apperception that has its source in the life of transcendental subjectivity. And Husserlian phenomenology does not go beyond this correlation—the correlation is its absolute. As Fink indicates, both “world” and “transcendental subjectivity” are moments within this absolute; “just as the world only is what it is in terms of its ‘origin,’ so this origin itself is what it is only with reference to the world” (Fink 1966, 106/99f.). Husserl describes this notion of “with reference to the world” in much the same way as he usually describes any consciousness’s intentional “being-directed-toward-an-object”—namely, with the concept of apperception: “The world is there for us as pregiven insofar as a world-apperception already constantly runs through our life prior to thematizing this or that object, or even the world as universe” (Hua XXXIX, 42). It is only due to the way in which the passively fowing “total apperception” ongoingly unifes individual apperceptions that things constantly appear “whether we are paying attention to them or not” (Hua XXXIX, 42). Thus it is through this “total apperception” that the world is horizonally pregiven to us, and as soon as we bring refection into play, we become experientially aware that the pregiven world “continually has its subjective milieu—and without this, we can never be conscious of it” (Hua XXXIX, 43).
38.2. The cosmological turn In the introduction to Experience and Judgment, we read, “The world we are conscious of horizonally has in its constant ontic acceptance the subjective character of familiarity in general” (Husserl 1939, 33/37). Seen critically, this description displays a tendency toward what Fink initially saw as the prejudice of the pregivenness of the world, later reproaching Husserl for a kind of metaphysical “cloistering”—namely, the tendency to interpret world-apperception as if any experienceable thing or reality whatsoever is given a priori through a “preacquaintance” with it in its typicality, all the way to a “totality of typifcation” pertaining to the “world-horizon as a whole in its infnity” that suffuses every individual entity from the start and co-determines it in advance (Husserl 1939, 32f./36).Thus in the course of this tendency toward totalization, the essential familiarity of the world winds up meaning that “unfamiliarity is always simultaneously a mode of familiarity” (Husserl 1939, 34/37) formed in the course of object-constitution and spreading across the entire universe, making it a securely sealed realm determined in advance.8 437
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For critical voices within the phenomenological movement, this seems to preclude the very openness of the world and above all of what appears, which leads, on the one hand, to taking an ever clearer distance from, or even turning away from, such an a priori world-framework. From Emmanuel Levinas to Michel Henry or Jean-Luc Marion, and for Marc Richir as well, the world is not the ground of what appears; what appears is not linked to a passively fowing, continually unifying world-apperception, as Husserl would have it. On the other hand, however, this break from Husserl’s approach was preceded by a certain cosmological turn9 for which what appears does indeed have its ground in the world.What both trends have in common is that they want to preserve the appearing from being dissolved into a universal world-apperception and ultimately being seen as a mere correlate of intentional consciousness. And one way to do this would seem to involve recovering a more original pregivenness of the world and establishing the priority of the world as the framework that makes all phenomenal correlations—hence the appearing as such—possible in the frst place. In conjunction with Heidegger’s critique of phenomenology, Eugen Fink follows this impulse to think the world in another way—indeed, to initiate a cosmological turn beyond phenomenology.While functioning as Husserl’s close co-worker, Fink accompanied the latter’s later trains of thoughts and projects, but took other paths in his own philosophy. Here a central role is played by the claim that the human’s world-relation should not frst be thought of in terms of intentional consciousness and its horizons; instead, one must think in terms of the framework that always already embraces such a consciousness and its horizons.Thus, the claim is that it is possible to retrieve dimensions that are missing not only in Husserl’s phenomenology, but also in Heidegger, insofar as their approach to the world-framework is limited to taking it in terms of nexuses of sense. To pursue our sketch of the phenomenological problematic of the world—and the way in which the pregivenness of the world and the interpretation of this pregivenness are related to one another—we may turn to Klaus Held’s essay on world and fnitude for an insight that marks an important step on the path toward a phenomenological cosmology. While recognizing the decisive step Heidegger takes in Being and Time, Held also offers an answer to the diffculties arising with a transcendental-phenomenological clarifcation of our having a world. According to this answer, the world is originally pre-intentionally pregiven on the basis of our readiness “to be affected in one or another way,” which determines the how of the appearing that takes place “in the [consciousness–appearing object] correlation” (Held 1992, 141). And Held’s aim in this essay is to show that “it is the fnitude of the world in Heidegger’s sense that makes its infnity in Husserl’s sense possible” (Held 1992, 131). Here it is important that this readiness is not that of the “I-can” available to intentional consciousness, since in the frst place, this I-can is limited in its freedom and depends on something that is not at its disposal—hence we speak of the fnitude of the original, pre-intentional pregivenness of the world. In addition, the intentional I-can, and its ability to penetrate ever further into an endless world, is itself frst awakened and made, possibly by this very readiness to be affected. Held accordingly tells us that such readiness to be affected is nothing other than the manner in which a pre-intentional world-openness that is “not a relation” comes about (Held 1992, 141). With Heidegger, he characterizes this openness as Befndlichkeit, as an originally felt/attuned world-openness that is essentially linked with the world’s withdrawal and fnitude: “The withdrawal that allows the world to be fnite overcomes us in the mood—we sense with astonishment that we are not master of the openness of the world,” that it can “withdraw into the abyss of nothingness” (Held 1992, 143). Yet even in Heidegger’s presentation of the fnitude of the world, which is to make possible its infnity in Husserl’s sense (its endlessly intersecting horizons), the world remains a horizon, 438
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a nexus of sense, even if the pre-intentional pregivenness of the world is not an apperception, which for Husserl ultimately remains the exclusive model for givenness. It is Eugen Fink who tackles and plumbs the depths of world-withdrawal in a different way from Heidegger. After his time as Husserl’s assistant—thus in his later, independent attempts to work out a cosmology from such a phenomenological perspective—Fink chooses an even more negative point of departure in his 1949 lecture course on “World and Finitude”: world is the paradoxical intentional phenomenon of an empty horizon that burst forth ahead of all experiencing and transforms it as a whole.World for Husserl is not in itself any more than it is for Kant; if for Kant it is a sheer “idea,” for Husserl it is sheerly “horizon.” (Fink 1990, 149) But even if the “worldliness of the world” is manifested in horizonality, world cannot be equated with the phenomenon of the horizon, for the latter “is grounded in world-openness, but is not the genuinely worldly way of being open” (Fink 1990, 29). In order to detach himself from Husserl’s model of levels of horizons concentrically arrayed over against a subject, Fink turns to the metaphor of Rückschein: whereas in his dissertation he had appealed to a notion we might render as Durchscheinen in order to refer to the nonhorizonal co-presence of the material stratum “through” which an image appears (NielsenSepp 2011, 11),10 we might think of Rückschein not in terms of something “appearing before” consciousness, but in terms of world as continually and invisibly “shining back,” permeating and presupposed by both act-intentionality and horizon-intentionality.11 Thus he can start out with horizons, but read them, so to speak, in the opposite direction from Husserl. For Fink, then, experiential horizons are no longer to be taken “as the relations constituted within the immanence of a subjectivity to what is outside this subjectivity itself, but rather as an announcement—one that occurs within the immanence of the circumference of a life—of that which exceeds this circumference” (Nielsen-Sepp 2011, 11). What is to be reached through this reversal is an interpretation of the pregivenness of the world that differs from Husserl’s characterization of the world as the concordant total horizon of all experience. Guided by the notion of Rückschein, the world is no longer grasped in terms of a system of nested concordant horizons extending “outside of ” the experiencing subject. Instead, with the reversal, the world is shining back “into” the subjectively lived system (Nielsen-Sepp 2011, 11; cf. Bruzina 2004, 428f.). (Alternatively, we might suggest the metaphor of the voice of the world singing itself back into the innerworldly.) And with this, the sense of the horizon itself is surpassed, since it proves unsatisfactory “to tie the sense of the world to the relation to a horizon” (Nielsen-Sepp 2011, 11). What is thereby emphasized in Fink’s repeated attempts to leave behind the horizonal worldapperception of intentional consciousness and forge a way toward another mode of thinking, as in the 1949 lecture course on “World and Finitude,” is the “cosmological difference,” (Fink 1990, 19) and accordingly the need not only to reject the model of “world” as encompassing in contrast to entities that are encompassed, but also to respect the invisible, non-present “presence” of the world that shines into but does not itself appear within the innerworldly. And this very “inaccessibility” of the world is precisely the fundamental way in which it escapes the grip of any metaphysical thinking that takes entities “within” the world as its point of departure (Fink 1990, 201f).Thus, even though Fink does follow Heidegger’s repudiation of metaphysics up to a point, he is still critical of Heidegger for beginning from being-in-the-world as the locus of the felt withdrawal of the world.12 439
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38.3 Back to the world as the “thing itself ” of Husserlian phenomenology We have pointed out above that according to Held, Befndlichkeit—our felt attunement to fnitude—can provide the basis for the infnity of the concrete world-horizon that frst of all makes an openness for appearing possible. In contrast, what László Tengelyi defends in his posthumously published last book (Tengelyi 2014) is the open infnity of the world. He interprets the pregivenness of the world in terms of an extension of phenomenology, incorporating the method of transcendental phenomenology on the one hand (Tengelyi 2014, 200) and the recognition of underivable primal facts on the other (Tengelyi 2014, 14). Here he sees a certain phenomenological metaphysics of contingent facticity already at work in Husserl, insofar as any eidetic variation—and thus any eidetic transcendental phenomenology—is based on such primal facts. Tengelyi initially fnds four such primal facts in Husserl’s writings, then adds two more.The frst four are: 1) the current I in each case; 2) this I’s having a world; 3) the intentional intertwining between I and others; and 4) the teleology of history (Tengelyi 2014, 184). In addition, there is, most noticeably, the event of appearing itself (Tengelyi 2014, 190). And—more inconspicuously or subliminally—embodiment as a primal fact. And what is decisive is that in their facticity and plurality, these primal facts persist even though we cannot derive these facts themselves from primal causes. They don’t amount to some kind of onto-theological ground, yet they are not simply empirical facts among others.13 With regard both to the primal fact of having a world and to its infnity, Tengelyi introduces a “diacritical distinction,” namely, the “fundamental difference between totality and infnity” (Tengelyi 2014, 184). This is related to the problem of the Husserlian scheme whereby the world would be nothing but the correlate of an intentional consciousness determining it, a priori, in advance, thereby forestalling its openness and undermining its alterity or withdrawal. For Tengelyi, the world’s infnity is not, for instance, the totality of the world as a “self-contained whole”; instead, it is a matter of the “openness of the world for the infnite” in such a way that the world is a totality that is open for infnity, so that the distinction between “totality” and “infnity” does not imply that they are antithetical, but is quite precisely “only a distinction” (Tengelyi 2014, 299). The “diacritical distinction” is nevertheless decisive, for it gives us a chance to escape the danger of the world being swallowed up in consciousness as its correlate. Here,Tengelyi’s turn to the diacritical (in contrast to a distant third-person perspective) was inspired by Merleau-Ponty (Tengelyi 2014, 301). Yet he remains close to Husserl’s phenomenological idea of the structure of a thing within an infnite world-horizon, which is here taken as a “differential system of possible experiences”; thus Tengelyi’s task is to take Husserl further by linking the “structure” of the thing with the thing as a “reality.” And the classic problem according to which in the end, the world is nothing but—or nothing beyond—a mere correlate of consciousness is now renewed in the form of a challenge: how can we think with Husserl, yet without turning the world into a mere correlate of consciousness? What stands in the way of this? For Tengelyi, what we have to give up is the idea of the thing as a completely determined reality. The “diacritical task” requires us to break free from the idea of “an infnite system of possible experiences” of the ontic totality of the thing and the total (determinate) reality of the world. Rather than simply turning away from Husserl, however,Tengelyi fnds a way out in Husserl’s own notion of the “contingency” of our knowledge of the world, which is not based on exuberant speculative metaphysics trying to trace primal facts back to frst causes or grounds, but emerges through phenomenological refection on, and description of, the experiential givenness of the world (Tengelyi 2014, 324). This seems to be directed against Fink’s speculative thesis concerning the necessity of the world, replacing it with the Husserlian thesis of the necessary fact of having a world. According to the diacritical method, then, it is possible 440
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that infnity—as the infnity of what appears—does not frst arrive in the world through the subjectivity for whom the appearing appears; this infnity of the world is made possible by the openness of world-reality itself. The diacritical method even claims that the latter is manifested through the unavailability that is linked with world-experience and that is able, as an event, to disturb the concordant world-apperception comprising an infnite system of possible experiences. Instead, the openness brings an element of alterity into play—one that is indeed taken up into experience, and is experienced as the contingency of experience, but is never fully absorbed or dissolved in horizonal anticipations of experiential coherence. For Tengelyi, then, the very openness of the world includes the alterity that is lived as the contingency of experience; thus this openness can still be phenomenologically demonstrated through experience without requiring any speculative references to what lies beyond phenomenology.
38.4 Conclusion It is the accent on the facticity of the pregivenness of the world (the emphasis found in Husserl, Landgrebe, and Tengelyi), in contrast to the tendency to include or even to dissolve this (as well as other primal facts) in the “ultimate facticity” of a necessary relation to the absolute, understood as the movement of the world itself (as happens with authors following the cosmological turn), that comprises the project of a path back to the world as the matter of phenomenology. Here Tengelyi’s fnal book opens further vistas. And we can also fnd aspects of this path in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jan Patočka, and Klaus Held, as well as in other authors we have not mentioned.Thus despite maintaining some critical distance from Husserl, their work is linked with the Husserlian approach to the problem of the world that we began with, while at the same time their innovative re-readings of a phenomenology of the world can engage with attempts at a cosmological turn, here discussed above all in terms of Fink’s contribution.14
Notes 1 Cf. an essay by Ludwig Landgrebe from the late 1930s that frst appeared in English: “The World as a Phenomenological Problem.” We shall cite the revised German text that appeared in his Der Weg der Phänomenologie. Das Problem einer ursprünglichen Erfahrung (the published translation in English has sometimes been modifed). Landgrebe wrote this essay while working on Erfahrung und Urteil and preparing some of Husserl’s other manuscripts on the theme of “world-experience and the problem of the horizon” for a publication planned for Prague—see Hua XXXIX, lvii. 2 Cf. Jan Patočka, who not only refers to the “mystery” whereby we tacitly take the world for granted as a “prior whole” through which human life moves, but points to the “dizzying” recognition of the fact of a “non-sensuous presence” of the world through which everything sensuous becomes accessible to us and in which we ourselves live (Patočka 1965, 2). 3 Cf. Fink 1966, 119/113, where Fink identifes the transcendental problem of the world as “the basic problem of phenomenology.” 4 Cf. Bimbenet 1998, 13. 5 In a late research manuscript, Husserl formulates this as follows: “As the universe of ongoingly concordant experience, the world is actually constituted, we can say, for each normal mature human being precisely as a developed capability for being able to experience ever further—this is the ‘worldconcept’ of natural human life. The everyday sense ‘world’ is drawn from the shifting ‘worldview’ or experiential intuition of the world arising in the actualization of this process of ‘again and again, and so on’” (Hua-Mat VIII, 186 n.2). 6 “The basic question of phenomenology … can be formulated as the question concerning the origin of the world” (Fink 1966, 101/95). 7 As Husserl programmatically puts it in the Crisis, the aim of the transcendental-genetic question of the origin of the world is “learning to understand that the world constantly existing for us in the streaming play of modes of givenness is a universal mental acquisition that has developed, and at the same time is
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8 9 10 11 12 13 14
ongoingly developing, as a unity of a mental confguration, as a sense-formation—the formation of a universal, ultimately functioning subjectivity” (Hua VI, 115/113). Thus as Fink points out in a 1949 lecture course, taking the intentional relation to the thing as a model for the ontological region where all objects are encountered continually expands the “nearness” of the already familiar and makes this very region “something derived” (Fink 1990, 148). See, e.g., Barbaras 2014 for some recent work in line with this cosmological trend. Cf. Fink 1966, 76f., on the “transparency” (Durchsichtigkeit) of the physical medium through which the image is given. On the world as “shining back” (relucent), see Fink 1960, 123; cf. Bruzina 2004, 369, and see also Chapter 4 on the development of Fink’s notion of world. Here it is not possible to pursue Fink’s discussion of Heidegger’s later thinking on earth and physis (cf. the latter’s 1935/36 lecture on “The Origin of the Work of Art”). See, however, Nielsen 2011; cf. Dastur 1998. Cf. Inga Römer, “László Tengelyi—Die Welt und ihre Unendliches,” in Phänomenologie und Metaphysik der Welt [working title], ed.Tobias Keiling (in preparation). The translation of this essay from German to English, which was prepared by Elizabeth A. Behnke, was supported within the framework of institutional support for the Long-Term Development of Research Organizations provided by the Ministry of Education,Youth, and Sports to the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University (2018).
References Barbaras, Renaud. 2014. Dynamique de la manifestation. Paris:Vrin. Bimbenet, Étienne. 1998.“Merleau-Ponty: La parole du monde”. Alter (6): pp. 11–38. Bruzina, Ronald. 2004. Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938. New Haven:Yale University Press. Dastur, Françoise. 1998.“Le concept de monde chez Heidegger après Être et temps”. Alter (6): pp. 119–136. Fink, Eugen. 1960. Spiel als Weltsymbol. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. ——. 1966. “Edmund Husserl in der gegenwärtigen Kritik”. In: Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 79–156 (“The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism”. In: The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings. Ed. and trans. R. O. Elveton. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970, pp. 74–147). ——. 1990. Welt und Endlichkeit. Ed. Franz-Anton Schwarz.Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Held, Klaus. 1992.“Die Endlichkeit der Welt. Phänomenologie im Übergang von Husserl zu Heidegger”. In: Philosophie der Endlichkeit. Festschrift für Erich Christian Schröder zum 65. Geburtstag. Eds. Beate Niemeyer and Dirk Schütze. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 130–147. Husserl, Edmund. 1939. Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik. Hrsg. Ludwig Landgrebe. Prag: Akademia-Verlag (Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Landgrebe, Ludwig. 1963. Der Weg der Phänomenologie. Das Problem einer ursprünglichen Erfahrung. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn (“The World as a Phenomenological Problem”. In: Landgrebe, The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays. Ed. Donn Welton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1960. “Le philosophe et son ombre”. In: Signes, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 201–228 (“The Philosopher and His Shadow”. In: Signs.Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 159–181). Nielsen, Cathrin. 2011.“Kategorien der Physis. Heidegger und Fink”. In: Welt denken. Annäherungen an die Kosmologie Eugen Finks. Eds. Cathrin Nielsen and Hans Rainer Sepp. Freiburg/München: Karl Alber, pp. 154–183. Nielsen, Cathrin, Sepp, Hans Rainer. 2011. “Welt bei Fink”. In: Welt denken. Annäherung an die Kosmologie Eugen Finks. Eds. Cathrin Nielsen and Hans Rain Sepp. Freiburg/München: Karl Alber, pp. 9–24. Tengelyi, László. 2014. Welt und Endlichkeit. Zum Problem phänomenologischer Metaphysik. Freiburg/München: Karl Alber.
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PART III
Major fgures in phenomenology
39 HANNAH ARENDT Sophie Loidolt
39.1. Arendt—a phenomenologist? It is hardly disputable that Hannah Arendt had ties to the phenomenological tradition. Her biography and formation clearly situate her within the context of phenomenology and Existenz philosophy, well before she found her own way into political theory.The more disputed question is how important phenomenology remained for Arendt when developing her central ideas concerning the political, action, plurality, and freedom. Did she leave phenomenological philosophy altogether, because it simply, like all philosophy, couldn’t account for genuinely political phenomena, methodically always remaining an “existential solipsism”? Or did she develop a new, genuinely political phenomenology? Her own statements concerning this question are somewhat ambivalent. In the television interview with Günter Gaus,Arendt famously refuses being called a philosopher. Philosophy, she says also on other occasions, always deals with “man in the singular” while her feld of “political theory” investigates plurality and plural existence. In what will follow, I take this to be a very philosophical statement that transforms philosophy itself. However, as she adds in the interview with a charming as well as ironic smile, apart from not feeling like a philosopher, she hasn’t even been “accepted in the circle of philosophers, as you [Gaus] so kindly suppose” (Arendt 1994a, 1). If we look at how little Arendt is taught at philosophy departments compared to her overall success with readers all over the globe, and, for that matter, how rarely her positions are discussed in “serious” phenomenological publications, this is a somewhat bitter self-fulflling prophecy (with an ironic smile, to be sure).We know, on the other hand, that with her last book The Life of the Mind, Arendt explicitly returned to philosophy and phenomenology and that she even once described herself as a “sort of phenomenologist, but, ach, not in Hegel’s way—or Husserl’s” (Young-Bruehl 1982, 405).The situation is thus by far not as clear as some interpreters suggest who argue that the “political Arendt” had said goodbye to it all: philosophy and phenomenology. A glance on the abundant literature on Arendt shows that this ambivalence concerning her phenomenological involvement tends to be reproduced. This happens, unfortunately, either in a slightly clueless or in a rather hostile way.While many studies mention Arendt’s phenomenological heritage and sometimes even label her approach as a “phenomenology” of public space, judgment, the political, etc., it often remains unclear what the exact conceptual content of “phenomenology” amounts to in these cases and what should be the substantial beneft of taking 445
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a phenomenological view on these issues. It is no wonder that some commentators have then come to the rather superfcial conclusion that phenomenology somehow belongs to Arendt’s eclectic toolbox, while leaving us in the dark which elements she actually takes up of this tradition and why this should be philosophically interesting (cf. Barton-Kriese 1998). Another strand of the reception avoids these ambiguities by explicitly rejecting Arendt’s phenomenological infuences and/or methodology. More often than not, this rejection stems from a negative political evaluation of “political existentialism” and, on top of that, of Arendt’s personal involvement with Martin Heidegger. Occasionally, this sort of evaluation has reached the level of “guilt by association” (Villa 1996, 115).1 The more balanced accounts deny this, but still see a “phenomenological essentialism” (Benhabib 2003, xliv, 123f.) at work that is held responsible for Arendt’s sometimes awkward statements concerning a strict separation of “the political” from social questions.Without being able to demonstrate this here, I would argue that “phenomenology” in these cases is employed as a strawman while in-depth analyses are missing. But also on the phenomenological side, it has to be stated, in-depth conceptual and systematical studies on Arendt are (still) rare. One reason for this, especially in the English-speaking world where the Arendt reception is dominated by Critical Theory and poststructuralist approaches, could be that Arendt wrote many of her texts twice: frst in English, where she addressed an audience not familiar with the philosophical tradition she came from, and then in German, where these intellectual roots manifested themselves, as it were, naturally in her writing. To a reader of these German “second originals,” Arendt’s phenomenological connections will be much more evident and salient than they appear in the English versions.This especially counts for The Human Condition. Drawing on this background, I will sketch out roughly in this chapter what I take to be the real “phenomenological Arendt”—who is, at the same time, the “political Arendt.”2 In contrast to the eclecticism camp I will claim that there is a deep, often only implicit structure and methodology at work in Arendt’s approach that is clearly phenomenological in origin, and that her readings of other philosophers such as Kant and Aristotle are, in fact, phenomenological readings. This, however, should not result in simply putting Arendt in the “phenomenology-box.” No boxes or banisters will ever capture the richness of her thought. It will, however, shed a new light on some of Arendt’s core notions and ways of thinking and allow for a deeper understanding of both.
39.2. How phenomenology operates in Arendt’s work In a paper on Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Eugen Fink differentiates between “operative” concepts and “thematic” concepts employed by philosophical thinkers. While the latter are in the focus of the thinker’s attention, the former are the tacit “conceptual medium” in and through which the thinker moves in order to formulate and elaborate her themes. As Fink puts it, this conceptual medium “is what is not seen because it is the medium of seeing” (Fink 1981, 61). I fnd this distinction a useful tool to point to the phenomenological infuence in Arendt’s work. Indeed, I want to claim that phenomenology, for Arendt, is the medium of seeing the political the way she does. My claim is this: Arendt’s thought revolves around a core phenomenon that, in methodical terms, is comparable to Levinas’ basic situation of the “face to face encounter” with the other, which lies at the heart of his ethical refections. Explaining the implications of such a “core phenomenon” or “core situation” uncovers the fundamental structures of meaning that found a whole dimension of human life, such as the ethical or the political. In this sense, Arendt takes “the political” and its meaning to crystallize when plurality is actualized in a space of appearances. 446
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Why is this a “phenomenon” and, moreover, a “core phenomenon” that requires a phenomenological approach? (1) First of all, it is something that appears and is experienced.To be more precise: It is an event which needs to appear intersubjectively (and thus publicly) and which needs to be experienced intersubjectively (and thus as something real, from different perspectives) in order to happen. Husserl’s as well as Heidegger’s phenomenological approaches have developed tools to describe and analyze phenomena like these.Arendt uses these tools and pushes them further into an intersubjective, worldly, plural, and politicized paradigm. (2) Second,Arendt draws the phenomenal structure of “actualizing plurality” from basic experiences instead of starting on the higher, more abstract level of discourse, rational argumentation, or the normativity of the concepts of “politics,”“freedom,” or “justice.”The meaning harbored in these concepts, she would claim, can only stem from common experiences that have been transformed into thoughts and ideas. Going back to these experiences and phenomena is essential. Why? Because when plurality is actualized in speaking, acting, or judging, a meaning-dimension is revealed in the course of the interaction itself. This not only points to the pre-refective roots of certain concepts but also to the existentially meaningful component in political (inter)action, as it is something we live through and which thereby makes us who we are. (3) Arendt hermeneutically unfolds this existential dimension, by analyzing either contemporary political events or by unearthing experiences in the past, be it the Athenian polis or the American Revolution. But there is also the negative mirror image of these experiences, which very much concerns Arendt. It is undisputed that totalitarianism is one of the main negative motors of her political thinking. I would like to understand this in the context that Arendt claims that totalitarianism makes persons into “no one,” that it robs them of their property and place in the community, and that it fnally strives to radically annihilate plurality and natality in the terror of the camps. This means that it aims at destroying all conditions that could make experiences of an actualization of plurality possible.The same, in a softer version, counts for a consumerist capitalist mass society. Both systems produce experiences of deprivation, world-alienation, senselessness, and loneliness (of the masses), which Arendt reveals and criticizes. (4) “Saving the phenomena” (Arendt 1977b, 3), one of Arendt’s oft-used quotes, thus amounts to saving the precise articulation of what makes us political beings (and what doesn’t)— which points to experiences, not to ideas, and to interaction, not to theory.As follows from this,“experiences” for Arendt are never simply occurring empirical events or just subjective impressions but are always regarded with respect to their essential structure and existential meaning. “Actualizing plurality in a space of appearance” articulates such a structure that lies at the heart of experiences of “the political.” (5) Finally,Arendt’s claim is that it is the ontological primal fact of plurality (in its phenomenologically conceived contingent actualization) that fundamentally politicizes our Being and not, for example, the friend–enemy constellation as in Carl Schmitt. This claim has its normative implications, not only for the term of “the political”—in contrast to “politics”—but also for a whole political theory derived from it.Yet, as Arendt would argue, this is not a construed normativity derived from an imposed idea or concept, but one that lies in the phenomenon itself, in the experiences we make with it, as well as in its conditions of success. Arendt, I want to claim, thereby develops a phenomenologically grounded political theory that, in contrast to her French existentialist colleagues, can do without a Marxist background, and in contrast to Heidegger and Schmitt, can and wants to argue for an intrinsically demo447
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cratic and isonomic constellation, one that needs to be protected from an antagonism that aims at destroying plurality itself. From these short notes we can already see that by conceiving the political as such, several operative concepts are in play that are genuinely phenomenological concepts: frst and foremost, appearance, experience, and world, but also intentionality/transcendence, intersubjectivity/ Being-with, and meaning-constitution/existentialia.3 However, the phenomenon in question does not leave the concepts and their methodological implications untouched. According to a basic phenomenological conviction, methodical tools are to be drawn from the “things themselves” and should not be simply applied to whatever comes along.This has kept the phenomenological tradition a lively and dynamic intellectual community, whose most prominent fgures are often critics of their teachers in the name of the phenomena themselves. And here again, I would like to point to a parallel between Arendt and Levinas: Just like Levinas’ explanation of the ethical core situation forced him to rethink and reconceptualize basic phenomenological concepts to arrive at an “ethics as frst philosophy,” so does Arendt rethink the phenomenological and philosophical tradition in the name of the political, and thereby politicizes the phenomenological ontology of appearance. My answer to the question raised at the beginning of the chapter thus would be the following: Arendt indeed uses phenomenological concepts in order to develop her main political ideas, but thereby also transforms them. This constitutes her genuinely political phenomenology, which is also a methodically refected enterprise that fts well into the bunch of heterogeneous and transformative projects by other second-generation phenomenologists like Levinas, Sartre, Patočka, or Merleau-Ponty.
39.3. Arendt’s phenomenological concepts, methods, and concerns: a short overview In the next step, I will very roughly sketch out some main lines of thought that Arendt shares with the phenomenological tradition and that put her in the midst of some prominent phenomenological debates (where she has not yet been suffciently recognized).A deeper understanding of what “phenomenology” means in Arendt’s work must systematically investigate these issues.
39.3.1. Appearance It has been widely recognized that Arendt’s concept of appearance refers to the worldview of the ancient Greeks and Nietzsche’s re-appropriation of it, as well as to Kant’s Third Critique.These references, however can only fruitfully converge and be held together by an operative notion of appearance that is of phenomenological origin.Why is that so? Developing a “philosophy of appearance” as Arendt does requires a strong theoretical position with regard to the relation of “Being” and “appearance.” And this is a position that Arendt clearly takes, most articulately in The Life of the Mind. She does this also by distancing herself from Kant, whose notion of appearance, as she claims, still carries the meaning of semblance in it and thereby continues to subscribe to a metaphysics of two worlds (Arendt 1977a, 40). On the other hand, she limits a Nietzschean aestheticized notion of appearance by tying it back to the constitution of reality and truth (cf. Villa 1996, 103f.). Quotes like “Being and Appearing coincide” (Arendt 1977a, 19),“semblances are possible only in the midst of appearances” (Arendt 1977a, 38),“truth can be conceived only as another appearance” (Arendt 1977a, 24) and “evidence is inherent in a world of appearances” (Arendt 1977a, 54) serve as vibrant examples for her endorsement of the phenomenological take 448
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on these matters. At the same time, Arendt fundamentally pluralizes and politicizes the classic phenomenological notion of appearance.As Jacques Taminiaux nicely put it: [P]recisely because they [Being and appearing, S.L.] coincide, nothing of what is, i.e., of what appears, is strictly singular: instead, it remains offered to the gaze of several spectators. And those spectators in the plural are also offered as a spectacle, they are at the same time perceiving and perceived. (Taminiaux 1997, 127) The plurality of perspectives is thus “no obstacle to the identity of emerging spectators, it is constitutive of it” (Taminiaux 1997, 127).This implies three further theses which are discussed in the following sections: (1) To be real means to appear; (2) to be a self means to appear; (3) to “be-of-the-world” means to fundamentally belong to the realm of appearance.
39.3.2. The question of reality All three theses go back to Arendt’s early and initial concern for the question of reality that she comes to conceive in “intersubjective” terms—however not in a Husserlian, constitutional manner but in an existential fashion. In the early essay “What is Existenz philosophy?” (Arendt 1994b) from 1946, these concerns and the direction she takes to solve them become visible in her critique of Husserl’s as well as Heidegger’s approach to the question of reality: While Husserl’s concepts of intentionality and the reduction appease the existential “shock of reality” by a constitutional analysis in consciousness, Heidegger’s fxation on the self renders void his insights into the reality of “being together” and leaves him with an “existential solipsism.”This is Arendt’s verdict, which makes her turn to new solutions. Arendt’s own position frst develops from her appropriation of Jaspers’ existential interpretation of the Kantian themes of freedom and dignity as a “surplus” to all thought working in communication with others. But she soon rejects Jaspers’ preference of an I-Thou-situation and heads towards rethinking Heidegger’s unthought space of Miteinandersein, and thus a “we.”This is where the notion of plurality (which does not yet appear in the early paper on Existenz philosophy) becomes relevant.
39.3.3. Becoming a self and experiencing reality in the medium of plurality Turning to thinking of the existence of “men” in the plural and not the essence of “man” in the singular is Arendt’s programmatic step into what she calls “political theory.” But at the heart of this political theory there lies an answer to the phenomenologically and existential questions on self, world, and reality raised above—and those answers, I contend, remain phenomenological in style. Besides common action, realizing freedom and the new, what Arendt aims at in her major works is the experience of reality and the articulation of individuality through human plurality. The phenomenological ancestry of the notion of plurality is to be found in the concepts of intersubjectivity (Husserl) and Mitsein (Heidegger). Keeping this in mind allows for a more sophisticated reading than the “standard-interpretation,” which fails to capture the real radicality of Arendt’s ontological and phenomenological commitment to plurality (cf. Cavarero 2005, 191). Often this is reduced to a theory of pluralism or to the simple statement “that many and different or distinct men inhabit the earth” (Dossa 1988, 74).When talking about “uniqueness in plurality,” Arendt, however, never has differences in mind that could be framed in the language of third-personally attributed properties or dispositions—eventually not even in narratives,4 since we are dealing with something “intangible” (an expression that reminds of Levinas’ as well 449
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as Husserl’s notions of alterity).What makes humans unique is not that they are just many and different in qualities (a “what”), but that they are an irreducible frst-person access or openness to the world (a “who”) and that they are able to articulate this being-a-perspective. Being-anaccess or being-a-perspective is nothing distanced or theoretical, but a practical immersedness into the world through activities, in which one experiences and appears and is experienced in one’s appearance by others who also appear. Plurality is thus a plurality of fundamental perspectives actively sharing a common world in which they appear. Without being able to go deeper into these issues here, I would like to point to six basic theses that I take to be vital for Arendt’s conception of the “who” as well as for the fundamental features of political intersubjectivity and her basic political ontology (cf. Loidolt 2017, 181–188): (1) “Who one is” appears and develops only together with others (the thesis of self-appearance-in-togetherness). (2) What appears is not controllable. It might reveal itself better to others than it does to oneself (the thesis of anarchic appearance). (3) The appearance of the “who” is at the same time a withdrawal with respect to propositional and narrative language (the withdrawal-thesis). (4) Still, speaking and acting leave something behind that can be woven into a story (the narrativity-thesis). (5) The appearance of the “who” needs and sustains a space of appearance. Its medium of appearance is a web of relationships (the thesis of the second in-between). (6) The appearance of the “who” together with others is experienced as an end-in-itself and creates a shared reality (the end-in-itself and reality thesis).
39.3.4. The enactive character of plurality Now, it is crucial for Arendt’s approach that she regards the activities of speaking, acting, and judging as well as a space of visibility (“the public”) as necessary for actualizing plural uniqueness—which otherwise remains unarticulated. In the latter case, differences between people really only amount to a mere difference in properties (different genetic codes, fngerprints, and other features of “uniqueness” that are important at borders) and not in perspectives. Plurality is hence not just an ontological fact, but essentially something we do, something we have to actualize together. This enactive character also makes it fundamentally precarious and in need of encouragement and support. On the other hand, Arendt, through her life, develops a whole “architecture” of the actualized space of plurality:While acting and speaking make up/constitute the closely intertwined ontological core domain of plurality, judging expands its horizon to the dimension of spectators who judge actors and thereby form a community. It is in this full sense that Arendt contends that plurality is essential for a sense of self, a sense of reality, and a sense of acting, speaking, and judging that realizes the specifc freedom of creatures who express their individuality by relating to the world and others. Furthermore, the space of actualized plurality is guided by a “logic” of its own. Arendt’s respective demand that the “principles” of political action must be drawn from “experiences which are entirely based on the presence of others” (Arendt 1998, 237) and not from any moral principles foreign to the political domain is a demand that is typical of a phenomenological approach where the method is prescribed by the phenomenon in question. Here, Arendt can be seen in line with Reinach’s tradition in examining “social acts” like promising and forgiving. In her case, these analyses serve as possible answers to the challenges of an action-based intersubjective space, shaped by the unpredictability, irreversibility, and boundlessness of action. 450
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39.4.5. Actualization of the self-other-world-relation, anti-Cartesianism, and being-of-the-world All of this happens in a world of appearance—but to understand this properly I would like to emphasize another basic strand of phenomenological thought that Arendt inscribes herself to by her anti-Cartesianist argumentation, by her concept of Being-of-the-world, and by conceptualizing existence mainly through activities that actualize specifc world- and other-relations. “Actualizing plurality” does not describe a static or substantial concept, but something that happens in a “verbal sense” like an activity, e.g. the activity of dancing or conducting a conversation. This points to a typically “operative concept” in Arendt’s thought that is crucial for a profound understanding of the phenomenological approach in general: Appearance, which equals the intentional presence of the world, is not thought as a functional or causal relation between two pregiven substances, subject and object. Instead, appearance is the basic event, a state of actuality, from which subjectivity, world, and intersubjectivity emerge as interrelated elements. Without recognizing the verbal sense as an operative element in Arendt’s thought, we cannot properly understand how she conceives of the world-relation as well as the intersubjective relation. I have already pointed to the structural similarities between Arendt’s and Levinas’ transformative critiques of phenomenology and philosophy. In both cases this entails a strong critique and reformulation of the classic picture of subjectivity. Instead of the classical “dative of appearance” that remains in itself, Arendt’s brand of subjectivity is turned “inside out” and enacts itself in the world. This transformation of the classic transcendental subjectivity is also comparable to corresponding movements in the philosophies of Fink, Merleau-Ponty, and Patočka (cf. Loidolt 2017, 89–93). In The Life of the Mind, which is certainly Arendt’s most phenomenological book, she takes this insight a step further and develops a fundamental ontology based on appearance: We are “of the world” in the sense that the world of appearance is our home that we never leave.This means: we never stop appearing in the world, even if we are occupied with the activity of thinking that allows us to distance ourselves from this immediate realm of appearances and to “make sense” of it. In exploring the experiences and “transcendental illusions” of thinking, Arendt continues Merleau-Ponty’s (1968, and 2005) critique of intellectualism and his investigations into “perceptual faith.” I would argue, however (or: therefore), that in phenomenological discussions of Heidegger’s (1962) “being-in-the-world” and Merleau-Ponty’s “être-au-monde,” Arendt’s conceptual twist of “being-of-the-world” still needs much more attention and further investigation. Arendt is the phenomenological thinker who seriously takes into account the worldly selfappearance of consciousness/Dasein and gives it a political dimension from the outset. Finally, Arendt develops three different but closely interrelated notions of “world”: frst, the “appearing world,” the fundamental space of appearance, in which being equals appearing; second, the world of objects and objectivity (die Dingwelt), which we encounter in the activity of working; and third, the “second in-between,” which emerges through our intersubjective relations (die Mitwelt). The interrelations of these multifaceted and multilayered dimensions of “world” guide many of Arendt’s analyses and lead to a rich picture of activities and visibilities creating different and sometimes competing world-spaces. This also points to a uniqueness in Arendt’s approach: In contrast to a stable phenomenology, where the world is an ultimate horizon that encompasses all being, or a Bewandtniszusammenhang (context of involvements) pertaining to Dasein (Heidegger 1962, §18 and 355, 359, 368), Arendt emphasizes that the world is a frail and endangered space that constantly has to be intended in order to sustain it.What is at stake here is the third notion of world, the web of relationships or Mitwelt, which, as she argues, holds everything together and which—to come back to the initial 451
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problem—also guarantees our sense of reality, the reality of our bearings in the world and of ourselves. World and worldliness are thus not simply theoretical issues for Arendt, but urgent political problems: Her diagnosis of “worldlessness,” “loss of world,” and “world alienation” in the Modern Age is one of her core motivations for promoting a new philosophy of actualized plurality.Arendt’s whole phenomenology of the world is thus pervaded by a normative tendency.
39.3.6. Crisis and “Besinnung” This brings me to a last train of thought, which Arendt deeply shares with other prominent phenomenologists: the diagnosis of “crisis” as found in Husserl’s book on the “Crisis” of European sciences and mankind (Husserl 1954/1970) and in Heidegger’s critique of technology (Heidegger 1977).There is a striking similarity in the general structure of Husserl’s, Heidegger’s and Arendt’s respective treatments of the modern situation: It is that of a crisis in present times that has been triggered by a certain forgetfulness and which can only be confronted by means of a radical reconsideration (Besinnung). Since we are always immersed in the meaning-structures upon which we try to refect, we must embark on a hermeneutical enterprise, for which Arendt, in the German version of The Human Condition, uses precisely the same term as Husserl (Husserl 1954, 4, 16) and Heidegger (Heidegger 1977, 155) (Arendt 1981, 13): Besinnung (reconsideration or refection). It is not a coincidence that all three authors are drawn to a word that includes the German word Sinn (sense or meaning). It indicates their domain of refection on processes that constitute meaning-structures that form the basic understanding of our being-in-the-world. Undoubtedly, what Husserl, Heidegger, and Arendt understand as their present “crisis” and what each regards as a “remedy” is not the same. Arendt’s claim is that it is neither intersubjective constitution (Husserl), nor Being (Heidegger), but action that has been forgotten. This is the decisive step into a political version of a phenomenological critique of modernity. Arendt’s goal is to revive the experience of the public realm as a doxastic space of appearance and meaning, or, at least, to create public awareness of this “loss of human experience” (Arendt 1998, 321).
39.4. Conclusion The goal of this chapter was to show how we can acquire a deep and fruitful understanding of “the phenomenological Arendt” instead of only superfcially employing the term “phenomenology” when characterizing her philosophy of action, plurality, or public space. Once more, I would like to emphasize that I do not claim that Arendt doesn’t also use other, e.g. post-metaphysical strategies such as “pearl diving” with respect to history, as Seyla Benhabib (2003, 172) has argued. My claim is rather that several operative and thematic concepts of phenomenological origin, such as appearance, experience, and world, guide Arendt’s thinking, and that her core descriptions of plurality and of what happens in action, speech, and judgment are results of her implicit phenomenological take on these issues. Arendt is therefore rightfully to be counted among the phenomenological tradition for having developed her own phenomenology of plurality; at the same time, the theme of human plurality harbors philosophical implications that transform and politicize the classical phenomenological framework. I hope to have demonstrated at least in its outlines that Arendt’s notion of plurality requires a phenomenological in-depth explanation to be fully understood in its signifcance and consequences.The result is a strong and genuinely phenomenological approach to political intersubjectivity and political philosophy which, in the classical phenomenological framework, has remained underdeveloped.
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Notes 1 Key examples for this position are the publications of Martin Jay (1986) and Richard Wolin (2001, 30–69) who have gone as far as associating Arendt with the political existentialism of the National Socialists Carl Schmitt and Alfred Bäumler. 2 I have elaborated this thesis in detail in Loidolt (2017) and will occasionally point to pertinent passages for further argumentation with respect to issues I can only briefy touch upon here. 3 I use both the Husserlian as well as the related Heideggerian terms in order to indicate that I do not see Arendt only as a follower of Heidegger, but consider her phenomenological mindset in the broader context of the phenomenological tradition (cf. Loidolt 2017, 6–7). 4 To be sure, narratives do let us know who someone is and by no doubt occupy a central place in Arendt’s thinking. However, Arendt also insists on the appearance of “the living essence of the person as it shows itself in the fux of action and speech” (Arendt 1998, 181).This withdrawing appearance of the living person always remains “intangible” and can neither be captured by characterizations nor by narratives.
References Arendt, Hannah. 1977a. The Life of the Mind.Vol. One:Thinking. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1977b. The Life of the Mind.Vol.Two:Willing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1981. Vita activa oder vom tätigen Leben. München: Piper. ———. 1994a. “‘What remains? The language remains’: A conversation with Günter Gaus”. In: Essays in Understanding 1930–1954. Ed. with an introduction by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken, pp. 1–23. ———. 1994b.“What is existential philosophy?”. In: Essays in Understanding 1930–1954. Ed. with an introduction by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken, pp. 163–187. ———. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Barton-Kriese, Paul. 1998.“Arendt, Hannah 1906–1975”. In: Reader’s Guide to Women Studies. Ed. Eleanor B.Amico. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn, pp. 61–62. Benhabib, Seyla. 2003. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt: New Edition. New York: Rowman and Littlefeld. Cavarero, Adriana. 2005. For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dossa, Shiraz. 1988. The Public Realm and The Public Self: The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt. Waterloo, ON:Wilfred Laurier University Press. Fink, Eugen. 1981. “Operative concepts in Husserl’s phenomenology”. In: Apriori and World. European Contribution to Husserlian Phenomenology. Eds. and trans.William R. McKenna, Robert M. Harlan, and Laurence E.Winters.The Hague: Nijhoff. Heidegger, Martin. 1967. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer (1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford, UK/Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell). ———. 1977. The Question of Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York/London: Garland. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.Trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Jay, Martin. 1986. “The political existentialism of Hannah Arendt”. In: Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 237–256. Loidolt, Sophie. 2017. Phenomenology of Plurality. Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity. New York: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2005. Phenomenology of Perception.Trans. Colin Smith. London/New York: Routledge. Taminiaux, Jacques. 1997. The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Villa, Dana R. 1996. Arendt and Heidegger.The Fate of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wolin, Richard. 2001. Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. 1982. Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World. New Haven, CT/London:Yale UP.
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40 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR Christine Daigle
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) is a key fgure of French existentialism. Her early philosophical and literary writings are permeated by ethical questions of the other and ambiguity. Her magnum opus, The Second Sex, is widely recognized as a foundational work in feminist philosophy. Her attention to oppression and interpersonal relations persists through the writings that follow this treatise. In order to best assess the philosophical position that Beauvoir holds throughout her writings – philosophical, literary, and autobiographical – it is essential to understand how this position embraces phenomenological tenets and uses its methods for its expression. As Debra Bergoffen puts it, “To read Beauvoir as a philosopher is to discover that her concerns are persistently ethical and consistently phenomenological” (Bergoffen 2000, 69). To demonstrate that this is the case, I will trace the development of her fundamental notion of ambiguity from Pyrrhus and Cinéas to The Second Sex. I will also explicate the notion of disclosure of existence as Beauvoir appropriates it in connection to the notion of the appeal to the Other. Importantly, the Beauvoirian understanding of disclosure directly relates to her understanding of the political role of literature. I will explain that Beauvoir’s refections on philosophy, the role of literature, and her usage of multiple modes of expression are all part of her phenomenological method.This will allow for the demonstration of the phenomenological nature of The Second Sex in which she unveils specifc patterns of oppression and inauthenticity. I will show that Beauvoir’s phenomenology supports an ethics of authenticity that champions ambiguity and freedom. Beauvoir’s oeuvre is manifold and extensive.Throughout her career, Beauvoir wrote philosophical essays, novels, one play, autobiographies, and many shorter circumstantial pieces. The novel She Came to Stay (1943) is her frst publication. Its epigraph, a quote from Hegel, illustrates particularly well the problem to be explored:“Each consciousness seeks the death of the other.” The main protagonist, Françoise, sees her life and relation with Pierre completely overturned by the presence of the young Xavière as they take the young woman under their wings.While Françoise has been experiencing a symbiotic relation with Pierre, Xavière is a foreign consciousness that remains entirely closed upon itself for Françoise: “Before Françoise’s very eyes, yet apart from her, existed something like a condemnation with no appeal: detached, absolute, unalterable, an alien conscience was rising” (Beauvoir 1982, 292).The French speaks of this presence as an enemy (présence ennemie). It is such because it has its own viewpoint on the world; its own intentional arc sheds meaning onto others and things, thus objectifying others. Françoise experiences 454
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her own objectifcation in Xavière’s eyes and perceives it as a threat to her own consciousness. As a result, the relation between the two is experienced as confictual.The novel concludes with the main character, Françoise, murdering the young Xavière. While this is quite a dramatic handling of the problem of other consciousnesses and interpersonal relations,1 Beauvoir presents a very sophisticated analysis of the problem from a phenomenological point of view both in this novel and in the writings that follow it. Many passages contain phenomenological analyses in which she tackles the intentional nature of consciousness. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator observes that “She [Françoise] alone evoked the signifcance of these abandoned places, of these slumbering things. The world belonged to her” (Beauvoir 1982, 2). This is the case because intentional consciousness constitutes the world for itself. Further, as Françoise observes the empty theater, the narrator notes, “the red-plush seats were lined up in their rows, motionless and expectant. A moment ago they had been aware of nothing. Now she was there and they held out their arms” (Beauvoir 1982, 12).The empty room and its objects come to life once an intentional consciousness encounters them, looks at them, and constitutes them for itself. Consciousness constitutes itself and the world as intentional. In the novel, the presence of an other, literally alien, consciousness becomes a threat for the main character as it challenges her whole world and relations with others. Indeed that alien consciousness is also intentional and engages in the same processes of world and self constitution.2 Pyrrhus and Cinéas (1944) explores the question of self and world constitution through a different angle.The essay opens with a dialogue between the king, Pyrrhus, and his advisor, Cinéas. The conversation revolves around Pyrrhus’ conquests and what motivates them. If Pyrrhus will rest after a long series of conquests, as he claims, why not just rest now? To ask this question is to seek an answer to the question of whether life has meaning. Why engage in any course of action if life does not have any meaning? Beauvoir proposes that the human being defnes itself and its world through its actions and thereby gives meaning to its life. While she does not explicitly discuss the notion of ambiguity in this essay, one can see various aspects of it emerge. She discusses the relation between consciousness and the world, positing that we are free and yet situated. She also advances her view of intersubjective relations as both necessary to our constitution and potentially problematic. Beauvoir explains that we come to a world that we can make our own through our choices and deeds. She says: “My relationships with things are not given, are not fxed; I create them minute by minute. […] Thus our relationship with the world is not decided from the onset; it is we who decide” (Beauvoir 2004a, 94).We are in a world which we must appropriate for ourselves and give meaning to from our own perspective.“Each man decides on the place he occupies in the world, but he must occupy one. He can never withdraw from it” (Beauvoir 2004a, 100). The same is true of an individual’s project.We exist in the world and appropriate it through our actions and we form projects in it.This is not something we can escape: it is the very way in which we exist. Although this may lead us to think that projects and meanings are arbitrary and formed in a solipsistic fashion, Beauvoir argues rather that this is not the case.We form our projects and generate meaning in the world as beings that are always in relation with others. She says: “A man alone in the world would be paralyzed by the manifest vision of the vanity of all his goals. He would undoubtedly not be able to stand living. But man is not alone in the world” (Beauvoir 2004a, 115).We live in a world that is populated by other free consciousnesses.We are all subjects of our own existences and, at the same time, objects in that of others. In Pyrrhus and Cinéas, the presence of others is no longer as threatening as it was in She Came to Stay.The Other validates our existence, our goals, our actions, and our choices. It is only once the Other also values whatever it is that I have put forth that its value is established. Likewise, 455
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the Other needs me to take on their project. Humans appeal to one another for the validation and grounding of their project, and thereby of their own existence. As Beauvoir explains, this appeal, this call to the other to take on our project, can resonate only if the Other is free and if I have made them my fellow human. However, there is a risk involved in appealing to the Other: the Other might choose not to reciprocate and not to consider me a free human being. She says,“Our being realizes itself only by choosing to be in danger in the world, in danger before the foreign and divided freedoms that take hold of it” (Beauvoir 2004a, 133). Making ourselves vulnerable, putting ourselves at risk, we regain ourselves. The Other must be free if they are to respond to the appeal but, because they are free, they can also opt to ignore it, objectify us, deny our freedom. Despite the risk that is inherent in this, Beauvoir insists that we must work actively to make human beings free.The need we have for others, the fact that “Our freedoms support each other like the stones in an arch” (Beauvoir 2004a, 140) leads her to embrace this ethical and political stance, one that will endure through her career. In her publications between Pyrrhus and Cinéas and The Second Sex, Beauvoir continues to explore the notion of ambiguity, focusing on ethical and political questions. Her essays Moral Idealism and Political Realism (1945) and An Eye for an Eye (1946), as well as her novel The Blood of Others (1945) and her play The Useless Mouths (1945), continue to fesh out the tension between freedom and situation, between the self and others, choice, action, and responsibility.This is all related to the ambiguity she has identifed as being at the heart of the human condition. This refection culminates in the essay The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).3 Debra Bergoffen suggests that “Instead, however, of interpreting intentionality as directed by the desires of the same perceiving (Husserl), imperialist (Sartre), or sexual (Merleau-Ponty) subject, Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity introduces the idea of otherness into intentionality itself ” (Bergoffen 2000, 62). I would argue rather that this move had already been accomplished at the time of Pyrrhus and Cinéas.We have seen above that the individual is always in a realm of intersubjectivity, always in relation with others. The Ethics of Ambiguity reinforces and consolidates this view by putting emphasis on authentic ethical fourishing. Beauvoir explains,“To attain his truth, man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it” (Beauvoir 1976, 13). This involves acknowledging one’s own ambiguity and one’s connection to others. One must acknowledge and aim to realize oneself as both object and subject, immanence and transcendence, self and other, free and situated. One must come to terms with the fact that It is desire which creates the desirable, and the project which sets up the end. It is human existence which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged. (Beauvoir 1976, 15) I take this passage to be a description of the operations of consciousness as intentional, which constitutes itself and the world in the same process. And it is reminiscent of the passages I have quoted above from both She Came to Stay and Pyrrhus and Cinéas.The emphasis is now put on the notion of disclosure. Beauvoir explains that “man does not create the world. He succeeds in disclosing it only through the resistance which the world opposes to him” (Beauvoir 1976, 28). But she reminds us that “if it is true that every project emanates from subjectivity, it is also true that this subjective movement establishes by itself a surpassing of subjectivity. Man can fnd a justifcation of his own existence only in the existence of other men” (Beauvoir 1976, 72). This brings her to the same conclusion she had drawn in Pyrrhus and Cinéas, namely,“To want 456
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existence, to want to disclose the world, and to want men to be free are one and the same will” (Beauvoir 1976, 86–87). Her phenomenological position carries an ethical and political imperative, namely to actively work to maximize freedom in the world by fghting oppression. In order to accomplish her goals, Beauvoir feels the need to adopt a methodological stance that allows her to tackle ambiguity. She is critical of traditional philosophizing, which she fnds reductive and alienating. At the beginning of The Ethics of Ambiguity, she explains that, “As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it” (De Beauvoir 1976, 7).They have done so by adopting philosophical viewpoints that were dualistic and championed an absolutist point of view. Rather, she wants to “try to assume our fundamental ambiguity” (Beauvoir 1976, 9). This entails embracing a non-dualistic understanding of ourselves and of our interaction with others and the world. Her philosophical method avoids the philosophical treatise and favors instead a manifold approach to the complexities and fundamental ambiguity of human existence and experience. As Sara Heinämaa puts it, Beauvoir rejects “philosophical systems that do not pay attention to the plurality of living experience and its expression in language” (Heinämaa 2003, 17).4 Phenomenology is a method of choice, since it “aims at a presuppositionless description of the essential features of experience” (Heinämaa 2003, 11).Wendy O’Brien explains that Beauvoir’s encounter with phenomenology happened early, as she was studying with Jacques Baruzzi at the Sorbonne. He was interested in German philosophy, and it is more than likely that he would have been aware of Husserl’s phenomenological works (O’Brien 2001, 3ff.). Beauvoir would thus have been exposed to these ideas before she set out to write her frst pieces. Her review of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception written for Les Temps modernes in 1945 leaves no doubt about Beauvoir’s enthusiasm for the potential of the phenomenological approach as well as her agreement with some of the insights offered by Merleau-Ponty. She says,“One of the great merits of phenomenology is to have given back to man the right to an authentic existence, by eliminating the opposition of the subject and the object” (Beauvoir 2004b, 160). By focusing on embodied consciousness, phenomenology shows that it is impossible to think the body merely as an object. Embodied consciousness is of the world and is “our manner of being in the world, our ‘anchorage’ in this world” (Beauvoir 2004b, 160).This body is not in the world in the same way as any other object. It lives in it,“our existence realizes itself in it” (Beauvoir 2004b, 161). It does so through its action in the world and through its relating to things in the world.The world is our place, we give it meaning through our actions. Given her claims in Pyrrhus and Cinéas, it is not surprising that Beauvoir would welcome such phenomenological views. In fact, her own align with those of Merleau-Ponty. She concludes her short review by pointing out that the most important aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s book is its attention to the lived experience of perception thanks to the phenomenological method that avoids the pitfalls of the systematic philosophy she criticizes and rejects. She says, Merleau-Ponty does not invent a system; he starts from established facts and he demonstrates that it is impossible to account for them on an experimental plane. Instead they imply an entire relationship between man and the world, and it is this relationship that he patiently brings out. (Beauvoir 2004b, 163–164) What Merleau-Ponty shows, and what Beauvoir appreciates, is that one must start from one’s experience in the world and in relation with objects rather than attempt to build an abstract 457
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system of thought and then try to superimpose it on the world.This means going back to the things themselves as has been famously claimed by Edmund Husserl. Doing so means unveiling things and our relations to them. In addition to phenomenology as a philosophical method, metaphysical literature is another methodological tool that can bring about the disclosure of existence that Beauvoir’s ethicopolitical imperative necessitates. In her 1946 essay, “Literature and Metaphysics,” Beauvoir explains that the metaphysical novel, if “honestly read, and honestly written, provides a disclosure of existence in a way unequalled by any other mode of expression” (Beauvoir 2004c, 276). In seeking to unveil ambiguous reality, the metaphysical novel does not convey specifc philosophical ideas, and thus avoids the didacticism of the roman à thèse. This reality is permeated by ambiguity. Beauvoir claims, It is not by chance if existentialist thought today attempts to express itself sometimes by theoretical treatises and sometimes by fction; it is because it is an effort to reconcile the objective and the subjective, the absolute and the relative, the timeless and the historical. (Beauvoir 2004c, 274) For Beauvoir, the metaphysical novel’s accomplishment lies precisely in that: it can evoke for the reader the fundamental ambiguity of our existence. In communicating this to the reader, it also serves to open the reader’s eyes to their own experiences as ambiguous beings and possibly illuminate in what way human freedom may be stifed. In doing so, it contributes to the appeal that Beauvoir identifed as necessary in Pyrrhus and Cinéas. It appears, then, that a manifold of methods ought to be embraced in order to maximize the appeal to the Other. And this is why Beauvoir writes the diverse type of works she does. The Second Sex (1949), however, is a particular case. Within it, Beauvoir makes use of different methodological approaches. The book combines the philosophical essay, the historical account, the anthropological analysis, as well as literary and autobiographical writing through the many excerpts that Beauvoir quotes. Despite this, Karen Vintges suggests that “far from being a clumsy eclectic work [a charge sometimes put against the work], The Second Sex is structured systematically as a philosophical phenomenological enterprise” (Vintges 1995, 49). I agree with Vintges that this is the case and that, in particular, the extensive use of examples is essential to this approach. Indeed, by presenting a manifold of experiences to the reader through these examples, the appeal is maximized: it is more likely that one of those will resonate with the reader.The inner methodological multiplicity of The Second Sex makes it more effcient in its appeal to the reader.5 The Second Sex (1949) further refnes the notion of ambiguity by adding an extra layer to it: that of sex and gender.Although Beauvoir does not use the term “gender” herself, the work she accomplishes in the book provides the foundation upon which gender theory can be erected by dissociating gender from physiological sex and insisting that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (Beauvoir 2011, 283). She thus continues to hold to the phenomenological notion of the body as a situation rather than a thing. In the frst chapter,“Biological Data,” she explicitly positions herself in this philosophical tradition. She says,“in the position I adopt – that of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty – that if the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects” (Beauvoir 2011, 46).6 This is consistent with the views she elaborated starting with She Came to Stay. In The Second Sex, this leads her to the conclusion that although the biological data she has uncovered about male and female bodies are important, they are far from determining. She says: 458
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These biological data are of extreme importance: they play an all-important role and are an essential element of woman’s situation: we will be referring to them in all further accounts. Because the body is the instrument of our hold on the world, the world appears different to us depending on how it is grasped, which explains why we have studied these data so deeply; they are one of the keys that enable us to understand woman. But we refuse the idea that they form a fxed destiny for her. (Beauvoir 2011, 44). In this manner, Beauvoir introduces an important distinction between the physiological body, which she refers to under the banner of “biological data,” and the lived body of embodied intentional free consciousness. It is the latter that can determine itself in situation. This distinction then serves as the foundation for her critique and rejection of the patriarchal oppressive system in which woman is relegated to the role of the subservient Other to man. Indeed, the situation is constitutive of one’s self but it is not a destiny. The phenomenological positions Beauvoir embraces are thus pillars to her feminist analysis and critique as well as to her political program. She concludes the treatise by a call for action:“Within the given world, it is up to man to make the reign of freedom triumph; to carry off this supreme victory, men and women must, among other things and beyond their natural differentiations, unequivocally affrm their brotherhood” (Beauvoir 2011, 766).7 In the works that follow The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s political commitments to fghting oppression become more and more prominent.All her writings, literary, philosophical, autobiographical, are driven by this desire to disclose existence and appeal to the reader to take on action to change and improve the world. Interestingly, Beauvoir wrote another treatise, Old Age (1970), in which she put a manifold methodology similar to the one used in The Second Sex to work.8 Beauvoir’s commitments to phenomenology and its philosophical method persist through her entire career and serve to establish her ethical and political positions on frm ground, that of ambiguity, freedom, and intersubjective relations.
Notes 1 Many commentators have read this novel as a mise en oeuvre of Sartre’s view that “The essence of the relations between consciousnesses is not the Mitsein; it is confict” (Sartre 2009, 451). In her “Sartre and Beauvoir on Hegel’s Master Slave Dialectic and the Question of the ‘Look’,” Debbie Evans (2009) shows that this is not the case and that, in fact, Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel’s dialectic in the novel served as an inspiration for Sartre to turn to Hegel. Each thinker uses Hegel each in their own way. 2 This is reminiscent of Sartre’s phrase:“The Other steals the world from me” (Sartre 2009, 313). 3 This essay has often been taken to present the Sartrean ethics promised in conclusion of Being and Nothingness. Because Beauvoir was considered to be merely Sartrean for a long time and because Sartre had failed to publish an ethics, readers turned to this essay for the Sartrean ethics they were looking for.This, however, constitutes a profound misunderstanding of Beauvoir’s original phenomenological position, which rests on ambiguity in a way that escapes Sartre’s views. 4 Heinämaa argues that Beauvoir is a Socratic type of philosopher who prefers to focus on questioning. She also claims that Kierkegaard was infuential in the development of her philosophical method. His notion of indirect communication in particular would have been of interest to her. 5 I have explored in detail how this appeal operates in the context of The Second Sex and how it relates to Beauvoir’s phenomenological positions in my article “The Second Sex as Appeal:The Ethical Dimension of Ambiguity.” 6 She explicitly relates this to the views of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. It is to be noted that Beauvoir wrote a review of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception for Les Temps modernes in 1945. In it, she expressed her enthusiasm for Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, in particular his view of the body as situated and as the expression of our existence. She also praised his method: “Merleau-Ponty does
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Christine Daigle not invent a system; he starts from established facts and he demonstrates that it is impossible to account for them on an experimental plane” (Beauvoir 2004b, 163). 7 Although the use of “brotherhood” might seem surprising, one must keep in mind that what Beauvoir is referring to here is the notion of equality and solidarity that is expressed in the motto of the French Republic, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.” 8 In her introduction to Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age, Sylvia Stoller explains that there are many similarities in themes and methods between The Second Sex and Old Age. Both are concerned with the oppression and marginalization of a group, women in the one case and the elderly in the other. And both use a phenomenological method that combines a variety of approaches and narratives to unveil the situation in which the oppressed group comes to be marginalized. Stoller is right that this later work has been unduly neglected and her edited volume begins to remedy this situation. See her Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age. Gender, Ethics, and Time.
References Beauvoir, Simone de. 1976. The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Citadel Press. ———. 1982. She Came to Stay.Trans.Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse. London: Harper Collins. ———. 2004a. “Pyrrhus and Cinéas”. In: Philosophical Writings. Eds. Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmermann and Mary Beth Mader. Urbana/Chicago:The University of Illinois Press: pp. 89–149. ———. 2004b.“A Review of the Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945)”. In: Philosophical Writings. Eds. Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmermann and Mary Beth Mader. Urbana/Chicago:The University of Illinois Press. ———. 2004c. “Literature and Metaphysics”. In: Philosophical Writings. Eds. Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmermann and Mary Beth Mader. Urbana/Chicago:The University of Illinois Press. ———. 2011. The Second Sex.Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York:Vintage. Bergoffen, Debra. 2000. “From Husserl to Beauvoir: Gendering the Perceiving Subject”. In: Feminist Phenomenology. Ed. Linda Fischer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing. Daigle, Christine. 2014. “The Second Sex as Appeal:The Ethical Dimension of Ambiguity”. philoSOPHIA. A Journal of Continental Feminism (4.2): pp. 197–220. Evans, Debbie. 2009. “Sartre and Beauvoir on Hegel’s Master Slave Dialectic and the Question of the ‘Look’”. In: Beauvoir & Sartre. The Riddle of Infuence. Eds. Christine Daigle and Golomb Jacob. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 90–115. Heinämaa, Sara. 2003. Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference. Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefeld. O’Brien,Wendy. 2001.“Introduction”. In: The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir. Eds. Wendy O’Brien and Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 1–15. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2009. Being and Nothingness.Trans. H. Barnes. London/New York: Routledge. Stoller, Sylvia. 2014. Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age. Gender, Ethics, and Time. Berlin:Walter de Gruyter. Vintges, Karen. 1995.“The Second Sex and Philosophy”. In: Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir. Ed. Margaret A. Simons. University Park, PA:The Pennsylvania State University Press: pp. 45-58
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41 FRANZ BRENTANO Arkadiusz Chrudzimski
For a long time, the philosophical signifcance of Franz Brentano has been reduced to being the most important teacher of Edmund Husserl. However, since Roderick Chisholm’s pioneering work (cf. e.g. Chisholm 1982, Chisholm 1986) the situation has changed. Nowadays the importance of Brentano’s work is generally appreciated and there is a growing community of scholars involved in Brentano research (cf. e.g. papers collected in Kriegel 2017). Brentano’s contributions are numerous. Beside inspiring such important movements as Husserlian phenomenology, Meinongian theory of objects, and Polish analytic philosophy of the Lvov–Warsaw school, Brentano developed many interesting philosophical ideas. The importance of his re-discovery of intentionality is well appreciated, but his analyses of epistemic and ethical concepts are just as interesting and his late reistic ontology is still highly attractive for those “who have a taste for desert landscapes” (Quine 1951).
41.1. Intentionality The most important part of Brentano’s work is his philosophical psychology. Here we fnd his re-discovery of intentionality, his classifcation of mental phenomena, and his idea of descriptive psychology that was so inspiring for Husserl. Let me begin this chapter with intentionality. Intentionality is the property of certain states or objects consisting in being about, referring to or being directed at something.The paradigmatic examples of intentionality are mental states and speech acts. My thought that Donald Trump is a bad president refers in this sense to Donald Trump, my perception of the Eiffel Tower is directed at the Eiffel Tower and my statement that the Chinese economy is growing is about the Chinese economy. True enough, the phenomenon of intentionality has been intensively investigated by medieval philosophers (Perler 2002), and also, the majority of analyses that we fnd in works of Descartes and Kant revolve around the issues concerning intentionality. Still, it was Franz Brentano who clearly delineated this problem and turned it into the central point of his philosophical system. That’s why Brentano is justifably credited with the re-discovery of the phenomenon of intentionality for contemporary philosophy. The fact that intentionality becomes a philosophical problem has to do with certain logical irregularities pertaining to the above-mentioned intentional directedness or aboutness.The irregularities are marked by the violation of the logical principles of existential generalization and substi461
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tutivity of identicals salva veritate, and are sometimes labeled as existential indifference and aspectuality of intentional states. The frst problem is illustrated by the fact that from a sentence like “John believes that Santa Claus is funny” we cannot infer that there is something which John believes to be funny, for, sad as it may be, there is no Santa Claus.The second irregularity causes that, from the sentence “John admires the victor at Jena”, together with the true identity “The victor at Jena is the same person as the vanquished at Waterloo”, we cannot infer the sentence “John admires the vanquished at Waterloo”. In order to be able to infer the latter sentence it is not enough that the identity “The victor at Jena is the same person as the vanquished at Waterloo” in fact obtains.To secure the inference we must frst secure that John knows that it obtains. The solution proposed by many philosophers was to introduce certain supplementary entities that were designed to play the role of ersatz-objects in cases of non-existence of the genuine reference object, and that would be fne-grained enough to account for the difference between the victor at Jena and the vanquished at Waterloo.The whole group of such theories of intentionality can be called the family of theories of mediating entities. Simplifying a little the development of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, one can say that in his works there are two theories of intentionality – the “early” and the “late” one;1 and that his early theory clearly belongs to the family of theories of mediating entities. In Psychology from an Empirical Point of View (1874), he speaks of “having something immanently as an object” as the defning feature of mental phenomena. Every mental phenomenon, we read, “includes something as object within itself ” (Brentano 1874, 106/88). Such objects are called by Brentano “immanent objects”, “contents” or “intentional correlates”. The most important aspect of the “immanence” of an immanent object is its undetachability from the corresponding mental act. Intentional objects are ontologically dependent on mental acts. In this and only in this sense we can say that they are “in” the mind. Incidentally, we also see that Brentano treats the presence of an immanent object as the defning feature of mental phenomena and thus claims that every mental phenomenon is intentional. The ontology of immanent objects is a somewhat tricky matter. Before Psychology from an Empirical Point of View (cf. Chrudzimski 2013b), Brentano accepted the medieval doctrine of esse obiectivum, according to which an object intentionally referred to enjoys an “objective”, ontologically non-committing mode of being in the subject’s mind. It is not excluded that also in the Psychology the ontological status of immanent objects should be interpreted in this way. But later, particularly in Brentano’s lectures on Descriptive Psychology (Brentano 1891), the situation changes and immanent objects (called there “intentional correlates”) are taken ontologically seriously.2 They are defned as entities ontologically dependent on mental acts and it is claimed that they have the properties that are relevant to establishing the intentional directedness (in my above examples, the property of being Santa Claus or the property of being the victor at Jena) not in a standard way, but in an ontologically puzzling “modifying” sense (Brentano 1891, 27/29f.). In the “middle” period of Brentano’s philosophy, immanent objects become thus ontologically serious and highly articulated entities resembling intentional objects that can be found e.g. in the ontology of Roman Ingarden (Ingarden 1931).3 In the late period of his philosophy, Brentano rejected all kinds of entities that don’t belong to the category of things and tried to explain the logical puzzles of intentional directedness without the reference to immanent objects. The conclusion, published in the Appendix to the second edition of Psychology from an Empirical Point of View (Brentano 1911), can be interpreted in two ways.4 The frst interpretation says that, according to the late Brentano, the intentional directedness doesn’t involve any relation (either to an external thing or to an immanent object) but consists in having by the subject a peculiar monadic property.The property in question is a mental property of intentionally referring to, and the object of reference is specifed by a cer462
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tain higher-order property, typically expressed by adverbs. In this interpretation Brentano’s late theory takes the form of the so-called adverbial theory of intentionality.The second interpretation stipulates a special category of non-extensional dyadic relations that don’t require the existence of the second term and that are sensitive to the above-mentioned aspectuality of intentional states. In general, it seems that the adverbial interpretation is ontologically less controversial and fts better the reist ontology of the late Brentano.
41.2. Classifcation of mental phenomena According to Brentano there are exactly three kinds of mental phenomena. The most basic mental state consists simply in having an object before one’s mind and is called presentation (German: Vorstellung). Presentation in this sense doesn’t involve any claim concerning the existence or non-existence of the presented object and therefore it cannot be true or false. The further two kinds of mental states are founded on presentations and in this sense are ontologically dependent on them. The frst one is judgment (German: Urteil). In opposition to the Aristotelian tradition Brentano denies that the essence of judgment consists in a composition of presentations. A mere complication of content is principally unable to transform a presentation into a judgment. But also, intensity of mental states, which was designed by British empiricism to play this role, doesn’t work properly. Brentano notices that we have very intense presentations and very “washed out” judgments.The differences of intensity have nothing to do with the distinction between presentation and judgment.What we need, argues Brentano, is a new primitive mental mode – the mode of judging. Judgments aren’t reducible to some compositions or kinds of presentations.They are mental acts sui generis.That’s why Brentano’s theory has been labeled the idiogenic theory of judgment. As said above, according to Brentano every judgment needs a presentation as its foundation. It takes a presented object and refers to it with an additional mental mode – that of accepting or rejecting. Because of this additional mode a judgment can be right or wrong. If we accept an object that exists or reject an object that doesn’t exist our judgment is right, otherwise it is wrong. In this sense it is often said that, according to Brentano, in a judgment a presented object is accepted as existing or rejected as non-existing, but we must be aware that this formulation is rather imprecise and when taken literally can lead to deep confusions. One of the central features of the Brentanian theory of judgment is, namely, the claim that judging doesn’t consist in any predication of existence or non-existence.As we will see in the following, existence and non-existence cannot be construed as standard concepts that could be predicated at this level. In his Psychology from an Empirical Point of View, Brentano tried to demonstrate that all kinds of categorical judgments (in particular all four traditional Aristotelian forms: a, i, e, o) can be reduced to the existential (positive or negative) form.The principle is simple.The form “every S is P” becomes “there is no S which is non-P”; the fgure “some S are P” is rewritten as “there is S which is P”; the Brentanian counterpart of “no S is P” is “there is no S which is P” and “some S are non-P” is interpreted as “there is S which is non-P”.5 We must only remember that the phrases “there is” and “there is no” are not to be construed as signs of some peculiar content but as expressions of certain peculiar mental modi. The third and last group of the mental phenomena are emotions (German: Gemütsbewegungen) or the phenomena of love and hate, as Brentano often calls them.They are very similar to judgments. Like judgments, they take presentations as their foundations and refer to the presented objects with a peculiar binary mode of acceptance or rejection. But this time, the acceptance or rejection has emotional character that can be captured by the concepts of love and hate, provided we take them in their broadest possible meaning. In the Brentanian sense, we emotionally reject 463
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both rotten meat and the sexual crimes of the Catholic Church.The details of our mental states in these two cases will be, in many respects, quite different, but according to Brentano’s theory we can clearly spot a common character of emotional rejection.
41.3. Inner perception In the middle period of Brentano’s philosophy – roughly between 1870 and 1895 – the most important area of his research was the discipline that we would call philosophical psychology and that, around 1890, Brentano labeled “descriptive psychology”, a discipline that should systematically describe essential features of our mental life and that later on became the prototype of Husserl’s phenomenology. Brentano took great pains to secure a solid epistemological basis for this discipline.The key should be his doctrine of inner perception. Brentano classifed himself often as empiricist, but it seems that for many reasons the label “Cartesian” would ft better. In particular, Brentano wouldn’t be happy with any form of knowledge that couldn’t provide absolutely secure,“Cartesian” justifcation that he called evidence. No judgment that could turn out false deserves, according to him, the name of knowledge. Brentano’s epistemology was perfectly binary. On the one hand, we have fully justifed, evident judgments; on the other hand, only blind faith. In particular, if we follow Brentano’s epistemic principles, then the so-called “external perception” shouldn’t be classifed as perception at all.The only mental state that truly deserves the name of perception is inner perception, in which we grasp our own mental states. Many philosophers claimed that we are able to refect on our own mental state in such a way that we direct at it a second mental state. Such theories are nowadays often called “higher-order theories”, as they involve a hierarchy of higher-order states that are necessary in order to grasp the lower-order ones. But Brentano’s theory doesn’t belong to this family.The basic vehicles of self-knowledge are, according to him, acts of inner perception, in which the perceiving act is to be considered as a part of its own object. Every mental state involves two aspects. On the one hand we have the main, or, as Brentano says, primary intention, directed at its primary object. When I imagine Pegasus, then the primary object of my imagination is Pegasus and my primary intention is the intention directed at Pegasus. But this is not the end of the story, for beside this primary intentionality there is also the secondary intention and the secondary object.The secondary intention of my imagination of Pegasus is directed at the act of imagination itself and the secondary object is, consequently, the mental act of imagination. So, according to Brentano, every mental act is in the frst line directed at its primary object, but “in passing” it always grasps also itself, and this grasping is not restricted to a mere presentation. Brentano says that in the inner perception there is always an evident judgment that accepts the object of inner perception. In this way, in every mental act there is involved a knowledge about this very act. By the way, the inner perception is the only mental phenomena that really deserves the name “perception”. Neither the so-called external perception nor the inner observation, in which we can direct second-order mental acts at our past acts, are perceptions in the strict sense of the word. The reason is that they are not evident, which for Brentano means that they are to be classifed as cases of instinctive, blind faith.
41.4. Truth and value Brentano proposes a highly interesting view concerning the notion of truth and value. In general, his offcial views can be classifed as an anti-realist approach, while in his unpublished lectures one can fnd elements of an ontologically robust theory of truthmakers and values. 464
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Let me begin with Brentano’s offcial views. As stated above, his theory of judgment and emotion sees these phenomena as mental states that take presentation as their foundation and apprehend the presented object through certain mental modes of (alethic or emotional) acceptance and rejection. The consequence of this approach is that the only structures that appear on the object-side are objects of presentation of the nominal form. In particular, in Brentano’s offcial writings there are no states-of-affairs or states-of-values that we know from the works of Carl Stumpf,Anton Marty or Alexius Meinong (Chrudzimski 2009).The only truthmakers that would be accessible within Brentano’s offcial ontological universe would be nominal (even if sometimes quite complex) objects. Assuming Brentano’s theory of judgment, it would be possible to build a realist theory of truth on this basis. It would be enough to say that a judgment accepting an A is true if and only if there is, in our universe, an A; and the judgment rejecting an A is true if and only if there is no A. But in his offcial writings, Brentano never proposed such a realist story about truth. He argues that the only concept of truth that can be accessible to a human mind is an epistemic one.The argument goes as follows: A realist concept of truth assumes a certain comparison between a mental act (a judgment) and a truthmaking reality. Now, no matter what this reality were, the only epistemic access we could have to it is through an evident judgment. So from an epistemic point of view, we cannot differentiate between the presence of the appropriate truthmaker in the universe on the one hand and making an evident judgment on the other (Chrudzimski 2001, 71ff.). Consequently, the only concept of truth that we can have is the following: a judgment is true if it can be also made by someone who judges with evidence (Brentano 1930, 139/122), and so at the end of the day Brentano defnes truth in epistemic terms as an idealized justifcation, exactly like the contemporary anti-realists and pragmatists.6 A true judgment is a correct judgment, a judgment as it should be, which in the end means as much as “epistemically justifable”. As we see, Brentano’s arguments in favor of the epistemic construal of truth, as well as the arguments of the anti-realists and pragmatists mentioned, are deeply rooted in the conviction that our concept of truth must involve certain experiential criteria of application. As I argued elsewhere (Chrudzimski 2016), this supposition leads inevitably to an epistemic concept of truth. A natural basis for such a “criteriological” theory of concepts is the doctrine of conceptual empiricism, according to which all our concepts stem from experience. And indeed, Brentano was a conceptual empiricist in this sense. Brentano’s approach to the question of values and moral rightness is quite similar to his analysis of the concept of truth. In his Origin of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (1889), he outlines a theory to the effect that our concept of the moral correctness doesn’t involve any comparing of our emotional acts of love and hate with objective states-of-values but, exactly like the correctness of a judgment, is to be analyzed in terms of idealized justifability.The condition that must be fulflled in order to make it work is the existence of a counterpart of evidence in the domain of emotional intentionality; and indeed, Brentano claims that there is such a counterpart. Exactly as in the case of judgments, certain emotions also have an inner characteristic of being intrinsically right. In the case of judgments, Brentano called this characteristic “evidence”. For the case of emotions he has no special term, but we can call it “emotional evidence”. And similarly to the defnition of truth, we can defne moral rightness as a characteristic of an emotion that could be also performed with emotional evidence. As we see, in Brentano’s universe we need no special entities that would play the role of truthmakers or moral verifers. Consequently, Brentano remarks that the notions of existence and moral goodness that often tend to be philosophers’ favorite pets have a more complicated psychological genesis than it seems.These concepts are not obtained directly, through a simple gazing at the world, because there is nothing in the world that would correspond to them.We 465
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gain them rather through an inner perception directed at our evident acts.To exist means to be correctly acceptable, which in turn means to be acceptable in an evident judgment; and to be good means to be a possible object of a correct love (i.e. a love that could be also performed with emotional evidence).The reader has surely noticed that Brentano’s defnitions generously use modal operators and unreal conditionals. Nowadays we know that this can have severe ontological consequences, including even such perversities as the ontology of possible worlds. However, it seems that Brentano wasn’t aware of these dangers. Before closing this section, let me say a few words about Brentano’s unoffcial doctrine. As mentioned above, beside the offcial, anti-realist theory of truth and values, in Brentano’s unpublished lectures we can fnd a rich ontology introducing special correlates for judgments and emotional phenomena.7 These lectures were particularly inspiring for Brentano’s students, and a detailed theory of states-of-affairs and states-of-values (German: Sachverhalte, Wertverhalte) is to be found in the works of Anton Marty.8 The difference in comparison with the offcial story is that in both the domains of immanent and transcendent entities, we now encounter special objectual correlates for judgments and emotional phenomena. In the school of Brentano, they have been investigated under the name “contents”. Let me begin with judgments. Beside immanent objects of presentation, we now have immanent contents such as “accepted object” and “rejected object”; and in the domain of transcendent entities we now have not only nominal objects but also existences and non-existences thereof.Turning to the emotional phenomena, in the immanent area, beside the immanent object A we see complex structures that Brentano calls “loved A” resp. “hated G” and in the world outside we have even the objective states-of-values like “the good A” or “the bad A”. It is clear that these unoffcial views are inconsistent with some of Brentano’s central and particularly interesting ideas, like e.g. the idea that the concepts of existence and moral value aren’t standard predicates and have no objectual correlates. According to the outlined doctrine, they become perfectly standard predicates and judgments and emotional phenomena have to be interpreted as predications of existence and values (see Chrudzimski 2014). It’s hard to resist the impression that the sudden ontological permissivity spoiled the beauty and simplicity of Brentano’s offcial doctrine.
41.5. General ontology Roughly speaking, Brentano’s metaphysical views can be divided into three long periods: (i) the early period in which Brentano developed a parsimonious ontology, using mainly conceptualist tools of medieval philosophers; (ii) the middle period, from the publication of Psychology to 1900, in which a descriptive attitude led Brentano to a very rich ontology, mainly concerning complex structures of intentional states; and (iii) the late, reist period, in which Brentano banned from his ontological universe everything that doesn’t belong to the category of things. I have no room to present here the evolution of Brentano’s ontological views in detail.9 For the purposes of this chapter we can assume that the rich ontology of intentional states that was the major concern of the middle period has been already suffciently presented in the previous parts. And as for early conceptualism, it must be said that Brentano’s ontology of this period wasn’t particularly original. Generally speaking, he was infuenced by conceptualist readings of Aristotle and assumed that only particulars were to be regarded as entities existing in the fullest sense of the word. Nevertheless, he allowed for reference to various ontological categories, interpreting them as “mere modes of speaking” without ontological import. In particular, the young Brentano operated notoriously with counterfactuals whose ontological force wasn’t further explained. 466
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The most interesting ontological analyses from the early period are to be found in the lectures on metaphysics from 1867 (manuscript M 96). He distinguishes there three kinds of parts of real beings: physical parts, logical parts and metaphysical parts. The only things that exist in the fullest sense of the word are real things that correspond to Aristotelian substances. Brentano agrees with Aristotle that as long as the thing hasn’t been actually divided into parts, its physical parts exist only potentially. Boundaries have a still weaker mode of being; they are fctions cum fundamento in re.They cannot be isolated, even in principle. Their foundation consists in the fact that real things can be measured, and measurements are expressed by reference to corresponding boundaries. The logical parts of an entity Brentano describes as parts of a defnition in Aristotle’s sense. In this sense, in a concrete human being there are logical parts such as “animal”, “mammal” or “primate”. Also, Brentano claims here that the division of a real thing into its logical parts is a fction; this fction is cum fundamento in re, because some divisions of this sort are correct, and others incorrect.And correctness and incorrectness are in turn explained epistemically, along the lines of the epistemic analysis of the concept of truth. Brentano distinguishes, fnally, the notion of metaphysical parts, which correspond to the Aristotelian notions of substance and accident. Unsurprisingly, these metaphysical parts also turn out to be fctions cum fundamento in re, and this “foundation” is, again, explained in normative terms. Some divisions are correct, some others incorrect.10 It seems that the ontological permissivity of the middle period resulted in the frst line from the fact that Brentano realized that a fat dismissal of various categories as ontological non-serious fctions cum fundamento in re cannot be a pure declaration, but must be based on an analysis showing how a given category can be effectively reduced. A reduction of this kind has been proposed in the late, reist period. In his late period, after 1904,11 Brentano allows for only one metaphysical category – that of things – but at the same time he became much more permissive in relation to mereological composition. Not only is each physical body and each non-material soul or mind a thing; also, every physical part of a thing and every collection of things are things in their own right (Brentano 1933, 4/16). The late Brentano has also an interesting idea how to analyze the concept of accident in reistic terms. He proposes to construe an accident as a whole that contains its substance as a part (Brentano 1933, 11/19). In this way, accidents can be classifed as things, but the price is that the relation of parthood involved in this theory is a very special one. On the one hand, an accident must be interpreted as “something more” than the underlying substance, but on the other hand there is nothing in the accident that would remain if the substance were somehow removed (Brentano 1933, 108/85). If we destroy the substance, the accident vanishes completely. This means that one of the principles of classical mereology, the so-called supplementation principle – affrming that if an individual has a proper part, then it has a further proper part, disjoint from the frst and constituting, as it were, the difference between the two – does not hold for this peculiar parthood relation.12 In this respect, Brentano’s late mereology is of a non-standard type (Baumgartner/Simons 1992/93, 68).
Notes 1 For a more detailed story see Chrudzimski 2001, Chrudzimski 2004 and Chrudzimski 2013b. 2 Antonelli (2000 and 2001, 395–405) claims that the intentional correlate from Descriptive Psychology shouldn’t be identifed with the immanent object from Psychology from an Empirical Point of View. I disagree with Antonelli’s interpretation. For details and arguments see Chrudzimski 2004, 155 n150.
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Arkadiusz Chrudzimski 3 On the systematic ontology of intentional objects (including the variants of Brentano’s theory), cf. Chrudzimski 2013a. 4 For the details of these two interpretations, see Chrudzimski 2004, 188–193. 5 For the details, see Simons 1992. 6 In his book Pragmatism.An Open Question Hilary Putnam writes:“To say that truth is ‘correspondence to reality’ is not false but empty, as long as nothing is said about what the ‘correspondence’ is. If the ‘correspondence’ is supposed to be utterly independent of the ways in which we confrm the assertions we make (so that it is conceived to be possible that what is true is utterly different from what we are warranted in taking to be true, not just in some cases but in all cases), then the ‘correspondence’ is an occult one, and our supposed grasp of it is also occult” (Putnam 1995, 10). In a similar vein, Michael Dummett argues that “the notion of truth, when it is introduced, must be explained, in some manner, in terms of our capacity to recognize statements as true, and not in terms of a condition which transcends human capacities” (Dummett 1976, 116). 7 Cf. above all Brentano’s Logic Lectures from the 1870s and 1880s (Manuscript EL 80). On the theory of intentionality developed in these lectures, see Chrudzimski 2001, 42–46, 62–66. 8 On Marty’s theory see Chrudzimski 2014. In his later writings Marty acknowledges his debts to Brentano. Cf.“So habe ich selbst […] den Terminus ‘Urteilsinhalt’ verwendet und vor mir Brentano in seiner Würzburger und Wiener Vorlesungen” (Marty 1908, 292) 9 A detailed exposition of Brentano’s metaphysics can be found in Chrudzimski 2004. For a quick survey, see Chrudzimski and Smith 2004. 10 The work of Brentano from the early period that is historically interesting is without doubt his dissertation On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (Brentano 1862). However, its value lies in the frst line in the fact that it served as the source of inspiration for Heidegger’s (in)famous doctrine of being. 11 This is of course a very rough periodization. In a more detailed analysis, one had to distinguish a transitory period, between 1893 and 1904, during which the rich ontology of the middle period was gradually defated. For details, see Chrudzimski 2004. 12 This principle has been called by Simons (1987, 28) the Weak Supplementation Principle. In point of fact classical mereology assumes much stronger principles. Cf. Simons 1987, 25–37.
References Antonelli, Mauro. 2000. “Franz Brentano und die Wiederentdeckung der Intentionalität. Richtigstellung herkömmlicher Mißverständnisse und Mißdeutungen”. Grazer Philosophische Studien (58/59): pp. 93–117. ———. 2001. Seiendes Bewußtsein, Intentionalität im Frühwerk von Franz Brentano. Freiburg/München:Verlag Karl Alber. Baumgartner, Wilhelm, and Simons, Peter M. 1992/1993. “Brentanos Mereologie”. Brentano Studien (4): pp. 53–77. Brentano, Franz. 1862. Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles. Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften, Bd. IV. Eds. T. Binder and A. Chrudzimski. Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter 2014 (1981. On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle.Trans. by R. George. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). ———. 1874. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. In: Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte.Von der Klassifkation der psychischen Phänomene. Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften, Bd. I. Eds. T. Binder and A. Chrudzimski. Frankfurt am Main: Ontos-Verlag, pp. 1–289 (1973. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Ed. L. L. McAlister. London: Routledge). ———. 1889. Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis. In: Franz Brentano, Schriften zur Ethik und Ästhetik. Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften, Bd. III. Eds.T. Binder and A. Chrudzimski. Berlin/Boston, MA: DeGruyter, 2010, pp. 19–98 (1969. The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong. Trans. Roderick M. Chisholm and Elizabeth H. Schneewind. London: Routledge). ———. 1891. Deskriptive Psychologie. Eds. Roderick M. Chisholm and Wilhelm Baumgartner. Hamburg: Meiner, 1982 (1995. Descriptive Psychology.Trans. Benito Müller. London: Routledge). ———. 1911. Anhang [zur Klassifkation der psychischen Phänomene]. In: Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte.Von der Klassifkation der psychischen Phänomene. Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften, Bd. I. Eds.T. Binder and A. Chrudzimski. Frankfurt am Main: Ontos-Verlag, 2008, pp. 391–426 (1973. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Ed. L. L. McAlister. London: Routledge). ———. 1930. Wahrheit und Evidenz. Hamburg: Meiner (1961. The True and the Evident. Ed. R. M. Chisholm. London: Routledge).
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Franz Brentano ———. 1933. Kategorienlehre. Ed. A. Kastil. Hamburg: Meiner (1981. The Theory of Categories. Eds. R. M. Chisholm and N. Guterman.The Hague: Nijhoff). ———. EL 80. Logik, logic lectures, from 1870s and 80s. ———. M 96. Ontologie (Metaphysik), Metaphysics Lectures from 1867. Chisholm, Roderick M. 1982. Brentano and Meinong Studies. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi. ———. 1986. Brentano and Intrinsic Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz. 2001. Intentionalitätstheorie beim frühen Brentano. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2004. Die Ontologie Franz Brentanos. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2009. “Brentano, Marty, and Meinong on Emotions and Values”. In: Values and Ontology. Eds. Beatrice Centi and Wolfgang Huemer. Frankfurt am Main: DeGruyter, pp. 171–189. ———. 2013a.“Varieties of Intentional Objects”. Semiotica (194): pp. 189–206. ———. 2013b.“Brentano and Aristotle on the Ontology of Intentionality”. In: Themes from Brentano. Eds. Denis Fisette and Guillaume Fréchette.Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 121–137. ———. 2014.“Marty on Truth-Making”. In: Anton Marty, Karl Bühler. Between Mind and Language. Eds. L. Cesalli and J. Friedrich. Basel: Schwabe, pp. 201–234. ———. 2016.“Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz on Transcendental Idealism from a Semantic Point of View”. Studies in East European Thought (68): pp. 63–74. Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz, and Smith, Barry. 2004. “Brentano’s Ontology: From Conceptualism to Reism”. In: The Cambridge Companion to Brentano. Ed. D. Jacquette. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 197–219. Dummett, Michael. 1976. “What is a Theory of Meaning? II”. In: Truth and Meaning. Eds. G. Evans and J. McDowell. London: Oxford University Press. Ingarden, Roman. 1931. Das literarische Kunstwerk. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972. Kriegel, Uriah. 2017. The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School. New York/London: Routledge. Marty, Anton. 1908. Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie. Halle: Niemeyer. Perler, Dominik. 2002. Theorien der Intentionalität im Mittelalter. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. Putnam, Hillary. 1995. Pragmatism.An Open Question. Oxford: Blackwell. Quine, Willard V. O. 1951. “On What There Is”. In: Quine, Willard V. O., From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953, pp. 1–19. ———. 1953. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Simons, Peter M. 1987. Parts. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1992. “Brentano’s Reform of Logic”. In: Philosophy and Logic in Central Europe from Bolzano to Tarski. Ed. Peter Simons. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 41–69. Smith, Barry. 1992/1993.“The Soul and Its Parts II:Varieties of Inexistence”. Brentano Studien: pp. 35–51. ———. 1994. Austrian Philosophy.The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Chicago/LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
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42 EUGEN FINK Riccardo Lazzari
Eugen Fink was born in Konstanz, Germany, on December 11, 1905. He undertook his university studies in Münster, then in Berlin and lastly in Freiburg im Breisgau, the town where he lived, except for a short period during wartime, until his death (July 25, 1975) and where he taught philosophy and pedagogy at the university uninterruptedly from 1946 to 1971. § 1. Fink was a student and scientifc collaborator of Edmund Husserl for about ten years, from 1928 onwards, when the elderly founder of phenomenology was made Emeritus Professor and left the frst chair of philosophy at the University of Freiburg to his former disciple Martin Heidegger.1 In December 1929, Fink, with Husserl as frst supervisor and Heidegger as second supervisor, discussed his doctoral dissertation about the acts of presentifcation and consciousness of image. It consists in a revision of the text that he had submitted in an essay competition announced by the Faculty of Philosophical Studies in 1927. From 1928 to 1931 – while he was already an assistant of Husserl (and from 1930 onwards the only one) – Fink attended all Heidegger’s lectures. Among these lecture courses he was strongly infuenced by Heidegger’s winter course of 1929–1930 entitled Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (Heidegger 1983),2 whose main topic was the openness of the human being to the world. He also attended the famous Heidegger–Cassirer debate in Davos (Switzerland) in 1929. In the same years Fink collaborated with Husserl on a set of projects – in the spirit of what we can defne a genuine “co-philosophizing” between master and disciple – and was charged by Husserl with the task of revising for publication his Bernau manuscripts on time-consciousness (dating back to 1917–1918).3 But the most noteworthy step of this co-working relationship4 was when Fink attempted – in the early Thirties – to rework the previous text of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations with a view to a systematic treatment of phenomenology. During the period of academic isolation of the “Jew” Husserl, following the ascent to power of Nazism in Germany (1933), Fink maintained an active and constant collaboration with him, relying economically on some scholarships he had obtained from Great Britain and the USA, until his master’s death in 1938. But in the new political situation of Germany, his relationship with the “non-Aryan” Husserl precluded any chance of him achieving the qualifcation as Professor. In March 1939, Fink emigrated to Louvain in Belgium, where the large legacy of Husserl’s manuscripts had been transferred from Nazi Germany and put in a safe place thanks to Fink and Ludwig Landgrebe’s care, but above all thanks to Franciscan friar Herman Leo Van Breda’s initiative. Together with Landgrebe, Fink planned the transcription of these manuscripts. After 470
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the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 and several other vicissitudes Fink was compelled to go back to Germany and drafted into the Wehrmacht; he was assigned as a common soldier to aerial surveillance around Freiburg till the end of the war. It was at the University of Freiburg, in 1946, that Fink achieved the qualifcation as Professor, producing as his dissertation the unpublished text of that Sixth Cartesian Meditation which he had written in 1932, at the time of his active collaboration with Husserl. So, he was able to begin his activity as unsalaried lecturer and after two years he became full Professor of philosophy and educational science. Bureaucratic diffculties prevented him from accepting Felix Kaufmann’s invitation to teach for a year at the New School of Social Research of New York and at the University of Chicago. In 1950 he founded the Husserl-Archiv of Freiburg, which in the following years collaborated with the Husserl-Archiv of Louvain in order to publish Husserl’s manuscripts. Fink attended many philosophy conferences: in 1949 in Mendoza (Argentina); in 1966 in Vienna and in 1971 in Salzburg (Austria); in 1972 and 1973 in Merano (Italy). He also attended international conferences of phenomenology: in Brussels (Belgium, 1951); in Krefeld (Germany, 1956); in Royaumont (France, 1957); and in Sarajevo (former Yugoslavia, 1967).As a consequence of a surgical operation and poor health he retired in 1971. On July 25, 1975, Eugen Fink died of a heart attack. In the Thirties Fink was appreciated by scholars of phenomenology as Husserl’s faithful disciple and the “offcial” interpreter of his thought.This reputation was due above all to the publication in Kant-Studien in 1933 of Fink’s long article The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism, which included a foreword where Husserl stated that “it contains no sentence which I could not completely accept as my own or openly acknowledge as my own conviction” (Fink 1966b,VIII/74).That explains the propensity, among the frst readers of Fink, to understand his earlier works as writings born in the spirit of Husserl’s research. This was the opinion of French phenomenologists Gaston Berger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who were among the frst scholars to obtain knowledge of Fink’s project of a Sixth Cartesian Meditation. As a matter of fact, the collaboration between Fink and Husserl in the Thirties had led to a complex discussion in which the disciple did not fail to assert new ideas and original problematical statements within his master’s phenomenology.We can say that Fink’s contribution to phenomenology was so important that – as Ronald Bruzina writes – “Husserl’s phenomenology, at least as it reached its maturity in his last years, was not just Husserl’s – it was Husserl’s and Fink’s” (Bruzina 1995, xxviii).We can also say that, from Husserl, Fink learned the exactness of the phenomenological way of seeing; from Heidegger, he learned the speculative tendency to “project” the being-question, which he tried to insert into transcendental phenomenology. From the phenomenological decade (1928–38) of Fink’s research, we must distinguish a second stage that starts with the beginning of Fink’s teaching at the University of Freiburg in 1946. In this second stage he focuses his research on the relation between the human and the world through an original interpenetration of ontological, cosmological and anthropological themes. § 2. In his doctoral dissertation of 1929, published in 1930 in Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung and entitled Vergegenwärtigung und Bild (Fink 1966a), Fink stressed that the intentional interpretation of acts, in the whole of the phenomenological analysis of the constitution, remained fundamentally provisional and preliminary to the “constitutive clarifcation in proper and pregnant meaning”, which comes back to a last level of problems: the “temporal constitution” of the acts themselves (Fink 1966a, 19). It is a matter of a problematic level which in his unpublished drafts and working notes of the Thirties (now in course of publication)5 Fink assigned to a meontic (from Greek mē on, “non-being”, “non-existent”) consideration referring to the question of the “origin of being”.6 In its provisional outcomes Fink’s dissertation – which originally involved a second part – not only offered a study of the 471
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intentional forms of “presentifcation” and “consciousness of image” with a view to outlining a “phenomenology of non-actuality”, but it also put at the center of phenomenological research those moments of consciousness of time (the forms of “de-presencing” [Entgegenwärtigung]) (Fink 1966a, 22), in which un-actual backgrounds surrounding our living experiences take their forms (as happens, for instance, in “forgetting”). It was an attempt to refer to phenomena that are not susceptible to being thematized on the basis of something given and intuitionally present, and therefore to proceed beyond the “presentialism” of Husserl’s analysis of intentional acts, which has its model in the object of sensorial perception. But it is also possible to fnd in the text of 1930 Fink’s propensity to confer a speculative character to phenomenology, much beyond Husserl’s preference for descriptive and intuitive analysis of phenomena. Fink’s work must be placed in a period of revision and self-criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology, on the grounds of the need to tackle some recent objections which had been raised against it, like the criticism made by Heidegger, according to whom consciousness in its transcendental meaning, disclosed in phenomenological reduction, would remain a wordless subjectivity. In the years from 1929 to 1932 Husserl wavered between two different tasks: on the one hand, the project of a revision of his text of Cartesian Meditations (Hua I; Husserl 1960) to make it functional to a global presentation of phenomenological philosophy, much more than the French version published in 1931; on the other hand, the project of writing a system of phenomenological philosophy. Both projects were resumed by Fink, who proceeded to plan a new systematic presentation of transcendental phenomenology and to revise the fve Cartesian Meditations published in France. But, above all, he wrote an entirely distinct Sixth Meditation,7 which aimed at laying the foundations of a second-level phenomenology by sketching the idea of a “transcendental doctrine of method” (with an explicit reference to the inner partition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason into “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” and “Transcendental Doctrine of Method”). What distinguishes Fink’s rewriting of the Cartesian Meditations is, frst of all, his inclination to create a “de-Cartesianization” of the procedure of phenomenological reduction and to overcome the apparent pre-eminence in it of a self-suffcient and self-present ego, which the phenomenologist would detect by leaving simply behind any reference to the world. On the contrary, according to Fink, it is important to show how this reduction has its worldly starting situation, which constitutes an inescapable moment of the reduction itself: it is not possible to take leave “at one stroke” from the general thesis of the natural attitude and avoid the question of the pre-givenness of the world. While the text of Husserl’s First Meditation moves from the idea of a true science in order to attain the apodictic evidence of the transcendental ego, after having put the objective world “between brackets”, Fink’s rewriting of it establishes a kind of “circularity” between pre-givenness of the world (as a world which also includes me in my human existence) and reduction.This emphasis on the pre-givenness of the world will have a noteworthy weight in preparing that concept of “life-world”, which later will be the core of Husserl’s Crisis (Hua VI; Husserl 1970)8 and will justify the overcoming of the “Cartesian way” to phenomenological reduction. In Fink’s texts, a certain propensity is evident to take into account Heidegger’s objections to transcendental phenomenology and to assume his existential analytics developed in Being and Time (1927) as an elaboration of the starting point of philosophy, which prepares the task of phenomenological reduction. However, unlike Heidegger, Fink does not give up the transcendental character of phenomenology and rather interprets its fundamental question as the question on the “origin of the world” (Fink 1966b, 102/98). According to Fink’s reading of transcendental phenomenology, the performance of phenomenological reduction does not lead metaphysically “outside” of the world, i.e. into a sphere that is separate from it. On the contrary, the move of 472
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transcending the world, which happens with reduction as the disclosure of transcendental subjectivity, involves at the same time the retention of the world in the “absolute” in the phenomenological sense.That is to say,“the world remains immanent to the absolute and is discovered as lying within it” (Fink 1966b, 105/99). This phenomenological absolute must be understood, according to Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, not only as a comprehensive unity of world and origin of the world, but, in its most pregnant meaning, as the comprehensive unity in which transcendental life is articulated; as the unity of constituting life and phenomenologizing life, or as constituting life that comes to selfconsciousness in the process of phenomenologizing, i.e. in the pure theorizing activity and in the self-refection peculiar to the transcendental onlooker “non-participant” in the constitution of the world. In idealistic and speculative language, Fink speaks about the “being-in-itself ” and the “becoming-for-itself ” (Hua-Dok II/1, 164/148) of the phenomenological absolute, in order to characterize it as the synthetic unity of two antithetical tendencies. We can thus recognize in it, on the one hand, a constitutive tendency that is directed to the world; in this tendency (the “being-tendency” or “enworlding”) (Hua-Dok II/1, 23/21) we can distinguish further between “constituting pre-existent [vorseiendem] performance” and “constituted existent [seiendem] ‘result’”; on the other hand, we can also recognize a properly transcendental tendency as the opposite “tendency of self-elucidation, of coming-to-oneself ” (Hua-Dok II/1, 163/147). If it is the task of a “regressive phenomenology” to explore the world-constitution, if this regressive phenomenology is accompanied further by a “constructive phenomenology” that investigates those problems that cannot be certifed intuitively, now, according to Fink, it is a matter of attaining a “phenomenology of phenomenology”: this second-level phenomenology, instead of pursuing the task of drawing out the “transcendental cosmogony” (Hua-Dok II/1, 157/142) (i.e. the constitutive becoming of the world) from its concealment, brings into focus the activity of the phenomenological onlooker. That is to say that, whereas in the previous stages of regressive and constructive phenomenology the phenomenological onlooker was fundamentally directed to the constitutive operations of transcendental subjectivity, which have the world as their end-product, we are now, on the contrary, facing the task of a phenomenological science of phenomenologizing, directed to a transcendental elucidation of the acting life of the same ego that phenomenologizes transcendentally. In the background of Fink’s theoretical design we can see some resumptions of different philosophical conceptualizations: 1) a conceptualization of a dialectical kind (the formulation of the movement intrinsic to transcendental life as coming-to-itself, as proceeding from being-in-itself and being-outside-itself to being-for-itself), which entails an unusual introduction of Hegelian themes into phenomenology; 2) a conceptualization of a criticist kind, according to which the idea of a “system” of phenomenology is planned on the grounds of a “structural analogy” with the design of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; 3) a conceptualization of an ontological kind, which arises from Fink’s intent to establish a connection with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. From this last point of view, Fink makes explicit an ontological meaning implicit in the phenomenological reduction, as a refection that discloses the difference in being between the transcendental subject and the world. Further, he maintains that performing the phenomenological reduction involves “a separation of transcendental being into two heterogeneous regions” (Hua-Dok II/1, 22/20): the region of the constituting I and the region of the phenomenologizing I. With regard to these questions Fink raises the issue of a “thematic reduction of the Idea of being” (Hua-Dok II/1, 80/71); the execution of this complex task introduces the transition to a sphere of problems that are focused on the concept of a “meontic philosophy of the absolute spirit” (Hua-Dok II/1, 183/1) (as he wrote in the draft of a Foreword to the Sixth Cartesian Meditation). Fink seems to refer to such a concept in the text of the Sixth Meditation, when he stresses that 473
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the theoretical experience of the phenomenologizing I tends towards something that properly is not, i.e. that is not existent in the meaning of the mundane concept of “being” and, at most, may be expressed analogically as “pre-being” [Vor-sein] (Hua-Dok II/1, 83/74, 85/76). In this regard, to the reduction of the Idea of being Fink strictly connects the question of mundane language, settled in the natural attitude. This language, which unavoidably transmits ontic meanings, is now taken over by the phenomenologizing onlooker and employed as an analogical medium to predicate transcendental knowledges and to signify meontic meanings. Since he raises the question of the phenomenologizing I, which is separated both from the constituting I and from the natural human I, Fink can state a transcendental tendency to “un-humanization” [Entmenschung] (Hua-Dok II/1, 43/40; 119/109; 132/120), which must be understood as the tendency of man – when he performs the phenomenological reduction – to “overcome” himself and his mundane self-apperception in order to fnd the transcendental onlooker in himself. Now, this transcendental onlooker – the phenomenologizing I – comes into a relation of antithetic opposition to the activity of the transcendental constituting I, since the former does not share the “being-tendency”, peculiar to the latter, and only reveals this tendency to the constitution of worldly being. Fink, however, does not purpose to emphasize this polarization inside transcendental life; on the contrary, his refection on the phenomenologizing onlooker allows him to mediate between worldliness and transcendentality. Indeed, it is the onlooker who is charged with the task of this mediation, owing to his necessary tendency to reenter into worldliness: his phenomenologizing does not happen only as un-humanizing and abstention from transcendent apperceptions, but realizes also a tendency to enworlding [Verweltlichung], in the meaning of what Fink calls a “non proper or secondary enworlding” (Hua-Dok II/1, 108/99) and conceives as a tendency to the “appearance” of the phenomenologizing subject in the world. At this point, the full subject of phenomenologizing must be characterized, according to Fink, not only as transcendental, but also as worldly, on the ground of what he defnes as a “dialectical unity” (Hua-Dok II/1, 127/116) between the spheres of the transcendental and the mundane. Fink’s design of a systematic completion of phenomenology through a phenomenology of phenomenological reduction arose from an intensive dialogue with Husserl and was bound to take account of the critical remarks expressed by the older philosopher about several points of the project of a Sixth Cartesian Meditation, whose manuscript text remained unpublished and had a limited circulation among few readers.Although, afterwards, Fink departed from the problems of phenomenology in its transcendental meaning in order to undertake new ways of research, the following developments of his thought are rooted in his early projects, arising from daily conversations between him and Husserl on the basic principles and limits of phenomenology. To understand these developments, it is most important to consider the task of a “constructive phenomenology”, in which Fink included those problems that rise at the margins of regressive phenomenology and its genetical developments, i.e. the problems which belong to the external horizons of the reductive givenness of transcendental life and cannot be certifed intuitively any longer, as, for instance, in the question about the “beginning” and the “end” of our constituting life. To face the generative problems (birth and death) and the problems of the reference to something that is not given intuitively requires one, according to Fink, to go beyond the boundaries of intentional analysis, which maintains its fundamental model in the object of perception. Rather than to describe – as Husserl did – the phenomena in an intuitive and analytical way by attaining them in the original sources of the experience, Fink prefers to anticipate speculatively the last horizon in which these phenomena are placed. It is not astonishing that, in §7 of the Sixth Meditation, Fink makes explicit an analogy between the concept of a “constructive phenomenology” and Kant’s concept of the “transcendental dialectic”. Indeed, he stresses 474
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that in one as in the other there is an inquiry into structures of wholeness that are in principle non given: here concerning the totality of transcendental subjectivity, there the totality of “appearances” (the cosmological antinomies). […] In both cases it is a matter of the basic problem of the relation of the “given” to the “non-given”. (Hua-Dok II/1, 71/64) Especially in Fink’s working notes of the Thirties we can see the outlines of a phenomenology that, in a subterranean way, takes form as a phenomenology of non-givenness, referring to those “phenomena” that cannot be thematized on the basis of what is “given” as an object or a set of objects. Fink focuses on particular phenomena of “circumstantial” and “all-pervasive” character or denoting an absence (for instance, “day light” and “night”, “silence”, “wakefulness” as the original way of being open to the world, “sleep” as a state of closure to the world). Moreover, in Fink’s analyses, the whole feld of phenomenality is not circumscribed by a fxed and stable horizon, equally distant from a center – from a subject that describes phenomena as lived and perceived by it – but it is structured variously in “proximities” and “distances”, according to the different reference points inside it.We can fnd here Fink’s peculiar theoretical tension towards a “cosmological phenomenology”, which aims at founding the appearing of beings not on subjectivity but on the world, according to a point of view that is also at the roots of the idea of a “non-subjective phenomenology”, developed by Czech philosopher Jan Patočka (1907–1977), who shared with Fink a lifelong dialogue.9 § 3. In the university courses of the post-war period – some of which are at the basis of important published works: Zur ontologischen Frühgeschichte von Raum – Zeit – Bewegung (1957); Sein – Wahrheit – Welt.Vorfragen zum Problem des Phänomenbegriffes (1958); Alles und Nichts. Ein Umweg zur Philosophie (1959); Spiel als Weltsymbol (1960); Nietzsches Philosophie (1960); Metaphysik und Tod (1969) – and in manifold articles and lectures (collected posthumously in Nähe und Distanz), Fink moves beyond Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Now, transcendental phenomenology is considered by him as inadequate to clarify those dimensions of “space”, “time” and “movement”, which are not “things” that come to a phenomenological givenness, but ways in which the world as a whole deploys itself. However, the world is not considered by Fink in the same way as Husserl, i.e. as the universal and athematic horizon of phenomena, but ontologically, as the “whole of being” in its difference from “beings” which are inside it. The assertion of a “cosmological difference”, owing to which the world is not “a being” – it is not an object and neither is it the sum of all things – brings Fink’s thought near to Heidegger’s theme of the “ontological difference” as a distinction between being [das Sein] and beings [das Seiende]. However, Fink does not refer frst of all to the problem of being as the fundamental question of philosophy, as Heidegger did in Being and Time, but inserts this problem in the question of the world, because he thinks that the being-question can be posed only with regard to the world, conceived as the dimension of the manifestness of all beings – i.e. of their appearing. According to Fink, the appearing of beings must not be thought any longer as a subjective event – the becoming object for a subject of representations – but as their coming to light, their coming out of concealment and entering disclosure, in conformity with a cosmic movement that coincides with the process of universal individuation, through which things are outlined in space and time.The cosmic movement of appearing and individuation of beings cannot be the object of intuition and description as it is in the phenomenological method, which remains bounded to phenomena that are given, but requires the transition to speculative thought. For Fink, this thought demands that we make use of peculiar symbolic concepts. It is the case, for instance, of the concepts of “heaven” and “earth”, which, if on the one hand border on myth, on the other hand are suitable for pointing out the poles of the movement 475
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through which beings come out of concealment, emerging from the shapelessness of elements, and expose themselves in the light of appearing. So Fink tries to establish the premises for a non-metaphysical thought of the world,10 i.e. a thought which does not conceive the world on the basis of thing as substance; therefore, in his lessons of the post-war period he does not address Husserl any longer, but Nietzsche and pre-Socratic thinkers (especially Heraclitus, on whom he holds a seminar together with Heidegger in winter 1966–1967) (Heidegger and Fink 1970). Among symbolic concepts, the concept of “play”, which rises to the function of “symbol of the world”, holds a central position in Fink’s thought (as highlighted in his work of 1960 Play as Symbol of the World).11 The “speculative concept of play” (Fink 2010a, 28/30) allows him to think of the cosmic movement as a process that is not “focused” on a unique subject in its theological-metaphysical (God) or idealistic (the ego) meaning, but as the universal emergence and decline of all beings in their individuation, as the process through which fnite things arise and fade in space and time.According to Fink, cosmic play, unlike human play, consists in a game without a player. As such, it has no foundation – it does not refer to a purpose, a meaning or a project – but starting from itself produces all foundations for the being of things and men. At the same time, play, understood as human play and thought as “symbol” (in its original Greek meaning of a fragment destined to be completed), allows Fink to refer to the process of the peculiar “completion” of man with the world, by which man enters into relation to the whole. The world, which is never visible as such, appears in human play as in a feld within itself; play refects thus not only the ecstatic openness of human being to the world, but also the prevailing of the world itself. In this meaning, “the world comes to appear in the appearance of play: it shines back itself into itself in taking on an intrawordly relation, even if in irreal form, taking on features of the prevailing whole” (Fink 2010b, 215/207–208). If in Fink’s cosmological thought man has no longer an absolute cosmic centrality, as in subject-oriented philosophies, he retains, however, a primacy among all beings. Indeed, man, unlike other living beings, does not confne himself to follow a predesignated way, that is, to live according to fxed patterns, but he projects himself ceaselessly and engages himself in multidimensional projects. He is the only one among intra-worldly beings that not only is in the world, but also relates to his being-in-the-world and is so open-to-the-world.What distinguishes man from stone, plant or animal is that he lives in a meaningful dimension and shares this dimension with other men in a common social context, according to ways of existence that at the same time are ways of “co-existence”; in play – as well as in work, in struggle for dominance, in love and in the experience of death – man realizes his openness to the world in co-existential relations and joins himself to the whole of the world. In the light of these themes – which are at the center of some important courses of lectures published after Fink’s death (Fink 1979, 1987) – the goal of Fink’s thought seems to consist in an anthropology of cosmological tendency. In the situations of play, work, struggle, love and death Fink, indeed, recognizes the “basic phenomena” [Grundphänomene] of human existence, which at the same time act as “ways of the understanding of being and world” [Bahnen des Seins- und Weltverständnisses] (Fink 1976, 273, 276) and therefore can be defned as “symbols of the world”.
Notes 1 On Fink’s life see Fink S. 2006. See also the recent illustrated biography of Ossenkop, Kerckhoven, Fink R. 2015. 2 See the Appendix, which contains the speech Heidegger made in celebration of Fink’s sixtieth birthday: “Für Eugen Fink zum sechzigsten Geburtstag” (Heidegger 1983, pp. 533–536/367–369).
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Eugen Fink 3 On Fink’s early philosophical itinerary, see Bruzina 2004. 4 An interesting account of the working relation between Husserl and Fink is provided by Dorion Cairn’s notes from his conversations. See Cairns 1976. 5 See Fink 2006. The vol. 3/1–4, Phänomenologische Werkstatt, includes the transcriptions edited by Ronald Bruzina of Fink’s unpublished drafts and working notes; up till now the following sub-volumes of EFGA 3 have been published: 3/1, Die Doktorarbeit und erste Assistenzjahre bei Husserl (2006), and 3/2, Die Bernauer Zeitmanuskripte, Cartesianische Meditationen und System der phänomenologischen Philosophie (2008). Other published volumes of EFGA: 2, Textentwürfe zur Phänomenologie 1930–1932 (2019); 5/2, Sein und Endlichkeit.Teilband 2:Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (2016); 6, Sein,Wahrheit, Welt (2018); 7, Spiel als Weltsymbol (2010b); 13/1–3, Epilegomena zu Immanuel Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (2011); 16, Existenz und Coexistenz (2018). 6 On these issues see Chapter 7 of Bruzina 2004: “Critical-Systematic Core: The Meontic – in Methodology and in Recasting of Metaphysics”, pp. 375–451. 7 Hua-Dok II/1-2. For an insightful review of Bruzina’s translation (Fink 1995), see Hopkins 1997. On Fink’s texts regarding the project of a rewriting of the Cartesian Meditations and Husserl’s marginal remarks, see the important and pioneering work of Kerckhoven 2003. 8 On Fink’s contribution to the writing of the “Crisis”-texts, see Bruzina 2004, pp. 61–63. 9 See Fink and Patočka 1999. 10 These premises were already defned by Fink in his lecture course of 1949 on Welt und Endlichkeit. See now Fink 2016, pp. 191–402. 11 See Fink 2010b.The key text, from which the volume takes its title, is on pages 30–224/33–215.
References Bruzina, Ronald. 1995.“Translator’s Introduction”. In: Fink 1995, pp. vii–xcii. ———. 2004. Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology 1928–1938. New Haven:Yale University Press. Cairns, Dorion. 1976. Conversations with Husserl and Fink. Ed. Husserl-Archives in Louvain. The Hague: Nijhoff. Fink, Eugen. 1966a. “Vergegenwärtigung und Bild. Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Unwirklichkeit (I. Teil)”. In: Eugen Fink, Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930-1939.The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 1–78. ———. 1966b. “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik.” In: Eugen Fink, Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930-1939. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 79–156 (“The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism”. In: Roy Elveton The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970, pp. 74–147). ———. 1976. “Weltbezug und Seinsverständnis”. In: Eugen Fink, Nähe und Distanz. Phänomenologische Vorträge und Aufsätze. Ed. Franz-Anton Schwarz. Freiburg/München:Alber, pp. 268–279. ———. 1979. Grundphänomene des menschlichen Daseins. Eds. Egon Schütz and Franz-Anton Schwarz. Freiburg/München: Alber. ———. 1987. Existenz und Coexistenz. Ed. Franz-Anton Schwarz.Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ———. 1995. Sixth Cartesian Meditation.The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method with Textual Annotations by Edmund Husserl.Trans. R. Bruzina. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2006. Eugen Fink Gesamtausgabe (= EFGA). Eds. Stephan Grätzel, Cathrin Nielsen and Hans Rainer Sepp. Freiburg/München: Alber. ———. 2010a. “Oase des Glücks. Gedanken zu einer Ontologie des Spiels”. In: EFGA 7. Eds. Cathrin Nielsen and Hans Rainer Sepp. Freiburg/München: Alber, pp. 11–29 (“Oasis of Happiness.Thoughts Toward an Ontology of Play”. In: Eugen Fink, Play as Symbol of the World and Other Writings. Eds. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016, pp. 14–31). ———. 2010b.“Spiel als Weltsymbol”. In: EFGA 7. Eds. Cathrin Nielsen and Hans Rainer Sepp. Freiburg/ München: Alber, 30–224 (“Play as Symbol of the World”. In: Eugen Fink, Play as Symbol of the World and Other Writings. Eds. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016, pp. 33–215). ———. 2016. “Welt und Endlichkeit”. In: EFGA 5/2. Ed. Riccardo Lazzari. Freiburg/München: Alber, pp. 191–402. Fink, Eugen, and Patočka, Jan. 1999. Briefe und Dokumente 1933-1977. Eds. Michael Heitz and Bernard Nessler. Freiburg/München: Alber.
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Riccardo Lazzari Fink, Susanne. 2006.“Die Biographie Eugen Finks”. In:Anselm Böhmer (Ed.), Eugen Fink: SozialphilosophieAnthropologie-Kosmologie-Pädagogik-Methodik. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 267–276. Heidegger, Martin. 1983. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt - Endlichkeit - Einsamkeit. Ed. Fr.-W. von Herrmann. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann (1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics:World, Finitude, Solitude.Trans.William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press) Heidegger, Martin, and Fink, Eugen. 1970. Heraklit. Seminar Wintersemester 1966/67. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann (1979. Heraclitus Seminar.Trans. Charles H. Seibert.Alabama: University of Alabama Press. Hopkins, Burt C. 1997. “Book Review: Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method”. Husserl Studies 14: pp. 61–74. Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University. Kerckhoven, Guy van. 2003. Mundanisierung und Individuation bei Edmund Husserl und Eugen Fink. Die sechste Cartesianische Meditation und ihr ‘Einsatz’. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Ossenkop, Axel, van Kerckhoven, Guy and Fink, Rainer. 2015. Eugen Fink (1905-1975). Lebensbild des Freiburger Phänomenologen. Freiburg/München: Alber.
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43 ARON GURWITSCH1 Michael D. Barber and Olav K. Wiegand
Aron Gurwitsch (formerly Hurwitz) was born on January 17, 1901 in Wilna (Latvia), which was at that time Russian territory, and hence he could be rightly characterized as a Russian citizen of Jewish origin. Gurwitsch moved to Danzig in 1906, and undertook studies in medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and other subjects in Berlin in 1919. He continued his education from 1920 to1928 at the University of Frankfurt, where he encountered Gestaltists Ademar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein. He passed his last oral examination in 1928 at Göttingen University under the direction of Moritz Geiger and Georg Misch. He immigrated to France in 1933 and in 1940 to the United States. He served at various universities, fnishing his career at the New School for Social Research, where he had been a professor of philosophy from 1959 to 1973. He died in 1973. Gurwitsch was so overwhelmed by Edmund Husserl’s “uncompromising integrity and radical philosophical responsibility” and his “painstaking analytic work on concrete problems” (Gurwitsch 2009, xv) that he decided to devote his life and work to the continuation and expansion of Husserl’s phenomenology – in a word, to remain a disciple forever” (Gurwitsch 2009, xv–xvi). However, he also resolved that he would depart from Husserlian theories if the nature of the problems or the logic of the theoretical situation called for it. He did, in fact, differ from Husserl on his understanding of the perceptual noema, the mereology of the noema (which he explained in terms of Gestalt theory), and egology.This entry will present Gurwitsch’s approach to 1) phenomenology in general and the noema, 2) the mereology of the noema understood as a Gestalt pattern, and 3) wider philosophical discussions of consciousness, ontology, and science.
43.1. Phenomenology and the perceptual noema Following Husserl, Gurwitsch recognized that one must start with the natural attitude in which one experiences objects as functional objects of use (Gurwitsch 2002, 74–76/84–86; 80/91); takes one’s conscious experiences as expressions, symptoms, or the causal effect of one’s engagement with the world (Gurwitsch 2002, 71/81); envisions one’s humanity as the outcome of factors described by anthropology or biology (Gurwitsch 2002, 348–349/327); and participates in the unexamined perceptual activity that lies at the root of the physical sciences (Gurwitsch 2009, 108; 134). In order to break with these many taken-for-granted suppositions of the natural attitude, one undertakes the phenomenological reduction, inhibiting (but not suppressing) the 479
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existential character of all objects in order to be able to see how they present themselves (including as existing) and are built up (constituted) in relationship to conscious acts (Gurwitsch 2002, 88–93/100–106).The reduction brings into focus consciousness, which Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch 2002, 131) claims is the subject matter of phenomenology, even its exclusive subject matter, but only insofar as its importance consists in its being “the universal and only medium of access to objects” (Gurwitsch 2002, 131). The difference between conscious acts and the objects correlative to them—a difference that emerges once one enacts the reduction—enabled Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch 2002, 100–114/113– 130) to criticize Hume’s theory of perception, which failed to explain the identity of a perceived object insofar as Hume took that identity to consist merely in a temporal succession of (similar) facts of consciousness. By contrast, for Gurwitsch, identity is established in the interplay between the multiplicity of perspectives and acts succeeding each other temporally, but in relationship to a single object over against them. For Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch 2009, 154), temporality and identity are poles opposed to each other, but they do not exclude each other and, in fact, require each other, as terms of a correlation. Once one implements the phenomenological reduction, one becomes aware of a noema that is the correlate on the objective side of an act, such as perception (one of the many possible types of act that can be oriented toward an object). The perceptual noema can be defned as the perceived thing as it stands before the experiencing subject’s consciousness through that act (Gurwitsch 2010).The perceiver does not grasp or notice the noema while directed toward the object and it only becomes visible through refection, that is, in the phenomenological reduction (Gurwitsch 2002, 240/284), and once it becomes thematic it functions as the “sense” or “meaning,” in a broad understanding of these terms, of the thing perceived (Gurwitsch 2010, 170). Insofar as the noema is that through which an object is given and insofar as it is discovered only in refection, it does not function as an intermediary between the act and the thing (Gurwitsch 2002, 134–135/156).As such, the noema is distinct from the act to which it is given, and this distinctiveness is reinforced insofar as the noema can be the identical object of several different perceptual acts (Gurwitsch 2010, 168); hence, one could perceive repeatedly a house given from the same angle, or the same noema could be the object of different acts such as remembering or desiring. Furthermore, the noema is not identical with the perceived real thing, which might possess properties not given in the one-sided presentation of the thing through a noema (Gurwitsch 2010, 169). Consequently, the noema can be described as an ideal unit, lacking spatial or temporal dimensions, uninvolved in causal relations, and, consequently, irreal (Gurwitsch 2002, 371; 2010, 175). In the object as given noematically, one becomes also aware of the how of its givenness, that is “as perceived” if given to a perceptual act or “as desired” if given to a desiring act. However, it is not only the object as given that counts as part of the noematic sense. Material and practical determinations, such as “desk seen from above” or “house perceived from the front,” are also contained in the noema. Such noemata correlate with temporally extended, psychological acts (in phenomenological terms: they correspond to a noesis) of the perceiving subject.Taking perception as the starting point, the problem now becomes how the manifold sides of a perceptual object, its different noemata, are connected to one another in such a way that they constitute a single noematic system. Noetically speaking, this is to ask how it is possible that a course of perception results in a unifed and interconnected psychological act in which an identical object is given and shows itself from various perspectives. The meaning of a given noema can be frst clarifed only within the temporally unfolding context of further perceptions. Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch 2010, 270–271) noted that “the experienced one-sidedness and incompleteness of every single perception is accounted for, since 480
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references to items not given in direct and authentic sense experience are tantamount … to anticipations of further perceptions by which that single perception is complemented.” As a consequence, there is a mutual dependency between the individual noemata and the complete noematic system. On the one hand, each individual noema has a functional signifcance for the whole (one might say that it makes demands on the whole, in order to ft into the whole). But at the same time, the complete noematic system determines the functional signifcance of the parts.This is what Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch 2009, 390) called the “principle of conformity to sense.” In its noematic expression the principle states that:“the total noematic system must be so of such a kind as to be capable of receiving the present perceptual noema as a part of member of itself ” (Gurwitsch 2009, 390; 2002, 402; 2010, 205, 234–235). For Gurwitsch, the object, then, is equivalent to the systematically organized totality of its noemata (Gurwitsch 2010, 293).
43.2. Gestalt theory and mereology Gestalt Laws have not essentially changed since their formulation in the so-called Berlin School of Gestalt Theory, with its representatives Wertheimer, Köhler, Koffka, Lewin, and others. Gestalt Laws account for Gestalt-formation. For the Berlin School (and Gurwitsch) a Gestalt is defned as an ensemble of items which mutually support and determine one another.Thus they realize a total structure which governs them and assigns to each of them (as a part of the whole) a function or a role to be performed as well as a determinate place in that whole. (Gurwitsch 2009, 26) The notion of Gestalt was originally developed within the feld of cognitive psychology, but it was soon generalized, so that now it can (at least as a meta-concept) be applied to all branches of science. In general, Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch 2010, 112) avoided the term “Gestalt” and instead used the concept of the structured whole, which is a gradual concept and also avoids any unwanted connotations like that of shape and the like.The “part-whole-relation” mentioned in the defnition is basic, and thus there is a short path from Gestalt theory to mereology—the theory of parts and wholes in general.Within the broader framework of a general mereology, one may defne an alternative, competing concept of the whole, namely that of an “aggregate.” An aggregate, usually understood as a mere sum of its parts, differs from a Gestalt, whose above defnition implies that the function of each part of the common Gestalt depends upon the functions of all the other parts, and that all these functions mutually demand each other (Gurwitsch 2010, 112, 130–131). An aggregate is a whole that is only minimally affected by the modifcation of one of its elements.Adding or removing a unit does not alter an aggregate in any qualitative sense. From the point of view of Gestalt theory, an aggregate is nothing more than one limiting case, namely that of a minimally integrated structured whole, and thus opposed to the (maximally integrated and stable) pregnant structured whole. Both concepts are contrasted to the limiting case of chaos, which is devoid of all fragmentation or differentiation. Also important here is that, at least in the perceptual feld, neither the aggregate nor chaos is encountered in its pure form, whereas the pregnant structured whole occurs frequently, particularly under experimental conditions (Gurwitsch 2009, 27–28). The frst sentence of Husserl’s Third Logical Investigation states the importance that a mereological theory has for the whole of phenomenology: The distinction between ‘abstract’ 481
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and ‘concrete’ contents, which is equivalent to Carl Stumpf ’s distinction between dependent and independent contents, is of great importance for all phenomenological investigations (Hua XIX-1, 227/3).Taking Stumpf ’s work as his starting point, Husserl developed a mereology that encompasses mainly two concepts: whole and part. In addition, he treats two two-place relations: the part-of-relation and the relation of foundation.The concepts of Gestalt or aggregate are implicitly there already, but not clearly defned. Parts can, for Husserl, be dependent parts (“abstract contents”) or independent parts (“concrete contents”), the defnition of which will soon be provided. As early as 1929, Gurwitsch developed an informal theory of “foundation” and the mutual relationship between parts and wholes that was based on a critique of Stumpf and Husserl and that drew on the results of Gestalt Psychology in the spirit of the Berlin School (Gurwitsch 2009, 286–293). The most important criticism advanced by Gurwitsch is that the principle of contextuality, one of the most important principles of Gestalt Psychology, is not handled satisfactorily in Husserl’s Third Logical Investigation. Husserl had analyzed the separability of a part (and thereby its “independence”) by means of the concept of eidetic variation. In the terminology of variation, separability is so defned that the content of a representation is “separable” if it can retain its identity (Husserl also said if it can be held in grasp) while the other parts (of the common confguration) are altered in an unrestricted manner.The observed content would remain unaltered, even if other parts (of the common confguration) should disappear entirely (Hua XIX-1, 238–239/9). For Gurwitsch, though, all objects, among them visually given things (a tree or a cup), but also geometrical fgures or melodies with their tones, are treated as Gestalts. A part is in this sense always part of a Gestalt, so that two-sided relations of foundation are always present between the parts of a common Gestalt: that is, no part can be separated from its context and remain what it was (in a qualitative sense) (Gurwitsch 2009, 288–293). To be sure, it might be possible for someone in imagination to remove the line forming the right side of a rectangle, separate it, consider it on its own, and then think that it is the same line as it appeared as part of the rectangle. However, this retrospective imaginative transfer of the line back into the rectangle overlooks how one frst perceived that line as a component of the rectangle. In that frst encounter, one perceived the line in relation to the top and bottom lines running perpendicular to it and in a relationship of parallelism to the line on the left side of the rectangle. All these relationships affect how one perceives the line forming the right side of the rectangle, and, if one remembers that original experience of the rectangle, one recognizes that the line appears very differently when isolated from the rectangle (Gurwitsch 2010, 144); in fact, it is a different line (Gurwitsch 2009, 267). Gurwitsch, who does not criticize Husserl’s distinction between independent and non-independent parts, but rather Husserl’s interpretation of this distinction, speaks instead of “items not lending themselves to being singled out or made independent” (Husserl’s “dependent” parts) and “items susceptible of being made independent” (Husserl’s “independent” parts) (Gurwitsch 2010, 292). Of course, a Gestalt can be ruptured (as when a single line segment is removed from a rectangle), in which case we are left with an “item” in the second of Gurwitsch’s senses.Yet neither a phenomenological analysis nor experimental results offer grounds for claiming that a line remains the same after variation or removal of the rest of the fgure.These principles make up the background of Gurwitsch’s understanding of intentionality. There are two ways in which Gurwitsch integrates the Gestalt theoretical approach with phenomenology and, in particular, his discussion of the perceptual noema: his critique of the constancy hypothesis and his discussion of the noematic system. As regards the constancy hypothesis, one must start with Husserl’s idea that one can instantaneously apprehend a sensuous multiplicity (e.g. a pile of stones) as a multiplicity without frst going from element to element 482
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and then colligating all the elements at once. Husserl (Gurwitsch 2009, 278–281; 2010, 41, 59, 62, 67–68, 81–82, 141) thought that this apprehension of the sensuous multiplicity actually constituted a sensuous quality of a second order that supervened upon the frst-order sensing of the individual elements (e.g. the individual stones), and he designated such a second-order quality as a “fgural factor.” In so doing, he joined the company of Ehrenfels, Meinong, Benussi, Piaget, and others, all of whom posit a dual layer of simply given frst-order sensuous elements upon which a higher stratum, founded on that lower level, appears; a superius is automatically connected with founding inferioria. Indeed, a variant of this point of view appears in Husserl’s distinction between hyle and morphe, between the sensible material on which consciousness imposes the ordering that yields a perceptual experience (for instance, of a table or a stone) (Gurwitsch 2009, xxiii, 3, 261).This dual-layeredness can help explain how it is that one observing on the horizon what looks like a distant cloud can suddenly experience change and come to recognize that the cloud is actually the peaks of a mountain range. Psychologists and their dual-layer philosophical followers would explain that the lower-level sensory data were produced by regular, unvarying external stimuli, which remained constant, and that only the higher-level interpretation of sensory data was altered (Gurwitsch 2009, 209, 242). On the basis of this constancy hypothesis (Gurwitsch 2009, 3, 8–9; 2010, 88–89), one believes that external stimuli produce constant sensory data that conscious activity reconfgures on a higher level. However, such a hypothesis violates the parameters of the phenomenological reduction, which, as mentioned above, blocks one from looking upon conscious states as the causal products of the external world. Furthermore, when one attends to the percept, one does not experience two strata, namely of constant stimuli and interpretive reconfguration, but rather a regrouping and restructuring of the all the parts of what is perceived in their relationships to each other.The parts come to appear differently in relationship to each other, and one suddenly or gradually begins to see that what looked like a drooping cloud was actually the mountain peaks covered with snow (Gurwitsch 2002, 205–206/242; 2010, 101–102). In other words, by abandoning the constancy hypothesis and the dual-layered approach to describe the perceptual noema as it presents itself, the Gestalt account abides within the constraints of the phenomenological reduction, is already incipiently implementing the reduction, and ends up, by being faithful to what is given in experience, doing better phenomenology (Gurwitsch 2002, 122–125/141–143; 2009, 100, 101, 114, 116, 214; 2010, 49, 262). In like manner, Gurwitsch rejects Husserl’s view, based on the relationship between the noema and the object, that the noematic sense polarizes toward a center, the central noematic point, as if there were a kind of substance sustaining the accidental features within the noema (Gurwitsch 2002, 172–175/202–205) in the same way that the object has been interpreted by philosophers like Aristotle to consist of a metaphysical substance underlying accidents. Instead, Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch 2002, 174–175/204) recommends not a “substantial” but a “relational” approach that would examine the interrelationships among parts within a single noema and among the many noema that constitute the noematic system that is the equivalent of the identity of the thing perceived. As a result, the material thing proves to be “the systematically organized totality of its perceptual appearances or noemata,” each referring to each other and qualifying each other, and each individual noema is a part of that whole system (Gurwitsch 2010, 215, 204, 210, 293; 2002, 379, 402; 2009, 232–233). Clearly, Gurwitsch is articulating the relationship between the complete noematic system and individual noema of perception in a manner analogous to the relationship between an encompassing Gestalt and its parts. Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch 2009, 30–31) further notes that Wertheimer’s law of the “continuation of the curve” can be treated as a special case of the principle of the conformity of sense in which individual parts and Gestalt whole mutually adjust to each other. Furthermore, the phenomenologically identifable 483
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frst principles at the lowest level of intentionality can also be divided into two classes, analogous to the division of Gestalt-regularities, namely into fgure-background-phenomena and basal regularities of organization in the visual feld. However, one must note at the same time that the parallelism of results between Gestalt Psychology and the genetic analysis of intentionality with regard to the noetic–noematic correlation does not imply that there is no difference between Gestalt Psychology and phenomenology. The difference between them should be abundantly clear when one observes that they employ different methods: experiment in Gestalt Psychology and refection within the parameters of the reduction in phenomenology (Gurwitsch 2009, 117–118).
43.3. Wider discussions: consciousness, ontology, science In addition to these distinctive developments of his own phenomenological accounts, Gurwitsch staked out a position in contrast to Husserl’s in his understanding of consciousness as nonegological and structured as a feld. Consistent with the Husserl of the Logical Investigations as opposed to the later Husserl from Ideas 1 onward, Gurwitsch’s frst argument against the transcendental ego was an epistemological one: the ego was not phenomenologically given (Gurwitsch 2002, 240). Subsequent refection on what acts one has been engaged in (and their objects) only turns up those acts (and their objects) (Gurwitsch 2009, 322). In addition, while refection is capable of grasping a preceding act, which it grasps as having existed, it is incapable of bringing such acts into existence or giving rise to them, so if refection could fnd no ego already there, it would not be able to conjure one up (Gurwitsch 2009, 327–328). Refection might be able to conceive the ego as a transcendent existent, as an ideal noematic unity, but this leaves the ego as still open to doubt (Gurwitsch 2009, 333).2 Even though one fnds neither an ego foating above the multiplicity of one’s experiences (Gurwitsch 2009, 313) nor an underlying substance—a metaphysical concept, which Gurwitsch rejected also in connection with the central noematic point (Gurwitsch 2009, 333) and which he felt that developments in the sciences had long since surpassed3—he did, nevertheless, endorse the idea of a unifed non-egological consciousness. This consciousness amounts to the chain of one’s mental states, undergoing continuous transformation and internally related to each other—the synthetic unity of all consciousness’s members, that is, one’s dispositions and actions (Gurwitsch 2009, 306–317, 331). Insofar as consciousness itself appears as a whole of interrelated parts, it too appears much like a Gestalt unity, and hence Robert Sokolowski’s observation that the unity of the non-egological consciousness is analogous to that of the observed thing (Sokolowski 1975, 9).4 Finally, Gurwitsch’s account of the contents, on which the acts of the non-egological consciousness focus, clearly mirrors the Gestalt paradigm. One focuses on a theme that is related to its thematic feld, which, in turn, is relevant back to that theme. For example, the theme of Descartes’s body/mind theory could be situated with the differently relevant thematic felds, or contexts, of his overall philosophy or to its historical signifcance via a “Gestalt connection” (Gurwitsch 2009, 228). Consequently, in relation to its thematic feld, the theme will be affected and appear differently (Gurwitsch 2009, 228; 2010, 331–332, 343). Finally, the margin, part of the whole context in which a theme is located, consists in events of no relevance to the theme or the thematic feld in which the theme is situated, and could include such factors as the fowing of time, self-awareness, or ongoing somatic processes (Gurwitsch 2010, 334–335, 399, 462–463, 474–475, 478). Extending his discussion of the importance of the context, such as the thematic feld for the theme, Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch 2010, 352) takes up the more encompassing context of 484
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orders of existence to which themes of all sorts pertain. He (Gurwitsch 2010, 384–393) develops his views of orders of existence by contrasting such orders with Alfred Schutz’s “multiple realities” that depend on an agent adopting the cognitive style pertinent to different realities (e.g. of dreams, phantasy, or scientifc contemplation) with relevances from the noetic side playing a key role in the appearing of such fnite provinces of meaning. Gurwitsch, instead, inquires what is necessary for an object to be perceived or posited as a real existent, particularly within the perceptual world of everyday life in which human beings pursue all their activities, live out their life histories, encounter others in objective space and time, and even embark upon one of Schutz’s multiple realities (Gurwitsch 2010, 372–373, 376–377, 394). For Gurwitsch, any existent becomes real once it has a place within objective spatio-temporality, which serves as “the constitutive relevancy principle” of the perceptual world and forms, as it were, the presupposition and background, developed from the noematic side, of all everyday life activities (Gurwitsch 2010, 394–395). Correlatively, the world of imagination is an order of existence in its own right, whose constitutive relevancy principle is the quasi-time of different imaginative worlds in which events and characters are located (Gurwitsch 2010, 379). Atemporal eidetic domains and mathematics also constitute distinctive orders of existence (Gurwitsch 2010, 380, 398). As regards a theory of science, for Husserlian phenomenology, the elaboration of the theory of science proved to be tantamount to accounting for the transition from protologic, i.e. the specifc logicality that pertains to the life-world and manifests itself in the typicality prevailing in the latter, to the conceptual and logical realm in the strict and proper sense. In other words, the frst task of a phenomenological theory of the sciences is to develop a phenomenological theory of conceptualization, that is, a phenomenological account of the transition from type to a concept and eidos (Gurwitsch 1974, 142). A phenomenological theory of science rests on and takes its starting point from the phenomenological theory of intentionality (i.e. the theory of objectivizing consciousness). In fact, Husserl and Gurwitsch both treated science and in particular the formal sciences on the basis of a genetical theory of intentionality, which means that scientifc-theoretical problems are approached through genetic analysis: it is a question of explicating how mathematical and formal-logical concepts (e.g. number, group, set, proof, truth) originate out of perception (Gurwitsch 2002, 389–411/411–437). In other words: When scientifc abstraction (i.e. idealization, generalization, or formalization) is explicated, this explication assumes the form of a detailed description of how formalizing abstraction and processes of idealization or generalization make available and found (mathematical or logical) evidence. For both Husserl and Gurwitsch, this genetic exploration of the intentionality involved in the protologic of the life-world becomes of great importance insofar as from the time of Galileo onward, nature has been mathematized, and mathematical entities connected by exact laws have been substituted for the life-world, which itself was consigned to being merely a subjective phenomenon. In the end, physico-mathematical theories can explain away the conscious activity of human beings and even scientists themselves (Gurwitsch 2009, 462–463). Of course, recovering the life-world and its intentional activity, which science itself has forgotten, is itself part of an intellectual undertaking consistent with the aspirations of intellectual integrity of science itself. Not to examine such philosophical presuppositions, in Gurwitsch’s opinion, would be tantamount to surrendering to anti-rationalistic and anti-intellectualist tendencies and to betray the teleological destiny of humanity (Gurwitsch 2009, 500–501). Because of Gurwitsch’s commitment to this teleological destiny, he admired Husserl’s “uncompromising integrity and radical philosophical responsibility” and also did not hesitate to criticize Husserl whenever he thought Husserl had ceased being faithful to the things themselves. 485
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Notes 1 This paper substantially develops an original draft by Olav Wiegand.The author is indebted to William Hannegan for his editorial assistance. 2 To see a counter-argument consult Alfred Schutz, letter of December 11, 1941, in Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959 (Schutz 1989, 53). 3 Philosophers in Exile, Gurwitsch to Schutz, Nov. 30, 1941; Gurwitsch 2009, 332–333. 4 For Sokolowski, the Husserlian view that the thing and the ego consist in an identity across a manifold is preferable. John Drummond, too, has noted that Gestalt frameworks found identity in part/whole relationships instead of an identity being preserved across a manifold, in Drummond 1990, 150.
References Drummond, John. 1990. Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Gurwitsch,Aron.1974.Phenomenology and the Theory of Science. Ed. Lester E. Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002. Esquisse de la phénoménologie constitutive. Ed. José Huertas-Jourda. Paris: Vrin (2009. The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973), vol. 1: Constitutive Phenomenology in Historical Perspective. Trans. and Ed. Jorge García-Gómez. Dordrecht/New York: Springer). ———. 2009. The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973), vol. 2: Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology. Ed. Fred Kersten. Dordrecht/New York: Springer. ———. 2010. The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973), vol. 3: The Field of Consciousness:Theme, Thematic Field, and Margin. Eds. Richard M. Zaner and Lester Embree. Dordrecht/New York: Springer. Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Logical Investigations.Trans. J.N. Findlay, Ed. Dermot Moran. London: Routledge. Schutz, Alfred. 1989. Philosophers in Exile:The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959. Ed. R Grathoff,Trans. J. Claude Evans. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indianapolis University Press. Sokolowski, Robert. 1975.“The Work of Aron Gurwitsch”. Research in Phenomenology, vol. 5: pp. 7–10.
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44 MARTIN HEIDEGGER Daniel O. Dahlstrom
After Husserl, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is the person most responsible for promoting phenomenology as a philosophical method in the 20th century. Although Husserl, by the late 1920s, came to think that Heidegger’s philosophy betrayed transcendental phenomenology’s rigor and promise in favor of studies more akin to anthropology, he initially regarded Heidegger as the most gifted phenomenologist in the Freiburg circle of disciples of the new discipline after the war (Hua-Dok III/1-10).1 Husserl repeatedly provided crucial support to Heidegger’s early career, including his frst stint at Freiburg and his Marburg appointment. Even as it became clear to Husserl that Heidegger had not understood his method (Hua-Dok III/3, 236), he successfully recommends him to be his successor at Freiburg (Hua-Dok III/8: 194–5). In a late 1926 draft of a letter to Heidegger, Husserl writes:“No one has greater faith in you than I” (Hua-Dok III/4, 140). As late as 1928, albeit before careful study of Being and Time, he tells Heidegger:“You and I are phenomenology” (Cairns 1976, 9). The dates of these endorsements are signifcant, given Heidegger’s open criticisms of Husserl’s thinking in lectures at Marburg, beginning in 1923. Suggestions of substantial revision, if not explicit criticism, of Husserl’s phenomenology can also be found in the early Freiburg lectures, during times when Husserl and Heidegger are meeting each other regularly on weekends in what appears to have been mutually benefcial philosophical discussions.To be sure, upon Heidegger’s return from Marburg in 1928, Husserl notes that, after the frst two months, all philosophical exchange between them came – quite distressingly for Husserl at least – to an abrupt end. Later apologizing but also explaining to former student Alexander Pfänder his recommendation of Heidegger over Pfänder for the Freiburg position, Husserl writes that he was forewarned that Heidegger’s phenomenology, far from advancing Husserl’s project, aimed at undermining it. Yet when he broached the subject of these differences with Heidegger, Heidegger “would just laugh and say:‘Nonsense!’” (Hua-Dok III/2, 182). As Husserl tells it, then, he initially accepted Heidegger’s assurances of not abandoning transcendental phenomenology and remained blinded to their differences by a desperate need for someone of Heidegger’s intellectual talent to carry on the project. Only after sustained reading of Being and Time, he relates, did it become evident that he has nothing do with Heidegger’s project, that Heidegger’s criticisms of him are based upon “a gross misunderstanding,” and that Heidegger aimed at a philosophical system that Husserl considered it his life work to render forever impossible. To which he poignantly adds:
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“Everybody except me saw this long ago” (Hua-Dok III/2, 184; Hua-Dok III/3, 254, 476; see Breeur 1994, 13). To conclude from these revelations that Heidegger had simply played Husserl like a fddle is perhaps too easy. To be sure, opportunism and guile play unmistakably important roles in Heidegger’s relations with Husserl, where the lines between personal, professional, and philosophical dimensions are often blurred.2 At the same time, Heidegger construes his early investigations as phenomenological, even if he arrives at his own version of phenomenology through critical engagement with Husserl’s phenomenology. Thus, he criticizes Husserl’s phenomenological research for being insuffciently phenomenological, to the extent that it excludes from phenomenological inquiry the domain most proper to it, i.e., being (Heidegger 1979, 159). The aim of this entry is to establish how Heidegger understands ‘phenomenology’ when he uses the term to characterize his method. Heidegger prominently identifes his philosophical method as phenomenology in Being and Time as well as in lectures and occasional writings in the 1920s. Accordingly, the following entry aims at elaborating Heidegger’s sense of ‘phenomenology’ (here dubbed ‘existential phenomenology’) during this decade, particularly as it converges with and diverges from Husserl’s phenomenological method with regard to the themes: intentionality and being-in-the-world, phenomenology’s scientifc promise, phenomenological reduction, basic components of existential phenomenology’s method, its ontological ambitions, and the defning roles that it assigns to affectivity and authenticity. After 1930 Heidegger largely abandons the term ‘phenomenology’ as a label for his thinking (although he returns to the term in some late works). Notably, this abandonment seems to have been abetted by Husserl’s efforts at the time to separate his phenomenology from Heidegger’s “so-called” phenomenology (Br 3: 476). Precisely in response to these efforts, Heidegger tells his students that, “going forward, we would do well to call phenomenology only what Husserl himself has fashioned” (Heidegger 1997, 40). For the most part, Heidegger listens to his own advice, leaving the term, if not all the trappings of the method itself, behind.3
44.1. From one hiddenness to the other: intentionality and being-in-the-world Like Husserl, Heidegger conceives phenomenology as a method of uncovering a structured process that is operative in experience on various levels, but typically hidden from view within experience itself. For Husserl, this structured process is that of intentionality, a particular way of relating, attending to something by way of its sense. Perceiving, remembering, imagining, for example, are acts by means of which something is made present in a certain way respectively, i.e., perceived, remembered, imagined as a tree. In perception the object is present in a paradigmatic way, pre-eminently capable of entering into acts of knowing. In published works before Heidegger’s arrival on the scene, Husserl focuses on acts of consciousness – opining (Meinen) and imagining, perceiving and knowing – that, while the subject matter of psychology, are also the very acts constitutive of scientifc research. “Elements of a phenomenological explanation of knowledge,” the title of Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation, attests to his fundamentally epistemological orientation.Yet while perception and cognition are paradigmatic in these investigations, he initially characterizes the investigations as “descriptive psychology.” Given his epistemological concerns, the characterization is misleading, to be sure, as he comes to realize, but it is nonetheless revealing. Husserl’s phenomenology is not psychology, however the latter be understood, but the disciplines remain bedfellows of a sort. Husserl’s own continuing preoccupation with phenomenological psychology attests to this basic affnity. The situation is dramatically different in the case of Heidegger’s phenomenology. He does not investigate acts of consciousness with a view to resolving epistemological concerns. To 488
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the contrary, he shifts phenomenological analysis’s center of gravity from intentional experiences (where the presence of an intended object is paramount) to worldly experiences (where things are accessed without being perceived or registered themselves). A relation and the sense (meaning) of it are still fundamental. However, the sense is that of a more or less transparent involvement in a purposive complex of tools or instruments.The sense of that involvement is a combination of lateral and holistic utility, where the sense of one instrument is laterally its usefulness in relation to another instrument and the sense of their relations is the usefulness of the whole complex of which they form a part.The utility of the instruments is precisely proportional to their unobtrusiveness, their imperceptibility, as it were, in the process of being used. Whereas for Husserl, perception and the presence of the perceived object is paradigmatic for the analysis of intentionality, for Heidegger, using implements and the unobtrusiveness of the implement in the process is paradigmatic for everyday being-in-the-world.The use of the implement presupposes a kind of understanding on two levels: an ontic understanding of it as a tool (e.g., a knife, a hammer) and an ontological understanding of its manner of being, namely, as handy (ready-to-hand). In contrast to the presence that marks the manner of being of what is perceived, what is handy withdraws in the course of being used and this withdrawal is essential to its manner of being.To be sure, its withdrawal is a relative absence, capable of becoming starkly present at any moment, as is obvious in breakdowns and defectiveness. However, absence is not only inherent to the handiness of implements. It is also inherent to what any complex of tools is for.Appropriating Aristotle’s hou heneka causation, Heidegger notes how these complexes are for-the-sake-of something –something not literally present (temporally, materially, or spatially) within them. These complexes and what they are respectively for make up the whole that is human existence, understood as ‘being-in-the-world.’ Heidegger does not deny intentionality and its transcendence, as Husserl understands them. Nor does he simply replace Husserl’s conception of intentionality and its transcendence with being-in-the-world. He contends, however, that intentional experiences (including perception and cognition) are grounded in being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1989, 249). It is easy to see the legacy of Husserl’s phenomenological analyses in Heidegger’s account of the structural and holistic character of being-in-the-world. Both treatments distinguish similar elements: the act, sense, and object (e.g., hammering, fastener, hammer), though Heidegger further differentiates the ontic and ontological senses in play. So, too, Heidegger’s insistence upon that holistic character captures Husserl’s sense of experience as a concretum, of which these elements are abstracta. Husserl’s account of the necessity of both horizons (indicating levels of attenuation) and empty intentions in experience signals an unmistakable appreciation of the role of absences in experience (albeit absences in principle eliminable4). Yet while these homologies between the two phenomenologies are patent, there is also a decisive difference that can also be traced to the meaning of an absence. In Heidegger’s phenomenology, there is a paramount yet enigmatic sort of absence at the heart of human existence. It is paramount because it cannot be foregone or eliminated, yet stands as the pre-eminent possibility, namely, death as the possibility that signals the end (the absence) of all possibilities that otherwise make up an individual’s existence.
44.2. The scientifc promise Like Husserl, Heidegger regards phenomenology as the gateway to critical consideration and revision of the basic concepts of the sciences. For Heidegger, this scientifc promise of phenomenology depends, above all, on a suffcient clarifcation of the sense of being as such that is more fundamental than “the ontic questions of the positive sciences” (Heidegger 1967, 9–11). In his 489
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1927 lecture “Phenomenology and Theology,” Heidegger iterates this contention in the course of stressing how absolutely different philosophy (“the ontological science”) is from theology (an ontic science), by virtue of the former’s phenomenological character.After observing that there is no such thing as a phenomenological mathematics or theology, Heidegger advises that ’phenomenology’ designates nothing but “the procedure of ontology that is essentially different from that of all other positive sciences” (Heidegger 1976a, 66–7).Yet this difference brings with it a fundamental connection between phenomenological ontology and the ontic sciences. Precisely when the researcher in an ontic science, coming to grips with the traditional basic concepts of his science, questions their adequacy for the entities that make up the science’s subject matter, philosophical knowledge becomes “relevant and fruitful.” At this juncture alone (“at the limit, as it were, of his basic concepts”), Heidegger contends, the researcher is able to step back from the horizons of the science and inquire into “the primordial constitution of the being of the entities.” In this process, he adds, those entities “remain the object” and yet they also “become new” (Heidegger 1976a, 67).5
44.3. Phenomenological reduction In the frst decade of the last century, Husserl explicitly identifed the process of reducing the contents and objects of experience to their constitution in and by consciousness. Without denying the transcendence of things, the reduction requires a shift in focus from things to how they are experienced, from ordinary ways of experiencing things to how they are constituted as such in consciousness. In Ideas I (1913), reductions on several levels become the defning feature of the phenomenological method, so much so that a phenomenology without reductions is impossible. Yet in Being and Time, Heidegger does not characterize his phenomenology as a reduction of any sort.As a result, scholars have long been divided on the question of whether reductions are implicit or simply missing in Heidegger’s phenomenology.6 Some light has been shed on this issue by the publication of Heidegger’s lectures in the 1920s, though the issue remains controversial (not least because of Husserl’s own developing ways of regarding the kinds and status of reductions). In one of his frst explicit mentions of phenomenological reduction (winter semester 1919– 20), Heidegger remarks that it is deemed necessary only from the transcendental standpoint, and that only after performing the reduction would the genuine problem arise, namely, “what now?”Though the context of these transcribed notes is typically underdetermined, two points of emphasis seem evident. First, the reduction in this sense is dispensable, serving a purpose only from a standpoint that Heidegger places in apposition, as it were, with an epistemological standpoint (he writes “transcendental, epistemological”), the standpoint concerned with knowledge of objects. Should someone consider the reduction necessary (in the sense of freeing us from a model of experience that lends itself to idealism),“it is, however, not itself productive,” requiring a further step of seeing, but leaving up in the air “what and how” (Heidegger 1993a, 151).Thus, Heidegger frst portrays the phenomenological reductions as dispensable, necessary only from a specifc vantage point, and, even then, limited. In these same lectures, however, Heidegger more often speaks of phenomenological reduction in a positive way, a way that he appropriates into his own project.Thus, there is a specifc sort of reduction of lived experience that, Heidegger submits, neither takes its bearings from psychology, nor eventuates in knowledge of life as an object, nor refers it back to a foregoing I in some “transcendental consideration of the constitution of consciousness.” Instead, the reduction takes place as part of transporting ourselves into a “living, factical experience,” immersing 490
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ourselves in it, and sharing (Mitgehen) in it. The actual context and fow of the experience in question are bracketed, “phenomenologically reduced” to our way of becoming acquainted (Kenntnisnahme) with them, purportedly lending them a new intensity (Heidegger 1993a, 123). The aim of this reduction is “the acquisition of pure, completely un-reifed life, freed from any reifcation,” on the basis of the different “sorts of meaningfulness” (Bedeutsamkeiten) that compose it. In this attempt to enter into life not as an impersonal event but as something we bring about (nicht Vorkommen, sondern V o l l z u g), “everything devoid of meaning, everything that cannot be understood, is suspended or siphoned off (phenomenological reduction!!)” (Heidegger 1993a, 156). In these same lectures, Heidegger also comments on Husserl’s phenomenological reduction explicitly. In the comment, which cannot be considered unfavorable, Heidegger identifes the reduction’s negative and positive sides. The former is the process of withholding (epoche) all transcendent objectifcations and thereby enabling the critical rejection of “false attitudes.”The positive function (which, he adds, echoing his earlier ‘what now?’ comment, must be set forth) is to set off the sphere of what can be understood,“the pure self-suffciency” (Selbstgenugsamkeit) that characterizes, as Heidegger puts it, life “in itself ” (Heidegger 1993a, 249–50, 254). What these frst lectures reveal is Heidegger’s appropriation of the phenomenological reduction to a conception of phenomenology, the central focus of which is not the subject matter (die Sache selbst) of theoretical or even proto-theoretical investigations.7 The focus is, instead, life as it is lived and the means of access to it requires a gaze from within, a way of seeing and thereby in some sense arresting it, to be sure, but by way of sharing in it. Notably, in these lectures Heidegger does not indicate any explicit differences between this conception of the phenomenological reduction and Husserl’s conception. The discussion remains at a level of generality that preserves something of the spirit of a phenomenological reduction without entering into the letter of Husserl’s account of it. Once in Marburg, however, Heidegger “takes the gloves off.” In his frst Marburg lectures, he openly criticizes his mentor’s phenomenology and the place of the reduction within it. Once again, he identifes the reduction’s positive character, albeit with a different emphasis, as he contrasts it with Descartes’ remotio.Whereas Descartes initially removes the world and the sciences from the cogito, Husserl takes them up through the reduction “into the thematic region of the new science” of phenomenology.8 But Heidegger also voices two criticisms that implicate Husserl’s conception of the phenomenological reduction. He criticizes Husserl for orienting the entire reduction to consciousness and, indeed, as something self-evident (so that, in the end, the charge of a basic kinship with the Cartesian cogito stands) (Heidegger 2006, 267). Out of a concern for certainty much like the concern that motivated Descartes, Husserl construes the reduced consciousness as the absolute region of being, i.e., the region “in which every transcendent being is in some sense there” and which underlies all other sciences. By doing so, he not only follows Descartes in setting up the cogito as “the explicit norm” for grasping this region, but expands the region’s reach to every possible object of science, in disregard of their specifc manners of being (Heidegger 2006, 264–9, 172, 316). If we compare this criticism with Heidegger’s positive remarks about the reduction, both here and in the earlier Freiburg lectures, it seems safe to conclude that his problem is not with the reduction as such, but with an ontological shortsightedness in Husserl’s use of the reduction. This conclusion is further supported by Heidegger’s explicit criticism of the eidetic reduction in these same lectures. Heidegger does not take exception to the idea of reducing individual instances of consciousness to consciousness in general; indeed, acquiring scientifc propositions demands as much. But he does take exception to determining consciousness, intentionality, and its various basic genera in terms of genus, species, specifc difference, and the like. The latter, 491
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Heidegger observes, are “categories that have their determinate grounding and say nothing about such a being as consciousness [ein solches Sein wie Bewußtsein]” (Heidegger 2006, 273–4, 303). Heidegger returns to the topic of reductions in two further Marburg lectures, identifying transcendental and eidetic reductions as two stages of the phenomenological reduction. In the frst of these lectures (summer semester, 1925), his gloss is fairly straightforward. He relates how we frst gain access to consciousness as a feld of experiences, as its own region, by refraining from positing any transcendent world. In other words, we bracket entities with a view to “making present” how they are,“the character of their being” (Heidegger 1979, 136).This reduction is transcendental in the sense that it suspends all positing of something transcendent – not to do away with it, but to determine its manner of being. Following this transcendental reduction (the frst step of the reductions) is the eidetic reduction of the newly acquired feld of consciousness, the suspension of the individual character of the experiences with a view to securing solely their structure. This much of Heidegger’s gloss could easily be transposed to the existential analyses in Being and Time and their focus on the essential manners of being of what is encountered in and with the world. Yet there are further aspects to Husserl’s “twofold” reduction, as Heidegger reads it, from which his existential analysis departs and that he fags at the conclusion of his gloss. According to the account in Ideas I, Heidegger notes, what is perceived in the feld of pure consciousness is immanent to it and, as such, absolutely given. As such, it stands in sharp contrast to the contingency of any perceived transcendence. Against the background of this gloss on the reductions and the absolute sphere of consciousness achieved by them, Heidegger raises the obvious question of how this absolute sphere and the transcendence of the world can come together (Heidegger 1979, 139). This criticism gives way, however, to a more basic criticism, the criticism, namely, that Husserl’s own use of the reductions, the reduction to consciousness, has the effect of leaving the question of being generally, and intentionality’s being in particular, unaddressed. Precisely insofar as the reductions move away from any positing of reality, including that of intentionality, they are “fundamentally unsuited to determine the being of consciousness positively” (Heidegger 1979, 150–2).To be sure, Heidegger is quick to add, Husserl would disagree, arguing that only after the reduction are we able to regard reality as it announces itself in pure consciousness. But to this riposte Heidegger asks rhetorically whether such an answer suffces for the being of the intentional. Heidegger’s complaint is that the reductions aim at what something is without addressing what it means to say that something is.9 Heidegger supposes a further riposte, namely, that the being of the intentional is given in the reductions’ point of departure, namely, in the natural attitude,“the theoretically unmodifed experience” (Heidegger 1979, 152). But then, Heidegger protests, the being of the intentional is taken as “that of real occurrences in the world, organic beings that are objectively on hand [vorhanden], built into the ‘fundamental layer’ of all reality, into the material being of a thing, as far as its being is concerned” (Heidegger 1979, 153). In sum, Heidegger argues, in Husserl’s hands the reductions reduce the being of the intentional to something to be constituted – supposedly like anything else or, better, anything else in nature – as an object of consciousness. “The being of the acts is determined from the outset in theoretically-dogmatic fashion as being in the sense of the reality of nature” (Heidegger 1979, 157). In this way, Husserl not only posits but answers the question of being, albeit precipitously by equating it with what thus presents itself to a scientifc consciousness.To be sure, Heidegger adds, this object (the actual being of the intentional) has to be understood like any other object as the correlate of pure consciousness. But, driving home his point, Heidegger cites Husserl’s claims that, in the wake of the reductions, it is “absurd” to construe the latter as real (Hua III-1, 134).10 492
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These criticisms in the summer semester of 1925 could leave the impression that Heidegger is washing his hands of the phenomenological reduction. However, in the summer semester of 1927, he endorses a version of the phenomenological reduction, as he did in his early lectures. For Husserl the phenomenological reduction … is the method of leading the phenomenological gaze back from the natural attitude of the human being living in the world of things and persons to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences in which the objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us the phenomenological reduction signifes the process of leading the phenomenological gaze from the grasp (however it be determined) of entities to the understanding of the being of the entities ([understanding in the sense of] projecting the manner of its unhiddenness). Just as very scientifc method grows and develops, so, too, does the phenomenological method on the basis of penetrating to the matters, doing so precisely with its help. (Heidegger 1989, 29) This passage, penned after the completion of Being and Time, demonstrates that Heidegger has a place for phenomenological reduction within his own thinking in the late 1920s. As the last line attests, the method of the reduction, while not the same as Husserl’s, has grown out of it.11
44.4. The three basic components of the phenomenological method Heidegger’s endorsement of the phenomenological reduction is qualifed, not only because he requires its redirection from an ontic to an ontological theme, but also because he regards it as one of the method’s three basic components: reduction, construction, and destruction. In lectures billed as a new elaboration of the unpublished third section of part one of Being and Time, Heidegger stresses that an understanding of phenomenology cannot be given in advance but is to be obtained only in the course of investigating concrete, individual problems that lead to phenomenology’s “basic problems.” One aim of these lectures is to demonstrate that “phenomenological research can present nothing other than the more explicit and radical understanding of the idea of scientifc philosophy” that philosophers, from the ancients to Hegel, have striven for. “Phenomenology,” Heidegger adds, is the name for “the method of scientifc philosophy in general.” 12 To be sure, the expression ‘scientifc philosophy’ is a pleonasm but necessary in Heidegger’s view, given a tendency to equate philosophy’s task with that of forming a world-view. This tendency is motivated by the view that, in contrast to the positive sciences, philosophy does not relate to entities as such. In a sense, Heidegger concurs, but precisely because philosophy, in his view, is ontology, a science of being, a science of what every positing of entities (including a world-view’s positing) must presuppose. The lectures’ immediate aim is to become conversant with “the phenomenological manner of handling problems that refer to being” (for example, specifc, interrelated theses about being) as a means of preparing his students for consideration of the basic problems of phenomenology (“What does ‘being’ mean? From what vantage point is something like being to be understood at all? How is understanding of being possible at all?”) (Heidegger 1989, 19–20). In addressing these problems, one of the central tasks is the elaboration of the sense of the a priori character of being in relation to entities.After noting that this elaboration requires in turn “a specifc type of access and manner of grasping being: the a priori knowledge,” Heidegger adds: “The basic components that belong to a priori knowledge make up what we call phenomenol493
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ogy” (Heidegger 1989, 27).13 After designating the frst such element, that of directing attention away from entities to their being,“the phenomenological reduction,” Heidegger distinguishes it from Husserl’s version, as cited above. But the reduction, he advises, is not even the central, basic element of the phenomenological method, since it does not, by itself, lead to being itself. Being has to be brought into view in a free projection.“We designate this projection of the pre-given entity onto its being and its structures as phenomenological construction” (Heidegger 1989, 29–30). The phenomenological construction is by no means an unmediated creation.To the contrary, it takes its bearings for considering being from the entities themselves, and the latter are determined by the historical setting of the research and the researcher’s factical way of being-here. Already among the ancients, Heidegger avers, an average conception of being became established and was applied indiscriminately across domains without regard for the specifc manner of being of the entities in those respective domains themselves. This ontological obliviousness has persisted, he contends, into the present, requiring the third component of the phenomenological method. Hence, with regard to the concepts that have come down and initially need to be applied, a destruction, i.e., a critical razing of them down to the sources out of which they have been gathered, belongs necessarily to the conceptual interpretation of being and its structures, i.e., to the reductive construction of being. (Heidegger 1989, 31) Following this all too brief gloss on the three components, Heidegger adds that, as far as their content is concerned, they belong together and that they must be established mutually in that regard.The reduction of entities to their being goes hand-in-hand with a projection (construction) of the entity onto a sense of being and this construction, in turn, entails a dismantling (destruction) of the handed-down conceptions of being. Regrettably, this gloss leaves much to be desired, particularly since Heidegger did not give the third part of these 1927 lectures, in which he planned to address phenomenology’s basic components. As reviewed above (section 44.3), he gives ample clues to his distinctive understanding of the phenomenological reduction. He is also somewhat forthcoming when it comes to the phenomenological destruction.The account of destruction given in the 1927 lectures is a more streamlined version of §6 of Being and Time (“The Task of a Destruction of the History of Ontology”). In both texts he insists that the destruction is not a matter of relativizing, shaking off, or fnding fault with past ontological standpoints. It is instead a process of breaking them down “until we reach the primordial experiences in which the frst and leading determinations of being were achieved” (Heidegger 1967, 22). Heidegger apparently construes the phenomenological destruction, then, not as an eliminative procedure, but as an interpretive process of dismantling traditional conceptions of being that have been fashioned in good faith but within certain limits (the historical limits peculiar to every philosophy, respectively). The aim of the phenomenological destruction is to retrieve the experiences on the basis of which past philosophers fashioned their conceptions of being, such that those conceptions continue to have a hold on us today. At work in this rather fanciful conception of phenomenological destruction is a presumption that the texts of past thinkers provide a means of differentiating their still operative determinations of being from the pre-ontological experiences underlying them. As for phenomenological construction (the third basic component of the phenomenological method), Heidegger leaves few clues for unraveling what he understands by it.Yet, while he is critical of “free-foating,”“abstract conceptual,” and “pure” (“logically empty”) constructions,14 he deems the existential interpretation an “ontological ‘construction’” and seeks a basis for it 494
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that moves beyond “a merely arbitrary construction.”15 The acknowledgment of the constructive character of phenomenology is not surprising, particularly when juxtaposed with the reductive and destructive components of the method.The reduction precludes reliance upon talk merely of entities (whether pre-scientifc or scientifc); the destruction guards against naively taking up traditional determinations of being (whether explicitly or implicitly). In the face of these constraints, recourse to construction is unavoidable.Yet this recourse obviously brings with it the burden of discriminating between constructions that are genuinely phenomenological and those that are not.16
44.5. The ontological ambition of existential phenomenology In Being and Time, Heidegger initially characterizes phenomenology as a concept of method, the manner of treating the fundamental question of philosophy, i.e., the question of the sense of being.17 As such, it signifes neither a standpoint nor a direction nor a problem.These qualifcations are gibes at Neo-Kantian conceptions of philosophy, but they also underscore an important feature of Heidegger’s phenomenology as his philosophical method. Instead of fnding application to an already established discipline (e.g., epistemology, ethics, etc.), his phenomenology is part of an inquiry that makes a discipline’s (ontology’s) development possible at all. Just as Scholastics, following Aristotle, ground the method of a science in its subject matter, Heidegger observes further that a concept of method is more genuine and farther removed from a technical device, the more originally it is rooted in the critical engagement with the matter itself. He regards his phenomenology accordingly as rooted in and constrained by its subject matter, the being of beings (Heidegger 1967, 27–8).18 As a means of clarifying, in a preliminary way, what this means (namely, how the method is rooted in its subject matter), Heidegger examines the two roots of the term, phenomenon and logos.19 ‘Phenomenon’ signifes fundamentally what is manifest, an entity’s showing of itself and thus “a pre-eminent way of encountering something,” since even semblances and so-called “mere appearances” trade on that signifcance (Heidegger 1967, 28–31). Despite the myriad uses and translations of ‘logos,’ Heidegger contends that, as talk or discourse (Rede), it primarily signifes “making manifest” what is talked about, “letting it be seen … of itself ” (von dem selbst her, i.e., on its own terms or as it presents itself), and thereby rendering it accessible to others.20 Thanks to this function, logos takes the form of a synthesis, making it possible to see something together with something else, to see it as something. (While the synthesis can thereby bring something out into open, uncovering it, the synthesis can also be deceptive and conceal it.) Combining the glossed meanings of the two terms, Heidegger defnes phenomenology as “letting what shows itself be seen of itself, [i.e., on its own terms,] just as it shows itself of itself ” (Heidegger 1967, 34). Aping Husserl’s principle of all principles, Heidegger further explains that ‘phenomenology’ stands for “grasping its subject matters in such a way that everything up for discussion about them must be treated by directly showing it and directly identifying [or demonstrating: ausweisen] it” (Heidegger 1967, 35; see, too, Heidegger 1979, 117–18). In this context, Heidegger also endorses the descriptive character of phenomenology, albeit under these constraints. With this formal concept of phenomenology in hand, Heidegger turns to the question of “de-formalizing” it, the question of what it should let be seen.To this question, the answer has already been given above. What needs to be identifed explicitly is “what initially and for the most part precisely does not show itself … but at the same time belongs to what does show itself in this way such that it makes up its sense and ground” – i.e., the being of beings (Heidegger 1967, 35). After making the point that phenomenology is the way of accessing and identifying 495
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ontology’s theme, Heidegger adds: “Ontology is only possible as phenomenology” (Heidegger 1967, 35; see, too, Heidegger 1967, 38). Yet the phenomenological focus of Being and Time is not ontology as such, but rather fundamental ontology, an investigation required for any ontology, namely, the investigation of the being of the entity for whom being matters and who has, accordingly, an understanding of being. Heidegger reserves the term Da-sein or ‘being-here’ for this entity that is equivalent (but not identical) to a human being.The phenomenology of Being and Time is thus a “phenomenology of being-here.”The corresponding phenomenological descriptions display or lay out (auslegen) its manner of being, in keeping with the original meaning of the term ‘hermeneutics.’What is said in this phenomenology of being-here has this hermeneutical character, through which – Heidegger unhesitatingly, even peremptorily, declares – “the authentic sense of being makes itself known to the understanding of being that is inherent to being-here itself ” (Heidegger 1967, 37).
44.6. Affectivity and authenticity The constitutive character of affectivity for being-in-the-world (and, by consequence, for intentional experiences) and the pretension to authenticity make up two additional ways in which, at least prima facie, Heidegger’s phenomenology saliently diverges from Husserl’s phenomenology. Far from being ancillary, affectivity informs the other basic existential characters of being-here: the ways that we understand and talk. In this way, Heidegger builds into his account of beingin-the-world Aristotle’s notion of orexis (felt motivation).21 A mood like angst, furthermore, is fundamental in its capacity to disclose what it means to be here. It discloses, among other things, a capacity to be authentic, in the face of an inevitable tendency to conform. No analysis of being-in-the-world (or the intentionality spawned by it) can lose sight of the fundamental, affective struggle to be responsible for it.
Notes 1 For Husserl’s increasing wariness and eventual rejection of Heidegger’s “so-called” phenomenology, see Hua-Dok III/3, 234–7, 254, 456–7, 473, 476; Hua-Dok III/6, 277–8. 2 In the frst half of 1923, after declaring that “Husserl was never a philosopher,” Heidegger writes Karl Löwith that his latest lectures deliver the main blows to phenomenology, and that, once he publishes, Husserl will see what he is up to, leaving him no chance of getting an appointment with Husserl’s help or succeeding him; see Ted Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 372.Yet he does not share such sentiments with Husserl himself. Husserl, in fact, vacations at Todtnauberg with Heidegger in April of 1926, as the galleys for Being and Time arrive. Husserl helps him proofread the galleys, writing that he does so “enthusiastically” and that it is giving him a great deal of satisfaction (Hua-Dok III/3, 347).Within a month or so of this episode, however, Heidegger writes Jaspers that Husserl not only found the work strange but could fnd no place for it in his phenomenology, from which Heidegger concludes that he is further removed from Husserl than he can believe (Heidegger and Jasper 1990, 64). 3 For interpretations of Heidegger’s phenomenology after 1930, see Crowell 2017 and Sheehan 2016. 4 See Dahlstrom 2018. 5 Heidegger envisions a reciprocal – ontic-positive and transcendental-ontological – questioning that negotiates the rapid and complex self-critical developments on the part of the positive sciences themselves with philosophy’s own developing clarifcation of its essence. Communication on this level cannot be tied down to fxed rules; instead it is genuine and fruitful only if guided by an “instinct for the matter and by the sureness of a scientifc good sense [Takt],” beholden to nothing but the “inner necessity of the scientifc problem itself ” (Heidegger 1976a, 67). 6 See Dahlstrom 2001, 113 n72. 7 Heidegger 1979, 274. As with “the given,” Heidegger is anything but consistent when it comes to die Sache selbst; see, for example, Heidegger 1993a, 58, 24, 95, 249. So, too, Heidegger identifes phenome-
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nology with the negative task of securing an account of the matters themselves in the face of prejudices and the positive task of analyzing them in such a way as to explain how preconceptions about them emerge; see Heidegger 1976b, 32–3. Heidegger 2006, 235, 257–60. For an analogous criticism of essentialism, see Gilson 1952. Heidegger takes issue with taking the natural attitude as the reduction’s starting point insofar as (1) the attitude is “not natural at all,” but proto-theoretical and (2) attitudes suppose but are not the same as “the human being’s natural manner of experience” (Heidegger 1979, 155–6). This section’s aim has been to demonstrate how Heidegger appropriates the phenomenological reduction.Whether in the end, as Husserl contends, Heidegger fatally misunderstands it is a separate issue. Crucial for this issue are the documents (drafts and correspondence) surrounding their ultimately failed collaboration on the phenomenology entry for Encyclopedia Britannica. On this issue, see Crowell 1990 and Theodorou 2015, 78–100. All passages cited in this paragraph are from Heidegger 1989, 2–5. On the following page, Heidegger rejects the idea that his is a “Catholic phenomenology,” a notion as absurd, he observes, as that of a “Protestant mathematics.” This endorsement of an a priori investigation is iterated (with a nod of appreciation to Husserl) in Heidegger 1967, 50 n1. In Heidegger 1979, 99–103, Heidegger depicts “the primordial sense of the a priori” – detached from subjectivity as well as what transcends it – as the third decisive discovery of phenomenology. Phenomenology is said to be opposed to all “free-foating constructions” (Heidegger 1967, 28; see, too, 302); Heidegger also criticizes philosophical constructions, particularly among Neo-Kantian philosophers (Heidegger 1993a, 2, 26, 133, 135, 174, 191, 214) and “Hegel’s ‘constructions’” (Heidegger 1967, 435). Heidegger 1967, 197, 260, 303; he refers, too, to a “phenomenological construction” and an “existential construction” of historicity (Heidegger 1967, 375–6, 378). Once again, anticipations of this positive sense of ‘construction’ abound in Heidegger’s early lectures; see, for example, Heidegger 1993a, 138, 148, 228, 233. In early lectures Heidegger speaks of phenomenology’s proximity to art, as it gives shape to what has been taken apart; see Heidegger 1993a, 255. For Husserl, too, phenomenology is a means to ontology; see Hua II 32, 58f; and Hua I 38. This grounding is unique, to be sure, since in this case what is investigated coincides (allegedly) with how it is investigated; see Heidegger 1967, 35: “Ontologie ist nur als Phänomenologie möglich” and Heidegger 2004, 123:“Nur das Wie ist wiederholbar.” In 1923/24 and 1925, he similarly appeals to Aristotle’s analysis of ϕαινόμενον in terms of what shows itself in the light of day or darkness and his determination of λόγος as talk that is meaningful vocalizing and ostensive; Heidegger 2006, 6–41; and Heidegger 1979, 110–21. Heidegger 1967, 32; there are, Heidegger is quick to add, forms of discourse (such as requesting) that make something manifest in a different way. Heidegger 1993b, 310: “The object is not grasped through αἴσθησις but instead through ὄρεξις; the ‘striving’ has the function of discovering …. Not an observing being that frst looks around itself observing and then moves toward something; ὄρεξις is instead the basic manner [of movement].” For the accompanying affective state in which one fnds oneself (translated as sich befnden), see Heidegger 1993b, 185–6; see, too, Heidegger 1967, 171. So, too, Heidegger characterizes intentionality as “being out for something volitionally (ὄρεξις)”; see Heidegger 1988, 70.
References Breeur, Ronald. 1994.“Randbemerkungen Husserls zu Heideggers Sein und Zeit und Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik”. Husserl Studies:Volume 11, numbers 1-2, pp. 3–63. Cairns, Dorion. 1976. Conversations with Husserl and Fink. Dordrecht: Nijhoff. Crowell, Steve. 1990.“Husserl, Heidegger, and Transcendental Philosophy:Another Look at the Encyclopedia Britannica Article.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research:Volume 50, number 3, pp. 501–17. –––. 2018. “The Middle Heidegger’s Phenomenological Metaphysics”. In: The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology. Ed. Dan Zahavi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 229–50. Dahlstrom, Daniel O. 2001. Heidegger’s Concept of Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –––. 2018. “Heidegger’s Early Phenomenology.” In: The Oxford Handbook to the History of Phenomenology. Edited by Daniel Zahavi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. pp. 211–228.
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Daniel O. Dahlstrom Gilson, Étienne. 1952. Being and Some Philosophers.Toronto: Pontifcal Institute of Medieval Studies. Heidegger, Martin. 1967. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1976a. “Phänomenologie und Theologie”. In: Heidegger, Martin, Wegmarken. Ed. FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman. ———. 1976b. Logik: die Frage nach der Wahrheit, Gesamtausgabe. Band 21. Ed.Walter Biemel. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1979. Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Band 20. Ed. Petra Jaeger. Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman. ———. 1988. Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität). Band 63. Ed. Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1989. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Band 24. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1993a. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Gesamtausgabe. Band 58. Ed. Hans-Helmuth Gander. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1993b. Die Grundbegriffe der Antiken Philosophie. Band 22. Ed. Franz-Karl Blust. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1997. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ed. Ingtraud Görland. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 2004. Der Begriff der Zeit, Gesamtausgabe. Band 64. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 2006. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Gesamtausgabe, Band 17. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin, and Jaspers, Karl. 1990. Briefwechsel 1920-1963. Hrsg. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner. Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman. Sheehan,Thomas. 2016.“Phenomenology rediviva.” Philosophy Today:Volume 60, number 1, pp. 223–35. Theodorou, Panos. 2015. Husserl and Heidegger on Reduction, Primordiality, and the Categorial. New York: Springer.
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45 MICHEL HENRY Paula Lorelle
Michel Henry has always described his philosophical project as phenomenological.This “radical” or “material” phenomenology becomes, through its most specifc developments, a “phenomenology of the body”, a “phenomenology of community”, a “phenomenology of incarnation” and even a “phenomenology of the Christ”. But Henry’s philosophical project is frst and foremost a “phenomenology of life”. Life—as Henry wrote at the age of twenty-two—“is what would need to be said and what is self-suffcient”.1 Life does not need to be said as revealed by something exterior. Life needs to be said as that which reveals itself. Phenomenology, therefore, is not only the exterior method that expresses life’s self-revelation, it is in itself such a revelation. Conversely, phenomenology does not need to manifest an exterior object—“Phenomenology is its own object” (Henry 1973, 56). But, to equal life, phenomenology must frst overcome the morbid presupposition from which it has already exhausted the resources, and according to which transcendence is the one and only mode of manifestation (Henry 2008, 1). Only the radicalization of phenomenology as this “frst” phenomenology, will ensure, according to Henry, the life of phenomenology.
45.1. Radical phenomenology Today the renewal of phenomenology is only possible on one condition: that the question that determines it entirely and that is philosophy’s own raison d’être be renewed. This does not mean that it should be expanded, corrected, amended, or still less abandoned for the sake of another question, but that it should be radicalized in such a way that what depends on it would be overturned and, subsequently, everything would in fact be changed. (Ibid., 2)
First philosophy and ontology The radicalization of the philosophical questioning on which depends the renewal of phenomenology is, frstly, the radicalization of its fundamentality. In the frst pages of The Essence of Manifestation, Michel Henry states the methodological requirement that any philosophical research must meet: its fundamentality. 499
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Before claiming to obtain any results, every inquiry must frst try to render itself transparent to itself. It must frst try to determine whether the problematic which it inaugurates can be considered as original and fundamental or whether it is subordinated to a frst inquiry upon which it proves to be dependent. (1973, 2) A philosophical inquiry is a fundamental inquiry whose questioning does not depend on other researches. Philosophy must be First Philosophy.And, the required fundamentality of this research implies its universality. Ontic inquiries, focusing on determined types of being, presuppose an inquiry into Being in general. “First Philosophy is universal ontology” (Ibid.) that seeks for the universal Being of any determined being, the “essence” of everything that is.
Three principles of phenomenology Yet, Being equals appearing. Henry takes over what he calls the frst principle of phenomenology: “Autant d’apparaître, autant d’être” (2003a, 123; 2000, 41),“the origin of Being, is appearing” (2000, 83),“being is coextensive with the phenomenon and founded on it” (2008, 3). Ontology is phenomenological. According to a second general principle, phenomenology is not about specifc phenomena, but about their very phenomenality—not that which appears, but its appearing.The object of phenomenology, which makes its “originality” (Henry 2003a, 59), is the way things appear—the “Wie” or the “How” of their manifestation.“The theme of phenomenological ontology is in no way constituted by the determined, and in a certain way material, content of any manifestation whatever, but on the contrary, deals with the ‘how’ of this manifestation and of every possible manifestation in general” (Henry 1973, 39).The object of a phenomenological ontology is therefore the fundamental and universal “How” of manifestation—its essence or condition.Yet, this fundamental mode of manifestation can only be reached through itself. According to a third general principle, phenomenology not only seeks for the un-appearing essence of phenomenality, but aims rather at its own manifestation. Hence the question that guides The Essence of Manifestation:“How can the origin be raised to the condition of the ‘phenomenon’ in such a way as to become the ‘object’ of phenomenological inquiry?” (Ibid., 28). Henry does not only seek for the fundamental condition of manifestation—the fundamental essence of manifestation—but for the fundamental manifestation of this condition—the fundamental manifestation of the essence. Any inquiry focusing on a determined being or a determined region of beings implies that “Being has already appeared” (Ibid., 2). “How” does Being appear originally? How does appearing appear? Once crossed these ontological and phenomenological premises, the proper object of Henry’s “universal phenomenological ontology” can be disclosed: that is, the fundamental and universal phenomenality that has been forgotten by “historical phenomenology”.
Phenomenology of reason Historical phenomenology is presented, in the introduction to The Essence of Manifestation, as a “Phenomenology of Reason”.“Phenomenology of reason”2 can be defned as the adequate and intuitive knowledge of essential modes of correlation. It implies two dimensions of Husserlian phenomenology: (1) its ontological dimension: phenomenology seeks for the formal and material essences of the objects; (2) its intuitionism: the essences that prescribe to objects their specifc modes of being intuited must give themselves adequately in an eidetic intuition.Yet, according to Henry, such a phenomenology of reason fails to manifest the fundamental essence of manifestation. It misses its (1) universality, (2) its fundamentality, (3) its effectiveness or reality. 500
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(1) As it rests on “intuitionism”, phenomenology fails to reach the universal essence of manifestation. Intuitionism is characterized by the orientation toward a determined being. Intuition limits itself to the intuited reality and comes to be confused with the particular content that shows itself in the intuition (Ibid., 19). This determination—which, according to Henry, marks a fnitude or a limitation—still holds when it is not the particular beings themselves that are intuited, but their essential and “determined structure”. Even when it has laid bare such an immediate ontic meaning in order to turn toward grasping an eidetic structure which belongs to a genus of Being, such a structure is always a determined structure, so that the ontological orientation of intuition remains fundamentally limited in principle. (Ibid., 13) Material ontology seeks for the different and essential forms of intuition.Yet, “the more numerous are the spheres of Being […] and fnally the more decisive and inevitable is the forgetfulness in which philosophy moves about” (Ibid., 10). Universality is not generic or regional. It is the “absolutely original generality which constitutes its specifc theme and which deliberately goes beyond every genus” (Ibid., 13). Phenomenology of reason is, whether limited to the determined being that is intuited, or to the general eidetic structures of intuition. But it fails in each case to reach the universal essence of manifestation.A formal ontology, however, would not be more suited to the task: if formal ontology pretends to reach the universal structure of being, this structure depends on existing material regions and fails to account for its own fundamentality.3 (2) Intuitionism also fails to account for the fundamental character of the essence of manifestation. Intuition cannot be the fundamental essence of manifestation, since it itself presupposes a condition. Intuition essentially supposes an horizon that is not accounted for in its own possibility. Even though phenomenology of reason aims at a completely adequate intuition, it is an unattained ideal, and intuition is in fact essentially surrounded by empties intentions. Of course, horizon can itself be intuited in its essence. However, the intuition of the essence of the horizon presupposes itself an horizon.And the essence of horizon can only be intuited from within an horizon. “The horizon is precisely that which escapes thought at the very moment when it wishes to intuit its essence” (Ibid., 18).4 The essence cannot therefore manifest itself intuitively, in an horizon, unless it loses its fundamentality. And intuition is not the fundamental essence of manifestation. Phenomenology must not consider the “universal phenomenological horizon” as the essence of manifestation, but must seek for its very essence or condition; an essence that cannot itself be given in an intuition. (3) Eventually, phenomenology of reason cannot account for the essence’s “reality”—for the effectiveness of its manifestation. Indeed, neither the universal character of the essence of manifestation, nor its fundamental character, signs its abstraction.The condition for the possibility of manifestation is not a “pure” or an “empty” possibility. It is not the empty and purely formal frame that one can abstract from any determined region of being, nor is it this regional frame itself.The universal is a “concrete terminus which each region of Being presupposes” (Ibid., 11). It is their Being itself in its effectiveness—in its effective phenomenological dimension.“The individual Being, the genus, the species are dependent upon it, not by virtue of a formal or logical regulation which would remain exterior to them, but in their very Being” (Ibid.)—that is, in their very appearing. It is the presence of any Being; that which realizes this presence. “The ontological possibility is the absolute reality” (Ibid., 39). 501
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And the affrmation of this reality is its “realization”.This is the task of a phenomenological ontology that had not been carried out so far by historical phenomenology. Michel Henry’s radical phenomenology results from this threefold radicalization. Radical phenomenology seeks for the universal and fundamental effectiveness of phenomenality. It is “radical” in the proper sense, as it returns to the roots of appearing—where appearing effectively appears to itself.
45.2. Phenomenology of life A radical phenomenological thought must interrogate the manner in which transcendental power, which gives everything, is itself given. It is given to itself inasmuch as nothing but itself is at play here (Henry 2008, 22)
Immanence Manifestation has always been interpreted unilaterally as “transcendence”. To appear is to appear outside, in an exteriority, as a world. “Distance”, “alienation” or “transcendence” are one and the same condition of manifestation. Yet, this unilateral position that Henry calls “ontological monism” is unable to provide for a fundamental condition of manifestation. Intentional phenomenology sets forth the power of transcendence that conditions any manifestation but cannot account for this power’s own manifestation. To this ontological monism, Henry therefore opposes the heterogeneity of these two modes of manifestation that are transcendence and immanence—an immanence that owes nothing to any transcendent exteriorization. The intentional power of transcendence must frst appear to itself in a selfimpression prior to any ekstatik intention. Transcendence must appear to itself frst and can only do so in an immanent manifestation. “Transcendence rests upon immanence” (Henry 1973, 41), and immanence, structured as auto-affection, is the essence of manifestation. “The original revelation is its own content unto itself” (Ibid., 40). “Self-manifestation is the essence of manifestation” (Ibid., 143).
Life The fundamental identity between that which appears and its very phenomenality “is life itself” (Ibid., 41). Life is not an objective property that could be studied from outside as implying functions like motility, nutrition, etc. Life does not point towards these specifc phenomena studied by biology. Biology rests instead upon the Galilean’s inauguration of modern science which precisely extracts the sensible and affective life out of its object—reducing life to physical and chemical processes (2003b, 37–38). In other words, life does not suppose Being—in order to “be”. It is Being, once equaled with appearing, that supposes life as the absolute identity between that which appears and its appearing. Because life is the original phenomenalization at the core of being and thus what makes it be, one must reverse the traditional hierarchy that subordinates life to Being under the pretext that it would be necessary for life itself “to be”. As such, the being to which life is submitted is Greek being, the being of a worldly being. Such a being would still only be a dead being or rather a nonbeing, if the ek-stasis in which its 502
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proper phenomenality unfolds were not auto-affected in the immediacy of the pathos of Life. So Life always founds what we call “being” rather than the contrary. (Henry 2008, 3) Henry’s concept of “life” designates the auto-affection that presides to any other phenomenality. Life is that which gives itself absolutely.
Ego and subjectivity Subjectivity is the essential structure of manifestation. If Being implies subjectivity, subjectivity gains frst a strictly ontological dimension: manifestation does not rest upon a “subject” as an ontic and determined region of Being, opposed to this other region of the world.This would fail to meet the universal criterion of ontology. Likewise, subjectivity gains a strictly phenomenological dimension: the Self is nothing but this fundamental mode of manifestation, that which constitutes itself in auto-affection. “The phenomenological Being of the ego is one with the original revelation which is accomplished in a sphere of radical immanence” (Henry 1973, 41). The original and immanent revelation is not equivalent with the ego itself, but rather with the “Being of the ego”—and, since Being equals appearing, it is equivalent with its mode of manifestation. As Grégori Jean wrote:“Thus it isn’t the subject who self-affects, but it is self-affection which determines the phenomenological sense of ipseity and makes this “how” a Self ” (in Henry 2012, 41).
Ipseity, individuality and birth The Being of the Self is “allowed”,“revealed” and “constituted” by auto-affection (Henry 1973, 465).“Affectivity is the essence of ipseity” (Ibid.). Being a Self is nothing but this feeling of self. And, it is not the universal essence of the Self that is as such constituted, but the concreteness of the individual Self; a Self that is not a pure act or an empty form of thought but the concrete and individual Self that is constituted by Life’s auto-affection. And, just like subjectivity, individuality must be understood from this proper ontological and phenomenological dimension. Such a generation of the living ego from life’s auto-affection gives rise to Henry’s “Phenomenology of Birth”. The living ego—or “Man” himself—proceeds from the prior essence of life which endlessly gives birth. Life generates the living by perpetually generating itself in auto-affection. And time must be redefned from this temporalizing process—not from the world’s ekstatik and perpetual movement of losing itself, but from life’s perpetual and immanent movement of coming to itself. It is not a birth that happened once, but the endless process of life’s self-generation. “Birth is not an event but a condition” (Henry 2003a, 139)—that is, “Transcendental Birth”. Living egos are, as such, “the transcendental Sons of Absolute life”. This generation then supposes a distinction between two concepts of “Life” that will eventually give rise to Henry’s reading of Christianity.
Philosophy of Christianity “A Life that is capable of engendering itself [is] what Christianity calls God” (2003b, 51). And, “If God is Life, then the frst results of the phenomenological analysis of life makes it possible to understand the fundamental arguments of Christianity” (Ibid., 54). The generation that occurs from within life’s self-generation is twofold then. It is frst the generation of the “First-Living” that Christianity calls “the First born-Son” or the “Christ”.The birth of the Christ is life’s self503
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accomplishment and self-revelation.The Christ is generated in the very process of God’s coming to itself.“The Father eternally engenders the Son within Himself ”.This generation, constitutive and contemporary to its own process, is what Henry calls an Arch-birth, giving birth to an ArchSon.And this Arch-Son’s condition is extended to humans. In order to distinguish humans from the Christ and from God, Henry distinguishes between a strong and a weak concept of autoaffection (Ibid., 106).Whereas Life in God produces its own content, the living “man” is brought to itself through Life. “This self-affection that defnes my essence is not my doing” (Ibid., 107). This is why the Christ is understood as an intermediary between “man” and God.The Christ constitutes the absolute auto-affection that generates him.“The Arch-Son precedes any Son as the preexisting and pre-established essence without which and outside of which nothing could be constructed that is anything like a Son, like a living Self ” (Ibid., 110). “Man” is the “Son of the Son”. This generation is understood by Henry as an incarnation, and incarnation as the possibility of Flesh itself. “What comes before any fesh, is its incarnation—which is never its own doing, occurring only in the coming to itself of Absolute Life” (Ibid., 347). It is from this reference of the fesh to its prior incarnation that one can understand the relation with the other.
The other, intersubjectivity and community The other does not give itself as exterior to me, like an object. Against Husserl’s ffth Cartesian Meditation, Henry claims that the alter ego is frst an ego, and cannot therefore be given perceptively, through intentionality.An ego can only be given directly or immediately in the autoaffection that constitutes it—not perceptively and exteriorly but affectively and interiorly.The relation that relates the egos to each other is not worldly but lively—structured by life’s affective laws. As constituted by the same life as me, the other takes part in one and the same “pathetic intersubjectivity” or living community. Thus, what the members of the community have in common is the arrival of life in oneself through which each one of them enters into the self as this particular self who one is. So they are at the same time selves in the immediacy of life and others in that this experience of life is each time irreducibly in one of them. (Henry 2008, 133) Henry then draws the foundation of a “Phenomenology of community”—understood from within life’s absolute, intersubjective and pathetic “Fond”. “The community is a subterranean affective layer. Each one drinks the same water from this source and this wellspring, which it itself is. But, each one does so without knowledge and without distinguishing between the self, the other, and the basis (Fond)” (Ibid., 133).
Culture and science In La barbarie, Michel Henry thinks of culture as life’s self-transformation.“Culture means life’s self-transformation, the movement by which life never ceases to modify itself in order to reach higher forms of realization and accomplishment” (Henry 1983, 14). Life’s desire of feeling itself more intensely generates frst needs as well as superior needs—art, ethics and religion. The world—that seemed to be excluded from life’s auto-affection—reappears as the cultural and aesthetics product of life’s self-development. However, life also has an essential tendency to selfdestruction; which gives rise to an objective world that is neither lively nor cultural anymore.
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The economic and technical modes of production—subtended by the principle of modern science—empty the sensible world from life’s affectivity that constitutes its sensible dimension. While Life’s absolute self-affection endlessly persists from underneath, creating unrealized drives, the objective world of modern science blindly condemned itself to its own loss. From the emptiness and morbidity of the modern world, Henry aims at returning to that which constitutes the world’s life or reality—the effectiveness and materiality of its phenomenality. Henry’s radical phenomenology or phenomenology of life is, as such, a “material phenomenology”.
45.3. Material phenomenology To radicalize the question of phenomenology is not only to aim for a pure phenomenality but also to seek out the mode according to which it originally becomes a phenomenon—the substance, the stuff, the phenomenological matter of which it is made, its phenomenologically pure materiality. (Henry 2008, 2)
Hyletic and material phenomenology The original matter of phenomenality results, in Material Phenomenology, from a radicalization of Husserl’s concept of “hyle”. Husserl rightly distinguished the intentional content of a lived experience from its hyletic content that belongs to it as its “real” element.The “reality” of a material content designates its immanence to the lived experience, the subjective impression that really pertains to an experience in a non-intentional sense. However, if Husserl acknowledges the existence of a material and purely impressive content of phenomenality, he does not confer its own power of manifestation upon this content. Phenomenality is understood unilaterally as the transcendental power of intentionality. In order for the hyletic content to appear, it must be apprehended and informed by a noetic intention. Hence the necessity for Husserl to reintroduce the intentional moment within the lived experience, opening both “matter” and “reality” to their own ekstatik loss. On the contrary,“matter” for a material phenomenology “no longer indicates the other of phenomenality but its essence” (Ibid., 42). Material phenomenology undertakes the radical exclusion of any intentional element from the material content of phenomenality, its reduction to a purely impressional dimension. (1) First, impression must not be confused with the object of which it is an impression, but understood in itself, as the impressional character of an impression. This impressional character is deprived of any transcendent intention and becomes strictly immanent. It is a pure auto-impression that holds from itself its own plenitude.“Reality” then comes to designate the plenitude of this auto-impression—“the auto-impression of the impression” (Ibid., 25). (2) Then, this impressional character is deprived of its sensuous dimension to become strictly affective. The sensuous dimension of an impressional content is always already the matter of a sensible perception: to sensuous contents always correspond objective sense-qualities. But a strictly affective auto-impression can be recognized, on the contrary, in its radical immanence. A feeling like fear, anxiety, pain or pleasure has no necessary objective correlate. “Here the specifc phenomenological content of everything that is an ‘impression’ and everything whose internal phenomenality is affectivity as such can be discovered” (Ibid., 14). Any sensation supposes this prior auto-affection in which affectivity is given to itself.Affectivity is defned as “that which is felt without the intermediary of any sense whatsoever” (Henry 1973, 462).
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Affectivity In The Essence of Manifestation, Henry distinguishes three kinds of affection: (1) the ontic affection by which a determined being is given; (2) the ontological affection supposed by any ontic affection through which the world’s horizon is received; and (3) the auto-affection that this reception frst supposes. Affectivity in the last sense is prior to any sensible perception and is, as such, invisible. Any sensible affection supposes an invisible affectivity.The original matter of phenomenality—its essence—is a pure affectivity that must be understood as life’s auto-affection. Affectivity is the very essence of manifestation—its proper materiality of effciency. It is given to itself absolutely and incessantly in a radically passive way that Henry thinks of as suffering. From this unbearable pathetic auto-affiction arises a frst modalization of affectivity—as pain changes to pleasure. Affectivity is not a static auto-affection but the historial process of this absolute self-givenness.
The “unconscious” Invisible auto-affection is “the invisibility of our night”, “thoughts un-thought”, that is, the genuine phenomenological sense of the “unconscious”. If, on the one hand, the Freudian’s concept of the unconscious is “the ultimate illusion of representational metaphysics” (Henry 1993, 318), it also escapes from this tradition as it is thought as the effcient activity, force or drive, prior to any representation. Drive designates “power and force”, “pure activity and the principle of all activity”, (Ibid., 298). It is the force that arises from the inescapable weight of auto-affection. “In the fnal analysis, Freud’s ‘drive’ does not mean a particular psychical motion but the weight and charge of actual, inescapable self-impression” (Ibid., 307).The possibility of its “repression” reveals the affectivity’s internal historiality.
Body and action The “force” that emerges from this primordial and pathetic self-embracing is the origin of any power, including the power of the body.The body cannot simply be ejected out of the original manifestation—of a universal phenomenological ontology. If, on the one hand, the body is excluded from affectivity—which persists independently from any sensuous implication—it is from this auto-affection that the body must be thought of in its original experience—as the “original”, “subjective” or “absolute” body. Conversely, the body confers its “matter”, its effectivity or its absolute concreteness to the universal condition of phenomenality. “Corporeity is an immediate pathos which completely determines our body before its raises to the world. It is from this original corporeity that it holds its fundamental capacities, that of being a force and of acting” (Henry 1965, “Avertissement à la seconde édition”). Action or praxis must be thought of as well from this affective effort. This is, according to Henry, Marx’s genuine philosophical undertaking. Henry’s phenomenological reading of Marx intends to free him from its Marxist misreading—from the political fxations of his concepts into objective essences such as “productive forces” and “social classes”—to insist on his defnition of reality as the affective and individual praxis irreducible to any objectifcation, in which social classes, productive forces or economic laws fnd their own reality.5
Art and cosmos If the affective matter that constitutes the practical power of our body is invisible—irreducible to the light of exteriority—it can still be “seen” through art; not through fgurative art, which remains attached to the realm of objective representations, but through abstract art which 506
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“places before our wondering eyes an unexplored domain of new phenomena that have been forgotten” (Henry 2005, 20). Kandinsky’s theoretical and artistic work reveals affectivity as the essential matter of painting.“The content of art is this emotion” (Ibid., 18). But, emotion is not only the matter of art in this frst sense of “content” or “subject-matter”. It is also its material means of expression. Once freed by abstraction from their representational function, pictorial elements—such as colors, forms, plans and supports—immediately express life’s affectivity.The force of a line is an affective force or a drive.And a color has an immediate pathetic materiality. The affective and original matter of phenomenality—this pathetic force—is revealed by art to be the matter of the world itself understood as “cosmos”. By tearing colours and linear forms away from the ideal archetype of meanings that constitute the objective world and by taking them in their non-referential pictoriality, Kandinskian abstraction does not depart from nature but returns to its inner essence. This original, subjective, dynamic, impressional and pathetic nature—the true nature whose essence is Life—is the cosmos. (Ibid., 137–138)
Conclusion A proper understanding of Michel Henry’s philosophical project can only be phenomenological. The publications and research works that have been carried out since the opening of the Fonds Michel Henry make it very clear that Henry cannot simply be accused of “hyper-transcendentalism” or absolute subjectivism. Subjectivity is not a realm of being opposed to the world as to this other realm of being, but the original mode of manifestation of any phenomenon, including that of the body, the other and of the world itself. Neither can Henry be accused of re-establishing another kind of monism than the one he denounces: opposed to this frst mode of phenomenality is this other mode of appearing in the exteriority of an outside, as an object. But, if a proper understanding of Michel Henry can only be phenomenological, so should be his critique. Even in acknowledging this strictly phenomenological dimension, questions still remain to be asked. Does Henry’s dualistic phenomenology not rest upon two uninterrogated and non-phenomenological presuppositions? The presupposition on the one hand, according to which one would need to account for an absolutely autonomous phenomenality? And the presupposition on the other hand, according to which otherness would result from an objectifcation? Would a Phenomenology of life not achieve further richness and density, by overcoming both the transcendentalist and the objectivist presuppositions of this dualistic conception of phenomenality? The life of material phenomenology, as well as its further developments, might well rest today upon such critical interrogations.
Notes 1 This claim appears indeed in the very frst page of his war notebooks.These notebooks are at the Fonds Michel Henry of the Université catholique de Louvain.They are currently being edited. 2 As it appears for instance in the foreword of the sixth Logical Investigation, in the last section of the Ideas I or in the last chapter of Formal and Transcendental Logic. 3 Formal ontology is unable to meet the criteria of a “universal phenomenological ontology”, because the empty form of a region in general still presupposes the being of a region in general. Hence the essential dependence of formal ontology upon material ontology.“It is obviously in the realm of material essences that formal ontology fnds its origin, because the pure essence of a region in general is necessarily relative to something like a concrete region” (Henry 1973, 11).
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Paula Lorelle 4 Michel Henry enlarges Husserl’s concept of “horizon” and the horizontal structure of manifestation beyond the region of material objects that appear in a sensible world. As he says in a note, eidetic objects also suppose horizons—as mathematical essences suppose a mathematical horizon. Henry’s concept of “horizon” is closer to the idea of a “transcendental horizon of manifestation”—a “universal phenomenological horizon”—that can be understood from Heidegger’s reading of Kant. 5 The use-value, for instance, is the direct expression of this lively and affective praxis. However, such an individual praxis also reveals to be the ultimate foundation of its own economic and political negation. As the transformation of the use-value into the exchange-value, capitalism—like any form of political totalitarianism (Nazism or Communism)—signs the objectifcation of the affective and subjective work that constitutes the genuine reality of any economic production.
References Gregory, Jean. 2012. “Notes préparatoires à L’essence de la manifestation: la subjectivité.” In: G. Jean, J. Leclercq(Eds.), Revue internationale Michel Henry. Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, pp. 15-92. Henry, Michel. 1965. Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps. Paris: PUF. ———. 1973. The Essence of Manifestation.Trans. G. Etzkorn.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1983. La barbarie. Paris: PUF. ———. 1993. The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis.Trans. D. Brick. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ———. 2003a. Phénoménologie de la vie, tome I: De la phénoménologie. Paris: PUF. ———. 2003b. I Am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Trans. S. Emmanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. Seeing the Invisible. On Kandinsky.Trans. S. Davidson. New York: Continuum. ———. 2008. Material Phenomenology.Trans. S. Davidson. New York: Fordham University Press.
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46 EDMUND HUSSERL Burt C. Hopkins
Introduction Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is the founder of the method of scientifc and philosophical research called phenomenology. Husserl’s phenomenology is largely recognized as the source of one of the two major philosophical trends in the 20th century, continental philosophy (the other trend being analytical philosophy). Husserl’s thought infuenced many major fgures of the last century, including Martin Heidegger (who was Husserl’s assistant for three years), Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida. Husserl was educated in mathematics and philosophy by some of the leading mathematicians and philosophers in the second half of the 19th century in Germany and Austria, including Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker (in mathematics), and Franz Brentano and Karl Stumpf (in philosophy). He completed two Ph.Ds.The frst was in mathematics (1883), on the calculus of variations (under Weierstrass’ student Leo Königsberger) and the second in philosophy (1891), on the concept of number (under Stumpf, who was a student of Brentano and who also was one of the founders of experimental psychology). Husserl published four books during his lifetime: The Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) (Husserl 2003), Logical Investigations (Part I, 1900; Part II, 1901) (Husserl 1970a), Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913) (Husserl 2014), and Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) (Husserl 1969). A selection of his lectures on internal time consciousness edited by Martin Heidegger (based on work done by Edith Stein) was also published in his lifetime (1928) (Husserl 1964) in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), the journal he founded in 1913. Husserl also left over 40,000 pages of unpublished research manuscripts, many of which have been edited and published in the 50-plus volumes of his collected works. Among the most infuential posthumously published volumes of Husserl’s writings are Cartesian Meditations (1950) (Husserl 1960) and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1976) (Husserl 1970ab. Husserl’s phenomenology may be succinctly characterized as a method for investigating the essential structure of consciousness, where consciousness is not understood as the mind or as a mental being. Rather, by consciousness, phenomenology understands the basic mode of being awake that is behind the appearances of the respective objects of human sense perception, 509
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imagination, and thought.The meaning of ‘object’ in Husserl’s phenomenology is therefore not limited to the kind of objects perceived in sense perception. It embraces anything with a suffciently stable identity to be capable of appearing repeatedly, which is why Husserl also considers appearances in imagining and thinking that meet this criterion to be objects.
Epochê and bracketing of natural attitude One of the most basic tenets of Husserl’s phenomenology is that native to consciousness is the belief that what is really real are the physical objects of sense perception and that these objects exist independently of the human being. Husserl calls this native belief in the independent existence of physical objects the “natural attitude” and the content of this belief – the independent existence of physical objects – the “thesis” of the natural attitude. In modern times, Husserl maintains that the natural attitude and its thesis have been reinforced by the success of the natural sciences, especially physics. A consequence of this reinforcement is the conviction that consciousness’ native belief in the true being of the independent existence of physical things is a fact, a fact whose truth has been unquestionably established by natural science. Because consciousness includes the appearance of objects that are not physical, Husserl’s phenomenology had to develop a method to counteract the natural attitude’s conviction that only physical things are truly objects.This is especially necessary when the thesis of the natural attitude is elevated to the status of a philosophical claim, which results in the philosophical bias called naturalism. Husserl’s method to neutralize this bias involves two interrelated steps. The frst is the suspension of the belief behind the natural attitude’s conviction that what is really real are the independently existing physical things perceived in sense perception. Husserl employed the Greek word “epochê,” which means “suspension,” to characterize the method of consciously acting to suspend this belief, which he also described as “putting it out of action.” Husserl also used a convention of modern mathematics for excluding a part of a formula in a mathematical expression, the convention of “putting into parentheses” or “bracketing,” to describe the result of this frst step.Thus, by suspending the belief in the thesis of the natural attitude, the phenomenological “epochê” in effect “brackets” it. In line with the meaning of this mathematical convention, the thesis that what is really real are independently existing physical things is excluded, in the precise sense that its truth is no longer taken for granted. On Husserl’s view, this is different than denying the thesis outright and thereby treating it as false: the content of the thesis remains what it is, namely, that what is really real are the independently existing things perceived by sense perception. Only now, subsequent to the methodical intervention of the epochê and bracketing, the natural attitude’s conviction that the thesis is true is annulled.
Transcendental phenomenological reduction Together, the epochê of the belief in the natural thesis and that thesis’ bracketing prepare the way for another important phenomenological method, the phenomenological reduction. Once belief in the thesis of the natural attitude has been suspended and the thesis itself bracketed, the philosophical claim implicit in it, that what is really real are independently existing physical objects, loses its privileged position as the guiding paradigm for understanding what is really real. Crucial to Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction is the generalization of the thesis of the independent existence of objects beyond the paradigmatic physical objects posited by the natural thesis. Once generalized, Husserl then brackets the thesis that any kind of object exists independently of consciousness. Husserl’s phenomenology capitalizes on this universal bracketing to the end of investigating consciousness on its own terms rather than in terms of its relation 510
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to something else.The methodical intervention that makes this possible is the phenomenological, or more precisely – the transcendental phenomenological – reduction. Husserl’s reduction, like all reductions, reduces something to something else, although in this case what is reduced is not quantitative and therefore not diminished in any way. Rather, Husserl makes the claim that by focusing on an aspect of that which is reduced, the transcendental phenomenological reduction, on the contrary, opens up an aspect of it that is disclosed by systematic phenomenological investigation to be infnite. Husserl calls what is reduced “lived-experience,” by which he understands our experiencing of everything there is to experience, namely the objects of outer and inner perception, the objects of the imagination, and the objects of thinking. Lived-experience is reduced in the precise sense that the thesis of the independence of all the objects of lived-experience from the consciousness of them in such experience is bracketed, which results in consciousness itself being made into an object. As such, namely, as a repeatable identity, consciousness becomes the subject matter of phenomenological investigation.The isolation of consciousness as an aspect of lived-experience, however, as mentioned, does not represent its diminishment for Husserl.This is the case because the nature of the being of consciousness, which he opines is discovered for the frst time by the method of phenomenological reduction, is infnite.To understand properly the infnite being of consciousness, Husserl maintains that its peculiar phenomenological being must be kept distinct from the various dimensions of material being presupposed and investigated by natural science, the likewise various dimensions of non-material being (Geist) presupposed and investigated by the human sciences, and, fnally, the formal being presupposed and investigated by logic and mathematics. According to Husserl, properly understanding the infnite phenomenological being of consciousness involves mastering the methodological protocols necessary, frst, to secure consciousness as an object and, second, to investigate it systematically in a manner appropriate to its being. The frst two of these protocols have already been mentioned.Thus, initially, there is the reduction of the lived-experience of every kind of object to the consciousness of them, such that consciousness itself is made into an object. It is important to stress here that the status of consciousness as an object is established because it satisfes Husserl’s criterion for an object, namely, the exhibition of a stable identity capable of appearing repeatedly.Anything capable of satisfying this criterion counts as a phenomenon for Husserl. But, as will be seen, the phenomenon of all phenomena for Husserl is consciousness itself. It is so not only because its phenomenological being is infnite, but also because the nature and structure of its being elevates it to a place of preeminence among all other kinds of phenomena.
Methodically refective appearance of consciousness as an object In order to appreciate the philosophical signifcance of these last-mentioned claims made by Husserl’s phenomenology, as well as the related claim that the being of consciousness is absolute, it is imperative to grasp how he understands consciousness to appear as an object in the phenomenological reduction. The appearance of consciousness, like all appearances, must appear to something. That to which consciousness appears, however, is consciousness itself; it thus appears in, or better, as self-consciousness.The moment of consciousness’ consciousness of itself is termed “refection” by Husserl. By refection, Husserl understands a modifcation of the consciousness moment of livedexperience.The default mode of this conscious moment is characterized by him as “straightforward.” By this he means to indicate that prior to refecting on itself, the conscious moment of lived-experience is directed toward the objects that are encountered by that lived-experience. 511
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For example, the conscious moment of the lived-experience of external perception is directed toward perceptual objects like trees and writing desks, that of inner perception is directed toward perceptual objects like a toothache and an itch, that of imagining is directed toward objects like honest politicians and unicorns, and that of thinking is directed toward objects like the Pythagorean theorem and Plato’s idea of the good. When refectively modifed, the conscious moment of lived-experience shifts its directedness from the objects encountered in its straightforward directedness to its own consciousness of those objects. When this refection has been prepared for by the methodological protocols leading up to and including the reduction, consciousness itself appears as an independent object. It does so in the precise sense that once the thesis of the truth of the independent existence of the objects of its straightforward directedness has been neutralized by the reduction, consciousness itself now appears as an object that is independent of the truth or falsity of what is posited by that thesis.That is, whether or not those objects are really independent of consciousness’ directedness toward them, that it is directed toward their appearance and that their appearance is inseparable from consciousness being directed toward them is something that is irrefutably established. It is so established because consciousness itself appears in the refection that makes the phenomenological reduction possible. Husserl characterized the refection connected with the phenomenological reduction as an “inner perception.”This, of course, invited its interpretation as an act of mental observation, of what the empirical tradition calls “introspection.” Husserl further characterized the refective inner perception in terms of its “immanence” to the refecting act, again inviting the interpretation of its nature as psychological. What should have been clear to those who accept these invitations, however, is that the reductive context of the appearance of consciousness as an object precludes limiting the reduced lived-experience in which it appears to a particular region of lived-experience; in this case, to the non-material lived-experience in which the psyche appears as an object. Apart from the obstacle that an improper understanding of the transcendental phenomenological reduction presents to the attempt to grasp the appearance of consciousness as an independent object, there is also the obstacle presented by the proximity of Husserl’s thought and terminology to that of his mentor Franz Brentano. For Brentano,‘inner perception’ referred to the intrinsically indirect self-awareness possessed by consciousness in its awareness of mental objects. As such, he distinguished it from the direct self-awareness characteristic of self-observation that is the salient characteristic of introspection. He based this distinction on the view that introspection has as its condition a higher act of consciousness, which he understood to presuppose an act that is intrinsically foreign to the indirect self-awareness characteristic of inner perception. Brentano, therefore, did not understand the proper object of inner perception to be consciousness itself. Rather, he understood it to be a mental object “immanent” to inner perception, which he characterized using Scholastic terminology as an “intentional” object. The reductive context of Husserl’s characterization of refection as inner perception, however, rules out its object being the mind or an aspect of mental reality. This context also rules out its interpretation as introspection.The former is the case because, as we have seen, the thesis of the independent being of all regions of objects, including the psyche (and with it, the mind), is bracketed by the reduction. The latter is the case, because subsequent to the reduction, the appearance of the objects of the various regions of material, non-material, and formal being appears inseparably from the appearance of consciousness itself as an object.This is to say, that subsequent to reductive annulment of the truth of the independent existence of the objects composing the various regions of being, consciousness as an object appears together with the appearance of the various objects encountered by the lived-experiences in which these objects are encountered. 512
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Transcendental refection Given the transregional scope of the refection in which the transcendental phenomenological reduction is effected, Husserl characterized it as a transcendental refection. Likewise, because of this, he characterized the objective appearance of consciousness to transcendental refection as transcendental consciousness. That said, the question emerges, why did Husserl continue to use Brentano’s terminology of ‘inner perception’ and ‘immanent object’ to characterize this refection, given their psychological associations and Husserl’s wish to dissociate the method and content of transcendental phenomenology from psychology? The answer to this question lies in the scientifc aspiration of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Crucial to the realization of this aspiration is that all the cognitive claims made by phenomenology have their basis in direct, unmediated evidence. Husserl thought such evidence is free from presuppositions, insofar as no claim made on its basis exceeds what it makes evident.Thus, phenomenology’s cognitive claims are constrained by their commitment to scientifc rigor, which entails that they limit their scope to that which appears in the direct, unmediated evidence exhibited by transcendental refection. Because such refection functions to make manifest something that is intrinsic to consciousness, Husserl characterized the perceptual awareness of what is made manifest in this way as ‘inner perception’.What transcendental refection makes manifest is the appearance of consciousness as an object, an appearance that includes the objects whose thesis of independent existence has been bracketed and therefore put out of play. Because of this, the evidence in which the appearance of consciousness as an object appears is characterized by him as being immanent to the refective modifcation of consciousness. The inner perception characteristic of the transcendental refective modifcation that is behind the transcendental reduction is therefore radically distinct from both Brentano’s notion of inner perception and the empirical understanding of introspection. Brentano’s notion, as mentioned, referred to the indirect self-awareness that he argued accompanies inner perception’s directedness to the immanent mental object proper to the psychological act of perception. Husserl’s notion, on the contrary, refers to the refectively modifed conscious moment of lived-experience, the objects of which, as mentioned, are not limited to the lived-experience of objects perceived by acts belonging to the non-material region of the psyche. Husserl’s account of transcendental refection is likewise contrary to the empirical understanding of introspection. This is the case because the object of the latter is the mind, whereas for Husserl the object of transcendental refection, consciousness, is understood neither as the mind nor limited to acts, psychological or otherwise. It is not so limited, because the transcendentally reduced phenomenon of consciousness includes the appearances of the objects belonging to the various regions of being.And while these regions include the being of the psyche, they are not exhausted by it. The failure to take into account these distinctions is responsible for the contemporary debate about whether the refective modifcation of consciousness is a necessary condition for consciousness itself to appear and thus to become a phenomenon. The terms of the debate present the following alternatives: 1) self-awareness accompanies all acts of consciousness directed toward objects other than consciousness, and therefore inner perception does not need a special, higher-order act of consciousness that objectifes the act of perception for its (the act’s) selfawareness to come about; or 2) an explicit act of conscious self-objectifcation – refection – is required in order for the self-awareness of the act of inner perception to come about.
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effect the reduction acknowledged, the terms of this debate resolve themselves into a pseudoproblem.To begin with, the association of Husserl’s notion of transcendental refection with the refection at issue in the debate has its basis in an equivocation.Transcendental refection is not identical with the refection that occurs in the natural attitude. As we’ve seen, transcendental refection presupposes the methodical protocols of the reduction. To be sure, these protocols are executed in acts of refection, but these acts are radically distinguished by Husserl from both the empirical characterization of refection and his own account of phenomenologically psychological refection. In the case of empirical refection, Husserl characterizes it in terms of inner perception, with its interiority being marked by 1) its contrast with the outer perception directed to an external object and 2) the ontological status of the mind as an internal object.The non-perceptual interiority of the latter, and not the perception directed toward it, is therefore responsible for the empirical account of refection as inner perception. Phenomenologically psychological refection, in contrast, is characterized by Husserl in terms of its objectifcation of the lived-experience of both inner and outer perception. Phenomenologically psychological refection is therefore characterized by Husserl in terms of the immanence to its regard of perceptual lived-experiences directed toward the appearances of inner and outer objects. Transcendental phenomenological refection is distinguished from its phenomenologically psychological variant by its bracketing and suspension, respectively, of the natural attitude and its thesis, and the reductive generalization of this thesis.As mentioned, Husserl’s characterization as ‘immanent’ of the evidence in which the phenomenologically reduced objects of all regions of being appear and the transcendental refection to which they appear as ‘inner perception’ can give rise to equivocations. Specifcally, equivocations arise if these characterizations are understood in terms of either empirical or phenomenologically psychological refection. These equivocations are behind the contemporary controversy mentioned above. On the one hand, the terms of the controversy have their basis in the formulation of the opposition between refection as an inner-directed act of internal perception and external perception as an externally directed act. On the other hand, the alternatives proposed as the condition for self-consciousness, either 1) the indirect phenomenon of self-relation inseparable from all acts of objectively oriented perception, or 2) the objectifcation of acts by higher-level acts of refective consciousness, are posited in blissful ignorance of Husserl’s account of the sine qua non for phenomenological evidence: its immanence to transcendental refection’s peculiar inner or immanent mode of perception. Only the evidence given in this immanence, together with the refective inner consciousness to which it appears, is capable, for Husserl, of establishing whether unrefectively modifed lived-experience is composed of acts that are indirectly self-conscious or not.Arguments in favor of either alternative are clearly incapable of resolving the controversy phenomenologically. They are so because either alternative presupposes rather than accounts for the only evidence capable of providing these arguments with a phenomenological basis: the reductive appearance of consciousness as an independent object. This last point can be seen quite clearly when the following is considered. Either of the alternatives proposed cannot account for that which their comparison presupposes: the consciousness of each as distinct phenomena, i.e., of 1) an indirect self-awareness accompanying the straightforward directedness of conscious acts and of 2) a natural act of refection that objectifes acts of consciousness.The comparison of 1) and 2) therefore presupposes a methodical refection capable of objectifying each as a possible candidate for the answer to the question: how does self-consciousness initially come about? As such, it presupposes the phenomenologically transcendental refection that effects the transcendental reduction and, with it, the possibility of consciousness itself appearing as an independent object, the appearance of which includes both the act of being conscious and the object of this consciousness. Put differently, the very possibil514
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ity of considering 1) and 2) as alternatives for the initial emergence of self-consciousness points to a mode of consciousness that encompasses them both. Husserl called this mode of consciousness transcendental refection.
Intentionality as the essential being of consciousness The infnite being of consciousness manifests itself to transcendental refection when that refection attends to the way in which the reduced phenomenon of consciousness, as an independent object, shows up to its refective regard. According to Husserl, consciousness most fundamentally shows up as the unity of two irreducibly distinct moments. On the one hand, there is its moment of awareness, which Husserl characterizes as the primitive quality of being aware of something.This quality is primitive in the sense that it can neither be analyzed further into more basic qualities, nor can it be made more intelligible by relating it to other qualities. On the other hand, there is the object moment of consciousness, the stable identity of which the moment of consciousness that is aware of something is aware.This moment, too, belongs to consciousness, or better, it belongs to the transcendentally reduced phenomenon of consciousness. It does so in the precise sense that the philosophical meaning of its stable identity is restricted to the scope and limits of its appearance to consciousness.Which is to say, that when the epochê and bracketing of the generalized natural thesis is in effect, the being of what appears to consciousness is taken to be a function of consciousness itself rather than of the independent being of nature or any of the other regions of being. Husserl calls the unity that binds these two fundamental moments of consciousness its “intentionality.”These two moments, in turn, as moments of the intentionality of consciousness, are designated by Husserl with either the Latin or Greek philosophical terms for thinking and thought. Thus, in Latin, the ‘awareness of ’ moment of the intentional unity of consciousness is termed “cogito” and its object moment “cogitatum.” In Greek, the two moments are termed respectively “noesis” and “noêma.” Husserl treats these terms as being phenomenologically equivalent. The infnite being of the reduced phenomenon of consciousness becomes manifest for Husserl when the ways in which these moments of consciousness appear are investigated, both in terms of their relative distinction from one another and their relationship. In all three cases, Husserl makes the claim that the appearances in question, the noesis, the noêma, and their intentional relationship, all appear as the unities of multiplicities. These multiplicities, in term, appear as unlimited. Husserl’s claim here, it must be stressed, is not empirical.That is, he is not claiming that, as a matter of fact, the being of consciousness is infnite. Rather, his claim is phenomenological, in the precise sense that subsequent to the enactment of the methodological protocols of the epochê, bracketing and reduction, consciousness, as a region of being, appears to transcendental refection as an infnite region. Or better, Husserl’s claim is that the intentional essence of consciousness so appears. This is because Husserl formulates phenomenology as a science that provides knowledge of the essences of phenomena. In the case of intentionality, this means that consciousness isn’t sometimes intentional, sometimes not, depending on factors other than consciousness. Intentionality therefore does not designate a fact about consciousness. Rather, Husserl’s claim is that the very structure of consciousness, as a transcendentally reduced phenomenon, and therefore, as something that appears to transcendental refection, is intentional. As such, however, the philosophical status of the essence in question must be sharply distinguished from the metaphysical essences of the Aristotelian tradition. For Husserl, the essences at issue in phenomenology are not posited on the basis of philosophical orthodoxy. Rather, they are apprehended on the basis of the evidence made manifest in the object immanent to the conscious regard of transcendental refection. 515
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Essential seeing of the intentional structure of the infnite being of consciousness The apprehension of an essence takes place in the phenomenological method Husserl calls “essential seeing” (Wesenserschuung). This method has been controversial since its inception, because its reference to seeing invites understanding it in analogy with perceptual vision.When this invitation is accepted, the expectation is created that the objects it sees, namely, the phenomenological essences, somehow appear to this method like physical objects appear to vision. That is, just as visible objects appear to vision passively, in the sense that their being looked at is suffcient to make them appear – provided, of course, there’s suffcient light – so, too, it is expected that phenomenological essences will appear to essential seeing in the same way.This expectation, however, overlooks the two interrelated and interdependent methodological protocols that Husserl maintained are necessary to apprehend a phenomenological essence. One is that the phenomenon whose essence is in question must be varied and the other is that its variation must be guided. Far from being the result of a passive looking, then, essential seeing requires the methodological intervention of the phenomenologist. Husserl developed essential seeing on the basis of his pre-transcendental phenomenological method of ideation. Ideation was formulated by him as the method to bring to evidence, as empirically pure phenomena, the ideal structures presupposed by logic. Its point of departure is the lived-experience of general meaning, which is brought to prominence and then isolated. Ideation accomplishes the former by generating a manifold of lived-experiences. The latter is accomplished by thematizing the logical content of the unity that encompasses the instances of general meaning common to each of the discrete lived-experiences composing the manifold. Crucial to the generation of the manifold in question is that its composition exceed empirically given lived-experiences. The comparison of empirically given general meaning can only make prominent and isolate empirical generalities, and not the “pure” – because unconditional – universality coincident with logical meaning. Generation of a manifold that is unrestricted by empirical limits requires the imaginative variation of an originally given empirical manifold. Despite Husserl’s initial characterization of this variation as “free,” from the beginning the crucial methodical protocol for the imaginative extension of the empirically given manifold was that the variation involved be guided: guided initially by 1) the empirical style characteristic of the unity yielded by the comparison of the empirically general meaning common to the members of the empirically given manifold, and then by 2) the pure essence eventually yielded by the empirical style’s imaginative extension. Husserl’s early critics, alas, either missed or ignored this protocol with their worry that ideation disregarded or otherwise undervalued the empirical or factical dimension of experience. For Husserl, the empirical is clearly there in the phenomenon from the start; as the undeniable point of departure for the comparison that yields the empirical style that functions as the guiding clue for the ideation proper, the empirical dimension of experience, or better, its intelligible structure, is manifestly not disregarded. Nor does the highlighting of its intelligible structure undervalue, for instance, its ontological status, since that status is the very basis for the appearance of the pure phenomenon in ideation.This same early criticism is equally misguided when directed at the essential seeing developed out of ideation. Essential seeing follows the same methodological protocols as ideation, save for its extension of the guiding clue to include empirical styles common to all aspects of lived-experience, not just those whose unfolding yields the idealities that comprise the species of pure logic. The essential seeing of the intentional essence of consciousness takes its point of departure from any arbitrarily refected, phenomenologically reduced, conscious lived-experience, 516
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which is compared with other such arbitrary conscious lived-experience.The resulting series of conscious lived-experiences, which is generated with the addition of each arbitrary conscious lived-experience, eventually leads to the recognition of a common style “running through” and thus shared by each arbitrary “exemplar” of conscious lived-experience. Refectively objectifed, this style then functions as the “guiding clue” for introducing further arbitrary exemplars of conscious lived-experience. In the present case, the objectivation of the style in question yields two interrelated and interdependent invariants: the directedness of consciousness to the appearance of some object, and that object itself, as that which appears to consciousness’ directedness. Husserl terms the peculiar ‘consciousness of ’ characteristic of the directedness moment of consciousness its “intentional directedness” and the object of that conscious directedness its “intentional object.” Intentionality, then, is the structure of consciousness highlighted by the interrelation and interdependence of consciousness’ intentional directedness and its intentional object. Essential seeing properly transpires when this style is used as a guide for comparing exemplars of conscious lived-experience that no longer originate in arbitrarily refected, phenomenologically reduced, conscious lived-experiences but in the imaginative variations of such livedexperiences.According to Husserl, these imaginative variations have the capacity to generate an unlimited multiplicity of “as if ” conscious lived-experiences, each of which exhibits the characteristics of intentionality.At a certain point in the process of generating this multiplicity, Husserl maintains that the insight is arrived at that the generation of any further possible imaginative exemplar of conscious lived-experience will yield an exemplar with the same structure of intentionality.The moment this insight is arrived at, the multiplicity is transformed into what Husserl calls an eidetic manifold, and the invariant structural status of the guiding style transformed into an eidetic generality. These transformations then make it possible for the conscious regard of the transcendental refection operative in the process of essential seeing to shift its regard from the imaginative exemplars in the series to the invariant structure running through them, and to objectify that structure. Husserl calls the structure so objectifed the pure essence or “eidos” and the transcendentally refective consciousness of the eidos “essential seeing.” The essence of the conscious moment of lived-experience, as an infnite being, therefore appears in the eidetic manifold generated by the method of essential seeing. As such, the appearance of consciousness’ infnitude is coincident with the appearance of intentionality as its essence and the objective apprehension of that essence as an eidos. Husserl articulated the intentional eidos of consciousness in terms of both the essential correlation between the cogito and the cogitatum and their respective essential structures. On his view, the structure of each of these aspects of the eidos of consciousness appears as an infnite manifold, in the precise sense of the appearance of a unity that itself necessarily appears only through the appearance of an unlimited multiplicity.The appearances of the unity and unlimited multiplicity therefore appear inseparably from one another, despite their phenomenal distinctness. Husserl characterizes the sense of the most universal aspects of these unities as the triad: ego-cogito-cogitatum. And he assigned transcendental phenomenology the “infnite task” of investigating their eidetic structures for every region of being.
Regional ontology of the natural, human, and formal sciences Consciousness itself, however, is not only a region of being but a region of being that is irreducible to the material and non-material regions of being investigated by the natural and human sciences. Because of this, Husserl maintained that the investigation of the eidetic structure of the intentionality of its transregional being, or better, its transcendental being, counts among 517
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transcendental phenomenology’s infnite tasks. Husserl grouped these tasks under three headings: regional ontology, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology.The task of regional ontology is to provide a foundation for the natural, human, and formal sciences. The task of phenomenological psychology is to investigate the eidetic structures of consciousness within the horizon of the natural attitude. And that of transcendental phenomenology is to investigate the eidetic structures of transcendental consciousness. As the self-conscious founder of a new science, Husserl viewed himself as a pioneer whose task was to make a rough map of the new terrain of the region of consciousness and leave it to those who follow him to explore it more exhaustively. One result of this was Husserl’s tendency to intermix programmatic announcements of tasks for future research with his presentation of both phenomenology’s epistemic necessity and concrete phenomenological investigations. Indeed, in some cases, for instance, his account of the regional ontologies underlying the natural and human sciences, Husserl provides little more than general accounts of their cognitive incompleteness before making programmatic pronouncements about future tasks. Most of Husserl’s concrete phenomenological research focused on the formal region of being and transcendental consciousness. Husserl’s general argument that the natural, human, and formal sciences are cognitively incomplete focuses on their uncritical epistemic relationship to the natural attitude and its thesis that what’s really real are independently existing physical objects. He argues that these sciences elevate this uncritical relationship to a matter of methodological principle, which systematically limits their cognitive claims to evidence based on sense perception. The problem with this, according to Husserl, is that the cognitive claims of all of these sciences, and thus not just the formal sciences, include references to ideal concepts whose meaning cannot be accounted for by appeals to physical evidence.This is a problem for Husserl, because it means that the methodologies of these sciences are, in principle, incapable of establishing the truth of the ideal concepts that inform their cognitive claims about the specifc region of being they present themselves as investigating. Moreover, to the extent that the cognitive claims of these sciences are formulated using modern, symbolic mathematics, there is the added problem of the mathematical formalization of the region of being that they ostensibly investigate. This is a problem, according to Husserl, because apart from the objects of the sciences of logic and mathematics, the being of the objects investigated by the natural and human sciences is not intrinsically formal. Husserl took the term “a priori” from rational philosophy, and which in that context designated the concepts and conditions for cognition that cannot be traced to the sense perception of physical objects, to refer to the status of the ideal concepts that are employed but unaccounted for by the natural, human, and formal sciences. However, unlike traditional rational philosophy, which opposes the a priori to what can be experienced in sense perception, Husserl maintained that such conditions and concepts are capable of being experienced. However, the experience they are experienced in is not that which is limited to sense perception but rather experience that has been expanded phenomenologically, namely, the lived-experience that makes up the point of departure for phenomenological cognition. The isolation and apprehension by the method of essential seeing of what, for Husserl, amounts to the a priori presuppositions of the natural, human, and formal sciences, is how he formulates the task of their respective regional ontologies.And this formulation of that task is what is behind the two mottos that Husserl used in the presentation of his phenomenology.The frst, that the goal of phenomenology is to be a “presuppositionless” science, and the second, that this science is most essentially characterized by its “return to the things themselves.” From the preceding, it can be seen that the presuppositions in question are above all the unaccounted for (because they are in principle incapable of being accounted for by the existing sciences) a priori aspects of the cognitive claims of the natural, human, and formal sciences. Likewise, it can be seen that the terminus ad quo of the 518
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phenomenological return to the things themselves are the ideal meanings that compose the a priori presuppositions of the sciences, especially the mathematical formalization of scientifc cognition, while its terminus ad quem is the apprehension of their essential a priori structure in essential seeing.
Phenomenology of transcendental consciousness as transcendental idealism Husserl’s investigation of the infnite intentional being of transcendental consciousness systematically uncovered the essential structure of its being in roughly three discernable phases. The ordinality of these phases marks both their place in the development of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and in the systematic order of transcendental phenomenology’s investigations. The frst uncovered and explored the intentional structure of the pure immanent being of the region of transcendental consciousness. The second uncovered and explored the functional dimension of transcendental consciousness, what Husserl called transcendental subjectivity and which includes transcendental intersubjectivity. And the third uncovered and explored the intentional historical horizon inseparable from the meaning of all intentional objectivities that are mediated by tradition.The concrete phenomenological investigations that characterize each of these phases are guided by Husserl’s philosophical self-interpretation of transcendental phenomenology as a transcendental idealism.This interpretation has two pillars. One is the eidos that is apprehended in essential seeing. The other is the independent being of the region of consciousness apprehended in the transcendental reduction. As we’ve seen, the methodological intervention that yields the eidos does so as the essential structure of a unity that encompasses the infnitude of the intentionality of consciousness. Because the science of phenomenology uncovers and investigates the intentional eide of the various regions of being, and especially the region of consciousness, one aspect of Husserl’s philosophical interpretation of it as a transcendental idealism focused on the ideal status of its eidetic subject matter.The other aspect of this interpretation focused on the independence of the being of the transcendentally reduced region of consciousness from all other regions’ being. On Husserl’s view, this independence renders the phenomenological being of transcendental consciousness preeminent among all other regions of being, i.e., natural, human, and formal. And it does so because the phenomenological being at issue, intentionality, is the source of the appearance of the objectivities proper to all the other regions of being. Consideration of this last point led Husserl to characterize the phenomenological being of consciousness as an absolute being. His reasoning was that the appearances of the objectivities of all other regions of being are fundamentally dependent on transcendental consciousness, while its appearance is independent of all these other regions of being.The appearance of consciousness, in other words, is dependent only on itself, unlike the other regions of being, whose appearances are relative to consciousness.Thus, for Husserl, this non-relativity in relation to the appearance of all the other regions of being is what defnes the absolute being of transcendental consciousness. Husserl’s philosophical self-interpretation of transcendental phenomenology as transcendental idealism presented a major obstacle to the realization of his vision of its method and major fndings becoming the point of departure for the renewal of philosophy as a unitary enterprise. His closest students, like Eugen Fink and Ludwig Landgrebe, and early critics alike, like Martin Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, shared the worry that Husserl’s philosophical self-interpretation has its basis in phenomenologically unwarranted philosophical presuppositions that block rather than provide access to the things themselves. Fink, in fact, got Husserl to share this worry when it came to the frst stage of transcendental phenomenology’s account of the pure immanent 519
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being of the region of transcendental consciousness. In this case, the worry was that a Cartesian bias rendered its approach to the things themselves overly formal, in a manner that presented the results of the reduction as apparently empty of content. However, what is easily lost in the consideration of the history of the critical reception of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is that its followers and critics alike advance their criticisms of it from within the horizon, if not on the ground, of the philosophical issues that are inseparable from its guiding mottos of presuppositionlessness and return to the things themselves. If there were nothing else to Husserl’s legacy than this continued recognition of his formulation of what most radically determines philosophy’s inner most nature, that would be enough to establish the importance of that legacy beyond the historical past. But a brief review of the salient results of the three phases of transcendental phenomenology adumbrated above is suffcient to establish an even greater importance of that legacy.
The three phases of transcendental phenomenology Husserl’s investigation of the eidetic structure of the immanence of pure consciousness articulates the formal a priori that structures intentionality. In addition to the essential correlation between noesis and noêma, he articulates their structures as, respectively, the subject and object poles of intentionality. In the case of the latter, its appearance is structured by the object’s thematic prominence and the horizontal limit of that prominence. In the case of the former, its consciousness of the objective appearance is structured temporally, in accordance with its thematic intentional directedness to its present appearance and its horizonal directedness to its just past appearances and appearances to come. The horizonal appearance of both the object and subject poles of intentionality are structured by a unitary limit. In the case of the object pole, that limit is the horizon of the world, which appears indirectly through the infnite manifold of objective appearances.The unitary limit of the subject pole appears as the transcendental “I” (Ego), and as such appears as the unity that necessarily encompasses the infnite manifold of intentional directedness. The essential formality proper to the a priori of the intentionality of the immanence of pure consciousness exhibits the eidetic structure of any act of consciousness rather than that of the specifc acts determinative of the natural, human, and formal regions of being.The concern with its apparent emptiness of content is therefore misplaced, since that emptiness is methodologically necessary in order to uncover the eidetic structure of transcendental consciousness in its widest universality. Once uncovered, this eidetic structure provides, as it were, the guiding clue for the specifc phenomenological investigations that comprise its infnite tasks. Husserl’s investigation of the functional dimension of transcendental consciousness articulates the eidetic structure of the genesis of the unitary limits of the subject and object poles of the immanence of pure consciousness. He characterizes this functional dimension as transcendental subjectivity and maintains that its eidetic structure includes transcendental intersubjectivity. Husserl formulated the contrast between the transcendental phenomenological investigation of the genesis of unitary limits of the subject and object poles with the investigation of the eidetic structure of those limits in terms of the methodological distinction between the “static” character of the investigation of the latter and “genetic” character of the former. Rather than represent two completely distinct methods, Husserl understood the genetic investigation of the origin of the unities of the objective and subjective pole to have as its sine qua non their prior articulation in a static investigation. Husserl characterized the genetic investigation as regressive, in the precise sense of the refective uncovering, in the statically articulated unities in question, references to meanings that function as a part of the intelligibility of those meanings despite 520
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nevertheless not appearing in their objective appearance. Such meanings, according to Husserl, are therefore sedimented in a dimension of transcendental consciousness that he termed transcendental subjectivity. Following up these references, to the end of uncovering the sedimented meanings in question and then reactivating the acts that originally generated them, is the task of genetic phenomenology. Husserl’s investigation of the intentionality of the historical meaning inseparable from the unity of some objective meanings has its basis in the radicalization of the genetic investigation of the origin of the unity belonging to objective meaning.This radicalization proved necessary in the case of the unities of meaning operative in the sciences, given their mediation by tradition, and indeed, of the unities of meaning operative in philosophy itself. The investigation of the intentionality of historical meaning is structurally analogous with that of the genetically refective uncovering of sedimented meanings and the reactivation of the acts that generated them, with one decisive difference. The sedimented meanings and acts regressively uncovered in genetic phenomenology originate in the living experience of the transcendental subjectivity belonging to both the transcendental “I” and the intersubjective community of transcendental Egos to which it belongs. Those meanings uncovered in transcendental phenomenology’s investigation of the intentionality of historical meaning, however, do not originate in the living experience of an Ego and its intersubjective community. Rather, their origin must be traced back to no longer living lived-experiences that once upon a time belonged to an intersubjective community of transcendental Egos.
References Husserl, Edmund. 1960. Cartesian Meditations:An Introduction to Phenomenology.Trans. D. Carins.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1964. The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Trans. J. S. Churchill. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic.Trans. D. Cairns.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1970a. Logical Investigations.Trans. J. N. Findlay. NJ: Humanities Press. ———. 1970b. The Crisis of European Philosophy and Transcendental Philosophy: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.Trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2003. Philosophy of Arithmetic.Trans. Dallas Willard. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 2014. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.Trans. Dan Dahlstrom. Indianapolis, IN/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
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47 ROMAN INGARDEN Giuliano Bacigalupo
47.1. Short biographical note Roman Witold Ingarden was born on February 5, 1893 in Kraków as an Austrian citizen. In 1912, after attending the Gymnasium in the same city, he started to study philosophy at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lvóv. Here he came in contact with Kazimir Twardowski, one of the many brilliant students of Franz Brentano. Partly because of dissatisfaction with the positivistic tendency of the philosophy department (Ingarden 1998, 409), Ingarden left Lvóv to continue his studies in Göttingen under another well-known pupil of Franz Brentano: Edmund Husserl. In Husserl’s phenomenology, Ingarden found the alternative to positivism he was looking for. For his part, Husserl considered him to be one of his best students and accepted to supervise his PhD thesis. In 1916, Ingarden followed Husserl to the University of Freiburg, where they had occasion to discuss philosophy on a daily basis and, in 1918, he defended his thesis on Intuition and Intellect according to Henry Bergson. From 1918 until 1924, Ingarden worked as a Gymnasium teacher in different cities of the newly re-established state of Poland. Even though his teaching load contemplated up to thirty hours per week, in 1923 Ingarden was able to submit his Habilitationsschrift with the title Essential Questions:A Contribution to the Problem of Essence.The text was published in Husserl’s Jahrbuch für philosophische und Phenomenologische Forschung (Ingarden 1925) and reviewed twice in Mind (by A.C.Wing in 1926 and by Gilbert Ryle in 1927). The defense of his Habilitationsschrift led to Ingarden’s appointment as a Privatdozent in 1925, and then, in 1933, as a Professor at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lvóv. In this period, Ingarden worked on what would become his most famous work, The Literary Work of Art (1931). One should stress how the real focus of Ingarden’s study is not so much on aesthetics but rather on ontology. In turn, the ontological focus is strictly linked to Ingarden’s interest in one of the oldest riddles of philosophy: the existence of the (external) world. From this perspective, The Literary Work of Art may be seen as a preparatory work to address this problem. According to Ingarden, only once a clear understanding of the ontological status of fctional objects has been developed is it then possible to address the question as to whether the world as a whole is a fction or not (Ingarden 1931, IX–XIII). Ingarden’s interest in the problem of the existence of the world is best understood on the background of his intellectual biography. As addressed above, Ingarden was drawn to Husserl’s 522
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approach to philosophy as an alternative to positivism. But, as many of Husserl’s students, Ingarden strongly resisted his alleged turn to idealism in Ideas I (Hua III/1).1 In the years that followed the publication of the The Literary Work of Art, and partly building on the analysis of this work, Ingarden thus set himself to the ambitious task of providing a fully fedged defense of the existence of the world. Even the diffcult years of World War II, a time at which the Jan Kazimierz University had to be closed (1941–1944), were devoted to this project.This work led to the publication of the frst two volumes of The Controversy over the Existence of the World in 1947 and 1948 (because of the different historical circumstances, this work was not written in German but in Polish).The planned third and fourth volumes, however, did not follow suit.As it happens, Ingarden was only able to complete what he labeled as the ontological analysis of the idea of world and mind, which are the essential features of the idea of the world and mind. But the metaphysical question as to whether what we think of as the world exists independently of the mind was left unanswered. Ingarden’s inability to accomplish his project may partly be accounted for by his academic diffculties after World War II. Under Stalinization, and after having moved to the Jagellonian University of Kraków, Ingarden was banned from teaching (1949–1957). Ironically, the reason for this ban was Ingarden’s alleged idealism—a criticism indiscriminately leveled at the whole phenomenological tradition by orthodox Marxism.The fate of Ingarden, however, could have been much worse, and, once the ban was lifted, Ingarden was able to teach until his retirement in 1963. During the years from 1963 to 1970, he was also able to travel several times to international conferences in Western Europe. On June 14, 1970 Ingarden suddenly died because of a cerebral hemorrhage (for more details on Ingarden’s biography, see Mitscherling 1997).
47.2. Ontology and existential ontology As already addressed, Ingarden was drawn to ontology because of his interest in the problem of the existence of the world. By ontology—one should note—Ingarden understands the study of pure, i.e. not empirical, necessities and possibilities. Or, as he phrases it, ontology is the a priori study of the contents of ideas—whereby by ideas we should not understand psychological but rather Platonic entities broadly construed.To give an example, it is purely necessary that a color has an extension and impossible that it has a pitch. Or, from the point of view of ideas, to have a certain extension is part of the content of the idea of color, whereas to have a certain pitch is part of the content of a different idea, namely the idea of sound (Ingarden 1947–48, I, §6).The ideas of color and sound are of course neither interpreted as psychological entities nor as the result of a psychological process. As addressed above, ideas are non-empirical—i.e. Platonic— entities. Ingarden subdivides ontology into three kinds: formal, material and existential ontology. If we are interested in the form of a certain kind of entity,2 such as the classical distinctions between object, property and relation, then we are dealing in questions of formal ontology. If, on the other hand, we are interested in the material qualities of an entity, such as the abovementioned ones of having an extension or a pitch, then we are doing material ontology. Finally, if we are interested in the existence of an entity, then we are doing existential ontology. The notion of an existential ontology may seem redundant.This worry, however, is dispelled as soon as Ingarden’s approach to existence is taken into due account. Referring to the authority of Kant, Ingarden discards the view of existence as a property of objects.This, however, does not hinder him from considering existence to be a “character” of objects. By this, he does not mean that the domain of objects may, in a (Neo-)Meinongian fashion, be divided into two classes, those that exist and those that do not exist (cf. Chrudzimski 2015, 206–7). To Ingarden, if an 523
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object loses the character of existence, there is simply no object left, and thus also no property. From the perspective of the contemporary debate, one may thus say that according to Ingarden existence is a non-discriminatory, i.e. universal property of objects. Nevertheless, this character of existence may be, so to speak, distinguished within an object (Ingarden 1947–48, I, §9). In addition, this character of existence may come in different forms: there are different kinds of being or existence. Consequently, one may develop a discipline within ontology which focuses on the different kinds of existence: existential ontology. As we will soon be able to see, it is this kind of ontology that is crucial to the analysis of the controversy over the existence of the world. Within existential ontology, Ingarden distinguishes between two groups of questions. On the one hand, we have questions related to the mode of being of an entity, whereby one may fnd the usual distinction between real (or concrete), ideal and possible being.These distinctions are exclusive: no entity can have two modes of being. On the other hand, we have questions related to the existential moments of an object. More precisely, an entity may enjoy (or, perhaps more appropriately, suffer): Inseparateness (Seinsunselbständigkeit): the mereological dependence of an entity on another entity (e.g. color and extension, property and object) (Ingarden 1947–48, I, §14).3 Derivation (Seinsableitung): the dependence of an entity on another entity in order to come into existence (e.g. a child with respect to its parents) (Ingarden 1947–48, I, §13).A non-derived entity is also called original (Seinsursprünglich). Contingency (Seinsabhängigkeit):4 the dependence of a separate entity on another entity in order to remain in existence (e.g. the living human body and oxygen) (Seinsunabhängikeit), (Ingarden 1947–48, I, §15). Heteronomy (Heteronomie): the dependence of an entity on another entity for its determinations (Ingarden 1947–48, I, §12).The opposite of heteronomy is autonomy (Autonomie). These four notions provide the existential moments of an entity.5 One should notice that, to the contrary of the modes of being, the existential moments may be combined.There are some constraints on the possible combinations, though. First, as it already follows from the abovegiven defnition, an entity may be contingent or self-dependent if and only if it is a separate entity. From this perspective, it would thus seem more natural to consider contingency and self-dependence as a sub-species of separate entities. Secondly, also, the opposite notions of heteronomy and autonomy cannot be freely combined with the other existential moments. More precisely, heteronomous objects seem to be a special kind of objects that are derived: If an entity is heteronomous, then it is derived (cf. Chrudzimski 2015, 215). Moreover, if an entity is derived and separate, then it is contingent. Understanding the reasons behind these last conceptual relations requires some further details about the notion of heteronomy.
47.3. The pure intentional object In order to elucidate the notion of heteronomy, we have to consider Ingarden’s theory of thought or intentionality. According to Ingarden, if we think of something, we think of something existing (this follows from the view that existence is a universal property). But what is then the difference between, say, thinking about Hamlet and thinking about the Eiffel Tower? Ingarden’s answers are as follows: Hamlet (the character, not the play) has all its determination in virtue of another entity; in the frst place, Shakespeare.That Hamlet is for instance from the formal point of view an object and not a relation (i.e. something belonging to its formal side), that he is a rather fat man (i.e. something belonging to its qualitative side) and that he is con524
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cretely existent (i.e. something belonging to its existential side) is entirely a result of the creation of Shakespeare. In other words, those determinations are not “immanent” to Hamlet, and in this sense, Hamlet is a heteronomous object. On the other hand, the Eiffel Tower is a 300-meter high iron lattice tower that exists concretely independently from the fact that someone is thinking about it or not.True, the Eiffel Tower, too, was created, but in an entirely different fashion than Hamlet: the Eiffel Tower was built and therefore it immanently has all its determinations. In this sense, the Eiffel Tower is an autonomous object. Another way of characterizing autonomous objects would be by saying that it is only by chance that they are thought upon by someone. Heteronomous objects, on the other hand, are essentially so: they are “pure intentional objects” (reine intentionale Gegenstände).6 Once these considerations are taken into account, we may understand the limits of the diagonalizations of heteronomous objects addressed above. Heteronomous objects – or, more generally, entities – have to be created by a given consciousness. For instance, Hamlet has to be created by an author. And it is only because of this creation that Hamlet has its determinations. The question whether the pure intentional object is separate or not is open to discussion, so to speak: it may be a mereological part of a given consciousness (Shakespeare or the reader of the play in the case of Hamlet) or it may be separated. If, however, it turns out that the pure intentional object is separated, then it has to be considered contingent: it stands in need of someone thinking about it as the human body is in need of oxygen. One last remark is required to provide an adequate characterization of the notion of heteronomous or pure intentional object. As already addressed, heteronomous objects are defned as those entities whose determinations are not immanent to them.This, however, does not mean that such entities have no inner determinations at all. Clearly, they require at least the immanent determinations of being created and being thought about.The pure intentional object of Hamlet, for instance, is really created by its author and it is really thought upon by him and the readers of the play. At the same time, these determinations cannot really be attributed to the character in the play Hamlet: it is not true of Hamlet that he was created by Shakespeare, and it is not literally true of Hamlet that readers are thinking about him. To explain this further aspect, Ingarden develops a theory of the pure intentional object as having a “remarkable double-sidedness” (merkwürdige Doppelseitigkeit) (Ingarden 1947–48, II/1, §47): It is an object with a “content” (Gehalt). Only the object has immanent determinations, whereas the content has only non-immanent determinations. For instance, Hamlet as the character of the play is the content of a pure intentional object, which, as such, has only nonimmanent determinations. On the other hand, the pure intentional object of which Hamlet is the content has the immanent determinations listed above: it is created by someone and thought upon by different individuals. Besides the ones listed above, the pure intentional object has also other immanent determinations that are more logical in character: it is identical with itself and fulflls the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM).The content of the pure intentional object, on the other hand, does not comply with LEM. For some properties, it will always be the case that the content of the pure intentional object is underdetermined. For instance, it is neither true that Hamlet is left-handed, nor that Hamlet is right-handed (at least as long as we only read the text and do not see the play) (Ingarden 1947–48, II/1, 219–24). Things are somewhat different with the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) and self-identity: to Ingarden, a content of an intentional object does not have to violate LNC or self-identity. But it may, namely if it is described as such by the author (Ingarden 1947–48, II/2, 91–5).This violation of logical or, as Ingarden prefers to label them, formal-ontological laws are not all too troubling, though. The reason for this is that the content of the pure intentional object is—as Ingarden often repeats—a mere illusion or a nothing. 525
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A fnal remark may address the temporal character of the pure intentional object. It may seem that the pure intentional object has immanent time-determinations. For instance, it seems that the pure intentional object that has Hamlet as a content really came into existence when it was created by Shakespeare. In his The Literary Work of Art, it seems that Ingarden did follow such an approach. However, in the Controversy, he retracts this view.True, the pure intentional object is still created. But we should only think of the creating mental events as temporally located; not the pure intentional object (Ingarden 1947–48, I, §32). In other words, the pure intentional object has a time location only indirectly, i.e. by means of the temporality of the creative mental events.
47.4. Being and relative being We are now in the position to assess how these existential-ontological distinctions bear upon the problem of the existence of the world.The crucial claim of idealism is that consciousness is in a certain sense dependent or relative to consciousness.With his conceptual apparatus, Ingarden is now in a position to provide a very sophisticated analysis of this claim.To him, there is only one sense in which we may speak of a truly absolute being, but seven different senses in which we may speak of a relative being (Ingarden 1947–48, I, §16): Absolute being: I) Autonomous, original, separate, non-contingent Relative being: II) Autonomous, derived, separate, non-contingent III) Autonomous, original, inseparate IV) Autonomous, original, separate, contingent V) Autonomous, derived, separate, contingent VI) Autonomous, derived, inseparate VII) Heteronomous, derived, separate, contingent VIII) Heteronomous, derived, inseparate Accordingly, Ingarden may distinguish between different kinds of idealism. For instance, Berkeley may be interpreted as endorsing the following declination of idealism: the alleged external world is in fact heteronomous, derived and inseparate (i.e.VIII) with respect to consciousness (of course, things would get considerably more complicated if one were to take the role of God into consideration). On the other hand, Ingarden attributes to Husserl the view that the external world is heteronomous, derived, separate and contingent (i.e.VII) with respect to consciousness (Ingarden 1947–48, I, §19). The difference between these two versions of idealism is that Berkley’s alleged external world is reduced to a bundle of ideas, which are mereological parts of consciousness; Husserl, on the other hand, considers the external world to be something over and above the mere sum of our ideas: it is something “constituted” by ideas but different from them. This difference is, of course, strictly linked to opposite accounts of the pure intentional object as a separate or inseparate entity. Independently from the distinction between two kinds of idealism, the task for every kind of realism is to demonstrate that the external world (together perhaps with other ideal, i.e. non-temporal entities) is an autonomous being.This is the ambitious task that was undertaken but never fulflled by Ingarden. In order to do this, however, he has to move from the level of ontology to the level of metaphysics. From this perspective, it is not enough anymore to simply consider the different possible ideas of the world. Rather, it is necessary to prove what kind of entity the external world really is.This is a task for the metaphysician. 526
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In this respect, it is important to notice that, according to Ingarden, we should distinguish between metaphysics and what he calls the individual sciences. One may in fact be tempted to say that the question as to whether a specifc kind of object–-in this case the external world–-exists or not should be assessed by the individual sciences and, more precisely, by physics. However, to Ingarden, physics as a science presupposes the existence of the external world, and thus it is not in a position to address this question (Ingarden 1947–48, I, §5). But what is then the method of metaphysics—one is tempted to ask—if it has to be distinguished from both ontology and the individual sciences? How should we understand such an enterprise? Be that as it may, Ingarden never completed his work and, more precisely, never accomplished the metaphysical inquiries that should lead to a solution of the controversy.7 As many commentators have noted, however, the preparatory work contained in the frst two volumes of the Controversy is of great interest in and by itself because its meticulous study of ontological issues (see Haefiger and Küng 2005, 9;Thomasson 2012; Chrudzimski 2015, 210).
47.5. The mode of being and essence of the literary work of art Ingarden’s most well-known book, The Literary Work of Art, is not primarily interested in developing a theory about aesthetic values in literature. Rather, what Ingarden addresses is, in the frst place, the question as to what is the essence of the literary work (of art). In other words, he does not develop a theory that allows us to draw a clear line between Goethe’s Faust and the poem of a schoolboy as having different aesthetic values.To the contrary, Ingarden is really interested in what Goethe’s Faust and the schoolboy’s poem have in common, i.e. a given essence. Not surprisingly, to Ingarden the question about the essence of the literary work is strictly linked to the question about its kind of being. The problem is, to him, an ontological one or, more precisely, an existential-ontological one.This is a rather unusual undertaking in the feld of literary studies or theory of literature. One may think, for instance, of the Russian Formalists, who attempted a scientifc defnition of literature at the beginning of the last century. Nothing could be further away from their interests than ontological problems. From the ontological perspective, the literary work presents us with a fascinating puzzle, to which Ingarden draws attention at the beginning of his study.Traditionally, philosophers like to distinguish between real (or concrete) and ideal existence.The literary work, however, seems to take a hybrid middle position: it shares with real objects the property of coming into existence, undergoing changes and possibly even being destroyed. We do not want to say that Goethe’s Faust existed before Goethe wrote it.We also do not want to say that it did not undergo some changes while Goethe was working on it.We also would refrain from claiming that Faust may not be destroyed, namely, if all copies were lost. (One may want to add that also all the memories of it would have to be lost: Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 presents us with a suggestive scenario where works of literature are, so to speak, kept alive by memorizing them). At the same time, it is diffcult to reduce the existence of the literary work to any of the two possible kinds of concrete objects, namely mental events or physical objects (or properties thereof).The reduction to a physical object may be easily ruled out. Nobody would consider seriously the option that the ink marks on paper should be considered Goethe’s Faust. At the same time, we cannot reduce the literary work to the mental events of its creator. It is rather implausible to claim that, for instance, the readers of Faust have access to them. Similarly, the literary work cannot be reduced to the mental events of all the readers.The reason for this is that it would lead to the loss of the identity of the literary work.The literary work would become, as our mental events, something essentially private and thus not sharable (Ingarden 1946, §§3–5). But what is then the mode of being of the literary work? Ingarden has a straightforward answer: it is a pure 527
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intentional object. Notice, moreover, that it has to be a pure intentional object in the sense of (VII) and not in the sense of (VIII): it has to be heteronomous, derived, but separate. Indeed, only if this interpretation of the pure intentional object is granted may we avoid the reduction of the literary work to mental events.8 As we have seen, the interpretation of the literary work as a pure intentional object in the sense of (VII) is a necessary condition to vindicate its identity across readers. It is not a suffcient condition, though.The problem may be formulated as follows: how is it possible that, for instance, Goethe created a pure intentional object Faust and that we are in a position to have access to the very same object? Clearly, some very general considerations about language may be invoked here.The story that Ingarden tells us is a fairly orthodox one. By convention, we associate with the same (type of) linguistic signs the same ideal meanings, which are again understood by Ingarden as Platonic entities broadly construed. However, these ideal meanings do not enter directly into the literary work. Instead, the author relies on the ideal meanings to build sentences (Sätze).This is what constitutes the literary work. And since the literary work is a pure intentional object, so are the sentences which constitute it. Notice, moreover, that, according to this picture, sentences are a very peculiar kind of pure intentional object.They present, so to speak, a double heteronomy. Sentences are heteronomous with respect to their creator as well as with respect to the ideal meanings (see Ingarden 1946, §18). At least at this stage of the analysis a problem arises: how can we distinguish between sentences we consider to be literary works of art and those which are not? Ingarden’s answer runs as follows. He individuates the specifcity of what we may label as literary sentences in what is meant by the author through them.The ordinary communication, and, more precisely, ordinary written communication, refers to autonomous entities (i.e. I–VI). In the literary work, on the other hand, what is meant is a pure intentional objectivity in the sense of (VII).As Ingarden phrases it, in a literary work we do not have judgments but quasi-judgments, i.e. judgments which do not intend to say things as they really are.Analogously, in a literary work we do not have questions, but quasi-questions, not imperatives but quasi-imperatives, and so on (Ingarden 1946, §25). More generally, even though Ingarden does not use this term, in a literary work we do not have sentences but quasisentences.These secondary pure intentional entities—i.e. what is meant by quasi-sentences—may be regarded as the very heart of the literary work. They are secondary because they are only indirectly dependent upon a thinking subject, namely via sentences. At the same time, like the sentences themselves, they also depend upon ideal meanings (Ingarden 1946, §22). One last important distinction within Ingarden’s analysis of the literary work has to be addressed. The secondary pure intentional object that constitutes the heart of every literary work may either be intended, to borrow a Husserlian term, blindly, i.e. merely linguistically (think, for instance, of Descartes’ chiliagon).At the same time, the linguistic meanings prescribe a class of imaginations that would, so to speak, correspond to them (at least in the case of judgments about real, i.e. non-ideal entities). Now, Ingarden calls the property that determines the class of imaginations that correspond to a given meaning the “schematic aspects.” For instance, every time someone reads the incipit of the Divine Comedy, he may imagine a man in his thirties who fnds himself in a dark forest. Of course, there will be infnite variations among these imaginations.The man may be in his early thirties or late thirties, the forest may be more dark or less dark, etc. However, all the imaginations will be the imaginations of a man in his thirties in a dark forest.This common element is the schematic aspect that is prescribed by the sentence. The infnite variations thereof, on the other hand, are labeled by Ingarden as concretizations—a concept which is in the vicinity of the Husserlian notion of fulfllment.Accordingly, on the level of the derived pure intentional entities which constitute the literary work, we should distinguish between the schematic aspects and the concretization of an object (Ingarden 1946, Chapter 8). 528
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It is worth noticing that Ingarden’s ontology of the literary work does not provide us with any objective characterization, such as, for instance, the one sought by the Russian Formalists. To them, we may objectively characterize a literary work because of its deviation from ordinary communication (it is thus an objective, but relative characterization).To Ingarden, on the other hand, what is decisive is the intention of the author, namely that he did not intend to describe autonomous entities.This may be puzzling if one considers that Ingarden saw the originality of his approach to literature in its overcoming of psychologism – an overcoming that he considered on a par with the one achieved by Frege and Husserl in the understanding of logic (Ingarden 1947–48, I, 84, footnote). However, one should note how this critique of psychologism is strictly related to the interpretation of the literary work as separate from consciousness (i.e.VII). From this it does not follow that the intentions of the author have to become irrelevant in assessing whether something is a literary work. According to the theory endorsed by Ingarden, if a Martian would one day land on a deserted earth and fnd a copy of Goethe’s Faust—without cover page, one should perhaps add—he would have no way of saying that this was a literary work.The Russian Formalists, on the other hand, were looking for such an objective characterization and they assumed to have found it in the deviating literary style.
47.6. The different strata and the aesthetic value of the literary work of art The ontological analysis just sketched provides us with a very complex structure. Four different strata may be distinguished in every work of art. We have (a) words, sounds and phonetic formations. Then we have (b) the sentences expressed by (a). Then we have (c) the schematized aspects as abstractions from the infnitely possible concretizations. Finally, we arrive to (d) the represented entities. As already addressed above, (d) is the very heart of the literary work. Nevertheless, (d) requires all the other strata. Once this sophisticated picture is put into place, Ingarden may rely on it to advance a fnegrained theory of the aesthetic value of the literary work: to every stratum corresponds its own kind of aesthetic value. For instance, the value of the phonetic formations lies in their musicality (Ingarden 1946, §13); at the level of the represented entities, on the other hand, the aesthetic value lies in what Ingarden labels as the metaphysical qualities, such as, for instance, the tragic (Ingarden 1946, §§48–49). In addition, the different strata present an aesthetic value not only in themselves but also in relation to one another, i.e. to the extent that they are suited for one another. In this sense, Ingarden can speak of the polyphony of the literary work. Incidentally, it is worth noticing that this notion of polyphony is very different from the one developed by the Russian scholar Michail Bachtin, which has been very infuential in literary studies.To Bachtin, the polyphony results from the clash of the different ideological points of view represented in a literary work and, more precisely, in novels (Bachtin 1929). As it happens, this is what characterizes (good) novels with respect to other forms of literary works, namely that there is no dominant ideological point of view.To Ingarden, the polyphony is related to a notion of teleology of the different strata of the literary work and may be found in every kind of literary work. It may also be interesting to briefy compare Ingarden’s theory of the literary work to Aristotle’s Poetics. One may say that Ingarden’s analysis stops where the Aristotelian one begins. True, Aristotle was, for instance, well aware of the role of language in a literary work of art, so that we fnd a chapter dedicated to it in his Poetics. But he was mainly interested in studying how one specifc metaphysical quality may be produced, namely the tragic; which are the concatenations of events that are most tragic. Ingarden, on the other hand, simply provides us with a very general notion of metaphysical qualities, and no detailed analysis as to how these qualities may be produced.This may be seen as a result of the strong ontological focus of Ingarden’s approach. 529
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One crucial advantage of the ontological perspective, however, is that it provides a good background to compare the literary work to other kinds of works of art. In separate studies, Ingarden (1946; 1946a; 1955) does in fact proceed to provide similarly detailed analysis of music, painting, architecture and movies.We may thus fnd here an implicit overall ontology of art. As noted by Thomasson (2012, section 2.2), Ingarden is in fact even moving beyond this to provide us a general theory of social reality, which may thus be considered a forerunner of recent works in social ontology.
47.7. Ingarden’s legacy and the artifactual theory of literary fctions Within literary studies, Ingarden’s theory of the literary work has been developed in the direction of the Reader-Response Theory (Iser 1972) and the New Criticism (Wellek 1982). However, it is diffcult to see both traditions as really taking over the heritance of the core issues addressed by Ingarden, which, as we have seen, are ontological in character. On the other hand, one may see a stronger continuity between Ingarden’s analysis and the position within ontology that is now labeled as fctional realism, namely the view according to which fctional objects have their own kind of existence. In other words, to say that x is a fction is not to say that x does not exist, but rather that x has a certain kind of being different from the being of concrete objects. Historically, the view of fctional realism may at least be traced back to Kripke (1973[2013]) and van Inwagen (1977; 1983). The most developed version of this approach, however, may be found in Thomasson’s Artifactual Theory. This theory, moreover, has been developed by Thomasson with explicit reference to Ingarden’s approach. It may thus be worth highlighting some similarities as well as differences. Thomasson (1999) is led to attribute a kind of being to fctional objects because we can make true intentional statements about them. For instance, it is true that Sherlock Holmes was thought upon by Conan Doyle, as it is true that I am thinking about Holmes while reading A Study in Scarlet. Moreover, we also would grant that there is a sense in which Sherlock Holmes is self-identical, so that for instance the Sherlock Holmes I am thinking about is the same as the one that was created by Doyle.Thus, since we have at least two kinds of statements that are true of fctional objects, namely intentional and identity ones, we should assume that fctional objects have a kind of being.These are in fact the same reasons that lead Ingarden to the postulation of pure intentional objects in the sense of VII. At the same time, Thomasson notices that statements that attribute properties to fctional objects that are neither intentional nor identity ones should be deemed false. For instance, it is not literally true that Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street. As we have seen, Ingarden was capturing this very intuition while saying that we should distinguish between the two sides of the pure intentional object. Relying on the modern notion of a modal operator, Thomasson suggests that we should distinguish between the properties a fctional object really instantiates and those properties that it instantiates only within the scope of a modal operator. Finally, since fctional objects actually (i.e. non-modally) instantiate only intentional property and logical ones such as self-identity,Thomasson interprets fctional objects as abstract entities. Since, moreover, these abstract entities are created at a certain moment in time (i.e. they are not discovered), it is helpful to introduce a new name for them in order to distinguish them from idealities such as numbers: they are artifacts. If we remember that the pure intentional objects, too, are interpreted by Ingarden as non-spatial but intentionally linked to time, it is easy to see how close the two theories really are. The introduction of modal properties to explain fctional objects, however, does lead to a crucial difference between Ingarden’s and Thomasson’s approach. According to the Artifact 530
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Theory, we have to give up the intuition that negative existentials about fctions – e.g. that Holmes does not exist – are literally true.The reason is that Holmes does really exist, albeit as a non-spatial object. Ingarden, on the other hand, may avoid this consequence by means of his distinction between the pure intentional object and its content. In his framework, what exists is merely the pure intentional object of which Holmes would be the content.Yet Holmes does not exist, since the content is—as noted above—a mere illusion.To be fair, however, the distinction between a pure intentional object and its content raises its own set of problems. In the frst place, the notion of content remains rather opaque and metaphorical. How can it be something, i.e. a content, while at the same time being an illusion or a mere nothing? May two intentional objects have the same content, as for instance Holmes seems to be the same character depicted in different novels by Conan Doyle? These questions do not seem to fnd a clear answer in Ingarden’s theoretical framework. There is a fnal difference between Ingarden and Thomassons’s approach that deserves to be stressed. Relying on Kripkean insights,Thomasson (at least in 1999) interprets fctional objects as something to which we may rigidly refer by means of proper names.With the introduction of this new relation, she is then in a position to develop a study of existential-dependence even more fne-grained than Ingarden’s.9 To conclude, Thomasson’s interest in the work of Ingarden should be read in the broader context of a reevaluation of metaphysics and/or ontology. This is a feld that has witnessed a fourishing in the last decades, at least within analytic philosophy. During his lifetime, however, one should remember how Ingarden was working on a very unfashionable topic (he was well aware of the bias against metaphysics from authors such as Carnap).Thus, we may say that the urgency of his philosophical project was vindicated by the new trends in contemporary philosophy.
Notes 1 As early as 1918, Ingarden wrote a letter to Husserl in which he not only criticized the idealist stances of his teacher but also set out a program as to how realism may be defended (see Ingarden 1998, 1–20). 2 The term “entity” is taken here as a rendition of the German Gegenständlichkeit; it is a notion which is broader than the notion of object, since it encompasses, for instance, properties, relations and events. 3 Ingarden explicitly links this existential moment to the analysis of the concept of part and wholes developed by Husserl in the third of his Logical Investigations. 4 I follow Thomasson’s (2012) rendition of the German term.This choice presents the advantage of sparing the term “dependence” for a general notion encompassing the different existential moments. 5 Since all the existential moments capture different notions of dependence between entities (for instance, the dependence of a property upon an object) one is tempted to see in this part of Ingarden’s existential ontology a “formal ontology under disguise” (Chrudzismki 2015, 220; see also Simons 2005 and Póltawski 2005, 195).This may also be seen from the fact that we do not seem to lose anything by omitting the Sein-component in the translation of the existential moments. 6 The notion of a pure intentional object should be contextualized within the Brentanian tradition, where questions about the nature of intentionality were widely discussed (see Chrudzimski 2002; 2005a). We should notice that Ingarden seems to consider also a second kind of heteronomous object besides purely intentional ones, namely future empirical possibilities (Chrudzismki 2015, 213, footnote). It is, however, not easy to see to what extent both the pure intentional object and future empirical possibilities may be subsumed under the same concept (see again Chrudzimski 2015, 222). 7 What Ingarden did offer, on the other hand, was a criticism of the reasons that allegedly led Husserl to an idealist stance.Without entering into the details, to Ingarden the mistake of Husserl was to move from epistemological premises to metaphysical conclusions (Ingarden 1998, 274-351). 8 This—one may notice—is an assumption Ingarden will not be able to make in his Controversy: As long as we do not even know whether the external world exists, we clearly cannot assume that different
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References Bachtin, Mikhail M. 1929. Problemy Tvorcestvo Dostoevskogo. Leningrad: Priboj. Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz. 2002. “Von Brentano zu Ingarden. Die Phänomenologische Bedeutungslehre.” Husserl Studies, 18/3, pp. 185–208. ———. 2005. Existence, Culture and Persons:The Ontology of Roman Ingarden. Ed.A. Chrudzimski. Frankfurt: Ontos, pp. 83–114. ———. 2005a. “Brentano, Ingarden und Husserl über die intentionale Gegenstände.” In: Chrudzimski 2005. ———. 2015.“Ingarden on Modes of Being.” Forthcoming in: Object and Pseudo-Objects: Ontological Deserts and Jungles from Brentano to Carnap. Eds. B. Leclercq, S. Richard, and D. Seron. Berlin: De Gruyter. Fontaine, Matthieu and Rahman, Shahid. 2010. “Fiction, Creation and Fictionality: An Overview.” Methodos, 10. http://methodos.revues.org/2343. ———. 2012. “Individuality in Fiction and the Creative Role of the Reader.” In: Revue Internationale de Philosophie. Eds. S. Rahman and M. Fontaine. pp. 539–60. ———. 2014.“Towards a Semantics for the Artifactual Theory of Fiction and Beyond.” Synthese, 191, pp. 499–516. Haefiger, Gregor and Küng, Guido. 2005.“Substances, States, Processes Events. Ingarden and the Analytic Theory of Objects.” In: Chrudzimski 2005, pp. 9–37. Ingarden, Roman. 1921. Intuition und Intellekt bei Henri Bergson. Halle: Max Niemeyer. ———. 1925. Essentiale Fragen. Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Wesens. Halle: Max Niemeyer. ———. 1931. Das literarische Kunstwerk. Eine Untersuchung aus dem Grenzgebiet der Ontologie, Logik und Literaturwissenschaft. Halle: Max Niemeyer.Trans. in Ingarden 1973. ———. 1946. O budowie obrazu. Szkic z teorii sztuki (On the Structure of the Painting: A Sketch in the Theory of Art). Rozprawy Wydziału Filozofcznego PAU, Volume LXVII, No. 2, Kraków. Trans. in Ingarden 1989. ———. 1946a.“O dziele architektury” (On the Architectural Work of Art). Nauka i Sztuka,Volume II, No. 1, pp. 3–26 and No. 2, pp. 26–51.Trans. in Ingarden 1989. ———. 1947–48. Spór o istnienie śwaita (The Controversy over the Existence of the World). PAU,Volume I, Kraków: 1947,Vol. II, Kraków, 1948.Trans. in German in Ingarden 1964. ———. 1955. “Elementy dzieła muzycznego” (Elements of the Musical Work of Art). Sprawozdania Towarzystwa Naukowego w Toruniu.Volume IX, Nos. 1–4, pp. 82–4.Trans. in Ingarden 1989. ———. 1964. Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt.Volume I, II/I, II/2.Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. ———. 1973. The Literary Work of Art.Trans. G. G. Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1989. The Ontology of the Work of Art.Trans. R. Meyer and J.T. Goldthwait.Athens: Ohio University Press. ———. 1998. Schriften zur Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Iser,Wolfgang. 1972. Der implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. München: Fink. Kripke, Saul. 1973 [2013]. Reference and Existence (The John Locke Lectures). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitscherling, Jeff. 1997. Roman Ingarden’s Ontology and Aesthetics. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Półtawski,Andrzej. 2005.“Roman Ingardens Ontologie und die Welt.” In: Chrudzimski 2005, pp. 191–220. Ryle, Gilbert. 1927.“Review of Roman Ingarden’s Essentiale Fragen.” Mind, 36 (143), pp. 366–70. Simons, Peter. 2005.“Ingarden and the Ontology of Dependence.” In: Chrudzimski 2005, pp. 39–53. Thomasson, Amie. 1999. Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. “Roman Ingarden.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/ingarden/. Van Inwagen, Peter. 1977.“Creatures of Fiction.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 14, pp. 299–308. ———. 1983.“Fiction and Metaphysics.” Philosophy and Literature, 7, pp. 67–77. Wellek, René. 1982. Four Critics: Croce,Valery, Lukács and Ingarden. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
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48 JACOB KLEIN Burt C. Hopkins
Jacob Klein (1899–1978) was a Russian-born American philosopher and author of “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra” (Klein 1934, 1936), an extended two-part article that was later translated into English and published as a book with the title Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (Klein 1968).1 He wrote a Ph.D. dissertation (Klein 2012) on Hegel in 1922 under the direction of Nicholai Hartman and attended Martin Heidegger’s lecture courses at the University of Marburg in the 1920s. From 1928 to 1929, Klein studied with Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Berlin.2 Klein was also a friend of the Edmund Husserl family.3 Despite the profound phenomenological relevance and context of (Klein 1934, 1936), Klein’s contribution to the phenomenological tradition has only recently come to be acknowledged and in some quarters appreciated.A number of factors are responsible for this. Paramount among them was the historical situation in Germany at the time Klein published (Klein 1934, 1936). Klein’s Jewish background ruled out submitting (Klein 1934, 1936) for his Habilitation and, of course, soon his physical safety in Germany was ruled out as well. Then there was the disruptive impact of the Second World War on the international dissemination of scholarship published in Germany, which, among other things, resulted in (Klein 1934, 1936) languishing in obscurity until the publication of the English translation of it in 1968, notwithstanding the signifcant scholarly status of the journal (Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik) in which it was published. And, fnally, there is the imposing content of (Klein 1934, 1936), which according to its author represents “the frst attempt to develop a fundamentally different approach to the history of the exact sciences and philosophy as it is ordinarily practiced”4 and which, according to the author’s close friend, Leo Strauss, is “unrivaled in the whole feld of intellectual history, as least in our generation” (Klein and Strauss 1970, 3). The historical content of (Klein 1934, 1936) concerns, above all, its presentation of a thread in the development of modern symbolic algebra that leads from Plato’s initial positing of a difference between arithmetic and logistic to the French mathematician François Viète’s invention of symbolic mathematics. Klein’s research provides an account of Viète’s transformative appropriation in the 16th century of the ancient Greek geometrical method of logistical analysis and synthesis to purify the algebra of the “barbarians” and invent symbolic algebra and therewith modern symbolic mathematics. In addition, Klein situates within the conceptual context of his narrative of this historical development an account of the transformation of the concept of number that he argues 533
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occurred in Viète’s symbolic algebra. The philosophical content of (Klein 1934, 1936) has three dimensions.The frst is based on the claim that Viète’s symbolic algebra lays the groundwork for the realization of the early modern ideal of a mathesis universalis, that is, of a universal science based on a method of mathematical calculation capable of discovering truths about the notions common to discrete (numerical) and continuous (geometrical) magnitudes.The symbolic mathematical development of this method, which was accomplished above all by Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton, is averred by Klein to become the basis for the latter’s laying the foundation for classical mathematical physics.The second philosophical dimension is manifest in Klein’s claim that the new science established on the basis of this symbolic mathematics is interpreted by its innovators as superseding the cognitive capacities of Platonic dialectic and Aristotelian metaphysics for apprehending the true nature of things. Klein argues that this self-interpretation is problematical, above all because the symbolic mode of cognition of the new science has its basis in the formalization of the objects of its cognition, which are mistakenly posited as having the same ontological status as the Forms and Universals of ancient Greek science.This mistake sows the seeds for the foundational crises of both the mathematical and natural sciences in the 20th century, because formalized exact science lacks the resources possessed by the ontologies it superseded to address the foundational problems of cognition and being that were inseparable from the ancient preoccupation with Forms and Universals.The third dimension of the philosophical content of (Klein 1934, 1936) advances the thesis that the cognition of both Viète’s innovation and its implications for the epochal shift in the nature of concept formation that occurred in the modern transformation of the ancient science of being has as its requisite a radical critique of the philosophy of the philosophy of the history of science.This critique seeks to establish, above all, the methodological illegitimacy of the historical interpretation of the meaning of pre-modern, and therefore pre-symbolic mathematics, from the conceptual level of modern mathematics and its symbolic conceptuality.
Klein’s Research’s Contribution to the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics Klein’s (Klein 1934, 1936) frst received recognition for its historical-mathematical content in conjunction with the methodological claim in the third dimension of its philosophical content. In 1975, the historian of mathematics Sebatai Unguru published the ground-breaking article, “On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics” (Unguru 1975). The article challenged the prevailing methodological approach to the history of mathematics at that time, which it characterized as being guided by the intention “to show how past mathematicians hid their modern ideas and procedures under the ungainly, gauche, and embarrassing cloak of antiquated and out-of-fashion ways of expression” (Unguru 1975, 68). Moreover, in line with this, it argued that “the purpose of the historian of mathematics is to unravel and disentangle past mathematical texts and transcribe them into the modern language of mathematics, making them thus easily available to all those interested” (Unguru 1975, 68). Unguru’s take-noprisoners rhetorical style, evident even in these brief quotes, and which included direct attacks on the research of major historians of mathematics of the day, produced a prolonged controversy that resulted in the eventual recognition of the legitimacy, if not methodological superiority, of historical mathematical research that strives to explicate the mathematical meaning of its subject matter within its own proper historical context (Schneider 2016). The last part of Unguru’s article discussed views similar to his own, and characterized Klein’s book to be one of the most substantial contributions to the literature on the history of mathematics; by the same token, it seems one of the least infuential. In this book, Klein 534
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deals primarily with the differences between the Greek and the modern concept of number, and his conclusions completely match mine. (Unguru 1975, 109) Unguru goes on to endorse Klein’s analysis of the difference between the ancient Greek and Modern concept of number and Klein’s historical-mathematical argument that there is no algebra in Euclid because, in contrast with symbolic mathematics, Euclid’s geometry does not work with the concept of general magnitude.After quoting at length Klein’s argument on this matter in the conclusion to his article, Unguru writes “It simply cannot be said any better!” (Unguru 1975, 113). The controversy provoked by Unguru’s article drew attention not only to his (at that time) radical thesis but also to Klein’s research on the topic. In the decades following the publication of and controversy surrounding Unguru’s article, Klein’s work (mostly the English translation) attracted notice among historians of mathematics working in both ancient Greek and Modern mathematics.5 Understandably, the historians of mathematics have focused on Klein’s immanent mathematical claim about the difference between the pre-modern and modern concept of number and his account of the nature of the conceptual shift determinative of this difference. In general, the reception of Klein’s distinction between the pre-modern and modern concept of number has been accepted by the historians of mathematics but not his account of the transformation of Greek logistic into symbolic algebra that he presents as a strand in the development of modern mathematics.The reception of the latter, especially the philosophical dimensions of Klein’s argument, has generally been criticized and rejected in proportion to their incomprehension by the historians of mathematics.
Context of Klein’s Research’s Relevance to Phenomenology: Formalization as the Whence of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Return to the Things Themselves The latter state of affairs is also understandable, especially considering that it wasn’t until over a quarter of a century had passed after the publication of Unguru’s article that the philosophical content of Klein’s (1934, 1936) began to receive philosophical attention. This attention began with a focus on the phenomenological context and relevance of Klein’s account of the transformation of the concept of number together with his philosophical reconstruction of the fundamental shift in concept formation6 behind this transformation.7 This relevance may be succinctly stated as follows. Implicit in phenomenology’s self-understanding as a philosophy whose method and content are most fundamentally characterized in terms of the maxim, “return to the things themselves,” is the question: from whence does that return return? On Klein’s view, in the phenomenology of both Husserl and Heidegger, the answer to this question is from the formalization of cognition and its formalized object. Both Husserl and Heidegger understand the formalization of mathematics to be the sine qua non for establishing the mathematical foundation of modern mathematical physics.The phenomenologies of both phenomenologists present mathematical physics as the driving force responsible for natural scientifc cognition’s ontological alienation from the original phenomena characteristic of the things themselves. Husserl characterizes formalized cognition—as it is operative in mathematic physics—as a method that is mistaken by both its innovators and practitioners for the true ontology of the world. This mistake results in the occlusion of the true—non-formalized—being of the lifeworld.This is the case because, for Husserl, the symbolic methodology that governs formalized mathematical cognition is phenomenologically characterized in terms of the progressive emptying of the material content from its concepts to the vanishing point where these concepts have zero reference to the beings that belong to the manifold of the natural non-formalized beings 535
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that compose the pre-scientifc life-world. In Husserl’s view, it is precisely the point in which the mathematized method of modern physics assumes the mantle of the true science of nature that Mathematics and mathematical science, as a garb of ideas, or the garb of symbols of the symbolic mathematical theories, encompasses everything which, for scientists and the educated generally, represents the life-world, dresses it up as “objectively actual and true” nature. It is through the garb of ideas that we take for true being what is actually a method—a method which is designed for the purpose of progressively improving, in infnitum, through “scientifc” predictions, those rough predictions which are the only ones originally possible within the sphere of what is actually experienced and experienceable in the life-world. It is because of the disguise of ideas that the true meaning of the method, the formulae, the “theories”, remained unintelligible and, in the naive formation of the method, was never understood. (Husserl 1970, 51) Husserl goes on to say,“Thus no one was ever made conscious of the radical problem of how this sort of naivete actually became possible and is still possible as a living historical fact” (Husserl 1970, 52). In Heidegger’s case, formalized cognition is guided by an understanding of the meaning of being that privileges the cognitive presence of beings to formalized cognition, with the result that being present (Vorhandensein) becomes paradigmatic of Being’s meaning.This paradigmatic understanding of Being conceals, on Heidegger’s view, both the phenomenon of the original mode of being of subjectivity, what he calls being-in-the-world (Dasein), as well as the phenomenon of the original givenness of that world, what he calls the “worldhood of the world.” Heidegger traces the original formalization of the meaning of Being back to the ontologies of both Plato and Aristotle, each of whom he maintains take as their guiding clue for the meaning of Being the presence of beings to the logos in the mode of “any object whatever” (Etwas überhaupt) (Heidegger 142, 155, 299, 313, 356).This original formalization is then amplifed by the early modern project to mathematize nature qua the a priori projection of the framework (Gestell) of formalized objects as being determinative for the cognition of any being whatever.
Klein’s Research’s Critical Impact on Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Accounts of the Origin of Formalization Despite the fact that Klein’s (Klein 1934, 1936) presents a fundamental critique of Husserl’s account of formalization in Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl 1969), he is not mentioned in the book. (Klein 1940), however, not only mentions Husserl, but directly situates the mathematical contents of (Klein 1934, 1936) and the frst two dimensions of its philosophical arguments within the context of Husserl’s “Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology” (Husserl 1936) and “Origin of Geometry” (Husserl 1939). Klein does so, however, without mentioning (Klein 1934, 1936), preferring instead to present both its approach to the history of mathematics and its salient results in terms of Husserl’s account of the task of reactivating the historicity of the arithmetical meaning sedimented in the formalized concepts of the mathematics at work in mathematical physics. Looked at closely, however, these results challenge the very foundation of Husserl’s phenomenology, as they call defnitively into question both Husserl’s account of the whence of its return to the things themselves and the methodology of that return insofar as it is determined in response to that whence. Likewise, (Klein 1934, 1936) presents a fundamental critique of Heidegger’s reading of Plato, or, more precisely, of Heidegger’s incomprehension of Plato’s account of the κοινωνία τῶν εἰδῶν 536
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(community of the Forms) in the Sophist.“I confess that I do not genuinely understand anything of this passage and that the individual propositions have in no way become clear to me, even after long study” (Heidegger 1997, 365).The passage in question is the notoriously obscure Sophist 253d, where the Stranger articulates the three kinds of unity of a multitude and the kind that structures its absence, the knowledge of which is required for the practice of dialectic. Klein attended Heidegger’s lecture course on the Sophist (winter semester 1924–5) and most likely was present when Heidegger made this confession. Klein’s critique exposes not only the Aristotelian basis of Heidegger’s incomprehension of Platonic dialectic but also defnitively critiques his anachronistic account of formalization that fnds its object—the “anything whatever” (Etwas überhaupt)—present in Plato’s and Aristotle’s understanding of the meaning of Being (Heidegger 1997, 142, 155, 299, 313, 356). Klein’s investigation of the origin of modern algebra, more specifcally, its symbolic language, is motivated by the project of tracing the symbolic language behind mathematical physics to its origin. His investigation is guided by the thesis that “The creation of the formal language of mathematics is identical with the foundation of modern algebra” (Klein 1968, 4). Klein’s strategy for exposing this foundation is at once philosophical and historical. Historically, he establishes that the foundation of modern algebra is inseparable from its originator’s appropriation and transformation of the Euclidean theory of ratios and proportions and the Diophantine method of arithmetical analysis. For Klein, the historical relation of the foundation of modern algebra to ancient Greek mathematics is of major philosophical signifcance, because it entails that the epistemological meaning of that foundation cannot be separated from its historical dimension. This insight therefore anticipates Husserl’s seminal insight in his last work that “The ruling dogma of the separation in principle between epistemological elucidation and historical … explanation, between epistemological and genetic origin, is fundamentally mistaken” (Husserl 1970, 371). Moreover, to the extent—which is considerable—that the manifestation of this historical dimension discloses not only a fundamental shift in the basic mode of concept formation in ancient Greek episteme and modern science, but also the radically different orientation to the world characteristic of these two sciences, Klein’s historical researches are philosophically signifcant in a manner that extends beyond their signifcance for reforming the methodology of historical research in the exact sciences. Indeed, this signifcance is doubly phenomenological in the following senses. One, it involves exhibiting, in the sense of making conscious, how the methodological “naivete” is possible that is behind what Husserl characterizes as “the garb of symbols of the symbolic mathematical theories” (Husserl 1970, 51) through which what is really a method is taken for the true being of nature.Two, it likewise makes conscious how this naivete endures to this day as a “living historical fact” (Husserl 1970, 52).
Klein’s Research and the Phenomenological Possibility of the Methodological Naivete of the Symbols of Symbolic Mathematics Klein exhibits the phenomenological possibility of the methodological naivete of the symbols of symbolic mathematics by reconstructing their origin in Viète’s invention of pure algebra. Coincident with this origin and the very phenomenological “how” of its possibility, Klein also exhibits how it is possible that this naivete endures as a living historical phenomenon. The methodological status of Klein’s reconstructions may be characterized anachronistically—that is, from the standpoint of Husserl’s Crisis texts (Husserl 1936, 1939)—as the historical-epistemological reactivation of Viète’s primal accomplishment of symbolic algebra together with the sedimentation in that algebra of the pre-symbolic and therefore natural numbers that is inseparable from this very accomplishment. (Klein, in fact, so-characterizes these reconstructions in [Klein 1940] discussed above.) Klein’s reconstructions show that what makes possible Viète’s accomplishment is the simultaneous formalization 537
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of the traditional objects of mathematics—numbers and shapes—and the generalization8 of the traditional natural being and concept of number. Both reconstructions have as their methodological prerequisite the reconstructive exhibition of the pre-modern being and concept of number together with the pre-modern methods of geometric and arithmetical analysis. It is noteworthy that Klein’s method here critically departs from both Husserl’s phenomenological approach (prior to Husserl’s Crisis texts) to the constitutive genesis of formalization and Heidegger’s reliance on that approach for his own approach (Heidegger 2004, 39).This approach to formalization’s origin attempts to capture it in acts immanent to the subject (abstraction of material contents in Husserl [Husserl 1973, 359]) or to the understanding (the exclusive attitudinal focus on the relationality characteristic of theoretical understanding in Heidegger [Heidegger 2004, 61–62]), which are presented as the source of the constitution of formalized objectivity. Klein’s method critically departs from these accounts of formalization by showing that the phenomenon of the formalized object generated by formalization can only become manifest by exhibiting the historically dated meaning that is inseparable from the meanings of the formal structures that are the objects of the exact and philosophical sciences.The historicity of the formal objects at issue here becomes visible in Viète’s symbolic reinterpretation of the traditional formal structures of mathematics in the pure algebraic moment of his analytical art, what he termed “zetetic” (the fnding of the fnding of the sought after and therefore unknown quantity). Crucial to Klein’s reconstruction of the ancient Greek mathematical context for the origin of symbolic algebra is his critique of Heidegger’s incomprehension of Plato’s Sophist 253d, a critique that exhibits the close association of mathematics with Plato’s ontology to the end of exhibiting the number (ἀριθμός)-like structure of the community (κοινωνία) of the Forms (εἴδη) and Kinds (γένη) that is anticipated by this passage in the Sophist. Klein’s reconstruction has its basis in the rejection of the two major tenets of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato, namely, the hermeneutical priority of Aristotle’s thought over Plato’s and the fundamentality of Being in the thought of Plato. The former permits Klein to reconstruct the independence of the collective unity characteristic of the unity of a multitude that structures number in Plato’s philosophy of mathematics and the latter allows him to reconstruct the collective unity characteristic of the community of the greatest kinds and thereby exhibit (non-metaphorically) the “beyond Being” (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας) structure of the Kinds of the Same and the Other. Klein’s reconstruction of Plato’s account of the structure of number independently of Aristotle’s criticism of it is also what permits him to reconstruct the supreme accomplishment of Plato’s dialectic in the Sophist, namely, Plato’s teaching reported by Aristotle (in his criticism of it) that the Forms are in some sense numbers. Klein will employ, on the one hand, his reconstruction of Plato’s account of the mathematical being of number (ἀριθμός) as a guiding clue to reconstruct the being and concept of number in Greek and pre-modern mathematics generally, in order to trace both its transformation and sedimentation in Viète’s invention of pure logic. On the other hand, Klein will use his reconstruction of the Sophist’s presentation of the fve greatest Kinds (μεγιστα γένη) to establish the structural naivete behind mathematical physics’ symbolic occlusion of the life-world.
Klein’s Account of the Origin of Formalization and the Constitution of Formalized Objects Formulated in terms of its Husserlian and Heideggerian context, fve moments can be identifed in Klein’s account of the origin of formalization and the resulting constitution of formalized objects. First, there is a preexisting tradition—preexisting to François Viète in the 16th century—of Greek, Arabic, and European mathematical calculation whose method employed ratios and proportions to solve numerical and geometric problems. Referred to by either the Greek name analysis or the “barbaric” name algebra, this tradition had roots that extended back 538
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to the classical Greek mathematical techne of logistic and the Elements of Euclid.This tradition used letters to represent the unknown number or geometrical magnitude that was analytically (or equivalently algebraically) sought in order to solve mathematical problems.According to this tradition, the ontological status of both the numbers and geometrical magnitudes that analysis or algebra sought to resolve was determinate, in the precise sense that number was always understood as a determinate amount of determinate homogeneous units and geometrical magnitude was always understood as a particular line, plane, or solid.The letters employed by this tradition thus always referred to determinant mathematical objects in this sense. The unknown status of these objects before the calculation was complete was therefore indeterminate, but only provisionally so, since once the calculation was completed and the sought-after unknown number or geometric magnitude was known, the referent of the letter representing the unknown unequivocally had the status of a determinate number or magnitude. Second, Viète transformed the method of analysis or algebra (hereafter referred to as algebra) with two innovations that made the following possible for the frst time: a) the calculation with letters that represented not only unknown numbers and geometrical magnitudes, as in traditional algebra, but that likewise represented known numbers and geometrical magnitudes; and b) the indeterminate solution of algebraic calculations, i.e., calculations whose resolution referred neither to determinate numbers nor determinate geometrical magnitudes. The innovation responsible for a) was Viète’s self-consciously symbolic9 stipulation of the letters of the alphabet for both the unknown and known numbers or geometrical magnitudes (vowels for the unknown and consonants for the known). The innovation responsible for b) was Viète’s “supreme stipulation” that “a proportion can be understood as the composition (constitution) of an equation, and an equation the resolution (resolution) of a proportion” (Viète 1983, 15). Third, these two innovations made it possible for Viète’s algebraic method to include calculational operations that referred solely to the letters for vowels and consonants, to which he conjoined the genera of the ratios and proportions of known and unknown geometrical magnitudes. Neither of these letters nor genera referred, respectively, to determinate numbers or determinate geometrical magnitudes, and, further, the genera of these geometrical magnitudes were not treated as ratios and proportions in Viète’s calculations but—in accordance with his supreme stipulation— as equations. Viète referred to the mathematical status of these letters and conjoined genera as “species” (using the Latin translation for the Greek Form [εἶδος]). He did so in deference to the arithmetical analysis of the 3rd-century mathematician Diophantus, whose recently rediscovered work Arithmetic (Diophantus, 1910) Viète studied, and which calculated with the εἴδη of numbers (square, cube, square-times-square, square-times-cube, cube-times-cube) that nevertheless ultimately referred to determinate numbers.Viète’s species, however, referred neither to determinate numbers nor to the ratios and proportions of determinate geometrical magnitudes. As such, they constituted a new mathematical object unknown to both Greek antiquity and the tradition of analysis that grew out of it. Identifable with neither determinate numbers nor the ratios and proportions between determinate geometric magnitudes,Viète’s species represented the frst formalized mathematical object in the modern sense.Viète called the method of calculation that works solely with his algebraically conceived species “logistice speciosa,” and understood it “as the most comprehensive ‘analytical’ art, indifferently applicable to numbers and to geometric magnitudes” (Klein 1968, 165).As a consequence of this formalization,“the concept of the ‘species’ … in the light of this general procedure … represents general magnitudes simply” (Klein 1968, 166). Fourth,Viète did not understand the pure algebraic (the zetetic) aspect of his analytic art to be its most important aspect, as he treated it as an auxiliary method for the solution of geometrical problems whose object was magnitude, as traditionally conceived in astronomy. Nevertheless, the symbolic presentation of the letters in Viète’s pure algebra together with the symbolic being of its 539
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object (general magnitude) represents the primal institution of the original formalized object in exact science. Original here means frst in the empirical history of exact science.As such, the mode of concept formation behind it presents the phenomenological conditions of possibility for the formalization of the cognition that comprises the whence from which the phenomenologies of both Husserl and Heidegger must necessarily return in their return to the things themselves.This frst formalized object had the ontological status of a general magnitude, that is, a quantity identical with neither of the traditional objects of mathematics—discrete (numerical) and continuous (geometrical) magnitude.Thus, it did not have the ontological status of the non-quantitative formalized object characterized by Husserl (and Heidegger following Husserl) as the “anything whatever” (Etwas überhaupt) by which Husserl (and, again, Heidegger following him) characterized the formal-ontological object of contemporary mathematics. This, however, changes nothing regarding its phenomenologically original constitution.The historicity of that constitution, therefore, which is to say, the uncovering of the historicity of the symbolic mode of presentation and symbolic mode of being proper to general (formalized) magnitude, in effect de-sediments Husserl’s immanent subjective account of the emptying of material content from mathematical objectivity that essentially characterizes the process of formalization in which the objectivity of formalized mathematical objectivity is necessarily constituted. Fifth, because the letters in Viète’s pure algebra are incapable of presenting themselves as mathematical objects independently of the operational rules of his logistice speciosa, those rules represent the frst modern axiom system. However, given that those rules were ultimately derived from calculations with determinate numbers, the symbolic mode of being of Viète’s symbols, despite their formalizing extension, nevertheless retain a tie with the realm of determinate numbers.This connection is indirect.The phenomenological signifcance of this is twofold. On the one hand, the numerical character of a symbol is general, in the exact sense that the letter that is inseparable from it does not refer to a determinate amount of a multitude of units, but rather it (the letter) presents the general concept of such a multitude of units that belongs to the being of number.This is to say, the symbolic presentation of the letter presents the concept of such a multitude, not its being; i.e., the concept of an amount as opposed to the being there of the non-conceptual multitude of units that compose its determinate amount. On the other hand, the symbol can only acquire something of the character of a number in the sense of the determinate amount of determinate units (ἀριθμός), “because the ancient ‘numbers’ [determinate amounts of a multitude of determinate units] are themselves … conceived from the point of view of their symbolic representation” (Klein 1968, 176).This state of affairs is at the bottom of the “living historical fact” of the “naivete” of modern mathematical physics. It is the case, since, on the one hand, the most immediate and, therefore, fundamental intelligibility of the pre-scientifc life-world is arithmetical: number is what is responsible for the human capacity to distinguish and order the unlimited multitude of the parts of the whole in which the world is most fundamentally given. On the other hand, this intelligibility is occluded the moment the multitude of beings inseparable from that multitude is replaced by the unreality—relative to the multitude of those beings—of their symbolic expression.The substitution of formalized concepts for the world’s fundamental arithmetical intelligibility that occurs when the methodically generated symbols replace our unmediated arithmetical access to the world’s intelligibility—for Jacob Klein and for Edmund Husserl—manifests the phenomenon of the living historical fact responsible for the methodological naivete that each philosopher identifed as the epochal predicament of our times.
Notes 1 Klein also published two books in English: (Klein 1965) and (Klein 1977). 2 This information is found in Klein’s September 21, 1929 application for a research stipend, addressed to “the Emergency Association of German Science” (Klein’s Papers, Greenfeld Library, St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD).
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Jacob Klein 3 One of Klein’s students in a 1933 Plato seminar he taught was Elisabeth Rosenberg, daughter of Edmund Husserl, who invited him to visit her brother Gerhart in Kiel. Klein accepted the invitation, and soon became friends with the extended Husserl family and Gerhart’s wife, Else (Dodo) (Allanbrook and Ruhm von Oppen, 17). (Gerhart Husserl divorced Else in 1948; she and Klein were married in 1950 [Allanbrook and Ruhm von Oppen, 9].) 4 Jacob Klein, letter to Leo Strauss,April 17, 1934 (Strauss, 2001, 499). 5 See: (Bos 2001), (Heeffer 2011), (Mahoney 1980, 1994), (Macbeth 2004), (Malet 2006), (Netz 1999, 2004), (Oaks 2018), (Stedall 2002), (Unguru 1975). 6 Klein (1934, 1936) uses the term Begriffichkeit to characterize the dynamic structure of concept formation determinative of the pre-modern and modern epochs. The English translation (Klein 1968) consistently renders this term as “intentionality,” which is misleading, especially given its Husserlian connotation.“Conceptuality” is the preferred translation. 7 See: (Angus 2005), (Kates 2004), (Hopkins 2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2004a, 2004b, 2005a, 2005b, 2008, 2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2017), (Majolino 2012). 8 “Generalization” here signifes the mathematical meaning of the term and not Husserl’s phenomenological meaning. Husserl uses this term to distinguish non-formalized from formalized universal meanings. Klein uses it to characterize the process coincident with the process of formalization that generates the concept of an indeterminate and therefore general number as a unit of mathematical meaning. 9 It was Viète who frst introduced the term “symbol” into mathematics.
References Allanbrook,Wendy and Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. (Undated).“Interview of Else (Dodo) Klein.”Transcript of the tape-recorded interview (the original tape is apparently lost), housed in Greenfeld Library, St. John’s College,Annapolis, MD. Angus, Ian. 2005.“Jacob Klein’s Revision of Husserl’s Crisis:A Contribution to the Transcendental History of Reifcation.” Philosophy Today 49, pp. 204–211. Bos, Henk. 2001. Redefning Geometrical Exactness. New York: Springer. Heeffer, Albrecht. 2011. “On the Curious Historical Coincidence of Algebra and Double-Entry Bookkeeping.” In: Foundations of the Formal Sciences VII Bringing Together Philosophy and Sociology of Science. Eds. K. François, B. Löwe, T. Müller, and B.Van Kerkhove. London: College Publications, pp. 109-130. Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Plato’s Sophist. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2004. The Phenomenology of Religious Life.Trans. M. Fritsch and J. Goestti-Ference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hopkins, Burt. 2001. “Jacob Klein and the Phenomenology of History, Part I.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy I, pp. 67–110. ———. 2002. “The Phenomenological Project of Desedimenting the Formalization of Meaning: Jacob Klein’s Contribution.” Philosophy Today 46(5), pp. 168–177. ———. 2004a. “Jacob Klein on François Vieta’s Establishment of Algebra as the General Analytical Art.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 25(2), pp. 51–85. ———. 2004b.“The Husserlian Context of Klein’s Mathematical Work.” The St. John’s Review 48, pp. 43–71. ———. 2005a.“Meaning and Truth in Klein’s Philosophico-Mathematical Writings.” The St. John’s Review 48(3) (Fall), pp. 57–87. ———. 2005b. “Klein and Derrida on the Historicity of Meaning and the Meaning of Historicity in Husserl’s Crisis-Texts.” The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 36(2), pp. 179–187. ———. 2008. “Klein and Gadamer on the Arithmos-Structure of Platonic Eidetic Numbers.” Philosophy Today, vol. 52, pp. 151–157. ———. 2009.“Jacob Klein on the Myth of Learning.” St John’s Review, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 5–39. ———. 2011a. “The Philosophical Achievement of Jacob Klein.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XI, pp. 282–296. ———. 2011b. The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics: Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2017.“Husserl and Jacob Klein on Arithmetical Unity.” In: Essays on Husserl’s Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. Ed. Stefania Centrone. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 461–484. Husserl, Edmund. 1936. “Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie.” Philosophia I, pp. 77–176.
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Burt C. Hopkins ———. 1939. “Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-historisches Problem.” Ed. Eugen Fink, Revue Internationale de Philosophie I, pp. 203–225. ———. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic.Trans. Dorion Cairns.The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1970.The Crisis of European Philosophy andTranscendental Philosophy:An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973. Experience and Judgment.Trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2014. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.Trans. Dan Dahlstrom. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Kates, Joshua. 2004. “Philosophy First, Last, and Counting: Edmund Husserl, Jacob Klein, and Plato’s Arithmological Eide.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 25(1), pp. 67–96. Klein, Jacob. 1934, 1936. “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra.” Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik,Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien 3(1) (Berlin, 1934), pp. 18–105 (Part I); no. 2 (1936), pp. 122–235 (Part II). ———. 1940.“Phenomenology and the History of Science.” In: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl. Ed. Marvin Farber. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 143–163; reprinted in Klein, Jacob. (1985). Lectures and Essays. Ed. Robert B.Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman.Annapolis: St. John’s Press, pp. 65–84. ———. 1965. A Commentary on Plato’s Meno. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 1968. Reprint 1992. Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. Trans. Eva Brann. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T.5. Press; reprint: New York: Dover. ———. 1977. Plato’s Trilogy Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——–. 2012. “The Logical and Historical Element in Hegel’s Philosophy.” Trans. Jerome Veith. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XII (2012), pp. 243–85. Klein, Jacob and Strauss, Leo. 1970. “A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss.” The College (St. John’s College), vol. 22 (April), pp. 1–5. Mahoney, Michael. 1980.“The Beginnings of Algebraic Thought in the Seventeenth Century.” In: Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics. Ed. S. Gaukroger. Sussex: The Harvester Press/Totowa: Barnes and Noble Books, pp. 141–155. ——–. 1994. The Mathematical Career of Pierre de Fermat 1601-1665. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Majolino, Claudio. 2012. “Splitting the Monas: Jacob Klein’s Math Book reconsidered (Part I).” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XI, pp. 187–213. Macbeth, Danielle. 2004.“Viète, Descartes, and the Emergence of Modern Mathematics.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 25(2), pp. 87–115. Malet,Antoni. 2006.“Renaissance Notions of Number and Magnitude.” Historia Mathematica 33, pp. 63–81. Netz, Reviel. 1999. “Archimedes Transformed: The Case of a Result Stating a Maximum for a Cubic Equation.” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 54, pp. 1–47. ——–. 2004. The Transformation of Mathematics in the Early Mediterranean World: From Problems to Equations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oaks, Jeffrey. 2018. “François Viète’s Revolution in Algebra.” Archive of the History of Exact Science 72, pp. 245–302. Panza, Marco. 2007. “What is New and What is Old in Viete’s Analysis Restituta and Algebra Nuova.” Available online at: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00116725/document. Schneider, Martina. 2016.“Contextualizing Unguru’s 1975 Attack on the Historiography of Ancient Greek Mathematics.” In: Historiography of Mathematics in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Eds. Remmert, Volker, Schneider, Martina, and Sørensen, Henrik. Switzerland: Birkhäuser Springer, pp. 245–268. Stedall, Jacqueline. 2002. A Discourse Concerning Algebra English Algebra to 1685. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strauss, Leo. 1978. “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John’s College.” Interpretation 7(3) (September), pp. 1–3. ———. 2001. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Henrich Meier. Stuttgart: Metzler, pp. 455–605. Unguru, Sabetai. 1975. “On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics.” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 15(1), pp. 67–114. Viète, François. 1983. The Analytic Art: Nine Studies in Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry from the Opus Restitutae Mathematicae Analyseos, seu, Algebrâ novâ by François Viète.Trans. Richard Witmer. Kent, OH: Kent State University.
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49 LUDWIG LANDGREBE Ignacio Quepons and Noé Expósito
Ludwig Landgrebe was born on March 9, 1902, in Vienna, Austria. After obtaining his Matura in 1921, he studied Philosophy, Geography, and History at the University of Vienna for three semesters (D. Landgrebe 2009, 65). During the summer of 1923, Landgrebe left Vienna and continued his studies in Philosophy at the University of Freiburg (Landgrebe 1975b, 133). On the recommendation of his uncle, Eduard Leisching—a former student of Brentano and an old friend of Edmund Husserl (Ibid., 133)—Landgrebe started working from the very beginning of his stay in Freiburg as the private assistant of the founder of the phenomenological movement. On February 24, 1927, Landgrebe obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy with a dissertation under Husserl’s direction entitled Wilhelm Dilthey’s Theory of the Human Sciences (D. Landgrebe 2009, 67), which was published the following year (Landgrebe 1928). Landgrebe remained in Freiburg as a scientifc collaborator of Husserl until 1929 (D. Landgrebe 2009, 67). During his days in Freiburg, Landgrebe was in charge of the Phenomenological Society founded by Gerda Walther, with the support of Oskar Becker; however, the society was not as successful as the Göttingen Circle of Husserl’s early students (Spiegelberg 1982, 240). As Husserl’s assistant, Landgrebe transcribed and edited the 1923–1924 lectures on First Philosophy, as well as working on other materials that Edith Stein had already transcribed and organized for further publication (Ibid., 242). Among such manuscripts we may fnd Ideas II and III (Hua IV, xviii), along with the still unpublished project Studies on the Structure of Consciousness (Melle 2015, 3; Zirión 2018). Two years after publishing his dissertation, Landgrebe started working on his habilitation (Landgrebe 1975a, 140). In September of 1930, he became a German citizen (D. Landgrebe 2009, 70), which allowed him to get a stipend for writing his habilitation thesis, The Concept of Experiencing (Der Begriff des Erlebens). Nevertheless, after Husserl retired from the university, Landgrebe struggled to obtain the degree. Since Heidegger was not inclined to help him (Ibid.), Landgrebe approached Cassirer, who was unfortunately fully occupied with his own students (Ibid.; Hua-Dok III/4, 248–304). Given the diffculties of obtaining the habilitation in Germany, Landgrebe moved to Prague to work with Oskar Kraus, once more through a recommendation from his uncle Leisching (Hua-Dok III/4, 302). In 1933, Landgrebe fnally obtained the approval to present the habilitation, although since Kraus was a harsh critic of Husserl, he had asked Landgrebe to write on a different topic (Landgrebe 1975b, 142). By 1934, Landgrebe had accordingly produced a new text with the title 543
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The Nominative Function and Linguistic Meaning, a study on Anton Marty, while the original project remained unpublished (D. Landgrebe 2009, 84) until 2010.As Van Breda mentions,“Neither his departure from Freiburg in 1929, nor his appointment (Habilitation) to the University of Prague in 1935, had interrupted his collaboration with Husserl” (Van Breda 2007, 49). During his stay in Prague, Landgrebe worked intensively on Husserl’s manuscripts on the lifeworld (Hua XXXIX, lvii–lviii) and on the edition of Husserl’s studies on logic that was published after the latter’s death as Experience and Judgment. Besides these duties, Landgrebe continued, with the author’s permission, his systematic transcriptions of Husserl’s stenographic research manuscripts. But in addition, right after his arrival in Prague, Landgrebe made arrangements with the Prague Philosophical Circle to support the transcription of this material. According to Van Breda, by 1936 Landgrebe had obtained a modest grant permitting him some trips to Freiburg (Van Breda 2007, 49). To express his gratitude to the Circle, Husserl offered to allow the original manuscripts Landgrebe was transcribing to remain in the care of the Prague Philosophical Circle.This, then, was the inception of the original project of publishing Husserl’s complete works. Nevertheless, right after Husserl passed away, Father Van Breda began making arrangements with Husserl’s family and invited Landgrebe the year before the World War broke out to join the project of preserving Husserl’s legacy in Leuven instead of Prague (Ibid., 61, 63f.). Landgrebe and Fink worked together in Leuven until Landgrebe’s deportation in 1940 (Landgrebe 1972, 149). After the war, Landgrebe was able to rejoin the German academic community, and in 1945 he gave his frst public lectures, frst at the University of Hamburg and then in Kiel. During these years, Landgrebe became increasingly interested in the works of Hegel and Marx. This does not mean that he renounced his interest in phenomenology; on the contrary, Landgrebe combined his investigations of Marxism with a series of studies, progressively published in different academic journals, on the possibility of rethinking the idea of humanity in a phenomenological perspective beyond naturalism and materialism. In 1956 Landgrebe became professor at the University of Cologne, and there he founded the Cologne Husserl Archive (Ibid., 157) in collaboration with Paul Janssen and Ulrich Claesges (Spiegelberg 1982, 655). During these years he also promoted the collection Phaenomenologica. In 1963, by invitation of José Gaos, Landgrebe participated in an International Symposium on the Lifeworld at the International Conference of Philosophy in Mexico City (Gaos 1963, 25–50); this encounter with the Spanish-speaking community eventually resulted in Spanish translations of two of his books by his former student Mario A. Presas (Landgrebe 1963, 1968). In 1970 Landgrebe became emeritus at the University of Cologne, and in 1971 the Catholic University of Cologne honored him as doctor honoris causa. In May 1980, Landgrebe delivered a lecture at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (“The Concept of the Life-world in Husserl’s Phenomenology”) and participated in the Husserl Circle meeting at Ohio University (“The A Priori of the Life-World and the Problem of History”—cf. Landgrebe 1981, 139); then in 1981, some English translations of several of his most important essays appeared (McKenna et al. 1981;Welton 1981). Ludwig Landgrebe passed away August 14, 1991, in Bergisch Gladbach. In addition to setting the tone for much modern scholarship on Husserl’s phenomenology (in open controversy with persisting criticism arising from the early reception of his master’s writings), Landgrebe also wrote several essays attempting to rethink the very aim of the phenomenological project. He was particularly interested in the link between the origin of intentionality and the implicit teleology involved in the self-movement of the lived body. Such a perspective allowed him to show how it is possible to understand concrete life as the very origin and key for describing the development of meaning of the lifeworld in general (Landgrebe 1981). In this regard, Landgrebe argues—against Heidegger’s criticisms of the transcendental reduction—that Husserl’s philosophy, particularly after the discovery of genetic phenomenology, does 544
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not necessarily imply a Cartesian position. This is particularly emphatic in his essay “Husserl’s Departure from Cartesianism” (Landgrebe 1961). Moreover, the main insights of his philosophical career can already be seen in the motivations guiding his early works: on the one hand, the aim of the doctoral dissertation on Dilthey was to show how the possibility of grounding the human sciences rests on the notion of the nexus of meaning allowing us to understand concrete life as a singular totality (Landgrebe 1928, 308); on the other hand, the goal of the study on Marty was to perform an analysis of the origin of meaning from nominative acts (Landgrebe 1934). His long study entitled The Concept of Experiencing is devoted to a phenomenological refection on the very notion of lived experience from a phenomenological and ontological perspective. In this work Landgrebe explores the importance of the interplay of passive synthesis, practical horizons, and affectivity in the original constitution of the surrounding world, thereby attempting to reconcile the phenomenological projects of Husserl and Heidegger (Landgrebe 2010). The mature work of Landgrebe focuses on the relevance of the lived body for a dynamic and genetic account of intentionality and the horizons of the lifeworld. In this context Landgrebe attempts to explore alternatives to a merely formal and logical emphasis on the notion of intentionality. For Landgrebe, before considering intentionality a formal structure, we should recognize its origin in the tending-toward involved in the self-motivated movement of the lived body, understood as the primal potency of subjectivity.“The lived body (Leiblichkeit) should not be understood only as constituted, but also as constituting, as a system of capabilities (System von Vermöglichkeiten)” that we become aware of because of “the ‘I can’ (Ich-kann), which is a practical consciousness of ‘being-able-to-rule’ over my body (‘Walten-können’ im Leibe)” (Landgrebe 1982, 82). This focus on movement and tending-toward allows him to specify how sensations, far from being mere exhibitions of the objective contents of the experience, are always lived in dynamic and affective contexts.Therefore, the involvement of the lived body is essential in the account of intentionality and of transcendental subjectivity as such. However—and against Merleau-Ponty, for instance—this does not mean that subjectivity is individuated because of embodiment (Ibid., 86). The progressive development of Landgrebe’s refections goes on to consider the relation between self-motivated movement, history, and individuation through the notion of teleology. As he declares at the beginning of his paper “Faktizität und Individuation,” the reach of such notions goes beyond the feld of general logic (namely, the relation between the general and the particular), extending instead to individuation “insofar as it is a fundamental problem of the knowledge of history” (Ibid.,102). The main question Landgrebe raises runs as follows: “Is individuation, inasmuch as it is individuation of human essence, a product of history, namely, the historical development of the society, or is it a prior condition for something like history actually to be given for us?” (Ibid.). In response to such questions, Landgrebe considers the phenomenological analysis of his two masters, Husserl and Heidegger.Thus, he articulates his own response by comparing the notion of “facticity” in both authors. Moreover—taking as his point of departure Husserl’s statement that “history is the grand fact of absolute being,” which is at the same time the topic of one of his studies in Facticity and Individuation (Ibid., 38–57)—he demonstrates the necessity of tracing back the question regarding teleology to the “depth-dimension of the original stream of life” (Tiefendimension der urströmenden Lebendigkeit) insofar as it is understood as the “self-temporalization of transcendental subjectivity” (Ibid., 105). Landgrebe studies this genetic analysis in detail in “The Problem of Passive Constitution” (Ibid., 71–87). In this regard, Landgrebe also calls into consideration the Heideggerian notion of “affective disposition” (Befndlichkeit) (Ibid., 112), which allows us to understand the notion of facticity as 545
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the transcendental condition of possibility for the constitution and the openness of the world. In this way,“the world is originally revealed through ‘Befndlichkeit’” (Ibid.). His original insight in this regard frst involves showing that the affective dimension of the facticity of individual existence is the condition of possibility for the “life history” (Lebensgeschichte) of each of us. However, Husserl’s descriptions had already demonstrated that such “being there” (Da) as a “zero-point of orientation” of our body (Nullpunkt-funktion des Leibes) is precisely the condition of possibility for the openness of the surrounding world.Therefore, such affective disposition or temperament is connected with our concrete embodiment. According to Landgrebe, such a link is related to the Husserlian notion of the “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart).The importance of this idea resides in the insight that “the consciousness of possibilities fnds its origins and roots in such a consciousness of the I can.”Therefore—according to Husserl— “the consciousness of the ‘I can’ is genetically prior to the explicit consciousness of the ‘I am’” (Ibid., 67). Only from this perspective it is possible to understand the main thesis of Landgrebe:“Each new learned movement enhances at the same time the horizon of what is to be experienced. Each new experience we gain from our world is at the same time a new experience of ourselves in our capabilities” (Ibid.).This genetic and transcendental-phenomenological analysis is crucial for understanding the problem of history, since “phenomenological refection does not merely lead to the history of experience and to the lifeworld as common grounding. It is, on the highest level, transcendental self-experience—transcendental in the sense that it discovers the self through whom and for whom a history of experience is possible” (Ibid., 70). Additionally, along Landgrebe’s career we may fnd various studies on the work of Marx, especially concerning a fruitful dialogue with Marxism. Some of his most important studies on this theme are “Hegel and Marx” (1948), “The Critique of Religion in Marx and Engels” (1957), and his contribution to the series Marxismus Studien with his work “The Problem of Dialectic” (1960). However, his most important contribution in this regard appears in 1977 in the essay “The problem of teleology and corporeality in phenomenology and Marxism.”There, Landgrebe draws upon all the notions and descriptions we may fnd in Facticity and Individuation (note that almost all the papers collected in this volume were originally published before 1977) in order to consider, among other topics, the key concerns of Marxist theorists of that time— namely, to establish 1) the extent to which it is possible to speak about a teleology of history in Marx; 2) how it is possible to understand the relation between nature and culture (Geist); and 3) how it is possible to understand Marxism as a science, and in this respect, what its object and appropriate method could be.With regard to the frst problem, Landgrebe holds that it is completely impossible to address the problem of teleology if we fail to consider the analysis of the lived body, i.e., the very existence of the human being as an embodied entity (Landgrebe 1977, 71). This is precisely the novelty of Landgrebe’s contribution: instead of considering Marxism as a doctrine, he claims that it is possible to reframe the problematic of the teleology of history— decisive for Marxist philosophy—by taking phenomenological analysis as its point of departure: “The continuity and teleological unity of history does not exist previously, but must frst be produced in each ‘being-there.’”Therefore, the idea of a teleology of history does not have its origin in a theoretical consideration, but in the “highest practical interests of the human being” (Ibid., 93).The result of such refection is not a mere theoretical remark; instead, such a phenomenological approach also makes a practical attitude possible. Moreover, the main insight of Landgrebe’s interpretation of Marx consists in analyzing the core notions of the latter’s refections on nature and culture in terms of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. Seen in this light—and this is a response to the second problem mentioned— Marxism is not a science in the sense of the natural sciences, but a science of the “structures of 546
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the lifeworld” (Ibid., 102) as the horizon of the historical realities that are human beings. But this leads to the third problem, namely, the scientifc character of Marx’s enterprise and the determination of its object. The reach of such phenomenological analysis is not only descriptive but also implied possible consequences, and as Landgrebe claims, such legitimacy can be disclosed only from the articulation of “a ‘science’ in a different style as a science of the lifeworld, a science whose point of departure and mode of investigation can only be worked out by transcendental philosophy” (Ibid., 101).This science is supposed to have in view “the origin, and thus the legitimacy within the lifeworld (das lebensweltliche Recht), of the notion of a teleological effcacy” (Ibid., 78). Therefore, both notions—teleology and corporeality—are crucial for both phenomenology and Marxism, which is explicit in the title of his essay. In this way, Landgrebe’s approach opens up a practical perspective with regard to the relation between Husserl and Marx. Just as for Husserl the phenomenological enterprise is not only a critical refection upon the historical crisis of human sciences, understood as a crisis of humanity, but a refection that must culminate in “a far-reaching transformation of the whole praxis of human existence” (Hua VI, 333), so is it the case that for Marx, philosophical understanding is not only a critical response to the world’s crisis, but a call for a radical transformation of the world.
References Gaos, José. 1963. Symposium sobre la noción husserliana de Lebenswelt. Ed. José Gaos. México: UNAM. Landgrebe, Detlev. 2009. Kückallee 37. Eine Kindheit am Rande des Holocaust, Arthur Goldschmidt, Geschichte der evangelischen Gemeinde Theresienstadt 1942–1945. Rheinbach: CMZ. Landgrebe, Ludwig. 1928. “Wilhelm Diltheys Theorie der Geisteswissenschaften. Analyse ihrer Grundbegriffe.” In: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 9. Halle: Max Niemeyer, pp. 237–366. ———. 1934.Nennfunktion und Wortbedeutung. Eine Studie über Martys Sprachphilosophie.Halle:Akademischen Verlag. ———. 1948. Was bedeutet uns heute Philosophie. Hamburg: M. von Schröder. ———. 1949. Phänomenologie und Metaphysik. Hamburg: M. von Schröder. ———. 1952. Philosophie der Gegenwart. Bonn: Athenäum-Verlag. ———. 1961.“Husserls Abschied vom Cartesianismus.” Philosophische Rundschau 9, pp. 133–177;“Husserl’s Departure from Cartesianism.” In: The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings. Ed. and trans. R. O. Elveton. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970, pp. 259–306; rpt. in:Welton 1981, pp. 66–121. ———. 1963. Der Weg der Phänomenologie. 4th ed. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978. ———. 1968. Phänomenologie und Geschichte. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn. ———. 1969. Über einige Grundfragen der Philosophie der Politik. Köln/Opladen: Schriften der RheinischWestfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. ———. 1975a. Der Streit um die philosophischen Grundlagen der Gesellschaftstheorie. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———. 1975b.“Ludwig Landgrebe.” In: Philosophie in Selbstdarstellungen. Ed. L. J. Pongratz. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, vol. 2, pp. 128–169. ———. 1977. “Das Problem der Teleologie und der Leiblichkeit in der Phänomenologie und in der Marxismus.” In: Phänomenologie und Marxismus. 1: Konzepte und Methoden. Eds. B. Waldenfels, J. M. Broekman, and A. Pažanin. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 71–104;“The Problem of Teleology and Corporeality in Phenomenology and Marxism.” In: Phenomenology and Marxism.Trans. J. C. Evans. Eds. B.Waldenfels, J. M. Broekman, and A. Pažanin, Jr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 53–81. ———. 1981. “The Life-World and the Historicity of Human Existence.” Trans. D. Chaffn, D. Welton, and D. Chaffn. Research in Phenomenology 11, pp. 111–140; abridged and revised from “Lebenswelt und Geschichtlichkeit des menschlichen Daseins.” In: Phänomenologie und Marxismus. 2: Praktische Philosophie. Eds. B.Waldenfels, J. M. Broekman, and A. Pažanin. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, pp. 13–58; see
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Ignacio Quepons and Noé Expósito also “Life-World and the Historicity of Human Existence.” (Trans. J. C. Evans, Jr.). In: Phenomenology and Marxism. Eds. B. Waldenfels, J. M. Broekman, and A. Pažanin. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 167–204. ———. 1982. Faktizität und Individuation. Studien zu den Grundfragen der Phänomenologie. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. ———. 2010. Der Begriff des Erlebens. Ein Beitrag zur Kritik unseres Selbstverständnisses und zum Problem der seelischen Ganzheit [1929–1932]. Ed. K. Novotny.Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Marcelle, Daniel. 2013.“Ludwig Landgrebe and the Signifcance of Marginal Consciousness.” In: Husserl’s Ideen. Eds. L. Embree and T. Nenon. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 209–224. McKenna, William, Harlan, Robert M., and Winters, and Laurence E. (Eds.). 1981. Apriori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenology.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Melle, Ullrich. 2015. “Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Husserls Beitrag zu einer phänomenologische Psychologie.” In: Feeling and Value,Willing, and Action: Essays in the Context of a Phenomenological Psychology. Eds. M. Ubiali and M.Wehrle. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 3–11. Sepp, Hans Rainer. 2003.“Der Begriff des Erlebens. Ludwig Landgrebes unveröffentlichte Schrift von 1932.” In: Lebenswelten. Ludwig Landgrebe – Eugen Fink – Jan Patocka. Ed. H.Vetter. Frankfurt: Schriftenreihe der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Phänomenologie (vol. 9), pp. 103–113. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1982. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd rev. and enl. ed. with the collaboration of K. Schuhmann.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Van Breda, Herman Leo 1972.“Laudatio für Ludwig Landgrebe und Eugen Fink.” In: Phänomenologie heute. Festschrift für Ludwig Landgrebe. Ed.W. Biemel. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, pp.1–13. ———. 2007. “The Rescue of Husserl’s Nachlass and the Founding of the Husserl-Archives.” Trans. D. Ulrichs and B.Vassilicos. In: Husserl-Archive Leuven (Ed.), Geschichte des Husserl-Archivs/History of the Husserl-Archives. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 39–69. Walton, Roberto. 1985. “El lado natural de la subjetividad transcendental.” Revista de la Sociedad Argentina de Filosofía 5, pp. 89–108. ———. 1993. Husserl, Mundo, Conciencia y Temporalidad. Buenos Aires: Editorial Almagesto. Welton, Donn. 1981. The Phenomenology of Husserl: Six Essays by Ludwig Landgrebe. Ed. Donn Welton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zirión, Antonio. 2018. “Colorations and Moods in Husserl’s Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (with a fnal hint toward the coloring of life).” Special Issue of The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (XVI), Rodney K B Parker, Ignacio Quepons (Eds.), Phenomenology of Emotions, Systematical and Historical Perspectives , pp. 41–75.
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50 EMMANUEL LEVINAS Raoul Moati
Summary In order to present Otherness as something that eludes the grasp of the phenomenological method, Levinas must propose an original methodology, one that allows his description to avoid the charges of being either arbitrary or mythological. Previous defenses of Levinas’s position have avoided such charges by arguing that Levinas remains rigorously faithful to the phenomenological method, even as he critiques it. My goal here is instead to demonstrate that Levinas’s philosophy does not consist in a renewal of the phenomenological method, but rather in an attempt to deformalize the primary concepts that emerge from Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenology in order to further specify their meaning. In this way, the problem of phenomenology does not lie, for Levinas, in its inability to describe pure alterity as such, but rather in the formality of the primary notions that it deals with.Thus, the deformalization of phenomenology entails the elaboration of a deductive method that is no longer phenomenological, but which resituates the phenomenological discoveries of Husserl and Heidegger within concrete horizons of their own meaning.
Levinas and the deformalization of phenomenology Historically, there have been two standard ways of relating Levinas to phenomenology.The frst is to present Levinas as proposing a kind of paradoxical phenomenology, one that describes phenomena (such as the Face of the Other) that have no place within the framework of traditional phenomenology.The second option has been to present Levinas as breaking entirely with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. Contrary to both of these readings, I argue that Levinas’s primary goal is neither to refute nor to overcome phenomenology on the one hand, nor to propose an alternate phenomenology on the other. Rather, Levinas seeks to deformalize the central concepts that constitute the traditional phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. My goal here is thus to defne this idea of “the deformalization of phenomenology,” and to demonstrate the stakes of that deformalization.
50.1. The deduction of entities in the early Levinas In the 1947 text Existence and Existents, Levinas raises the possibility of deducing the ontological difference between Being and beings, in opposition to Heidegger. From Levinas’s point of view, 549
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although these concepts originate with Heidegger, they remain underdetermined and vague in the latter’s thought. Indeed, for Levinas, the majority of phenomenological notions will remain unclear so long as the events that undergird them, which are presupposed as the very conditions of their possibility, remain undisclosed. However, any such disclosure could not be based on phenomenological intuition, but it would rather entail a break with the phenomenological concepts discovered in perceptual intuition. Levinas refers to the method required as a “deduction.” And although he refers to this idea of “deduction” as early as Existence and Existents (1947), he only defnes his deductive method for the frst time rather late, in Totality and Infnity (1961). In the Preface of Totality and Infnity, Levinas says that “The break-up of the formal structure of thought (the noema of a noesis) into events which this structure dissimulates (emphasis mine), but which sustain it and restore its concrete signifcance, constitutes a deduction” (1969, 28). Deduction in Levinas’s sense thus consists in allowing for the appearance of those fundamental events that are obscured by phenomenological intuition. Such a deduction is necessary for the appearance of events that are hidden to the phenomenological approach, because within the phenomenological framework, the instant is restrictively given to the phenomenological intuition as an unbreakable state: “the diffculty of separating Being from beings and the tendency to envisage the one in the other are not accidental. They are due to the habit of situating the instant, the atom of time, outside any event” (Levinas 2001, 1). If Heidegger discovered the ontological difference in Being and Time, Levinas reminds us that “in Heidegger there is a distinction, not a separation” (Levinas 2001, 24). According to Levinas, phenomenology as a philosophical method can only approach the instant as an unbreakable state: for phenomenological analysis, the instant is “something that cannot be decomposed” (Levinas 2001, 2).And it is for this reason that the phenomenological approach to the instant misses the very articulation of the instant as such:“An instant is not one lump; it is articulated.This articulation is what distinguishes it from the eternal, which is simple and foreign to events” (Ibid.) In this way, Levinas’s notion of deduction intervenes as a way to exceed phenomenological intuition, and thus the restriction of the instant as an unbreakable state.This is what he means when he speaks of “a method” thanks to which “thought is invited to go beyond intuition” (Ibid., 63).What is at stake in the deductive method is thus a description of the instant in which it is no longer understood in terms of the unbreakable state entailed by the phenomenological framework. Instead, Levinas provides an understanding of the instant as an “event,” “the very event through which, in the pure act, the pure verb, of Being, in Being in general, a being is posited, a substantive which masters that Being” (Ibid., 2).To “deduce” in the Levinasian sense means to break the phenomenological “play of light” (Levinas 1969, 27) in which the instant is given as an unbreakable state, in order to reach existing and existent in their very articulation, grasped as an “event”: the birth of an existent in existence.This “event of birth”—described as the very passage from pure existence to existence as the existence of an Existent—coincides with what Levinas calls “hypostasis.” For Levinas, Heidegger’s phenomenological approach to the instant falls short of the genetic approach to ontological difference, in which existence is presented in the instant, as becoming the existence of an existent, and thanks to which an existent is then deduced in its ontological meaning. If the deductive method is required to counterbalance the effects of the phenomenological approach, it is because phenomenologists, and Heidegger frst and foremost, start directly with “Mineness” (Jeimeinigkeit) as an existential.1 By this notion of “Mineness as an existential,” Levinas refers to the idea that existence is always already conceived of as being the existence of an existent: In Heidegger there is a distinction, not a separation. Existing is always grasped in the existent, and for the existent that is a human being the Heideggerian term Jemeinigkeit 550
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precisely expresses the fact that existing is always possessed by someone. I do not think Heidegger can admit an existing without existents, which to him would seem absurd. (1987, 45) In breaking down that which remains unbreakable to the phenomenological glance, Levinas proposes that we think the constitution of existents from the fact of existence prior to any existent, in other words, from being in its pure verbality, or the “work of being” (oeuvre d’être). In other words, he suggests that we think being prior to the subject–object distinction: “The subjectobject distinction by which we approach existents is not the starting point for a meditation which broaches being in general” (Levinas 2001, 52). Once being in general “in its impersonality” is taken into account as the point of departure for ontological inquiry, it in turn becomes possible to take the act of hypostasis into account. This allows Levinas to explain the way in which an existent arises, emerging from hypostasis, as an act of the mutation of the verb to be. For Levinas, the thematization of the arising of existents in existence from the ontological mutation of the verb to be coincides with the deduction of the ontological meaning of an entity: “On the ground of the ‘there is,’ a being arises. The ontological signifcance of an entity in the general economy of being, which Heidegger simply posits alongside of Being by a distinction, will thus be deduced” (Ibid., 83; emphasis added). Once phenomenological intuition is broken, it becomes possible to describe the passage from one state of being to another, to describe the “instant” as an event that remains hidden to the phenomenological intuition of phenomena. Such a description, beyond the phenomenological approach, coincides with the description of the passage from one state of being (anonymous existence) to the other (existence as possessed by an existent), instead of thinking Being and beings simultaneously (phenomenologically). This means that Levinas’s description coincides with the deduction of the ontological meaning of an existent “in the general economy of being.” Through this method, which is no longer phenomenological, an existent can no longer be understood alongside existence, but as what becomes “the subject of the verb to be” (Ibid.). For Levinas, in remaining faithful to the phenomenological method, Heidegger “posits being alongside entity,” instead of thinking the constitution of the latter from the ontological mutation of the former. Levinas claims that because Heidegger begins with the ontological relation as an unbreakable state; the author of Being and Time overlooks being in its verbal (prior to any existent) dimension: “Fundamental ontology itself, which denounces the confusion between Being and entities, speaks of Being as an identifed entity” (Levinas 1998, 43).As we can see, this claim deeply complicates the opposition traditionally drawn between Levinas and Heidegger, historically understood in terms of a confict between the primacy of Being (Heidegger) and of that which is Otherwise than Being (Levinas). Against this oversimplifed view, it is crucial to see that Levinas places that which is “Otherwise than Being” in opposition to Heidegger’s thought of Being because he proposes a notion of Being altogether different from that of Heidegger. Levinas’s view is one of Being detached from entities, Being entirely thought in its verbal dimension, as an anonymous dimension. In other words, Levinas’s opposition to Heidegger consists in the idea that, for the latter, the verbality of Being remains unthinkable in the framework of Mineness, since being is not dissociated from the existent. It is for this same reason that, following Heidegger, Levinas describes Being in its verbal dimension as “there is,” “il y a.” However, once it is detached from the horizon of existents, Levinas ascribes an entirely different meaning to this notion. This difference is evinced in the interview Ethics and Infnity, where the following question is put to Levinas: 551
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A moment ago you evoked the “es gibt,” the German “there is,” (il y a) and the analysis Heidegger made of it as generosity, since in this “es gibt” there is the verb geben which signifes to give. For you, on the other hand, there is no generosity in the “there is” (il y a)? Levinas responds: I insist in fact on the impersonality of the “there is” (il y a); “there is,” as “it rains,” (il pleut) or “it is night” (il fait nuit).And there is neither joy nor abundance (…) Existence and Existents tries to describe this horrible thing, and moreover describes it as horror and panic. (Levinas & Nemo 1985, 48–49) Because Heidegger does not think the ontological independence of Being towards entities, Being as anonymous there is, Levinas argues that he therefore cannot ultimately think the “hypostasis of the instant” as the very passage from the pure verb to substantives. In this way, Heidegger’s approach to ontological difference remains formal. In other words, from Levinas’s perspective, the Heideggerian approach necessarily overlooks what Levinas calls “the constitution of an existent (la constitution d’un existant)” (2001, 103). Levinas’s method is thus, strictly speaking, no longer phenomenological, since, as we have already seen, it requires a focus on the “anonymous vigilance” which “goes beyond the phenomena:” The affrmation of an anonymous vigilance goes beyond the phenomena, which already presupposes an ego, and thus eludes descriptive phenomenology. Here description would make use of terms while striving to go beyond their consistency, it stages personages, while the ‘there is’ is the dissipation of personages.A method is called for such that thought is invited to go beyond intuition. (Ibid., 63; translation modifed)
50.2. Events behind the subject–object relationship: the path to “Totality and Infnity” In Totality and Infnity, Levinas emphasizes the ontological event represented by the way in which the Face of the Other overwhelms the intentional knowledge of the subject who seeks to discover and reveal the Other in the light of knowledge. This event reveals the capacity of consciousness to depart from the activity of unveiling the world in order to produce what Levinas calls nocturnal events. In Totality and Infnity, Levinas further seeks to describe a singular experience in which consciousness enters into a relationship with an existent, an Other, which is not an object, but reveals itself by overfowing its illumination by a subject. In the social relation, consciousness enters into a relationship with an existent who does not discover itself in the light and who escapes visibility: Consciousness then does not consist in equating being with representation, in tending in the full light in which this adequation is to be sought, but rather in overfowing this play of lights—this phenomenology—and in accomplishing events whose ultimate signifcation (contrary to the Heideggerian conception) does not lie in disclosing. Philosophy does indeed dis-cover the signifcation of these events, but they 552
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are produced without discovery (or truth) being their destiny. No prior disclosure illuminates the production of these essentially nocturnal events. The welcoming of the face and the work of justice—which condition the birth of truth itself—are not interpretable in terms of disclosure. Phenomenology is a method for philosophy, but phenomenology—the comprehension effected through a bringing to light—does not constitute the ultimate event of being itself. (Levinas 1969, 27–28) In nocturnal events, consciousness overfows the activity of illumination and objectifcation and thus enters into relation with the Other. In so doing, consciousness transcends the “play of light” by which it typically discloses/represents objects, a “play of light” that, for Levinas, is constitutive of traditional phenomenology: phenomenology is “the comprehension effected through a bringing to light.” In order to properly describe the originary movement of the production of these nocturnal events—what Levinas calls “the ultimate event of being itself ”— he must modify Husserl’s method of “phenomenological reduction.” This is because the latter reduces the activity of consciousness exclusively to the intentional relation to an object given in “adequation” to the subject’s representation—which Levinas refers to above as “equating being with representation.” Because the Other is presented by Levinas as not being an object given in adequation to the subject’s knowledge, the discovery and description of the subject’s relation to the Other requires a renewal of the phenomenological method, which remains restrictively based on the subject–object structure. In order to properly describe the originary movement of the production of these nocturnal events, Levinas must modify Husserl’s method of “phenomenological reduction.” Because the Face is never reducible to an object given in adequation and visibility, the discovery and description of the subject’s relation to the Face requires a renewal of the phenomenological method based on the subject–object (discovery of an object by the subject) paradigm. As we have seen, Levinas affrms that consciousness is not limited to the discovery of being in its disclosure by illumination. Instead, its originary movement consists in overfowing the disclosure of an object in the production of nocturnal events—relation to the Other—which undergird consciousness and illumination themselves, and which sustain, in other words, the subject–object relationship. Nocturnal events thus make the diurnal activities of consciousness possible—knowledge of an object in adequation to the subject’s representation—i.e., to the discovery of the object in the element of light. What Levinas is saying, in other words, is that Objective knowledge depends upon the social relation—which is to say, the interlocutory relationship to the Other who is never present to consciousness in the form of a given visible object: “The welcoming of the face and the work of justice—which condition the birth of truth itself.” And yet, for Husserl, the transcendental reduction provides access to the absolute sphere of the cogitatio, while disregarding the Idea of the Infnite (the relation to the Other).2 In order to return to the originary movement of consciousness, which exceeds (phenomenological) knowledge defned as the activity of unveiling objects, Levinas must propose a method that allows us to go beyond Husserl’s reduction in order to recover those nocturnal events upon the foundation of which the intentional knowledge of the object is based.This new method consists in the deformalization of the phenomenological apparatus based on the subject– object structure.To deformalize the subject–object structure thus means nothing less than the attempt to inscribe the subject–object relationship into the interlocutory context that renders such knowledge possible. We have, then, a decisive indication of the real project of Totality and Infnity: Levinas does not seek to renounce the phenomenological reduction, but rather to resituate the noetico–noe553
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matic (the technical name given by Husserl to describe the subject–object relation) structure of the reduction within the interlocutory, social context that is constitutive of it. And for that reason, the contextualization of the noetico–noematic structure requires a method wholly unlike that of traditional phenomenology, as the latter consists in “the comprehension effected through a bringing to light.” Indeed, the required method “is invited to go beyond intuition,” as Levinas says: “a method is called for such that thought is invited to go beyond intuition” (2001, 63). It is for this reason that the repositioning of phenomenological inquiry beyond the noetico–noematic structure proceeds from what Levinas calls a rupture of the formal structure of noesis and noema. It is thus a question of beginning with Husserl and the noetico–noematic structure, in order to then go beyond Husserl and resituate that structure within the concrete interlocutory context to which it belongs.As Levinas puts it, The break-up of the formal structure of thought (the noema of a noesis) into events which this structure dissimulates, but which sustain it and restore its concrete signifcance, constitutes a deduction—necessary and yet non-analytical. In our exposition it is indicated by expressions such as “that is,” or “precisely,” or “this accomplishes that,” or “this is produced as that.” (1969, 28; translation modifed; emphasis added) Here, Levinas indicates the steps of the method that he mobilizes. It will thus become a question of beginning again from the place of the Husserlian noetico–noematic structure, in order to bring into view those concrete events that this formal structure covers up and upon which it is nevertheless based. Levinas’s approach accomplishes this revelation precisely by deformalizing and concretizing that structure itself. Indeed, Levinas speaks explicitly of the deductive rupture brought about by this deformalization, which is to say by the resituation of the formal structure in question within the concrete horizon of its performance. Any such rupture must allow us to specify the meaning of the formal noetico–noematic structure that comes from the phenomenological apparatus (again:“The break-up of the formal structure of thought (the noema of a noesis) into events which this structure dissimulates, but which sustain it and restore its concrete signifcance.”) This means, therefore, that the goal of Levinas’s method of deduction is in fact to specify those structures that the phenomenological reduction conceals (and frst and foremost: the noetico–noematic structure). In other words, its aim is to show that the subject–object relation (noesis–noema) that Husserl describes depends upon the social relation—the relation to the Other— which does not have the form subject–object, but in fact sustains it.3 Levinas’s discovery that the subject–object structure depends upon the social relation in turn allows for the specifcation of the signifcance of precisely those fundamental structures discovered by Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology.
Conclusion We can see, then, that Levinas’s phenomenology in fact aims to give an account of those events which are behind the subject–object structure. The discovery of these events is necessary in order to reveal the concrete meaning of such cognitive structure, as that meaning eludes the grasp of the formal approach to the ontological structures in question proposed by traditional phenomenology. Levinas resituates the event of hypostasis below the instant, and the revelation of the Other beneath the noetico–noematic structure. For him, it is always a question of describing the events hidden beneath the ontological structures discovered by Husserl and Heidegger, 554
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whose presentations of those structures remain abstract and formal. Levinas, to the contrary, seeks to restore their “concrete signifcance.” Deformalization is thus not a refutation nor a refusal of phenomenology—“the comprehension effected through a bringing to light”—but rather a restoration of the concrete meanings of the essential concepts of phenomenology.
Notes 1 Cf. Heidegger 2001, §9. 2 As the specifcation of such complex structures would take us too far outside of the present focus, I invite the reader to see Moati 2017, Chapter 6,“The Metaphysical Context of Intentionality.” 3 See again Moati, 2017, Chapter 7, for a more detailed discussion of the intersection of the subject– object relationship and the subject–other relationship.
References Calin, Rodolphe.2009. “Didier Franck, l’un-pour-l’autre. Levinas et la signifcation.” Les études philosophiques, n. 89, pp. 289-296. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infnity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. –––. 1987. Time and the Other.Trans. R.A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. –––. 1998. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. –––. 2001. Existence and Existents.Trans.A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel, and Philippe Nemo. 1985. Ethics and Infnity. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Moati, Raoul. 2017. Levinas and the Night of Being: A Guide to Totality and Infnity. Trans: D. Wyche. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
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51 MERLEAU-PONTY Patrick Burke
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s1 phenomenological philosophy and his subsequent ontology can be characterized as a continuous attempt to disclose and resolve the tensions secretly polarizing Husserl’s phenomenology. In his last work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty concentrated on how those same tensions insidiously entered his own thought in his earlier masterwork Phenomenology of Perception. Just as he labored to reveal the “impensé,” the circumscribed but “unthought of ” dimension creatively animating Husserl’s whole philosophical itinerary, so Merleau-Ponty sought to draw up the submerged “impensé” of his own thought.This effort has important consequences for evaluating the signifcance of his early work and, for that matter, of his entire philosophical project. About this last period of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, John Bannon writes: There have, in fact, been rumors that Merleau-Ponty was engaged in a serious revision of his thinking prior to his death, and one wonders if we might have seen a change of position on such questions as perception and the nature of man comparable to that change in his position on Marxism which make his Les Aventures de la Dialectique such a dramatic event. (1966, 384) In Humanism and Terror and other essays written in the 1940s, Merleau-Ponty credited Marxism with providing the concrete interpretive perspective on social and political life in the twentieth century. But his consequent disenchantment with the communist praxis of the early 1950s led him to withdraw this privilege and to relegate the work of Marx to the status of a classic, as that which ceases to be true in the sense that it believes itself true but maintains, nonetheless, a serious heuristic value. Does Merleau-Ponty’s later critical refection on Phenomenology of Perception lead likewise to a disaffection with Husserl’s style of philosophizing? Does it too become for Merleau-Ponty another classic? These questions are dramatically situated by Jacques Taminiaux when he writes: In his recent work Le Sense du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl, G. Granel writes: “Phenomenology’s attempt to survive as a philosophical school has produced
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epigones, or has led to the ritual murder of the father, which Merleau-Ponty piously and pitilessly had set out to perform, and would have performed had he not himself died.”And Granel characterizes The Visible and the Invisible as a wonderfully “agonizing reappraisal.” The expressions “ritual murder” and “agonizing reappraisal” suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s itinerary from Phenomenology of Perception to his last works involved some kind of reversal of his attitude toward phenomenology. (1972, 307) There is much discussion of a ‘Kehre’ a reversal of direction, when interpreting Heidegger’s later approach to the meaning of Being. Regarding the last writings of Merleau-Ponty,Taminiaux, in effect, questions the same possibility:“Do these texts authorize us to speak of a rupture or of a murder?” (Ibid., 308).Are we justifed in speaking of Merleau-Ponty’s “Kehre”? The concern expressed here refects Merleau-Ponty’s self-criticism in The Visible and the Invisible when he writes in a “working note” of July 1959 that “the problems posed in Phenomenology of Perception are insoluble because I start from the ‘consciousness-object’ distinction” (1968, 200). In a “working note” of February 1959 he claims that “the problems that remain […] are due to the fact that in part I retained the philosophy of ‘consciousness’” (Ibid., 183). He proposes relative to the results of Phenomenology of Perception “the necessity of bringing them to ontological explication” (Ibid.). For Merleau-Ponty,“ontology would be the elaboration of the notions that have to replace that of transcendental subjectivity” (Ibid., 167), and this will involve a “disclosure of wild or brute being by way of Husserl and the Lebenswelt upon which one opens” (Ibid., 183). The later citation contravenes any claim about a ritual murder of the father. In commemoration of the living Husserl, the perpetual beginner, the philosopher inhabiting the chiaroscuro of his own questions, Merleau-Ponty devotes an article, “The Philosopher and his Shadow,”2 published in 1960, where he takes up some of the themes of Ideas II in order to unveil the questions which motivated Husserl’s thought at its deepest level. Here Merleau-Ponty says that “Husserl’s thought is as much attracted by the haecceity of Nature as by the vortex of absolute consciousness” (1964, 165). To show how this is the case and the meaning that it has vis-à-vis Husserl’s formulated philosophy is, for Merleau-Ponty, to disclose the “unthought-of element” operative at the source of Husserl’s vision. Whereas Husserl had argued in Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness that absolute consciousness was the purely noetic and constitutive source of the feld of presence, in Ideas II, Merleau-Ponty fnds him arguing for a notion of consciousness rooted in the raw openness of sensible being, such that the feld of presence is primarily neither a noematic correlate of consciousness nor the dynamic noetic domain of consciousness, but is what is beneath such a distinction, what is fundamentally and originally meant by Nature. Here Merleau-Ponty is pitching the transcendental Husserl against the existential Husserl. Nature or sensible being is “the being which reaches me in my most secret parts but which I reach in its brute or untamed state, in an absolute of presence which holds the secret of the world, others, and what is true” (Ibid., 167). Merleau-Ponty fnds the key to the diffcult notion of “an absolute of presence” in Husserl’s analysis of the ontogenesis of the body in the reversibility, the chiasm, between the touching and the touched or between the seeing and the seen, within which each is instituted, making the relation of the body to itself “the viniculum of the self and things” (Ibid., 166).Transcendental phenomenology’s heralded relation of “presence to,” which is based on the sharp distinction between subject and object, is rendered secondary by this primordial reversibility. The indestructible intertwining of the touching and the touched in every act of touching expresses an
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“absolute of presence” wherein they are accomplished as variations of what Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, designates in The Visible and the Invisible as ‘my fesh’ and ‘fesh of the world.’ The perceived thing has fesh because my feshy body is a “perceiving thing,” a “subjectobject,” which upsets the classical separation between subject and object so that, to a certain extent, one cannot say that what is proper to the perceiving body is not proper to the thing perceived, because the perceiving body is a thing perceived, and the things “are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted into its fesh, they are part of its full defnition” (MerleauPonty 1971, 163). There is a “double inscription, outside and inside, things touching me as I touch them and touch myself ” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 261). In other words, the body, through the reversibility which institutes it, is ‘incorporated’ into things and they are ‘incorporated’ into it.Although the fesh of the world is distinct from my fesh, the term “fesh of the world” is to be taken literally if, by it, we mean that “the world is made of the same stuff as the body” (MerleauPonty 1971, 163), i.e., the same intentional fabric, the same crisscrossing of the touching and the tangible, of the seeing and the visible, so that fesh is not simply a property of the perceiving body relative to the world, but is the ‘irrelative,’ the absolute of all relations of compresence and ‘presence to’ that encompasses the whole of nature or the world, persons as well as being. Stated otherwise, the fesh is the savage Offenheit of sensible being differentiating itself as what Merleau-Ponty calls “wild-fowering world” and “wild mind.” It is what Merleau-Ponty means by Being, the primordial and transcendent opening of the open, which grounds and determines the relation of incarnate subject and object. Sensitive fesh is both Nature opening itself in touching and seeing to make manifestation possible, and it is the display of Nature itself, within this opening, in the sensing that this sensitive fesh does not only of other things but of itself.The fesh is both the coming to be of phenomenality as such and a specifc phenomenon within it. It is because of his indebtedness to the Husserl of Ideas II that Merleau-Ponty can write in a working note of January 1959, “outline of ontology projected as ontology of brute Being – and of logos. Draw up the picture of wild Being prolonging my article on Husserl” (1968, 165). Besides the notion of the fesh and reversibility that he fnds already at work in Husserl’s thought, in this article, “The Philosopher and his Shadow” (referenced above), Merleau-Ponty addresses a number of notions that were taken up in the Phenomenology of Perception and would be unpacked more profoundly in his later work; for instance, the notions of phenomenological reduction, radical refection, and operative intentionality. For the purposes of this essay, we will concentrate principally on the phenomenological reduction within which Merleau-Ponty articulates four phases, transcendental, aesthetic, eidetic, and historical, relative to which the other themes will be addressed. Each of these phases is called a “reduction.”
The transcendental reduction In the “Preface” to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty asserts that the phenomenological reduction is best expressed by Eugen Fink as wonder.3 Merleau-Ponty argued that, unless the transcendental phase of the reduction, the epoché, i.e., the ‘putting out of play’ or ‘bracketing’ of the familiar world, takes place also as a lived experience that evokes a feeling of wonder at the strangeness and mystery of the world, the transcendental reduction would amount to a mere academic exercise of suspending the judgments of the natural attitude. About the natural attitude, Merleau-Ponty writes that, the natural attitude … is prior to any thesis. It is, as Husserl says … the mystery of a Weltthesis prior to all theses … the mystery of a primordial faith and a fundamental and original opinion (Urlaube, Urdoxa) … that gives us not a representation of the world but 558
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the world itself … the rights of this Urdoxa are defnitive and reduced consciousness must take them into account … must make the descent into the realm of our archeology. (1954, 163–165) Wonder, therefore, was presented as the source and motive of the phenomenological reduction, which should effect an archeology of constituting consciousness, by actively returning categorical refection to its origins in the vast regions of the unrefective and, hence, present refection with its limit and task: “to operate the reduction is to disclose the wild or vertical world” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 177).Wonder is the most primitive openness at the core of perception; it is what Merleau-Ponty means by ‘wild mind’ and it must be grasped as fundamentally interrogative.We do not constitute our wonder.Wonder is not so much one act or attitude among others of the subject as it is the instituting act or attitude that defnes the subject, that motivates all his or her acts from the most rudimentary perception to the most abstract thinking.Wonder is not only prior to consciousness, but consciousness is one of its modes. Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty can write:“we constitute constituting consciousness” (1964, 189).Wonder reveals perception as having its own logos intrinsically and dynamically independent of the subsumptive conceptual, categorical, and judgmental structure of thought. Wonder is the originary mode and force of all interrogation. As such it is “an ontological organ” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 121). Wonder engulfs not only the perceiver but also the existing world, which Merleau-Ponty says also “exists in the interrogative mode” (Ibid., 103). Both perceiver and world are of the same Being, both are reverse sides of each other, both stand in the interrogative transcendent openness of the opening, of Being. Distinct conscious life arises out of the ‘dehiscence’ of Being, that bursting open, that primordial self-differentiation of Being, which is the perpetual advent of wonder within the wild-fowering presence of the world.Thus Merleau-Ponty is able to argue that Refection reveals a third dimension in which the distinction between objective and subjective become problematic. From Ideas II on Husserl’s refections deliberately goes beyond the ideal correlation of subject and object and presents it as relatively founded, true derivatively as a constitutive result. Refection cannot go beyond this opening to the world except by making use of the powers it owes to the opening itself. (1954, 163) Relative to this, Merleau-Ponty follows Husserl in calling for an intentionality without acts, for an operating or latent intentionality like that which animates time, more ancient than the intentionality of human acts, contrary to the centrifugal activity of thetic consciousness and to the intellectual possession of a noema. Intentionality is no longer the mind’s grasping of an essence, no longer the recognition in things of what we have put there. (Ibid., 165) Ultimately Merleau-Ponty dislodges intentionality from the transcendental subject and fnds it animating the world itself, as intentionality within being.
The aesthetic reduction The transcendental phase of the phenomenological reduction is understood by Merleau-Ponty as pointing to the aesthetic reduction.To clarify this move, it is important to cite Husserl’s letter 559
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to Hugo Von Hoffmannsthal written in 1907 when he was still developing the epoché. Husserl claims that the “short dramas” of Von Hoffmannsthal were a great source of inspiration for him. For me, the “inner states” that are portrayed in your art as purely aesthetic, or not exactly portrayed, but elevated into a sphere of pure aesthetic beauty, these states hold, this aesthetic objectifcation, a particular interest – i.e., not only for the art lover in me, but also for the philosopher and phenomenologist. (Hua-Dok III., Bd. 7, 133–136/26–27) Husserl goes on to state that “phenomenological intuiting is closely related to aesthetic intuiting in pure art” (Ibid.). In fact, Husserl writes that he performs his research “in a purely intuiting (as if it were aesthetic) fashion” (Ibid.). In Eye and Mind,4 the last work that he published, Merleau-Ponty claims that the philosopher is not in possession of his own vocation, but that he or she must heed the calling of the painter who alone accomplishes the phenomenologist’s epoché, who alone genuinely disengages “the watchwords of knowledge and action” (1971, 161), who alone holds the world suspended, who alone practices his wonder, who alone ruminates and creates within the living present, he who silently summons the philosopher into the mystery of presence and presencing. For Merleau-Ponty, Husserl’s originary transcendental feld of consciousness is a pure aesthetic feld. Any form of givenness to refective consciousness and ultimately to transcendental consciousness is a species of aesthetic givenness. Following Cezanne, Merleau-Ponty would argue that primordial aesthetic values permeate all givenness, even what Husserl calls pure consciousness in so far as it can be given in primary refection, such that we can speak meaningfully of the feeling of consciousness, of the felt experience of cognition. This feeling cannot be “put out of play” without such action already presupposing it. There is always an affective coloration to refective consciousness, a shunning or seeking, attraction or repulsion. There is a kind of aesthetic pleasure in the very manner of givenness of the powers and performances of consciousness.They all have, as Merleau-Ponty would say, their ‘emotional halo.’ At all levels of constitution, consciousness is valued for itself; we shun the abyss, the night of nothingness, meaninglessness, emptiness, powerlessness, futurelessness. From sleep we awaken to an opening upon the life-world that engulfs us, an experience with its vividness and feeling tone intact, not an abstraction from the vital context of life; we grasp things as their emotional qualities and intrinsic expressive patterns awaken consciousness before analysis has done its work of dividing and abstracting. Even though the ego’s original self-grasping is pre-theoretical, the feelings evoked therein, and in which the ego lives, are extended even to the theoretical attitude that delights in them, so that we might say that the consciousness of joy is rooted primordially in the joy that is internal to consciousness, that the consciousness of anguish is rooted primordially in the anguish internal to consciousness. For Merleau-Ponty, the aesthetic feld in its originary mode is fundamentally the pre-objective life-world upon which the primordially intersubjective givenness of all objects is based, from which all other senses and types of objectivity derive. And so he can write “that the transcendent is not constituted in the immanence of constituting consciousness” (1954, 179), that “the transcendental feld has ceased to be simply the feld of our thought and has become the feld of the whole of experiences” (Ibid., 177).
The eidetic reduction For Husserl, “the transcendental reduction is inevitably eidetic” (Ibid., 179). Throughout all of Husserl’s work, the eidetic reduction is principally presented under the terms eidetic focusing, 560
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eidetic seeing, eidetic intuition, eidetic attitude, and eidetic insight, all of which would disclose beneath the fow of contingent variations an apriori, i.e., a universal and necessary invariant, an eidos, an essence, a pure sense, a fxed framework for the course of possible experience, fnding its expression through logical concepts, regional concepts, and their material particularizations. This seeing of essences is achieved by the imaginative variation of the phenomenal object under consideration. It is said to be free because the weight of actuality, of the factual world discussed by physics and chemistry, does not restrict it, free also from all metaphysical interpretation, from all doxic positing of existential commitments embedded in the natural attitude, which are “suspended,” put out of play, but not negated. This ‘freedom-from’ is achieved by Husserl’s understanding of the transcendental reduction, which reveals consciousness in its purity and absoluteness, and which liberates consciousness to catch the phenomenon as it is unfolding in the play of its very appearing and appearance, to intuit the phenomenon as pure phenomenon independent of any practical or empirical conceptual interest, to stand in wonder at it. Husserl affrms that the imagination is enriched by possibility and not by existence, and so he lets it roam and play in the feld of the logically possible, within an openly endless multiplicity of variants of the object under consideration until an absolute invariant or essence, pervading all variants, is intuited apodictically. There are two points of interest here for Merleau-Ponty. First of all, the method takes its starting point in the positive experience of the phenomenal object, in the massive presence of the life-world. And, secondly, the fruit of the method, the so-called purifed essence, is not something positive. It is simply that which resists any further variation. But as Merleau-Ponty observes, the so-called apodictic intuition of an essence is not an insight whose term or content would be the positive structure of the thing (in fact, in Phenomenology of Perception, he rejects the idea of the formal essence of the triangle); rather it would be a grasp of the pure limit of its own operations in the face of the thing, and thus presumably a grasp of its own incompleteness and inadequacy vis-a-vis the thing. Merleau-Ponty goes on to note that in order to have an apodictic intuition of the pure essence, it would be necessary to have a pure “spectator himself without secrets, without latency, if we are to be certain that nothing be surreptitiously introduced into it” (1968, 11).The pure spectator, or Kosmotheoros as MerleauPonty likes to call it, would have to be totally transparent to itself, which implies that it be its own ground and that it hold the real with all its manifold implications under its sovereign gaze.
The historical reduction But, according to Merleau-Ponty, these requirements, once met, destroy the very experience of thinking the essence, an experience that is durational and not atemporal, that is situational and not free from every point of view. Here he sees that the eidetic reduction entails a historical reduction. For Merleau-Ponty, we cannot understand the full nature of theoretical thought if we have failed to see it in its proper context, namely, in its relation to the historicity of the lifeworld.The eidetic reduction occurs in and is thus mediated by a historical context, one which may well limit the range of free variation. Even though Husserl’s persistent concern for history and origins is not a betrayal of his transcendental phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty consistently criticizes this transcendental form of phenomenology. In his Course Notes for “Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology”,5 which takes up Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Merleau-Ponty calls for a “total remanipulation of the distinctions between fact and essence, real and ideal” (2002, 19) showing that “there has to be an ideality which has need of time” (Ibid., 19), what is not “intemporal,” not a “positive quiddity that would dominate genesis and engulf it,” (Ibid., 28) “that would separate ideality from history” (Ibid., 30). Merleau-Ponty remarks that, in his Origin 561
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of Geometry, Husserl is to be credited for arguing for the role of historicity in the constitution of the ideal, but nonetheless he continued to “maintain intemporal formulations when describing the world, such as “unconditioned general validity” (Ibid.) or ‘apodictic certainty,’ and thus vitiated the “historical apriori” that is formalized in this work. Eidetic variation and intuition draw their certainty at each moment from the temporal cohesion of experience and the wild presence of the world, from what Merleau-Ponty calls the fesh of time that is the tissue in which all moments are originally connected and thus gives the idea its historicity, that makes the same idea intuitively endure through the process of variation and that thereby makes the process of variation possible. It is “that very cohesion in depth of the world without which the essence is subjective folly and arrogance” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 112). If thought does not possess in transparency the being of its ground, if it is secretly nourished by a presence older than it, it cannot fatter itself that it reveals the essential. At most, according to Merleau-Ponty, it has the power to “determine the inessential” (Ibid). The essences that it provisionally fxes are simply expressions of what would not be inessential in the thought of Being, but they nowise express what necessarily belongs to Being or what an adequate idea of Being would be or if it is even possible on the model of the essence. The determination of the inessential is likewise something provisional, since “there is no positive vision that would defnitely give me the essentiality of the essence” (Ibid.). Merleau-Ponty points out that Husserl himself never obtained one sole Wesenschau that he did not subsequently take up again and rework, not to disown it, but in order to make it say what at frst it had not quite said.To claim that the facticity and historicity of the thing is inessential to its meaning, that its intelligible structure lies behind its temporal and spatial articulation, is to assume that the real is a simple variant of the possible, that Being is merely the possibility of all possibilities instead of the actuality of all actualities. In order to avoid such an outcome, Merleau-Ponty proposed that philosophy dispense with “the myths of inductivity and the Wesenschau” (Ibid., 116), which are predicated on the classical distinction between essence and existence. But the question of the essence is important, and Merleau-Ponty admits that ontology cannot dispense with intuition as a methodological tool, but he claims that it requires a different kind of intuition than that of the pure gaze of a worldless subject which fattens the world and robs it of its depth. He claims that what is false in the ontology of the blosse Sachen is that it makes a purely theoretical or idealizing attitude absolute, neglecting or taking as understood a relation with being which founds the purely theoretical attitude and measures its value. (1964, 163) What is required is an intuition that is in the world and of the world, which is an opening out of the self from and upon the depths of the world and which expresses the turning-in of the world upon itself. Merleau-Ponty describes this intuition as an “auscultation or palpation in depth” (1968, 128) of the Being that surrounds us and makes its path through us in order to reveal the logos that grounds ontological predication, which is the universal ground of sense. Intuition as ‘auscultation in depth’ requires that refection become radically self-critical if it is to be an indispensable tool for ontology. It must become ‘hyper-refection’ that would take itself and the changes it introduces into the spectacle into account … it must plunge into the world instead of surveying it, it must descend toward it such as it is instead of working its way bay up toward a prior possibility of thinking it – which would impose upon the world in advance the conditions for our control over it. It 562
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must question the world, it must enter into the forest of references that our interrogation arouses in it, and it must make it say, fnally, what in its silence It Means to Say. (Ibid., 39) Hyper-refection, as a highly poised form of wonder, makes use of eidetic refection, but only in order to show the extent to which the life-world both converges with and diverges from the fxed eidetic invariants, the extent to which the world transcends the relation between thought and its object. But this process is not so easy. It discovers an endless dialectical movement of differentiation and integration within which radical refection itself is caught and which undermines any alleged transparency of its own self-relationship. It discovers its own historicity; it discovers the self-mediation of its own present by the projected futures of the past that were realized or unrealized and that either open or block the path of the present toward its future and which that future may affrm or negate. It discovers that any effort to capture thought or thing in one sole thesis breaks up before the capacity of each to differentiate itself endlessly within the historical labyrinth of the life-world. Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty proposes that radical refection be founded on a “hyper-dialectic, i.e., one which criticizes itself and surpasses itself as a separate statement” (Ibid., 94). The hyper-dialectic is that labyrinthian thought of labyrinthian Being, of the Being that cannot be eidetically intuited or refected through an apodictic judgment but that thought must follow, not knowing the route in advance or whether it is indeed traversable, and along which and in terms of which thought discovers its own inherent logic of reversibility beneath refection and intuition and the imperative of non-contradiction. Merleau-Ponty asks whether what he calls the hyper-dialectic leads to “skepticism, vulgar relativism, or the reign of the ineffable” (Ibid., 95). He answers that within the hyper-dialectic, truth is both possessed and not possessed. It is possessed in so far as, by attending to the multiplicity and ambiguity of relationships within Being, certain problems and certain apparent solutions are eventually eliminated. It is not, however, something defnitely possessed.The only truth which is defnitely possessed is that of idealization or theses detached from experience and the concrete historical movement of Being. But, as Husserl himself came to understand, this merely logical order of truth, if absolutized, is, in the end, what positively discourages thought from deciphering the truth of Being, a truth that can be progressively revealed only by an operation beneath the predicative logic, by an operation of radical interrogation that is the soul of the hyper-dialectic.
Conclusion From his earliest major works to his last meditations in Eye and Mind and The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty embraced the existential phenomenological project. He continued to approach in a distinctly phenomenological manner the classical epistemological and ontological problems that polarized the Western tradition, especially as these problems were taken up in competing ways by Cartesian rationalism and British empiricism, problems such as the relation of mind to body, of soul to matter, of perception to intellection, of percept to concept, of subject to world, of necessity and contingency, of time and eternity, etc. In relation to Husserl, there is no Kehre in Merleau-Ponty’s later thinking. Jacques Taminiaux is quite right when he says that Merleau-Ponty does not abandon Husserl but resumes with renewed vigor the interpretation of his texts.6 As shown above, Husserl’s Ideas II leads MerleauPonty to a more profound rumination on the ontological bases of the phenomenological relation of the presence of the subject to the world. He does not exile phenomenology to being another of the classics of our rich tradition, nor does he ever uproot it from his thinking. However, 563
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Merleau-Ponty always had problems with the ‘transcendental’ Husserl, as does Husserl himself, whose thought was in part strongly motivated by the classics produced by Descartes, Berkeley, and Kant. Merleau-Ponty always argued the case for the ‘existential’ Husserl who challenges and reworks the consciousness–object distinction. But even a thought as rigorous and cautious as Merleau-Ponty’s succumbed to the temptations embedded in the use of refection and unwittingly assumed Husserl’s transcendental attitude in some of his key analyses. Accordingly, the later Merleau-Ponty sensed the necessity of a rigorous interrogation of presence that would establish his thought defnitively beyond the transcendental starting point of presence-to, an interrogation that would ground it frmly in the presencing that is the transcendent process of Being.The phenomenological reduction, with its four phases, reveals the unmotivated upsurge of wild Being in its unfolding as wild mind and wild-fowering world. It is only in so far as Being, as the ultimate subject of ontology, factors in and as what Husserl called an “absolute of presence” that anything can be said of it at all. In the last analysis, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is nothing more and nothing less than a phenomenological ontology.
Notes 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty held the prestigious Chair of Philosophy at College de France from 1952 until his death in 1961 at the age of 53. His major works are The Structure of Behavior, Phenomenology of Perception, Eye and Mind, and The Visible and the Invisible. 2 Merleau-Ponty 1954, 159–181. 3 Merleau-Ponty 2014, XXVII. 4 Merleau-Ponty 1971, 169. 5 Merleau-Ponty 2014, 408. 6 Merleau-Ponty 2002, 11–89.
References Bannon, John F. 1966. “The ‘Later’ Thoughts of Merleau-Ponty.” Dialogue,Vol.V, No. 3 (December), pp. 383-403 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Signs.Trans. R. C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible.Trans.A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1971.“Eye and Mind.”Trans. C. Dallery. In: The Primacy of Perception. Ed. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159-190 ———. 2002. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Trans. L. Lawlor. In:. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2014. Phenomenology of Perception.Trans. D.A. Landes. London: Routledge. Taminiaux, Jacques. 1972.“Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s Late Work.”Trans.A. Lingis. In: Life-World and Consciousness, Essays for Aron Gurwitsch. Ed. Lester E. Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 307-322
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52 ENZO PACI Michela Beatrice Ferri
Enzo Paci was born in Monterado, Ancona, on September 18, 1911. He taught philosophy at the University of Pavia from 1951 until 1958 and later on at the University of Milan from 1958 until his passing in Milan on July 21, 1976.
52.1. The Platonic background and the interpretation of the “Parmenides”. After attending high school in Cuneo, Piemonte, where his father Corrado Paci moved with the family because of his job, Paci enrolled in philosophy at the University of Pavia.There he was a student of Adolfo Levi, a famous scholar in ancient philosophy. At the very beginning of his philosophical career, Paci focused his studies on ancient philosophy: this was the origin of his Platonic background. After two years of course work, Enzo Paci moved to the University of Milan to study with Antonio Banf, who became his mentor. With Banf as his supervisor, Paci earned his master’s degree in November 1934 after defending a thesis dedicated to Plato’s “Parmenides”. This text became his frst book, published in 1938 with the title Il signifcato del “Parmenide” nella flosofa di Platone (The meaning of “Parmenides” in Plato’s philosophy). In this work, Paci analyzed the concept of “existence” as it is refected in Plato. In the process, it took up many of the great philosophical issues in Plato’s writings, such as the relationship of being and becoming to the concept of existence. Especially in the “Parmenides”, Paci sees the core of a contemporary philosophical problem: the alternation of the two concepts of “Time” and “Relation”. Paci’s master’s degree thesis, as published in 1938, is not confned to the “Parmenides”, despite its title, but is an analysis of Plato’s speculative thought as it appears in twenty-three of his dialogues. Excluded from this analysis, among his major writings, are only the “Apology”, “Seventh Letter”, and “Laws”. Paci’s intention in this analysis is to examine how Plato sees being and becoming, doxa and epistemology, and to look at how Plato’s understanding of the relationship between these terms gives theoretical signifcance to the concrete contradictions of life by elevating them conceptually to an abstract level.To understand being and becoming involves looking at the issue of the gap between forms and appearance – the problem of the chorismos – the issue of the effect of time on being and becoming, and the issue of the dialectical relationship between being and non-being. Paci considered that the most important
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two dialogues to deal with the latter two issues are the “Parmenides” (for its refections on time) and the “Sophist” (for its refections on relationship). In his analysis, Paci is concerned with detecting the coherence and importance of the one– many theme in metaphysics and epistemology.This theme, in fact, also underlies all the hypotheses of the “Parmenides” interpreted in the light of the transcendental correlation between being and non-being. In the “Preface” to the frst edition of this book, Paci states that going back to Plato’s thought means to fnd the eternal foundation of the European spirit, the primordial essence of Europeanism. He adds that both the synthesis of opposites and the positive solution of all the antinomies is European (Paci 1938, 6). This point is made clear in Paci’s attempt to connect Platonism with Husserl’s thought, in light of the fact that a couple of years before, in 1936, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology was published for the frst time.1 Paci states that he believes in the Platonic antinomy of being, even when it is brought beyond the Platonic horizon of thought: the basis of a true Idealism; an Idealism that intends Life as opposition, as creatrices fght. Paci believes that historically and idealistically Plato’s thought can be the basis of contemporary philosophical refection.Wherever in this “Preface” Paci writes that non-being is destroying every aspect of life and of European thought, he refers to Husserl’s “Crisis”. He is convinced that this crisis of European culture may be resolved. He states that thanks to Plato’s “Parmenides”, with its invitation to accept every experience, live in all the oppositions, follow all the senses of being that reason indicates to us, we can resolve the crisis. For Paci, the “Parmenides” dialogue is not the breaking of Logic, as the philosophy of existence recalls—here Paci refers to Karl Jaspers’s “Philosophie”—but, properly, this dialogue champions the oppositions that create the life of thought, the dialectic mood of the living world. Paci elaborates on the foundation of a “meditatio vitae”, basing it on the same themes elaborated by Existentialism to arrive at the “meditatio mortis” (Ibid., 7). Already in this work are defned the roots of Paci’s thought: Plato, existence, time and relation, Husserl. Later, Paci’s 1957 essay entitled On the Meaning of “Platonism” in Husserl (Sul signifcato del “platonismo” di Husserl) (Paci 1957b) analyzes the issue of relationship between being and non-being by comparing Platonic philosophy with Husserl’s phenomenology.The core of Paci’s analysis is the Platonic side of Husserlian thought.This time, he focuses on the problem of the relationship between time and truth, and on the third hypothesis of the “Parmenides”, to demonstrate that Plato’s philosophy is totally congruent with Husserl’s phenomenology. This analysis shows the great ongoing infuence of the “Parmenides” on Paci’s thought.
52.2. Encountering Existentialism: the problem of nothingness It was in Milan – and thanks to his mentor Antonio Banf – that Enzo Paci encountered the philosophy of Husserl, in addition to that of Simmel, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Wahl. Paci’s interest during the 1940s was mainly in Existentialism. For this reason, he gave to Existentialism – a philosophy which arose in France and Germany during the late 1930s – a personal re-elaboration according to which Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Wahl took precedence over Martin Heidegger. In Paci’s “positive Existentialism”, existence is intended as a pure possibility; consequently, it is freedom in opposition to any determinism and to any nihilism. As Paci developed his interpretation of Existentialism, he met another Italian existentialist, Nicola Abbagnano, and, by following Abbagnano, he became a promoter of Existentialism in Italy. In 1940, Paci published the book entitled Pensiero, esistenza e valore (Thought, existence and value), in which his frst analysis of Existentialism appeared. Here, Paci explains that value is the key of transcendence, a mediation between the absolute of thought and the fniteness of existence. In Paci’s existential perspective, when existence becomes value, the person rises to dignity as a 566
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person. In 1943, in the journal “Primato. Lettere e arti d’Italia”, together with Abbagnano, Paci started an inquiry dedicated to Existentialism that was destined to become a milestone in the history of twentieth-century Italian philosophy. During World War II, Paci as a soldier was a prisoner in the camp of Beniaminowo and later imprisoned in Wieztendorf, where he met Paul Ricoeur. Here, Paci gave prison soldiers lessons dedicated to the philosophy of literature in Thomas Mann,Thomas Stearns Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, and Marcel Proust, that he then recollected in a volume published in 1947, entitled Esistenza e immagine (Existence and Image). Later books – Ingens sylva. Saggio sulla flosofa di G.B.Vico (Ingens sylva. Essay on the Philosophy of G. B.Vico) (Paci 1949), and Il nulla e il problema dell’uomo (Nothingness and the Problem of Man) (Paci 1950b), and Esistenzialismo e storicismo (Existentialism and Historicism), both published in 1950 – show the saturation of existential analysis in Paci’s thought and its comparison with Italian historicism. In 1951 Paci founded and became the frst director of the magazine aut aut. Rivista di flosofa e di cultura, named after Kierkegaard’s work.2 Paci argues that his Existentialism is based on the denial of being “Parmenides”, combined with the tools of Nietzschean thought. He poses his analysis between Heidegger’s and Jaspers’s in recognizing that all existence is revealed as precarious, by forcing the thinker to abandon illusions of omnipotence or absolutization of “self ” as mere solipsistic temptations. This is the context of defense on the philosophy of existence. For Paci, the worldview promoted by Existentialism revolves around the fundamental idea of an internal process, that men are going to be their true unity and substantiality. Speaking of destiny and the capability of thinking of nothingness, anguish, and sense in its alternation with the non-sense of mortality and fnitude of existence, Paci says that Existentialism has turned what was an attitude into a philosophical problem. Existence is revealed as a philosophical problem.The anguish in front of nothingness – the feeling that accompanies the existentialist – does not really exist, it is not fear of anything, it is consciousness – not anguish, a deep and original sense of one’s being. It is the discovery of the seriousness in life, the responsibility of being in the world. Paci addresses the problem of nothingness by linking it to the moral problem of the possibility in being through the forms to the issues of the Existentialism of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Heidegger. The problem of morality for Paci is that the frst principle is not the “being”, but the “possibility” of being: what counts is one’s decision, the will of each individual.The world and the story I have not given before are extremely dependent on my decision, my choice. In Paci’s refection on Existentialism, the antinomy between “being” (reason) and “nonbeing” (the negative possibility, limitations of existence) is mediated and resolved by the value that is the regulative idea of existence; for this reason, Paci wrote that this antinomy is dominated by the problem of relationship.
52.3. Encountering phenomenology: rime and relation Paci’s initial Existentialism was infuenced by Banf’s critical rationalism, not the tendencies of nihilism, which Paci harshly criticized from the beginning. Unsatisfed with Existentialism, Paci replaced the centrality of the concept of existence with the emphasis given to the concept on the relationality of experience: through this, during the early 1950s, he moved into a relationistic perspective. Paci states that experience itself is primarily a process and interaction. He argues that existence is fnite, bounded by birth and death, and that the existence is a moment of temporality, not only unstoppable but also irreversible. As a matter of fact, for Paci, every event takes place in a process, as it is always in relation to other events. No event is self-suffcient or a substance: the non-substantiality of the event therefore implies a principle of relation between 567
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the events, the principle of universal interrelation.This theorization led to a defnition of Paci’s Existentialism as purely “relationistic”. Existence is therefore an event and not a substance; and if it is not a substance, existence is nothing. This explains the natural direction of man to someone, to something, a direction that means the possibility of “being”. Each “being” is characterized by reciprocal relations with other beings; such relations form the framework of reality and of the human world, and since this framework is dynamic, the characteristic of real life is temporality. For this reason, the category of “relation” is closely related to the conception of experience as temporality and history, and hence the category of possibility. Since the basis of Paci’s Existentialism – positive, intensely dynamic, and strongly permeated with ethics – is therefore the concept of “relation”, his theorization has led him to a form of relationalism that can be defned as ethical relationalism. The relation is frst and foremost an existential condition in the sense that all events are manifested by a relationship of mutual interaction. An event is all that happens or is in the world; also, the “ego”, the “self ”, which is known as ending, and empirical existence in relation to other existences. The concept of relation thus passes from the existential feld to the feld of knowledge and becomes a condition of being and of knowing.The relation, irreversible and necessary for information, is the law of knowledge and thought. In this phase, Paci published the book Tempo e Relazione (Time and Relation) (Paci 1954), and the book Dall’esistenzialismo al relazionismo (From Existentialism to Relationism) (Paci 1957a).With a clear debt to Alfred North Whitehead’s organicism, Paci wanted to go beyond the analysis of man offered by Existentialism by developing a vision of man in relation to Philosophy, in addition to culture, the arts, life in a whole sense, and by opening man to the concrete sense of history. Paci added to this original relationistic view an interpretation of Kant’s “transcendental schematism” as syntheses between the empirical and the conceptual. With these additions, around the mid-1950s, Paci was ready to graft Husserlian phenomenology onto Relationalism. In the late 1950s, Paci shifted his focus mainly to Husserlian phenomenology, and so it was until his death. He outlined a phenomenology based on the concepts of time and of relationship that underlined the concreteness of man’s relationship with the world of practice.
52.4. Phenomenology and relationalism Paci became a major leader of the Husserl-Renaissance in Europe with the books he published in the 1960s: Omaggio a Husserl (Homage to Husserl) published in 1960, and Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl (Time and Truth in the Phenomenology of Husserl) published in 1961. In his efforts, Paci was assisted by his connection with Father Hermann Leo Van Breda. During that time, Paci’s work was an event in Italian philosophy. In his interpretation, Husserlian Phenomenology is a teleology, a horizon of an intentional and intersubjective relationship, in which the frst person or person as the presence “in the fesh”, as eros and need, at the same time regains a practical-historical sense; and through the epoché, Phenomenology is an exercise in asceticism. The interpretation and development of Husserl’s phenomenology by Paci are related to the following linked three core themes: (1) epoché; (2) intentionality, precategorial, Lebenswelt; and (3) time, subject, person, intersubjectivity, history. The epoché or phenomenological reduction – more than the bracketing – to Paci is the suspension of any prior judgment. It is the refusal to accept a counterfeit, inauthentic world; the denial of inheritance without beneft of inventory; the rejection or abandonment of mundane attitudes, of habitual or bad daily life. In other words, it is the rejection of objectifying a “scientistic-positivistic” worldview. It is an “exercise” (in Greek, “asceticism”) and is “back to 568
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the same things”.After this epoché is the phenomenon – it is a living presence, and thus evidence; searching for the meaning of life, the movement toward the transcendence of new horizons. The epoché has concrete total experience – it is not just a cognitive formula for Paci.The epoché refers back to ego (which is the transcendental ego), and is therefore pure “intentionality”. In the interpretation of Paci, the epoché reads and interprets phenomenology as exercise and now asceticism – as a continuous operation, a “lifestyle”. The second thematic core comprises the intentionality themes, the precategorial, the Lebenswelt. Intention is indicated by Paci as “overcoming”, and returning to the defnition given by Sartre, Paci showed intentionality as “explosion toward” (s’éclater vers). From the “phenomenology of the essences” proposed in Husserl’s Ideas I, Paci developed the foundation of knowledge in subjective and intersubjective operations. Paci is also concerned with the problems of transcendental constitution. Phenomenology is defned, therefore, in terms of its antirelativism as well as in terms of its antipsychologism. Transcendental or intentional consciousness is presented in conjunction with the other, between instincts and needs, the body and its kinesthesia, feeling love and affection; Paci defnes consciousness as “concrete monads”, as “I inescapable”. In his interpretation, Paci passes from intentionality to consciousness to “Life original acting”, which is Lebenswelt. He believes that Lebenswelt is simply the existence of Existentialism, that life precedes the life sciences. Life is prior to methodologies, language analysis, technical languages, symbolism, formalism. Consciousness is constituted in the body and in becoming; this is “life original acting” that operates in time in an inter-relationship. Paci indicated that the objective of Husserl’s phenomenology would have to be to get to a junction of the meaning of the word “life” with that of the word “truth”. The third thematic unit includes the themes of time and history, the subject, person, intersubjectivity, crisis, and the telos. Regarding these issues, Paci’s philosophy is based on Husserl’s “Lectures on Internal Time-Consciousness”, of spring/summer 1928. Paci interprets the “time” of Husserl’s phenomenology as the fow of the original perceptions (“inferior”), as the “feeling alive”, the “present” that believes the past is to be contained in itself. Paci defnes “time” as a retention, an expected anticipation. Paci follows the famous tripartite division with which Husserl provides a frst – though not fnal – accommodation of the problem of time. Time is “principium individuationis”; it is growing as a person, understood as a responsibility in history. Paci’s phenomenological perspective is infuenced by the texts of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. Notwithstanding this, in the title of his book Time and Truth in Husserl’s Phenomenology, the words “Time and Truth” appear as the exact contrary to the words of Heidegger’s work “Being and Time”. Paci interprets the concept of “telos” as the fnal form that the intentional consciousness wants to realize, expressing how humanity wants to be realized in an authentic life, in a rational life. We must be aware of the link between personal and social behavior, and ethics and history: violence is indicated by Husserl as “barbaric” and by Paci as “ingens sylva” – referencing to Giambattista Vico. In his interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology, Paci does not stop at naturalism, nor organicism, he goes further to get to teleology.
52.5. Building bridges between phenomenology, science, and literature: relations and signifcations Paci’s work entitled Relazioni e signifcati (Relations and Meanings) (Paci 1965-1966), published in three volumes between 1965 and 1966, is dedicated to an interpretation of science, culture, and the arts in relation with his relationalistic Phenomenology. The essays published in these volumes were chosen by Paci among his writings elaborated between 1946 and 1965.3 569
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The essays analyze themes related to contemporary philosophy, literature, anthropology, and aesthetics – of music in particular – to the interrelation between aesthetics and ethics, and then also to poetry, architecture, and the dialogue between philosophy and architecture.4 This work shows Paci’s willing to give to his public a relationistic vision of culture, analyzed with the means given by philosophy, and especially by Phenomenology.
52.6. Husserl meets Marx: a new interpretation of the life-world In the early 1960s, Paci combined his understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology with his personal reinterpretation of Marxism via his reading of Labriola and Gramsci to emphasize anti-reifcation, anti-objectifcation, anti-fetishization, and thus, in macro-transposition, anti-capitalism and antibureaucratism. For Paci, the “crisis” of European Sciences is not a rejection of science as a cause of or contributing factor to barbarism. Two fgures are at the origin of the theory of the crisis, Galileo and Descartes, and the crisis is understood by Paci as a critique of science. Paci indicates the remedy to the crisis in the foundation of the rational and human value of science through a search for truth on the precategorial foundation of science, the Lebenswelt, and the original experience that precedes every scientifc category of transactions that subjects perform over time. Following Husserl, philosophers are “servants of humanity” and the philosophy is “strenge Wissenschaft,” science that is strict, radical, goes to the roots, brings all truth; and transcendental ego. Paci’s book Funzione delle scienze e signifcato dell’uomo (Function of Science and the Meaning of Man) is already a manifesto of his phenomenological perspective accompanied by Marxism. Published in 1963 in Italy, this book became well known in Europe and in the United States of America. His former student, Stefano Zecchi, perfectly recalls the core of this theme in what follows: It is interesting to note that in the third section of Funzione delle scienze e signifcato dell’uomo, the one devoted to the relationship between Phenomenology and Marxism, Paci especially highlighted Merleau-Ponty’s statement that Marxism is neither a philosophy of subjectivity, nor objectivity, but a philosophy of history. History, in Paci’s thought, is recovered more and more in the framework of a philosophy of history. (2002, 479) In this way one can capture the sense of the central thesis of this book, where it is argued that philosophy constitutively tends towards a teleological intentional meaning because the world is not interesting for what it is, but for the meaning it can have. Behind the overcoming of Husserl, the criticism of his thought, is the attempt to provide a historical-materialistic basis to phenomenology. (Ibid., 479–480) His last works were devoted to the project of a phenomenological encyclopedia (Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica / Ideas for an phenomenological encyclopedia), published in 1973, and, again, to a comparative analysis of Husserlian Phenomenology and Marxism, carried out in his posthumously published (1981) book, Il flosofo e la città: Platone, Whitehead, Husserl, Marx (Philosophy and the City: Plato,Whitehead, Husserl, Marx). In this work, Paci proposed a solution to what for him was the unsolved problem of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology: the objectifcation of man conceived as its reduction to an abstract category – objectivifcation that then approached the Marxist concept of “alienation”. 570
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With the book “Ideas for a phenomenological encyclopedia”, Paci prepared the project for a phenomenological encyclopedia of knowledge. Paci saw in phenomenology a “new science”: the term “new science” is deliberately taken from Vico. Phenomenology as a new science is the dynamic synthesis of human activities. Paci said that the fght against the categorical, and the return to the subject for the foundation of science and philosophy, is the struggle against capitalism. Paci also indicates that the philosophy that continually goes from the actual presence (and thus turns and transforms the world) is the only philosophy, the “perennial philosophy”, the frst philosophy that returns to the sciences their function and to man the meaning of truth.
Notes 1 Hua VI. It is thanks to Paci that in 1961 there appeared the frst Italian translation of this Husserl text (translation by Enrico Filippini). 2 aut aut. Rivista di flosofa e di cultura, founded in 1951. Il Saggiatore, http://autaut.ilsaggiatore.com/ 3 Relazioni e signifcati I (Filosofa e fenomenologia della cultura), I – Filosofa e fenomenologia della cultura; II – Fenomenologia della vita e ragione in Banf; III – Il signifcato di Whitehead; IV – Logica e flosofa in Whitehead;V – Empirismo e relazioni in Whitehead;VI – Whitehead e Husserl;VII – Nota su Bertrand Russell; VIII – Neopositivismo, fenomenologia e letteratura; IX – Caduta della intenzionalità e linguaggio; X – Follia e verità in Santayana; XI – Scienza e umanesimo italiano; XII – Fenomenologia e letteratura; XIII – Fenomenologia e narrativa; XIV – Fenomenologia, psichiatria e romanzo; XV – Robbe-Grillet, Butor e la fenomenologia; XVI – Problemi di antropologia; XVII – Struttura e lavoro vivente; XVIII – Sul concetto di struttura. Relazioni e signifcati II (Kierkegaard e Th. Mann), Part 1. I – Ironia, demoniaco ed eros; II – Estetica ed etica; III – La dialettica della fede; IV – Ripetizione e ripresa: il teatro e la sua funzione catartica;V – Storia ed apocalisse;VI – La psicologia e il problema dell’angoscia;VII – Angoscia e relazione;VIII – Angoscia e fenomenologia dello eros; IX – L’intenzionalità e l’amore; X – Kierkegaard e il signifcato della storia. Part 2. I – Musica mito e psicologia in Th. Mann; II – Th. Mann e la flosofa; III – Due momenti fondamentali nell’opera di Mann; IV – L’ironia di Mann;V – Su «Altezza reale»; VI – Ricordo e presenza dei «Buddenbrook». Relazioni e signifcati III (Critica e dialettica), Part 1. I – Sulla poesia di Rilke; II – Sul senso della poesia di T. S. Eliot; III – L’uomo di Proust; IV – Valéry o della costruzione;V – Sulla musica contemporanea;VI – Per una fenomenologia della musica;VII – Interpretazione del teatro;VIII – Teatro, funzione delle scienze e rifessione; IX – Sull’architettura contemporanea; X – L’architettura e il mondo della vita; XI – Il metodo industriale, l’edilizia e il problema estetico; XII – Fenomenologia e architettura contemporanea; XIII – Wright e «lo spazio vissuto». Part 2: I – Il signifcato della dialettica platonica; II – Dialettica, fenomenologia e antropologia in Hegel; III – Tre paragraf per una fenomenologia del linguaggio; IV – Ancora sulla fenomenologia del linguaggio;V – Dialettica e intenzionalità nella critica e nella poesia;VI – A cominciare dal presente;VII – In un rapporto intenzionale;VIII – L’alienazione delle parole. 4 Cf. Ferri 2013.
References Abbagnano, Nicola and Paci, Enzo. (Ed.). 1943. Primato. Lettere e arti d’Italia, n. 1, gennaio. Ferri, Michela Beatrice. 2013. “Ernesto Nathan Rogers ed Enzo Paci.” In: Ernesto Nathan Rogers, 19091969. Ed. C. Baglione. Nuova Serie di Architettura, 1. Milano: Franco Angeli, pp. 148–155. Paci, Enzo. 1938. Il signifcato del Parmenide nella flosofa di Platone. Messina-Milano: Principato, Pubblicazioni della Regia Università di Milano, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofa. ———. 1940. Pensiero, esistenza e valore: studi sul pensiero contemporaneo. Milano-Messina: Principato. ———. 1947. Esistenza e Immagine. Milano:Tarantola Editore. ———. 1949. Ingens sylva. Saggio sulla flosofa di G.B.Vico. Milano: Mondadori. ———. 1950a. Esistenzialismo e storicismo. Milano: Mondadori. ———. 1950b. Il nulla e il problema dell’uomo. Torino: Taylor ———. 1954. Tempo e relazione. Torino: Taylor.
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Michela Beatrice Ferri ———. 1957a. Dall’esistenzialismo al relazionismo. Messina-Firenze: D’Anna Editore. ———. 1957b.“Sul signifcato del ‘platonismo’ di Husserl.” Acme, vol. X, pp. 135–151. ———. 1960. Omaggio a Husserl. Ed. Enzo Paci. Milano: Il Saggiatore. ———. 1961. Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl. Bari: Laterza. ———. 1963. Funzione delle scienze e signifcato dell’uomo. Milano: Il Saggiatore. ———. 1965–1966. Relazioni e signifcati, volume 1: Filosofa e fenomenologia della cultura (1965), volume 2: Kierkegard e Thomas Mann (1965), volume 3: Critica e dialettica (1966). Milano: Lampugnani Nigri. ———. 1973. Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenologica. Milano: Bompiani. Zecchi, Stefano. 2002.“Enzo Paci.The Life-World from an Empirical Approach.” In: Phenomenology WorldWide: Foundations—Expanding Dynamics—Life Engagements: A Guide for Research and Study. Ed. A-T. Tymieniecka. Analecta Husserliana.The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. LXXX, Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 479–481.
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53 JAN PATOČKA Riccardo Paparusso
The following chapter analyzes Jan Patočka’s concept of “asubjective phenomenology”. It begins with Patočka’s criticism of the Husserlian “life-world”, a criticism which leads to Patočka’s concept of the “phenomenal feld” as the original source of manifestation, that which is irreducible both to a singular being and to a transcendental subject (in the Husserlian sense). After retracing the Husserlian roots of Patočka’s conception of phenomenality, the text examines human existence as the agent of asubjective phenomenology, ontologically characterized by a unitary, ‘melodic’ movement.This unitary,‘melodic’ movement, I will show, is triggered and nurtured, in turn, by the original requirement to fulfll the needs of the naked body in which ‘existence’ itself is incarnated. Attending to existence’s movement and its vital origin permits a more in-depth comprehension of the nature of the phenomenal feld and allows us to rethink, with Patočka, Husserl’s “life-world” in terms of the “natural world”.
53.1. The crisis of the Lebenswelt: the Husserlian roots of asubjective phenomenology The core of Jan Patočka’s theoretical thought can be found in the idea of “asubjective phenomenology.” The concept of “asubjective phenomenology” courses throughout his phenomenological work, most prominently during the mature period of Patočka’s thinking, between the second half of the sixties and the second part of the seventies. The theoretical operation which leads Patočka to the thematization of “asubjective phenomenology” consists of a criticism of the Husserlian foundation of the Lebenswelt in transcendental consciousness.At the beginning of the essay La philosophie de la crise des sciences d'après E. Husserl et sa conception d'une phénoménologie du monde de la vie, Patočka, following in Husserl’s footsteps, emphasizes the paradox of modernity.The universalization of European techno-scientifc rationality has led Europe to collapse, to the loss of itself as the “special, even privileged” role of the leader for humanity.The analysis described by Husserl in the Crisis of the European Sciences is, for Patočka, the key reference point for every attempt to reply to this catastrophe of reason and for understanding its very motives. Nevertheless, according to Patočka, the Husserlian elaboration of the “life-world” shows itself to be afficted by a basic error which compromises its very starting point, making it party to the oblivion of the “life-world”. In Patočka’s view, the hint of complicity between Husserl and the 573
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techno-scientifc removal of the pre-categorical world is to be found in the transcendental status assigned to the ‘life-world’ by Husserl himself. What Husserl denounces about our artifcially constructed world is not thought, functioning even in the realm of the given, but rather thought rendered wholly autonomous, which, in place of fnding its intuitive fulflment in experience, makes itself wholly independent of it and ultimately seeks to replace it […] (Patočka 1972, 231) By founding the “life-world” in the constitutive activity of transcendental intentionality, Husserl, according to Patočka, effectively reiterates the modern scientifc claim to truly penetrate tangible reality by removing each sign of its irreducibility. This is to say, the “life-world” that has already been objectifed by techno-science is yet again reduced to a mere object by the constitutive gaze of transcendental consciousness.The ‘life-world’ consists of contents that are independent in their correlation to an embodied consciousness. But when set before the absolute regard of the ego, these contents inevitably lose their independence. In Patočka’s view, Husserl only attains the ground of a secondary world, while failing to account for the world itself in its primeval and obscure nature, i.e. the world of doxa. Because the Husserlian “life-world” is conceived of as that which can show itself ‘in the fesh’ before the ego, its inobjectivity is violated and it is reduced to an innocuous presence. In order to dissolve the aporia Patočka detects in the “life-world”, he suggests a project working towards the ‘universalization of the ‘epoché ’. According to such a universalization, the epoché itself would expand its operational range to encompass, as a consequence, the immediateness of the inner experience of the ego.This operation results in what Patočka conceives of as the authentic transcendental, that a priori by virtue of which an ego can appear: the “world”. Through the ‘universal expansion’ of the epoché, Patočka comes to a ‘world’ which, showing the unmistakable mark of the Finkian concept of “world”, stands out as the condition of the manifestation of each existing being.To be more precise, the world is a horizon that, proceeding and including the inner horizons of each body, allows for the appearance of that which exists. It is, in other words, the “horizon of the horizons”. As the “horizon of the horizons” is gained by the suspension of the transcendental conscience, it must impose itself as an asubjective “phenomenal feld”.This, as such, makes possible both the appearance of the being and of the subject to which the being appears. Free from every type of ontic or egologic conditioning, Patočkan phenomenality shows itself to be “appearing-as-such”, i.e. as a source of manifestation that reveals itself directly, without any type of ontic, conscious metaphorization, or intermediation. At frst sight, one might see such a mode of thinking as a direct overturning of Husserlian phenomenology. However, Patočka himself detects the early seeds of this movement of a-subjectifcation in the defnition of the phenomenological I proposed by Husserl in the Logical Investigations. The real discovery of the Logical Investigations is the feld of appearing which must overcome the thing and its material structure, in order for the thing itself to be able to present itself and appear, a feld which hides in itself a legality (Gesetzmässigkeit) sui generis, which is not convertible into that of the object in its being or in that of the mental being with its specifcally egological character. (Patočka 1991, 175) Undoubtedly, here the object appears only as intended by the intentional acts of that phenomenological ego resulting from the suspension of the empirical ego. Nevertheless, what Husserl 574
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implies as a phenomenological phenomenon here is not an autonomous, absolute pole capable of uniting the multiplicity of conscious experiences or dispose of them. Rather, it can only announce itself in the convergence of those experiences. He is interested in the notion of intentional acts, and of the corresponding objective reality, insofar it seems to allow him to avoid, provided that some precautions are taken, the confusion of subjective and objective, which is very common in the psychology of that period infuenced by Empiricism. His aim, when he speaks about lived experiences and their intentional feature, is not something subjective in an egological sense. When he writes the Logical Investigations, Husserl does not acknowledge the existence of a pure ego (Patočka 1991, 175–176). If Husserl does not here posit any pure ego as the foundation of the fux of intentional experiences, then the source of manifestation that he discovers could be only thought of, to the full, as a sphere which is irreducible to the subjective regard.
53.2. Embodied existence In attributing a subjective character to phenomenality,one should give the term “subjective”a “much simpler” sense than one would normally use (Patočka 1991, 184). In Patočka’s view, the “phenomenal sphere” is ‘subjective’ not because it coincides “with the essence in itself ”, with the transcendental ego. Rather,“[i]t is something larger, more inclusive: it is a project of all the possible encounters with the essence” (Patočka 1991, 185). A phenomenon is said to be a “project of a possible encounter” (Patočka 1991, 185) to the extent that it is in relation to an ego sum that, as such, dwells in its situation and lives in possibilities. Better yet, the source of manifestation is a feld of possibilities that – far from being made up by a subjective entity – actually ‘opens’ to an ego, placing itself as a condition of possibility for any possible encounter between the ego and the being. In his account of the impurities of the ego as conceived of in the Logical Investigations, then, Patočka rethinks the ego as a Da-sein incarnated in a living body, whose practical-perceptive orientation towards the surrounding environment always precedes anything we would conventionally defne as ‘subjectivity’. Here Patočka joins those critics – led primarily by Levinas – who identify the weak point of Heideggerian existence in its lack of bodily consistency. While the ego of asubjective phenomenology is a conception of human existence that clearly echoes the existential analytic of Heidegger, the “openness” of this existence, for Patočka, emerges from a body motility which is involuntary and ungovernable because it is aroused by the vacuum-flling tension of vital necessities. Patočka leads us to this conception of existence by rethinking the Heideggerian concept of “project” (Entwurf). More precisely, he radicalizes the original condition of ‘thrown-ness’ (Geworfenheit) in Heidegger’s idea of project. Refusing the Heideggerian project’s implementation of understanding (Verstehen) – which Patočka sees as the expression of a consolidated residual ‘subjectivism’ and, therefore, an ‘undetermined idealism’ (Patočka 1980b, 125) – Patočka understands thrown-ness as a horizon of possibilities. He explicitly denies a phenomenological status for this horizon: “there is no phenomenological project of possibilities” (Patočka 1980b, 125). Patočka writes: “the projection of one’s own possibilities is not an original creation of possibilities; neither a project of the world, but just a project of my existence based on the world” (Patočka 1980b, 125).Things themselves release feasible possibilities through their use, by asking existence to realize itself through the implementation of such usabilities: The projection of possibilities is an activity whose nature is completely determined by possibility. Nevertheless, it is not a phenomenon. It rather works as a constructive 575
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operation. It is evident that it is only because I can that the things uncover themselves to me, in the context of my “power”. On the other hand, the I which can is able to show itself in its power only thank to the appeal that it receives from things themselves. I would not have any possibility if I did not have the means to realize possibilities, my possibilities. (Patočka 1980b, 120) The material background of the world accomplishes the movement of possibilities by establishing a relationship of attraction and repulsion with the kinesthetic system of the “living body” (Leib).The sentient body fnds its way among the things of the surrounding environment and receives from things themselves, which attract and reject it, a feld of possibilities which it in turn transfers to existence. By virtue of this privileged relationship of ‘meshing’ with things, Patočkan corporeality acts as a mediation center.The body is co-involved with existence, to which it is offering itself as a necessary candidate in the realization of the possibilities themselves.The mass of things, therefore, opens towards the ‘living body’ a feld of possibilities where the existence, rooted in the body itself, perceives the manifestation of each single possible entity. It can be consequently inferred that Patočka’s phenomenality is a binary structure formed by the weaving between the ‘living body’-mass of things and the feld of possibilities that opens up from the weaving itself. The interweaving between the thing and ‘living body’ is posited by Patočka as an elementary relation. The totality of possibilities is not only formed by practical skills; behind it, Patočka identifes a succession of ‘appetites, desires, needs …’. Moreover, if the possibilities involve human existence through dynamics of attraction–repulsion, they open up, above all, from things that are related to the needy body, which satisfy its needs, its instincts, attracting or repulsing it. In other words, in Patočka’s view, the thing originally manifests itself as a nourishment, the object of instinct, of bodily desire, even before taking the form of a manageable and perceptible entity. Above all else, things communicate to the ‘living body’ the possibilities of satisfaction of vital needs. Existential possibilities, in turn, arise from those needs, staying irreparably related to them. To arrive at a clearer understanding of the biological origin of existential possibilities, it is both useful and necessary here to read a salient passage from The Natural World and Phenomenology: It is clear that the things that we handle and that we understand precisely through their manipulation are the things, which serve our needs, needs, which are implicated by our bodily functions and by our ability to provide.And such needs do not exist in isolation, as a single reality closed in and of themselves, but as concrete references: a key in the hands of a blacksmith refers to the lock, to the material used and to the lathe. Instead in the hand of the tenant it refers to the room with its furniture, its separateness from the outside, the workplace, and so on. (Patočka 2009, 221)1 To further understand the argument that Patočka develops in the lines above, we can read a passage from the Draft of Lectures on Corporeality, a text written one year after The Natural World and Phenomenology. We are capable of getting dressed, of walking, of politely using a knife and fork, of reading and writing, of playing the violin or the piano, of driving a car, etc. … Every action is a being around things, is a modifcation of things. Most of these modifcations are necessary to prolong and renovate life, so that life itself manages to stand in the 576
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exact place where it already is. In fact, human life needs constant concern, because on top of being movement, it is a stationary vibration. (Patočka 1980a, 70) Here, Patočka recalls, radicalizes and even goes beyond Levinas’ work on “enjoyment”. He sees the thing as an element that flls the emptiness carried by the intention to satisfy the body. Such a body, as Levinas says in Totality and Infnity, is basically naked, destitute. With Patočka, we realize that the possibility, the usability that originally asks existence to project, emerges frst and foremost from a movement of attraction – or rejection – carried out by the elemental basis of the world in the naked body. In short, this possibility emerges from (and continuously returns to) the opportunity for biological satisfaction which the needy body is promised by the element. One could otherwise say that Patočka reinterprets the Heideggerian “world-environment” (Umwelt) as being radicalized on a feld belonging to the philosophy of life.To illustrate: the key in the hand of the blacksmith has its “for” (Wozu) in the lock and in the lathe. The key has its “in order to” (Um-zu) – which is to say, its usability – in the locking and unlocking of the door. However, the private, intimate handling that the blacksmith makes of the key reveals that the entire operation essentially recalls the naked body’s need for protection from the outside, a need itself belonging to the naked body of the blacksmith. Thus, the usability of the equipment emerges from the possibility of biological fulfllment and ultimately reconnects to it.The “for” thus emerges from the ‘cavity’ dug in the naked body by biological need; the “in order to” is developed from the ability to fll this need. Accordingly, the totality of “involvements” (Betwandtnis), the network of object-like entities in which every tool works “for” the other, is irradiated from a primary totality of biological fulfllments. In short, it originates from a primordial chain of connections between the elements and the needs that can be satisfed. Given the analysis developed so far, it is possible to assume that the feld of possibilities for human existence is opened by an elemental and biological link between thing and corporeality.Therefore, the asubjective phenomenality thought by Patočka can be understood as a double binary system made up of a corporeity–thing vital relationship and a feld of biological possibilities – which in turn leads to a feld of practical possibilities. The ego sum, the incarnate Da-sein, keeps this dual feld of possibilities in sight. Now, the original biological and involuntary character of the feld of possibilities makes this phenomenality impenetrable to any attempt at foundation-forming by human existence.At the same time, this protects the existence itself from any tendency towards the “subjective irruption”, which Patočka considers as the crucial faw of Husserl’s transcendental consciousness.
53.3. Human existence in motion The fundamental category through which Patočka defnes incarnate existence as the ego of his asubjective phenomenology is movement. “Our existence”, he writes in Lesson Plans on Corporeality, “is of such a level that movement is not only essential to it, but it is all its nature.” To clarify, Patočka has a conception of human existence as a movement of possibility, namely as a movement of a being that can live in the realization of its possibilities. This conception of existence stems from a radicalization of the Aristotelian idea of movement. Using a methodology borrowed from Heidegger’s existential analytic of Da-sein, Patočka gives an in-depth examination of the adherence between potency (dýnamis) and substrate (hypokeimenon). Here, it is useful to focus on a passage drawn from Lesson Plans on Corporeality. 577
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Having described the Aristotelian conception of movement as a model for understanding the constitutive movement of human existence, Patočka writes: Let suppose that we do not have a movement based on something, a movement of a possibility which has at its bottom something that persists and realizes itself in the possibilities. Suppose, therefore, that this something is its possibility, that in it there is nothing before and after the possibilities. Rather it lives only by being in its possibilities. In this way, we obtain the radicalization of the Aristotelian concept of movement, which is no longer defned by a common holder. TI METABALLON = the particular being, which we are speaking about, is not given in advance as common foundation of mutable determinations, but it is only in the possibility of encompassing all these determinations in a unique, global, sense-donation.The movement of this kind is also a dýnamis which realizes itself, but not the dýnamis of a being that exists in advance. Rather it is the dýnamis of something which is not yet and which has the possibility of encompassing in itself and overcoming all the dýnamis as their means, as moments of its situation.A movement of this kind recalls the movement of a melody or in general of a musical composition: each element is only a part of something exceeding it, which is not here from the beginning in a completed shape. Instead, in all its details, it is only prepared and as long as the composition keeps on playing it is always to-be. (Patočka 1980a, 66–67)2 Patočka intends to emancipate the movement from its traditional ontifcation.This is why the movement itself cannot consist, for him, as the mere shift of a substrate – something persistent, a subject – from the form of potency to actualized shape. Patočka radicalizes the state of pure potency in which the substrate, the matter, is at the starting point of its movement. In this way, he replaces the human substrate – the subjectum – with the dynamis, the possibility. As pure potency of a certain form, the hypokeimenon, especially in its human iteration, is potentially disposed to adopt an indefnite spectrum of shapes. Better yet, because it could potentially assume all the possible forms, it tends to foat in the dynamis of no form, in a possibility that is not that of a determined form (i.e. of an entity already provided in advance), but rather the possibility of an indefnite spectrum of possibilities, forms, acts. In other words, Patočka sees the notion of substrate as being susceptible to the metaphysical projection of the notion of the subject. Namely, he is aware that modern metaphysics reads the notion of substrate through the lens of the subject, reducing the movement of the substrate to a movement of a subject. By this operation, modern metaphysics subjectivizes any and all movement. In order to avoid this reduction of humanity to subjectivity, Patočka turns the hypokeimenon of the human movement into a pure dynamis. In doing so, he reconceives of it as the movement of a possibility that is deprived of a predetermined ontic (and thus, subjective) foundation and is thus realized without ever defnitively actualizing itself, as an energeia atheles. In other words, it realizes itself as an act of endlessly becoming, a possibility irreparably open, never crystalizing itself in the rigidity of a subject. In short, Patočka rethinks human existence as the motion of a project of an indefnite horizon of possibilities that, as such, can never achieve a defnitive realization. Now, as we have already acknowledged, the possibilities projected by Patočkan existence derive from the relationship between the needy living body and its elemental basis in the world. Accordingly, it is reasonable to assume that the movement of human existence as a motion of possibilities is originally triggered by the elemental, natural relationship between things and
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corporeality. This is to say, human existence is an existential movement that is aroused, constantly passed through, and nourished by the bodily movement directed to satisfaction of biological need. It is precisely because of this that the movement in question develops as a blind telos, which, emerging from the nebulous and unintelligible ground of vital necessity, cannot proceed as a progressive, already speculated, advancement of the telos itself. This movement takes place as a continuous rise of an end, maturing itself successively on the original bodyelemental ground. As a consequence, it unfolds itself as an irremediably open possibility, never crystallizable and attainable in any fnal sense. Precisely because of this uneven character and its irreparable openness and incompleteness, this existential movement does not develop as a net succession of autonomous and disjointed moments. Rather it is articulated as a melodic movement whose phases follow by intersecting and clinging to one another.
53.4. The natural world Patočka’s thematization of the notion of the “natural world” reaches its most signifcant development in “The Natural World and Phenomenology”. Here, the universal extension of the epoché leads to a rethinking of Husserl’s Lebenswelt as a “life-world” which is an original ‘natural’ dimension, not inhabited by a prior conscious structure.The “life-world”, thus redefned by Patočka, affrms itself as the elementary feld of vital nourishment that causes the original movement (pohyb) through which human life relates to itself to gain self-consciousness. The natural world, thus understood, is that pre-thematic sphere in which an ego is not yet present. It is the area, indeed, where human life originally develops the movement to face the original source of manifestation, so to understand itself in its own being and only then to work as an ego. As this movement is centered on the original bodily orientation between things, it unfolds between the two main points of reference for such an orientation: the “earth” (země) and the “sky” (nebe). By setting up the natural world between the extraneousness of “earth” and “sky”, Patočka strengthens its irreducibility to objectifcation. More precisely, the natural world receives from the “earth” and the “sky” the tension between familiarity and extraneousness (i.e. closeness and ‘distance’) that, as such, keeps any attempt at detecting a defnite sense in check. Patočka identifes three fundamental phases of movement in human existence: “anchoring” (zakotvení) or “rooting” (zakořenění); “self-removal in self-extension” (sebezbavení sebeprodlužováním); and “self-fnding in self-surrender” (sebenalezení sebevzdáním) (see Patočka 2009, 233; English translation 269).3 The concern with the fulfllment of vital needs is the center of existence in the “anchoring” phase. At this stage, the movement develops as a dynamic of “acceptance” that roots human life in the ground of the “natural world”. Such a dynamic of anchoring and acceptance allows human existence to access the “natural world”. In doing so, it not only opens the movement of existence, but continues to fow and echo throughout the other two phases. Consequently, the second and third movement can elevate human existence from its rootedness only thanks to this original “rooting”. In order to ensure the satisfaction of vital necessities, the fulfllment of biological needs to be organized.This organizational activity coincides with the second movement which, by rationalizing the process of conservation, comes to identify existence to its function, to the role that it plays in the exploitation of nutritional resources. Such a process of identifcation rids existence
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of the possibility of accessing the most authentic nucleus of its being, reducing it to a merely ontic-biological level of being. Each of the frst two movements is characterized by a specifc relationship to the other: the frst is marked by an attitude of complete reliance and abandonment to the care of the other; in the second, human existence develops an attitude of opposition by which it reduces the other, and itself, to mere force, a means useful in the pursuit of economic objectives. Furthermore, through the second movement, existence expands in attempting to optimize its performance more and more, thus losing itself in a spiral of rationalization, mechanization. For the expanded existence to fnd itself again, it is necessary to undertake a movement of unconditional “dedication” to others, an act of unforeseeable responsibility for others.This brings us to the third movement. The third movement does not demand any guarantees of restitution; it suspends the rational economic circuit, propelling an existence towards the attainment of self-consciousness. The act of “dedication” culminates in the realization of a mutual interpenetration of individuals, through which the human being can fnally be recognized, not in terms of its object-hood, but as a consciousness. As unconditional devotion to the other, the third movement consists of a universal renewal of that acceptance of the other which is the necessary basis of the frst movement: “rooting”. Thus, through the movement of “dedication”, the human life reveals an openness and an infnity that were announced already, originally, in the feld of frst movement. Here, human existence is rooted in the natural world only as a ‘foreign guest’ of the other who accepts it, and therefore it is already decentralized. In other words, through “dedication” human existence reveals an openness, which it shows implicitly already in the movement of “rooting”. Accordingly, the third movement exposes existence to a phenomenal feld, which is already present within the dimension of anchoring, though the rooted existence is not fully aware of it. This brings to the surface an openness that already passes through the movement of rooting. And in doing so, it exposes the existence to a whole before the parts, which was already opening within the anchoring dimension without the rooted existence being fully aware of it. In The Natural World and Phenomenology, Patočka concludes the thematization of the third movement precisely by returning our attention to the movement of “rooting”. Any doing, any orientation or behavior must be preceded by an anchorage, a rooting that takes place in the dimension of passivity, of being exposed. It is here that, frst of all, a whole is opened up to the parts and is essentially inexhaustible and we discover our relationship with it – or, better yet, its relationship with us – in affectivity, in the way it intonates with us as we are exposed, as we are open and sensitive to it. (Patočka 2009, 263) Rooting, then, is a phase of existence when the “living body” is anchored to the ground of the surrounding world with which the body itself establishes an organic bond. And this, in turn, emanates vital-practical possibilities that help existence to orient itself among other things.The “dedication” of the third movement leads to an openness that embryonically traverses the “natural world” in the “rooting” phase. Thus, through unconditional devotion to others, existence returns to the anchoring step to grasp, as a unitary structure, the naked “living body”, the thing and its feld of organic-practical possibilities.That is, a whole before the parts – which appears to the existence as the source of manifestation for both the being and the existence itself.
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Notes 1 Here I provide my direct translation from the Czech original version since the English edition misses the translation of this fragment.All the page references are to the translations listed in the bibliography below. 2 This fragment has been directly translated from the original Czech version. 3 The translation of the words mentioned has been modifed on the basis of the original version.
References Patočka, Jan. 1972. “La philosophie de la crise des sciences d'après E. Husserl et sa conception d'une phénoménologie du monde de la vie.” Archiwum Historii Filozofi i Myśli Społecznej, 18, pp. 3–18; English translation: “Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy of the Crisis of the Sciences and His Conception of a Phenomenology of the ‘Life-World’.” Trans. E. Kohák. In: Jan Patočka. Philosophy and Selected Writings. Ed. Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989, pp. 223–238. ———. 1975. “Epoché und Reduktion.” In: Bewusst-sein, Gerhard Funke zu eigen. Eds. Alexius J. Bucher, Hermann Drüe, and Thomas M. Seebohm. Bonn: Bouvier, pp. 76–85; French translation: “Epoche et reduction.” Trans. E. Abrams. In: Qu’est-ce que la phénomenologie? Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2002, pp. 217–228. ———. 1980a. “Koncept přednašek o tělesnosti.” In: Přirozený svět a pohyb lidské existence II. Ed. Ivan Chvatík. Prague: Archive Collection, pp. 2.5.1–2.5.76; French translation: “Leçons sur la corporeité.” Trans. E.Abrams. In: Papiers phénoménologiques. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995, pp. 53–116. ———. 1980b. “Tělo, možnosti, svět, pole zjevování.” In: Přirozený svět a pohyb lidské existence III. Ed. Ivan Chvatík. Prague: Archive Collection, pp. 216–232; French translation: “Corps, possibilité, monde, champ d’apparition.”Trans. E.Abrams. In: Papiers phénoménologiques. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995, pp. 117–129. ———. 1991. “Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Möglichkeit einer “asubjektiven” Phänomenologie.” In: Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz. Eds. Klaus Nellen, Jiri Němec, and Ilja Šrubař. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, pp. 267–285; French translation:“Le subjectivisme de la phenomenology husserlienne et la possibilité d’une phenomenologie ‘asubjective’.”Trans. E. Abrams. In: Qu’est-ce que la phénomenologie? Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2002, pp. 166–188. ———. 2009. “Přirozený svět a fenomenologie.” In: Fenomenologické spisy II. Eds. Pavel Kouba and Ondřej. Prague: Oikoymenh, pp. 202–237; English translation: “The Natural World and Phenomenology.” Trans. E. Kohák. In: Jan Patočka. Philosophy and Selected Writings. Ed. Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989, pp. 239–273.
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54 ADOLF REINACH Marco Tedeschini
54.1. A short biographical note Adolf Bernard Philipp Reinach was born in Mainz on December 23, 1883. Reinach was a leading fgure among Husserl’s early pupils who animated the circles of Munich and Göttingen and, together with Alexander Pfänder and Johannes Daubert, was a leading fgure of the so-called Phenomenological Realism (Salice 2016). Between 1909 and 1914 he taught in Göttingen alongside Husserl; then, at the outbreak of World War I, he left academia to volunteer for the army. Adolf Reinach was killed in action outside Diksmuide in Flanders, on November 16, 1917. In his short intellectual life, he tackled logic and theory of knowledge, ontology, psychology, theory of law, physics and religious experience through phenomenology. His most important work is On The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law. In what follows, I will outline an intellectual and philosophical profle of this prominent fgure, one of the protagonists of the emerging Phenomenological Movement (Spiegelberg 1982).
54.2. What Reinach’s realistic phenomenology is As a phenomenologist, Reinach was interested in investigating phenomena, that is, anything that can be the object of our experience as intuitively appears in the latter. He believed that our experience is intentional, i.e., it is directedness toward something. According to Reinach and other phenomenologists – including Husserl – phenomenology aims to clarify the essence of phenomena through the analysis of the experience in which they appear. As Reinach himself states, the concept of essence (Wesen) is “ambiguous” (Vieldeutig) (1989e, 362). However, by this concept Reinach often seems to mean the “so-being” or “Whatness” of something (e.g., Reinach 1989g, see in particular 144). Although he never called himself nor his phenomenology “realist”, Reinach was regarded as such by his followers – both of his time (Hildebrand 1960, 489–490; Stein 2002, 220; Ingarden 1968, 106–135, see in particular, 113) and of today (Dubois and Smith 2014) – precisely because of this phenomenological quest for essences. However, as Reinach states, the task of clarifying essences is merely “a means” (1989g, 156): in fact, the ultimate goal of phenomenology is to grasp the laws that “hold true of ” these essences (Ibid.). Only thus can
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this philosophical approach become a rigorous science and give all other sciences their proper foundation (Ibid., 163). This target was the same as Husserl’s. In fact, even after the transcendental turn, Husserl thought that eidetic sciences should be grounded in phenomenology (Hua III/1, 5–32/153– 160). Nevertheless, Reinach refused Husserl’s transcendental reform of phenomenology because, as far as we know, if the method of the phenomenological reduction “were necessary, then the entity in its being and likewise the being itself could not be inquired with the method and […] every ontology would be precluded” (Conrad 1992, 83, translation is mine). Reinach thought that the very being of phenomena would have become lost with this reduction, so he moved away from Husserl. Probably, Reinach understood this method as an actual reduction of phenomena to consciousness, i.e., as the loss of the phenomena’s independence from it – which is exactly what the concept of “essence” should grant them. Indeed, with regard to Ideas I, he critically stated that “according to Husserl phenomenology and the eidetic are to be separated” (Reinach, 1989e, 362, translation is mine) – which is exactly what he could not accept. As Conrad put it, Reinach’s phenomenology was a “phenomenology without reduction” (1992, 83, translation is mine).
54.3. The theory of judgment and the concept of intentionality Reinach’s theory of judgment constitutes the epistemological framework of his phenomenology.This set of assumptions on epistemology establishes the ground of Reinach’s phenomenological philosophy. By means of judgment, one seizes and expresses the laws of essence, which, as we have seen, are the ultimate aim of the phenomenologist. In fact, judgment is nothing but “my reply to the unity that appears in front of me in the objective state of affairs” (Reinach 1989f, 463, translation is mine). States of affairs are the correspondent intentional object of judgment. Hence, there are states of affairs that correspond to the laws of essence. I will come back to this point in the next section. Meanwhile, it is necessary to clarify Reinach’s original perspective on judgment. Within the general defnition of judgment just outlined, Reinach distinguishes two kinds: 1) conviction or belief, and 2) assertion (1989b, 331). A belief is a position-taking act – an antepredicative “state of consciousness” (Ibid., 320) – in which the subject posits a state of affairs as certainly being.An assertion is a linguistic act, which is spontaneous, i.e.,“‘made’ by us” (Ibid.). A belief prescribes four possibilities for a judgment to be such.The subject can assume a certain positive or negative position concerning a certain state of affairs, which in turn can be either positive or negative.Therefore, there can be either the positive conviction (belief) of a positive or negative state of affairs, or the negative conviction (disbelief) of a positive or negative state of affairs (Ibid., 351–354).The positive or negative conviction of a positive state of affairs is formed through the presentation of a positive state of affairs or by “grasping” a “confict” between a state I believed in and the actual state that is presented and “is evident to us” (Ibid. 351). However,“if we were to limit ourselves to reading off those states which are given to us by the world of real and ideal objects, then such a thing as a negative state would never be presented to us” (Ibid., 353). In order to “read off ” a negative state of affairs (i.e., to grasp it) a subject must frstly grasp a positive state of affairs by virtue of a presentational act (e.g., 3 is greater than 2). Secondly, the subject must refer to a negative state of affairs (e.g., 3 is not smaller than 2).Thirdly, the subject should seize the relation of necessary connection between “the judged negative state – the being-not-smaller-than of the number three” and “the apprehended state – the being greater than” (Ibid.).Accordingly, the two states are “directly bound up” (Ibid.).
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If judgment is a “reply” to what appears to the subject, then what is at stake in Reinach’s theory of negative judgment is a realism of the negative.There are negative states of affairs, that is, negative entities that subsist “wholly independently of any conscious subject which may grasp it” (Ibid., 361), just like positive states. Reinach tried to show this phenomenologically in his essay On the Theory of Negative Judgment as his frst and explicit goal; however, phenomenologists of subsequent generations did not develop this approach and some even criticized it (Ingarden 1965, 299–311; Chrudzimiski 2012). This view also concerns the second kind of judgment: assertion.The latter is the way through which “states of affairs are adequately grasped; here they achieve expression” (Reinach 1989f, 459, translation is mine).This means that, by mirroring a state of affairs, an assertion articulates it and its elements in the form of “a is P” (Reinach 1989b, 356) through “successive acts of grasping” (Ibid., 355). Once again, assertions can be either positive or negative. Negative assertions feature an added “function”, i.e., a word without an “objectual correlate” (Ibid., 358): namely, the “negating function” (Ibid., 360) that transforms the assertion “a is P” into “a is not P”. Be it positive or negative, an assertion always rests on a positive conviction (Ibid., 355). Indeed, according to Reinach, a subject must believe in what they state. This is only possible through a belief. In fact, while on the one hand it is the sole act of judgment that can arise from an evident presentation of its intentional object (Ibid., 343; 352), on the other hand, assertions are not directly based on intuitive acts. This depends on Reinach’s theory of intentionality, which is quite different from Husserl’s. Reinach agrees with Husserl that the “intentional” character of experience means “that it possesses a ‘directedness toward’ something objectual, and this, in turn, presupposes that something is ‘at hand’ for consciousness” (Ibid., 321). However, Reinach distinguishes two ways of being “at hand” for an object, which correspond to an intuitive and a non-intuitive directedness. The frst one is the presentation (Vorstellung), which is “a bare receptive ‘having’ of the object” (Ibid., 323) that makes the object “‘present’ to us, ‘there’ for us” (Ibid.). The second one is the meaning (Meinen). This way to be “at hand” of the object is “always linguistically clothed” and essentially concerned with “a spontaneity of directedness and a temporal punctuality” (Ibid.). Between these two ways there is a “fundamental opposition” (Ibid., 325): presenting has many ways of referring to objects (seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, etc.), whereas meaning can just mean objects through words. Presentation “presents” or “gives” the object to us (Ibid., 328), while “in the sphere of meaning there is absolutely nothing to hand which is presented” (Ibid.). Therefore, presentation and meaning cannot be understood respectively as the intuitionally flled and intuitionally empty (or sense-bestowing) acts (Ibid., 326), about which Husserl writes in his Logical Investigations. In actual fact, Reinach aims to make some “corrections” (Korrekturen) to the latter, which he does in a bid to refuse the very concept of the “synthesis of fulflment” (Reinach 1989a, 339, translation is mine; Hua XIX, 263; Salice 2012, 231; see section 54.5.). This distinction between an ante-predicative and a predicative intentionality refects the distinction between conviction and assertion, while also determining the ontological (and even epistemic) dependence of the latter on the former. To return to the main goal of phenomenology according to Reinach, it is clear that fnding the laws of essence is the last step of a process, which starts with intuitive acts (presentations) and ends with an act (assertion) that is formed logically and linguistically. Hence, adequately grasping a state of affairs means completing a process that leads the subject to seize something in and by an assertion.The intermediate step of this process is the conviction, which is rooted in a peculiar intentional act that depends on presentation and actually (i.e., intuitively) gives the state of affairs to the subject. Reinach calls it “knowledge” or “apprehension” (Erkenntnis). 584
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54.4. Knowledge and states of affairs Despite assertion being the only act that adequately grasps and expresses a state of affairs, Reinach did not call Erkenntnis either this act or the entire process leading to assertion. As a phenomenologist, he believed that knowledge in a proper sense could only be an act with an intuitive content. In his essay on Refection, he speaks of “comprehension” (Verstehen) to name the way in which the acts pertaining to the sphere of meaning grasp objects. Since one has no direct access to phenomenal reality through meaning, if one comprehends, e.g., an a priori law, one has to move from the sphere of thought to the correspondent evident intuition of the meant state of affairs in order to base one’s comprehension on evidence.This is exactly what the “intellectual refection” (Reinach 1989c, 280–290, translation is mine) does: it brings the subject to grasp with evidence something that was “simply” understood before.Thus, comprehending a state of affairs still does not mean that the state of affairs is evident to us. Equally, the assertion of a state of affairs, which belongs to the sphere of meaning, requires in turn an actual intuition in order to be justifed. In fact, Reinach defnes Erkenntnis (knowledge, apprehension) as the experience in which a state of affairs is actually given to us (1989b, 341). On the one hand, knowledge and states of affairs are completely bound to each other. On the other hand, however, this does not mean that states of affairs cannot be grasped without an act of apprehension (e.g., by an act of imagination, or by remembering it). Bringing a state of affairs to mind is not the same as apprehending it, “for it is essential to an act of apprehension that in it the correlate state of affairs is, in the fullest sense, there for us” (Ibid., 344). That is to say, according to Reinach, grasping a state of affairs “with evidence” (Ibid., 375 n. 31; 1989g, 159–160). The notion of “state of affairs” was very controversial in the School of Brentano during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Smith 1992; Frechette 2014). Many among Brentano’s pupils defned it as the intentional target of judgment in order to distinguish it from that of presentation (i.e., the object). Reinach followed this debate and recalled the theories of Stumpf, Meinong and Husserl.1 Reinach also refers the act of judgment to the Sachverhalt and distinguishes the “objectual formations of the form being P of a” (the state of affairs) from the “objects in the strict sense”, e.g., physical things, tones, numbers or propositions (1989b, 338). Accordingly, states of affairs are then “the so-being of something” (Ibid., 346). As seen above, however, Reinach revised the strict correlation between judgment and state of affairs by introducing a distinction, on the side of intentional experiences, between “judgment” and “knowledge”. He also stated that the act of knowledge is the only act that not only grasps but also actually gives this state of affairs. Since knowledge relies on presentations and states of affairs rely on objects, Reinach argues “quite generally that the entities which are the elements of a state of affairs are perceived, seen, heard, or grasped categorially.And, on the basis of these ‘presentations’ the state of affairs itself is apprehended” (Ibid., 343). Thus, what the act of knowledge really gives is the “unifed multiplicity” or the “synthetic unity of certain elements”, e.g.,“the being red of a rose”, (Reinach 1989f, 462) to which the assertion “the rose is red” refers. Reinach calls this synthetic unity “structure” (Gliederung) (Ibid.). What characterizes such structure is its “being”. According to Reinach, “the ‘being’ in the rose is red; the being similar, the being warm, is always what is identical in a state of affairs. However, the factual material can vary case by case” (1989a, 344, translation is mine). Thus, Reinach distinguishes the factual material, which “underlies” and constitutes the state of affairs, from the latter, which is its being in a proper sense. Reinach does not explain the relationship between state of affairs and the underlying objects or its elements, but according to some authors (Smith and Mulligan 1982; Smith 1987) it is a founding relationship (an 585
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existential dependence) in the sense Husserl established in the third Logical Investigation (§14). What is certain is that, for Reinach, the being (the state of affairs) has logical properties that objects cannot have: states of affairs “stand in relations of ground and consequent” (Reinach 1989b, 338), “suffer modalities” (Ibid., 339), “may be either positive or negative” (Ibid., 340). Because of these logical features, Reinach believed that states of affairs are the ontological foundations of “traditional logic” (Ibid., 376 n. 40). States of affairs suffer modalities insofar as they can be necessary, possible, probable, and so on (Ibid., 339).A necessary state of affairs is an a priori one (Reinach 1989g, 158).That is because a priori structures are “forms of states of affairs” (Ibid., 159), and because Reinach defnes essential connections “a necessarily-having-to-be-so, and an in-virtue-of-essence-cannot-be-otherwise” (Ibid., 156). Essential connections are not to be identifed with essences. Nevertheless, as said at the beginning, Reinach speaks about essences in terms of the so-being of something, that is, in the sense of its “Whatness” (Ibid., 144) and states that essences are to be grasped by an act of “knowing” (Ibid., 157).Thus the concept of essence seems to be conceptually and phenomenologically bound to the concept of a priori state of affairs. The last characteristic of states of affairs concerns their way of being:“in the case of the rose we speak of existence [Existenz], in the case of the states of affairs based upon the rose we’d better speak of subsistence [Bestand]” (Reinach 1989b, 340). Objects exist, while states of affairs subsist.This different way of being concerns the categorial status of states of affairs, i.e., the fact that the categorially formed multiplicity actually is. Thus, Reinach’s phenomenological epistemology is grounded on the very intuition of a being that is the intentional correlate of the “being” considered in a strictly logical-grammatical sense.
54.5. Husserl revised: Adolf Reinach’s revision of phenomenology Reinach’s theory of judgment aims to provide the conceptual devices and to show the entities of which phenomenology avails itself in order for (at least) traditional logic to be grounded.This target goes hand in hand with that of grounding phenomenological epistemology, which, from Reinach’s perspective, deals with the meaning of objective knowledge. These are the same goals as those of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Hua XIX, 165–180). Husserl established a certain overlap between objective knowledge and the very idea of logic as a theoretical science (Hua XVIII, §§62, 67–69); Reinach did the same by means of the state of affairs. In this sense Husserl and Reinach shared the same idea, according to which knowledge in a proper sense has an ideal (i.e., not factual) content (Hua XIX, §65; Reinach 1989a, 344). However, Husserl recognizes that judgment is the proper instrument to gain knowledge (Hua XIX, §§43–47), whereas Reinach makes this process slightly more complex by distinguishing, within the general process, which makes a subject aware of the “being P of a” (something that one can reasonably call “knowledge”), two acts of judgment and the intentional act of knowledge (in a technical sense; see previous section). This is a crucial difference.As seen above, Reinach does not make use of Husserl’s phenomenological concept of “fulfllment unity” between the intentions of meaning and presentations, but instead “corrects” his view. Husserl’s solution to the problem of knowledge relies on “fulfllment unity”, which he presents in the First Logical Investigation but which he actually develops in the Sixth Logical Investigation. Reinach argues against this concept by stating that “inside thought there is no function of fulfllment”, and “sense-bestowing and sense-fulflling acts” do not fuse or coincide “in fulfllment” (1989a, 339, translation is mine); consequently, Husserl’s way to the phenomenological foundation of logic and elucidation of knowledge did not convince Reinach. 586
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By preventing any fusion between meaning and intuition, Reinach proposes an idea of objective knowledge that gives up subjective synthesis (even if it is a synthesis of intentional experiences).This solution frees a radical phenomenological intuitionism, in which any synthesis of knowledge can only take place on the side of its very object: the state of affairs. Reinach deprives the subject of any capacity for synthetic knowledge, and conceives of the state of affairs as a “synthesis in an objective sense” (1989f, 462, translation is mine) that assertions may express later. Therefore, in Reinach’s perspective, objectual knowledge and objective knowledge coincide. Thus, Reinach’s radically ante-predicative intuitionism moves away from Husserl’s phenomenology. In fact, he avoids any concept of knowledge in which the subject has an active role or where intentional experiences are supposed to fuse, and he prevents any ambiguity between what is given and what is meant. However, he remains on Husserl’s path insofar as his phenomenological philosophy states that phenomena (be they objects or states of affairs) are independent of consciousness, without this idea implying that the intentional correlate of acts actually exist in the external world. Indeed, as Reinach himself notes,“subsistence is by no means included as an essential moment within the concept of a state of affairs”, just like “existence” with regard to the concept of objects (1989b, 340).
54.6. A phenomenological account of social acts: the paradigm of promising Despite this epistemological reconstruction, Reinach’s main phenomenological interest mostly lay in ontological material a priori inquiries. Reinach adopted phenomenology with regard to numerous subject matters, while helping increase the thematic scope of phenomenology. Among the various thematic felds (of study), the feld of civil law is undoubtedly the most famous one. Reinach summarized his investigation on a priori law in his work The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law. Here, he set the “a priori theory of right” against any positivist theory of law (Reinach 1989d, 2). According to Reinach, the positivist theories of civil law accept that “all legal propositions and concepts are creations of the lawmaking factors, and it makes no sense to talk about any being of theirs which would be independent of all positive law” (Ibid., 4).Yet, Reinach strives to show that it is “not only false but ultimately meaningless” to think that legal concepts and propositions are created. He claims that there are legal structures and even entities “which have a being of their own just as much as numbers, trees, or houses, that this being is independent of its being grasped by men, that it is in particular independent of all positive law” (Ibid.; see next section).These ontological laws constitute the “basic concepts of right” (Ibid., 5). Besides them, Reinach recognizes the existence of laws produced by human needs, economic necessities and moral convictions in a given situation (Ibid., 2), which are actually positive. Positive right can either “deviate” from the a priori laws (Ibid., 5) or incorporate them (Ibid., 6). In any case, it always “presupposes and uses” these laws (Ibid.). Reinach believes that a priori laws also “form the a priori of social intercourse” (Ibid.). According to him, the sphere of a priori right governs a much wider part of the human life than positive right. Since Reinach looks for “a frst access to” the realm of the a priori theory of right, he deals with “a particular problem”, which is, strictly speaking, a social one: that of promising (Ibid., 8).According to Reinach, promising “is not subject to” positive law (Ibid., 10), but belongs to the class of social acts, which, however, are closely related to the a priori legal sphere. Social acts are, of course, very similar to Austin’s and Searle’s speech acts, above all because of Reinach’s analysis of promising. According to many (Burkhardt 1986; Crosby 2012; Mulligan 1987; Salice 2016), social acts are descriptively the same as speech acts; their conceptual (a priori and not conventional) framework, however, provides a better philosophical ground toward a 587
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social theory. Others (Laugier 2005; Ambroise 2005) believe that it makes no sense to compare such theories because their conceptual frameworks are incomparable. Regardless of this debate (see Chrudzimski 2015), let us examine social acts as a whole, before dealing with the specifc act of promising. First, social acts are intentional and spontaneous, that is, the subject actually does something with them (Reinach 1989d, 18). Second, they need to be directed toward “another person”, or rather,“other-directed”.Third, they “address” the other person (Ibid., 19). As to the constitution of these acts, they have “an inner and an outer side”. Even if the outer side changes (words, gestures, etc.), the inner side – its content – remains identical (Ibid., 20). The absolutely crucial feature of a social act is its need to be heard and understood by the addressee. In fact, apart from the extreme case of the prayer, which is “a purely interior social act” (Ibid., 21), all social acts are “cast towards another person in order to fasten themselves in his soul” (Ibid., 20). As a result, forgiving is not a social act because it “can unfold entirely within” itself. By contrast, commanding is a social act, since it needs to be “heard” (Ibid).The same goes for “requesting, warning, questioning, informing, answering, and many other acts” (Ibid., 19–20). According to Reinach, all these acts are social because they cannot obtain without another person grasping at least their content.This is a matter of “a priori necessity” (Ibid., 22). Some of these acts need to be grasped as “these acts as such” (Ibid., 21). Promising is one of them: the promisee must be aware that the promisor promised something.This social act opens a “circuit” that will only end with the realization of whatever was “prescribed by the act” (Ibid.), e.g., once “the thing promised is performed” (Ibid., 8). Reinach observes that the circuit produced by promising is a “bond” between the people concerned.This bond consists in the fact that – “strictly simultaneously” (Ibid., 31) – the promisee can “claim” what has been promised to them, while the promisor is “obliged to perform it or to grant it” (Ibid., 8).According to Reinach, claim and obligation are two “legal entities”, which arise following a promise and expire when the promise has been fulflled, unfolding “an obligatory relationship” (Ibid., 32).What is presupposed “for the coming into being” of both entities “is that the addressee consciously takes the promise in” (Ibid., 31). However, this relationship “is destined to be dissolved” (Ibid., 32).This can happen in three ways: frst of all, by carrying out “the content of the promise”; secondly, the promisee may “waive” the claim so that, as soon as the promisor apprehends it, both obligation and claim dissolve (Ibid.); fnally, the promise can be “revoked” by the promisor (Ibid., 33). However, according to Reinach, the revoking party cannot eliminate the claim unilaterally: “The revoking would result in a claim to the waiving, but not in the direct dissolving of the (original) claim” (Ibid).
54.7. The phenomenological theory of law: a new material a priori feld The theory of social acts describes the a priori laws underlying social interaction, thanks to which legal structures and entities (e.g., claims and obligations) may arise in the world. Additionally, Reinach considers the “legal power”, which concerns “the origin of ” rights and obligations stemming from “our own action” (Ibid., 66) – e.g., the right of property or the right of waiving. Accordingly, the sources of right are the a priori ways through which legal entities and structures appear in the world.They also constitute the a priori foundations of law. Furthermore, Reinach provides many descriptions of this a priori sphere, which include synthetic statements “in the sense of Kant” (Ibid., 9), that is to say, statements that are not exhausted in the concept of the entity or structure they refer to.As Reinach states,“in the ‘concept’ of claim nothing is ‘contained’ in any possible sense about the fact that the claim dissolves under certain circumstances” (Ibid.). Reinach believed to have discovered a “new feld” of philosophical research (Ibid., 6), because these entities could not be understood either as physical, psychical or, being “temporal” (Ibid.), as ideal. They are divided into rights (e.g., claims) and obligations. According to Reinach, it is 588
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“certain” that they are not physical; what is controversial is whether they are psychical (Ibid., 9). Against this hypothesis, Reinach argues that such entities can “last for years without changes” and exist even when “the subject has no experience, as in sleep or in the loss of consciousness” (Ibid.). Although they are not psychical entities, they need a person bearing them in order for them to exist (Ibid., 102). Besides this strict ontological analysis, it should be added that legal entities are “extra-moral phenomena” (Ibid., 51), because they do not refer to “moral value” (Ibid., 52). Reinach states that legal entities can arise and dissolve for “arbitrary” or “free acts of persons”, whereas this is “impossible” in the case of moral entities (Ibid., 13). Finally, legal entities can be “transferred” – that is, one can bear a claim or an obligation that belonged to another individual – while moral ones cannot be transferred (Ibid.).
54.8. Phenomenology of premonitions In addition to these famous topics, Reinach dealt with some themes that originated directly from his experience of the war. Indeed, between 1916 and 1917, Reinach wrote some fragments, collected under the title Annotations (Aufzeichnungen) concerning religious experience and premonitions. In his fragment On the Phenomenology of Premonitions (Zur Phänomenologie der Ahnungen), he examined the subject of premonition with the aim of showing that it is an actual intentional experience. Reinach’s interest in it grew after witnessing an animated discussion between some soldiers and a deputy sergeant about this topic.The sergeant argued,“There are no premonitions, only rational calculations are possible” (Reinach 1989h, 589; this and all the following translations are mine). Reinach’s purpose was to argue against the sergeant’s “genetic elucidation” of premonitions, which goes as far as denying their very essence and which he nonetheless “recognized” (Ibid., 590). According to Reinach, premonitions exist, regardless of whether they are true or not. Premonition is an intentional experience concerning knowledge (Wissen) “in a broad sense” (Ibid., 591). In fact, premonitions are knowledge insofar as they allow us to grasp states of affairs that were previously “inaccessible” (Ibid.).These states of affairs are a matter of knowledge, in a way, because they always appear as subsistent “either now or in the future or in general” (Ibid.). Even so, Reinach explicitly sets this meaning of knowledge against the one we encountered earlier (Ibid.; see section 54.4.). Since both knowledge in a proper sense and premonitions are rooted in a conviction, understanding to what extent the two experiences overlap becomes the crucial task of this investigation. Indeed, Reinach planned to show “the fundamental differences of both” (Ibid.). Regrettably, he never managed to.
54.9. First attempts toward a phenomenological description of religious experience Reinach’s analyses of religious experience are much more complex and detailed than those on premonition. He wrote about religious experience between April 25, 1916 and the day of his death. His interest in religion grew as a consequence of his conversion to Christianity. Unfortunately, his death also left his projects on the phenomenology of religion unfnished and scattered across several Notes (Notizen auf losen Zetteln) (Ibid., 592–605) and in the Religiousphilosophical Fragment (Bruchstück einer religionsphilosophischen Ausführung)(Ibid., 605–611), which is his frst systematic attempt to examine the phenomenon of the “absolute” (Ibid., 605–610). In these fragments, Reinach deals with a cluster of problems. Among many considerations on the phenomenological idea of experience, the relationship between ethics and religion, the 589
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issues of time, the existence of God, immortality as well as human and intellectual fnitude, it is possible to recognize a clear nucleus focused on “religious experience” as such (Ibid., 592). For Reinach, this intentionally refers to God as an “absolute highness” (Ibid., 607) and is “an absolute upward directedness” (Ibid., 596). In particular, Reinach stresses the issue of absoluteness, because it allows one to clearly discern what concerns the “religious” and what does not. Indeed, it is impossible for an individual to access God’s “absolute fullness” on their own (Ibid., 608).The possibility to grasp the absolute is actually a “gift”, according to Reinach (Ibid.). In religious experiences one “receives an unearthly content” that is absolute and complete (Ibid.).This content is a matter of absolute feelings, that is to say, feelings that cannot be increased in their intensity (Ibid.). Reinach describes different kinds of such feelings.At frst, one fnds fundamental feelings such as “being guarded by God”, and “feeling dependent” on Him. Upon these experiences, being “confdent” and being “grateful” to God occur as their respectively derived position-takings (Ibid., 599–600). According to Reinach, religious experience allows for a “living” relationship between “me as a man” and God (Ibid.). Only through that can one become aware of God (and of His existence) and obtain a kind of knowledge that Reinach explicitly calls “religious” (Ibid.).
Note 1 As an example, Reinach 1989b, 373 n. 16 mentions Stumpf 1907; Stumpf 1999; Meinong 1977; Hua XIX.
References Ambroise, Bruno. 2005. “Le problème de l’ontologie des actes sociaux: Searle héritier de Reinach?” Les études philosophiques 72/1, pp. 55–71. Burkhardt, Armin. 1986. Soziale Akte, Sprechakte und Textillokutionen, A. Reinachs Rechtsphilosophie und die Moderne Liguistic. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Chrudzimiski,Arkadiusz. 2012.“Negative States of Affairs: Reinach Versus Ingarden.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 16/2, pp. 106–127. ———. 2015.“Reinach’s Theory of Social Acts.” Studia Phaenomenologica (15), pp. 281–302. Conrad, Theodor. 1992. “Bericht über die Anfänge der phänomenologie Bewegung, in Eine Zeitzeuge über die Anfänge der phänomenologische Bewegung:Theodor Conrads Bericht aus dem Jahre 1954.” In: Eine Zeitzeuge über die Anfänge der phänomenologischen Bewegung:Theodor Conrads Bericht aus dem Jahre 1954. Eds. Eberhard Avé-Lallemant and Karl Schuhmann. Husserl Studies 9, pp. 77–90. Crosby, John F. 2012.“Speech Act Theory and Phenomenology.” In: The Apriori Foundations of Civil Law. Ed. Adolf Reinach. Heusenstamm: Ontos Verlag, pp. 167–191. Dubois, James and Smith, Barry. 2014.“Adolf Reinach.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/reinach/. Frechette, Guillaume. 2014. “Austrian Logical Realism? Brentano on States of Affairs.” In: Defending Realism: Ontological and Epistemological Investigations. Eds. Guido Bonino, Greg Jesson, Javier Cumpa. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 379–400. Hildebrand, Dietrich V. 1960. What is Philosophy. Andover: Routledge. Ingarden, Roman. 1965. Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt. Formal Ontologie, 1. Teil, II/1. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1968. “Meine Erinnerungen an Edmund Husserl.” In: Briefe an Roman Ingarden mit Erläuterungen und Erinnerungen an Husserl. Den Haag: Nijhoff, pp. 106–135. Laugier, Sandra. 2005. “Actes de Langage et états des choses: Austin et Reinach.” Les études philosophiques 72/1, pp. 73–97. Meinong, Alexius. 1977. Über Annahme. 1910. Eds. Roderick M. Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, and Rudolf Kindinger. Gesamtausgabe IV. Graz:Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt. Mulligan, Kevin. 1987.“Promisings and Other Social Acts:Their Constituents.” In: Speech Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology. Ed. Kevin Mulligan. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, pp. 29–90.
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Adolf Reinach Reinach,Adolf. 1989a.“Wesen und Systematik des Urteils” (1908). In: Sämmtliche Werke I. Eds. Barry Smith and Karl Schuhmann. Munich: Philosophia, pp. 339–345. ———. 1989b. “Zur Theorie des negativen Urteils” (1911). In: Sämmtliche Werke I. Eds. Barry Smith and Karl Schuhmann. Munich: Philosophia, pp. 59–107; English translation: “On the Theory of Negative Judgment” (trans: Barry Smith). In: Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology. Ed. Barry Smith. Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1982, pp. 315–377. ———. 1989c. “Die Überlegung; ihre ethische und rechtliche Bedeutung” (1912/13). In: Sämmtliche Werke I. Eds. Barry Smith and Karl Schuhmann. Munich: Philosophia, pp. 279–311. ———. 1989d. “Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechts” (1913). In: Sämmtliche Werke I. Eds. Barry Smith and Karl Schuhmann. Munich: Philosophia, pp. 141–278; English translation: “The Apriori Foundations of Civil Law” (trans: John F. Crosby). In: The Apriori Foundations of Civil Law. Heusenstamm: Ontos Verlag, 2012, pp. 1-142 ———. 1989e. “Die Vieldeutigkeit des Wesensbegriffs” (WS 1912/13). In: Sämmtliche Werke I. Eds. Barry Smith and Karl Schuhmann. Munich: Philosophia, pp. 361–363. ———. 1989f.“Einleitung in die Philosophie” (SS 1913). In: Sämmtliche Werke I. Eds. Barry Smith and Karl Schuhmann. Munich: Philosophia, pp. 369–513. ———. 1989g. “Über die Phänomenologie” (1914). In: Sämmtliche Werke I. Eds. Barry Smith and Karl Schuhmann. Munich: Philosophia, pp. 531–550; English translation: “Concerning Phenomenology” (trans: Dallas Willard). In: The Apriori Foundations of Civil Law. J. Crosby (Ed.). Heusenstamm: Ontos Verlag, 2012, pp. 143–165. ———. 1989h.“Aufzeichnungen” (1916/17). In:Sämmtliche Werke I. Eds. Barry Smith and Karl Schuhmann. Munich: Philosophia, pp. 589–611. Salice, Alessandro. 2012. “Phänomenologische Variationen. Intention and Fulfllment in Early Phenomenology.” In: A. Salice (Ed.). Intentionality. Historical and Systematic Perspectives. Munich: Philosophia, pp. 203–242. ———. 2016. The Phenomenology of Munich and Göttingen Circles. Ed. Edward N. Zalta, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/phenomenology-mg/. Smith, Barry. 1987.“On the Cognition of the State of Affairs.” In: Speech Act and Sachverhalt. Adolf Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology. Ed. Kevin Mulligan. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, pp. 189–225. ———. 1992.“Sachverhalt.” In: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Eds. Joachim Ritter and Karl Gründer. Basel-Stuttgart: Schwabe, pp. 1102–1113. Smith, Barry and Mulligan, Kevin. 1982. “Pieces of Theory.” In: Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology. Ed. Barry Smith. München-Wien: Philosophia, pp. 15–109. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1982. The Phenomenological Movement.The Hague/Boston/London: Nijhoff. Stein, Edith. 2002. Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Familie und weitere autobiogaphische Beiträge. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. Stumpf, Carl. 1907. Erscheinungen und Psychische Funktionen. Berlin: Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1907. ———. 1999.“Syllabus for Psychology [1888].” In: Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano. Ed. Robert D. Rollinger. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 285–309.
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55 JEAN-PAUL SARTRE Nathanaël Masselot
Turned into a world-wide known cultural trend, often labeled as “atheistic existentialism”, scattered through very different domains (psychology, aesthetics, literary criticism, ontology, politics, ethics, psychoanalysis), employing a wide range of literary forms (philosophical essays, novels, dramas, journal articles), Jean-Paul Sartre’s contribution to philosophy is both rich and extremely variegated. But what is the place of phenomenology within such a complex picture?
55.1. Diving into phenomenology: a frst but decisive step Sartre’s frst step into phenomenology appears as a radicalization of Husserl’s discovery of intentionality. Husserl’s fundamental statement, according to which “consciousness is always consciousness of something”, requires that every conscious lived experience is necessarily related, in one way or another, to some transcendent object (be it a number, a fctional character, a melody, a perceptual thing, etc.).To such preliminary account Sartre adds a further clause: if consciousness is intentionality, then the very fact of being conscious of something implies the rejection of all forms of immanence (be they psychological, epistemological, metaphysical, etc.). It is precisely by adding such clause that Sartre’s relationship to phenomenology, literally, begins—both from Husserl and against Husserl. It is worth noticing, however, that accepting Husserl’s concept of intentionality while rejecting, at the same time, all form of immanence strikes as a quite drastic move. For the notion of “immanence” also lies right at the heart of Husserl’s own phenomenological project. Already in the Logical Investigations, Husserl had in fact included within the actual stream of conscious experiences not only the “real” (reell) presence of intentional acts (directed towards something transcendent), but also the equally “real” purely immanent presence of non-intentional sensible contents (5th Logical Investigation, Ch. I.). Moreover, Ideas I’s introduction of the noema also strongly suggests the idea of a somehow intentionally “immanent” object, whose status appears to be quite controversial. But Sartre does not shy away from criticizing Husserl’s phenomenology in the very same moment in which he acknowledges its philosophical and critical potential, as if he could sharply separate the invention of intentionality from any possible use of the vocabulary of “immanence”. 592
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The reasons for this twofold radical move (appropriation of intentionality qua transcendence/critique of any form of immanence) are better clarifed if we keep in mind the historical context within which Sartre developed his own variety of phenomenology.And more generally, they become ever more apparent if one reminds oneself of Sartre’s relation with history. Sartre has always shown little or no interest in the history of philosophy. And in the rare cases in which he refers to the philosophical tradition, he hardly goes further than Descartes’s Modernity. By contrast, what has always been crucial for Sartre is the engagement with the philosophy of his time.Though almost ignoring his predecessors, Sartre constantly struggles with his contemporaries, facing the way in which the world is pictured in the present, and challenging the living effects of the philosophical shortcomings of his generation. This apparently biographical detail turns out to be of the utmost importance in order to understand Sartre’s philosophical relation to phenomenology. In fact, the main interlocutors of his frst philosophical essays are not drawn from the catalogue of the philosophia perennis, but precisely from the living discussions of French, German and Anglo-American epistemology between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.Thus the very concept of “immanence” Sartre is fercely opposed to—and further applied to Husserl himself—is frst and foremost the backbone of the mainstream epistemological projects of his time, be they neoKantians, psychologists, empirio-criticists or intellectualists of all sorts (Brunschvicg, Lachelier, Mach, Brochard, Lalande, Meyerson, etc.). Now, how is it possible to lump together so many different approaches under a common heading? To begin with, thanks to a literary device: the image of what Sartre calls “digestive philosophy”. According to Sartre, if one draws from the concept of “immanence” in any of its varieties, knowledge literally turns into something monstrous, i.e. the absorption of the world within a conscious subject that, stripped out from the world itself, turns out to be something external to it. An absorption that could fttingly be captured by the powerful comparison between the cognitive process of bringing the transcendence of the world into the immanence of consciousness and the physiological process of digestion. Appearing or cognitive objects seem to “sink” into the “empty stomach” of a starving consciousness, eager to assimilate the world, instead of preserving its irreducible exteriority. This literary image has a philosophical background though. In the Logical Investigations Husserl had criticized Brentano’s Psychology for having described consciousness as having mental objects as its contents, immanent copies of transcendent objects, in-existing in the mind as within each and every spiritual act of representation. Moreover, in the short paper A fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology: intentionality, published in 1939, the attentive reader fnds Sartre explicitly echoing Husserl’s own critique of Wilhelm Schuppe’s “Immanent-Philosophy” and his rejection of Richard Avenarius’ empirio-criticism in §56 of the Krisis (1935–1936). Thus Sartre wholly endorses this Husserlian critique of “immanence” and amplifes it to the point that consciousness itself turns out to be ultimately equated to the act of positing a transcendent being as such. Nothing more, but also nothing less. The literary metaphor of “digestive philosophy” and the fully fedged philosophical concept of “philosophy of immanence” ultimately join forces to unify and challenge an otherwise scattered contemporary philosophical landscape. By doing this, by drastically identifying consciousness, intentionality and transcendence, Sartre has thus a twofold aim. He not only rejects all forms of representationalism or psychologism (as Husserl); he also maintains—and this is the crucial point—that the intentionality of consciousness is precisely what grants the irreducibility of Being to consciousness, vouchsafng the transcendence of the World. Differently put, it is not that consciousness has intentionality, i.e. includes intentional lived expe593
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riences. One should rather say that consciousness is intentionality. Accordingly, knowledge (as a conscious state, i.e. as an intentional conscious state) is not aptly pictured by the metaphor of “absorption”, but rather by the feeting image of an “explosion” (Sartre 1939a); something that is comparable not to the process of bringing inside what is outside, but rather to the eccentric movement of the turning inside-out. Thus Sartre’s battle has two fronts: theoretical-conceptual (philosophy of immanence vs. philosophy of transcendence) and literary-metaphorical (philosophy of digestion vs. philosophy of explosion). As a result, Husserl’s phenomenology fnds itself dislocated in two different felds: as a residuum of immanentism it is still somehow similar to neo-Kantianism and intellectualism; as a force of transcendence it fnds itself carelessly merged with Heidegger’s “beingin-the-world”. One might have the impression, however, that, in his virulent plea against the “philosophies of immanence”, Sartre seems to follow a quite idiosyncratic idea of Philosophy: merging arguments and attacks, catchy metaphors and text interpretations—all weapons seem to be allowed to defeat the “enemy”. After all, in Sartre’s good friend Paul Nizan’s Les chiens de garde (1932), one fnds exactly the same targets (Bergson, Bourtroux, Brunschvicg, Lalande, etc.) and somehow the same literary device. Yet what makes Sartre’s enquiry so sharp, if compared with Nizan’s polemic pamphlet, is precisely the twofold fact we have stressed so far. On the one hand, as already suggested, Sartre turns into literary images a wide array of very structured philosophical claims borrowed from phenomenology; on the other, he is not only motivated by the idea of rejecting the philosophies of immanence, but also by the urge to pursue phenomenology with other means. Differently put, inspired by Husserl’s conception of intentionality, Sartre’s main aim is to question the ultimate legitimacy of phenomenology itself.What lies behind the critical transformation of the phenomenological concept of intentionality into a weapon against the philosophy of immanence, and activates its metaphorical resources, is precisely the very question of the status of transcendental phenomenology. As a result, when it comes to the relation between Sartre and phenomenology, one should sharply distinguish and, at the same time, clearly articulate two quite different and yet connected standpoints. On the one hand, we have “phenomenology” as the vector of Sartre’s motivation, what Sartre tries to do, and, on the other, there are “Sartre’s views on Phenomenology”, i.e. how Sartre tries to understand phenomenology and its inner possibilities.
55.2. Recasting the ego: a vagrant story From his frst signifcant publication, The Transcendence of the Ego (1936), to his magnum opus Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre insists in providing a series of variations on the very same theme: the phenomenological privilege of “exteriority” or “transcendent being” (to which consciousness is essentially related). In an unusually academic style and mode of argumentation, The Transcendence of the Ego focuses on what seems to be a quite technical issue, i.e. the status of psychic life and the relation between consciousness and ego. By “ego” Sartre understands what we usually refer to by means of linguistic items, such as “I” (active form) or “me” (passive form), expressing the identical pole of “our” personal psychic life (Sartre 1936, 13–26/31–60). The ego is the frst victim of Sartre’s turning-inside-out-strategy. In a handful of very dense pages, Sartre now argues that the ego is nothing but a transcendent object that appears through refection to a prior consciousness. The core of the argument
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is quite straightforward: if consciousness is intentionality and intentionality is nothing but the position of a transcendence; since the ego only shows itself through refection and refection is a form of intentionality, then the ego is a posited transcendence. Consider the ordinary experience of reading a book: as I am reading Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, “my” consciousness is experiencing the reading and refers to the investigations of a famous fctional private detective.“I” am entirely conscious of Sherlock Holmes’ adventures, not of “myself ”. It is only thanks to a new kind of consciousness, which does not posit the (fctional) occupant of 221B Baker Street, but “myself ”, sitting on this couch (in the world) and actually having a novel in my hands, that something like an “ego”—“my” ego—could be posited. Once recast in strict phenomenological terms, such ordinary description shows that the “ego” cannot be fttingly described as something like the inhabitant of consciousness—showing itself without the world, within the depths of one’s mental life—but rather as being simply an object; an object that is transcendent as any other object, and appearing as any actual or possible appearing transcendent object, i.e. through a specifc intentional position of the world. Rejecting what he assumes to be Kant’s account of the transcendental ego, Sartre’s essay also provides a thorough examination of the constitution of the ego thanks to a meticulous description of all kinds of synthesis (such as the emanation of qualities or the procession of states).Yet the use of philosophical technicalities to criticize Kant is not a central movement in Sartre’s strategy.What is relevant, instead, is the phenomenological idea that actions, qualities and states constitute the ego as “the ideal (noematic) and indirect unity of the infnite series of our refexive conscious acts” (Sartre 1936, 43/60). It is not that the ego refers to the transcendent world by means of conscious intentional acts of all sorts. One should rather say that the ego is constituted as a transcendent worldly-object by means of conscious intentional acts of all sorts. Again, Husserl’s immanence is, quite literally, turned inside-out. After having “exteriorized” the ego in the Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre now exteriorizes emotions, as it were, in another short essay called Sketch of a Theory of Emotions (1939b). No longer conceived as internal psychological processes—revealing only the hidden secrets of one’s inner life, but silent about the actuality of the world “out there”—emotions are now recast within an intentional-phenomenological framework. The new question is thus the following: what does “to be conscious of the world” mean when I am conscious of the world in the mode (that I experience every day) of being-emotionally-conscious-of something? By stating that emotions are intentional conducts directed towards the world and thanks to which—as we will see shortly—one is able to, literally,“escape the inescapable”, Sartre reaffrms the primal relation of the consciousness to transcendence (rejecting, again, all forms of interiority).What is new, however, with respect to his previous attempt in the Transcendence of the Ego, is the idea of engaging the essential ability of consciousness to modify the world. If one is stuck in front of a rabid dog and no way out is available, one is likely to be very scared. But, according to Sartre, being afraid, scared, terrorized, screaming and fainting are all ways to modify emotionally a situation that could not be modifed practically. Emotions are forms of consciousness, and therefore ways to posit something transcendent. Perception and knowledge posit out in the world the existence of a rabid dog next to me; emotions posit—always out in the world— the existence of a frightening rabid dog.They are, as Husserl would have put it, value-constitutive intentional experiences (Sartre 1039b, 69–117/56–91). Sartre’s phenomenological description of emotions as intentional conducts is thus meant to account for the fundamental affective being of human existence. Accordingly, it ultimately frees affectivity from any commitment to the interiority of the ego that “I” am. As in Rimbaud’s famous “Lettre du Voyant” (May 15, 1871) addressed to Paul Demeny: “I is someone else” (“Je
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est un autre”, quoted in: 1936, 63/97). And Sartre tries precisely to explain who this “I” is, i.e. the result and necessary correlative pole of all our objective negotiations with the world.A pole that is constituted, little by little, whenever we deal with the world, in all intentional ways possible. “The object is transcendent to the consciousness which grasp it, and it is in the object that the unity of the consciousness is found (l’objet est transcendant aux consciences qui le saisissent et c’est en lui que se trouvent leur unité)” (1936, 22/38; on the topic see Masselot 2012). Thus, if the ego truly is a unifying pole—as Husserl claimed—then, since the unifcation is founded on an unrefective and prior consciousness always and necessarily directed towards the world, one should draw the conclusion that such unifcation is always delayed. An indefnitely moving and ungraspable object, the ego is not less infnitely constituted than any other transcendent object. For as a constant in-between, setting apart myself from the world but out of the world, this “ego” is constantly modifed along with all kinds of (prior) experiences of the world—and this includes emotions.
55.3. From images to imagination: on the way to nothingness The analysis of the ego has uncovered what Sartre calls a “structure of backward reference” (structure de renvoi) that “is limited to refecting an ideal unity, whereas the real and concrete unity has long been effected” (à reféter une unité idéale, alors que l’unité concrète et réelle est opérée depuis longtemps) (1939, 81/100). Now, once this inescapable condition of consciousness is assumed, one is left with the task of uncovering the necessary condition of the being in the world of such consciousness. Being intentionally directed towards the world from within the world, consciousness is not the world. Drawing again from Husserl the idea that intuitions of transcendent objects can be either perceptive or imaginative, The Imaginary (1940) focuses on another relevant way for a consciousness to be conscious-of an object, i.e. image consciousness. One could already expect to see Sartre repeating the same phenomenological move shown in his previous works.After having “turned inside-out” the ego and the whole of emotional life, it is now time to destroy the concept of “mental image” and exteriorize the imaginary through the intentional description (both eidetic and psychological) of the act of “aiming at an object in image” (viser un objet en image). But something new happens in this novel confrontation between Sartre and phenomenology. Thanks to their intentional structure, perception and emotions still posit something real in the world (the rabid dog is actually frightening); imagination doesn’t. Imagination is still transcendence and yet it is a transcendence that is not real, that does not posit its objects as in the world— although it cannot posit them without the world. I can say I am imagining Sherlock Holmes or a rabid dog in front of me only if their appearance is negated by what I actually perceive here and now: my room, my couch, the books that are around me, etc.Thus imagination certainly posits something transcendent as unreal, but it does so only from within and along with the position of the transcendent reality it negates. This brings Sartre to an extremely important conclusion. If the intentionality of imagination allows us to posit an absent object despite its unreality, then a consciousness that is able to imagine is also a consciousness that is certainly in the world but not stuck in it. Imagination is thus reinterpreted not as a mere psychological accident of mental life, but as decisive phenomenological experience and an essential feature of consciousness; a consciousness that is able not only to comply with the world (as still happens with the intentionality of emotions) but rather to radically transgress it. On this point, Sartre’s reading of the famous Müller-Lyer illusion (in which two identical segments seem to be of a different size) appears to be quite instructive. Image conscious596
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ness, Sartre says, breaks the solidarity between perception and knowledge. In the Müller-Lyer illusion one confers “on the object a new quality, and this quality we have perceived. The object thus constituted can serve as a sign (…) but never as an image, at least not as such” (1940, 72/33). Now, the eye movements through which the transformation is carried out (so that segments having the same size are imagined to have different sizes) do not objectify such new quality as real (for nothing has really changed, the segments have still the same size) but in image.Thus, what happens in the case of perceptual imagination is a transformation of the perceptive objectifcation or, as Sartre puts it, a new change of “focus” (mise au point). Of course, this can only be the case if the object is already “there before the focusing” (être là avant la mise au point) (1940, 84/39). Sartre’s conclusion is the following: image consciousness hinges on spontaneity. It is a sui generis form of consciousness, rooted in perception and relying on a “certain thickness of reality” (certaine épaisseur de reel), (1940, 132/66 modifed); at the same time, it transgresses the rules of perceptual reality as such and refers to something that is not there. It is intuitive (as perception), relies on perception, but refers to something absent (as knowledge). In this sense, neither perception (reality) nor pure knowledge (ideality), and yet, relying on both perception (un-realization) and knowledge (debasement of ideality), imagination is therefore an intermediary and unsteady form of consciousness. It is a form of transcendence that somehow breaks the negotiations with the world. To put it in slightly different terms, one could also say that imagination shows the possibility of constituting objectivity into image. Again, it should not be described as the “creation” of something that is not (or is “inside us”), but as the consciousness of something that is “given as not-being there in person” (1940, 205/113).The word “image” is therefore the name of a mode of consciousness (deeply rooted into the position of transcendence), not of a particular kind of entity (having the property of being similar to some other entity). Or, to put it in Sartre’s words, “the image is not a thing but a consciousness”. At this point, Sartre’s descriptions widen to the point of drawing an entire map of the whole “family of the images” (1940, 40/17): portraits, mirrors or refections, pantomimes, mental images, dreams, and all sorts of “unreal objects” (1940, 240/125). In all these cases transcendence is still bound but not limited to the reality of the world. One last point needs now to be recalled. Since imagination is an essential “ability” of consciousness, and since we, as human beings, are beings having such ability, then imagination also tells us something about us—i.e. about the mode of existence of that being that is essentially able to imagine. Deeply rooted in the world and, at the same time, distanced from the world, consciousness “exists the world” in positing being in that very way that Sartre calls “Nihilation”. In other words, a consciousness that is free to imagine, is essentially free. As a result, from the analysis of the Ego in the mid-1930s to The Imaginary, Sartre refnes his phenomenological understanding of exteriority and seizes more accurately the different and irreducible patterns of transcendence; the transcendence of mundane objects, of the Ego, of emotionally charged reality, and, fnally, of the “images”—which ultimately shows our own overall transcendence as being both relative to the world and free to nihilate it. From now, Sartre’s phenomenology will focus precisely on this fundamental transcendent pole of consciousness and its distinctive mode of existence. And he will do so mostly in two different directions: frst, by considering the transcendence of consciousness as the ontological position of an external Being; second, by focusing on consciousness itself, which realizes itself by irrealizing Being (and thus allowing us to understand how “knowledge of ourselves” is ultimately possible). Such a double process hinges on Nihilation. Both paths will fnally lead to the phenomenological ontology of Being and Nothingness. 597
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55.4. A new variety of phenomenology: the project of a phenomenological ontology In order to interpret imagination as an act of freedom with respect to the world and yet from within the world, Sartre needs a deeper analysis of the concept of “Nihilation”. Such analysis, however, as suggested by the complete title of Being and Nothingness—“Essay on Phenomenological Ontology”—can only be carried out if one switches from a phenomenological account of consciousness to an ontological one. Differently put, consciousness is now studied not with respect to its different modes to transcend itself, but in its mode of being—a mode that is essentially different from the mode of being of that towards which consciousness transcends itself. From a more general standpoint Sartre’s project is to bring together phenomenology and ontology, Husserl’s (phenomenological) method and Heidegger’s (ontological) purpose; the two most noticeable varieties of “philosophy of transcendence” discussed in his previous works. However, in Being and Nothingness, merging “intentionality of consciousness” and “being-inthe-world of the Dasein” is no longer enough. And treating these two concepts simply as two different ways to praise the transcendence of human conscious beings appears to be utterly insuffcient. The new, refned, form of encounter between Husserl and Heidegger is now summarized in Being and Nothingness’s inaugural statement, according to which consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself (la conscience est un être pour lequel il est dans son être question de son être en tant que cet être implique un être autre que lui). (Sartre 1943, 29/24) At frst sight, one might have the impression that such uncanny sentence merely rephrases the very general key tenets of Sartre’s illustrious predecessors: Husserl’s intentionality, to begin with, but more than anything else Heidegger’s ontological depiction of the Dasein as being in quest of his or her own Being. However, though somehow justifed, this impression would be quite misleading. For if this were the case, Sartre would be simply turning Heidegger’s ontology into a quasi-anthropology and Husserl’s phenomenology into a naïve ontology. But this is far from being the case and Sartre strongly insists on this point. Moreover, the accuracy of Sartre’s reading of Being and Time is also attested by a private letter that Heidegger sent to the young author of Being and Nothingness: For the frst time—Heidegger writes—I fnally meet an independent thinker having experienced all the way the domain from which I am thinking.Your book shows an immediate understanding of my philosophy, something I haven’t met so far (Pour la première fois, écrivait Heidegger, je rencontre un penseur indépendant qui a fait à fond l’expérience du domaine à partir duquel je pense.Votre livre fait montre d’une compréhension immédiate de ma philosophie telle que je ne l’ai pas encore rencontrée). (de Towarnicki 1993, 84) Thus Heidegger himself was well aware of the fact that Sartre was neither simply merging his fundamental ontology with some Husserlian insights, nor misunderstanding it as a form of existential anthropology. Sartre is not unwillingly confating Husserl’s (phenomenological account of) consciousness and Heidegger’s (ontological account of) Dasein. He is deliberately providing 598
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a shift. He is shifting to an entirely new project of a “phenomenological-ontology”.Though still employing the language of his sources of inspiration, Sartre redefnes his own terms. Phenomenological-ontology only begins with discussing “consciousness” or “Dasein”. But this happens in order to accede to a new concept of the subject: the “for-itself ” (pour-soi). Correlatively,“phenomenological-ontology” does not deal with Husserl-like “phenomena”, but with an entirely new ontological sense of the phenomenon, i.e. what Sartre calls the “transphenomenal-being”. The outcome of such “shift” is noteworthy and grounds the one and only true “ontological difference” that Sartre is willing to recognize. Not Heidegger’s “invisible” difference between Being and Entity, but the “hyper-visible” and inescapable difference between Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself. While there is little is to say about the latter (one could say that “Being is”, that “it is what it is”, that “it is in itself ”, etc.) an ontological description of the former under the guidance of phenomenological intuition turns out to be an extremely rich enterprise; an enterprise to which, in some sense, the whole of Being and Nothingness is somehow entirely devoted.And among the richness of this ontological description, Sartre immediately singles out one distinctive feature: the for-itself is the only conscious being that is inhabited by a Non-Being (“the spur of Nothingness”), kept at distance from Being (in it-self). Differently put, the for-itself is characterized by an “internal breach”; a “breach” thanks to which, to use Sartre’s convoluted formula, the for-itself posits a Being in a way such that he/she is always aware of the fact that he/she is not and cannot be the Being that is posited. Sartre expresses such a condition by famously defning consciousness as a “For-itself ”, namely as “a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is” (un être est ce qu’il n’est pas et n’est pas ce qu’il est) (Sartre 1943, 94/100). Next to and beyond the for-itself, there is always and necessarily the posited Being in-itself. But how could one get a phenomenological intuition of the Being in-itself as such?—Sartre asks.The only intuition one could get of Being is, as we have seen, the (transphenomenal-)Being as it appears to a For-itself. Differently put, what only shows itself is a portion of Being (namely a being-in-itself) appearing to a “given portion” of Nothingness (namely a being-for-itself). Such phenomenological description is to be considered as somehow complete and ultimate. Hence, in some sense, when Sartre quite surprisingly claims that “everything about the being in itself has been said” in the introductory remarks, this stunning allegation is indeed correct. And in this regard, one could truly argue that Sartre tries to provide a genuine ontological analytic of the phenomenon (as transphenomenal-being) whose starting point is neither the appearance of Being (realistic position) nor the appearing of consciousness (idealistic position), but the ultimate analysis of a given portion of transphenomenal-being under the scope of a given consciousness. There is nothing even remotely comparable in the whole phenomenological tradition. This point needs to be emphasized, for it is oftentimes a source of confusion, especially when one has to assess the originality of Sartre’s project. Despite the fact that Sartre frequently borrows terms and themes from Husserl and Heidegger, his “phenomenological ontology” is more suitably characterized as the constant attempt to develop its own conceptual tools somehow “from within”.And probably one of Sartre’s most relevant conceptual innovations is precisely this new correlation established between “Transphenomenal-Being” and “Human-Reality”. The concept of “transphenomenal-being” is in fact introduced to defne not a particular kind of phenomenon, but the (identical) Being of all (singular) phenomena, i.e. the Being “of what is for consciousness” (de ce qui est pour la conscience) and “is itself in-itself ” (est lui-même en-soi) (Sartre 1943, 29/24). As for the correlative concept of “human reality” (la réalité-humaine), it is defned accordingly as 599
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being in so far as within its being and for its being it is the unique foundation of nothingness at the heart of being (l’être en tant qu’il est dans son être et pour son être fondement unique du néant au sein de l’être). (Sartre 1943, 115/126) At this point, Sartre is fnally able to describe with extreme precision a wide array of new and irreducible ontological structures that are nevertheless always and constantly in relation to and accordance with the “transphenomenal-being” they rest upon: the “Being for-itself ” (Being and Nothingness, second part); the “Being for-other” (third part). Finally, once the core structures of “Human-Reality” are defnitively feshed out, Sartre can approach the three cardinal categories: “To Have, to Do, to Be” (fourth and last part). Only at this point the meaning of our essential freedom in every fundamental “situation” of the Being could fnally be affrmed. Only now, at the end of this phenomenological path, the concept of freedom—discovered at the end of the Imaginary—receives a strong ontological rooting. Probably the best-known example of such ontological rooting is Sartre’s famous account of “Bad faith”. This concept, often hastily read as superfcially “existential”, has rather a deep phenomenological meaning. More specifcally, it has to be understood from an irreducibly twofold point of view: on the one hand, as a fact (say in a psychological-sociological point of view), on the other as a phenomenological-ontological component of our being.Thanks to three very explicit and evocative literary examples—thus continuing his strategy to complement conceptual and metaphorical tools—Sartre now shows the impossibility for the For-itself to “fll” his/her lack of being and turn into an In-itself. “Bad faith” is therefore the concept to describe the dual ontological transgression by which, at the same time, one is tempted to turn the For-itself into something that is (while only the Being in-itself is), tries to extirpate a sample of Being in-itself and turn it into a component of the For-itself.Thus the arch-famous examples of the waiter who is “playing the game” of beinga-waiter, or the young lady who is-not-there, letting the womanizer bachelor touch her hand as a mere-being, or the gay person who is sincerely aware of the essential impossibility to bridge the gap between what “he is” and what he is “expected to be”—all these examples are not meant to illustrate psychological characters or social conducts.They are rather varieties of one absolute ontological structure.They all reveal that “Being” is always kept at a distance and, at the same time, it is always and necessarily more or less contracted in the form of not being in-itself. As Sartre writes—strikingly anticipating the non-existing and yet frm character of Agilulf in Italo Calvino’s novel The Nonexistent Knight (1959)—such impossibility-to-be (not only “to-besomething”, but also, and more importantly “to-be-myself ”) is “the very stuff of consciousness” (l’étoffe même de la conscience) (Sartre 1943, 97/62). The for-itself ontologically clothed in “bad faith” seems to be like Calvino’s non-existent knight, whose otherwise solid armor appears as the rather thin membrane setting apart two regions of Being, one of which is empty. Given Sartre’s tendency to complement concepts and metaphors, one might feel entitled to suggest that Calvino’s character could have a been a suitable literary counterpart of Sartre’s nonpsychological description of bad faith as an ontological-phenomenological structure of the Foritself. In fact, an ontological gap clearly separates the non-existent Agilulf from both his armor (the transcendence that closely surrounds him) and the world (the transcendence of himself, ipseity and facticity). Sartre’s for-itself provides a strongly conceptual account of such gap.Yet, instead of relying on a self-evident literary device as the walking empty armor of Calvino’s novel, Sartre depicts waiters, seduced women, gay people, etc. And by doing this he also ambiguously suggests a “psychological-empirical” understanding of “bad faith”; an understanding that, for instance, has 600
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not fooled an attentive reader like Deleuze who has fttingly labeled such descriptions as “short novels” (courts romans). Be that as it may, what is ultimately relevant is the idea that existence hinges on a double degree of nihilation according to which one is neither the Being that he/she nihilates (frst degree: I am neither this table nor this chair, i.e. the nihilation of transcendence) nor the Being that he/she “is” (second degree: I am neither what I pretend to be—the transcendence of my “own” ipseity—nor what I have been so far—the facticity of the past). But what has this to do with phenomenology? The answer could be found in Sartre’s assessment of the fnal aspiration of Being and Nothingness. In his “phenomenological ontology” Sartre is trying to push to its limits one of the most fundamental claims of Husserl, i.e. the claim that phenomenology should account for the ultimate concreteness of the factual life in its innermost features, i.e. to reveal in essence what only stands as a fact in Psychology. Of course, far from equating this phenomenology ambition with Husserl’s eidetic project, Sartre’s own understanding of this “essentiality” is that of a twofold ontology of human reality and of the trans-phenomenal-being. But this brings us to what appears to be a major problem. Is Sartre’s joint venture between conceptual and metaphorical strategies, between theoretical and metaphorical devices, truly “descriptive”? Or, differently put, are Sartre’s putative ontologicalphenomenological descriptions actually “true” to the facts and, as one often says, to the “things themselves”? The problem, however, is easily solved if we recall another distinctive feature of Husserl’s phenomenology. Phenomenological descriptions are never brute reports of facts.And, quite certainly, this cannot be the case when the description aims at the ontological relation between the pure nothingness of the Human-Reality and the pure identical trans-phenomenal-Being. On the one hand, literary fctions are precisely—as suggested by Husserl—the necessary devices to turn an empirical fact into something carrying the phenomenological weight of a self-showing essence. On the other, as we have seen, Sartre often insists that we constantly experience a given phenomenon that is not the whole (identical) Being but a given way through which the Being appears to me as being so and so.This latter point is of the utmost importance to understand another aspect of Sartre’s appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenology. In this manner and despite all possible comparison with Calvino’s novel, where at least in some sense the knight is “someone” who tries to be something, Sartre considers the For-itself not an “empty-being” (something one could see and report about) but as a “non-being” whose very “mode of being” tends to be achieved in the unachievable form of Existence. As the Foritself is free to nihilate the Being in-itself, he/she exists precisely insofar as he/she is not an identical Being. As it is meant to depict a “metastable” (metastable) form of realization (Sartre 1943, 104/68), Sartre’s phenomenological ontology leads not to a descriptive classifcation of facts/ essences, but rather to an existential psychoanalysis (which develops the ontological features of the being for-itself) and to a critic of the principles of the Dialectical reason (which presents the epistemological conclusions of the ontological principles of the Being in-itself) as it appears via adumbrations to a given consciousness, which in turn appears to itself in a given situation of Being. Thus, Sartre’s “phenomenological ontology” is not a systematic work guided by merely theoretical concerns. It is rather meant to account for and start from every dimension of our life and our world as interwoven; dimensions that are captured by a suitably combined strategy of conceptualization and metaphorization. Accordingly, Sartre’s essays written after Being and Nothingness—and often labeled as “non-phenomenological”—now appear under a new light. 601
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Neither following the dogmatic principles of a realistic philosophy, nor indulging in any idealistic form of “immanentism”, Sartre’s later work could now fttingly be considered as an attempt to further stretch the limits of phenomenology. From now on, Sartre will not simply apply phenomenology to ontology but to all areas of human life whose principles are ontological and founded on phenomenological method.
55.5. Beyond ontology, still phenomenology? Questions of (phenomenological) method In his impressive book The Family Idiot (1971–72), Sartre directly inscribes the concrete case of Flaubert within the scope of his previous book Search for a Method (1957). But what is the method he is talking about? Sartre’s writings now focus on the life of one single individual or a group.And such life is questioned with respect to its “truth”, whose understanding is related to the dialectical movement of being and knowing. Despite the apparent differences, the conceptuality spelled out in Being and Nothingness is clearly active even in these later texts. Neither the for-itself nor the Human-Reality are able to reach pure identity—that is to be realized, achieved, completed. Accordingly, “truth” (be it of an individual or a group) has to be realized through a historical process, either a single existence or the whole history of HumanReality.As Sartre stresses in the Preface of the essay Search for a Method, later included in the frst tome of the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960),“if such a thing as Truth can exist in anthropology, it must be Truth that has become, and so it must make itself a totalization” (Sartre 1957, 10/ xxxiv). Acknowledging the fact that in this sense, reason has been understood as dialectic only since Hegel and Marx, Sartre does not have the ambition to rediscover or revisit Dialectics in a new fashion. He rather aims at providing a “critique” of it, a critique of dialectical reason recalling that of the “analytic reason at the end of the 18th Century when its legitimacy was threatened” (Sartre 1957, 15/2). The importance of Kant’s Critique of (pure) reason and its analytic (and eventually empirical) function is not only related to the development of post-Kantian Idealism and Romanticism. Its greater relevance rather lies in the fact that, since then, it is widely accepted that we have the right to study a man, a group of men, or a human being in the synthetic totality of his signifcance and his reference point in the process of totalization (droit d’étudier un homme, un groupe d’hommes ou un objet humain dans la totalité synthétique de ses signifcations et de ses références à la totalisation en cours). (Sartre 1957, 15/2) Thus, Sartre’s initial claim is not that reason has to be dialectic, but rather that one has to acknowledge the fact that reason has become dialectic. One still needs, however, to provide an ontological ground for this fact.And Sartre fnds it in the fact that Human-Reality is essentially unable to be what it is, but has only to become what it is. In other words, what Sartre is doing here is to provide a strong phenomenological-ontological basis to Dialectical reason. In doing so Sartre doesn’t merely assume that a given change happened in the History of Philosophy at a certain time in a certain place (18th-century Germany). By remaining faithful to his “idea of Intentionality” as the position of the irreducible Transcendence (now also called “Otherness”), which consciousness or Human-Reality are always and necessarily related to,
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Sartre makes explicit the phenomenological framework within which his critique of dialectical reason has to be developed. Thus, it is safe to say that the late Sartre did not turn into a Hegelian or a Marxist, but always remained a Phenomenologist. In fact, Sartre’s critique of Hegel, developed in Being and Nothingness, is still valid:“the totalization is never achieved and the totality exists at best only in the form of a detotalized totality” (la totalisation n’est jamais achevée et que la totalité n’existe au mieux qu’à titre de totalité détotalisée) (Sartre 1957, 67/78; 1983, 68/88). Leaning on Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, Sartre stresses that it is only thanks to Human Beings that Dialectics is introduced within nature. For nature is, in itself, essentially non-dialectical and governed by the pure principle of identity of the Being-in-itself. In other words, if identity is not dialectical, dialectics can only exist as related to negativity. Accordingly, reality is dialectical only because the natural world (of the In-itself) is inserted within a human world (of the For-itself). However, since the In-itself necessarily resists Dialectics, the latter cannot complete its process of totalization. Thus, echoing the Kantian distinction between phenomenon (sphere of knowledge) and Metaphysics of pure reason, Sartre expands from the Critique of Analytic Reason to the Critique of Dialectical Reason and tries to ground ontologically the fact that no process of totalization could ever be achieved. However, such impossibility is not grounded on the legitimate principles of Knowledge (as in Kant) but on the structural principles of Being.And since Sartre’s ontology aims at legitimating the irreducibility of the identic Being in-itself to the For-itself, it implies at the same time that the In-itself is irreducible to an achieved historical process.Again, the concepts of phenomenology supersede both the language of Kant and that of Hegel. But, if this is correct, what kind of “unexpected” phenomenologist is the late Sartre? One could say that, against Husserl, Sartre has now developed an ontology that is still based on his early idea of phenomenology and intentionality. So, at least from this specifc standpoint, nothing new could be found in Sartre’s late position with respect to Husserlian phenomenology. Against Heidegger, however, Sartre has now developed an ontology which strongly requires an anthropology; an anthropology that is not ontology itself, but is based on ontological-phenomenological principles. And, more specifcally, an anthropology whose core is represented by a critique (i.e. an epistemology) of Dialectical reason that is consistent with the ontological principles it is based on. Now if one follows the pattern going through a (phenomenological) Ontology to a (phenomenological) Anthropology and ultimately to a (phenomenological) Epistemology, one has clearly mapped the borders of Sartre’s way to phenomenology. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was supposed to end by addressing the problems of morality. The task of addressing morality from the standpoint of a phenomenological ontology remained unfulflled for more than ffteen years. In this sense, the examination of dialectical reason could be seen precisely as the achievement of such task. It is thanks to the concept of “detotalized totalities” that a critique of Reason appears to be fnally able to deal with the moral dimension of human reality as the ongoing history of an unachievable synthesis.
55.6. Idios and idioi The last step brings us from a phenomenological account of the history of humanity to the history of one human being. It is, again, the dialectic quest for a constantly “detotalized totality” that ultimately leads Sartre to consider the work of Flaubert.And, as already anticipated, he does so within the framework of what he calls “existential psychoanalysis”. Who is Flaubert, the man?—Sartre asks (Sartre 1971–72).
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Whereas one could begin by imagining a sharp difference between objective facts (as Flaubert’s birth certifcate stating that he was born in Rouen in 1821) and reports of feelings and thoughts (such as Flaubert’s intimate confessions, written down over one of the thirteen volumes of his published Correspondence), Sartre maintains that both documents are equally relevant to answer to the question about Flaubert, the man. What will bring these elements together is again the narrative device of a hybrid biographical novel as the literary counterpart of the philosophical project of an existential psychoanalysis. The task is daunting: capturing “one” life in its ultimate singularity and inner becoming.The ultimate phenomenological description, as it were. As a result, Sartre’s Flaubert appears to be a living demonstration of the fact that knowledge demands a dynamic dialectical consideration in which we must assume that any given individual has to be “called a singular universal being”. Carrying over the manifold levels of understanding of his analysis, Sartre shows in quite rigorous terms how an individual singular life is precisely a nontotalized and non-totalizable totality. Thus, for Sartre, calling Flaubert the “Family Idiot” is not indulging in a disrespectful remark. Echoing the Ancient Greek word “idios” (meaning “particular”), Sartre now tries to account for the passive-active individuation of Flaubert in which he distinguishes his “constitution” and “personalization” from any other member of his family, and ultimately from any other existed, or existing, presently or in the future, human being. Who is Flaubert, the man, then? If, as Sartre puts it,“a man is nothing more than an individual”, it cannot be but an “idiot”.The existential psychoanalysis is thus ultimately geared to the idea of a phenomenology of idiocy, i.e. of the untotalized totality that each of us is; a project whose frst realization can be found already in the provocative opening sentence of his early essay Baudelaire where is said that, despite the appearances, Charles Baudelaire “lived just the life he deserved” (Sartre 1947, 17ff./15 ff.).
Conclusion Navigating through Sartre’s works, from his early essays written in the 1930s to his last essays on which Sartre had been working until his death, it seems we have never lost the thread of Phenomenology. Intentionality could certainly be considered the essence of Sartre’s “Idea of Phenomenology”, and the latter represents a constant leitmotif of his work. Yet such leitmotif varies in numerous ways. From the psychological (eidetic and empirical) descriptions of the ego, emotions or imagination; through the project of an overall ontology of the For-Itself and the In-Itself; to the progressive discovery of epistemic and normative principles anchored in our most concrete structures of human life; taking the form of a critical-historical study where a phenomenological-ontology of relation (a discourse from and upon the absolute-relative Being of the transphenomenal being) turns into a critique of dialectics; throughout the vicissitudes and adjustments required by each specifc stage of Sartre’s enquiry—one can certainly fnd a pattern of unity in Sartre’s thinking that could soundly be called “phenomenology”. This pattern ultimately leads to the irreducible yet not self-existing “Relative” (be it a “transcendence”, a “relative being”, “alterity”, the “In-itself ”, “Nature”, etc.) to which Human beings, collectively and individually, are deeply and essentially rooted.And this is what should be unambiguously acknowledged as Sartre’s major contribution to phenomenology.
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References De Towarnicki, Frédéric. 1993. A la rencontre de Heidegger. Paris: Gallimard. Masselot, Nathanaël. 2012. “L’ontologie sartrienne est-elle une phénoménologie trasncendantale? Imagination et constitution.” Methodos, 12. journals.openedition.org/methodos/2965#ftn28. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1936. La transcendance de l’ego. Esquisse d’une philosophie phénoménologique. Paris:Vrin.Trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick, The Transcendence of the Ego.An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960. ———. 1939a.“Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité.” In: Situations I. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 31–35. Trans. H.-F. Amiel, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1, 1970, Issue 2, pp. 4–5. ———. 1939b. Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions. Paris: Hermann. Trans. P. Mairet with a Preface by M. Warnock, Sketch for a Theory of Emotions. London/New York: Routledge, 1962. ———. 1940. L’imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Paris: Gallimard. Trans. J. Webber, The Imaginary.A Phenomenological Psychology of Imagination. London/New York: Routledge, 2004. ———. 1943. L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard.Trans. H. E. Barnes, Being and Nothingness.A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. New York/London/Toronto/Sidney:Washington Square Press, 1956. ———. 1947/1954. Baudelaire. Paris: Gallimard.Trans. M.Turnell, Baudelaire. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1972. ———. 1957. Questions de méthode. In: Sartre 1960, pp. 9–111.Trans. H.A. Barnes, Search for a Method. New York: Random House,Vintage Books, 1968. ———. 1960. Critique de la raison dialectique I. Théorie des ensembles pratiques. Paris: Gallimard. Trans. A. Sheridan-Smith, Theory of Dialectical Reason. Vol. 1. Theory of Practical Ensembles. London: New Left Books, 1976. ———. 1971–1972. L’idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857. Paris: Gallimard.Trans. C. Cosman, The Family Idiot. 5 Volumes. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981–1983. ———. 1983. Cahiers pour une Morale. Paris: Gallimard.Trans. D. Pellauer, Notebook for an Ethics. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.
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56 MAX SCHELER Panos Theodorou
56.1. Life and personality Max Scheler was born in Munich (August 22, 1874) and died in Frankfurt am Main (May 19, 1928) just before taking up his post as professor at the University of Frankfurt. He started his studies in Munich (1893), where he was enrolled for medicine, but transferred to Berlin the next year, where studied philosophy under Wilhelm Dilthey and sociology under Georg Simmel. He wrote his doctoral and habilitation theses in Jena (1897, 1899) with Rudolf Eucken, where he also started his career as a Privatdozent. He lost his right to teach in 1910 while Privatdozent at the Catholic University of Munich (a position that he had acquired with Husserl’s help).This was due to rumors spread by his frst wife (whom he had just divorced) and publicized (libelously) in a newspaper that he had accrued debts in order to enjoy affairs with young women. He then moved to Göttingen, where he lectured privately in cafés and hotel rooms and soon became a central fgure in the local realist Phenomenology circle. Tensions in his relationship with Husserl, who felt both jealous of Scheler’s growing fame and angry for not being recognized as source in his writings, drove him back to Munich (1911) and then to Berlin (1912). During this period, he worked on his Ressentiment and Formalismus books, and started working as freelance writer and propagandist (after 1914) of the rights of Germany in the First World War. In 1919 he was again permitted to teach philosophy at Cologne and also became one of the directors of the newly founded Institute for the Social Sciences. During this period, he distanced himself from Catholicism, and eventually moved to Frankfurt in 1928, where he was expected to work as professor of philosophy and sociology at the city’s university. His personal life is notorious for its scandalous twists and turns, which concerned not only his three marriages and rumored love affairs, but also his religious, political, and professional stances. Born to a Jewish mother and a Protestant father, he turned to Catholicism at fourteen years old, later distanced himself from it, then returned, only to later abandon it again for panentheism. He had an early philosophical interest in Nietzsche, became a Marxist enthusiast, supported the old conservative German establishment, and later promoted the view that only the German bourgeois elite could lead the country out of crisis during the unstable Weimar Republic period.
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56.2. Overview of his thought, work, and infuence In his time, Scheler was recognized as one of the most important fgures for the future of German and European philosophy. Decisive in the reorientation of his thought away from Eucken’s neo-Kantian “constructivism” and toward the phenomenological realist position was his acquaintance with Edmund Husserl in 1902.1 In the Phenomenology of the latter’s Logical Investigations (1900/01), Scheler found a systematic analysis of the ideas he was working on during this period.2 He adopted some of the then-developed central tenets of Husserl’s Phenomenology and formed his own phenomenological style.The dazzling result of his work was Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, which appeared in two installments (1913, 1916) in the corresponding consecutive volumes of the Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie (I/2 and II), which was instituted by Husserl and then run by Pfänder, Scheler, and others. The fundamental insights and views developed there set the ground for a course of thought that eventually reached the stage found in his last work, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928), published just before his untimely demise. During the period that separates these two works, Scheler wrote a series of important texts, many of which were also published.Their thematics included the sociology of knowledge, war, the spirit of capitalism, the essence of religion, feminism, the tragic, and many others.3 His talent, however, was not bounded by the limits of philosophy in the strict sense. Before, during, and after the First World War, he also defended the rights of Germany and participated actively in public discussions regarding the identity and future of Germany and Europe. Between 1917 and 1918 he even worked for the German state as a diplomat at posts in Geneva and The Hague. His fame spread quickly throughout the Western world, especially to the USA, and then also to Japan. After the Second World War, when twentieth-century German philosophy and especially Phenomenology fell into disrepute, this infuence declined. Progressively, however, interest in Phenomenology began to grow again. The great winner of this was certainly Heidegger (who had himself benefted signifcantly from Scheler’s thought), but Husserl and Scheler also attracted renewed attention. However, Scheler’s thought did not attract the same degree of interest and scholarly elaboration as that of Heidegger and Husserl. The reasons for this have been thoroughly discussed, and there is unanimous agreement among Scheler scholars that he was magnifcent in terms of achieving new, far-reaching insights and mesmerizing his audiences,4 but disappointing as regards systematicity and expository clarity in his written works. For instance, an analysis of or even a mere remark from his Formalism can leave a deep impression and inspire enthusiasm, but, soon after, frustration and a feeling of helplessness can set in due to apparent jumps or discrepancies in his work, along with his sometimes-cryptic phrasing.
56.3. Themes and characteristics of his work Many of Scheler’s works were published during his lifetime.After his death, his third wife, Maria Scheler, preserved his research manuscripts and edited some of them for publication in the Gesammelte Werke series. In 1973, Manfred Frings took up the continuing work on this edition of Scheler’s writings, which was completed in 1993, comprising ffteen volumes, and published by Franke Verlag (Bern) until 1986, then by Bouvier Verlag (Bonn).5 The bulk of Scheler’s contribution to philosophy and to understanding the problems facing humanity can be boiled down to his critique of rationalistic, hedonistic, and utilitarian ethics, leading toward an ethics based on the concrete human person in the world. This emphasizes
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an embodied spiritual existence, living in a solidary community with other persons, grounded in an order of emotions conditioned by love.This emotive life is not irrational, but rather connects us to a value-laden reality in praxially meaningful ways; it also has its own normativity, determined by an objective hierarchy of values. Under conditions relative to the socio-historical milieu, however, the formable and transformable internal ethos of a person may fall into a state where these ordered values cannot be intuited correctly (or at all) anymore. Humans are thus found to follow courses of action that lead to the realization of values that fail to guarantee the prevalence of the good. The array of topics that occupied Scheler during his philosophical career refect his efforts to clarify this core idea and explore the fate of the person and humanity in the becoming of the world. In his later thought Scheler tries to overcome the problems that humanity faces, especially in the Western world, including the crises that led to the First World War and that were giving rise to the fascism and racialist nationalism that eventually resulted in the disaster of the Second World War. His sensitivity to the problematic situation made it urgent for him to adopt an unconventional way of working at the limits of Phenomenology, a way that—repeatedly and not always clearly—crossed the borderlines between ethics, psychology, theology, sociology, anthropology, social criticism, the critique of ideology, and metaphysics.The importance of his insights and the similar urgency of our own times make his writings a valuable living source for theoretical guidance and inspiration even now.The deadlock in the thematic of values that prevailed as the frst half of the twentieth century drew to a close appears to have now been overcome, and interest in this thematic, combined with that in the emotions and desire or the will, is rising again.
56.4. The context of Scheler’s thought and work Scheler’s family diffculties and tempestuous love life contrasted with his early Catholic conviction.This is said to have made Scheler quickly realize the diffculty of combining theory with praxis, especially insofar as Christianity and bourgeois worldviews could no longer provide guidance on values to the European peoples in the twentieth century. At his frst university year in Munich, Scheler came to believe that the problems of injustice and evil could be solved by giving precedence to radical moral reform before any corresponding political-institutional change. Later in Berlin, he saw the face of radical industrialization and the miserable living conditions of the helpless and cruelly treated proletariat (Staude 1967, ch. 1, esp. 8.). By the time of his move to Jena (1895), Scheler had abandoned the Church for philosophy as a guide for his searches. The anti-positivist neo-Kantian thought of his Doktorvater, R. Eucken, infuenced Scheler in thinking that Geist is autonomous with regard to the living, and that humanity’s course in history, away from his original experience of nature and toward the control and manipulation of the latter through work and science, had emptied human life of meaning. Human spirit, as a refection of the absolute spirit, is our capacity to be in contact with eternal ideals and values in the pure realm of being (Ibid., 13–14). The solution, then, to the crisis of nihilism was thought to be a rebirth of spirituality. During the period that followed, Scheler returned to the Church and its message of love. He also discovered Husserl’s Phenomenology and Bergson’s life philosophy, as well as both thinkers’ trust in the essential riches that simple intuition can offer the unprejudiced philosopher.With this equipment, he could now turn to the depths of the human constitution and the structure of the cosmos in order to thoroughly examine the problems of humanity. He explicitly recognized the root of discontent among modern humanity in bourgeois de-spiritualization brought about with naturalization and capitalism. Scheler emphasized the philosophically suppressed emotive 608
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substrate of humanity and saw the world as the value-rich garden of God’s creation, veiled by scientism and a morality that reduced all value to mere utility (Staude 1967, 23; Stikkers 1980, esp. 21–23, 26ff.; Frings 2001, 168–172). He remained distrustful of liberalism and the idea of popular sovereignty, biased instead toward traditional and religious views of society and politics. After his return from Jena to Munich and experiencing the harshness of life without a job or an income, Scheler became pessimistic about the future of Europe and humanity, fantasizing about the supposed lost paradise of the medieval rural and pre-industrial, communal and preindividualist,‘organically’ arranged natural life, wherein solidarity was valued over competition. The general climate in Germany during these pre-war years, however, was not very different than the one he himself was living in. The loss of a context for a communal life of solidarity with others, said Scheler, was a result of the anti-metaphysical, scientifc spirit that had eyes only for material bodies and mechanical interactions, not only in nature but also in labor and human exchanges. The value of persons was reduced to their calculable productivity and the wealth they produced, which could be used to buy consumerist goods, conveniences, and pleasures (Scheler, 1961, 32, 38, 41; Frings 2001, ch. 6).The new liberal and socialist ideologies preached humanitarianism (privileging and loving humans) outside the religious framework of Christian love, and equality for all irrespective of the genuine personal value of each person. Scheler believed that this created a false conception of unity and functionality in society, casting the seed of ressentiment for all that did not already enjoy the promised privileges of the successful.Arrivism and corruption become, then, the natural state of the modern society, with the socialists and the bourgeois parties remaining content with only irresponsible criticism of the situation and each other, drawing on resentful populist slogans without any real vision for escaping the crisis (Scheler 1961, 50–52, 56–57; Frings 2001, 151–167). Only Christian metaphysics and the relevant ruling elite, Scheler then thought, could restore the lost unity and harmony in modern societies, away from societies divided by class. In addition, it was not class struggle but Christian love and solidarism/corporatism (as opposed to both bourgeois individualism and socialist collectivism) that Scheler took to be the remedy for bourgeois inequalities, individualism, selfshness, and alienation (Staude 1967, 32ff., 67ff.). When the First World War was visible ahead, Scheler thought it a great opportunity for renewal of the spiritual condition in Germany and, through its prevalence over the decadent European nations, in the Western world in general.A Christian order based on love and organic unity of the people, ruled by a sublimated noble feudal elite instead of the industrialist-merchant bourgeois elite that had corrupted Wilhelmian Germany with its monetary wealth and comfort, would restore humanity to the objective order of values. His propagandist Genius of War (1915)6 immediately made Scheler a favorite thinker among Germans. It treated the war as a call addressed to Germany so that it might accomplish its historic destiny: to rediscover humane and heroic values in order to fght, in the name of humanity, against the English spirit of material comfort, selfshness, calculative rationalism, commercialism, and love of wealth, but also—he decried—against the slavish, barbaric, and irrational Orthodox Christian world in the East and the Balkans, at the head of which was Russia.7 After all, since the rise of German romanticism, this was how many German intellectuals represented the non-Germanic world in the postEnlightenment era, if not also in our own time.
56.5. The core theory of his philosophical remedy However, Scheler believed that any hope for the future and rebirth of Europe under Germany’s guidance and control should be based on essential knowledge of what humans are and how they stand and act in the cosmos.The greatest achievement of Scheler’s philosophy is the discovery 609
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of a way of building a normative material ethics of values without falling prey to the dangers that Kant understandably pinpointed in any such effort. Kant claimed that any ethics that refers to non-formally (or materially/contentfully) grounded moral values is necessarily an ethics of goods and purposes, only a posteriori and inductively valid and condemned to concern only the consequences of action, thus unable to thematize the virtuous ethos (Gesinnung) of the person. Such an ethics would be reducible to mere hedonism or an ethical legalism that presupposes a heteronomous and egoistic subject (Scheler 1973a, 6–7; Spader 2002, ch. 1; Blosser 1995). Scheler recognizes the greatness of Kant’s criticism against all pre-existing, non-formal ethics, but also rebuts this as no longer valid since Phenomenology discovered a way to overcome the traditional view of the constitution of our experiential possibilities and of the worldly beings we are presented with. The frst systematic theory covering this appears in the two installments of Formalism in the Jahrbuch (1913, 1916). Experience is not a matter of only having access to internal representations caused by outer beings, and the latter are not mere spatio-temporal clusters of sensory properties to which representations somehow refer. Humans exist as persons, as concrete beings, a fundamental part of which is their emotive make-up, and their experience is characterized by intentionality.This intentionality means that the beings that appear to us belong to a transcendent world-horizon, while the fact that humans exist as concrete persons with emotive lives means that beings in the world appear and are recognized by us, primordially, as always already invested with value and meaningfulness. In straightforward experience, we do not come across mere sensory things; rather, we experience beings having this or that value for us and for our life or existential and praxial aspirations in the world. That is, in our primordial experience of the world we are conscious of goods, i.e., of thingly substrates bearing—or metaphorically ‘invested with’—values.Values have a special status with regard to the things that happen to be their contingent bearers.And the phenomenological way of seeing can show us that values stand independently from their bearers and are hierarchically interrelated as either lower or higher values, which are also deemed either positive or negative (Scheler 1973a, 12–22, 85–100; Frings 2001, 19–34). Our ethos-defning emotive life is conditioned by an a priori stratifcation that enables us to experience the corresponding objective order of values, which are either to be realized in the world as good or otherwise avoided. Echoing Husserl’s remarks in the ffth Logical Investigation (1901), Scheler distinguishes between mere sensory feelings and specifcally intentional feeling acts.8 In the former we become aware of sensory contents like pain, pleasure, fatigue, vigor, sadness, etc., corresponding to analogous states in our body, organism, or psyche; in the latter, however, by experiencing the organismic, psychic, or spiritual self we intuit values, such as agreeableness, nobility, healthiness, beauty, or holiness as special objects in the transcendently appearing world of (correspondingly valued) beings. In the cognitive act of preferring we can experience the objective order of values, which can be either negative or positive and low or high.The specifcally moral values of good and evil, according to Scheler, are not values standing as such within reality, but are realized, as it were,“on the back” of non-moral values (Scheler 1973a, 27; Frings 2001, 39–41). What he means is that whenever we realize positive and high values, we are promoting or realizing the good.The contrary is the case with evil.The actions of a person in the world who has a healthy ordo amoris aim at realizing the higher positive values, which promote good, and avoiding the lower negative values, which promote evil. Good acts and persons, then, are those that promote positive high values (and vice versa for evil acts and persons). The study of ethics is precisely about the conditions that should be presupposed on the side of the person’s ethos so that his or her actions can achieve the ultimate goal of safeguarding the 610
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promotion of the good. Scheler develops an amazing and very delicate analysis of the emotive and willing or desiring factors that come into this picture.The foregoing basic exposition suffces to show us that it constitutes a necessary basis upon which to build a new non-formal (material/contentful) ethics of values, immune to the threats evoked by Kant. But this can only provide a basis for a new ethics if we also have a well-developed theory about the factual presence of evil in the world. If we are beings with the capacity for experiencing the objective order of values and a preference for the good, then why is there—at least moral—evil in the world? The diffculty of developing a full account of this forced Scheler to explore, in separate studies, the problems of how evil enters the world and of our prospects within it. In the frst exposition of his theory, Scheler developed a phenomenological theory of emotion, value, and motivation that culminates in a rich and penetrating theory about the constitution of the person. In parallel and in a further development of the theory, Scheler conducted separate analyses regarding the ordo amoris, ressentiment, and related issues such as the forms and bonds of sociality, the metaphysics of the living organism, history, and culture, some of which were also published. Finally, Scheler elaborated further on some ideas regarding the place and course of the human being in the cosmos as a result of the way in which he or she confronts reality qua painful resistance to his or her aspirations.9
56.6. The formation of the ethos in a turbulent reality Why do humans commit evil? The inner life of the person, Scheler said, is continuously formed and reformed, each time taking the shape of a concrete ethos or, as it is more generally known, a particular ordo amoris. The constituents of our emotive lives are each time ordered or “crystallized” in ways that depend on the moral education and experiences that each of us has in the course of life (Scheler 1973c, esp. 100; Frings 2001, 58–70). The normative, loving inner organization, then, breaks down and others are established.This reorganization of the ethos of a person results in corresponding misapprehensions of the objective order of values. Responding to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (1887), Scheler focuses especially on the formation of the ethos of ressentiment, which he holds responsible for the pathological systematic reverse of the objective order of values in our experience. In a society in which this has happened, nothing makes sense and the society is then doomed to fail, its culture collapsing into nihilism.Another source of the problem is that human persons are fnite beings, never having fully developed their ordo amoris to the degree of an absolutely pure loving personality, which does not allow us a full vision of the total spectrum of objective values. In addition, the facticity of reality and our lives in it makes it so that, more often than not, we come across situations in which we experience irresolvable, original conficts of values in the Kantian sense: for example, a mother being asked by the police to inform on her thief son; a radical pacifst being forced to decide what to do when terrorists are about to cut the throat of his or her beloveds, etc. In Formalism, Scheler works on the idea that moral life is not achieved legalistically by conforming to abstract rules, but in the very core or internal lived ethos of the person.We obtain guidance for leading such a life from a priori possible living exemplars or model personalities experienced in terms of their value, while being and acting in situations like the latter (Spader 2002, 140–5; Frings 2001, 74–80). From Scheler’s analyses, we have the model personalities of the saint, whose ordo amoris is sensitive and preferentially locked to the values of the holy; the genius, who sees spiritualcultural values; the hero, who sees psychic or vital values; the leading spirit, who is sensitive to the values of usefulness and achievement; and the bon vivant, who has eyes for sensory values (Scheler 1973a, 109–110, 502–503, 585–586; Stikkers 1980, 17ff.; Spader 2002, 135ff.).10 These models could provide suffcient guidance if we were not simple fnite beings who cannot be 611
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fully in all these modes of being or experientially and ‘commensurably’ estimate the worth and appropriateness of each, and, furthermore, beings who can never experience the full spectrum of objective values. Does it follow, then, that we are inexorably doomed to moral fragmentation and inconclusiveness? Scheler originally hoped that a deep relation to (participation in) God somehow offers a way out of this tragic diffculty. In the closing sections of his magnum opus, he explicitly states that further research regarding the essence of God and the intentional acts of faith, in which we supposedly come to know God, will show us the way. Scheler actually engages in such a project in On the Eternal in Man (1921).The outcome is an extended attempt at the phenomenologization of religious consciousness and (supposedly) experience.11 However, the effort to show precisely how this is done and to complete his non-formal ethics of values raised severe problems regarding the essence of a theistic God and the presence of evil in the world, which forced him to reconceive his program and its possibilities (Spader 2002, 143–148 and ch. 8).
56.7. The ideal, the real, the becoming of God and of the world After 1921, Scheler progressively moved toward dramatically new views. From 1922, he was also disappointed with the Catholic Church, which showed marks of open hostility against him after his third marriage in 1924. At this point he came to believe that personal, social, and ideological conficts could not be solved via the Catholic religious experience of a theistic God. It was no longer the model personality of a saint that could bring about the sought-after overcoming of fniteness and partiality, the presence of which was torturing human persons and their social formations, but scientifc knowledge of the social basis of all political ideologies and Weltanschauungen (Ibid., 137–138, 144, 147, 189–190). The post-war Weimar mass democracy was becoming a failed attempt at rationalization and technocratization of human affairs.Against this tendency, Lebensphilosophie called for re-spiritualization through intuition of the essence of life and its inner forces. Scheler suggested that values and meaningfulness might be provided by the elite in religion or philosophy, but, in agreement with Weber, now believed that science should be recognized as the value-free provider of impartial grounding truths. Against the rising anti-rationalism cultivated in the masses by the Church, as well as by the radical political right and left, in 1924–25 Scheler started to appeal to the Enlightenment science and liberaldemocratic principles for the salvation of Germany and human culture from confict and collapse (Ibid., 152). The possibility of the scientifc, neutral search for truth could show us that conficting Weltanschauungen are not arbitrarily relativistic, but they rather grow out of a deeper common ground. For Scheler, this was none other than an “absolutely natural Weltanschauung” that Phenomenology could trace behind historically actualized views and cultures, corresponding to the eternal objective hierarchy of truths and values of Geist or Logos.Thus, a series of basic typologies of “relatively natural Weltanschauungen” grow in each region and time, becoming further bifurcated in response to the real material factors (Realfaktoren) of each time (Spader 2002, 155–161; Frings 2001, 195–212). He argued that philosophical-sociological scientifc knowledge (critical of both Comtean and Marxian views) of how all this happens could help both in educating the elite to rule and in attaining mutual understanding between disparate moral outlooks and social groups. In an explicitly anti-Hegelian vein, Scheler insists that it is not the spirit and ‘its’ ideal factors (Idealfaktoren) that cause the holding of a worldview, but the real factors. Leaving behind the view of an absolute complete God as the eternal, powerful, personal spirit that creates and moves everything, Scheler now conceives of spirit/reason in general as totally impotent.12 What comes to hold—or, in Scheler’s terminology, what gets “functionalized”—is 612
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a particular worldview (viz. a system of values) (e.g., Frings 2001, 60–63). In other words, the world order we happen to experience depends on what we come to comprehend as valuemeaningfulness in our interest- or urge-motivated struggle with the real factors we confront at each time.Thus, worldviews take hold depending on the course of the interest-driven struggle of our all-powerful urge or drive (Drang) against the rest of human and non-human reality.13 On the other hand, real factors, including social class identity (defnable by its ethos and corresponding value preferences), cannot determine the content of a worldview and what is seen as real, true, or valuable, but only the picking of this or that a priori possible way of seeing the world. Socio-historical or interest-determined are only the vantage points (generally, but also the ones that prevail), not reality itself or the truths valid for it (Stikkers 1980, 9ff.; Staude 1967, 155, 159, 164, 174–178, 207; Spader 2002, 188ff.).The latter are a priori possible and only picked and actualized in history in the way sketched. The phenomenological sociology of knowledge could, thus, show the whole of objective reality and the hierarchy of values, as well as humanity’s place ‘in between’ them and how worldviews become instituted in the course of history.The knower of all this—and not some absolute omnipotent God—could then guarantee the possibility of a unifcatory context within which the historically partial and fragmentary could be understood and handled, avoiding deadly confict and harms. On the basis of this, this privileged knower would be in the position to see what is the case at each time and, by contrast, what diverges (viz. evil) from the objective—even if not yet fully unfolded in the world—order of all beings. Accordingly, a suitable remedy for the realignment toward the prospective complete realization (viz. good) of the becoming cosmos could be discovered and applied. If someone had the possibility of such knowledge, then, along with knowledge of the formation and transformation of the human ethos, he, she, or they could eradicate evil from Earth.
56.8. The future and the prospect of a salvation from evil What does this panentheistic idea of a becoming God and the possibility of a human knower as described above signify with regard to the meaning of evil and the prospect of salvation? To his theist critics, this appeal to a historically becoming God indicates a psychological collapse and a surge of pessimism in Scheler’s soul during his last years (Spader 2002, 176ff., 196ff.). In reply, Scheler says that he was once told “that it is impossible to bear the idea of an unfnished and God-in-becoming.” However, Scheler then immediately responds to this position, saying that “My answer is that metaphysics is not an insurance company for weak people in need of protection. Metaphysics requires and presupposes human beings with strong and courageous minds” (2009, 66). But does Scheler show the strength and courage that he praises and promotes? It may well be said that his last approach to the issue is simply a more advanced version of the known uncurbable progressivism and eschatological optimism that characterizes most of philosophy and the Judeo-Christian tradition that has formed the Western religious and secular ethos. Instead of ascertaining a pre-existent, complete, personal, caring God or Spirit/ Logos, Scheler projects its panentheistic analogue into some indefnite future. Meanwhile, he also believed that elite phenomenologists would eventually understand what this becoming of God is and what is expected of us in the interim in order to be safe from evil. Despite past and present tragic fragmentation and confict, the good God, or rather our guided march toward goodness—qua harmony, “adjustment” or “equalization” (Ausgleich),14 this time, between Geist and Drang—miraculously synthesize everything in a perfect unity. One way or another, then, salvation is again guaranteed. But what if it is not? How should we live and act in case no such guarantee exists? 613
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Be that as it may, Scheler has given us, in the interim, incredibly rich insights about the human predicament, our current standing, and our possibilities. Some of these can probably help us to proceed further, but also in a different manner.15
Notes 1 In his 1922 work Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart, Scheler himself dates this frst meeting as occurring in 1901 (Scheler 1973b, 308). It appears, though, that this actually happened in 1902. For details, see Henckmann 1998, esp. 11–13 and 13 n. 5. 2 There are clues that Scheler was thinking in ‘phenomenological terms’ even before his meeting with Husserl. See Spiegelberg 1994, 269–270; Staude, 1967, 19ff. 3 The vast scope of Scheler’s thought and work is well depicted in Frings 2001. 4 Scheler appears to have played a very important role in the conversion of Edith Stein. The young Jewish phenomenologist,“dazzled,”“seduced,” and “fascinated” by the “genius” Scheler and his lectures in Gӧttingen, turned to Catholicism. See Stein 1986, 259. 5 There are already introductions to Scheler’s thought that present aspects of his philosophical theory or overviews of some of his important publications. In what follows, my aim is to present a reading of how his philosophy interacts with his socio-political and religious views in the historical context of the frst quarter of the twentieth century in Germany and Europe. 6 A rare exposition of this work can be found in Staude 1967, ch. 3. 7 The Genius of War (1915) also suggested that Germany’s differences with France were less fundamental and that, after the war, they could be eliminated in the context of a unifed Europe that would have eradicated the infuence and threat of Britain, the USA, and Russia. In War and Rebuilding (1916), however, Scheler placed France clearly on the side of the bourgeois spirit and identifed Germany alone as destined to rebuild Europe. See Staude 1967, 86ff., 94, 96, 100. 8 For more on this pivotal issue in Husserl and a phenomenological axiology and ethics, see Theodorou 2012. For Scheler’s understanding of and efforts to develop this distinction and further information on issues around this taxonomy, see Theodorou 2018. 9 On Scheler’s thematic of reality as resistance and his critique of Heidegger’s conception of reality in Being and Time (1927), see Dahlstrom 2002. See also Frings 2001, 191–2, 233–237. 10 A silent compromise has been made here in the correspondence due to the known discrepancy in Scheler’s analysis between, on the one hand, the fve model personalities and emotive spheres and, on the other hand, the four levels of values offered. 11 A short account of the main points of this analysis can be found in Davis and Steinbock 2016, §5. See also Spader 2002, 144–147 and ch. 7; Frings 2001, ch. 4. 12 This conception of the Geist in general, i.e., not only of the fnite human, appears to have taken place after his “Problems of Religion” (1921) and is refected in the frst chapter of the Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (1924) and in The Place of Humans in the Cosmos (1928). 13 It is generally acknowledged that Scheler’s thinking on spirit and urge (Drang) is not developed as extensively and as clearly as we would have liked. Elements of these abstract and helplessly realistic metaphysical ideas, however, are presented in his published The Human Place in the Cosmos and in the “Philosopher’s Outlook” (Scheler 1958). See also Scheler 2008. 14 On this notion, see Staude 1967, ch. 7. 15 I would like to thank James E. Hackett for his helpful comments on the penultimate draft of this paper and David Standen for his linguistic polishing of the text.
References Blosser, Philip. 1995. Scheler’s Critique of Kant’s Ethics.Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Dahlstrom, Daniel. 2002. “Scheler’s Critique of Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology.” In: Max Scheler’s Acting Persons: New Perspectives. Ed. Stephen Schneck.Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 67–92. Davis, Zachary and Steinbock, Anthony. 2016.“Max Scheler.” In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2016 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/sc heler/. Frings, Manfred S. 2001. The Mind of Max Scheler. Milwaukee,WI: Marquette University Press.
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Max Scheler Henckmann, Wolfhart. 1998. “Die Anfänge von Schelers Philosophie in Jena.” In: Denken des Ursprungs— Ursprung des Denkens: Schelers Philosophie und ihre Anfänge in Jena. Eds. Christian Bermes et al.Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, pp. 11–33. Scheler, Max. 1958. “Philosopher’s Outlook.” In: Max Scheler, Philosophical Perspectives. Trans. O. A. Haac. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, pp. 1–12. ———. 1961. Ressentiment.Trans. and ed.William M. Holdheim; introduced by Lewis A. Coser. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. ———. 1973a. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Trans. M. S. Frings and R. L. Funk. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973b. Gesammelte Werke, Band VII. Bern/Munich: Francke. ———. 1973c. “Ordo Amoris.” In: Selected Philosophical Essays. Ed. and introduced by D. R. Lachterman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 98–135. ———. 2008. The Constitution of the Human Being.Trans. and ed. John Gutting. Milwaukee,WI: Marquette University Press. ———. 2009. The Human Place in the Cosmos.Trans. Manfred Frings and with an introduction by Eugene Kelly. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Spader, Peter H. 2002. Scheler’s Ethical Personalism. New York: Fordham University Press. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1994. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Staude, John Raphael. 1967. Max Scheler: 1874-1928. New York:The Free Press. Stein, Edith. 1986. Life in a Jewish Family: An Autobiography, 1891-1916. Trans. Josephine Koeppel. Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies Publications. Stikkers, Kenneth W. 1980. “Introduction.” In: Max Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. Trans. Manfred Frings. London/Boston/Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 1–30. Theodorou, Panos. 2012. “Husserl’s Original Project for a Normative Phenomenology of Emotions and Values.” In: Values: Readings and Sources on a Key Concept of the Globalized World. Ed. Ivo De Gennaro. Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, pp. 265–89. ———. 2018.“On Scheler’s Theory of Emotions and Values:A Phenomenological Appraisal and Critique.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy,Vol. XVI, 121-157.
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57 ALFRED SCHUTZ Michael D. Barber
The work of Alfred Schutz can undeniably be located within the phenomenological tradition in which Edmund Husserl has been taken to be founder. Even though Schutz repeatedly criticized Husserl’s work and despaired once in a private letter about its “indefensibility” (Schutz and Gurwitsch 1989, 310),1 nevertheless at the end of his life, he described Husserl to his friend Eric Voegelin as the old “wizard” [Hexenmeister] who always survives the many objections one may raise against his philosophy (Schutz and Voegelin 2004, 565).2 To examine how Schutz engaged the phenomenology of Husserl, who “valued independent thought far more than slavish following” (Cairns 2013, vi), this entry will consider 1) the locus of Schutz’s phenomenological investigations (“a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude”), 2) his phenomenological description of that natural attitude, 3) the relationship of that description to the social sciences, and 4) his disagreements with specifc Husserlian positions and creative deployments of phenomenological concepts.
57.1. The locus of Schutz’s phenomenological investigations Schutz’s magnum opus, The Phenomenology of the Social World, originally Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, grew out of his desire to provide philosophical foundations for the social sciences, in particular sociology (Schutz 2011, 1). Although Schutz found most compelling Max Weber’s “interpretive sociology” (2004, 85/5), he recognized that Weber’s main problem, “understanding the subjective meaning a social action has for the actor” (2011, 1), needed philosophical underpinnings. Not fnding neo-Kantian thought satisfactory for such philosophical foundation, but drawn to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Schutz, through the intervention of Felix Kaufmann, eventually discovered the relevance of Husserlian phenomenology for his project. In The Phenomenology of the Social World, after briefy touching on questions in Weber’s thought that required philosophical elaboration (meaningful action, the alter ego, the difference between subjective and objective meaning), Schutz, in an all-important “Appended Note,” pinpointed precisely where, within the phenomenological framework, his philosophical investigation was to be placed (Schutz 2004, 129–130/43–44). First of all, he affrms that he intends to study the constituting process in internal timeconsciousness, developed within section two of The Phenomenology of the Social World, within the phenomenological reduction, as described in Husserl’s Ideas 1 (Hua III/1, 63–69/57–62). Since 616
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to analyze the phenomenon of meaning in mundane social life did not require him to remain further within the transcendental sphere, he discontinues relying on the reduction, beginning in section three, confdent that what he had found within the reduction would be applicable within the natural attitude, as Husserl had stipulated in his 1930 “‘Nachwort’ zu meinem Ideen” (Hua V, 138–162). Schutz, however, cautions that even after having dispensed with the reduction, his analysis remains “on the ground of inner appearance as the appearance of that which is peculiar to the psychic” (Schutz 2004, 130/44; Hua V, 144) with the result that he is developing in effect a “phenomenological psychology” (Ibid.). Husserl had remarked in the “Nachwort” that since, as often happens, one designates descriptions that restrict themselves purely and truly to what is given in intuition as “phenomenological,” the title “phenomenological psychology” perfectly fts an undertaking that seeks to describe accurately psychic processes (Hua V, 144). In fact, Husserl envisioned such an enterprise as being a great, self-standing science, as long as it did not focus on factual matters, but rather on a science of essence, that is, one which “seeks the invariant, unique structures of the psyche [Seele], of a community of psychic life, that is, with reference to its Apriori” (Ibid.). It is just such a phenomenological psychology that Schutz claims that The Phenomenology of the Social World instantiated (Schutz 2004, 130/44) and that he designates with Husserl’s own words from the “Nachwort” as a “constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude” (Ibid.; Hua V, 158). After having depicted what such a phenomenological psychology might look like, Husserl in the “Nachwort” proceeds to discuss the implementation of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction in which psychological subjectivity, along with all that is naively taken to be real, loses its sense of being a psyche in the spatio-temporal nature of a body (Hua V, 145). Husserl repeatedly points out how this transition to transcendental phenomenology launches a “philosophical science” (Hua V, 147) that is driven by the philosophizing ego (Hua V, 147); that provides a philosophically fundamental science as a basis for all philosophical knowledge (Hua V, 147); that attempts to exercise a radical philosophical self-responsibility that takes nothing for granted (Hua V, 148); and that returns to pure experience and builds up an account of what is encountered step by step and only on the basis of what is evident (Hua V, 148), since to do otherwise would contradict the very meaning of philosophy (Hua V, 148).As if attuned to the different possibilities that Husserl’s “Nachwort” affords, Schutz acknowledges the importance of the phenomenological and eidetic reductions for the foundation of a philosophy free of unexamined presuppositions, but, guided by his training in the social sciences, he feels that a phenomenology of the natural attitude would be more appropriate for exploring social reality (Schutz 2011, 2). In a sense and in good phenomenological style, Schutz allows the reality he intends to investigate to determine even the level and type of phenomenology appropriate for that reality. His approach apparently met the highest standards of phenomenological investigation since, when he sent his book to Husserl, it elicited “highly gratifying comments” and “warm approval” (Ibid.).
57.2. The phenomenology of the natural attitude In order to deal with the issue of the meaning that an action has for an actor—Weber’s basic problem—Schutz insists that one needs to penetrate to the deepest stratum of experience accessible to refection, out of which the phenomenon of meaning emerges: that is, one must grasp the foundational experience of internal time-consciousness—a central theme of Husserlian phenomenology (2004, 93/12). Consequently, Schutz affrms that “the problem of meaning is a time problem” (Ibid., the italics are Schutz’s). Following Bergson’s defnition of durée as a continuous fux of not clearly distinguished, heterogeneous qualities, Schutz states that the refective regard, which Husserl calls “recollection” or 617
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“reproduction” and which illuminates the-just-having-fowed-by stream of durée made available through “retention,” apprehends and distinguishes experiences from each other (Schutz 2004, 141–145/47–51). Such refection captures experiences that were merely undergone or suffered (such as pains) and it also apprehends the intentional attitudes that one spontaneously takes up toward such experiences, and Schutz classifes such spontaneous “behavior” [Tun] as a meaningendowing experience of consciousness (Schutz 2004, 151/55–56). Just as ongoing experiences are maintained after one experiences them in an ongoing string of retentions moving into the past, and just as one can turn refectively to such fowing-by experiences or to long-past experiences and single them out in reproduction and refection, so Schutz also articulates parallel conscious structures that were directed toward the future (Schutz 2004, 152–161/57–63). Hence protentions (the counterparts of retention) anticipate what is immediately coming, but one is also able to represent refectively via foreseeing expectations [Vorerinnerung] what will happen or what one will make happen in the more distant future (the counterpart of refection or reproduction). This temporal bi-directionality of the stream of consciousness, fowing into the past and aimed toward the future, makes possible Schutz’s account of action, which plays a central role in his effort to provide foundations for Weberian sociology. Refection discloses three levels: 1) passively undergone pains and refexes that Leibniz called the surf of indiscernible and confused small perceptions of which one is not usually not aware; 2) meaningful intentional acts emanating from our spontaneous life, often taken up in reaction to events, as when one perceives an object impinging on oneself or fghts a suddenly experienced pain; and 3) “action,” in which one constructs in advance a project that one envisions an outcome that will have come about (and hence is phantasized as a completed “act”) by one’s taking the steps to realize it and that will guide the steps taken to realize it (Schutz 1962, 210–211). Schutz makes it clear that “the meaning of any action is its corresponding projected act” (2004, 157/61; Schutz’s italics). Schutz rounds out his treatment of meaning by noting how through polythetic experiences synthetically linked to each other, one builds up monothetic schemes of experience that constitute the stock of knowledge through which one interprets lived experience (Ibid., 175– 195/71–86).Thus the object given to a spontaneous act of perception arising in response to the presence of a table is grasped as a “table,” a “typifcation” that has been built up in one’s stock of knowledge by repeated table-experiences. Or, when one phantasizes the action that will govern one’s project of “purchasing milk at the store,” one draws on the knowledge of how to execute typically such a project that can be found in the stock of knowledge built up over time. Such typifcations in one’s stock of knowledge, although grasped monothetically, are not only assembled across time, but are also socially transmitted to an actor. The methodology of “constitution” employed here, going behind a static given, the monothetic typifcations in one’s stock of knowledge, to uncover the experiences that went into the build-up of what one fnds as given, is typical of Husserlian phenomenology that, for instance, traces the many conscious processes that must have gone on for one to be able to have an object given in perception. Finally, to clarify the notion of motivation on which Weber relies and to terminate his analysis of bi-directionally oriented internal time-consciousness within the confnes of the phenomenological reduction, Schutz distinguishes between the “in-order-to” and “because” motives of an action.The “in-order-to” motive is established when one phantasizes before undertaking an action that action as completed, as what “will have been brought about,” that is, in future perfect tense, and as what will give direction to all the sub-steps one will take to realize that project. Hence, one conceives a project of robbing a bank, phantasizing what it will be like for the bank to be robbed, before one sets about to realize it. Likewise, it is possible to inquire about “because motives,” that is, to determine those events or circumstances in one’s past that 618
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may have determined or infuenced the adoption of a project. In this case, one must start with a decision to implement a project already arrived at and hence in the past, and then go back into the past before that past, in the pluperfect tense, to fnd prior events that may have infuenced that decision. Hence, for example, experiences of being violently abused in the bank robber’s childhood may provide the because motive explaining the robber’s decision to undertake the project to rob a bank. Schutz is fully aware that his sojourn within the phenomenological reduction in section two of The Phenomenology of the Social World focuses on structures essential to the individual consciousness, but he is also cognizant that an adequate constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude undertaken to provide a foundation for Weberian sociology must take account of intersubjective relationships. Instead of addressing the diffcult problem of constituting the Thou from within the constraints of transcendental phenomenology, as did Husserl in his Fifth Cartesian Meditation (Hua I, 121–183), Schutz dispenses with the phenomenological reduction and turns to describing how intersubjective understanding is experienced within the natural attitude (2004, 219–220/97–98). Like Husserl, he denies that one perceives the other’s experiences originarily as the other experiences them “from within” (Ibid., 222–225/99–101; 1962, 313–315). Instead, the other’s psychological life is appresented, parallel to the way that the front of an object appresents its unseen back side. However, the other’s body appresents the other’s psychological life with such immediacy and continual confrmation that the one apprehending the other need not resort to inferences about that psychological life (Schutz 2004, 224–225/101) and, in fact, one might feel as though he or she were actually perceiving the other’s experiences. The regular effcacy of intersubjective understanding further depends on the socially acquired interpretive schemes and typifcations established through repeated experiences of others and sedimented in one’s stock of knowledge. These interpretive schemes and typifcations enable interactors to know what others are doing and to understand their goals and motives at particular times and in particular circumstances (Schutz 1962, 55–56). Hence, even without originary access to another’s consciousness, a jury can determine whether a defendant killed a victim with premeditated intent, a teacher understands that a student wants to ask a question when she raises her hand, or everyone understands the police offcer who turns on the sirens of her car in order to let everyone know that she is driving at excess speed to deal with an emergency. Schutz, like Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and other phenomenologists, develops his account of intersubjective understanding on the basis of face-to-face relationships in which both parties share the same time and the space (and so have access to each other’s bodily expressions). In such a “We-relationship” between “Consociates,” each’s knowledge keeps pace with the other’s stream of consciousness, increases from moment to moment, and undergoes immediate correction (e.g., of the typifcations one deploys toward the other) when the least bodily movement of the other, such as a scowl, might call for it (Schutz 2004, 319–326/167–172). Moving beyond the foundational face-to-face relationship, Schutz points out how certain modifcations, often unnoticed in commonsense but recoverable in careful phenomenological refection, occur once one’s face-to-face partner departs and moves to a different space in such a way that the partner’s body is no longer accessible (Ibid., 331–334/176–178). One’s knowledge of the partner, who now becomes a “Contemporary” and who shares time with one but no longer space, “freezes,” in the sense that such knowledge is based on all one’s past experiences of the other up to that point and collected in the construction of an ideal type (much like a sociological type) of that other, a type much less revisable than the typifcations given face-to-face. Consequently, one’s knowledge of a Contemporary is mediate, descriptive, and inferential, since one corrects one’s understanding of the other only through the occasional letter or email in which one pieces together information about one’s partner as opposed to the 619
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abundant feedback given in that “interlocking of glances” and “thousand-faceted mirroring of each other” (Ibid., 331–334/176–178) uniquely characteristic of the face-to-face relationship. Finally, one knows Predecessors and Successors, who share neither the same time nor the same space and who are known also through types, corrigible also on the bases of the trickle of information available, as might occur when the discovery of long-lost letters of one’s greatgrandmother makes it possible to modify one’s type of her. Consociates given in immediate We-relationships and Contemporaries, Predecessors, and Successors, given through inferentially developed types, in what Schutz calls “They-relationships” (Ibid., 343–344/185, 359–360/195, 368–369/202–203), represent the various ways partners encounter each other in the structure of the social world. In summary, Schutz develops his constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude with an eye to providing philosophical foundations for Max Weber’s interpretive sociology, and hence this phenomenology focuses on issues such as meaning, the meaning of action (in its phantasized project imagined prior to its unfolding), the socially and temporally developed schemes of experience for the interpretation of experiences and of other persons, motivation, and the social world; in particular, the different ways one understands others depending on one’s spatiotemporal location in the structure of that world. At the same time, it is obvious that Schutz’s entire explanation is based in phenomenological ideas and concepts: inner-time; the selectivity of consciousness; intentionality (whether of a spontaneous act adopted in reference to impinging events and circumstances or projects correlative to acts of phantasying and to the subsequent acts aimed at realizing such projects); typifcations constituted in inner-time through repeated, similar experiences; motivations understandable by reference to inner-time indexes; and intersubjectivity, also indexed with reference to space and time, and requiring different cognitive, intentional activities depending on the placement of one’s partner within the structure of the social world. Indeed, besides operating within parameters established by Husserl himself, namely differentiating between a transcendental phenomenology and a phenomenological psychology, Schutz’s entire work here can be described as a major project in phenomenological constitution. Hence, he builds from the ground of the stream of consciousness upward (hence the German title “sinnhafte Aufbau” or the “meaningful build-up” of the social world) and details all the conscious processes that go into there being “a natural attitude” or social world. Clearly Schutz abides provisionally within the constraints of a phenomenological psychology, limiting himself to “inner appearance as the appearance of that which is peculiar to the psychic” (Schutz 2004, 44; Hua V, 144) and the structures of a community of psychic life. Furthermore, he does not concentrate on factual matters, but rather on a science of essence, that is, seeking invariant and unique structures. Hence, one recognizes that his “structure of the social world” is eidetic in character: Consociates, Contemporaries, Predecessors, and Successors cannot be understood in any other way than that in which Schutz presents them, namely as determined by spatiotemporal coordinates and as correlative to immediate, revisable typifcations or inferentially constructed types. In fact, this picture of the natural attitude Schutz gives is itself eidetic insofar as Schutz’s characterizations of temporality, meaning, schemes of interpretation, motivation, and intersubjective understanding are such that one cannot imagine any concrete instantiation of the natural attitude, any culture, or any society that would not be describable in these terms.
57.3. The social world and the social sciences The natural attitude is generally counterpoised to the transcendental phenomenology domain into which one enters through the phenomenological reduction, but when Schutz comes to consider the sphere that is roughly equivalent to the natural attitude but that is counterpoised 620
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to the realm of the social sciences, he speaks of it as “common sense everyday life” (1962, 57). He links this sphere to Husserl’s Lebenswelt, and he takes this sphere, which he also denominates “the world of daily life,” as interchangeable with the natural attitude (Ibid., 208). In his 1937 manuscript, “The Problem of Personality in the Social World,” Schutz makes it clear that he hopes to enrich his earlier The Phenomenology of the Social World by including “working” (2003, 132/277), which consists in bodily action in the outer world based on a project that one seeks to bring about (1962, 212). In effect, this articulation of the importance of “working” (Ibid., 230), the prevalent form of spontaneity in the world of everyday life, highlights how for Schutz “a pragmatic motive governs our natural attitude toward the world of everyday life” (Ibid., 209), even though pragmatic motivations were not absent from The Phenomenology of the Social World. By emphasizing the pragmatic character of the world of everyday life, Schutz converges with Husserl’s own account of the Lebenswelt, which precedes and contrasts with the disinterested scientifc attitude that arises out of it according to “The Vienna Lecture” (Hua VI, 329–332/283– 285; Husserl 1954, 52–53/53; Hua XXXIX, 58, 156, 201, 262, 264, 312–313, 320, 352, 387). Having modifed his earlier account of the natural attitude by emphasizing the pragmatic motives ruling in everyday life, Schutz, in his essay “On Multiple Realities” and in repeated discussions on the outlook of social scientists (1962, 36–38/63), argues that they undertake a shift in attitude away from the pragmatic orientation, similar to that of the epoché adopted by the phenomenologist, in order to embark upon the world of scientifc theory (Ibid., 145). They set aside the pragmatic motives prevalent in their commonsense life and those of the subjects of their investigation and allow the scientifc problem alone to determine what is relevant for them, thereby seeking to realize what Max Weber meant by the objectivity of the social sciences (Ibid., 63).Their predominant interest, or relevance, is not to master the world, as it would be in pragmatic everyday life, but to observe and to understand it (Ibid., 245). Not only does Schutz differentiate the pragmatic world of everyday life from the sphere of scientifc refection by conceiving social scientists as resembling phenomenologists in undertaking a kind of an epoché, adopting a distinctive attitude, and entering a refective domain with a specifc relevance-ranking. But also, Schutz’s phenomenological perspective, from which he constitutes the natural attitude and depicts the particular the stance of the sociologist, requires that the phenomenologist, following Husserl, exercise strict philosophical responsibility in not accepting unexamined presuppositions. Though Schutz’s focus is not on transcendental phenomenology, he exemplifes the critical spirit of such phenomenology in his exchange with the positivist philosophers of the social sciences of his time, particularly Carl Hempel and Ernest Nagel.These philosophers contended that the highly successful methods of the natural sciences should be employed also in the social sciences, restricting scientists to what is given in sensory observation, ruling out any talk or invisible purposes or meanings of actions, and resorting to behavioristic approaches. Schutz criticized this position because it operates uncritically with the presupposition that the methods of the natural sciences should supplant all other methods, without frst considering what the object of social scientifc investigation is and then determining what methods might be appropriate for its investigation. Instead, for Schutz, the object of social scientifc science is the world of everyday life, or “social reality,” whose essential features he had already mapped out. In that world or reality, the “objects” studied are unlike the objects studied by the natural scientists, who examine objects like electrons and molecules that do not interpret their world. Social scientists, by contrast, are engaged in a project of interpreting subjects who are in turn interpreting their word. Furthermore, as previously noted, purposes and meanings of actions in social reality, as Schutz describes it, need not be invisible if one does not limit oneself to bare sensory observation as do the positivists and if one relies on the standard typifcations of everyday life that make purposes and goals accessible, such that, for instance, one can interpret a 621
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raised hand as indicating that a student wants to ask a question. By simply assuming that natural scientifc methods are appropriate for the social sciences and by not frst having clarifed the object of their investigation, social reality, as Schutz himself had done phenomenologically, the positivistic philosophers of social science ended up not even seeing the intricate interpretive tasks that face social scientists, which Schutz describes as “constructing the constructs” (Ibid., 59) of actors in everyday life. By providing his philosophical foundation for the social sciences, Schutz recapitulates what Husserl achieved in his Crisis, which explains how “the knowledge of the objective-scientifc world is ‘grounded’ in the self-evidence of the life-world” (Hua VI, 134/130). Schutz’s phenomenological constitution of everyday life in fact facilitates the interpretive endeavor of social science, which he, following Max Weber, defnes as determining what actors mean by their actions, that is, their “subjective meaning” (1962, 57), as opposed to the meaning of an actor’s partner or a neutral observer. Effective social science requires via what Schutz calls the “postulate of subjective interpretation” (Ibid., 34–36) that social scientists examine the meaning of an action for the actor, and, for this scientifc purpose, Schutz’s depiction of everyday life provides the much needed conceptual machinery.To understand such meaning, the social scientist seeks to establish the in-order-to motive, the phantasied beforehand project that guides every actor, that provides the meaning of every action, and that even life-world actors must grasp to understand the actions of their co-actors in everyday life, even though their ultimate relevances have to do with mastering the world instead of understanding it.The in-order-to motive governing an actor’s action serves as a kind of directing relevance for that action, and the action itself often serves further the ranking of relevances that ultimately govern an actor’s whole life. Moreover, one’s in-order-to motives are conceived of as typifed, as the kinds of projects one has realized before or seen others realize, and any actor implementing a project must rely on the typifed interpretive schemes in one’s stock of knowledge. In brief, the entire phenomenological account of everyday life, which includes a carefully established explanation of meaning, motivation, typifcations, and relevances, stands available for any social scientist who seeks to construct the constructs of any everyday actor. To satisfy the postulate of subjective interpretation, to take account of the in-order-to motive that gives meaning to an actor’s action, the social scientist can make use of the method for which Weber was renowned: ideal type-construction. For instance,Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism constructs an ideal type of the in-order-to motive of the Protestant, that is, the religious purpose informing the Protestant’s entrepreneurial undertakings, its relationship to other subordinate relevances, and the Protestant’s stock of knowledge about the workplace, hard work, religious practice, and money. In fact, such type-construction by a social scientist such as Weber resembles the inferential building-up of ideal types that an everyday life actor constructs of Contemporaries, Predecessors, or Successors and that the everyday actor makes use of to understand the meanings of the actions or communications of the partners who no longer share this actor’s space and/or time. Consequently, Schutz recognizes that everyday actors already comport themselves as social scientists, though, of course the relevances behind type construction in everyday life and in social science are quite different (2004, 403/220). Schutz, it should be noted, is not opposed to social scientifc experiments or to the high-level generalizations and idealizations (1964, 84–85; 1962, 34–35), such as those employed in statistical social science, but he insists that such abstract conceptual schemes are a kind of “intellectual shorthand” and that one always can and sometimes must be able to refer to the activities of individual subjects in the social world, as the Weberian verstehende sociology, informed by Schutzian phenomenological foundations, can do. Furthermore, Schutz also acknowledges that he concurs with Ernest Nagel that social scientifc empirical knowledge must be established through con622
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trolled inference, propositionally articulated, and verifable by anyone who is willing to examine the corroborating observations, provided that by “observation” one does not mean same kind of sensory observation that the positivist philosophers think will validate empirical propositions in the natural sciences (Schutz 1962, 51). Since Schutz dispenses with validation through such sensory observation, intersubjective validation by the community of social scientists assumes greater prominence in his theory. In addition, he adds that well-crafted social science must comply with a series of postulates that mandate that social scientifc results be articulated with logical consistency, attentive to the subjective meanings of actors, and “adequate,” in the sense that the scientifc model of human action would be understandable for the actor and interactors in everyday life (Ibid., 43–44).This last “postulate of adequacy” seeks to insure a consistency between scientifc constructs and the constructs of commonsense experience, bringing into interaction thereby the dichotomy between science and life that the phenomenological epoché with regard to the life-world reveals.
57.4. Conclusion: specifc disagreements and creative deployments of phenomenology An indication of Schutz’s pertinence to the phenomenological tradition can be found in his serious critical engagement with the phenomenology of Husserl, who preferred followers who were, as Cairns noted, independent thinkers rather subservient disciples. Schutz’s criticisms focused on Husserl’s treatment of intersubjectivity in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. Schutz questioned whether the second epoché, by which one would seek to exclude the results of intentional activities referring to other subjectivities, could be successfully executed (Schutz 1966, 57–67/80–82; 1962, 120–132). He raised doubts about whether one would be able to apperceptively transfer the sense “living body” to another whose body differs markedly from one’s own, particularly if one is unable to experience the other’s body originarily as one experiences one’s own body or if the other belongs to the opposite sex. Finally, he opposed the idea that there are personalities of a higher order. In the end, Schutz concludes that the problem of intersubjectivity cannot be solved within the transcendental sphere but is rather a “datum of the life-world” (Schutz 1966, 82).There were objections to Schutz’s interpretation of the Fifth Meditation, such as Dorion Cairns’s criticism that Husserl’s second epoché was not intended to prescind from a pre-constituted stratum whose importance he underestimates, namely the social world. Rather, in Cairns’s view, Husserl begins with the social world and seeks to imaginatively re-construct through a kind of Abbau, or de-constructing, one stratum that the social world presupposes, namely, the primordial stratum that is the psychophysical ego (Schutz 1957).3 In addition, although there might be differences between the other’s body and one’s own, the extensive similarities between both bodies might be suffcient for a non-inferential apperceptive transfer of the sense “living body” to the other. Such matters, however, deserve more in-depth discussion than can be carried on in this entry. Despite these differences with Husserl, Schutz also deploys phenomenology creatively, in novel contexts. For instance, in “On Multiple Realities” he develops a series of fnite provinces of meaning such as dreaming, phantasy, and scientifc theory over against the pragmatic world of everyday life in analogy to the way that phenomenology, through its epoché, separates itself from the life-world while opening up an alternative, phenomenological “province of meaning.” In “Symbol, Reality, and Society,” Schutz correlates with this treatment of multiple realities a theory of symbolic representation by explaining how symbols, given in everyday life, “appresent” (in the Husserlian sense of that word) another multiple reality (e.g., religious or literary). In addition and on the basis of the distinction between the objective meaning (such as that of the 623
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terms defned in a dictionary) and subjective meaning (the distinctive infection terms take on due to one’s unique history), Schutz examines how racial groups differ from each other in their interpretation of group membership, equality, and equality of understanding. Finally, he develops an account of the role of relevances in pragmatic everyday life, illustrating, for instance, how actors on the basis of their intrinsic relevance-systems come to terms with imposed relevances (e.g., death, the onset of illness, or ontological limits) and how relevances play a key role in the selectivity of consciousness and in the continual attentional fuctuations between theme and horizon to which consciousness is prone.4
Notes 1 Letter of Schutz to Gurwitsch, February 3, 1959. 2 Letter of Schutz to Voegelin, October 16, 1958. 3 Cairns’s comments, also, were translated by Kersten for this Schutzian Research reprint, and the relevant comments referred to above appear in Schutzian Research 2, 19 n.15, 20 n.16. 4 The author would like to thank William Hannegan for his editorial assistance.
References Cairns, Dorion. 2013. The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Ed. Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, Edmund. 1954. Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik. Ed. Ludwig Landgrebe. Hamburg: Classen Verlag; Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Trans. James S. Churchill. Ed. Ludwig Landgrebe. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Schutz, Alfred. 1957. “Das Problem der transzendentalen Intersubjectivität bei Husserl.” Philosophische Rundschau 5, pp. 81–107; “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl.” Trans. Fred Kersten, reprinted as “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl.”Trans. Fred Kersten, with Comments of Dorion Cairns and Eugen Fink. Schutzian Research 2, 2010, pp. 9–51. ———. 1962. The Problem of Social Reality. Ed. Maurice Natanson. In: Collected Papers, vol. 1.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1964. Studies in Social Theory. Ed. Arvid Brodersen. In: Collected Papers, vol. 2. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1966. Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy. Ed. Ilse Schutz. In: Collected Papers, vol. 3.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 2003. “Das Problem der Personalität in der Socialwelt.” In: Theorie der Lebenswelt 1: Die pragmatische Schichtung der Lebenswelt. Eds. Martin Endress and Ilja Srubar. Alfred Schütz Werkausgabe, vol. V.1. Konstanz: UVK, pp. 91–176;“The Problem of Personality in the Social World.”Trans. Fred Kersten. In: Collected Papers 6: Literary Reality and Relationships. Ed. Michael Barber. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013, pp. 199–309. ———. 2004. Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. In: Alfred Schütz Werkausgabe, vol. 2. Eds. Martin Endress and Joachim Renn. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, pp. 69-447; The Phenomenology of the Social World.Trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1967. ———. 2011. Phenomenology and the Social Sciences. Ed. Lester Embree. In: Collected Papers, vol. 5. Dordrecht: Springer. Schutz, Alfred and Gurwitsch, Aron. 1989. Philosophers in Exile: Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959.Trans. J. Claude Evans. Ed. Richard Grathoff. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Schutz, Alfred and Erik. Voegelin 2004. Eine Freundschaft, die ein Leben ausgehaltet hat: Briefwechsel 19381959. Eds. Gerhard Wagner and Gilbert Weiss. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft.
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58 EDITH STEIN Antonio Calcagno
Much of the scholarly literature on the philosophy of Edith Stein focuses on her later philosophical project, which sought to synthesize both phenomenology and Christian philosophy to arrive at a fuller understanding of being.1 Recently, scholars and philosophers have turned to Stein’s earlier body of work, which is more strictly phenomenological (Burns 2015; Zahavi 2010; and Moran 2004).The predilection on the part of scholars for Stein’s later work can be attributed to two important factors. First, Stein is revered by many Christians as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. She was canonized by John Paul II on October 11, 1998. Her later work was relevant to those working in Christian philosophy and theology: scholars used Stein’s corpus to advance ideas and claims in these felds. Second, phenomenologists and philosophers in general conceived, and wrongly so, I might add, of Stein’s phenomenological investigations as simply being derivative of her teacher Edmund Husserl’s work. Some thought of her simply as Husserl’s secretary and editor, for example, Martin Heidegger (Bernet 1985). Moreover, sexism in philosophy hindered the study of Stein’s early phenomenological thought. Whereas male fgures in the early phenomenological tradition received due attention, including Adolf Reinach, Roman Ingarden, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Max Scheler, women phenomenologists, for example, Edith Stein, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Gerda Walther, and Else Vogtländer, were viewed as minor or secondary fgures, philosophers who simply repeated in large part what their “masters” taught them (Calcagno 2006).This chapter focuses on Stein the phenomenologist and will explore her original contributions to phenomenology, which include, I argue, a view of meaning-making or sense-bestowal (Konstitution) that is deeply connected with psyche; empathy as a means to self-understanding and to the general understanding of ourselves as persons as well as empathy as a condition for knowledge in the human sciences; and a developed social and political ontology that also includes a unique understanding of woman.
58.1. Setting the stage: a brief biography Born in 1891 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), Edith Stein was the last of eleven children born to Auguste Courant and Siegfried Stein. She was raised in an observant Jewish household and completed both her elementary and secondary education in Breslau, ultimately qualifying to enter the German university system. Stein began her university studies in psychology, history, and German at the University of Breslau in 1910. She became quickly dissatis625
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fed with psychology on account of its positivistic and psychologistic tendencies: psychological events and phenomena were either viewed as exclusively empirically quantifable and measurable phenomena, which reduced psychic events to material, corporeal mechanisms, or as strictly psychic phenomena with limited or no relation to other aspects of the human being, including spirit (i.e., intellect, motivation, and will). Stein felt that the experience of the human mind was much richer than the psychology of her day was willing to admit. A chance encounter with George Moskiewicz, whom Stein met at her pedagogy seminar, resulted in her friend introducing her to the work of early phenomenology, especially that of Adolf Reinach and Edmund Husserl (MacIntyre 2007, p. 14). Reinach was using insights from the Würzburg school of psychology and applying them to the development of the then-new phenomenological method. Stein was intrigued and began to read Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Having completed the frst volume, which contains a sustained attack against psychologism, she decided to go and study with Husserl and Reinach at Göttingen. In 1913, Stein was admitted to Husserl’s seminar and Reinach agreed to instruct Stein in the phenomenological method. While studying, Stein also took part in the meetings of the Göttingen Philosophical Society and subsequently met other phenomenologists, including Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Theodor Conrad, Jean Héring, Max Scheler, Roman Ingarden, Alexandre Koyré, and Hans Lipps. Stein describes this time as intensely philosophical and joyous (Stein 1986, p. 421, Kindle edition, location 4039 of 11). The outbreak of World War I in 1914 inspired many young scholars and university students to volunteer to fght, including Stein’s beloved philosophy teacher Adolf Reinach. Stein herself interrupted her studies to nurse patients at a lazaretto near the front lines. Having heard Husserl’s lectures on nature and spirit,2 Stein decided to work on the problem of empathy and how it is that we know other minds. Husserl asked that Stein present a historical analysis of the problem as it was taken up in philosophy and psychology as well as a phenomenological analysis of the mental act. In 1916, Husserl was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. Stein decided to move with Husserl in order to complete her doctorate, which she completed summa cum laude in 1917. Husserl required an assistant to help him with his work and he asked Stein if she would take on the unpaid role. Stein was very eager to help Husserl and saw her project as one of collaboration with her teacher. She remained with Husserl for about a year and helped prepare and edit a series of his texts, including Ideas II and III, Lectures on Thing and Space, and Phenomenology and Inner Time Consciousness (Hua IV; HuaV; Hua XVI; Hua X). Stein found her time with Husserl frustrating, for as she would prepare texts for him to read, he either wanted to revise them or simply was not satisfed with what he had written. Stein ultimately decided to stop working for Husserl in 1919. From about 1919–1920, she returned to her native Breslau and began giving private lectures on phenomenology.3 She tried to acquire a university teaching position (Habilitation), but was unsuccessful because of sexism and anti-Semitism prevalent in the university system of her day. In 1922, Stein converted to Roman Catholicism and her close friend and fellow phenomenologist colleague, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, served as her godmother. In 1923, Stein began working at the Dominican Teachers’ College at Speyer. It was at Speyer that Stein undertook a serious study of Christian philosophy. She translated into German various texts by Thomas Aquinas and Cardinal John Henry Newman, and she began to write essays about thinkers like Dionysius the Areopagite (Stein 2000b). Stein also developed a philosophy of education and wrote extensive essays on women’s education and women’s place in society. She became a popular lecturer and toured the German-speaking world addressing questions of women’s education and the role of women in religious life.4 Stein’s conversion also assisted the philosopher to express her desire or vocation for religious life. Her spiritual advisors at the time, recognizing her philosophical talents, thought 626
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that she would have a greater impact if she publicly taught and lectured. Stein decided to delay her entry into religious life in order to teach and write. Having tried two more times to acquire a university teaching position in Germany and having failed, Stein fnally was appointed Privatdozent at the Pedagogical Institute at Münster, where she was charged with giving lectures in philosophical anthropology.5 In 1933, Hitler passed the anti-Jewish laws, and Stein was summarily fred from her position. It was at this point that Stein entered Carmel as a religious sister.While in the convent, Stein completed her large work, Finite and Eternal Being,6 which seeks to synthesize phenomenology with Christian philosophy by explaining how one can acquire a complex sense of being, progressing from the most basic forms of being to the highest form, namely, God. In 1938, Stein and her sister Rosa fed Germany and were received at the Carmelite convent at Echt, Holland.While at Echt, Stein wrote her last work, Science of the Cross.7 In 1942, in retaliation for the Dutch bishop’s criticism of the treatment of Jews in Holland by the Nazis, the Nazis rounded up Edith Stein and her sister. Both were murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. In 2000, under the direction of Professor Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, Herder published the complete works of Edith Stein, which now consists of some 28 volumes (Stein 2000–2020).
58.2. Stein’s phenomenology and empathy The Phenomenological Movement (1901–1945) was dedicated to the acquisition of knowledge about things as they appear in reality. Early phenomenologists viewed themselves as combating the predominance of positivistic and psychologistic reductionism in the sciences and philosophy. The Movement was widespread, had many notable philosophers in it, and produced numerous studies and works on all kinds of phenomena, from investigations of various mental acts to social and political ontology to discussion of aesthetics (Spiegelberg 1960). There were three traditional centers of phenomenological investigation: Munich, Göttingen, Freiburg im Breisgau. There are also four founding fgures of the Movement: Edmund Husserl, Moritz Geiger, Max Scheler, and Alexander Pfänder.The frst three philosophers founded the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. Edith Stein was at both Göttingen and Freiburg, and had signifcant familiarity with the works of the Munich school. It could be said that Stein had four major phenomenological infuences in the fgures of Adolf Reinach, Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius: it is these four philosophers that shaped her ideas and with whom Stein dialogued in her texts. Each member of the Movement shared the same philosophical commitment to knowledge about real things in the world, but how they achieved that knowledge was a matter of dispute, as phenomenologists took various positions on the realist–idealist tension present within interpretations of the phenomenological method (Ales Bello 2015). If one examines Stein’s strictly phenomenological writings, including On the Problem of Empathy,8 Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities,9 An Investigation Concerning the State,10 and Introduction to Philosophy,11 her view of phenomenology evolves and changes, moving from a more eidetic, descriptive position to one that is a cross between transcendental phenomenology and formal ontology. Shifts and interpretations surrounding the nature of phenomenology and its method ought not to be read as a failure on the part of phenomenology to secure a stable foundation; rather, the method itself and what phenomenology aimed to do was a matter of rich and philosophical debate, each phenomenologist providing his or her own unique take on the question. Husserl himself changed and developed his phenomenology throughout his lifetime, as each major work published in his lifetime was conceived of as an introduction to phenomenology, especially as his phenomenology moved from its eidetic form to its transcendental one. 627
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Stein’s frst major published work in phenomenology, On the Problem of Empathy (1918), consisted of the second part of her doctoral dissertation.The frst part is no longer extant and was never published. Like in all of her other phenomenological texts, Stein admits that her thought was deeply infuenced by the work of her teacher, Edmund Husserl (Stein 1989, 1–2; 2000a, 1–2). Many scholarly articles have been written on why Stein differs from Husserl on various questions, but many of these articles often give the impression that Stein somehow ruptured with phenomenology and Husserl and that she developed her own line of thought distinct from or unfaithful to Husserl.12 The fact is that Husserl remained a constant infuence on Stein and she saw herself as being faithful to his method. Readers must recall that the method itself and how phenomenology was conceived was never fxed or stabilized. It remained and still remains a serious question of philosophical refection. In many ways, Stein extends Husserl’s insights into new directions, but it would be wrong to say that Stein broke with Husserl and developed an independent philosophy.We see traces of Husserl’s infuence in Stein’s late works, especially Finite and Eternal Being and in the phenomenological descriptions of the dark night of the soul in Science of the Cross. Husserl began treating the question of empathy in 1905, and some of his insights about empathy were communicated in his lectures on nature and spirit, which Stein attended.When Stein heard these lectures, she took up his suggestion that more work needed to be done on empathy.We know that Husserl greatly admired Stein’s work on empathy, praising it in his evaluation of her dissertation (Husserl 2017). Scheler also addressed Stein’s work in his The Nature of Sympathy (Scheler 2008, 213–264). Stein describes empathy as a sui generis act of mind in which one can bring the mind of the other into relief in one’s own consciousness (1986, 10–11). In order for an empathic act to occur, certain knowledge must be present. Empathy requires knowledge seized through both self- or internal perception as well as external perception (6–8). The former yields knowledge of one’s own inner states or awareness; for example, I can perceive the intensity of a certain affect on me, say joy or sadness (10). I know what it is for me to experience these states. I am also aware of my own body, how I experience it in and through the senses. I also experience sensations or sense impressions that communicate feelings like fatigue or liveliness.The latter form of perception makes immediately present to consciousness realities that lie outside my own sphere of immanence; for example, I can perceive objects in the world or events or other persons. In fact, others are co-given to me immediately in external perception and I immediately grasp that they are like me. In an act of empathy, my I intends what the other is experiencing and I bring the other’s mind into my own consciousness. Stein gives the example of experiencing and understanding the sadness of another (10). She learns that a friend’s family member has passed away and sees the body of the other, perceives the expression and the timber of the voice. I rightfully understand that the other is sad, but in order to do so, I have to take what the other presents and presentify it in my own consciousness. I use eidetic variation to read what the other is experiencing as sadness at the loss of a person (Stein 1986, 102; 2000a, 134), and as I try to bring the other’s mind to my consciousness, I analogically compare what I have seized from the other to my own knowledge acquired through internal and external perception. I know what the other is experiencing is sadness because I compare what I grasp from the other with my own experience of sadness. Empathy, then, allows one to bring the mind of the other to my own consciousness, but it also allows us to understand sadness in general. In fact, the other can modify my own understanding of sadness in general or any object of consciousness. Stein, like Husserl, admits that empathy has the power to constantly modify our own experience and understanding of self, other, and objective phenomena. Though Husserl wrote much about empathy, as we see from his Nachlass, he has, however, no sustained account of it in works published in his own lifetime. He makes references to it in vari628
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ous texts like the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, but he always struggled with the concept and what it could deliver.What is novel about Stein’s account is not so much the description she gives of the act, for empathy as a kind of analogical trading places of minds can be found in Husserl as well, but what it purports to do. Stein uniquely positions empathy as being able to achieve four things. First, it can give one self-knowledge. Second, it yields knowledge of other minds.Third, it can help us grasp certain objectivities unique to human beings, such as our personhood. Finally, empathy can serve as the unique phenomenological act that can serve as the foundational epistemic act that allows us to acquire knowledge in the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) as well as the natural sciences; for example, medicine. Husserl was always looking to ground his phenomenology as the foundational science. Stein’s empathy as a foundational epistemic act can be read as extending Husserl’s wish. It should be remarked that Stein changes her view on empathy as an act of mind foundational for the sciences by the time she writes her Introduction to Philosophy, for in this text empathy becomes a limited act that only can yield knowledge about certain aspects of one’s interiority (Calcagno 2017). Most scholarship on Stein’s investigation of empathy ignores her discussion of the human sciences and psychology found at the end of the text.13 Empathy, according to Stein, allows us to understand what it is for human beings to be persons.To be a person is to live a special and unique kind of unity, namely the unity of body, psyche, and spirit. Stein claims that the realm of spirit is unique to human beings and is the realm of human activity where freedom, the will, reason, and motivation work together to produce specifc kinds of objects, including objects that belong to religion, politics, love, and history (1986, 93). Stein remarks, “As it pursues the formative process of spiritual production, we fnd the spirit itself to be at work. More exactly, a spiritual subject empathically seizes another and brings its operation to givenness to itself ” (Ibid.). Dialoguing with Dilthey, Stein remarks that empathy allows one to enter into the mind of another spiritual being and we can understand the product of that other through empathy. Empathy, then, becomes foundational for the human or spiritual sciences, as it grants us access to uniquely human undertakings like our own lived senses of history, religion, politics, and art. But Stein even goes further, for as she shows in her text, empathy is necessary for us to understand our psycho-physical constitution as persons. Empathy allows us to understand causality, an if→then relation between states of affairs, which is the mechanism that allows us to understand how affectivity works, and empathy allows us to understand how it is that the other lives her own lived body (70–73). For example, I understand the onset of a certain emotional state of affairs, say sadness or joy, as arising or being caused by certain events or circumstances. The understanding of how causality works and brings about certain results allows me to apply the logic of causality to understand how it may be that one is experiencing a certain state of mind or experience. If this is the case, then empathy is important for the natural sciences, including psychology and sciences like medicine and anatomy (95). Stein takes up Husserl’s critique of the reductionistic psychologistic and positivistic sciences that make room neither for the life of spirit and its expressions nor for the need for empathy for the natural scientist to be aware of how she comports herself vis-à-vis others, nor for the knowledge of physical objects and phenomena seized through empathy, including the psyche and the lived body. Empathy, for Stein, allows us to develop a typology that can guide us in understanding ourselves as embodied-psycho-spiritual unities that produce unique objects and structures. She remarks, As natural things have an essential underlying structure, such as the fact that empirical spatial forms are realizations of ideal geometric forms, so there is also an essential structure of the spirit of ideal types. Historical personalities are empirical realization of these types. If empathy is the perceptual consciousness in which foreign persons come 629
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to givenness for us, then it is also the exemplary basis for obtaining this ideal type, just as natural perception is the basis for eidetic knowledge of nature. We must therefore fnd access to these problems from the point of view of our considerations. (95–96)
58.3. Psychology The discussions of the relation between the natural sciences and the spiritual or human sciences found at the end of her treatment of empathy is once again taken up in Stein’s second work, Philosophy of Psychology and the Human Sciences (2000a, 117–128).Whereas in Stein’s frst text on empathy, the natural and spiritual/human sciences require empathy as a foundational act of knowledge, in her second work, the relationship between the natural and human sciences is reframed. Stein wishes to establish an intimate connection between the psychic (nature) and the spiritual (human/culture) (115–116). In fact, these two domains are interlaced with one another, and the sciences must not split these two aspects of our personhood. The frst part of Psychology and the Humanities demonstrates how psyche and consciousness are interrelated, and how this interrelationship is important for the relationship between psyche and spirit (74–116). Stein’s argument for the interrelationship of psyche and spirit can be interpreted not only as a critique of psychologistic and positivistic tendencies in psychology and the natural sciences, but also as a critique of Husserl’s own project.Though Husserl privately wrote and lectured about the relationship between psyche and spirit, he was reluctant to publish anything in his lifetime about it, as it would compromise the transcendental purity of his project, which needed to make a fne break with the empirical sciences and empirical data.The Husserl that Stein knew and worked with was struggling to defend the transcendental idealism of Ideas I and the logic of the Logical Investigations. Stein was convinced of the need for a discussion of the interrelation between the natural/psychic and the spiritual that she arranged Ideas II and III to show how these realms were to be interrelated, knowing that Husserl would fnd this troublesome. She confesses her “heresy” to Roman Ingarden in a letter, admitting that she sees the need for phenomenology to better explain the relation between the two realms (Stein 1993, cited from Kindle edition, location 707 of 7742). Husserl was never satisfed with Stein’s texts and he never published them in his lifetime. The frst part of Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities is called “Psychic Causality.”The text opens with the claim that consciousness is lived as a seamless stream of experience in which experiences fow one into the other, often with no clear distinction of a beginning or an end (Stein 2000a, 9).And though consciousness wholly admits of the intentionality and the noematic structures Husserl uncovers in his own work, Stein claims that consciousness itself also is infuenced by another force, namely, psyche (14–21). Psyche is structured much like phenomena of nature in that it largely moves in a causal way (22–25), as discussed previously.Whether at the level of sensation, emotion/affect, or instinct/drive, psyche works in such a way that a certain stimulus will produce a certain response: there is a cause and effect structure that is primary and defning of psyche. Sensations of pain, the emotions of joy or sadness, or even the experience of drives compelling us to behave in a certain fashion will have an impact on how we experience both consciousness and the objects it intends. For example, fatigue will cause our conscious experience of our own mental acts and the objects of mind to appear with less intensity (18). Psyche colors our consciousness. Moreover, the life force, which manifests primarily in psyche, will also affect consciousness. If we are ill and weak, for example, the force of life is weak in us and will diminish consciousness’ capacity to carry out mental (and phenomenological) acts as well as experience objects of reality. Stein argues that the phenomenon of motivation, value-formation, and willing manifest the interconnection between psyche and spirit. To be motivated to do something is not the same 630
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as being driven by instinct (79–83).The latter suspends any role for the will in assenting to or declining the force of motivation. In motivation, often psychic affects will accompany a motivation, and though there is a psychic affect, motivation will often draw upon judgment and reason (all acts that lie within the domain of spirit) in order that the will may freely respond to what motivation beings forward (87–91). For example, I learn that someone I know requires books to carry on further study. The person has no money, but I have the funds to help. A situation arises, and I may feel sympathy for the person and I may even empathize with the other’s desire for further study. I feel sad that the other person cannot study. Reason tells or motivates me that I can afford to pay and I freely decide or will to help the person. Motivation and will work together with affects in order to complete an action of response and generosity. Likewise, values are formed at the intersection of psyche and spirit. For example, certain feelings of attraction or repulsion toward a specifc phenomenon may create certain feelings of pain and/or pleasure vis-à-vis a certain person, act or object (75). Persistent feelings over time may permit me to form an awareness that I care about a certain thing in a certain way. My care signifes that I value something.The value formed, however, is not simply a feeling. I can reason and even will to invoke the value manifest in feelings in different situations. For example, I profoundly dislike seeing someone suffer any kind of pain. I can form a general value from this affective experience, and declare that pain and discomfort must be alleviated. I reason that anytime I encounter such pain and discomfort, I must try to help alleviate them. I choose to do so and I also reason and judge how and why it is appropriate to do so in different situations. For Stein, the interworking of psyche and spirit mean that nature and spirit are intimately bound up with one another, especially when it comes to the life and products of the human person. If nature and spirit work together, then the sciences of nature and spirit/humanities must also work together: one cannot be reduced to the other, nor can they work separately. Ultimately, Stein, like Husserl, sees phenomenology as providing the best scientifc standpoint that can best accommodate the demands of both the natural and spiritual/human sciences. Again, however, though Husserl’s Nachlass may be read as supporting such a point of view, we also fnd the public Husserl, who insists on a transcendental foundation that is real, but free from empirical or natural causality. Husserl certainly can give a phenomenological or formal ontological account of natural phenomena and the sciences, but is reluctant to admit a purely empirical, descriptive role.
58.4. Social ontology Empathy serves as the foundational act that gives us knowledge of ourselves and others as well as certain objectivities in the world, especially spiritual objects created by human will, reason, and freedom. But empathy is essentially an interpersonal structure, which permits person to person understanding. One of Stein’s great and more original contributions to phenomenology and philosophy is her social ontology. In the second part of Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, Stein presents an account of another form of lived experience, which she calls the lived experience of community or Gemeinschaftserlebnis (133). In the lived experience of a community, one lives in the experience of another life in solidarity with a group (130–131). Stein gives the example of the death of a much-loved troop leader (134–135).When the troops learn of the death of their leader, empathy allows one to understand what it is for each individual to experience sadness and grief caused by loss. But in the lived experience of community, which is the most intense form of sociality, one not only feels the individual’s sense of grief but also the collective grief, the grief of the community as a whole. Here, the individual enters into and experiences the collective life of the troop. Stein remarks, “Certainly I the individual ego am flled up with grief. But I feel myself to be not alone with it. Rather, I feel it as our grief ” (134). 631
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Though Stein identifes community as the most intense form of sociality, she also describes two other forms of sociality that are less intense. Society is experienced as a collectivity that is moved by and oriented around a shared goal (130–132, 207–208). For example, the Göttingen Philosophical Society met and shared a bond that revolved around philosophical inquiry. Stein admits that community may be experienced within societal organizations. The least intense form of sociality is the mass. The mass act together, but their association is largely based on a kind of naïve interchange or imitation (241–245, 289–291). Stein gives the examples of a group of babies. One baby may start to cry and the others imitate the other baby and begin to cry, even though they may experience no discomfort or dis-ease. Community is experienced as a lived sense of solidarity, and one never fuses with other members of the community to form a whole. Individuals live a collective sense of intense togetherness without losing their individuation. In order to experience community, individuals must have certain psychic and spiritual capacities. Individuals must be able to experience communal affects, that is, each individual person must be able to distinguish collective affectivity from individual affect (151–157, 223). In the aforementioned example of the troop, there is a distinction between the experience of individual grief and collective grief. One must also possess certain rational and intellectual capacities that enable us to build up a collective understanding of a we (145–150). For example, categorial acts of synthesis allow us to take parts of individual experience and form wholes of collective experience like solidarity. Solidarity requires us to be able to bind individual experiences to form a logical whole called community. Furthermore, to be able to experience community requires us to be able to grasp communalizing acts of the imagination, will, and motivation (169–195). It is impossible to for us to experience the body of a community, especially if we understand community as being the lived experience of a sense of solidarity.A sense or meaning does not have a body. Nonetheless, the imagination can abstract out of individual experience of solidarity as it is lived in the body, for example the collective joy of togetherness and its effects on the body, and imagine what it would be like for a group to live joy bodily. Likewise, in order for us to be able to experience community, we need to be able to experience collective will and motivation. Stein gives the example of political will.The individual members of a political party can experience a collective political will as well as a common motivation pushing members to make the said decision only insofar as we have the capacity to experience collective motivation and make collective decisions (279–285). The lived experience of community is a specifc state of mind that allows individual persons to live and experience collective life, thought, affect, and action. The last form of sociality that Stein treats is that of the state, which is discussed in her work An Investigation Concerning the State.The work is a cross between Stein’s own interests in the politics of Weimar Germany and her phenomenology of community.The state is defned as a middle form of community, which lies between more intimate forms of community like the family and more expansive forms as found in the community of humanity (Stein 2006, 7). Stein says that the state community is typifed by two foundational traits: sovereignty and the law (7–16). Those that form the state community, and this state community need not be identifed with an ethnic group or people, live the bond of solidarity in and around the intimate relation between law-givers and law-followers. Stein adopts Reinach’s a priori theory of law as the highest form of law proper to the life of the state, though states can and do formulate positive laws, that is, laws specifc to time and place and the situation of the state (38).A priori laws are laws that are universally justifable and are not determined by the specifcity of place or culture; for example, certain inalienable human rights. Stein’s theory of state community is the preferred form of state, for she criticizes contractarian forms of statehood as assuming universal assent when, in fact, many living in contractarian states never have been allowed to assent to the social contract. In
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her later writings, Stein consistently defends community as the preferred and most intense form of sociality that is humanly possible. Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy, Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities and An Investigation Concerning the State can be read together as a developed social ontology. Other phenomenologists contemporary with Stein, including Max Scheler (1973; 2008), Adolf Reinach (1913), and Dietrich von Hildebrand (1955), presented social ontologies, but what is unique about her view is the centrality of community, understood as an intense lived experience of a sense of solidarity where one lives in the life of another, especially in the state, as well as her view of empathy as foundational. Moreover, Stein was the frst phenomenologist to include a discussion of the unique role of women in the construction of social ontology. In her writing on woman, she argues that human beings are marked by male and female essential structures. Stein describes female essence as marked by a capacity for empathy (Calcagno 2007), which means that those humans marked by female essence are more inclined to interpersonal relations and, therefore, community. Critics have charged Stein with essentialism, but as Linda Lopez McAlister argues, Stein’s notion of essence is fuid and can manifest itself in a variety of typological forms (1993). Also, Stein, unlike Scheler and Gerda Walther (1923), maintained that the most intense experiences of community never result in the loss of the primacy of the individual: Scheler and Walther argue that the most intense forms of community are experienced as a fusion in which self and other fuse together and become one. For Stein, such a fusion is impossible because every ego has to be present and corporeally individuated in order to make possible a sense-bestowal or, to employ Husserl’s term, constitution. Stein’s understanding of phenomenology moved from a more eidetic form to one of formal ontology, as developed in her Introduction to Philosophy. She, like Husserl, kept refning her idea of what phenomenology could be and achieve. She must be read like her counterparts as contributing to our understanding of the capacity of the mind to acquire philosophical knowledge and insight, but in this dialogue with her fellow phenomenologists Stein comes to unique conclusions about empathy, social ontology, woman, and the interrelationship between consciousness and psychology, and between the natural and human sciences.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
For example, Sarah Borden’s (2009) excellent study and Maskulak 2007. Subsequently modifed by Husserl and eventually published as Hua-Mat IV. These lectures are published as Stein 2010a. Some of Stein’s writings on woman from this period have been collected in Stein 1996. Stein’s lectures are now published in two volumes: Stein 2010b and 2005. Stein 2002a. Stein 2002b. Stein 1989. Stein 2000a. Stein 2006. Stein 2010a. The narrative of a philosophical rupture between Husserl and Stein is classic and can be found in such early scholarly works as Guilead 1974. 13 Sawicki 2001 is a notable exception.
References Ales Bello,Angela. 2015. The Sense of Things:Toward a Phenomenological Realism.Trans.Antonio Calcagno. In: Analecta Husserliana, vol. 118. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 1–23.
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Antonio Calcagno Bernet, Rudolf. 1985.“Einleitung.” Hua X, pp. i–lxxvii. Borden, Sarah. 2009. Thine Own Self: Individuality in Edith Stein’s Later Writings.Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Burns,Timothy. 2015.“On Being a ‘We’: Edith Stein’s Contribution to the Intentionalism Debate.” Human Studies, vol. 38, pp. 529–547. Calcagno,Antonio. 2006.“Assistant or Collaborator? The Role of Edith Stein in Edmund Husserl’s Ideas II.” In: Contemplating Edith Stein: A Collection of Essays. Ed. Joyce A. Berkman. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 243–270. ———. 2007.“Empathy as a Feminine Structure of Phenomenological Consciousness.” In: The Philosophy of Edith Stein. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, pp. 63–82. ———. 2017. “Edith Stein’s Second Account of Empathy and Its Philosophical Implications.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal—New School New York, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 131–147. Guilead, Reuben. 1974. De la phénoménologie à la science de la croix: L’itinéraire philosophique d’Edith Stein. Louvain: Nauwelaerts. Hildebrand, Dietrich von. 1955. Die Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft. Munich: Habbel Verlag. Husserl, Edmund. 2017. Gutachten Edmund Husserls zur Dissertation Edith Steins. Accessed at https://www .sdvigpress.org/dox/110271/110273.pdf. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2007. Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue 1913-1922. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefeld. Maskulak, Marian. 2007. Edith Stein and the Body-Soul-Spirit at the Center of Holistic Formation. New York: Peter Lang. McAlister, Linda Lopez. 1993.“Edith Stein: Essential Differences.” Philosophy Today, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 70–77. Moran, Dermot. 2004.“The Problem of Empathy: Lipps, Scheler, Husserl and Stein.” In: Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship. Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond in Honor of the Rev. Professor James McEvoy. Eds.Thomas A. Kelly and Phillip W. Rosemann. Leuven/Paris/Dudley, MA: Peeters, pp. 269–312. Reinach,Adolf. 1913.“Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes.” In: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, vol. 1. Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 685–847. Sawicki, Marianne. 2001. Body,Text and Science:The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein. Dordrecht: Springer. Scheler, Max. 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Trans. M. Frings and R.L. Funk. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2008. Nature of Sympathy.Trans. Peter Heath, introduction by Graham McAleer. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1960. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Dordrecht: Springer (revised in 1972). Stein, Edith. 1986. Life in a Jewish Family: Edith Stein,An Autobiography 1891–1916.Trans. Josephine Koeppel OCD.Washington, DC: ICS Publications. ———. 1989. On the Problem of Empathy.Trans.Waltraut Stein.Washington, DC: ICS Publications. ———. 1993.“Letter of Edith Stein to Roman Ingarden, February 3, 1917.” In: Edith Stein: Self Portrait in Letters 1916–194.Trans. Josephine Koeppel OCD.Washington, DC: ICS Publications. ———. 1996. Essays on Woman.Trans. Freda Mary Oben.Washington, DC: ICS Publications. ———. 2000–2017. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. ———. 2000a. Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities.Trans. Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki.Washington, DC: ICS Publications. ———. 2000b. “Ways to Know God: The Symbolic Theology of Dionysius the Areopagite and Its Objective Presuppositions.” In: Knowledge and Faith. Trans. Walter Redmond. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, pp. 65–94. ———. 2002a. Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt.Washington, DC: ICS Publications. ———. 2002b. Science of the Cross.Trans. Josephine Koeppel OCD.Washington, DC: ICS Publications. ———. 2005. Was ist der Mensch? Theologische Anthropoligie. Ed. Beate Beckmann-Zöller. In ESGA 15. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. ———. 2006. An Investigation Concerning the State. Trans. Marianne Sawicki. Washington, DC: ICS Publications.
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Edith Stein ———. 2010a. Einführung in die Philosophie. Ed. Claudia Mariéle Wulf. In: Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8. Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Herder. ———. 2010b. Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person: Vorlesungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie. Ed. Beate Beckmann-Zöller. In: Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe (ESGA), vol. 14. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. Walther, Gerda. 1923.“Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften.” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, vol. 6, pp. 1–158. Zahavi, Dan. 2010. “Empathy, Embodiment and Interpersonal Understanding: From Lipps to Schutz.” Inquiry, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 285–306.
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59 TRÂN DUC THAO Jérôme Melançon
Trân duc Thao’s attempts at solving the problems that arose out of his interactions with French and Vietnamese institutions, as well as those that emerged from the development of phenomenology in France, defned his philosophical trajectory. Like Husserl, he continuously sought to begin anew his own philosophy as well as the philosophical enterprise itself.And like MerleauPonty, who was his tutor (caïman, or agrégé-répétiteur) and published some of his frst texts in Les Temps Modernes, he found inspiration as much in Husserl as in the Marxist canon or in the contemporaneous developments of psychology and the social sciences.Yet unlike them, and like Jan Patočka, Thao spent most of his career at the margins of the philosophical establishment.1 The contexts in which his research took place infected his thought – especially since he chose to uproot himself on three occasions to pursue philosophy in the manner that was the most relevant to the problems of the moment. In light of the studies published in the context of a recent revival of studies focusing on Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism and Investigations into the Origins of Language and Consciousness, Thao’s contribution and relationship to phenomenology can best be understood through a study of the presence throughout his work of phenomenological themes and approaches.
59.1. French colonialism and the French philosophical tradition Thao was one of the frst Vietnamese students to undertake studies in France and the frst to study philosophy. Following the French curriculum in Hanoi through high school, he entered preparatory classes in Paris and was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS). He thus gained entry into the metropolitan system of higher education, a path that until then had not been open into the ENS or studies in the humanities.Through his participation in French colonial education,Thao developed an intercultural phenomenology, as Hwa Yol Jung (2011) would do in the following generation. Already a result of cultural transfers (Espagne 2013) and of the experience of cross-cultural interactions and migration and remigration,Thao’s philosophy also explicitly tackles the question of coexistence in a context of cultural difference and colonialism. Among his frst publications are three articles dealing with the war France was waging in Indochina, and more generally with the reality of colonialism that this war continued. Supported, although with some caution, by Merleau-Ponty and the rest of the editorial team at Les Temps Modernes,Thao argued that the fundamental confict between the French and the 636
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Vietnamese is existential and emerges from two manners of defning what is effectively possible for social existence. It is a confict of horizons, in the phenomenological sense:Vietnam is an existential horizon, one that is necessary for the Vietnamese, has yet to be created, and is made impossible by French colonialism. In contrast, the French horizon includes only Indochina as a colony able to fulfll metropolitan needs and as part of what defnes the French as such. No solidarity is possible between the two communities as a result of these incompossible horizons. Because the opposition takes place on the level of the fundamental meaning of social existence, no discussion can resolve it and no reform is possible until members of the French community transform their horizon – that is, until they learn to adopt the perspective of the members of the Vietnamese community (Thao 1946, 1947a). His reply to Claude Lefort’s Trotskyist analysis of the Vietnamese confict follows the same aim of explaining the Vietnamese perspective. Since the fundamental confict in colonialism has to do with the horizon within which each community lives, all classes are united within each horizon.This shared internal horizon means that Vietnam is able to achieve a classless society through a national independence movement led by the proletariat. However, it also means that Vietnam cannot follow the European conception of a revolution that begins with class confict since such a path would undermine the capacity to adopt a common perspective, which the Vietnamese proletariat and elites had already developed (Thao 1947b). This focus on coexistence helps understand the publication of an introduction to Western philosophy in Vietnamese, titled Where Is Philosophy Now? (referred to in French as Où en est la philosophie?) (Thao 1950a).2 According to Trinh Van Thao, in this short book published in 1950, Thao presents the main ideas of the Western canon using Vietnamese and Chinese neologisms and explaining their relation to European culture and class systems. Thao thus synthesizes and communicates his experience of European culture and his study of European philosophy to other Vietnamese expats in France.Yet his goal is not solely didactic, as he criticizes the dualism between nature and humanity that characterizes Western thought in favor of the monism of the East. Marxism is also leading Western philosophy toward monism by unifying human consciousness with social and natural life through praxis (Trinh Van Thao 2013). Consequently, the Asian and communist perspectives here again allow for coexistence and an understanding of the West – even as those set within the Western, capitalist perspectives are incapable of reciprocating. Thao had described this opposition of horizons between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the incompossibility of two classes whose conditions of existence are antagonistic: the proletariat only sees what capitalist society demands of it, while the bourgeoisie fnds values in this society that must be preserved and, at most, reformed.The bourgeois intellectual feels misunderstood by the proletariat, because it attempts to destroy that which gives his existence meaning rather than attempt to understand him.As a result, he cannot and does not seek to understand the proletariat or be understood by it (Thao 1949). In both cases, confict is a matter of divergent relationships to economic reality, from which different possibilities for action as well as different ideas and horizons of meaning emerge: class interests defne a horizon.The concept of horizon then serves to account for cultural difference as well as for class character. Thao’s introduction to Western philosophy is the result of his close study of the tradition and especially of the authors related to the phenomenological canon then studied in the preparatory classes and at the ENS. In 1942 he completed his graduate thesis [mémoire d’études supérieures] on Husserl under Jean Cavaillès’s supervision and, following the latter’s recommendation, he visited the Husserl Archives in Leuven during two three-week trips in the winter of 1944 (Courtine 2013). Thao and Merleau-Ponty would each bring to Paris a series of Husserl’s manuscripts and comment on those they had read, thus opening new pathways for French phenomenology. Indeed, while Merleau-Ponty had not indicated clearly which aspects of Husserl’s phenomenol637
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ogy he rejected or took on,Thao’s critical relationship to Husserl offers a path through his work toward non-Husserlian forms of phenomenology.
59.2. Phenomenology, dialectical materialism, and Paris In his reading of Husserl in Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (Thao 1986b), Thao uses the same method he had developed in his critique of existentialism and specifcally of Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel (Thao 1948). In seeking the “real content” of the work,Thao distinguishes between ideas and philosophical intuitions; the method, analyses, and descriptions that developed them; and the conclusions Hegel and Husserl drew from the product of their method. As a result, he is able to take on the core ideas and intuitions of the Hegelian and Husserlian phenomenologies, all the while refusing their methods and their results.This refusal is justifed by the impasse to which their work leads, but also by the promise of dialectical materialism. Thao engaged with Marxism at the same time as he undertook his critique of colonialism. Here too it was phenomenology that drove his exploration of Marxist themes, which he sought to translate into the phenomenological framework. Defning Marxism as focusing on appropriation as the enjoyment of productive work rather than on the generalization of private property through the state, he reorients it toward the problem of the capacity of human consciousness to recognize itself in the objects it produces, a recognition that creates this enjoyment. All human sensations, from perception to love, rather than being passive refections of the world, are active behaviors of appropriation of objects and of the world itself. As human consciousness is tied to objects and to the world through the organs at play in productive work, it also produces the meanings of its objects on the basis of the meanings passed down from previous generations to language. The experience of the world is thus structured by economic activity – that is, productive work and class struggle – which forms an infrastructure that is refected in nonetheless autonomous ideological and cultural superstructures.This experience, which is action, is broader than the sentiment of action that phenomenology proposes to describe, even as it cannot be understood in isolation from the intuitions and ideal objects that accompany that sentiment. These defnitions of Marxism and attempt to study the lived experience of economic relations led Thao to criticize the tendency to see the economic infrastructure as primary instead of as dialectically linked to the superstructure. Marx’s assertion of the primacy of economic life was merely strategic,Thao argues, a result of the impossible living conditions of the proletariat of the nineteenth century (2009c).Three years later, he positions Marxism once again as an ideological weapon meant for the proletariat and not for the bourgeoisie (2009a).The bourgeois intellectual can, however, learn from Marxism, which emerges from the same culture as phenomenology and existentialism and seeks to respond to the same problems, all the while seeking to “retrieve total and effective man” and to return to concrete reality. Reality, according to phenomenology, is what has meaning; it will thus be best understood through the study of processes of creation of meaning in consciousness.Yet this focus means that phenomenology can only understand that part of consciousness that deals with meaning and cannot fnd it as it is active in the world. Phenomenology – which Thao equates with Husserl’s philosophy – consequently sacrifces the relation of mutual envelopment of consciousness and of the world to the elucidation, made possible by the reduction, of the manner in which consciousness constitutes the meaning of the world. This critique of the reduction was already present in an article written in 1944 but submitted to Jean Wahl in 1949 (Thao 2009d).Thao retraces the origin of the reduction in Husserl’s 1907 and 1909 lessons: it is meant to protect the lived experiences of consciousness from psychologism, that is, from an interpretation that would be limited to personal history and to particular, 638
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individual experiences. Husserl seeks this protection in order to safeguard the absolute data found in the evidence of the subject and of its lived experiences of objects, “the certainty that consciousness forms of itself in its accomplishment.”The wealth of this absolute data extracted from real experiences, the universal character of essences, must be protected from a tendency to fall back into naturalism.We fnd another criticism of Husserl at the outset of this close study of his then-unpublished manuscripts: in this theory of essences,“judgment is analytical and is limited to make the contents of the concept explicit.We do not see any advance in the knowledge of the thing” (2009d, 130, 139; my translations). Thao instead embraces naturalism, which he seeks to wed to this intellectualism: dialectical materialism as he understands it presents the self as natural and as giving the world meaning.The self is entirely conditioned – it is a milieu, a set of structures and conditions, a member of a class and of a nation – but it is free when it defends not what conditions it, but what makes it be a subject, a consciousness: class and national interests. Humanity consists in living and existing as a subject, all the while placing the meaning of life above life itself. Being and projects are not chosen; they are sedimented out of past experiences into a direction for future actions, that is, into adaptation of institutions and common life to ft with lived evidence – that which Husserl had sought to understand. Here we fnd the question that drives Thao’s philosophy and distances him from the existentialist tradition and its relationship to both Marxism and phenomenology: rather than the authenticity, freedom, or coexistence central respectively to the work of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, his question is that of humanity. In Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism Thao undertakes a patient, precise critique of Husserl that takes as its starting point the failures of the phenomenological reduction: as a method it not only suspends beliefs and judgments about the existence of the world, it also suspends the existence of the world itself by separating it from philosophical analysis. As Thao interprets it, Husserl’s question deals with the manners in which consciousness works and relates to others in giving a sense of being and a character of evidence to the world and its objects. His criticism of Husserl thus takes aim at the very nature – or naturality – of consciousness.Arguing that the perspective of consciousness can be absorbed within natural reality, Thao presents a materialism that focuses on the mediation that is made possible by activities of production between consciousness and its environment. Husserlian phenomenology, he continues, shows consciousness at work on cultural objects, functioning on the basis of already acquired and idealized meanings. Dialectical materialism can provide the setting for this ideal dimension of existence by beginning with matter and moving to the labor it makes possible, thus taking into account the meanings that are acquired through labor.Truth can correspondingly be grounded in economic life and reality: truth is what expresses this reality and the authentic subject is “the self as a reality among other realities” (Thao 1986b, 129). Subjectivity is “a movement that envelopes the opposed kinds within a dialectical totality that is identical with respect to its actual content to the historical movement of reality itself ” (Thao 1986b, 129). History is then outside of humanity, in the world, as the natural setting for the history of humanity and of consciousness where matter is already a movement that elevates thought to consciousness. This natural world, as the world of production, is not the world of the natural attitude. Rather, it is part of a radicalized lifeworld within which meaning emerges biologically and productively as well as through perception and social interaction – a lifeworld that fnds its genesis in the animal relationship to the sensible world.Thao refers to §36 of Ideen II where Husserl indicates a need for a phenomenology of material nature that would be able to account for the animality of human beings, separate from the phenomenology Husserl develops and which focuses solely on individual and psychic human reality, and separate still from yet another phenomenology that would study higher-order objectivities (custom, right, the state, the Church) (Hua IV, 152–154). 639
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Taking on a dialectical approach that resembles Merleau-Ponty’s Structure of Behavior (MerleauPonty 1983),Thao indicates that these phenomena are reciprocally linked and recasts the intuitions and ideas Husserl provides as presenting different stages in the history of consciousness. At one end of the development of humanity, the study of kinestheses appears as the study of animality. At the other end of this history, he unveils the pure consciousness that is the result of the reduction as an abstract consciousness, a consciousness that has had its material characteristics and mediations abstracted, removed, in an attempt to justify the class position of those who have no direct relationship to material production and exploit that of others. The object is nothing but a synthesis of adumbrations and the external world is reduced to intentionality: they are constructed, rather than pre-existing as objects of possible work and production (Thao 2009b). Thao’s central operation on Husserl resides in a series of conceptual shifts: “materiality” becomes synonymous with “nature” and replaces it; “materiality” as the physical operations of the body on materials becomes the foundation and the origin of consciousness and thus the essence of all phenomena;“materiality” as the physical labor of the body-consciousness becomes the foundation and origin of sociality as the arrangement of the physical operations of many body-consciousnesses – in other words, as the division of productive labor (Thao 1986b, xxiii– xxv). Since materialism focuses not on what exists and has meaning, but on what is done, the constitution of meaning will not originate in consciousness but in its productive relationship to objects:“In the real process of production man is homogeneous with matter, and it is in that material relation itself that the original relation of consciousness to the object that it perceives is constituted as ‘constituted meaning’” (Ibid., xxviii).
59.3. Consciousness, language, and Vietnam The publication of Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism was rushed, leaving Thao with little time to develop the dialectic of human societies that concludes the book. More pressing matters were calling him to Vietnam: dialectical materialism demanded to be put into action in the service of revolution. The pure consciousness of capitalism and colonialism, being the result of material conditions and class struggle, would not be replaced with books of philosophy but rather with a change in material conditions and engagement in the class struggle. Finding his way to North Vietnam at the beginning of 1952, he worked as a researcher and then as a teacher, discovering the shape of the Vietnamese communist ideology.Thao thus set aside his expertise on Hegel and Marx and his project of moving phenomenology beyond Husserl in order to translate the Vietnamese General Secretary’s Maoist writings.Thao was sent for ideological reeducation in 1953 and tasked with re-educating local party members and peasants. He probably participated in the denunciation campaigns, in the attacks on “class enemies” and at the very least witnessed the violence that accompanied them (Papin 2013, 64–69). Following the success of the struggle for independence, Thao taught at the University of Hanoi and at the University of Pedagogy. During this period, Thao published ten texts in Vietnamese but none in French. According to Papin, most are typical of the ideological publication of the moment; the two articles that continue his earlier work and commitment to humanism cost him his position, his reputation, and his health. Following the opening of the Chinese Communist Party to internal critique (The Hundred Flowers Campaign),Thao published an article in the dissident journal The Humanities and another in Masterpieces of Winter (the third in its series after Summer and Fall). In these texts he defends freedom as the freedom to criticize, the freedom of the individual in relation to the collectivity, freedom from the control of an authoritarian democracy.When the regime, following China’s lead, cracked down on its critics, Thao was used as a scapegoat for the “Humanities and Masterpieces Affair” [Nhân 640
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Văn–Giai Phẩm] and presented as the mastermind behind the attempt to undermine the party: having studied and lived abroad, with few connections in Vietnam, he was the perfect victim (Ibid., 71–73). His trial ended, his spirit broken, he was assigned to a fctitious position as a contributor to the local party publication and received little to no salary and coupons, a situation that placed the necessities of life beyond his reach. Only a few out of date publications from the West could reach him, and he only received some of the publications he requested from communist countries. It is in this context that Thao, without any other clear occupation, resumed writing in French and picked up where Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism left off.Already seeing the conclusion of that book as a failure, he sought to begin anew in the study of the materiality of consciousness. Starting with a study of Hegel which recasts some of the ideas of the Phenomenology of Spirit in a materialist framework and presents a sketch of a non-idealist, non-transcendental theory of consciousness (Thao 1970),3 Thao asserts that the question of consciousness, which is central to phenomenology and rarely tackled by Marxists, demands to be addressed by dialectical materialism. Perhaps because the importance of the question of consciousness in these texts was played down by Marxist commentators at the time (e.g., François 1974) and because the reach of his work was limited outside of communist circles, his Investigations into the Origins of Language and Consciousness did not receive signifcant attention.While the lack of popularity of the question of the origin of humanity may also be blamed for this neglect from philosophers – Marxist or otherwise – it is worth noting that the study of paleontology might have been a result of Thao’s diffcult situation.With the disciplines of philosophy, politics, and history being central to communist orthodoxy, he would have been greatly if not completely limited in his access to their contemporaneous and especially Western production.Thinking in a vacuum, cut off from the French and Vietnamese intellectual worlds, he was able to access materials from a relatively unthreatening discipline with few possibilities for extrapolation regarding points of ideological orthodoxy or contemporaneous developments: paleontology. Rather than developing an art of writing,Thao found an alternative path to pursue the question that already occupied him – that of the origins of humanity. In this second major work, which takes up the contents of articles published in France between 1966 and 1970, Thao continues to transform the categories and concepts of phenomenology, doing to Husserl what he perceives Marx to have done to Hegel: not merely turn his philosophy on its head, but recreate it entirely.This use of phenomenological insights and concepts is, however, not a work of, or on, phenomenology, as Thao would later present his 1965 article on Hegel as an act of complete rejection of the phenomenological tradition.4 Throughout the Investigations,Thao continues to use a phenomenological vocabulary, setting it in a materialist context rather than in relation to ideas and meaning. Sedimentation appears as a process in which the subject’s sporadic consciousness of others refection of his actions back to him and of his repetition of their repetition of his actions becomes available as a way to orient his own action and work (Thao 1984b, 134); and in which the subject’s sporadic consciousness of others’ capacity to repeat his actions becomes available as a way to orient and motivate their actions (Ibid., 12–13). Furthermore, various forms of consciousness appear as a result of increasingly complicated collective processes of production – consciousness of the capacity to orient oneself and others, to direct oneself and others’ work, to recreate past situations and anticipate future ones, to name objects – and each becomes sedimented and serves as a foundation for the emergence of the next. The concepts of situation and horizon – respectively favored by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – are also at the heart of his analyses.Thao speaks of a biological situation, where objects that satisfy biological needs are present and motivate collective action; an immediate situation, defned 641
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by collective interactions and the actions that are possible for the group taken as a single work unit with a larger perception than that of the individual; and suggests a symbolic situation, as the functional phrase allows the group to recall or anticipate actions that have taken place or might take place and act in their immediate situation, in view of this future situation. His treatment of the concept of horizon is closer to what we can fnd in phenomenology.A horizon appears once a group of subjects learn how to indicate the location of objects only they can see to another group: the object is out of the perceptive frame of the latter group, but remains as a motivation for action through the directions given to follow and fnd it. Imagination is the beginning of thought: an image is created based on the typical characteristics of the object.The sedimentation of this capacity to imagine beyond the perceptive feld creates the horizon as a permanent structure of consciousness, that is, as an ever-present possibility of having others indicate something that is present beyond the immediate feld of perception. He also offers a solution of his own to the question of alterity. Consciousness is always a relation not only to production, but also to other people. Reciprocity and collective existence pre-date the formation of self-consciousness as an individual and make it possible. Other people are not perceived; rather, they are always already present in sensorimotor interactions: reciprocity precedes consciousness (Ibid., 9) and the question that occupies Thao is the emergence of individualized consciousness in the midst of this collective existence.The subject begins to be conscious of himself as others refect his actions as in a mirror and repeat his noises and words as in an echo.Transforming the insight that consciousness is always consciousness of some thing, Thao suggests instead that consciousness is always consciousness of practical, material actions on objects and of relations to others in view of those objects. Likewise, the Husserlian injunction to go “to the things themselves” becomes an injunction to understand how we put our fnger on things, how we indicate them to others and to ourselves, in the pressing contexts created by the production of tools or in the hunt. All consciousness is sporadic at frst, then collective, and only then can it become individual (Ibid., 133). This collective production structure demands solidarity among the members of the production group and a complementarity between the group and the family. Productive work is able to make individuals move beyond jealousy and general indignation can work to reduce individualism. In passages that focus heavily on marriage as the possession of women by men and reproduce colonialist presuppositions about Indigenous peoples,Thao seeks the original community – the source of primitive communism and appropriation.This communism is present in the replacement of relations of force by relations of production, which display their advantages by allowing for peace, unity, and comfort through more effcient production (Ibid., 166–167).
59.4. Renovation in Vietnam, The Formation of Man, and the return to Paris Thao would quickly dismiss aspects of his Investigations as overly formalistic and as remaining caught within the subjective method and attempting once again the impossible through a recourse to psychoanalysis that was to transform its intuitions into positive knowledge (Thao 2009b). Redefning his approach, he sets the lived acts on which phenomenology focuses against the background of the social image. Lived acts and experiences, on the one hand, are images that are projected onto objects, after being created in the process of sensing an object as external, but before the subject recognizes itself in the social image.The social image is an internal image of the social environment and of the self as similar to others. Lived experience only has meaning – is only possible – through these two dimensions of materiality and of sociality (Ibid.). The Renovation process, through which Vietnam sought to modernize its economy without the liberalization chosen by Deng’s China, opened a space for theoretical innovation in order 642
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to redefne socialism. Thao took the opportunity to publish the book The Philosophy of Stalin (1988), which appears both as a continuation of his attempts at understanding economic and productive life and as a subtle criticism of past economic policies in Vietnam through the criticism of Stalin’s ideas, and suggests criteria for a truly socialist system. In 1991, shortly following the publication of this book in France in 1988, the Central Committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party allowed (or forced) Thao to visit Paris.The accounts of those who met him and spent time with him then agree on the presence of a strong persecution complex and a complete disconnection from a France that looked nothing like the country and intellectual milieu he had left forty years earlier. In spite of such concerns and of his diffculties at expressing his ideas, he nonetheless prepared the manuscripts for Dialectical Investigations (1992) after selfpublishing a short book, The Formation of Man.This latter book is a renewed attempt at fnding the origins of consciousness in relation to language and production, this time by creating a clearer line between animality and humanity and using a more deliberate, deepened dialectical method. Schematically, production creates the language of real life, which leads to an internal language, which becomes conscious linguistic language, which fnally makes it possible for the self to experience itself and to name itself. Each time, the previous reality is taken up through a series of refections between the subject and the other producers in relation to their collective productive tasks. Lived intentionality, in such a context, is constituted “as aim of the object of social work in the internal image of one’s own body, which image duplicates itself by returning upon itself, which defnes the intrinsic form of the movement lived as such” (Thao 1991, 34; my translation). Sociability, as the psychic energy at the source of values as well as of the repeated attempts at cooperation, is the origin of production and of each transformation of the intersubjective relationship. As soon as the capacity to name objects appears, producers move from a collective possession of the tools built through cooperation to a collective possession of the world, understood not in Husserlian terms, but as the whole of the means of production. Self-consciousness thus becomes the consciousness the self has of itself as a member of the group and of the group as collective owner of the world. It is only against the background of this appropriation and prior belonging that self-consciousness can appear as a self who is reminded of its tasks and role, who has an obligation to fulfll these tasks. It is only through religious and artistic representation that a consciousness of self-consciousness will emerge: as two groups meet for exchanges, I emerge as the subject who is performing or offering on behalf of us.
59.5. Conclusion Throughout his publications Thao was able to give a partial view of the historical and material development of consciousness. We can fnd this thread through the frst use of an instrument (“La naissance du premier homme,” 1986); the shift from labor and the use of instruments to production and the creation of tools (Investigations, 1973); the frst appearance of exploitation (La philosophie de Staline, 1988); the birth and development of slavery (“The Rational Kernel in the Hegelian Dialectic,” 1956/1965); feudalism and the transition to capitalism (“La dialectique logique dans la genèse du ‘Capital’,” 1984); imperialism and colonialism (in his 1940s texts on Vietnam); and humanity and socialism as historical horizons (Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, 1951, and La philosophie de Staline, 1988). He also sought to develop dialectics as a method in relation to economic life in La philosophie de Staline – in response to the process of Renovation – as well as in his articles on Hegel and on Capital, and in his unpublished manuscript Recherches dialectiques (1992). 643
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Thao’s last philosophical efforts were focused, as always, on correcting his past analyses and on perfecting his method to include a wider range of phenomena. However, another endeavor preoccupied him in 1991 and 1992, echoing the intellectual autobiography presented in “From Phenomenology to the Materialist Dialectic of Consciousness.” In his introduction to The Formation of Man, which became the frst of three Dialectical Investigations, he presents his itinerary in such a way as to explain his position and help his readers understand the philosophical, political, and material context and underpinnings of his latest essays at defning humanity and tracing the path toward a fully human future.
Notes 1 De Warren (2009) offers a brief biography and overview of Trân duc Thao’s work. While De Warren uses the patronym Trân, the use of Thao here refects the Vietnamese custom of referring to a person by their frst name, even eminent ones and in formal settings.We also use Trân duc Thao’s own francized spelling of his name in his Recherches dialectiques. 2 Thao would give a similar course in 1955–1957, which was published posthumously in 1995 as The History of Thought before Marx [Lịch Sử Tư Tưởng trước Marx] (Trân duc Thao 1995). 3 Published in French in 1965, but in Vietnamese in 1956. 4 This role of “The Rational Kernel in the Hegelian Dialectic” is discussed in Thao 1991.
References Benoist, Jocelyn and Michel Espagne (Eds.). 2013. L’itinéraire de Tran Duc Thao. Phénoménologie et transferts culturels. Paris:Armand Colin. Courtine, Jean-François. 2013. “Tran Duc Thao et la protofondation des archives Husserl de Paris.” In: L’Itinéraire de Tran Duc Thao. Phénoménologie et transferts culturels. Eds. Jocelyn Benoist and Michel Espagne. Paris:Armand Colin, pp. 13–24. De Warren, Nicolas. 2009. “Hopes of a Generation. The Life, Work, and Legacy and Trân duc Thao.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 263–283. Espagne, Michel. 2013. “Du présent vivant au mouvement réel. Marxisme et transfert culturel chez Tran Duc Thao.” In: L’Itinéraire de Tran Duc Thao. Phénoménologie et transferts culturels. Eds. Jocelyn Benoist and Michel Espagne. Paris:Armand Colin, pp. 230–247. François, Frédéric. 1974. “Tran Duc Thao et les recherches sur l’origine et le développement du langage.” La Pensée, no. 174, pp. 32–52. Jung, Hwa Yol. 2011. Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts. Essays in Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy.Athens, OH: Swallow Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1983. The Structure of Behavior. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Papin, Philippe. 2013. “Itinéraire II. Les exils intérieurs.” In: L’Itinéraire de Tran Duc Thao. Phénoménologie et transferts culturels. Eds. Jocelyn Benoist and Michel Espagne. Paris:Armand Colin, pp. 62–89. Trân duc Thao. 1946.“Sur l’Indochine.” Les Temps Modernes, no. 5, pp. 878–900. ———. 1947a.“Les relations franco-vietnamiennes.” Les Temps Modernes 18, pp. 1053–1067. ———. 1947b. “Sur l’interprétation trotzkyste des événements d’Indochine.” Les Temps Modernes, vol. 21, pp. 1697–1705. ———. 1948. “La Phénoménologie de l’esprit et son contenu réel.” Les Temps Modernes, vol. 36, pp. 492–519. ———. 1949.“Le confit franco-vietnamien.” La Pensée, vol. 22, pp. 17–19. ———. 1950a. Triết-lý đã đi đến đâu? Paris: Minh Tan. ———. 1950b. “Les origines de la réduction phénoménologique chez Husserl.” Deucalion, vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 128–142. ———. 1970.“The Rational Kernel in the Hegelian Dialectic.” Telos, no. 6, pp. 118–139. ———. 1984a.“La dialectique logique dans la genèse du ‘Capital’.” La Pensée, no. 240, pp. 77–91. ———. 1984b. Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. ———. 1986a.“La naissance du premier homme.” La Pensée, no. 254, pp. 24–35. ———. 1986b. Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
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Trân duc Thao ———. 1988. La philosophie de Staline. I. Interprétation des principes et lois de la dialectique. Paris: Éditions Mây. ———. 1991. La formation de l’homme. Introduction à l’origine de la société, du langage et de la conscience. Paris: Published by the author. ———. 1992. Recherches dialectiques I, II, & III. Unpublished manuscripts. ———. 1993.“La logique du présent vivant.” Les Temps Modernes, no. 568, pp. 154–168. ———. 1995. Lịch Sử Tư Tưởng trước Marx. Hanoi: Social Sciences Publishing House. ———. 2009a.“Existentialism and Dialectical Materialism.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 285–295. ———. 2009b. “From Phenomenology to the Materialist Dialectic of Consciousness.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 297–325. ———. 2009c. “Marxism and Phenomenology.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 327–335. ———. 2009d.“The Origins of the Phenomenological Reduction in Husserl.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 337–348. Trinh Van Thao. 2013. “Quelques jalons dans le parcours philosophique de Tran Duc Thao (1944–1993).” In: L’Itinéraire de Tran Duc Thao. Phénoménologie et transferts culturels. Eds. Jocelyn Benoist and Michel Espagne. Paris:Armand Colin, pp. 90–114.
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PART IV
Intersections
60 PHENOMENOLOGY AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Guillaume Fréchette
60.1. Two traditions Analytic philosophy and phenomenology represent two different philosophical traditions, at least historically – that is, in terms of reconstructing the more or less recent history of a discipline by trying to answer the question,“How did we get here from there?” (Williamson 2014). Philosophical traditions are shaped by various factors, which play a more or less important role depending on the context in which the traditions developed. Starting with Brentano’s concern with the centrality of such constitutive features of mental phenomena as consciousness and intentionality and the research conducted by his students on these features, phenomenology1 rapidly developed into a philosophical discipline with its own journals,2 institutional centres3 and internal polemics between competing philosophical agendas, both inside and outside these centres. These contextual and institutional factors are essential for the shaping of a tradition. Additional theoretical principles can also play a role. Like any other philosophical tradition, phenomenology tolerates theoretical divergences, insofar as they occur within the realm of the mentioned factors, and more generally within the same broadly conceived spatial and temporal boundaries in which the rest of the tradition is located. The same holds for analytic philosophy. Though it is disputable to some extent, it seems quite reasonable, or at least useful, to identify Husserl as the father of 20th-century phenomenology and Russell as the father of 20th-century analytic philosophy, to point out that Cambridge was the most important centre for early analytic philosophy, or to stress the fact that analytic philosophy initially aimed at providing an analysis of thought through an analysis of language, while phenomenology aimed at a faithful description of our experience. Such a characterization does not have to be taken as the expression of a gap, divide, or split between the traditions (as it has been considered by many); it serves merely as an orientation aid that helps us to understand why a given philosopher addresses a specifc topic from a specifc angle, and why her arguments are directed against a specifc view. It gives the broad context in which individual philosophical works are to be understood. But if this is the case, why is there so much discussion about the fact that analytic philosophy and phenomenology are two different traditions? Many different factors play a role here. Let us start with Dummett (1993), who suggested that we see analytic philosophy and phenomenology, 649
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represented by Frege and Husserl, as the Danube and the Rhine, which both have their sources in Germany, but which at some point fow in different directions. From this perspective, it is reasonable to see phenomenology and analytic philosophy as sharing a common background, which has much to do with the philosophy of Bolzano, but also involves the immediate infuence of Frege on Husserl, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Dummett’s thesis is both ideological and historically problematic. It is historically problematic because whether analytic philosophy and phenomenology have the same source is a matter of perspective. If anti-psychologism and the common focus on Sinn or intentional content is the only concern at stake, as it obviously is in Dummett’s view, then Bolzano, Frege, Husserl, and Russell are indeed addressing the same issues, but anti-psychologism came to play a very different role in both traditions, which is why it seems somewhat exaggerated to see anti-psychologism as a constitutive feature of phenomenology in general. Dummett’s thesis is ideological inasmuch as it presents analytic philosophy and phenomenology as two divided streams of a single unifed source that can re-establish communication “only by going back to the point of divergence” (2014, 182), that is, to the point when analytic philosophy was able to take the linguistic turn and when it was impossible for phenomenology to do so. Such an account introduces a divide on the basis of normative reasons: good analytic philosophy should come back to linguistic analysis, and good phenomenology should come back to the early Husserl. Otherwise,“it’s no use now shouting across the gulf ” (Ibid.). With or without the normative dimension of the divergence, this picture of the relation between analytic philosophy and phenomenology has been infuential from early on in both analytic philosophy and phenomenology, to such an extent that people from both traditions proclaimed the necessity of “bridging the gap”.4 There are further problems with Dummett’s thesis of a divide: Dummett sees the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy and the transcendental turn in phenomenology as the frst manifestation of the divide. But then how should we read philosophers like Gareth Evans and Roderick Chisholm, who both reject the linguistic turn, although they clearly belong to the analytic tradition? Conversely, the focus on language that is central to the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer could perhaps qualify this school of thought, which historically belongs to a late phase of phenomenology, as analytical philosophy. Obviously, Dummett’s characterization poses problems. Furthermore, especially since the 1990s, the linguistic turn can no longer be said to be central to the characterization of analytic philosophy. Many historians of analytic philosophy have abandoned Dummett’s characterization in favour of a new one in terms of a “style” that emphasizes “‘logic’, ‘rigour’ and ‘argument’” (Leiter 2004, 11). Beaney, for instance, dismisses Dummett’s account of analytic philosophy’s “most popular creation myths”, offering as a positive qualifcation an “emphasis on argumentation, clarity, and rigour” (2013, 23ff.), much along the lines of Leiter. But it is still questionable whether the characterization of the socalled divide in terms of style and rigour offers an account to which both traditions would subscribe.
60.2. The story of a mutual contempt The idea of a divide has played a central role in the self-interpretation of both phenomenology and analytic philosophy, and for the interpretation of their relationship in the 20th century. Certain historical elements have played an important role. For some, the confict between phenomenology as inspired by Husserl and analytic philosophy emerged historically around 1928, with the publication of Heidegger’s inaugural lecture What is Metaphysics? (Friedman 2000). 650
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As Husserl’s successor in Freiburg, Heidegger was considered by many to be the future of the phenomenological movement.This explains many of the attacks addressed against him after the publication of the lecture. Carnap’s attack on Heidegger’s nihilism can be seen as one of the frst offcial manifestations of a confict between the traditions (Carnap 1932). Similar manifestations occurred at the same time. Oskar Kraus, a pupil of Franz Brentano, also attacked Heidegger’s nihilism on different grounds, although Carnap and Kraus agreed that Heidegger’s views on metaphysics were simply an instance of bad philosophy. Already a few years before, the label of “phenomenology” was used as a term of opprobrium in Kraus’s introduction to the new edition of Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Kraus 1924). The lengthy review by Ryle of Sein und Zeit in 1928 shows that he had read Kraus’s introduction. Here also, Ryle sees in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit a “disaster” (Ryle 1928), a falling down into a subjectivism that would invalidate the original project of phenomenology as it had been laid out by Brentano. Up to the late 1960s, the last students of Brentano took great pains to distinguish Brentanian descriptive psychology from the late phenomenology of Husserl and his heirs (Kastil 1950; 1958; Del-Negro 1953; Mayer-Hillebrand 1959; 1966), confrming on a different basis the view expressed by Ryle and Carnap that phenomenology was not something that anyone wanted to be identifed with. The Royaumont conference of 1958, where analytic philosophers and phenomenologists unsuccessfully tried to reach an agreement on some topics, also seems to have left a lasting impression on many representatives of both traditions.5 It is disputable, however, whether it had the signifcance that many analytic philosophers and phenomenologists still attribute to it today. Finally, the debate between Derrida and Searle has often been understood as a debate between analytic philosophy and phenomenology (Moati 2014). This is also a matter of perspective, since it is not clear whether Derrida was defending a view that aims to be representative of phenomenology. What is common to all these debates, attacks, and polemics is that they were most of the time utterly fruitless.Though they were once identifed as tradition-building events by the protagonists of both analytic philosophy and phenomenology, this identifcation seems quite artifcial today. The attacks on Heidegger may be seen as isolated events that most likely did not have the importance that was attributed to them later on; the Royaumont meeting is perhaps better understood as a philosophical conference that went wrong on the basis of an overly optimistic choice of participants; and the debate between Derrida and Searle is by no means emblematic of the relation between analytic philosophy and phenomenology. There are other debates that were more important and more central for both analytic philosophy and phenomenology, but they did not necessarily take place between the two traditions. Take, for instance, the correspondence between Chisholm and Sellars (1957), or the numerous debates on the nature of intentionality between Føllesdal and other readers of phenomenology such as Dreyfus (1982).These debates played a role in the shaping of both phenomenology and analytic philosophy. The theory that there was a “divide” cannot account properly for the role of these debates in the development of the two traditions.
60.3. Realism and anti-realism What makes the case of the relation between analytic philosophy and phenomenology so special is that the contextual and institutional factors described in section 60.1 seem by themselves to account for the unity of the tradition. In contrast with opposing traditions such as empiricism and nativism, each of which is constituted by a theoretical core, phenomenology and analytic philosophy both lack such a set of constitutive theoretical principles. In fact, some strands of 651
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analytic philosophy share the same theoretical principles as some versions of phenomenology, while other versions of phenomenology do not share the same principles. In the absence of a clear-cut theoretical separation between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, it could be more helpful to assess the theoretical relation between analytic philosophy and phenomenology from another perspective. Many perspectives suggest themselves. The primacy of the theoretical or practical interest, or the distinction between atomism and holism, might well serve as an orientation here, although they are not meant to be exhaustive on the nature of the relation between analytic philosophy and phenomenology. The same holds for a further distinction, which I suggest to take here as an orientation, between realist and anti-realist insights. In both traditions, we fnd positions that could be called realist in the broad sense that they hold that we actually, in our everyday attitude, possess knowledge of reality, and that our descriptions of the world and of the mind within it are descriptions of objectively existing things, structures, etc. that are mind-, theory-, and discourse-independent. We also fnd anti-realist positions in both traditions.What I mean here by the label “anti-realism” is the very general position or set of positions according to which our knowledge of reality being already conceptually, pre-theoretically, normatively, subjectively, narratively, or discursively constituted, our descriptions of the world and of the mind within it are not descriptions of mind-, theory-, or discourse-independent entities. Therefore, according to the anti-realist, any philosophical investigation should account for the way or ways in which they are constituted.This distinction seems to be more fundamental than the analytic–phenomenological distinction, since it is grounded strictly in theoretical concerns. It overlaps partly, but importantly, with the distinction between those who accept the Sellarsian critique of the given and those who reject it. In the remainder of this chapter I will use the labels “realism” and “anti-realism” exclusively in this sense. We fnd analytic and phenomenological positions on both sides of the realist/anti-realist divide. We fnd this opposition in analytic philosophy, for instance, between Quine’s position that the constituents of the world are those posited by our best theory of nature (Khlentzos 2004, 2), and Dummett’s and Putnam’s, who argue that realism cannot really meet the challenge of giving a sound account of how our beliefs are linked with the mind-independent entities they represent.We fnd it also between the correspondence theory of truth, which is generally realist, and the coherentist theory, like Davidson’s, which is anti-realist. An analogous opposition holds among phenomenological positions, for instance, between the early and the late Husserl on the nature of truth and meaning – Husserl defends mainly realist intuitions on these issues in the Logical Investigations, and turns to an anti-realist in the Ideas and in his later works.We see a similar opposition among contemporary phenomenologists: west-coast phenomenology, for instance, is realist in substance – in the sense that it considers intentional relations as mediated by an objective semantic entity: a meaning), but also in the sense in which it takes the descriptions of our experiences to be mind- and theory-independent. On these two points, it opposes east-coast phenomenology, which considers that our descriptions are neither mind- nor theoryindependent, advocating for the phenomenological reduction as the condition of possibility of our experience of objects.They side with anti-realists for this reason. Something similar to the division between realism and anti-realism has been already identifed (using slightly different terminology) by philosophers from both traditions as the actual bone of contention between analytic philosophy and phenomenology. Papineau, for instance, suggests that a “new and […] more fruitful division is emerging. […] In place of the old analytic-continental split we now have the opposition between the naturalists and the neo-Kantians” (2003, 12). Glendinning makes a similar observation (2002, 214–215).6 However, there are two problems here. First, they both identify as the terms of the analytic/ continental divide positions that are representative neither of analytic philosophy nor of phe652
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nomenology as a whole: some phenomenologists may call themselves post-Kantian or neoKantian, but this is by no means representative of the attitude of phenomenologists in general. The same holds for analytic philosophers: not all analytic philosophers are naturalists. Second, there are naturalists on both sides of the realism/anti-realism divide, as well as in both traditions. Philosophers like Hacker, McDowell, Putnam, and Brandom, who are naturalists on ontological grounds, reject epistemological versions of naturalism in favour of a normative view of human knowledge. Quine accepts both versions of naturalism. Similarly, phenomenologists like Varela (1996) are ontological naturalists, but argue for the irreducibility of frst-person descriptions of our experience. But it would be wrong to deduce from the fact that some ontological naturalists who reject epistemological naturalism hold a normative view of knowledge, that all ontological naturalists who reject epistemological naturalism would argue for a normative or post-Kantian view of knowledge.This is what Glock himself seems to think when he suggests that the only option for analytic philosophers who were not keen on adopting the naturalist programme of Quine was to go back to Kant (Glock 2008, 79ff. and 121ff.),7 as if there were no alternative to epistemological naturalism other than post-Kantianism or anti-realism. In fact, the most recent philosophy of mind shows that there are other alternatives, as we will see in the next section.
60.4. Realist convergences Using the realism/anti-realism distinction as an orientation to study the relation between analytic philosophy and phenomenology has an advantage over the “divide” reading. It can give a better account of the different convergence points between the traditions, without explaining them as irregularities of the divide, as mere coincidences, or as family resemblances between siblings of a mythical parental source. In analytic metaphysics for instance, we see this convergence in Husserl’s concept of foundation in the third Logical Investigation, especially in the discussion developed by Peter Simons (1982) and Kit Fine (1995). Furthermore, the theory of essences developed in the Logical Investigations, but also by other students of Husserl such as Jean Héring (1921) and Roman Ingarden (1925), shows interesting similarities with the theory of essence and modality developed by Fine (1994). In the recent literature on grounding, Bolzano (2014) is often seen as providing the frst systematic account of the grounding relation (Abfolge). In Husserl’s conception of a theory of sciences in the Prolegomena, Bolzano’s conception plays an important role. In the theory of emotions and values, many varieties of cognitivism defended today – the thesis that emotions presuppose cognition or even have a cognitive function themselves – echo views that were defended in early phenomenology.The view that emotions are based on cognitions – defended in different favours by, for instance, Anthony Kenny (1963), Michael Stocker (1987), Kevin Mulligan (1998), and Peter Goldie (2002) – are to be found in the works of Brentano and the early phenomenologists (Brentano 1874; Pfänder 1900; Stumpf 1899; 1928). The value objectivism defended by Scheler also fnds echoes in Graham Oddie’s robust realism about values (2005).The view that emotions themselves have a cognitive function is defended by Husserl (Hua XXVIII) and Meinong (1917), but is also to be found in Peter Goldie (2005), Sabine Döring (2007), Linda Zagzebski (2004), Christine Tappolet (2000), and Mark Johnston (2001). In social ontology, the views developed by Searle are in many respects similar to the views developed by early Munich and Göttingen phenomenologists (Searle 1995; 2010). Searle’s social ontology is based on what he calls “speech acts”, which are what Munich and Göttingen phenomenologists call “social acts”, especially in the works of Adolf Reinach (1989a), Edith Stein (1922; 1925), and Gerda Walther (1923). 653
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In epistemology, the view championed by Williamson (2000), according to which the traditional project of an analysis of knowledge in terms of true justifed belief should be abandoned in favour of a conception of knowledge as one of the most fundamental psychological and epistemic states, also has important predecessors in the phenomenological tradition.This is the case, for instance, of Reinach (1989b), Dietrich von Hildebrand (1916; 1950), and Friedrich Bassenge (1930).8 Similarly, many of the recent views on the irreducibility of intuition to belief come close to some of the views on intuition developed in phenomenology, especially by Brentano and Husserl (Bealer 1998; Chudnoff 2013; Huemer 2001; 2007).9
60.5. Anti-realist convergences Anti-realists (in the sense of the term introduced above) generally reject the idea that the world is given to us as it is in a manner that is mind-, theory-, and discourse-independent. Rather, they believe that our perceptual, intellectual, cognitive, and moral experiences of the world are determined or informed in a signifcant way by our conceptual, subjective, pre-theoretical, normative, narrative, or discursive activity. Such conceptions of our multifaceted subjective contribution as decisive for the construction of perception (and experience in general) sometimes have clear Kantian or neo-Kantian overtones. In analytic philosophy, such positions were defended in various forms by Wilfrid Sellars (1956) in his critique of the myth of the given, in Peter Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics (1959), and by John McDowell (1994), among others. Phenomenologists sympathetic to anti-realist accounts are generally sympathetic to accounts of phenomenology in which the role of the phenomenological reduction is central. Some of them believe that perception is normatively constrained; that there is no non-conceptual content (or more generally, that there is no content in which the active contribution of the subject doesn’t play a role); that phenomenology’s main concern “lies in the transcendental conditions of the constitution or disclosure of meaning”; that “the normative is at stake in the accounts of intentional content or meaning offered in both analytic and phenomenological traditions”; and that “it guided both Husserl and Heidegger towards the insight that phenomenological investigation of intentionality demanded a thorough reorientation in philosophy” (Crowell 2013, 2–3). They tend to believe that reality is “constituted” (normatively) and that subjectivity is constituting, and to see phenomenology as the endeavour allowing us, thanks to the phenomenological reduction or epoche, to see how this constitution takes place. There have been many attempts in recent years by such phenomenologists to incorporate theories such as those of McDowell (1994) or Korsgaard (1996; 2008) into their conception of phenomenology (Crowell 2007; 2013; Smith 2011). But not all anti-realists are normativists in their interpretation of the subjective contribution in our experience of the world. In the line of Ricœur, David Carr for instance emphasizes the role of narrativity (1986; 1987). Others, like Dan Zahavi, prefer to work with a minimal notion of selfhood as the basis of the experiential self but also underline its compatibility with narrative, social, or normative accounts of subjectivity (Zahavi 2014). While these phenomenologists agree that the phenomenological reduction, and with it a form of idealism, is an essential mark of phenomenology (with others like Jitendra Nath Mohanty [1989], John Drummond [1990], or Burt Hopkins [2011]) not all anti-realists are idealists in phenomenology.The best illustration of this is perhaps the debate between Hubert Dreyfus (2005; 2007a; 2007b) and John McDowell (2007a; 2007b) on the role of conceptual rationality in our skilful relation with the world. Drawing on Sartre, Heidegger, and MerleauPonty, Dreyfus stresses the importance of embodied activity but rejects, for instance, the conceptuality of normative comportment. 654
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60.6. Phenomenology and philosophy of mind Given their shared object of research, the convergence between phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind is particularly signifcant. It has its own prehistory in the reception of Brentano in Cambridge and Oxford. In Cambridge this was thanks to Stout, who introduced his students Russell and Moore to Austrian philosophy, in particular to Brentano and Meinong (Stout 1896). Russell himself showed interest in the works of Brentano, Meinong, and Husserl.10 It was Russell who led Chisholm to read Brentano, and this reading is quite evident in Chisholm’s frsts papers on intentionality.11 In Oxford, the reception of phenomenology was assured from early on by Ryle’s reviews of phenomenological publications and by his later critique of phenomenology in the background of his The Concept of Mind (2000; 2009). Ryle’s low opinion of phenomenology – although he himself characterized his own approach as a “phenomenology” – had a clear infuence on his student Daniel Dennett, especially in Content and Consciousness (1969), in which he sees with Quine (1960, 221) two possible attitudes towards the irreducibility of the intentional idiom: abandoning it (and conducting behaviourism), or defending the indispensability of the idiom, as did Brentano and the phenomenologists. Dennett adhered to the frst attitude, to the extent that most of his work is an attempt to show the dispensability of the intentional idiom.A science of phenomena, that is, of frst-person experience, must be replaced by a heterophenomenology that leads from third-person objective science to a “method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological scruples of science” (Dennett 1991, 72). Heterophenomenology amounts basically to the practice of the cognitive sciences, taking the reports of frst-person experience as the data, and not frst-person experience itself. Heterophenomenology is one of the most radical options for dispensing with phenomenological data. It minimizes the fact that intentionality is basically a conscious experience, and that a description of this experience essentially includes a description of the frst-person perspective, of the phenomenal character or “what-it-is-likeness” of intentional states. It eliminates altogether the phenomenological sense of “consciousness”. There are less radical attempts to deal with phenomenological data in contemporary philosophy of mind.A frequently employed strategy (for example, by Dretske, Tye, Prinz, Hill, Rosenthal, Lycan, Carruthers) is reductive representationalism, which reduces frst-person experience and its intentionality to frst-order or higher-order representations determined by their functional role in a physiological system. While such attempts share with phenomenological accounts the acknowledgement of the existence of phenomenological data, they suggest a reductive explanation of the data. Reductive accounts of phenomenological data are compatible to some extent with phenomenology understood as descriptive psychology (as Brentano called it). The phenomenological task of describing one’s own experience is not challenged by the possibility of giving a reductive account – from a “genetic” standpoint, as Brentano puts it – of intentional conscious states, insofar as the phenomenological task is given methodological priority. But since they try to explain conscious experience in terms of intentional states, they leave out much of the phenomenological data. In the background of Jackson’s knowledge argument (1982) and of Chalmers’s discussion of the “hard problem” (1996; 2002), philosophers of mind of all allegiances started to take the problem of consciousness more seriously. Searle argued that “there is no way to study the phenomena of the mind without implicitly or explicitly studying consciousness” (1992, 18); Siewert argued that “we have a distinctively frst-person knowledge of our own minds” (1998, 6). These views were infuential for the development of the view that intentionality is at bottom phenomenal, a view that was given such labels as “inseparatism” and “phenomenal 655
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intentionality”.12 Different varieties of these views are defended today by philosophers such as David Chalmers (2010), Eliah Chudnoff (2013), Katalin Farkas (2008), Uriah Kriegel (2011), Josef Levine (2011), Michelle Montague (2016), Galen Strawson (2011), and David Pitt (2004, 2009), to name only a few. Whether they are reductive or not concerning the hard problem, what unites these views is the idea that in the order of explanation, consciousness, or phenomenal experience, should be considered prior to intentionality. This comes very close to the view that has been defended by phenomenologists since Brentano and Husserl. Programmes such as Siewert’s analytic phenomenology can be understood as contributions in both the analytic and the phenomenological tradition (Siewert 2007; 2016). The distinction between broad realists’ and anti-realists’ insights discussed in the sections above also applies in this case, but it has to be complemented with further specifcations. Most of the phenomenologists labelled as anti-realists in section 60.5 are realists concerning the features of the mind (e.g. subjectivity, consciousness, intentionality) but anti-realists concerning the world, insofar as they take those features of the mind to be constituting the world (in one of the senses discussed in section 60.5). This is the case of the later Husserl himself, but of many phenomenologists following this perspective. Others are realists concerning the features of the mind, but non-realists concerning the external reality of the world: they don’t take a stance on the nature of external reality, although they argue that it plays a causal role in perception. This seems to be the case of Brentano in the Psychology from an empirical standpoint. Finally, there are realist phenomenologists that are also realists concerning the external reality of the world. This is the case of the early Husserl and of many early phenomenologists such as Reinach, Stein, and Ingarden, and more recently of Dagfnn Føllesdal, David Woodruff Smith, Barry Smith, and Kevin Mulligan. The situation is somewhat similar in analytic philosophy of mind, with some differences that seem more statistical than principled: many of the defenders of phenomenal intentionality or inseparatism are realists about consciousness with the proviso that it may or should be given a naturalist explanation. Phenomenologists – realists or anti-realists in the broad sense – rarely agree with this proviso. Also, many insights in analytic philosophy of mind are also anti-realists concerning the features of the mind. The heterophenomenology of Dennett is a good example of such an insight. But as we stressed earlier, not all analytic philosophers are naturalists. For this reason, these differences should not be considered as the expression of a divide between phenomenology and analytic philosophy, but rather – as is also the case with the other differences discussed here – as the expression of some of the specifc problems that are constitutive of these two traditions respectively.13
Notes 1 I take here phenomenology as the philosophical movement originating in Brentano’s “Phänomenologie”, a discipline introduced in the late 1860s/early 1870s in Brentano’s metaphysics lectures as propaedeutic to ontology, investigating the contents of our mental phenomena. This propaedeutic developed into a more general research programme in psychology, frst in the classifcatory analyses in Brentano’s Psychology from an empirical standpoint (1874) but also in the works of Brentano’s students, for instance Carl Stumpf 1873; 1886, 1891, in Brentano’s descriptive psychology and phenomenology lectures of 1887–1891 (Brentano forthcoming) and in the works of Brentano’s students who either personally attended these lectures (Twardowski 1894; Kreibig 1909; Hillebrand 1890; 1891; Höfer 1890) or had personal copies of them (Stumpf 1886, 1891, Hua XVIII and XIX; Marty 2010 [orig. 1895]). While it is indisputable that Husserl was the most important of Brentano’s students and that his Logical Investigations were central for the history of the phenomenology of the 20th century – representing the frst attempt of a systematic account of the discipline, encompassing logic, psychology, the theory of meaning, abstraction, mereology, pure grammar, and perception – we consider Husserl’s project as one
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2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
of the outcomes of Brentano’s phenomenology. On this early version of phenomenology, see Fréchette 2019. See for instance Husserl et al., Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Halle, Niemeyer (from 1913). In the more general context of the phenomenology of the school of Brentano, a similar phenomenon occurred with Twardowski’s journal Ruch Filozofczny, (from 1911 onwards) in Poland. This is the case, for instance, of Brentano in Vienna, Husserl in Göttingen and Freiburg, Marty in Prague,Twardowski in Lemberg, Stumpf in Berlin, and Meinong in Graz. On the phenomenological side, Paul Ricœur is perhaps the best example of a bridge-builder. His lecture notes from the 1960s show that he discussed Russell, Ryle,Wittgenstein, and linguistic analysis in many of his lectures at Wheaton College, John Hopkins, and Washington D.C. These discussions and the bridge-builder approach are explicit in many of his works, for instance in Ricœur (1982; 1990/1992). On Ricœur as a bridge-builder, see Engel 2014. More recently, the bridge-builder approach is also explicit in the editorial presentation of the newly relaunched journal Phenomenological Studies at http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=journal&journal_code=EPH (last view on November 8, 2017) or in Norris 2000 and Rinofner-Kreidl and Wiltsche 2016. On the analytic side, Dummett (1993) is perhaps the most visible example, although the bridge-builder approach was developed much earlier by Findlay (1933; 1958; 1963) and has a long tradition in Germany (e.g. Gabriel 1975 or Künne 1975). Recent works such as Mulligan 2012, particularly on Wittgenstein and Scheler, also shows the fruitfulness of such an approach. Many philosophers are said to be bridge-builders, but it is not always clear whether they considered themselves as such. Hans-Johann Glock (2008, 256), for instance, names among others Føllesdal,Tugendhat, and Dreyfus.At least Føllesdal (in Frauchiger 2013, 347ff.) explicitly rejects this qualifcation and denies the existence of a gap. See the extensive literature on this event, more recently Overgaard 2010. Both are quoted in Glock (2008, 258) to make a different point. On the problems of such a diagnosis, see Mulligan 2011. On the phenomenological version of the knowledge frst thesis, see Mulligan 2014. On this relation between phenomenological and analytic views of intuition in epistemology, see Fréchette 2016; 2017. See Russell’s early reviews of Meinong in Mind between 1899 and 1907. On Russell, see Russell 1921. On Russell’s infuence on Chisholm, see Chisholm 1997. On inseparatism, see Horgan and Tienson 2002. On phenomenal intentionality, see Kriegel. This chapter has been written as part of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project P-27215, “Franz Brentano’s descriptive Psychology”.Thanks to Johannes Brandl, Kevin Mulligan, and Dan Zahavi for their feedback on an earlier version of this article.
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61 PHENOMENOLOGY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES Jeff Yoshimi
Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences (the sciences of the mind, including psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, among other disciplines) have a long history of interaction. Husserl and his successors spoke at length about the relationship between phenomenology and the psychology of their day. In the 1950s phenomenological approaches to psychology and social science were established. Beginning in the 1990s “naturalized phenomenology” emerged as an explicit theoretical enterprise.This history is tracked by a parallel series of developments in psychology. In the 19th century, phenomenology—in the generic sense of the study of consciousness using frst-person refection—was well integrated with experimental psychology, physiology, and other disciplines.This early form of what is today called “consciousness studies” was suppressed during the behaviorist period, which in its most radical forms shunned all talk of internal states. In the 1950s the “cognitive revolution” began, and psychologists began to take internal states seriously again, though consciousness remained largely off limits. Beginning in the 1990s consciousness was again a legitimate topic of study, and a kind of return to 19thcentury integrated psychology took place.Today consciousness studies and naturalized phenomenology are active and partially overlapping areas of research.
61.1. Consciousness studies in 19th-century psychology In the 19th century, the mind and consciousness were studied using introspection, experimentation, physiology, mathematics, and other techniques. In the early part of the century, Herbart, anticipating Freud, said that when unconscious processes in the brain become active above some threshold, consciousness occurs. Unconscious items competing to become conscious were represented by terms in symbolic equations. In the middle of the century Fechner and Weber launched psycho-physics, the “oldest continuing research tradition in experimental psychology” (Baars 1986, 29), which involves the formulation of mathematical relationships between stimulus intensities and judgments of perceived stimulus intensity (i.e. simple phenomenological judgments). Mach, Hering, and Helmholtz performed detailed introspective, experimental, and physiological studies of the visual system, and in some cases predicted neural structures based on subjective introspection.Wundt, often described as the founder of experimental psychology, famously made introspection central to his method. He once said that he would not allow a student to participate in formal experiments until he or she had practiced introspecting 10,000 662
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times (Boring 1957). Stumpf ’s Tonpsychologie was a study of musical phenomenology—e.g. tonal discrimination, tonal fusion, and the components of timbre—developed on the basis of careful experimentation with tuning forks and cathedral organs (Stumpf 1930). Perhaps the greatest fgure in this tradition is William James, who integrated rich phenomenological descriptions with the latest developments in neuroscience, experimental studies of behavior, and other material (James 1890). His analyses of the stream of consciousness, the “fringe”, attention, and habit continue to be infuential today.These 19th-century thinkers emphasized different components of an interdisciplinary matrix encompassing physiology, mathematics, experimentation, physics, and introspection. For more background see (Baars 1986, Boring 1957, Gurwitsch 1979b, Mangan 1999).
61.2. Husserl on psychology Edmund Husserl—who took courses with Wundt at Leipzig and later habilitated under Stumpf (Schuhmann 1977)—had a complex view of the relationship between phenomenology and psychology, which he developed over the entire course of his professional career. See Hua XII,VI, XIV, IX,V,VI, XVII; also see (Moran 2008, Ramstead 2014,Yoshimi 2016, Zahavi 2004, 2010). One of Husserl’s frst widely read works was the Prolegomenon to Pure Logic (Hua XVIII), which contains a detailed critique of “psychologism” (the view that the laws of logic are laws of proper thinking). Husserl describes a variety of problematic consequences of the view; e.g. the laws of syllogisms become vague empirical generalizations that can be true for one person and false for another.As Husserl developed his conception of transcendental phenomenology— according to which all forms of being are constituted in the fux of pure consciousness, and on the basis of the transcendental ego’s activities—he generalized these arguments to his phenomenological program as a whole.Transcendental phenomenology, as Husserl conceived it, is in the business of describing necessary laws of consciousness (“eidetic laws”). It would obviously be problematic to base necessary laws of consciousness on contingent features of human cognition. Husserl was responding, in part, to Wundt and other 19th-century psychologists, who treated conscious mental states as natural phenomena, subject to experimental study in the same way as other natural phenomena. Husserl returns to his critique of natural science, and psychology in particular, in his late work, The Crisis of European Science (HuaVI), where he claims that the West has suffered from an over-emphasis on science and mathematics; it has “mathematized” being, clothed the world in a “garb of ideas”, and thereby reduced ultimate reality to an abstract formalism (roughly speaking, a manifold of points in space-time). Husserl treats this kind of mathematizing reduction as a source of the cultural anxieties affecting the West in the period following the Great War. Phenomenology is the antidote. No meaning can be found in empty symbols or brute matter. The study of consciousness must come frst. Psychology—like all natural sciences—must understand its proper place relative to the foundational enterprise of transcendental phenomenology. Later phenomenologists and other Continental philosophers infuenced by Husserl have sometimes taken this critique of science to be a core insight of Husserl’s, and have on that basis been distrustful of naturalized phenomenology and related projects. However, Husserl did take psychology seriously, and believed that it should interact with phenomenology. Husserl’s most detailed discussions of this kind of interaction are in lectures he gave in 1925, collected in Hua IX, Phenomenological Psychology; also see Hua IV and V, and (Yoshimi 2010, n.d.). Phenomenological psychology, as Husserl conceives it, is similar to conceptual analysis in contemporary philosophy of mind: it is in the business of describing necessary features of mental processes. For example, he describes a detailed taxonomy of intentional states (distinguishing sensations or hyle from animating forms or morphe, and presentations from 663
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modes of presentation), which he takes to be justifed via a priori eidetic analysis. Husserl believes empirical psychologists should make use of these analyses, for example by framing inductive psychological laws using the terms of his intentional taxonomy.
61.3. Husserl’s successors All of Husserl’s major successors in the phenomenological program commented on or in some way drew on psychology and other empirical sciences. In Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger discusses the physiologist Müller, the biologists Driesch and von Uexküll, and famously described animals as being “world poor” (Heidegger 2001). Aron Gurwitsch, a student of Stumpf and later Husserl, wrote his dissertation on Gestalt psychology and phenomenology in 1929. It is perhaps the earliest example of naturalized phenomenology in the literature. Gurwitsch worked with the neurologists Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb, who were studying veterans with brain injuries. He argued that such pathologies as color amnesia (subjects can match color samples but not name colors) “confrm” ideas in Husserl. He was struck by the affnity between Gestalt psychology’s emphasis on faithful description of perceptual phenomena, and Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction. He also critiqued the “constancy hypothesis”, according to which sensory stimulations uniquely determine sensations. Gurwitsch argues that phenomenological refection and Gestalt theory show that the constancy hypothesis is false: the most basic perceptual structure is an organized theme or Gestalt, whose structure can vary even if sensory stimulation remains constant. Gurwitsch’s writings on the relationship between phenomenology and the sciences are collected in (Gurwitsch 1979a, 1979b). His mature theory, which integrates Husserlian phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and ideas from James, Piaget, and others, is described in The Field of Consciousness (Gurwitsch 1964). Merleau-Ponty (who attended Gurwitsch’s lectures on Gestalt psychology in France) also drew extensively on psychology, and in fact held a chair of child psychology at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. Like Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty is critical of psychology on phenomenological grounds (Merleau-Ponty 1967, 1996), for example in his critique of Pavlovian learning theory (animals do not just respond refexively to stimuli but take in whole situations as felds of signifcance), and in his emphasis on concrete bodily existence, which he took to be more fundamental than the abstracted sensation complexes of empiricism or disembodied rules of “intellectualism”. Also like Gurwitsch, he draws on neurological cases, most famously “Schneider”, another Gelb and Goldstein patient, who could make “concrete movements” like removing his handkerchief from his pocket, but could not smoothly perform “abstract movements” like moving his hand in a circle in front of him. Merleau-Ponty takes this to confrm his phenomenological account of the fundamental status of concrete embodied action (e.g. removing a handkerchief), and his critique of intellectualism. See (Jensen 2009, Merleau-Ponty 1967, 1996). In French phenomenology Sartre and De Beauvoir also drew on non-phenomenological sources. References to Freud and other psychologists are sprinkled throughout their works (De Beauvoir 2012, Sartre 2001). De Beauvoir is especially notable for the variety of sources she draws on. In her discussion of marriage, for example, she draws on historical data, autobiography, literary depictions, philosophical sources, the Kinsey report, several psychoanalytic and psychological studies (of nervous anxiety, frigidity, and amorous jealousy), and survey-based studies. This variety of data, much of it empirical, is used to inform a detailed account of the frst-person experiences involved in marriage.
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61.4. 1950s through early 1990s Phenomenology was not a major source of infuence on psychology in the middle of the 20th century. Behaviorism had taken root in academic psychology, and consciousness was offcially verboten among serious psychologists. However, phenomenological investigation did persist in various forms, even within psychology. Verbal reports arguably involve “quick and minimal introspection” (Gallagher and Schmicking 2010, 22), e.g. reporting on seeing red or feeling anger, so that to some degree phenomenology persisted within behaviorist psychology. Gestalt psychology and its various offshoots, which arguably made use of phenomenological description, were also active at this time (Palmer 1999). Some more explicit interactions between phenomenology and psychology also occurred in this period. In the late 1950s various forms of humanistic and existential psychology became prominent (though they had been developing since the early part of the century), which applied phenomenological ideas to clinical practice (Schneider and Krug 2009). Frankl, for example, emphasized the need for patients to identify meaningful components of their lives (Frankl, Winslade, and Kushner 2006). In the 1960s some psychologists and social scientists began developing phenomenological approaches to psychology. They used such Husserlian methods as bracketing and horizon analysis to analyze interview data, in order to understand the “lived experiences” of individuals or social groups in as much detail as possible (Giorgi 1997).These developments are associated with the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, which was launched in 1970, and remains active today. In the 1980s phenomenology was more thoroughly developed into a form of qualitative research (Moustakas 1994,Van Manen 1990) and today it is considered one of the fve main research traditions in qualitative research, alongside ethnography and case study methods (Creswell 2012). Hubert Dreyfus’ seminal work at the intersection of phenomenology and cognitive science took form in this period. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he wrote a series of papers on phenomenology (drawing primarily on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) in relation to Artifcial Intelligence (AI), which culminated in the frst edition of What Computers Can’t Do (Dreyfus 1972). In this and other works, e.g. (Dreyfus and Hall 1982), Dreyfus compared Husserlian phenomenology with the project of AI: in both cases, Dreyfus contended, human cognition was understood in terms of explicit rules (or “essences”) applied to disembodied data. Thus, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, in critiquing Husserl and intellectualism, were indirectly critiquing AI. On Dreyfus’s account, humans only use explicit rules in special situations, e.g. when frst learning a task or when a tool stops functioning properly. But for the most part human beings simply know what to do in a situation and how to behave appropriately, without relying on any explicit rules or data. A handful of works connecting Husserlian phenomenology with psychology and early cognitive science also appeared in this period (Chokr 1992, Ihde 1986, McIntyre 1986).
61.5. Contemporary naturalized phenomenology and consciousness studies Naturalized phenomenology in its contemporary sense emerged in the late 1990s, in two distinct but complimentary ways. A frst group of theorists explicitly drew on the phenomenological tradition, from a naturalistic perspective. Some of the frst publications in this line are Varela’s paper on “Neuro-phenomenology” (Varela 1996) and a multi-authored volume on “Naturalized Phenomenology” (Petitot,Varela, Pachoud, and Roy 1999). In the late 1990s the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences was launched, and has been active to the present
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day.Today,“naturalized phenomenology” is a standard phrase, occurring in hundreds of journal articles and book chapters, and is the primary subject of several subsequent anthologies (Embree 2004, Gallagher and Schmicking 2010) and special issues of journals (Carel and Meacham 2013, Hasenkamp and Thomson 2013). Secondly, consciousness studies—which also studies consciousness in an interdisciplinary way, but without tracing its lineage to phenomenologists like Husserl or Heidegger—emerged in the 1990s (or re-emerged; recall that an early form existed in the 19th century). In this period several philosophers and psychologists persuasively argued that subjectivity was a legitimate and essential topic for naturalistic study (Baars 1988, Chalmers 1995, Mangan 1991, Searle 1994). Perhaps the defning moment of this period was the frst Tucson conference, “Towards a Science of Consciousness” in 1994. Today consciousness studies is a fully fedged interdisciplinary research area, with several dedicated journals (Journal of Consciousness Studies and Consciousness and Cognition) and active professional organizations (Association for the Scientifc Study of Consciousness and the Center for Consciousness Studies). Contemporary naturalized phenomenology and consciousness studies are too vast to summarize in a short space. There are literally thousands of papers, considering just about every phenomenological topic from the standpoint of cognitive science.To give a favor of this type of work, here are some of the main research areas. First, there has been an active discussion of methodology. Some have questioned whether phenomenology should be trusted at all, given how error prone phenomenological judgments are (Schwitzgebel 2008). Others, assuming that phenomenological refection has some value, have asked how it should interact with non-phenomenological sources of evidence. Does phenomenology simply provide “data” to be explained by neuroscience (Borrett, Kelly, and Kwan 2000), or should it play a more active role in experimental design (Gallagher and Sørensen 2006)? Phenomenology could also be used to generate testable predictions. In fact, there are extant cases of neural predictions based on phenomenological evidence, as in the case of Mach’s prediction of lateral inhibition in the retina based on certain subjective illusions (Mangan 2007), as well as phenomenological predictions based on neural evidence, for example predictions of “chimerical” color experiences based on the structure of the visual system (Churchland 2005). Both cases are discussed in (Yoshimi 2016). Most theorists in these areas believe some kind of pluralist interaction between phenomenology and the cognitive sciences is warranted.This kind of approach has been referred to as “convergent phenomenology” (Mangan 1991, ch. 5, Mangan 2014),“reciprocal constraints” (Varela 1996, 343), the “natural method” (Flanagan 1992, 11), and “mutual enlightenment” (Gallagher 1997, 195). Many studies in naturalized phenomenology apply this interdisciplinary method in an effort to refne our understanding of specifc features of consciousness. Consider the case of bodily awareness. In a review of this literature, deVignemont draws on the phenomenologists Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty, the neuroscience of bodily representation (for example, she reviews seven neuropsychological disorders relating to bodily awareness, from phantom limbs to alien limbs to peripheral deafferentation), and current theorizing in philosophy of mind to develop an extremely refned analysis of the phenomenology of bodily awareness (de Vignemont 2011). This analysis would have been diffcult to develop on the basis of psychology, neuroscience, or phenomenology alone, and thus highlights the importance of a pluralist method. Something similar is happening in the study of social cognition (Stawarska 2006), where phenomenological accounts of the experience of others and of social groups are being integrated with the empirical literature on social cognition, which is by now vast, encompassing neuroscientifc constructs (e.g. mirror neurons), experimental paradigms (e.g. joint visual attention, where one agent’s eyes fxate on the same location as another’s), and empirically based theoretical constructs 666
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(e.g. simulation theory and “theory theory”, which are accounts of how agents understand the mental states of others). Other areas where this kind of pluralist refnement is occurring are the phenomenology of agency, attention, emotion, perception, imagination, language, and psychopathology (schizophrenia in particular). For review see (Gallagher and Schmicking 2010). Another class of researchers has placed more emphasis on connecting phenomenology with neuroscience via mathematical and computational modeling. Varela’s “Neurophenomenology” was perhaps the frst approach of this type (Varela 1996).These theorists are generally interested in how the structure and dynamics of neural activity are related to the structure and dynamics of consciousness. For example, a series of papers have considered how Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness can be related to specifc types of process in the brain, e.g.“trajectory estimation” circuits that predict future states based on internal models (Grush 2006). Other approaches and examples are described in (Lloyd 2004, Thompson 2007, Van Gelder 1996,Yoshimi 2011). Other research at the intersection of phenomenology and cognitive science includes work in embodied cognitive science (Wilson and Foglia, 2016), work on the neural correlates of consciousness (Crick and Koch 1990, Dehaene 2014, Koch 2004), work on James’s concept of the fringe in relation to functional accounts of consciousness (Mangan 1999), work on the information theoretic properties of the brain and its relation to consciousness (Edelman and Tononi 2000, Tononi 2008), and continuations of Dreyfus’ work, including “Heideggerean cognitive science” (Kiverstein and Wheeler 2012,Wrathall and Malpas 2000). We have, in a sense, come full circle, from the exuberant interdisciplinary investigations of the 19th century, to a period of separation during the mid-20th century when phenomenology and psychology were largely (but by no means entirely) isolated, to their contemporary re-integration via naturalized phenomenology and consciousness studies.
References Baars, Bernard J. 1986. The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology. New York: Guilford Press. ———. 1988. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boring, Edwin G. 1957. A History of Experimental Psychology. London: Genesis Publishing. Borrett, Donald, Kelly, Sean, and Kwan, Hon. 2000. “Phenomenology, Dynamical Neural Networks and Brain Function”. Philosophical Psychology, 13(2): pp. 213–228. Carel, Havi, and Meacham, Darian. 2013.“Phenomenology and Naturalism: Editors’ Introduction”. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 72(Supplement -1): pp. 1–21. doi:10.1017/S1358246113000027 Chalmers, David. 1995.“Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3): pp. 200–219. Chokr, Nader N. 1992. “Mind, Consciousness, and Cognition: Phenomenology vs. Cognitive Science”. Husserl Studies, 9(3): pp. 179–197. Churchland, Paul. 2005. “Chimerical Colors: Some Phenomenological Predictions from Cognitive Neuroscience”. Philosophical Psychology, 18(5): pp. 527–560. Creswell, John W. 2012. Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Crick, Francis, and Koch, Christof. 1990.“Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness”. Seminars in the Neurosciences, 2, p. 203. de Beauvoir, Simone. 2012. The Second Sex. New York: Random House LLC. Dehaene, Stanislas. 2014. Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York:Viking Adult. de Vignemont, Frédérique. 2011. “Bodily Awareness”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011, https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=bodily-awareness) Dreyfus, Hubert. 1972. What Computers Can’t Do. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Hall, Harrison. 1982. Husserl Intentionality and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press.
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Jeff Yoshimi Edelman, Gerald, and Tononi, Giulio. 2000. “Reentry and the Dynamic Core: Neural Correlates of Conscious Experience”. Neural Correlates of Consciousness, Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press, pp. 139–151. Embree, Lester. 2004. Gurwitsch’s Relevancy for Cognitive Science. Dordrecht: Springer. Flanagan, Owen J. 1992. Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press. Frankl,Viktor,Winslade,William, and Kushner, Harold. 2006. Man’s Search for Meaning (1st edition). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Gallagher, Shaun. 1997.“Mutual Enlightenment: Recent Phenomenology in Cognitive Science”. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4(3): pp. 195–214. Gallagher, Shaun, and Sørensen, Jesper. 2006. “Experimenting with Phenomenology”. Consciousness and Cognition, 15(1): pp. 119–134. Gallagher, Shaun, and Schmicking, Daniel. 2010. Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Dordrecht/London/Boston, MA: Springer. Giorgi, Amedeo. 1997. “The Theory, Practice, and Evaluation of the Phenomenological Method as a Qualitative Research Procedure”. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 28(2): pp. 235–260. Grush, Rick. 2006. “How to, and How not to, Bridge Computational Cognitive Neuroscience and Husserlian Phenomenology of Time Consciousness”. Synthese, 153(3): pp. 417–450. Gurwitsch, Aron. 1964. Field of Consciousness. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1979a. Phenomenology and Theory of Science. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1979b. Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Hasenkamp, Wendy, and Thomson, Evan. 2013. “Examining Subjective Experience: Advances in Neurophenomenology”. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience., https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics /1163/examining-subjective-experience-advances-in-neurophenomenology Heidegger, Martin. 2001. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ihde, Don. 1986. Experimental Phenomenology:An Introduction. New Yok: SUNY Press. James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology.Vol. 1. New York: Holt. Jensen, Rasmus. 2009. “Motor Intentionality and the Case of Schneider”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8(3): pp. 371–388. Kiverstein, Julian, and Wheeler, Michael. 2012. Heidegger and Cognitive Science. London: Palgrave. Koch, Christof. 2004. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Englewood, CO: Roberts & Company Publishers. Lloyd, Dan. 2004. Radiant Cool:A Novel Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press. Mangan, Bruce. 1991. Meaning and the Structure of Consciousness:An Essay in Psycho-Aesthetics (Dissertation). University of California, Berkeley, CA. ———. 1999.“The Fringe:A Case study in Explanatory Phenomenology”. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3): pp. 249–252. ———. 2007. “Cognition, Fringe Consciousness, and the Legacy of William James”. In: The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. Eds. M.Velmans and S. Schneider. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 671–685. ———. 2014. “Meaning, God,Volition, and Art: How Rightness and the Fringe Bring it All Together”. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 21(3–4): pp. 3–4. McIntyre, Ronald. 1986.“Husserl and the Representational Theory of Mind”. Topoi, 5(2): pp. 101–113. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1967. The Structure of Behavior. Trans. A. L. Fisher. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1996. Phenomenology of Perception.Trans. D.A. Landes. New York/London: Routledge. Moran, Dermot. 2008.“Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy and the Critique of Naturalism”. Continental Philosophy Review, 41(4): pp. 401–425. Moustakas, Clark. 1994. Phenomenological Research Methods.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Palmer, Stephen E. 1999. Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology (1st edition). Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press. Petitot, Jean, Varela, Francisco, Pachoud, Bernard, and Roy, Jean-Michel. (Eds.). 1999. Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ramstead, Maxwell. 2014.“NaturalizingWhat?Varieties of Naturalism andTranscendental Phenomenology”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 14, pp. 1–43. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2001. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Washington, DC: Washington Square Press.
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Phenomenology and cognitive sciences Schneider, Kirk, and Krug, Orah. 2009. Existential-Humanistic Therapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Schuhmann, Karl. 1977. Husserl-Chronik: Denk-und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (Vol. 1). Dordrecht: Springer. Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2008. “The Unreliability of Naive Introspection”. Philosophical Review, 117(2): pp. 245–273. Searle, John. 1994. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press. Stawarska, Beata. 2006.“Mutual Gaze and Social Cognition”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5(1): pp. 17–30. Stumpf, Carl. 1930.“Autobiography of Carl Stumpf ”. History of Psychology in Autobiography, 1: pp. 389–441. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Tononi, Giulio. 2008. “Consciousness as Integrated Information: A Provisional Manifesto”. The Biological Bulletin, 215(3): pp. 216–242. Van Gelder, Tim. 1996. “Wooden Iron? Husserlian Phenomenology Meets Cognitive Science”. In: Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Eds. J. Petitot, F. J. Varela, and J.-M. Roy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 245–265. Van Manen, Max. 1990. Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. New York: Suny Press. Varela, Francisco. 1996. “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem”. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3(4): pp. 330–349. Wilson, Robert, and Foglia, Lucia. 2016. “Embodied Cognition”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=embodied-cognition. Wrathall, Mark, and Malpas, Jeff. 2000. Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press. Yoshimi, Jeff. 2009.“Husserl’s Theory of Belief and the Heideggerean Critique”. Husserl Studies, 25(2): pp. 121–140. ———, 2010. “Husserl on Psycho-Physical Laws”. New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 10: pp. 25–42. ———. 2011.“Phenomenology and Connectionism”. Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 2: pp. 1–12. ———. 2016. “Prospects for a Naturalized Phenomenology”. In: Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind. Conceptual and Empirical Approaches. Eds. D. Dahlstrom, A. Elpidorou, and W. Hopp. New York/London: Routledge, pp. 287–309. ———. (n.d.) “Phenomenological Psychology as Philosophy of Mind”. In: The Husserlian Mind. Ed. H. Jacobs. New York/London: Routledge. Zahavi, Dan. 2004. “Phenomenology and the Project of Naturalization”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 3(4): pp. 331–347. ———. 2010.“Naturalized Phenomenology”. In: Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Eds. D. Schmicking and S. Gallagher. Dordrecht/Boston, MA/London: Springer, pp. 2–19.
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62 PHENOMENOLOGY AND CRITICAL THEORY Alexei Procyshyn
Even a passing familiarity with the phenomenological tradition and Frankfurt School critical theory suggests a number of affnities. For instance, thinkers in both traditions are deeply interested in the constitution of meaning, the relational structure of experience, and the intersubjective conditions for engaging with the world, oneself, and others. Despite the similarity in themes, however, the engagement between phenomenologists and critical theorists exhibits a conspicuous one-sidedness. Except for Gadamer’s debate with Habermas in the mid-1960s, scholars working in the phenomenological tradition have largely tended to ignore critical theory. Heidegger, for instance, did not pen a single remark about any member of the Frankfurt School—despite having been personally acquainted with several of its members and being aware of their work (Demmerling 2013, 374). Critical theorists, on the other hand, have been anything but silent about phenomenology. For the frst generation of the Frankfurt School (e.g.Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse), phenomenology represents precisely the way in which thinking should not be undertaken. Horkheimer, for example, takes Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Husserl 2011) to be the paradigm of ‘traditional theory,’ which a critical theory aims to overcome (Horkheimer 1975, 190, cf. also Habermas 1972, 303–317). For his part,Adorno (1982) criticizes Husserl’s views of intentionality and the role he attributed to phenomenology as a foundational enterprise in Ideas I for involving irreconcilable commitments that render his project incoherent. His view of Heidegger is even more severe. In a letter to Horkheimer,Adorno describes him as “a cunning con-artist who has read a great deal” (Horkheimer 1998, 202). Although his engagements with phenomenology were limited,Walter Benjamin also held Heidegger in low esteem (2016, 344), but had an abiding interest in Husserlian phenomenology (Benjamin 2016, 302; cf. Fenves 2012). Subsequent generations of Frankfurt School critical theorists have modulated without altering the trend. Habermas, for instance, takes Heidegger to be “the most infuential philosopher since Hegel” (Habermas 1983, 53), but nevertheless sees phenomenology as a “monological philosophy of consciousness,” which his formal pragmatics of communication is supposed to replace (Habermas 1987, 119 f.). Silence and (ad hominem) critique thus appear to defne the historical relationship between these two movements. This entry will seek to understand philosophically the reasons for this historical one-sidedness, by outlining the idea of a critical theory and then by examining the criticisms members of the Frankfurt School have leveled against phenomenology. From this examination, a set of fundamental philosophical themes will emerge that critical theory and phenomenology share. 670
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Overview of Frankfurt School critical theory From its inception, critical theory has aimed to develop an inter- or transdisciplinary theory of society (for a good overview of critical theory’s development from Marx to Habermas, see Rasmussen 1996, 11–38).This form of collaborative research draws on sociology, social psychology (initially Freudian psychoanalysis), Marxism (especially the work of Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács), and various sub-disciplines of philosophy, to offer what Max Horkheimer called “a critical theory of society as it is, a theory dominated at every turn by a concern for the reasonable conditions of life” (Horkheimer 1975, 198–199). Critical theorists thus aim to integrate two distinctive orientations towards ‘society.’ On the one hand, they embrace the sociological task of understanding society in terms of its basic institutions, their integration, and the social practices that unfold within them (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, Habermas 1984 and 1987, Honneth 1995). On the other hand, theorists aim to extrapolate from this understanding of society a normative perspective that makes criticism and social transformation possible but remains endogenous to it. Or, in the words of Raymond Geuss, “a critical theory […] is a refective theory which gives agents a kind of knowledge inherently productive of enlightenment and emancipation” (Geuss 1981, 2). Geuss’ synthetic defnition highlights the three features of the Frankfurt School’s approach to theorizing that are supposed to integrate the normative and descriptive orientations involved in understanding ‘society.’ First, insofar as critical theorizing is ‘refective,’ it aims to be a praxis in the Marxist sense, i.e. a theoretically informed practical engagement with one’s situation that is guided by an “emancipatory interest” (Habermas 1971). Second, the kind of knowledge produced by critical theory—its cognitive content—is inherently normative. This distinguishes it from traditional theories, where ‘knowledge’ is understood descriptively, i.e. as value-neutral, accurate representations of facts, which facilitate successful interventions in the world aimed at achieving some extrinsic goal. Third, critical theory addresses concrete social actors, with whom it shares an emancipatory interest, in order to help them recognize their predicament and motivate social change. In brief, critical theorizing starts from empirical instances of social failure (disrespect, misrecognition, exclusion/alienation from social practices constitutive of social spheres or identities, etc.), which are accessible to a frst-person experiential perspective. Moreover, its proposals for addressing or redressing such failures involve realizing a potential latent in a social situation that has been obscured by contingent historical developments.
Adorno and phenomenology Interestingly, the frst generation of the Frankfurt School developed their interdisciplinary project in counterpoint to the phenomenological movements of their day. However instructive, the personal relations between Frankfurt School thinkers and phenomenologists do not necessarily explain this intense philosophical engagement (cf. Demmerling 2013, 374–381), which is at its most sustained in Adorno’s and Habermas’ work. Adorno wrote two books on Husserl. The frst, his PhD dissertation submitted in 1924 under the title The Transcendence of the Material and the Noematic in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Die Transzendenz des Dinglichen und des Noematischen in Husserls Phänomenologie [Adorno 1990, 7–79]), criticized Husserl’s account of givenness. In it,Adorno alleges that on the one hand Husserl demanded the founding of all thing-like being only by going back to immediate facts. On the other hand he considers things as “absolute 671
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transcendents” that might show themselves epistemologically only in their relation to consciousness, but whose own being should in principle be independent of the consciousness. (Adorno 1990, 370, qtd. in and trans. by Wolff 2006) On Adorno’s analysis, these two commitments yield a paradox. Husserl’s ‘things’ are not strictly speaking given in experience and yet cannot be bracketed out entirely.As Wolff explains, things are not experiences; whereas experiences are immediate data, the things are given only indirectly.The disjunction necessitates, frst the methodological suspension of all judgements about the reality of things, […] which should be followed up by studies of the rich plurality of states of consciousness. (Wolff 2006, 558) Adorno, however, insists that there is no real way to get this strategy off the ground, since the epoche presupposes what it wants to bracket. As Adorno argues, what is given after phenomenological reduction are remembered experiences of transcendent things. As re-presentations, however, they still refer to what has supposedly been bracketed.Adorno contends that the same problem affects Husserl’s noema. That is, a noema supposedly prescribes an object, while consciousness is able to entertain the noematic sense independently of the object prescribed. How this is possible remains a mystery, on Adorno’s view. He thus concludes that Husserl’s notion of givenness is incoherent. After his Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard, Adorno returns to Husserl several more times (e.g. Adorno 1940). His fnal engagement is documented in Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Adorno ranked this work second in importance only to his Negative Dialectics (Adorno 1970, GS V: 386). The reason is not diffcult to discern. If the dissertation stood frmly within the Neo-Kantian tradition of Adorno’s dissertation advisor, Hans Cornelius, Against Epistemology marks Adorno’s transformation into a critical theorist. As Petra Gehring notes, the book documents “Adorno’s programmatic self-understanding in which he hones aspects of his understanding of dialectics and his view of philosophy’s critical relation to the world” (Gehring 2011, 354). In Against Epistemology, Adorno intensifes the dissertation’s criticism of Husserl.The metacritique now insists that Husserl is committed to a form of thinking that capitulates to the social forces driving late capitalist societies. Husserl,Adorno contends, internalizes the reifying tendencies that Marx diagnosed in commodity fetishism. To wit, the essences and origins that phenomenological refection aims to uncover result from the same fawed method of analysis that Marx attributed to the assessment of a commodity’s exchange-value: Husserl mistakes the product of concrete historical relations and processes among social actors for an intrinsic property of things themselves.The reifcation of meaning and consciousness, so Adorno claims, is the consequence of severing the connections between the concrete, historical development of human reasoning (the historical genesis of meaning) and this form of reasoning’s rationalized structure.This results in misunderstanding the nature and properties of the meaning-unities being entertained. As Miller reconstructs the argument, “Adorno chides Husserl for hypostasizing the distinction between what [Adorno] calls ‘genesis’—the origin of concepts in a process of social-historical development—and ‘validity’” (Miller 2009, 105), i.e. the legitimate use of these concepts.This kind of error,Adorno insists, creates a blind spot:“the real life process of society is not something sociologically smuggled into philosophy […]. It is rather the core of the contents of logic itself ” (Adorno 1970, 26). 672
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Adorno thus sees Husserl’s effort to describe meaning-unities phenomenologically as an Idealistic expression of Marx’s fetishism of the commodity-form.To show this, he targets three core ideas in Husserl’s early work that exemplify this reifying tendency: the theory of logical absolutism from the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, the idea of perceptual fulfllment in Logical Investigations, and the related notion of categorial intuition. From a phenomenologist’s perspective, Adorno’s interpretation of Husserl in Against Epistemology is no doubt the defnition of uncharitable. It juxtaposes early and later texts without fagging the shifts in Husserl’s thinking, imports an entirely foreign terminology into the discussion, and oscillates between close readings of specifc passages and large-scale sociological considerations (for an overview of Adorno’s argument in Against Epistemology, see Gehring 2011; for a reconstruction of Adorno’s analysis that is sympathetic to Husserl, see Miller 2009; for an account of how Adorno misinterprets Husserl, see Hodge 2008).The text is nevertheless signifcant because it makes explicit a wedge issue between phenomenology and critical theory.The argument hinges on Adorno’s conviction that some version of historical materialism is true: philosophical refection cannot be uncoupled from the concrete historical forces responsible for one’s social situation and one’s intellectual capacities without thereby falsifying the contents of experience. Objects of experience are ontically constituted ‘behind one’s back’ such that they have a kind of independence and richness that resists our theoretical gaze. Failure to attend to the historical and material processes involved in the constitution of a thing and a subject’s cognitive capacities makes meaningful philosophical engagement impossible. But Husserl goes to great lengths to exclude precisely these processes in the works Adorno canvasses. Adorno’s approach distinguishes itself from Husserlian strategies in three ways. First, it shows the extent to which Adorno embraces a subject–object (S–O) model of experience, which phenomenology’s analyses of intentionality are supposed to bypass or overcome. Adorno uses the S–O relation to introduce a dialectical component into thinking—foreign to phenomenology—and fold the sociological situation of thought into a consideration of ‘experience’ as a reciprocally transformative relation.These represent the second and third differences from phenomenology. The ineliminability of S–O relations (whose fipside is the inherent falseness of all forms of subjective immediacy), together with a focus on the sociological (historical and cultural) conditions in which thinking dialectically unfolds (and subjects are ‘interpolated’), are thus the central commitments of Adorno’s thinking that distinguish him from the phenomenological movement. This leads Adorno to propose an alternative account of experience as the culmination of a reciprocal relationship between subject and object, which needs to be dialectically unfolded (for reconstructions of these ideas, see O’Connor 2004, and Bernstein 2002). Interestingly, the criticisms Adorno levels at Husserl from a broadly Marxist perspective bear striking similarities to Heidegger’s objections to Husserlian phenomenology (for an interesting effort to synthesize Heidegger’s fundamental ontology with Lukács’ Marxism, see Goldmann 2009). Indeed, Heidegger develops his own fundamental ontology from a similar set of coordinates. He insists, for instance, that ontological structures only become thematic through an analysis of one’s ontic engagements, that the entities one encounters have an irreducible historical character, that the signifcance of an entity is not exhausted by one’s relationship to it, and that one inherits coping strategies and goals rather than spontaneously constituting them for oneself.The ontic-ontological character of Dasein, the historicity of Dasein’s environment, life and understanding, and the recognition of Dasein’s thrownness thus seem to offer a hermeneutical vantage from which to integrate Adorno’s position into phenomenology. The literature discussing the similarities between Adorno and Heidegger is already vast (see, for instance, Macdonald and Ziarek 2008, O’Connor 1998). It is important to note, however, that Adorno develops his mature position in opposition to Heidegger’s work. And the opposi673
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tion follows the same pattern we found in his criticisms of Husserl: dialectics, not ontology. There is no way to fnesse this difference. For his part, Heidegger saw hermeneutical phenomenology as superseding dialectics altogether. “Dialectic,” Heidegger tells us in the second introduction to Being and Time, is “a genuine philosophical embarrassment, [which] becomes superfuous” for phenomenology (Heidegger 2010, 25). In Negative Dialectics, Adorno responds, “this makes the very word ‘thinking,’ which Heidegger will not renounce, as unsubstantial as the thing to be thought: thinking without a concept is not thinking at all” (Adorno 1973a, 97). Adorno’s insistence on dialectics, and the S–O relationship that concepts mediate, make it nearly impossible to bridge the gap that separates him from Heidegger, for whom the very categories of ‘subject,’ ‘object,’ and ‘concept’ are parasitic on a primordial form of practical engagement and non-discursive understanding. Hence, even as we identify overlapping ideas in their works (e.g. Macdonald 1997 and Macdonald 2011), we nevertheless fnd ourselves confronted with a stark Either/Or. For their philosophical procedures are fundamentally at odds.As O’Connor argues, the difference between Adorno and Heidegger can be characterized as a difference between critical and phenomenological versions of transcendental philosophy. […] Adorno’s philosophy tends to emphasize a particular rational structure of experience […] missed by traditional philosophy. […] Heidegger, by contrast, constructs a different model by elaborating a […] phenomenological description of the conditions of experience. (O’Connor 1998, 44) The difference in approach and focus leads O’Connor to conclude that any similarities between the thinkers are purely coincidental (ibid.). Their incommensurable approaches clarify the rivalry between Adorno and Heidegger. As Tilo Wesche argues, the rivalry illuminates their respective efforts to introduce a new orientation to post-war philosophy in Germany (Wesche 2011, 365).Adorno’s criticisms of Heidegger thus take on an added social signifcance insofar as they give voice to the broader historical and sociological concern for life and social action “after Auschwitz” (see Negative Dialectics, 361f.) that Heidegger has famously remained silent on. In doing so,Adorno deploys roughly the same interpretative strategies he used against Husserl. Now, however, he is careful to separate his overt polemic against Heidegger (Jargon of Authenticity) from his more philosophical criticism of Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology (Negative Dialectics) (Wesche 2011, 364). Adorno’s criticisms follow the same general strategy used against Husserl. On the one hand, Adorno contends that Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology merely ‘updates’ Husserl’s method by transforming the latter’s eidei into existentialia (Adorno 1973a, 62f.). This transformation, however, still reifes consciousness. It insists on being frst philosophy and emphasizing the purity of its philosophical descriptions (Adorno 1973a, 74–75). On the other hand, the ontological difference Heidegger imputes to Being and beings renders them both transcendent (like Husserl’s ‘thing’ and ‘noema’). Adorno even invokes the same ‘sociological mechanism’ of free-market exchange he used to criticize Husserl (Adorno 1982, 26 and 172), to characterize Heidegger’s thinking as “a highly developed credit system” (Adorno 1973a, 76): one concept borrows from the other. […] The debtor, says a faded joke, has it all over the creditor, who must depend upon the debtor’s will to pay—and so, for Heidegger, blessings fow from everything he owes.That Being [Sein] is neither a fact nor a concept exempts it from criticism.Whatever the critic would pick on can be dismissed as 674
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a misconception.The concept [of Being] borrows from the factual realm an air of solid abundance, of something not just cogitatively and unsolidly made—an air of being ‘in itself.’ From the mind that synthesizes it, entity [das Seiende] borrows the aura of being more than factual: the sanctity of transcendence. And this very structure hypostatizes itself as superior to the refective intellect which is accused of dissecting entity [das Seiende] and concept with a scalpel. (ibid.) Like his mentor, then, Heidegger is accused of internalizing an economy of thought without accounting for the process of its internalization, and for generalizing—reifying—this economy as a transcendental analytic of subjectivity. The framework of concepts, moreover, has been immunized against any form of criticism, since its foundational concepts do not have empirical touchstones (i.e. success/falsifcation conditions). This pre-empts focused conceptual analysis and makes any empirical application impossible. Like the Bible, the analytic of Dasein and the ontological difference upon which it is founded purport to explain everything and invite a reverential interpretative response. On Adorno’s view, it is therefore Ideology. Leaving aside the accuracy of Adorno’s critique, we should note that it remains motivated by a ‘sociological eye’ trained to identify functional identities underwriting disparate human engagements. If he can demonstrate that the functional identity he imputes to disparate felds of social production—philosophical thinking and free-market exchange—actually obtains, Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology have a serious problem: although they may elaborate a logic or set of competencies, they do not explain them nor do they open onto a normative consideration of whether one should accept them. Furthermore, it is clear that his opposition to Husserl and Heidegger hinges on the conception of critical theory with which we began.The dialectical account of one’s subjective experience develops a refective theory of society in which the contributions of concrete social institutions and practices to one’s frst-person experience are explicitly addressed. Such an account of society, if successful, would deliver knowledge productive of enlightenment and emancipation. Herein lies the force of Adorno’s criticisms against Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. His assessment that phenomenology cannot deliver the kind of normative knowledge conducive to emancipation because its interpretative strategies reproduce in thinking the very practices that exploit us in our social life could be damning indeed. The same goes for his contention that phenomenology’s claim to delineate the origins, essences, and unique interpretative structures of human experience or existence is tantamount to ideology. But the bottom line is that Adorno’s vision of post-war German philosophy stands or falls on his efforts to demonstrate these theses.
Habermas and phenomenology Many contemporary critical theorists think that Adorno’s project is a failure.The most powerful articulation of this failure can be found in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984, 339f.). Habermas argues that Adorno can only treat objects of experience as individuated according to their potential contributions to instrumental action, since his ‘sociological eye’ apprehends every human engagement as instantiating a S–O relation. As we just saw, Adorno’s criticisms of the phenomenological tradition support Habermas’ observation. But reducing all forms of rational engagement to the teleological structures of means-ends reasoning and the entrenched social practices patterning contemporary social life leads Adorno down a dead end, Habermas contends. If reason is exhaustively characterized by ‘identity-thinking,’ i.e. a lone subject’s capacity to represent and intervene in the world for prudential reasons, there seems to be 675
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no room for an alternative.Adorno’s thesis that previously successful instrumental action and its associated conceptual resources are historically sedimented in our contemporary practices, limiting and deforming our current engagements, entails the idea of a totally administered society (e.g. ‘the culture industry’). Adorno himself saw no real escape from this predicament—which explains his heavy investment in subjective aesthetic expression as a mere intimation (not full articulation) of an emancipatory alternative (Habermas 1984, 384f.). Habermas argues, however, that the predicament Adorno and Horkheimer fnd themselves in is avoidable, since it is a consequence of a faulty philosophical starting point:“the program of early critical theory foundered not on this or that contingent circumstance, but from the exhaustion of the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness” (Habermas 1984, 386). Habermas uses ‘philosophy of consciousness’—or its equivalents, ‘monological theory’ and ‘philosophy of the subject’—to denote S–O models of experience and action that we have inherited from early modern philosophy, culminating in German Idealism (For his comprehensive account of the ‘philosophy of consciousness,’ see Habermas 1987b, 294–326.): Under ‘object’ the philosophy of the subject understands everything that can be represented as existing; under ‘subject’ it understands frst of all the capacities to relate oneself to such entities in the world in an objectivating attitude and gain control of objects, be it theoretically or practically.The two attitudes of mind are representation and action. The subject relates to objects either to represent them as they are or to produce them as they should be. (Habermas 1984, 387) The limitation of this philosophical paradigm comes from reducing social interaction to a single dimension of engagement in which meanings are attributed to things on the basis of an isolated—Cartesian—subject’s interests (notice that this criticism also targets Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology; see Habermas 1972).This obscures the equally important intersubjective and communicative dimensions of human activity, which are central to hermeneutical phenomenology. Indeed, Habermas locates the normative knowledge that critical theory aims to produce and the emancipatory potentials it hopes to realize precisely in this intersubjective and communicative dimension of social interaction. His theory of communicative action feshes out this dimension. The emphasis on an intersubjectively shared world connects Habermas’work to Heideggerian and Husserlian approaches. Moreover, his criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer has a phenomenological analogue. Heidegger’s critique of the representational conception of intentionality unfolds in much the same way as Habermas’ critique of the Frankfurt School’s frst generation (Dreyfus 1991, 46–59, and 1993). In both cases, S–O relations are denied foundational status. Instead of conceiving intentional relations exclusively in terms of the mental attitudes and representational capacities of a (transcendental) subject, both Habermas and Heidegger emphasize the practical and communicative dimensions of an actor’s social interaction with others. They also foreground the hermeneutical processes involved in reaching understanding and the intersubjective nature of a shared world which this process entails. The relationship is not accidental. As Habermas acknowledges, his early philosophical outlook is deeply indebted to Heidegger (Dews 1986). His frst published article, “Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger: On the Publication of Lectures Dating from 1935” (1991), identifes the positive contributions that Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology might bring to critical theory, while rejecting his post-Kehre thinking. (Habermas viewed Heidegger’s later works as motivated by extra-philosophical ambitions tied to his involvement with Nazism. 676
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For a discussion of this early piece, see Lafont 2008; for Habermas’ further engagements with Heidegger, see Habermas 1983, 1987b, and 1991.) As Cristina Lafont has shown, Habermas and Heidegger share two fundamental commitments: the rejection of the philosophy of consciousness (i.e. the S–O model of experience) and a conception of language as ‘world-disclosing’ (Lafont 1999). Furthermore, both thinkers connect these two ideas by rethinking the way in which social actors share a world. “The most important feature of the hermeneutic notion of the world,” Lafont writes, is that “the world is always intersubjectively shared because it is linguistically articulated. It is by virtue of sharing a natural language that Dasein can share the same world with others” (Lafont 2008, 165). “Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger” thus involves rethinking what it means to share a world by sharing a language. On the one hand, “it is precisely this hermeneutic model of a linguistically articulated and intersubjectively shared lifeworld that will allow Habermas to break with the priority of the philosophy of consciousness” (Lafont 2008, 166).Yet, on the other hand, the very same hermeneutical insight about the way in which a shared language and the web of signifcance enveloping the world engender meaningful communicative interaction seems to preclude the critical vantage central to the Frankfurt School’s project. Upholding the School’s explicitly critical orientation means that Habermas cannot simply adopt a hermeneutical conception of a shared world and of our intersubjective participation in dialogue and tradition. The very possibility of hermeneutically articulating an emancipatory interest is the core of Habermas’ debate with Gadamer in the late 1960s (Habermas 1980, Gadamer 1976). For his part, Gadamer argues that the privileged perspective that critical theorists hope to inhabit requires them to step outside of a shared tradition and overstep the role of a refective dialogue partner. But “the hermeneutic perspective of a symmetrical dialogue oriented toward understanding prohibits its participants from ascribing to themselves superior insight into the ‘delusions’ of other participants that would eliminate the need of validation of their own views through dialogue with them” (Lafont 2008, 169). In other words, the very idea that critical theorists have access to a transpersonal emancipatory interest is incompatible with a hermeneutic understanding of reaching understanding. If correct, Gadamer’s criticism shows that the project of critical theory is ad hoc (Gadamer 1976, 275)—and indeed apiece with the ‘traditional’ scientifc theorizing that critical theorists explicitly reject. One can plausibly read The Theory of Communicative Action as addressing precisely this problem, insofar as it aims to account for its own normative foundations so that the kind of vantage critical theorists need can be extrapolated from within a shared social space without presupposing a view from nowhere (for a discussion of Habermas’ systematic aim and its articulation, see Finnlayson 2013).The result is Habermas’ theory of society as both ‘Lifeworld’ and ‘System.’ The two-aspect theory seeks to satisfy critical theory’s demand to provide a descriptive understanding of society, while also identifying the normative resources and potentials which make possible social criticism and change. Thus, the System aspect promises to satisfy the descriptive orientation, while the Lifeworld aspect provides the normative one. Interestingly, however, Habermas approaches these tasks in a different order from the previous critical theorists. Instead of beginning from a sociological description of the functions of social action in order to identify implicit normative content, Habermas starts with the normative structure of our lifeworld. He argues that the various sociological subsystems subtending contemporary society grow out of the normative structures of our shared lifeworld interactions, as the lifeworld’s stock of knowledge, practices, and meanings increase in sophistication and become autonomous regions of social practice. In short, Habermas espouses a notion of the ‘lifeworld’ inspired by Husserlian phenomenology and an intersubjective process of reaching collective understanding that overlaps with 677
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Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology and Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, while seeking to satisfy critical theory’s central requirement for a sociologically informed, refective theory of society.The interactive relationship between ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’ is meant to make good on the hermeneutical project of reaching understanding from within the shared resources of a tradition, where participants have equal normative/moral/interpretive authority. It also thematizes the material and historical constitution of meaning within the lifeworld, along with the processes involved in maintaining and reproducing these shared signifcations. In this way, Habermas hopes to address Adorno’s criticism according to which phenomenology is blind to the material conditions that generate and reproduce meaningful experience, while jettisoning the philosophy of consciousness. If successful, the theory effectively answers Gadamer’s objection by identifying a transpersonal emancipatory interest at the core of the practices involved in reaching understanding—namely, the possibility of uncoerced agreement based on acknowledging successful acts of justifcation—and shows why a hermeneutical approach “throws light on experiences a subject has while exercising his communicative competencies, but […] cannot explain this competence” (Habermas 1980, 186). The crucial step in Habermas’ approach involves reconceiving what ‘reaching understanding’ involves. Consistent with Ernst Tugendhat’s (Tugendhat 1967) criticisms of Husserl and Heidegger, Habermas inverts the priority given in phenomenology to pre-propositional understanding and pre-discursive interpretation over propositionally structured knowledge. For Habermas (as for Tugendhat, Apel, Brandom, etc.), a propositionally structured understanding antedates—as an empirical fact about socialization/learning or as a counterfactual meant to render complex social action intelligible—our pre-refective attitudes and practical engagements with the surrounding world. For him,‘knowing-how’ presupposes ‘knowing-that,’ where ‘knowing-that’ in turn is subject to socio-historical forces that do not appear within the knowledge claims themselves. This shift accomplishes three things. First, it allows Habermas to conceive of rational action along speech-act theoretical lines (Habermas calls his tweaked version of speech-act theory a ‘formal pragmatics of communication’). In this view, every action instantiates a set of social commitments that can be articulated propositionally. These commitments, which Habermas calls ‘validity-claims,’ delineate the conditions or ‘rules’ an activity must satisfy in order to be considered successful. Meaningful action thus entails an effort to satisfy the validity-claims informing it and hence an acceptance/rejection or affrmation/denial of the validity-claims themselves. Second, insofar as every act presupposes a stock of interconnected validity-claims (pertaining to the accuracy of an actor’s beliefs about the ‘objective world,’ the normative rightness of her practical engagements, and the sincerity or truthfulness with which she holds her basic commitments), it also implies a shared space—of reasons—in which other social actors can take a stand on one’s practical activities.The speech-act theoretical interpretation of social action thus allows Habermas to avoid an S–O relationship and to introduce a shared world in which one’s actions unfold alongside those of others, draw upon a shared stock of interpretative and practical resources, and address others as symmetrically situated participants in one and the same social space.This space of meaning and reasons, upon which symmetrically situated social actors draw, constitutes his version of the lifeworld (for a comparative overview of the notion in Habermas and Husserl, see Russell 2011). Finally, since the validity-claims implicit in one’s practical engagements encourage a public form of rational assessment, they make intersubjective understanding possible. This allows Habermas to reinterpret the hermeneutical process of reaching understanding in connection with a normative, emancipatory potential. For insofar as any action instantiates a stock of
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validity-claims that are publicly available, every actor must, in principle, be prepared to justify or criticize an action in light of the validity-claims she takes to underwrite it.The practices of justifcation that comprise one’s social situation further fesh out the intersubjective character of social action and the manner in which actors share a world. For the practices involved in giving and taking reasons create the possibility of understanding—construed as uncoerced consensus. Habermas’ ‘formal pragmatics of communication’ thus replaces the hermeneutical goal of reaching interpretative understanding with the ideal of uncoerced consensus formation brought about by the communicative process of justifying and criticizing an action (or proposed action) in light of its publicly available validity-claims and a society’s accepted justifcatory strategies. As one can imagine, the complications of Habermas’ theory increase exponentially from here on (for an excellent study of Habermas’ philosophy of language, see Cooke 1997). For our purposes, suffce it to note that all social action involves a distinctively communicative dimension that is founded in a shared stock of publicly available meanings (i.e. validity-claims), interpretative practices (including justifcatory practices), and symbolic structures that comprise Habermas’ ‘lifeworld.’ His conception differs from the various conceptions of the lifeworld we fnd in phenomenology, however, in that it gives priority to discursive structures and ties directly into the intersubjective processes of reason-giving involved in consensus and collective will formation. Habermas’‘lifeworld’ also introduces two developmental arcs, via the processes involved in one’s socialization, which cultivate the requisite social competences needed to participate in society, and the processes of a society’s development, which generate, institutionalize, and modify these competences. For what counts as a reason or justifcation depends upon one’s social and historical situation (Habermas 1984, 273f.).The capacity to attribute validity-claims to another social actor and to justify or criticize an activity in light of the validity-claims attributed to it requires one to learn how to give and take reasons relative to the institutions and codifed practices of one’s society. The two developmental arcs of individual socialization and sociological change introduce the second dimension of Habermas’ theory: the ‘system perspective.’ It describes social development and interaction in functional terms—descriptive, and yet implicitly normative—to explain the macrological social forces informing the genesis, maintenance, and reproduction of social actors’ practical abilities and shared world. In Habermas’ view, then, a systems-theoretical perspective is simultaneously a necessary theoretical supplement to our lifeworld interactions and an outgrowth of them. It is necessary because it makes the material and historical mechanisms structuring our lifeworld activities available to inner-worldly actors in the form of knowledge about their forms of life.The need for precisely this kind of knowledge motivated the Frankfurt School’s criticism of phenomenology. For instance, Adorno insisted that the social forces of commodity fetishism do not appear thematically to agents and cannot be explained phenomenologically or by an ‘immanent critical’ analysis of one’s frst-person point of view. And Habermas’ objection that hermeneutics foregrounds the basic competencies agents must possess in order to participate in a shared world but cannot explain them involves a similar sociological claim. The systems-perspective resolves this issue by making the requisite knowledge concerning the constitution of our social world available to us. It describes the macrological forces shaping social practices and individual action. Following Talcott Parsons, Habermas identifes four functionally differentiated spheres of social interaction: an economic sphere of activity that adapts to shifting empirical conditions, a political sphere that sets collective goals and delineates the methods for their attainment, a social sphere that that integrates various groups, institutions, and
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identities into cohesive units, and a cultural sphere that maintains and reproduces meaningful relationships among members/institutions of a society (Habermas 1984, 5–6). Over the course of their empirical development, the different subsystems comprising ‘society’ rationalize lifeworld practices. Consequently, Habermas assigns sociological analysis the task of understanding this process and describing society as a whole (ibid.). This comprehensive account of ‘society,’ which satisfes one of critical theory’s two orientations, describes the functional differentiation of validity-claims, social activity, and practices of justifcation in a way unavailable to hermeneutical and phenomenological engagement, even though phenomenological/hermeneutical analyses presuppose or allude to it (e.g. Gadamer’s ‘Tradition’ or Heidegger’s ‘Gestell’). It also produces knowledge that social agents may use to justify or criticize social action as part of their intersubjective engagement with others within the lifeworld. In effect, then, the increasing complexity of social life catalyzes a cognitive and practical division of labor.The functional differentiation among sub-types of human action and their associated validity-claims, according to their specialized contributions to society, allows us to introduce a robust sense of progress and diagnose illicit justifcatory strategies or deformations in the intersubjective lifeworld practices to reach understanding. For instance, a justifcation for action that relies on the commitments of different social spheres or blocks agents from introducing other salient validity-claims into the discussion would involve an illicit strategy that coerces assent. Since these processes of rationalization and illicit transfer of justifcatory strategies are beyond the scope of one’s frst-person experiences, phenomenological or hermeneutical analysis has no access to them. And yet knowledge of these transformations is available to participants in dialogue.
Phenomenology and critical theory – wedges and commonalities The brief overview of Adorno and Habermas identifes two substantive wedge issues separating phenomenology and critical theory, while also signaling a number of points of contact.The frst wedge concerns how one is to account for the basic competencies informing our frst-person experiences and participation in the shared practices comprising our world. For their part, members of the Frankfurt School insist that these competences need to be accounted for sociologically through a process of socialization, the historical entrenchment of previously successful activities, and their subsequent historical refnements in light of distinctive social pressures. Prominent members of the phenomenological tradition (e.g. Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer) do not appear to accept this claim. In fact, they appear to bracket out any kind of consideration of how concrete social structures constitute, maintain, and reproduce the very competencies they uncover.This tendency is especially clear in Husserl’s work, but can also be found in Heidegger and Gadamer, insofar as they insist on uncovering origins, sources, or existential structures that pattern our intersubjective engagements without explicitly investigating the sociological contexts in which these engagements unfold. A second and closely related wedge issue concerns the character of meaning itself.As we saw, critical theorists are committed to a cognitivist, discursive account of meaning or experience, whereas the phenomenological tradition has pressed forward in the opposite direction, conceiving of meaning in non-propositional, non-discursive terms. Indeed, phenomenologists treat discursive accounts of meaning and action as parasitic on a more primordial form of worldly engagement. This difference motivates Adorno’s objection that Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology involve a false sense of immediacy. Habermas echoes Adorno’s sentiment in that he too takes our pre-predicative engagements with the world and others to presuppose a discursive knowledge.
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The primacy critical theorists attribute to discursive content, moreover, turns on their views of socialization and the social reproduction of our contexts of action. Although it might be tempting to think that thrownness, projection, and fallenness offer a phenomenological version of the Frankfurt School’s account of an actor’s competences, it is important to underscore the crucial difference: even though this hermeneutical characterization makes essential reference to intersubjective features, Heidegger (and Gadamer) develop it exclusively from a frst-person perspective—hence the decisive move to a notion of authenticity. From such a perspective, we cannot say anything about the concrete character of one’s social situation, let alone identify an emancipatory potential that all agents could share. Indeed, in Heidegger’s analysis, the social setting determining Dasein’s concerns and basic orientation opens up onto care as a condition of possibility for any action whatsoever. But this says precious little about any given social situation or how the historically determinate concerns distracting Dasein emerge from a specifc social situation. The wedges illuminate why the interaction between phenomenology and critical theory has been one-sided: there is no obvious way for a phenomenologist to adopt the techniques of analysis and investigation developed by critical theorists without giving up what is distinctive about phenomenology; at the same time, the frst-personal perspective from which one experiences social harms is essential to critical theory, whose aims could therefore be furthered by certain elements of phenomenological analysis. Phenomenology promises to clarify the very structures and experiences that critical theorists would like to help alleviate. Hence, despite the wedges, there still remain a number of points of contact between the two traditions and shared lines of fight. We have seen in some detail that critical theorists are not averse to deploying phenomenological ideas, such as the ‘lifeworld.’ After Habermas, Rahel Jaeggi’s recent Kritik von Lebensformen (Jaeggi 2014) offers distinctive ways to synthesize sociological situations and intersubjective patterns of action and experience to satisfy the Frankfurt School’s goals. Cristina Lafont too has convincingly shown that critical theory and Heideggerian phenomenology share a similar set of philosophical coordinates concerning ‘language’ and ‘truth’ (Lafont 2000 and 1999). Recent work by Nicholas Kompridis (2008) builds on this insight and reformulates critical theory’s focus on ‘emancipatory critique’ via Heidegger’s account of truth, promising to reopen the dialogue between these two traditions. Another important point of contact can be found in critical theorizing concerning the social transformations in temporal expectations of action brought about by social acceleration (Rosa 2013, Hammer 2017). In tracking the way technical developments infuence one’s experience of time and the temporal parameters of action, critical theorists have stumbled on a theme long familiar to phenomenologists, from whom they might learn. The wedge issues aside, critical theory and phenomenology share a fundamental effort to open up a dimension of social engagement that purposive theories of rational action and rational choice foreclose.The common insistence on the intersubjective nature of human engagement represents a powerful challenge to the thesis of (methodological) individualism, which is central to teleological approaches to action. Phenomenologists and critical theorists thus share the same opposition to decision-theoretical models of rational action and rational choice. Similarly, the wide appeal of the notion of recognition (Honneth 1996 and Ricoeur 2005) provides another opportunity for critical theorists and phenomenologists to come to the same table, just as recent interest in vulnerability and receptivity as critical theoretical concepts could stand to gain a lot from phenomenology’s long history of investigating these notions. In brief, however fraught their past engagements, critical theory and phenomenology have enough in common to keep the lines of dialogue open.
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References Adorno,Theodor W. 1940.“Husserl and the Problem of Idealism.” The Journal of Philosophy 37.1: pp. 5–18. ———. 1973a. Negative Dialectics.Trans. E.B.Ashton. New York: Routledge. ———. 1973b. The Jargon of Authenticity.Trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1982. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique – Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies. Trans.Willis Domingo. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1990. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Benjamin, Walter. 2016. Gesammelte Briefe.Vol. I. Eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Bernstein, Jay. 2002. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooke, Maeve. 1997. Language and Reason:A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics. Cambridge: MIT Press. Demmerling, Christoph. 2013. “Faszinierte Distanz: Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas.” In: Heidegger Handbuch: Leben,Werke,Wirkung. Ed. Dieter Thomä. Stuttgart: Springer-Verlag, pp. 347–381. Dews, Peter. 1986. Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. London:Verso. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 1993. “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s (and Searle’s) Account of Intentionality.” Social Research 60.1: pp. 17–38. Fenves, Peter. 2012. The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Finnlayson, Gordon. 2013.“The Persistence of Normative Questions in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action.” Constellations:An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory20.4: pp. 518–532. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1976.“On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Refection.” In: Philosophical Hermeneutics. Ed. and Trans. David E. Linge. Berkley: University of California Press, pp. 18–43. Gehring, Petra. 2011. “Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie: Husserl.” In: Adorno Handbuch: Leben, Werke, Wirkung. Eds. Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, and Stefan Müller-Doohm. Stuttgart: Springer-Verlag, pp. 354–364. Geuss, Raymond. 1981. The Idea of Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldmann, Lucien. 2009. Lukács and Heidegger:Towards a New Philosophy. London: Routledge. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests.Trans. Jeremy Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1980.“The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality.” In: Contemporary Hermeneutics. Ed. Josef Bleicher. London: Routledge, pp. 181-211. ———. 1983. Philosophical-Political Profles.Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1987a. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason.Trans.Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1987b. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 1991. “Werk und Weltanschauung: Ein Beitrag zur Heidegger Kontroverse aus deutscher Sicht.” In: Texte und Kontexte. Ed. Jürgen Habermas. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, pp. 49-83. Hammer, Espen. 2017. “Experience and Temporality: Towards a New Paradigm of Critical Theory.” In: Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory. Ed. Michael J. Thompson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 613–630. Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press. Hodge, Joanna. 2008.“Poietic Epistemology: Reading Husserl Through Adorno and Heidegger.” In: Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions. Eds. Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 64–86. Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition:The Moral Grammar of Social Conficts.Trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge: MIT Press. Horkheimer, Max. 1975.“Traditional and Critical Theory.” In: Critical Theory: Selected Essays.Trans. Matthew J. O’Connell. New York: Continuum Press, pp. 188–243. ———. 1988. Gesammelte Schriften.Vol. 14. Eds.Alfred Schmid and Gunzelin Schmid-Noerr. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
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63 PHENOMENOLOGY AND DECONSTRUCTION Mauro Senatore
This entry focuses on the relationship between the concepts of “deconstruction” and “phenomenology” as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida develops and interweaves them together in the writings that he had published from 1967 on. It consists of the following steps: a) it starts with Derrida’s elaboration of the concept and work of deconstruction; b) it explains why, for Derrida, the deconstruction of phenomenology comes frst; c) it highlights links and shifts between the deconstruction of phenomenology and the works that Derrida had devoted to Husserl before 1967; d) it focuses on the concept of ultra-transcendental life as the key legacy of the deconstruction of phenomenology for Derrida’s later work. 1 In Positions (1972), Derrida designates his work by the term “deconstruction,” placing it at the limits of philosophical discourse.Within these limits, he explains, philosophy has established itself as a system of conceptual oppositions or philosophemes without which it would be neither possible nor practicable. Deconstruction constitutes the attempt to carry these philosophemes to their closure—that is, to trace their history from a certain outside that this very history cannot qualify and thus to determine the latter as the history of a repression (Derrida 1982, 6). This textual work at the limits of philosophical discourse allows us, according to Derrida, to read philosophemes as the symptoms of an experience that has never been present, an illusionary experience around whose necessity an epoch such as that of metaphysics has been structured (Derrida 1982, 7).This illusionary experience is the reduction of the exteriority of the signifer. For this reason, a certain determination of the sign or a semiology, whose fundamental presuppositions can be found from Plato to Husserl, is at the heart of metaphysics (Derrida 1982, 22). However, if the aforementioned symptoms are revealed at that time, this is not, for Derrida, because of someone’s initiative, but the effect of a total transformation extending across regional felds, from theoretical mathematics to molecular biology, from cybernetics to telecommunication (Derrida 1982, 7). In Grammatology, Derrida explains that we can observe a process of overfowing at work in Western culture by which the concept of writing, until then determined as the signifer of the signifer, comes to exceed and encompass the very extension of language. Hence there is no transcendental signifed that would not be already involved in the play of signifying renvois that constitutes writing as the movement of language (Derrida 1976, 7).Writing as the possibility of the inscription in general, namely, arche-writing, accounts for the minimal synthesis of experience, from the most elementary process of information in the cell (revealed by the biology of the time, namely, genetics) to the most complex practice of information (cybernetics) (Derrida 684
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1976, 9). The historical closure of the epoch of metaphysics is thus outlined. The concept of sign is exemplary here precisely as it betrays the work of agony of a tradition that wishes to strip meaning away from the process of signifcation.The concept, work and style of deconstruction is concerned with what in that concept has been systematically and genealogically determined by the history of metaphysics (Derrida 1976, 14). From these premises, Derrida argues in Positions that the general strategy of deconstruction cannot consist in neutralizing the oppositions of metaphysics and remaining within them, merely. It requires a double gesture. On the one hand, deconstruction must revert the violent hierarchy that underlies all metaphysical oppositions. However, the reversion still takes place within the deconstructed system. Therefore, on the other hand, through a double writing, deconstruction must demarcate itself from the mere inversion of metaphysical oppositions and cause the irruption of a new concept that does no longer let itself be encompassed within the deconstructed system (Derrida 1982, 41). First and foremost, one may think of the work done by a new concept of writing, which achieves the inversion of the metaphysical hierarchy speech/writing at the same time as it makes writing irrupt from within speech, thus carrying out the aforementioned overfowing of writing (Derrida 1982, 42). This new concept is an undecidable to the extent that it does not constitute itself as a third term, as a solution in the form of speculative dialectics (Derrida 1982, 43). At this point, it is worth understanding how Derrida interprets phenomenology within the epoch of metaphysics and why the point of departure for deconstruction consists in the deconstruction of phenomenology. He suggests that, if we want to describe his work in terms of a classical philosophical architecture, we should allow that his deconstructive reading of the phenomenological concept of sign, entitled Speech and Phenomena (SP) and published in the same year as Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference, comes frst. As Derrida puts it, this reading raises the question of phonocentrism, of the privilege of voice and phonetic writing in relation to Western history as the history of metaphysics and to the most modern, critical and vigilant version of this history, that is, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology (Derrida 1982, 5). In the following pages, we unpack this suggestion by looking at SP and by casting light on the relation of this deconstructive work to Derrida’s earlier or pre-deconstructive readings of Husserl. As suggested by Derrida himself in Positions, the working hypothesis of SP is that the phenomenological concept of sign as it is elaborated by Husserl in the frst chapter of the frst Logical Investigation constitutes a privileged case for showing that the phenomenological critique of metaphysics constitutes the historical achievement of metaphysics itself in its original project (Derrida 1973, 5).To put this hypothesis to the test, Derrida recalls that the unique and persisting motif of Husserl’s critique of metaphysics points to the inability of metaphysical perversions to grasp the authentic mode of ideality—that is, of the possibility of the indefnite repetition of the presence of the ideal object as identical to itself. This possibility, Husserl explains, requires the nonreality or independence of ideality from worldly and empirical existence.Therefore, the ultimate form of ideality, which secures an indefnite and identical repetition, is the presence of the living present or the self-presence of transcendental life (Derrida 1973, 6). Later, we see that the enigma of life inscribed in these expressions is one of the main concerns of Derrida’s deconstructive reading. A crucial diffculty arises when Husserl has to reconcile the facts that the ideal objects are historical products made possible through the mediation of language and that consciousness, as the element of transcendental life, consists in the possibility of producing them. Does it follow from this, Derrida remarks, that the element of consciousness is indiscernible from that of language and thus that ideality has already admitted a worldly and empirical synthesis? This diffculty does not account for a weakness implicit in Husserl’s system, but concerns metaphysics as such (Derrida 1973, 15). From this perspective, Husserl’s proposal repre685
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sents a refned version of the metaphysical solution of this diffculty. It amounts to the concept of phenomenological voice, which is no longer a physical and worldly voice, but is taken in its transcendental fesh that thus protects the self-presence of transcendental life (Derrida 1973, 16). Husserl draws this concept on the distinction between expression and indication, namely, a sign that does not express anything as it does not convey Bedeutung (which Derrida translates by “wanting-to-say” since it designates an animating intention) (Derrida 1973, 17-18). Voice accounts for the phenomenological situation of purity in which expression is disentangled from indication.This situation cannot be that of empirical and worldly communication, for reasons that will appear evident later, but is that of the absolutely low voice of the solitary life of the soul. It consists in the exteriorization, still within consciousness, of the relation of the intention of Bedeutung to the ideal object, which, according to Derrida, prefgures what Husserl calls later the noetico-noematic sphere (Derrida 1973, 22). In expression the intention is fully expressed as it animates a voice that does not seem to imply an empirical and worldly synthesis (Derrida 1973, 33). Derrida follows the progressive reductions of indication as Husserl operates them in order to determine the phenomenological voice. In doing so, he shows that indication designates the general situation in which the intention that animates a discourse and is present to itself in consciousness (psychè or spirit) goes out of itself, in the world, or spaces out (as nature).To this extent, it accounts for the process by which the transcendental life of the spirit goes out of itself, in nature, that is, for the process of death at work in signifcation (Derrida 1973, 40).This work of death is what designates a particular kind of sign, writing, which by defnition functions beyond and thanks to the death of its animating intention (Derrida 1973, 93).Therefore, the distinction between indication and expression aims to disentangle expression from the relation to death that constitutes the possibility of signifcation and, more precisely, of writing. Derrida examines how the complicity between idealization and voice has taken place in the so-called epoch of metaphysics in a key section of SP entitled “The Voice That Keeps Silence” (§6) (Derrida 1973, 75). His argument is that voice is the kind of monstration that does not require a worldly and empirical synthesis.To this extent, it is the medium that makes idealization possible, as it protects the presence of the intended object and the self-presence (or selfproximity) of the intending acts.The phenomenality of phenomenological voice is such that I hear my voice in the present moment and thus in the self-proximity of enunciation. In other words, I hear myself speak (Derrida 1973, 75-76). From this it follows that the intention animating the signifer and transforming it into an expression does not go out of itself nor does it require the relation to death, which is implicit in signifcation and writing.The phenomenality of voice seems to operate a self-reduction or self-effacement by which it turns its phenomenological body into a pure transparency and thus has always already belonged to the medium of idealization. This phenomenality constitutes the very form of the presence of the object to consciousness (Derrida 1973, 77). Derrida designates this operation of the I’s hearing itself speak as a special kind of auto-affection, a pure one, that demarcates itself, for example, from the operation of self-touching.This auto-affection does not imply the exposure of the body proper to the world, with all the consequences that are implicit in it, such as the birth of nature, the relation to death, writing (Derrida 1973, 78). Rather, it consists in the self-presence and self-proximity of the I, and thus in the absolute reduction or effacement of space, etc. As Derrida explains, this auto-affection secures the possibility of what we call subjectivity or for-itself. Furthermore, voice is consciousness itself, as it unfolds the very meaning of con-sciousness as the element of universality, of the self-presence of transcendental life, in which I hear the other speak as if it were me (Derrida 1973, 79-80). At this point, Derrida wonders how we can reconcile this reduction of language at work in phenomenological voice with Husserl’s insight that the inscription in the world is indis686
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pensable for the constitution of ideal objects. He addresses this question by further developing the reading of this insight that he had elaborated earlier in his Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, where Husserl explicitly suggests that writing consists in the ultimate reduction required to secure the absolute objectivity of the geometric object (Derrida 1989, 76-86). According to Derrida, writing achieves the constitution of ideal objects only to the extent that it inscribes a given word.Therefore, reactivating writing becomes equivalent to reactivating the word implicit in it and thus reactivation is safe from any crisis implicit in the inscription (for instance, the aforementioned relation to death) (Derrida 1973, 80-81, see also Derrida 1989, 86-107). However, despite this understanding of writing, we cannot ignore the motif that leads Husserl to have recourse to writing as the ultimate constitution of ideal objects and thus of language itself (Derrida 1973, 81-82). Finally, the complicity of idealization and voice, as it is described by Derrida, is based on an illusionary experience, that of reducing the exteriority of the signifer, which, however, we fnd still at work in voice. Here we come closest to pure difference, understood as the root of everything that takes self-presence out of itself (nature, space, world, etc.), that is, the difference that divides self-presence. By appealing to the operation of auto-affection that is the voice as the condition of self-presence, Husserl admits a difference within self-presence.This difference makes transcendental reduction possible at the same time as impossible to the extent that it carries with itself what is supposed to be reduced. Derrida designates pure difference as the movement of différance that constitutes sameness (self/autos) as self-relation in the difference from itself (Derrida 1973, 82). In the concluding pages of this section of SP, Derrida demonstrates that temporalization itself consists in the movement of différance as it has been described above.To this end, he suggests that this concept applies to the process of the originary generation (genesis spontanea) of time that Husserl analyses in his lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Derrida 1973, 83). Derrida summarizes this generation as the process by which a now produces itself spontaneously by retaining itself in another now, that is, by affecting itself with a new now in which it is retained as past. Hence, he concludes that the living present presupposes the possibility of retentional trace—namely, of the most general possibility of signifcation—and thus the former must be thought from the latter and not the other way around (Derrida 1973, 85). Temporalization is already spacing out (espacement), if we understand by that the fact that the living present produces itself by going out of itself. Finally, if we go back to the concept of phenomenological voice, we understand that temporalization contradicts the privilege of voice and of the operation of pure auto-affection to which the I’s hearing itself speak amounts. For Derrida, this privilege is grounded on the fact that the phenomenality of voice is merely temporal, that I hear myself speak in the very present of enunciation. But, as we know now, this temporal being has already involved the movement of différance (Derrida 1973, 86). It is worth remarking that Derrida has recourse to the term “dialectic” to designate the movement that opens transcendental life onto différance and arche-writing and thus leads us as close as possible to pure difference and its consequences (spacing out, world, nature, signifcation, etc.). “Dialectic,” Derrida writes, “in every sense of the term and before any speculative subsumption of this concept.” (Derrida 1973, 69).This use of “dialectic” echoes the dissertation that Derrida had devoted earlier on to the problem of genesis in the philosophy of Husserl (frst written in 1954 and then published in 1990). Here, Derrida resorts to the concept of dialectic to designate the originary complication of the transcendental and the worldly which, according to him, if one excepts the case of the aforementioned lectures on the phenomenology of internal time-consciousness, Husserl fails to take account of as his work develops and seems to come closer to it (Derrida 2003, XXV).As Derrida suggests in the preface to the later publication of the text,“dialectic” had disappeared from his work to leave room for différance and the 687
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trace (Derrida 2003, XV).Therefore, by means of the aforementioned reference in SP, Derrida makes explicit the link between his earlier dialectical reading of Husserl and the later deconstructive one. In SP, he conceives of the movement of différance as the relation to death and thus the originary possibility of writing, or arche-writing—which is at work in the self-presence of transcendental life. As we must think the self-presence of transcendental life from the movement of différance and arche-writing, it appears evident now why the enigma of the concept of life is at the heart of SP (Derrida 1973, 6).2 Derrida points to an ultra-transcendental life that consists in selfrelation or self-affection (as self-difference) and thus constitutes the common root of empirical and transcendental life, or, in other words, accounts for all forms of life up to consciousness (Derrida 1973, 15).This concept of life does not lead us back to the pre-transcendental naiveté of ordinary language and biology but opens up the history of life and of its evolution (that is, of the becoming-conscious of life) (Derrida 1973, 67). Here Derrida intersects the proposal advanced by the French-Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao in the second part of his Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (1951). Tran Duc Thao had elaborated the possibility of overcoming phenomenology onto a new dialectic of nature in which consciousness is the result of the real movement of the constituting subjectivity (Derrida 1989, 86).3 For Derrida, life as the trace allows us to deconstruct the metaphysical opposition between the non-living, that is, the animal and the machine, or the Cartesian animal-machine, and the living, and to tell the history of life and of its evolution as a process in which the power of repeating the ideal objects escapes less and less to the living (on these points see respectively Derrida 1976, 47 and 165-166). This deconstructive reading of the phenomenological concept of life is full of consequences for future developments of deconstruction. For instance, Derrida appeals to this reading in his later analyses of the modern thought of animality, from Descartes to Lacan, as well as of the ethico-political distinction between reaction and responsibility, in order to show that both are grounded on a metaphysical concept of life and thus to refer them back to the ultratranscendental concept of life as the trace (Derrida 2008, 111, 2009, 120).
Notes 1 For a detailed reconstruction of the debate in Derrida/Husserl studies, see Kates 2005, 32-52. Kates also offers an overall interpretation of Derrida’s transition from his earlier work on Husserl to the later development of deconstruction. For other studies devoted to Derrida’s early work on Husserl, which also trace across that work the elements of future elaborations, see: Costa 1996; Giovannangeli 2001; Lawlor 2002; Marrati-Guénoun 2005. 2 To my knowledge, there is no reading of Speech and Phenomena that focuses on this enigma of life and links Derrida’s formulation of ultra-transcendental life to the problem of the history of life. For a further elaboration of this reading, see Senatore 2018. 3 Derrida’s reading of Tran Duc Thao’s interpretation of phenomenology shifts from The Problem of Genesis to An Introduction. For an overall analysis of Derrida’s relation to Thao across his early work, see (Giovannangeli 2001, Moati 2013, and Senatore 2018).
References Costa, Vincenzo. 1996. La generazione della forma. La fenomenologia e il problema della genesi in Husserl e in Derrida. Milano: Jaca Book. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (trans: David Alison and Newton Garver). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1976. Of Grammatology (trans: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. ———. 1982. Positions (trans:Alan Bass). Chicago:The Chicago University Press.
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Phenomenology and deconstruction ———. 1989. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry:An Introduction (trans: John P. Leavy). Lincoln: Nebraska University Press. ———. 2003. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy (trans: Marian Hobson). Chicago:The Chicago University Press. ———. 2008. The Animal that Therefore I Am (trans: David Wills). New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2009. The Beast and the Sovereign Volume I (2001-2002) (trans: Geoffrey Bennington). Chicago: The Chicago University Press. Giovannangeli, Daniel. 2001. Le Retard de la conscience. Husserl, Sartre, Derrida. Bruxelles: Ousia. Kates, Joshua. 2005. Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Lawlor, Leonard. 2002. Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marrati-Guénoun, Paola. 2005. Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Moati, Raoul. 2013. “Phénoménologie et dialectique: Derrida critique de Tran Duc Thao”. In: L'itinéraire de Tran Duc Thao: Phénoménologie et transfert culturel/Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique. Eds. Jocelyn Benoist and Michel Espagne (Eds.). Paris:Armand Colin/Recherches, pp. 133–160. Senatore, M. 2018. “Leaving a Trace in the World (II): Deconstruction and the History of Life.” In: Postmodern Culture, vol. 28, n. 3 (online version).
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64 PHENOMENOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS James Risser
64.1. From phenomenology to hermeneutics: Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology The intersection between phenomenology and hermeneutics was initially established by Heidegger in his early work leading up to the publication of Being and Time in 1927. While Husserl was said to have claimed in these years that phenomenology, “that’s Heidegger and I and no one else,” Heidegger’s phenomenology was already something different. In its simplest, if not exaggerated, characterization, Heidegger insists against Husserl that phenomenology cannot hold fast to pure description but becomes a matter of interpretation; it becomes a hermeneutic phenomenology. In his early lecture courses Heidegger frst approaches this turn within phenomenology through what he sees as a need to clarify the character of phenomenology as a rigorous science. Heidegger is not convinced that Husserl’s attempt at phenomenological description avoids the “fact” world of positive science. What is given to phenomenological description, Heidegger claims, already involves a certain theoretical refection. Accordingly, the fundamental stance of phenomenology will require a clarifcation of the theoretical itself with respect to what is given to phenomenological description.This clarifcation will require access to the pre-theoretical, to what Heidegger calls a “certain unity of natural experience,” as the original evidence situation of philosophy. It is the very accessibility of the pre-theoretical that inaugurates the turn to the hermeneutical.The access to the original evidence situation, which, for Heidegger, still following Husserl, constitutes the character of phenomenological explication, is not attained by means of a leap but only in a “continual movement of rigorous gaining access” (Heidegger 2001, 119). Heidegger will soon call the original evidence situation “factical life,” and this, in turn, he will eventually call “Dasein.”There is to be a continual movement of gaining access precisely because factical life is not capable of being an object, and, even less so, a datum for consciousness. It is that which is always already there and behind which one cannot go. It is an original unthematic ‘having’ of life that is constantly being accessed and determined.The continual movement of gaining access amounts to an interpretative “seeing” within the movement of life, and Heidegger soon calls this phenomenological explication a hermeneutics of facticity. Presented in this way the character of the hermeneutical within phenomenology has little to do with interpretation in the ordinary sense of explicating the meaning of a text (Schleiermacher) or a life expression (Dilthey), as we see in classical hermeneutical theory. Rather, it is concerned 690
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with a more fundamental explicating in relation to the way in which one already ‘has’ the phenomenon. For Heidegger this entails more than a reformulation of the classical conception of the hermeneutic circle that was employed as a method for the epistemology of understanding. In his own way of radicalizing the project of phenomenology, Heidegger claims that the hermeneutical access to the pre-theoretical involves the explicating of the very categories or concepts that structure the original evidence situation.The categories are not pure logical forms but are themselves interpretive accomplishments consonant with the “method” that would gain access to this original pre-thematic having of life. The categories that structure the phenomenon of life are formally indicating, providing access to the phenomenon through a directional sense. In effect, they are a revisable way of pointing to a phenomenon in order not to fx the phenomenon through a specifc conception. Only through these interpretive accomplishments can phenomenological explication “bring to fruition [zeitigen] the vitalization of the genuine binding claim of the object and thereby bring about a genuine grasp of the object” (Heidegger 1992a, 125). In relation to this interpretive accomplishment, hermeneutic phenomenology will of necessity involve itself in a “destruction” of the theoretical within the history of philosophy. As Heidegger explicitly states in his 1923 lecture course on the hermeneutics of facticity, hermeneutics is coextensive with a de-structuring in the manner of a de-composing.1 If philosophy is to make the concrete interpretation of factical life transparent, it must “loosen up the handed-down and dominating interpretatedness in its hidden motives … and to push forward by way of a dismantling return toward the primordial motive sources of explication” (Heidegger 1992b, 371).This necessary destruction amounts to a destruction of tradition.This is so because Heidegger regards the facticity of life as being in itself historical, and as such it is in relation to the historical world of former times.The sense of any tradition is thus inseparable from the basic phenomenon of the historical. Factical (historical) life remains the basic “substratum” for the interpretation of historical life in general. Heidegger gives a more extensive treatment of this connection between hermeneutics and the historical in his treatment of the work of Wilhelm Dilthey. In his Kassel lectures on Dilthey given in 1925, Heidegger is quick to point out what he considers to be Dilthey’s advance over previous theory, namely, that all refection and inquiry arise from life, that is, from an awareness of the interwoven texture of world and self, and not from introspection.2 But for Dilthey the standpoint of life is more than contextualized relations. According to Heidegger, “for Dilthey authentic historical being is human Dasein,” and in recognizing this Dilthey had begun to understand the authentic meaning of history in phenomenological terms (Heidegger 2002, 162). He had only begun, though, for he could not free himself from an approach to historical life thought in terms of science and the framework of objectivity. Historical meaning for Dilthey remains a product of an objective historical development, which is not to say that he did not make an advance over the neo-Kantians of his time, who in their theoretical approach de-historicize our original experience of the world. Dilthey’s real failure, Heidegger claims, is that he never really considered the full implications of the being of the historical. According to Heidegger, while indeed for Dilthey everything in historical life is historically determined, and this would include the human being itself, the need remains “to work out the being of the historical, i.e., historicity rather than the historical [Geschichtlichkeit, nicht Geschichliches], being rather than beings, reality rather than the real” (Heidegger 2002, 159). In drawing this distinction Heidegger underscores the idea that historicity involves more than the historical inquirer being situated in history. Historicity pertains essentially to the experience of temporality. In the previous year, in his lecture on the concept of time given to the theological society in Marburg, Heidegger had already made this decisive formulation on the essence of the historical. Decrying historicism and what he calls pseudo-history, Heidegger 691
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notes that “the possibility of access to history is grounded in the possibility according to which any specifc present understands how to be futural.”And to this Heidegger adds:“This is the frst principle of all hermeneutics” (Heidegger 1992b, 20e). This further development of a hermeneutic phenomenology comes to full expression in Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus Being and Time. In his analysis of the existential analytic of Dasein Heidegger frst describes interpretive explication as a basic component of Dasein’s being in the world. Dasein “understands” itself not through a defnite object of knowledge but from the way in which it is already affected and disposed in its being from the start. It does so within this condition by being toward possibilities. Dasein projects itself unto a world of everyday concern and projects unto its own possibilities of being.3 Dasein casts itself in a certain light, just as, in an everyday concernful dealing with things, one understands by casting things within the framework of an as-what.The working out of possibilities projected in understanding is the act of interpretation, which has by its design a distinctive circular structure. It is no longer the hermeneutic circle that functions by the formal relating of a part to the whole and the whole to a part. For Heidegger the act of interpretation is a making explicit of the as-what, which always stands in relation to the way in which what is to be understood is already understood in some fashion through the fore-structure of understanding.The fore-structure involves the prior way in which understanding proceeds from a sphere of relevance (fore-having), a frst approach to this relevance (fore-sight), and a conceptualizing with respect to it (fore-conception). In the circulation between the fore-structure of understanding and the making explicit of understanding (the hermeneutic circle), Heidegger insists that the integrity of understanding is arrived at by being guided by the things themselves (Sachen selbst).4 In Heidegger’s subsequent analysis in Being and Time, he links the structure of understanding to the temporality of being, which links understanding directly to Dasein’s way of being. Understood ontologically, the projection upon possibility means that Dasein is out ahead of itself (future) in relation to its here and now that has been (past). Dasein’s way of being is caught within a certain historically situated factical understanding from which it cannot escape. For the early Heidegger, hermeneutic phenomenology ultimately stands in opposition to transcendental phenomenology.
64.2. Hermeneutics in relation to phenomenology: Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer Still situated in the phenomenological tradition, the scope of hermeneutics after Heidegger was greatly enlarged by the work of both Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Ricoeur in particular had been introduced to the work of Husserl early on in his career, even translating Husserl’s Ideas while in a German prison camp during the Second World War. Ricoeur’s own work soon came to focus on existential questions and the question of history, which eventually produced a turn to post-Heideggerian hermeneutics and specifcally to the issue of interpreting hidden meanings. His essay from this time, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” provides a clear statement on how he regards the development of hermeneutics from phenomenology. In the essay Ricoeur presents the question of the destiny of phenomenology from the concern that Husserl’s project of phenomenology has been transformed, if not displaced, by hermeneutics, which he identifes with the work of Heidegger and, above all, Gadamer. His intent is to show that it is possible to do philosophy with them and after them without forgetting Husserl.Typical of Ricoeur’s philosophical style, he comes to the conclusion that this destiny is one that would mediate between phenomenology and hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, he insists, does not ruin phenomenology as such, but only its idealistic interpretation given by Husserl himself.The two belong together, which he establishes through the exposition of two dialectical claims. Ricoeur’s 692
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frst claim is that phenomenology remains the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics. He establishes this claim through four theses: 1) phenomenology frst takes the question of being as a question of the meaning of being; 2) phenomenology frst employs the hermeneutical concept of distantiation (as the counter-concept to belonging) in the notion of phenomenological epoché; 3) phenomenology, similar to hermeneutics, references the linguistic order back to the structure of experience; 4) phenomenology, similar to the hermeneutics of historical experience, grounds the order of objectivity in the life-world (Ricoeur 1981, 114–119). Ricoeur’s second claim is that phenomenology cannot constitute itself without a hermeneutic presupposition, by which he means that ultimately it is necessary for phenomenology to conceive of its method as an interpretative explication (Auslegung). Ricoeur establishes the latter claim through an analysis of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations in which “phenomenology seeks to give an account not simply of the ideal meaning of well-formed expressions, but of the meaning of experience as a whole” (ibid., 124). Ricoeur contends that in the account of phenomenology given in the Cartesian Meditations the role of Auslegung is no longer limited, as one fnds it in the Logical Investigations, to bringing signifcation confrming acts to intuition, but will enter into the problems of constitution in their totality.At the center of the problem of constitution is the apparent paradox that, on the one hand, “the reduction of all meaning to the intentional life of the concrete ego implies that the other is constituted in me and from me,” yet on the other hand,“phenomenology must account for the originality of the other’s experience, precisely insofar as it is the experience of someone other than me” (ibid., 125). For Ricoeur, this paradox is heightened when the other “from me” is no longer a thing but another self, a subject of experience in the same way I am. In this case of intersubjectivity, in which a common cultural world arises, a new existential meaning is constituted that goes beyond the being of my monadic ego. It is this paradox, if not outright confict between a project describing transcendence and a project of constituting in immanence, that is to be resolved through Auslegung. Ricoeur shows how the resolution can occur by frst noting that in the fourth and ffth Cartesian Meditations Husserl points to the need for interpretative explication in the infnite work involved in unfolding the layers of meaning, which together form the world as a constituted meaning.This constituted meaning is never created, but only uncovered through the clarifcation of horizons. In linking interpretative explication to the clarifcation of horizons, Husserl attempts to realize a progressive constituting toward what he calls a “universal genesis.” Ricoeur then claims that the paradox can be resolved precisely because interpretive explication encompasses both sides of the confict: the respect for alterity of others and the experience of transcendence in primordial experience. Interpretative explication encompasses both insofar as it is already at work in the sphere of belonging, in the prior sphere of meaning that subtends the relation of the constituting autonomous subject and the (distant) other object. This sphere is not a given from which one progresses to another given, which would be the other. It is, rather, a founding stratum that remains the limit of a questioning back.Yet in such questioning back “refection glimpses, in the thickness of experience and through the successive layers of constitution, what Husserl calls a ‘primal instituting’ … to which these layers refer” (ibid., 127).This primal instituting is an antecedent that is never given in itself, and, according to Ricoeur, in spite of its intuitive kernel, this experience remains an interpretation. Quoting Husserl, Ricoeur concludes: My own too is discovered by explication and gets its original meaning by virtue thereof (Hua I, 132; Husserl 1970, 102).What is one’s own is revealed only as ‘explicated experience’ (Hua I, 132; Husserl 1970, 102). Even better, it could be said that what is one’s own and what is foreign are polarly constituted in the same interpretation. (ibid., 128) 693
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Ricoeur thus sees that hermeneutics is able to graft itself onto phenomenology.The dream of phenomenology’s self-grounding is given over to a continual effort of making explicit—a position that even the later Husserl’s theme of the life-world is not able to do away with. In his own work in hermeneutics Ricoeur draws heavily on his claim that hermeneutics is able to graft itself onto phenomenology.While recognizing phenomenology’s separation of sense from the background of existence, for which he uses the term distantiation, he insists that any form of distantiation will always stand in relation to a more fundamental (and hermeneutical) belonging to the world. Such belonging to the world is the condition that frees hermeneutical self-understanding from the primacy of subjectivity. In its place hermeneutics gives primacy to the work of the text, which can be interpreted independently of the subjective intentions of the author. For Ricoeur, the work of the text entails the whole domain of the linguistic (“there is no hermeneutical self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts”), and in this regard Ricoeur acknowledges essential insights into the nature of language provided by both Heidegger and Gadamer (Ricoeur 1983, 175–197). Ricoeur is convinced that what has been overlooked in the importance that hermeneutics gives to language is a proper treatment of the indirect reference that is presented by the metaphorical statement. Ricoeur describes this work of the text as a long detour through the various manifestations of sense in the human sciences, in contrast to the short route taken by Heidegger’s ontological project. In taking this longer route Ricoeur keeps in play the difference between understanding and explanation. Interpretation is to be defned by a dialectic of understanding and explanation at the level of sense immanent to a text. In the complete expression of his hermeneutic theory, Ricoeur never abandons phenomenology because both are concerned with sense: just as phenomenology regards every question concerning being as a question of sense, so too for hermeneutics. This common element allows Ricoeur to interpret the dimension of distantiation that remains within a hermeneutics concerned with the historical human sciences as a variant of phenomenological epoché. Stated in a way that follows a key formulation in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Ricoeur contends that hermeneutics is not simply content with belonging to the historical world in which there is the transmission of tradition: hermeneutics must interrupt the relation of belonging in order to signify it (Ricoeur 1995, 36). Gadamer, for his part, does not take his point of departure directly from phenomenology but from a critique of neo-Kantianism and methodologism, dominated by epistemology. The title of his 1960 magnum opus Truth and Method captures succinctly the issue in this critique. Gadamer argues that there are experiences of truth (i.e., acts of understanding) that cannot be arrived at through methodological procedures, as exemplifed in art, history, and philosophy.5 This is not to say, though, that Gadamer does not draw from phenomenology in establishing his philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer actually describes the “methodology” of Truth and Method as phenomenological because of the way in which it is able to reveal the hermeneutic problem of understanding (Gadamer 1989, xxxvi). More than this, Gadamer recognized the advance that Husserl’s phenomenology makes over neo-Kantianism, despite the fact that it never freed itself from a form of neo-Kantian idealism. In the concept of intentionality and the descriptive approach for phenomenological investigation, Husserl’s phenomenology distinguished itself from the dominant neo-Kantianism of the day. The development of his philosophical hermeneutics, though, rests primarily on Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology with its emphasis on the hermeneutics of facticity. In his own account of the transformation in phenomenology in the early 1920s, Gadamer remarks that the impact Heidegger had on him and others was in showing the way out of the “circle of refection” that is instantiated once one starts philosophizing from the standpoint of consciousness and subjectivity. He recalls specifcally how in his lectures Heidegger had pointed 694
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out the signifcance of the scholastic distinction between actus signatus and actus exercitus. As Gadamer explains it: There is a difference between saying “I see something” and “I am saying that I see something.” But the signifcation “I am saying that …” is not the frst awareness of the act.The act originally taking place is already such an act, which is to say it is already something in which my own operation is vitally present to me. (Gadamer 1976a, 123)6 There is meaning “in the exercise,” in the doing, before it becomes the property of a theoretical consciousness. Gadamer thought that even his good friend Karl Löwith, who was also a student of Heidegger during this time, did not fully understand how to break the circle of refection in his description of intersubjective communication in language. For Gadamer, understanding what the other has to say, which is the central act in his philosophical hermeneutics, can only be accomplished by breaking with the priority of refection.The activity of understanding for Gadamer is frst an event of being before it is our own doing. Starting from the problem of understanding in the historical human sciences, Gadamer basically follows Heidegger’s earlier advance in hermeneutics to claim that the knower is always already situated in historical life in the interpretation of it. He describes this mode of being of historicity as being in a tradition, which is simply the historical transmission of meaning. It is this inability to step out of tradition that supports his claim that hermeneutic understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition where there is a mediation between the past and the present.The specifc way in which interpretation is then carried out rests on the character of this mediation. For Gadamer this is always an interpretation occurring in relation to an experience of alterity, and ultimately his philosophical hermeneutics is defned by the effort of language, and specifcally that of dialogue, in which one attempts to hear what the other (here the alterity of the past) has to say. Gadamer’s description of how this mediation occurs in the interpretation of historical life actually draws on Husserl’s concept of horizonal intentionality. For Husserl, the intentional act is always more than what is explicitly intended at the moment. It stands in relation to a horizon that would complete what is indeterminate in the intentional act. In Husserl’s words, “every subjective process has a process ‘horizon’, which changes with the alteration of the nexus of consciousness to which the process belongs … an intentional horizon of reference to potentialities of consciousness that belong to the process itself ” (Husserl 1970, 44).When Gadamer then describes the character of the mediation in the understanding of tradition as a fusion of horizons between the past and the present, he sees the concept of horizon as the appropriate way to express the way in which every limited interpretation of tradition stands in relation to a whole of meaning that is never given in the interpretive act. For Gadamer, hermeneutic understanding is always to be worked out in relation to this horizon of the whole. What interests Gadamer most about Husserl’s phenomenology, though, is unquestionably the later Husserl’s concept of the life-world. For Gadamer the issue of the life-world is Husserl’s insight “that the task of justifying knowledge did not mean scientifc knowledge as much as it did the totality of our natural experience of the world” (Gadamer 1976c, 152). In this sense, the introduction of the concept of the life-world must be seen in the context of the movement beyond neo-Kantianism and as a concept that resonates with Gadamer’s own interest in linking hermeneutic understanding to life-world experience. In saying this, one must also say that Gadamer is by no means blind to the inherent diffculties in Husserl’s analysis of the life-world. Because Husserl’s style of thinking blurs the distinction 695
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between self-correction and self-criticism, Gadamer thinks that the concept of the life-world can be read in an ambiguous way. On the one hand, the concept of life-world is “a mere description of the authentic approach that Husserl chose for his phenomenological investigation, which separates it from neo-Kantianism and positivistic scientism” (Gadamer 1976d, 182).As such, the concept of the life-world can be interpreted broadly to indicate the intention of phenomenology to get behind the whole of scientifc experience to a wide feld of everyday experience. It constitutes a return to a pre-given world that does not abandon reason per se, but only the objectivistic reason that reductively extends positive science to the whole of life. On the other hand, it is a new self-criticism that would appear to make Husserl’s goal to found philosophy as a rigorous science attainable. Husserl’s description in the Crisis of the history of objectivism that arises out of the infuence of Galilean science simply serves to bring Husserl’s phenomenological program into explicit historical relief. In this, the old goal of a transcendental phenomenology is never left behind. Gadamer does not think that here in the Crisis the later Husserl really embraced his own claim that the “dream is over” for philosophy as a rigorous science. Gadamer thinks that Husserl is simply challenged by this pronouncement to renew his refections—in this case, it is historical refection that is needed to offset that danger of the very future of philosophy. And it is in this context that Gadamer interprets the Crisis to be concerned with carrying out a really defensible transcendental reduction.The elaborate survey of the history of objectivism serves the purpose of bringing his own phenomenological program into explicit historical relief. A transformation of the task of knowledge is to be achieved through phenomenology; there is no more assumed experiential basis for it. Even that universal belief in the world, which supports the ground of experience in every case of doubt regarding the contents of experience, must be suspended and must fnd its constitution in the transcendental ego. The doctrine of the life-world, which points to the original horizon of lived meanings, is intended to make the transcendental reduction fawless. The question in Gadamer’s mind is whether this attempt to secure transcendental phenomenology as the fnal meaning of the history of philosophy, through historical self-clarifcation, can really be successful. Gadamer is most suspicious at the point at which Husserl attributes historical considerations to transcendental phenomenology. For Husserl, the self-refection that is tied to this new form of science would culminate in a “universal praxis” of humanity. But Gadamer thinks that there is an illusion present in the claim “that from science—in whatever style—rational decisions can be derived that would constitute a ‘universal praxis’” (Gadamer 1976d, 196). The mistake is to think that behind our practical decisions there is a knowledge based on the application of science. Gadamer does not think that the gulf between practical judgment, which characterizes human activity in the life-world, and the anonymous validity of science can be bridged in this way.Yet Gadamer’s suspicion at this point is not so overwhelming that the fundamental signifcance of the life-world is overlooked. What confronts us here is not a synthesis of theory and practice nor science in a new style, but rather the prior, practical political limitation of the monopolistic claims of science and a new critical consciousness with respect to the scientifc character of philosophy itself. (ibid.) The issue for Gadamer becomes the issue of an account of hermeneutic experience that will address the problem of “reason in the age of science.” For this Gadamer links the older tradition of practical philosophy to the “moral impulse” that lies at the basis of Husserl’s idea of a new kind of life-world praxis. 696
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Notes 1 In the Appendix to this lecture course, which follows Heidegger’s own notes, Heidegger writes: “For the concrete investigations, each in its place and at a particular time [jeweils]: historical investigations— Aristotle,Augustine, Parmenides. (Hermeneutics is destruction!) Only in such a manner demonstrating the primordiality of this hermeneutical destructive research” (Heidegger 1999, 81). 2 “Life is what is given in lived experience and understanding.… Life is the basic fact that that must form the starting point of philosophy. Life is that with which we are acquainted from within and behind which we cannot go” (Dilthey 2002, 280). 3 Although the case can be made that Heidegger’s emphasis on the possibilizing condition of life and the act of understanding commensurate with it is taken from Kierkegaard, it cannot go unnoticed that it can also be found in Husserl’s phenomenology. In the Cartesian Mediations Husserl uses the word interpretive explication (Auslegung) in his discussion of intentional analysis. He writes: Conscious (intentional) life “is not just a whole made up of ‘data’ of consciousness … but everywhere its peculiar attainment (as ‘intentional’) is an uncovering of potentialities ‘implicit’ in actualities of consciousness—an uncovering that brings about, on the noematic side, an ‘explication’ or ‘unfolding’ [Auslegung]” (Husserl 1970, 46). Phenomenology has the task of making the implicit explicit. See below for a discussion of this connection between phenomenology and hermeneutics made by Paul Ricoeur. 4 Heidegger writes,“a positive possibility of the most primordial knowledge is hidden in it which is only grasped in a genuine way when interpretation has understood that its frst, constant, and last task is not to let fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be given to it by chance ideas and popular conceptions, but to guarantee the scientifc theme by developing these in terms of the things themselves” (Heidegger 2010, 148). 5 At one point, Gadamer had proposed “Verstehen und Geschehen [Understanding and Event]” as a title for his book. 6 In his essay “Heidegger and Marburg Theology” in the same volume Gadamer writes: “[In Marburg] Heidegger was dealing with a scholastic distinction and spoke of the difference between actus signatus and actus exercitus. These scholastic concepts correspond approximately to the concepts of ‘refective’ and ‘direct’ and mean, for instance, the difference between the act of questioning and the possibility of directing attention explicitly to the questioning as questioning.The one can lead over into the other. One can designate the questioning as questioning, and hence not only question but also say that one questions, and say that such and such is questionable.To nullify this transition from the immediate and direct into the refective intention seemed to us at that time to be a way to freedom. It promised a liberation from the unbreakable circle of refection and a recapturing of the evocative power of conceptual thinking and philosophical language, which would secure for philosophical thinking a rank alongside poetic use of language” (Gadamer 1976b, 202).
References Dilthey, Wilhelm. 2002. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Selected Works III. Eds. R. Makkreel and F. Rodi. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1976a. “Philosophical Foundations of the Twentieth Century”. In: Philosophical Hermeneutics.Trans. D. E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 107-129. ———. 1976b. “Heidegger and Marburg Theology”. In: Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. D. E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 198-212 ———. 1976c. “The Phenomenological Movement”. In: Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. D. E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 130-181. ———. 1976d.“The Science of the Life-World”. In: Philosophical Hermeneutics.Trans. D. E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 182-197. ———. 1989. Truth and Method, 2nd revised edition. Trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall. New York: Crossroads. Heidegger, Martin. 1992a.“Phenomenological Interpretation with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation”.Trans. M. Baur. In: Man and World (25), pp. 355-393. ———. 1992b. The Concept of Time.Trans.W. McNeill. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ———. 1999. Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity.Trans. J. van Buren. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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James Risser ———. 2001. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research. Trans. R. Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2002.“Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and Struggle for a Historical Worldview”.Trans. C. Bambach. In: Supplements. Ed. John van Buren.Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 147-176. ———. 2010. Being and Time.Trans. J. Stambaugh, rev: D. J. Schmidt.Albany: SUNY Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. Cartesian Meditations.Trans. D. Cairns.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981.“Phenomenology and Hermeneutics”. In: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Ed. and Trans. J. B.Thompson. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 61-89. ———. 1983. “On Interpretation”. In: Philosophy in France Today. Ed. Alan Montefore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 175-197. ———. 1995. “Intellectual Autobiography”. In: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Ed. Lewis Hahn. Chicago: Open Court, pp. 3-53.
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65 PHENOMENOLOGY AND MEDICINE Valeria Bizzari
Ontology of the body and epistemology of medicine If we look closely at the history of medicine, we will notice an essential link between the refection on the meaning of being (ontology) and the nature of scientifc, medical knowledge (epistemology). Beginning with Socrates and Plato, Western culture has been characterized by a dichotomous vision of the human, fundamentally rooted in something whose deepest expression is found in Descartes’ division between res cogitans and res extensa. Behind this ontological assumption is a specifc kind of medicine, constituted by those features that still characterize the classical image of the clinician: an essential fairness and a strong inductive capacity, thanks to which she can produce a diagnosis. On this view, illness is a sort of epiphenomenon, a merely contingent event, because it takes root in the res extensa.Accordingly, the gaze of the clinician is represented by an anatomical look on a depersonalized body: the emotional components of the lived body are completely rejected and the fulcrum of this medical practice is the opening of the corpse in order to better observe its disease. It seems clear that, given such a vision of the body and medicine, the patient’s narrative is completely unnecessary and useless, and the hierarchy between doctor and patient shifts in favor of the former, leaving the latter completely inert: rather, it is the body (understood as mere matter) that talks through physical evidence.The removal of the lived body from the scientifc ideal involves what Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (Whitehead 1929): an ideal of pure objectivity is identifed with the reality itself, and the clinical reality is refected in the analysis of the corpse and in experiments in the lab, rather than in the living sick person. Beginning with Canguilhem the ontological-epistemological dichotomy starts to change. In fact, although he agreed with the Positivists concerning the usefulness of the pathophysiological analysis of the corpse, he shed light on a new and completely different dimension: lived experience. This emphasis on the experiential aspects of pain put the author much closer to the phenomenological way of thinking: Canguilhem himself recognizes his debt to Merleau-Ponty in the text The Normal and the Pathological (Canguilhem 1991). He gives importance to the disease, and he claims that it is the sick individual, the living subject with its own body, that gives it meaning. The role of the embedded and embodied subject involved in an ongoing relation with the world is emphasized, and the idea of the clinician also faces a transformation: as a matter of fact, we can witness the passage from the body-corpse, the bearer of meanings 699
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of the pathological perspective, to the revaluation of the body-subject and of the experiential dimension that may still play a role in the defnition of the diagnosis. Infuenced by a similar vision of the body, medicine itself is therefore likely to change, and to free itself from the dream of pure objectivity. Accordingly, the experiential and qualitative dimension is emphasized as characterizing both the healthy subject and the pathology. In this context, the living body is not described as “a representable object but in the immediacy of its concreteness” (Jennings 1986, 1238).As a result, medical analysis should also focus not just on the individual symptoms, but on the existential meaning that each pathology represents to the sick subject.
The “phenomenological body”: from disease to illness Considering pathology exclusively in a biological sense seems to be a very reductive and incomplete approach. For this reason, thanks to a change in the epistemological medical paradigm, in recent decades the sick person has started to be considered both in her “pure” biological dimension, both in her existential and psychological features, which have been revalued as constitutive for the experience of the illness. From such a perspective, the body of the patient cannot be intended anymore as a mere biological organism (Körper), but needs to be considered as a body necessarily linked to feelings, and infuenced by anthropological, cultural and social elements that give it a specifc shape. On a theoretical level, the body of the patient starts to be intended as a “bio-psycho-social whole”, and consequently, according to our thesis for which the ontological defnition of body defnes the epistemological paradigm of reference, the clinical approach begins to study the body in a gestaltic and holistic manner. In other words, considering the subject a psycho-physical whole involves the shift from the disease (a vision of the pathology as something that affects the biological organism that medicine should rigorously and objectively study in detail, in its unlimited fragmentation that paradoxically makes the body “invisible”) to the illness: a pathology considered as a lived experience capable of changing the subject both somatically and psychically. The vision of the body of the patient changes from a body as object of medical therapy and becomes a body-subject of the clinical relationship. The necessity to enlarge the horizon of medicine, and to consider illness a complex personal experience, involves several issues, both ethical (the patient is a subject with her own autonomy) and of clinical effcacy (the patient has to supervise her own illness from a frstperson perspective). In this view, a phenomenological approach seems to be useful: as a matter of fact, considering the subject a Leib enables the overcoming of the Cartesian dualism and the understanding of the patient in her entirety, as a lived body. Furthermore, the use of a phenomenological method is helpful for the understanding of the deepest structures and meanings of the clinical experience. By analyzing the modes of our experience of the world, phenomenology highlights its forms and its constitutive processes rather than its contents: it’s not only descriptive, but also explicative.1 This tendency has started to be considered in the United States since the 1970s, thanks to the work of thinkers like Richard Zaner and Edmund Pellegrino.2 The richness of the phenomenological lexicon and its usefulness in the clinical area emerges from these authors’ thought, especially concerning the concepts of epoché, reduction, lifeworld and intersubjectivity.Thanks to the epoché and the reduction, we can reach the essence and the concreteness3 of the experience of illness, while the notion of lifeworld could be useful in contextualizing the clinical encounter. Zaner, in particular, utilizes the Husserlian insight that intellectual 700
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abstractions and mere theories can actually be true, but that these also can be irrelevant if we lose awareness of the concreteness. Following this thesis, the attention is focused on the stories of patients. On the other hand, bracketing the ethical paradigms of medical practice, Pellegrino wants to reach the eidos of the intersubjective experience between the patient and the clinician. In this view, analyzing the lifeworld through the epoché allows us to elaborate a clinical ethics that doesn’t involve either the total objectifcation of the intersubjective reality or the mere prevalence of transcendental subjectivity. Adopting a phenomenological approach will be useful in order to reach those substructures of consciousness that are disrupted in the sick subject: in fact, it is important to realize that a situation of dis-ease implies a “break” of well-being characterized by a constellation of changes in the world-of-life and in the lived body.These changes not only pose a danger to the physical integrity of the subject, but also threaten the personal identity: in this view, the disease verges on an ontological assault on the self-body unity.We speak of the “war” against cancer, the “struggle” against a disease or pain or suffering … Alienation of the body from the self, a true ontological disassociation occurs.The person altered by illness asks if he is the same person who became ill. He does not know if he will ever be again that person. (Pellegrino 2004, 193) Interestingly, Merleau-Ponty also claimed that the experience of the sick body implies the coexistence of two different types of knowledge: on the one hand, the usual way that the subject has to join the world (her way of being and her capacity before the onset of illness) and on the other, the current way of relating to the environment, which is imposed by the limits of illness and of which the subject is not fully aware.The appropriate way of dealing with the subject is not, therefore, either to reduce her body to a physiological malfunctioning object nor to consider the disease only through a disembodied frst-person perspective: rather, it is necessary to treat the patient as a dynamic consciousness intentionally related to the world, remembering that “The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought about by arbitrary decree. It is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence” (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 102). This implies a medical gestaltic analysis of the entire existence of the subject with particular attention to phenomenological structures, such as the intentions towards the world, the distortion of the potentialities (conceiving the body as an “I can”) and the world-of-life. The Schneider case is an example of the need for a phenomenological-existential analysis that has as its object the living body, whose complexity will never be fully described by a purely scientifc approach. In the wake of Merleau-Pontian philosophy, the patient’s body becomes an “expression of life”, and not just a biological support.The unity between the somatic region and the psychic one is indivisible, and, therefore, the therapeutic relationship is confgured as a process that involves an enlargement of assistance interventions, which are transformed from an organic cure into a holistic care.4 The result is an emphasis on the everyday world, on things and their function in the clinical encounter, which takes the form of an exchange of perspectives, a blend of two different Leiber, of two different worlds of life: the medical activity has found its own way in this intersection, in the complexity of shared perspectives.The phenomenological approach seems to be suitable to describe a similar encounter also because it emphasizes that this type of sharing will never be completed: the commonality goes hand in hand with individual uniqueness, so that frst- and third-person perspectives will never be reduced to one another. 701
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The clinical relationship: an empathic understanding In the complex hermeneutic act of understanding the patient, the clinician should be aware that illness is “a disturbance within that most intimate sphere of relationships between self and its own body” (Zaner 2004, 240). The existential aspect of the disease implies the necessity of compassion on the part of the doctor, who must not only understand the illness but also empathize with the patient. In this view, the clinical relationship could be considered an ethical relation between two subjectivities, a “form of affliation” (ibid., 235). Instead of focusing on the body-as-object (Körper), according to a “medical phenomenological approach” the encounter between the clinician and the patient should consider the bodyas-subject (Leib), taking into account her double ontology, made up of dimensions irreducible to each other but articulated to one another. This doesn’t involve a complete prevalence of the subjectivity on the objectivity: simply, both the clinician and the patient understand the multiple dimensions of the body, and the intertwining between the psychic side and the mere biological functions. On the one hand, the clinician starts to consider the sick person as a subject; on the other hand, the patient, who usually lives her disease in an existential way, starts to attribute objective reasons to her illness and to accept it. There is a balance between the clinician’s and the patient’s perspectives and an articulation between the Körper studied by medicine and the lived body of the patient; a collaboration where differences and mutual understanding coexist.The Husserlian “opacity” typical of the intersubjective relationship remains: there is still a sort of divergence and dialogical breakdown between the illness lived from within by the patient and the illness analyzed by the clinician.The doctor, simply as a human being, can empathize with the patient’s experience, knowing what it is to be in pain or be disabled and understanding the illness as a disruption that involves not a single organ, but a Self. Speaking in Schutzian terms, this relation seems to be a Du-Einstellung, that is, an orientation towards otherness, a trend that may be unilateral or reciprocal. In the specifc case of the medical report, the relationship between the two poles is undoubtedly an intense one, characterized, however, by the lack of a balance. The method implied is to interview the patient in order to reveal her lived experience of the illness and to conduct qualitative research, prioritizing “the person and her experiences as the preeminent source of valid data” (Leder and Jacobson 2014, 1436). In other words, the clinician has to consider her a Leib, an intersection between transcendent and mundane, not reducible either to a mere objective thing or to an abstract ideality. Concerning this theme, it is interesting to shed light on a distinction made by Husserl in Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory among “not two, but three objects, which, when one successively changes the direction of one’s regard, also come to the fore as separately meant: namely, the physical image, the presented mental image … and fnally the image subject” (Husserl 2005, 131–132): Husserl made the example of looking at a painting.At the beginning, I consider the painting a mere physical thing (a canvas on a wall); then, I focus on the subject represented by the painting (image subject), and fnally I re-consider it a picture representing something (image object). In the same way, we can affrm that the perception of the illness should be made up of these different but entangled dimensions: the physical image (for instance, the results of blood analysis, which represent a specifc state of the patient), the image object (the Körper), and the image subject, a Leib, usually not studied by medicine.The distinction made by Husserl focuses on these different but necessarily intertwined dimensions, which have to be considered in a unitary apprehension.5 702
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The result is a new medical approach, based upon an empathic relation between two lived bodies: in this sense, we can consider medicine not a mere biological and scientifc study, but an embodied ethics.
Conclusions In the last few years, we have witnessed the development of several attempts to use phenomenological notions in areas very far from the “pure transcendental” domain of eidetic experience. Medical phenomenology is a paradigmatic example, and it surprisingly reveals many epistemic and moral consequences. Firstly, considering the patient as a Leib has completely changed the epistemic defnition of medicine: in fact, stressing the importance of Erlebnis and of the psyche of the patient involves a holistic and gestaltic understanding of the disease and healing. In this view, the mind–body dichotomy seems senseless, and phenomenological notions are helpful in order to understand the essential meaning of illness. Overcoming qualitative or narrative approaches, phenomenology highlights the centrality of the lived dimensions, helping not only the clinician, but also the patient, who could be aware of the psycho-physical changes caused by the disease, which represent a danger to her self-identity and integrity. Narrowing the gap between the objectifying gaze of science and the subjective experience and modifying the clinical relationship in a dimension shared by two lived bodies, a medical phenomenological approach could bring out the variations caused by illness, and medicine could acquire an ethical-moral value.
Notes 1 We should notice that phenomenology has always been characterized as a purely descriptive enterprise, focusing on the eidos of things. Following the thought of Sass, it seems to us that, especially in the analysis of psychiatric pathologies, the descriptive aim could be helpful also in the explanation of such pathologies. In other words, the eidetic description could contribute to explaining both the genesis and the structure of human experience. 2 Richard Zaner (1933–) was Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, while Edmund Pellegrino (1920–2013) was a bioethicist and president of the Catholic University of America. 3 We should notice the contradiction present in this sentence: in fact,“essence” and “concreteness” usually stand in opposition to each other.What we would like to underline is that, as for its relationship with medicine, we should not speak about a use of phenomenology in the strict sense, but rather of what Natanson defnes a “phenomenological orientation”. Natanson distinguishes between a phenomenological attitude, more formal and closer to Husserl’s method, and a phenomenological orientation characterized by “an insistence on a return to what is basic to science, its grounding in a reality taken for granted by the learned and the vulgar” (Natanson 1973, 115). In the same way, we think that medical phenomenology is of course an evidence of the richness and the modernity of phenomenology, but at the same time it is a “metaphenomenological approach” not totally reducible to the “classical” one.This idea can be placed inside of the debate about the naturalization of phenomenology, or the possibility of bringing phenomenology close to the empirical sciences. In fact, despite the several attempts of “naturalizing phenomenology”, we should remember the strong Husserlian anti-naturalism, according to which naturalism is an essentially fawed tendency because we cannot reduce issues like idealism, normativity and consciousness objectively. Naturalism and the empirical sciences are incorrect because they do not recognize the double ontology of consciousness, which is both subject and object of the world. Today, we can observe a practical use of phenomenological notions in several kinds of study. Nevertheless, we should be careful to recognize the “phenomenologization” of disciplines like medicine (or psychiatry), which are benefting from the phenomenological method and concepts.
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Valeria Bizzari Remembering the “Natansionian” distinction could be helpful to appreciate these tendencies without forgetting the real meaning of phenomenology. 4 To cure is synonymous with healing by means of specialized medical technologies, which refer to the body like an organic Körper; on the contrary, to care means taking care of the sick person in a global sense, with an emphasis on the educational and relational dimensions of the clinical process. Considering the patient a Leib, whereby the disease afficts not only the single organs, but the body in its whole existence, implies a sense of cure that stresses the complexity of the person and reveals the necessity of a holistic and not merely biological therapy. 5 See also Legrand 2013.
References Canguilhem, Georges. 1966. Le normal et le pathologique. Paris: Puf. Husserl, Edmund. 2005. Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (1898-1925), Hua. Vol. 11 (trans: John Brough). Dordrecht: Springer. Jennings, Jerry. 1986. “Husserl Revisited: The Forgotten Distinction Between Psychology and Phenomenology.” American Psychologists, vol. 41 (11), 1231–1240. Leder, Drew, and Jacobson, Kirsten. 2014. “The Experience of Health and Illness.” Encyclopedia of Bioethcs, vol. 2, 1434–1443. Legrand, Dorothée. 2013. “The Patient’s Voice in Psychoanalysis, Narrative Medicine and Patient-Based Research. What is the Clinical Impact of Patient-Based Research?” Bulletin of the Graduate School of Education (Hiroshima University), part. 1, n. 62, 29–38. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2005. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Natanson, Maurice. 1973. Edmund Husserl: Philosopher on Infnite Tasks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Pellegrino, Edmund. 2004. “Philosophy of Medicine and Phenomenological Ethics: A Phenomenological Perspective.” In: Handbook of Bioethics, edited by George Khushf. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 183–202. Whitehead, Alfred. 1929. Process and Reality. New York: Harper Brothers. Zaner, Richard. 2004. “Physicians and Patients in Relation: Clinical Interpretation and Dialogues of Trust.” In: Handbook of Bioethics, edited by George Khushf. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 223–250.
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66 PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Emiliano Trizio
The relation between the phenomenological tradition on the one hand, and, on the other, the philosophical refection on science in general, and of the natural sciences in particular, constitutes an important strand in the vicissitudes of contemporary philosophy. Seen through the lens of this relation, what is striking is the radical cleavage separating Edmund Husserl from the other major phenomenological authors. As is well known, within 20th-century continental philosophy, Husserl’s thought represents the last attempt to redefne and defend the vocation of philosophy as the universal science of being encompassing all special sciences. His refection on modern science and on mathematical sciences in particular was a crucial component of such effort. Subsequent phenomenologists, with the exception of some direct disciples such as Oscar Becker (Becker 1923), did not take up and further pursue Husserl’s foundational project, and often regarded the refection on scientifc knowledge as a secondary and derivative issue. In this respect, the position of Martin Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are emblematic. Heidegger believed that the advent of modern technology was a more fundamental phenomenon than the emergence of modern science after the Renaissance, to the point that, reversing Husserl’s more traditional judgment on the matter, he claimed that the latter was a consequence of the former. Heidegger acknowledged that mathematical physics arose before what we consider to be modern technology. However, he believed that mathematical physics was only anticipating in its fundamental structure the conception of being and truth characterizing the essence of technology.This is why Heidegger could claim that the rise of modern science heralded the advent of technology (Heidegger 1977, 22). Both technology and science, furthermore, appeared to Heidegger as the last step in the history of metaphysics, a history that, according to him, we must leave behind us for good.While Merleau-Ponty manifested a great interest for the natural sciences,1 he believed that Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as the ultimate theory of science was the hallmark of an objectivistic conception of philosophy, which a genuine interrogation of the phenomenal givenness was meant to overcome. It would be impossible, therefore, to fnd in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty a systematic investigation into the foundations of the sciences, in spite of their enduring interest for them. Furthermore, from the 1950s onward, in the wake of the demise of logical empiricism, frst in the English-speaking world and, subsequently, in continental Europe, the philosophical refection on science has been marked by the emergence and the academic institutionalization of philosophy of science.This discipline, while being largely autonomous, is nevertheless con705
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tiguous to the analytic tradition, to its themes, methods, and conceptual vocabulary.These two parallel developments, on the one hand, the marginalization of the refection on science within continental philosophy, epitomized by the internal evolution of the phenomenological tradition, and, on the other, the establishment of philosophy of science as an autonomous discipline within the analytic tradition, have jointly brought about the situation familiar to students of philosophy from the late 20th century up to a few years ago. Recently, this situation has somehow evolved, due the efforts of a slowly growing number of continental philosophers interested in natural science. However, in spite of these attempts, there still appears to be a persistent divide between phenomenology as currently practiced and the philosophical investigations into the methodological and ontological foundations of natural science. This fact explains the fate of Husserl’s account of natural science over the past seventy years. On the one hand, Husserl’s readers belonging to the continental tradition have produced a number of exegetical studies aimed at clarifying the phenomenological account of natural science. Most of these analyses have focused almost exclusively on Husserl’s last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (henceforth, Krisis), and, in particular, on the famous sections devoted to the Galilean mathematization of nature.The reason for this choice is that this theme is of paramount importance for elucidating the notion of life-world and the signifcance of history and of cultural critique in the last period of Husserl’s production. In this sense, the theme of the mathematization of nature and of the emergence of modern mathematical physics have been approached in a somewhat instrumental way, without trying to trace its origin and signifcance in the overall development of Husserl’s philosophy. Notable exceptions in this respect are the works of Roman Ingarden (1964),Aron Gurwitsch (1974), Elizabeth Ströker (1987) and (1988), Bernhard Rank (1973) and (1990), and François De Gandt (2004), who have conducted extensive explorations of the theme of natural science within Husserl’s corpus. On the other hand, given the fundamental role that the scientifc worldview ultimately based on physics plays in so many branches of analytic philosophy (from philosophy of science and epistemology to philosophy of mind and metaphysics), it is unsurprising that those seeking to establish relations between phenomenology and the analytic tradition have often turned to Husserl’s conception of nature and to his account of modern science. Indeed, there is a growing literature trying to situate Husserl’s account of natural science within the conceptual framework and the debates of contemporary philosophy of science, and to understand whether and to what extent it can provide the key to solve some of its central issues. Unsurprisingly, the problem of scientifc realism has completely dominated the scene, for it concerns the ontological status of that “physical reality” that plays such a fundamental role in many areas of analytic philosophy.Within mainstream philosophy of science, scientifc realism expresses an optimistic epistemic attitude vis-à-vis successful and mature scientifc disciplines, according to which the latter can legitimately aspire to provide true or partially true descriptions of the observable and unobservable aspects of the world, and, to an extent, have already achieved such aim. Scientifc antirealism of empiricist inspiration typically limits such epistemic ambitions to the observable aspects of the world. It is noteworthy that, over the past forty years, the attempts to fnd the right way to interpret Husserl’s work in light of such conceptual vocabulary has produced no stable consensus. Scholars have focused mainly on §§40 and 52 of Ideas I and the famous §9 of the Krisis containing a detailed discussion of Galileo’s mathematization of nature and of the lifeworld as its forgotten sense-fundament.To a lesser extent, they have addressed Husserl’s analysis of the constitution of material nature as developed in the frst part of Ideas II. Different antirealist interpretations and developments of Husserl’s theory of science have been proposed by Gutting (1978), Harvey (1986) and (1989), Heelan (1987), and Wiltsche (2012), while realist-inclined approaches of various kinds have been developed by Rouse (1987), Soffer (1990), Hardy (2013), 706
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and Reynolds (2018). The efforts to fnd within contemporary philosophy of science suitable counterparts of Husserl’s own position have led Wiltsche to draw a parallel between phenomenology and Bas Van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism (Van Fraassen 1980), and Rouse and Hardy to suggest its affnity with Nancy Cartwright’s entity realism (Cartwright 1983). Such predicament directly stems from the radical incompatibility between transcendental phenomenology and the implicit presuppositions on which philosophy of science as an autonomous “philosophical” discipline rests. In other words, there is no way to situate the transcendental phenomenological elucidation of physical reality within the array of positions characterizing the contemporary debate on scientifc realism, and this for principled reasons.2 On the one hand, no form of scientifc realism implying metaphysical realism is compatible with transcendental idealism, according to which nature cannot be conceived as a being existing in itself independently from consciousness (Hua XXXVI, 71–72). On the other, no form of scientifc antirealism is compatible with the transcendental idealist identifcation between being and knowability.3 Unquestionably, the aim of a science, according to Husserl, is to become the episteme of its domain of investigation: science arises precisely with the emergence of the correlative ideas of objective knowledge and being in itself. However, the domain of investigation of a science, as such, exists only as the correlate of the constituting intentional operations of transcendental intersubjectivity (Hua XVII, 15). Furthermore, all the forms of “social constructivism” that, at least since the 1960s, have widened the traditional stock of options available to the philosophers of science are ruled out by transcendental phenomenology, due to the fact that they imply the relativization of knowledge (and often even of the being of the world itself) to communities of empirical (historical and social) subjects, whose own sense of being and whose relation with the world remain unclarifed. Finally, also the broadly construed (and often dimly understood) “Kantianism” that, in various ghostly guises, recurrently haunts today’s epistemological debates is wholly incompatible with transcendental phenomenology, for the latter rejects any notion of an unknowable “thing in itself ” as well as any belief in a hidden side of the world lying for essential reasons beyond our cognitive grasp.This radical heterogeneity between transcendental phenomenology and the landscape of contemporary philosophy of science is not a contingent state of affairs that could be overcome by merely transplanting the former into the latter, or by grafting its central insights onto some of the more or less common fora that can be found in that landscape. In other words, neither can transcendental phenomenology be recruited by contemporary philosophy of science in view of fostering its own goals, nor is it conceivable to combine the two disciplines into a chimeric “phenomenological philosophy of science”.4 In order to convince ourselves of this fact, it is necessary to appreciate that these intellectual endeavors are rooted in two radically incompatible conceptions of the very nature of philosophy. According to Husserl, philosophy must strive to establish itself as the universal science of being. Thus, the existing special sciences, the so-called positive sciences, are not reducible to cultural realities that a sub-discipline of philosophy could try to understand, and whose methodology it would be enough to codify and, eventually, turn into an explicit norm. Rather, they are partially developed attempts to realize in their respective domain the ideal of genuine knowledge of what ultimately exists (Hua XVII, 14). In other words, they are not activities essentially other than philosophy and that philosophy takes as objects of investigation. In the present cultural context, one marked by the demise of the modern rival of universal philosophy inaugurated by Descartes, they are incomplete and only “unilaterally” rational fragments of the kind of science that philosophy was destined to be. Even when their method is fairly developed and successfully applied (as is the case for physics, and not for psychology), these sciences lack clarity about the sense of being of their respective domain, i.e., about what it means for it to exist. Such sense of being is the correlate of the anonymous intentional accomplishments of transcendental inter707
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subjectivity.Without this clarifcation, also their method, which draws its legitimacy solely from the essence and sense of being of their objective domain, remains obscure and questionable. In order to “philosophize” the sciences, to turn them into philosophy, or more specifcally, into metaphysics as the ultimate science of reality, it is, thus, necessary to clarify the sense of being of the world and of its fundamental layers (i.e., nature and spirit). For such an endeavor, the method of the transcendental reduction is required, which is unique to the philosophical fundamental discipline, transcendental phenomenology, a method on which the unity and scientifcity of all philosophy rests. By virtue of the transcendental reduction, the sense of being of the world is elucidated independently of the methods and results of the special sciences, and as a precondition for their rationality. In other words, the notion of “world” is rescued from all forms of objectivism that derive the sense of the world from the method and results of the special sciences: all variants of naturalism imply such objectivism.This illuminates the sense of Husserl’s late systematic use of the term “life-world”.There is, of course, only one world, and it is the correlate of the unitary nexus of our lives.The contrast between the life-world and the world of science is not the contrast between “two worlds”, but between the world as originally disclosed, as unfolding the sense of its being in intuitive givenness, i.e., the only real world (Hua VI, 48–49), and the scientifc determination of it as the ideal telos of an infnite epistemic accomplishment. Husserl’s analysis of Galileo’s mathematization of nature becomes, then, transparent. A science is characterized by a task and a method.The task is the theoretical determination of an objective domain and the method is the set of rational procedures appropriate for such determination.The rise of modern physics coincides with the emergence of a method apt to bring to theoretical determination its objective domain, i.e., material nature. Crucial to such method is the mathematization of material nature, which consists in replacing its sensible determinations (whether spatial, temporal, or causal) with geometrical and mathematical properties only. Galileo, to whom the life-worldly origin of geometrical idealizations was no longer accessible due to the technization that the science of geometry had undergone after its emergence in Ancient Greece, misunderstood the sense of the method he had devised. Instead of correctly framing it as a way of determining material nature as an aspect of the life-world, as an aspect of the world whose sense is fxed in intuitive givenness before any scientifc investigation, he came to conceive of it as the key unlocking a nature mathematical in itself, existing “beyond” and independently from subjectivity. Such misunderstanding crippled modern metaphysical rationalism from the outset and condemned it to its inevitable collapse. It is the task of transcendental phenomenology to unveil the true sense of the world, and turn all positive sciences into branches of the universal cognition of the world, which transcendental subjectivity carries “within” itself. In contrast, philosophy of science does not see itself as an integral part of an all-encompassing philosophy conceived in turn as a science. By the same token, philosophers of science do not even dream of turning the sciences into branches of their own philosophical activity.5 More or less implicitly, philosophy is taken to amount to a set of disciplines loosely related to one another and lacking a unitary method. Each such discipline is defned by an object, while its debates are nourished by a stock of traditional positions about it. In some cases, the reference to a specifc object is less explicit: ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics … In most cases, however, it is completely explicit: philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, philosophy of sport … philosophy of science.The disunity of these disciplines has nothing to do with our failure to master their countless intellectual products and bestow upon them the form of an encyclopedic synthesis, because it is due to the lack of their principled grounding by means of a unitary method. Deprived of such methodological awareness, philosophy of science is unable even to thematize, let alone to overcome, the natural attitude.Thus, it is bound to misinterpret the sense of being of the world (the being of the life-world) on the basis of objectivistic conceptions of 708
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being, or on the basis of relativistic forms of constructionism.We can in this way appreciate that all the ontological positions advocated by philosophers of science are based on the surreptitious “construction” of the world itself out of the results, the methods or the conceptual frameworks of the special sciences. Physicalism is an obvious example, but it would take little effort to show that intermediate positions in the spectrum between scientifc realism and empiricism can be subjected to the same critique.All such positions are forms of naturalism; they all understand the being of the world based on a self-suffcient natural objectivity.The opposite upshot of this process is the mirror image of naturalism: historicism. All forms of social constructivism are more or less conscious attempts to understand the nature of knowledge and even the sense of the world in relation to the social interactions occurring within communities of empirical subjects. Thus, even these apparently so “unnatural” forms of world-interpretation are unable to break free completely from the shackles of the natural attitude. Husserl’s warning against naturalism and historicism as the Scylla and the Charybdis of modernity has not lost its signifcance in our present situation. These considerations highlight the in-principle opposition between phenomenology and philosophy of science.Within the unity of phenomenological philosophy, there is a place for a “philosophized” form of the different a priori and a posteriori objective sciences, and for the different chapters of transcendental phenomenology, but there is no place for different “philosophies of ”. The very term “philosophy of science” appears misleading at best to those who discern through the medium of the word “science” the light emitted thousands of years ago by the Greek star of episteme. A more ftting title for this entry would be “phenomenology versus philosophy of science”.
Notes 1 See, for instance, his famous lectures on the concept of nature (Merleau-Ponty 2003). 2 This thesis is developed in detail in Trizio 2020. 3 A correct reading of §§40–52 of Ideas I confrms that Husserl rejected any form of “anti-realism” underplaying the ontological value of physical theory (see Trizio 2020) 4 Similar conclusions hold concerning the relation transcendental phenomenology entertains with the cognitive sciences and with philosophy of mind. In some form, they can be extended to any specialized area of contemporary philosophy, from ethics to metaphysics. 5 Indeed, radical methodological naturalists believe that the discourse on natural science must be ultimately reduced to natural science itself.Their aim is, thus, to broaden the scope of natural science as to include what traditionally is called philosophy (or, at any rate, epistemology). In this way, they surely manifest a certain sensitivity to the methodological drama unfolding at the heart of any philosophical understanding of science, although they seek a wrongheaded solution to it. However, also for them, science remains a fact, rather than a telos.
References Becker, Oskar. 1923.“Beiträge zur phänomenologischen Begründung der Geometrie und ihrer physikalischen Anwendung”. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung,VI, pp. 493–560. Belousek, Darrin. 1998. “Husserl on Scientifc Method and Conceptual Change: A Realist Appraisal”. Synthese, 115, pp. 71–98. Cartwright, Nancy. 1983. How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford: Clarendon Press. De Gandt, François. 2004. Husserl et Galilée. Paris:Vrin. Gurwitsch, Aron. 1974. Phenomenology and the Theory of Science. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Gutting, Gary. 1978. “Husserl and Scientifc Realism”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 39, pp. 42–56. Hardy, Lee. 2013. Nature’s Suit.Athens: Ohio University Press. Harvey, Charles. 1986.“Husserl and the Problem of Theoretical Entities”. Synthese, 66, pp. 291–309.
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Emiliano Trizio ———. 1989. Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Foundations of Natural Science.Athens: Ohio University Press. Heelan, Patrick. 1987.“Husserl’s Later Philosophy of Natural Science”. Philosophy of Science, 54, pp. 368–390. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York/London: Garland Publishing, Inc. Ingarden, Roman. 1964.“Husserls Betrachtungen zur Konstitution des Physikalischen Dinges”. Archives de philosophie, 27, pp. 356–407. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2003. Nature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Rang, Bernhard. 1973. Kausalität und Motivation.The Hague: M. Nijhoff. ———. 1990. Husserls Phänomenologie der materiellen Natur. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Reynolds, Jack. 2018. Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science. New York: Routledge. Rouse, Joseph. 1987. “Husserlian Phenomenology and Scientifc Realism”. Philosophy of Science, 54, pp. 222–232. Soffer, Gail. 1990. “Phenomenology and Scientifc Realism: Husserl’s Critique of Galileo”. Review of Metaphysics, 44, pp. 67–94. Ströker, Elisabeth. 1987. The Husserlian Foundation of Science.Washington: University Press of America. ———. 1988. “Husserl and Philosophy of Science”. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 19(3), pp. 221–234. Trizio, Emiliano. 2020. Philosophy’s Nature: Husserl’s Phenomenology, Natural Science, and Metaphysics. New York: Routledge. Van Fraassen, Bas. 1980. The Scientifc Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiltsche, Harald. 2012. “What is Wrong with Husserl’s Scientifc Anti-Realism?”. Inquiry, 55(2), pp. 105–130.
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67 PHENOMENOLOGY AND POLITICAL THEORY Edouard Jolly
Introduction At frst glance, phenomenology as a philosophical movement born in the 20th century seems to be essentially involved in pure epistemological questions, following thus the original impulse in this direction produced by Husserl’s tremendous body of work. Indeed, we could summarize the Husserlian project with a simple question: how is knowledge possible? It seems that there are many obstacles between the original theoretical relevance of phenomenology and any possible practical function it should play beyond academia and its scientifc production.That is why different questions need to be asked: how is it possible to conceive phenomenology as a political theory?1 To what extent would the phenomenological method immanently imply a political attitude?2 In a manner of speaking, the question is not to fnd in which way political philosophy could be phenomenologically oriented, as if some eternal political problems were the objects of a dubious and useless science such as philosophy seen through an unhistorical perspective. The problem is more about thinking how and why phenomenology itself as a method is necessarily political. Phenomenology, following Husserl, must be seen as a protest against the false assumptions that allow us to presume that we know how to answer questions when in fact we do not even know what it means to ask such questions. Politics forms a specifc domain for a philosophical inquiry regarding, for example, the constitution of organized societies, the exercise of power, the legality in rights and duties, the legitimacy of violence and conficts, the conduct of government affairs and, last but not least, the meaning of war and destruction throughout history. In order to properly think the relation between phenomenology and political theory, we need only briefy expose what could be referred to as ‘political phenomenology’, namely a specifc philosophical method assuming its own epistemology directed towards political issues. To strengthen the programmatic focus of this overview, the frst theoretical statement will be the following: the expression ‘political phenomenology’ simply means seeking a philosophical path through political issues that are historically involved in human existence. Any philosopher who thinks through his own social function as a political phenomenologist must aim to produce a critique of political knowledge, which is usually taken for granted.To know how political phenomenology could be relevant as a philosophical movement, we have to clarify frst of all which works could be already conceived as historical expressions of political phenomenology. Because there are many such works, we will present only a few of them, united by the question of praxis in a situation 711
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and the seeking of a way to an absolute self-responsibility, either achieved or not by the authors. Indeed, the main issue according to both questions of praxis and self-responsibility stays a classical one for philosophy in general: do we necessarily need to fnd a consistency between philosophical works and their authors? Should a book of political theory be read independently from its author’s life and choices? Our hypothesis could be formulated as follows: we conceive political phenomenology as a resolution (Entschluss) to openly assume the socio-political dimensions entailed in practising philosophy. This requires the acceptation of specifc political attitudes in relation to society in general, namely an indifference, the practical negation of any teleological system of thought, a responsibility described without any principle of order and grounded on a detachment from any kind of belief.Then one might be able to design rules (and not principles) for acting and thinking through how human existence is embroiled in political issues within the context of contemporary politics.
Political phenomenology as a method The main question regarding political phenomenology lies in praxis. How could we describe any political phenomenon with the help of this singular way of doing philosophy? In short, political phenomenology should be conceived as a method of understanding in which way any practical a priori appears to be the foundation of thinking and acting, especially in its historical dimension. But the question of method does not mean that we need to fnd a universal theory that could be used as systematic structure of analysis for any kind of political phenomenon.What does matter is in fact the practical environment that conditions acting and thinking in relation to motivational relevancies that play a role in concrete individual and collective actions (Schütz 1975). Finding the proper method to understand the socio-political conditions of concrete human existence amounts to saying that the inherent historicity of any practical environment needs to be seen as a situation that provides the possibility of critique throughout a philosophical work (Arendt 1998). In other words, the political phenomenologist needs to perceive himself as historically situated in a meaningful whole in a manner to use his philosophical distance as a fruitful estrangement and then in order to remove himself from an accustomed place or set of associations.3 The philosophical work, especially the one produced by political phenomenology, is therefore aimed at fnding ways to understand each dimension of the polis. That is why the basic methodology for a political phenomenology consists of three steps, implemented in praxis and dependent on one another: historical, exegetical and experimental. This methodology could be defned as situational hermeneutics providing a critical content for political phenomenology conceived as a political theory. As previously said, the frst step is historical. Political phenomenology is neither a pure speculative science, a utopian inquiry, nor a set of empirical descriptions: it simply helps to understand political life in general.The critique of positivism and scientifc objectivism may be considered to have been reached by Husserl, among others, and for some aspects by earlier phenomenology with its adaptation of earlier Husserlian research in logic (Hua VI, Reinach 2007, Stein 2006, Walther 1922). But any author practising political phenomenology frstly needs to identify a textual material composed of works published about events and experiences during a considered historical period. The methodological question consists in keeping a phenomenological gesture (see ‘experimental step’ below) combined with an interest in political history. That is why we need both past political theories in philosophy and any sources from different felds of research (legal studies, sociology, psychology, etc.). All of these textual sources fall within a specifc historical ground, for example the events of the 20th century, such as the Great War or the emancipation movements during the 1960s, but also the experiences, choices and constraints 712
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they expressed.The unity of this diversity of knowledge, supposed to be drawn from an idea or an original principle, is rejected as being too speculative or at least as being the production of cultural world-views following the progressive death of theological principles (for a critique of secularization in politics see Löwith 1984). On the other hand, the Diltheyan principle ‘individuum is ineffable’ does not guarantee the unity of the psychological expression for an author working in political phenomenology. The historical unity comes only from the produced totality of texts.That is why the frst step of the work consists in reading every text in such a manner as to discover the fundamental constants hidden behind institutions, norms, values, legal statements, i.e. every expression of a political rationality that needed to be ignored to stay effcient in praxis. Discovering past philosophical theories regarding this political rationality is useful to establish in which way every theoretician depends on his general situation as a worker.Texts are all selected as testimonies to the contingent situation stabilized in the past: writing is conceived as an absolutization of the individual memory. Reading is supposed to understand what is not immediately apparent, what seems to have been forgotten, even if the events and experiences that are investigated in order to be clarifed happened recently. If oblivion is the vital engine of history, the ‘critical’ reading, in order to follow up this meaning developed originally by Nietzsche, expresses the general orientation of the work, namely a political direction.We need to focus the historical analysis on what justifed the necessity of the expressions: on the one side, those of the past, the totality of texts; confronted, on the other side, with those of the present, the political direction of the author, considering his own situation lived as a reader, writer, student, teacher, professor, archivist, namely, as a worker. Why were authors such as Heidegger, Patočka, Arendt (Arendt 1970) or Anders convinced that writing during and about certain political events was a good way to cope with them? In politically tense situations, why did so many authors choose to fght in writing and therefore become somehow detached observers of the mass political movement of their times? We can think, for example, of Sartre and his Critique of Dialectical Reason, resulting from a philosophical work in political phenomenology against colonialism and the 1960s political world crisis, formulating thus a critique of both capitalism and totalitarian Marxism. Even if the Sartrian dialectical method seems to follow an ideal and classical conception of a total and rational human existence (Sartre 1980), his project of writing, i.e. producing philosophy, is conceived as a critical testimony to political problems that then become historical.Therefore, the search for textual sources besides philosophical analysis allows us to ask different questions. For example, how any legal text such as a peace treaty is able to be a compelling force in the organization of a society? What is it in these kinds of political texts that deserves not to be forgotten in order to make philosophical use of them? The intertextuality between quotes, references and epigraphs, as structured in the various works produced by each source (from the reports of administrations and institutions to books of philosophy) will contribute to radicalize the philosophical meaning of the words.A drastic selection of the historical material allows us to extract the major themes while maintaining a sense of unity with its own limitations. This is the role of each historical point of view: when inserted into the same context, it validates the phenomenological analysis in ensuring a greater cohesion, such as in the case of Heidegger and Sartre about humanism (Heidegger 1949, Sartre 1970) or Anders and Schürmann about nihilism (Anders 2001, Schürmann 1982). Each historical example plays a crucial role in understanding: it demonstrates the validity of a rule described in its application in action, thus avoiding the theoretical a priori claiming that a wise political theory must be either prescriptive (from a subjective point of view) or descriptive (from an objective point of view). This theoretical a priori reveals itself in praxis by its lack of historicity and by its incorrect claim that a ‘scientifc’ philosophy has to be somehow ‘neutral’ in regard to history and traditions. For instance, instead of trying to invent 713
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methodological thought experiments such as ‘the original position’ (Rawls 1971), the political phenomenologist establishes his critique upon historical contents showing that every sociopolitical contract comes from confictual positions and not from a formal social equality (see Patočka 1999).
Interpreting the nature of political life The second methodological step is exegetical: after a frst reading and selection of historical material, our methodology is founded on one hermeneutic rule, namely, that we need to search for ‘the meaning against meaning’. In other words, the interpretation must be contrasted with the conventional history of texts and events. This depends not only on the chronological historical time, but also on the different strengths of tradition and political attitudes inside the production of critical knowledge. Interpreting here means going against what seems to be known from the texts and their authors or what seems taken for granted concerning political events such as the two world wars or the revolutions of the past centuries. Inside any historical selection of sources, there are always many levels of attack.Among them, we can fnd dominant forms of knowledge, especially in philosophy. As previously evoked, the choice is not limited to the traditional way of a theoretical historicism or to a mostly ahistorical analytic approach. As a minor literature or a situated philosophy, political phenomenology has to deal with the life-world and its socio-political structures. Its raw material is constituted frst by subjugated knowledge: Subjugated knowledge are, then, blocks of historical knowledge that were present in the functional and systematic ensembles, but which were masked, and the critique was able to reveal their existence by using, obviously enough, the tools of scholarship. (Foucault 1976, 7) In the sense that, for Foucault, the genealogical method is grounded on subjugated knowledge and disqualifed knowledge, subjected to axiologies, we can say that political phenomenology is a public disclosure of subjugated knowledge confronted with overqualifed knowledge. This last kind of knowledge proceeds both from the technical specifcation of scientifc language and its application in theories of communication. Linguistic communication could thus be the scientifc feld to study in order to produce reasonable conditions for a political agreement. But overqualifed knowledge is precisely the opposite, because it is masked in discourse strategies for which a tactical thought is needed. This exegetical step with its heuristic confict produced between different forms of political knowledge is itself a practical negation of systematic teleologies. Understanding sources consists in developing a critical sharpness against any belief produced by historical institutions of knowledge. Indeed, we postulate that there is never an immediate understanding and that we cannot only use an established hierarchy of works, subjects, themes, to deal with human concrete existence and its political frameworks. This exegetical step corresponds to a desire to provide at least a taxonomy of sources, which could be useful for other researchers and authors. The expressed thought is put in order, arranged to form a transversal reconstruction of the thinkable produced in the selection of texts and quotes related to a historical delimitation. In addition, any research in political phenomenology should deal most of the time with texts written in many languages: this implies an important role entrusted to the translation.Thinking between different languages equates to acting between borders and boundaries, always trying to reconsider the language in use like a foreigner discovering it would do. Marcuse, for his part, became famous not only for 714
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his critique of the power exercise involved in sexuality and post-industrial societies, but also for his pleadings against the uni-dimensional language invading academic philosophy and therefore restraining any subversive and insurrectional function attributed to the critique (Marcuse 1966). The key role devoted to some expressions may account for the rule of ‘meaning against meaning’: we argue against the use of ritual concepts – the Lingua Tertii Imperii described by Viktor Klemperer or the ‘jargon’ analysed by authors such as Theodor Adorno – just as well as we need to avoid any lack of conceptual clarity (Adorno 1973, Klemperer 1975).The overall goal is to detect what is operating in the expressions, the political thought hidden in the speech that is implied between the lines. Some authors in political phenomenology expressed a feeling of guilt about their writing, because they knew that action always begins where the text stops (see for example Anders 1966). The interpretation of each source is organized around specifc hermeneutical rules: the objective is not to produce a fusion of textual horizons concerning a political object of study, but to understand each dimension of them (of mainly social, political and existential relevance). Recognizing the linguistic dimension of thought allows us to systematically avoid confusion between the authors and their various perspectives. In this way, we can take into account the event dimension of language.Another risk to avoid consists in choosing a deterministic approach a posteriori that presupposes a destinal character attributed to the biographical expressions of authors.To prevent the interpretation from this risk of purely conjectural assumptions, the main interest is also focused on the texts and not on an original idea that would have to act as a major infuence over a whole political period.The critical translation of a specifc conceptual terminology, which essentially depends on the linguistic dimension of the original language, aims to emphasize the historicity of texts and to reconstruct the context of their elaboration, namely the experience of any political event or transformation. This hermeneutical distance refects the result of interpreting as a revitalization, constantly repeated until all possibilities of the sources have been exhausted. Then this textual material will function like a critical basis in order to be able to break any naive attitude regarding every practical a priori, especially the political and social ones. This means that this critical position grounded on interpretation is an act in favour of becoming free from any association of ideas acting itself as a compelling unknown force on the socio-political judgement related to the present experimented life-world.
Political attitude as a phenomenological experience Finally, the third methodological step is experimental: once the historical and the exegetical steps have been fulflled, political phenomenology aims to develop the concepts of violence and confict with its different fgures or modalities of being-in-the-world. In other words, theses and arguments cannot obtain their full validity only from a doxography, even with a good comparison between points of view: philosophical consistency must come from both past and current experiences too, united by an assumed political attitude. This last objective leads not to produce a philosophy only attached to trivial events, but rather to fnd transversal perspectives, historical backgrounds, without convening new metaphysical entities.The aim is to avoid invoking new beliefs instead of the described idealities. If we always postulate a consequence between philosophical theory and practice, the last question would be: why did authors such as Sartre or Anders refuse to be politically compromised by their own work? Or why did one other author choose to accept working in the name of a totalitarian regime that provided social acknowledgement (Heidegger 2014)? Our task is to determine to what extent we have inherited a situation in which the possibility to be politically compromised still remains. Some other 715
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phenomenological experiences in political writings can already show us original and targeted critiques: Jesse Glenn Gray, for example, who testifed about Second World War situations (Gray 1959), Frantz Fanon who exposed the foundations of political violence in racism and colonialism (Fanon 2002) or Patočka who showed how the First World War has to be seen as a major philosophical event (Patočka 1999).What they all have in common is that their mode of thinking is thus made dependent on their modes of living. Like Schürmann, they all intended to work as philosophers in order to live and not to live in order to be historicists or positivists inside a determinate hierarchy of knowledge (Schürmann 1982, §43). As a method, political phenomenology is a path leading from a way to live to a way to think properly. Its own condition consists in a detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) from any kind of beliefs, enhanced with historical works and provided by exegetical work. In this way, political phenomenology, as a practical experience, must be seen as a thought including its own acting: a responsibility as an estrangement towards order principles. It opens the possibility to think critically, which means ‘absence of rule, but not absence of rules’ (Schürmann 1982, 344).That is why we need to understand what it means to think and act politically through experiences of starting new insurrections of knowledge. Reframed in their dynamic relationship, the three programmatic steps for a political phenomenology – historical, exegetical, experimental – inspired by past philosophical experiences fnd their justifcation particularly in regard to problems outside of texts, precisely in our threatened life-world.
Notes 1 See, for example, as an attempt to expand the phenomenological concept of horizon to the discovery of a political world between doxa and episteme, Held 2012. 2 See, for example, with a strong focus on the meaning of political life and existence, Dodd 2012. 3 For a wider perspective on this peculiar question, see Jolly 2019.
References Anders, Günther. 1966. Wir, Eichmannsöhne. München: C.H. Beck. ———. 2001.“Nihilismus und Existenz.” In: Neue Rundschau, Stockholm, No. 5, 1946, pp. 48–76. In: Über Heidegger. Ed. G. Oberschlick. München: C.H. Beck, pp. 39–71. Adorno,Theodor Wiesengrund. 1973. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. 6, Negative Dialektik. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dodd, James. 2012.“Political Philosophy.” In: The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology. Eds. Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard.Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 429–438. Fanon, Frantz. 2002. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: la Découverte. Foucault, Michel. 1976.“Il faut défendre la société”, Cours au Collège de France. Paris: Gallimard. Gray, Jesse Glenn. 1959. The Warriors: Refections on Men in Battle. New York: Harcourt. Heidegger, Martin. 1949. Über den Humanismus. Frankfurt a. M.:V. Klostermann. ———. 2014.Überlegungen II-VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931-1938),Überlegungen VII-XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39), Überlegungen XII-XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939-1941), 3.Vol. Ed. P.Trawny. Frankfurt a. M.:V. Klostermann. Held, Klaus. 2012 “Towards a Phenomenology of the Political World.” In: The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. Ed. Dan Zahavi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 442–459. Jolly, Édouard. 2019. Étranger au monde, essai sur la première philosophie de Günther Anders. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Klemperer,Victor. 1975. LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen. Leipzig: Reclam. Löwith, Karl. 1984. Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen: zur Kritik der Geschichtsphilosophie. Stuttgart: Mezler. Marcuse, Herbert. 1966. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press.
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Phenomenology and political theory Patočka, Jan. 1999. Essais hérétiques sur la philosophie de l’histoire.Trans. fr. E.Abrams. Lagrasse:Verdier. Rawls, John. 1971.A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: University of Harvard Press. Reinach, Adolf. 2007. Zur Phänomenologie des Rechts. Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechts Saarbrücken. Riga:Verlag VDM Müller. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1970. L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Nagel. ———. 1980. Critique de la raison dialectique, Tome I, Théorie des ensembles pratiques; précédé de Questions de méthode. Paris: Gallimard. Schürmann, Reiner. 1982. Le principe d’anarchie: Heidegger et la question de l’agir. Paris: Seuil. Schütz, Alfred. 1975. Strukturen der Lebenswelt. Luchterhand: Neuwied. Stein, Edith. 2006. Eine Untersuchung über den Staat, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7, I. Ed. Reidel-Spangenberger. Freiburg: Herder. Walther, Gerda. 1922. Ein Beitrag zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften. Halle: M. Niemeyer.
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68 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHENOMENOLOGY Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch
In his own defnition of psychoanalysis, Freud outlined its three dimensions: PSYCHO-ANALYSIS is the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientifc discipline. (Freud 1923a)1 Freud’s defnition articulates a dimension of research devoted to unconscious processes of the mind; a practical-clinical as well as research-guided dimension of therapy; and a theoretical dimension, meaning psychoanalysis has ever since been aiming for a general theory of the mind, not merely a theory of psychopathology. Regardless of some degrees of plurality among current developments of these three dimensions (research, therapy, and theory) within contemporary psychoanalysis, the threefold approach to knowledge is constantly pursued.
Psychoanalysis as a therapy The second dimension of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis as a therapy, including the clinical concept of the psychoanalytic relationship, seems to allow for a comparison with the phenomenological approach to subjectivity. Psychoanalysis since Freud has not only been a theory of mind and a scientifc methodology for investigating mental processes; psychoanalysts have also been developing their own practices and techniques for treating patients. Psychoanalysis has acquainted us with the insight that something might occur to a subject and, in that sense, be subjective and yet not be accessible to him or her. Psychoanalysis differentiates between conscious and non-conscious phenomena and justifes this distinction by maintaining that the subject is not aware of what happened to him or her. However, although psychoanalysis questions the “frst-person” perspective of patients and of psychoanalysts as well, this perspective is nevertheless a sine qua non for it as a treatment.
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Glen Gabbard, psychoanalyst and researcher, emphasizes the “unique value of subjective experience” for the psychoanalytic approach to the patients. Psychoanalysts work with their patients by trying to determine what is unique about each one – how a particular patient differs from other patients as a result of a life story like no other. Symptoms and behaviors are viewed as the fnal common pathways of highly personalized subjective experiences that flter the biological and environmental determinants of illness. (Gabbard 2014, 8–9)
Paul Ricœur’s phenomenological approach to the psychoanalytic experience2 As early as 1965, Paul Ricœur’s Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation attempted to reformulate psychoanalysis both in terms of scientifc psychology such as behaviorisms as well as in terms of phenomenology (Ricœur 1970, 344–408). This chapter will focus on Ricœur’s tentative approach to the psychoanalytic situation through the phenomenological experience, an “experience that is deliberately philosophical and refective” (ibid., 376). Here Ricœur’s seminal intuition is to consider the psychoanalytic situation as a via regia for reaching the phenomenon of subjective experience, and further to choose phenomenology for approximating to psychoanalysis. Ricœur seems to be aware that the psychoanalytic clinical method is not only a unique source of information on the mind and its mechanisms, but also provides a systematic exploration of subjective experience. Ricœur’s approximation of phenomenology to psychoanalysis is developed along four steps, addressing the following issues: 1. The method of reduction or suspension of the immediate consciousness as origin and place of meaning is the starting point of the phenomenological investigation. Its own natural attitude makes a self-deception of the immediate consciousness possible. Phenomenology reveals an “unconsciousness” or unawareness that has to do with the implicit or “cointended”. 2. The theme of intentionality shows that consciousness is not self-presence or self-possession, but frst of all intentional vision of the other. Since thematic intentionality is sustained by intentionality in act, which precedes and founds it, it generates another form of unawareness, the unrefected, and this brings about some relevant consequences: (a) The mind is defnable by meaning, before and without appealing to self-consciousness; (b) The lived relation can be dissociated from its conscious representation in consciousness; (c) The meaning in act is more primary than the expressed or represented meaning: the passive genesis of meaning introduces the concept of meaning in act without me; (d) The mode of being of this meaning, which exists without being conscious, is the mode of being of the body. Finally, as the two last steps, Ricœur suggests taking the following into consideration: 3. The attention of phenomenology given to the dialectic aspects of language. 4. The theme of intersubjectivity as constitutive of all our relations with the world. Let me elaborate on Ricœur’s steps of approximation of phenomenology to psychoanalysis, as well as on his detailed explication of how the psychoanalytic approach to experience within
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the psychoanalytical situation differs considerably from the phenomenological and hence offers different outcomes. 1. Edmund Husserl calls reduction that attitude of phenomenology that suspends the natural attitude of “self-evidence” [Selbstverständichkeit] of the appearance of things. This methodological displacement reveals the self-misunderstanding of the immediate consciousness. Phenomenology presupposes a nucleus of experience named “the ego’s living self-presence” [lebendige Selbstgegenwart], but beyond this lies an implicit horizon of the “properly nonexperienced” [eigentlich nicht erfahren] and the “necessarily co-intended” [notwendig mitgemeint].The phenomenological unconscious is in fact unawareness about the implicit, cointended or “co-implicit”. Against the backdrop of this approximation to the method of the phenomenological reduction, it immediately becomes clear why Ricœur records that the Freudian unconscious is rendered accessible through the psychoanalytic technique, which has no parallel in phenomenology: Hence the suspicion analysis professes about the illusions of consciousness is different from the suspension of the natural attitude. […] By starting from the very level of this bondage, that is, by unreservedly delivering oneself over the domineering fux of underlying motivation, the true situation of consciousness is discovered. The fction of absence of motivation, on which consciousness based its illusion of self-determination, is recognised as fction.The fullness of motivation is revealed in place of the emptiness and arbitrariness of consciousness. (Ricœur 1970, 390–391) As a major result of the psychoanalytic working through, Ricœur fnds a genuinely novel comprehension of freedom, which can no longer be related to the arbitrary but should be linked to understood determination. 2. For Ricœur intentionality is the theme of phenomenology which seems to mark another step toward the unconscious: “[C]onsciousness is frst of all an intending of the other, and not self-presence or self-possession” (Ricœur 1970, 378). Ricœur evokes the “invincible unawareness of the self that characterizes intentionality in act” (ibid., 379) because for the Husserl of Krisis, intentionality in act is broader than thematic intentionality, therefore leading to the “primacy of the unrefected over the refected, of the operative over the uttered, of the actual over the thematic” (ibid.). The co-implicit and co-intended cannot become transparent to consciousness. In the end, Ricœur must object to his second tentative approximation: [O]ne moves from phenomenology to psychoanalysis when one understands that the main barrier separates the unconscious and the preconscious, and not the preconscious and the conscious: to replace the formula Cs./Pcs., Ucs. by the formula Cs., Pcs./Ucs. is to move from the phenomenological point of view to the topographic point of view.The unconscious of phenomenology is the preconscious of psychoanalysis, that is to say, an unconscious that is descriptive and not topographic. The meaning of the barrier is that the unconscious is inaccessible unless an appropriate technique is used. (ibid., 392) Ricœur also considers four corollaries to intentionality, his second step of approximation: 720
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(a) He defnes the mind as the intending of something and not as self-consciousness, and refers to Antoine Vergote:“[T]he psychical is defned as meaning, and this meaning is dynamic and historical” (Vergote 1958). Ricœur explicates that the division of meaning in psychoanalysis is only one aspect of the laws of the systems of the mind, which have their own legality such as the laws of the system unconscious including primary process, absence of negation, absence of contradiction, timelessness, etc. He maintains that this “legality cannot be reconstructed phenomenologically but only through the familiarity provided by analytic technique” (Ricœur 1970, 393). (b) Phenomenology shows that the lived relationship is dissociable from its representation.3 By becoming representation, the relation to the world becomes self-knowing. In a philosophy of immediate consciousness, the subject is a knowing subject. In phenomenology, on the contrary, the subject is primarily a desiring subject. If phenomenology shows that the lived meaning of a behavior extends beyond its representation in consciousness, an investigation other than phenomenology is required. Psychoanalytic technique is indispensable for understanding the division at the basis of the distortion that is making the text of consciousness unrecognizable. (c) According to Ricœur, in phenomenology the meaning in act is more primary than the expressed or represented meaning: the passive genesis of meaning introduces the concept of meaning in act without me. How are different experiences possible in the same ego? They are “compossible” through the genesis that links together past, present, and future in the unity of a history. Also concerning the passive genesis, Ricœur remarks its unmistakable difference to Freud’s dynamic of drives and conficts, which are again decipherable only by means of the psychoanalytic technique. (d) While asking how it is possible for a meaning to exist without being conscious, Ricœur answers that its mode of being is that of the body:“The phenomenologist is not saying that the Freudian unconscious is the body; he is simply saying that the mode of being of the body, neither representation in me nor thing outside of me, is the ontic model for any conceivable unconscious” (Ricœur 1970, 382). Investigating the unconscious origins of the self, Johannes Lehtonen, psychoanalyst and researcher, refers to Joona Taipale’s recent interpretation (Taipale 2013) of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, according to whom “a pre-personal self is regarded to exist as something ‘anonymous’ and ‘mute’. It can be regarded as the lived body itself that underlies the conscious and refective self, and rests upon an embodied ‘work already done’” (Lehtonen 2016, 215; Merleau-Ponty 2002, 277) However, Freud himself strenuously rejected the widespread common conception held by the philosophical psychology of the 19th century, including Franz Brentano and William James, that the unconscious states are not mental but physical states. Freud called the question whether unconscious states are mental or physical states “the frst shibboleth of psycho-analysis,” further explaining: To most people who have been educated in philosophy the idea of anything psychical which is not also conscious is so inconceivable that it seems to them absurd and refutable simply by logic. I believe this is only because they have never studied the relevant phenomena of hypnosis and dreams, which – quite apart from pathological manifestations – necessitate this view.Their psychology of consciousness is incapable of solving the problems of dreams and hypnosis. (Freud 1923b) 721
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3. For Ricœur an important implication of intentionality concerns the dialectical aspects of language, especially the interplay of the presence and absence characteristics of signs. Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1920) describes the child’s mastery over privation by playing the game of fort-da: By alternately voicing the two words, the child interrelates absence and presence in a meaningful contrast; at the same time, he no longer undergoes absence as a ft of panic massively substituted for a close and saturating presence. Dominated thus by language, privation – and consequently presence as well – is signifed and transformed into intentionality; being deprived of the mother becomes an intending of the mother. (Ricœur 1970, 385;Waelhens 1959, 232) Ricœur fnds that the linguistic interpretation of psychoanalysis, as carried out by Lacan and his followers, does not constitute an alternative to the Freudian “economic” explanation, e.g. in terms of drives and intrapsychic confict: “We are in presence of phenomena structured like a language; but the problem is to assign an appropriate meaning to the word ‘like’” (Ricœur 1970, 400). In Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900), the dream mechanisms of condensation and displacement appear to be similar to fgures of rhetoric like metaphor and metonymy. Ricœur is nonetheless aware that only Freud’s economic explanation in terms of drives takes account of the barrier between the systems of the mind and therefore of their separation. 4. The fourth point mentioned by Ricœur considers the phenomenological theme of intersubjectivity as constitutive of all our relations with the world. According to Ricœur, another relevant implication of intentionality involves the theory of intersubjectivity, which assumes its whole meaning in the semantic of desire, where the meaning is more lived than represented and where the human desire is intentional vision, that is, a desire of other desires. However, it is exactly on the theme of intersubjectivity that the experience within the psychoanalytic situation diverges most distinctly from the phenomenological experience: “[P] sychoanalysis is an arduous technique, learned by diligent exercise and practice. One cannot underestimate the amazing audacity of this discovery, namely of treating the intersubjective relationship as technique” (Ricœur 1970, 417). Undertaking an accurate investigation of the technical writings of Freud, Ricœur acknowledges that in the experience of psychoanalytic treatment, the crucial question is less about replacing the ignorance of the patient with knowledge than overcoming his or her resistances that defend the patient’s illness. At this point, the concept of experience in psychoanalysis seems to me to be worth a more in-depth look. Here, I would like to refer to the clarifying contribution of R. Horacio Etchegoyen, who further elaborated on Freud’s distinction between two different phenomena coming from the past.According to Freud, the conscious ones are constantly forced to confront themselves with reality progressively reaching their psychic accomplishment and staying at the disposal of the ego. On the other hand, the arrested so-called “defended” impulses fxated on the archaic object have been isolated from consciousness and reality remaining unconscious. On the basis of Freud’s differentiation, Etchegoyen makes a distinction between his concept of experience and the concept of transference. According to him, experience is constituted by “conscious impulses, which help the ego to understand present circumstances using models from the past and within the reality principle.” In contrast, transference arises from unconscious 722
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impulses, which,“subjected to the pleasure principle, [take] the present for the past in search of satisfaction” (Etchegoyen 1992, 87–88). On the whole, according to Etchegoyen: the libido that seeks channels of satisfactions in reality has to do with experience and not with transference.The idea is applied to all human experience no less than to the erotic encounter […].To the extent that these experiences operate as memories at the disposal of the ego and are conscious, our ability to operate realistically will be greater. The other part of the libido, that linked to unconscious imagos, is always by defnition dissatisfed and seeks discharge without taking the elements of reality into account. (ibid., 106–107) Addressing that special kind of resistance termed transference-love, Ricœur outlines the technique for its management during the psychoanalytic treatment as described by Freud in “Observation on Transference-Love” (Freud 1915), consisting in the technique of exploiting it without satisfying it. Again, Etchegoyen tries to put the distinction between reality and experience regarding the patient into words: My relation with my analyst, if I am within the framework of reality, cannot be other than the reality of the treatment. Insofar as my infantile libido attempts to attach itself to this woman, I am already erring. Here my reality judgement fails. The task then is, in my view, what guides us to apprehend reality, the anchor that ties us to it; and everything that is not linked to the task can be considered, by defnition, transference, since it occurs in an inadequate context. (Etchegoyen 1992, 107) In his The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, Christopher Bollas outlines the experience of the analyst, as the “most ordinary countertransference state” i.e. “a not-knowing-yet-experiencing one”.4 Furthermore, Glen Gabbard and Sallye Wilkinson point out – especially in case of the treatment of patients with severe illness such as borderline patients – as its “essential and unavoidable aspect” the “immersion in this intense affective experience” of the patient (Gabbard and Wilkinson 1994, 32). Indeed, the psychoanalytic treatment should be carried through in a state of abstinence:“For the phenomenologist, this technique of frustration is the most surprising aspect of the analytic method; he can no doubt understand the rule of veracity, but not the principle of frustration: the latter can only be practiced” (Ricœur 1970, 417). Meaning that even dealing with the demanding phenomenon of transference-love of the patients, the analysts are “curious to know what this resistance is protecting and what past situation is being reenacted” (Gabbard 2014, 22). There seems to be no relation that is so artifcial and constructed as the psychoanalytic relation, as Freud points out: “The course the analyst must pursue is […] one for which there is no model in real life” (Freud 1915, 166). Ricœur describes the conditions of possibility for an entirely technical relationship to be conducted as an intersubjective relation: [T]he fact that the analytic dialogue, within a special context of disengagement, of isolation, of derealisation, brings to light the demands in which desire ultimately consists; but only the technique of transference, as a technique of frustration, could reveal the fact that desire is at bottom an unanswered demand. (Ricœur 1970, 417) 723
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In the previously considered chapter “Epistemology: Between Psychology and Phenomenology” from Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation, Ricœur’s tentative understanding of the psychoanalytic situation through phenomenology seems promising. Due to the richness of his evocative style, Ricœur’s defnition of psychoanalytic experience remains ambiguous but open. It is true that Ricœur has already described the psychoanalytic situation also as “a work of speech with the patient” (Ricœur 1970, 369), but for understanding the mode of being of the unconscious he suggests links to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notions of one’s own body. Further, he explicitly criticizes Lacan’s linguistic turn regarding the understanding of the unconscious: “The linguistic interpretation does not constitute an alternative to the economic explanation” (ibid.). Even more, Ricœur seems to be attempting to grasp the rich variety of emotions occurring in the dynamic of transference and countertransference.
Psychoanalysis and phenomenology overlap on the attention to phenomena rather than to the texts In his later The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings (Ricœur 1981, 22), Ricœur holds – even more defnitely and explicitly – psychoanalytic theory to be coextensive with what takes place within the psychoanalytic relationship, where the psychoanalytic experience happens. Unfortunately, Ricœur moves away from phenomenology and almost exclusively restricts the psychoanalytic experience to speech acts. The philosopher of science Adolf Grünbaum, in his The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, argues that Ricœur “immures its [the psychoanalytic clinical theory] substantive purview within the verbal productions of the clinical transaction between the analyst and the patient. […] the analysand’s non verbal are excluded from its scope” (Grünbaum 1984, 43) And he adds:“True enough, psychoanalysts generally regard their many observations of the patient’s verbal and non verbal interactions with them in the treatment sessions as the source of fndings that are simply peerless as evidence, not only heuristically but also probatively”(Grünbaum 1984, 44). Thus Ricœur’s controversial epistemological understanding of psychoanalysis as hermeneutics receives a dismissive critique from Adolf Grünbaum who maintains that the generic disavowal of causal attributions advocated by the radical hermeneuticians is a nihilistic, if not frivolous, trivialisation of Freud’s entire clinical theory. Far from serving as a new citadel for psychoanalytic apologetics, the embrace of such hermeneuticians is, I submit, the kiss of death for the legacy that was to be saved. (ibid., 58) Although Grünbaum criticizes both of Ricœur’s works, especially because of the weakness of his epistemological approach, the plentiful suggestions of Ricœur’s tentative phenomenological approach should not be underestimated. Back to his later, through and through hermeneutical The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings, Ricœur frst claims that “the equivalent of what the epistemology of logical empiricism calls ‘observables’ is to be sought frst in the analytic situation, in the analytic relationship” (Ricœur 1981, 248). Ricœur’s tentative answer to the widespread critique that psychoanalysis does not satisfy the required criteria of scientifcity leads him to deny the scientifc status of Freud’s clinical theory. Ricœur argues that psychoanalysis should not be judged using the criteria of an empirical observational science, because facts in psychoanalysis are in no way facts of observable behavior.Therefore, he suggests changing the criteria for “facts” in psychoanalysis. 724
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It is worth mentioning that, even as early as 1983, before Grünbaum’s The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, the psychoanalyst and philosopher Charles Hanly warned psychoanalysts and all “friends” of psychoanalysis of the trap of making “psychoanalysis more defensible as a science by weakening the epistemological criteria for scientifc knowledge in general” (Hanly 1983, 394). The crucial limitation in Ricœur’s approach is constituted by his four criteria of selection among the facts that can be taken into account using the narrowed frame of a psychoanalytic clinical theory so understood. According to this impoverishment of the domain of facts, only the following issues enter into the felds of investigation and treatment as the objects of psychoanalytic knowledge: 1. That part of experience which is capable of being said; 2. Even more, the psychoanalytic situation selects not only what is sayable, but what is said to another person; 3. Further, the psychoanalytic experience requires that we add the reference to fantasies to the two preceding criteria; for what has been said (the frst criterion) and what is demanded of the other person (the second criterion) bear the mark of the particular imaginary formations which Freud brings together under the term phantasieren. (Ricœur 1981, 28) Therefore, Ricœur introduces a third criterion concerning “the coherence and the resistance of certain manifestations of the unconscious which led Freud to speak of ‘psychic reality’ in contrast to material reality” (ibid., 250). 4. As the fourth criterion, the analytic situation singles out what is capable of entering into a story or narrative from a subject’s experience, because to remember is “to be able to constitute one’s own existence in the form of a story where a memory as such is only a fragment of the story” (ibid., 253). His conclusion about the verifcation of the assumptions of psychoanalysis is the following:“[I] f the ultimate truth claim resides in the case histories, the means of proofs reside in the articulation of the entire network: theory, hermeneutics, therapeutic, and narration” (ibid., 268). Far from substantiating the experience within the psychoanalytic situation through linking it to results of the phenomenology of perception or to further phenomenological inquiries on subjective experience, the later Ricœur increasingly circumscribes the psychoanalytic experience to a narrative enterprise.
Further remarks on the psychoanalytic technique Although, as previously stated, psychoanalysis goes far beyond the “frst-person” perspective of patients and psychoanalysts as well, the living subjective perspective is at the core of the treatment.5 A common misunderstanding of the psychoanalytic practices and techniques compares them with text-decoding linguistic work. Interpreting the spoken text of patients is really just a component of the whole psychoanalytic undertaking. Another misleading metaphor considers psychoanalytic work as archeology in search of the lived past of the patient. Indeed, the past suddenly becomes crucial every time a hidden, unwelcomed past is unconsciously repeated in the present, in the case of past “in vivo” without the awareness of the patient, as in the phenomena 725
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of transference. The focus of the analytic work of listening and observing, understanding and conceptualizing, as well as fnally intervening-interpreting is devoted to the living subjectivity of the patient including his or her pre-, para-, and nonverbal expressions. The experience of living subjectivity occurs in an intersubjective situation, in the relationship between psychoanalysts and patients. The psychoanalytic experience is not just a mental one, but rather a psychophysical, embodied experience, which further allows for re-establishing contact and continuity between one’s own mind and body. Framing the approach of Freud’s psychoanalysis within the philosophical mind-body problem, psychoanalysis assumes a continuum from the body to the mind. In current philosophical terms, Freud’s position can be termed as a nonreductive physicalism including emergent irreducible mental properties which hold causal powers.As Shmuel Erlich points out: The most basic underpinnings of Freud's discoveries are, frst and foremost, the unifed spectrum of body and mind that may be approached and studied from either side.The mind is the direct and immediate elaboration of the body and its component systems, especially but not only the nervous system. (Erlich 2015, 5–6) While the work of patients is basically to express their free associations, presenting their “frstperson” subjectivity, psychoanalysts are required to focus not only on the patient’s whole expression (meaning cognitive and emotional, conscious and unconscious, verbal and pre-, para-, and nonverbal expressions) of his or her own experiences, but also on their own overall reaction to the patient, termed countertransference. The countertransference of the analyst is assumed to be the best way to reach the subjective experience of the patient.The concept of evenly hovering or free-foating attention defnes the psychoanalytic mode of listening, which, according to Joseph Sandler, is the “capacity to allow all sorts of thoughts, daydreams and associations to enter the analyst’s consciousness while he is at the same time listening to and observing the patient” (Sandler 1976, 44). Concerning countertransference, long before Heinrich Racker (Racker 1968) in Buenos Aires and Paula Heimann (Heimann 1950, 81–84) in London recognized it to be not simply interference but an important tool of the treatment, the pioneer Sándor Ferenczi led the way in this direction (Ferenczi 1950, Giampieri-Deutsch 1996/2000). Going in a similar direction, Sandler outlines the free-foating responsiveness in countertransference: The analyst is, of course, not a machine in absolute self-control, only experiencing on the one hand, and delivering interpretations on the other […]. Among many other things he talks, he greets the patient, he makes arrangements about practical matters, he may joke and, to some degree, allow his responses to depart from the classical psychoanalytic norm. My contention is that the analyst’s overt reactions to the patient as well as in his thoughts and feelings what can be called his “role responsiveness” shows itself, not only in his feelings but also in his attitudes and behaviour, as a crucial element in his “useful” countertransference. (Sandler 1976, 44–45) Psychoanalysts have the unique opportunity to take part in the living subjective experience of their patients.What patients cannot tell us, they will show us.This experience offered by patients in the analytic session may even be the instantiation in vivo of their very early preverbal past experience. 726
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A great clinical “object relation” tradition in psychoanalysis, starting with Sándor Ferenczi and carried on to the “Independent Group” inside of the British Psycho-Analytical Society has always recognized the importance of all these pre-, para-, or simply nonverbal expressions (Giampieri-Deutsch 1995, 1996/2000). Another less well-known line was developed by the pioneers Paul Federn and Edoardo Weiss (Weiss 1972, 41–44) who devoted themselves to the treatment of severe disturbances and even psychoses, focusing frst and foremost on the pure phenomenology of the analytic session. Nevertheless, they worked toward making psychoanalysis a science in the long run and they never dismissed this position (Giampieri-Deutsch 2002b, 1225–1226). As previously elaborated, psychoanalysis as a therapy is a treatment that heavily takes into account the “frst-person” perspective of the patient. However, his or her subjective point of view as well as his or her experience will be challenged during the course of the treatment. Indeed, psychoanalysis assumes models of the mind to consist of dynamical parts in confict, which, in his last model from 1923, Freud terms as structures: the Id, the Ego, and the SuperEgo, including its sub-structure, the Ego Ideal (Freud 1923b, cf. also Freud 1923b/2020). Further contributors to this confict are states of mind deeply rooted in the body such as drives, affects, and feelings that are equally parts of this cognitive and affective structural model of the mind. All parts of the confict could certainly be analyzed in the long-term; furthermore, their mainly unconscious processing could become partly predictable. Notwithstanding this, assuming a psychodynamic frame of reference, a subject can hardly be considered prima facie and immediately transparent to herself or himself.This includes her or his thoughts and emotions as well as his or her past experiences and decisions about his or her future.
Psychoanalytic knowledge from the “third-person” perspective The psychoanalytic clinical method provides a systematic exploration of living subjective experience and is a source of clinical data on the mind. In the clinical situation, psychoanalysts hold the “frst-person” perspective in evenly hovering attention and in the phenomena of countertransference. Nevertheless, the knowledge of a psychoanalyst is also knowledge from the “third-person” perspective on different levels: On the frst weak level, psychoanalysts take a distance in their everyday clinical work of interpretation, namely in the on-line real-time situation of the setting. Other weak “thirdperson” practices are participating in supervision, intervision, or case study seminars. A further weak “third-person” methodology is Freud’s traditional case study method, according to which psychoanalysts write individual case studies in their clinical investigations.6 However, there is even a hard level of “third-person” methodologies, the psychoanalytic empirical research, which claims more compelling “evidence” (Giampieri-Deutsch 2004). Bridging the gap between weak “third-person” and hard “third-person” methodologies, Rolf Sandell, psychoanalyst and researcher, names his own approach double vision: Double vision in research means having in mind two points of view simultaneously. One point of view involves focusing on what is generally expectable, not knowing the specifcs of any particular case. […] This is of course what nowadays is naively called “evidence” in outcome research […].There are regularities, indeed.The second point of view involves focusing on the individual differences [and using a means of synthesizing to bring some order to the individualities]. (Sandell 2014, 56) 727
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Robert Wallerstein, psychoanalyst and researcher, welcomes Sandell’s double vision: “This involves setting up research strategies that encompass both the generalizable and the individual […] the formal systematic research program, and the intensive individual case study; both, not just one or the other” (Wallerstein 2014, 263). A double vision in psychoanalysis allows for bringing together both perspectives: on the one hand, Freud’s traditional case study method, “frst-person” research methodologies and the qualitative research as a whole, and on the other hand, the later developed formal empirical and experimental research, mainly embedded within a quantitative frame. Reaching here the dimension of empirical research in psychoanalysis devoted to general processes of the mind including unconscious mechanisms, a major difference to/from phenomenology becomes progressively apparent. To conclude, it is in utilizing “third-person” methodologies in psychoanalysis to investigate general mechanisms of the mind that psychoanalysis mostly diverges from the phenomenological approach to the mind.
Notes 1 References to the works of Sigmund Freud are quoted from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Freud 1953-1974).The chronological order of Freud’s writings is based upon Meyer-Palmedo and Fichtner (1989, 15–90). 2 The following two paragraphs are an extensively revised version of Giampieri-Deutsch (2012, 84–89). 3 Within this chapter, I will not elaborate further on the divergence between the representational theory of the mind of psychoanalysis and the non-representational tradition in phenomenology inspired by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and further developed, among others, by Varela, Rosch and Thompson (1991), Dreyfus (2002), Noë (2004) or Gallagher (2008). 4 Even if Bollas (1987, 203) seems to introduce a distinction between experience and knowledge, I will not summarize it here nor can I enter the longstanding debate within the philosophy of mind about the question to what extent experiencing can be regarded as a knowledge or not – see also GiampieriDeutsch (2002a, 64–71) – nor the underlying distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description deeply rooted in the 19th century as well as the still running discussion about it.At stake here is the epistemological status of experience. 5 This paragraph is based upon the paragraphs “Psychoanalysis” (Giampieri-Deutsch 2016, 232–233) and “Psychoanalytic Technique” (Giampieri-Deutsch 2016, 233–234). 6 For a more detailed account see Giampieri-Deutsch (2002a and 2005, 31-37).
References Bollas, Christopher. 1987. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia University Press. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2002. “Intelligence Without Representation”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 367–386. Erlich, H. Shmuel. 2015.“Will Two Walk Together, Except They Have Agreed? On the Encounter Between Psychoanalysis and Religion”. Keynote Lecture held at the 5th “Maimonides Lecture” of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Unpublished manuscript. Etchegoyen, Ricardo Horacio. 1992. The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique. London/New York: Karnac Books. Ferenczi, Sándor. 1950. “On the Technique of Psycho–Analysis” (1919). In: Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho–Analysis. Ed. Michael Bálint. New York: Brunner and Mazel, pp. 177–189. Freud, Sigmund. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams. In: Freud 1953-74:Vol. 4–5. ———. 1915.“Observation on Transference-Love”. In: Freud 1953-74:Vol. 12. ———. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In: Freud 1953-74:Vol. 18. ———. 1923a.“(A) Psycho-Analysis.Two Encyclopaedia Articles”. In: Freud 1953-74:Vol. 18. ———. 1923b/2020. Freuds dynamisches Strukturmodell des Mentalen im 21. Jahrhundert. Freuds Werke.Wiener Interdisziplinäre Kommentare. Ed. Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch. Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
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Psychoanalysis and phenomenology ———. 1953–74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Eds. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson.Vols. 1–24. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Gabbard, Glen O. 2014. Psychodynamic Psychiatry in Clinical Practice. 5th edition.Washington, DC/London: American Psychiatric Publishing. Gabbard, Glen O., and Wilkinson, Sallye M. 1994. Management of Countertransference with Borderline Patients. Washington, DC/ London:American Psychiatric Press. Gallagher, Shaun. 2008. “Direct Perception in the Intersubjective Context”. Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 17, pp. 535–543. Giampieri-Deutsch, Patrizia. 1995. “Ferenczis Beitrag zur Theorie des psychoanalytischen Prozesses”. Zeitschrift für psychoanalytischen Theorie und Praxis,Vol. 10, pp. 259–291. ———. 1996/2000. “The Infuence of Ferenczi’s Ideas on Contemporary Standard Technique”. In: Ferenczi´s Turn in Psychoanalysis. Eds. Peter L. Rudnytsky, Antal Bókay, and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch. New York/London: New York University Press, pp. 224–247. ———. 2002a.“Die psychoanalytische Theorie des Mentalen und analytische Philosophie des Geistes”. In: Psychoanalyse im Dialog der Wissenschaften. Europäische Perspektiven.Vol. 1. Ed. Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, pp. 64–71. ———. 2002b. “Psicoanalisi”. In: Storia d’Italia. Le Regioni dall'Unità a Oggi. Il Friuli Venezia Giulia, Vols. 1–2,Vol. 2. Eds. Roberto Finzi, Claudio Magris, and Giovanni Miccoli.Torino: Einaudi, pp. 1223-1233. ———. 2004. “Auswirkungen der Kooperation zwischen der analytischen Philosophie des Geistes und der Psychoanalyse auf die empirische psychoanalytische Forschung”. In: Psychoanalyse im Dialog der Wissenschaften. Anglo-amerikanische Perspektiven. Ed. Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch. Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, pp. 80–91. ———. 2005. “Approaching Contemporary Psychoanalytic Research”. In: Psychoanalysis as an Empirical, Interdisciplinary Science. Collected Papers on Contemporary Psychoanalytic Research. Ed. Patrizia GiampieriDeutsch.Vienna:Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, pp. 15–54. ———. 2012. “Psychoanalysis: Philosophy and/or Science of Subjectivity? Prospects for a Dialogue Between Phenomenology, Philosophy of Mind, and Psychoanalysis”. In: Founding Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically. Phenomenological Theory of Subjectivity and the Psychoanalytic Experience. Eds. Dieter Lohmar and Jagna Brudzinska, Phaenomenologica,Vol. 199. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 83–97. ———. 2016.“Towards Living Subjective Experience”. In: Thinking Thinking: Practicing Radical Refectivity. Eds. Donata Schoeller and Vera Saller. Freiburg in Breisgau and München:Verlag Karl Alber, pp. 226–237. Grünbaum, Adolf. 1984. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis. A Philosophical Critique. Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press. Hanly, Charles. 1983. “A Problem of Theory Testing”. The International Review of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 10, pp. 438–439. Heimann, Paula. 1950. “On Countertransference”. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,Vol. 31, pp. 81–84. Lehtonen, Johannes. 2016.“Self Before Self. On the Scenic Model of the Early Embodied Self ”. Journal of Consciousness Studies,Vol. 23, No. 1–2, pp. 214–236. Meyer-Palmedo, Ingeborg and Fichtner, Gerhard. (Eds.). 1989. Freud-Bibliographie mit Werkkonkordanz. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception.Trans. C. Smith. London/New York: Routledge. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA/London:The MIT Press. Racker, Heinrich. 1968. “The Countertransference Neurosis”. In: Transference and Countertransference. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 105–126. Ricœur, Paul. 1970. “Epistemology: Between Psychology and Phenomenology”. In: Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven/London:Yale University Press, pp. 344–408. ———. 1981.“The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings”. In: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp 247–305. Sandell, Rolf. 2014.“On the Value of Double Vision”. In: Special Section: Systematic Research on Psychoanalytic Treatment. Ed. Rebecca Coleman Curtis. Contemporary Psychoanalysis,Vol. 50, No. 1–2, pp. 43–57. Sandler, Joseph. 1976.“Countertransference and Role-Responsiveness”. The International Review of PsychoAnalysis,Vol. 3, p. 43–47. Taipale, Joona. 2013. “Facts and Fantasies: Embodiment and the Early Formation of Selfhood”. In: The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity. Eds. Rasmus Thybo Jensen and Dermont Moran. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 241–262.
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Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch Varela, Francisco J., Rosch, Eleanor, and Thompson, Evan. 1991. The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA/London:The MIT Press. Vergote, Antoine. 1958. “L’intérêt philosophique de la psychanalyse freudienne”. Archives de Philosophie (Jan.–Feb.),Vol. 21, p. 26–59. Waelhens, Alphonse de. 1959.“Réfexions sur une problématique husserlienne de l’inconscient: Husserl et Hegel”. In: Edmund Husserl, 1859–1959. Phaenomenologica,Vol. 4. Eds. Jacques Taminiaux and Herman Van Breda. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 221–237. Wallerstein, Robert S. 2014. “Psychoanalytic Therapy Research: A Commentary”. In: Special Section: Systematic Research on Psychoanalytic Treatment. Ed. Rebecca Coleman Curtis. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 50, No. 1–2, pp. 259–269. Weiss, Edoardo. 1972.“Federn’s Phenomenological Ego-Psychology”. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,Vol. 8, No. S1, pp. 41–44.
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69 PHENOMENOLOGY AND RELIGION Stefano Bancalari
It is a fact that the varied philosophical movement that goes under the name of “phenomenology” has broadly accepted in its own feld of inquiry a whole family of issues, all converging on a virtual blaze that can be defned, by frst approximation, with the generic and all-encompassing noun “religion”: God, the absolute, the sacred, the holy, the faith, the mystic, the infnite (with its glory), prayer, incarnation, idol, icon, liturgy, but also religion as such are objects of analyses elaborated in texts that claim to be developments (more or less heretical) of Husserl’s ambition to a rigorous science and that in some cases have become real classics of phenomenological thought. One could, of course, dismiss all this as “swerving” of a method that has undergone an illegitimate “theological turn”:1 were it not that it would be really hard to know exactly when this turn took place, since the problem of phenomenological analysis of religion was born together with phenomenology itself. Or, in truth, even before. When, in fact, Husserl baptized his research method with the name of “phenomenology”, a certain “phenomenology of religion”, understood as an empirical, non-evaluative and not philosophical description of religious phenomena, already existed.2 While completely independent as to its origin, this prephilosophical and pre-Husserlian phenomenology inevitably ends up weaving its path to that of phenomenology as properly (i.e. philosophically) intended.The result is a conceptual and methodological situation, intricate to say the least, which loads the question of a “phenomenology of religion” with a not-quite-easy-to-manage polysemy:3 but that is why it is crucial to note that the problem of the link between phenomenology and religion immediately (both in the historical and in the theoretical sense) imposes itself as inescapable within those boundaries drawn from Husserl’s method. On a frst level, this is even obvious: religious facts and problems, like any other fact capable of entering the cone of light of the phenomenological glance, claim to be taken into consideration, were it merely to be relegated to the pertinence of the natural attitude and therefore excluded from that of phenomenology. But there is a far deeper reason, which makes it inevitable for phenomenology to take on the religious problem, or rather the problem that religion in general represents for philosophy. In phenomenology’s genetic heritage, indeed, one fnds a hereditary trait that links it in an essential manner with “philosophy of religion”.This latter is not an eternal category of the spirit, but, as Jean Greisch rightly asserts, it was “invented” (Greisch 2002–2004) at a given time: namely, in modernity, to coincide with that general theoretical movement that can be described as the crisis of metaphysics. It is when God's existence (as the ground of meta731
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physics) becomes questionable that the need for a specifc philosophical discipline that inquires into religion rather than into God comes out: so that religion, in fact, and not immediately, nor directly God, becomes the possible and legitimate object of a truly philosophical discourse, that keeps itself “within the boundaries of mere reason”, to say it à la Kant. In the moment in which the ability to leverage on the ipsum esse subsistens as the foundation of all that (derivatively) “is” breaks down, then the very possibility of resorting to the notion of “existence” in general is called in question, with the inevitable effect of casting in doubt ontology and metaphysics in the traditional sense of the two concepts.4 From this point of view, phenomenology really appears as “the secret nostalgia of all modern philosophy” (Hua III/1, 133/142); by explicitly undertaking this leave from existence, which is phenomenologically understood as a general “thesis” of the natural attitude, and by theorizing the epoché as the inaugural gesture of the phenomenological viewpoint, phenomenology is repeating and radicalizing that overall movement of taking distance from ontological metaphysics, by which God Himself, as Nietzsche says, is nothing more than an “epoch”,5 i.e. suspended, as the etymological derivation of “epoch” from epoché suggests. It is no surprise therefore that, just as happens likewise in philosophy of religion, such an epoché does not translate, at all, for phenomenology, in a simple elimination of objects and problems, but in a reconstitution and transposition of the same on another plane: in the specifc case, on the plane of manifestation. In this sense, the famous §58 of Ideas I can really be seen as the opening moment, in the historical and theoretical sense, of a phenomenology of religion in the philosophical sense of the word. Here Husserl, with the same gesture with which, on the one hand, he proceeds to a “disconnection” (Ausschaltung) of God’s transcendence, on the other hand prefgures the possibility of an “absolute” that is “totally different” (Hua III/1, 125/134) with respect to the absolute of transcendental consciousness. Regardless of the specifc problem on which Husserl will almost never stop refecting, it is interesting to note that this indication of a path, that at this level is really only just mentioned, is immediately translated, in the phenomenological circle, to the insistent position of a fundamental question: is it possible to “apply” the phenomenological method to a particular feld of phenomena in such a way as to formulate a sort of regional ontology that has its theoretical foundation in the phenomenology of consciousness in general? The way to answer this question is so decisive for the type of phenomenology of religion that turns out, that the option for a positive or negative response can be effectively used to organize the (obviously very varied) feld of the different approaches to the problem of the relationship between phenomenology and religion. The paradigmatic example of an “ontological-regional” approach is Max Scheler's phenomenology of religion. According to Scheler it is possible to identify a class of experiences and objects, specifcally religious, that defne the scope of relevance of a phenomenological-eidetic discipline that is totally autonomous. As defned by Scheler, the “essential phenomenology of religion” is, thus, a “thorough examination, on the basis of religion’s independence, into the general peculiarities of the objects and values of faith” (Scheler 1954, 150–151/154), which is based on three fundamental tasks:“1) the essential nature of the divine; 2) the study of the forms of revelation in which the divine intimates and manifests itself to man; 3) the study of the religious act” (ibid., 157/161). Scheler's case is paradigmatic, but not isolated: the attempt to make phenomenology of religion a true phenomenological discipline on a classical Husserlian basis is shared by a large number of authors who design a perhaps not very well-known but heavily compact and interesting landscape [one thinks, for example, of Robert Winkler (1921), Jean Hering (1926) and Johannes Heber (1929)]. At the theoretical (and very problematic) core of this approach lies the need to trace, within the context of experience, a specifc object and, by analogy, a specifc act that allows us to uniquely qualify that experience as a specifcally religious 732
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one, differing from any other type of experience. In a sense, this type of phenomenology of religion reworks in a strictly phenomenological key the question raised by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy (Otto 1917), who, despite his estrangement from the lexicon and setting of Husserl, is an important reference point for all the authors mentioned here. And it is no coincidence. On the one hand, the identifcation of the “sacred” as the object of the inquiry responds to the need of not restricting the feld by prejudicially opting, for example, for theistic conceptions or institutionalized religions: so that it is evident and entirely intentional, in this setting, to marginalize the question of God’s existence in favor of the question of the description of religious living experience. On the other hand, the two central philosophical objectives of Otto’s work are purely phenomenological: a) to demonstrate that the sentiment of the “numinous” (the term was coined by Otto to avoid the ethical resonance of the German word heilig), the ambivalent mix of terror and fascination that is experienced in certain particular experiences (Otto offers a large number of examples), is radically distinct from any “natural” feeling; b) to prove that this sentiment is able to reveal immediately (regardless of any logical deduction or inference) the presence of a corresponding numinous object; an affrmation easily translatable in the phenomenological lexicon of intentionality. It is signifcant to note that this “ontological-regional” understanding of the phenomenology of religion is by no means a thing of the past, but features in a style of research that is contemporarily practiced as of today, as is well documented in the relevant entry recently written by Mark Wynn for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Wynn 2008). A second (far more philosophically radical) approach is defned by the methodological refusal to understand the phenomenology of religion in disciplinary terms. Here the problem is not to cut into the space of experience an autonomous feld that pacifcally coexists with others, leaving the overall conceptual framework intact: a framework substantially coincident with the space of manifestation defned by the constituting transcendental consciousness; the problem, on the contrary, is just to understand how experience in general is to be considered, admitting (but not allowing) that a religious experience be possible.The fundamental theoretical core of this approach can be posed starting from an alternative: either in experience in general, that is, in every experience, we open a space for what is naturally understood in terms of religious experience, or the latter loses every phenomenal consistency, to prove to be an undue (and illusory) transposition on the phenomenological plane of what is and remains a thesis proper to the natural attitude. In this perspective, which takes seriously the claims made by the method, the problem posed by Husserl (bracketing and eventual revival on another plane of a divine “absolute”) appears in all its complexity, revealing itself, more strongly and convincingly, as the theoretical beginning of the phenomenological-religious problem and as a phenomenological-religious version of the problem of the beginning, i.e. the problem of reduction. In effect, it opens a series of radical questions: if it is true that the practice of phenomenology is only possible thanks to the reduction of every transcendence to the immanence of the transcendental consciousness as the only legitimate source of meaning – i.e. as the absolute – is there still place for a phenomenological recovery of the meaningful character of the religious phenomenon? And from the opposite point of view: is it really conceivable that the absolute is the subject (rather than the object) of a religious experience? It is clear that the short way to appeal to an alleged “religious experience”, capable of connecting consciousness with the divine (the way of the frst approach), circumvents the problem rather than solving it.Again, it is interesting to observe that this problem is taken up immediately after the publication of Ideas I:Adolf Reinach (1989), Josef Heiler (1921), and Kurt Stavenhagen (1925) enact a real intellectual battle to cope with the paradox of the conceptually never-heard-before situation, represented by the absolute (of transcendental consciousness) opening to another absolute, i.e. by the doubling of that which is single by defnition. 733
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What seems at frst glance a trivial contradiction is a powerful trigger for a logical and methodological refection that gives rise to some of the most original and fruitful developments of Husserl’s method. Indeed, at close glance, the formal structure of the problem of the “absolutes”, which confgures what, technically, is a paradox rather than a contradiction, is nothing but the problem of the relationship between immanence (to the absolute of consciousness) and transcendence (of another absolute) – which means that it is a variant of a problem of phenomenology that is radical and by no means “regional”: the problem of intersubjectivity.6 It is the problem that arises when the intentional transcendence – the relationship between consciousness and the noematic contents that it encounters within its horizon (perceptive and temporal) – turns out to be inadequate to account for that particular “object” that claims to be another subject, with its own horizon of manifestation; a subject that claims to be constituting and not just constituted – exactly like the “totally different” absolute that, indeed, claims to be the principle of a unitary teleological movement that embraces not only the totality of the egos, but even that meaningfulness factually present in the world and, apparently, not attributable to any ego-consciousness in particular. The classical phenomenological question of intersubjectivity and that of divine absoluteness converge in questioning the constituting ambition of transcendental consciousness: the latter fnds itself in a diffcult relationship with a transcendence that is non-constituted and non-intentional and yet not to be reduced to that of the natural attitude. The question of God and that of intersubjectivity converge to the point that the interweaving between the two, and the consequent need to think their distinction, can be assumed as the very core of the “phenomenology of religion” in the sense that we are examining. Far from being a discipline, phenomenology of religion is the effort to articulate the notion of “transcendence”, so that it becomes possible to distinguish different levels of it, all “immanent” to the phenomenological point of view and all different from the naive transcendence that transcendental reduction excludes: therefore, it becomes possible to recover on the phenomenological level the meaningfulness of that intertwining of religion and transcendence that ordinary language and natural attitude assume as inextricable. In this sense, the operation carried out by Levinas on the non-technical term “religion”, resemanticizing and technicizing it in the light of the phenomenological problem of intersubjectivity, becomes a paradigm: “We propose to call ‘religion’ the bond that is established between the same and the other without constituting a totality” (Levinas 1990, 30/40).Two aspects here are extremely signifcant and exemplary of an overall attitude of this direction of the phenomenology of religion: a) the fact that, despite any simplifying attempt to identify (erroneously) Levinasian alterity with “God”, religion is called in question without reference to any divine element, but as the activation of a paradoxical “relationship” that breaks with the totality of the Same; the latter turns out to be questioned by another that has nothing of the divine, but indeed is “the neighbor”; b) the fact that phenomenology thus opens to “religion” in its pre-philosophical dimension, not so much as to make it an object of study, but to borrow lexical and conceptual resources that, revised and corrected on a methodological level, can be fruitful to describe, articulate, think the phenomenological problem of outright transcendence (not necessarily divine, and in any case not in the frst place). Among the many possible exemplifcations of how this theoretical paradigm is embodied in contemporary phenomenological-religious theories, two particularly signifcant cases can be recalled. The frst is that of Michel Henry, whose conceptual lexicon, strictly based on the idea of the immanence of life, understood as pure auto-affection, and considered as the most original layer of the manifestation, seems to make it an exception to the general picture we are tracing. And yet, regardless of the use of the term, it is exactly the attempt to overcome the level of the intentional and horizontal manifestation, considered inadequate, which makes the dimension of 734
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Henry’s concept of immanence substantially equivalent to “transcendence” in the way defned above.This is especially so, given that the research of this dimension leads to a direct confrontation with the Christian tradition that seems to be the inevitable reference point in order to move from life (of the single) to Life (that transcends any singular) (Henry 1996, 2000, 2002). The second case is that of Jean-Luc Marion. Marion’s phenomenology also makes explicit use of a pre-phenomenological ground intended as a reserve of sense, from which it is possible to derive useful tools for a radicalization of the very idea of phenomenology.The “privileged” and yet ordinary phenomenon of “gift”, as a paradigm of the “givenness” of each phenomenon as such, is elaborated by virtue of a reduction exercised simultaneously on two sides: that of the empirical phenomenon of intersubjective exchange and that of the Christian theological tradition, both considered to be able to offer an alternative to the metaphysical model if phenomenologically reinterpreted.The transition from transcendental consciousness to the “gifted” (adonné) precisely marks the opening to the radical transcendence of what precedes and exceeds the constituent power of subjectivity: what Marion defnes as “saturated phenomenon” (Marion 1998). Further examples, as was said, could be given.7 However, it is interesting to note that the understanding of the relationship between phenomenology and religion in terms of a fruitful osmosis of conceptual resources between the two domains is already explicitly and theorized early on by Heidegger in the famous course of 1920–21 dedicated to the phenomenological analysis of the letters of Paul (Heidegger 1995). The young phenomenologist, who at this time was engaged in the elaboration of the “factic life experience” as the very scope of the phenomenological description, directed his interest to the Pauline epistolary, moving from a precise working hypothesis: primitive Christianity lives temporality as such, i.e. authentically. Consequently, phenomenological analysis requires, as an indispensable completion, an investigation into specifcally Christian temporality, for it is the latter that reveals to the “self ”, normally dispersed in the world, the possibility of access to its fniteness and “affiction” (thlipsis), without the protective and reassuring screen that is offered by what is “worldly”. If the time of the world is tailored to the self, the one that allows the self to foresee and control future events, the authentic time is the one of waiting for something that is not conceivable, that of those who live the “worldly meaningfulness” as something that “is passing away” (1 Cor 7:31). Beyond the specifc interest of these Heideggerian analyses, it is signifcant to note, once again, the need for transcendence in the phenomenologically more radical sense of the term: the one that consists in opening the horizon of the manifestation as a space within which the self necessarily moves – a space that embraces, surrounds, and constrains the self, and that the latter, relying solely on itself and on its own point of view, could not open without the help of a transcendent point of view. In the refned elaboration of the complex Pauline formula “as though not” (hos me), Heidegger intends to show how it is an expression of the authentically Christian attitude, and at the same time, of the authentically phenomenological attitude toward the world. Thus, an extremely interesting solidarity emerges, enabling us to reconsider the deeper and deeper core of the course we have undertaken and that brings the matter back to the kinship between phenomenology and philosophy of religion from which we started: in the end, it is by bracketing or suspending the world’s claims (that is, of natural attitudes) and its more or less conscious and more or less explicit “theses” that phenomenology and religion fnd their decisive point of contact; in the theorization, that is, of an epoché that is not merely understood as the simple preparation and/or reduplication of the transcendental reduction, that is, of the moving back to the constituting operations of consciousness, but which is understood as the suspension of the transcendental consciousness itself as the opening of itself to a stage further beyond the self, to a paradoxical transcendence, which is also paradoxically immanent, which never stops questioning both phenomenology and religion.8 735
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Notes 1 The allusion is evidently to the controversial pamphlet by Janicaud (1991) who bemoans a betrayal of the Husserlian method by some of the most well-known French phenomenologists (such as Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry or Jean-Luc Marion). He considers them to have forced phenomenology, for the sake of apologetics, in the direction of theological and philosophical-religious themes, which in his opinion would be very alien to it. 2 Chantepie de la Saussaye is probably the frst to use the “phenomenology of religion” expression in his Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte (Saussaye 1887–1889). 3 Douglas Allen distinguishes four meanings of the expression (Allen 2005). 4 For an historical and theoretical analysis of the birth the philosophy of religion in the modern era, see the fundamental contribution of (Olivetti 1995). 5 “The only possible way of upholding the sense of the concept ‘God’ would be: to make Him not the motive force, but the condition of maximum power, an epoch; a point in the further development of the Will to Power” (Nietzsche 1970, 201/122). 6 For its classical formulation see (Hua I). 7 Consider, for example, the phenomenological work on the prayer by Bernhard Casper (1998), that about the “kingdom of God” by Kevin Hart (2014) or, also, the trilogy by Emmanuel Falque (2016). 8 I tried to test this working hypothesis and to identify, in the elaboration of a new concept of “epoché” conceived of in terms of paradox, the real engine of conceptual contemporary phenomenology of religion in (Bancalari 2015).
References Allen, Douglas. 2005.“The Phenomenology of Religion”. In: Encyclopedia of Religion Second Edition. Ed. L. Jones, vol. 10. New York: Macmillan. Bancalari, Stefano. 2015. Logica dell'epochè. Per un’introduzione alla fenomenologia della religione. Pisa: ETS. Casper, Bernhard. 1998. Das Ereignis des Betens. Grundlinien einer Hermeneutik des religiösen Geschehens. Freiburg: Alber. Chantepie de la, Saussaye, Pierre Daniel. 1887–1889. Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols. Freiburg: Mohr. Falque, Emmanuel. 2016. Triduum philosophique: Le Passeur du Gethsémani. Métamorphose de la fnitude. Les noces de l'Agneau. Paris: Cerf. Greisch, Jean. 2002–2004. Le Buisson ardent et les Lumières de la raison. L'invention de la Philosophie de la religion, 3 vols. Paris: Cerf. Hart, Kevin. 2014. Kingdoms of God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heber, Johannes. 1929. Die phänomenologische Methode in der Religionsphilosophie. Königsbrück: Pabst. Heidegger, Martin. 1995. Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. Frankfurt a. M.:V. Klostermann. Heiler, Josef. 1921. Das Absolute. Methode und Versuch einer Sinnklärung des “Transzendentalen Ideals". München: Reinhardt. Henry, Michel. 1996. C’est moi la vérité. Pour une philosophie du Christianisme. Paris: Seuil. English translation: I Am the Truth.Toward a Philosophy of Christianity.Trans. S. Emanuel. 2002. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair. Paris: Seuil. English translation: Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh. Trans. K. Hefty. 2015. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002. Paroles du Christ. Paris: Seuil. English translation: Words of Christ. Trans. Ch. Gschwandter. 2012. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Hering, Jean. 1926. Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse. Étude sur la théorie de la Connaissance religieuse. Paris: Alcan. Janicaud, Dominique. 1991. Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française. Combas: Éclat. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1990. Totalité et infni. Essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Livre de Poche. English translation: Totality and Infnity.An Essay on exteriority. Trans.A. Lingis. 1969. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1998. Étant donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: PUF. English translation: Being Given.Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Trans. J. Kosky. 2002. Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1970.“Wille zur Macht, § 639”. In: Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst 1887 – März 1888, Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe hrsg. von G. Colli & M. Montinari,VIII/2, pp. 201-202. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. English translation: The Will to Power, vol. 2.Trans. A. M. Ludovici. 1924. New York: Macmillan.
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70 PHENOMENOLOGY AND STRUCTURALISM Kwok-ying Lau
70.1. Two senses of structuralism The term “structuralism” can be understood in two ways. It can mean a method of analysis, that of the structural method, which aims at the search for knowledge and truth specifc to the human sciences. But the term “structuralism” can also convey a second meaning that is of ideological and polemical usage: it designates a way of position-taking within the theoretical debates of the French intelligentsia of the 1960s and the 1970s. Under this context, the term “structuralism” is used by theoreticians who defne themselves in opposition frst of all to existentialism as a current of thought that excels in the investigation of human existence. Apart from this, theoreticians who associate themselves with structuralism also defne it as a form of philosophy against all other forms of philosophy that assign a constitutive role to the human subject or subjectivity in general in the event of formation of meaning and institution. Phenomenology, in particular the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, is the main target of attack by structuralist thinkers. Consider frst of all the usage of the term “structuralism” as the method of structural analysis. It has been developed in the human sciences since the early twentieth century. Its origin is commonly attributed to the method demonstrated by the modern linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) in his work Course in General Linguistics (frst published posthumously in 1916) (Saussure 1972).The empirical method of the natural sciences prevalent at the turn of the century takes the physical properties shown by natural objects as the primary order, and considers the construction of physical laws as a result of association and induction based on empirical observations of physical phenomena. In contrast, the structural method invented by Saussure in his observation of linguistic phenomena advocates the direction of the investigating gaze onto structures that are results of theoretical construction in the form of conceptual pairs regulating relations between elements in a linguistic system, rather than, like the natural sciences, paying attention to the properties shown by individual elements within this same linguistic system. By proposing the binary conceptual pairs of signifer and signifed, langue (as a codifed system of linguistic signs) and parole (as living speech), synchrony and diachrony, as well as the constitutive function of difference among written signs and sound images in the formation of linguistic meaning, Saussure has initiated the school of research in the human sciences known later under the name “structuralism” without himself inventing this name. 738
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Under this structural method, the role played by the totality and the form of the system is greater than that played by individual elements distinguished by particular properties. This is because these properties can manifest their specifc character and function only within the systematic whole in which one element enters into relation with other elements. In a word, it is structures that defne the properties of individual elements and not otherwise. In addition, structures as relational totalities exhibit characters irreducible to properties of individual elements or to their quantitative summation (Piaget 1968, 8). Structures are thus eidetic structural variants that regulate the behavior of individual elements within the system. Such mode of theorization is not only anti-empiricist (anti-associationist and anti-psychological), but also anti-positivist.
70.2. Phenomenology as ally of the structural method If structuralism is understood from its methodological choice, phenomenology from the very beginning is a sort of ally to structuralism. In the frst volume of Logical Investigations, Prolegomena to a Pure Logic, Husserl has explained with exemplary clarity and patience his anti-psychological standpoint in the elucidation of the origin of truth pertaining to the domain of logic.According to Husserl, logic is a normative discipline; the laws which govern logical thinking are not laws of nature.The origin of the validity of logical deduction and of the laws governing the validity of logical thinking is not to be searched for in the mind as the domain of psychic reality. Logical propositions and logical rules are objects of ideality.They belong to an order of being beyond and in distinction to objects of the psychological order, this latter being understood as an order of natural reality subtracted from its physical or material substructure. The anti-psychological standpoint of the Prolegomena prepares Husserl to investigate into the order of ideality to which belongs linguistic meaning in general. In Investigation I of the Logical Investigations, Husserl devotes detailed efforts to explicate the status of ideality of unities of linguistic meaning and distinguishes it from the accidental external expressive formulae. Investigations III and IV of the Logical Investigations are devoted to the study of the theory of the wholes and the parts as well as the distinction between independent and non-independent meanings.While the parts are non-independent components of a linguistic expression, only the whole enjoys a veritable independent status. Husserl tries to show that laws governing logical thinking and linguistic meaning are eidetic and enjoy the status of a priori. In Investigation V, Husserl moves to the terrain of phenomenology proper: the study of the general structure of consciousness as intentional experience. Referring to the pioneering role played by Brentano in the discovery of intentionality of consciousness, Husserl declares that consciousness as “mental phenomenon is characterized by what the medieval schoolmen called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and by what we call … the relation to a content, the direction to an object … or an immanent objectivity” (Hua XIX/2, 554). The most comprehensive defning characteristics of consciousness is thus: it enters necessarily into an “intentional relation” with a certain content (Hua XIX/2, 555). Consciousness is then a structural form under which individual objects can enter into the phenomenal feld of appearance.This essential defnition of consciousness in terms of intentionality as a structural a priori confers to it implicitly a transcendental status, as consciousness understood in this sense does not belong to the realm of human psychic reality. In a later lecture course that begins by presenting the “Task and Signifcance of the Logical Investigations,” Husserl explains that consciousness as the internal passivities and activities in which ideal objectivities such as logical and mathematical entities “are subjectively formed and become intuitively disclosed by methodic refection and phenomenological analyses, are not empirical contingencies of human act-living, not contingent facticities …. Rather, … these lived experiences … must have their essentially necessary 739
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and everywhere identical structure” (Hua IX, 38/27). Toward the end of his life, Husserl even uses the term “structural form” to describe the general character of the most universal form of judgment in his genealogical studies of logic published under the title Experience and Judgment: From this exposition of the original givenness of a universal content “in general”, it is evident that the universal being thus “in general” is a higher structural form which includes in its sense the idea of a particular “in general” and raises it to a higher form.1 Thus it can be said that the phenomenological method of analysis practiced by Husserl includes already a structural, if not yet structuralist, perspective. In the post-Husserlian development of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty is among the frst philosophers to embrace the method of structural analysis in his effort to provide a phenomenological elucidation of the specifc character of human experience. In his frst book The Structure of Behavior (fnished in 1939 but frst published 1942), Merleau-Ponty introduces the structural study of the three different modes of behavior shown in the three levels of organisms.2 They are respectively: 1) syncretic behaviors in simple organisms such as insects, which are basically limited to refex actions as response to stimulus of the environment; 2) amovable behaviors in higher animals such as hens and chimpanzees, which are vital activities exhibiting comprehension of structural relations beyond mere physical properties through genuinely learning activities; and 3) symbolic behaviors specifc to humans, which, by means of symbols and signs, serve to express their sentiments, choices, and refections through the projection of a virtual space on the basis of, but also superimposed on, their original life-world.These three modes of behavior correspond respectively to those of the material order, the vital order, and the human order of spirit or mind. Merleau-Ponty has integrated in a critical manner the fndings of Gestalt theorists such as Wolfgang Köhler, Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein into the phenomenological method demonstrated by Husserl. Merleau-Ponty declares that all behaviors, even at the lowest level, have to be understood as “forms,” namely: total processes whose properties are not the sum of those which the isolated parts would possess …. [T]here is form wherever the properties of a system are modifed by every change brought about in a single one of its parts and, on the contrary, are conserved when they all change while maintaining the same relationship among themselves. (Merleau-Ponty 1942, 49–50/47) Thus to Merleau-Ponty the basic structures of behavior are forms that are dialectical, reciprocal, and dynamic relations irreducible to mechanical causality determined linearly. In addition, these three modes or orders of behavior do not exist in isolation from one another, but rather relate to one another in an integrative manner.The higher orders of behaviors integrate that or those of the lower order(s) to form a hierarchy of behaviors of increasing complexity. Each order of behavior exhibits properties characteristic of itself in view of exercising some specifc function. Yet even in the lowest order of behavior, that of the physical order, properties and laws have to be understood by the notion of “structure” or “form,” which is defned as an ensemble of forces in a state of equilibrium or of constant change such that no law is formulable for each part taken separately and such that each vector is determined in size and direction by all the others …. In other words, each form constitutes a feld of forces characterized by a law which has no meaning outside the limits of 740
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the dynamic structure considered, and which on the other hand assigns its properties to each internal point so much so that they will never be absolute properties, properties of this point. (Merleau-Ponty 1942, 147–148/137–138) In short, the phenomenological descriptions undertaken by Merleau-Ponty in The Structure of Behavior serve to show that the three orders of behavior are structurally distinct but ontologically intertwined.They obey the logic of the whole and the parts in which the whole exhibits a unitary meaning, which is beyond the quantitative summation of the parts and is irreducible to them. The logic of the whole and the parts receives further attention in Merleau-Ponty’s second book Phenomenology of Perception (1945). In contrast to empiricism and intellectualism, which both deny any meaningful confguration to the object perceived in an act of perception, Merleau-Ponty shows through phenomenological descriptions that perceptual experience even at the elementary level is a self-organized activity. The basic component of elementary perception is the Gestalt, which is the threshold of the meaningful whole articulated through the appearance of the fgure against the background (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 9–10, 4). It shows, in addition, that any meaning formation, even elementary perceptual meaning, is diacritical in nature, in which a movement of differentiation is involved and plays a constitutive role. Merleau-Ponty is thus entirely in tune with the structural linguistics of Saussure. One of the central concepts of Merleau-Ponty’s very rich phenomenology of the embodied subject undertaken in the 1945 masterwork, the corporeal schema, also functions as a kind of Gestalt: it is the inter-sensorial unity as the basic meaning bearing corporeal gesture of the human subject at the pre-refective level.The corporeal schema is also self-organized. Its introduction serves to express that the spatial and temporal unity, the inter-sensorial unity, or the sensorimotor unity of the body is, so to speak, an in principle unity, to express that this unity is not limited to contents actually and fortuitously associated in the course of our experience, that it somehow precedes them and in fact makes their association possible. (Merleau-Ponty 1942, 115–116/102) Here again Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the precedence of the corporeal schema as the structural unitary form over the particular sensorial contents and their association.This observation is in strict conformity with the structural method. It is with the concept of corporeal schema that Merleau-Ponty is able to give a phenomenologically based philosophical elucidation of the phenomenon of phantom-limb. If structuralism is understood as a kind of philosophy for the human sciences,3 characterized by its structural method and its anti-psychological and anti-positivist position, as well as its adherence to the logic of the whole and the parts, phenomenology, which accepts all of the above principles in theory and practice, should be considered as an ally of structuralism.
70.3. Phenomenology faced to structuralism in its polemical usage Notwithstanding the adherence of phenomenological philosophers to the same basic principles of the structural method, the later prevalence of the structural method in the human sciences, which has given rise to structuralism as a school, has rebounded onto phenomenology as a target of its polemical attack. Led by Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structural anthropologist, Roland Barthes, the literary theorist, Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst, and later by the philosopher 741
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Michel Foucault, the success of structuralism in France rendered the term phenomenology hardly audible to the French intellectual public in the 1960s, except to be understood as a pale and outmoded philosophy of subject. Other than the criticism by Lévi-Strauss of Sartre’s philosophy of subject,4 Foucault’s stigmatization of the philosophy of subject by the expression “the disappearance of man” (“la disparition de l’homme”) (Foucault 1966, 397/386), an expression that is not only directed against Sartre, but also against the phenomenology of Husserl and implicitly that of Merleau-Ponty, put phenomenology as a whole in a position of defense in the intellectual climate of France in the 1960s. The basic reason for structuralist thinkers to take Husserl’s phenomenology as their main target of attack is that Husserl’s phenomenology after the Logical Investigations evolved into transcendental phenomenology, expressed in Ideas I (1913).After the operation of the transcendental reduction, designed by Husserl as the methodological guarantee against the naivety of the natural attitude, which maintains not only the pre-refective belief of the existence of the world but also that every worldly existent belongs to the order of natural reality, the transcendental refective consciousness emerges as the constitutive origin of the meaning and ontic validity of every object.This confers an idealist appearance to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Owning to the ambiguity of the term “constitution” employed by Husserl, phenomenology, in particular Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, is often considered as a philosophical subjectivism that reduces all meaning formation to transcendental subjectivity. Some commentators simply present Husserlian phenomenology and structuralism as two diametrically opposite modes of thought. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow are among the most notorious of these commentators.They present their view in the following way: The structuralist approach attempts to dispense with both meaning and the subject by fnding objective laws which govern all human activity …. Structuralists attempt to treat human activity scientifcally by fnding basic elements (concepts, actions, classes of words) and the rules or laws by which they are combined ….Transcendental phenomenology, as defned and practiced by Edmund Husserl, is the diametric opposite of structuralism. It accepts the view that man is totally object and totally subject, and investigates the meaning-giving activity of the transcendental ego which gives meaning to all objects including its own body, its own empirical personality, and the culture and history which it “constitutes” as conditioning its empirical self. (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, xix–xx) In this presentation, Dreyfus and Rabinow commit several errors in the understanding of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. 1.The “transcendental ego” is not “man” as an anthropological existence, but the transcendental consciousness that emerges after the transcendental reduction. 2. The transcendental ego does not give meaning arbitrarily, but assures the role of the subjective pole in the essential structure of the phenomenal feld, which is the necessary structural referent of any meaning conferred to an object.Thus, Husserlian transcendental phenomenology is never a unilaterally subjectivistic philosophy. In fact, though there is an idealist appearance in the transcendental phenomenology in Husserl’s Ideas I, its core is the description of the essential structural form and structural components of the feld of phenomenality. Intentionality of consciousness as the key to the essential structure of the feld of appearance is always understood according to the index of subject– object correlation as in the Logical Investigations.The meaning of an object in the phenomenal feld is elucidated through its status as intentional object of consciousness. It is always this intentional relation or correlation that defnes the mode of appearance of any object whatsoever.The 742
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term “constitution” chosen by Husserl to account for the event of meaning formation should be understood as “meaning announced to the transcendental consciousness” in this structure of subject–object correlation, rather than as meaning given out unilaterally by the transcendental subject. For the transcendental consciousness never interprets or gives meaning to a given object arbitrarily. As refective consciousness, the transcendental consciousness plays both a passive and an active role. It plays the passive role of receiving the meaning announced about the object, and also plays the active role of confrming this meaning according to the mode of givenness of the object in question.That is why Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology does not operate Kant’s Copernican revolution (overturn) by demanding the conformity of the object to the thinking subject. On the contrary, Husserl’s transcendental reduction operates an overturn of this Kantian overturn by demanding the transcendental consciousness as the refective subject to conform itself with the givenness of the phenomenal feld. What is important is that the transcendental consciousness assures the validity of meaning formation through its refective acts. Under the transcendentally refective attitude, consciousness plays the role of the guarantee of the validity of the meaning of the object announced within this intentional relation; otherwise the meaning announced risks being arbitrary. In this sense, transcendental phenomenology is never unilaterally subject oriented, as misunderstood by its structuralist critiques, but always maintains the subject–object correlation. One of the major criticisms of structuralists against Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is related to the negligence of the central role of language in the activity of meaning formation. To Lévi-Strauss, the rich meanings of myths of peoples without writing is the proof that language alone is necessary for meaning formation in which the subject has no role to play. In particular, the structures he discovers in these myths often operate unconsciously at the very depth of the human mind. In resonance to this, Michel Foucault, in the Preface to the frst French edition of Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, declares that he is not working on the history of language of madness, but rather “the archaeology of this silence” (Foucault 1994, 160/xxviii). Myths of peoples without writing and the mind of the madmen reduced to silence are, of course, objects that can never be attained by the transcendental reduction.They are narratives without authors and thus beyond the reach of the transcendental refective subject. Yet Foucault himself, in order to argue that insanity or unreason can have its own meaning or “rationality,” refers to Hölderlin and Nietzsche as immensely talented creative authors. But from where do the creative works of these authors come? How are they created? In the language of structuralism, these are the questions of the how, the where and the when of the formation of the structures (Piaget 1968, 10). The negation of any role given to the subject by structuralism results in the impossibility of accounting for creation and action.The human will is necessary for the understanding of creation and action. But, to structuralism, the human will seems inexistent.There is also the problem of the becoming of reason, as well as the relation between reason and unreason. If there is the distinction between reason and unreason, is reason a result of the state of culture? If so, then unreason is inherent to the state of nature: this runs counter to the thesis of Foucault, which argues that unreason or madness is a product of modern Western culture. In any case, there is the problem of the genesis of reason and unreason. There is also the problem of the genesis of institutions from the sedimentation of new ideas and new actions in the social existence of human being. And for the individual human being, when she is aware of her situation, her birth and her death, that is to say her limits as a fnite existence, the question of choice and preference arises. These are the questions that evolve around the problem of individual existence. But it seems evident that structuralism cannot provide any help in this area. 743
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With reference to the problem of the condition of possibility of creativity and action, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the embodied subject provides a much better solution than structuralism. In his genetic phenomenological study of language, Merleau-Ponty advances two important theses. 1.There are pre-linguistic or extra-linguistic meanings manifested through bodily gestures in the form of “gestural signifcation” (signifcation gestuelle) (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 209/184). In the era of globalization, traveling to a foreign country in which we do not master its language is a common experience. Facial expressions such as a smile and bodily gestures such as stretching out a hand to shake with an unknown person are very important ways to express meaning outside of language. Gestural signifcation is also fundamental in the understanding of music, paintings, dance, and drama. 2. Underneath the accomplished speech, there is the speaking speech or speech in the nascent state (la parole à l’état naissant) (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 229–202). The latter is a frst-time expression in which a ready-made articulated meaningful expression is not at the disposal by the speaking subject. The speaking subject wants to inaugurate a new meaning. Language is needed, but not all meanings are linguistic meanings and there are conditions other than language such as the mind, the intention, and creativity.With speech in the nascent state, Merleau-Ponty not only can explain the ordinary experience of diffculty in frst expressions, but can also understand creative works in writing and thoughts. Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology has the immense merit of showing that the society of peoples without writing is not at all a primitive society as it observes the basic structures of organization of social and cultural life of the so-called advanced and civilized societies.The mind of these peoples is neither primitive in the sense of lacking of a logic of thinking. Rather, the savage mind follows a logic of the concrete.Yet why is there the formation of sophisticated institutions in peoples with writing? With writing, there is the genesis of institution in human culture as history and the consciousness of history. The structural method provides no key to this question necessary for the understanding of the genesis of the various forms of human culture and their mutation. By investigating the mode of being of objects outside of natural reality, Husserl has provided a key to the understanding of the genesis of culture in his discovery of the ideality of spiritual existence, which is the basis of historicity, in the manuscript Origin of Geometry.The late Merleau-Ponty has pursued further the Husserlian effort of genetic phenomenology to sketch an ontology of the fesh as ontology of the wild being to understand the genesis of ideas. Merleau-Ponty suggests that in addition to purely intelligible ideas there are sensible ideas which not only draw the line between nature and culture, but also connect nature to culture (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 195–199/149–152). Ideas can act on nature in such a way that they transform nature by intertwining with it to form culture as institutions. The action of ideas on the human mind plays an important role in the process of coming to awareness of the situation in which the human being, individually and collectively, fnds herself. This process of coming to awareness of the human mind is at the origin of the genesis of the consciousness of value and the motivation to actions.Actions eventually lead to the modifcation and even transformation of the natural life process.Thus the question of existence is not a question posed by a particular school of thought but by human life itself and shows a perennial status. While structuralism cannot answer the question of the genesis of culture as an institutional form of collective life from nature, it also evades the question of existence. In a certain way, structuralism as a thinking movement à la mode came to an end in France when students taking part in the events of May 1968 shouted: “La structure ne descend pas dans la rue!” (“Structure does not go down into the street.”) While structuralism is a school of thought, phenomenology is both a method and a philosophy of subject attentive to questions of life and existence as well as the genesis of culture and institutions and historicity. 744
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Notes 1 Husserl 1973, 372, emphasis by Husserl. 2 The term “behavior” used by Merleau-Ponty is basically the equivalent of the phenomenological concept of experience, in contrast to the connotation that the North American school of behaviorism confers on it. Cf., the admirably clear and well-informed entry on “Maurice Merleau-Ponty” by Ted Toadvine in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Toadvine 2018). 3 This is the subtitle of the book by Peter Caws, Structuralism (Caws 1988). 4 The whole last chapter (Ch. IX,“Histoire et dialectique”) of La pensée sauvage by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss 1962) is devoted to the criticism of Sartre’s effort to elucidate the role of subject of practice in history in Critique de la raison dialectique, 1 (Sartre 1960).
References Caws, Peter. 1988. Structuralism. NJ: Humanities Press. Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard. English translation: The Order of Things. 1970. New York: Random House. ———. 1994.“Preface” to the First French edition of Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. In: Dits et écrits, I. Eds. D. Defert and F. Ewald. Paris: Gallimard. English translation: “Preface. To the 1961 Edition”. In: History of Madness.Trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa. 2006. London/New York: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund. 1973. Experience and Judgment. Trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1942. La structure du comportement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. English translation: The Structure of Behavior.Trans.A. L. Fisher. 1963. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. English translation: Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. D.A. Landes. 2012. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 1964. Le visible et l’invisible. Ed. C. Lefort. Paris: Gallimard. English translation: The Visible and the Invisible.Trans.A. Lingis. 1968. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Piaget, Jean. 1968. Structuralisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1960. Critique de la raison dialectique,T. 1. Paris: Gallimard. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1972. Cours de linguistique générale. Eds. C. Bally, A. Sechehaye, and A. Riedlinger, nouvelle édition critique par Tullio de Mauro. Paris: Payot. Toadvine, Ted. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/e ntries/merleau-ponty/, retrieved 19 September 2018.
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PART V
Phenomenology in the world
71 AFRICA Bado Ndoye
The history of ideas does not always follow predictable paths. Sometimes it goes through ways so tortuous that it comes to connect cultures and geographical areas where nothing is predisposed to meet.The reception of phenomenology in Africa is a good example of this. Husserl, as everyone knows, is considered the philosopher of “European humanity” who, as such, never worried about Africa.When he happened to mention African or non-Western people in general, it was always in order to make a contrast with what he used to call the “Idea of Europe”, as if the very essence of the latter could not be cleared if not opposed to a radical exteriority. His purpose is then so scandalous that one can wonder if he never really expected to be read and commented on one day by Papuans, Indians, Gypsies, and Africans, those radical fgures of otherness. However, Husserl is paradoxically massively present in the discussions that have continued to mobilize African philosophers around the famous book of the Belgian missionary, Reverend Father Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, published in 1947.1 Obviously, this does not imply an “‘African’ phenomenological moment”, because phenomenology is not yet really institutionalized as such in the continent, for example in journals, scientifc societies, annual conferences, or dedicated research centers, as is the case elsewhere.2 But when we consider that the history of philosophy in contemporary Africa has been, to some extent, the history of the controversy around Tempels’ book, we can see how phenomenology is closely linked to the birth and the history of philosophy in Africa. More specifcally, it has signifcantly infected this debate by infuencing not only the positions of a central fgure of it, namely the Beninese philosopher Paulin J. Hountondji in his criticism of the so-called “ethno-philosophy”, but also, though in a negative way, all those who saw him as the representative of what they called “Europhilosophy” (Diagne 1981). The hypothesis we would like to highlight here is the following: the way Hountondji reads Husserl is so faithful that it seems to marry the two characteristic moments of the evolution of Husserl’s phenomenology as it’s generally established between, on one hand, an early Husserl, exclusively concerned with theory of knowledge and epistemology, and on the other hand, a later one, rather anxious to fnd that same epistemological requirement in the soil of the “Life-world’’. As led by Hountondji, it seems that the criticism of ethno-philosophy is based on the Husserlian stance of philosophy defned as a rigorous science.According to such a stance, philosophy as a “worldview’’ is an avatar of skepticism and of irrationalism.That’s why Hountondji’s approach, inspired by such a conception, may appear at frst sight to be denying any kind of importance to local cultures against which philosophy should be established. 749
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Then, philosophy must be literally polarized by the ideal of universality and scientifc rigor, without which there is no rational knowledge.Thus, when in the 1990s Hountondji began to examine issues related to culture, in order to think the endogenous development of sciences in Africa, he didn’t deny the criticism against Tempels he made on behalf of the scientifc ideal defned by Husserl, nor the heritage of the latter, contrary to what a superfcial reading might lead one to believe. Rather, by highlighting the cultural substructure from which emerged African endogenous knowledge, Hountondji remained faithful to the inspiration of Husserl and to his famous thesis, according to which scientifc idealities are determined by the Lebenswelt, even though he did not explicitly mobilize this concept in his published works. It’s the logic that unites these two moments, both in Husserl and in Hountondji, that we would like to discuss, in order to show that it can give a new coherence to the contemporaneous African philosophical debates.
71.1. The idea of philosophy As a former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure de la rue d’Ulm, Paris, Hountondji passes generally for an Althusserian. In most of his texts where he explicitly referred to Althusserian analysis, he mostly sets up an idea of philosophy that could oppose Tempels’. But one cannot grasp the very critical scope of these texts if one does not bring them in relation to the issue of science as aroused from the very beginning of Husserlian phenomenology. So it’s towards Husserl that we must turn, that is to say, to the academic works Hountondji devoted to him, especially in his postgraduate doctoral thesis in 1970 on the subject:“The idea of science in the Prolegomena and in the frst logical Investigation”, conducted under the direction of Paul Ricoeur.This work is the foundation of his philosophical orientation because it gives the frst outlines of what will constitute the theoretical justifcations of his rejection of ethno-philosophy. Indeed, the question of the epistemological status of philosophy is not a question among others for Husserl, for it illuminates his whole project and can allow us to track the different stages of the development of phenomenology. From the Logical Investigations (1901) to Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911) and Renovation of Man and Culture published in the Japanese magazine The Kaizo (1923–1924) to the texts collected in Teleologie in der Philosophiegeschichte (Hua XXIX) (1936–1937), Husserl supported the development of phenomenology by a patient and sustained meditation on the meaning of philosophical activity he conceived in accordance with an ideal of scientifcity that should not only emancipate it from the theoretical models inherited from experimental sciences, but should even be able to found the latter. For Husserl, the positive scientifcity of natural sciences is a factual datum. In other words, it is a fact of history whose true meaning could only be grasped if related to the primary sphere of donation where all scientifc practice originated. By such a gesture, as everyone knows, it is a question to reveal the genetic process by which scientifc concepts are generated from the natural life, a process that the positive practice of sciences tends to overshadow. It is clear, therefore, that if this ideal of scientifcity is wider than that of the experimental sciences, it is partly because it has a more original relationship with the pre-scientifc word. It is also because it is closely in accordance with the requirement of selfrefexivity by which science should be able to get back to itself, and thus, render account of the methodological approaches by which it proceeds. But in the last part of his life, facing the rise of Nazism in Germany, Husserl articulated this requirement of scientifcity as a practical concern. The challenge now is to show that the aspiration to rational knowledge implies a fundamental ethical issue, that of the individual responsibility of each philosopher to think the history of philosophy as the unity of an intention that drove European history since its origins in Ancient Greece. Such a history is inhabited by a telos that prescribes its unity, despite the apparent disper750
Africa
sion of philosophical systems.The task of the philosopher, then, should be to uncover the latent yearning for unity that springs instinctively in each particular philosophy and to appropriate it for his own account. History, understood in this way, should overcome the opposition between factual doctrines by releasing the secret intention that unites them. By doing so, one can fnd the requirement of universality underlying philosophical doctrines and give himself the means to defeat historicism, and, therefore, ultimately, irrationalism. It’s this teleological conception of philosophy as rigorous science that Paulin Hountondji addressed in the African philosophical debate, and particularly in his criticism of Tempels’ work. If in the historical context of the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, dominated by the issue of national liberation struggles, Husserl found himself paradoxically to be the main reference of a considerable part of the intelligentsia and the African left, it’s probably because the phenomenological conception of philosophy as rigorous science, as Hountondji would defend it, was seen at that moment as the only true remedy against what was then considered a kind of “philosophical nationalism” that had fourished across the continent in the wake of the Blackness movement (Negritude). Published in French in 1947, slightly less than ten years after the frst texts on Negritude,Tempels’ book immediately aroused the enthusiasm of African intellectuals, including Senghor,Alioune Diop, and Cheikh Anta Diop, who saw this as a refutation of Lévy-Bruhl’s thesis on the pre-logical mind of “primitive societies”. As many have noticed, it is probably in this book that the term “philosophy” has been applied for the frst time to an African system of thought. The methodological premise of the book, which is shared by many in Africa, is the assumption that there are in African societies unspoken philosophical thoughts that are experienced daily and that control the entire existence of the African communities. The task is then to have these philosophical thoughts clearly expressed by a process that will consist in reconstructing its logical consistency.With respect to the populations studied by Tempels, we are dealing with an ontology organized around the key concept of vital force: all things that exist are endowed with a specifc force, and the universe in its totality is a hierarchical system organized according to their degree of intensity. If, according to Tempels, the difference between beings refects the intensity of the force that characterizes them, this force can be increased or decreased depending on whether we act in accordance with good or evil.Thus, ontology leads to an ethic that can be formulated as a categorical imperative:“Act always in order to increase the strength to life of all Muntu (men)”. As we can see, this ontology proceeds methodologically as a hermeneutical approach based on empirical data that are collected in the feld and cannot, therefore, be regarded as the work of a Bantu philosophical subject, but rather as that of Tempels himself. However, such a process is never neutral. It always obeys biases and choices, consciously or not, and Hountondji’s work will consist of tracking, under the ethno-philosophical discourse’s appearance of objectivity, the epistemological and ideological premises that guide it.As he wrote, the ethno-philosophers believed they were reproducing existing philosophemes whereas they were producing them. They believed they were telling when in fact they created. This commendable modesty is a treason in fact: the clearing of the philosopher before his own speech was inseparable from a projection that made him arbitrarily give his people his own theoretical and ideological choices. (Hountondji 1977, 21) The principle of such a criticism will be to focus on what appears to be a mix of genres, a regrettable confusion between philosophy and ethnology that consists of theorizing on ethnological data that have been too hastily promoted to the status of philosophical concepts. 751
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Thus, according to Hountondji, by expanding the concept of philosophy to tales, myths, cosmologies, and other cosmogonies, ethno-philosophy disqualifes itself both from a methodological point of view and from its contents. To this criticism one can add others, more explicitly political and ideological, according to which Tempels’ work could be seen as a fantasized vision of African societies that are falsely perceived as “unanimist”. Such a stance excludes the existence of different individual thoughts and could explain why Africans are inevitably doomed to eternal stagnation. All these criticisms developed by Hountondji, Marcien Towa, Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, and others are rejected by “la contre-critique”, that is to say, by all those who see in the defnition of philosophy as proposed by Hountondji, who follows Husserl, an undue restriction of it which depends, moreover, on a purely Western criteriology. Thus, Hountondji and all those who rejected Tempels’ works will be accused of developing an idea of philosophy that disconnects them from the African realities.The Senegalese philosopher Alassane Ndaw, for instance, will seek to show that there is a great similarity between pre-Socratic thoughts and those of the Africans, and there is no reason, therefore, to allow the frsts of the philosophical and to reject the seconds. Considering the example of Platonician philosophy, which was widely inspired by the ancient Greek traditions, he goes further and says: “You could even say, by analogy, that all philosophy is ethno-philosophy. No serious philosopher can neglect the problems of his soil and his ethnos, modern or traditional” (Ndaw 1966). As summarized, we can see that beyond its multiple twists, the debate on ethno-philosophy is ultimately settled around the question of the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences, particularly ethnology, and then, subsequently, around the question of the universal in its relation to the particular. Therefore, when Hountondji began a sociological refection on African indigenous knowledge, in a move that seemed to replicate Tempels’ gesture, there were some African scholars who said that he had given up the critique of ethno-philosophy, and thus, Husserl’s stance of philosophy as science as well. But as Souleymane Bachir Diagne judiciously put it: If [Hountondji] returns […] to what was written and discussed and on the answers he already made to critics which did not miss […], it’s above all, simply to make visible to those who misunderstood his theoretical path because they have had a truncated understanding of it, the whole totality of it.Thus, before the criticism of ethno-philosophy to which it is often reduced, there has been work on Husserl, and that’s why “after” this criticism, or rather at the same time, with it and through it there is the thinking about science. (Hountondji 1997) In other words, when Hountondji thematizes the issue of the re-appropriation of indigenous knowledge, far from breaking with his former stance, he continues a meditation that we cannot grasp the meaning of if we do not relate it to his interest in science.We think that, in order to explain this thesis, it is necessary to assume a continuity inspired by Husserl’s course, who himself came from a fgure of Reason mainly focused on the egological subject and moved to a conception of rationality that recognizes that its own principle is not immanent to it, but resides in non-thematized presuppositions that are buried in the very depths of the surrounding world. To support this thesis, it is necessary to see the reasons that led Husserl, in the last years of his life, to rethink the question of the basis of science within the framework of the Lebenswelt. Such a decision led him to consider in a new way the links existing between philosophy and social sciences, especially with ethnology. 752
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71.2. Lebenswelt and the basis of sciences In order to solve the diffculties generated by the objection of transcendental solipsism, Husserl, in the 1930s, had to confront the task of unveiling, by his famous “question in return” (Rückfrage) the forgotten foundations of scientifc rationality, as they are given in the world of cultures and mentalities, that is to say, in the natural attitude that transcendental reduction had nevertheless switched off. Husserl’s initial project, as we said, was to fnd an ultimate foundation for science. By means of reduction, he frst found it in the “ground of absolute being,” that is to say, in the Ego, thereby defning transcendental phenomenology as Egology. But faced with the objection of transcendental solipsism, he was forced to root the Ego into the primordial ground of corporeality.Then, from the Ego, Husserl moved to the bodily life, which has brought up many questions about the coherence of the phenomenological project. By this second reduction, Husserl discovered that the Ego is always preceded by a materiality on which are built the theoretical thoughts that appear then, as surface effects. Logical acts are then returned to the “basement” of primordial strata that the Ego can access only through the mediation of the body and the surrounding world.Thus, as the task of the frst reduction was to clear the eidetic structure of the Ego, the task after the second reduction is to uncover the essential structures of life-world. The shift that phenomenology went through is noteworthy, because it took its meaning in a new direction.While in the Cartesian Meditations, The Ideas, and contemporaneous texts the basis of the Ego is to be found in the corporeal nature, so much that biology was seen for a moment as frst philosophy, in subsequent works, Husserl saw this kind of foundation as an avatar of objectivism. It was frst in Husserliana XV and in the Crisis that he rejected this naturalistic and reifying approach of the life-world. In fact, if the latter always refers to everyday life, intuitive perception can never meet simple sensory substrates as such, but socially constructed objects, and therefore spiritual objects that are already fully loaded with human intentions. In other words, nature is always invested of culture and cannot, therefore, be held as primordial ground, because it is a result of idealization produced by experimental sciences.This means that the presence of other subjects is always required for a nature and a world to be possible as such. Hence, it’s towards transcendental inter-subjectivity, understood as an original pregiven, that we should instead turn, because it is the only real subject that could give to itself the infnite horizon of objectivity as a correlate, and thus, could constitute the world.As Husserl put it, As persons we are in relation to a common surrounding world – we are in a personal association: these belong together.We could not be persons for others if there were not over and against us a common world. Each one is constituted together with the other. Each Ego can become a person in a personal association only when, by means of comprehension, a relation to a surrounding world is produced. (Hua IV, 197/387) If, as Husserl says in the Crisis, “There is, for essential reasons, no zoology of peoples” (Hua VI, 320/275), he means that a people could never be a natural entity whose essence could be captured and fxed in defnitive natural categories, but a fow of spiritual life.Then we can see why it is always as a temporal dynamics, in the basis of a sedimented history, that each community experiences itself in a reciprocity that creates relations from man to man. Ultimately, therefore, it is towards a non-objectivist sociology, namely a transcendental sociology, that we must thus turn to in order to ground rationality. Such a sociology will be developed as a systematic ontology of social data. However, those data could only be delivered by the positive sciences, specifcally ethnology. In his famous letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, (1935) Husserl writes: 753
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Naturally, we have long known that every human being has a “world-representation,” that every nation, every supranational cultural grouping lives, so to speak, in a distinct world as its own environing world, and so again every historical time in its [world].Yet, in contrast to this empty generalization, your work and your exceptional theme has made us sensitive to something overwhelmingly new: namely, that it is a possible and highly important and great task to “empathize” with a humanity living self-contained in living generative sociality and to understand this humanity as having, in and through its socially unifed life, the world, which for it is not a “world-representation” but rather the world that actually exists for it.Thereby we learn to understand its ways of apperceiving, identifying, thinking, thus its logic and its ontology, that of its environing world with the respective categories. (Husserl 2008) This letter is important in more ways than one because it prescribes a methodological recommendation that goes in the direction opened by the later Hountondji, even though the latter never explicitly mentioned it in his published works. In fact, it seems, according to this letter, that Husserl was no longer satisfed by his method of imaginative variation to grasp otherness in its very foreign cultural forms. It seems that he posed the necessity for an effective encounter with historical cultures, as that was the only way to provide a full understanding of what was the very best of their surrounding world. Then, only anthropology could provide such knowledge, as explained by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom the moment of relativism, as mentioned in this letter, is not only necessary and unsurpassable. For him, it should be necessary to reverse the roles of ethnology and philosophy in order to proscribe the prominent rule of the latter upon the historical sciences. According to this, one could say, as mentioned above, that there was an early Husserl, insensitive to the historical reality of cultures and for whom the eidetic reduction in its formal operations is suffcient to grasp the reality of foreign societies, and a later Husserl for whom the heterogeneity of cultures cannot be overcome simply by the use of morphological essences, and who thought, therefore, that the methods and resources anthropology makes available must be our starting point. But regardless of the way we understand this interpretation – Derrida, for instance, rejected it in his famous introduction to the French edition of The Origin of Geometry – it can account for Hountondji’s approach in his last writings. It’s quite clear that the fgure of Reason that emerged from this theming of the Lebenswelt has very little to do with that of the Cartesian Meditations, and consequently with that of the early phenomenology that Hountondji mobilized in his criticism of ethno-philosophy. It is clearly explained here that science is built on a pregiven universe of meaning that existed previously and that could not be taken back as a theme if one doesn’t renounce the idealistic requirement of a science without presuppositions, as had been established in the Logical Investigations. This is probably why Hountondji never really mobilized systematically the concept of Lebenswelt in the mid-1980s when he began, not to rehabilitate ethnology he never really disowned, but to identify the philosophical signifcance that underlies Tempels’ work. Rather, it is thanks to the work of French anthropologist Marc Augé, on “ideo-logical”, i.e. the logic of collective representations, as he explained himself, that he turned to read Tempelsian works, which now appear to him as the necessary reminder to a self-evident truth, that of the radical impossibility of an absolute beginning in the feld of thought and, therefore, the need for any human, even and especially if he wants to be innovative, to take root in the concrete soil of a tradition. From these re-readings, a lesson is learned according to him:
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the particular exists and must be taken into account. However, instead of enclosing himself into it, one should be aware of it in order to get through, to put it back in its place and into context and, if possible, to go beyond. (Hountondji 2007, 207) The new research program that emerged from there will then be to undertake, in the feld of social sciences, a positive survey of African thoughts, because it is has become a matter of, according to Hountondji, holding both ends of the chain – the empirical and the transcendental – knowing that there is freedom only for [he] who knows to accept himself and assume his affliations, but conversely, affliations were never, and have never wanted to be any more in Africa than elsewhere, a prison. (ibid., 212) This direction will then guide the two important works he coordinated. The frst, Les savoirs endogènes: pistes pour une recherche (Hountondji 1994) and the second, La rationalité, une ou plurielle (Hountondji 2007), in which the question of African scientifc research extraversion is posed in terms both of the critical appropriation of these traditional knowledge and the questioning of what should be a rationality capable of integrating them in the unity of an exigent thought which is anxious of its own coherence and aware of the intelligibility of its own practical approaches. It must be possible to operate not a leap from a mode of thought to another, from a logical universe to another, but a passage, a conscious and intelligible trajectory whose steps are identifable. (Hountondji 1994, 12) Then, for this new research program, it will not only be a matter of rehabilitating the indigenous knowledge through a critical validation approach, but mostly “to build bridges, to restore the unity of knowledge, and more simply, more profoundly, the unity of man” (ibid., 13). Hountondji has not personally engaged himself in that direction as he would have liked, although he has organized two symposia on this issue that resulted in two important publications. But nonetheless, this new direction of research could take into account philosophical works on language, politics, etc. in Africa that explicitly refer to anthropological data as a starting point for a further theorization. Although these authors did not appeal to Hountondji nor to Husserlian phenomenology, their approaches refect, to some extent, the methodological recommendations to pass through the element of the particular, in this instance the local cultures, as a gateway to the universal.
71.3. Conclusion We started from the hypothesis that Hountondji’s evolution of thought reproduced somewhat the passage, in Husserl’s phenomenology, from an idealistic fgure of Reason to a conception of the transcendental subject who’s more conscious of its roots within its surrounding world. It seems, if one is aware of the evolution of his entire career, that on such a central issue in Husserl’s phenomenology as that of the subject, Hountondji developed a philosophy that could be situated in the wake of that of the Crisis. Like Husserl, who did not abandon the requirement for the
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apodicticity of the transcendental Ego, even when he overcame his so-called Cartesian moment by establishing the subject in its social origins, Hountondji maintained frmly the primacy of the philosophizing subject upon the tradition.Then, even though we recognize that every thought takes shape in a cultural substratum that feeds it, in fact, We merely shift the problem. Due to the fact we recognize these cultural determinants, one cannot help recognizing that, at a certain level, tradition itself is plural and as such, offers a range of possibilities that confront the individual [with] the task of determining himself, placing him, again and again, in front of an inescapable responsibility. (Hountondji 2016)
Notes 1 Mamoussé Diagne is right to say that even though the debates on African cultures predate this book, Tempels can be considered the “paradigm of origin”, in the sense that “discussions about the existence or not of an African philosophy refers to his work as an inescapable reference. By this very fact, he is a theoretical ancestor about who a dispute arises over his inheritance” (Diagne 2006). 2 With the notable exception of South Africa, where the Center for Phenomenology in South Africa regularly organizes international meetings. It should also be noted that phenomenology in Africa was essentially Husserlian in its inspiration. That is to say that the debates that led the frst disciples like Heidegger, Patočka, Landgrebe, Levinas, Sartre, or Merleau-Ponty to break with Husserl on certain points of doctrine have had almost no echo on the continent. Certainly, these authors are read and widely commented upon and are studied by African scholars, but their divergence with Husserl does not constitute an essential point in the African philosophical debate
References Diagne, Mamoussé. 2006. De la philosophie et des philosophes en Afrique noire. Dakar: Editions Karthala. Diagne, Pathé. 1981. L’europhilosophie face à la pensée du Négro-Africain. Dakar: Editions Sankoré. Hountondji, Paulin J. 1977. Sur la “philosophie africaine”. Critique de l’ethnophilosophie. Paris: Maspero. ———. 1994. Les savoirs endogènes: pistes pour une recherche. Dakar: Codesria. ———. 1997. Combats pour le sens (Préface). Cotonou: Les Editions du Flamboyant. ———. 2007. La rationalité, une ou plurielle. Dakar: Codesria. ———. 2016. “Ethnophilosophie: le mot et la chose” http://www.etudier.com/dissertations/Ethnophi losophie-Le-Mot/471433.html. Retrieved October 24, 2016. Husserl, Edmund. 2008.“Letter to Lévy-Bruhl”.Trans. L. Steinacher and D. Moran. The New Year Book for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy,VIII, pp. 349–553. Ndaw,Alassane. 1966.“Peut-on parler d’une pensé africaine?”, Présence africaine, 58, pp. 32–46.
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72 AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND Erol Copelj and Jack Reynolds
It may not be a coincidence that, in a country where the vast majority of the population resides in a few big cities, many of the Australian phenomenological fgures that we will meet below were born or enculturated in the margins, in the country or the bush. This puts a new twist on an often heard story in Australian philosophical circles. When asked about why Australian philosophers tend to be ‘realists’, David Armstrong responded that “the strong sunlight and harsh brown landscape of Australia force reality upon us”, inclining philosophers in this country away from the sort of “bullshit” that had taken hold elsewhere, including in Europe, which at least on Michael Devitt’s retelling, has “mists and gentle green landscape” that “weaken the grip on reality” (Devitt 1991, viii).This attitude refects a common misconception about phenomenology, a misconception according to which it is a philosophy that is all about withdrawing from the hard, cold reality to some inner, ephemeral substance – a “woolly mysticism” as Gilbert Ryle once put it.This sentiment fnds expression in James Franklin’s Corrupting the Youth, a provocative history of Australian philosophy: is the inwardness of phenomenology all together healthy? Wallowing in the world of inner experience is all very well, but like drug-taking, it can lead to one’s becoming excessively cut off from the bracing world of the great outdoors …. If phenomenology is the marijuana of the philosophical world, the heroin that beckons the percentage of hardy souls who are always on the lookout for boundaries to transgress is idealism. (Franklin 2003, 151–156, 194) In stark contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote of phenomenology that: “it has been centuries since philosophy has given evidence of such a realist trend. Phenomenologists have immersed man back into the world, they have restored to his anguish and his sufferings, and to his rebellions too, their full weight” (Sartre 2012, 51). In this view, phenomenology made philosophy more “concrete”, describing objects as seen and touched, and extracting philosophy from them. Ironically, then, contra Armstrong and Devitt, Australian phenomenologists can take the strong sunlight and the harsh brown land as an invitation to look away from all theories, speculations and constructions, and to confront reality just as it enforces itself upon us. Here we may have an Australian rendering of the famous phenomenological motto,‘back to the things themselves!’
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The expression ‘Phenomenology in Australasia’ can be used to designate any of the following activities undertaken by an Australasian philosopher: (1) original phenomenological investigations and/or discoveries; (2) the interpretation, exegesis and translation of classical phenomenological texts; (3) the use of classical phenomenology for the purpose of contributing to contemporary philosophical and interdisciplinary debates; or (4) teaching of phenomenology in Australasian universities and the spreading of phenomenological ideas to the wider Australasian public. Australasian phenomenologists have, and continue to, make important contributions to categories (2)–(4). But there is a lack regarding (1). In terms of scope, execution and focus, we have nothing like Alfred Schutz’s Phenomenology of the Social World or even Jean-Paul Sartre’s A Brief Sketch for a Theory of Emotions, not to mention such classics as Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Heidegger’s Being and Time and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Notwithstanding that what phenomenology is contested and continuously transformed, it is still fair to say that in so far as (1) is concerned, ‘Australasian phenomenology’ designates a promise yet to be fulflled.
Phenomenology in Australia and New Zealand before World War II A diary entry of a key fgure in the history of Australasian phenomenology, William Ralph Boyce Gibson (1869–1935), with whom our historical survey begins, can shed some light on the reasons behind this comparative lack of original phenomenological investigations. Gibson occupied the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne from 1911 to 1935. In 1928 his sabbatical leave took him to Freiburg, where he spent time with Husserl and where he met other well-known phenomenological fgures, most notably Heidegger and Levinas.Thankfully, Gibson kept a diary in which he recorded his impressions of this time, including a discussion with Husserl that lucidly illustrates, on the one hand, Husserl’s insistence that genuine phenomenology calls for actual investigative work and, on the other hand, the reluctance and fear induced by the daunting task of facing the things themselves (here exemplifed by Gibson but which is by no means unique to him).1 The diary entry in question recollects Husserl as claiming that in order to get out of all the conficting views and theories that we face when we open philosophical books—the empty and symbolic representations of phenomena—it is necessary to go back to the things themselves, to the “This must be so”. Gibson’s responds to Husserl thus: I suggested he was a peculiarly begabter Mensch and that we ordinary people needed the stimulus of the world’s more or less distracted but always renovating thinking to help one on and enable one to see, even what Phenomenology required one to see. Husserl’s responds by humbly denying that he has any special gift. Phenomenology does not call for some special gift (of course, as in any other feld, there will be gifted phenomenologists, but not every phenomenologist need be gifted, hard work can make up for it).What it does call for is hard work and a sustained effort:“Husserl rather implied that if there were not more phenomenologists in the world at present it was because they shirked the hard work” (Spiegelberg 1971). Gibson’s own chief contribution, not just to Australasian phenomenology but to the phenomenology in the entire English-speaking world, is without a doubt his translation of Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie I in 1931. This was the standardly used translation of Husserl’s classic work until the 1980s. Gibson authored a number of articles on Husserlian themes, including “The Problem of Real and Ideal in the Phenomenology of Husserl”, read before the Australian Association of Psychology and Philosophy conference in Melbourne in May 1923. Gibson also wrote on the work of Nicolai Hartmann, contemplated 758
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translating Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and conspired (ultimately unsatisfactorily) to have Levinas lecture in Australia. Gibson appointed J. McKellar Stewart (1878–1953) to the University of Melbourne in 1912. Stewart lectured at Melbourne until 1923 and in 1924 he moved to the University of Adelaide, where he was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy, a position in which he remained until 1950. At Adelaide, on the basis of Gibson’s translation, Stewart taught Ideas I, wrote a couple of articles on Husserl, including “Husserl’s phenomenological method” (Stewart 1934) published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, drew extensively on Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic and Cartesian Meditations and put together a book manuscript on phenomenology, which was unfortunately destroyed in a fre in 1939 (the publisher’s copy also perished during the Blitz on London), never to be rewritten again (Grave 1984). Gibson and Stewart were the two leading lights of Australian phenomenology before World War II. In New Zealand, South African-born John Niemeyer Findlay was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Otago from 1932 to 1944. Educated at Oxford, like Gibson he translated a key text of Husserl’s (Logical Investigations), and for this reason alone he is also an important phenomenological fgure in the English-speaking world. During his time in New Zealand, he revived Hegelianism and despite publishing little in the area nonetheless championed the philosophical signifcance of Husserl’s early phenomenology. He also infuenced Arthur Prior and worked on tensed logic, wrote books on Meinong,“rational mysticism” and transcendental refection.While Findlay infuenced philosophy around the world, his impact on the reception of phenomenology in New Zealand is less clear. Indeed, it is probably true to say that the story of New Zealand philosophy gives phenomenology a lesser role than it occupied in Australia throughout the twentieth century.
Phenomenology in Australia and New Zealand after World War II With World War II, analytic philosophy rose to prominence in Australia (and New Zealand). On his retirement, Stewart suggested that the department take a new philosophical direction and, consequently, in 1950 Jack Smart was appointed the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide (Mortensen et al. 2012). While Smart went on to become one of the best and most well-known Australasian philosophers, his appointment played a role in the decline of Australian phenomenology in general and at Adelaide in particular (much as Wilfrid Quine assuming the Chair at Harvard in 1956 had a related effect on that institution, which had previously had a large number of phenomenologists working there or passing through).2 Smart’s disdain for phenomenology is no great secret, and he himself once wrote that “I have moments of despair about philosophy when I think of how so much phenomenological and existential philosophy seems such sheer bosh that I cannot even begin to read it” (Smart 1975). This attitude carried over into action.At Adelaide, Smart removed all ‘continental philosophy’ from the syllabus, including Husserl’s Ideas I. Smart also encouraged a fnal year student, Neil Nilsson, who studied Ideas I under Stewart and who was prepared to engage in a study of the Cartesian Meditations, to drop these topics and to read Ayer and Ryle instead (Grave 1984, 111).3 Australian phenomenology was all but dead during the war years and in the period immediately afterwards.Almost single-handedly, Max Charlesworth brought it back to life. (Incidentally, Charlesworth’s heroics teach that even a single phenomenological voice, unwavering in the face of social pressures and current trends, has the power to signifcantly alter the direction of philosophy in Australasia.) Charlesworth took a position at the University of Melbourne in 1958, after having studied at Louvain, the home of the Husserl Archives and at the time the centre of phenomenology, the place where Merleau-Ponty and other well-known phenom759
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enologists would visit to get access to Husserl’s Ideas II and other signifcant texts that had not yet been translated. Working against the current orthodoxy of ‘Wittgensteinian Melbourne’, Charlesworth’s primary interest was in French, existentialist phenomenology, as developed by Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone Beauvoir. In 1967, he conducted what was Australia’s ‘frst full course in contemporary continental philosophy’, the focus of which was on the just mentioned phenomenological fgures (but he also discussed Husserl’s Ideas). In 1974 Charlesworth was appointed Foundation Planning Dean of the Humanities at Deakin University and fostered a culture that continued to encourage phenomenology, appointing staff like Douglas Kirsner, who published a book on Sartre (Kirsner 1977), and R. D. Laing in the 1970s. Charlesworth played a signifcant role in helping spread existential ideas to the wider Australian public: in 1975, he produced a series of programmes for the ABC on existentialism, in particular that of Sartre, from which his book The Existentialists and Jean-Paul Sartre was born. The radio programme was an overwhelming success.This—interest in existential phenomenological philosophy amongst the general public—was not just a localised phenomenon. Facing the void left behind by the war, the whole world felt the immediate reality of such questions as:What does it mean to be free? (This question must have felt especially real in the occupied lands, such as France.) What is death? What is anxiety? What is the purpose of life? And so on. Given the nature of the times, it is perhaps unsurprising that an existentially oriented phenomenology, which can be understood as the application of the phenomenological method to existential themes, would capture the common imagination. Around this same time Melbourne’s Existentialist Society was formed (which is still running), with the objective of making existentialist ideas accessible to the general public. Arguably the nature of the times also played a role in the shadowing of Husserlian phenomenology by its existential successor, just as they arguably did in post-World War I Germany and the Heideggerian eclipse of Husserl too (Philipse 2003). William Doniela, an undergraduate of the University of Sydney and who completed his doctorate at Freiburg, taught at the University of Newcastle from the early 1960s until his retirement in 1987. Doniela’s primary focus was Hegel but he also had a strong interest in the Husserlian variety of phenomenology.This was evident early on: Doniela was seriously considering the University of Göttingen as the place to undertake his doctoral studies largely because of the phenomenologist and ontologist Nicolai Hartmann who was working there at the time. Hartmann’s unexpected death put an end to those plans. During his professorship at Newcastle, Doniela took an interest in the work of Heidegger and Husserl, and was one of the founding members of the Australian Phenomenology Association. Doniela never saw a sharp line between continental and analytic philosophy and it is in him that we fnd one of the clearest examples of that integrationist spirit that is so characteristic of Australian phenomenologists. This spirit was also embodied by Max Deutscher, who was appointed as the Foundation Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University in the early 1970s.The story of Deutscher’s philosophical evolution, through which an analytic philosopher turned into one with a serious academic interest in existential phenomenology, further reinforces the notion that interest in the latter is often motivated by the real need to make sense of the darker sides of life. During the Korean war, before he studied philosophy, Deutscher’s life was “disturbed” by his conscription into the army (Deutscher 2007). “Everything”, he says, “… was thrown into a confusion”. The need to make sense of it all led Deutscher to the works of Sartre, amongst others. This sparked his interest in philosophy in general, which he took up academically. Deutscher was a graduate from the University of Adelaide, where he studied under Jack Smart. His studies eventually took him to Oxford, then the home of Gilbert Ryle and a key centre of analytic philosophy.4 At Oxford, Deutscher did not pursue phenomenology academically (but he did read a paper on Sartre at Oxford, in large part because no-one else was familiar 760
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with his work). His early philosophical output was solidly placed in the analytic tradition and one of his early papers, “Mental and Physical Properties” (Deutscher 1967) defends a Smart/ Armstrong kind of physicalism. Things changed in 1969, however, when he moved to the USA. Finding himself in the middle (quite literally, he ended up renting a house located on the border of the white–black divide) of the racial division that so tainted American society at the time, Deutscher became preoccupied with the phenomenon of making someone into an Other, a phenomenon that he felt analytic philosophy did not have the resources to handle. This brought back his earlier interest in Heidegger and Sartre and other phenomenological fgures, including Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Despite this (re)turn, in a sense Deutscher always remained true to both of his philosophical parents, phenomenology and analytic philosophy.This is exemplifed in his more recent book, Judgment After Arendt, which draws upon, besides Arendt, such classical phenomenological fgures as Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre, but also on the work of his mentor at Oxford, Ryle. Deutscher’s colleague at Macquarie, Luciana O’Dwyer, was a phenomenologist in a purer sense of the term: her primary interest was in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology; she drew on Husserl’s conception of the transcendental as developed in such works as the Cartesian Meditations and the Krisis and published a number of important articles in this area, including ‘The Signifcance of the Transcendental Ego for the Problem of Body and Soul in Husserlian Phenomenology’ (O’Dwyer 1983). Indeed, O’Dwyer has been described as being “Australia’s leading Husserl scholar” at the time (Bilimoria 1997). Sinnerbrink and Russell describe the contrast between Deutscher’s integrationist and O’Dwyer’s purist approaches to phenomenology in the following way: O’Dwyer’s ‘purist’ tendencies as a phenomenologist present an interesting counterpoint to Deutscher’s more ‘integrationist’ approach, which became paradigmatic of the way a number Australian philosophers approached Continental philosophy—namely, as an alternative source of ideas that could contribute to ‘mainstream’ philosophical inquiry rather than a specialised approach in its own right. (Sinnerbrink and Russell 2014) The integrationist approach to phenomenology is also nicely embodied by Maurita Harney. In 1984, Harney published “Intentionality, Sense and Mind”, wherein she attempted to connect Husserl and Frege by identifying the former’s noema with the latter’s Sinn. Harney contributed to Australian phenomenology in a number of other ways: she taught phenomenology and existentialism at the ANU from 1973 to 1980, offered courses on phenomenology and neuroscience at Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, ran phenomenological courses at adult education groups and gave talks on phenomenology at the Existentialist Society. Her very recent work, which continues the integrationist approach, explores the possibility that phenomenology can contribute to such emerging felds as biosemiotics (Harney 2015). The lack of strong Husserlian heritage during this period is a point of distinction between phenomenology in Australasia and the corresponding story in the USA, but it is important to recognise the infuence of Marion Tapper at the University of Melbourne who taught and researched in the area from the late 1970s until at least her retirement in the mid-2000s.Tapper completed an honours thesis on Heidegger under the supervision of Bill Doniela and a doctorate with Deutscher at Macquarie. In the mid-1980s she was appointed at the University of Melbourne and published two important articles on Husserl: “Husserl and the Subject-Object Dichotomy” (Tapper 1985) and “The Priority of Being or Consciousness for Phenomenology”. Many postgraduate students worked with her on continental and phenomenological theses, 761
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some of whom came to found the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and be leaders within the Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy (see below). Australia’s frst phenomenology conference was held at the ANU on June 12–14, 1976, organised by Harney. Eleven papers were discussed in front of an audience of over 70 who came from a variety of academic backgrounds (Harney 1977). In 1981, under the imperative of Deutscher, Doniela, Harney, O’Dwyer, Tapper and others, the Australasian Association of Phenomenology was formed. The organisation later changed its name to the Australasian Society of Phenomenology and Sociology and, in a further alteration,‘Sociology’ was dropped in favour of Social Philosophy (AAPSP). In the same year, the AAPSP organised the second Australian phenomenology conference in Brisbane. Signifcantly, in 1990 the AAPSP held the frst international phenomenology conference in Melbourne, in the attendance of which were two notable modern phenomenological fgures: J.N. Mohanty and Don Ihde. AAPSP underwent a demise in 1994 before a kind of metamorphosis took place in 1995 when the society turned into The Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP). What is the signifcance of this last event for Australasian phenomenology? Is it a matter of a mere name change or does it refect a more substantive transformation in philosophical outlook? On this, Sinnerbrink and Russell comment as follows: This transition between the AAPSP and the ASCP marked a new phase in the history of Continental philosophy in Australia. It symbolised the shift from the older generation of scholars working on phenomenology and existentialism to a younger generation of postgraduates keenly interested in French poststructuralism and critical theory, a shift that had already been occurring in some departments from the late 1970s. (Sinnerbrink and Russell 2014) While it is arguable that related transformations have also taken place at SPEP (the USA’s Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) notwithstanding the retention of ‘phenomenology’ in the name of the organisation, this new phase may also refect Australasia’s forgetfulness of phenomenology. How many from this new generation actually got to learn what phenomenology is? How many read Husserl?5 How many tried doing their own phenomenological investigations? How much of this transition from phenomenology to other forms of ‘continental philosophy’ was well-informed and how much of it was just following the latest European trend? Most Derrida scholars, for example, did not follow Derrida and spent ten years reading Husserl, including one sometime Derridean coauthor of this article!
Contemporary scene In what may very well be a refection of our multiculturalism, this historical survey suggests that Australasian philosophers have tended towards the integrationist approach to phenomenology, which involves drawing on phenomenological ideas and insights, not for the sake of developing phenomenology per se but for the purpose of contributing to wider philosophical or extraphilosophical issues, perhaps in regard to other trajectories in analytic philosophy, or in regard to a particular theme that has a phenomenological aspect (technology, say). It is fair to say that this continues to be the trend of Australasian phenomenology today. The University of Tasmania is currently the home of Jeff Malpas and Ingo Farin.While both philosophers describe themselves as working in the hermeneutical tradition, they have made contributions to phenomenology, especially to the exegesis, translation and interpretation of Heidegger’s thought. Malpas can be described as a topical thinker: his primary interest is 762
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in the philosophical signifcance of place or topology, which he has explored in such works as Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World and Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Malpas 1999). That Malpas embodies the integrationist spirit is seen through his attempt to bring together, through the topic of place, the ideas of Heidegger and Donald Davidson. Ingo Farin has translated Heidegger’s The Concept of Time:The First Draft of Being and Time and (together with James G. Hart) Husserl’s The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Husserl 2006; Heidegger 2011). At Deakin University, Jack Reynolds’ recent book, Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science (Reynolds 2018), argues that phenomenological investigations and discoveries—e.g. Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness, Merleau-Ponty’s study of the lived body, Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, Sartre’s investigations of Others—have an important role to play in contemporary philosophical and empirical issues that have to do with embodiment, time and social cognition. He also argues that phenomenology itself must be constrained by empirical fndings, relax its traditional bias against all forms of naturalism, and be open to a kind of middle way that he argues was earlier practised by Merleau-Ponty. His earlier book, Chronopathologies (2013), attempts a similar kind of bridge-building, the focus here being time and politics, and he has a general interest in phenomenology of embodiment since his frst book on Merleau-Ponty and Derrida in 2004. A number of phenomenologically oriented scholars have found a home at Murdoch University. L’ubica Ucnik focuses on the work of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka, a student of Husserl and Heidegger, a friend of Eugen Fink and an important phenomenological fgure in his own right. Paul S. MacDonald has written a number of interesting articles on Husserl’s thought, including “Husserl, the Monad and Immortality” (2007). Horst Ruthrof had earlier done signifcant work in the phenomenology of language. Heath Williams, who began his PhD at Murdoch and is currently completing it at the University of Western Australia, is working on the problem of intersubjectivity from a Husserlian perspective and is also the author of a number of articles, including “Husserlian Phenomenological Description and the Problem of Describing Intersubjectivity” (Williams 2016). In 2014, the ffth meeting of the Organisation of Phenomenological Organisations held a conference at Murdoch University, with a number of well-known phenomenological names in attendance, including Dermot Moran, Burt Hopkins and the late Lester Embree. The Australian Catholic University has hosted signifcant phenomenological activity in recent years, especially at its Melbourne campus, developing a connection between phenomenology and religion that Max Charlesworth’s work had earlier made clear. In recent years, Kevin Hart, Jeff Hanson, Chris Hackett and Nick Trakakis established a research group titled ‘Philosophy and Phenomenology of Religion’.The interests here were multiple, but the primary focus was on the so-called “theological turn” of phenomenology, and on such important French phenomenological fgures as Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Luc Marion, amongst others. In 2012, the group organised a workshop on the Phenomenology of Emotions, the main speaker of which was the well-known phenomenologist Anthony Steinbock.Although the centre is no longer operational, ACU continues to nurture its interest in phenomenology, through Richard Colledge’s work on Heidegger, and, in a part-time capacity, through the renowned French phenomenologist Claude Romano, who is also familiar with analytic philosophy and is the author of, amongst other works, At the Heart of Reason. With the exception of Karen Green, most scholars with an interest in phenomenology and existentialism at Monash University reside(d) outside the philosophy department. This includes Robin Small, who wrote a thesis titled “Heidegger’s Concept of Human Nature” at the ANU in the 1970s and who lectured on existentialism in the department of education (Harney 1992). 763
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Stuart Grant, from the Centre for Theatre and Performance, has a focus on phenomenology and its application in performative arts. Given the almost non-existent interest in phenomenology amongst Monash philosophers, it is quite remarkable that Sartre was taught in the department at least since 1969, when Sandy Boyce Gibson lectured on existentialism (ibid.). In the 1990s Karen Green took over the old Sartre unit, and combined it with the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. More recently, one of the authors of this paper, Erol Copelj, is in the process of completing his PhD on the Phenomenology of Mindfulness and is also the author of a couple of phenomenological essays, including “Displaced Feeling:A (Partial) Phenomenological Study” (2016), published in Husserl Studies. Monima Chadha also does interesting comparative work on phenomenology and Indian philosophy, taking a particular interest in debates surrounding the self/no-self distinction in a cross-cultural manner that was also a major part of Purushottama Bilimoria’s use of phenomenology at Deakin, another appointment of Charlesworth.6 In 2015 Chadha was awarded the Annette Baier Prize by the Australasian Association of Philosophy for her article “Time-Series of Ephemeral Impressions: The Abhidharma-Buddhist View of Conscious Experience” (2015), wherein she engages with phenomenology, in particular with the work of Dan Zahavi. Finally, Andrew Benjamin also does signifcant work on Levinas and Heidegger, for example, although he would likely resist any phenomenological label. In recent times,Andrew Inkpin has taken on the phenomenological mantle at the University of Melbourne and has done signifcant work on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, offering both a new synthetic view on their takes on phenomenology of language, as well as doing new phenomenological analyses, based primarily on his own linguistic experiences in Germany where he worked for some time, including as a translator. In 2016 he published Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language (Inkpin 2016). The University of Auckland is probably the only institution in New Zealand where phenomenology has had an ongoing presence in a philosophy department: over the last generation or so, Julian Young, Lisa Guenther, Robert Wicks, Stefano Franchi and Matheson Russell have researched in and taught on phenomenology. Russell’s work on Husserl (e.g. Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed) (Russell 2006), and his more integrationist concerns about the relationship between phenomenology and critical theory ft the above narrative well. Guenther has done important phenomenological work on the experience of birth, both in interpreting Levinas’s writings on fecundity and the “gift of the other”, and in developing what she and others have called “critical phenomenology”. Since her departure from New Zealand for the USA and Canada, she has done important philosophical and political work on the phenomenology of solitary confnement and other conditions associated with daily life in maximum security prisons. In this respect, it is also important to recognise the contributions (sometimes critical) of Australian feminist philosophers to phenomenology since the 1970s. Philosophers like Moira Gatens (Sydney), Elizabeth Grosz (Sydney, Monash), Philipa Rothfeld (La Trobe) and Rosalyn Diprose (UNSW) have also undertaken internationally known analyses of embodiment, temporality and our experience of alterity, as well as dance in Rothfeld’s case. Diprose’s work, and her interpretations of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas amongst others, have also been very infuential on many postgraduate students. Diprose and Gatens have both been keynote speakers at the annual meetings of the Merleau-Ponty Circle in the USA. Since the 1970s conference, the ANU has continued to employ staff working on and teaching phenomenology, despite it being the notional “home” of analytic philosophy in Australia, including Richard Campbell, Penelope Deutscher (in particular on de Beauvoir and Sartre) and Bruin Christensen. The latter has done important work on the thought of both Husserl and Heidegger, and in one paper, “Getting Heidegger off the West Coast” (1998) he contests the ‘West Coast’ (of the USA) interpretation of Heidegger’s thought. Christensen has also been 764
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productive in comparing and combining phenomenology and analytic philosophy, especially the work of John McDowell, as in his book Self and World – From Analytic Philosophy to Phenomenology. Macquarie University has also continued to be strong in phenomenology, albeit with perhaps no-one who would proclaim to be a card-carrying ‘phenomenologist’. Of particular note, Jean Philippe Deranty’s research on labour draws on phenomenological accounts of our experience of working life, and Robert Sinnerbrink’s various publications on cinema use the insights of phenomenological philosophers like Heidegger and others, while also offering new insights into the phenomenology of cinematic experience. From a more cognitive science-oriented perspective, John Sutton and his collaborators have also made signifcant use of descriptions of the phenomenology of skilled action in their work. This, of course, is a potted and selective account, both as history and a survey of the contemporary scene. Nonetheless, it suffces to show that phenomenology remains a signifcant part of the Australasian philosophical landscape, albeit often in impure and hybrid ways.Whether that is to be embraced or bemoaned depends on one’s perspective, but despite the earlier twentiethcentury infuences (e.g. Gibson) Australasia has not had the kind of solid education in phenomenology that is still available in the USA, for example. Philosophers in this region are more inclined to use phenomenology for particular purposes, rather than exposit the work of the great and the good, or do sustained phenomenological analyses for their own sake.
Notes 1 Excerpts from Gibson’s diary have been published in (Spiegelberg 1971). 2 Harvard University had signifcant connections with German phenomenology both sides of World War I, with many of their students studying with Husserl, including J. Leighton,W. Hocking (Husserl’s frst American student in 1902), and Winthrop Bell, who supervised Dorion Cairns who was an infuential fgure throughout much of the twentieth century.This may explain the manner in which certain US philosophers were key players in bringing Husserl to an English-speaking audience, whether we think of Cairns, Marvin Farber or others. For more on this American story, see (Livingston, forthcoming). 3 In similar fashion, in the 1960s Ryle himself advised the (now) famous flm-maker,Terrence Malick, to abandon his thesis on Heidegger and Wittgenstein on the grounds that its concern with being-in-theworld was insuffciently philosophical. Cf. (Critchley 2002). 4 Ryle did study, publish on and meet Husserl, and in fact devoted two (out of 15) pages of his autobiographical essay to phenomenology, but he was often polemically against phenomenology despite (or perhaps because of) some metaphilosophical proximity concerning the relationship between philosophy and science. His famous idea of a category mistake derives substantially from his earlier reading of Husserl, as does, arguably, the use he makes of the know-how/know-that distinction (Thomasson 2002). 5 The neglect of Husserl’s work is particularly acute in Australasia. For, after World War II, Australia did not have a group of signifcant and internationally renowned Husserlians in the manner that the USA did.This is illustrated by a story told to me by Karen Green, then of Monash University (private correspondence).When she took out Husserl’s Logical Investigations from the departmental library in the early 1990s, she noticed that the book had not been borrowed once since its arrival in 1976. Incidentally, after Karen, the next person to borrow the book was myself (Copelj), in 2010. 6 For more on this, see (Bilimoria 1997).
References Bilimoria, Purushottama. 1997. “Australia”. In: Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Eds. Lester Embree et al. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 39–43. Chadha, Monima. 2015. “Time-Series of Ephemeral Impressions: The Abhidharma-Buddhist View of Conscious Experience”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 14 (3), pp. 543–560. Charlesworth, Max. 1976. The Existentialists and Jean Paul Sartre. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
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Erol Copelj and Jack Reynolds Christensen, Carleton B. 1998.“Getting Heidegger Off the West Coast”. Inquiry:An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 41 (1), pp. 65–87. ———. 2008. Self and World – From Analytic Philosophy to Phenomenology. Berlin, Boston:Walter de Gruyter. Copelj, Erol. 2016.“Displaced Feeling:A Phenomenological Study”. Husserl Studies, 32 (1), pp. 1–20. Critchley, Simon. 2002. “Calm – On Terrence Malick’s the Thin Red Line”. Film-Philosophy, 6 (1), pp. 133-148. Deutscher, Max. 1967.“Mental and Physical Properties”. In: The Identity Theory of Mind. Ed. C.F. Presley. St. Lucia, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. ———. 2007.“The Great Divide”. In: The Philosopher’s Zone. Ed.Alan Saunders. Devitt, Michael. 1991. Realism and Truth. Oxford: Blackwell. Franklin, James. 2003. Corrupting the Youth:A History of Philosophy in Australia. Macleay Press, pp. 151–156. Grave, Selwyn Alfred. 1984. A History of Philosophy in Australia. St. Lucia, QLD, Australia: University of Queensland Press. Harney, Maurita J. 1977. “Report of the Phenomenology Conference Held at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, June 12–14, 1976”. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 8 (1), pp. 65–67. ———. 1984. Intentionality, Sense and the Mind. Phaenomenologica; 94;The Hague/Boston/Hingham, MA: M. Nijhoff; Distributors for the U.S. and Canada: Kluwer Academic. ———. 1992.“The Contemporary European Tradition in Australian Philosophy”. In: Essays on Philosophy in Australia. Eds. Jan T. J. Srzednicki and David Wood. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 125–151. ———. 2015. “Naturalizing Phenomenology – A Philosophical Imperative”. Progress in Biophysics & Molecular Biology, 119 (3), pp. 661–669. Heidegger, Martin. 2011. The Concept of Time.Trans. I. Farin. London/New York: Continuum. Husserl, Edmund. 2006. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures,Winter Semester, 1910–1911. Trans. I. Farin and J. G. Hart. Eds. Ingo Farin, et al. Dordrecht: Springer. Inkpin, Andrew. 2016. Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (forthcoming). Kirsner, Douglas. 1977. The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Sartre and R. D. Laing. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Livingston, Paul. 2019. “The Analytic Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in the US: History, Problems, and Prospects”. In: The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 100. Ed. Beatrice Michela Ferri. New York: Springer, pp. 435-459 Malpas, Jeff. 1999. Place and Experience:A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place,World. Bradford. Mortensen, Chris, et al. 2012. “Philosophy at the University of Adelaide”. In: A History of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide: 1876–2012. Eds. C. Crossin, et al.Adelaide:The University of Adelaide Press, pp. 351–358. O’Dwyer, Luciana. 1983.“The Signifcance of the Transcendental Ego for the Problem of Body and Soul in Husserlian Phenomenology”. In: Soul and Body in Husserlian Phenomenology: Man and Nature. Ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 109–117. Philipse, Herman. 2003. “The Phenomenological Movement”. In: The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1870–1945. Ed.Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 477–496. Reynolds, Jack. 2012. Chronopathologies: The Politics of Time in Deleuze, Derrida, Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefeld. ———. 2018. Phenomenology, Naturalism and Empirical Science: A Hybrid and Heretical Proposal. New York: Routledge. Russell, Matheson. 2006. Husserl:A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2012. The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Sinnerbrink, Robert and Russell, Matheson S. 2014.“Black Swan:A History of Continental Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand”. In: History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Graham Oppy and N. N.Trakakis. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 637–678. Smart, Jack. 1975.“My Semantic Ascents and Descents”. The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy. Eds. S. Jack Odell Charles Bontempo. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 57–72. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1971.“From Husserl to Heidegger”. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2 (1), pp. 58–83.
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Australia and New Zealand Stewart, J. McKellar. 1934. “Husserl’s Phenomenological Method”. Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 12 (1), pp. 62–72. Tapper, Marion. 1985.“Husserl and the Subject - Object Dichotomy”. Philosophical Inquiry, 7 (2), pp. 65–73. ———. 1986. “The Priority of Being or Consciousness for Phenomenology: Heidegger and Husserl”. Metaphilosophy, 17 (2–3), pp. 153–161. Thomasson,Amie. 2002.“Phenomenology and the Development of Analytic Philosophy”. Southern Journal of Philosophy, XL, pp. 115–133. Williams, Heath. 2016. “Husserlian Phenomenological Description and the Problem of Describing Intersubjectivity”. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23 (7–8), pp. 254–277.
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73 EASTERN ASIA Simon Ebersolt, Tae-hee Kim, Choong-su Han, Ni Liangkang, and Fang Xianghong
China Ni Liangkang and Fang Xianghong
The acceptance and spread of phenomenology in China Although in the 1920s some of Husserl’s basic ideas were already mentioned in the writings of important Chinese thinkers, such as Zhang Dongsun (1886–1973), only a few Chinese scholars studied German phenomenology in the frst half of the last century. The frst was Xiong Wei (1911–1994), who belonged to the frst generation of phenomenological researchers in China who studied in Germany. In the 1930s he went to Freiburg, where he attended seminars and lectures by Martin Heidegger and was greatly infuenced by his way of thinking. At the same time as Xiong, two other Chinese students were in Freiburg. One was Hsiao Paul Shih-yi, with whom Heidegger attempted a translation of Dao De Jing by Laozi in 1946. He taught at Fujen University in Taipei after he came back to China. The second was Shen Youding, whose dissertation was directed by Eugen Fink on Husserl’s behalf. Shen taught later at Tsinghua University in Beijing and eventually worked at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The Chinese nation had gone through a series of unprecedented disasters and catastrophes from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s. During this period, phenomenological investigations almost came to a halt in mainland China. However, Hong Kong and Taiwan had become exceptions to this situation, due to their historically special political status.The frst Chinese translation of Husserl’s phenomenology—a selection from the frst and second part of the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology—was published in 1980 by a scholar named Hu Qiuyuan (1910–2004), who had moved to Taiwan. Through the 1980s, especially with China’s adoption of policies of reform and opening up to the world, many students interested in Western philosophy went to Europe and America to study phenomenology, including students of Xiong Wei. By the 1990s, a second generation of phenomenological researchers had been well trained domestically and abroad and exerted a preliminary infuence on the academic circle of philosophy in China. In 1994, they organized China’s frst phenomenological conference and founded the Chinese Society
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for Phenomenology, a research group that meets annually and publishes its proceedings in the yearbook Phenomenological and Philosophical Research in China. The Hong Kong Society for Phenomenology was founded in 1996, with the aim of using Hong Kong’s special geographical position and local academic openness as a basis for intercultural and interdisciplinary research. In 2004, the frst issue of the Journal of Phenomenology and the Human Sciences was published in Taipei; it became the main journal for phenomenologists in Hong Kong. In Taiwan, several institutions and university centers for phenomenology were established. A close relationship of exchange and cooperation is maintained between the phenomenological research circles in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
The research status of phenomenology in China since 2000 Recent phenomenological research in the Chinese cultural sphere is conducted and driven forward mainly by the third and fourth generation of Chinese phenomenologists, who work at various major universities and research institutes.Their academic interests and contributions to phenomenology are sketched in what follows.1 In mainland China, at Beijing University, Jin Xiping studies Husserl, Heidegger, and ancient Greek philosophy. Zhang Xianglong not only studies phenomenological literature, but also brings the spirit of phenomenology to the study of Chinese traditional philosophy. Chen Jiaying and Wang Qingjie translated Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit into Chinese, which is a major achievement. Du Xiaozhen focuses on the translation and interpretation of French phenomenology. Wu Zengding studies both phenomenology and political philosophy. At Renmin University of China, Zhang Zhiwei focuses on the German philosophical tradition from Kant to Heidegger. At Fudan University (Shanghai), Zhang Qingxiong brings together themes in felds such as Marxism, analytical philosophy, and religious experience from the phenomenological perspective. Ding Yun studies political philosophy while focusing on phenomenology. At Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou), Ni Liangkang (who moved to Zhejiang University recently) works on introductory and advanced phenomenological investigations, and he also explores in depth the relationship between phenomenology and traditional Chinese and Indian culture. Zhu Gang and Fang Xianghong study both German and French phenomenology.At Tongji University, Sun Zhouxing has made great achievements in the study and translation of Heidegger and Nietzsche. Ke Xiaogang attempts to integrate phenomenology with traditional thought and culture. At Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Wuhan), Deng Xiaomang works in phenomenology and German idealism. Zhang Tingguo concentrates on the study and translation of Husserlian phenomenology. At Zhejiang University, Pang Xuequan is introducing Hermann Schmitz’s new phenomenology, while Yang Dachun focuses on French phenomenology. At Xi’an Jiaotong University, Zhang Zailin pursues the grafting of phenomenology with cultural philosophy. At Lanzhou University, Chen Chunwen translates and reinterprets Heidegger’s phenomenology.At Hainan University, Zhang Zhiyang employs phenomenology to refect on contemporary thought and to deconstruct traditional philosophy.At the Commercial Press, while promoting phenomenological publishing, Chen Xiaowen is engaged in the translation and study of Heidegger’s works. In Taiwan, at National Chengchi University,Wang Wen-sheng concentrates on the exploration of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology. Tsai Cheng-yun correlates phenomenology with post-modern thoughts. Luo Li-jun focuses on Husserlian phenomenology. Chang Ting-kuo, who suffered an untimely death, has left a concise and very rich corpus on phenomenology and hermeneutics.At National Sun Yat-sen University (Kaohsiung),Yu Chung-chi
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simultaneously works in the areas of phenomenology, social theory, and the theory of culture. At National Tsing Hua University (Hsinchu), Huang Wen-hong focuses on the relationship between Husserl’s and Eugen Fink’s phenomenology and Kitarô Nishida’s philosophy.Wu Junye’s interests range from Husserl through Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty. In Hong Kong, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Cheung Chan-fai and Kwan Tze-wan conduct research on German phenomenology. Lau Kwok-ying focuses on French phenomenology. Wang Qingjie studies both phenomenology and Chinese traditional culture. Yao Zhihua works on phenomenology and Buddhism. Most of the important phenomenological works have been translated into Chinese due to the personal practice, active participation, and elaborate organization of researchers working in phenomenology, including those scholars mentioned above.Translations of the complete works of some classic phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, etc. are either in progress or being planned; such publications continue to be welcomed by students and researchers. With the efforts of these scholars, phenomenology fnds its spiritual community in China, which makes it possible to take root and blossom in Chinese culture. The phenomenology of Xinxing (nature of mind) is one such blooming fower. It has had a very long incubation period. Iso Kern and Ni Liangkang, who are equally at home working in phenomenology,Yogācāra (Vijñānavāda), and Confucianism, have had deep inquiries and probing debates on the connections and distinctions of key concepts in these three areas.Their theses, monographs, and articles have yielded the landmark achievement of the “phenomenology of Xin (mind)”,2 which is the predecessor to the phenomenology of Xinxing (nature of mind). In 2011 Ni Liangkang published the programmatic treatise The Research of Area and Methodology for Phenomenology of Xinxing (nature of mind) (Ni 2011), and from that point on the bud of the phenomenology of Xinxing (nature of mind) began to bloom. The 1st International Symposium of Phenomenology of Xinxing (nature of mind) was held in 2012. Iso Kern’s phenomenological collection of essays The Phenomenon of Mind was published in the same year. In 2014 Iso Kern’s monumental work, The Most Important Thing in Life:Wang Yangming (1472-1529) and His Followers on the “Realization of Original Knowledge” came out. Meanwhile articles on the phenomenology of Xinxing (nature of mind) started to appear in journals and periodicals, together with articles that focused on microscopic modes of the constitution of concepts and the detailed process of formulation of thoughts, all of which aimed analytically and critically at a dialogue and fusion between phenomenology,Yogācāra, and Confucianism. Research achievements and innovative theories based on these three philosophies but that do not belong singly to any one of them started to emerge. It will be possible to make great theoretical innovations in the phenomenology of Xinxing (nature of mind) in the near future. We have reason to believe that the fower of this kind of Chinese-style phenomenology will bear rich fruit. The approach to inquiry and thought characteristic of the phenomenology of Xinxing (nature of mind) has provided a successful paradigm to establish a connection between phenomenology and all aspects of Chinese traditional culture. Following this path, we can construct or reconstruct a series of inter-disciplines which associate with traditional thought, such as traditional-Chinese-medicine phenomenology, Yi-ology phenomenology, HeavenDao phenomenology, calligraphy phenomenology, Poetry (Shi Jing) phenomenology, Chuci phenomenology, and so on. What needs to be stressed is that there is no strict logical correlation between these designations. However, they come about because there are already related theses in some of these inter-disciplines and overlapping concerns in other areas. We call attention to them here to emphasize the many possibilities of combining phenomenology with Chinese culture. 770
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Japan Simon Ebersolt Husserl was frst introduced to Japan by Nishida Kitarô (1870–1945) in a 1911 article criticizing psychologism, titled “On the Thesis of Pure Logic in the Theory of Knowledge” (Fujita 2018). Later, in an essay titled “Current Philosophy” (1916), Nishida presented phenomenology according to Ideas I. However, the Japanese reception of phenomenology was mediated, above all, by the direct participation of Japanese students in phenomenology courses in Germany, in particular those of Husserl, Heidegger, and Oskar Becker. It was these students (who were, incidentally, Nishida’s disciples) who contributed the most to the reception of phenomenology in the 1920s. For example,Yamauchi Tokuryû (1890–1982), who attended Husserl’s lectures in Freiburg in 1920, contributed to the frst special issue of a Japanese journal devoted to “phenomenological research”3 and published an Introduction to Phenomenology (1929). According to Kuki Shûzô (1888–1941), who was present at Husserl’s lectures in Freiburg and Heidegger’s in Marburg (1927–1928), and mentioned by the latter in “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer”, Japanese philosophers “were brought from neo-Kantianism to phenomenology by Bergsonian philosophy” because Bergson and the phenomenologists share what he calls the “method of intuition”, which abolishes “the too clear distinction between the matter of knowledge and its form”. Kuki particularly brings closer to Bergsonian intuition “the idea of ‘intentionality’ in Husserl” and “the notion of ‘being in the world’ in Heidegger” in order to place them in opposition to the above neo-Kantian abstract distinction (Kuki 1981a, 259). In the 1920s and 1930s, in Europe as well as in Japan, philosophers sought to emphasize the idea of the “concrete” over and against the so-called “abstract”.This is the case in Tanabe Hajime’s (1885– 1962) article “The New Turn in Phenomenology: Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Life” (1924), which is based on Heidegger’s lecture on “Ontology (The Hermeneutics of Facticity)” (1923). Published before Being and Time (1927), it is the frst presentation of Heidegger in Japan, and probably one of the frst in the world (let us also notice that this fast Japanese reception allowed Kuki to contribute to the French reception of phenomenology, by presenting the Heideggerian conception of temporality at the Pontigny Decade in 1928 and advising Sartre to read Being and Time) (Light 1987). Clarifying the hermeneutic turn of phenomenology, in this article Tanabe proposes a “phenomenology of the concrete life of spirit which does not have to be a phenomenology of a scholarly consciousness dealing with an abstracted feld, but a phenomenology of the living and concrete consciousness, in other words of Dasein itself ” (Tanabe 1963, 29). This Heideggerian infuence (Ôhashi 1989; Parkes 1996) is visible in Miki Kiyoshi’s (1897– 1945) Studies of the Human Being in Pascal (1926) and Kuki’s “hermeneutics of ethnic being” (Kuki 1981b, 2004) in his Structure of Iki (1930), which explores an ethical and aesthetic ideal (Iki) born in Tokugawa Japan.The reception of phenomenology, and Heidegger’s in particular, was not simply passive, but also critical and innovative.The main criticism against Heidegger was that he tended to underestimate the question of spatiality (reduced to the ecstatic temporality). For Watsuji Tetsurô (1889–1960), Heidegger underestimates spatiality because he dismisses “the individual-social double structure” (Watsuji 2007, 4) of the human being, who is always already in a spatial milieu, in relationship both with land and society. For Kuki, since Heidegger does not suffciently take into account the “spatiality and common-being” of the coexisting Dasein who encounters by chance another Dasein, “the ontological meaning of contingency has been dismissed from his horizon” and the contingent character of thrownness has been missed (Kuki 1981c, 270).These criticisms allowed both Kuki and Watsuji to develop their own thoughts in the 1930s: a philosophy of contingency, in particular a phenomenology of encounter, for Kuki 771
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(The Problem of Contingency, 1935) (Ebersolt 2017); and a mesology (fûdogaku), i.e. a study of the interaction between land and the human being, and an ethics of the social interrelation (aidagara) for Watsuji (Fûdo, 2007, 13; Ethics, 2007, 20). In conclusion, the pre-war Japanese reception of phenomenology was fertile and quite rapid. Phenomenological research in philosophy departments continued to develop in the post-war period until the present day, with phenomenology also inspiring a number of philosophers to develop their own refections. Tanabe, for example, continued to confront Heidegger in “Ontology of Life or Dialectic of Death?” (1958) (translated as Tanabe 2013). South Korea Tae-hee Kim Choong-su Han
Beginning of phenomenological studies in Korea (1920s–1945) The history of phenomenological studies in Korea began in the Japanese colonial era in the 1920s, especially in the philosophy department of Keijō Imperial University in Seoul. In this waking phase of studies on Western philosophies in Korea, German philosophies including phenomenology and German idealism attracted philosophical interest, which mirrored the situation of Japan’s close relationship with Germany. Kuk-sok Kwon’s “The Phenomenological Theory of Truth – A Consideration of Husserl’s Logical Investigations”, published in 1929, was the frst academic paper on phenomenology written by a Korean. In the 1930s, Heideggerian philosophy was studied more actively than Husserlian, which was a consequence of the philosophical situation in Germany and Japan.This is testifed to by the following papers: Chong-hong Pak’s “On Care in Heidegger” [in Japanese] (1932) and “On Horizon in Heidegger” [in Japanese] (1935); Ki-rak Ha’s “On Spatiality and Temporality in Heidegger” (1940).
Incubation period of phenomenology in South Korea (1945–1960s) Suffering national division and the Korean War (1950–1953) after liberation from Japanese occupation in 1945, the philosophical interests of Korean intellectuals, severely affected by such tragic and desperate situations, focused on existential philosophy or German idealism. In this period of the 1940s and 1950s, however, some philosophers such as Chong-hong Pak and Hyong-gon Ko at Seoul National University paid attention not only to Heideggerian but also to Husserlian phenomenology.These original thinkers, always taking into account the Korean and Asian philosophical traditions, have been counted as good examples for coming generations of Korean phenomenologists to do phenomenology in their own historical situation, instead of just doing philological studies on the phenomenological literature. In the 1960s and 1970s, Kah-kyung Cho, after receiving his PhD in 1957 in Germany, began to lecture at Seoul National University on existential philosophy and phenomenology.Through his lectures and above all through his celebrated book Existential Philosophy [in Korean], he has played a decisive role in the history of the reception of existential philosophy and phenomenology in Korea since the 1960s. Having directly experienced the so-called Husserl renaissance in the mid-1950s in Germany, there were various lectures and seminars based on Husserl’s texts which laid the foundation for the following breakthrough of phenomenology in Korea by new generations of scholars. 772
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Breakthrough of phenomenology in South Korea by academic societies (1970s) It was in the late 1970s that the phenomenology, introduced in Korea during the Japanese occupation in the early 20th century and continually studied after liberation in 1945, brought about a new era of phenomenological research in South Korea. In 1976, the second generation of phenomenologists in South Korea launched the subcommittee for phenomenological research under the Korean Philosophical Association, which was the frst offcial organization of Korean phenomenologists.While reading Idea of Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, many scholars gathered to discuss phenomenological philosophy, which resulted in renaming the organization in 1978 as the Korean Society for Phenomenology (KSP) (Cho and Lee 1997). Since then, this society has played a decisive role in the development of phenomenology in South Korea for over 40 years.Also, due to the quantitative and qualitative growth of the KSP, the Korean Heidegger Society and the Korea Society for Hermeneutics became independent in 1992 and 1994 respectively (Lee 2018). The KSP frst published the Journal Phenomenological Studies in 1983, whose title was changed to Research in Philosophy and Phenomenology in 1990.The KSP has published 81 issues of its journal so far.The Korean Heidegger Society (KHS) frst published the Journal Heidegger Studies in 1995, whose title was changed to Ontology Studies in 2010. The KHS has published 37 issues to 2015. The Korea Society for Hermeneutics (KHS) frst published the journal Studies for Hermeneutics in 1994, which published 36 issues until 2015. In 2015, Ontology Studies and Studies for Hermeneutics were integrated into the journal Researches in Contemporary European Philosophy, which is published four times a year (Park 2013). Since its inception in 1978, the KSP, with over 200 members, has regularly held over 300 academic symposiums including monthly seminars and international conferences. The KHS, with about 100 members, has held 64 conferences so far.The KHS, with over 70 members, has held 128 conferences so far.
Development and perspective of phenomenological studies in South Korea (1980s to date) Refecting the zeitgeist of the 1980s in South Korean society, often characterized as the age of democratization, social and political philosophy attracted the interest of the philosophical world in Korea.This situation amounted to a temporary decrease in the young generation of phenomenologists. In spite of this, phenomenological research in Korea was preparing for a new leap forward in the 1990s. Since the 1990s, phenomenology in South Korea has experienced unprecedented progress, both quantitatively and qualitatively.While less than ten PhD dissertations related to phenomenology at universities in Korea or overseas were written by Korean scholars in the 1980s, approximately more than 70 young scholars have written or are writing dissertations regarding phenomenology at Korean or foreign universities since 1990s. Korean phenomenologists have also made efforts to translate classic literature of phenomenology into Korean.To take Husserl and Heidegger for example, Husserliana I, II, III, IV,V,VI, IX, X, XI, XVI, XVII, XVIII, and XIX and Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.1, 6.2, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 24, 26, 27, 29/30, 39, 40, 42, 45, 48, 51, 52, 53, 60, 61, 63, 64, and 65 have been translated into Korean. Husserl’s phenomenology is actively studied in Korea not only by philosophers but also by scholars in other humanities and social sciences such as political science, sociology, cognitive sciences, anthropology, and qualitative studies, etc. In this respect, interdisciplinary researches of 773
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phenomenology and other disciplines are actively pursued. For example, the ICAP (International Center for Applied Phenomenology), established in 2017 by Nam-in Lee, is making efforts to establish applied phenomenology as a form of interdisciplinary research based on the dialogue between phenomenological philosophy and various disciplines. Heidegger’s philosophy appeals to Korean phenomenologists at least for two reasons. First, his critique of modernity becomes more and more meaningful in South Korea, insofar as its society and citizens are rapidly modernizing, with many problems that Europe has already encountered. Second, Heidegger’s interest in East Asian thinking and his approach to it have inspired many Korean phenomenologists to make comparative studies of his philosophy and East Asian thinking, including Korean traditional philosophy. Furthermore, not only Husserl or Heidegger but also the philosophies of Brentano, Scheler, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, Schutz, Gurwitsch, Levinas, Henry, Derrida, and so on are actively studied by young phenomenologists who are attempting to search for a philosophical refection on the reality of South Korea. These younger scholars, moreover, do not limit their inquiries to phenomenology alone, but also engage in research on a wide variety of contemporary movements such as hermeneutics, the philosophy of life, critical theory, and postmodernism, as well as traditional Western thought and East Asian philosophy. To enhance international cooperation, the KSP agreed with the American Phenomenological Society to hold academic conferences every two years.The frst academic conference was held in Seoul in 2002 and the second in Seattle in 2004. This conference was succeeded by the conference of PEACE (Phenomenology in East Asia CirclE), which has been held biannually eight times since 2004 in Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Seoul. Recently, the young phenomenologists of Korea have been actively participating in the conferences of the EANP (East Asian Network for Phenomenology) which has been held annually since 2016 in China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea.
Notes 1 There is a large number of third and fourth generation of researchers who have also made great achievements and contributions. Due to limited space, however, we can only briefy indicate the research areas of the executive members of the Chinese Society for Phenomenology. 2 This can be seen in the title of a book by Ni Liangkang, The Order of the Mind: the Possibility of the Research of Phenomenology of Mind (Ni 2010). 3 Shisô [Thought], January 1927.
References Cho, Kah-kyung, Hahn, Jeon-sook (Eds.). 2001. Phänomenologie in Korea. Freiburg i. Br. / München:Verlag Karl Alber. Cho, Kah-kyung, Lee, Nam-in 1997.“Phenomenology in Korea.” In: Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Ed. L. Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 387–391. Ebersolt, Simon. 2017. Contingence et communauté. Kuki Shûzô, philosophe japonais. PhD diss., Inalco-Univ. Paris 1. Paris:Vrin. Fujita, Masakatsu. 2018. Nihon tetsugaku-shi [History of Japanese Philosophy]. Kyôto: Shôwadô. Hahn, Jeon-sook. 1996. “Phenomenological Research in Korea.” In: Phenomenology and Korean Thought, Seoul: Chulhak kwa Hyunshilsa, pp. 309–380. [in Korean]. ———. 2001.”Phänomenologische Forschung in Korea.” In: Cho, Kah-Kyung, Hahn, Jeon-sook. Kuki, Shûzô. 1981a.“Bergson au Japon” (1928, in French). In: Kuki Shûzô zenshû [Collected Works of Kuki Shûzô= KSZ], vol. 1.Tôkyô: Iwanami.
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Eastern Asia ———. 1981b. Iki no kôzô. In: Kuki Shûzô zenshû [Collected Works of Kuki Shûzô= KSZ], vol. 1.Tôkyô: Iwanami. ———. 1981c. “Haideggâ no tetsugaku” [The Philosophy of Heidegger] (1939). In: Kuki Shûzô zenshû [Collected Works of Kuki Shûzô= KSZ], vol. 3. ———. 2004. The Structure of Detachment:The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shûzô.Trans. Hiroshi Nara. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lee, Nam-in. 1999. “The Development of Phenomenology in Korea.” In: Korea Journal, Vol. 39 (1), pp. 130–153. Lee, Su-jeong 2018. “A Study on Heidegger’s Research in Korea.” In: Korean Contemporary European Philosophy Research,Vol. 51, pp. 1–85. [in Korean] Light, Stephen. 1987. Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Ni, Liangkang. 2010. The Order of the Mind:The Possibility of the Research of Phenomenology of Mind. Nanjing: Jangsu People’s Publishing House. ———. 2011.“The Research Area and Methodology for Phenomenology of Xinxing (Nature of Mind)”. Journal of East China Normal University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 1, pp. 1–23. Ôhashi, Ryôsuke. 1989. “Die frühe Heidegger-Rezeption in Japan”. In: Japan und Heidegger (dir.) H. Buchner. Sigmaringen:Thorbecke, pp. 23–37. Park, Chankook. 2013. “Zur Heidegger-Forschung in Korea.” In: Heidegger und das ostasiatische Denken (Heidegger-Jahrbuch 7). Freiburg/München:Verlag Karl Alber, pp. 448–458. Tanabe, Hajime. 1963.“Genshôgaku ni okeru atarashiki tenkô. Haideggâ no sei no genshôgaku” (1924). In: Tanabe Hajime zenshû [Collected Works of Tanabe Hajime], vol. 4.Tôkyô: Chikuma shobô. ———. 2013.“Ontology of Life or Dialectic of Death?”Trans. Sugimura Yasuhiko. In: Philosophie japonaise. Le néant, le monde et le corps. Eds. Michel Dalissier et al. Paris:Vrin. Tani, Toru, Lee, Nam-in, Ni, Liangkang, Fang, Xianghong. 2015. “Phenomenology in East Asia.” In: Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/phenomenolog y-in-east-asia/v-1) Watsuji Tetsurô. 2007. Fûdo (1935).Tôkyô: Iwanami bunko. French translation: Fûdo: le milieu humain.Trans. Augustin Berque. 2011. Paris: CNRS Éditions.
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74 LATIN AMERICA Rosemary R.P. Lerner1
74.1. Preamble If unifying one country’s production into a specifc philosophical tradition is hard, it is even harder with the entire Latin American region, which includes not only South American countries, but also countries from Central and North America (such as Mexico). For the purposes of this chapter, I will especially focus on the phenomenological production of Latin American philosophers during the past and current centuries, and I will not include its relations with the hermeneutical and deconstructionist traditions (among many others), despite their inevitable intersections during this period.Thus, my focus will be the work and research done following the tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the twentieth century, including those who followed his path in one way or another. I will accordingly also include research done on some of his followers—even though, as Antonio Zirión has noted (Zirión 2003, 12, 18–21), their ideas and terminology frequently seem to go in opposite directions, hindering the understanding of phenomenology as a unifed movement. However, in my view, one exception to this circumstance is the successful effort by Roberto Walton (Argentina) during the past two decades to trace and reveal the inner conceptual connections, similarities, and actual differences between Husserl and his followers (see sections 74.3 and 74.4 below). Latin America’s phenomenological tradition includes exegesis, translations, and the teaching of classical texts and authors, as well as original investigations. But in order to understand its sui generis development during the past and current centuries, I will frst outline the historical context within which it occurs. Then I will trace the current situation of phenomenology in Latin America, including its main associations, activities, authors, and publications, among other aspects. Finally, I will outline some future prospects regarding Latin American phenomenological studies.
74.2. The introduction of phenomenology in Latin America: an overview During most of the past century, many Latin American countries were ruled by authoritarian military governments or assailed by radical leftist movements, and in some countries by guerrilla insurgents (Reyna 2006, 759).2 This situation led not only to crimes against humanity committed by all sides involved in these conficts,3 but also to pervasive political instability, 776
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the delayed installment of democracy, and receding economies in increasingly poverty-stricken regions. Additionally, the restrictions in the exercise of political liberties had a negative impact on the rigorous development of certain academic traditions. Within this context, drug lords, from Mexico to the Andean and Amazonian countries, who supply both Europe and the United States, have introduced even more havoc in the region. On the one hand, due to the complex geography and multifarious ethnic and social groups in some of its countries (especially in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru)—many afficted with extreme poverty—a restless and potentially incendiary political situation was ignited. In most of the universities of the Andean countries, for example, as well as in Argentina and Chile, varied summaries and simplifed interpretations of basic Marxist concepts were popularized (Harnecker 2014), with the hope not only of understanding the genesis of social inequalities, but of fnding ways to overcome what was experienced as political and ethnic injustice. Increasingly, both political philosophy and the analytic tradition gained ascendency. On the other hand, in some countries of the region during the twentieth century (especially the 1960s and 1970s) who were under the rule of military dictatorships pushing an isolated and endogenic development model, governmental restrictions and absurd tariffs were imposed on book imports. For some decades, some of the Andean countries had hardly any access either to original phenomenological publications or to their translations into English or French. And perhaps with the exceptions of Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia—countries that fostered early phenomenological translations—other Latin American countries too had no access to the scarce translations, mostly prepared in Spain (Lerner 1993, 156).The geographical vastness of the region in general (again with the aforementioned exceptions) also contributed to very isolated research initiatives in the phenomenological tradition. José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) had a vital infuence on the development of the phenomenological movement in Latin America.The Spanish philosopher visited Argentina three times, in 1916, 1928, and 1939. During his frst visit, he gave a few lectures under the title “Introduction to current problems in philosophy”; during the second one, he lectured on “What is science, what is philosophy” and read fve papers on the topic of life (Medin 1994, 7).This is why the introduction of Husserl’s phenomenology in Latin America has been attributed to Ortega y Gasset. However, according to my information, the frst native Latin American phenomenologists were Mexicans who had studied in Germany, such as Adalberto García de Mendoza (1900– 1963), who taught neo-Kantianism (Cohen) as well as phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler) from 1927 to 1933 at the National Preparatory School and Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (Zirión 2003, 29–45).4 Then, although Antonio Caso (1883–1946) was the former’s mentor and teacher, he got in contact with phenomenology (mostly Husserl’s) only much later in his career—probably no sooner than 1934.That same year Caso translated fragments of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and wrote two texts on Husserl’s universal intuition and philosophy, later collected in his 1946 book, El acto ideatorio y la flosofía de Husserl (ibid., 45–47). José Gaos (1900–1969), who was born in Spain but obtained Mexican political asylum and nationality during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), was a vital source for the consolidation of phenomenology in Latin America. He was primarily infuenced by his teachers, José Ortega y Gasset; Xavier Zubiri (1898–1983); and Manuel García-Morente (1888–1942), with whom he translated Husserl’s Logical Investigations into Spanish in 1928–29 (Husserl 1967). Gaos initially worked on neo-Kantianism and on Husserl’s phenomenology.Yet he soon converted—alongside Ortega y Gasset—to Heidegger’s philosophy. Both considered Heidegger’s Being and Time “the summit of a still living and current philosophy, bustling with a conceptual gestation” (Zirión 2013, 9). Nelson Orringer (Orringer 2006, 149) suggests that both Ortega y Gasset and Gaos 777
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were infuenced by Heidegger’s allegedly conclusive interpretation of Ideas I, as well as by the contrast between Husserl’s epochē and Heidegger’s analytics of Dasein, a contrast popularized by Georg Misch’s 1929 Lebenswelt und Phänomenologie (San Martín 2015, 64).Thus when Gaos halfheartedly and very loosely translated Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations in 1942 (Husserl 1942) and Ideas I in 1949 (Husserl 1949), he considered these works to be “destined for the ‘philosophers’ museum’” (Zirión 2013, 9). During the thirteenth International Philosophy Congress held in Mexico in 1963, where a “Symposium on Husserl’s notion of the Lebenswelt” took place— attended by Ludwig Landgrebe, Enzo Paci, and John Wild (Gaos, Paci, Wild, and Landgrebe 1963)—Gaos was still under the aegis of Ortega’s belief that Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology had been written by his assistant Eugen Fink (San Martín 2015, 35). Indeed, sticking to his Cartesian view of Husserl, Gaos still refused to admit that transcendental phenomenology had any relationship with the historicity of the Lebenswelt (Landgrebe), with the lived body (Wild), or with Marxism (Paci), which fustered him the most (Zirión 1999, 35; San Martín 2015, 53). In contrast to his hasty and inaccurate translation of Ideas I, Gaos worked long and carefully on his translation of Being and Time, for having fnished it in 1947, he continued working on it until its publication in 1951 (Heidegger 1927). Perhaps this explains why it has taken so long for Husserl’s texts to be translated into Spanish, and why there are still so few. For the most part, Latin American scholars interested in Husserl’s thought have been reading his work either in the existing translations into other languages or directly in German as his works and immense Nachlass were being re-edited, transcribed, organized, and published in the Husserliana series from 1950 onwards. As has also been the case in other regions of the world (Europe, North America, Asia), there has been in Spain and Latin America a general preference for translating and developing the work of his successors, beginning with Heidegger.5 Despite this situation, some of the earliest Spanish versions of Husserl’s work belong to the Peruvian Carlos Cueto (1913–1968), who translated the Introduction of Husserl’s 1929 Formal Logic and Transcendental Logic (Husserl 1937) and Lévinas’s article, “On Edmund Husserl’s Ideen” (Lévinas 1929). Luis Villoro (1922–2014), who like his mentor José Gaos was born Spanish and naturalized Mexican after having emigrated to that country during the Spanish Civil War, translated the full text of Husserl’s Formal Logic and Transcendental Logic in 1962; a second entirely revised and amended edition of this translation was undertaken much later by Antonio Zirión (Husserl 1962). Another phenomenologist born in Spain who emigrated to Mexico in 1939 by the end of the Spanish Civil War was Eduardo Nicol (1907–1990).Yet there were also early native Latin American philosophers who contributed to spreading and developing the phenomenological and existential tradition in Latin America, such as the Argentineans Francisco Romero (1891– 1962), who spearheaded a reaction against positivism, and Eugenio Pucciarelli (1907–1995). In Colombia, Danilo Cruz (1920–2008) worked especially on Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche and on the transition from Husserl to Heidegger (Cruz 1970). In Venezuela, Ernesto Mayz (1925–2015) published works on Dilthey and on the phenomenology of knowledge. In Peru, Alberto Wagner (1915–2006) was a fervent proponent of Heidegger’s work (Reyna 1945), and before he converted to analytic philosophy, Francisco Miró Quesada (1918–2019) introduced the phenomenological movement (Quesada 1941).The research, books, and teachings of the aforementioned, alongside the Chilean Félix Schwartzmann (1913–2014), played a vital role in the dissemination and development of the phenomenological tradition in the region (Loparić and Walton 2007). It should be noted that the Venezuelan Alberto Rosales (1931– ), the Colombian Guillermo Hoyos (1935–2013), and the Argentinean Antonio Aguirre (1927–2015) each published relevant texts on Heidegger and Husserl in the Phænomenologica 778
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series (Rosales 1970, Hoyos V. 1976,Aguirre 1970).Although Hoyos dedicated his fnal decades to Habermas’s political philosophy, he collected his phenomenological works before his passing (Hoyos V. 2012). Before the end of the twentieth century, the Argentinean Roberto Walton had already published two books (Walton 1993a, 1993b) and innumerable papers on phenomenology, with special emphasis on Husserl’s work. Also from Buenos Aires, Julia Iribarne (1929–2014) contributed scholarship on Husserl’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity, monadology, and ethics (San Martín and Walton 2015) and translated selected texts from volumes XIII, XIV, and XV of Husserliana for the second volume of her exposition of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity (Iribarne 1988). In Colombia, around the same time, Guillermo Hoyos supervised and commented on the translation of the frst volume of Husserl’s First Philosophy (Husserl 1998). I must also mention the Portuguese translation of Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation by the Croatianborn Brazilian philosopher Željko Loparić (Husserl 1975).And in addition to his revision of the Spanish translation of Formal and Transcendental Logic, Antonio Zirión has also undertaken several translations of other major works by Husserl, including the Paris Lectures (Husserl 1988), the Encyclopedia Britannica article (Husserl 1990), and Ideas II (Husserl 1997), as well as a new version of Ideas I (Husserl 2013). Moreover, in 1992 he launched an online collaborative work dedicated, among other projects, to documenting the technical terminology used in translating Husserl’s phenomenology. Finally, in 1992, a Peruvian publication collected works from several renowned European phenomenologists along with their Latin American colleagues (Lerner 1992). Built upon efforts of this sort, by the end of the last century attempts were made to rethink and reshape the Latin American phenomenological movement, although these attempts would not be fully materialized until the early 2000s. For instance, the second World Congress of Phenomenology took place in Guadalajara (Mexico) in 1995, with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s visit. During this event, the Iberoamerican Society of Phenomenology was created, although there was practically no representation from Iberoamerican countries (Zirión 2003, 381).
74.3. Latin American phenomenology in the twentyfrst century: regional initiatives By the end of last century, the need for a better, more rigorous, and mature understanding of the philosophical tradition inaugurated by Husserl was noticeable.This fnally materialized with the creation of numerous national and international associations and circles related to the study of phenomenology.These spaces began to contribute to the promotion of phenomenology by putting forth multiple projects, intensifying translations of classical works, and supporting publications of various kinds.Very soon there ensued a valuable exchange and debate of ideas among Latin American scholars related to this philosophical tradition. The starting point was the 1999 founding of the Latin American Circle of Phenomenology (CLAFEN) in Puebla, Mexico, during the First Latin American Colloquium of Phenomenology within the context of the fourteenth Interamerican Congress of Philosophy, with representatives from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela (Loparić and Walton 2007, 700)—an initiative motivated by a suggestion made by Klaus Held during his Latin American tour (Peru, Colombia, and Mexico) (Zirión 2003, 381–382). By the end of 2019, the Circle already had more than 390 members from over 20 countries, including associates from ten non-Latin American countries.6 Since its foundation, the Secretariat has managed its members’ database in Lima at the Pontifcal Catholic University of Peru (which keeps it active with a small allocation). Its electronic site—managed by Antonio Zirión (Mexico), with the support of Germán Vargas (Colombia) and more recently of Hernán Inverso (Argentina)—has ensured fu779
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ent communication among its members throughout the region as a whole. Its objectives (spelled out in CLAFEN’s founding statutes) include the harmonization of phenomenological research in Latin America. Regional coordinators in each affliated country and the Secretariat in Lima permanently consult regarding the membership applications and the category of their admittance. Further goals orient and foster collaborative work among phenomenologists, including debates and exchanges of opinions through different types of events, as well as supporting phenomenological research through the publication and promotion of joint activities and projects.7 CLAFEN caucuses in different countries each time that a Latin American Colloquium takes place (every three or four years) and produces an online publication containing its annals (Acta fenomenológica latinoamericana).8 Since the initial meeting in Puebla (1999), other Colloquia have taken place in Bogotá (2002), Lima (2004), Bogotá (2006), Morelia (2009), Santiago de Chile (2012), and Buenos Aires (2016), with the participation of renowned European and North American phenomenologists. Special collaborations have been established between CLAFEN and the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (CARP), as well as with the Husserl Circle; the latter carried out its frst meeting outside the United States in Lima, Peru.The last CLAFEN meeting took place in Puebla, Mexico, in 2019, marking its twentieth anniversary. In what follows, I briefy offer an account of several countries’ most important active associations and some of the prominent work of their members. First, I will focus on the current state of phenomenological studies in Argentina. The Phenomenological Psychology and Psychiatric Group was founded in 1991 by María Luisa Pfeiffer and María Lucrecia Rovaletti.The group has held biannual conferences as well as constant meetings, and has developed many graduate courses at Buenos Aires University (Loparić and Walton 2007, 691). (In fact, many countries’ phenomenological associations are also related to psychology or psychiatry associations.) The Argentinean Circle of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, founded in 1992, is currently one section of the Center of Philosophical Studies of the Buenos Aires National Academy of Sciences. Formerly, this section of the Center was under the direction of Julia Iribarne (1929–2014), and the Circle has held various meetings with outstanding international guests. Furthermore, its members have contributed valuable research to Escritos de Filosofía, the journal of the Center of Philosophical Studies (Loparić and Walton 2007, 694). The aforementioned association should not be confused with the Circle of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Santa Fé and Paraná (Argentina), which comprises fve different universities and has been the host of various meetings and workshops, such as the yearly National Workshop on Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, since its foundation in 2003.9 In recent years, in 2011 to be precise, Husserl’s Group was founded under the direction of Verónica Kretschel and Andrés Osswald. The group holds ongoing meetings for the reading and discussion of Husserl’s most important texts.10 Beyond the associations we have mentioned, the outstanding work carried out by Roberto Walton and Luis Rabanaque (CLAFEN’s former and current coordinators for Argentina, respectively) has been crucial in encouraging the formation of a younger generation of phenomenologists and has enabled the realization of different research projects and events such as the aforementioned seventh CLAFEN Latin American Colloquium of Phenomenology (Buenos Aires, 2016).11 Walton has recently published two books entitled Intentionality and Horizonality (Walton 2015) and Horizonality and Historicity (Walton 2019), which comprise part of his lifelong research on the topic and will be followed by other volumes. The Brazilian case deserves special attention. Due to the language barrier (since their native speech is Portuguese), phenomenological studies only started gaining momentum in Brazil in the late 1950s, motivated both by the return of young Brazilian philosophers who had been studying in Germany, such as Gerd Gornheim, and by the thrust already found in the Spanishspeaking Latin American countries (Loparić and Walton 2007, 21).The Brazilian Phenomenological 780
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Society (SBF) was created in 1999 to promote phenomenological studies in the country. By 2007, it already had four regional sections as well as various research groups, specializing in authors such as Heidegger, Schutz, and Lévinas. It carries out national and international events such as the National Congress of Phenomenology.12 However, before the SBF was created, Loparić had already founded the Research Group in Philosophy and Psychotherapeutic Practices in 1995.This group focuses on the study of Heidegger’s existential analytics and the Zollikon seminars, as well as on Winnicott’s contributions to psychoanalysis. Since the beginning, it has also been in charge of organizing the Heidegger Colloquia and the Winnicott Colloquia (Loparić and Walton 2007, 21).13 Besides the many events they organize, they also publish their own journal under the name Natureza Humana, specializing in philosophy and psychoanalysis.14 Finally, André de Macedo Duarte’s work as Brazil’s coordinator for CLAFEN has been crucial for organizing many international events and promoting the exchange of ideas between Spanish- and nonSpanish-speaking Latin American phenomenologists. Although Chile has had a long tradition of scholars and studies in phenomenology, it was not until 2018 that the Chilean Phenomenological Association was founded, with the objective of gathering the already existing studies and endeavors in phenomenology carried out throughout the country, promoting further research and the exchange of ideas, both at a national and international level.15 They have taken the responsibility for organizing the National Colloquium of Phenomenology for Students and are organizing varied events and reading groups.16 This association builds on the work carried out by investigators from the Pontifcal Catholic University of Chile, especially the grounding work of Prof. Luis Flores.A younger generation is active at other universities, such as Patricio Mena (Universidad de la Frontera) and Roberto Rubio (Alberto Hurtado University); their research projects focus on the intersection between phenomenology and hermeneutics. Professor Raúl Velozo was one of the founding members and frst coordinator for CLAFEN in Chile (1999), and published a translation of Eugen Fink’s 1933 article on Husserl facing contemporary criticism in the frst volume of the Acta fenomenológica latinoamericana in 2003. Enrique Muñoz—Chile’s current coordinator for CLAFEN—is also a key fgure in the recent development of Chile’s phenomenological movement, having given his support to the organization of the sixth Latin American Colloquium of Phenomenology17 in Santiago (2012), whose convener was Mariano Crespo before he returned to his native Spain. There is also a rich and thriving tradition of phenomenological studies in Colombia. Research and translations by Guillermo Hoyos have played an important role in that country as well as in the Latin American phenomenological movement in general throughout the second half of the twentieth century and the early 2000s. His initiatives were later followed by Germán Vargas, Colombia’s current coordinator for CLAFEN—who is very active in teaching as well as in fostering new research projects and publications in phenomenology—and by Pedro Juan Aristizábal, who is an active collaborator of the Colombian Phenomenological Yearbook.18 Their efforts made possible both the second19 and fourth20 Latin American Colloquia of Phenomenology, which took place in Bogotá in 2002 and 2007, respectively. Concerning Central America, the Costa Rica Circle of Phenomenology seeks to promote the study of contemporary phenomenology, mainly through the organization of national and international events and projects.21 It is directed by Jethro Masís—Costa Rica’s coordinator for CLAFEN—who also coordinates the International Association of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, as well as its journal.22 The current center of gravity for phenomenological work in Guatemala appears to be Rafael Landívar University, although phenomenological research is also conducted at other Guatemalan universities.And the most prolifc phenomenologist in this country is Antonio Gallo, S.J. (1925–), who was born in Italy but has been active in Guatemala since the 1960s; he has taught at 781
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least four generations of philosophers associated with Rafael Landívar University.Themes of his publications range from Husserlian considerations on sociality (Gallo 1995) and Husserlian epistemology (Gallo 2002) to phenomenology of values (Gallo 2006, 2011). Other authors include, for example, Roberto Palomo, who specialized in Heidegger; Oswaldo Salazar, who works on the literary phenomenon; Bienvenido Argueta, who investigates such themes as intercorporeality in the educational feld and in Mayan thought (Argueta H. 2019); and Amílcar Dávila, whose work on community and existential-phenomenological ontology includes a study of the “communing” at the root of “community” (Dávila E. 2017). Another important aspect of phenomenological work at Rafael Landívar University is the Center for Dance and Movement Research founded in 2000 by Sabrina Castillo-Gallusser, where the rich and multifarious experience of dancers and choreographers provides the basis for ongoing work in phenomenology of the body as well as phenomenology of dance and of artistic creativity, often in collaboration with phenomenologically oriented philosophers (Castillo-Gallusser and Salazar D. 2006, Castillo and Arévalo 2007). The philosophy department at Rafael Landívar University is also home to a master’s degree program with an emphasis on phenomenology, including seminars on Brentano, Husserl, Scheler, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Gadamer, Lévinas, Zubiri, and Ricoeur; this program serves as a springboard for a new generation of Guatemalan philosophers working in or infuenced by phenomenology, including Ángel Orellana, Santiago Azurdia, and Javier Pérez. Finally, interest in phenomenology has recently emerged through work at the Association for the Advancement of Social Sciences in Guatemala (AVANCSO, founded in 1986),23 where discussions concerning issues of body and racism bring the work of Merleau-Ponty into dialogue with such authors as Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, and Jean-Luc Nancy.24 As already indicated, since the beginning, Mexico has consistently been one of the most prolifc countries in Latin America regarding both phenomenological research and fostering the phenomenological tradition. We have already mentioned the patient work of Antonio Zirión (Morelia, Mexico City) since the 1980s and 1990s as one of CLAFEN’s founding members and promoters, as well as its coordinator for Mexico.Thanks to his zealous work, Mexican scholars with other philosophical interests have begun to take phenomenology’s achievements seriously. Moreover, he has been a key fgure during recent years in the increasing interest in phenomenology in general, as well as in training a new generation of young phenomenology scholars such as Marcela Venebra, Ignacio Quepons, and Esteban Marín. Ángel Xolocotzi is a very active Heidegger scholar whose work bears on phenomenology and hermeneutics. He has translated several works of the Master of the Black Forest (Heidegger 1984, 2006a, 2006b), and has written and edited numerous texts on this author (Xolocotzi 2007, 2011a, 2011b). At the Benemérita Universidad de Puebla he has edited several monographs with Ricardo Gibu (a Peruvian settled in Mexico) and others (Xolocotzi, Gibu, Godina, and Rodolfo 2011a, 2011b, Xolocotzi, Gibu, Huerta, and Veraza 2014, Xolocotzi and Gibu 2014); with Antonio Zirión (a Husserlian) he has published a book about Husserl and Heidegger and the meaning of their motto “to the things themselves” (Xolocotzi and Zirión 2018).And many others could also be mentioned, such as Eduardo Gonzales (Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás Hidalgo) and his research on Edith Stein’s legacy, Jean Patočka, José Gaos, and more. Several phenomenological associations have been founded in Mexico since 2007, such as the Seminar/Workshop of Studies and Projects of Phenomenology,25 directed by Zirión, and still active with events and seminars on specifc phenomenological topics. Zirión also conducts the Seminar of Basic Studies on Transcendental Phenomenology,26 where discussions of phenomenological texts take place in weekly meetings. The recently founded Acta Mexicana de Fenomenología (AMF)27 is particularly promising under Marcela Venebra’s direction with the active collaboration of a younger generation of 782
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Zirión’s students. Its goal is the online diffusion of international phenomenological and philosophical research (in English and/or Spanish). It focuses on phenomenology not as a limited research area, but rather as method. Namely, it attempts to reach all areas of scientifc knowledge, provided that the methodical requirements of phenomenological philosophy are strictly fulflled such that the subject matter is analyzed from the point of view of experience as the ultimate ground of all rational justifcation.The AMF is edited by the Mexican Center of Phenomenological Investigations,28 promoted by a team of researchers and professors stemming from different universities of Mexico, the United States, and Europe. One of its main goals is to include in every issue, as a central segment, an original Spanish translation of one of Husserl’s texts. They also aim to reinforce and renovate the Iberian-American phenomenological tradition.The positive response that the frst three volumes have provoked allows me to anticipate that it is rapidly becoming one of the most relevant and internationally visible current phenomenological Latin American publications.29 The Peruvian Circle of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics (CIphER)30 was created in 2004 by a group of professors of the Pontifcal Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) and the Antonio Ruiz de Montoya University, also members of CLAFEN. CIphER’s Secretariat—as well as CLAFEN’s since its 1999 foundation—is under the responsibility of Rosemary R.P. Lerner, thanks to the support that PUCP continues to offer. It was CLAFEN’s Secretariat in Lima that hosted the twenty-third meeting of the Husserl Circle in 2002,31 as well as CLAFEN’s third Colloquium of Latin American Phenomenology in 2004 within the framework of the Interamerican and Iberian-American Philosophy Congress (Lerner 2006). Numerous renowned phenomenologists, not only from North and South America, but also from the Iberian peninsula attended. In 2005, both CIphER’s Secretariat and CLAFEN’s Secretariat organized and co-sponsored the second meeting of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations (OPO) in Lima, Peru.32 Since 2004, CIphER has organized yearly meetings (Journeys of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics)33 on different topics (Arendt, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Husserl, Heidegger, Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty,34 and so forth) in which several international phenomenologists and hermeneutic philosophers have participated as keynote speakers. For example, the XIV Jornadas de Fenomenología y Hermenéutica (2018) had as its main topic “The Lifeworld and the Sense of History: In Commemoration of the Bicentenary of Karl Marx’s Birth.”The proceedings of these yearly meetings are regularly published on CIphER’s website.35 CIphER’s statutes, following CLAFEN’s model, also seek to promote research projects among students and fellow colleagues, as well as encouraging the exchange of ideas within the feld of phenomenological and hermeneutical studies. Short courses, seminars, workshops, a permanent seminar on Husserl’s texts, and conferences of visiting scholars are currently taking place.36 In August 2016 an agreement for inter-institutional research was signed in Lima, Peru, by Zirión, as representative of the Seminar/Workshop of Studies and Projects of Phenomenology and of the Seminar of Basic Studies on Transcendental Phenomenology, and Lerner, as representative of CIphER and of the Peruvian Permanent Husserl Seminar. Within the context of this agreement, the frst Interamerican Phenomenology Workshop (“Methods and Problems: Current Phenomenological Perspectives and Research”)37 took place in Lima (July 2018), with the support of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (CARP). Currently a three-year research project conducted by ten CIphER members will be published under the title La racionalidad ampliada: Nuevos horizontes de la fenomenología y la hermenéutica.38 Finally, thanks to the collaborative efforts of Mariana Chu (Peru), Luis Rabanaque (Argentina), and Mariano Crespo (Spain), the full translation of Husserl’s 1920 and 1924 lectures on ethics will fnally appear with an introduction by Mariana Chu (Husserl, forthcoming). 783
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74.4. Building on the work of previous generations Most of the twentieth-century contributions to phenomenology in Latin America are found in countless articles scattered in different journals, book series, or collections (I have already mentioned some of them in this chapter).The younger and proactive generations of brilliant scholars count upon powerful online tools that allow them to communicate and exchange their work not only within Latin America, but worldwide. However, the previous generations did not have this advantage, and their painful efforts were mostly isolated across our wide and geographically diverse region.This is the reason why I would like to highlight some work that has previously been mentioned, but that deserves special recognition. Probably the most important contributions to the diffcult exegesis of Husserl’s works—scholarship that stands out not only according to Latin America’s standards, but also to international ones (although most of his work has been published in Spanish)—is that of Roberto Walton (Argentina). Here it is impossible to do justice to the scope of his work, but the extent of his efforts can be gauged by the list of his papers and lectures compiled by Javier San Martín for a volume honoring Walton’s work (a list that includes more than 300 entries) (San Martín 2016). As mentioned, Walton’s work not only penetrates into the depths of Husserl’s most intricate refections (including those found in his research manuscripts), but confronts them critically with many of Husserl’s successors and detractors, putting their real points of departure from the founder in an appropriate perspective on the basis of a broader common ground (despite the carefully chosen divergences of terminology) than has generally been acknowledged. In addition, Julia Iribarne, also from Argentina, has contributed expositions and interpretations of Husserl’s concepts of intersubjectivity and of monadology (Iribarne 2002), as well as translating Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences (Husserl 2008);39 later she published on the ethical and metaphysical aspects of Husserl’s philosophy (Iribarne 2007, 2012). In Venezuela, one of CLAFEN’s co-founders,Alberto Rosales, is recognized for his contribution to the dissemination of Heidegger’s phenomenology (Rosales 1970).To Antonio Zirión’s previously mentioned projects and work—besides his varied translations—one has to add his coordination of the edition of José Gaos’ complete works,40 whose frst volumes have begun to be published. The positive upshot of having CIphER and CLAFEN’s Secretariat in Lima is that it has allowed the older generation—with their scattered work and courses on Heidegger, Husserl, Ricoeur, Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Arendt, and Gadamer, among others—to gather and foster a new generation whose works are starting to be known not only in Latin America, but abroad. For example, Lerner’s own work, which collects and re-elaborates her scattered papers from 1985 to 2015 (Lerner 2012, 2014/2015a, 2015b), may have helped to boost a new generation of Peruvian phenomenologists.
74.5. Some future prospects The work developed by rigorous phenomenological studies in the region during the twentieth century—augmented not only by the creation of local and regional organizations that have enabled mutual connection between isolated endeavors, but also by technological tools (available only recently in historical terms) that have allowed scholars to provide open access to their very rich contributions—will enhance the further development of a Latin American phenomenological tradition throughout the twenty-frst century. As the 2018 Interamerican Phenomenology Workshop in Lima clearly showed, a new and vibrant generation is actively, decisively, and creatively carrying forward the labor that was painstakingly inaugurated by their forerunners, even with the odds against them. Both the focus on the diffusion of the works of the most important 784
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authors of the phenomenological tradition and the promotion of rigorous original research that builds upon this work and meets high academic standards have been crucial for the development of a younger generation of Latin American phenomenologists. Phenomenology offers an important outlook within the current (and multifarious) traditions of philosophical research worldwide. It relies on human experiences as endowed with sense and validity, and thus it enhances the relevance of human studies within lower and higher education, the survival of which is currently being questioned all over the world (and in some cases is even being suppressed).Thus it is vital to continue such research and to combine our efforts, both within and outside the phenomenological feld, in order to guarantee the relevance of the human sciences and philosophical culture for the future development of humanity. Finally, while most of the production of Latin American phenomenologists contributes to the phenomenological tradition in general, there is also research being made from the phenomenological perspective on specifcally Latin American issues.This is the case of topics such as the worldviews of traditional cultures and their mutual conficts, as well as the meaning of historical-political conficts, all of which have merited a strictly phenomenological approach on the basis of human experience. Such innovative research can lay the foundations for a specifcally Latin American phenomenological tradition in a narrower sense.
Notes 1 ORCID number: 0000-0001-6634-4437. I wish to thank Vania Alarcón and Ricardo Rojas, for their help in compiling the elements for the frst draft of this chapter and Elizabeth A. Behnke for contributing the paragraph on Guatemala and for the fnal editing. 2 For further information on the situation of Latin American governments, see (United Nations Development Programme 2011). 3 On the experiences of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, and Peru, among others, see (Hayner 2011, 27–51). 4 Zirión’s work includes an extensive and thorough account of the different stages of the reception of the phenomenological tradition in Mexico developed by native Mexicans and Spanish emigrants. 5 For a relatively early account (unfortunately unsympathetic and very inaccurate, yet useful as a bibliographical source regarding the development of the phenomenological-existential movement in Latin America), see (Sobrevilla 1988–89). 6 https://clafen.org/directorio/ 7 https://clafen.org/reglamento/ 8 Volumes 1 to 6 were co-edited by Rosemary R.P Lerner with Germán Vargas, Antonio Zirión, and alternatively by the conveners of the different bi-annual meetings (https://clafen.org/acta-vol -i/, https://clafen.org/acta-vol-ii/, https://clafen.org/acta-vol-iii/, https://clafen.org/acta-vol-iv/, https://clafen.org/acta-vol-v/, https://clafen.org/acta-fenomenologica-latinoamericana-vol-vi/). 9 https://circulofyh.wordpress.com/about/historia/ 10 http://grupohusserl.ophen.org/ 11 https://clafen.org/vii-coloquio-clafen/ 12 http://www.ppgf.ifcs.ufrj.br/?p=1708/ 13 See also https://ibpw.org.br/ 14 http://pepsic.bvsalud.org/scielo.php?script=sci_serial&pid=1517-2430&lng=pt&nrm=iso/ 15 https://fenomenologiachile.wordpress.com/quienes-somos/ 16 See https://fenomenologiachile.wordpress.com/ 17 https://clafen.org/coloquios-latinoamericanos-de-fenomenologia/quinto-coloquio-latinoamerica no-de-fenomenologia/ 18 https://fenomenologiaymundo.wordpress.com/category/anuario-colombiano-de-fenomenologia/ 19 https://clafen.org/segundo-coloquio-latinoamericano-de-fenomenologia/ 20 https://clafen.org/coloquios-latinoamericanos-de-fenomenologia/cuarto-coloquio-latinoamericanode-fenomenologia/ 21 https://fenomenologiacr.com/ 22 https://fenomenologia-cogsci.com/
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Rosemary R.P. Lerner 23 www.avancso.org.gt/ 24 I wish to thank Bienvenido Argueta, Sabrina Castillo-Gallusser, and Amílcar Dávila for sharing information regarding phenomenology in Guatemala for this chapter. 25 https://sites.google.com/site/stfhusserl/ 26 http://www.investigacionesfenomenologicas.org/index.php/el-seminario/ 27 http://actamexicanadefenomenologia.org/AMF-Espanol.html 28 http://www.cemif.info/ 29 I wish to thank Marcela Venebra for providing us with input regarding AMF for this chapter. 30 http://red.pucp.edu.pe/cipher 31 http://red.pucp.edu.pe/cipher/2002/12/07/xxxii-reunion-del-husserl-circle/ 32 http://red.pucp.edu.pe/cipher/2011/12/07/ii-encuentro-de-la-organizacion-de-organizaciones-de-f enomenologia/ 33 http://red.pucp.edu.pe/cipher/jornadas/ 34 Among local participants in these “Journeys,” Bernardo Haour, S.J. published Introducción a la Fenomenología de la percepción de Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Haour 2010), and Cesare del Mastro edited Emmanuel Levinas: metáfora y vulnerabilidad (Mastro 2013). 35 http://red.pucp.edu.pe/cipher/actas/ 36 http://red.pucp.edu.pe/cipher/noticias-y-actividades/ http://cef.pucp.edu.pe/agenda/ 37 http://red.pucp.edu.pe/cipher/2018/07/03/workshop-2018/ 38 This focuses on the discussion of different topics from a phenomenological perspective, arranged in three main sections: Rationality Reconsidered, From Aesthetics to Ethics, and Between Confict and Dialogue. 39 There is also an earlier Spanish version of this work (Husserl 1984). 40 http://www.flosofcas.unam.mx/%7Egaos/
References Aguirre, Antonio. 1970. Genetische Phänomenologie. Zur Letztbegründung der Wissenschaft aus der radikalen Skepsis im Denken Edmund Husserls. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Argueta H., Bienvenido. 2019. Cuerpo indígena. Racismo en el discurso pedagógico guatemalteco. Guatemala: University of San Carlos,Teacher Training School of Secondary Education, 2019. Castillo, Sabrina and Arévalo, Rodolfo. 2007.“Las sombras mueven el suelo: Encuentro con Momentum”. Abrapalabra 40, pp. 37–60. Castillo-Gallusser, Sabrina and Salazar D., Oswaldo. 2006. “Danza con Husserl”. Abrapalabra 39, pp. 97–130. Cruz V., Danilo. 1970. Filosofía sin supuestos. De Husserl a Heidegger. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. Dávila E.,Amílcar. 2017. Comunar.Algunas notas ontológicas acerca de la comunidad, a partir de Martin Heidegger y Jean-Luc Nancy. Guatemala: Cara Parens. Gallo, Antonio. 1995. El hombre, mi hermano. Guatemala: Ministerio de Cultura. ———. 2002. Ver de verdad. Guatemala: Universidad Rafael Landívar. ———. 2006. Introducción a los valores. Guatemala: Universidad Rafael Landívar. ———. 2011. Ver los valores. Guatemala: Universidad Rafael Landívar. Gaos, José, Paci, Enzo,Wild, John, and Landgrebe, Ludwig. 1963. Symposium sobre la noción husserliana de la Lebenswelt. México: UNAM/Centro de Estudios Filosófcos. Haour, S.J., Bernardo. 2010. Introducción a la Fenomenología de la percepción de Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Lima: Fondo Editorial Universidad Ruiz de Montoya. Harnecker, Marta. 2014. Un mundo a construir. Nuevos caminos. Santiago de Chile: Editor LOM. English translation: A World to Build: New Paths Toward Twenty-First Century Socialism.Trans. Fred Fuentes. 2015. New York: Monthly Review Press. Hayner, Priscilla B. 2011. Unspeakable Truths:Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions, 2nd rev. Ed. New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1927.“Sein und Zeit”. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 8, 1–439. Spanish translation: El ser y el tiempo.Trans. J. Gaos. 1951. México: FCE. ———. 1984. Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte “Probleme” der Logik (WS 1937/8). Ed. FriedrichWilhelm von Hermann. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. Spanish translation: Preguntas fundamentales de la flosofía. “Problemas” selectos de “lógica”. Trans. Á. Xolocotzi. 2008. Granada: Comares.
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Latin America ———. 2003. Briefe an Max Müller und andere Dokumente. Freiburg: Alber. ———. 2006a. Cartas a Max Müller y Bernhard Welte. Trans. Á. Xolocotzi and C. Gutiérrez. México: Universidad Iberoamericana. ———. 2006b. Zollikoner Seminare. Ed. Medard Boss. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann. Spanish translation: Seminarios de Zollikon. Trans. Á. Xolocotzi. 2013. México/Barcelona: Herder Editorial. Heidegger, Martin and Welte, Bernhard. 2003. Briefe und Begegnungen. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Hoyos V., Guillermo. 1976. Intentionalität als Verantwortung. Geschichtsteleologie und Teleologie der Intentionalität bei E. Husserl. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 2012. Investigaciones fenomenológicas. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores. Husserl, Edmund. 1937. “Introducción de Husserl a Lógica formal y trascendental". Trans. C. Cueto. Revista Letras 8, pp. 424–436. ———. 1942. Meditaciones cartesianas [Meditations I–IV]. Trans. J. Gaos. México: El Colegio de México/ UNAM. ———. 1949. Ideas relativas a una fenomenología pura y una flosofía fenomenológica. Trans. J. Gaos. México: FCE. ———. 1962. Lógica formal y lógica trascendental. Ensayo de una crítica de la razón lógica. Trans. Luis Villoro. México: UNAM. 2nd rev. and amended ed.Trans.A. Zirión. 2009. México: UNAM. ———. 1967. Logische Untersuchungen; Investigaciones Lógicas, 2 vols.Trans. M. García-Morente and J. Gaos. México: FCE. ———. 1975. Investigações lógicas. Sexta investigação. Trans. Željko Loparić. São Paulo: Nova Cultural, rpt. 1988. ———. 1984. Crisis de las ciencias europeas y la fenomenología trascendental. Trans. H. Steinberg, rev: Oscar Terán. México: Folios Editores. ———. 1988. Las conferencias de Paris. Introducción a la fenomenología trascendental. Trans. A. Zirión. México: UNAM. ———. 1990. El articulo de la Encyclopedia Britannica.Trans.A. Zirión. México: UNAM. ———. 1997.Ideas relativas a una fenomenología pura y una flosofía fenomenológica, Libro Segundo:Investigaciones fenomenológicas sobre la constitución. Trans.A. Zirión. México: UNAM. ———. 1998. Filosofía primera.Trans. Rosa Helena Santos. Bogotá: Norma. ———. 2008. La crisis de las ciencias europeas y la fenomenología trascendental.Trans. J. Iribarne. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros. ———. 2013. Ideas relativas a una fenomenología pura y una flosofía fenomenológica, Libro Primero: Introducción a la fenomenología. Trans.A. Zirión on the basis of Gaos, Ideas. México: UNAM. ———. Forthcoming. Introducción a la ética. Lecciones de los semestres de verano 1920 y 1924.Trans. M. Chu, L. Rabanaque, and M. Crespo. Madrid:Trotta. Iribarne, Julia. 1987–1988. La intersubjetividad en Husserl. Bosquejo de una teoría, 2 vols. Buenos Aires: Carlos Lohlé. ———. 2002. Edmund Husserl. La fenomenología como monadología. Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de las Ciencias. ———. 2007. De la ética a la metafsica. Bogotá: Universidad Pedagógica Nacional/San Pablo. ———. 2012. En torno al sentido de la vida. Ensayos fenomenológicos sobre la existencia. Morelia: Red Utopía/ Jitanjáfora. Lerner, Rosemary R.P. (Ed.). 1992. El pensamiento de Husserl en la refexión flosófca contemporánea. Lima: Instituto Riva-Agüero, PUCP. ———. 1993. “La flosofía de Husserl en el Perú”. In: Encuentros y desencuentros. Estudios sobre la recepción de la cultura alemana en América Latina. Eds. Miguel Giusti and Horst Nitschack. Lima: Fondo Editorial PUCP, pp. 101–157. ———. (Ed.). 2006. Tolerancia/Toleration/Tolerância. Interpretando la experiencia de la tolerancia/Interpreting the Experience of Tolerance. Lima: Siglo del Hombre Editores/Fondo Editorial PUCP. ———. 2012. Husserl en diálogo. Lecturas y debates. Bogotá/Lima: Siglo del Hombre Editores/Fondo Editorial PUCP. ———. 2014/2015a. El exilio del sujeto. Mitos modernos y postmodernos. Bogotá/Lima: Editorial Aula de Humanidades/Fondo Editorial PUCP. ———. 2015b. La agonía de la razón. Refexiones desde la fenomenología práctica. Madrid/Lima: Anthropos/ Fondo Editorial PUCP. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1929.“Sur les ‘Ideen’ de M. E. Husserl”. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger 54, pp. 230–265. Spanish translation:“Sobre las ‘Ideen’ de Edmund Husserl”.Trans. Carlos Cueto. 1937. Revista Letras 6, pp. 142–169.
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Rosemary R.P. Lerner Loparić, Željko and Walton, Roberto (Eds.). 2007. Phenomenology 2005, vol. 2: Selected Essays from Latin America. Bucharest: Zeta Books. Mastro, Cesare del (Ed.). 2013. Emmanuel Levinas: metáfora y vulnerabilidad. Lima: Universidad del Pacífco. Medin, Tzvi. 1994. Ortega y Gasset en la cultura hispanoamericana. México: FCE. Orringer, Nelson. 2006. “La critica de Ortega a Husserl y Heidegger. La infuencia de Georg Misch”. Revista de Estudios Orteguianos 3, pp. 147–166. Quesada, Francisco Miró. 1941. El sentido del movimiento fenomenológica. Lima: Biblioteca de la Sociedad Peruana de Filosofía. Reyna, José Luis. 2006. “América Latina. Hacia una nueva geometría política”. Estudios Sociológicos 24, pp. 757–771. Rosales, Alberto. 1970. Transzendenz und Differenz. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der ontologischen Differenz beim frühen Heidegger. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. San Martín, Javier. 2015. La nueva imagen de Husserl. Lecciones de Guanajuato. Madrid: Trotta. ———. 2016.“Lista sequida de obras de Roberto Walton”. In: Horizonte y mundanidad. Homenaje a Roberto Walton. Eds. Luis Román Rabanaque and Antonio Zirión Q. Morelia: Jitanjáfora/Red Utopía, pp. 431–462. San Martín, Javier and Walton, Roberto (Eds.). 2015. Julia V. Iribarne. Intersubjetividad, ética y antropología. Investigaciones fenomenológicas, Monographic edition 6, Madrid: UNED/Escritos de Filosofía, Segunda Serie, No. 3. Buenos Aires:Academia de las Ciencias. Sobrevilla, David. 1988–89.“Phenomenology and Existentialism in Latin America”. The Philosophical Forum 20, pp. 85–113. United Nations Development Programme. 2001. Our Democracy in Latin America. New York: UN Plaza. Wagner de Reyba,Alberto. 1945. La ontología fundamental de Heidegger. Su motivo y signifcación. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada. Walton, Roberto. 1993a. Husserl, mundo, conciencia, temporalidad. Buenos Aires: Almagesto. ———. 1993b. El fenómeno y sus confguraciones. Buenos Aires: Almagesto. ———. 2015. Intencionalidad y horizonticidad. Eds. Germán Vargas G. and Víctor E. Espinosa. Bogotá: Aula de Humanidades ———. 2019. Horizonticidad e historicidad. Cali, Colombia: Aula de Humanidades en co-edición con la Universidad de Buenaventura. Xolocotzi, Ángel. 2007. Subjetividad radical y comprensión afectiva. El rompimiento de la representación en Rickert, Dilthey, Husserl y Heidegger. México: Plaza y Valdés/Universidad Iberoamericana. ———. 2011a. Fundamento y abismo. Aproximaciones al Heidegger tardío. México: Porrúa/Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. ———. 2011b. Una crónica de Ser y tiempo de Martin Heidegger. México: Ítaca/Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Xolocotzi, Ángel, Gibu, Ricardo, Godina, Célida, and Rodolfo S., Jésus (Eds.). 2011a. Ámbitos fenomenológicos de la hermenéutica. México: Eón/Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. ———. 2011b. La aventura de interpretar. Los impulsos flosófcos de Franco Volpi. México: Eón/Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Xolocotzi, Ángel and Gibu, Ricardo. 2014. Fenomenología del cuerpo y hermenéutica de la corporeidad. Madrid: Plaza y Valdés/México: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Xolocotzi, Ángel, Gibu, Ricardo, Huerta,Vanessa, and Veraza, Pablo (Eds.). 2014. Heidegger, del sentido a la historia. Madrid: Plaza y Valdés. Xolocotzi, Ángel and Zirión Q.,Antonio. 2018. ¡A las cosas mismas! Dos ideas sobre la fenomenología. México: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla/Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. Zirión Q., Antonio. 1999. “Nota del coodinador de la edición”. In: Gaos, José. Obras completas, vol. 10, De Husserl, Heidegger y Ortega. Ed. Antonio Zirión Q. 1999. México: Coordinación de Humanidades Instituto de Investigaciónes Filósofcas/UNAM, pp. 35–50. ———. 2003. Historia de la fenomenología en México. Morelia: Red Utopía/Jitanjáfora. ———. 2013. “Presentación”. In: Ideas relativas a una fenomenología pura y una flosofía fenomenológica, Libro Primero: Introducción general a la fenomenología pura. Ed. Edmund Husserl.Trans. A. Zirión. México: FCE, pp. 5–26.
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75 NORTH AMERICA Steven Crowell and Rodney Parker United States1 Steven Crowell
75.1. Introduction What the history of phenomenology in the United States is depends on how broadly one construes the term “phenomenology.” Should the reception of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work – which did not begin here until the mid-1970s, and not under the label of phenomenology – be considered part of the history of phenomenology? One might wonder whether even Heidegger belongs to the history of phenomenology in the United States. By 1962, when William Richardson published the frst full-scale treatment of Heidegger in English, Heidegger was already known as an “existentialist,”2 and English translations of a few of Heidegger’s essays on Hölderlin preceded the translation of Being and Time – arguably his most phenomenological work – by more than a decade (Heidegger 1949). Despite its subtitle (“A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology”), Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was “existentialism,” identifed with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Camus, not Husserl or even Heidegger. Unless one restricts the term “phenomenology” to the philosophy of Husserl, then, it seems that one must construct the history of its dissemination in the United States as a story of the various guises and aliases through which it became familiar. It is no accident that the frst postwar professional society dedicated to phenomenology in the United States insisted on a distinction here: Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.The Heidegger Circle was established in 1967 and the Husserl Circle in 1969.The emergence of such societies highlights the fact that there was no reception of “phenomenology” as such in this country, but only of individual thinkers whose intellectual and personal relations in earlier decades of the century, in Europe, were repeated on these shores in temporally foreshortened ways and behind a pretty thick veil of ignorance.Thus there can be no talk of “the” Phenomenological Movement here. Herbert Spiegelberg’s 1960 volume by that name was a backward-looking history of the European scene in which both Heidegger and Sartre appear as somewhat marginal, and even dangerous, fgures. Further complicating the picture is the impact that Jacques Derrida exerted on what came to be called “Continental philosophy.” His earliest publications place Derrida squarely in the phenomenological tradition, but that is not how he was received in the 1970s, when a spate of translations appeared and, in the following decades, he took up teaching appointments at various American universities. Rightly or wrongly, deconstruction was seen as anti-phenomenological, and phenomenology itself appeared to be a paradigm of the “metaphysics of presence.” Thus, 789
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when Derrida later insists that his work belongs within the scope of “the phenomenological reduction,” should we take deconstruction (and all its aliases) as another guise in which the history of phenomenology happened? Or is it merely an opportunistic use of the word – which may also be reckoned, precisely because of its opportunism, to that history, but which is hardly part of the narrative of the thing itself? But what is the “thing itself ”? In a useful nuts-and-bolts article on the history of phenomenology in the United States, the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology tackles this problem by distinguishing between “four successively emerging tendencies now discernable in the worldwide phenomenological movement,” which it employs as a prism for narrating the reception of Husserl, Heidegger, and others in this country (Embree et al. 1997, 718–723).3 The “tendencies” include two that are defned pretty narrowly in terms of Husserl’s thought (“realistic” and “constitutive” phenomenology, picking out the pre- and post-Ideas I Husserl respectively), and two that are constructed around major criticisms of the frst two: “existential” phenomenology (early Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) and “hermeneutic” phenomenology (Heidegger, Ricoeur, Gadamer). The article notes that American phenomenology has “sometimes been challenged” by movements such as “deconstruction,” but it recoups such criticism for the history of phenomenology with the remark that this is “not unlike the way some existentialists and hermeneuticists, also under the infuence of literary theory, ignored their origins.” (ibid., 723, my emphasis) The fact that a European philosophical movement originates in a criticism of phenomenology, however, does not necessarily mean that it belongs to the history of phenomenology in the United States.As for literature, we shall have occasion to return to its role below. The Encyclopedia article also notes the rise of “analytical phenomenology” which, unlike the other tendencies, did not originate in Europe but in the “Anglo-American” tradition.Why do the philosophers mentioned here – among them David W. Smith, Ronald MacIntyre, Dagfnn Føllesdal, Hubert Dreyfus, and John Searle – not fnd a place under one or another of the four previously mentioned tendencies? In part – and this shall provide our narrative thread – it is because the history of phenomenology in the United States is the story of how it has been superseded in the context of its original reception: university departments of philosophy receptive to philosophical tendencies originating in Continental Europe. Currently, philosophy departments which self-describe as “Continental” typically have faculty members who work on an ever-changing list of fgures such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Arendt, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Lyotard, Gadamer, Habermas, Deleuze, Irigaray, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Badiou, Vattimo, Agamben, and many others. Most of these have ties to Husserlian thought at some remove or another, but it would be absurd to think that a philosopher who writes on Badiou or Deleuze, say, is part of the history of phenomenology in the United States. Such a person will not claim to be doing phenomenology, but the same can be said of many (or even most) of those who work on Heidegger, Gadamer, or Levinas.This is not to suggest that there is no such thing as “hermeneutic” or “existential” or even “deconstructive” phenomenology; it is merely to say that the question of whether something belongs under one of those heads can no longer be answered by reference to historical origins at all. Once phenomenology is divorced from the names of its originators in this way, the stance that “analytic phenomenology” adopts becomes normative: phenomenology is a distinctive, though vaguely defned, way of tackling philosophical problems. At present, much signifcant phenomenological philosophy in the United States is done in departments that do not selfdescribe as “Continental” and under rubrics such as philosophy of mind, moral psychology, or metaphysics. Such work often (but by no means always) makes reference to Husserl, MerleauPonty, Heidegger, or Sartre; but the internecine quarrels that separated these thinkers from one 790
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another and led to the balkanization of the various “tendencies” within “the” phenomenological movement make their appearance solely as moves within philosophical argumentation around a given theme. In the United States today there is no reason why a phenomenological approach to phenomenal consciousness, intention-in-action, or perceptual content should not include elements of realistic, constitutive, existential, and hermeneutic thinking.The differences between Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and others continue to be vigorously debated in special societies dedicated to the philological preservation of their work and to following out the implications of their thought in its own terms. But only to the extent that members of these societies pursue particular philosophical problems – either among themselves or with philosophers of other persuasions – can they be said to contribute to the history of phenomenology in the United States today.4 Thus the present chapter argues (1) that the European philosophical movement, phenomenology, has been superseded in the United States by other movements and is now the province of specialized societies dedicated to individual philosophers; and (2) that a home-grown version of phenomenology has emerged that draws upon the European tradition but understands itself primarily as a way of dealing with philosophical problems.Thus the history of phenomenology in the United States will appear here neither as the chronicle of its various aliases, nor as an exhumation of the origins of movements that are avowedly not phenomenological, but as the story of how a way of doing philosophy that stood in some contrast to the dominant traditions of AngloAmerican thought came to have a non-adversarial relation to those traditions in the present.
75.2. The early reception of Husserl’s thought (1902–1950) The initial reception of Husserl’s phenomenology took place at a time when American universities were dominated by versions of pragmatism and German (and British) Idealism. The fundamental intellectual challenge was to understand the place of “value” in a world increasingly conceived in natural-scientifc terms (Blanshard 1962, esp. Chapter 1). Husserl’s account of the ideality of meaning in the Logical Investigations, and his descriptive approach to conscious experience, found resonance here (as it did in Germany) as a defense of the irreducibility of value. William Ernest Hocking, for instance, whose interests lay in integrating the idealism of Josiah Royce with naturalism, met Husserl in 1902. In the 1920s Hocking’s colleague at Harvard,Winthrop Bell (also a student of Husserl), taught phenomenological value theory and sent Dorion Cairns and Marvin Farber to work with Husserl in Freiburg. In 1931 an English translation of Husserl’s Ideas I appeared by W. R. Boyce Gibson, a Lecturer at the University of Melbourne with interests in the religious thinker, Rudolf Eucken. In 1939 a Journal of Philosophy article praised Husserl for initiating a “systematic study” of experience that reduced it neither to the physical nor the psychical (Montague 1939, 232). In 1935, when he was seventy-four years old and his situation in Freiburg tenuous, Husserl was offered a position at the University of Southern California, largely through the efforts of a graduate student, E. Parl Welch, who was then working on Max Scheler’s theory of value. Had philosophy in America continued in this vein – that is, characterized by a kind of pragmatism with roots in Hegel’s thought and an idealism that shared a vocabulary and topical concerns with contemporary German neo-Kantianism – the reception of phenomenology might well have been different. After the war, however, leading American philosophy departments came increasingly to embrace a European philosophical movement that was specifcally opposed to the pragmatic/idealist consensus: logical analysis.With its roots in Frege and Wittgenstein, and as championed by Russell, analysis, in the form of logical positivism, ran philosophical idealism 791
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out of Oxford and Cambridge and served as a model for the restructuring of American philosophy departments from the 1940s on.5 To philosophers who embraced the “linguistic turn” – the idea that philosophical problems could be solved or dissolved by logically scrutinizing the kind of overt behavior in which they were formulated (i.e., linguistic behavior) – Husserl’s “systematic study” of the conscious experiences in which linguistic meaning was supposedly grounded seemed nothing but unscientifc “introspection” and mystical “intuition.” Thus the attitude toward phenomenology was already darkening when, in 1942, John Wild, together with Cairns and Farber, established the International Phenomenological Society and its journal, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. The Society included prominent European phenomenologists who had emigrated to America during the war, among them Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, Fritz Kaufmann, Felix Kaufmann, and Herbert Spiegelberg. In retrospect, this beginning actually signals the end of a time when there was common ground between domestic philosophical concerns and European phenomenology.Wild had taught at Harvard since 1927, and the Harvard department produced students who went on to signifcant careers in phenomenology – Harmon Chapman, Hubert Dreyfus, Calvin Schrag, and Samuel Todes among them. But by 1961, when Wild left for Northwestern University, only Yale – where Ernst Cassirer had taught during the war and where Wild went in 1969 – among leading American graduate programs had any signifcant phenomenological representation. Edward S. Casey and David Carr taught there in the 1960s and 1970s, but in the 1980s the department was reorganized and lost its last phenomenologist when Maurice Natanson retired in 1995.
75.3. The “University in Exile”: phenomenology as an “exotic transplant” Beginning in the 1950s, then, phenomenology came increasingly to be identifed exclusively with “foreign” ways of thinking, an “exotic” in the words of Dorion Cairns (writing in 1950) (Natanson 1969, vii). In part, this was because it gained its foothold in universities that did not participate in the analytic consolidation: above all, the New School for Social Research, but also several Catholic universities whose interests were not well served by militant logical positivism. With growing postwar traffc between students from these institutions and the European bastions of the phenomenological tradition (Louvain, Paris, then Freiburg), and thanks to the increasing number of European philosophers on these shores, this was also the period in which disputes over orthodoxy that had characterized the pre-war phenomenological movement in Europe came to defne the reception of phenomenology in the United States as well. The New School in the 1950s and early 1960s boasted a faculty that included Dorion Cairns, Alfred Schutz, and Aron Gurwitsch – all of whom drew inspiration primarily from Husserl. Cairns was a prolifc translator of Husserl and defended a systematic version of “constitutive” phenomenology. Gurwitsch focused on phenomenological psychology and developed a “non-egological” conception of consciousness that tried to mitigate Husserl’s idealism without abandoning it altogether.And Schutz, trained as an economist and sociologist, turned to Husserl’s account of meaning to ground Max Weber’s social-scientifc method of Verstehen. These philosophers produced a generation of students who would continue largely in this Husserlian vein – among them, J. N. Mohanty, Maurice Natanson, Fred Kersten, Lester Embree, and Richard Zaner. At the same time, the New School was home to other emigres who brought with them very different currents of European thought, including different takes on phenomenology. European critical social thought (e.g., Frankfurt critical theory) was represented: the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science (the branch of the New School in which the phenomenologists also held appointments) had been founded as the University in Exile, a home to European scholars threatened by the Nazis. But Hannah Arendt wrote her major Heidegger-inspired works of 792
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political theory there; Karl Löwith and Hans Jonas were on the faculty; and Werner Marx taught there from 1949 to 1964.Thus while it is true that these years saw the emergence of something called “existential phenomenology” in the United States, the paramount question at the time was whether any of this existentialism was phenomenology. Heidegger had published Being and Time in 1927 under the banner of phenomenology, but by 1929 the rift between his thinking and Husserl’s had become public, and Heidegger’s subsequent involvement with the Nazi regime had made him anathema to thinkers like Schutz and Gurwitsch. Indeed, in 1960 Spiegelberg could refer to the “fateful and almost fatal infuence” that Heidegger’s thought had exerted on phenomenology (Spiegelberg 1982, 273). For Schutz and Gurwitsch, “existential” phenomenology was represented by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, whose adaptation of Husserlian ideas seemed more palatable.They thus passed the disputes of the 1920s and 1930s in Germany on to their own students in the 1950s and 1960s. Representatives of Heideggerian thought at the New School, in turn, viewed the history of phenomenology as a progression from Husserlian idealism to a concern for the “factic” historical, social, and political world – a story in which phenomenology was fnally to be superseded by hermeneutics, dialectics, or the “thought of being.”And they passed on this view of phenomenology to their students. Constructive dialogue between the two camps became increasingly diffcult. Their students, however, beneftted from the opulence of university budgets in the growth economy of the late 1950s and 1960s, when courses on existentialism came to be offered and most philosophy departments felt that they could afford to have (as Natanson put it) a “token” phenomenologist. These same tendencies were found at the several Catholic universities which served as another conduit for phenomenology in the United States – above all, Duquesne, Catholic University, Fordham, and Boston College.The important connection between Catholic theology and the metaphysical tradition made such places less hospitable to logical positivism and preserved a respect for the history of philosophy that facilitated reception especially of the hermeneutic strand of phenomenology. But equally, the touchstone of Aristotelianism in these departments provided the context for a reading of Husserl’s work that – in contrast to the New School and to the Harvard diaspora – emphasized its ethical motivation and reconstructed its idealism as a modernist version of classical realism. Thus Robert Sokolowski, who received his doctorate from Louvain in 1963 with a thesis on Husserl, established himself at Catholic University, where he has taught several generations of students.As with Schutz and Gurwitsch, Sokolowski’s phenomenology has little time for Sartre or Heidegger; it is Husserl’s way of re-casting what it means to be a human person that represents the “essence” of phenomenology. William Richardson, in contrast, who also received his doctorate from Louvain and taught for many years at Fordham and later at Boston College, established his reputation with a book whose title announced Heidegger’s move through phenomenology to “thought” (Richardson 1963). Richardson represented in the Catholic context the sort of view found at the New School among thinkers like Werner Marx and Hannah Arendt: phenomenology is a kind of transition – beginning with Husserl and developed by the early Heidegger – from traditional philosophy to a post-phenomenological kind of thinking.Thus Boston College, for instance, has had its share of notable Husserlians, but it is equally known as a place where phenomenology’s various “aliases” have found a home: Gadamer was for many years a regular part-time visiting professor, as was Jacques Taminiaux.
75.4. The Age of Societies: the Americanization of phenomenology Despite the tensions described in the previous section, phenomenology achieved a certain momentum during the 1950s and 1960s, as students trained at the New School, Harvard,Yale, 793
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and the Catholic and European universities found positions and established their reputations. Though these positions were widely scattered around the country,6 the 1960s saw a great expansion of university philosophy departments and graduate programs, and one of these – at Northwestern University – became especially strong in phenomenology and existentialism. John Wild moved there in 1961, and in 1962 his earlier plans for a “society devoted to the examination of recent continental philosophy” became a reality with the founding of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), together with Northwestern University Press’s book series, Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.7 This inaugurates the Age of Societies. The growth of philosophy graduate programs demanded new outlets for presentation and publication of work, and phenomenological philosophy was no exception.The internal tensions in its reception thus became institutionalized in societies devoted to individual fgures such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and many others. But it is to SPEP that we must turn if we want to understand where phenomenology fnds itself today, and why. SPEP was founded as an alternative to the national professional organization, the American Philosophical Association, which was dominated by departments that were increasingly hostile to European thought. SPEP’s founders understood that such an alternative could not fy under a unifed banner. If phenomenology found a home there, it was only along with the culturally more familiar “transplant,” existentialism.The strategic aspect of this coupling could not mask the underlying disagreements between the philosophers brought together in this way. In subsequent years it became clear that neither phenomenology nor existentialism constituted the core of the alternative identity; that could only be the connection with Europe itself, where “Europe” came to be understood as whatever is not analytic philosophy.This development calls for more careful treatment; here we shall examine only how it infects the history of phenomenology in the United States. In the 1960s, the work of most philosophers who met at SPEP annual meetings was either phenomenology of a generally Husserlian sort (a translation of Cartesian Meditations had appeared in 1960, of “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” in 1965, and of Formal and Transcendental Logic in 1969), or else an existentialism that drew on recently translated texts by Sartre (Being and Nothingness, 1957), Heidegger (Being and Time, 1962), and Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception, 1962). Among the latter group, some cultivated a topic that found little resonance among Husserlian phenomenologists: philosophy in literature. It was not as though the branch of phenomenology that looked to Husserl had no interest in literature. Roman Ingarden’s classic, The Literary Work of Art, appeared in 1965 and was translated into English in 1973 in the Northwestern series. But existentialism treated literature itself as a mode of philosophizing, drawing on Sartre as an example, and on Heidegger’s Hölderlin lectures. With the translation of some of Heidegger’s important later works (among them, Poetry, Language, Thought and On the Way to Language) during the late 1960s and early 1970s, some who came together under the banner of “phenomenology and existentialism” as an alternative to analytic philosophy began to consider whether their work might not be better described as an alternative to philosophy. The idea arising with literary existentialism – that creative literature was not merely a topic for philosophy but a way of doing philosophy with its own mode of “truth” – would be developed in two directions in the 1970s: frst toward a “philosophical hermeneutics” (Gadamer, Ricoeur) and then toward the “deconstruction” of philosophy (Derrida). The former represented an attempt to contain the question of literature within something like a phenomenological framework, while the latter, within the context of SPEP, represented the kind of linguistic turn that, since the 1940s, had rendered phenomenology otiose in the analytic mainstream. 794
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Against the background of literary existentialism, the interest in hermeneutics forced a confrontation between the two narratives of phenomenology developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Published in 1960, Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode precipitated signifcant controversy in Germany for its thesis that the pre-judgments that structure the interpretation of texts are a universal feature of all understanding,thus apparently rendering impossible the sort of critical social science projected by the Frankfurt School.This also came to be part of the debate in SPEP (Truth and Method was translated in 1975), but here hermeneutics was conscripted into the Heidegger-inspired version of the phenomenology narrative (“through phenomenology to thought”). In this way (to use the Encyclopedia’s vocabulary) the phenomenological “origins” of hermeneutics were de-emphasized in favor of its connection to German Idealism, ancient Greek philosophy, and the later Heidegger. In the United States, then, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics was not received as hermeneutic phenomenology but as an altogether distinct thought-formation. Critics like Thomas Seebohm, who sought to recast hermeneutics in specifcally Husserlian form, were not part of “hermeneutics” as this was understood within the SPEP context. This reception of hermeneutics without phenomenology was abetted when Paul Ricoeur began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1970. Ricoeur’s 1960 study of the will, Freedom and Nature, was a classic of “existential” phenomenology, but it was not translated until 1966, by which time Ricoeur had turned his attention to the Continental debates over hermeneutics. In an infuential book (Freud and Philosophy, 1965; English translation 1970) and a series of essays written in the mid-1960s (translated in The Confict of Interpretations in 1974), Ricoeur rejected the idea that there was a phenomenological method that could dispense with “detours” through dialectics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and structuralism. “Hermeneutics” here names the stance that is to mediate between these positions, the goal of a phenomenological elucidation of meaning endlessly deferred. The reception of hermeneutics was contemporaneous with the development of large graduate programs devoted to “phenomenology and existential philosophy” at SUNY Stony Brook and at the Pennsylvania State University. Here and elsewhere, the tensions between the Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology narratives that had characterized the earlier reception of existentialism reappeared in institutionally more trenchant form in the struggle over how to situate philosophical hermeneutics. One signifcant example is found in the history of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (CARP). Established in 1971 by two New School alums, Lester Embree and Richard Zaner, together with the Canadian Jose Jourdas-Huerta, CARP saw its mission as one of preserving the heritage of phenomenology – which meant, largely, the anti-Heideggerian wing of the New School’s version of it. In 1974 Embree moved to Duquesne University, where John Sallis had been teaching since 1966 and had founded a journal, Research in Phenomenology. In 1975 Embree, Jourdas-Huerta, and Pina Moneta, a student of Aron Gurwitsch, established the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, whose purpose was to run a summer workshop in Perugia, Italy, for American students interested in European thought. But because both the students and faculty of the Collegium were drawn from the larger graduate programs where, increasingly, hermeneutics held sway – that is, the German Idealist reading of Gadamer and the French structuralist context that informed Ricoeur’s work – the Collegium soon came to have only a tangential connection to phenomenology. Though Husserlian-style phenomenology was not absent, it was typically historicized as a bygone stage in what began to seem a permanent stream of European movements: existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, post-modernism, and so on. In the late 1970s the Collegium split from CARP, and it exists today as a fagship of mainstream Continental philosophy in the United States, while CARP continues to represent the Husserlian wing of the New School tradition. 795
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If something like “existential” phenomenology dominated the 1960s in America, the era of “hermeneutic” phenomenology was much shorter.This is because by the time Truth and Method had been translated into English, the infuence of “deconstruction” was already on the rise, generating a Continental version of the analytic linguistic turn that was hostile to phenomenological (and hermeneutic) concepts such as “experience,”“subjectivity,” and “meaning.” Derrida had written on Husserl in the early 1960s, but it was the post-structuralist themes of the three major works that were translated into English in the 1970s (Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference) which facilitated his reception. In that context, literature – which both existential and hermeneutic phenomenology held to possess a truth-claim similar to that of philosophy – became something of a Trojan horse. Deconstruction seemed to show that the “plenitude” of meaning that some phenomenologists sought in literature as a counterweight to analytic philosophy’s supposedly “abstract” and lifeless concepts was doomed, by the very structure of writing, to be displaced or postponed forever.The phenomenological (and hermeneutic) search for a kind of originary experience was exposed as nothing but the deformation professionelle of philosophy as such. Throughout the 1970s Derrida held visiting appointments at leading American universities such as Yale and Johns Hopkins, but these appointments were in departments of literature.The fact that Derrida’s thought had roots in phenomenology could not be denied, but what he did with it seemed to entail the collapse of any distinction between philosophy and literature.This increased the tension within SPEP and its feeder graduate programs, for Derrida’s followers confronted colleagues who did not want to see the history of phenomenological (or hermeneutic or existential) philosophy as entailing the deconstruction of their discipline. By the mid-1980s, such programs were faced with a dilemma: the “phenomenological” narrative as such – including the Heideggerian-hermeneutic version that arrived at a non-metaphysical “thinking” – seemed every bit as naive as the worst forms of analytic logicism or foundationalism.Yet embrace of the deconstructive, thoroughly post-phenomenological narrative seemed to imply that all the action was elsewhere – in departments of comparative literature, or else in a growing number of interdisciplinary programs such as cultural studies, gender studies, post-colonial studies, and the rest. By the early 1980s, then, the term “phenomenology” had come to denote one entry on a long list of thought-currents from Continental Europe that could be found in non-analytic philosophy departments, and the omnibus term, “Continental philosophy,” came to be used to describe what SPEP represented. This was made offcial when departments adopted it to advertise faculty positions in the American Philosophical Association’s organ for that purpose, Jobs for Philosophers. By that time SPEP had grown quite large and diverse, but its institutional structure had not kept pace. Faced with the demand for a more representative program and greater access to decision-making by feminists, critical theorists, and others not enamored with deconstruction, SPEP established an Executive Committee whose seats were to represent what were then perceived as the main directions in Continental philosophy. One seat went to phenomenology, understood as including work on Husserl and Husserl-inspired interpretations of later fgures (early Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty), but excluding “hermeneutics” (which had its own seat) and French philosophy – meaning fgures such as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard: post-structuralism or post-modernism – which too had its own seat, as did feminism and critical theory. Thus the history of phenomenology in the United States became a chapter in the history of American “Continental” philosophy, inextricably entangled with the conficting ways in which home-grown advocates of various European movements defned their relation to the thought of Edmund Husserl. Before leaving the Age of Societies, a signifcant footnote should be mentioned. In 1930 Emmanuel Levinas published his Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (English transla796
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tion 1973), and throughout the 1940s and 1950s he published essays on Husserl and Heidegger. In 1961 Totality and Infnity appeared, proposing a radical reorientation of phenomenology in the direction of an “ethical frst philosophy.” None of this work found much resonance in the early days of SPEP, and even after Totality and Infnity was translated into English, in 1969, it did not gain much traction. Derrida had written a lengthy critical essay on Levinas in 1964, but while deconstruction held sway Levinas’s thought was more or less invisible. All that changed when Derrida, and deconstruction itself, was caught up in the brackish cesspool of scandal surrounding, frst, the revelations of the extent of Heidegger’s Nazi involvement (attendant upon the French publication of Victor Farias’s Heidegger and Nazism in 1987), and then the suggestion that Derrida’s close friend and fellow literary deconstructionist, Paul DeMan, had been a collaborator in Belgium.These involvements cast suspicion on the “ethics” of deconstruction, which in turn was taken by many outside the profession to exemplify the ethical bankruptcy of Continental philosophy as a whole. In the rush to fnd a response to this threat, Levinas became, for several years, the dominant fgure on the SPEP program, refecting the exponential increase in courses and publications devoted to him. Far from constituting a post-deconstructive return to phenomenology, however, this embrace of Levinas mostly remained within the orbit of deconstruction itself, since it was not Levinas’s self-described phenomenological method that drew attention, but precisely his attempt to escape the totalizing “atmosphere” of Husserlian and Heideggerian thought – an ambition he shared with deconstruction.Thus what seemed important was the idea that Levinas had taken Derrida’s criticisms of the “phenomenological” position of Totality and Infnity to heart and had abandoned phenomenology in Otherwise than Being. With the waning of Levinas’s prominence in SPEP, and the turn toward a host of thinkers whose only connection is that they are European (Badiou, Deleuze, Rancière, Vattimo, Agamben), the reception of phenomenology in the United States comes to an end.
75.5. The path of “analytic” phenomenology But the end of the reception of phenomenology in the United States does not spell the end of phenomenology there; rather, it signals the beginning of a phenomenology that is not a European movement, not part of “Continental” philosophy at all – though by the same token it is not an “American” movement either.To understand this development, we need to return to what the Encyclopedia termed “analytical phenomenology,” a strand of the reception that was associated with SPEP early on but which distanced itself increasingly after the 1960s.The roots of analytic phenomenology were at Harvard, where Hubert Dreyfus (PhD 1964) and Sam Todes (PhD 1963) were students, and where Dagfnn Føllesdal received his PhD in 1961 under Quine and taught for several years. Dreyfus,Todes, and Føllesdal were all involved in SPEP at the beginning and were Board members on the Northwestern series, but with Føllesdal’s removal to Stanford in 1968 and Dreyfus’s move to Berkeley in the same year, a kind of phenomenology appeared that did not track the fate of phenomenology in SPEP. While drawing on both Husserlian and existential phenomenology, the character of analytic phenomenology was defned by Føllesdal’s claim that Husserl’s noema is best understood as an abstract entity, like a Fregean Sinn. Føllesdal’s work in logic and semantics in the 1960s offered a phenomenological contrast to logical positivism, and his project was taken up by his students, David Woodruff Smith and Ronald MacIntyre. But Føllesdal’s interpretation also allowed Dreyfus to situate Husserl in the camp of “representationalist” philosophers and develop a more pragmatic and existential version of phenomenology. For Dreyfus, Husserlian phenomenology has more in common with the logicism of Quine and the early Wittgenstein than it does with 797
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the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which in turn can be connected to the kind of philosophy practiced by the Wittgenstein of the Investigations. Dreyfus’s infuential critique of the Artifcial Intelligence program – his What Computers Can’t Do was published in 1972 – exemplifed how phenomenology could engage directly with non-phenomenological philosophy and issues. When practiced in this way, phenomenology is no longer understood in terms of originary names or European developmental stories; rather, it is non-rigorously characterized as a philosophical approach that rejects constructivism and scientism and insists on the careful description of experience.To adopt such an approach, one need not choose between realistic, constitutive, hermeneutic, and existential versions; instead, one can draw on each as the problems at hand demand. “Analytical” phenomenology is thus a misnomer, coined because its practitioners sometimes take up problems also treated by analytic philosophers and respond to these analytic treatments. But it is true that such work is in evidence in traditionally non-Continental schools (among them Chicago, Boston University, Columbia, Riverside, Irvine, and Florida) and has spawned its own societies (Society for the Study of Husserl’s Philosophy, International Society for Phenomenological Studies, and a host of smaller workshops and conferences). Similar trends can be identifed in Europe (for instance, the Center for Subjectivity Studies, in Copenhagen), suggesting that this is not a phenomenon limited to the United States. What, then, is the relation between this development in phenomenology and Continental philosophy in the United States more generally? When university philosophy departments stopped expanding in the late 1970s, the analytic mainstream had virtually no incentive to fnd room in the curriculum for the newer European movements, and Continental philosophy (including phenomenology) became increasingly isolated in departments devoted primarily to it. In the SPEP context phenomenology was associated with an oppositional stance toward analytic philosophy, and so phenomenologists who did communicate with analytic philosophy were not considered Continental philosophers (hence not phenomenologists) at all. Thus “analytic phenomenology” found no home at SPEP or its feeder graduate programs. Nor was it better received in the special societies devoted to the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and others, since these generally overlap in membership with SPEP. But the broader feld of philosophy in the United States today is actually quite hospitable to phenomenology. In philosophy of language (for instance, the work of Robert Brandom and John McDowell, which goes back to ideas of Wilfrid Sellars), moral psychology (one thinks here of Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Darwall, and Bernard Williams, among many others), philosophy of mind (for instance, David Chalmers’ work on consciousness, and the immense literature this has generated), philosophy of science (Kuhn and the “post-positivists”), and in several other areas, there exists something like the situation that obtained prior to the militant analytic revolution and the Continental reaction it inspired, when phenomenology found resonance with American pragmatic idealism and value theory. Meanwhile, within SPEP itself a use of the term “phenomenology” that is independent of the way phenomenology is positioned in the post-structuralist, deconstructive narrative can now be found.This usage has been sparked by contemporary interest in environmental philosophy, where Merleau-Ponty, the “new” Husserl, and “life” philosophers like Bergson loom large. Because an interest in nature, life, embodiment, and environmental ethics is shared by phenomenologists working in cognitive science, consciousness studies, philosophy of biology, and practical and moral philosophy, a confuence of “Continental” and non-Continental phenomenology appears possible. Indeed, the questions that occupy both camps – questions concerning nature, meaning, and normativity – are pretty much the ones that brought phenomenologists together with other philosophical directions during its initial American reception in the early decades of the 20th century.“Phenomenology” is once more becoming a term around which a diverse 798
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group of philosophers can fnd common ground. Thus it may well be that the future of phenomenology in the United States lies on the far side of any Continental/Analytic divide. Not that the divide does not exist: graduate programs in both analytic and Continental philosophy insist on it for their own reasons. Phenomenology, however, has nothing to do with it, being, at its core, neither Continental nor analytic. Canada Rodney Parker Many Canadian phenomenologists can trace their lineage back to the University of Toronto. It was there that Canadian phenomenology was born in the early decades of the 20th century – the unplanned child of historians of Scholastic philosophy and German Idealism. For a large part of the 20th century, Toronto was also where phenomenology fourished in Canada. However, the story of phenomenology in Canada does not begin in Toronto; it begins in Göttingen by way of the Maritimes. Edmund Husserl’s frst Canadian student was Winthrop Pickard Bell (1884–1965). Born in Halifax, Bell began his academic career at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. After obtaining his MA from Mount Allison in 1907, Bell continued his education at Harvard, where he became a student of Josiah Royce. He completed a second Master’s in Philosophy at Harvard in 1909, and after brief stays at Cambridge and Leipzig, Bell enrolled at the University of Göttingen to study with Edmund Husserl in April 1911. Over a span of six semesters, Bell attended the lectures and seminars of Husserl and Adolf Reinach, as well as the “secret lectures” held by Max Scheler for the members of the Göttingen Circle. In 1914, Bell completed his dissertation, Eine kritische Untersuchung der Erkenntnistheorie Josiah Royces, under Husserl’s supervision.8 After returning to North America, Bell taught briefy at the University of Toronto from 1921 to 1922 and then at Harvard from 1922 to 1927.9 With the exception of Gustav Hübener (1889–1940), Bell’s friend and fellow member of the Göttingen Circle who took up a position as the chair of German Studies at Mount Allison in 1937,10 Husserl’s students and followers did not fee to Canada during WWII. And whereas Harvard, in large measure due to Bell, continued to provide Husserl with North American students – such as Dorion Cairns, Marvin Farber, Charles Hartshorne, and Vivian Jerauld McGill – none were Canadian and none returned from Germany to academic positions in Canada. Though scattered individuals across eastern Canada may have known something of Husserl and his followers during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, this material was not widely taught. It was not until 1946, when Lawrence Edward Michael Lynch (1915–2001) began teaching phenomenology and existentialism at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, that phenomenology took root in Canada. Lynch was born in Toronto and completed his BA at St. Michael’s College in 1936. Most of his teachers had little training in philosophy, with one notable exception being the Haligonian Gerald Bernard Phelan. Lynch went on to write a doctoral thesis at the Mediaeval Institute under the supervision of Étienne Gilson. While there is no evidence that Phelan or Gilson taught or even mentioned phenomenology during Lynch’s student years, they were certainly aware of it.11 Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent entry of the United States into WWII, Lynch – who was born to American parents – joined the US navy. He was assigned to on-shore duty at Pearl Harbor, working in naval intelligence, and it was during this time that he recalls being introduced to phenomenology by a friend.When he returned to U of T in 1946, he petitioned to give a graduate course on existentialism and phenomenology (Slater 2005, 568).12 Lynch’s review of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism (Lynch 1948) leaves little doubt that the phenomenologists he frst came to know were Sartre and 799
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Martin Heidegger.13 The frst PhD written on phenomenology in Canada was completed under Lynch’s supervision – Richard Caswell Hinners’ Martin Heidegger’s Conception of the Question: “What is the meaning of to be?” in Sein und Zeit (Hinners 1955). In his dissertation, Hinners also thanks Emil Ludwig Fackenheim (1916–2003), who had joined the faculty at Toronto shortly after Lynch began offering courses on existentialism and phenomenology. After completing Gymnasium in 1935, Fackenheim enrolled in rabbinic studies at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin.There he had the mixed fortune of being a student of Arnold Metzger – who had served as Husserl’s private assistant in Freiburg from 1920 to 1924. Fackenheim recalls: “Metzger was the worst and best philosophy teacher I ever had: worst pedagogically, expecting frst-year students to understand Kant or Husserl; best in making philosophy seem monumentally relevant” (Fackenheim 2008, 16). During Kristallnacht, Fackenheim was arrested and taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was released in 1939 and fed to Scotland but was then held as an enemy alien and sent by the British forces to the Newington internment camp in Quebec.After his release in 1941, Fackenheim enrolled as a graduate student in the department of philosophy of U of T. In 1945, he completed his dissertation (Fackenheim 1945), and became professor in 1948.Along with Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, he began teaching and supervising dissertations on Husserl and Heidegger. His students include Henry Pietersma (1932–2017), Graeme Nicholson (b. 1936), and George di Giovanni (b. 1935). It seems that phenomenology began to draw the attention of philosophers in Quebec and the Maritimes in the late 1940s and early 1950s independent of the developments at the University of Toronto. Phenomenology’s way into the predominantly francophone province of Quebec is diffcult to trace. Despite the popularity of phenomenology in France during the 1930s, it lacked a strong foothold among professional philosophers in Quebec until the 1970s, in the wake of the Quiet Revolution.14 Nevertheless, there were some philosophers in Quebec with an interest in phenomenology prior to this. One was Hubert Aquin (1929–1977), who, upon completing his Licentiate in Philosophy at the Université de Montréal in 1951, moved to Paris and began writing a doctoral thesis titled Phénoménologie de la création du personnage dans le roman under the supervision of Étienne Souriau at the Sorbonne. His intention was to apply Husserl’s phenomenological method to an analysis of literary works (Massoutre 1992, 70).15 Another was Raymond Klibansky (1905–2005). Klibansky was born in Paris and educated in Germany, receiving his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg – where he studied with Ernst Cassirer and Karl Jaspers – in 1928. His dissertation was on the School of Chartres and written under the supervision of the NeoKantian Ernst Hoffmann. From 1927 to 1933 he was an assistant at the Heidelberg Academy and from 1931 until 1933 he was a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. In 1933, he was forced to fee Germany due to his Jewish heritage. After teaching at Oxford from 1936 to 1946, Klibansky took a position in the department of philosophy at McGill University. For over three decades Klibansky taught at McGill and lectured at the Université de Montréal until his retirement in 1979.Though Klibansky’s primary area of research was medieval philosophy, he had a special interest in phenomenology and was friends with Jean Hering,Alexandre Koyré, Paul Ricoeur, and Jan Patočka.16 In 1969, he gave the opening address at the frst meeting of the International Husserl and Phenomenological Research Society at the University of Waterloo,17 and hosted this group in Montréal in 1974.Another important early Québécois phenomenologist is Yvon Gauthier (b. 1941), who wrote his dissertation, L’arc et le cercle (Gauthier 1969), at the University of Heidelberg with Hans-Georg Gadamer in 1966. Gauthier taught at U of T from 1972 to 1973 before settling at the Université de Montréal. He was an infuence on both Jean Grondin (b. 1955) and Denis Fisette (b. 1954).18 800
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The Maritimes lacked a practicing phenomenologist for decades after the death of Hübener. It was only in the 1960s, when philosophers such as Cyril Welch (b. 1939) and William Robert Miller Elderkin (b. 1936) took positions at Mount Allison and the University of New Brunswick respectively, that phenomenology was taught to students in the Atlantic provinces.19 Yet there were murmurs of Heidegger and Sartre among academic philosophers along the East Coast prior to this, most notably from George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) and James Alexander Doull (1918–2001). Grant taught philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax from 1947 to 1960, and during this time he developed an interest in the work of Heidegger (Christian 1993, 364). In his writings and lectures from this period, Grant refers to the “existentialists” Sartre and Heidegger, but not phenomenology as such.20 Doull, his colleague at Dalhousie, had also read the work of Heidegger.Whether Grant introduced Doull to Heidegger or vice versa is unclear.21 What is clear is that Doull introduced Graeme Nicholson to phenomenology. Born in Nova Scotia, Nicholson began his university career at Dalhousie in 1953. After completing his BA, Nicholson began working on a Master’s thesis on Kant’s critical philosophy under Doull’s supervision. Struggling to understand the chapter on “Phenomena and Noumena” from the Critique of Pure Reason, Doull recommended to Nicholson that he read Heidegger’s Einführung in die Metaphysik (Heidegger 1953). However, it was when Nicholson was studying at Union Theological Seminary that he would realize it was phenomenology that he had been searching for in his philosophical endeavors all along. Nicholson left Halifax for New York in 1957. In 1958–59, Ricoeur held a visiting professorship at Union and became Nicholson’s frst proper teacher in phenomenology. Heeding Doull’s advice, he read Heidegger – the English translation of An Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger 1959) had just been published and introduced many English-speaking readers to Heidegger. Nicholson worked on his Master’s thesis intermittently while at Union, eventually obtaining his degree from Dalhousie in 1961. Nicolson then enrolled in the PhD program in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He completed his dissertation, The Ontological Difference. A study in Heidegger (Nicholson 1968) under the supervision of Fackenheim. His other mentor at U of T was Henry Pietersma. Pietersma was born in Opende, The Netherlands. After completing his Master’s thesis on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness at the University of Indiana, Pietersma moved to Canada.While he had intended to study medieval philosophy with Gilson, he ended up writing his dissertation on Edmund Husserl’s Concept of Philosophical Clarifcation (Pietersma 1962) with Fackenheim. Thereafter, he was given a position at U of T and began offering graduate and undergraduate courses in phenomenology. His interest in phenomenology began with Husserl’s theory of knowledge and the attempt to render Husserl’s epistemological project in the language of AngloAmerican philosophy. Pietersma was a self-professed realist, and in his own way attempted to revitalize realist phenomenology, though it appears he knew little, if anything, of the Göttingen and Munich Circles. Despite the power of Husserl’s philosophy, Pietersma believed it fell short with respect to a key requirement of epistemology: an account of the real reality of the external world. His refections on the theories of knowledge of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty are published in Phenomenological Epistemology (Pietersma 2000). One of Pietersma’s notable students is Jay Raymond Lampert (b. 1957). Lampert earned his PhD from U of T in 1987. In the mid-1960s, two more phenomenologists joined the faculty at the University of Toronto alongside Pietersma and Nicholson:Thomas D. Langan (1929–2012) and James Carlton Morrison (b. 1938). These four formed the core of what we might call the Toronto school of phenomenologists. Langan earned his PhD from the Institut Catholique de Paris and was the chair of Philosophy at Indiana University before coming to Toronto in 1967. He had previously worked with Gilson on the two-volume collection, Recent Philosophy, authoring the entry on “German Philosophy”, which included sections on Husserl and Scheler (Langan 1966a), and 801
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Heidegger and Jaspers (Langan 1966c), as well as a chapter on existentialism and phenomenology in France (Langan 1966b). His fnal book, Human Being. A Philosophical Anthropology (Langan 2009), was edited by Antonio Calcagno (b. 1969). Calcagno studied with Langan, Nicholson, and Pietersma at Toronto shortly before they retired. He went on to complete his dissertation under Lampert and has since established himself as a leading scholar of Edith Stein. James Morrison came to U of T circa 1965 after completing both an MA and PhD at Pennsylvania State University, though neither dealt with phenomenology.22 However, while at Penn State Morrison had been infuenced by Stanley Rosen, who worked on Husserl and Heidegger and who studied with Alexandre Kojève in the early 1960s. It was perhaps because of Rosen’s infuence that Morrison took up phenomenology when he arrived at Toronto, teaching Husserl and Heidegger. His most notable student is James Richard Mensch (b. 1944). Mensch came to Canada from the US in 1967. As an undergraduate at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, he studied with Jacob Klein, a former student of Heidegger. In Toronto, he received a Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies from the Pontifcal Institute and his doctorate from U of T in 1976 for his work The Question of Being in Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Mensch 1981). In addition to Morrison, Mensch studied with Langan, Pietersma, and Fackenheim, and took a year-long course circa 1970 with Gadamer in Toronto.23 From 1989 to 2013, Mensch taught at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Other important Canadian phenomenologists associated with the Toronto school are Philip Buckley (b. 1959), who received his BA and MA from U of T before earning his PhD at KU Leuven;24 John Russon (b. 1960), who completed his PhD at U of T with Nicholson; and Evan Thompson (b. 1962). This article omits many other important past and current Canadian phenomenologists. A more comprehensive history needs to be written.
Notes 1 This paper frst appeared, in an Italian translation by Antonio Cimino (Crowell 2012), and was subsequently published, in English, as Crowell 2013. It has been lightly revised for the present volume. 2 See, for instance, Langan 1959, in which, as Spiegelberg notes,“the phenomenological aspect is named but not developed,” and Grene 1957, about which Spiegelberg says that the “connections with phenomenology are hardly mentioned” (Spiegelberg 1982, 420). 3 Another indispensable source of information is Kaelin and Schrag 1989. 4 My account is restricted to the history of phenomenological philosophy. In a certain sense this is a distorting restriction, since much phenomenology is done other felds. There are phenomenological currents in psychology, sociology, literary theory, and flm and media studies, to name a few. But to do justice to these trends – which, in any case, refect the disputes and ambiguities that one fnds in the more strictly philosophical reception of phenomenology – would require more space than is allotted here. 5 See Blanshard 1962, chapters 3–7 for a contemporary’s view of these events. For a recent account see McCumber 2001. 6 For instance, Maurice Natanson began at the University of Houston and moved to the University of California Santa Cruz, Herbert Spiegelberg taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Calvin Schag and William McBride taught at Purdue, Edward G. Ballard had an appointment at Tulane, Frederick Kersten at the University of Wisconsin, J. N. Mohanty at Oklahoma, and Hubert Dreyfus taught at the University of California at Berkeley. 7 Calvin O. Schrag,“The History of SPEP” (http://www.spep.org). 8 Due to the outbreak of WWI, Bell was interned by the German government, frst at the student prison in Göttingen and then at the Ruhleben internment camp. During his imprisonment, Bell delivered a lecture to the other internees titled “Canadian Problems and Possibilities” (Bell 2012).As a result of his detention, Bell’s doctorate was not formally conferred until 1922, some eight years after he had passed his oral exams. Bell declined Husserl’s invitation to have the dissertation published in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung.The dissertation is now published as part of the Husserliana Dokumente (Bell 2018).
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North America 9 Bell left academia in 1927 to pursue a career in business. However, he remained active in the governance of Mount Allison and published on Canadian history. 10 According to Raymond Klibansky, during his time at Mount Allison, Hübener “taught his pupils there how to apply the phenomenological method to the study of literature” (Klibansky 1972, 18). 11 Gilson had met Husserl during Alexandre Koyré’s thesis defense at the Sorbonne in 1929 and attended the famous Paris Lectures (Kojevnikov 2015). Phelan wrote his dissertation Feeling Experience and its Modalities (Phelan 1925) at the Catholic University of Louvain.There is a mention of “phenomenology” in Phelan’s dissertation, but the only fgure associated with the movement he refers to by name is Theodor Lipps. 12 In 1946, Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) also joined the faculty at U of T. McLuhan was not himself a phenomenologist, but we know that he was at least aware of the work of Heidegger, who he names in The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan 1962). In is correspondence, we fnd reference to Existenzphilosophie as early as 1946 (McLuhan 1987, 183–184). 13 See also his essay on Heidegger (Lynch 1959). 14 See Madison 1985, pp. 69–71. 15 Aquin had studied Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and Ideas I, as well as Heidegger. See Massoutre 1992, 55–75. 16 Ricoeur and Patočka both contributed to Klibansky’s Festschrift (Kohlenberger 1979). Klibansky supervised Lucinda Vandervort’s dissertation on Adolf Reinach in 1973 (Vandervort Brettler 1973). Jeffrey A. Mitscherling, who works on Roman Ingarden, was also acquainted with Klibansky. However, Mitscherling attributes his interest in Ingarden to his teacher Jakob Amstutz (1919-1995) at the University of Guelph. 17 This conference was organized in part by Richard Hood Holmes (b. 1941). Holmes was a student of Herbert Spiegelberg. After completing his dissertation, Husserl’s Transcendental Turn (Holmes 1972), under Spiegelberg at Washington University in Saint Louis, Holmes took a position at the University of Waterloo.There he was joined by José Huertas-Jourda (1931–2007). Huertas-Jourda received his PhD from New York University in February 1969, with his dissertation On the Threshold of Phenomenology:A Study of the Philosophie der Arithmetik (Huertas-Jourda 1969). In June of that same year, he co-founded the Husserl Circle with Algis Mickunas and F. Joseph Smith. In 1970, Huertas-Jourda took a position at the University of Waterloo, and in 1974 moved to nearby Wilfred Laurier University. He was also a co-founder of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. 18 For more on the key fgures who brought phenomenology to French Canada, see Fisette and Fréchette 1998. 19 Cyril Welch is the son of Edward Parl Welch, known for his book The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (Welch 1941) and his correspondence with Husserl from 1933, which occasioned the offer of a position at USC to Husserl (Spiegelberg 1972). Cyril Welch completed his dissertation, A Phenomenological Analysis of the Occurrence of Meaning in Experience (Welch 1964) at Pennsylvania State University under the supervision of John M.Anderson and was given a professorship at Mount Allison in 1967. Elderkin, who came to UNB from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, introduced John van Buren, known for his work on The Young Heidegger (Van Buren 1989), to phenomenology at UNB during the latter’s early student years in Fredericton. 20 See Grant 2002. 21 Prior to taking a position at Dalhousie in 1947, Doull had studied at Harvard. It may have been that Doull was exposed to phenomenology frst at Harvard, either through his teacher Werner Jaeger – who had previously taught at the Humboldt University of Berlin, alongside Nicolai Hartmann and Jacob Klein – or another faculty member. 22 Morrison studied with John M.Anderson around the same time as Cyril Welch. 23 Gadamer spent signifcant time in Toronto and at McMaster. Gadamer taught at McMaster for three years (1972–1975) and had intended to establish the archives for his Nachlass there.This was in large part due to the efforts of Gary Brent Madison (1940–2016), a former student of Ricoeur who began teaching at McMaster in 1970. In 1984, Madison founded the Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought (now the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy) along with a group of his students, including Jeff Mitscherling and John van Buren. 24 From 1986 to 1992 Buckley worked as a research assistant at the Husserl-Archives in Leuven.
References Bell,Winthrop. 2012.“The Idea of a Nation”. Symposium. Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 16 (2), pp. 34–63.
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Steven Crowell and Rodney Parker ———. 2018. Eine kritische Untersuchung der Erkenntnistheorie Josiah Royces. Mit Kommentaren und Änderungsvorschlägen von Edmund Husserl. Eds. Jason Bell and Thomas Vongehr. Dordrecht/Boston: Springer. Blanshard, Brand. 1962. Reason and Analysis. LaSalle: Open Court. Christian, William. 1993. George Grant:A Biography.Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Crowell, Steven. 2012. “La fenomenologia negli Stati Uniti”. In: Storia della fenomenologia. Eds. Antonio Cimino and Vincenzo Costa. Roma: Carocci editore, pp. 299–316. ———. 2013. “Phenomenology in the United States”. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XII (2012 [2013]), pp. 183–197. Embree, Lester; Behnke, Elizabeth; Carr, David; Evans, J. Claude; Huertas-Jourda, José; Kockelmans, Joseph; McKenna,William; Mickunas,Algis; Mohanty, Jitendra Nath; Seebohm,Thomas; Zaner, Richard (Eds). 1997. The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Fackenheim, Emil. 1945. ‘Substance’ and ‘Perseity’ in Mediaeval Arabic Philosophy. With Introductory Chapters on Aristotle, Plotinus and Proclus. Doctoral Dissertation. University of Toronto,Toronto. ———. 2008.“Hegel and ‘The Jewish Problem’”. In: The Philosopher as Witness. Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust. Eds. Michael Morgan and Benjamin Pollock.Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 15–28. Fisette, Denis and Fréchette, Guillaume. 1998.“La phénoménologie”. In: La pensée philosophique d’expression française au Canada. Le rayonnement du Québec. Eds. Josaine Boulad-Ayoub and Raymond Klibansky. Quebec City: Presses de l’Université Laval, pp. 231–261. Gauthier,Yvon. 1969. L’arc et le cercle. L’essence du langage chez Hegel et Hölderlin. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Grant, George. 2002. Collected Works of George Grant Volume 2: 1951–1959.Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Grene, Marjorie. 1957. Martin Heidegger. New York: Hillary House. Heidegger, Martin. 1949. Existence and Being. Chicago: Regnery. ———. 1953. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1959. An Introduction to Metaphysics.Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven:Yale University Press. Hinners, Richard Caswell. 1955. Martin Heidegger’s Conception of the Question:“What is the Meaning of to Be?” in Sein und Zeit. Doctoral Dissertation. University of Toronto,Toronto. Holmes, Richard. 1972. Husserl’s Transcendental Turn. Doctoral Dissertation.Washington University, St. Louis. Huertas-Jourda, José. 1969. On the Threshold of Phenomenology. A Study of the Philosophie der Arithmetik. Doctoral Dissertation. New York University, New York. Kaelin, Eugene and Schrag, Calvin. (Eds). 1989. American Phenomenology: Origins and Developments. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Klibansky, Raymond. 1972.“Address”. In: The Later Husserl and the Idea of Phenomenology. Idealism-Realism, Historicity and Nature. Ed.Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 18–20. Kohlenberger, Helmut. (Ed). 1979. Reason, Action, and Experience. Essays in Honor of Raymond Klibansky. Hamburg: Meiner. Kojevnikov, Aleksandr. 2015. Alexandre Vladimirovich Koyré’s Dissertation Defence. Trans. Anna Yampolskaya. Available online at http://rustik.ophen.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2017/08/K ojeve-A.-1929.-Alexandre-Koyres-dissertation-defence-Yampolskaya-2015.pdf. Langan, Thomas. 1959. The Meaning of Heidegger: A Critical Study of Existentialist Phenomenology. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1966a.“Beyond Positivism and Psychologism”. In: Recent Philosophy. Hegel to the Present. 2 volumes. Eds. Étienne Gilson,Thomas Langan, and Armand Maurer. New York: Random House, pp. 93–144. ———. 1966b. “Existentialism and Phenomenology in France”. In: Recent Philosophy. Hegel to the Present. 2 volumes. Eds. Étienne Gilson,Thomas Langan, and Armand Maurer. New York: Random House, pp. 374–410. ———. 1966c. “Two German Existentialists”. In: Recent Philosophy. Hegel to the Present. 2 volumes. Eds. Étienne Gilson,Thomas Langan, and Armand Maurer. New York: Random House, pp. 145–168. ———. 2009. Human Being. A Philosophical Anthropology. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Lynch, Lawrence. 1948. [Review] “Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism”. University of Toronto Quarterly 17 (4), pp. 430–433. ———. 1959. “Martin Heidegger: Language and Being”. In: An Etienne Gilson Tribute. Ed. Charles J. O'Neill. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, pp. 135–147. Madison, Gary. 1985. “Contemporary Status of Continental Philosophy in Canada. A Narrative”. Eidos 4 (1), pp. 63–81. Massoutre, Guylaine. 1992. Itinéraires d’Hubert Aquin. Chronologie. Montreal: Bibliothèque québécoise.
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Appendix
76 SYNOPTIC SCHEME OF THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOVEMENT Carlo Ierna
The following pages contain diagrams and lists that should be helpful as a map to the phenomenological movement. In the frst diagram, you will fnd a display of the “original” movement, mostly composed of direct students, colleagues and assistants of Husserl.The separation between Munich, Göttingen and Freiburg is canonical, but does not really refect any strict doctrinal separation. In any approach, there will be grey areas, exceptions and overlaps.The division based on Husserl’s institutional affliation and the provenance of his students is merely a convenient and familiar one. The diagram focuses mostly on Husserl and his intellectual progeny. Of course, there are independent phenomenologists who never studied with Husserl, students that adapted and changed his philosophy, students that refused central parts of the phenomenological method, students that to all intents and purposes founded their own schools and movements, etc.All of this is far too subtle and intricate to reproduce visually in the present schematic, while keeping it readable. Besides the dates of birth and death of the philosophers involved in the phenomenological movement, you will also fnd included, in so far as known and in as much detail as known, the years during which they studied with Husserl, which volumes of the Yearbook they edited, or when they served as his assistants. “Assistant” is not further split up into offcial, salaried or voluntary positions, or whether it was “assistant to the seminar”, private assistant to Husserl, for teaching or for research. While every choice for including or excluding a fgure or region can be controversial, the aim of the diagrams is to be informative and help to give an orientation, not to be completely exhaustive. Starting off from the present schematic can then help to fll in the blanks by using some of the literature indicated in the bibliography. The phenomenological movement is by far broader and more diverse than can be reproduced here in these few pages. Moreover, the impact of the phenomenological movement was not felt exclusively in philosophy, but also in sociology, psychology, psychiatry, nursing, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, etc. whose representatives cannot all ft in here. Several sources were useful for the compilation of these diagrams, but of course the main and decisive sources both for information and structure of the diagrams were Hua-Dok I, HuaDok III, and obviously Spiegelberg 1982. Much more detailed analyses of more recent developments in various regions (including e.g. South America) can be found in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. 809
Carlo Ierna The Phenomenological Movement EDMUND HUSSERL (1859-1938)
Munich Phenomenologists
Freiburg students
JOHANNES DAUBERT (1877-1947, SS 1905) ALEXANDER P (1870-1941, ed. I-XI)
MORITZ GEIGER (1880-1937, SS 1906, ed. I-XI) ADOLF REINACH (1883-1917, SS 1905, SS 1907 ed. I-III)
Bergzabern Circle
DIETRICH VON HILDEBRAND (1889-1977, SS 1909, SS 1910-SS 1911)
HEDWIG CONRAD-MARTIUS (1888-1966, WS 1910/11- SS 1912)
KARL L (1897-1973, SS 1919-SS 1922)
HELMUTH PLESSNER (1892-1985, 1914-1916)
WILHELM SZILASI (1889-1966)
FRITZ KAUFMANN (1891-1958, 1913-14, WS 1919/20-SS 1922)
MAX SCHELER (1874-1928, ed. I-VII)
THEODOR CONRAD (1881-1969 SS 1907)
DIETRICH MAHNKE (1884-1939, 1902-SS 1906)
HANS REINER (1896-1991, WS 1920/21, WS 1922/23-SS 1926)
ALFRED VON SYBEL (1885-1945, 1907-1912)
ARNOLD METZGER (1892-1974, WS 1920/21, SS 1922, ass. 1920-1924)
JEAN HERING (1890-1966, 1909-SS 1912)
MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889-1976, ass. 1919-1923, ed. VIII-XI)
ALEXANDRE K (1892-1964, WS 1910-11, SS 1913)
HANS-GEORG GADAMER (1900-2002, WS 1921-22)
HANS LIPPS (1889-1941, 1911-1914)
OSKAR BECKER (1889-1964, SS 1922, ass. 1923-1927, ed. IX-XI)
EDITH STEIN (1891-1942, SS 1913-SS 1915, ass. 1916-1918)
THEODOR CELMS (1893-1989, SS 1922 - SS 1923, SS 1925)
GERDA WALTHER (1897-1977, WS 1917/18 - SS 1919)
LUDWIG LANDGREBE (1902-1991, SS 1923, ass. 1923-1930) HANNAH ARENDT (1906-1975, WS 1926/27) EUGEN FINK (1905-1975, SS 1927, ass. 1928-1938)
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Synoptic scheme of the phenomenological movement The Phenomenological Movement Geographically
In North America WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING (1873-1967, 1902) WINTHROP BELL (1884-1965, 1911-1914) MARVIN FARBER (1901-1980, 1923-24) DORION CAIRNS (1901-1973, WS 1924-SS 1926,1931/32) HERBERT SPIEGELBERG (1904-1990, WS 1924/25) V. JERAULD MCGILL (1897-1977, 1926) ALFRED SCHUTZ (1899-1959) ARON GURWITSCH (1901-1973, 1922) JOSEPH J. KOCKELMANS (1923-2008) JAMES M. EDIE (1927-1998)
In Eastern Europe and Russia NIKOLAI O. LOSSKY (1870-1965) GUSTAV SHPET (1879-1937, WS 1912/13-SS 1913) ROMAN INGARDEN (1893-1970, 1912-1914, SS. 1915) KASIMIERZ AJDUKIEWICZ (1890-1963, WS 1912/13-WS 1913/14) JAN PATO KA (1907-1977, SS 1933)
United Kingdom & Commonwealth CHRISTOPHER V. SALMON (1901-1960 WS 1922, 1926-1927) WILLIAM BOYCE-GIBSON (1869-1935, 1928-1929) WOLFE MAYS The Low Countries HENDRIK J. POS (1898-1955, WS 1922/23) STEPHAN STRASSER (1905-1991) HERMAN LEO VAN BREDA (1911-1974) KARL SCHUHMANN (1941-2003) Italy ANTONIO BANFI (1896-1957) ENZO PACI (1911-1976)
France EMMANUEL LEVINAS (1905-1995, 1928-29) GEORGES GURVITCH (1884-1965) JEAN WAHL (1888-1974) GABRIEL MARCEL (1889-1973) GASTON BERGER (1896-1960) ALEXANDRE KOJEVE (1902-1968) JEAN CAVAILLES (1903-1944) JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905-1980) MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908-1961) SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1908-1986) PAUL R (1913-2005) MICHEL HENRY (1922-2002)
Far East
Other students
KITARO NISHIDA (1870-1945) TANABE HAJIME (1885-1962 WS 1922/23-SS 1923) TAKAHASHI SATOMI (1886-1962 1926-1927) TRAN DUC THAO (1917-1993)
ERNST ZERMELO (1871-1953, WS 1890/91) CHARLES HARTSHORNE (1897-2000, 1923-1925) RUDOLF CARNAP (1891-1970, SS 1924-SS 1925) HERBERT MARCUSE (1898-1979, SS 1929)
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Carlo Ierna
References and further reading Crowell, Steve. 2012. “Phenomenology in the United States.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XII: pp. 183–197 (see also Chapter 75 in the present volume). Dewalque,Arnaud. 2013.“Schema of the Brentano School Intellectual Progeny.” Phenomenology & Cognitive Science 12: p. 445. Embree, Lester. (Ed.). 1997. Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Feldes, Joachim. 2015. Das Phänomenologenheim: Der Bergzaberner Kreis im Kontext der frühen phänomenologischen Bewegung. Nordhausen:Traugott Bautz. Glombik, Czeslaw. 2005. “Die Polen und die Göttinger phänomenologische Bewegung.” Husserl Studies 21: pp. 1–15. Kuhn, Helmut, Ave-Lallemant, Eberhard, and Gladiator, Reinhold (Eds.). 1975. Die Miinchener Phanomenologie. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Salice, Alessandro. 2016. “The Phenomenology of the Munich and Göttingen Circles.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/phenomenology-mg/ Sepp, Hans Rainer (Ed.). 1988. Edmund Husserl und die phänomenologische Bewegung. Zeugnisse in Text und Bild. Freiburg: Karl Alber. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1981. The Context of the Phenomenological Movement. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1982. The Phenomenological Movement.The Hague/Boston/London: Nijhoff. Van Breda, Herman Leo, and Taminiaux, Jacques. 1959. Edmund Husserl 1859–1959. Recueil commemoratif publie a l’occasion du centenaire de la naissance du philosophe. Den Haag: Nijhoff.
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INDEX
Abbagnano, Nicola 566–567 Absolute 54, 88, 91–92, 94–95 absorption 163, 212, 593–594; inertia of 162; law of 189 acceptance 81, 202, 395, 437, 463, 465, 579–580, 678, 768; intuitive 273; ontic 437; of perception 81 actuality 51, 81, 140, 200–203, 208, 226, 347, 426, 429, 431, 451, 561–562, 595; non- 232, 472 Adorno,Theodor 100, 670–676, 678–680, 715 Advancement of Social Sciences in Guatemala (AVANCSO) 782 Aertsen, Johannes 389–390 aesthetics 26, 114, 116, 123, 242, 504, 522, 570, 592, 627; phenomenological 113–115, 118–119; reduction of 114; thematics of 113–114; traditional 116; transcendental 215 affective 78, 120, 222, 224, 309, 363, 413, 505–507, 727; act 255; affordances 311; aspects 133; attunement 305, 309–310; background 311; being 595; coloration 305, 560; communion 121; context 545; dimension 545; disclosure 304, 306; disposedness 307–308; disposition 545–546; engagements 311; experiences 310, 631, 723; factors 134; familiarity 310; intentionality 305; involvement 305–306; laws 504; layer 504; life 304–305, 309, 311, 502; meaning 120; neurosciences 312; openness 306–307, 310; phenomena 305, 309; pre- 79; qualities 311; relation 130, 134; response 134, 187, 310; self364; sensations 306; solicitations 312–313; state 191, 305, 309; struggle 496; syntheses 382–383; tension 130; tones 306; world 120 affectivity 161, 163, 305–306, 308, 310, 488, 496, 503, 505–507, 545, 580, 595, 629; basis of 310; collective 632; human 54; internal historiality 506; investigation of 305, 310, 318; invisible 506;
modalization of 506; ontological structure of 307; primacy of 306; pure 506; self- 30; theory of 308 African: communities 751; indigenous knowledge 750, 752; intellectuals 751; left 751; people 749; phenomenological moment 749; philosophers 749; philosophical debate 750–750; realities 752; scholars 752; scientifc research 755; societies 751–752; thought 751, 755 Ahmed, Sara 123, 133 Albertazzi, Liliana 100, 218 Allison, Henry E. 172 Almeida, Guido Antonio de 214 Alston, William 347–348 alterity 205, 266–267, 316, 319, 331–332, 440–441, 450, 549, 604, 642, 693, 695, 734, 764; proper 267; radical 193, 267 American Phenomenological Society 774 American Revolution 447 Anders, Günther 713, 715 Angst 162, 307–308, 311, 318, 496 anthropology 90, 165, 286, 476, 479, 487, 570, 602–603, 608, 754, 773, 809; existential 598; phenomenological 319, 603; philosophical 165, 198, 241, 247, 627; quasi- 598; structural 744 Antonelli, Mauro 467n2 apodictic 143, 177, 213, 296, 298–299, 414–420, 561, 756; certainty 293, 562; consciousness 177; core 296; evidence 44, 296, 414, 417–421, 472; insight 419; intuition 561; judgment 563; knowledge 418; necessity 279; principles 430; science 297; transcendental 296; truth 416 appearing 30–32, 40, 56, 82, 84, 114, 119, 138, 145, 254, 305, 319, 355, 356, 365, 400, 438, 440–441, 448–449, 451, 475–476, 485, 500–503, 507, 510–511, 521, 561, 574, 593, 595, 599; object 381, 438; phenomena 225; self- 364; sensuous 120; world 451, 610
813
Index apprehension 39, 83, 124, 126, 184, 189, 223, 252, 306, 332, 373, 415, 483, 516, 518–519, 584–585; analogical 79; apperceptive 83; assimilative 261; concept-free 348; conceptual 77, 306; intuitive 393; mental 65; mis- 611; natural 400; naturalistic 124; noetic 405; objective 517; perceptual 40; unitary 702 appresentation 170, 260–261, 264, 267 appropriation 3, 164–165, 198, 332, 384, 389, 449, 491, 593, 601, 638, 642–643; Christian 199; critical 755; in-depth 22; mis- 236; originator’s 537; schematic 238; transformative 533; unacknowledged 252 Aquinas,Thomas 3, 50, 53–56 Archimedes 281 Arendt, Hannah 3, 193, 445–452, 712–713, 761, 783–784, 790, 792–793 Aristotle 3, 23, 37–39, 41, 43–47, 51, 58, 60, 198–201, 221, 242, 331, 335–336, 376–377, 384, 389, 391, 404–405, 408, 446, 466–467, 483, 489, 495–496, 529, 536–538 Armstrong, David 757, 761 Arnauld, Antoine 64 artifcial intelligence (AI) 665, 798 artwork 114–118 associations 274, 344, 382, 712, 726, 776, 780; active 780; free 726; international 779; phenomenological 780, 782; psychological 513 assumption 77, 89, 91, 238, 244, 264, 266, 268, 312, 346, 394, 408, 583, 725, 751; basic 244; conjectural 715; Eurocentric 5; everyday 18; false 711; intellectualist 306; metaphysical 368; modern 305; natural 234; naturalistic 368; objectivist 305; ontological 699; passive 128; theoretical 81 Athenian polis 447 attunement 162, 307, 310–311, 318, 440; anxious 307; basic 162, 307–308; deep 307; fundamental 307; ground 307, 311; modes of 307–308; pervasive 309; sense of 163; ubiquitous 304, 308–309; see also affective Augustine 53, 61–62, 403–404 Australasian Association of Phenomenology 762 Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy (ASCP) 762 Australasian Society of Phenomenology and Social Philosophy (AAPSP) 762 Australasian Society of Phenomenology and Sociology 762 authenticity 27, 152, 163, 198, 228, 265, 454, 488, 496, 639, 681 Avenarius, Richard 74, 82, 271, 368, 593 axiology 188, 191 Baars, Bernard J. 662–663, 666 Bachelard, Gaston 329 Bachtin, Mikhail M. 529
Banf, Antonio 565–566 Bannon, John F. 556 Barbaras, Renaud 266, 373, 435 Barth, Karl 198 Barthes, Roland 741 Baruzzi, Jacques 457 Bassenge, Friedrich 654 Baumann, Julius 65–66 Baumgartner, Wilhelm 467 Beaney, Michael 650 Beaufret, Jean 204 Beck, Heinrich 60 Becker, Oskar 48, 278–280, 286–287, 543, 705, 771 behavior 242, 247, 259, 264, 266–267, 309, 313, 334, 580, 662–663, 665, 719, 721, 739–740; active 638; amovable 740; distinct 241; ethical 333; hierarchy 740; illicit 262; instinctive 241–242, 247; linguistic 792; manifestations 312; modes of 740; observable 724; of consciousness 399; order of 740–741; overt 792; psychology 665; social 569; spontaneous 618; structure of 247, 740; symbolic 740; syncretic 740; unintelligible 260 Beierwaltes, Werner 60 being-at-work 39 being-here 160–165, 494 being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein) 25, 27–28, 118–119, 129, 162, 190, 203, 276, 307, 309, 319, 365, 408–410, 439, 451–452, 476, 488–489, 496, 536, 715, 763 being-there 160, 202, 213, 276, 307, 334, 546 being-toward-the-world 27 beingness 30 Bell,Winthrop 791, 799, 802n8 Benhabib, Seyla 446, 452 Benjamin, Walter 670 Benoist, Jocelyn 31, 126 Berg, Adam 14 Berger, Gaston 471 Berghofer, Philipp 422 Bergo, Bettina 194 Bergoffen, Debra 454, 456 Bergson, Henri 235, 594, 608, 616–617, 771, 798 Bernard of Clairvaux 57 Bernays, Paul 288 Bernet, Rudolf 126, 395, 625 Bernstein, Jay 673 Bilimoria, Purushottama 761, 764 Blackness movement (Negritude) 751 body schema 131–132, 311 Bollas, Christopher 723 Bolzano, Bernard 11, 98–100, 201, 391, 650, 653 boredom 310–311, 403; deep 307–308, 311; profound 307 Boulaga, Eboussi 752 Boulnois, Olivier 61
814
Index bourgeois 606, 608–609, 637, 638 Brentano, Franz 3, 13–16, 23, 50–52, 57, 66, 75, 83–84, 98–106, 140, 171, 189, 198–201, 205, 207–208, 210, 218, 251, 306, 352–353, 371, 413, 461–467, 509, 512, 522 British Empiricism 1, 73, 77, 82, 99, 391, 463, 563 Bruzina, Ronald 471 Buber, Martin 198, 265–266 Buddhism 124, 317, 770 Bultmann, Rudolf 198 Cairns, Dorion 487, 616, 623, 765n2, 791–792, 799 Calcagno,Antonio 625, 629, 633, 802 Camus,Albert 198, 312, 789 Canguilhem, Georges 699 capitalism 571, 607–608, 640, 643, 713; anti- 570 Cardinal John Henry Newman 626 Carman,Taylor 24, 129, 267 Carnap, Rudolf 288, 316, 531, 651 Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (CARP) 780, 783, 795 Carr, David 268, 654, 792 Carruthers, Peter 128, 655 Cartesianism 1, 3, 64, 66, 246, 394–395, 545; anti- 395, 451 Cartwright, Nancy 707 Casper, Bernhard 61–62 Cassirer, Ernst 391–392, 470, 543, 792, 800 Castillo-Gallusser, Sabrina 782 Caston,Victor 252 causality 78, 200, 213, 629–631, 740 Cavaillés, Jean 327–328, 336 Cézanne, Paul 117, 119, 237, 560 Chadha, Monima 764 Chalmers, David 146–147, 656, 666, 798 Charlesworth, Max 759–760, 764 Chelstrom, Eric 268–269 Chisholm, Roderick M. 21, 461, 650–651, 655 Chokr, Nader N. 665 Christensen, Carleton B. 764 Christianity 53–54, 503, 589, 608, 735 Chudnoff, Eliah 654, 656 clarifcation 152–153, 155, 176, 181, 183, 213, 244, 247, 308, 325, 335, 353, 416, 437, 489, 690, 693, 708; concept 44; constitutive 471; genetic 437; noematic 224–225; noetic 224–225; phenomenological 104, 438; philosophical 414; progressive 152; self- 696; terminological 280; transcendental 276 cogitatum 84, 515, 517 cogito 19, 28, 66–67, 139–140, 256–258, 491, 515, 517; Cartesian 204, 394, 491; ego- 68, 517 cognition 24, 37, 54, 65, 75–76, 134, 233, 244, 305, 377, 390, 414, 419, 488–489, 518, 534, 536, 540, 560, 653; eidetic 152; empirical 391; formalization of 535–536; human 663, 665; mathematical 535; modes of 232,
390, 534; of nature 80; origin of 377, 391; phenomenological 518; problems of 534; scientifc 176, 257, 320, 519; social 128, 666, 763; source of 234; transcendental 390; universal 397, 708; valid 171; visual 172 Cohen, Hermann 391–392 collectivity 269, 632, 640 colonialism 638, 640, 643, 713, 716; French 636–637 confict 75, 190, 259, 273, 340, 551, 583, 612–613, 636–637, 650–651, 693, 714–715, 722, 727 Conrad,Theodor 114, 583, 626 Conrad, Waldemar 114 Conrad-Martius, Hedwig 53–54, 56, 625–627 constructions 90–91, 119, 357, 195, 757; dialectical 92, 95; foating 360; formal 73; metaphysical 89–91, 95; methodical 273; nominalist 234; pure 494; speculative 91, 95; surreptitious 709; theoretical 91; thought 83 contingency 27, 191, 235, 440, 442, 524, 563, 771; character 426; empirical 358; of experience 441; of facticity 279; human 1; philosophy of 771 continuity 3, 52, 58, 153, 156, 209, 211, 281, 381, 530, 546, 726, 752; of meaning 130; of movement 168; of perceptual felds 82; of philosophy 99; of similarity 80; temporal 130 Copernican 65, 89, 98, 105, 743 corpus 57, 64, 154, 625, 769 countertransference 723–724, 726–727 Courtine, Jean-Francois 31, 61, 64, 637 Crane, Tim 346 Creswell, John W. 665 Crick, Francis 667 criticism 15, 22, 29, 41–42, 65, 83, 127, 147, 154, 200, 202, 260, 286–287, 308, 310, 359, 472, 491–492, 516, 523, 538, 544, 570, 573, 572, 610, 623, 627, 639, 643, 671–672, 674–679, 742, 749–752, 754, 771, 781, 790; empirio- 271, 368, 593; explicit 487, 491; important 482; irresponsible 609; philosophical 674; self- 152, 472, 557, 696; social 608, 677 Crosby, John F. 587 Crowell, Steven Galt 101, 127, 191, 194, 263, 654 Cruz V., Danilo 778 Czech Science Foundation 269 Darwall, Stephen 192, 798 Dasein 24–26, 28, 116–117, 129, 160–162, 183, 198–200, 202–204, 228, 247, 263, 265, 276, 287, 307, 318–319, 361, 363, 376, 395, 408–411, 421, 451, 496, 536, 575, 577, 598–599, 673, 675, 677, 681, 690–692 Dastur, Francoise 12, 25 Daubert, Johannes 20–21, 104, 582 Davidson, Donald 344, 652, 763 Dávila E.,Amílcar 782 de Beauvoir, Simone 3, 123, 132–133, 191, 198, 385n1, 454–459, 664, 760, 764, 790, 794
815
Index De Gandt, Francois 706 De Palma,Vittorio 75–76, 80 De Santis, Daniele 43 De Towarnicki, Frederic 598 de Vignemont, Frederique 666 de Waelhens,Alphonse 421, 722 de Warren, Nicolas 268 deconstruction 2, 94, 317, 684–685, 688, 776, 789–790, 794–797 Deleuze, Gilles 238, 601, 790 Dennett, Daniel 128, 655–656 Derrida, Jacques 28–30, 264, 328, 331, 333–335, 365, 373, 421, 509, 651, 684–688, 754, 762–763, 774, 789–790, 794, 796–797 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint 27, 328–331, 334, 336 Descartes, Rene 19, 24, 43, 51, 64–69, 75, 105, 154, 157, 258, 284, 295, 299, 326–327, 336–337, 354–355, 358, 365, 371, 394–395, 399, 412–413, 461, 484, 491, 528, 534, 564, 570, 593, 688, 699, 707 Descombes,Vincent 322n21 Deutscher, Max 760–762 Devitt, Michael 757 de Warren, Nicholas 268 Diagne, Mamousse 756n1 Diagne, Pathe 749 Diagne, Souleymane Bachir 752 diairesis 376, 384 dialectics 24, 66, 88, 603–604, 643, 672, 674, 685, 793, 795 dignity 65, 103, 324, 334, 336, 372, 418, 449, 566 Dilthey,Wilhelm 94, 210, 216–217, 221, 371, 543, 545, 606, 629, 690–691, 713, 778 directedness 40, 243–244, 250–255, 312, 512, 517, 582, 584, 590; conscious 517; horizontal 520; intentional 45, 252–255, 257, 461–462, 517, 520; intuitive 584; invariant 250; nonconceptual 251; original 250; practical 129; straightforward 514 discourse 52, 58, 62, 162, 190, 251, 326, 329, 384, 409–410, 447, 495, 604, 652, 654, 686, 714; contemporary 252–253; metaphysical 62, 293; phenomenological 48; philosophical 251–252, 316, 329–331, 336, 684, 732, 751; rational 316; scientifc 14; silent 163; speculative 292; theological 31; totalizing 330 dissociation 282, 418–419 Donohoe, Janet 194 Döring, Sabine 311, 653 doxa 565, 574, 716 doxic 208, 306, 400, 561 Doyle, John 251 Dreyfus, Hubert L. 168, 173, 348, 651, 654, 665, 667, 676, 742, 790, 792, 797–798 drive 44, 263, 407, 506–507, 613, 630; aesthetic 242; innate 241–242; moral 242 Drummond, John J. 146, 173, 194, 654
dualism 68, 124, 147, 263, 292, 637, 700 Dubois, James 582 Dufourcq, Anne 237 Dufrenne, Mikel 119–121 Dummett, Michael 649–650, 652 East Asian Network for Phenomenology (EANP) 774 Ebersolt, Simon 772 Edelman, Gerald 667 ego: absolute 88, 90–91, 94; alter 261, 264, 267, 362, 504, 616; -body 126; Cartesian 293; centered 192; concrete 168, 209, 426, 430–432, 693; consciousness 734; eidos 430–432; empirical 94, 167–168, 399, 574; factual 430–431; -foreign 74, 84; -form 215; ideal 727; identical 74; individual 631; living 503; meditating 25; monadic 430, 432, 693; monadological 68; mundane 93; non- 84, 94; personal 79; phenomenological 167, 574; philosophizing 617; -polarization 208; -pole 79, 170; positing 94; psychological 20; psychophysical 623; primal 90, 93–94; primitive 168; pure 66, 106, 167–173, 293, 399, 430, 575; super- 727; transcendental 19, 67–68, 89, 93–94, 104–105, 171, 261, 271, 319, 369, 425, 430–431, 472, 484, 569–570, 575, 595, 696, 742, 756, 761; universal 69; see also cogito egology 263, 479, 753; Cartesian 69; transcendental 68, 320 eidetic: cognition 152; doctrine 80, 356; empiricism 74; insights 152, 156, 235, 401, 560; intuition 18, 91, 178, 235, 370, 415, 500, 560; investigation 179, 183, 425; judging 176–177; knowledge 78, 175–176, 182–184, 630; laws 74, 77, 177, 210, 213, 215, 358, 663; method 21, 56, 179, 183, 370; monad 47; necessity 78, 171, 177; numbers 37, 46–47; ontology 276; orientation 28; phenomenology 78, 114, 440, 732; psychology 83, 207, 357, 371, 393, 428, 604; reduction 330, 357, 369–370, 373, 491–492, 560–561, 617, 754; science 18, 138, 152, 175, 177, 183–184, 280, 355–357, 369, 392–393, 401, 416, 428, 430, 432, 583; sense 76; singularities 427–429, 431–432; standpoint 79; structures 27, 53, 79, 81, 419, 425, 428, 501, 517–518, 520, 739, 753; truth 176–178, 184; unity 47; universality 177; validity 176; variation 76, 175, 184, 406, 425–426, 428, 440, 482, 562, 628 Elsenhans,Theodor 107n12, 413 Elster, Jon 312 embodiment 27, 123–124, 127–130, 133, 310, 421–422, 440, 545–546, 763–764, 798; human 124, 127; phenomenology 123 Embree, Lester 666, 763, 792, 795 emotions 54, 127, 133–134, 188, 190, 192–194, 267, 293, 304–305, 308–313, 463, 465,
816
Index 595–596, 604, 608, 630, 653, 724, 727; confictridden 259; intentionality of 596; moral 188, 193–194; object-directed 309; perceived 133; phenomenology of 763; redefnition of 313; relevant 193; requalifcation 313; shared 311; unsettling 311 empathy 127–128, 133, 260–261, 298, 371–372, 625–631, 633 epistemology 1, 54–55, 326, 329, 336, 385, 464, 495, 565–566, 583, 593, 603, 654, 691, 694, 699, 706, 724, 749, 782, 801; empiricist 346; modern 55; phenomenological 586 epochê 113, 119, 164, 171–172, 273, 276, 326, 329, 368–369, 371, 392, 406–407, 436, 491, 510, 515, 558, 560, 568–569, 574, 579, 621, 623, 654, 672, 700–701, 732, 735, 778; absolute 330; Cartesian 358; phenomenological 256, 370–371, 510, 560, 623, 693–694 Erlich, H. Shmuel 726 Espagne, Michel 636 essences 28, 53, 78, 139, 142, 145, 147, 142, 176, 178, 180–181, 183, 235, 237, 279, 293, 357–358, 369–370, 373, 415–416, 500, 515, 561–562, 582, 586, 601, 639, 653, 665, 672, 675; epistemic 414; formal 77; ideal 77; intentional 142; intuition of 25, 44, 179, 324; material 77–78, 500; metaphysical 515; morphological 416, 754; objective 506; phenomenological 516, 569; philosophy of 21; physical 357; poor 364; psychological 357; pure 16; realism of 21, 357; sensuous 77–78; vision of 337 Etchegoyen, Ricardo Horacio 722–723 ethics 1, 29, 123, 187–189, 191–194, 205, 263, 331, 333–335, 362, 364, 422, 448, 454, 495, 504, 568–570, 589, 592, 607–608, 610–611, 708, 772, 779, 783, 797; clinical 701; embodied 703; environmental 798; of freedom 190; material 54, 247; non-formal 610–612; normative 188, 610; of obligation 191; primacy of 30, 263, 333, 335; utilitarian 607 Eucken, Rudolf 606, 608, 791 European Regional Development Fund 184, 313, 432 Evans, Debbie 459n1 evolution 347, 420, 466, 688, 749, 755; internal 706; philosophical 760 existentialism 2, 26–27, 198, 204–205, 566–568, 638, 738, 760–764, 789, 793–795, 799–800, 802; atheistic 592; French 454; interpretation of 566; literary 794–795; political 446; positive 566 experiential 25, 384, 408; aspects 699; basis 268, 696; character 147; coherence 441; complexity 309; content 275, 346, 382; consciousness 147; context 188; criteria 465; dimension 345, 700; encounter 318; evidence 420–421; feld 393; foundations 394; givenness 183, 440; horizons 439; life 306; motivation 212; perspective 671; possibilities 610; self 654
explication 42, 74, 88, 92, 94–95, 179, 228, 316, 321, 361, 378, 485, 691, 693, 719; existential 395; of indifference 92; interpretive 692–693; meaningful 92; metaphysical 94; ontological 321, 557; phenomenological 690–691; refective 429; systematic 88, 435; transcendental 394 Fackenheim, Emil 800–802 Fales, Evan 348 Falque, Emmanuel 62 Fanon, Frantz 123, 132, 716, 782 Farkas, Katalin 656 Fasching,Wolfgang 147, 340 fascism 608 fear 57, 162, 308, 312, 318, 505, 567, 758 feminism 607, 796 Ferenczi, Sandor 726–727 fetishism 672–673, 679 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 24, 87–91, 93–95, 100, 242, 391, 800 Fifth Cartesian Meditation 68, 372, 382, 504, 619, 623, 629, 693 Findlay, John 759 Fine, Kit 653 Fink, Eugen 17, 20, 89–90, 94–95, 238, 259, 264, 359, 435, 437–439, 442n8, 446, 451, 470–476, 519, 544, 558, 763, 768, 778 Fisette, Denis 800 Flanagan, Owen J. 666 Flynn,Thomas R. 236 Føllesdal, Dagfnn 651, 656, 790, 797 formalism 12, 286, 329, 569; abstract 663; axiomatic 286 Foucault, Michel 328–329, 421, 714, 742–743, 796 foundationalism 342, 796; Cartesian 371 Frankfurt School 670–671, 680, 795 Frankl,Viktor 665 Franklin, James 757 Frechette, Guillaume 585 freedom 26–27, 54, 125, 190–193, 198, 200, 205, 234, 236–237, 262, 329, 332–334, 385, 438, 445, 447, 449–450, 454, 456–457, 459, 561, 566, 598, 600, 629, 631, 639–640, 720, 755; categorical 27; creative 236; dependent 115; factual 238; human 191, 234, 458; ideal 238; kinaesthetic 127; phenomenology of 247; primacy of 332; primordial 205; radical 193; unconstrained 117 Freeman, Lauren 308, 310 Frege, Gottlob 102, 282, 529, 650, 761, 791 Freud, Sigmund 662, 664, 718–719, 721–725, 727 Friedman, Michael 650 Fries, Jakob Friedrich 391 Frings, Manfred S. 607, 609–613 frustration 607, 723; intentional 378 Fuchs,Thomas 132, 134, 311 Fujita, Masakatsu 771
817
Index fulfllment 39–42, 45, 143–144, 146, 177, 225, 227, 235, 261, 320–321, 342, 347, 349, 378, 407, 414, 416, 419, 528, 577, 579, 586, 673 Gabbard, Glen O. 719, 723 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 11, 22–23, 26, 48n4, 228–229, 650, 677, 680–681, 692, 694–696, 782–784, 790, 793–795, 800, 802, 803n23 Gallagher, Shaun 123, 131, 665–667 Gallese,Vittorio 128 Gallo, Antonio 781–782 Gauthier,Yvon 800 Gehlen, Arnold 247 Gehring, Petra 672–673 Geiger, Moritz 20, 104, 114, 180, 189, 479, 627 Geist 373, 511, 546, 608, 612–613 Gelb,Adhémar 130, 479, 664, 740 genesis 77, 79, 208–210, 213, 215, 217, 261, 274, 305, 382, 436–437, 520, 561, 639, 672, 679, 687, 743–744, 777; concept of 211; constitutive 538; doctrine of 210; foundation of 245; historical 215, 273, 672; intentional 209; lawfulness of 212–213; natural 211; passive 719, 721; phenomenological 208–209, 212; psychological 465; rejection of 208; temporal 215; transcendental 209, 245–246; universal 693 Geniusas, Saulius. 420 geometrical: circles 286; determination 390; fgures 482; idealizations 708; judgments 279; knowledge 280; magnitudes 534, 539–540; methods 533; problems 539; projections 119 Gestalt 14, 99–100, 131, 479, 481–484, 664–665, 740–741 Geuss, Raymond 671 Giampieri-Deutsch, Patrizia 726–727 Gibson, Boyce 758–759, 764–765, 791 Gilbert, Margaret 268 Gilson, Étienne 56, 60, 69n13, 799, 801 Giorgi, Amedeo 665 givenness: absolute 66, 355, 417; aesthetic 560; conception of 345; of consciousness 138; of entities 38; of experiences 141; experiential 183, 440; freeing 229; horizontality of 415; immanent 139; immediate 74; implicit 224; intersubjective 560; intuitive 226, 394, 708; itself- 76, 213; layer of sense 67; livedexperience 250; manners of 17, 225, 560; of material essences 78; modes of 18, 76, 138, 142, 208, 210–211, 304–305, 337, 343, 394, 743; momentary 82; necessary 38; non- 475; notion of 374, 672; of objects 144; optimal 127; originary 145, 178, 183; of the Other 93; phenomenology of 31, 365, 475; phenomenon of 364; philosophy of 365; pre- 225, 227, 272, 276, 435–441, 472; problem of 412; reductive 474; self- 31, 415, 417–419, 506; sensuous 81; of spiritual senses 81; subjective 114; thematic 256
Glendinning, Simon 652 Glock, Hans-Johann 653 Goldie, Peter 312, 653 Goldmann, Lucien 673 Goldstein, Kurt 130–131, 479, 664, 740 Graf, Rudiger 151 Grant, George 801 Grave, Selwyn Alfred 759 Gray, Jesse Glenn 716 Greisch, Jean 336, 731 grief 267, 307, 309, 631–632 Griffths, Paul E. 312 Grünbaum, Adolf 724 Grush, Rick 667 guilt 188, 310, 385, 446, 715 Gurwitsch,Aron 479–485, 663–664, 666, 706, 774, 792–793, 795 Gutting, Gary 706 Gyllenhammer, Paul 193 Habermas, Jurgen 421–422, 670–671, 675–681, 790 habits 125, 129–132, 228, 238, 274, 293–294, 310, 407 Haefiger, Gregor 527 Haller, Rudolf 98–99 Hanly, Charles 725 Hardy, Lee 146, 706–707 Harnecker, Marta 777 Harney, Maurita J. 761–763 Hart, James 194, 763 Hartmann, Nicolai 188, 190, 192–193, 758, 760 Harvey, Charles 706 Heber, Johannes 732 Heelan, Patrick 706 Heffernan, George 159n5, 349n6, 413, 416, 420 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 13, 73, 75, 78, 82, 88–92, 94–95, 99–100, 329, 352, 391, 408, 454, 493, 533, 544, 546, 602–603, 638, 640–641, 643, 670, 760, 800 Heiler, Josef 733 Heimann, Paula 726 Heimsoeth, Heinz 65, 65n5 Heinämaa, Sara 123–124, 133, 193, 457, 459n4 Held, Klaus 435, 438, 440–441, 779 Henry, Michel 3, 28–30, 61, 131, 363–365, 373, 438, 499–507, 508n4, 734–735, 763, 774 Herbart, J. F. 98–100, 391, 662 Héring, Jean 626, 653, 662, 732, 800 hermeneutics 2, 26, 28–29, 58, 287, 361, 496, 650, 679, 690, 692–695, 724–725, 769, 774, 781–782, 793, 795–796; of absence 421; of ethnic being 771; of facticity 25, 690–691, 694; phenomenological 363, 365; philosophical 26, 678, 694–695, 794–795; reconstructive 712 heterogeneity 225, 502, 707, 754 heteronomy 524, 528 Hilbert, David 92, 280–285, 287
818
Index Hinners, Richard Caswell 800 Hintikka, Jaakko 101 historicism 99, 217, 567, 691, 709, 714, 751 Hitler, Adolf 627 Höfer, Alois 413 homogeneity 47, 80, 225, 328 Honneth,Axel 671, 681 Hopkins, Burt 654, 763 Horkheimer, Max 670–671, 676 Hountondji, Paulin J. 749–752, 754–756 Hoyos V., Guillermo 778–779, 781 Huertas-Jourda, José 803n17 Hume, David 43, 73–76, 78–80, 82–84, 168, 232, 371, 382, 391, 412–413, 480 Hutto, Daniel 134 hyletic 141, 253–254, 306, 505 hypokeimenon 577–578 hypostasis 550–552, 554
448–449, 451, 456, 568–569, 620, 623, 693, 700, 719, 722, 734, 763, 779, 784; conception of 262; consciousness of 274; constitution of 89, 93; monadal 382; pathetic 504; phenomenology of 261, 264, 779; political 450, 452; transcendental 68, 261, 297, 372, 519–520, 707 intuitionism 73, 286–287, 329, 500–501, 587 Iribarne, Julia 779–780, 784 Iser, Wolfgang 530 I–thou 259, 264–266, 449
idealism 22, 27–28, 82–83, 147, 370, 392, 415, 490, 523, 526, 566, 575, 654, 757, 791, 793; absolute 391; alleged 523; anti- 21; attendant 395;Austrian 1; classical 331; French 235; German 1, 3, 13, 87–95, 105, 676, 769, 772, 795, 799; Husserl’s 83, 792–793; metaphysical 91, 145; neo-Kantian 694; phenomenal 171; philosophical 791; post-Kantian 91–92, 602; pragmatic 798; –realism debate 392; subjective 83–84; transcendental 19, 105, 115, 382, 389, 391–392, 421, 519, 630, 707; true 566 idealization 67, 78, 485, 563, 686–687, 753 ideation 38–39, 178, 235–236, 516 ideology 162, 347, 422, 608, 640, 675 Ierna, Carlo 100, 103 Ihde, Don 665, 762 immanence 18, 93, 169, 200, 256, 263, 298, 320, 354–355, 363, 368–369, 374, 380, 391, 394, 439, 456, 462, 502, 505, 512, 514, 520, 560, 592–593, 595, 628, 693, 733–735; intentional 256; intuitive 301; philosophy of 368, 593–594; psychological 256; radical 503, 505; transcendence in 256, 391, 405 Ingarden, Roman 1, 20–21, 114–116, 119–120, 179–180, 370, 373, 392, 462, 522–531, 582, 584, 625–626, 630, 653, 656, 706 Inkpin, Andrew 764 inspiration 106, 201, 235, 608, 636, 750, 792; central 26; empiricist 706; Franciscan 56; Husserlian 60; source of 54, 62, 560, 599; speculative 59 Institute for the Social Sciences 606 intellectualism 53, 246, 263, 306, 451, 594, 639, 664–665, 741 International Center for Applied Phenomenology (ICAP) 774 intersubjectivity 93, 127–128, 132, 192, 215–217, 246, 259, 261–262, 264, 266–267, 275, 313,
James,William 222–223, 242, 310, 663–664, 721 Janicaud, Dominique 31, 61, 736n1 Jansen, Julia 234, 237 Jaspers, Karl 198, 203, 449, 566, 800, 802 Johnston, Mark 653 judgment: activity of 76, 177, 179–180; analogical 260; analytic 77, 91, 334; apodictic 563; apophantic 327; arithmetical 279; blind 74; conceptual 377; eidetic 176; empirical 91, 393; essential 183; ethical 189; evaluative 116; false 176; formal 279; geometrical 279; hypothetical 181; identifcation 179–182, 184; moral 187; negative 584; of essence 180–182, 184, 463; phenomenological 662, 666; plural 328; predicative 66, 334, 377, 380–381; primacy of evident 74; singular 328; spontaneous 187, 217; suspension of 326; synthetic 77, 91; true 176, 279, 398, 413, 465; universal 176; value 103, 313; of value 188 Jung, Hwa Yol 636 justice 31, 193, 231, 238, 332, 334, 426, 447, 553, 608, 655, 777, 784 Kant, Immanuel 13, 19, 21, 24, 51, 60, 75, 78, 89–94, 99–100, 105, 113, 116, 169, 192–193, 200, 232, 237, 329, 334, 336–337, 352–353, 365–366, 369, 371, 376–377, 379–380, 383–384, 389–395, 397, 399, 405, 437, 439, 446, 448, 461, 471, 523, 564, 588, 595, 603, 610–611, 653, 732, 769, 800 Kastil,Alfred 100, 651 Kaufmann, Felix 287–288, 616, 792 Kelly, Michael 193 Kenny, Anthony 653 Kern, Iso 770 Kind 38, 40, 43, 48 Kirsner, Douglas 760 Kiverstein, Julian 667 Klein, Jacob 44–48, 533–534, 536–540, 802 Klemperer,Victor 715 Klibansky, Raymond 800 Köhler,Wolfgang 481, 740 Kojeve,Alexandre 603, 638, 802 Kompridis, Nikolas 681 Königsberger, Leo 509 Korea Society for Hermeneutics 773
819
Index Korean Heidegger Society 773 Korean Society for Phenomenology (KSP) 773–774 Korsgaard, Christine 654, 798 Koyré,Alexandre 327, 626, 800 Kraus, Oskar 100, 543, 651 Kriegel, Uriah 656 Kripke, Saul 530 Kuhn, Helmut 798 Kuki, Shuzo 771 Kwan, Tze-Wan 770
Lormand, Eric 308 Löwith, Karl 496n2, 695, 713, 793 Lucretius 199 Luft, Sebastian 368
Lacan, Jacques 688, 722, 741 Lafont, Cristina 677, 681 Lambert, Johann 13, 92, 352 Lampert, Jay 801–802 Landgrebe, Detlev 544 Landgrebe, Ludwig 224, 436, 441, 470, 519, 543–547, 778 Langan, Thomas 801–802 Lask, Emil 22 Lateran Council 52 Latin American Circle of Phenomenology (CLAFEN) 779–784 Laugier, Sandra 588 Lavigne, Jean-Francois 368, 370 Law of Excluded Middle (LEM) 525 Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) 525 lawfulness 76, 78–79, 83, 212, 214, 416 Leder, Drew 702 Lee, Nam-In 213, 421, 774 legitimation 80, 82 Lehrer, Keith 99 Lehtonen, Johannes 721 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 64, 68–69, 70n22, 92, 200, 221, 280, 284–286, 293, 297, 299, 328, 534, 618 Leiter, Brian 650 Lerner, Rosemary R.P. 777, 779, 783–784 Levinas, Emmanuel 12, 28–32, 61, 170, 192–193, 205, 259, 262–264, 267, 321, 327, 331–337, 339, 362, 364–365, 421, 438, 446, 448–449, 451, 549–555, 575, 619, 734, 758–759, 764, 774, 778, 781–784, 790, 796–797 Levine, Joseph 146, 656 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 741–744 limitations 143, 191, 225, 332, 397, 399, 422, 567, 713; intrinsic 2; naturalistic 73; sensualistic 73 Lipps,Theodor 20–21, 413, 626 Locke, John 64, 73, 75, 82, 168, 232, 391, 393 logical positivism 316, 791–793, 797 logos 152, 286, 360–361, 365, 495, 536, 558–559, 562, 612–613; genuine 380; Greek 331; intuitive 119; nascent 119; philosophical 119 Lohmar, Dieter 370 Loidolt, Sophie 193, 450–451 Loparić, Željko 778–781
MacDonald, Paul 763 Mach, Ernst 14, 73, 100, 271, 593, 662, 666 MacIntyre, Alasdair 626 MacIntyre, Ronald 790, 797 Mahnke, Dietrich 278, 280–281, 283–286 Majolino, Claudio 43–44, 65, 353, 355–356 Malebranche, Nicholas 64, 68 Malpas, Jeff 762–763 Mancosu, Paolo 278 Marcel, Gabriel 327 Marcuse, Herbert 670, 714–715 Maréchal, Joseph 59 Marion, Jean-Luc 28–31, 61–62, 70n16, 205, 229, 335–337, 362, 364–365, 374, 422, 438, 735, 763 Maritain, Jacques 56, 59–60 Marty,Anton 14, 100, 202, 465–466, 544–545 Marx, Karl 506, 544, 546–547, 556, 570, 602, 638, 640–641, 671–673, 783 Marxism 546–547, 556, 570, 603, 606, 612, 637–639, 641, 671, 673, 769, 778; background 447; canon 636; concepts 570, 777; defnitions of 638; doctrines 205; investigations of 544; interpretations of 546, 570; misreading 506; orthodox 523; perspective 673; philosophy 546; totalitarian 713 materialism 147, 392, 544, 639–640; dialectical 638–641; historical 673 mathematics: arithmetic 46, 65, 106, 281–285, 533; axiomatic 284; contemporary 540; deductive 286; demonstrative 286; edifce of 282; formal 278, 280–283, 285–287, 289, 328, 535, 537–538; formulae of 288; foundation of 282, 284–285, 288; geometry 65, 106, 175, 216, 278–281, 283– 284, 289, 326, 369, 408, 535–536, 708; Greek 46, 534–535, 537; history of 279, 286–287, 534, 536; material 278, 289; modern 510, 534–535, 538, 540; objects of 115, 287, 538; ontology of 65; phenomenological 490; philosophy of 100, 286–287, 414, 538; pure 152; symbolic 45, 518, 533–535, 537; theoretical 684 McAlister, Linda Lopez 633 McDowell, John 344, 653–654, 765, 798 McMullin, Irene 194 medicine 479, 606, 629, 699–700, 702–703, 770 medieval 609; doctrine 462; era 51–52; infuences 53; origins 389; past 51; philosophy 2, 50, 55, 60, 199, 221, 390, 461, 466, 800–801; roots 389; schoolmen 739; studies 57; theme 57; thought 51–53, 55, 57–59; tradition 59 Mehl, Edouard 64 Meinong,Alexius 14, 99–100, 102, 413, 465, 483, 585, 653, 655, 759
820
Index Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy 761–762 Melle, Ullrich 189, 193, 543 Mensch, James Richard 802 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1, 21, 26–30, 101, 118–120, 123, 128–134, 170, 191, 205, 228–229, 235–237, 247, 259–260, 264, 266–267, 274, 276–277, 304, 310–311, 313, 330, 348, 365–366, 373, 376–377, 383–385, 395, 421, 435, 437, 440–441, 448, 451, 456–458, 471, 509, 519, 545, 556–564, 569–570, 636–637, 639–641, 654, 664–666, 699, 701, 705, 721, 724, 740–742, 744, 754, 758–761, 763–764, 770, 774, 782–784, 790–791, 793–794, 796, 798, 801 Messer, August 370 metaphysical: assumptions 368; cloistering 437; commitments 147; consequences 133; constructions 89–91, 94; desire 263, 332; discourse 62, 293; elements 14; entities 89, 715; explication 94; extension 89; extravagance 99; falsifcations 271; framework 23, 116; ground 93; hypostatization 77; hypotheses 158; idealism 91, 145; inquiry 200, 317, 527; interlude 67; interpretation 221, 561; justifcation 65; neutrality 17, 374; novel 458; ontologies 325, 333; phenomenology 90, 92; presuppositions 24, 66, 397; primacy 30, 336; principle 59; questions 106, 157–158, 317, 327, 523; radically 68; reading 65; realism 51, 707; solipsism 170; speculations 90; stakes 22; strategies 452; tendency 53, 327; theories of knowledge 326–327; theses 147; tradition 58, 61, 66, 793; transcendence 31, 334; trick 66; truth 370; understanding 92; values 115, 352 methodological: approach 14, 458, 534, 750; awareness 708; basis 256; claims 2, 534; displacement 720; distinction 520; equipment 426; fction 370; framework 14; function 357; guiding thread 4; illegitimacy 534; implications 426, 448; individualism 681; intervention 516, 519; issue 235; level 284, 734; multiplicity 458; naivete 537, 540; notion 425–426; parallels 392; place 183; preeminence 372; primacy 14; principle 201–202, 288, 394, 518; priority 183, 655; procedure 368, 370, 694; protocols 511–512, 515–516; questions 56, 712; reductions 93; refection 734; requirement 499; regard 257; resources 123; rigor 106; role 301; self-understanding 255; signifcance 175, 233; stance 457; step 429, 714–715; superiority 534; terms 276; tools 305, 425, 458, 562 Milgram experiment 269 Mill, John Stuart 82, 392, 413 Miller, Jared A. 672–673 Moati, Raoul 651 modalization 214, 227, 506
modernity 51, 55, 59, 154, 221, 317, 397, 452, 573, 593, 709, 731, 774 Mohanty, Jitendra Nath 654, 762, 792 monad 69, 167–168, 170, 172–173, 209, 213, 216, 292–293, 295–301, 425–426, 430–432; adulthood of 299; animate 286; birth of 292; concept of 295, 298, 300; concrete 209; correction of 300; historicity of 215; Husserlian 172, 297–298; individual 211, 297–300; living 213; mathematical 47; of possibilities 300; phenomenological 295; pure 173; structure of 213; super- 299; vices of 299; virtues of 300 monadological 69; account of subjectivity 294; approach 301; community 301; contract 301; ego 68; framework 293–294; project 298; republic 301; society 299; stance 292; understanding 300; view 292 monism 58, 147, 507, 637; ontological 52, 363, 502 Montague, Michelle 656 Montague,W. P. 791 moods 133, 304–310, 312; communication of 118; function of 307; ground 308; passing 307; pervasive 309; phenomena of 304; ubiquity of 307 morality 187, 193, 247, 567, 603, 609 Moran, Dermot 102, 144, 146, 268, 625, 663, 763 Morrison, James C. 801–802 motion 5, 41–43, 48, 506, 577–578 motivation 21, 79, 126, 213, 370, 496, 594, 611, 620, 622, 626, 629–631, 642, 744; absence of 720; to act 312; collective 632; concepts of 209; ethical 793; experiential 212; fullness of 720; moral 193; notion of 618; rational 145; underlying 720 Mulligan, Kevin 21, 587, 653, 656 multiplicity 4, 39, 46, 57, 79, 268, 281, 355, 383, 385, 397, 400, 429, 482, 484, 517, 563, 575, 586; of beings 41; confusing 360; of entities 42; of exemplars 184; indefnite 68; of images 43; irreducible 52; of manifestations 400; methodological 458; of objects 45; of perspectives 480; real 385; of requirements 308; sensuous 482–483; unifed 585; unity-less 257; unity of 359; unlimited 517; of variants 184, 426, 561 Nagel, Ernest 621–622 Nagel, Thomas 147 Natalis, Hervaeus 251 Natanson, Maurice 703n3, 792–793 Natorp, Paul 23, 65–66, 102, 209–210, 219n14, 286 naturalism 74, 147, 372, 510, 544, 569, 639, 653, 708–709, 763, 791; dualistic 216; epistemological 653; full-blown 399 Nazism 470, 676, 750, 797 Ndaw, Alassane 752
821
Index Neo-Scholasticism 50–51, 53–55, 58–61 neuroscience 123, 131, 662–663, 666–667, 761; affective 312 New School of Social Research of New York 471 Ni, Liangkang 769–770 Nicholson, Graeme 800–802 Nietzsche, Friedrich 61, 116, 221, 228, 238, 336, 476, 566–567, 606, 713, 732, 743, 769, 778, 789–790 nihilation 318–321, 597–598, 601 nihilism 157, 336, 566–567, 608, 611, 651, 713 Noë, Alva 133–134 noema 53, 119, 173, 242, 257, 285–287, 359, 415, 436, 479–483, 515, 520, 550, 554, 559, 592, 672, 674, 761, 797 noematic 208, 224, 377, 400, 485, 493, 595, 734; analysis 223; constitution 212; correlation 208, 242, 484, 557; expression 481; horizons 223–224; intuition 44; laws of form 286; nexuses 436; parallelism 287; perspective 224; point 483–484; references 224; sense 84, 480, 483, 672; sphere 686; standpoint 224; structures 209, 379, 415, 554, 630; system 480–483; unity 171, 210, 484; see also clarifcation noesis 119, 242, 257, 285–287, 415, 436, 480, 515, 520, 550, 554 noetic 223–224, 377, 379, 485, 505, 557; apprehension 405; aspects 139; awareness 251; complexity 211; domain of consciousness 557; forms 171; horizons 223; instance 337; multiplicities 210; nexuses 436; parallelism 287; primacy of consciousness 337; processes 211, 217; references 224; sense 84; standpoint 224; structure 144, 415; see also clarifcation non-being 113, 316–317, 369, 471, 565–566, 599, 601 normativity 194, 268, 447, 608, 703, 798 noumena 65, 88, 801 objectivism 68, 156, 158, 272, 274–275, 653, 696, 708, 712, 753 objectivity 24, 38, 68, 103, 114, 146, 226, 254, 261, 275, 279, 286, 294, 301, 307, 371, 376, 381, 398, 417, 429, 436, 451, 540, 560, 570, 597, 621, 687, 691, 693, 702, 709, 751, 753; categories of 378; character of 394; concept of 261; consciousness138; counterpoint to 68; domains of 16; fnite 364; formalized 538; founding 38; immanent 13, 16, 140, 201, 251, 739; intentional 342, 528; of knowledge 44, 100; manifestation of 348; mathematical 540; modifed 286; possibility of 19; pure 699–700; rational 358; reduction to 31; restricted 81 O’Brien, Wendy 457 O’Connor, Brian 673–674 Oddie, Graham 653 O’Dwyer, Luciana 761–762
Ȏhashi, Ryosuke 771 Olivetti, Marco Maria 61–62 ontic 76, 81, 428, 430–431, 493, 503, 574, 580, 673, 721; accent 287; acceptance 437; affection 506; dignity 65; domain 429; engagements 673; essential form 429; feelings 307; force 287; inquiries 500; level 307–308, 317; manifestations 308; meanings 474, 501; modes of attunement 307; predetermined 578; priority 203, 287; questions 489; sciences 361, 490; senses 489; side 307; totality 440; understanding 489; validity 81, 742; weight 287 openness 54, 306, 316, 408, 421, 438, 440–441, 450, 470, 476, 557, 575, 580; academic 769; affective 307, 310; ecstatic 476; fundamental 16; intentional 305; irreparable 579; primitive 559; transccendent 559; world- 438–439, 546 O’Regan, Kevin 133–134 orientation 16, 20, 29, 51, 56, 100, 125, 127, 131, 139, 310, 392, 501, 537, 546, 579–580, 649, 652–653, 674, 702, 809;Aristotelian 390; background 307; basic 681; bodily 579; critical 677; descriptive 677; double 210; eidetic 28; epistemological 390, 488; existential 30; general 309, 713; idealistic 27; intellectual 394; materialistic 391; ontological 333, 501; phenomenological 21, 31–32, 54; philosophical 750; practical-perceptive 575; pragmatic 621; preliminary 87; pre-objective 27; primordial 24; spatial 310; subjective 19; temporal 24; transcendental 20; world- 306 Orringer, Nelson 777 otherness 263–264, 266, 298, 332, 456, 507, 549, 602, 702, 749, 754 Otto, Rudolf 733 Ozar,Anne 188, 193 Paci, Enzo 565–571, 778 Padoa, Alessandro 281 Papin, Philippe 640 Papineau, David 652 Parmenides 38, 316, 398, 565–567 Pascal, Blaise 64 passivity 217–218, 264, 381–383, 407, 580; primary 382; secondary 379, 382; vigilant 263 Patočka, Jan 1, 48, 82, 395, 441, 448, 451, 475, 573–580, 636, 713–714, 716, 763, 782, 800 Pegasus 464 Pellegrino, Edmund 700–701 Perler, Dominik 53, 461 perspective: action-oriented 277; Christian 54; common 637; of consciousness 639; ethical 205; existential 566; experiential 671; fnite 57; frst-person 192, 203, 238, 259, 263, 372, 655, 681, 700, 718, 725, 727; hermeneutic 677; interpretive 556; monadic 301; naturalistic 124, 146, 665; noematic 224; normative 671;
822
Index objectivizing 304; ontological 132–133, 527, 530, 545; original 583; pathological 700; personal 124; phenomenological 23, 27, 300, 439, 544–545, 569–570, 621, 673, 769, 785; practical 547; privileged 677; relationistic 567; reversed 306; scientifc 274, 765; second-person 192, 259; subjective 725; system 679; thirdperson 259, 440, 727; transcendental 66, 326; unifying 278 Peruvian Circle of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics (CIphER) 783–784 Petitot, Jean 665 Peucker, Henning 193 Pfänder,Alexander 20–21, 53, 101, 104, 179, 487, 582, 607, 627, 653 phantasy 175, 183–184, 231–233, 238, 340, 344, 401, 425–426, 485, 623 Phelan, Gerald Bernard 799 Philipse, Herman 83, 760 Piaget, Jean 483, 664, 739, 743 Pietersma, Henry 800–802 Pitt, David 656 Plato 3, 37–38, 40–42, 44–48, 58, 91, 154, 316, 329, 398, 536, 538, 565–566, 570, 684, 699 Platonism 1, 77, 209, 221, 566 Poincaré, Henri 281 politics 2, 123, 447, 592, 609, 629, 632, 641, 711, 713, 755, 763 positivism 88, 99, 330, 368, 392, 522–523, 778; logical 316, 791–793, 797 primordial 167, 190, 204, 506, 558, 674, 680, 753; acquaintance 267; aesthetic values 560; being-in-the-world 118–119; chain of connections 577; constitution 384, 490; dimension 408; equi- 410; essence 566; experience 119, 204, 261, 494, 610, 693; faith 558; freedom 205; ground 276, 753; mode 344; motive sources 691; orientation 24; owning 164; perception 119; phenomenon 163; positing 340; reduction 93, 372; reversibility 557; selfdifferentiation 559; sense 163–164; signifer 263; silence 330; sphere 93; stratum 623; temporality 407, 409; understanding 409; way 116; weaving 119; world 119 Przywara, Erich 54, 59 psyche 132, 288, 428, 512–513, 610, 617, 625, 629–631, 686, 703; individual 286; pure 428–429 psychoanalysis 26, 592, 642, 671, 718–722, 724–728, 781, 795; contemporary 718; existential 601, 603–604; interpretation of 722 psychologism 15, 18, 20–21, 51, 66, 83–85, 88, 90, 224, 253, 392, 412–413, 529, 593, 626, 638, 663, 771; anti- 102, 650; logical 90; positivistic 88; transcendental 18, 88–91, 253; unabashed 392 Putnam, Hilary 653
qualitative: approach 703; aspects 14, 218; character 147; dimension 700; growth 773; infnity 92; phenomena 218; point of view 295; progress 773; research 665, 702, 728; sense 481–482; side 524; studies 773; transformation 262 Quesada, Francisco Miro 778 Quine,Willard van Orman 461, 653, 655, 759, 797 Rabinow, Paul 742 Racker, Heinrich 726 radicality 1, 15, 18–19, 21, 24, 32, 68, 73, 118, 120, 238, 328, 331, 384–385, 449, 499, 502, 505, 521, 575, 577–578, 592, 639, 691, 713, 732, 735 Rasmussen, David M. 671 rationalism 64, 67–68, 73, 91, 99, 151, 156, 158, 189, 198, 287, 412, 422, 563, 567, 609, 612, 708, 749, 751 realism 21–22, 53, 82, 188–189, 357, 365, 374, 392, 526, 584, 651–653; anti- 651–653;Austrian 1; classical 793; entity 707; epistemological 392; fctional 530; idealism– 392; metaphysical 51, 707; phenomenological 21–22; philosophical 53; pragmatic 422; scientifc 706–707, 709; transcendental 19, 326 regressive 53, 164, 366, 393, 520–521; analysis 276; distinctly 393; infnite 332; inquiry 211, 272; phenomenology 473–474; questioning 215; strategy 374; systematic 210 Reinach,Adolf 1, 3, 20–21, 53–54, 104, 188, 357, 392, 582–585 relativism 66, 89, 99, 189, 217, 275, 420, 563, 754 religion 2, 26, 54, 57, 422, 504, 589, 612, 629, 731–732, 734–735, 763; essence of 607; intertwining of 734; natural 54; phenomenology 53, 589, 731–735; philosophy of 708, 731–732, 735 reproduction 213, 344, 618, 679; social 681 resonance 80, 120, 134, 207, 311, 333, 733, 743, 791, 794, 797–798 retention 139, 305, 406–407, 473, 569, 618, 762 Reyna,Alberto Wagner de 778 Reyna, Jose Luis 776 Reynolds, Jack 194, 707, 763 Richard of Saint Victor 200 Richardson, Alan 105 Richardson,William 789, 793 Richir, Marc 238, 438 Rickert, Heinrich 22, 391–392 Ricœur, Paul 1–2, 4, 12, 22, 26, 61, 76, 101, 365, 567, 569, 654, 681, 692–694, 719–725, 750, 774, 782–784, 790, 794–795, 800–801 Rinofner-Kreidl, Sonja 188, 193 Rockefeller Foundation 327 Rolland, Jacques 335–336 Rollinger, Robin 100, 102 Roman Catholicism 50, 54, 57, 606, 626 Romano, Claude 763 Rosales,Alberto 778–779, 784
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Index Rosenzweig, Franz 61, 331 Rouse, Joseph 706–707 Russell, Bertrand 288, 328, 649–650, 655 Russell, Matheson 678, 761–762, 764, 791 Russian Formalists 527, 529 Ryle, Gilbert 522, 651, 757, 759–761 Sachverhalte 21, 178, 466 Salice,Alessandro 582, 584, 587 Sallis, John 238, 795 Salomon, Gayle 123 San Martin, Javier 778–779, 784 Sandell, Rolf 727–728 Sandler, Joseph 726 Sartre, Jean-Paul 1, 21, 26–27, 29, 117–120, 129, 139, 172, 191, 198–199, 204–205, 234–236, 247, 259, 261–262, 264–267, 317, 319–321, 365–366, 373, 395, 448, 456, 458, 509, 569, 592–604, 619, 639, 641, 654, 664, 713, 715, 742, 757, 760–761, 764, 771, 774, 782, 784, 789–790, 793–794, 796, 799, 801 Saussure, Ferdinand de 738, 741 Scheler, Max 12, 20–21, 50, 53–54, 57, 104, 123, 188–190, 192–194, 198, 241, 247, 259–261, 313, 321, 373, 392, 606–614, 625–628, 633, 653, 732, 770, 774, 777, 782, 791, 799, 801 Schelling, Friedrich 87–88, 91, 94, 100, 391, 800 schema: anticipatory 225; body 131–132, 311; corporeal 741; foreground 227; relational 289 Schiller, Friedrich 242, 286 Schmid, Hans Bernhard 268–269 Schneider, Kirk 130, 664–665, 701 Schneider, Martina 534 Schnell, Alexander 238 Scholastic 54, 59, 390–391; categories 54; distinction 695; metaphysics 58, 60; method 56; motifs 62; neo- 13, 58–60; notion 370; ontology 64; philosophy 799; roots 389; sense 390; studies 57; terminology 13, 512; theme 57; thought 53, 55, 62; tradition 57–59, 62, 390; type 57 Scholasticism 52, 55, 57–58, 62, 391; Neo- 50–51, 53–55, 58–62; Second 58 Schuhmann, Karl 101, 103–104, 352, 663 Schuppe,Wilhelm 82, 368 Schürmann, Reiner 713, 716 Schutz,Alfred 277, 616–624, 712, 774, 781, 792–793 Schwitzgebel, Eric 666 Scotism 1, 58 Scotus, Duns 3, 57, 389–390 Searle, John 268, 651, 653, 655, 666, 790 Seebohm, Thomas 795 Sellars,Wilfrid 339, 344–345, 651, 654, 798 sensory 83, 306, 610; affections 90; awareness 404; components 141; contents 232, 285, 610; data 483; experience 118, 286, 372; feelings 306, 610; feld 372; foundations 285; imagination
232; impairment 310; intuition 88, 90, 94, 284; material 283, 285; observation 621, 623; perception 283–284, 287, 404; properties 610; qualities 130, 280; states 129; stimulation 664; substrates 753; values 611 separation 84, 103, 321, 362, 418, 446, 473, 573, 550, 667, 722, 809; classical 558; doctrinal 809; incipient 59; metaphysics 331; of perception 119; from philosophy 326; Platonic 46; putative 46; of sense 694; thematic 328; theoretical 652; thesis 44; unbridgeable 58 Shakespeare,William 5, 524–526 shame 188, 259–260, 262 Sheehan, Thomas 421 shortcomings 12, 24, 29, 225; philosophical 23, 593; putative 2 Siegel, Susanna 348 Siewert, Charles P. 655–656 Sigwart, Christoph von 413 Simmel, Georg 271, 566, 606 Simons, Peter 21, 653 Sinnerbrink, Robert 761–762 Sizer, Laura 308 skepticism 66, 89, 232, 373, 398, 563, 749; sophistical 37, 43, 154, 398 Slater, John G. 799 Smart, Jack 759–761 Smith,Arthur D. 143–144, 341 Smith, Barry 21, 99–100, 103, 142, 585, 656 Smith, David Woodruff 145, 656, 790, 797 Smith,William 194, 654 sociality 259, 264, 266–267, 611, 631–633, 640, 642, 754, 782 Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) 762, 794–798 sociology 247, 274, 326, 606–608, 616, 618–619, 622, 671, 712, 753, 762, 773, 809; critical 312; interpretive 616, 620; objectivist 753; phenomenological 613; transcendental 753 Socratic: account 40; method 44; philosophy 43; pre- 43, 153–154, 252, 476, 752; procedure 176, 181; response 37 Soffer, Gail 345, 412, 706 Sokolowski, Robert 21, 144, 214, 393, 484, 793 solipsism 68, 106, 170, 261–262, 266–267, 371–372; epistemological 170; existential 445, 449; metaphysical 170; transcendental 753 Spader, Peter H. 610–613 speech 21, 37–42, 45–48, 117, 119, 313, 330, 345, 360, 362, 410, 416, 421, 452, 461, 587, 653, 678, 685, 715, 724, 738, 744, 751, 780, 796 Spiegelberg, Herbert 1, 12, 102–104, 352, 370, 543–544, 582, 627, 758, 792–793, 809 Spinoza, Baruch 64, 68, 157, 299, 307, 329 Staiti,Andrea 369, 371 Staude, John Raphael 608–609, 613 Stavenhagen, Kurt 733
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Index Stawarska, Beata 666 Stein, Edith 20–21, 50–51, 54–57, 59, 188, 259–260, 264–265, 370, 372–373, 509, 543, 582, 625–633, 653, 656, 712, 802 Steinbock,Anthony J. 188, 194, 210, 217, 763 Steinmann, Heinrich Gustav 370 Stewart, J. McKellar 759 Stikkers, Kenneth W. 609, 611, 613 Stocker, Michael 653 Stout, George Frederick 655 stratum 115, 529, 617, 623, 693; fundamental 306; higher 483; material 115, 439; phonetic 115; physical 124; primordial 623; psychological 124; semantic 115; sub- 81, 118, 691, 756 Strauss, Leo 533 Strawson, Galen 656 Ströker, Elizabeth 706 structuralism 738–739, 741–744, 795–796; post- 2, 762 Stumpf, Carl 14, 88, 100, 465, 482, 509, 585, 653, 663–664 Suárez, Francisco 58, 64, 200 subjectivism 51, 66, 507, 575, 651, 742 Svenaeus, Fredrik 311 Taipale, Joona 131, 721 Taminiaux, Jacques 373, 449, 556–557, 563, 793 Tanabe, Hajime 771–772 Tapper, Marion 761–762 Tappolet, Christine 311, 653 Taylor,Verta 312 telos 153, 246, 257, 569, 579, 708, 750 Tempels, Placide 749–752, 754 temporality 163, 202, 204, 215, 228, 237, 272, 294, 297, 377, 395, 405, 407–409, 411, 420, 480, 526, 567–568, 691–692, 735, 764, 771; authentic 411; characterizations of 620; Christian 735; of consciousness 139; ecstatic 24, 771; existential 409; image of 410; immanent 209, 213, 253; inner 89, 95; original 233, 410; primal 95; primordial 407, 409; reconciliation of 214; spatio- 485; static 409; unity of 228; vulgar 228 temporalization 406, 410, 687; self- 209, 214, 217, 406–407, 545 Tengelyi, László 31, 267, 440–441 theology 32, 52, 56–57, 161, 241, 333, 335, 490, 608, 625; Catholic 22, 50, 793; Christian 54, 57, 199, 203, 241; mystical 57; natural 54; negative 30, 57; onto- 164; philosophical 422 Thomasson,Amie 527, 530–531 Thomism 1, 54, 56, 59 Thompson, Evan 134, 667 Tononi, Giulio 667 Trân duc Thao 636, 688 transcendental: aesthetic 81, 215, 272, 379–380, 382, 558; apperception 91, 93, 359; attitude 83, 265; character 53, 276, 472, 513; consciousness
202, 211, 253, 256, 293, 320, 329, 356, 401, 513, 518–521, 560, 573–574, 577, 732–735, 742–743; condition 68, 369, 546, 654; deduction 76, 93, 172, 377, 384, 394; dialectic 88, 91, 474; dimension 19, 253, 356; doctrine 87, 472; egology 68, 320; idealism 19, 105, 115, 382, 389, 391–392, 421, 519, 630, 707; imagination 231, 237, 384; intersubjectivity 68, 261, 297, 372, 519–520, 707; logic 88, 155, 217, 328, 379–380, 390–391; method 22, 28; monadology 68; orientation 20; perspective 66, 326; philosophy 19–20, 27, 43, 82, 89–90, 92, 105, 207–208, 216, 234, 238, 276, 325, 358, 390–395, 547, 674; psychologism 18, 83, 88–91, 253; question 60, 82; radicalization 19, 21; reassessment 21; reduction 18, 20–21, 31, 171, 208, 253, 293, 356, 358–359, 369, 393–394, 400, 406, 428, 430, 436, 492, 513–514, 519, 544, 553, 558, 560–561, 687, 696, 708, 734–735, 742–743, 753; self 167, 299, 546; shift 17, 19; subjectivity 67, 80, 155, 209, 216, 225, 246, 273, 275, 293, 295–297, 299–300, 393–395, 405, 437, 451, 473, 475, 519–521, 545, 557, 701, 708, 742; terms 18–19, 160; unity 93–94, 356, 377; see also apodictic; clarifcation; cognition; ego; genesis; realism transcendentalism 73, 395, 507 Trinh Van Thao 637 Tugendhat, Ernst 80, 191, 421, 678 Twardowski, Kasimir 14, 66, 100, 199, 201–202, 522 unconscious 139, 381, 506, 662, 720–722, 724–726; choice 191; conceivable 721; Freudian 720–721; imagos 723; impulses 722–723; intentionality 244; life 211, 215, 295; mechanisms 728; origins 721; phenomenological 720; processes 718, 727; states 721 Unguru, Sabetai 534–535 universality 64, 68, 164, 177–178, 189–190, 266, 430, 432, 500–501, 516, 520, 686, 750–751; concrete 431–432; eidetic 177; essential 177; notions of 177; unconditional 177–178 Van Breda, Herman Leo 544, 568 Van Fraassen, Bas 707 Van Gelder,Tim 667 Van Inwagen, Peter 530 Varela, Francisco J. 134, 653, 665–667 variation 184, 427, 429, 431, 482, 516; arbitrary 235; argument 183; co- 425, 428–432; double 425; eidetic 76, 175, 184, 406, 425–426, 428, 440, 482, 562, 628; free 561; imaginative 516, 561, 754; logical 356; method of 175, 184, 425–429; notion of 425; phantasy 175, 183–184, 425; process of 184, 426–427, 432, 562; self425, 430–432
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Index Vendrell Ferran, Ingrid 193 Vergote, Antoine 721 Victorinus, Marius Caius 199 Viète, François 538–539 Villa, Dana R. 446, 448 Vintges, Karen 458 violence 264, 268–269, 569, 640, 711, 715; political 716 von Ehrenfels, Christian 14, 100, 483 von Hildebrand, Dietrich 53–54, 188, 192–193, 582, 625, 633, 654 Wahl, Jean 27, 332, 566, 638 Waldenfels, Bernhard 34n33, 125 Wallerstein, Robert S 728 Walther, Gerda 543, 625, 633, 653, 712 Walton, Roberto 776, 779–780, 784 Watsuji, Tetsuro 771–772 Weber, Max 612, 616–622, 662, 792 Weiss, Edoardo 727 Weiss, Gail 123, 132–133 Welch, Cyril 801 Welch, Edward Parl 791 Wellek, Rene 530 Welton, Donn 140, 214, 345–346, 544 Wesche, Tilo 674 Weyl, Hermann 278, 285 Willard, Dallas 141, 143, 145, 342, 344, 347 Willey,Thomas E. 391 Williams, Bernard 798 Williams, Heath 763 Williamson,Timothy 649, 654 Wilson, Robert 667 Wiltsche, Harald 706–707 Winkler, Robert 732 Wolff, Christian 64, 200 Wolff, Ernst 672
world: alienation 447, 452; -consciousness 226–227; cultural 93, 155, 158, 275, 693, 713; external 75, 85, 106, 114, 305, 353, 399, 483, 522, 526–527, 587, 640, 801; -horizon 225–228, 256, 437, 440, 610; ideal 75; identical 81; intersubjective 134, 372, 447; -lessness 452; life- 80, 93, 156, 158, 227, 234, 271–277, 371, 420–421, 472, 485, 536, 538, 540, 560–561, 563, 570, 573–574, 579, 622–623, 693–696, 706, 708, 714–716, 740, 749, 753; loss of 452; material 68, 82; natural 20, 93, 147, 222–223, 228, 271, 273, 573, 576, 579–580, 603, 639; objective 20, 68, 80, 275, 294, 298, 300, 472, 504–505, 507, 678; philosophical 55–56, 757, 773; physical 146, 156, 158; proximate 162; real 75–76, 79–80, 82, 233, 273, 275, 370, 708; scientifc 75, 81, 246, 276, 420, 622, 706; sensible 47, 505, 639; sensuous 76, 78, 81; spiritual 93; transcendent 44, 129, 399, 492, 595, 610; work 162 Wrathall, Mark 667 Wundt,Wilhelm 413, 662–663 Wynn, Mark 733 Xolocotzi, Angel 782 Yoshimi, Jeff 663, 666–667 Young, Iris Marion 132 Young, Julian 764 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 445 Zagzebski, Linda 653 Zahavi, Dan 101, 123, 139, 146–147, 169, 259, 261, 267, 374, 625, 654, 764 Zaner, Richard 700, 702, 792, 795 Zecchi, Stefano 570 Zirión,Antonio 543, 776–779, 782–783
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