Hegel and Phenomenology 3030175456, 9783030175450

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Contributions To Phenomenology 102

Alfredo Ferrarin Dermot Moran Elisa Magrì Danilo Manca Editors

Hegel and Phenomenology

Contributions To Phenomenology In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology Volume 102 Series Editors Nicolas de Warren, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA Ted Toadvine, Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA Editorial Board Alweiss Lilian, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, Memphis, USA Rudolfh Bernet, Husserl Archive, Leuven, Belgium David Carr, Emory University, Atlanta, USA Chan-Fai Cheung, The Chinese University Hong Kong, Xianggangdao, Hong Kong James Dodd, New School University, New York, USA Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, Florida, USA Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy Burt Hopkins, University of Lille, Lille, France José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of) Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Koln, Germany William R. McKenna, Miami University, Ohio, USA Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, Ohio, USA J.N. Mohanty, Temple University, PA, USA Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Belfield, Ireland Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Minato-ku, Japan Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, TN, USA Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany Gail Soffer, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University System, Carbondale, USA Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Yamagata, Japan Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA

Scope The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than 80 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship, the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phenomenological research. The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811

Alfredo Ferrarin  •  Dermot Moran Elisa Magrì  •  Danilo Manca Editors

Hegel and Phenomenology

Editors Alfredo Ferrarin Department of Philosophy University of Pisa Pisa, Italy

Dermot Moran Philosophy Department Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA, USA

Elisa Magrì School of Philosophy University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

Danilo Manca Department of Philosophy University of Pisa Pisa, Italy

ISSN 0923-9545     ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic) Contributions To Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-030-17545-0    ISBN 978-3-030-17546-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Editors’ Introduction

Hegel and Phenomenology Pursuing the history of philosophy appears wholly unlike pursuing the history of any other discipline. An inner connection between the subject-matter and the story we are telling animates and organises our work. Unless we philosophise along with the thinkers we consider – and are therefore prepared to run the risk of arbitrariness as we examine their arguments from what is necessarily a perspective external to theirs – the result we are likely to get is little more than an assemblage of moot facts. The ideal of historiography, clothed in the seemingly noble garments of respectful self-restraint inviting us to forsake originality to let things speak authentically for themselves, is the restitution of other philosophers’ thought to be preserved unaltered and intact by contamination with ours. This ideal is correctness. But as long as we let ourselves be guided by this ideal, we wind up condemning ourselves to silent repetition. For a historiography that looks for influences, appropriations and derivations, and fears getting astray by superimposing on its questions something undocumented that was not already there, nothing seems more futile or otiose than a comparative analysis of Hegel and Twentieth-Century Phenomenology. Truth be told, Husserl’s neglect of Hegel is nothing more than a sign of his indifference and ignorance; Hegelians, in turn, find it hardly interesting to examine Hegel in light of phenomenology or learn anything from what they see as a form of subjective idealism. For historiography, there is no room for a dialogue. Hegel thinks that the history of philosophy is philosophy at its best when it engages in a living exchange with the past and does not limit itself to reporting a gallery of dead opinions. As he says, the realm of truth is the eternal essence of spirit, a life neither moths nor thieves can enter or corrupt (Hegel 1986, 57–8). To use and paraphrase now Husserl’s language, taking philosophical positions as indexes of possibilities rather than facts (which requires imagination’s eidetic variation, including counterfactual considerations of what we examine) allows us to establish an invariant core, so that Husserl goes to the point of saying that fiction, properly understood, is the vital element of phenomenology as well as of all eidetic v

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sciences (Husserl 1976, §70). For an imaginative history of philosophy in search of fresh insights and provocative challenges, a discussion of certain thematic relations between dialectic and phenomenology can prove more than interesting. It does not have to compromise on rigour, for it can become a compelling manner to test critically the respective key theses. In the end, what guides us is not the life of spirit as in Hegel or the supposed realm of fiction as in Husserl but a different standard of truth than in the positivism and historicism historiography tacitly assumes.

An Overview of this Volume According to the line of thought that inspires this book, we as readers and philosophers are not compelled to choose between Hegel and Husserl. Our task is rather that of unearthing the philosophical relevance of those problems that both Hegel and Husserl taught us to rethink in a radical way. Starting with a historical appraisal of the Hegelian heritage in the phenomenological tradition, the book proceeds by addressing core issues revolving around the topics of history, being, science, subjectivity, and dialectic. In this way, the book complements and integrates recent scholarly works on this subject,1 shedding light not just on the unwritten philosophical dialogue between Husserl and Hegel but also on the motifs that underpin the phenomenological reception of Hegel’s philosophy and dialectic. The goal of this volume is to provide readers with a theoretical framework for appreciating the reaches of the Hegelian dialectic as well as the richness of the phenomenological method across different traditions. As the approach of this book is both interpretative and critical, the papers collected in this volume are interrogative, soliciting new parallels that help reconsider established concepts of the phenomenological tradition (e.g. synthesis, evidence, a priori, genesis) against the backdrop of Hegel’s dialectic and systematic philosophy. One of the major upshots of this critical work is the possibility of reading Husserl, Hegel, and their respective interlocutors not only in dialogue with each other but also beyond standard labels that invariably set them apart from each other. The first part of the volume is dedicated to the theme of history. Dermot Moran in “Husserl’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reading of the Crisis of European Sciences and Related Manuscripts” traces the revival of Hegel studies in the early twentieth century, showing how phenomenology incorporated Hegel into a mature conception of transcendental philosophy. On the one hand, Moran argues that Heidegger and his students (Fink, Marcuse, and Löwith) were responsible for the retrieval of Hegel’s philosophy in Germany, after Heidegger moved to Freiburg in 1928 as the successor to Husserl in the Chair of Philosophy. On the other hand, Moran demonstrates Husserl’s indebtedness to Hegel’s philosophy, suggesting that Husserl’s engagement with Hegel evolves across three phases. The first one is marked by the influence of Brentano and Neo-Kantianism, when Husserl rejects 1  Staehler (2003, 2016), Russon (2010), Fabbianelli and Luft (2014), Manca et al. (2015), Manca (2016), Moran and Magrì (2017), Magrì and Petherbridge (2017) and Stone (2017).

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Hegel’s philosophy due to its lack of a transcendental basis. The second phase is characterised by a renewed approach to classical German philosophy, which is mediated by Husserl’s engagement with Kant and Fichte. Finally, the last period corresponds to Husserl’s work on The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Vienna Lectures, when  – perhaps now influenced by Fink’s portrayal of phenomenology in Hegelian terms as “the self-­ comprehension of the absolute” – Husserl proposes explicit Hegelian formulations, such as the idea of a teleology of reason that unfolds itself in history. Tanja Staehler in “How is a Phenomenology of Historical Worlds Possible?” explores the concept of teleology of Hegel and Husserl, emphasising their most relevant difference: while Hegel notoriously describes history as a progress, Husserl speaks of a history of crises. Yet Staehler shows that both Hegel and Husserl are concerned with the analysis of the absolute present. While this perspective tends to limit the appraisal of the future, it provides an insight into Hegel’s account of the completion of history, as well as into Husserl’s phenomenology of cultural worlds. On Staehler’s view, neither Hegel nor Husserl conceives history as an endless repetition or as a contingent stratification of event. By uncovering the teleological dimension of historicity, both Hegel and Husserl seek to explore connections between the concept of historical development and reason’s invariant forms. Danilo Manca in “Hegel and Husserl on the History of Reason” examines Hegel’s and Husserl’s views of the history of philosophy, considering them as an integral part of their philosophical-theoretical investigation. Starting with Kant’s idea of a philosophising history of reason, Manca considers the similarities between Hegel’s and Husserl’s reappraisals of this idea in contrast to that of Windelband. This allows for a comparison between Hegel’s account of the history of philosophy as reason’s self-actualization and Husserl’s perspective of a critical history of ideas. According to Manca, a fundamental point distinguishes Hegel’s concept of telos from Husserl’s, i.e. two different ways of conceiving the role of reason. For Hegel, reason coincides with an objective principle that actualizes itself in history and finds in human spirit the highest manifestation of its becoming, even if not the sole one. By contrast, for Husserl, reason is the historical manifestation of transcendental constituting life. The second part of the book deals with the topics of being and science and methodological issues concerning Hegel’s, Heidegger’s, and Fink’s respective approaches to ontology and transcendental phenomenology. Chong-Fuk Lau in “Hegel’s Critique of Foundationalism and Its Implications for Husserl’s Dream of Rigorous Science” compares Hegel’s anti-foundationalist method in the Science of Logic, which pursues the goal of a presuppositionless science, with Husserl’s foundationalist approach rooted on the notion of evidence. By examining Hegel’s argument for the presuppositionless beginning of the Science of Logic, Lau argues that a truly presuppositionless philosophy can only consist in the process of self-reflection and self-critique that Hegel’s philosophy as a whole exhibits. Accordingly, Lau shows that in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl revises his early approach to science, delving deeper into the concept of lifeworld, which brings him closer to Hegel’s view of self-reflection and self-critique.

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Antoine Cantin-Brault in “Archeo-Logos: Hegel and Heidegger on Finding the Principle in Heraclitus’ Saying” focuses on Hegel’s and Heidegger’s interpretations of Heraclitus’ fragment on the logos as the arche of phusis. Cantin-Brault argues that the difference between Hegel’s and Heidegger’s approaches to ontology can be examined in light of their different interpretation of Heraclitus’ fragment. For Hegel, the logos corresponds to reason as the power that unifies opposites, and it also represents a way to criticise the absolute of Parmenides, which is devoid of becoming and movement. For Heidegger, instead, Heraclitus was unable to break with the ontic commitments that are embedded in his conception of phusis. Yet Cantin-Brault also notices that after the Kehre, Heidegger develops a different interpretation of the fragment, which culminates in the appraisal of the arche as disclosing, rather than positing, the truth of phusis. The third part of the volume is concerned with the theme of subjectivity. Andrea Altobrando in “The Phenomenology of the Pure Ego and Its Dialectical Actuality” argues that Husserl and Hegel share significant views concerning one of the most difficult and often contested philosophical concepts, namely, the idea of a pure Ego. On Altobrando’s view, both thinkers ascribe to the pure Ego the following qualities: purity, simplicity, indeterminacy, emptiness, and negativity. Altobrando proceeds by reconstructing the problem of the pure Ego in Husserl from the Logical Investigations to Ideas I, showing that, ultimately, the pure I is neither a synthetic nor a forming principle, as it can only be characterised in relation to its concrete and actual existence. Similarly, Altobrando shows that in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit as well as in Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in the Encyclopaedia, the problem of the pure Ego, while not being univocally stated and often described in negative terms, points towards a full-fledged, constant, and inexhaustible realisation of the free spirit. Alfredo Ferrarin in “Hegel, Husserl and Imagination” discusses the unsuspected centrality of the notion of imagination in Hegel and Husserl. Drawing on the contradictory nature that both Hegel and Husserl ascribe to perception, Ferrarin illustrates how the function of imagination is both discontinuous and plurivocal with respect to the modes of intelligence (Hegel) and to consciousness (Husserl). By considering Hegel’s Psychology, particularly the transition from the sphere of representation to that of language and memory, and Husserl’s different notions of image consciousness, imagination, and phantasy, Ferrarin uncovers the role of negativity in structuring and determining these different experiences. This leads Ferrarin to conclude that for both Husserl and Hegel, imagination is not essentially alternative to, or disconnected from, reality, but rather its unreality helps us constitute a sense of reality. Elisa Magrì in “Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, and the Paradox of Expression” explores the concept of expression in both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, suggesting that expression is not exclusive to any specific domain, but rather it emerges across all the spheres of meaning as a process. Such process is rooted in distinct forms of passive and corporeal self-determination, and it sediments in intersubjective acts of communication. Starting with Kant’s appraisal of the institutional power of artistic ­creation, Magrì examines Hegel’s and Merleau-Ponty’s developments of the relation between expression and institution. Her analysis takes into account both Hegel’s

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critique of expression in the Science of Logic and Hegel’s appraisal of expression in his philosophical anthropology, which both resonate with Merleau-Ponty’s view of speech and gestures as forms of expression. According to Magrì, both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty reject a view of expression as manifestation of a pre-existing logos. On the contrary, they favour a genetic approach to the self that brings to light not just the relevance of bodily self-experience but also the critique of all model of expression that rules out the link between processuality and self-relation. The final part of the book is dedicated to the theme of dialectic, conceived as the subterranean and often implicit revival of Hegelian and Husserlian motifs in contemporary thinkers (Adorno, Ricœur, Sellars) in their approaches to knowledge, ethics, and meaning. Giovanni Zanotti in “Adorno on the Meaning of Phenomenology” discusses Adorno’s concerns with Husserl’s early phenomenological project. Zanotti considers in particular Adorno’s critique as this is developed in the article Husserl and the Problem of Idealism (1940), as well as in the book Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (1956). According to Zanotti, Adorno’s critique of Husserl contains Hegelian motifs in that Adorno ascribes to Husserl a lapse into logical antinomies that ultimately reveal the inescapable stakes of the present and the failure of idealism. By unmasking the “involuntary dialectic” that, for Adorno, is distinctive of Husserl’s accounts of first philosophy and categorial intuition, Zanotti shows in what sense the failure of Husserl’s idealism paves the way for a reinterpretation of Hegel’s project, emancipated from the claustrophobic pursuit of systematic philosophy. Gilles Marmasse in “Ricœur as a Reader of Hegel: Between Defiance and Nostalgia” sheds light on the ambivalent role played by Hegel in Ricœur’s reflections. Marmasse explains why, for Ricœur, Hegel’s philosophy appears animated by a quest for meaning which is, however, overshadowed by the concept of absolute knowledge. From Ricœur’s point of view, interpretation cannot take as its point of departure the whole, but only a certain perspective. Thus, Ricœur ultimately suggests that a philosophy of interpretation is only possible in a quasi-Hegelian fashion or at least by engaging in a debate with and against Hegel. However, Marmasse also points out Ricœur’s appraisal of Hegel’s ethics as opposed to Kant’s view of morality, discussing in detail Ricœur’s critique of Hegel’s theory of the state. By acknowledging Ricœur’s diagnostic errors, Marmasse expands on the reasons why Ricœur rejects the Hegelian view of history, focusing on the chapter of Time and Narrative (1983) entitled “Renouncing Hegel”. Daniele De Santis in “Méditations Hégéliennes vs. Méditations Cartésiennes: Edmund Husserl and Wilfrid Sellars on the Given” offers a thought-provoking reading of Husserl’s Cartesianism against the backdrop of the so-called Hegel Renaissance that characterises some trends in contemporary analytical philosophy inspired by Sellar’s diagnosis of the Myth of the Given. After presenting Sellars’ view of the Myth, De Santis elaborates on the general Hegelian character of Sellars’ reflections. The Hegelian motifs include a critical core (or threefold argument, namely, a genetic explanation of evidence), a historical counteraccount of the ­origins, and a conceptual holism. By critically examining these elements in relation to Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, De Santis shows not only that Husserl does not

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fall prey to Sellars’ version of the Myth at all but also that Husserl’s accounts of evidence and synthesis provide the opportunity to question some implications of Sellars’ philosophy. Acknowledgements  The papers collected in this volume were originally presented at the International Colloquium devoted to “Hegel and the Phenomenological Movement” organised by the Zetesis Research Group at the University of Pisa in June 2014. The editors wish to express their gratitude to all the collaborators and participants in the event for their support and to all the authors in this volume for their insightful contributions. Department of Philosophy University of Pisa Pisa, Italy Philosophy Department Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA, USA

Alfredo Ferrarin

Dermot Moran

School of Philosophy University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

Elisa Magrì

Department of Philosophy University of Pisa Pisa, Italy

Danilo Manca

References Fabbianelli, Fausto and Luft, Sebastian., eds. 2014. Husserl und die Klassische deutsche Philosophie. Dordrecht: Springer. Hua 3/1: Husserl, Edmund. 1976. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Magrì, Elisa and Petherbridge, Danielle., eds. 2017. Intersubjectivity and Recognition. Metodo. Internationational Journal in Phenomenology and Philosophy V (1). Manca, Danilo, Magrì, Elisa and Ferrarin, Alfredo., eds. 2015. Hegel e la fenomenologia trascendentale. Pisa: ETS. Manca, Danilo. 2016. Esperienza della ragione. Hegel e Husserl in dialogo, Pisa: ETS.

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Moran, Dermon and Magrì Elisa., eds. 2017. Hegel and Phenomenology, Hegel Bulletin, 38/1 (75). Russon, John. 2010. Dialectic, Difference, and the Other: The Hegelianizing of French Phenomenology. In Phenomenology. Responses and Developments, ed. Leonard Lawlor, 17–42. Durham: Acumen. Stähler, Tanja. 2003. Die Unruhe des Anfangs. Hegel und Husserl über den Weg in die Phaenomenologie. Phaenomenologica, 170. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Stähler, Tanja. 2016. Hegel, Husserl, and the Phenomenology of historical worlds. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield International. Stone, Alison. 2017. Hegel and Twentieth-Century French Philosophy. In Oxford Handbook of Hegel, ed. Dean Moyar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. W 18: Hegel, G.W.F. 1986. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I. (Band 18). In Werke in zwangig zwanzig Bänden, ed. E. Modelnhauer and K. M. Michel. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Contents

Husserl’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reading of the Crisis of European Sciences and Related Manuscripts����������������������    1 Dermot Moran How is a Phenomenology of Historical Worlds Possible?����������������������������   29 Tanja Staehler Hegel and Husserl on the History of Reason ������������������������������������������������   45 Danilo Manca Hegel’s Critique of Foundationalism and Its Implications for Husserl’s Dream of Rigorous Science������������������������������������������������������   61 Chong-Fuk Lau Archeo-Logos: Hegel and Heidegger on Finding the Principle in Heraclitus’ Saying���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 Antoine Cantin-Brault The Phenomenology of the Pure Ego and Its Dialectical Actuality������������   93 Andrea Altobrando Hegel, Husserl and Imagination ��������������������������������������������������������������������  115 Alfredo Ferrarin Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, and the Paradox of Expression��������������������������������  131 Elisa Magrì Adorno on the Meaning of Phenomenology��������������������������������������������������  147 Giovanni Zanotti Ricœur as a Reader of Hegel: Between Defiance and Nostalgia������������������  163 Gilles Marmasse Méditations Hégéliennes vs. Méditations Cartésiennes. Edmund Husserl and Wilfrid Sellars on the Given��������������������������������������  177 Daniele De Santis xiii

Husserl’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reading of the Crisis of European Sciences and Related Manuscripts Dermot Moran

It is true not only for nineteenth-century Germany but also for the whole of Europe that philosophy developed under the sign of Hegel. (Brunschwicg 1927, 35) For the spirit alone is immortal [Denn der Geist allein ist unsterblich]. (Vienna Lecture, Husserl 1954, 348)

Abstract  In this paper I trace the revival of Hegel in France and Germany in the early twentieth century and point especially to the crucial role of phenomenology (both Husserl and Heidegger, as well as their students, e.g. Fink, Landgrebe and Marcuse) in incorporating Hegel into their mature transcendental philosophy. Indeed, Martin Heidegger was responsible for a significant revival of Hegel studies at the University of Freiburg, following his arrival there in 1928 as the successor to Husserl. Similarly, Husserl’s student, Fink characterised Husserl’s phenomenology in explicitly Hegelian terms as “the self-comprehension of the Absolute”. The late Husserl seems to embrace the Hegelian vision when he presents his approach in the Crisis itself as a “teleological historical reflection”. Keywords  Husserl · Hegel · Phenomenology · Spirit · History · Self-consciousness

D. Moran (*) Philosophy Department, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Ferrarin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Phenomenology, Contributions To Phenomenology 102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_1

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D. Moran

1  T  he Twentieth-Century Revival of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: The French Wave Hegel’s influence dominated academic philosophy in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth-century. As is well known, his successors could be grouped between Left (Feuerbach, Marx) and Right Hegelians (Karl Friedrich Göschel, the successor to Hegel in Berlin, Georg Andreas Gabier, and Bruno Bauch). But Hegel suffered a significant eclipse in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, for instance, in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Karl Barth wonders why Hegel never became a guiding figure for Protestant theology, equivalent to Thomas Aquinas for Catholic theology (Barth 2002, 370). In fact, it was the revival of Kantianism in Germany,1 along with the rise of positivism (to which versions of Marxism also became aligned), which delivered the death blow to Hegel’s influence,2 both of which movements were suspicious of what they saw as Hegel’s speculative mysticism and lack of appreciation of modern scientific method.3 In this regard, Franz Brentano, in Vienna, was a significant figure in the rejection of Hegel as a windy mystic whose irrationalism marked the final phase of the decline of philosophy understood as a rigorous science.4 Edmund Husserl, trained as a mathematician but then a student of Brentano in Vienna, from 1884 to 1886, was for a long time also hostile to Hegel. Thus, he regarded Hegel as having no regard from the logical Principle of Contradiction. The reception of Hegel was somewhat different in France, Italy, and England, where varieties of Hegelianism flourished in the late nineteenth century. Hegelian Idealism became a dominant force in British philosophy after 18655 up to the time of Bertrand Russell (Bosanquet, Green, Bradley, McTaggart).6 Benedetto Croce famously produced his book What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel in 1906 (Croce 1915), which saw Hegel as primarily interested in charting the very logic of philosophy itself, philosophy as an activity of comprehension that proceeds dialectically and whose aim is to think the universal in all its concreteness and dynamism. Croce claims that the “logic of the dialectic is therefore to be considered a true and original discovery of Hegel” (Croce 1915, 49). Yet Croce also sees Hegel’s exploration of the dialectics of the negation as the 1  Alexandre Koyré offers reasons for the collapse of Hegel, which include his lack of appreciation for mathematics as an instrument in science in his 1931 Rapport sur l’état des études hégéliennes en France, reprinted in Koyré (1961). 2  In fact, Auguste Comte was somewhat appreciative of Hegel. They shared a view of the organic nature of society, and they had a mutual friend Gustave d’Eichthal, who alerted Hegel to Comte, see Singer (2005, 172 n.11). Comte’s view of the evolution of society placed Hegel at the metaphysical rather than the scientific stage. 3  See Higgins and Solomon (2003) and Beiser (2014). 4  See, for instance, Brentano (1999, 14–28). 5  The Scottish Idealist J. H. Stirling published his The Secret of Hegel in 1865. He saw Hegel as the exponent of the “concrete universal”. See Stern (2007). 6  See Mander (2011).

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culmination of a long history that includes Plato’s Parmenides and the work of Nicholas of Cusa, Jacob Boehme, G. B. Vico, among others.7 Among Hegel’s published works, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) was particularly neglected in the nineteenth century, until it was enthusiastically revived in the 1930s in France by Delbos, Koyré, and Kojève.8 Victor Delbos taught a course on Hegel and post-Kantian Idealism at the Sorbonne from as early as 1909 to 1929. This revival of philosophical interest in Hegel’s Phenomenology began not in Germany but in France,9 primarily inspired by Alexandre Kojève’s lectures delivered in Paris between 1933 and 1939 (Kojève 1947, 1980). In fact, Kojève had replaced Alexandre Koyré who had earlier lectured on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Paris at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1931 to 1933.10 Interestingly, Kojève himself acknowledged the inspirational impact on him of Martin Heidegger’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, showing that the German revival of Hegel was in fact behind Kojève. Kojève, inspired by the newly discovered 1844 manuscripts of Karl Marx, presented Hegel’s Phenomenology as a “phenomenological description of human existence” as it manifests itself to the one experiencing it (Kojève 1980, 261). Both Koyré and Kojève construed Hegel’s Geist as the specifically human spirit and understood the driving force for the historical movement of human existence as negativity (equivalent to freedom).11 Inspired by Koyré’s and Kojève’s interpretations, and by the magnificent French translation of the Phenomenology by Jean Hippolyte (Hegel 1939–1941), a new generation of French philosophers—and among them, notably, prominent phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Wahl, and Paul Ricoeur12—combined Hegel’s conception of the dialectical struggle for recognition  In this regard, see also Kolakowski (2005).  I refer to Hegel (1952, 1979). For an excellent discussion of the history of the term “phenomenology” in Hegel and others, see Johannes Hoffmeister’s introduction to the 1952 Meiner edition. For a discussion of the historical reception of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, see Pöggeler (1973, 170–230). 9  See Roth (1988) and Althusser (1997). Althusser records that Kojève claimed that he could not have understood Hegel without the influence of Heidegger (Althusser 1997, 171). Of course, following on the earlier work of Delbos, Jean Wahl had already re-introduced Hegel into France with his Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Wahl 1929). Koyré reviewed Wahl’s book in 1930. 10  Koyré studied with Husserl in 1908 but left for Paris when Husserl did not approve his thesis. Nevertheless, Koyré always acknowledged the impact of Husserl on him. Indeed, Koyré’s reading of Hegel is strongly phenomenological. See Wahl (1966, 15–26). Kojève himself acknowledged that he was following many of Koyré’s interpretations. See also Baugh (2003), who claims that the French tradition of interpreting Hegel in an “anthropological” manner began with Victor Delbos’ lectures on post-Kantian Idealism in the Sorbonne in 1909 (Baugh 2003, 19). See also Canguilhem (1948). Delbos had been teaching Hegel in Paris since 1909 and it is probable that both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty attended his lectures. 11  See, for instance, Kojève (1980, 216). 12  Of course, phenomenologists were not the only French philosophers to take up Hegel; many philosophers inspired by the rediscovered early writings of Marx were similarly enthused. But in this essay, I shall concentrate on Hegel within phenomenology. 7 8

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between Master and Slave with the Husserlian methodology for the description of consciousness, to produce dynamic and challenging accounts of the intersubjective encounter of free, intentional subjects acting in the world (e.g. Sartre’s account of the look and of shame in Being and Nothingness, published in 1943). Later in the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas,13 Hans-Georg Gadamer,14 and Landgrebe (1968, 1977), and others, continued to build on and develop the Hegelian interconnections with phenomenology originally made by Koyré and Kojève, as did more recent commentators such as Hartmann (1988), Marx (1988), Otto Pöggeler, Findlay (1958), and Carr (1974). A neglected chapter in the revival of Hegel in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century is the role played by phenomenology and especially by Heidegger and his students (Fink, Marcuse and Löwith). It is clear that Hegel was revived within the phenomenological movement, as I shall now explain.

2  T  he Freiburg Revival of Hegel: Heidegger, Fink, Marcuse, Löwith Prior to this French revival of Hegel, it is a little acknowledged fact that the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger was responsible for a significant revival of Hegel studies at the University of Freiburg, following his arrival there in 1928 as the successor to Husserl in the Chair of Philosophy. Recent publications in the Gesamtausgabe series of Heidegger’s lecture courses on Hegel confirm the extent and depth of the Messkirch master’s sustained engagement with Hegel especially during the 1920s and1930s, and continuing throughout his career.15 At Freiburg, Heidegger made a determined effort to read Hegel (and especially his 1807  Derrida points out that Levinas is closer to Hegel than he is willing to admit (Cf. Derrida 1978, 99). 14  Gadamer’s first publications were primarily on Greek philosophy, but he did publish an article on Hegel (Gadamer 1939). After 1945, Gadamer was instrumental in founding the Internationale Vereinigung zur Förderung der Hegel-Studien. Subsequent studies include Gadamer (1976). On Gadamer’s reading of Hegel and relationship with Heidegger, see Pippin (2002) and Dostal (2002). 15  Heidegger had a much deeper interest in Hegel than is often appreciated. He regularly lectured on Hegel in the 1920s and 1930s at Marburg and Freiburg, including courses entitled: Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I. Buch (1925/1926); Ontologie des Aristoteles und Hegels Logik (1927); Anfanger: Über Idealismus und Realismus im Anschluss an dei Hauptvorlesungen (Hegels ‘Vorrede’ zur Phänomenologie des Geistes), (1929); Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (1930/1931); Hegels Jenenser Realphilosophie (1934) and Hegel, Über den Staat (1934/1935). Volumes relating to Hegel in Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe include: Der Deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling) und die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart (Sommersemester 1929) (Heidegger 2011); Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (Wintersemester 1930/31) (Heidegger 1997); Hegel und das Problem der Metaphysik (Heidegger 2016), and Hegel. 1: Die Negativität (1938/39), 2: Erläuterungen der “Einleitung” zu Hegels “Phänomenologie des Geistes” (1942) (Heidegger 2009). Heidegger also 1published a number of essays on Hegel (Heidegger 1970, 1988). On Heidegger’s reading of Hegel see Schmidt 1988. 13

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Phenomenology of Spirit)16 in new and exciting ways. In part, Heidegger was signalling his break with the Neo-Kantianism of his teachers, e.g. Heinrich Rickert,17 as well as distancing himself from the Neo-Kantianism of Ernst Cassirer (whom Heidegger famously debated in Davos in 1929). Heidegger had arrived in Freiburg from Marburg (another centre of Neo-Kantianism under Paul Natorp and others) but he came deeply influenced by the hermeneutics of the Marburg theologians. Heidegger was insistent that Hegel’s conception of phenomenology had nothing to do with the Husserlian method of the same name.18 Nevertheless, inspired by Heidegger, a whole generation of phenomenologically trained students, e.g. Eugen Fink, Ludwig Landgrebe, Herbert Marcuse,19 Karl Löwith,20 and Hans Jonas,21 all read Hegel and especially his Phenomenology of Spirit, seeking for ways to address the meaning of history and of human being in time. For Hegel, phenomenology refers to the description of the process of spirit coming to self-consciousness of itself and in so doing actualising its infinite potential.22 Heidegger, with his emphasis on the finitude and historicity of Dasein, departed from the classic Hegelian approach that emphasised eternity.  On the Phenomenology of Spirit, see Pippin (1993).  For Heinrich Rickert’s interpretation of Hegel in relation to whether his system is ‘open’ or ‘closed’, see Przylebski (1993, 154–59). Several of Rickert’s students were Hegel scholars, and Wilhelm Windelband himself in his later years had called for a revival of Hegel. 18  Heidegger rejects a number of misinterpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, including that it is a kind of typology of worldviews (presumably he has Wilhelm Dilthey in mind). For a study of Hegel’s relation to Husserl’s phenomenology, see Williams (1992, 95–120). 19  Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) completed his doctorate in literature in Freiburg in 1922 with a dissertation on the German novel, Der deutsche Künstlerroman. Following a period as a bookseller in Berlin, he returned to Freiburg to study philosophy with Martin Heidegger from 1928 to 1932. In 1928 he published an article on the relationships between phenomenology and dialectical materialism (Marcuse 1928, 45–68). In this article Marcuse argued that Marxist thought had rigidified and needed to be vivified through phenomenological exploration. In 1930 he completed his Habilitation thesis, Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit (originally published in 1932 by Vittorio Klostermann; reprinted with a slightly different title, Hegels Ontologie und die Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit in 1978. Due to the Nazi rise to power in 1933 the degree was not awarded. Marcuse wrote in a letter to Löwith that the work read Hegel’s Logic and Phenomenology of Spirit as providing the ‘foundations for a theory of historicity’, quoted in Wolin (2003, 153). 20  Karl Löwith was writing about Hegel, Marx and Weber, in the early 1930s (Cf. Löwith 1964, 1993). 21  See Jonas (1966). Jonas was extremely critical of Hegelian dialectics that tried to see history as the abstract “cunning of reason” rather than as the work of mortals, see Jonas (2008). 22  As is well known, Hegel rarely uses the term “phenomenology” in his Phenomenology of Spirit. The term “phenomenology” appears in the Preface and in the last section “Absolute Knowing”, where he writes: “Whereas in the phenomenology of Spirit each moment is the difference of knowledge and Truth, and is the movement in which that difference is cancelled, Science on the other hand does not contain this difference and the canceling of it” (Hegel 1979, § 805). [“Wenn in der Phänomenologie des Geistes jedes Moment der Unterschied des Wissens und der Wahrheit und die Bewegung ist, in welcher er sich aufhebt, so enthält dagegen die Wissenschaft diesen Unterschied und dessen Aufheben nicht…”]. The phenomenology of Spirit documents the selfunfolding and return to itself of conscious culture. 16 17

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3  Edmund Husserl’s Engagement with Hegel In contrast with Heidegger’s early championing of Hegel in his seminars and lecture courses, the old Freiburg master Edmund Husserl had comparatively little familiarity with Hegel until the 1930s.23 Husserl’s former assistant, Ludwig Landgrebe, records that “Husserl scarcely knew Hegel’s works and at no time studied them” (Landgrebe 1972, 36). Indeed, when Herbert Marcuse sent Husserl a copy of his newly published 1932 Hegels Ontologie und die Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit,24 Husserl replied that he did not have sufficient knowledge of Hegel to enable him to appreciate Hegel interpretations.25 However, in the same letter, he also attests—against Hegel’s speculative approach—that only phenomenology can give a proper treatment of the Absolute. The person who most awakened Husserl’s attention to Hegel was not Heidegger but his own student and assistant Eugen Fink (Bruzina 2004). As a young student, Fink attended both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s lectures in Freiburg. After Husserl’s retirement, Fink continued to attend Heidegger’s courses, including his famous 1931/1932 lecture course on Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (Heidegger 1997a, b). Fink’s Hegelian-style speculative thinking greatly influenced Husserl’s thought, especially in the period after 1933, when Husserl was intellectually isolated due to the National Socialist enforced Beurlaubung. Recent studies by Bruzina (2004) and Luft (2002), among others, have shown the close and complex relations between Heidegger, Husserl and Fink in the period in question (1928–1938). Fink played a major role in contextualising Hegel in relation to Husserl’s phenomenology and indeed in provoking Husserl to take Hegel seriously.26 Fink saw it as his own task to keep speculative philosophy alive within phenomenology. As he remarked to Ludwig Landgrebe in 1939: “I myself see the task of phenomenology to lie in getting philosophy going again in phenomenology”.27 By this Eugen Fink appeared to mean speculative philosophy of the Hegelian kind. During the early 1930s, Fink assisted Husserl in the development of his phenomenological system and in expanding the German version of the Cartesian Meditations, with which Husserl was still dissatisfied because of “major

 See, for instance, Lauer (1977, 39–60), Staehler (2003) and Geniušas (2008, 27–36). See also Spiegelberg (1994, 12–19). Earlier discussions of the relationship between Husserl and Hegel include: De Waehlens (1959, 221–237) and Janssen (1970). 24  Marcuse discusses Hegel in relation to Aristotle and Dilthey through the lens of Heidegger’s Being and Time but without explicitly discussing him. Marcuse sees Hegel in Heideggerian terms, his central category is “movement” (Bewegheit). See Abromeit (2004, 131–51). See also Feenberg (2005). Marcuse’s second work on Hegel, Reason and Revolution was published in the USA in 1941 and was more explicitly Marxist in orientation. 25  See Husserl’s letter to Marcuse of 14th January 1932 in Husserl (1994, 401). Indeed, Bruzina also contends that Husserl seemed unable to grasp Hegel’s thought, see Bruzina (2004, 401). 26  See Bruzina (2004, 570). Although some of Husserl’s students, including Edith Stein, felt Fink was misrepresenting Husserl’s relation to Fichte and Hegel, see Luft (2002, 157 n. 40). 27  Quoted in Bruzina (2004, 539–40). 23

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shortcomings in its presentation”, as Fink put it.28 As Husserl’s Assistant, Fink’s role was to impose order and system on Husserl’s reflections and to make his method more explicit.29 Between 1930 and 1932, he worked with Husserl on his planned systematic presentation of phenomenology, even drafting a “layout for Husserl’s System of Phenomenological Philosophy”.30 Fink sought to impose a system on Husserl and the system he chose was a version of Kant’s framework (architectonic) as found in the Critique of Pure Reason. Fink was deeply influential not just in ordering Husserl’s research notes but in drafting and co-writing texts. As a result, it is in fact notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle Husserl from Fink in the early 1930s. It is safe to say, however, that Husserl’s approach parallels or intersects with Hegel’s on many themes. Indeed Husserl’s later writings may be regarded as an independent effort to rethink the meaning of transcendental first philosophy and an attempt to understand the trajectory of spirit (Geist), a term Husserl uses with increasing urgency during the 1930s. We can say therefore that Husserl’s own aim was a new phenomenology of spirit, of human consciousness, existence, historicity and sociality, of everything that is included under the concept of Geist. Fink was particularly preoccupied with Husserl’s idea of phenomenology as an absolute science which therefore had to ground itself by self-conscious reflection, through what both Husserl and Fink will call paradoxically the “phenomenology of phenomenology” (Husserl 1954, 250, 1970, 247), in other words making phenomenology’s starting-point and procedures self-transparent and presuppositionless so that phenomenology can be a genuine grounding science for all other sciences. Phenomenology must first ground itself, in order to be the ultimate “first philosophy”. In this regard Fink was especially drawn to the methodological self-awareness and narrative character of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.31 Fink—perhaps guiding Husserl or perhaps simply expressing Husserl’s own intentions in more Hegelian language—characterises phenomenology as “the self-comprehension of the Absolute”.32 Furthermore, for Fink, the Absolute exists only in its self-­manifestation. Phenomenology, then, Fink argues, is the “theory of the appearance of the Absolute”.33 In general Fink thinks the Hegel and Fichte are intimately connected with Husserlian transcendental idealism (Fink 1995, 156). For Fink, however, Husserl’s use of the reduction is superior to Hegel’s, while Hegel’s account of the movement of absolute life is superior to Husserl’s (quoted in Bruzina 2004, 408).  Husserl had published the French text as Méditations cartésiennes: introduction à la phénoménologie in 1931. He withheld the German text, however, with the intention of revising and expanding it. It was not published until 1950 as Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (Husserl 1950). The English translation by D. Cairns is Husserl (1960). 29  See especially Husserl’s letters to Albrecht 29 December 1930 and 22 December 1931. 30  See Bruzina (2004, 212). 31  See Denker (2003, 107–137). 32  See Fink (1995, 152). See for instance: “The truth is that the Absolute is not the unity of two non-self-sufficient moments that, while indeed mutually complementary, also delimit and finitize each other, but is the infinite unity of the constant passage of one ‘moment’ (constitution) to the other (world)” (Fink 1995, 146). 33  Fink as quoted in Bruzina (2004, 407). 28

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Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations presented phenomenology as making the first genuine breakthrough into transcendental subjectivity. Husserl often presents the “self-explication” (Selbstauslegung) of the transcendental ego as part of the “great tasks” (Husserl 1954, §29) of transcendental phenomenology. This topic is beset by paradoxes such as: How can the ego be that which constitutes the world and also that which is concretised, mundanised and corporealised in the world? Both Fink and Husserl seriously maintain that the performance of the epoché effectively strips away everything human. As Fink puts it, Husserl’s philosophy, because of this reduction, is no longer “captivated in the horizon of the world” (Fink 1995, 158). The natural attitude is much more than one attitude among many, it is the specifically human attitude; and once suspended, the phenomenological subject becomes one (in a kind of Hegelian synthesis) with the Absolute process itself. There is a suspension of the human in the epoché as Husserl’s Ideas had already indicated. In this regard, Fink maintained that the traditional interest of philosophy in specifying the nature of non-human (i.e. divine) consciousness and German Idealism’s interest in intellectual intuition were forerunners to phenomenology’s concept of “the disengaged spectator” or “transcendental onlooker” whose own status is such a puzzle (Fink 1995, 77). Certainly, Husserl often speaks of a certain internal “splitting of the ego” (Ichspaltung) that is brought about by the interruption of the natural attitude by the transcendental epoché. Fink in fact pushed the distinction between the constituting transcendental ego and the phenomenologizing ego much further than Husserl wanted (Fink 1995, 1). Fink claims that the phenomenologizing ego (the transcendental onlooker) is not an “ego” at all in the mundane sense, rather it is a kind of “pre-ego” with its own “pre-being”, a kind of nothingness, a “meontic” (Fink’s term) source for both the self-constitution of the ego and thereby the constitution of the world. Indeed, Fink even claims somewhat cryptically that phenomenological knowledge is knowledge of the meontic, i.e. knowledge of the non-being that precedes being (quoted in Bruzina 2004, 377).

4  H  usserl on Intersubjectivity, Historicity, and Transcendental Life Let us now look in more detail at Husserl’s evolving understanding of Hegel and German Idealism generally. Although some commentators have claimed that Husserlian phenomenology can never reach to exhibiting the infinite transcendental subject of Hegelian Idealism, there is a great deal of evidence that Husserl from the 1920s on conceived of phenomenology (both constitutive and genetic) as exhibiting the history of transcendental life in its inner teleology and full concreteness. Indeed, Husserl’s genetic phenomenology is an explicit attempt to comprehend phenomenologically the domains of birth, death, waking, sleep, and other “generative” phenomena (Husserl 1954 §55), regions that cannot be brought directly to intuitive fullness in human experience (a point of course that Heidegger makes in

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different register primarily about our anticipation of dying) but which can be accessed indirectly through eidetic variation of the present ‘waking’ ego in its rational maturity. Husserl even claims (quite frequently) that while humans die and necessarily so, the transcendental ego is immortal (e.g., Husserl 1954, 338). Husserl also wants to understand human spirit in its sociality and historicity. He speaks of the “the discovery of absolute intersubjectivity [die Entdeckung der absoluten Intersubjektivität] …objectified in the world as the whole of humankind” (Husserl 1954, 275, 1970, 340). Husserl always situates this discussion (as in Crisis) in terms of his attempt to understand the inner teleology of modern philosophy. In fact, Husserl’s parallels Hegel’s interests in several dimensions, for instance: rethinking the meaning Greek “origins” or breakthrough into philosophy, discovery (Entdeckung) of the theoretical attitude, the intersubjective constitution of culture, the forms of spiritual life, and the notion of “reason in history”. Edmund Husserl’s early training was primarily in mathematics, hence his philosophical formation was somewhat limited. Through his friend and mentor Thomas Masaryk (1850–1937), he was introduced to the classical empiricists; and this interest was reinforced by Franz Brentano, an admirer of J. S. Mill and Auguste Comte (1798–1858), the so-called “father of positivism”.34 In his Göttingen years, as the First Philosophy (1923–1924) lectures make clear, Husserl developed a deep understanding of the history of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. Earlier he had relied heavily on survey works such as Ernst Cassirer’s Das Erkenntnisproblem (Cassirer 1906–1907) especially the first two volumes (1906, 1907), for its accounts of modern philosophy. But in later works such as his Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), especially §100 which sketches a history of transcendental philosophy beginning with Hume, “the first to grasp the universal concrete problem of transcendental subjectivity” (Husserl 1969, 256), and Crisis of European Sciences (1936), Husserl demonstrates his ability to think through in an original manner this tradition of modern philosophy as in fact a ‘breakthrough’ into transcendental philosophy. Nineteenth-century Kantians and Positivists had a particular contempt for Hegel’s woolly “mysticism” and Husserl often expresses admiration for the intellectual élan of positivism. In Ideas I (1913), he is even happy to call himself a “positivist”: If “positivism” is tantamount to an absolutely unprejudiced grounding of all sciences on the “positive,” that is to say, on what can be seized upon originaliter, then we are the genuine positivists. (Husserl 1983, 39, 1997, 38)

He felt, however, that positivism too quickly denied the validity of intuiting essences (Husserl 1977 §25) and completely ignored the subjective dimension. In that sense, positivism with its refusal to see beyond facts “decapitates” philosophy (Husserl

34  Husserl’s Second Logical Investigation, for instance, is a sustained critical engagement with empiricist conceptions of knowledge.

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1970, 9). Nevertheless, Husserl also sees phenomenology as a completion of both the positivist and the rationalist projects: Phenomenology is the most extreme completion of rationalism, it is also to reckoned just as much as the most extreme completion of empiricism. (Husserl 2002a, 288)

His main claim is that previous philosophies—be they positivist, empiricist or rationalist—have underestimated the complexity and diversity of thought forms. Phenomenology then proposes a more inclusive way of attending to the diversity of experience, the diversity of givenness, as he would say. Indeed, as his thought developed, he came to see phenomenology as expressing the inner essence of all genuine philosophy. In this sense, phenomenology, as he writes in 1922/1923, is the “original method (Urmethode) of all philosophical methods” (Husserl 2002a, 51). As a philosopher in Germany in the early twentieth century, Husserl could not avoid exposure to Neo-Kantianism. The slogan “zurück zu Kant” had already appeared in German thought in 1865 in Otto Liebmann’s (1840–1912) Kant und die Epigonen (Liebmann 1865) and indeed Neo-Kantianism was the dominant philosophical position in Germany in the first part of the twentieth century, challenged primarily by Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl admired Hermann Lotze (especially his Cosmology) and was personally close to Paul Natorp, with whom he regularly corresponded. In his Freiburg years he maintained professional relations with Rickert and Cassirer, as their correspondence attests. Kant, however, always presented a major challenge to Husserl. Already in the Prolegomena to the Logical Investigations he expressed his unhappiness with then current psychologistic readings of Kant (Benno Erdmann). Later, in his transcendental period, Husserl criticised Kant’s lack of philosophical radicality (in contrast to Descartes). In the Crisis Husserl talks about the revival of a “multicoloured” Kant [ein vielfarbiger Kant] (Husserl 1954, 198) and complains that this has given rise to confusion and that the “history of philosophy has been substituted for philosophy of philosophy has become a personal worldview” [zur persönlichen Weltanschauung] (Husserl 1954, 199, 1970, 196).

5  T  he Early Husserl’s Suspicion of Hegel: The Influence of Brentano In these extended interpretative engagements with the history of modern philosophy, however, although Husserl regularly engages with Kant, he never confronts Hegel. For instance, in Erste Philosophie (1923–1924), Hegel merits only a single mention in connection with the movement of rationalism in modern philosophy from Descartes through Spinoza, Leibniz to Kant and Hegel (Husserl 1956, 182). At least until the early 1930s and his collaboration with Fink, Husserl’s attitude to Hegel had been primarily not just negative but indifferent. He was deeply influenced by his teacher Brentano’s conviction that Hegelian philosophy was a kind of groundless speculation that weakened the claim of philosophy to be a rigorous science. In

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his 1895 essay, The Four Phases of Philosophy, Brentano maintained that philosophy inevitably progressed in four phases, including alternating phases of abundance and different stages of decline (Brentano 1999, 14–28). According to this periodization, all great periods of growth in philosophy were characterised by the preponderance of the purely theoretical interest (ein reines theoretisches Interesse) and develop a method proper to the subject matter (Brentano 1999, 9). In this stage philosophy is pursued as a theoretical science. Thus, in the period from Thales to Aristotle, there was the steady growth of pure theoria (similarly, with Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and Bacon and Descartes in the modern period). After a while, theoretical activity weakens, and practical interests begin to dominate, (e.g., Stoicism, Epicureanism). This phase of applied philosophy is in turn followed by a third phase when scepticism grows, counterbalanced by the construction of sects and dogmatic philosophies (among which Brentano includes Kant). Finally, in a fourth phase, mysticism, intuitionism and irrationalist world views, “pseudo-philosophy”, and religious Schwärmerei, start to proliferate (e.g., Plotinus; Eckhart and Cusanus; Schelling and Hegel) leading to a moral and intellectual collapse (Brentano 1999, 58). Then the cycle begins again. Brentano’s schematic approach to the history of philosophy strongly influenced Husserl and left him with a permanent distaste for speculative systems in general, and especially the Hegelian. For example, Hegel’s is named only twice in the Logical Investigations in the Prolegomena §40 (Husserl 1975, 147, 2001a, 93). He is listed among philosophers (beginning with Epicurus) who rejected the Law of Contradiction (Husserl 1975, 147, 2001a, 93). For Husserl, this rejection puts Hegel in the company of madmen. Of course, Husserl’s real target in Prolegomena §40 is in fact not so much Hegel as the Neo-Kantian Benno Erdmann (1851–1921) whom he accuses of psychologism. In Prolegomena Appendix to §61 Bernard Bolzano is described as belonging to the time of Hegel (Husserl 1975, 228, 2001a, 143) and it is clear that Husserl contrasting the logical approach of Bolzano with the illogical approach of Hegel. In his next publication Philosophy as a Rigorous Science (1910–1911), Husserl directly targets the “worldview philosophy” of thinkers such as Dilthey, often seen as being a development of Hegelian historicism. Husserl singled out Dilthey’s “philosophy of world-views” [Weltanschauungsphilosophie] as denying the objective validity of cultural formations.35 In this essay, Husserl gives a very Brentanian verdict on Hegel’s philosophy and its influence. Husserl writes: However much Hegel insists on the absolute validity of his method and doctrine, his system nevertheless lacks the critique of reason that first makes possible the scientific character of philosophy. Connected with this, however, is that Hegel’s philosophy, like romantic philosophy in general, acted in the ensuing years in the sense of either a weakening or a falsification of the drive for the constitution of rigorous philosophical science. (Husserl 1910–1911, 292, 2002a, 252)

 Years later, in his 1925 lectures, Husserl made amends, acknowledging Dilthey’s contribution to descriptive psychology.

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This last sentence is a purely Brentanian sentiment. In fact, Husserl sees Hegelianism as giving rise to the reaction of naturalism, which “with its skepticism, which abandoned all absolute ideality and objectivity of validity, has determined the worldview and philosophy of recent years”, Husserl writes. For Husserl, Hegelianism was right (as was positivism) only in so far as it recognized the demand that philosophy be a systematic science, but it failed completely, as a form of Romanticism, to carry through its task. Hegel’s philosophy had in fact a quite different outcome: “worldview philosophy” that ends in scepticism: With the sudden turn of Hegel’s metaphysical philosophy of history into a skeptical historicism, the emergence of the new “worldview philosophy” was essentially determined that precisely in our days seems to be spreading rapidly and that, incidentally, judging by its largely antinaturalistic and occasionally even antihistoricistic polemics, by no means wants to be skeptical. However, insofar as it shows itself to be, at least regarding its whole intention and procedure, no longer dominated by that radical will to scientific doctrine that constituted the great march of modern philosophy to Kant, the talk of a weakening of the drive for philosophical science referred specifically to it. (Husserl 1910–1911, 293, 2002a, 252

Even in this essay, however, Husserl, echoing Hegel, recognises that the “life of spirit” [Geistesleben], as he calls it, takes many forms. Furthermore, like Hegel, he believes that philosophy has the function of unifying spiritual life and reflecting it: Every great philosophy is not only a historical fact, but in the development of the spiritual life of mankind it also has a great, indeed unique teleological function, namely as the highest intensification of the life-experience, culture, and wisdom of its age. (Husserl 1910– 1911, 329, 2002a, 284)

In this essay, Philosophy as Rigorous Science, Husserl also recognizes that there is a need for a systematic science of spirit: If through inner intuition we immerse ourselves in the unity of the life of spirit, we can feel our way into the motivations prevailing therein and also “understand” the essence and development of the respective form of spirit in its dependence on the spiritual motives of unity and development. In this way everything historical becomes “understandable,” “explicable” for us in its peculiarity of “Being,” which is precisely the “Being of spirit,” unity of internally mutually-conditioning moments of a sense and therefore unity of taking shape and developing in accordance with inner motivations and that sense. Also in this way, then, art, religion, morals, and the like can be intuitively inquired into. Likewise the worldview, which is closely related to them and at the same time comes to expression in them, and which, if it assumes the forms of science and lays claim to objective validity after the manner of science, used to be called ‘metaphysics’ or even ‘philosophy’. Hence with regard to such philosophies the great task arises of exploring their morphological structure and typology, as well as their developmental connections, and of bringing to historical understanding the motivations of spirit that determine their essence by living in the most inward accord with those philosophies. How much that is of significance and indeed admirable is to be achieved in this regard is shown by Wilhelm Dilthey’s writings, particularly the recently published treatise on the types of worldview. (Husserl 1910–1911, 323, 2002a, 279)

These sentiments, written during Husserl’s early middle period, is surprisingly close to a Hegelian understanding of the development of spirit.

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6  T  he Mature Husserl’s Engagement with German Idealism (Kant, Fichte) During a sustained period of intensive research (and few publications) Husserl devoted an enormous amount of energy to explicating the genuine sense of—and various possible approaches into—transcendental philosophy, which, from around 1908, he explicitly construed as an idealism, with a growing sense that he was recovering the true sense of past German idealisms (especially Kant and Fichte). The first published announcement of this idealism (without using the word) came in Ideas I (1913), a move widely repudiated by Husserl’s more realist Munich and Göttingen followers.36 Husserl later conceded that this “scandal” affected the reception of Ideas I. In the twenties, beginning with his Introduction to Philosophy lectures and his London Lectures (both 1922) Husserl now planned an ambitious and far-reaching “system” of transcendental philosophy (Husserl 2002b, 49).37 Although he subsequently explicitly rejected the term “system”,38 nevertheless he continued to emphasise his idealism in all his later works, e.g. Formal and Transcendental Logic (see §99), Cartesian Meditations (§41), Crisis (§26 ff) and in 1930 Author’s Preface to the English translation of Ideas I (1930). Given Husserl’s early hostility to Hegel, it is somewhat surprising to find Husserl lecturing regularly on Fichte’s Bestimmung des Menschen (1800)39 between 1903 and 1918 (Husserl 1986, 1995). This is an Enlightenment text on human self-­ development, which is among the more popular of Fichte’s works. It focuses on human cultural perfection including treating others with freedom and dignity, recognising the need for a political order and even discussing world peace. In order to achieve this end, one must go beyond the sensible world to the “supersensible world” [übersinnliche Welt] or “world of reason” which is governed by rational laws. This “second world” [zweite Welt] is the moral world—not in the future but in the now, that in which human beings act. This world has to be seen and envisaged and this needs a spiritual eye. Husserl’s interest in Fichte had been originally stimulated by his student Emil Lask’s 1902 study on Fichte, Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte,40 as well as through his contact with Jonas Cohn (1869–1947), a professor at Freiburg from 1901 to 1933, who was one of Rickert’s first Habilitation students and was deeply  Most of Husserl’s students, including Adolf Reinach, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Gerda Walther and Martin Heidegger, rejected this idealist turn. 37  See Husserl’s letter to Roman Ingarden of 31 August 1923, in Husserl (1968a, 26). 38  Letter of Husserl to Robert Parl Welch, 17/21 June 1933, in Husserl (1994, 459). 39  See Nuzzo (2010, 97–118). 40  Husserl lectured on Fichte’s Bestimmung des Menschen for the first time in the summer semester of 1903 and repeated the course in the summer semester of 1915 and again in 1918. Husserl had read Emil Lask, Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte (Tübingen, 1902), reprinted in Lask (2002). See also Schuhmann and Smith (1993). Lask was also an important influence on Georg Lukacs, see Rosshoff (1975) and Heinz (1997). Heidegger was also drawn to Fichte in that period, see Denker (1997). Fichte, in fact, is the source of the term “facticity”. 36

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influenced by Georg Simmel’s life-philosophy. Cohn wrote on the history of dialectic, Theorie der Dialektik. Formenlehre der Philosophie (Cohn 1923) and on the concept of the infinite, Geschichte des Unendlichkeitsproblems in abendländischen Denken bis Kant (1896).41 Husserl is especially interested in Fink’s understanding of Kant’s notion of the transcendental ego. He writes in Fichtes Menschenideal that the Fichtean ego is not the individual human ego: The I of Fichte, the pure or absolute I, is nothing other than this subjectivity in which (according to the systematic play of actions) the phenomenal world with all its human I’s first comes to be. To write the history of the I, of the absolute intelligence, is therefore to write the history of the necessary teleology in which the world as phenomenal comes to progressive creation, comes to creation in this intelligence. This is no object of experience but a metaphysical power. Because we knowing humans, nevertheless, are I’s in which this absolute I has split itself, we can, through intuitive immersion in that which belongs to the pure essence of the I, of subjectivity, reconstruct the necessary teleological processes out of which the world inclusive of ourselves (in what for us is an unconscious holding sway of absolute intelligence) is formed in teleological necessity. (Husserl 1986, 276, 1995, 118)42

Husserl is therefore interested in tracking the “necessary teleology in which the world as phenomenal comes to progressive creation”. Husserl continues: If we proceed so, we are philosophers. And the only genuine task of philosophy is to be found here. It consists in grasping the world as the teleological product of the absolute I and, in the elucidation of the creation of the world in the absolute, making evident its ultimate sense. Fichte believes he is able to achieve this and to have achieved this. (Husserl 1986, 276, 1995, 118)

Against Fichte, Husserl does not believe in the idea of “deducing” the world from transcendental subjectivity but he does affirm that transcendental subjectivity is the source of all “meaning and being” [Sinn und Sein] or “meaning and validity” [Sein und Geltung]. Indeed, Husserl continues to acknowledge the importance of Fichte in the Crisis (Husserl 1954, 227).43 While many of Husserl’s earlier followers at Munich and Göttingen were realists who were unhappy with Husserl’s turn to the transcendental ego, Eugen Fink sought to make sense of it by giving it a source in a “pre-ego” [Vor-Ich] or “original ego” [Ur-Ich]. Of course, Husserl himself often appears quite Fichtean in some of his pronouncements concerning the transcendental ego, e.g.: “the I is not thinkable without a not-I to which it intentionally relates” [Das Ich ist nicht denkbar ohne ein Nicht-Ich, auf das es sich intentional bezieht] (Hua XIV 245). In the Crisis §54, he speaks of the Ur-Ich as the ego that is performing the epoché and which is ‘personally indeclinable”. From around 1905, Husserl was reading Kant seriously. Indeed, he sympathised with the Neo-Kantians in their repudiation of naturalism. Thus, in a letter dated 20 December 1915, addressed to Heinrich Rickert, Husserl commented that he found  See Klockenbusch (1989) and Heitmann (1999).  Husserl seems only to have read Fichte’s popular works and did not read the Wissenschaftslehre. 43  For Husserl’s relationship with Fichte see Fisette (1999), Hyppolite (1959), Rockmore (1979), Mohanty (1952), and Tietzen (1980). 41 42

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himself in alliance with German idealism against the common enemy: “the naturalism of our time”.44 In this letter, Husserl says that even “in his naturalistic beginnings” his soul “was filled with a secret nostalgia [Sehnsucht] for the old Romantic land of German Idealism” (Husserl 1994, vol. 5, 178). In his 1924 Address to the Kant Gesellschaft he sought to address directly the relationship between transcendental phenomenology and Kantian transcendental philosophy and this is an important document for Husserl’s growing engagement with Kant.45 Indeed he more or less repeats this critique of Kant in his Crisis of European Sciences more than a decade later. Kant failed to make a proper breakthrough to transcendental subjectivity and to chart its true domain (Husserl 1954, 202). Husserl insists, with Kant, that transcendental idealism is also an empirical realism. Husserl is not in any way attaching a doubtful or illusory status to the objects in the world. It is rather the sense [Sinn] of world that is forever altered by the transcendental approach. Moreover, Husserl endorses transcendental philosophy’s opposition to scepticism and especially to Hume’s mitigated scepticism: The genuine transcendental philosophy … is not like the Humean and neither overtly not covertly a s sceptical decomposition of the world cognition and of the world itself into fictions, that is to say, in modern terms, a “philosophy of As-If.” Least of all is it a “dissolution” [Auflösung] of the world into “merely subjective appearances,” which in some still senseful sense would have something to do with illusion. It does not occur to transcendental philosophy to dispute the world of experience in the least …. (Husserl 1956, 246–7, 1974a, 22)

In his Cartesian Meditations, originally delivered as lectures in Paris in 1929, Husserl proclaims that “… phenomenology is eo ipso ‘transcendental idealism’, though in a fundamentally and essentially new sense” (Husserl 1950, 118, 1960, 86). Here again he affirms that this idealism is not the product of arguments against realism, but emerges rather from close investigations of constituting consciousness in all its possible modalities. Thus, he asserts: The proof of this idealism is therefore phenomenology itself. Only someone who misunderstands either the deepest sense of intentional method, or that of transcendental reduction, or perhaps both, can attempt to separate phenomenology from transcendental idealism. (Husserl 1950, 119, 1960, 86)

Husserl’s critical engagement with Kant and his embrace of phenomenology as a radical ––indeed the only true version––of transcendental idealism, however, did not immediately lead him explicitly to appreciate the problematic of history or the role of Hegel especially in attempting to recognise the inner rationale of history. An important text for Husserl’s commitment to German Idealism, albeit in a renewed and radical sense, is his Author’s Preface to Boyce-Gibson’s English translation of Ideas I that appeared in 1930 which reaffirms that Ideas I is a work of  Cf. Husserl’s letter to Rickert, 20 December 1915, in Husserl (1994, vol. 5, 178). See Kern (1964, 35). 45  See Kant und das Idee der transzendentale Philosophie, in Husserl (1956, 230–87). See also Husserl (1974a, 9–56). 44

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“pure or transcendental phenomenology”, an a priori eidetic science which explores a new “absolutely independent realm of direct experience”––“transcendental subjectivity” (Husserl 1931, 11). Husserl claims that this realm of experience is only reachable through a radical alteration of the natural attitude. By performing the “transcendental-phenomenological reduction” the domain of the ego and transcendental subjectivity comes into view. Husserl is preoccupied with the parallelism between this inquiry and psychological subjectivity of the inner life and hence places a great deal of emphasis on the change of attitude (which he acknowledges can seem like a mere “nuance”, Husserl 1931, 15) required by the epoché. In this Preface, Husserl admits that Ideas I lacks “the proper consideration of the problem of transcendental solipsism or of transcendental intersubjectivity, of the essential relation of the objective world, that is valid for me, to others which are valid for me and with me” (Husserl 1931, 18). Husserl says these issues should have been addressed in a second volume but opposition to idealism and the alleged solipsism of Ideas I, “seriously impeded the reception of the work” (Husserl 1931, 18). Husserl insists he has taken nothing back and his objections to self-standing realism and its opposing idealism remain. Husserl will concede only the “incompleteness” of his exposition (Husserl 1931, 19). Husserl is constantly seeking a fresh formulation of the transcendental problematic. Husserl wants transcendental phenomenology not to begin with assumptions but to reflect on its own beginning: “Philosophy can take root only in radical reflexion upon the meaning and possibility of its own scheme” (Husserl 1931, 27). One must adopt the “radical attitude of autonomous self-responsibility” (Husserl 1931, 29). Transcendental phenomenology, he insists, is not a speculative theory, but a self-grounding science that lays the a priori framework and condition for all other sciences but the natural and the historical sciences. The sole task of this transcendental science is clarifying the meaning of the world and “the precise sense in which everyone accepts it… as really existing” (Husserl 1931, 21). For Husserl the nonexistence of this world always remains thinkable. The existence and meaning of the real world is relative to transcendental subjectivity (Husserl 1931, 21). Husserl speaks of the “transcendental society of ‘ourselves’” (Husserl 1931, 21–22). It is within intersubjectivity that the real world is constituted as objective, as being there “for everyone”. This 1931 Preface to the English translation of Ideas I is very close to what Husserl had already attested in his 1929 Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl 1974b, §§100 ff).

7  H  egelianism in the Late Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences Husserl reconciled with German Idealism in his later writings and especially in the Crisis. Indeed, Hegel’s name appears most frequently (of all the works Husserl published in his lifetime) in the Crisis. Hegel features prominently in Husserl’s

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Crisis Part Three B, especially in §§ 56 and 57. He now acknowledges that German Idealism had grasped the true sense of philosophy although it had failed to ground it appropriately. Husserl is moving closer to Hegel especially when he develops his historical introduction to transcendental phenomenology. Following the Neo-­ Kantians, Husserl had been increasingly preoccupied with the problematic of the methodological relationships between the natural and human sciences (Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften) especially in his Natur und Geist lectures. He saw the need for phenomenology not just to address the growing crises in the natural sciences but also the human sciences. In the Crisis, accordingly, Husserl addresses not just modern mathematical and natural sciences, but also the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). The proper methodology of the human sciences had been, of course, a subject of serious debate among German philosophers, including Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians (especially Windelband, Rickert, Cassirer), as well as among the followers of French positivism (Comte, Durkheim, etc). Husserl had been discussing it not just in Philosophy as a Rigorous Science but also in Ideas II and in his Nature and Spirit Lectures (Husserl 2001b). Already in Ideas I § 1 Husserl leaves it as an open question whether the cultural sciences share the method of the natural sciences. Human cultural history, especially as reflected in the history of philosophy, comes to the fore in Husserl’s lectures in Natur und Geist and also in Erste Philosophie. Similarly, in a text associated with the Crisis (but written prior to 1930) Husserl raises the question on the methodology of the natural sciences and asks whether there can be a similar methodology also for the human sciences and for history: Is there a method for encompassing the realm of the “spirit,” of history, in all its essential possibilities, so that one can arrive at “exact” truths through exact concepts for this realm? (Husserl 1954, 301n, 1970, 322n)

Having acknowledged that the natural sciences now claim a privileged position in specifying the “truth of the world”, with almost a desperate tone, he now asks a question concerning the meaning and teleology of history at the outset of the Crisis: Scientific objective truth is exclusively a matter of establishing what the world, the spiritual as well as the material world, is in fact. But can the world, and human existence in it truthfully have meaning if the sciences recognize as true only what is objectively established in this fashion, and if history has nothing to teach us than that all the shapes of the spiritual world [Gestalten der geistigen Welt], all the conditions of life, ideals, norms upon which man relies, form and dissolve themselves like fleeting waves, that it always was and ever will be so, that again and again reason must turn into nonsense, and well being into misery. Can we console ourselves with that? Can we live in this world where historical occurrence is nothing but an unending concatenation of illusory progress and bitter disappointment? (Husserl 1954, 4–5, 1970, 6–7)

Husserl’s opposition is sceptical relativism and the relativism of competing historical world-views simply replacing one another historically, is as strong here as it was in his 1910/1911 Philosophy as a Rigorous Science essay. Over and over, Husserl insists that we are committed as rational beings (following the Greeks) to believing in the inner rationality of history. Furthermore, his reference to the “forms of the spiritual world” has a distinctly Hegelian ring.

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In Crisis § 56, Husserl attempts to understand the meaning of philosophical progress and why transcendental philosophy failed. As part of a “history of transcendental philosophy” (Husserl 1954, 202, 1974b §100), Husserl rethinks his relationship with Hegel and German Idealism in terms of thinking of the emergence of the “transcendental motif” in Descartes, Hume, Kant and Hegel, and indeed in Mill (Husserl 1954, 198)46! He acknowledges that the great system of Hegel had a temporary impact but was not fated to endure (Husserl 1954, 196)—he even speaks of the “collapse of the Hegelian philosophy” (Husserl 1954, 201) and indeed provoked a reaction (especially the positivism of Schuppe and Avenarius) that threatened all of transcendental philosophy. Husserl believes that transcendental philosophy can never be transformed into techne. Rather the whole force of transcendental philosophy has been trying to begin, to come to clear self-­ understanding about its task (Husserl 1954, 202, 1970, 199). Husserl says one can be convinced of the “teleological meaning of history” [der teleologische Sinn der Geschichte] (Husserl 1954, 200) but raises the question as to whether philosophy has achieved the purpose originally and essentially accorded to it. Husserl wants to understand why the great project of philosophy failed. It failed because of the difficulty of performing the inversion from the natural outlook and attaining the transcendental outlook (Husserl 1956, 204, 1970, 200). For Husserl, German Idealism too had failed (Husserl 1992, 107), and reaction to it produced a new anti-­ metaphysical positivism, a new objectivism—a development that has produced the current “existential catastrophe” [eine existenzielle Katastrophe] (Husserl 1992, 108). In the manuscript that the editor Walter Biemel includes as Section 73 of the Crisis47 Husserl sees the period of modern philosophy from Descartes to the present irrationalism as essentially a closed era. He now looks forward to a new era driven by phenomenology and involving the re-appropriation of the Cartesian discovery of transcendental subjectivity and a radical rethinking of the demand for apodicticity. He even speaks obscurely of a “life in apodicticity” [Leben in der Apodiktizität] (Husserl 1954, 275, 1970, 340). This new era involves what Husserl calls (in Hegelian mode) “the discovery of absolute intersubjectivity” [die Entdeckung der absoluten Intersubjektivität] which he sees as “objectified in the world as the whole of mankind” (Husserl 1954, 275, 1970, 340). Husserl here talks of an “infinite progress” of coming to self-understanding and of ego-subjects as “bearers of absolute reason”. For Husserl, universal intersubjectivity cannot be anything other than humankind (Husserl 1954, 183, 1970, 179). Moreover, everything objective is “resolved” [auflöst] into this intersubjectivity. Already in his Amsterdam Lectures (1928) Husserl had stressed the importance of transcendental intersubjectivity:  Husserl includes Mill as a line of transcendental philosophy that came from Hume not Kant.  David Carr disputes Biemel’s editorial decision here because the manuscript in question is marked by Husserl as belonging rather to Crisis Part One and because the style of the text is radically different from what goes before in Crisis Section 72 (Husserl 1970, xx). In my view the text’s Hegelian echoes may owe considerably to the influence of Fink.

46 47

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Transcendental intersubjectivity is the absolute and only self-sufficient foundation [Seinsboden]. Out of it are created draws the meaning and validity of everything objective, the totality of objectively real existent entities, but also every ideal world as well. An objectively existent thing is from first to last an existent thing only in a peculiar, relative and incomplete sense. It is an existent thing, so to speak, only on the basis of a cover-up of its transcendental constitution that goes unnoticed in the natural attitude. (Husserl 1968b, 344, 1997, 249)

Husserl draws on all these locutions to trying to articulate his sense of the meaning of subjective life in its first person, individual consciousness with its many layerings (including those that might properly be described as “pre-ego” [Vor-Ich] and “pre-­ personal”), as well as in its connection with other selves and in its moral, social and rational nature, amounting to its communalised “life of spirit” [Geistesleben], the life of “we-subjectivity” [Wir-Subjektivität]. In fact, Husserl insists that subjectivity understood as “primordial, concrete subjectivity” …includes the forms of consciousness, in which is valid nature, spirit in every sense, human and animal spirit, objective spirit as culture, spiritual being understood as family, union, state, people, humanity…. (Husserl 1973, 559, my translation)

From one perspective, Husserl’s Crisis attempts to recover the meaning of human historicity and cultural becoming from within phenomenology. Indeed, the Crisis is Husserl’s most sustained effort to develop a phenomenological approach to issues concerning temporality, historicity, finitude and cultural and generational development (which Husserl calls ‘generativity’, Generativität, see Husserl 1954, 191, 1970, 188). Almost re-inventing the project of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Husserl presents his approach in the Crisis itself as a “teleological historical reflection” (Husserl 1954, xiv n. 3, 1970, 3) or “teleological-historical way” (Husserl 1954, 435, 1970, 102), a kind of intellectual “reconstruction”, backwards reflection [Rückbesinnung] (Husserl 1954, 16), “backwards questioning” [Rückfragen] of the history of western culture (and philosophy) in order to produce an “eidetic history” and identify its hidden goal (telos) and “hidden innermost motivation” [verborgene innereste Motivation] (Husserl 1954, 9, 1970, 11). Indeed, in his Foreword to the Continuation of the Crisis (Beilage XIII) Husserl himself points out the historical mode of exposition is ‘not chosen by chance’ (Husserl 1954, 441), but rather is central to his task since he wants to exhibit the fact that the whole history of philosophy has a “unitary teleological structure” [eine einheitliche teleologische Struktur] (Husserl 1954, 442). Similarly, in Crisis §14 Husserl discusses the tension in modern philosophy between objectivism and transcendentalism and speaks of phenomenology as the “final form” [Endform] of transcendental philosophy. This final form of philosophy must include an exhibition of the inner rational teleology of human culture in opposition to the current scientifically-inspired objectivist rationalism that has made history into meaningless nonsense. Several times in the course of the main body of the Crisis (and in associated essays such as the Vienna Lecture), Husserl emphasizes that the crisis is a crisis of reason.48  As Husserl asserts in the Vienna Lecture: “the European crisis has its roots in a misguided rationalism” (Husserl 1954, 337, 1970, 290).

48

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Scientific rationalism has forgotten its source in human subjectivity. According to Husserl, the Greek breakthrough to philosophy has enjoined on Western culture the requirement to live life according to reason. Human beings have freely given themselves this task. Repeatedly Husserl endorses the ancient Greek insight that human beings are in essence rational animals (see Husserl 1954, 13, 1970, 15): The human being is called animal rationale not merely because he has the capacity of reason and then only occasionally regulates and justifies his life according to the insights of reason, but because the human being proceeds always and everywhere in his entire, active life in this way. (Husserl 1988, 33)

This rationality emerges in practical striving that has given itself the goal of reason, which in its ideal limit, is also the idea of God (Husserl 1988, 34). “All specifically personal life is active life and stands as such under the essential norms of reason” (Husserl 1988, 41). Husserl’s teleological understanding of rationality as a demand of human beings, a demand that must be instantiated historically, is what brings him closer to Hegel. In the Crisis §6 Husserl writes: To be human at all is essentially to be a human being in a socially and generatively united civilization [in generativ und sozial verbundenen Menschheiten]; and if man is a rational being [animal rationale], it is only insofar as his whole civilization is a rational civilization, that is, only with a latent orientation toward reason or one openly oriented toward the entelechy which has come to itself, become manifest to itself, and which now of necessity consciously directs human becoming. (Husserl 1954, 13, 1970, 15)

In the Crisis, therefore, Husserl openly and explicitly embraces a qualified version of the Enlightenment project, especially in its Kantian sense, whereby enlightened humanity leaves behind enslavement to prejudice and enters the new realm of freedom by giving the law to itself, and freely undertaking to be bound by laws that are commanded by universal reason itself. Today rationalism is in the grip of objectivism and naturalism. The Enlightenment had too narrow a conception of reason (Husserl 1954, 337, 1970, 290). We must return to the “genuine” sense of rationality inaugurated by Greek philosophy, he writes in the Vienna Lecture: Rationality, in that high and genuine sense of which alone we are speaking, the primordial [urtümlich] Greek sense which in the classical period of Greek philosophy had become an ideal, still requires, to be sure, much clarification and self-reflection; but it is called in its mature form to guide [our] development. (Husserl 1954, 337, 1970, 290)

The concept of history is closely connected to the concept of “reason”. Husserl is interested in much more than a critique of cognition. He is interested in understanding the meaning of reason. Reason plays an important but often neglected role in Ideas I, Part Four where there is a whole chapter devoted to the “Phenomenology of Reason” (§§136–145) and another chapter on the connection between reason and universality. Reason has a number of levels (theoretical, axiological, practical) and covers the whole field of culture. There is a dynamic element to reason, it is seeing to realize itself, come to self actualization and also self-clarity (as Husserl writes in §73, which Walter Biemel placed as the concluding section of the Crisis):

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Thus philosophy is nothing other than [rationalism] through and through, but it is rationalism differentiated within itself according to the different stages of the movement of intention and fulfillment; it is ratio in the constant movement of self-elucidation, begun with the first breakthrough of philosophy into mankind, whose innate reason was previously in a state of concealment, of nocturnal obscurity. (Husserl 1954, 273, 1970, 338)

8  Husserl on the Self-Sufficiency of the Life of Spirit Husserl’s 1935 Vienna Lecture employs throughout a strikingly Hegelian tone. There he proclaims: The spirit, and indeed only the spirit, exists in itself and for itself, is self-sufficient [eigenständig]; and in its self-sufficiency, and only in this way, it can be treated truly rationally, truly and from the ground up scientifically. (Vienna Lecture, in Husserl 1954, 345, 1970, 297)

The spirit is both “in itself” and “for itself”. There is a dynamic element to reason, it is seeing to realize itself, come to self-actualization and also self-clarity (as Husserl writes in Crisis §73, controversially placed as the concluding section of the Crisis): Thus philosophy is nothing other than [rationalism] through and through, but it is rationalism differentiated within itself according to the different stages of the movement of intention and fulfilment; it is ratio in the constant movement of self-elucidation [Selbsterhellung] begun with the first breakthrough [Einbruch] of philosophy into mankind, whose innate reason was previously in a state of concealment [Verschlossenheit], of nocturnal obscurity. (Husserl 1954, 273, 1970, 338)

As we have seen, Husserl had been explicating the strata of the “world of spirit” from the time of his Ideas II manuscript. Husserl is absolutely clear that human consciousness exists and develops only within a communal culture. In a late text of 1934 entitled “human life in historicity” Husserl expresses the manner in which humans live within a spiritual culture: Man lives his spiritual life not in a spiritless world, in a world [understood] as matter, but rather as a spirit among spirits, among human and super-human, and this world-totality [Weltall] is, for him, the all of existing living, in the way of spirit, of the I-being, of the I-living among others as I subjects, life in the form of a universal I-community [Ich-­ Gemeinschaft]. (Husserl 1992, 3)

As with Hegel, Husserl turns to the history of philosophy to supply him with a roadmap for the teleological development of reason. As he writes in Crisis Section 15: Our task is to make comprehensible the teleology in the historical becoming of philosophy [die Teleologie in dem geschichtlichen Werden der Philosophie], especially modern philosophy, and at the same time to achieve clarity about ourselves, who are the bearers [Träger] of this teleology, who take part in carrying it out through our personal intentions. (Husserl 1954, 71, 1970, 70)

This statement has a typical Hegelian ring. Both Husserl and Hegel believe that the development of culture is illuminated by the development of philosophy. Philosophy

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is in a particular way mirrors the development of culture; philosophy represents historical humanity’s self-reflection and hence it represents (in more Hegelian terms) the human spirit’s coming to self-consciousness about itself. On Husserl’s mature view, transcendental phenomenology does not just describe life rather it actually leads or guides life into its rational self-reflexive “absolute” form. Transcendental phenomenology is now the science that grasps in a fundamental way the meaning of the accomplishment of spiritual life in all its forms, that is, what makes rational human intersubjective life possible as such. Husserl, in a manner increasingly close to Hegel, also believes that transcendental philosophy takes up and completes all previous philosophy; it embraces and redeems the entire philosophical tradition.49 Husserl does not claim to be doing history in any straightforward sense of collecting historical facts. This is what he calls “external history” or “factual history”. History is not a “storehouse” of items that lay before one; rather one picks and choses depending on one’s motivation. Husserl sees himself as trying to gain access to the “inner meaning and hidden teleology” of history; he is seeking, in quasiHegelian fashion, “reason in history”: We shall attempt to strike through the crust of the externalized “historical facts” of philosophical history, interrogating, exhibiting, and testing their inner meaning and hidden teleology. Questions never before asked will arise … In the end they will require that the total sense of philosophy, accepted as “obvious” throughout all its historical forms, be basically and essentially transformed. (Husserl 1954, 16, 1970, 18)

Husserl’s “historical reflections” [historische Besinnungen] (Husserl 1954, 58, 1970, 57) aim at “self-understanding” [Selbstverständnis] or “inner understanding” [das innere Verständnis] (Husserl 1954, 12, 1970, 14). These “sense-investigations” or “self-reflections” [Selbstbesinnungen] (Husserl 1954, 72–73) will reveal the “hidden unity of intentional inwardness” which alone is responsible for the “unity of history” (Husserl 1954, 74, 1970, 73), “our history” (Husserl 1954, 72, 1970, 71). It is quite surprising to find Husserl talking about the “inner sense” of history and attempting to trace the teleology of the modern philosophical tradition, for instance. But Husserl thinks of the field of the transcendental as a field of life, and individual lives are oriented towards goals and unified in terms of their overall goal or purpose. Finally, Husserl’s former assistant Ludwig Landgrebe sums up Husserl’s task in terms that express both his nearness to and distance from Hegel as follows: The task of describing the human “life-world” therefore includes a higher level. Having brought to light the all-pervading “aesthetic” structures of the world and world-experience the structures pertaining to Nature as the basis of every surrounding world-we must look for the possible types of world, as the surrounding worlds of particular human communities. This may be conceived as an empirical enterprise, namely, as the task of reducing to types the environing worlds and the world-pictures that have in fact been produced by past or present communities of various levels, and investigating their development and the evolutionary levels to which these worlds belong. But the empirical task is, in itself, secondary to the task of elaborating the essential possibilities and fundamental structures, the essentially possible types, of surrounding worlds. (Landgrebe 1940, 47) 49

 Husserl (1956, 256, 1974a, 30).

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A more apt summation of Husserl’s efforts to understand the history of culture and the history of philosophy as mirror of culture cannot be found. Acknowledgments  An earlier version of this paper was given at the conference, Hegel and the Phenomenological Movement, Pisa, Italy, 10–13 June 2014. I want to thank Elisa Magrì, Danilo Manca, and Alfredo Ferrarin, for their comments.

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Findlay, John N. 1958. Hegel: A Re-Examination. London: George Allen & Unwin. Fink, Eugen, 1995. Sixth Cartesian Meditation. The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method with Textual Annotations by Edmund Husserl. Trans. with an Introduction by Ronald Bruzina. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fisette, Denis. 1999. Husserl et Fichte: Remarques sur l’apport de l’idéalisme dans le développement de la phénoménologie. Symposium: Journal of the Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought III (2): 195–207. Special Issue: Fichte: Perspectives contemporaines, ed. Donald Ippercie. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1939. Hegel und der geschichtliche Geist. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 100 (1–2): 25–37. ———. 1976. Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies. Trans. C. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press. Geniušas, Saulius. 2008. Self-Consciousness and Otherness: Hegel and Husserl. Santalka. Filosofi ja. 16 (3): 27–36. Hartmann, Klaus. 1988. Studies in Foundational Philosophy. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi. Hegel, G.W.F. 1939–1941. La Phénoménologie de l’esprit. Trans. Jean Hyppolite. Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaigne, voll. 1–2. ———. 1952. In Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. ———. 1979. Hegel’s phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller with a foreword by J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1950. Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1970. Hegel’s Concept of Experience. San Francisco: Harper & Row. ———. 1997. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (Wintersemester 1930/31). In Gesamtsausgabe, ed. Ingtraud Görland, vol. 32, 3rd ed. Frankfurt: Klostermann. ———. (1997a). In Der Deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling) und die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart (Sommersemester 1929), ed. Claudius Strube. Frankfurt: Klostermann. GA Band 28. ———. (1997b). In Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (Wintersemester 1930/31), ed. Ingtraud Görland, 3rd ed. GA Band 32. Frankfurt: Klostermann. ———. (1988). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2009. Hegel. 1: Die Negativität (1938/39). 2: Erläuterungen der “Einleitung” zu Hegels “Phänomenologie des Geistes” (1942). In Gesamtsausgabe, ed. Ingrid Schüßler, vol. 68. Frankfurt: Klostermann. ———. 2011. Der Deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart (Sommersemester 1929). In Gesamtsausgabe, ed. Claudius Strube, vol. 28. Frankfurt: Klostermann. ———. 2016. Hegel und das Problem der Metaphysik, in Vorträge Teil 1: 1915–1932. In Gesamtsausgabe, ed. Günther Neumann, vol. 80. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Heinz, Marion. 1997. Die Fichte-Rezeption in der südwestdeutschen Schule des Neukantianismus. Fichte-Studien 13: 109. Heitmann, Margret. 1999. Jonas Cohn (1869–1947): Das Problem der unendlichen Aufgabe in Wissenschaft und Religion. Hildesheim: G. Olms. Higgins, Kathleen, and Kathleen Solomon, eds. 2003. The Age of German Idealism, Routledge History of Philosophy. Vol. 6. London/New York: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund. 1910–1911. Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft. Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Kultur 1: 289–341 (Reprinted in Husserliana Vol. XXV). ———. 1931. Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W. R. Boyce-Gibson. London: George Allen & Unwin. ———. 1950. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. In Husserliana, ed. Stephan Strasser, vol. I. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1954. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. In Husserliana, ed. Walter Biemel, vol. VI. The Hague: Nijhoff.

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———. 1956. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Erster Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte. In Husserliana, ed. R. Boehm, vol. VII. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1960. Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. D. Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff.S ———. 1968a. In Briefe an Roman Ingarden, ed. R. Ingarden. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1968b. Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925. In Husserliana, ed. W. Biemel, vol. IX. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 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: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil. 1929–35. In Husserliana, ed. Iso Kern, vol. XV. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1974a. Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy. Trans. Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl. Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 5: 9–56. ———. 1974b. Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. Mit ergänzenden Texten. In Husserliana, ed. Paul Janssen, vol. XVII. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1975. Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Text der 1. und der 2. Auflage. In Husserliana, ed. E. Holenstein, vol. XVIII. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1977. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie 1. Halbband: Text der 1–3. Auflage, Husserliana. III/1, hrsg. K. Schuhmann. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1983. Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. In Husserl Collected Works. Trans. F. Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1986. Fichtes Menchheitsideal, in Aufsätze und Vorträge 1911–1921. In Husserliana, ed. H.R. Sepp and Thomas Nenon, vol. XXV, 267–293. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1988. Aufsätze und Vorträge. 1922–1937. In Husserliana, ed. T. Nenon and H.R. Sepp, vol. XXVII. The Hague: Kluwer. ———. 1992. Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937. In Husserliana, ed. Reinhold N. Smid, vol. XXIX. The Hague: Kluwer. ———. 1994. Briefwechsel. In Husserliana Dokumente, ed. Karl Schuhmann in collaboration with Elizabeth Schuhmann, vol. 4. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1995. Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity [Three Lectures]. Trans. James G. Hart. Husserl Studies 12: 111–133. ———. 1997. Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–31). The Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, The Amsterdam Lectures “Phenomenology and Anthropology” and Husserl’s Marginal Note in Being and Time, and Kant on the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans. T. Sheehan and R.E. Palmer, in Collected Works, Vol. VI. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 2001a. Logical Investigations. Trans. John Findlay, ed. with a new introduction by Dermot Moran and new preface by Michael Dummett, 2 vols. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2001b. Natur und Geist: Vorlesungen, Sommersemester 1927. In Husserliana, ed. Michael Weiler, vol. 32. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2002a. Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. Trans. M.  Brainard. New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy II: 249–95. ———. 2002b. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Vorlesungen 1922/23. In Husserliana, ed. Berndt Goossens, vol. XXXV. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Hyppolite, Jean. 1959. L’idée fichtéenne de la doctrine de la science et le projet husserlien. Husserl et la pensée moderne. The Hague: Nijhoff. Janssen, Paul. 1970. Geschichte und Lebenswelt. Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion von Husserls Spätwerk. The Hague: Nijhoff. Jonas, Hans. 1966. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York: Harper and Row.

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———. 2008. In The Legacy of Hans Jonas: Judaism and the Phenomenon of Life, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Christian Wiese. Dordrecht: Brill. Kern, Iso. 1964. Husserl und Kant. Eine Untersuchungen über Husserls Verhältnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus. The Hague: Nijhoff. Klockenbusch, Reinhold. 1989. Husserl und Cohn. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kojève, Alexandre. 1947. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. 2nd ed. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1980. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. James H. Nichols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kolakowski, Leszek. 2005. Main Currents of Marxism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Koyré, Alexandre. 1961. Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique. Paris: Libraire Armand Colin. Landgrebe, Ludwig. 1940. The World as a Phenomenological Problem. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1 (1): 38–58. ———. 1968. Phänomenologie und Geschichte. Gütersloh: Verlagshaus G. Mohn. ———. 1972. The Problem of the Beginning of Philosophy in Husserl’s Phenomenology. In Life-World and Consciousness. Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1977. Phenomenology as Transcendental Theory of History. In Edmund Husserl. Expositions and Appraisals, ed. F. Elliston and P. McCormick, 101–114. Notre Dame: Notre Dame. Lask, Emil. 2002. Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte (Tübingen, 1902). Reprinted in Lask, Kleine Schriften: Sämtliche Werke Band I. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog. Lauer, Quentin. 1977. Phenomenology: Hegel and Husserl, in Essays in Hegelian Dialectic. New York: Fordham University Press. Liebmann, Otto. 1865. Kant und die Epigonen: Eine kritische Abhandlung. Stuttgart: Schober. Löwith, Karl. 1964. Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. ———. 1993. Max Weber and Karl Marx. London: Routledge. Luft, Sebastian. 2002. Phänomenologie der Phänomenologie. Systematik und Methodologie der Phänomenologie in der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Husserl und Fink, Phaenomenologica 166. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Mander, W.J. 2011. British Idealism, A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1928. Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie des Historischen Materialismus. Philosophische Hefte 1: 45–68. Marx, Werner. 1988. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Commentary Based on the Preface and Introduction. Trans. Peter Heath. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mohanty, J.N. 1952. Fichte’s Science of Knowledge and Husserl’s Phenomenology. Philosophical Quaterly 25: 113–125. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2010. Phenomenologies of Intersubjectivity: Fichte between Hegel and Husserl. In Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition, ed. V. Waibel, D. Breazeale, and T. Rockmore, 97–118. Berlin: DeGruyter. Pippin, Robert. 1993. You Can’t Get There from Here: Transition Problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C.  Beiser. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Gadamer’s Hegel. In The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pöggeler, Otto. 1973. Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie der Geistes. Freiburg: Alber. Przylebski, Andrzej. 1993. Das Hegelbild im Badischen Neukantianismus. Hegel-Jahrbuch, ed. Andreas Arndt, Jure Zovko, and Myriam Gerhard: 154–159. Rockmore, Tom. 1979. Fichte, Husserl, and Philosophical Science. International Philosophical Quarterly 19: 15–27. Rosshoff, Hartmut. 1975. Emil Lask als Lehrer von Georg Lukacs. Bonn: Bouvier. Roth, Michael S. 1988. Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Schmidt, Dennis. 1988. The Ubiquity of the Finite: Hegel, Heidegger and the Entitlements of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schuhmann, Karl, and Barry Smith. 1993. Two Idealisms: Lask and Husserl. Kant-Studien 83: 448–466. Singer, Michael. 2005. The Legacy of Hegel. Dordrecht: Springer. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1994. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd, revised and enlarged. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Staehler, Tanja. 2003. Die Unruhe des Anfangs. Hegel und Husserl über den Weg in die Phänomenologie, Phaenomenologica. Vol. 170. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Stern, Robert. 2007. Hegel, British Idealism and the Curious Case of the Concrete Universal. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15: 115–153. Tietzen, Hartmut. 1980. Fichte und Husserl. Letzbegründung, Subjektivität und Praktische Vernunft im transzendentale Idealismus. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Wahl, Jean. 1929. Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel. Paris: Rieder. ———. 1966. Le rôle de A. Koyré dans le développement des études hégéliennes en France. Hegel Studien Beiheft 3: 15–26. Williams, Robert R. 1992. Hegel and Phenomenology. In Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, 95–120. Albany: SUNY Press. Wolin, Richard. 2003. Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

How is a Phenomenology of Historical Worlds Possible? Tanja Staehler

Abstract  A phenomenology of the historical world, if successful, could provide us with a descriptive account of our historical world that does not pre-decide how the world should be organized on the political, economic, or cultural level. Yet in order for such a phenomenology to be successful, a plausible perspective on history is needed that is not limited to a mere succession of contingencies, but that allows exploring their connections. Teleology is what emerges from the description of these connections. According to both Hegel and Husserl, teleology is justified because history is (at least partly) shaped by human beings who act on reasons – but who can also be mistaken or manipulated. The thesis of the current article is that Husserl’s phenomenology radicalizes Hegel’s in such a way that a plausible account of history as teleology emerges, yet in such a way that history does not need to have one goal set from the beginning. Moreover, Husserl’s phenomenology allows for a plurality of historical worlds; it does not need to settle on an account of progress, and it allows to explore crises. Finally, on the issue of critique, a Husserlian response would be that understanding the crisis in its origins and different historical manifestations is a necessary first step to addressing it. Keywords  Hegel · Husserl · Historical world · Teleology

1  Introduction Why is it important to develop a phenomenology of historical worlds? Given the changing and complex nature of historical worlds, it might be more obvious why such a phenomenology is difficult than why it is significant. Let me therefore address its advantages before responding to some of the difficulties. Phenomenology is characterized by its descriptive nature. It does not prescribe how things ought to be, but it describes how things are. This is consistent with phenomenology’s starting point as both Hegel and Husserl characterize it: phenomenology should strive for a T. Staehler (*) University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Ferrarin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Phenomenology, Contributions To Phenomenology 102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_2

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presuppositionless beginning, should aim to make as few presuppositions as possible and carefully examine everything that could prove an implicit assumption. Such an approach might initially appear restrictive when it comes to historical worlds, since ‘mere’ description would not seem to allow for critique. Yet a critical approach tends to involve presuppositions, and our current perspective on the world makes us more than ever susceptible to taking certain political frameworks for granted, such as democracy. Yet the political is itself a peculiar realm. If we look more closely, we might well find that we neither fully understand the current political scenery nor the current economic crisis, nor the relationship between them. We could, however, learn from Hegel that politics (‘the state’) and economics (‘civil society’) are different realms, and having allowed for their inextricable intertwinement might be an important factor contributing to our current crisis. The fact that there is a crisis is barely debatable, and in that sense, starting with a description of the crisis of our historical world would seem the best way of not violating the phenomenological principle of presuppositionless beginnings. The strongest objections to there being a crisis might be these two questions: (1) Have there not always been crises? and (2) Has there not been so much progress that any talk of a crisis is just an unwarranted historical pessimism? In both respects, Hegel and Husserl will be our best candidates for discussing the issue. Husserl will allow us to describe how indeed there has always been a crisis in a certain sense; yet this allows us to see the current crisis in relationship to the origin of crisis (in Ancient Greece), tracing different manifestations of the crisis in different historical worlds. The second question takes us to what seems the most important difference between Hegel and Husserl: Hegel notoriously describes a history of progress, Husserl a history of crisis. In order to see the extent to which this is true, we need to examine what unites, and then again separates them: the idea of goal-directedness or teleology in history, which they both hold, yet in different ways.

2  Hegel and the Completion of History It is by no means a new accusation against Hegel that his philosophy lacks a dimension of critique concerning the historical situation, and that it is thus conservative in the literal sense of preserving the current condition. Already because of its popularity, this criticism needs to be treated with care. At the same time, the accusation appears to have a certain justification, especially since such criticism has not only been uttered in general, but on the basis of a thorough knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy.1 A very explicit passage in which Hegel confirms that he does not want to state what ‘ought to’ happen can be found in the “Preface” to the Philosophy of Right: 1  To give just one example which is chosen here because of its close connection to our current theme, let me quote Ernst Tugendhat: “The possibility of a self-responsible, critical relation to the state is not allowed for by Hegel; instead, we learn: the existent laws carry absolute authority; the community determines what the individual is supposed to do; the individual conscience has to

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This treatise, therefore, in so far as it deals with political science, shall be nothing other than an attempt to comprehend and portray the state as an inherently rational entity. As a philosophical composition, it must distance itself as far as possible from the obligation to construct a state as it ought to be; such instruction [Belehrung] as it may contain cannot be aimed at instructing the state on how it ought to be, but rather at showing how the state, as the ethical universe, should be recognized. (…) To comprehend what is is the task of philosophy, for what is is reason. As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts. (Hegel 1821, 26/21)2

This passage is so unequivocal that it hardly needs interpretation. Hegel’s refusal to give a presentation of the state “as it should be” appears to be motivated by the danger that such a presentation would fall into arbitrary speculation. If theorists lose sight of how the state is, they also lose sight of reality – and it cannot be our task to “construct” an ideal state. Yet it can also not be our task to merely observe what is the case but to examine how the state “should be recognized.” This statement implies that there are various possibilities to do so, and the way in which the recognizing takes place influences what is being recognized. When we look at the state rationally, we will also find reason in it. Moreover, the reality is so rich that it can tell us a lot if we only know how to read it. Reality itself can tell us what we should do, i.e., what we should do in the face of this reality (rather than in empty space, so to speak). Even though Hegel never literally speaks of an “end of history,” there are many passages in his work which show that he regarded his time as the completion of history. This is particularly obvious in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History when Hegel says that the “ultimate result” of the process of world history has become realized in the present (Hegel 1970, 141/116). Spirit has become present in reality, which becomes apparent on an external level in the fact that state and church are co-equal. When compared to the life history of a human being, so Hegel explains, the Germanic world corresponds to the “old age” (Greisenalter); yet in contrast to the individual’s old age as a time of weakness, the old age of Spirit signifies its “perfect maturity and strength” (Hegel 1970, 140/115). Hegel cautions us to avoid hasty parallels, and it would be hasty to conclude from the designation “old age” that this age will be followed by Spirit’s death. And yet, if the goal of world history has been realized, what else should follow? On the basis of a teleological conception of history, how could there be a next step after the goal has been reached? A further argument to show that Hegel indeed assumed that history could be completed lies in the parallel between world history and system of logic: history is the system in its development.3 Spirit externalizes itself into space and time; its externalization into space is nature, its externalization into time is history (Hegel disappear, and reflection is replaced by trust – this is what Hegel means by the sublation of morality into Sittlichkeit” (Tugendhat 1979, 349). 2  Hereafter, the page number of the English translation follows the corresponding page number of the German edition. 3  See Hegel (1807, 491/589): “Conversely, to each abstract moment of Science corresponds a shape of manifest Spirit as such [eine Gestalt des erscheinenden Geistes überhaupt].”

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1807, 492/590). If the development of Spirit runs parallel to the levels of actual history and if this development can be presented in a highly complex, yet accessible system, the question about a possible end of history indeed becomes pressing. Of course, such an end would not mean that nothing would happen in the future; but it is implied that nothing essentially new would happen any more, i.e., nothing which had not already been treated at one point of the system or the other. Concerning the Phenomenology of Spirit, this means that all essential shapes of consciousness have been dealt with. They can be repeated, and they might even be repeated in a modified form. But to the extent that Spirit reached itself in the end, there is no motivation to pass from the shape of absolute knowing to a fundamentally new shape. The idea of such an end does not mean that time stops. However, whether a development which does not allow for anything truly new can be called history is a difficult question. Not only would it be arrogant to state how the world will need to be, but “the insight to which philosophy should lead us is that the actual world is as it should be” (Hegel 1970, 53/38). This is the case because God has accomplished the world and has come to reign: “God reigns over the world; the content of his government, the fulfillment of his plan is world history” (Hegel 1970, 53/38). God’s government of the world has two implications. It means that nothing is lacking; there is nothing we should – and could – hope and wait for. Furthermore, it means that time has been annulled and that time and eternity have been reconciled. Spirit belongs to eternity (Hegel 1970, 141/116).4 What is meant here by eternity? For Hegel, eternity is not the negation of time; that would be bad eternity since it remains dependent on time. This theme is connected to the distinction between the “bad” and the “good” infinite. The bad infinite is defined in opposition to the finite, hence determined by and dependent on it. If infinity is supposed to be true infinity, nothing can be opposed to it. As a result, Hegel rejects infinite progress because it remains related to finitude. Infinite progress is merely the negation of finitude; it means to go beyond the limit again and again. The image of infinite progress is the “the straight line, with the infinite on both ends” (Hegel 1812, 164). Its problematic nature becomes obvious when imagining such a line. We can only imagine a finite line; thus, with respect to both endpoints, the question arises as to how to continue. The line continues just in the same fashion. The limits, the endpoints of the line are being surpassed again and again, yet only to reach new endpoints which need to be surpassed. In contrast, the image of true infinity is the circle, “the line that has reached itself, that has closed and entirely present, without beginning point and end” (Hegel 1812, 164). Eternity is the “absolute present” (Hegel 1830a, 26) which will not be, but is. Spirit is eternal, i.e., “it is not over, and neither is it not yet, but is essentially now” (Hegel 1970, 105) – as the present Spirit which encompasses all earlier levels. The concept of absolute present evokes an association with the “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart) in Husserl. Both philosophers are thinkers of the present.

4  See also Hegel (1830b, § 577): “(…) and this movement is just as much the activity of knowing in which the eternal idea in and for itself engages, creates, and enjoys itself as absolute Spirit.”

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3  Open Teleology in Husserl Husserl also considers history to be determined by an inherent teleological directedness; in characterizing this directedness, his formulations are strikingly similar to those of Hegel. Yet in contrast to Hegel, Husserl emphasizes the openness of history. The telos is an idea of absolute perfection lying in infinity. In this part, I will first briefly present Husserl’s ideas regarding the teleological character of history. Afterwards, the accusation that Husserl’s conception of history entails an image of the future which does not do justice to the nature of future will be examined, first on the level of inner time-consciousness, then on the level of history. Concerning both levels, I shall argue that Husserl’s phenomenology provides the possibility to account for the phenomenon of the future in a satisfying fashion. However, Husserl sometimes goes beyond the frame of his own philosophy and overemphasizes the way in which the future can be planned, rather than acknowledging how the future not only crosses out our plans, but it comes toward us as that which we truly did not expect. If the horizontality of all experience is taken seriously, the strength of Husserl’s philosophy emerges as that of a “working philosophy” (Arbeitsphilosophie) which he did not want to end, but to begin. On the level of history, horizontality comes to manifest itself as the relation between homeworlds and alienworlds. Husserl’s philosophy thereby acquires a fundamental ethical dimension which prevents his conception of history from sliding into a mere relativism. “The teleology which is now our topic as an ownmost feature of philosophy’s history certainly designates nothing less than some kind of a metaphysical substructum [Substruktion], no matter how this substructum would be presented”  – Thus runs Husserl’s opening sentence for a manuscript on teleology in the history of philosophy from the texts supplementing the Crisis (Husserl 1992, 362). For Husserl, teleology designates an inner sense, a tendency which shows “what, through all these philosophers, ‘the point of it’ ultimately was” (Husserl 1954, 74/73). Is Husserl thus only concerned with the history of philosophy, not with the history of mankind as a whole? Is teleology only at work in the history of philosophy? The fact that Husserl speaks of the “crisis of European sciences” or, as the title of the original Vienna lecture has it, the “crisis of European mankind,” shows that Husserl is not merely concerned with the history of philosophy. Philosophers are “functionaries of mankind” (Husserl 1954, 16/17); their ideas are supposed to have a guiding function, and in that sense, their reflections show what “the point of it” was. Yet in contrast to Hegel, Husserl does not really thematize the relation between the history of philosophy and the history of mankind.5 When relating Husserl’s conception of the present to Hegel’s, an objection arises concerning Husserl’s thesis of a teleological directedness of history: Husserl does 5  However, he asks rhetorical questions like this one: “Is philosophy perhaps merely a primary example of the universal truth that the deepest and truest history is the one which takes place in the common history of external, motivational contexts, as a history of ideas in the sense which has to first be clarified with respect to philosophy?” (Husserl 1992, 418).

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not consider his times as a period of completion, but as a situation of crisis. How can a teleological development yield a crisis? Such a crisis can occur if philosophers did not truly realize what “the point of it” is, i.e., if they interpreted the primordially instituted sense (Urstiftungssinn) in a one-sided fashion. What justifies the teleological designation of the development is the primordially instituted sense, which was given to philosophy and sciences in ancient Greece. This sense has been modified or re-instituted during the course of history; it is not a static sense, but a historical sense, keeping its unity as it undergoes modification. The primordially instituted sense has become blurred, misdirected, and misunderstood in various ways during the course of history. While originally the goal was to gain reliable insight into being as a whole, there has been an emphasis on objective knowledge, ignoring the subject-relativity of all knowing and its grounds in the lifeworld. This misunderstanding is thus ultimately not a function of the philosophers’ blindness, but stems from an ambiguity in the primordially instituted sense itself. Husserl states that the “end of the development is rather a beginning,” namely, a beginning of the “infinite task for the open infinity of future scholar generations” (Husserl 1992, 408). Although Hegel also considers the end as the beginning – hence the image of the circle –, he does not regard it as the beginning of something new, extending into infinity. From Husserl’s perspective, the preceding history of thought has been determined by imperfection and deficits; yet these deficits are shortcomings caused by a lack of self-reflection. They can therefore be overcome, and this is the task of phenomenology. At the same time, such shortcomings in the history of philosophy do not result from contingent difficulties of specific philosophers, but are founded in the objectivist tendency which is already prepared for in the Greek primordial institution of philosophy and which becomes effective particularly during the modern era. Yet is it possible, considering this background, to conceive of transcendental phenomenology as history’s telos? After all, the present experience is an experience of crisis, and Husserl himself states: “Indeed, philosophy since Descartes exhibits nothing less than the image of a teleology completing itself” (Husserl 1992, 398). We thus need to undertake a closer examination of this teleology within the history of philosophy as diagnosed by Husserl. Husserl presumes that we not only bring our rationality to bear on history, but that we aim at reason’s success and at being enlightened. This assumption is related to the concept of intentionality as the dynamic directedness toward intuiting the object more and more closely. Does the concept of intentionality with its basic schema of expectation and fulfillment or disappointment offer enough room for the surprising and the new? Considered on the level of history, does Husserl’s philosophy sufficiently account for the nature of the future, given that future appears to be more than and different from the process of increasing rationalization?

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Husserl has often been criticized for his conception of the future. His view would not allow for the “essentially new”6 or for the “unexpected, surprising future.”7 The most prominent expression of this criticism can be found in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy. Levinas points out that, in its true nature, the future is absolutely other and cannot be grasped or anticipated. The future is absolutely surprising; this has been missed by all theories of time, from Bergson to Sartre, since they considered the future to be a projection of the past (Levinas 1987, 82). The concept of intentionality which is so central to Husserl’s phenomenology makes it impossible, according to Levinas, to conceive of the future as absolutely other: in the “intentional relation of representation (…) the same is in relation with the other but in such a way that the other does not determine the same; it is always the same that determines the other” (Levinas 1969, 124). To be sure, it is possible to confront Levinas’s concept of the “absolutely other” with the (more Hegelian than Husserlian) question as to what absolute otherness is supposed to mean, if it is absolute, i.e. in no way related to the same. Phrased in phenomenological terms and related more concretely to the future, the question is, how can the future surprise us if surprising is not supposed to mean running counter to an expectation or being different from all expectations? This problem shall first be considered here with respect to individual time-­ consciousness and its intentionality. The basic schema of intentionality as developed, for example, in Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis, involves having an expectation about the further continuation of my perception. This expectation will be fulfilled or disappointed. In this process, a retroactive crossing-out can occur, as when we realize that what we took to be a human being is, and has been, in fact a mannequin. Such an expectation is obviously grounded in the present perception; but it can always be disappointed, and we know about the possibility of such disappointment. This basic schema can also account for the difference between intersubjectivity and the perception of an object: the Other is accessible in the mode of inaccessibility. Here as well, I have expectations, and I might even expect the Other to behave like myself, but I constantly encounter the failures of such assumptions. The Other surprises me, offering more and at the same time less than I had expected.

6  Janssen (1970, 114). Janssen first explains with respect to Hegel’s concept of history: “In this way, historical teleology lets the future become inessential because the present, as preserving completion of the past, contains the essence of the future such that nothing ‘essentially new’ can come from it.” And a corresponding footnote explains: “This feature also holds for the historical teleology in Hegel as well as in Husserl. In Husserl, this is less obvious since he considers the future as an infinite horizon for phenomenological research and development. But this future horizon is defined by the conditions of transcendental phenomenology which determine in advance that only something which conforms to it can occur.” 7  See Bernet (1983, 30 f.): “The analysis of time as epistemologically oriented expands further the primacy of the now-present as naturally assumed. However, it employs the unnatural reduction of the passed present to the present remembering [Vergegenwärtigung] and the future present to the current expectation [Entgegenwärtigung] of the future. It thus denies the forgotten past and the unexpected, surprising future.”

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Husserl can well be accused of not sufficiently examining the dimension of the unexpected, although his late philosophy attends more to this dimension (without, however, explaining how the basic concepts of his philosophy need to be modified). The “positive” function of that which crosses out would need to be emphasized more; such an objection could be brought forth against Husserl, with the help of Hegel. Crossing out is not merely an “obstacle” (Hemmung) (Husserl 1992, 366) or “disappointment” (Enttäuschung) (Husserl 1966, 25/63). Although the expressions “obstacle” and “disappointment” do not hold negative connotations for Husserl, it is not by chance that he uses these expressions rather than stating that something comes toward us or overcomes us. On the level of history, the situation is doubtlessly more complex than on the level of time-consciousness, and our plans – individual and communal ones – are crossed through in a less obvious fashion. Does the future perhaps indeed play a marginal role in Husserl’s conception of history, given that he appears to be mostly interested in “rationalization”? This claim could be supported by the fact that transcendental phenomenology, for Husserl, has the task of fulfilling the primordially instituted sense which was at work, albeit in a concealed fashion, in past philosophies. The tasks, possibilities and limits of phenomenology thus appear to be set in advance. The expression “reactivation” is significant in this context because it designates a turning back. What is being reactivated is a first instituting act (Husserl 1992, 371), such as the act of primordially instituting philosophy and science. Yet this reactivation harbors – and this is essential – a directedness toward the future which consists in “me having this abiding direction of will ‘from now on [hinfort]’” (Husserl 1992, 371f.). Reactivation thus means that, upon reflection, I take up a decision or a task again. This means, first, that I do not simply repeat this task, but I revive it for myself (and modify it in such a way that it can be presently alive for me). Second, the mere revival of a task or direction does not yet tell us anything about its actual execution; that would be too easy. Rather, we reflect on the past in order to get a better sense of how we should try to shape our future – and this is more difficult than just enjoying the day. The fact that we have a future and worry about it distinguishes us from animals, according to Husserl.8 This concern is rooted in the “world’s structure of fate and death”9 – and it is this structure which human beings meet with reason and with rational planning. How does reason manifest itself, how does it come to appear? Already in the Kaizo articles, it becomes obvious that Husserl conceives of reason in the sense of the Greek logos, designating that in which humans participate. That which humans share then finds its expression in logos qua language. 8  Manuscript E III 4, Teleologie, 3a: “The life of the animal as life in the concrete present with its small component of future. The human life as life into a wide future of life, as life in care which turns into universal care for the entire future of life” [Das Leben des Tieres als Leben in der konkreten Gegenwart, mit ihrem kleinen Bestand von Zukunft. Das Menschenleben als Leben in eine weite Lebenszukunft hinein, als Leben in der Vorsorge, die zur universalen Sorge für die ganze Lebenszukunft wird]. I would like to thank the Husserl Archives for permission to cite from this manuscript. 9  Manuscript E III 4, 10a: Schicksals- und Todesstruktur der Welt.

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4  The Problem of Singular and Plural It thus becomes obvious that intersubjectivity plays an essential role in Husserl’s teleological understanding of history. At the same time, language is not a unified phenomenon; we are usually dealing with a native tongue, potentially some more or less familiar foreign languages and a multiplicity of entirely foreign languages. Within the context of a phenomenology of history, Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity acquires a new form which is essentially determined by the relation between home- and alien  worlds. Accordingly, the question arises as to how the limits between home and alien can be transgressed without being neglected or violated.10 Respecting these limits means that the points of view of home and alien are not interchangeable. We always remain bound to our homeworld and can only cross its borders as coming from within; there is no bird’s-eye view that would allow us to survey different worlds (Held 2000, 11). The fact that a bird’s eye view of this kind does not exist means that homeworld and alienworld cannot be dissolved into a higher unity. In spite of the fact that borders shift and move all the time, it will never be possible to extend the borders of the homeworld such that there would be one world only. The prospect of a possible single world can with good reasons be called imperialistic: we always have to start from our homeworld and can, at most, extend its limits; we cannot leap over all existing limits and gain a homogeneous world in this way. Husserl talks a lot about “the common objective world,” the “world in itself” (Husserl 1973, 436f.), or the “true world” as the topic of transcendental phenomenology (Husserl 1973, 215 fn.). At the same time, he says explicitly: “The world in itself (...) is never given” (Husserl 1973, 614). Is Husserl here contradicting himself? Even if Husserl might use misleading formulations at times, his position seems to be the following, non-contradictory one: the world in itself is indeed never given, namely, never given in experience. However, phenomenology searches for “invariant” structures of the lifeworld, which belong to the project of a lifeworld ontology. The twofold character of the lifeworld as world-horizon (Welthorizont) and earth-­ ground (Erdboden) are examples for such structures, as well as the relativity of homeworld and alienworld itself. Although every world has in one way or the other the character of earth-ground, the “one” earth-ground, the earth-ground in itself is never given to us. Given is this particular, relative earth-ground, as it comes to appearance in the context of a homeworld. Nevertheless is it legitimate for phenomenology to search for those structures if we keep in mind that they are ‘ideas’ and not something given in experience. Likewise, we have a “right to the idea of a complete understanding” (Husserl 1973, 625), even though there are actually always limits to our understanding, because of the limits of homeworld and alienworld. By designating reason as omnitemporal, Husserl is creating the impression that there is one reason common to all humans. It seems indeed to be Husserl’s conviction that there is such a unified concept of reason; but it makes a difference whether 10

 Steinbock (1995, 250 ff). See also Waldenfels (1991, 39).

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there is the “idea” of such reason, coming to manifest itself in various shapes, or whether unified reason is postulated as truly existing. Although some of Husserl’s formulations sound as if he held the second of these two positions, he only remains true to the principles of his phenomenology if he holds the first position.11 To see this better, reason should once again be understood as logos. Even though there is no homogenous ground of communication amongst people, we nevertheless assume that communication is possible. We can convey12 our opinion to the Other but need to keep in mind that misunderstandings are possible and that there is no guarantee. This situation becomes obvious in the way logos manifests itself in different languages. Translation makes the communication between home and alien possible, yet it does not preclude misunderstandings. These considerations also offer new possibilities for thinking philosophy as singular. We do have a unified idea of philosophy which we utilize when distinguishing the philosophical from the non-philosophical. But is not philosophy concretely always given as philosophies which are closer and more familiar to us and those which are more distant, depending on our point of departure? Is not analytic philosophy, for example, something which is at first alien to phenomenologists, albeit not inaccessible? Within certain limits, we can understand the alien. This is due to the fact that something alien can already be found in ourselves. For example, my transcendental ego in its functioning is not entirely accessible to me, but it withdraws.13 Yet despite various crucial moments of insight, Husserl does not sufficiently consider phenomena of withdrawal (Entzug). The withdrawal corresponds to the coming of a future which is ultimately not in our hand. It is undeniably “good” for us to plan and project and strive to realize rational goals. Yet we need to be aware that this is not the full picture, and that we might sometimes even be successful against our intentions (and without being able to give an account). It is part of the nature of horizons to be limited, even though these limits can be shifted and modified. Furthermore, there are always some horizons in the dark. The horizontality of all knowledge and experience means that we never survey all connections; “no thing is entirely isolated” (Husserl 1988, 79). When it comes to historical horizons, we are always confronted with various home and alien horizons rather than a unified world. Analogously, history cannot be reduced to a unity; open horizons extend into the future.

 See also Ladrière (1960, 187).  Drawing on Kant’s third critique, Klaus Held suggests the appropriate German term “ansinnen” to describe this conveying (Held 2000, 12). 13  See also Bernet’s convincing article in Bernet (1998), in which he shows the strengths of Husserl’s interpretation in comparison to Levinas’s: “Sticking to the First Interpretation and its conception of an analogous apprehension of the Other, one would then have to say that there must be a strangeness in myself the understanding of which guides me in my apprehension (or appresentation) of the Other’s strangeness. Several texts of Husserl seem to be willing to go as far as this” (Bernet 1998, 97). 11 12

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5  Historical World in Crisis The relevance of Husserl’s considerations for our times finds some confirmation in the fact that Derrida, in his late text Rogues. Two Essays on Reason (Derrida 2005) turns to Husserl’s Crisis and especially to the notion of crisis. He certainly does not take it for granted that our crisis is Husserl’s crisis, but since it is rare for philosophers to focus on crises and especially historical crises, Derrida seems to suggest that we take Husserl’s considerations seriously, at least as a starting point. On this basis, we might then ask: “What would have changed for us since 1935–36, since this Husserlian call to a philosophical and European coming to awareness in the experience of a crisis of the sciences and of reason?” (Derrida 2005, 124). Perhaps we need to try to think “something other, in any case, than a crisis of reason, beyond a crisis of science and of conscience, beyond a crisis of Europe” (Derrida 2005, 124), Derrida suggests. However, as his reflections unfold, it appears that the crisis is actually still a crisis of reason and perhaps of the sciences and also of Europe; it is just not limited to Europe and to sciences, but it is more encompassing. And it is still a crisis of reason, but it involves reason in a more entangled or interdependent fashion than it initially seemed. Maybe ‘our’ crisis goes back to the same primacy of quantification that Husserl identified as problematic, no longer only embodied by the natural sciences but rather, the economic sciences, their laws and predictions? A boundless capitalism, coupled with a global expansion of that which for Hegel was called ‘civil society’ and which originally held a subordinate position in the system to that of the political – this is not the place to develop a response to this explosive combination, from a phenomenological perspective. A first step, from a Husserlian perspective, would certainly consist in reflecting back from the abstract to the concrete, and thus to the concrete lifeworld. Economics considers relations which have their basis in the lifeworldly activities of trading and exchange. It was exactly in trading, according to Husserl, that the Greeks encountered alien trading nations. Such encounters can lead to a productive ‘crisis’ of the home convictions. While the levelling of all differences and the illusion of a unified lifeworld only veils the crisis and thus exacerbates it, it is in the encounter with the alien that the kind of wonder might arise which leads us into philosophy, according to Husserl.14 Traditional philosophy has resembled the sciences by placing an emphasis on the identical being-in-itself in contrast to the various subjective ways of grasping it. Phenomenology, in contrast, strives to examine both the relative ways of givenness and the non-relative core, and the difference between them. It is this twofold emphasis, and the focus on the relation between objectivity and subjective givenness, that justifies Husserl’s otherwise peculiar claims at the end of the essay on The Origin of Geometry. Husserl here explains that his phenomenological approach to history is closely linked with the existence of a “universal historical a priori” and an a priori  See Husserl (1954), 331 on wonder and Husserl (1992), 387 about the relevance of encountering the alien.

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of the lifeworld. In fact, he seems to claim (although his formulations are somewhat ambiguous in this respect) that the existence of such a priori forms the presupposition of his method. Husserl deemed the project of an “ontology of the lifeworld” quite significant (Husserl 1954, §37), but he never really carried it out.15 For him, such an ontology would be a crucial component of a phenomenology of historical worlds. Such an ontology would be concerned with identifying irrelative or invariant structures of the lifeworld which form a “lifeworldly apriori” (Husserl 1954, 139/142). Husserl is convinced that the lifeworld has “in all its relative features, a general structure’ which is ‘not itself relative’” (Husserl 1954, 139/142). The assumption of such an apriori is dubious to Derrida. At the same time, it is Derrida who alerts us to one of Husserl’s most plausible examples for such invariant structures: the earth-ground (Erdboden) which designates the phenomenon that every culture rests on some kind of earth-ground, even though its actual appearance varies, in accordance with the culture and historical epoch (Derrida (1989), 84 ff.).16 Each culture and each epoch needs some version of earth-ground on which to build their dwelling, and this earth-­ ground forms their point of orientation, their ‘here,’ which is experienced as resting (so that motion can be defined in relation to it). Although the actual givenness of this earth-ground varies from culture to culture and epoch to epoch, it makes sense to identify the structure of earth-ground as constitutive of every lifeworld. This example works well to show the strength of the phenomenological method: phenomenology can identify the one, unified, irrelative structure (in this case, of earth-ground), but it also attends to the multiple forms of givenness. Phenomenology thus does not undermine the project of the sciences, it but complements it by trying to understand it better. By thematizing the relation between ideal objects and lifeworld, phenomenology can also describe what a remarkable accomplishment the spiritual idealisation is, and how it allows us to take an extreme distance from our entanglement in the vagueness of the lifeworld. It is this vagueness which prevents Valentine, a scientist in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, to continue his work on a mathematical model of the grouse population. Close to tears, he decides that he “can’t do it” because there is “just too much bloody noise!” (Stoppard 1999, 62) or, as Valentine described it earlier: “Distortions. Interference. Real data is messy” (Stoppard 1999, 46). There is no solution to this problem; but it might help to thematize the ‘noise’ as such, rather than trying to forget about the noisy lifeworld.  In addition to the Crisis and supplementary manuscripts, Husserl provides indications for such a project in a manuscript entitled The Anthropological World (Husserl 1992). 16  Husserl suggests a closer examination of the lifeworld’s ground-function in the Crisis (Husserl 1954, 158), but he conducts it elsewhere, see Husserl (1941, 2002). Already the titles of these manuscripts indicate that the earth-ground is taken here to constitute the spatiality of the lifeworld. In order to investigate the nature of the earth-ground, Husserl revisits his reflections on the livedbody (Leib). Just like the lived-body presents a zero point in relation to which rest and motion acquire their meaning, the earth-ground exhibits this function on the larger scale. Cf. Steinbock 1995, Chapter 7. 15

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To sum up, the differences between Hegel and Husserl regarding the concept of teleology are rooted in their divergent conceptions of history’s telos. For Hegel, this telos is attainable and unchangeable; for Husserl, it is unattainable and it can be modified in the course of history. While it might seem likely that a teleological conception of history would lead to an emphasis on the future, this is the case neither for Hegel nor for Husserl. Hegel considers the present as completion of a teleological development. In Husserl’s philosophy, the present plays an essential role as the dividing line between the primordially instituted sense and the goals of the future. Our expectations and goals for the future are (partly) known to us in the present, as yet unfulfilled; whether they will become fulfilled in the future is later on measured back against these expectations. Although it has turned out, in this essay, that it is justified to describe a surprise from the phenomenological perspective as that which runs counter to our expectations, Husserl does place too little emphasis on the “positive” and not merely disappointing aspect of the way in which the future comes toward us as new and surprising. It is thus true that Hegel and Husserl, in different ways, do not give sufficient room to the phenomenon of the future in their conception of history. In Hegel’s case, this shortcoming is grounded in the essence of his philosophy while Husserl’s phenomenology would allow him to place more emphasis on the coming of the future. Hegel thus holds on the primacy of the present in accordance with his philosophy; Husserl holds on to the same primacy, yet against the possibilities of his phenomenology. This also becomes obvious on the level of communal history: Husserl’s attempts to transcend the various home- and alienworlds toward one world run counter to his own philosophy. Furthermore, Husserl discusses homeworlds in much more detail than alienworlds. To be sure, a phenomenology of the alien has an entirely different character than that of the home; it requires considering the different forms of rupture in the home experience and the different ways of being called into question. It sometimes seems as if Husserl wanted to stay on safe, homey ground as long as possible – even though he has already realized that the home is always already permeated by the alien and that even the traditionally self-certain transcendental ego withdraws. In a similar fashion, Sartre criticizes Hegel, here in respect to intersubjectivity, by accusing him of an ontological and epistemological optimism. According to Sartre, Hegel takes the perspective of the whole and thereby takes position outside of consciousness; he attempts to surpass the “plurality” toward the “totality” (Sartre 1943, 243). Yet it is not possible for us to take up the standpoint of totality: “No logical or epistemological optimism can cover the scandal of the plurality of consciousnesses. If Hegel believed that it could, this is because he never grasped the nature of that particular dimension of being which is self-consciousness” (Sartre 1943, 244). The desire to attain the viewpoint of an encompassing totality is understandable and human. But we gain a future only by giving up on complete transparency.

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References Bernet, Rudolf. 1983. Die ungegenwärtige Gegenwart. Anwesenheit und Abwesenheit in Husserls Analyse des Zeitbewußtseins. In Zeit und Zeitlichkeit bei Husserl und Heidegger, Phänomenologische Forschungen, ed. E.W. Orth, vol. 14, 16–57. Freiburg: Alber. ———. 1998. Encounter with the Stranger: Two Interpretations of the Vulnerability of the Skin. In Zeit und Zeitlichkeit bei Husserl und Heidegger, Phänomenologische Forschungen, ed. E.W. Orth, 89–111. Freiburg: Alber. Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. An Introduction. Trans. J.P. Leavey. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2005. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. P.-A.  Brault, and M.  Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1807. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke, vol. 3, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans: A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. ———. 1812. Wissenschaft der Logik, I. Erster Teil: Die objective Logik. Werke, vol. 5, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1969. Hegel’s Logic. Trans: W. Wallace. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. ———. 1821. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. Werke, vol. 7, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970. Trans. T.  M. Knox, 1942; Trans: H.  B. Nisbet, 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1830a. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II.  Die Naturphilosophie. Werke, Vol. 9. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt, a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970. ———. 1830b. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III. Werke, vol. 10, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970. Trans. W. Wallace. Together with the Zusätze in Boumann’s Text (1845). Trans: A.V. Miller. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ———. 1969–1971. Werke in 20 vol., ed. E.  Moldenhauer und K.M.  Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1970. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Werke, vol. 12. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Held, Klaus. 2000. The Controversy Concerning Truth: Towards a Prehistory of Phenomenology. Husserl Studies 17 (1): 35–48. Husserl, Edmund. 1941. Notizen zur Raumkonstitution (1934), ed. A.  Schütz. Philosophy and phenomenological research 1: 21–37. ———. 1950. Husserliana. The Hague: Nijhoff. 1950–1987; Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer 1988–2004; Cham/Heidelberg/New York/Dordrecht/London: Springer, 2011-. ———. 1954. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. In Husserliana, ed. Walter Biemel, vol. 6. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1966. Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs-und Forschungsmanuskripten, 1918–1926. In Husserliana, ed. Margot Fleischer, vol. 11. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil. 1929–35. In Husserliana, ed. Iso Kern, vol. 15. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1988. Aufsätze und Vorträge. 1922–1937. In Husserliana, ed. T. Nenon and H.R. Sepp, vol. 27. The Hague: Kluwer. ———. 1992. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937. In Husserliana, ed. Reinhold N. Smid, vol. 29. The Hague: Kluwer.

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———. 2002. Foundational investigations of the phenomenological origin of the spatiality of nature: The originary ark, the earth, does not move. In Merleau-Ponty. Maurice. Husserl at the limits of phenomenology. Including texts by Edmund Husserl, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo, 117–131. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Janssen, Paul. 1970. Geschichte und Lebenswelt. The Hague: Kluwer. Ladrière, Jean. 1960. Hegel, Husserl, and Reason Today. The Modern Schoolman XXXVII: 171–195. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. ———. 1987. Time and the Other. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard. Steinbock, Anthony J.  1995. Home and Beyond. Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern UP. Stoppard, Tom. 1999. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber. Tugendhat, Ernst. 1979. Selbstbewußtsein und Selbstbestimmung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 1991. Der Stachel des Fremden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Hegel and Husserl on the History of Reason Danilo Manca

Abstract  In the present essay, I will compare Hegel’s and Husserl’s conceptions of the history of philosophy. I will show how Hegel and Husserl recast Kant’s idea of a philosophizing history of philosophy in two different ways. Both Hegel and Husserl share the conviction that reason unfolds itself in history. Nonetheless, whereas Hegel identifies the history of philosophy with the contingent manifestation of the self-actualization of the Idea, Husserl develops a critical history of ideas. On the one hand, Hegel conceives of the history of philosophy as a complex whole and each determinate philosophy as interpreting a specific articulation of the logical deduction of thought-determinations. On the other hand, perhaps influenced by Windelband, Husserl appropriates the Kantian thesis according to which the objects of the history of reason represent specific constellations of problems. Keywords  History of philosophy · Reason in history · Historicity · Hegel · Husserl · Kant

1  Introduction Any attempt to embark on a comparison between Hegel and Husserl meets a simple objection: in his works, Husserl takes scarce interest in Hegel’s philosophy, and his few references to Hegel are quite disputable. In the present essay, I would like to demonstrate that this objection presupposes a view of the history of philosophy that is far from that which Hegel and Husserl conversely share. In particular, such an objection presupposes the idea that a comparison between two thinkers can be considered not just significant, but also possible, only when the influence of one philosopher on the other is philologically attestable. This is not the case with Hegel on Husserl, as is easily demonstrable. But this idea does not belong to either Hegel or Husserl; rather, they portray the history of philosophy as an ongoing whole, which encompasses all determinate philosophical perspectives coming in succession over D. Manca (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Ferrarin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Phenomenology, Contributions To Phenomenology 102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_3

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the course of history, and which takes them to be the moments of reason’s self-­ actualization in the contingent field of history. In the first section of this essay, I will focus on Kant’s idea of a history of reason. This will allow me to deal in the second section with the problem of the historicity of philosophy and to examine the different solutions that Hegel and Husserl have provided in their works. In the third section, I will deal with the different models for a history of reason that both Hegel and Husserl develop by starting from a confrontation with Kant’s idea that the history of reason should deal with some particular constellations of problems.

2  Kant and the Philosophizing Historiography of Philosophy Kant introduces the notion of “a pure history of reason” at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason. In the fourth chapter of the transcendental Doctrine of Method, he employs such an expression for “a place that is left open in the system and must be filled in the future” (Kant 1781/1787, A852/B880). Here he only limits himself to casting a cursory glance, from a transcendental point of view, on the becoming of reason in history. His sketch of the history of philosophy is, however, catastrophic, since he sees the history of pure reason as characterized by a series of edifices in ruins, which convey the alteration of metaphysics over the centuries. In such a way, Kant repeats the argumentation of his preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, whereby metaphysics is described as the battlefield of endless controversies and as a queen of all the sciences that, however, mourns, outcast and forsaken, like Hecuba (Cf. Kant 1781, AVIII).1 In the last chapter of his masterpiece, Kant points out that in the infancy of philosophy, metaphysics enjoyed a privileged position, since human beings began where modern philosophy rather ends, namely, “by studying first the cognition of God and the hope or indeed the constitution of another world” (Kant 1781/1787, A852/B880). Furthermore, he lists three different points of view from which one could evaluate the stage of conflict characterizing metaphysics in modern times: they are the object of rational cognition, the origin of pure cognition of reason, and the method ruling philosophical inquiry. The fact that here Kant provides a historical sketch of the development of reason’s self-understanding could seem at odds with the claim of the Architectonic of Pure Reason, where Kant identifies historical cognition with cognition ex datis

1  Yovel (1980, 6) distinguishes two different sense of Kant’s conception of the history of reason. The first is practical; according to it, the history of reason coincides with the process whereby “human reason imprints itself upon the actual world, reshaping its empirical organization in light of its own goals and interests”. The second sense is manly theoretical, since it identifies the history of reason with the process through which “human reason gradually explicates its latent paradigm, articulating its essential concepts, principles, and interest within a coherent system”.

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because it does not arise from the spontaneous activity of reason, but depends on instruction and imitation (cf. Kant 1781/1787, A836/B864ff.). Kant sets historical cognition against philosophical cognition, which arises from principles and is strictly related to the essential ends of human reason. And, consequently, he states that philosophy cannot be learned; we can at best only learn to philosophize. A philosophical cognition based only on instruction and history proceeds in a scholastic way. It is erudition rather than authentic cosmic philosophy, since it is not effectively driven by ends which reason spontaneously produces by itself and adopts as regulative ideas. In other words, a historical inquiry of philosophy seems to provide, from that perspective, an external cognition which allows reason in no way to lead back to the origins of its own activity. Thus, at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason the reference to the history of pure reason seems to be merely another way to strengthen the idea that, at this level of the history of philosophy, the only path still open is that of critical philosophy, since it is the only way to bring human reason to full satisfaction.2 Nonetheless, Kant further develops his analysis by expressing the need of a historical cognition of pure reason in his Fortschritte zur Metaphysik. In an appendix to this essay, he deals with the concept of “a philosophizing history of philosophy” (Kant 1942, 340/417).3 He begins by noting that all historical knowledge is empirical, hence it is concerned with the things as they are. This does not, however, imply that things necessarily have to be that way. A historical presentation of philosophy is just an account of how philosophizing has been done theretofore, and in what order. More specifically, it is characterized by the absence of necessity. However, Kant even acknowledges that “philosophizing is a gradual development of human reason, and this cannot have set forth, or even have begun, upon the empirical path, and that by mere concepts” (Kant 1942, 340/417). The object of a philosophical historiography is the same activity of philosophizing. It cannot be properly presented in an empirical way, by means of an account proceeding rhapsodically, without any kind of order except that of time. A history of philosophy should be philosophical in turn: “A philosophizing history of philosophy is itself possible, not historically or empirically, but rationally, i.e., a priori” (Kant 1942, 341/417). The historian of philosophy does not have to assume chronological events as clues in his or her inquiry, but one must be able to grasp “a need of reason (theoretical or practical) which obliged it to ascend from its judgments about things to the grounds thereof” (Kant 1942, 340/417). More explicitly than in the final chapter of Critique of Pure Reason, here Kant proposes an analogy between the process through which philosophical reason becomes conscious of its own spontaneous thinking (Selbstdenken) and reason’s historical work. Indeed, he explains that reason initially starts from world-bodies and their motion, then it understands that rational grounds can be sought concerning all things. This leads to the enumeration 2  On reason’s history in connection with Kant’s idea of system in philosophy see Ferrarin (2015b, ch. 1). 3  Hereafter, the page number of the English translation follows the corresponding page number of the German edition.

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of the concepts of reason by analyzing thinking in general without any kind of object. In other words, the path that philosophy has followed in its own historical evolution is similar to that which pure reason followed in the deduction when striving to fully know itself. The history of philosophy begins by tracing the ontological principles in material entities such as water or air. In a similar way, the critique of pure reason begins by analyzing sensible experience. If general logic has been complete since Aristotle, it is due to the fact that it pertains to reason to seek its own principles by considering thinking without any object. The facts of the history of reason offer evidence of the outcomes of critical philosophy, and they lay the foundations of a teleological account of the history of philosophy.4 Kant’s analogy between reason’s becoming in history and reason’s inner development undoubtedly represents the starting point of any other attempt to sketch a philosophizing history of philosophy such as those of Hegel and Husserl.

3  The Historicity of Philosophy By insisting on the fact that history appears as a series of edifices in ruin, Kant demonstrates his skepticism in attributing a historical development to reason. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the reference to a history of pure reason seems to be merely instrumental for justifying the validity and the necessity of critical philosophy. In other words, the fact that the philosophy’s past is characterized by a series of failures could suggest that the only reason Kant speaks of a history of reason is that the right approach in philosophy had not yet been discovered before the advent of the critical method. However, in the posthumous documents, Kant realizes more explicitly than in the Critique that this situation of philosophy is not contingent; rather, the historicity of reason is an effect of reason’s nature. Reason grows internally; for the task of a philosophizing historiography of philosophy should consist of reconstructing the moments of pure reason’s development. From this perspective, the failures of philosophy in history appear as consequences of reason’s innermost tendency toward totality. Kant points out that reason has a natural propensity to overstep the boundaries of experience, finding itself burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss; often, in history, this tendency has led reason to build great edifices without solid foundations. Therefore, a philosophizing historiography of philosophy serves to account for the limits of previous determinate philosophies and contributes to enlightening the task of a philosophy to be. Hegel and Husserl tackle the issue of how to conciliate the historicity of philosophy with the aim of philosophical cognition to dealing with eternal truths in two subtly different ways. I will analyze their accounts separately. In the introduction to his Lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel’s starting point is that history is the field of what is transient, whereas philosophy seeks to deal  On the significance of Kant’s historiographical project see Micheli (2015).

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with the eternal truth, namely with that which is necessary, not subject to change. And yet philosophy undoubtedly has a history. This highlights two different issues to be addressed.5 Firstly, the philosopher that deals with the problem of the historicity of philosophy has to question the conviction that no eternal truth could be ascribed to a historically determined kind of knowledge. Secondly, he or she has to explain how it is possible that truth is one, and philosophies, which aim to grasp it, are many. Natural sciences have a history, too. They follow a continuative path characterized by successes and, of course, failures. However, whereas they share the same goal and avoid continuously re-thinking their models and paradigms, the history of philosophy seems conversely to be scattered in a mass of contrasting points of view, which share no parameter, no task. Regarding the first issue, notice that in Encyclopaedia § 6 Hegel claims that “existence (Dasein) in general is partly appearance and only partly actuality.” In common life, any transitory event could wrongly be called actual, but “even our ordinary feelings are enough to forbid a fortuitous existence (Existenz) will not be deemed to deserve the emphatic designation of being actual (wirklich); for by fortuitous we mean an existence which has no greater value than that of something possible, which may just as well not exist as exist” (Hegel 1830, 47/33, trans. emended).6 In his Science of Logic, Hegel identifies contingency with that which is merely possible: “The contingent is an actual which is at the same time determined as only possible, an actual whose other or opposite equally is” (Hegel 1813, 205/480). Possibility stands in contrast to necessity. However, necessity in turn emerges from a process involving the transformation of possibility into actuality. Hegel distinguishes between formal and real possibility. Formal possibility pertains to what is merely conceivable. The opposite of a fact taken to be formally possible is formally possible in turn. However, the conceivability of a fact is not enough to assure that a possibility can be actualized. Each possibility requires the preliminary actualization of some conditions to be actualized: “Whenever all the conditions of a fact are completely present, the fact is actually there” (Hegel 1813, 207/483). What is necessary cannot be otherwise. Since real possibility depends on the actualization of a complex set of conditions, it is, according to Hegel, only apparently different from necessity. Necessity is relative. Since the range of conditions making a fact actualizable appears to be a mere possibility in turn, then, the process through which a possibility becomes real depends on the contingent existence of its connected conditions. This explains why Hegel concludes that necessity takes its start from, and thus contains, the contingent.7 Substance must express itself throughout its own accidents. This entails not only that the determinateness of necessity consists in having its negation, namely contingency, within it, but also that it is necessity that determines itself as contingency.

 See Hegel (1994, 1–10).  On the relationship between existence and actuality in Hegel see Marcuse (1987, 80–111). 7  See Henrich (1971, 157–165) and Mabille (1999, 177–212). 5 6

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Substance has to be expressed by a range of contingent conditions. It is the capacity of being one with its negation. Applying this logical argument to the case of the historicity of reason, we may claim that reason’s self-unfolding process necessarily assumes the form of contingency in history.8 This does not imply that there is no eternal truth. The historical form of reason’s development does not depend upon the limits of reason, but upon the limits of the element through which reason manifests itself. Once the eternal truth appears in history, it expresses its nature and, at the same time, differentiates itself from that which is contingent. In other words, the eternal must come up against the finite. The history of philosophy tells us about the encounter of the eternal with the finite. Such an encounter makes the destiny of two elements evident. The finite collapses. The eternal stays alive. Both elements show what they are. The eternal makes its necessity actual. The finite reveals itself to be transient. On this point Hegel is particularly clear, in the introduction to his Lectures on the history of philosophy, when making a distinction between two different ways to account for the self-­ unfolding process of truth. One is that of logical philosophy. The other is that of philosophical historiography. The logician focuses on such a process by being conscious of its necessity, whereas the historian investigates the same process by being aware that its form is contingent. In the Encyclopaedia § 13 Hegel explicitly claims that the history of philosophy portrays the stages in the evolution of the Idea as following each other “by accident” (Hegel 1830, 58/42). Regarding the question as to how the unity of truth can be preserved before the multiplicity of determined philosophies, we have to point out that Hegel resolutely rejects the idea that truth is tautology. Truth is not undetermined. The truth is the whole, and the whole is not only the result, but also the entire process through which reason, understood as an ontological principle, actualizes itself. Truth is the unity of many and diverse determinations. The most appropriate example of that is the life of spirit: it is initially an embryo, that is, a person only in itself, but not for itself. The human being is an individual spirit for itself when it has cultivated its own rationality by making its own self-conscious freedom actual. However, in order to actualize its own nature, spirit needs to undergo a development from the condition in which it is like a child, “who after a long silent period of nourishment draws his first breath and shatters the gradualness of merely quantitative growth,” to the condition of cultural maturity (Hegel 1807, 18/5). The moments of this formation process are not only distinguished from each other, but they are also incompatible with each other. However, they have at the same time a fluid nature, which allows us to take them to be moments of an organic unity that, in Kant’s terms, grows internally and within which each moment is seen as being not only in conflict with the others, but also as equally necessary as the others. Applying this structure to the history of philosophy, we may say that no historically determined system of philosophy could yearn for being the full exposition of 8  By pursuing this idea, in Manca (2015b) I have outlined Hegel’s position regarding the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.

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truth. Each particular philosophy is, however, a moment of the development of truth. Each mirrors the whole from a partial point of view. Hence, past philosophies are all modifications of the same truth and steps through which truth reaches the current point of view. Of course, they are replaced and confuted by the systems that follow. However, each determinate philosophy is equally as necessary as the other and takes part in the life of a whole.9 Let me turn now to Husserl. In his Philosophy as rigorous science, Husserl apparently excludes any possibility that a history of past philosophies could sustain the development of philosophical investigation. Rather, he thinks that a historic-­ philosophical activity diverts the attention of the philosopher from the impulse to make philosophy a rigorous science. In the conclusion to his 1911 essay, indeed, he states that “the impulse to research must proceed not from philosophies but from things and from the problems connected with them; remaining immersed in the historical dimension, forcing oneself to work therein in historico-critical activity leads to nothing but hopeless efforts” (Husserl 1987, 61/196). Nevertheless, Husserl paradoxically interprets this need of taking a distance from the historico-critical activity as related to the historical situation of philosophy in his times. This becomes explicit when he distinguishes the approach of Hegel from that of some historians of philosophy who wrote between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, historians such as Erdmann, Fischer and Windelband clung to Hegel’s statement, according to which philosophy cannot overstep its own time in order to proclaim the end of theoretical investigation after Hegel, and, consequently, to establish that the future of philosophy would only have been that of dealing with the history of philosophy. However, Husserl writes that the doctrine according to which every philosophy finds a justification of itself in its epoch alone, “in Hegel’s system, which pretended an absolute validity, had an entirely different sense compared to that historic one attributed to it by those generations that had lost, along with their belief in Hegelian philosophy, any belief whatsoever in an absolute philosophy” (Husserl 1987, 7/31). Husserl is not an accurate reader of Hegel at all. Nonetheless, he realizes that past philosophies like that of Hegel “were surely philosophies of worldview, but they were scientific too, since they keep the task of philosophy to become rigorous science alive” (Husserl 1987, 51/52). In The Crisis of European Science, Husserl adopts a perspective that is not far from that which he had attributed to Hegel since his 1911 essay.10 When the 9  On the relationship between determined philosophies and the universal idea of philosophy see Ferrarin (2001, 31–54). 10  In the introduction to his Logos article, Husserl evidently misunderstands Hegel’s perspective when criticizing it, because even though “Hegel insists on the absolute validity of his method and his doctrine, still his system lacks a critique of reason, which is the foremost prerequisite for being scientific in philosophy” (Husserl 1987, 5/168). By using a metaphor that Husserl adopted a page before this statement, we may say that Husserl erroneously suggests here that Hegel’s system keeps the traditional form of a system in metaphysics, according to which a system appears “like a Minerva springing forth complete and full-armed from the head of some creative genius” (Husserl 1987, 4/167). Instead, Husserl thinks that a philosophical system should be understood as

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p­ henomenologist turns his or her attention to the role that philosophy plays in the culture of his or her time, he or she realizes to be not only a disinterested onlooker, but also a functionary of mankind. The phenomenologist is called to work to break out of the normal way in which mundane subjectivity lives and thinks in order to let human beings rediscover their own immanent telos. More explicitly than in the past, in his last reflections, Husserl becomes aware of the fact that the emergence of idealities out of the contingent sphere of history does not occur by accident. The facticity of the contents of experience and the generativity of sense are two essential features of the world’s constitution.11 In other words, it is necessary that the philosophical cognition of essences starts from that which is acquired by historical experience, and it is equally necessary that philosophical cognition improves and enhances its method and knowledge over history thanks to a conflicting but steady relationship with its own tradition. This leads Husserl to distinguish the inner history of reason’s self-revelation from the mere history of facts.12 From this perspective, the intentions of a scientist like Galileo, for instance, can be understood as a step toward the actualization of a transcendental comprehension of the world. The idea of a geometric idealization allows Galileo to figure out a world-­ horizon made up by form-limits. This is a necessary moment for the future, conscious adoption of eidetic seeing as a method to grasp the invariant elements of variable experiences.

4  Some Models for the History of Reason Though the binding affinities between Hegel and Husserl regarding the idea that the history of philosophy plays a motivating role in the actualization of a scientific conception of philosophical activity, the models and methods for a history of reason that they outline and adopt do not necessarily coincide. In this final section I would like to demonstrate that their points of contrast depend not only on a different mode

the product of “a gigantic preparatory work of generations, really begins from the ground up with a foundation free of doubt and rises up like any skilful construction, wherein stone is set upon stone, each as solid as the other, in accordance with directive insights” (Husserl 1987, 4/167). Think of Hegel’s idea that spirit inwardly works in history like a mole. It would be enough to realize that the model that Hegel adopts for his system in philosophy is not the traditional one. On Hegel’s metaphor of the mole see Bodei (2014). For a comparison between Hegel’s idea of a thinking historian, which inspires his Phenomenology of Spirit, and Husserl’s depiction of the philosopher as a functionary of mankind see Manca (2016, ch. 2.3). 11  On these key concepts of Husserl’s late phenomenology see Moran (2012, 142–146). On the problematic issue of the presence of the ideal in the historical world see Dodd (2005, in particular ch. 2). 12  In his groundbreaking study of 1974, Carr have demonstrated to what extent Husserl’s theory of historicity paradoxically allows the philosopher to aspire to a ‘transhistorical truth’. On Husserl’s concept of historicity in comparison with Hegel see also the recent study Stähler (2018).

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of interpreting Kant’s idea of a history of reason, but also on an alternative mode of conceiving reason itself. Following Heidegger, scholars have often described Husserl as a thinker who pays scarce attention to the history of philosophy. Yet, starting from his time in Halle, Husserl taught courses in the history of philosophy.13 An important turning point occurs in the winter semester of 1923/1924 when Husserl introduces the expression Kritische Ideengeschichte instead of the usual term Geschichte der Philosophie. In this way, he emphasizes that when the historical activity of philosophy becomes a part of philosophical activity, the task is no longer that of dealing with past philosophies, but that of shedding light on theoretical problems with the help of a historical look back (historischer Rückblick; cf. Husserl 1959b, 5). In particular, here Husserl insists that the meaning of philosophical research can be illuminated only if one penetrates into the history motivating such a research. However, the aim of a critical approach to the history of philosophy does not consist in the revitalization of a perspective of the past, but in the thematization of the history of a theoretical problem, starting from the needs of the present. This argumentation places Husserl very close to Kant’s view according to which the history of reason should be focused on problems and issues rather than on the experiences of past philosophers. In fact, similarly to Kant, in his 1923/1924 lectures and in the first part of Crisis, Husserl describes the history of philosophy as a battle between factions who adopt alternative approaches and defend different solutions to the same problems. Windelband sets the view of Kant against that of Hegel, according to which the history of philosophy must proceed by grasping the inner principle animating the peculiar perspective of each past philosopher. By contrast, in Husserl, the relationship between a critical history of ideas and a history of past philosophies is extremely ambiguous (Cf. Windelband 1907). For instance, the reason Husserl appropriates Aristotle’s notion of ‘first philosophy’ in his 1923/1924 lectures must not be found in the purpose of restoring an Aristotelian approach to philosophy.14 Husserl explicitly states that he reintroduces that expression because it has not been contaminated by historical sedimentation, such as metaphysics. Husserl is more interested in the fact that that expression is scarcely employed in modern times rather than in outlining the original meaning that Aristotle ascribed to it (Cf. Husserl 1959b, 5). And yet, this way of proceeding appears to be alternative to the one Husserl assumes in Crisis, whereby the inner  In Halle and Göttingen Husserl taught classes in the history of philosophy yearly. In Freiburg he taught two courses in the history of philosophy between 1916 and 1918 before that of 1923/1924 concerning the critical history of ideas. 14  Sokolowski (2000, 62) held that “phenomenology restores the possibilities of ancient philosophy, even while accounting for new dimensions such as the presence of modern science. Phenomenology provides one of the best examples of how a tradition can be reappropriated and brought to life again in a new context.” However, the way in which Husserl justifies his re-introduction of the term “first philosophy” shows that a re-appropriation can never be considered as a restoration, but rather as a re-elaboration, which always presupposes a sort of misunderstanding. 13

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history of reason is seen as aiming to rediscover the original intentions of a philosopher of the past, since they reveal the unconscious goals and instincts of reason’s self-unfolding movement. When Husserl deals with Galileo’s revolution of the scientific attitude, he is certainly interested, as has already been said, in establishing the opportunities that this operation provides for the elaboration of a rigorous method in philosophy; however, he does not see this interest as at all conflicting with that of penetrating into the original motivation prompting Galileo to figure out the possibility of an indirect mathematization of sensible data. Thus, in Husserl, there is a tension between two models. One is much closer to Kant’s conception of the history of reason and coincides with the approach that Husserl calls “critical history of ideas.” The other conversely share more affinities with Hegel’s view and can be identified with what Husserl calls “inner history,” but which Fink and Klein designate as “intentional history.”15 Such a tension also explains why Jacob Klein and Derrida described Husserl’s teleological conception of the history of philosophy in two contrasting ways. Referring to Husserl’s definition of phenomenology as a science related to the roots of all things, in his essay on Phenomenology and the History of Science, Klein points out that it is particularly striking that Husserl employs the Empedoclean term ‘rhizome’ (rizoma in ancient Greek) instead of the much more frequently used arché: A ‘root’ is something out of which things grow until they reach their perfect shape. The arché of a thing – at least in the traditional ‘classical’ sense of the term – is more directly related to that perfect shape, and somehow indirectly to the actual beginning of the growth. The ‘radical’ aspect of phenomenology is more important to Husserl than its perfection. This is the attitude of a true historian. But it is obvious that the phenomenological approach to the true beginnings requires a quite special kind of history. Its name is ‘intentional history.’ (Klein 1985, 69)16

Here Klein is implicitly contrasting Husserl’s view of a teleology of reason with that of Kant, who in the Architectonic of Pure Reason describes philosophy as “a mere idea of a possible science, which is nowhere given in concreto, but which one seeks to approach in various ways until the only footpath […] is discovered, and the hitherto unsuccessful ectype […] is made equal to the archetype” (Kant 1781/1787, A 838/B 866). In the appendix to Fortschritte zur Metaphysics, Kant explicitly shows that his distinction between objective philosophy as a model and the determinate subjective philosophies as after-images of it can be interpreted from the point of view of a history of reason. Subjective philosophies are the facts of reason, whereas the objective system of philosophy represents the model on the basis of which one could assess the capacity of each subjective philosophy to develop the inner principle of reason. Accordingly, a philosophizing history of philosophy, which draws the facts of reason from the nature of human reason, can be described as a “philosophical  See Hopkins (2011, 26) and Moran (2012, 168–170).  On Klein’s understanding of Husserl’s theory of the history of philosophy see Hopkins (2011, 11–32).

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a­ rchaeology,” that is as a research aimed at accounting for the teleological development of reason in history by taking as a parameter its original model. In his essay entitled ‘Genesis and Structure’ and the Phenomenology, Derrida states that Husserl’s concept of telos is more akin to that of Kant—according to whom the telos (or Vorhaben) would be “an infinite anticipation which simultaneously is given as an infinite practical task-for” (Derrida 1967, 250/209)—rather than to that of Hegel. Derrida interprets Hegel’s system of philosophy as a closed metaphysics, whereas he holds that, since in Husserl’s philosophy telos is totally open, and is opening itself, it represents “the concrete possibility, the very birth of history and the meaning of becoming in general. Therefore it is structurally genesis itself, as origin and as becoming” (Derrida 1967, 250/210).17 In other words, Derrida thinks that Hegel treats history in a way that keeps the presuppositions of classical metaphysics intact. In Hegel’s view, history would only be the field within which an independent logos, separately investigable, manifests itself. On the contrary, by restoring a Kantian transcendental point of view, instead of the speculative one, Husserl would revitalize the idea that the logos, namely the meaning of the things themselves, occurs in history in an asymptotic way. In so doing, Husserl would leave out the difference between the empiric and the eidetic emerging without, however, presupposing a transcendent principle which is totally foreign to human experience. Although I do not agree with Derrida’s interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics, I acknowledge that there is a difference between Hegel’s and Husserl’s concept of telos. It is rooted in differing ways of conceiving reason. For Hegel, reason coincides with an objective principle which actualizes itself in history and finds in human spirit the highest manifestation of its becoming, even if not the sole one. By contrast, for Husserl, reason is the historical manifestation of transcendental constituting life. Such a manifestation regards exclusively human spirit, which in the Crisis Husserl identifies with the self-objectification of transcendental life. By self-­ objectification Husserl means the moment in which transcendental life makes itself an object of the reflection of the ego. In other words, the self-objectification is the condition for acquiring awareness of the constitutive process. However, the existence of reason in the form of human spirit coincides with the existence of transcendental life in the form of being-outside-itself, or in that of forgetfulness.18 Accordingly, for Husserl, philosophical historiography can only deal with the mundane manifestation of reason in history, just as for Hegel the philosophical historiography deals with the accidental appearances of reason in time. However, while Hegel acknowledges the primacy of reason’s self-actualization over its potential  See Lawlor (2002, 11–33).  Dealing with the awakening of philosophical reason, in his Sixth Meditation § 11c Fink (1988) insists on the crucial role that the natural attitude of mundane subjectivity plays in the formation of a phenomenological method. When he writes that “transcendental subjectivity becomes for-itself in the constitutive dimension of ‘being-outside-itself’,” Husserl comments in the margin: “good.” Accordingly, the constitutive dimension of “being-outside-itself” coincides with the self-objectification of transcendental intersubjectivity in the teleological dimension of the history of human reason.

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development, Husserl is more interested in the formation of reason’s powers than in their actual existence and exercise. In Husserl there is always a gap between the actualization of world-constitution and the self-actualization of transcendental life. The first form of actualization is carried out when the life-world and the opposite pole of the mundane psychological ego are constituted. Conversely, the second form of actualization reaches a full constitution when philosophical subjectivity wakes up and, by means of the practice of epochē, finds out that it is the principle guiding the world-constitution, namely when it becomes aware of being the medium through which transcendental life actualizes itself.19 In order to facilitate the full self-constitution of transcendental life, mundane subjectivity has to train itself to think in a philosophical way. The history of philosophy plays a key role in the formation of such a disposition, since it lets the phenomenologist focus on the previous attempts at carrying out the task of comprehending the world in a philosophical way and acquiring more awareness of the potentialities and the powers of reason.20 In light of all this, we may understand more profoundly why and to what extent Husserl’s critical approach to the history of philosophy differs from Hegel’s speculative approach. First of all, Husserl tends to focus on the problems of philosophy rather than on the singular interpreters of them. In other words, he aims to illuminate the powers of reason. Similarly to Kant, Husserl takes into account the past philosophies only as examples of failed attempts to put philosophy on the path to becoming science. This does not entail that he sees in some perspectives of the past (such as the “double star” Socrates-Plato, Galileo’s theoretical physics, Descartes’s meditations, Hume’s skepticism, Kant and Fichte’s transcendental projects) some necessary steps nourishing the impulse of philosophy to become a full science. However, it is equally true that he seems to pay attention to these past philosophical experiences only for the meaning that they can assume in light of, and on behalf of, his own perspective. This becomes particularly evident in one of Crisis supplementary texts, whereby Husserl glimpses the possibility of taking advantage of the dissemination of historical reconstructions of past philosophy for strengthening the search for a scientific method:  I deal with this issue in an article where I have discussed Husserl’s use of Aristotelian notion of hexis for the account of the phenomenologizing subject. See Manca (2017). 20  With the reference to the powers of reason, I naturally intend to evoke Kant’s project. However, notice that, as Kern 1964 and Ferrarin 2015a have already stressed, Husserl tends to expunge the adjective ‘pure,’ which in his view coincides with formal, since the limit of Kant would be that of overlooking the sphere of material a priori. In so doing, Husserl unwillingly finds himself to be close to Hegel’s re-elaboration of Kant’s project, even if the final solutions of the two thinkers are the antipodes of each other. I mean that, similarly to Hegel, Husserl thinks that philosophy should not deal with pure reason only, but it should strive to overcome the opposition between the sphere of the a priori and that of experience. On the other hand, while this conviction leads Hegel to speak of a speculative and objective thinking, Husserl introduces the alternative idea of a transcendental experience. On this point see Manca (2015a) and (2016). 19

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In our epoch everyone has in his surrounding world […] a science of history, and in particular a scientific history of philosophy. […] What is, what must be, the significance of this for the philosopher who thinks for himself? Is the lost work that he, unconcerned about scientific historical study, has done under the guidance of, through the use of, his ‘unhistorical’ Plato, etc.? What kind of ‘poetic invention’ (Dichtung), what kind of historical interpretation is this? What kind is appropriate, and to what extent, to help us? How must we carry it on […] in order to clarify our unclear consciousness of our telos? (Husserl 1959a, 512/394)

In Husserl’s view, for millennia philosophy could advance in naïve theorization; in other words, through naïvely developed concepts, the philosophers of the past raise ingenuous problems by in turn adopting naïve methodology. Even if skepticism criticizes this approach from the outset, the sense of philosophy was never undermined. According to Husserl, this occurs because genuine philosophers have progressively learned throughout the history to conciliate the poetical elements of their research with a critical approach. More specifically, they have learned that their ‘poetic invention of the history of philosophy’ would not remain fixed, but that every invention of the past serves them in understanding themselves, their aims and their relations to the inventions of others.21 Therefore, in Husserl’s view, the historical activity of the philosopher can be divided into two moments. The first is the poetical one. It puts the philosopher in connection to the historical tradition which “entered into him or her in a motivating way and as a spiritual sediment” (Husserl 1959a, 513/395). The second is the critical one. It allows the philosopher to grasp what is common to the inventions of past philosophers, and to learn from the errors of others. This view of the historic-philosophical activity is quite close to that which Hegel adopts in the Phenomenology of Spirit. His 1807 masterpiece is nothing but the research through which Hegel reconstructs the tradition influencing the culture of his epoch. Here the poetic element lies in the choice to present the development of spirit in history through a succession of figures (Gestalten), while the critical element can be found in the ongoing skepticism bringing consciousness to question its certainties and to seek new images for describing the acquired awareness of its historical condition. However, Hegel’s aim in this text is to get rid of all historical conditions in order to distinguish that which is contingent from that which conversely has to be understood as the manifestation of eternal truth in a determined epoch. Thus, unlike Husserl, through the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel releases his philosophical approach from the dichotomy between poetic invention and critical consideration and lays the foundations for a thinking consideration of history. After, and thanks to, the Phenomenology of Spirit, the starting point of Hegel will no longer be the culture of its epoch, but at most the philosophical principle of his own epoch, that is, Kant’s and Fichte’s idea that subjectivity has to be conceived as producing the a priori forms of the world. More specifically, after the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel progressively abandons the idea of presenting history as a gallery of

 As Moran (2012, 146) has explained, here Husserl maintains that “philosophers engage with their history as poets do with their tradition, reconstituting it and re-founding it through their own creative activity and engagement in a kind of poetic invention or ‘poetizing’”

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images and endorses the idea that each determinate philosophy could be seen as interpreting a specific articulation of the logical deduction of thought-­determinations. From this point of view, Spinoza, for instance, becomes the interpreter of the idea of substance as causa sui, namely as self-determination. Kant’s idea of an a priori synthesis should be understood as the modern re-elaboration of the ancient conception of a unity of the opposites (subject and object, the sphere of thinking and that of being). To conclude, Hegel could not share Husserl’s interpretation of the history of philosophy in terms of a history of ideas. Husserl appropriates the Kantian idea according to which the objects of a history of reason are specific constellations of problems. Windelband rightly sets this idea against that of Hegel,22 according to which the sequence in the systems of philosophy in history is the same as the sequence in the thought-determinations of the Idea. Such a statement of Hegel is undoubtedly disputable.23 However, the choice of configuring the history of reason as a history of the ways in which some specific constellations of problems have been treated in history misses a key point of Hegel’s speculative perspective. Instead of a history of ideas, Hegel thinks that we should more accurately speak of a history of the Idea. In his view, by keeping the plurality of the ideas one cannot realize that each constellation of problems represents a particular determination of the logos understood as a complex whole.

References Bodei, Remo. 2014. La civetta e la talpa. Sistema ed epoca in Hegel. Bologna: Il Mulino. Carr, David. 1974. Phenomenology and the Problem of History. A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1967. “Genèse et structure” et la phenomenology. In L’Ecriture et la difference, 229–252. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Trans. Alan Bass: ‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology. In Writing and Difference, 1978, 193–211. London/New York: Routledge. Dodd, James. 2005. Crisis and Reflection. An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences. Dordrecht/London/New York: Kluwer. Ferrarin, Alfredo. 2001. Hegel and Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. Hegel’s Aristotle: Philosophy and Its Time. In A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2015a. From the World to Philosophy, and Back. In Phenomenology in a New Key: Between Analysis and History, Essays in Honor of Richard Cobb-Stevens, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl and Nicolas de Warren, 63–92. Cham/Heidelberg/New York/Dordrecht/London: Springer.

 It is probable that Windelband’s approach influenced that of Husserl. In a letter to Rickert from December 20, 1915, Husserl states that the reading of Windelband’s Geschicte der Philosophie makes him feel longing for the “old romantic land of German Idealism” (Husserl 1994, 179). 23  For instance, Ferrarin (2011) demonstrates that Hegel’s interpretation of Aristotle is not compatible with his claim according to which philosophy is and remains its time grasped in thought. Nuzzo (2003) shows the limits of the idea according to which there is a strict parallelism between thought-determination in logic and the determined philosophies in history. 22

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———. 2015b. The Powers of Pure Reason. Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy. Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press. Fink, Eugen. 1988. VI Cartesianische Meditation. Teil 1: Die Idee einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre. Texte aus dem Nachlass Eugen Finks (1932) mit Anmerkungen und Beilagen aus dem Nachlass Edmund Husserl (1933/34), Husserliana Dokumente, vol. 2/1. Ed. Hans Ebeling, Jann Holl, and Guy Van Kerckhoven. Dordrect/Boston/London: Kluwer. Trans. Ronald Bruzina: Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, 1995. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1807. Phenomenologie des Geistes. In Hegel 1969-71, vol. 3. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Trans. Terry Pinkard: The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard, updated 10 July 2013, draft for Cambridge University Press available on translator’s personal blog http://terrypinkard.weebly.com/phenomenology-of-spirit-page.html. Accessed 30 July 2018. ———. 1813. Wissenschaft der Logik, II.  Zweites Buch: Lehre von Wesen. In Hegel 1969-71, vol. 6. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Trans. and ed. George Di Giovanni: The Science of Logic: The Doctrine of Essence, 2010, 337–505. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1830. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Wissenschaft der Logik. In Hegel 1969-71, vol. 8. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Trans. and ed. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part I: Science of Logic, 2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 1969–71. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1983. Vorlesungen. Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1994. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I.  Einleitung, Orientalische Philosophie. In Hegel 1983, vol. 6. Ed. Pierre Garniron and Walter Jaeschke, Hamburg: Meiner. Trans. considered (often emended though) Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane and Frances H. Simson: Lectures on the History of Philosophy, on the basis of Michelet’s edition 1940, originally published by Kegan Paul, Trench, London: Trübner, 1892–1896, new version with an introduction of Frederick C. Beiser, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Henrich, Dieter. 1971. Hegel im Kontext. Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp. Hopkins, Burt. 2011. The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics. Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1950-. Husserliana. The Hague: Nijhoff. 1950–1987; Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer 1988–2004; Cham/Heidelberg/New York/Dordrecht/London: Springer 2011. ———. 1959a. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. In Husserl 1950-, vol. 6. Ed. W. Biemel. The Hague: Nijhoff. Trans. David Carr: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, 1970. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1959b. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Erster Teil: Kritische ideengeschichte. In Husserl 1950-, vol. 7. Ed. Rudolf Boehm. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1987. Philosophie als Strenge Wissenschaft. In Aufsätze und Vorträge. 1911–1921. In Husserl 1950-, vol. 25. Mit ergänzenden Texten. Ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Reiner Sepp, 3–67. The Hague: Nijhoff. Trans. Quentin Lauer: Philosophy as rigorous science, in: Phenomenology and the Crisis of Man, 1965, 29–196. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1994. Briefwechsel: Die Neukantianer. In Husserl 1950-,  Dokumente, vol. 3.5. Ed. Elisabeth and Karl Schuhmann. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer. Kant, Immanuel. 1781/1787. Kritik der reinen Vernunft.  In Kant 1902-, vol. 3 and 4. Berlin: Reimer. Trans and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood: Critique of pure reason, 1998. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1902-. In Akademie-Ausgabe, ed. Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Berlin: Reimer 1902–1921; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1922.

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———. 1942. Preisschrift über die Fortschritte der Metaphysik. In Kant 1902-, vol. 20, 253– 332. Berlin: Reimer. Trans. and ed. Henry Allison, Peter Heath, Gary Hatfield, and Michael Friedman: What real progress has metaphysics made in Germany since the time of Leibniz and Wolff (1793/1804). In Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, 337–424. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010. Kern, Iso. 1964. Husserl und Kant. Eine Untersuchung über Husserls Verhältnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus. The Hague: Nijhoff. Klein, Jacob. 1985. Phenomenology and the History of Science. In Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliot Zucherman. Annapolis: St. Johns’s College Press. Lawlor, Leonard. 2002. Derrida and Husserl. The Basic Problem of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mabille, Bernard. 1999. L’épreuve de la contingence. Paris: Aubier. Manca, Danilo. 2015a. Hegel e Husserl sull’intelligibilità della filosofia. In Hegel e la fenomenologia trascendentale, ed. D. Manca, E. Magrì, and A. Ferrarin, 141–160. Pisa: Edizioni ETS. ———. 2015b. Hegel e la disputa tra Antichi e Moderni. Revista Eletrônica Estudos Hegelianos XII (19): 21–55. http://ojs.hegelbrasil.org/index.php/reh/article/view/5/6 Accessed 30 July 2018. ———. 2016. Esperienza della ragione. Hegel e Husserl in dialogo. Pisa: Edizioni ETS. ———. 2017. The phenomenologizing subject as an active power: An Aristotelian model for Husserl’s theory of subjectivity. In The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, XV/2017, 247–268. Marcuse, Herbert. 1987. Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit, Frankfurt a. M: Klostermann 1968. Trans. Seyla Benhabib: Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, Cambridge/London: MIT Press. Micheli, Giuseppe. 2015. Philosophy and Historiography: The Kantian Turning-Point. In Models of the History of Philosophy, The Second Enlightenment and the Kantian Age, ed. Gregorio Piaia and Giovanni Santinello, vol. III, 697–768. Cham/Heidelberg/New York/Dordrecht/ London: Springer. Moran, Dermot. 2012. Husserl’s Crisis of The European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2003. Hegel’s Method for a History of Philosophy: The Berlin Introductions to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1819-1831). In Hegel’s History of Philosophy. New Interpretations, ed. David A. Duquette, 19–34. Albany: SUNY. Sokolowski, Robert. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stähler, Tanja. 2018. Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Windelband, Wilhelm. 1907. Geschichte der Philosophie. In Die Philosophie im Beginn des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Festschrift für Kuno Fischer, ed. W. Windelband, 529–554. Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung. Yovel, Yirmiyahu. 1980. Kant and the Philosophy of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hegel’s Critique of Foundationalism and Its Implications for Husserl’s Dream of Rigorous Science Chong-Fuk Lau

Abstract  Hegel sees philosophy as the only rigorous science that does not have any presupposition, but he rejects the possibility of an absolute foundation for philosophy, instead maintaining that only the system as a whole can be free from all presuppositions. Hegel’s system lays claim to presuppositionlessness, not on the ground of any presuppositionless beginning, but rather as a holistic system of concepts in which inevitable presuppositions are made transparent and comprehended. This paper examines Hegel’s analysis of the concept of immediacy and his critique of the foundationalist conception of philosophy. Although Hegel’s critique is targeted against his predecessors and contemporaries, it has important implications for Husserl’s phenomenology, which represents one of the most ambitious foundationalist projects in the history of philosophy. The final part discusses the later development of Husserl’s thought and his introduction of the concept of lifeworld in light of Hegel’s critique. Keywords  Hegel · Husserl · Foundationalism · Presuppositionlessness · Lifeworld

1  I There is hardly any philosopher who pursues a more ambitious philosophical project than Hegel. Standing on the summit of German Idealism, Hegel explicitly defines his philosophy as the system of absolute truth, even considering the content presented in his Science of Logic to be “the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit” (Hegel 1832, 44/29).1 For such an ambitious philosophy, the problem of a secure foundation occupies a particularly crucial role. Hegel believes that philosophy as the only true science cannot  Hereafter, the page number of the English translation follows the corresponding page number of the German edition. 1

C.-F. Lau (*) The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Ferrarin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Phenomenology, Contributions To Phenomenology 102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_4

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be based on any presupposition, but it has to meet the demand for “the complete absence of any presupposition [gänzliche Voraussetzungslosigkeit an allem]” (Hegel 1830, § 78, 168/125).2 For Hegel, it is clear from the outset that, if there is an ultimate foundation for philosophy, the foundation must be something that is absolutely immediate. Otherwise, it would not be an ultimate foundation, as it would be mediated by something which is, ex hypothesi, more fundamental than it. The beginning must then be absolute or, what means the same here, must be an abstract beginning; and so there is nothing that it may presuppose, must not be mediated by anything or have a ground, ought to be rather itself the ground of the entire science. It must therefore be simply an immediacy, or rather only immediacy itself. (Hegel 1832, 68–69/48)

It is interesting to note that the major systematic works of Hegel, the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic, and the Logic of the Encyclopedia, all include, in their beginnings, a criticism of the concept of immediacy or the philosophical standpoint that is based on it. While the discussion of “sense-certainty” in the beginning of the Phenomenology is a refutation of the standpoint of immediate knowledge, the first chapter of the Science of Logic on the category of Being can be understood as a logical analysis of the internal inconsistency of the concept of immediacy. In addition, before the main texts of the Logic of the Encyclopedia and the Science of Logic, Hegel uses in each case a separate section to eliminate the common misunderstandings associated with the problems of immediate knowing and beginning. While in the “Preliminary Conception [Vorbegriff]” of the Logic of the Encyclopedia, the position of immediate knowing is analysed as the third position of thought towards objectivity, there is a whole section in the Science of Logic dedicated to the question “With What Must the Beginning of Science be Made?”. In all these passages, Hegel argues consistently against the possibility of an absolute beginning of philosophy, or, more precisely, against the idea of an absolute philosophy according to the traditional foundationalist conception. While ancient philosophy is primarily interested in a metaphysical first principle, such as the One, nous, idea, or substance, modern philosophy since Descartes turns to focus on an absolute beginning qua an absolutely grounded cognition. Pure thinking, sensuous experience, consciousness, or subjectivity itself prove to be representative candidates in this direction. Yet, Hegel points out that each and every one of the above candidates is immediate in one or another sense, but none is absolutely immediate. Hegel claims that the same thing can be, or even must be, immediate and mediated at the same time: there is nothing in heaven or nature or spirit or anywhere else that does not contain just as much immediacy as mediation, so that both these determinations prove to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition between them nothing real (Hegel 1832, 66/46).3 2  More precisely, “[p]hilosophy lacks the advantage from which the other sciences benefit, namely the ability to presuppose both its objects as immediately endorsed by representation of them and an acknowledged method of knowing, which would determine its starting-point and progression” (Hegel 1830, §1, 41/28). 3  In another passage, Hegel explains that “[i]t is only the ordinary abstract understanding that regards the determinations of immediacy and mediation each for itself as absolute and supposes itself to have a firm distinction in them” (Hegel 1830, § 70, 160/119).

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According to Hegel, it is the ordinary understanding which is responsible for the abstract separation between immediacy and mediation. Therefore, if philosophy pursues a presuppositionless and absolutely immediate beginning, it will be condemned to failure. If there is an absolute foundation for philosophy, it would be a kind of “immediate knowledge”, no matter what is taken to be the primary source of knowledge. But the very idea of immediate knowledge is internally inconsistent. It is clear that knowing, just like thinking, cannot do without concepts. Every concept obtains its specific content by virtue of its complex relation to other concepts, by distinguishing itself in a specific way from other concepts. Conceptual thinking is thus, in Kant’s word, discursive in nature (Kant 1781/1787, A 68/B 93). Since knowing is always based on thinking of something in a determinate way by means of concepts, it is also necessarily discursive, unless one possesses a kind of God-like power such as “intellectual intuition” (Kant 1787, B 72), which would allow direct access to reality. Immediate knowledge, therefore, contradicts the ordinary conception of knowledge, as it would mean knowing without (discursive) thinking. For this reason, those philosophers who advocate immediate knowledge tend to avoid using words such as “knowledge” or “cognition”, but prefer using terms such as “intellectual intuition” or “faith” (Glaube). The inclination to immediate knowledge at Hegel’s time was mainly motivated by the Romantic movement, which responded to Kant’s critical philosophy with a skeptical attitude toward the capability of discursive thinking and human language (Lau 2004). Jacobi’s argument against the possibility of comprehending the Absolute or God by means of conceptual thinking contributes substantially to the spirit of that epoch. Jacobi recognizes that the comprehension of an object consists in grasping what it is by means of appropriate concepts. The concepts specify the conditions under which the object is what it is, distinguishing it from other objects to which the conditions do not apply. Accordingly, to comprehend an object is always to grasp it conceptually in the form of something conditioned. The problem, however, is that the Absolute or God is, ex hypothesi, something that is infinite and unconditioned. To acquire conceptual knowledge of God would require us to grasp and express the conditions of something that is unconditioned, which is, according to Jacobi, a logically impossible requirement that accounts for the necessary failure of all attempts to comprehend God in human language and concepts. Any conceptual comprehension of God would unavoidably distort what it should be, reducing it to something that is conditioned and mediated. Considering this, Jacobi suggests that God can never be “known” in the ordinary way, but it is only accessible to us through “faith” (Jacobi 1994, 370–78). This is Jacobi’s way of reinterpreting Kant’s famous maxim “to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Kant 1787, B XXX). Although faith is supposed to be a kind of immediate, noninferential, and extraconceptual “knowledge”, Hegel points out that even this conception of faith necessarily involves mediation. As long as what is expressed under the name of faith still lays claim to truth in the traditional sense, then it supposes that a belief corresponds to what is the case in reality. This means, in fact, that the very idea of faith involves mediation between subjective belief and objective state of affairs.

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In Hegel’s words, the principle of immediate knowing insists on “the unity of the idea with being”, in which “it is posited that one determination possesses truth only by virtue of being mediated by the other or, if you like, that each is mediated with the truth only through the other” (Hegel 1830, §70, 159–60/119). The mediation between believing and being belongs necessarily to the nature of faith. What the position of immediate knowledge can at most strive for is that this mediation is not further mediated by any other grounds. But even in this weakened sense, the idea of immediate knowledge is still problematic. Since immediate knowledge, ex hypothesi, is not based on any rational, inferential grounds, its validity is either unexplained or is quasi-explained by an appeal to an exotic source, such as divine revelation or intellectual intuition. The position of immediate knowing normally excludes direct sensuous perception as a legitimate source of immediate knowledge, since perceptual knowledge is mediated by our sense apparatus and subject to various kinds of perceptual illusions. The advocates of immediate knowing, therefore, prefer to trust other mystical powers of the intellect which promise a direct and faithful access to the ultimate reality. This, however, means a straight denial of rational discourse and logical argumentation. In this connection, Hegel complains that “[i]ntellectual intuition might well be the violent rejection of mediation and of demonstrative, external reflection” (Hegel 1832, 78/55). The upshot of this rejection is not a direct access to reality, but rather an arbitrary affirmation of subjective convictions. In fact, what is affirmed through faith or intellectual intuition is mediated by a complex set of historically, socially, culturally conditioned factors.4 Immediate knowledge is considered to be immediate only because the complex mediations are ignored. Immediate knowledge is nothing better than an assertion of what is subjectively considered valid. Every particular individual mind can arbitrarily assert under the name of immediate knowledge what it happens to find convincing at a certain time moment. Hegel diagnoses the problem as follows: Because the fact of consciousness rather than the nature of the content is set up as the criterion of truth, the basis for what is alleged be true is subjective knowing [Wissen] and the assurance that I find a certain content in my consciousness. What I find in my consciousness is thereby inflated to mean what is found in everyone’s consciousness and alleged to be the nature of consciousness itself. (Hegel 1830, §71, 160/119)

There is, indeed, a deep-rooted paradox in the foundationalist conception. If there is an absolutely grounded or immediate knowledge, then there can be, ex hypothesi, no further justification for it; otherwise, the justification would be more fundamental than that knowledge itself. However, if there can be, in principle, no further 4  A good example is Jacobi’s famous claim that “[t]hrough faith we know that we have a body, and that there are other bodies and other thinking beings outside us. A veritable and wondrous revelation!” (Jacobi 1994, 231). The claim indeed shows the opposite of what it intends to show. There is a complex process of learning through which we acquire the basic criteria for judging validity. On the basis of the adopted criteria, this common-sense belief appears to be immediately evident in normal circumstances. But a simple philosophical reflection already suffices to show that that belief is far from being certain and infallible. Its objective validity is subject to rational evaluation, and it is not immediate in the required sense.

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justification, there will never be any explanation for why the immediate knowledge is true instead of false, or why this belief instead of another one constitutes the absolute foundation. Hegel, therefore, points out that the alleged foundation is, in the final analysis, nothing but a contingent “fact of consciousness”.

2  II Nevertheless, there are a few concepts or principles which seem to enjoy a privileged position in the pursuit of absolute foundation. Since Descartes, modern philosophy has cultivated special affection for the thinking subject itself. It appears to be more than a contingent “fact of consciousness” whereby I affirm my own existence. Hegel also sees the privileged status of this candidate, leading him to deal with it in greater depth: For the “I,” this immediate consciousness of the self, appears from the start to be both itself an immediate something and something with which we are acquainted in a much deeper sense than with any other representation; true, anything else known belongs to this “I,” but it belongs to it as a content which remains distinct from it and is therefore accidental; the “I,” by contrast, is the simple certainty of its self. (Hegel 1832, 76/53)

According to Hegel’s interpretation, the “I” combines two significant characteristics in itself, granting it a special status. On the one hand, the “I” is something with which everyone is directly familiar. If there is anything that is immediately known, the straightforward answer will be my own self. On the other hand, the “I” is something that must be presupposed in every conscious experience. While different conscious experiences come and go in a continual flux, there must be an identical self in which the changing experiences take place. In this sense, the “I” is not something merely contingent, but something of which one is immediately certain. However, Hegel points out that two different dimensions of the “I” have been mixed up. If the “I” is taken as a pure self or transcendental consciousness, then this pure “I” is now not immediate, is not the familiar, ordinary “I” of our consciousness to which everyone immediately links science. … that pure “I,” on the contrary, in its abstract, essential nature, is to ordinary consciousness an unknown, something that the latter does not find within itself. (Hegel 1832, 76/53–54)

This resembles Hume’s argument against the traditional conception of the soul, which points out that one can never “perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself”, but only “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (Hume 2000, 165). Hegel agrees with Hume’s thesis that a simple and continued self is not perceivable in one’s mind, but he does not subscribe to Hume’s conclusion that the self is nothing but a “bundle of perceptions”. Even if the pure “I” is not an object of empirical perception, it does not mean that there is no such thing as a pure “I” or transcendental consciousness. Although the “I” is not a directly accessible object in empirical consciousness, it is a proper object of

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philosophical reflection through an “elevation to the standpoint of pure knowing” (Hegel 1832, 76/53). How this elevation can be achieved does not concern us here, but since an elevation is needed, this pure “I” cannot serve as a point of departure. Instead, the comprehension of the pure “I” is the goal that philosophy strives to attain. If the self is taken as an empirical object, then it is the one with which we are acquainted. The problem, however, is that it is no longer simple consciousness, but rather “the consciousness of itself as an infinitely manifold world” (Hegel 1832, 76/53). In this sense, the self is equally mediated by all sorts of contingent conditions that lie behind other conscious experiences. It is quite obvious that the self, as it appears in the inner sense, is not an identical and continued consciousness but a changing and indistinct consciousness. Internal consciousness lacks even the regularity that is observed in external experiences, leading philosophers such as Kant to deny the possibility of empirical psychology based on inner sense (Kant 2002, 186). Empirical self-consciousness lacks the kind of universality and necessity that an absolute foundation of philosophy demands. Hegel thus concludes that neither the pure nor the empirical “I” can serve as an absolute beginning for philosophy. However, the objection could be made that empirical self-consciousness does enjoy a kind of epistemological privilege. As Descartes suggests, even though I can be mistaken in my judgment about the external world, the fact that I have a certain conscious experience in my mind can never be wrong, provided that I am really conscious of it and do not take it as an objective judgment about the external world. There are, of course, events that temporally precede and cause the emergence of a particular conscious experience and thus can be considered as the conditions of it. But what is given directly to consciousness can still claim to be evident and immediate in the sense that there is no external criterion for its validity. In other words, a first-person description of private conscious experiences is noninferential and infallible. Does this kind of introspective statement offer a reliable foundation for philosophy? In the first chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel deals with the allegedly most primordial and immediate form of knowledge called “sense-certainty”. In a way, Hegel’s phenomenological analysis does respond to the previously stated problem, although the formulation of the position of sense-certainty is a different one. The self-proclaimed immediate knowledge of sense-certainty assumes that if we avoid all kinds of subjective interventions and stick strictly to what is presented directly to the mind, the knowledge attained is the truest, the richest, and the most certain, since, in so doing, things appear truly and authentically as they are without any distortion. In Hegel’s words: The concrete content of sensuous-certainty permits itself to appear immediately as the richest cognition, indeed, as a knowing of an infinite wealth for which no limit is to be found, whether we venture out into the reaches of space and time as the place where that wealth extends itself, or when we take a piece out of this plenitude, divide it, and thereby delve into it. In addition, it appears as the most veritable, for it has not omitted anything from its object, but rather, has its object in its complete entirety before itself. (Hegel 1807, 82/63)

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In order to achieve this passive ideal, the position of sense-certainty is not allowed to use any concept to address its objects. In other words, the price of avoiding all subjective interventions is that objects cannot be identified conceptually or terminologically; the final resort is to use an indexical term such as “this” or “that” to refer to what is meant or intended. Taking up the basic stance of sense-certainty, Hegel proceeds to unveil the internal inconsistency of this position. If asked which one is the object intended, the advocate of sense-certainty can only answer by saying “this” or “that” with a pointing gesture. One might mean a particular object here or there, but the answer itself, the “this” or the “that”, does not specify anything, since it can be used to refer to anything. In ordinary situations, we can certainly use the words “this” or “that” to address a specific object, but the successful application of an indexical term presupposes an understood context, which again presupposes a conceptual and linguistic background for communications. However, in order to be faithful to the position of sense-certainty, the application of the indexical terms must be abstracted from their linguistic-conceptual background, which is thought to be a kind of subjective restriction that will distort the true appearance of objects. However, the words “this” or “that”, taken abstractly, do not refer to anything specific. Without language and concepts, the position of sense-certainty cannot even determine which object is intended, let alone formulate or express any knowledge about the object. That is why Hegel concludes that “this [sense-]certainty in fact yields the most abstract and the very poorest truth” (Hegel 1807, 82/58). The position of sense-certainty proves to be a preconceptual, prelinguistic, and thus precognitive attitude toward objects, having not yet entered into the sphere of cognitions at all. The insight Hegel obtains in the phenomenological analysis of sense-certainty is a simple but penetrating one. Identification of objects necessarily involves language and concepts, without which we could not even distinguish among different private conscious experiences. Without language and concepts, it is not only impossible to say or tell anything determinate, but also to determine internally what one really means or intends. We cannot fix a private conscious experience by merely looking or gazing at it in one’s consciousness. In order to attend to a specific conscious representation one has to be able to distinguish it from others, but this again presupposes a linguistic-conceptual framework under which the differences between different representations can be articulated. In other words, everything that appears in consciousness, in so far as it is identifiable, has already been mediated by our linguistic-conceptual understanding that penetrates into every activity of our mind. As language and concepts are developed and continuously developing in a complex process involving various contingent factors, the access to anything that seems to be presented directly and immediately to consciousness is inevitably mediated by a complex set of social, cultural, and historical conditions. Stated somewhat exaggeratedly, the totality of a linguistic-conceptual system together with its corresponding worldview is hidden behind every “immediate” consciousness.

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3  III Suppose that Hegel’s arguments are sound, then, with what can his Logic, the foundation of his philosophical system, begin? Hegel’s answer is: “Being, pure being – without further determination” (Hegel 1832, 82/59).5 The underlying reason for this choice is as follows: It [the beginning] must therefore be simply an immediacy, or rather only immediacy itself. Just as it cannot have any determination with respect to an other, so too it cannot have any within; it cannot have any content, for any content would entail distinction and the reference of distinct moments to each other, and hence a mediation. The beginning is therefore pure being. (Hegel 1832, 69/48)6

In terms of reflection-expressions (Reflexionsausdrücke), which express the conceptual content of a concept and could be called second-order expressions, the beginning is indeterminate immediacy. The true concept, or the first-order expression, of this formal characteristic of a true beginning is, according to Hegel, nothing but “pure being”. The point is that, in the very beginning with which philosophy begins, where further determinations have yet to be made, nothing has yet been determined. It is simply indeterminate and empty. The true beginning is presuppositionless in the sense of being determinationless (Lau 2000, 307–14). In a sense, every determination is a presupposition. If philosophy aims at a presuppositionless foundation, the beginning can only be something completely indeterminate and empty. Hegel has also considered a beginning which is very close to the maxim of phenomenology, namely, beginning “directly with the fact itself [Sache]”. But Hegel points out: well then, this subject matter is nothing else than that empty being. For what this subject matter is, that is precisely what ought to result only in the course of the science, what the latter cannot presuppose to know in advance. On any other form otherwise assumed in an effort to have a beginning other than empty being, that beginning would still suffer from the same defects. (Hegel 1832, 75/53)

In the very beginning, pure being is so empty that it cannot yet be distinguished from other concepts. “If any determination or content were posited in it as distinct, or if it were posited by this determination or content as distinct from an other, it would thereby fail to hold fast to its purity. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness” (Hegel 1832, 82/59). Beginning with such an empty being, however, does not really look attractive for an ambitious philosophical project. Is this empty or pure being really free from all presuppositions? Doesn’t the reflection through which 5  Noteworthy is the fact that the first sentence of the main text of the Logic is, in fact, not a complete sentence, but an anacoluthon (Wieland 1978). 6  Another formulation in the Logic of the Encyclopedia is as follows: “When beginning with thinking, we have nothing but thought in the sheer absence of any determination of it, since for a determination one and an other are required. In the beginning, however, we have as yet no other. The indeterminate, as we have it here, is the immediate, not the mediated absence of determination, not the sublation of all determinacy; but the immediacy of the absence of determination, the absence of determination prior to all determinacy, the indeterminate as the very first. But this is what we call ‘being’” (Hegel 1830, §86, 184/137).

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Hegel arrives at this beginning itself presuppose a good deal of operational concepts, argumentative principles, and an idea of presuppositionless philosophy? Isn’t Hegel’s criticism also applicable to the beginning of his Logic? Well, of course, it is! And Hegel is certainly aware of it. Pure being is absolutely immediate, not because it is not mediated by anything else, but rather because it is taken or considered as absolutely immediate in so far as all mediations are set aside. From another point of view, It is in this respect that this pure being, this absolute immediate, is just as absolutely mediated. However, just because it is here as the beginning, it is just as essential that it should be taken in the one-sidedness of being purely immediate. (Hegel 1832, 72/50)

It does not yet have any content and determination before the “movement of concept” begins, a movement that proceeds to explore what is implicitly contained in the beginning. It is empty and determinationless because all determinations or content are ignored. In a sense, the Logic never departs from its first category, “Being”. This is why the forward movement of the Logic turns out to be a circular one, with its end returning to the beginning, as “progression is a retreat to the ground, to the origin and the truth on which that with which the beginning was made, and from which it is in fact produced, depends” (Hegel 1832, 70/49). In this respect, the absolute beginning of the Logic does not rule out its being mediated and conditioned; instead, it expresses an attitude toward the project of pure thought. Hegel even concedes that if no presupposition is to be made, if the beginning is itself to be taken immediately, then the only determination of this beginning is that it is to be the beginning of logic, of thought as such. There is only present the resolve, which can also be viewed as arbitrary, of considering thinking as such. (Hegel 1832, 68/48)

What pure being incorporates is the simple resolve to consider thought as such, a resolve which is in some sense arbitrary. This “arbitrary” beginning, however, is a carefully chosen one to show the impossibility of making an absolute and radical new beginning for philosophy. The beginning of Hegel’s Logic is, in fact, a criticism of the demand for an absolute beginning of philosophy, showing that the beginning has already been made—a situation which philosophy must learn to live with. Philosophy can never disregard its history. Even such an empty concept as pure being cannot be free from the complex social, cultural, historical, and linguistic conditions that mediate our language and thought. The problem, however, becomes how Hegel still dares to claim his philosophy to be presuppositionless. The crucial point is that denying the possibility of an absolute beginning does not rule out the possibility of an absolute philosophy. Hegel’s system lays claim to presuppositionlessness not on the ground of a “presuppositionless beginning”, but on the ground that the presuppositions which could not actually be dispensed with are made transparent in the dialectical movement of the Concept. As Hegel emphasizes: Essential to science is not so much that a pure immediacy should be the beginning, but that the whole of science is in itself a circle in which the first becomes also the last, and the last also the first (Hegel 1832, 70/49).

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The presuppositions are integrated into the system in a way that they no longer represent a restriction. The total comprehension of the presuppositions at the same time makes them lose their “pre-suppositional” character. For Hegel, a truly presuppositionless philosophy is the consistent and thorough process of self-reflection and self-criticism in which the inevitable presuppositions are “sublated [aufgehoben]” (Lau 2007). In Hegel’s philosophy, the word “presuppositionlessness” does not refer to any concept, any judgment, or any beginning at all but only to the system as a whole. Strictly speaking, any claim to presuppositionless beginning is self-­ defeating. Isn’t the demand for a presuppositionless beginning itself a presupposition? The principle of foundationalism is itself a presupposition that is questionable. What Hegel offers is a counterproposal that proves to be, as a whole, more consistent.

4  IV Hegel’s criticism of the foundationalist conception is targeted against his predecessors and contemporaries such as Descartes, Reinhold, Fichte, and Jacobi. It has, however, particularly interesting implications for Husserl’s phenomenology, which represents one of the most ambitious foundationalist projects in the history of philosophy. As we know, Husserl maintains that: “From its earliest beginnings philosophy has claimed to be rigorous science” (Husserl 1987, 3/71). Husserl has made a number of attempts to realize the ideal of philosophy as a rigorous science or even a presuppositionless philosophy, aiming at “a scientific critique and in addition a radical science, rising from below, based on sure foundations, and progressing according to the most rigorous methods” (Husserl 1987, 57/142). The crux of this foundationalist ideal is, of course, to establish a philosophical system on a secure foundation, which, according to Husserl’s main work Ideas I, is guaranteed by what Husserl calls the Principle of All Principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily … offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there. ... Every statement which does no more than confer expression on such data by simple explication and by means of significations precisely conforming to them is … actually an absolute beginning called upon to serve as a foundation, a principium in the genuine sense of the word. (Husserl 1976, § 24, 51/44)

Husserl aims at a pure descriptive eidetic science based on the “data” given in pure consciousness. The Principle of All Principles operates on the evidence presented in pure consciousness, as “the primal source of all legitimacy lies in immediate evidence and, more narrowly delimited, in originary evidence” (Husserl 1976, § 141, 326/338). The concept of evidence has proved crucial for Husserl’s philosophy since his Logical Investigations. From its early qualification as the “experience of truth”,

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evidence is considered the ultimate ground for the truth and legitimacy of cognition. What is adequately evident is free from presuppositions and thus qualified as “an absolutely grounded cognition” (Husserl 1974, § 104, 283/277). There is and can be no further ground for justification behind what is immediately self-evident. That is why it is difficult to explain and clarify the concept of evidence, but Husserl did try to give a more detailed analysis of the concept in the Cartesian Meditations. For him, evidence is intimately and inseparably connected, if not even identical, to seeing: “Evidence is … precisely a mental seeing of something itself” (Husserl 1973a, § 5, 52/12). In a more elaborated way: In the broadest sense, evidence denotes a universal primal phenomenon of intentional life … the quite preeminent mode of consciousness that consists in the self-appearance, the self-exhibiting, the self-giving, of an affair, an affair-complex (or state of affairs), a universality, a value, or other objectivity, in the final mode: “itself there”, “immediately intuited”/“given originaliter”. (Husserl 1976, § 24, 92–93/57)

In Husserl’s theoretical enterprise, evidence is such a fundamental and irreducible concept that the concepts used in clarifying it are often clumsier and less clear than the concept of evidence itself. Yet, the essential point in the previous elucidation is that evidence is not something derivative, but is self-appearance, self-exhibiting, and self-giving. The most conspicuous word in the explanation is the prefix “self-”. The word here does not primarily refer to a self in the sense of a subject or a thinking being, but signifies a structure of “selfness”, which consists in the radical exclusion of all “otherness”. Self-appearance, self-exhibiting, and self-giving mean a kind of appearance, exhibiting, and giving which is not mediated by anything else. Instead, it is given originaliter or immediately. The complex characterization can therefore be summarized, in a logical term, by the concept of immediacy. Evidence is the “primal source of all legitimacy” just because it is not mediated by anything else; in this sense, it is “immediately intuited” or “given originaliter” prior to all possible distortions and prejudices. The immediacy of the “originary presentive intuition” guarantees that its legitimacy does not depend on a further ground that is itself not immediately self-evident. Evidence is the absolute and ultimate foundation in so far as it is absolutely immediate. Husserl’s radical new beginning of philosophy, realized through the phenomenological epoché, is a radical exclusion of all mediations, exclusion by means of putting everything that comes from outside, from society, and from history into brackets so as to rediscover to what is truly immediate. Eugen Fink aptly summarizes as follows: The pathos of phenomenology, its enthusiasm, results in the radicalism of the “beginner”, in the belief that human spirit freed from the burden of history has the ability to acquire an immediate relation to the existent. (Fink 1981, 34)

However, if Hegel’s criticism of immediate knowledge is right, then there is neither immediacy as such nor an absolute beginning. The pursuit of an absolute foundation for philosophy, and accordingly the ideal of philosophy as rigorous science, are doomed to failure. As Hegel points out, everything that appears in consciousness has been mediated by our linguistic-conceptual understanding that penetrates into every activity of our mind. Even if Husserl succeeded in guaranteeing

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“a seeing consciousness that directly and adequately apprehends itself” (Husserl 1973b, 59/47), what is seen in the eidetic seeing has to be described by language, which turns out to be a necessary mediation from which there is no escape. Later phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Gadamer departed from Husserl’s foundationalist position due particularly to their understanding of the inevitable mediation through language. Gadamer is right in emphasizing our unsurpassable bondage to language (Gadamer 1989, 421). The language with which we think, speak, and understand constitutes an unsurpassable basis for our being. In Heidegger’s words: “Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell” (Heidegger 1998, 239). Our thinking of or seeing the world is necessarily shaped by the worldview that comes with natural language. Instead of fantasizing about getting rid of all the inescapable preconceptions and preunderstandings, we learn from Gadamer’s idea of hermeneutic circle the necessary and constructive role of “prejudices” in the structure of understanding. If the prefix “self-”, as explained previously, could be considered symbolic of Husserl’s concept of evidence and his eidetic phenomenology, then the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger and Gadamer might be characterized by the prefix “pre-”. While “self-” signifies the ambition of a philosophy to stand on its own, to become an autonomous, pre-­ supposition-­less enterprise by virtue of an unmediated, intimate, and direct access to what is evident, “pre-” is the word expressing the recognition and appreciation of various preconditions, preconceptions, presuppositions, and prejudices with which philosophy has to cope. Indeed, this hermeneutic attitude has driven the later development of phenomenology more and more away from Husserl’s original conception of presuppositionless philosophy. In response to the challenge of the hermeneutic phenomenology as well as to the political turbulence in Europe, a major turn in Husserl’s philosophical project is observable around the 1930s. Husserl’s last major work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, departs significantly from his earlier works, incorporating a number of novel ideas and new themes, among which the concept of “life-world” (Lebenswelt) stands out as a leitmotif. By “life-world”, Husserl means the pre-predicative, pre-conceptual, pre-reflective, and pre-scientific world in which we human beings live. It is the “actually intuited, actually experienced and experienceable world”, not the objective world of natural scientific investigations, but the world of everyday life which serves as the “Forgotten Meaning-Fundament [vergessenes Sinnesfundament] of Natural Science”: It is this world that we find to be the world of all known and unknown realities. To it, the world of actually experiencing intuition, belongs the form of space-time together with all the bodily [körperlich] shapes incorporated in it; it is in this world that we ourselves live, in accord with our bodily [leiblich], personal way of being. (Husserl 1959, § 9 h, 50/50)

The concept of life-world suggests that all theoretical reflections operate on the basis of a pre-predicative, pre-conceptual, pre-reflective, pre-objective world of background understandings and experiences. The life-world, therefore, proves to be

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more fundamental than the methodological device with which Husserl attempts to guarantee a presuppositionless foundation, insofar as the pre-conceptual and pre-­ objective character of life-world makes a direct, explicit, and adequate description of it impossible. Husserl’s phenomenology was conceived to be a rigorous science or even a presuppositionless philosophy which should lay the ultimate foundation for all human knowledge including logic, mathematics, and natural sciences. However, the introduction of the concept of life-world means the abandonment of the original project, leading Husserl to make the controversial claim in “Denial of Scientific Philosophy”, appendix 9 to the Crisis: “Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science – the dream is over” (Husserl 1959, 508/389). Admittedly, philosophy in the form of rigorous science on the basis of a presuppositionless foundation is a dream that can never be realized. The problem, however, is not the incapability of philosophy, but rather that the dream itself is grounded on a prejudice that leads up to an unrealizable project. Over a remarkable philosophical career, Husserl has long been guided by the foundationalist conception of knowledge, searching for a secure foundation of philosophy. The fact that Husserl’s major works are almost always subtitled “introduction” documents his ever-repeated search for a new, reliable beginning. Yet, the Crisis as Husserl’s last “Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy” comes up finally with a new approach to the old project, which could be represented by the following “paradox”: From the beginning the phenomenologist lives in the paradox of having to look upon the obvious [das Selbstverständliche] as questionable, as enigmatic, and of henceforth being unable to have any other scientific 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 [Verständlichkeit]. (Husserl 1959, § 53, 183–84/180; see Carr 1974)

Husserl seems, in the Crisis, to have come to realize what Hegel had explained in his critique of immediate knowledge. Philosophy cannot refuse to acknowledge what has already been taken for granted and thus appears as obvious. These are the presuppositions with which philosophy begins, but which have to be “sublated” in the progress of philosophical reflections. The job of philosophy is not to search for what is selbstverständlich, but rather to transform Selbstverständlichkeit to Verständlichkeit, to understand and to make transparent the presuppositions that cannot be dispensed with. Freedom from all presuppositions can at best, as Hegel suggests, be projected as the ideal or the result that philosophy strives to achieve, but never as its point of departure. In this connection, the paradox is that the ideal of presuppositionlessness is to be attained by first acknowledging the fact that philosophy cannot be free from presuppositions at the beginning. The ideal is still a presuppositionless philosophy and, in this sense, a rigorous science, but it is, at best, to be realized in an infinite process of self-reflection and self-criticism.

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References Carr, David. 1974. Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Fink, Eugen. 1981. The Problem of the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In Apriori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenology. ed. and trans. W.  McKenna, R.M. Harlan, and L.E. Winters. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. Trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. New York: Continuum. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1807. Phenomenologie des Geistes. In  Werke, vol. 3, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Trans. and ed. Terry Pinkard. The Phenomenology of Spirit, 2018. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1830. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1830. Erster Teil. Die Wissenschaft der Logik. Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen. In  Werke, vol. 8, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Trans. and ed. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O.  Dahlstrom.  Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, 2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1832. Wissenschaft der Logik I. Erster Teil. Die objektive Logik. Erstes Buch. In Werke, vol. 5, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Trans. and ed. George di Giovanni. Science of Logic, 2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1998. Letter on “Humanism”. Trans. F.A.  Capuzzi. In Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume, David. 2000.  A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D.F.  Norton and M.J.  Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1959. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. In Husserliana, vol. 6. ed. W.  Biemel. The Hague: Nijhoff. Trans. David Carr.  The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, 1970. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973a. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. In Husserliana, vol. 1, ed. S. Strasser. The Hague: Nijhoff. Trans. D. Cairns. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, 1960. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1973b. Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen. In Husserliana, vol. 2. The Idea of Phenomenology, 1999. Trans. L. Hardy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1974. Formale and transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. In Husserliana, vol. 17, ed. Paul Janssen. The Hague: Nijhoff. Trans. D. Cairns. Formal and Transcendental Logic, 1969. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1976. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenlogie und phänomenlogischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. In Husserliana, vol. 3/1, ed. W. Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Trans. F. Kersten. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1987. Philosophie als Strenge Wissenschaft. In Aufsätze und Vorträge. 1911–1921. In Mit ergänzenden Texten, ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Reiner Sepp, 3–67. Husserliana, vol. 25. The Hague: Nijhoff. Trans. Quentin Lauer. Philosophy as Rigorous Science. In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Man, 1965, 29–196. New York: Harper & Row. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 1994. Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn (1789). In The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill. Trans. G. di Giovanni. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1781. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Akademie-Ausgabe vol. 4: 1911. Berlin: Reimer. Ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood.  Critique of Pure Reason, 1998. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 1787. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Akademie-Ausgabe vol. 3: 1904. Berlin: Reimer. Ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood: Critique of Pure Reason, 1998. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Trans. M. Friedman. In Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lau, Chong-Fuk. 2000. Voraussetzungs- und Bestimmungslosigkeit: Bemerkungen zum Problem des Anfangs in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik. Perspektiven der Philosophie: Neues Jahrbuch 26: 287–323. ———. 2004. Die Sprachlichkeit des Wahren und Hegels Kritik des “unmittelbaren Wissens”. In Hegel-Jahrbuch 2004: Glauben und Wissen II. Teil, ed. A. Arndt, K. Bal, and H. Ottmann, 203–208. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. ———. 2007. Absoluteness and Historicity: Hegel’s Idea of a Self-Transcending System. In Von der Logik zur Sprache, ed. R. Bubner and G. Hindrichs, 109–134. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Wieland, Wolfgang. 1978. Bemerkungen zum Anfang von Hegels Logik. In Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels, ed. R.-P. Horstmann, 194–212. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Archeo-Logos: Hegel and Heidegger on Finding the Principle in Heraclitus’ Saying Antoine Cantin-Brault

Abstract The logos of Heraclitus, the all-encompassing saying of the arche of phusis, is a complex notion. Moreover, in regard to phusis (beingness), arche can be understood in at least two ways: as an appreciation of beingness in regard to a supreme being, or as an appreciation of Being as permitting the disclosure of beingness. This article aims to show that Heraclitus’ logos is, in its entirety, onto-proto-­ logical and, therefore, can support these two seemingly different appreciations of the arche of phusis. It will do so by showing how Hegel’s and Heidegger’s interpretations of Heraclitus can coexist in the Obscure’s remaining fragments. Furthermore, this article aims to show that the Heideggerian interpretation of Heraclitus rests on the Hegelian reading, and that for Heidegger to finally posit that phenomenology is tautology implies a break with Hegel, but also from Heraclitus and from any other expression of metaphysics. Heidegger’s relationship to Heraclitus (and to Hegel, who inevitably lies in the background) reveals how Heidegger radicalized his own phenomenological thought. Keywords  Metaphysics · Onto-proto-logy · Arche · Phusis · Logos · Heraclitus · Hegel · Heidegger

1  Introduction Several of Heraclitus’ remaining fragments1 suggest that “logos,” perhaps the most prevalent notion in the Obscure’s saying, has at least two different meanings. According to T. M. Robinson, these two meanings are: 1- “logos in the sense that it is formulated in human speech of his [Heraclitus] own, but [2-] at a deeper level it is, via Heraclitus, the logos of ‘that which is wiseʼ” (Heraclitus 1987, 114). Stated  In particular fragments DK B 1, 50 and 108.

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A. Cantin-Brault (*) Université de Saint-Boniface, Winnipeg, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Ferrarin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Phenomenology, Contributions To Phenomenology 102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_5

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more bluntly, Heraclitus’ logos, without further precision, means Heraclitus’ account (logos in its first sense) of the arche of phusis2 (logos in its second sense). The arche, the first principle, incepts and steers beingness, phusis, so that phusis becomes explainable out of a sacred and divine logos in order to be expressed and communicated as human logos. “That which is wise” permits phusis’ unity through, or by taking distance from, plurality, revealing a grounded truth, an arche, which Heraclitus recorded in his remaining fragments. However, logos in the second sense, this deeper logos, this arche of phusis that articulates truth and molds human logos accordingly, has at least two other meanings as well: the arche of phusis can be the dialectical and determinate truth of beingness, i.e. truth of the unified articulation of the means of existence; or it can also be the indeterminate truth of Being, i.e. the unveiling of that which is concealed but which nevertheless brings to light the unified articulation of the means of existence. This splitting in two of the arche of phusis is not clearly indicated in Heraclitus’ articulation of his own logos. However, in considering how Hegel and Heidegger understood the wisdom of, and in, Heraclitus’ saying, this splitting in two is revealed to be one of the most radical contradictions that drive phusis in its universal strife. Hegel and Heidegger opposed each other philosophically in relation to the meaning of Heraclitus’ arche of phusis because they chose to present it in two different lights: Hegel presented Heraclitus in the clear light of beingness itself, while Heidegger presented Heraclitus in the very dim light of Being. Nonetheless, however, it would seem that even in insisting on their respective splitting of this arche of phusis, neither is able to disprove the other because Heraclitus’ logos resists all one-sided interpretations as it can be understood in an onto-proto-logical constitution of metaphysics. This onto-proto-logical constitution of metaphysics – as it can be found in Bernard Mabille’s work and as will be presented in further detail below – encompasses both sides of the splitting of the arche of phusis because it is in itself an onto-theo-logical understanding of beingness and a me-onto-logical understanding of Being. Thus, it is not because Heraclitus is obscure that Hegel and Heidegger were able to use his logos to present opposite views of metaphysics. On the contrary, Heraclitus’ obscurity may be in part explained by his attempt to show those two forms of understanding as constituting, in a never-ending negative relationship, the unity of phusis. It is thus unsurprising that Heidegger’s interpretation 2  We could go so far as to say, as Heidegger did, that “Φύσις is ἀρχή, i.e., the origin and ordering of movedness and rest, specifically in a moving being that has this ἀρχή in itself” (Heidegger 1976, 247/189). Hereafter, the page number of the English translation follows the corresponding page number of the German edition). In the following, however, I will keep them separate because phusis can indicate its arche in two different ways: the absolute becoming (if we understand the arche of phusis from beingness itself) or Being (if we understand the arche of phusis out of beingness and phusis as Being itself). To be clear, phusis is to be understood here as beingness – the gathering and the essence of beings -, and the search for its arche means to make sense of this essence of beings, with the help of another (supreme) being or Being itself. The following considerations regarding onto-proto-logy will clarify this separation.

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of Heraclitus’ logos cannot be appreciated without Hegel’s: Heidegger would not and, finally, could not entirely free Heraclitus’ logos from its Hegelian interpretation. This, in turn, suggests that Heraclitus cannot be isolated in only one of these two metaphysical understandings of the ultimate principle and, furthermore, that Heidegger’s thinking has to be understood in close relation to Hegel’s. In an attempt to understand Heidegger’s relationship to Heraclitus and to show how Hegel is always “in the mirror” when Heidegger approaches Heraclitus, it will first be useful to present briefly Hegel’s understanding of Heraclitus’ logos. Then, it will be necessary to consider more specifically the period (extending from around 1930 to 1960) in which Heidegger tried to completely isolate Heraclitus’ logos from Hegel’s, in order to show how this Heideggerian attempt must necessarily fail both in the context of the remaining fragments of Heraclitus and, more importantly, in the context of metaphysics as constituted onto-proto-logically. This is due to the fact that the battle between Hegel and Heidegger about the original arche to be found in Heraclitus’ logos is a battle fought on the same ground, i.e. onto-proto-logical metaphysics and, moreover, because any attempt to disengage from metaphysics completely by radicalizing phenomenology assumes a disengagement from Hegel, from Heraclitus and from logos altogether as well as from any other archeo-logical positioning.

2  Hegel’s Arche in Heraclitus’ Logos Hegel’s Absolute requires negativity to articulate itself out of itself and to produce infinite meaning. This negativity – dialectics being more than a mere method – is initially found in becoming, Heraclitus’ arche, which permits the systematic understanding of philosophy in Hegel. In this sense, Heraclitus’ logos “is essential, and hence it is to be found in my Logic, right after ‘being’ and ‘nothing’” (Hegel 1971, 325, 1989, 72–73, 1990, vol. 2, 75). Heraclitus, for the first time and hereafter, introduced truth as the identity of identity and non-identity (Hegel 1970a, 96). Becoming is in itself a negative force that must be applied to something, i.e. the Dasein (Hegel 1969a, 116), to be truly thinkable, although it is precisely this negative force that will drive the determinative process of the Idea logically and philosophically. Hegel expresses Heraclitus’ logos with several concepts that are interconnected: relationship (Verhältnis. Hegel 1971, 337, 1989, 79, 80), reason (Vernunft, Hegel 1971, 338, 341, 1989, 79) or even divine understanding, or divine logos, (göttliche Verstand, Hegel 1971, 341, 1989, 79). All these names used to designate logos are determinate notions that aim to rationalize and to define being in an ontic ­dimension: divine understanding is given by way of negative contradiction in the Logic; it splits itself so that it does not remain abstract. Furthermore, it arises in relationship with the different (the other), which reason grasps due to its ability to find unity in what

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was previously separated, and against simple understanding (Verstand), which sees only fixed identity against non-identity, missing the truth of the identity of identity and non-identity. Heraclitus’ logos is understood here as reason since reason unites, and gives meaning to, the absolutely indeterminate and unilateral notions of pure being and pure nothingness that are set forth as absolutely opposed by understanding. Becoming involves contradiction, contradiction between the finitude of being that is first understood as separated from nothingness and its turning into nothingness. Becoming permits infinite knowledge, true philosophical knowledge: stated bluntly, Heraclitus makes philosophy possible. Logos is, in other words, the Idea that subsumes its finitude negatively to speak itself in its entirety. Heraclitus’ logos is thus used by Hegel to show that determination does not hinder the Absolute in its infinite self-affirmation. On the contrary, the Absolute can articulate itself only by a process of determination that is made possible by the negativity of becoming. It is Heraclitus that led Hegel to write that: “it is least of all the logos which should be left outside the science of logic. Therefore its inclusion in or omission from this science must not be simply a matter of choice” (Hegel 1969a, 30/39). Logos as “the absolute, self-subsistent matter at stake [Sache] […], the reason of that which is, the truth of what we call things” (Hegel 1969a, 30/39) cannot be excluded from the Logic, since the Logic (just as Heraclitus’ own logos) is the spoken and preserved deployment of the pure logos, i.e. the arche of the determination of the truth in its purity and isolation from reality. This deeper logos found by Hegel in Heraclitus is “this process, this determinateness of movement that permeates the all, this rhythm or measure, an ethereal being that is the seed for generation of the whole – this One is the logos” (Hegel 1989, 79, 1990, vol. 2, 81). Heraclitus’ logos is the saying that initiates the Logic, but it is also the logic(al) in the Logic;3 logos is the arche from which begins the determination process of the Absolute in itself that the Logic gathers. And this logos truly becomes the arche of phusis when the Idea experiences its pure and logical logos systematically by setting itself in reality, namely nature and spirit. Regarding the significance of Heraclitus, the Encyclopedia, can be read as the negative determination of the logos (Logic) that serves to carry out the negative determinations of reality given as the spurious infinite (Nature) and sublated as true infinity (Spirit). Becoming is the logos that moves the Idea, it is its arche as the Idea systematically and completely determined is phusis in its entirety. Heraclitus, by thinking the becoming, the negative process itself, cannot come to the point of thinking the true infinity of absolute spirit, but he can truly think becoming and its real incarnation: time, the “intuited becoming” (Hegel 1970c, § 258, 48, 1971, 329, 1989, 76–77) that affects negatively beingness in its entirety, that is, nature and spirit (Cantin-Brault 2013).

3  “The logic(al) [le logique]: this is the unfolding explication of all that is, or, more precisely, all that exists. The Logic – The Science of Logic – is the discursive and organisational space where, from the perspective of Hegel and his time, the logic(al) finds its proper ‘placeʼ and the space from out of which it pronounces itself according to its own economy” (Jarczyk and Labarrière 1986, 290–291. My translation).

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Finding his arche in Heraclitus’ logos is also a way for Hegel to criticize Parmenides. By sublating the Eleatic being through becoming,4 Heraclitus prevented philosophy from falling back into tautology and, ultimately, from condemning itself to silence. Determination demands contradiction and contradiction demands that opposites be thought together, which Parmenides’ notion of being impedes. Identity without difference is, from a Hegelian standpoint, a hollow concept without any depth to ensure its truthfulness. Eleatic thinkers are engaged in a “conversation which merely reiterates the same thing […] But since only the same thing is repeated, the opposite has happened, nothing has emerged. Such identical talk therefore contradicts itself. Identity, instead of being in its own self truth and absolute truth, is consequently the very opposite” (Hegel 1969b, 44/415). The Absolute of Parmenides is no logos, it does not need to begin by being said, it is no arche since it posits phusis in its still unilateral vacuity. Heraclitus understands that “God is contradictory, since he embraces self-­ negation” (Hegel 2001, 7/4), negation of its abstract identity. Of course, it is the Atomists and Anaxagoras who deserve merit for thinking this God as a true, self-­ conscious Absolute. Hegel writes that “Anaxagoras is praised as the man who first declared that the Nous, the thought, is the principle of the world, that the essence of the world is to be defined as the thought” (Hegel 1969a, 44/50), so that thinking is posited as the ultimate truth. Nevertheless, for Hegel, Heraclitus was the first to set forth determination as a necessary component of the Absolute, after having first set a logos that works as the arche of Hegel’s philosophy. Therefore, for Hegel, all that can be understood as metaphysics – the form of philosophy that is not just a “love of knowledge” but effective knowledge (Hegel 1970b, 14) – must contain determination, or at the very least be articulated through logos, the negative becoming of the Idea.

 “Heraclitus utters the bold and more profound dictum that being no more is than is non-being – τὸ ὂν οὐ μᾶλλον ἔστι τοῦ μὴ ὄντος  – but no less either” (Hegel 1971, 323; 1989, 71; 1990, vol. 2, 73). From a philological standpoint, it is strange that Hegel cites these Greek words since we cannot find any occurrences of them in his remaining fragments. Michelet sends us to Aristotles’ Metaphysics Γ, 7, 3, and and P. Garniron to Α, 4, but there is no clear occurrence of this saying or Heraclitus himself in those two passages. Therefore, what Hegel cites seems to be a construction of his own, or of one of his disciples. And because Heraclitus says that being is no more than non-being, Hegel must place Parmenides before Heraclitus in his rationalized history of philosophy, since one must posit that being is the Absolute before Heraclitus can posit that being is no more than non-being. Hegel says that Heraclitus is “a contemporary of Parmenides” (Hegel 1971, 320; 1989, 69; 1990, vol. 2, 70), but he still comes logically after Parmenides. Except for Karl Reinhardt in his book of 1916 (reprint 1959, 201 ff.), no scholar subsequent to Hegel has thought, in light of all the philological and historical work done since Hegel on the study of the Presocratics, that Heraclitus came after Parmenides. Hegel’s position poses a real problem in terms of an understanding of Heraclitus, although it does not affect Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus or its relationship to Hegel. Furthermore, Heidegger seems to give credit to Hegel and Reinhardt for positing philosophically, and against the historical tradition, Heraclitus after Parmenides (see Heidegger 1993, 230). 4

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3  Heidegger’s Arche in Heraclitus’s Logos To say that Heidegger found Heraclitus’ logos as his arche cannot be understood in the same way as in Hegel, because Heidegger’s thought underwent a Kehre that, as Marlène Zarader (1996) has shown, was two-phased. Until the Kehre (around 1930), Heidegger was concerned with fundamental ontology, i.e. a re-positioning of Being in the light of a more profound understanding of the Dasein. For this project, Heraclitus, like all of the Presocratics, was of little importance because only Aristotle had truly posited the different modes of Being in their relation to the Dasein.5 It is only through the Kehre that Heidegger found Heraclitus’ logos as an arche for a-letheia: in abandoning his much too anthropologically centered fundamental ontology, Heidegger signified Being in its lethe, its concealedness. But in entering the last phase of the Kehre (around 1960), and by increasingly appreciating the concealedness and setting-aside of Being, Heidegger abandoned Heraclitus because he provided no historical site for the Ereignis: this light that had shined on beings without any philosopher, except maybe Parmenides, as its bearer. For Heidegger, every “principle” (arche) was an errant one as the Ereignis cannot be simply understood as an arche. Let us consider these three phases, insisting more specifically on the second one. Until the Kehre, and because fundamental ontology had sought to position Being in relation to the Dasein, Heraclitus’ logos, which shows that “oppositionality constitutes the very Being of the being” (Heidegger 1993, 56/46), was not aligned sufficiently with Dasein and, thus, was not to be thought of as a site for its articulation. Surely, understood as oppositionality, “Being is only consciousness and is unthinkable otherwise” (Heidegger 1993, 61/51), i.e. oppositionality can only be understood through reason, but reason has not been radicalized as a Dasein that is more than just something. Thus, Being remains infra-worldly, and its opposite, nonbeing, has not been radicalised in regard to Dasein as anxiety.6 However, this unification of Being with its opposite nonbeing in the concept of oppositionality shows that for Heidegger Heraclitus is here to be understood as Hegel understood him. What is the meaning of oppositionality? Heidegger answers: “The oppositional is, conflict; the dialectical itself in the Hegelian sense. The movement of constant opposition and sublation is the principle. Therefore Hegel already places Heraclitus after Parmenides and sees in him a higher level of development. Being and nonbeing are abstractions. Becoming is the first ‘truth,ʼ the true essence, time itself” (Heidegger 1993, 60/50–51). Time, as discussed above, is the becoming as the Idea proves its infinity and freedom through the finitude of reality. Heidegger seems to suggest that 5  Aristotle partakes in “the question of the being of human Dasein and the more radical appropriation of the question of the being of the world” (Heidegger 1993, 21/17). This course (Heidegger 1993), given by Heidegger in 1926 at the University of Marburg, is the most important source for Heidegger’s position on the Presocratics and the Greeks as a whole in his period of fundamental ontology. 6  “Heraclitus has taken nonbeing itself ontically and has understood this ontic determination as an ontological one” (Heidegger 1993, 61/51).

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Heraclitus could not think a true logical becoming because he had thought the oppositionality always and already in nature, phusis. This, in turn, implies that in thinking phusis he could not totally break from beingness and that his conception of the Dasein was always ontical and never ontological. But Heidegger’s critique is not directly aimed at Heraclitus; it is aimed at Hegel himself: in Heraclitus’s logos, “The mode of Being of life or of the soul does not come to be delimited against the mode of Being of nature or of the world. [...] Likewise for Hegel: he also grasps the spirit as substance, to be sure in a very broad sense. That is connected to the domination of Greek ontology” (Heidegger 1993, 245/191). Hegel’s Idea as becoming absolute spirit is a process occurring from and in beingness; his logos, as well as Heraclitus’, is the arche of phusis in and from phusis itself, nothing else. Thus, at this point, Heidegger cannot find his arche in Heraclitus’ logos, because this logos is already in the form proposed by Hegel: a logos that posits truth as substance, which is to be understood infra-worldly, i.e. as the negative process of the determination of things in the world for the sake of the Absolute’s absoluteness and not as the radical presence and absence of the Dasein itself in phusis. Heraclitus is here for Heidegger too Hegelian to be considered a decisive thinker. But after the Kehre, Heidegger reads Heraclitus differently, and he does so by insisting mainly on a specific meaning of the term logos, and by putting little emphasis on the play of opposites and contradiction; in short, by losing interest in the notion of (intuited or not) becoming.7 Heraclitus thus becomes the thinker of the disclosure of Being which is beyond what is, i.e. beingness. The change in tone is flagrant: “I only want to make clear the gulf that separates us from Hegel, when we are dealing with Heraclitus” (Heidegger 1986, 199–200; Heidegger and Fink 1993, 123). The importance of the Presocratics is now to be situated for Heidegger in the way they think without the weight of the dictatorship of subjectivity, which leads to the necessity of determination, since subjectivity requires discursive language as a condition for saying and understanding something, making it its own. The Presocratics mark a fundamental beginning,8 that of the origin of the swaying of Being, which is opposed to those metaphysical perspectives, such as Plato’s and Aristotle’s, that resort to a supreme being in order to make sense of beingness. According to Heidegger, Hegel is probably the most accomplished representative of this tradition. Presocratic thinkers are not clearly aware of having answered the call of Being, the call that joins both light and darkness (Heidegger 1979, 345). But we must conceive of the Greeks as even more “Greekly” in order to find the origin of 7  “By freeing Heraclitus’ words from the rigidity into which these words are placed and by situating his words within the fundamental occurrence of disclosure, Heidegger shows us a Heraclitus who is no longer primarily and exclusively the author of a metaphysical doctrine of becoming” (Maly and Emad 1986, 5). 8  “The first beginning experiences and posits the truth of beings, without inquiring into truth as such, because what is unhidden in it, a being as a being, necessarily overpowers everything and uses up the nothing, taking it in or destroying it completely as the ‘not’ and the ‘against.’ The other beginning experiences the truth of be-ing and inquires into the be-ing of truth in order first to ground the essential swaying of be-ing and to let beings as the true of that originary truth spring forth” (Heidegger 1997, § 91, 179/125–126).

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the call of Being.9 From there, what counts in Heraclitus’ thought, according to Heidegger, is not that pure being sublates itself in becoming, as to ensure that it was always and already the Absolute in its initial determination, but that there is Being that never enters beingness because it is the light that discloses beingness. Becoming becomes secondary to Being, since becoming is only the phenomenon of beingness, the way beingness shows itself. “Heraclitus knows neither something of opposites nor of dialectic” (Heidegger 1986, 25; Heidegger and Fink 1993, 11),10 contrary to what Hegel thought, and, as the Kehre continued to influence Heidegger’s thought, contrary to what Heidegger thought in his period of fundamental ontology, and to what he would come to think of Heraclitus at the end of his life. “Heraclitus, to whom one ascribes the doctrine of becoming, in stark contrast to Parmenides, in truth says the same as Parmenides.” (Heidegger 1983, 105/103). In trying to find an arche for indeterminate Being, it is pointless to attempt, as Hegel did, to contrast Heraclitus’ logos with Parmenides’ tautology because they seem to say, or point out, the same “thing.” Heraclitus’ logos can now be an arche for Heidegger precisely because it points to the same truth as Parmenides. They both understood truth as aletheia, which is what it is to think before anything else, since aletheia proves to be the meaning of Being, the meaning of real truth. “It suffices that this saying of Heraclitus expresses the fundamental experience in which and from which is awoken an insight into the essence of truth as the unhiddenness of beings. This saying is as old as Western philosophy itself, giving expression to that fundamental experience and orientation of ancient man from which philosophy begins” (Heidegger 1988, 14/11). Philosophy begins with aletheia because aletheia reveals Being that philosophy, contrary to traditional metaphysics, must gather in its absence with regard to beingness. Heidegger works with Heraclitus’ logos to signify aletheia as the arche of phusis, not as subjective truth, but as the movement of unconcealment of that which draws back to give presence to beingness: “The ἀλήθεια is, as its name suggests, not vain openness, but rather unconcealment of self-sheltering” (Heidegger 1979, 175. My translation). Thus, in order to grasp Being, we ought not to seek to contain it in discursive language, because to do so would entail losing its withdrawal. We must seize the openness of what is always hidden in this hidden way-of-being, which is the meaning of a-letheia. This aletheia is the truth of phusis for Heidegger, because phusis, in Heraclitus’ logos, shows clearly the lethe of aletheia: “The world’s real constitution [φύσις] has a tendency to conceal itself.” (DK B 123: Heraclitus 1987, 71). We cannot not try to grasp Being because of our Dasein constitution,11 although phusis cannot clearly 9  Heidegger insists that aletheia is the main objective of Heraclitus’ thought, but only once can this word be found in Heraclitus’ remaining fragments (DK B 112). Heidegger comments on this notable absence in the following manner: “With Heraclitus, ἀλήθεια, nonconcealment, stands in the background, even if it is not mentioned directly” (Heidegger 1983, 205; Heidegger and Fink 1993, 126). This is conceiving of the Greeks as even more “Greekly.” 10  More precisely, “When Heraclitus thinks γένεσις in γινομένων, he does not mean a process. But thought in Greek, γένεσις means ‘to come into being,’ to come forth in presence” (Heidegger 1986, 20; see also Heidegger and Fink 1993, 8). 11  See DK B 16. Even after the Kehre, the Dasein is still essentially linked to Being, but Being is more decisive now than the Dasein: Da-sein leads us to Sein.

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appear at the risk of becoming a being, it “must remain the invisible of all invisibles, since it bestows shining on whatever appears” (Heidegger 2000, 279/115). In other words, “Phusis is Being itself, by virtue of which beings first become and remain observable” (Heidegger 1983, 17/15). There is a relation between Being and nothingness, but not as Hegel understands it: the relation between being and nothingness in Hegel’s thought is to produce becoming, but in Heidegger’s thought, it is to show more clearly that Being is non-being, beyond beingness. Therefore, the task of the thinker engaged in a silent discussion with the Presocratics12 is to disclose this phusis without losing its concealment against the metaphysicians, who reduce Being to the ontic dimension. Phusis then is radicalized by Heidegger to refer not only to beingness itself, but also to its topos, this unseen place from which beingness emerges. Therefore, the whole expression “arche of phusis” for Heidegger points to Being; a logical distinction between arche and phusis seems now irrelevant, because phusis, as Being, is the arche of beingness.13 Heraclitus’ logos is an arche for the indeterminate Being because this logos is, in summary, lesende Lege: logos is not a saying, as traditional metaphysicians believed it to be; it is an originary recollection of the signs of Being. “We must inculcate us, that λόγος does not mean ‘word’ and not ‘speech’ and not ‘language’” (Heidegger 1979, 239). Rather, “Λόγος is in itself and at the same time a revealing and a concealing. It is ʼΑλήθεια” (Heidegger 2000, 225–226/71). Heidegger tried, and succeeded in part, to isolate Heraclitus’ logos from its Hegelian interpretation. In insisting on more ambiguous fragments than Hegel, Heidegger is able to show the richness of Heraclitus’ logos; he is also able to show that Heraclitus is “a philosopher of language who understands language ambiguously as both saying and not saying, so that in the saying we are to hear also what is not said, or hidden from the saying” (Brogan 1999, 269). “The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither indicates clearly nor conceals but gives as sign” (DK B 93: Heraclitus 1987, 57)14: this lord gives a sign of Being as a concealed arche/phusis, but gives more than a sign by also determining the articulation of beingness through a dialectical arche of phusis, where phusis is here understood as the terrain on which beingness is articulated. By isolating Heraclitus’ logos from its Hegelian interpretation, Heidegger did not erase this interpretation as an error brought upon Heraclitus’ logos, but rather showed the depth of Heraclitus’ logos as it can be an arche for both interpretations, constituting metaphysics as an onto-proto-logy, as it will be discussed in the following section.

 These Presocratic thinkers know how to listen, they are not dominated by subjectivity: “Heraclitus wants to say: human beings do hear, and they hear words, but in this hearing they cannot ‘hearken’ to – that is, follow – what is not audible like words, what is not talk but logos. […] But genuine hearkening has nothing to do with the ear and the glib tongue, but instead means obediently following what logos is: the gatheredness of beings themselves” (Heidegger 1983, 138/136–137). 13  See footnote 2 in regard to this indistinctness between arche and phusis. 14  Heidegger understands it as follows: “The oracle does not directly unconceal nor does it simply conceal, but it points out. This means: it unconceals while it conceals, and it conceals while it unconceals” (Heidegger 1976, 279/213).

12

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4  The Metaphysical Pulse In a discussion with Hegel about the ontological difference that must not relapse into the ontical dimension by a necessary relation to identity, Heidegger defines metaphysics as onto-theo-logy, a twofold science composed of onto-logy (science of being, on an ontic level) and theo-logy (the systematic study of the divine and its relationship to other beings and to beingness itself).15 This constitution is used by Heidegger to show that metaphysics, in its essence, cannot apprehend the ontological difference since it always conceives the divine as causa sui,16 and causes beingness out of the level of beingness. As metaphysics traditionally thought logos as a way of thinking cause and effect in a rational way, classical metaphysics could never escape the ontic level, which then allowed Heidegger to read the unthought that lies in the ontological difference, which is Being, that he found in Heraclitus’ logos. To be clear, for Heidegger, “there is no metaphysics where there is no question of being, god and logos” (Mabille 2010, 114. Hereafter translation is mine). This understanding of metaphysics is problematic, mainly (but secondary to us here) in regard to Neoplatonic thinking, which Heidegger situates in classical metaphysics. Neoplatonism is most certainly metaphysical, although Bernard Mabille shows that it does not necessarily fit into Heidegger’s metaphysical constitution: “Neoplatonic thought regarding the Principle is radical (and perhaps the most radical possible) because it extends to the point of declaring the Principle beyond beingness and logos” (Mabille 2006, 11). Indeed, not to confuse the principle with what it is the principle of, the Neoplatonic One is placed beyond beingness, so that it becomes non-being in regard to the ontic level of reality: “To state that the principle is ‘non-being (me on)’ is not to threaten it, but to protect it from degradation, from slipping from the originary to the derivative” (Mabille 2006, 12). Placing the One out of beingness protects it in its function as principle: “That which reveals the henologic thought-positioning – as it is meontological – is the irreducible contingency of a principle identified with a determined being or, more generally, which remains in the realm of beingness” (Mabille 2006, 22). So how does the One appear in Heidegger’s onto-theo-logical constitution? The One is beyond beingness, thus it is ultimately incommunicable in a determinative logos; if the One can be the Absolute, it can only be approached by negative theo-­ logy. To allow the inclusion of Neoplatonic thinking into metaphysics, Bernard Mabille modifies Heidegger’s constitution of metaphysics by replacing theo with  “When metaphysics thinks of beings with respect to the ground that is common to all beings as such, then it is logic as onto-logic. When metaphysics thinks of beings as such as a whole, that is, with respect to the highest being which accounts for everything, then it is logic as theo-logic” (Heidegger 2006, 76/70–71). 16  Beingness thought as reason “needs to be properly accounted for by that for which it accounts, that is, by the causation through the supremely original matter – and that is the cause as causa sui. This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god” (Heidegger 2006, 77/72). 15

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proto: “Wherever there is a ‘metaphysics,’ there is a question of being, of principle and of logos. The principle is not necessarily God or a god. It is, as admirably shown by Heidegger himself, the instance that begins (anfangt) and steers/controls (beherrscht). So rather than speak of onto-theo-logy, let us use the term onto-proto-­ logy” (Mabille 2010, 115–116). The Neoplatonic One can now be included into this constitution of metaphysics, but not without collateral damage: Heidegger’s thinking can now also be included into this new constitution because he is in pursuit of a first principle (arche or proto), even if this first principle is beyond beingness and found in a barely meaningful logos. “If metaphysics is thinking of the prime (a protology) and if this prime is not necessarily the primary being of the onto-theo-logy as described in the 1957 conference on Constitution but can also be a non-being or a beyond beingness, then the thinking of Heidegger remains thinking of principles” (Mabille 2004, 331). Heidegger and the Neoplatonists think in a similar way: “Even if they are not identical, this ‘meontological difference’ is equivalent to Heidegger’s ‘ontological difference.’ To say from what beingness is, is to transform it into a being. Alteration of the One or ‘becoming-a-being’ of Being” (Mabille 2010, 131). In these two expressions of the first principle, the essential point is to preserve the principle’s nature by isolating it from beingness, so that it can initiate and command beingness; as such, we can include both of them in a metaphysics understood as onto-proto-logy. To be sure, “If metaphysics is onto-theo-logy in the narrow sense of a discourse that brings the entirety of being to a supreme being from the identity of being and what is hidden in the background of logos, then Heidegger clearly thinks beyond this constitution of metaphysics, thinks from what is unthought in this constitution. But if onto-theo-logy as protology, as a quest for the Prime, involves a splitting in two of this principle as ontological Principle (more precisely ontical) and as meontological Principle, then Heidegger’s way of thinking belongs to metaphysics” (Mabille 2004, 335). If the first principle can both be a negatively determined supreme being (the divine dialectical thought as causa sui) and a principle beyond beingness, a me-ontological principle (Neoplatonic One or Heidegger’s Being), it seems that to propose anything other than metaphysics in pursuit of a first principle, an arche, is destined to fail. We cannot liberate ourselves from metaphysics; rather it is metaphysics that needs to be liberated from its excessively restrictive constitution. From this “dilemma of the principle” (Mabille 2006, 38), a simple metaphysical pulse emerges, which plays out in all three parts (onto-proto-logy) of the metaphysical constitution. If the first principle at which thought is aimed lies in beingness – as it is the becoming of the Idea – then its logos, the way it is expressed by reason, will be determining, because the principle has been articulated in a way that can be grasped by predicative language. And if the first principle at which the thought is aimed is beyond beingness – as it is Being – then its logos will be unspeakable in a predicative language: the revelation of this principle is only possible through the use of signs and puzzles. Mabille summarizes these two accents of this single pulse with the terms thesis and arsis, following Plotinus. Thus, the metaphysical pulse is composed, on the one hand, of the strong beat of thetic thinking, which situates and determines beingness,

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and on the other hand, of the weak beat of thinking, which lifts and abolishes thetic thinking. These two accents are probably present in all expressions of metaphysical thought to varying degrees. In a high concentration of determination, we find Hegel and in a high concentration of indetermination (or a low concentration of determination) Heidegger (Mabille 2004, 337). Metaphysics is liberated from the constant longing of its overcoming, since the overcoming itself, arsis, the logos of Heidegger, is included in the constitution of this metaphysics.17 Therefore, in a metaphysics understood as onto-proto-logy, Heraclitus’ logos is rich enough to be an arche for both onto-theo-logy and for me-onto-logy. This also clarifies why Heidegger’s interpretation cannot set aside the Hegelian interpretation of Heraclitus’ logos, for they both need to be thought in connection with each other to reveal the depth of Heraclitus’ logos.

5  Conclusion What was proved through the metaphysical pulse – namely that the arche of Hegel (the becoming of the Idea in its systematic process) and of Heidegger (Being as concealed to permit beingness) can only be understood jointly, and that, in this sense, Heraclitus’ logos contains both Heidegger’s and Hegel’s arche – has, however, to be considered in light of the fact that Heidegger himself, at the end of his life, abandoned Heraclitus’ logos as his arche. This implies that for Heidegger, Heraclitus was not, after all, a decisive thinker, and he was always, in a way, too Hegelian to show the accent in which he finally decided to set himself. After 1960 (and even before), Heidegger radicalized his conception of the concealedness of Being to the point where the term “Being” is somewhat set aside in favour of Ereignis, to suggest that the accomplishment of phenomenology, which he never abandoned completely, was tautology, a logos foreign to Heraclitus. In 1973, in the Seminar in Zähringen, Jean Beaufret noted that the position of Heidegger on Heraclitus and Parmenides had changed: “Indeed, in Vorträge und Aufsätze [published in 1954], the primacy seemed to be given to Heraclitus. Today, what place would Heraclitus take with respect to Parmenides?” To this Heidegger answers as follows: “From a mere historical perspective, Heraclitus signified the first step towards dialectic. From this perspective, then, Parmenides is more profound and essential [...]. In this regard, we must thoroughly recognize that tautology is the only possibility for thinking what dialectic can only veil. However, if one is able to read Heraclitus on the basis of the Parmenidean tautology, he himself appears in the 17  “The rhythmic principle that we have outlined implies, in its very concept, a dimension of overcoming (arsis). In liberating itself from the obsession to overcome or to renounce metaphysics and in expressing itself as freedom – that is to say as a determining and effectuating activity (a thetic moment) which always preserves the capacity for drawing back [retrait] and for abolition (a moment that has the form of arsis) –, the metaphysical exercise liberates itself as infinite invention” (Mabille 2004, 365, see also 336).

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closest vicinity to the same tautology, he himself then appears in the course of an exclusive approach presenting access to Being” (Heidegger 1986, 400; Heidegger 2003, 81). Any logos of Being that differs from tautology is unable to attain what Ereignis signifies, because in bringing about a distinction between the arche and what the arche produces, it brings forth a determination that prevents the Ereignis from simply “happening” and from being recorded by phenomenology. At this point, Heidegger does not try to find a tautology in Heraclitus’ logos: if anything, the last period of his thought (1930–1960) was the closest he came to in achieving such a task, although it did not seem to have fulfilled its objectives as he went back to Parmenides. Thus, in regard to onto-proto-logy, the opposition now seems to regard, on the one hand, Heraclitus’s logos as the arche of Hegel’s onto-theo-logy, and on the other hand, Parmenides’ tautological Being as the arche (or at least the bearer) of Heidegger’s me-onto-logy. Heraclitus is no longer to be associated to this last accent of metaphysics, and the opposition between Heraclitus and Parmenides is set back into place by Heidegger. As we have shown, it is possible to read Heraclitus’ logos as pointing to both accents, and his logos cannot be simply reduced to the thetic accent of metaphysics. Heraclitus is the author of fragments that point to the dialectical articulation of beingness, but he also left other fragments that conversely point to the concealment of Being. Heidegger himself here seems to forget, in reading Heraclitus, that “The barley-drink separates if it is not stirred” (DK B 125: Heraclitus 1987, 71); Heraclitus’ logos seems to portray only one accent of metaphysics, if metaphysics is not considered in a broadened constitution. But maybe what Heidegger was trying to do toward the end of his life was to break free from metaphysics, even understood as onto-proto-logy, and that phenomenology, radically conceived as tautology, would permit such a thing: tautology, this barely recognizable logos that repeats the same, compels silence and requires us to hear Ereignis. Perhaps any archeo-logical thinking was already and always a means of metaphysics, even for the metaphysics understood in its me-onto-logical accent. What remains unsaid in Heidegger would thus be more relevant than what he said. But, in order to find the meaning in the unsaid, the latter needs to be brought back into some form of logos, and the ultimate sacrifice capable of preventing such a fall back into metaphysics would have been to have never spoken at all, only perhaps in tautology. Yet, as Jean-François Courtine has already suggested, such a sacrifice would have been (or it has been, if Heidegger’s logos has finally set itself in tautology) a disaster for phenomenology,18 and for philosophy as a whole: it would have amounted to the end of philosophy in its entirety, because philosophy needs, as the bearer of the logos of “that which is wise,” an arche to direct its own saying of phusis.  “In a magnificent letter addressed to Heidegger in July 1942, Max Kommerell concludes an examination of the commentary on the hymn, ‘Wie wenn am Feiertag…,ʼ by risking the notion that Heidegger’s essay might well be a ‘disasterʼ (Unglück) for his thought as well as for Hölderlin’s poetry. I am tempted to end with an analogous question by asking whether the tautological transmutation of phenomenology does not itself also have a disastrous or catastrophic character, both for the very possibility of phenomenology and for the immense critical potential of Heidegger’s thought” (Courtine 1993, 255–256).

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Acknowledgments  I would like to express my deepest thanks to the organizers of the Pisa conference and to the Editors of this book, as well as to Prof. Paul. D. Morris for helping with translations and to the late Emeritus Prof. Theodore F. Geraets for his philosophical insights on this article. The present article contains English translations of passages previously published in an article of 2018 entitled Heidegger, lecteur d’Héraclite: l’ombre de Hegel (Archives de philosophie 81 (2): 311–327). I wish to thank Archives de philosophie for having authorised the republication of these passages.

References Brogan, Walter A. 1999. Heraclitus, Philosopher of the Sign. In The Presocratics after Heidegger, ed. D.C. Jacobs, 263–275. Albany: SUNY. Cantin-Brault, Antoine. 2013. Héraclite dans la Philosophie de la nature de Hegel. Laval théologique et philosophique 69 (2): 219–238. Courtine, Jean-François. 1993. Phenomenology and/or tautology. In Reading Heidegger  – Commemorations, ed. J. Sallis, 241–257. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1969–1971. Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1969a. Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Teil: Die objektive Logik. Erstes Buch: Die Lehre vom Sein. Werke, vol. 5, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Trans. A. V. Miller. Science of Logic. Amherst: Humanity Books. ———. 1969b. Wissenschaft der Logik, II. Zweiter Teil: Die Subjektive Logik. Werke, vol. 6, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Trans. and ed. George Di Giovanni: The Science of Logic: The Doctrine of Essence, 2010, 337–505. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1970a. Jenaer Schriften. 1801–1807. Werke, vol. 2, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1970b. Phenomenologie des Geistes (1807). Werke, vol. 3, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1970c. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830). Die Naturphilosophie mit den mündlichen Zusätzen. Werke, vol. 9, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1971. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I. Werke, vol. 18, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1983 ff. Vorlesungen. Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1989. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie II. Teil 2. Griechische Philosophie. I. Thales bis Kyniker. Vorlesungen, vol. 7. ed. Pierre Garniron and Walter Jaeschke. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1990  ff. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1825–26. Trans. R.F.  Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. Vorlesungen über die Logik (Berlin 1831, Nachgeschrieben von K.  Hegel). Vorlesungen, vol. 10, ed. U. Rameil, 2001. Hamburg: Meiner. Trans. C. Butler. Lectures on Logic 1831. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1975  ff. Gesamtausgabe, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1976. Wegmarken. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9, ed. F.-W. von Hermann. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. Trans. W. McNeill. Pathmarks, 1998. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 1979. Heraklit. 1. Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens (Sommersemester 1943)/2. Logik. Heraklits Lehre vom Logos (Sommersemester 1944). Gesamtausgabe, vol. 55, ed. M. S. Frings. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1983. Einführung in die Metaphysik (Sommersemester 1935). Gesamtausgabe, vol. 40, ed. P. Jaeger. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. Trans. G. Fried and R. Polt. Introduction to Metaphysics, 2000. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1986. Seminare (1951–1973). Gesamtausgabe, vol. 15. ed. C. Ochwadt. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. ———. 1988. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet (Wintersemester 1931/32). Gesamtausgabe, vol. 34, ed. H.  Mörchen. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. Trans. T. Sadler. The Essence of Truth, 2013. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 1993. Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie (Sommersemester 1926). Gesamtausgabe, vol. 22, ed. F.-K.  Blust. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. Trans. R.  Rojcewicz. Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, 2008. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 1997. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–1938). Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65, ed. F.-W. von Hermann. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. Trans. P. Emad and K. Maly. Contributions to philosophy (From Enowning), 1999. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2000. Vorträge und Aufsätze (1936–1953). Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7, ed. F.-W. von Hermann. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. Partial Trans. D. Farrell Krell and F. A. Capuzzi Early Greek Thinking, 1975. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 2003. Four Seminars. Trans. A. Mitchell and F. Raffoul. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2006. Identität und Differenz (1955–1957). Gesamtausgabe, vol. 11, ed. F.-W. von Hermann. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. Trans. J. Stambaugh. Identity and Difference, 2002. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin, and Fink, Eugen. 1993. Heraclitus Seminar. Trans. C.H.  Seibert. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Heraclitus. 1987. Fragments. Trans. and comm. T.M. Robinson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jarczyk, Gwendoline, and Pierre-Jean Labarrière. 1986. Hegeliana. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Mabille, Bernard. 2004. Hegel, Heidegger et la métaphysique. Paris: Vrin. ———. 2006. Philosophie première et pensée principielle (le révélateur néoplatonicien). In Le principe, ed. B. Mabille, 9–42. Paris: Vrin. ———. 2010. La libération de la métaphysique. In Ce peu d’espace autour, ed. B. Mabille, 107– 133. Chatou: Les Éditions de La Transparence. Maly, Kenneth, and Parvis Emad. 1986. Introduction. In Heidegger on Heraclitus: A new Reading, ed. K. Maly and P. Emad, 2–8. Lewiston/Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press. Reinhardt, Karl. 1959. Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie. Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann. Zarader, Marlène. 1996. The Mirror with the Triple Reflection. In Critical Heidegger, ed. C. Macann, 7–27. London/New York: Routledge.

The Phenomenology of the Pure Ego and Its Dialectical Actuality Andrea Altobrando

Abstract  The notion of the “pure ego” is an expression which seems to have long been discredited. Even before the twentieth century  – in the work of Hume, for instance – the idea that there is a pure pole of experience, and life, has been considered to be nothing more than a myth. More recently, criticism of the pure ego has often been made along the same lines as the criticism against the Cartesian self. That is to say, both have been regarded as something lacking not only a body, but also any psychological or historical qualifications. In this article, by means of a reconsideration of some ideas by Husserl and Hegel, I will try to show how it is possible to make sense of the pure ego, i.e. what kind of a real and, as it were, concrete meaning such an expression can have. I will claim that the capacity to refer to oneself as a pure ego is fundamental to our achievement of a (perhaps illusory, but anyway effective) understanding of oneself as a free agent. Keywords  Pure ego · Cartesian self · Husserl · Hegel · Phenomenology · Subjectivity The idea of a “pure ego”, in current theories, investigations, and debates concerning the self and subjectivity is quite unpopular, almost to the point that discussions of it are dismissed with prejudice. One of the main reasons for this disrepute can be ascribed to what, almost half a century ago, Cedric O. Evans has expressed in the following way: “The pure ego theory preserves the unity and the endurance of the self, but it does so at the cost of making the self non-experiential, and that is at odds with our native knowledge of ourselves” (Evans 1970, 30).

A. Altobrando (*) Philosophy Department, China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing, China e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Ferrarin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Phenomenology, Contributions To Phenomenology 102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_6

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In what follows, I will defend the opposite view, i.e. I will show that the pure ego is “phenomenologically” founded, and I will even claim that it is concretely effective.1 In order to achieve my goal, I will take advantage of some observations and reflections from Husserl and Hegel. Indeed, I will show that Husserl and Hegel share a similar view on both the legitimacy and the concreteness of the concept of a pure ego, i.e. an idea of oneself as something different from the totality of oneself, as well as something void of any determination. The meaning of these latter expressions will become clear over the course of the next few pages. I should, however, state clearly from the beginning that both Husserl and Hegel consider such an ego, i.e. a pure ego, as an abstract ego, or rather as an abstract understanding of one’s complete self. Hence, they assert the need to reach a more concrete and, therefore, more adequate understanding of what one “really” is – thus assuming that reality corresponds somehow to totality – whatever the latter can be, but, in our case, reasonably that of a whole individual being, or of a whole human being. Nevertheless, they also point out that this abstract element, i.e. the pure ego, is not properly unreal. It is rather abstract in the sense that it is something that cannot subsist alone, and that, by essence, necessitates something else to subsist, as well as to manifest itself. This, however, does not mean that it is a false image, or a illusory understanding of oneself. In other words, incomplete and abstract do not mean false or deceptive.2 It is perhaps interesting to remark that neither Hegel nor Husserl literally start their philosophical inquiries into knowledge and certitude by affirming the pure ego. However, they both acknowledge its fundamental role for the development of a full-fledged self-consciousness, and for the achievement of the ability of a “free” self-determination, which has to be understood as both epistemic and practical.3 In this paper I will try to point out this last issue, i.e. how an “abstract” understanding of oneself is necessary in order to achieve something, at least apparently, as concrete as (the realm of) freedom. I also believe that such an understanding can contribute  I will not fully tackle the question concerning the “causal efficacy” of the pure ego within the confines of this paper. I will only show that, if we assume something like intra-mental causality, then the pure ego has to be considered as something effectively existing, although its existence and its “efficacy” could simply be that of its mere concept. 2  As for Hegel, one could perhaps maintain that incompleteness corresponds to falsity, for only the totality is the truth (Hegel 1986a, 86/61. Hereafter, the page number of the English translation follows the corresponding page number of the German edition). However, when affirming this, one should carefully consider the specific understanding of the relationship between truth and totality in Hegel. This is not the place for such a discussion. I will limit myself to remarking that the understanding of the pure ego as partial and, thus, “false” should not be understood in the same way as if we were to say that the idea that a pure ego exists is wrong. Rather we should say that, without an understanding of the whole which stretches beyond the pure ego, and in which the pure ego is essentially embedded, one cannot properly understand the pure ego as well. In other words, the pure ego is not an invention or a mirage, it is something real, but to understand it requires a view of its specific position in the whole, or the totality, of the Spirit. I believe Tom Rockmore’s analyses of Hegel’s concept of truth and its relationship to that of totality can support, or are at least compatible with, the theses concerning the pure ego and its relationship to the totality of the individual, or subjective, spirit I propose here: cf. (Rockmore 1986). 3  In this regard, I consider the pure ego as being a fundamental element of what Dieter Henrich (1982) has famously called the “Ethics of Autonomy”, i.e. one of the main underlying motifs of the whole Classic German Philosophy. 1

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to a larger debate concerning the self, especially debates currently ongoing in both phenomenology and “analytic” philosophy of mind. This understanding could be especially helpful to debates concerning the very concepts of self, self-­consciousness, and the so-called “minimal self.”4

1  Husserl It is quite well known that the “early” Husserl strongly rejects the idea of a pure ego. This rejection has to be analysed with care, though. Indeed, it is beyond any doubt that Husserl has never denied the existence of consciousness, rather he seems to have considered it as the place where any reasonable edifice of knowledge has to be grounded. In Husserl’s works, consciousness is mostly used as a synonym of experience, and without experience we would not be able to meaningfully intend, and consequently to know, anything. Moreover, Husserl, at least from the Lectures on the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time onwards, speaks about the phenomenological field of enquiry, i.e. consciousness aka experience, also as “subjectivity”. The “phenomenologically reduced” field of subjectivity is actually the field of study of phenomenology, thus the “transcendental” ground of any evidence. If the field of investigation and the ground of phenomenology is experience aka consciousness aka subjectivity, then does Husserl not simultaneously reject the ideas of subject and of subjectivity in general when he rejects the idea of an ego? What idea of ego does Husserl specifically reject? As we will now see, what Husserl rejects under the term “ego” is something different from both consciousness and subjectivity, both generally, as well as phenomenologically, considered. In the Logical Investigations Husserl openly writes that in a philosophical account of experience, there is no place for an ego that is supposed to be the centre, the support, and the fixed-point of reference of experience, or of consciousness itself in its flowing (Husserl 1984, § 8, 372/81). The only self, or ego, which can 4  As for the “analytic” side, I believe that the view(s) concerning the pure ego I propose here could fruitfully be put into dialogue with the idea of Sesmet (“a subject of experience which is a single mental thing”) put forth by Galen Strawson two decades ago: see (Strawson 1997, 1999, 2009). As for the specific expression “pure ego”, there are different, and sometimes not compatible, concepts ascribed to it. For instance, Barry Dainton considers an idea of pure ego as “awareness, purely and simply”, and he also affirms that “[t]he Pure Ego entered the picture in the first place because it supplied us with an account of the unity of consciousness.” (Dainton 2014, 110–111). I hope it will become clear, in the following pages, that the concept of pure ego I try to let emerge from the works of Husserl and Hegel corresponds neither to a “unifier” of consciousness, nor to awareness. It is debatable whether the concept of pure ego I derive from Husserl and Hegel is equivalent to the Cartesian self  criticised by Williams (1973). An adequate confrontation, with both Williams’ Cartesian self and Strawons’ Sesmet, as well as with the notion of a “minimal self”, or otherwise with several other different concepts of pure ego, clearly beyond the limits of this contribution, though. In another paper, I have tried to show how the notion of a pure ego similar to the one I present here, can actually withstand Williams’ objections towards a Cartesian self: Altobrando (2017).

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sanely be found in experience is the stream of experience itself. As such, it is ­something changing and variable, and there is nothing permanent aside from some structures of experience itself (if there is anything permanent at all). In accordance with the later terminology of the Ideas, we can say that what is permanent are the noetic and the noematic structures of lived experience. A few years after the publication of the Logical Investigations, in the aforementioned Lectures on the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time of 1905, Husserl runs into the “hard problem” of self-consciousness and of reflective consciousness and knowledge (e.g., Husserl 1966, Beilage VI). All the same, in these lessons he does not speak of or mention anything which is not itself consciousness, i.e. there is still no room for a self, or an ego, as the basis, permanent inhabitant, or reference point of consciousness. Husserl does mention the notion of an “absolute subjectivity” (Husserl 1966, § 36). We should, however, understand this as a sort of absolute consciousness, the whole of consciousness, or better yet, what the stream of consciousness is. The consciousness should be considered as absolute because it refers solely to itself. It entails both the reflecting and the reflected consciousness; therefore it is at the same time intending and intended experience, both subject and object. There is not, we could say, anything else directly, or manifestly, implied by it.5 This idea is decisively restated in the lessons of 1907 on Thing and Space, where Husserl even claims that the consciousness at stake in phenomenological analysis is “no one’s consciousness” (Husserl 1973c, 40–41).6 The “pure ego” Husserl is fiercely rejecting in the Logical Investigation is, then, an ego understood as a “substrate” or “point of reference” of experience, but different from this concept, as well as, apparently, from any part of it. One reason for rejecting this kind of ego could be that Husserl does not want to endorse any metaphysical assumptions about the soul, thus partially following the teachings of Brentano.7 More importantly, however, Husserl is strongly inclined to keep to  Here, I will leave aside questions concerning the “external world.” With that said, I must note that Husserl is already developing his transcendental reduction, thus “reducing” the sense of the transcendent world to its appearances, and to the laws of such appearance. This, in my view, does not entail a form of ontological idealism, though. As for whether phenomenological philosophy can, or should, be considered as a form of transcendental idealism, is, as is well known, a quite prickly problem. I will not tackle these specific issues, here. I would just like to mention that, the interpretation of the pure ego I put forward seems to me to compatible with a headstrong anti-transcendentalist interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology, like the one put forward by De Palma (2015). 6  One should also consider the five introductory lectures to this course, published as The idea of Phenomenology, where Husserl openly establishes transcendental subjectivity as the field of phenomenological enquiry, though negating any self of this very field: see Husserl (1973a), especially 30ff. 7  As a matter of fact, Husserl discusses the “metaphysical” questions concerning the soul, especially that concerning its immortality, only in some manuscripts, most of which have only recently been published: see, in particular, Husserl (2014). As for Brentano, if one admits that, at least at its beginning, phenomenology is a development, of course with substantial revisions, of Brentano’s Psychology from an empirical standpoint, one could see that, in this writing, Brentano clearly states the possibility of a “psychology without soul”: cf. F. Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Meiner, Hamburg 1973, 8. This does not happen because Brentano thinks that the 5

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e­ xperience as the sole source of the validity of our ideas, and he “frankly confess[es] [that he is] quite unable to find this [scil. the pure] ego, this primitive, necessary centre of relations” (Husserl 1984, 374/92). In this way, Husserl quite openly restates Hume’s famous assertion that humans “are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (Hume 1739, I, IV, § VI). Indeed, Husserl, at least from the Logical Investigations onwards, expressively recognizes that the descriptive method of phenomenology is a reflexive method. Nevertheless, he thinks that what reflection discloses is none other than consciousness itself, as well as its various “ingredients” and laws. The reflective act is a part, or a moment, of this same stream, and the self it discloses is the stream itself – or rather a part of it. By reflecting one sees oneself, but this “self” is consciousness itself and not a “substrate” of it. This view is essentially maintained in the aforementioned 1907-lectures about Thing and Space, where Husserl indulges in what is likely his most radical refusal of the ego. The firmness and vigorousness of his rejection is particularly noteworthy if we consider that in the very same years Husserl was starting to express, at least to himself, his doubts about the issue of the ego, as well as the uneasiness he felt toward it.8 As Marbach (1974, 74–246) has extensively shown, from roughly 1907 to 1911, Husserl was puzzled by the ego, and his first resolute rejection began to waver, and finally converted into its polar opposite, i.e. a firm affirmation of a pure ego as the substrate and reference-point of the field of consciousness. This “officially”  – and notoriously  – happens in Ideas I. He would later even go as far as maintaining that the pure ego can be found in any possible consciousness and experience, even when it, i.e. the pure ego, is inactive and unapparent – or, as Husserl explicitly says, “out of service” (Husserl 1973c, 156). It is not easy to understand how, from a fiercely anti-egological position (i.e. a position which acknowledges no other subject, self, or ego, that is not consciousness itself or an “objectification” of it), one can come to assert the undeniable existence of a pure ego as the unmovable Einstrahlungs- und Ausstrahlungspunkt (point of irradiation, and of emanation) of consciousness, experience, and life. According to Marbach’s reconstruction, there are two main reasons for this assertion: problem of the soul is not a philosophical problem, or because he endorses some kind of reductionist, or even eliminativist, view on it. Brentano rather believes that in the empirical psychology he proposes, the question of the soul as a “substantial support” of mental life cannot be tackled, and it should be left to ontological and metaphysical enquiries. I would claim that, at least in the Logical Investigations, Husserl’s phenomenological project respects the division of work put forth by Brentano. Phenomenology as such can offer some materials for the metaphysical and ontological reflections, but cannot by itself perform ontological and metaphysical investigations. These investigations, indeed, would require one to go beyond what is given in experience – i.e. beyond the phenomena. They require logical, and indeed ontological reasoning, and not only analysis. 8  See Ms. A VI 8 II, 104a, where Husserl writes: “Ich sehe, ich meine Nichtgegebenes, und das Meinen ist zweifellos, das Sehen, die Erscheinung. Der Zweifel etc. ist, aber immer sage ich Ich, mein Sehen, mein Zweifeln etc., ich finde es, darauf hinblickend. Nun wohl, ich will von diesem ‘Ich’ weiter keine Aussagen machen. Es setzt mich in Verlegenheit”. This manuscript is quoted in Marbach (1974, 64).

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–– The “discovery” of the problem of intersubjectivity. There is not simply a unitary stream of consciousness, but rather this is always someone’s stream. In other words, any consciousness has to be individuated; –– The need to account for experiences which seem to require a kind of “guide” and reference, which differentiates them from other experiences and forms of consciousness. More specifically, Husserl developed and endorsed the idea of a pure ego as the centre of experience, because the peculiar experience of attention, which makes up great part of our waking life, seems to require, and to actually outgo from, a “point”, which, in turn, directs the attention, and cannot be itself identified with a moment of experience. As far as the validity of these motivations is concerned, I mostly agree with Marbach, who openly restates what was also asserted by Sartre and Gurwitsch: the reasons mentioned here are not sufficient to abandon a non-egological conception of experience and subjectivity (Marbach 1974, 185–192). At the same time, I think that Marbach’s analyses neglect, or do not duly consider, one decisive aspect of Husserl’s considerations in regard to the pure ego, that is its “Cartesian” evidence. As a matter of fact, Husserl’s remarks on this point are quite meagre. There are very few passages, at least in the published works, in which he explicitly speaks about the evidence of the pure ego  – and such passages are, moreover, far from being clear and perspicuous in their line of argumentation. The pure ego is mentioned several times in Ideas I (cf., e.g., Husserl 1976, 86–87, 123–124, 168, 178– 183), but never really justified nor clarified. Indeed, in the first volume Husserl (Husserl 1976, 124) states that he will deal with the pure ego in the second volume of the work. However, this second volume, as is well-known, was never published during Husserl’s lifetime. Moreover, in the manuscripts for Ideas II, we can find some summary characterisations of the pure ego, but the idea of the pure ego is never fully worked out. What is even more important is that such an idea of a pure ego does not properly emerge as a result of a careful and rigorous phenomenological enquiry of what experience shows, and it is also not appropriately, carefully, or critically assessed on the basis of what experience effectively manifests. In other words, in the writings related to Ideas, there is no proper phenomenological foundation of the concept of the pure ego, nor any examination of its tenability. It is somehow assumed for functional reasons, to account for (at least some) experiences, and not because it is displayed in experience. In his later writings, at least among the published ones, we can find a brief, but quite perspicuous, characterisation of the pure ego in the Cartesian Meditations. Here Husserl affirms that in the evidence that the subject has of itself there is, on the one hand, the “flowing cogito”, and, on the other hand, the “I, who lives this and that subjective process, who lives through this and that cogito, as the same I” (Husserl 1950a, b, § 31). In § 31 of the Cartesian Meditations, then, we can see that Husserl advocates an evidence of the pure ego in as much as one can refer to oneself as nothing more than the pole of one’s life and experience. There is no demonstration of this, indeed, but rather an appeal to experience, to a somehow crystal-clear and unavoidable evidence. Actually, such an appeal was already present in a footnote to

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the second edition of the Logical Investigations, which appeared in the same year of the first volume of the Ideas. In that footnote, Husserl wrote: the empirical ego is as much a case of transcendence as the physical thing. If the elimination of such transcendence, and the reduction to pure phenomenological data, leaves us with no residual pure ego, there can be no real (adequate) self-evidence attaching to the ‘I am’. But if there is really such an adequate self-evidence – who indeed could deny it? – how can we avoid assuming a pure ego? It is precisely the ego apprehended in carrying out a self-­ evident cogito, and the pure carrying out eo epso grasps it in phenomenological purity, and necessarily grasps it as the subject of a pure experience of the type cogito. (Husserl 1984, 368/352)

In other words, Husserl seems to claim that one has an intuition of oneself regardless of all attributes that one can ascribe to oneself. In sum: the evidence of the ego cogito consists in the evidence of an I and of a being, but, as Husserl will repeatedly maintain at least from 1913 onwards, the “I” which appears in the effectuation of the pure cogito is somehow different from its being. This can be interpreted to mean that the ego is (intuited as) different from all its features, and all its experiences, i.e. from consciousness itself. This is the reason why in paragraph 57 of Ideas I he defines the pure ego as a Transzendenz in der Immanenz. We could also make use of a terminology Husserl applies especially in the Cartesian Meditations, and assert that in the ego sum-experience we achieve an evidence of ourselves as Sein (being), but not of our Sosein (being-so) (Husserl 1950a, b, § 33). Either way, whatever I am, I am I, I am absolutely certain of this, and I am certain of myself as something different from all my experiences – including those which support the attributions of predicates to myself. Anything I think of myself could be wrong. However, it is always certain that I am referring to myself and to nothing or no-one else. I experience myself, indeed, as the reference of my self-consciousness, and not as coincident with the latter. The ego sum evidence does not tell me “you are this evidence,” but rather, “you see yourself through me, i.e. the evidence”. In my apodictic realisation that I exist, I do not identify myself with such a realisation. Rather, I grasp myself as a kind of entity beyond such appearances. As we will see, this is exactly what Hegel will point out as well. As we have already said, in the Cartesian Meditations the difference between the pure ego as the pole of consciousness and consciousness itself is finally and officially clearly stated. We must now figure out how to properly understand the passage, considered by Husserl himself as necessary, from this “polar” and “exclusive” understanding of the subject as a pure ego, to increasingly complex understandings of the subject, to an increasingly full-fledged self-exposition (Selbstauslegung) of subjectivity. The manifest one-sidedness of the understanding of oneself as a pure ego could give the impression that, to conceive of the self, or the subject, as a pure ego amounts to a mistaken (self-)understanding of the subject. However, we must consider that the abstractness of the subject as a pure ego actually means, as Husserl himself clearly states, that one is grasping only one “part” of the reality of oneself, and not that this part is a mere deception, or that our understanding of ourselves as pure egos is false.

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In this regard, I would like to say something about the Husserlian reappraisal of the Cartesian ego sum. From Husserl’s “Cartesian” musings, it emerges that the pure ego is a partial, and therefore abstract, result of the Cartesian cogito. In this regard, it is important to stress that, even if it is only a partial element of the methodical reflection we fulfil during the attempt to reach a stable and apodictic field of evidence, the pure ego corresponds to an intuition and, at the same time, i.e. exactly in the same intuition, it distinguishes itself from consciousness. This could possibly be considered as a relevant difference between Husserl and Descartes. Descartes, in fact, upon having stated the apodictic certainty of the ego, gradually specifies the meaning of such an ego by saying that it is a soul (or mind). Famously, Husserl has criticised Descartes in the Cartesian Meditations on exactly this point. Even if his writing is clearly dedicated to and openly inspired by Descartes, Husserl argues that Descartes was wrong in substantializing or objectifying his own discoveries about subjectivity, as well as the apodictic evidence connected to transcendental life. Descartes has made an illegitimate step beyond the evidence of the ego sum, thus misunderstanding the result of his very discovery (Husserl 1950a, b, § 10). Given our interest in the present article, and perhaps going beyond Husserl’s dictum, we could add that Descartes has not simply “objectified” consciousness, but he has also overcome the “pure” evidence of the ego – that is the ego simply as ego – by making a res cogitans out of it. Indeed, Husserl’s critique of Descartes has normally been understood as referring to the reification of the cogito. This is also what Husserl already mentioned in the lectures of 1907 that we previously brought up. Husserl always insists on rejecting an understanding of the transcendental field of consciousness as an objectual substance (Husserl 1952a, § 33). However, we have to notice that, in some manuscripts, specifically those where he also refers to Leibniz’ theory of monads and to Spinoza’s conception of substance, Husserl explicitly states that the field of consciousness can be understood as a substance, in as much as it in se et per se concipitur, i.e. it is understood in and for itself (Husserl 1973b, 257). Of course, even if we admit this, we can still maintain that consciousness is not anything fixed and homogeneous, if not in terms of some fundamental structures. In this regard, however, the pure ego clearly is a “wrong” understanding of the very “substantialist” understanding of the cogito admitted by Husserl in such manuscripts. The pure ego, indeed, is not defined by Husserl as a substance, but rather as a substrate, i.e. one of the other main meanings of the (modern) understanding of the substance after Descartes.9 As a reference-point and as a Träger of consciousness, the pure ego is possibly neither self-sufficient, nor independent. This is the case when speaking from both ontological and epistemological standpoints. To put it briefly: Husserl criticises the idea of consciousness as a separate substance, while it should rather be recognized as the field of disclosure of the world itself. Consciousness should not be considered as an immaterial soul, we could say. It does not disclose itself as opposite to matter, to body and space. The fact that 9  On the ambivalence of the idea of subject in the history of Western philosophy, and signally on its relationship with the concept of substance from Descartes onwards, see Natoli (2010).

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consciousness cannot be reduced to the body and matter, does not imply that it can be separated from them. The “things” consciousness does not need in order to exist, are things in themselves of which there is no evidence. When consciousness intends a sofa, all that is required is the manifestation of the sofa. There is no need to question the noumenal reality of the sofa. Once we have cleared this point, though, we can acknowledge that, at least within the framework of the reduction, consciousness can, and somehow has to, be considered as a substance, in the sense of quod nulla res indiget ad existendum et in se et per se concipitur. The pure ego, in turn, should be considered as a substance in another sense, that of “support” or “substrate,” not properly or directly of the world, but rather of consciousness itself, while it should not be considered as a substance in the sense of being independent. Now, how can we specifically and positively characterize this “pure ego”? First of all, one should get rid of a possible misunderstanding: Contrary to what we may assume because of his “Kantian” heritage, although “Husserl’s” pure ego is also referred to – quite misleadingly – as “transcendental” by Husserl himself, his concept of a pure ego does not unify the stream of experience nor its contents. Strictly speaking, even if the pure ego can be considered as a “formal” element of experience, it is not something which determines the “form” of experience, neither from a noetic nor from a noematic point of view. It is neither a “synthetic” nor a “forming” principle. It is not even an epistemic principle, strictly speaking, since it is not possible to derive anything from it. It can be considered as a principle only from a practical point of view. This could be the case insofar as, according to Husserl, it is, from time to time, the source of the fiat toward determinate actions and courses of actions.10 If one ventures into Husserl’s writings, where the pure ego as content of (reflective) intuition is considered, it appears to have the following characteristics: –– Empty: it has no qualities, no proper “identity”, no content (Husserl 1976, § 80, 1952a, §§ 22, 24, 1959, 412, 1962, 207); –– Concretely abstract, i.e. it is abstract in as much as it is only a part of the subjectivity, but it is nevertheless something really concrete (Husserl 1973b, 44–50); –– Distinct from consciousness, but also neither transcendent nor empirical object, and therefore Transzendenz in der Immanenz (Husserl 1952a, 97–98, 111, b, § 2 and Appendix I, 1962, 294, 1976, § 57); –– Simple, because it is not composed of any “smaller” parts11; –– Numerically identical with itself throughout the variations of the flux of consciousness it is linked to (Husserl 1973b, 50, 1976, § 57).

 See, e.g., Husserl (1952a, § 60, 62, Beilage XI).  This is not properly stated by Husserl, but it derives from the fact that, being by itself non-individuated, it is also numerically identical in all its occurrences, and it is characterised in a purely negative way. Something which is the negation of any determination receives also all its negative features from the other it is put into relationship with, but by itself it has no parts, otherwise the difference would also be internal. One can, anyway, see what Husserl says in Husserl (1952a, § 24).

10 11

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To these characteristics, we have to add some functions: –– It “frees” the stream of consciousness (Husserl 1952b, 108–109, 292, 293, 1976, 192); –– It decides (a part of) the actions of the stream of consciousness it inhabits (Husserl 1952b, 257; 14, 16–17). We do not have enough room here to show or discuss the passages of Husserl’s writings which permit us to draw such a list of characteristics of the pure ego in detail. I would just like to point out the “emptiness” of the pure ego, because it is exactly this emptiness that allows one to understand how the appearance of the pure ego enables a peculiar form of self-consciousness of the subject, which deeply and concretely affects, and influences the whole rest of the very same life it appears in and to. In as much as the pure ego is an “empty pole” of experience, it has to be considered as void of any determination, must thus be taken as something “indeterminate”. Husserl, indeed, states that the ego is a “quality-less pole of experiences”, and as such it “derives all its determinations from this polarization” (Husserl 1973b, 43), i.e. it owes all determination to what happens in the stream of consciousness it is united to. This means, on the one hand, that the ego as such cannot be criterially identified, because there are no criteria to identify it beyond its immediate, plain manifestation. Nevertheless, in saying, or thinking, “I,” all of us immediately grasp something and cannot fail to do so. The pure ego does not appear in transcendent world, nor as a part of consciousness. Therefore, to “catch” it means to catch something which is given in experience, but for which we have no way to positively characterize it, and nowhere to situate it. We can characterize it only in relationship to “its” stream of consciousness, i.e. the stream of consciousness in which the evidence occurs. At the same time, by means of its actual and concrete experience, it actually enables the orientation of everything, including the stream of consciousness. If it were true that it is in relation to this “indeterminate where” that the stream of consciousness is (at least partly) determined, it follows that what determines the stream of consciousness is intedeterminate. Put differently, its determination cannot be achieved without any reference to indetermination, or to something intedeterminate. This is exactly one point at which the considerations of Husserl can be more easily and fruitfully connected to – and, indeed, should be put into synergy with – those of Hegel.

2  Hegel Up to now we have seen that a thorough, and sober, insight into the experience of the ego sum allows us to find evidence for a pure ego. This pure ego appears as something simple and void of positive features. It seems, in a certain sense, to simply be the negation of any other content of experience and, to a certain extent, of experience itself. This negativity has not been thoroughly investigated or worked

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out by Husserl, though. On the contrary, this is exactly what Hegel stresses and develops. In Hegel’s writings, the “pure ego” makes a systematic appearance signally in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and in the Encyclopaedia. Although in the Phenomenology of Spirit the specific meaning of the “pure ego” is not univocally stated, as it will instead be in the Encyclopaedia, some of its main features and its peculiar function in the development of consciousness and Spirit can already be found in the earlier work. Moreover, its treatment in the Phenomenology of Spirit is particularly illuminating for understanding its complex as well as fundamental role in the totality of the life of Spirit. Indeed, even if in the Phenomenology of Spirit the characterisation of the pure ego and, especially, the meaning of such expression is not stated in a clear and univocal way, we must observe that a certain ambiguity regarding the reference of this expression is mainly due to the “thing itself”. Still in the Encyclopaedia, wherein, as we shall see, Hegel is quite precise in defining one specific meaning of the expression pure ego and in distinguishing it from other related and partly overlapping, but nevertheless distinct meanings, the fundamental double meaning which can be ascribed to the expression “pure ego” persists. So, although the “Archimedean” role of the pure ego for the entrance of the subject into the realm of free spirit is most clearly stated in the “Philosophy of Spirit” section of the 1830 edition of the Encyclopaedia, I believe that to better understand what is going on in that section, and also to better justify what Hegel says there,12 it is appropriate to consider what he writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807. Let’s then try to understand what these two main meanings are, starting from his breakthrough work. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, the pure ego clearly has its most relevant position in the chapter dedicated to Selbstbewusstsein.13 Nevertheless, one can observe that the pure ego is mentioned, and not at all marginally, already in the Vorrede and in the chapter on Sense-certainty. I say “not marginally” because, without the pure ego already somehow being present in these early chapters, there would probably be no way to come to the following steps of spirit. That said, one can clearly state that the expression “pure ego” is ambiguous if one considers a passage like the following: “Ich ist der Inhalt der Beziehung und das Beziehen selbst; es ist es selbst gegen ein Anderes, und greift zugleich über dies 12  Indeed, the Encyclopaedia section called “Phenomenology of Spirit” is somehow quite puzzling. It does not possess the strength and richness of the 1807 Phenomenology, and it actually anticipates elements which will be developed only in the following sections, of the Encyclopaedia, thus leaving the reader with doubts concerning the relationship between the order of the exposition and the order of the “thing itself”. My idea is that, beyond any “systematic” difference between the 1807 Phenomenology and the Encyclopaedia, the treatment of the pure ego in his earlier work can throw light onto the puzzles posed by the later work. For an insightful as well as accurate analysis of the systematic differences and relationships between the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopaedia, see Houlgate (2006, 144–162). See also Brinkmann (2011). 13  “The force of its truth thus lies now in the ‘I’, in the immediacy of my seeing, hearing, and so on; the vanishing of the single Now and Here that we mean is prevented by the fact that I hold them fast” (Hegel 1986a, 86/61).

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Andere, das für es ebenso nur es selbst ist” [“the ‘I’ is the content of the connection and the connecting itself. Opposed to an other, the ‘I’ is its own self, and at the same time it overarches this other”] (Hegel 1986a, 137/104). Roughly speaking, we can say that the ego is the totality, or the absolute, as subject, in particular in its movement of negation, and, at the same time, a part of this same movement. In the Vorrede, indeed, Hegel seems to take Thought, or Thinking (das Denken), the Intellect, or the Understanding (der Verstand), and the pure ego (das reine Ich) as synonyms. This is certainly not unproblematic. First of all, it seems to posit the ego on the side of immateriality. Moreover, as it is understood as Thought and as Intellect, and considering these also in their active sense, that is as the acts of Thinking and of Understanding, the pure ego seems to be itself reduced to an activity. As for Thought and Intellect, Hegel’s aim is quite clear. One of Hegel’s main, as well as famous, claims is exactly that substance be conceived as subject, and this implies that it can also be conceived of as something dynamic. Hegel explicitly criticises an understanding of the subject as a fixed point of predication, as a self-identity which gets stuck in its formal tautological identity (Hegel 1986a, 138/105). Thus, a mere characterisation of the subject as made of faculties without the activity of these faculties would be an abstract understanding of the subject. Thought consists in thinking, as well as the Understanding consists in the activity, and not merely the faculty, of understanding. On the other hand, also quite famously, Hegel wants to overcome the distinction between Thought and Being, Concept and Reality. Therefore a thinking which simply intends or means its object without assimilating it would also remain abstract. For this reason, understanding and thinking, in as much as they refer to any kind of otherness, should not simply be understood as something which keeps itself in front of such otherness, but rather as the activity which relates and mediates subject and object. In both cases, i.e. the overcoming of the distinction between faculty and activity, on the one hand, and the sublation of the difference between thinking and being, on the other, there is a polarization of what is at stake from time to time, and the ego is respectively understood as the totality of the movement of thought and as one of the poles. Indeed, if the mediation of Thought allows it to overcome the difference between Concept and Reality, one should not easily accept their identity as well. One could perhaps dare to say that the pure ego has to be understood as the activity of “ego-ing” or, maybe better, of “purifying.” One must, however, understand what such a concept of “purification” amounts to. As we know, in its utmost development, the subject is the Absolute Spirit. This implies that the “polar” understanding of the subject as something “distinct” from its activities, and of the latter as something different from what they are directed towards, or on, should be sublated. Nevertheless, there are various passages in which the pure ego is not so simply understood as the whole self-positing and self-­ relating subject-activity. We know that Hegel’s Aufhebung should never be understood as elimination or deletion. However, it is also suitable to keep a clear mind concerning the risk of “deleting” the difference between subject and object, which would lead to the dejection of the movement of mediation itself as a consequence,

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thus leaving us with a dead Spirit, probably with a Ghost, and no longer with the Spirit as Life.14 The overcoming of mediation, if achieved in the sense of its elimination, would leave us, in the best case, in the Spinozism Hegel explicitly criticises (Hegel 1986b, § 415, 203/145). That said, we have to understand why there is an ambivalence of the pure ego. Sometimes it seems to be a sort of synonym of Spirit itself, which is process, mediation, and totality. At other times, it is one of two extremes of the movement of self-­ determination of Spirit. As we know, this depends on the necessity to overcome the “original unity” as “immediate unity” of the subject with itself – and this is valid on both an individual and a universal level.15 The truth of the certainty A = A has to be realised by means of a self-negation and of a “journey” through the Anderssein, being-other. In this “movement of self-positing”, the pure ego is both an extreme of the relation and the relation, or the mediation, itself. It is so because the ego is, from the beginning, living as a part of the relation, and as the subject undergoing the mediation. The ego cannot understand itself in any form aside from being in such a relationship. However, it is possible to understand it as something totally different from anything else, including itself as a qualified being. Such a possibility is necessary for the very positing of the identity of I = I, and for its full concreteness, both cognitive and practical. Within the limits of this article, I am only interested in understanding this possibility, which is constituted by what Hegel calls the pure ego in its “polar” meaning. There is, indeed, a peculiar way in which the subject posits itself as pure ego and as something different from the rest of the whole movement of the Geist that is characterized in a way similar to the Husserlian differentiation between consciousness and ego. This specific way of positing itself on behalf of the subject is considered by Hegel as essential for the genuine realisation of the truth of absolute spirit as a free subject. The substance as subject has to realise itself by means of a self-­ negation in otherness, but also by negating the self-negation, and so, finally, recognizing itself in its negation. To be able to see oneself as a “pure ego” is necessary to this development. In turn, the fact that this vision “works,” and that it has effects, testifies to the “reality” (Wirklichkeit) of the pure ego. Moreover, we can observe that, in order to achieve all this, the pure ego must keep its negativity, it must persist in negating its identity both with the Other and with any of its own determinations, i.e. with any form of being. In the chapter on Sense-certainty, Hegel shows that what does not disappear during the sublation of the empirical certainty is the “I qua universal” (Hegel 1986a, 86/61), as something which is somehow different from all the contents of ‘its’

 The risk is similar to the one we have seen concerning Husserl’s treatment of the pure ego: once one realises that the pure ego is an abstraction, one tends to leave such an understanding aside as nearly erroneous. This, however, as I will specifically point out later, would possibly take us to neglect its “meaning,” i.e. also its specific “function”, in the totality of a self-conscious subject. 15  In this regard, the “ambiguity” is put forth in order to overcome or, better yet, sublate the problem of simple identity, and not to reach it. 14

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e­ xperience, and finally from experience itself. Concerning the chapter on Sensecertainty, then, two remarks can be made: (a) The ego conceived of as the pure seeing or as the reference of the indexical “I”, is from the beginning something universal; (b) The pure ego does not refer to any particular content, rather it seems to be the case that any possible content is understood with reference to it; (c) Even if it is already present, it is neither known nor properly “conscious.” To use Hegel’s conceptual coordinates, we should say that it is there for us, but not for itself. The following steps bring the ego to see itself as an ego. This means that to see the birth of the ego in the sphere of the elements of thought, we must wait for the ego to experience itself simply as ego, and for it to “consciously” determine itself according to this view. In other words, by seeing itself as a pure ego, the ego’s very self-determination occurs precisely in accordance with this specific kind of consciousness. The following phase, Wahrnehmung (Perception), does not actually seem to be particularly important, in as much it does not suggest any new feature of the pure ego. Nevertheless, there are some elements of the way of determining the objects of experience which are quite important for understanding how the ego must be when it comes to have itself as its own object: –– The perceived thing is apprehended as an excluding unity [ausschließende Einheit] (Hegel 1986a, 103/76). –– It is therefore “being for itself, or as the absolute negation of all otherness, therefore as purely self-related negation” [Fürsichsein oder [...] absolute Negation alles Andersseins, daher absolute, nur sich auf sich beziehende Negation] (Hegel 1986a, 103/76). –– The unity of perception, thus, ultimately consists in the “sublation of itself; in other words, it has its essence in another” [Aufheben seiner selbst oder [dies,] sein Wesen in einem Anderen zu haben] (Hegel 1986a, 103/76). We must also keep in mind that the criterion of truth is the identity-with-itself (Sichselbstgleichheit), and that, as a result, all features of the perceptual Thing just mentioned will be operative also in Selbstbewusstsein when, so to say, the ego will become the Thing to be known. The following chapter of the Phenomenology, devoted to the Understanding (Verstand), seems to prepare the ground for putting the ego on the scene, but a scene which is a Jenseits (Beyond) of pure negativity against the world of phenomena. The Understanding can be said to be the medium of determination of various matters. We are here on the extreme of the being-for-itself (Extrem des Fürsichseins). Consciousness (which here is Verstand) does not yet have itself as content. Therefore, Hegel says that “for consciousness, the object has returned into itself from its relation to an other and has thus become Notion in principle [an sich]; but consciousness is not yet for itself the Notion, and consequently does not recognize itself in that reflected object” (Hegel 1986a, 108/79). This lack of knowledge of itself as

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identical with itself implies that, at this level “consciousness plays no part in its free realisation, but merely looks on and simply apprehends it” (Hegel 1986a, 108/80). This means that the realisation of oneself is not free, yet, because the I still does not know, and thus does not possess, itself. At this stage, one is in the realm in which the truth of the appearances is judged as an empty “beyond.” But this empty beyond is understanding itself, even if understanding itself does not know it (Hegel 1986a, 124/95). To know what it is really doing, consciousness needs to posit itself as ego, i.e. as different from what it presumes itself to deal with in terms of “reality.” In order for this position to be possible, the ego must first become consciously void of any determination, and even of any substantial relationship with otherness. This is what happens in the first phase of self-consciousness.16 Hegel states that “Self-consciousness has in the first instance become a specific reality on its own account (für sich), has come into being for itself; it is not yet in the form of unity with consciousness in general.” This clearly means that a moment at which self-consciousness is consciousness of something detached and different from every other moment of, both “internal” and “external”, consciousness and experience is necessary.17 Only after this peculiar object has appeared “in” consciousness, i.e. only in as much the ego as pure ego has become a content of thought, the reconciliation and the identification with the whole of consciousness and experience become possible. Now, how does the ego appear to consciousness at this stage, which is also the first stage at which the ego becomes properly conscious of itself as ego? “What” does consciousness see as “itself”? The ego is consciousness, but consciousness as object of itself. Therefore, the ego is a specific form of self-understanding of  Hegel believes the process of self-consciousness takes three steps: “The notion of self-consciousness is only completed in these three moments: (a) the pure undifferentiated ‘I’ is its first immediate object. (b) But this immediacy is itself an absolute mediation, it is only as a supersession of the independent object, in other words, it is Desire. The satisfaction of Desire is, it is true, the reflection of self-consciousness in to itself, or the certainty that has become truth. (c) But the truth of this certainty is really a double reflection, the duplication of self-consciousness. Consciousness has for its object one which, of its own self, posits its otherness or difference as a nothingness, and in so doing is independent. The differentiated, merely living, shape does indeed also supersede its independence in the process of Life, but it ceases with its distinctive difference to be what it is. The object of self-consciousness, however, is equally independent in this negativity of itself; and thus it is for itself a genus, a universal fluid element in the peculiarity of its own separate being; it is a living self-consciousness” (Hegel 1986a, 144/110). I will here mainly consider the first moment, that is, the one in which the ego appears in its purest form. 17  “The identity of the mind with itself, as it is first posited as I, is only its abstract formal ideality. As soul in the form of substantial universality, mind is now subjective reflection-into-itself, related to this substantiality as to the negative of itself, something dark and beyond it. Hence consciousness, like relationship in general, is the contradiction between the independence of the two sides and their identity, in which they are sublated. The mind as I is essence; but since reality, in the sphere of essence, is posited as in immediate being and at the same time as ideal, mind as consciousness is only the appearance of mind” (Hegel 1986b, § 414, 201/144). It is difficult not to see the similarity between what asserted by Hegel in this passage and Husserl’s idea concerning the Korrelationsforschung (see, e.g., Husserl 1950, §41). 16

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c­ onsciousness, which becomes self-consciousness in as much as it differentiates itself from any of its contents. Therefore, self-consciousness is a splitting of consciousness, a splitting in which a part of consciousness is considered by consciousness as being itself. However, since consciousness is thus separating from itself, the pure ego it identifies itself with is also different from the whole consciousness as such. In other words, consistently with what we have seen in Husserl, the emergence of the subject as a pure ego amounts to an understanding of the subject as different from its very consciousness. Self-consciousness happens when the ego as pure ego comes into the scene as a specific content of experience. When it finally makes its first appearance, the ego delineates itself as both simple and persistingly identical, with no differentiations nor variations. In other words, it does not allow for any difference or variation. It has no plurality of aspects. Indeed, it has no aspects at all. The first step into a both epistemologically and practically appropriate self-­ consciousness is what Hegel calls a bewegungslose Tautologie, a motionless tautology: Ich bin Ich, I am I.  This self-certainty is abstract inasmuch as the self has detached itself from its own being. The being is actually what has been constituted during the previous steps of consciousness, when the self had no “idea” of itself, including the idea of “being itself”. Now, the ego seems to reach the idea of itself, but as something which still does not entirely know itself, thus still looking for satisfaction outside of itself. The really Sichselbstgleiche, the Identical-with-itself, entzweit sich, duplicates itself. The unity of the resulting two poles of identity is actually only a moment of the duplication (Entzweiung): “[such unity] is the abstraction of the simplicity or unitary nature over against the difference” (Hegel 1986a, 133/100). The self-­ identical duplicates itself. It overcomes itself as already duplicated and as being-­ other. In this process, unity is a moment of duplication. It is an abstraction of simplicity which is put in front of the differences. But it is also the duplication. It could not be unity as simplicity without differentiating itself. The becoming-­ identical-­with-oneself is a duplication. What becomes the same as itself, puts itself in front of the duplication. It puts itself on the side, it becomes a duplicated entity, as it were. In reality, we have here an internal difference, which means that we have two poles, each of which subsists only in opposition to the other. They are in themselves as Entgegengesetzte, in opposition, therefore they are only one unity (and, thus, one “entity”). Each of them is simple in itself thanks to its being different from the other. The ego, thus, differentiates itself from itself, though it does not know it, and considers itself in an extreme polarisation which excludes consciousness from itself. This form of self-consciousness emerges per differentiam. Self-consciousness, at this stage, is consciousness of a self which does not grasp its identity with consciousness. According to Hegel, otherness must not be kept in its fixed otherness, but must be acknowledged as belonging to the ego itself. It must not persist in its otherness, because in this way the ego can be only negativity. It is still “only” finite, it is still the negation of the positive, i.e. of Life and Substance.

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This position is confirmed in some of the main writings of the later Hegel. I will here only briefly consider some passages from the Encyclopaedia of 1817 and the one of 1830, which can help us to further dig out the specific as well as systematic meaning of the pure ego. In the 1817 version of the Encyclopaedia, Hegel states: “The judgment, in which the subject is “I” in contrast to an object, as if in contrast to a foreign world, is thus reflected immediately into itself. Thus the soul becomes consciousness” (Hegel 2001, 193–194). It is clear that, in this self-reflection, the ego defines itself only negatively, i.e. in contrast to all other contents. Therefore, it is a self which is different from the one we find in “self-feeling” (Selbstgefühl). Later, in the Encyclopaedia of 1830, Hegel stresses that reflection has to be included in the understanding of the absolute. This means that the movement by which a subject becomes an object is necessary in order to have the full, real, effective, and concrete realisation of what the subject already is, but only an sich, or in other words, unrealised. To reiterate, we need the Fürsichsein of the ego, and this means self-objectivation. Self-objectivation, though, needs an experience, or an understanding, of oneself as nothing else than an ego, as a pure and abstract ego, a form with no content, a formal principle with no definite shape, that kind of pure negativity that is “me.” In other words, in order to achieve the realisation of the Spirit as in-and-for-itself, an act of consciousness directed towards oneself as something different from any possible determination must occur. For this reason, in the Vorrede to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel differentiated ego and substance, and stressed, recalling the ancient philosophers, that emptiness is what moves (Hegel 1986a, 39/21). In the Encyclopaedia of 1830, Hegel restates even more clearly that the pure ego is not only simple, but also that it needs to be defined as something different from Life and Substance, terms apt to express the plurality of experiences and of their various respective contents and contexts. To summarize, we can say that in Hegel’s work there is a need to overcome the motionless tautology of “ego = ego” by means of an inner movement of the identification it refers to. The ego that is stated in the “immediate” reflection, which states the identity of the ego with itself, is indeed inadequate to what it pretends to grasp. The ego caught in its fixed identity is something numb. It is cognitively inadequate because it does not acknowledge the very same movements by means of which it is grasping itself, hence that it has been going through an alienation from itself which is essential to its very same full identity. It is also practically inadequate, because it neglects its own power of determining itself by acting in the “outer” environment. Nevertheless, even if Hegel stresses the necessity to overcome the numb identity “ego = ego,” he does not want to eliminate it, nor to get rid of the pure ego as an “abstract” part of the realisation of self-consciousness. The moment of abstractness that the pure ego entails, or, perhaps, that the pure ego is, is necessary to the movement and especially to the development of the full-fledged self-consciousness of the Absolute as Spirit. Indeed, if Spirit does not achieve an understanding “purely” of itself, it gets stuck in the phase of the Intellect, where it assumes itself to be busied only with itself, and does not realise that it is rather already dealing with outer

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r­ eality. To realise this, a lucid distinction between self and its other is necessary. It is solely on the basis of such distinction that a free shaping of the very unity between the two poles becomes possible. We could then say that, at the level of the subjective Spirit, or alternatively at the level of the individual subject, this amounts to stating that the element “pure ego” is necessary in order to have subjects which can think of themselves as individually responsible beings. From Sense-certainty to Understanding, the ego has been somehow already working as “absolute negativity.” This negativity has been the identical element of experience, but “im Anderssein,” in being other. The ego was there from the beginning, but it has not properly appeared until the moment of self-consciousness. Thus, the ego, that is the principle of both freedom and of reason, is initially not free “for itself,” but only for us, for the spectators of its phenomenology. To be concretely free it must become aware of itself as being itself, thus re-appropriating its otherness.18 This further means that the ego must also overcome his “abstract” self-­ consciousness as empty pole of the relation with other-being. Consciousness of the ego must become self-consciousness. In order to satisfy the desire to self-realise itself also by means of self-­knowledge, the subject has to go beyond the understanding of itself as only a pure ego. Nevertheless, the same subject must stay aware that it is also a pure ego in order to be able to be properly self-conscious and, thus, to act freely, in this way properly realising itself as a totality in the guise of a concrete universal spirit. The latter, in turn, could not be possibly realised without that form of self-consciousness. Otherwise, as already said, we would always have the risk to fall back in what Hegel defines as “Spinozism”: As regards Spinozism, it is to be noted against it that in the judgement by which the mind constitutes itself as I, as free subjectivity in contrast to determinacy, the mind emerges from substance, and philosophy, when it makes this judgement the absolute determination of mind, emerges from Spinozism. (Hegel 1986b, § 415, 199/142)

It follows that the “abstract” difference of the pure ego must be preserved in order for the development of the very universal absolute spirit to be possible. It is different from a feeling of oneself, and also from its very content. The content of such a feeling must be left aside, rejected as alien, or at least different from – though necessary, but not determining – the pure ego. The pure ego must be kept in its negativity. We can finally say that the specific “activity” of the pure ego, which we tried to identify with a form of “purification”, could be better defined as the activity of negation.

 “I is the infinite relation of mind to itself, but as subjective relation, as certainty of itself, the immediate identity of the natural soul has been raised to this pure ideal self-identity; the content of the natural soul is object for this reflection that is for itself. Pure abstract freedom for itself discharges from itself its determinacy, the soul’s natural life, to an equal freedom as an independent object. It is of this object, as external to it, that I is initially aware, and is thus consciousness. I, as this absolute negativity, is implicitly identity in otherness; I is itself and extends over the object as an object implicitly sublated, I is one side of the relationship and the whole relationship–the light that manifests itself and an Other too” (Hegel 1986b, § 413, 199/142).

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3  Provisional Conclusions On the basis of our work up to this point, we can assert that at least some aspects of Hegel’s and Husserl’s accounts of the pure ego are in agreement. Certainly, there is still a lot of work to be done in order to achieve a thoroughly accurate evaluation of their similarities, differences, compatibilities and incompatibilities, even when we are limited to the issue of the self. My aim, however, was only to show that it is meaningful to speak about a pure ego from an experiential point of view, as well as that its appearance has a very concrete meaning, i.e. the experience of oneself as a pure ego has concrete effects. With that said, in this regard also the “concrete” understanding of the pure ego I have sketched here is certainly far from being finished. Indeed, it would seem that this investigation is still at its beginning. In these provisional conclusions I would like to merely point out some elements which have emerged, as well as sketch some possible consequences, which can then be better assessed and developed by means of further investigations and reflections. From the analyses of Husserl and Hegel I proposed here, we can see that the pure ego is characterized by its: 1. Difference from the whole of the subject which grasps the pure ego as being identical with itself; 2. Purity, i.e. the absence of anything alien which is not the egoic reference itself. The alienness one gets rid of by means of a self-understanding as a pure ego, includes the manifestations of the ego itself, i.e. its consciousness, and also its (inner, i.e. psychical, and outer, i.e. physical and social) environment; 3. Simplicity, since it lacks a plurality of aspects, be they spatio-temporal aspects or otherwise; 4. Indeterminacy, understood as a lack of qualification, as well as a dearth of any positive quality. 5. Emptiness, since there is nothing one can properly find “in” it, and it is void of any quality, feature, or content; 6. Negativity, which should mainly be understood as expressing the purity and the indeterminacy of the pure ego in a kind of activity of opposition to any mixture with anything else, including its “life” and its “attributes”, as well as to any following determination of itself.19 Hegel has poignantly shown that, especially because of this last feature, the pure ego is not only an abstract in the sense of partial entity, but it is also an “effective” element of thought. Its appearance in the consciousness one has of oneself enables and, to some extent, causes a different course for the totality of the subject or living being. The main activity of the pure ego consists, thus, in its negation of any given determination, and of any established order. Hegel clearly shows this consequence.  It is obvious that, especially this aspect should be further investigated by means of a confrontation between the work done on the role of the negativity in the Hegelian tradition, including its critical developments, and the “phenomenological” reflections on freedom and resistance put forth by Sartre.

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Furthermore, this also seems to be consistent with Husserl’s characterisation of the pure ego as the source of the fiat, i.e. the act of deliberation by means of which a subject lets a certain course of action(s) happen. In this regard, we could say that the feature of “emptiness” is the counterpart to that of negativity: it does not constitute the negation of something, but rather the possible source both of one’s own evidence of oneself, and of one’s movement towards self- as well as other-determination. If we juxtapose Husserl and Hegel, we can say that Husserl allows us to see the emptiness of the ego as indeterminacy, while Hegel permits us to further take such emptiness as negation. Although both Husserl and Hegel insist on the role of the pure ego for the realisation of oneself as a free spirit, the fact that Hegel mainly speaks of the pure ego – at least in its “polar” definition – in negative terms, and indeed as a negative power, can lead one to neglect that one could, or should, persist in intending oneself as free in the sense of purely indeterminate subject, in order to have a concrete realisation of freedom. Consequently, it is dwelling on the positive aspect of the “emptiness” as indeterminacy of the ego that makes possible the movement of freedom, i.e. the movement towards a full-fledged, constant, and inexhaustible realisation of the free spirit. On the basis of these considerations, we can state at least three different experiential accesses to the pure ego: (A) Its plain evidence in the experience of the ego sum, which does not show any direct reference to anything beyond the ego, nor to any specific aspect, or feature, of it; (B) The negative, or oppositional evidence of the pure ego as somehow resisting any possible assimilation into any positive determination, as difference from anything else, including its own attributes; (C) The feeling of the need, or of the injunction, to determine oneself, which goes hand in hand with one’s awareness of indeterminacy as indecision. Access A is the most direct one, and it is the one which Husserl usually advocates. However, as Hegel has clearly shown, it requires several previous steps in consciousness before being possibly instantiated. In particular, it presupposes the capacity of the self to differentiate itself from anything else, including its own life and totality. This means that access A presupposes access B. In turn, access A seems to be necessary in order to have access C.  Indeed, without a grasp of oneself as something this side of any determination, one would possibly be insensitive towards the injunction to determine oneself. To put it briefly, and to conclude: I need to have myself at disposal as indeterminate in order to determine it/me. This capacity, whatever the ontological status of the pure ego is, must be granted in order to have freedom, at least experientially. My first attestation of myself as a free being is possibly an act of negation of any given content, i.e. only if I manage to positively see myself as void of any determination can I initiate a course of self-determination. Without the capacity to perceive oneself as indeterminate, which goes at least partially hand in hand with a feeling of irresoluteness, one remains in an abstract freedom.

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Acknowledgments  This paper has been made possible thanks to the initial support of the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 17BZX085), as well as of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Kakenhi No. JP25.03791).

References Altobrando, Andrea. 2017. Imagining Oneself. In Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, ed. T.  Fuchs, M.  Summa, and L. Vanzago, 23–43. New York: Routledge. Brinkmann, Klaus. 2011. Idealism without Limits. Dordrecht: Springer. Dainton, Barry. 2014. Self. Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin. De Palma, Vittorio. 2015. Eine peinliche Verwechselung. Zu Husserls Transzendentalismus. Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy Special Issue I., ch. 1: 14–45. Evans, Cedric O. 1970. The Subject of Consciounsess. New York: Humanities Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1986a. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke, vol. 3. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. English edition: Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. In Phenomenology of Spirit (Trans: Miller, A. V.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1986b. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1830. Dritter Teil. Die Philosophie des Geistes. Werke, vol. 10. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp. English edition: Hegel, G.W.F. 2007. Philosophy of Mind (Trans: Wallace, W. and Miller, A.  V., revised by Inwood, M. J.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1817, Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 13. Freiburg: Meiner. 2000. Henrich, Dieter. 1982. Ethik der Autonomie. In Selbstverhältnisse. Stuttgart: Reclam. Houlgate, Stephen. 2006. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Hume, David. 1739. Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2014. Husserl, Edmund. 1950a. Husserliana. The Hague: Nijhoff. 1950–1987; Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer 1988–2004; Cham/Heidelberg/New York/Dordrecht/London: Springer 2011. ———. 1950b. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. In: Husserliana, vol. 1. Den Haag: Nijhoff 1950. ———. 1952a. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. In Husserliana, vol. 4. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———. 1952b. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch. Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaft. In Husserliana, vol. 5 Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———. 1959. Erste Philosophie II (1923–24). Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion. In Husserliana, vol. 8. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———. 1962. Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925. In Husserliana, vol. 9. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———. 1966. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins. In Husserliana, vol. 10. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———. 1973a. Die Idee der Phänomenologie. In Husserliana, vol. 2. Den Haag: Nijhoff. ———. 1973b. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928. In Husserliana, vol. 14. Den Haag; Nijhoff. ———. 1973c. Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907. In Husserliana, vol. 16. Den Haag: Nijhoff.

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Hegel, Husserl and Imagination Alfredo Ferrarin

Abstract  In this essay I deal with Hegel and Husserl on imagination. I show both the unsuspected centrality of this notion for their relative philosophies and the intrinsic merits of their positions which, though quite far apart in their conclusions, turn around very similar aspects, such as the relation between imagination and perception, presence and absence, universality and particularity, signitive and intuitive reference, negation and distance, layers of consciousness. Keywords  Hegel · Husserl · Imagination · Negation

1  Introduction1 This essay deals with Hegel and Husserl on imagination. I should point out right at the outset that Hegel and Husserl put forth very different views on imagination, and there is no historical influence of Hegel on Husserl. And yet, there are some thematic affinities, as well as some remarkable differences, on which I would like to dwell. I take Hegel and Husserl as two models of a philosophy of the imagination which I think are each very insightful, rich and important. For all their differences, each has much to teach us about imagination. Another preliminary remark is this. The function of imagination may appear as a rather limited perspective from which to compare Hegel and Husserl. I suggest it is not. For Husserl, just consider the richness and importance of the minute analyses in volume 23 of Husserl 1956 on Bildbewusstsein, which must itself be seen in conjunction with the lectures on time-consciousness. Rudolf Bernet writes that Husserl’s transition from a logical-ontological idealism to a transcendental phenomenology 1  Translations from  Hegel and  Husserl are my own except for  Husserl (1973). I  quote Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (Hegel 1969: 8–10) by reference to  the  section number, whereby A  refers to Anmerkung, and Z to Zusatz.

A. Ferrarin (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Ferrarin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Phenomenology, Contributions To Phenomenology 102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_7

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occurs through the transformation of the analyses of image-consciousness.2 As to Hegel, we should remind ourselves that by being both inwardization and ­externalization, imagination is the key aspect of representation. It should suffice to read again § 457 of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in the Encyclopaedia, where he writes that it is in phantasy that “intelligence presents itself … as concrete subjectivity” and as the midpoint between inner and outer, between what is one’s own and what is found.

2  Unreality and Stratification Both Hegel and Husserl, albeit in very different terms, value the unreality of imagination. Unreality here does not mean a mode of being alternative to reality or the non-being of objects. Rather, it invites us to consider the role of absence in intuition. Differently stated, unreality is a relative non-being, the non-being proper to what is given intuitively. In this connection I think it is useful to begin with the definition of imagination we find in Wolff and Baumgarten taken up literally by Kant in the Critique of pure Reason (Kant 1787, B 151): in imagination we give ourselves an intuition without the presence of an object. There is something intuitive about imagination, but at a step removed from perception, for imagination works quite differently from perception. In imagination we presentify, in Husserl’s word, an object in its absence. This quasiintuitivity is equally at the root of Hegel’s remark in the Aesthetics that a painted lion is superior to a real one because it stems from spirit and is a production of human ingenuity, and of Husserl’s famous pronouncement in Ideas I (§ 70) that fiction properly understood is the vital element of phenomenology as well as of all eidetic sciences. Notice that whereas for Hegel this implies a form of anti-Platonism, for Husserl it points us to a realm of being, i.e., essences, irreducible to the world of facts. If we now consider a different point made by Kant, in § 59 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, that unlike in the Leibnizian tradition we must keep sharply separate signs and images and bring back to life the supersensible notion of symbol, we can narrow down further the limits of our discussion. Hegel treats imagination as a family term that assumes a continuity stretching from images to signs and symbols up to linguistic memory. By contrast, Husserl begins to define his mature conception of imagination as he realizes the difference between signitive and imaginative consciousness in empty intentions, until in Ideas I (§ 43) he emphasizes the insurmountable difference between these two and perception, which gives us the object originally and in its flesh. Hegel and Husserl both speak of perception as contradictory. Perception pretends to accomplish what it cannot in principle do (as Husserl’s lectures on Passive synthesis have it). It starts by assuming that the object will be captured in its entirety. It soon realizes that this clashes with the discrepancy between what I mean and what  Bernet (2004, 77). See also Bernet (2006, 269–89).

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I perceive. More striking than this ground shared by Hegel and Husserl, however, is how deeply their solutions diverge. In his criticism of sense-certainty, Hegel interprets this discrepancy as pointing to the superior truth of language. When I express the fullness of the object, my consciousness is surprised as it realizes how poor its vocabulary is; but this poverty is actually the beginning of knowledge, because language, including indexicals and pronouns which should safeguard individual reference but ultimately cannot, draws us out of the sensible towards the universality that alone makes it possible for thought to move confidently in its own element. The cognitive import of perception does not lie in it, but in language. By contrast, the discrepancy for phenomenology lies in the fact that all sensuous apprehension will always be partial. Perception is partial because the three-dimensional object is given as wholly there, but at the same time it never yields all its profiles at once. All perception is intrinsically finite, partial, successive and refinable over time: there is nothing like a complete grasp of the object, unlike in imagination or in conception. For what I imagine is given all at once. Imagination is directed towards itself, its own exercise, its world, while perception is directed towards the object. If the image is given as a whole by my activity, the percept is given as a whole to my perception. In their conception of imagination, Husserl and Hegel share two fundamental premisses, it seems to me. The first one is the polemical target, which for brevity’s sake I will simply call Hume’s imagination. The second one is a view of the life of the mind as a stratification, a mutual relation of layers that recall and build upon one another through transformation and negation. Let me explain them in turn. (i) Husserl admits that his initial inspiration for phantasy comes from Brentano’s lectures on psychology and aesthetics. Brentano argues that phantasy representations are analogues of perceptions. As such, they are ‘improper’ (uneigentlich) presentations, part intuitions and part concepts. In 1904–1905, after the brilliant criticism of Brentano’s Bildertheorie in the fifth Logical Investigation, Husserl writes that the dissatisfaction with precisely this point prompted him to investigate further the status of imaginative consciousness. We must not start from the sensible content of perception and imagination, but from the form of presentation. Besides, it is not a difference in intensity or vivacity that accounts for the distinction between sensation and phantasy, as in Hume: the difference is in essence (Husserl 1980, 92–3).3 What Brentano is not clear about is the difference of content, sense and form in objectifying apprehensions, and what he does not see is that phantasy representations are indeed intuitive (hence not improper) and yet are presentifications, not presentations: the imagined object is absent, but given as if it were present.

3  When I say that Husserl rejects the model of Hume’s imagination, I do not want to suggest that he decidedly rejects Hume’s language throughout. Strikingly, at Husserl (1980, 81), Husserl calls the difference between sensation and phantasma a difference between impressions and ideas, and later (1910–1912: Husserl 1980, 322) he renews his own opposition between original Erlebnis and reproduction in terms of impressions and ideas.

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In turn, Hegel positively rejects Hume’s imagination, despite several points of contact including the literal tribute to the gentle force of Hume’s imagination in the “attractive force” of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in the Encyclopaedia (Hegel 1830b, § 455 A). What Hegel objects to is not a Bildertheorie in perception, but a cumulative model through which the custom of repetition builds ideas relative to experience and vivacity works as a criterion to mark off impressions from ideas. What this model cannot account for is the nature of this “gentle force,” which for Hegel is none other than intelligence itself. The model pursued by Hegel is instead the subsumption under the universality of intelligence, the infinite self-relation that the I is. The single intuition is subsumed in the I like a particular under a universal, whereby the I is the unitary virtuality of thought, the night or pit in which representations are unconsciously preserved—as he puts it. The main difference is in terms of normativity and objectivity. And that is, as we will see presently, how Hegel recasts the relation between representation and image. (ii) About stratification: for Hegel intelligence is understood as development of itself in its various stages, and these are mutually related in such a way that every form becomes matter for subsequent consideration. Intelligence works as the actualization of what we have sedimented as potentialities in ourselves. This implies that the life of intelligence grows increasingly distant from the world of perception and is in ever greater relation to itself and its inferior forms (notably, intuition, recollection, reproductive imagination, sign-making phantasy, etc.) of dealing with the world. This increasing complexity is called a liberation from our dependence on what we at first find. Husserl argues that in images and memories I have ever new ways to refer to past perceptions. Through presentification I can “reflect in phantasy” (Husserl 1980, 186–7) on previous experiences, and thus bring to light their content. Particular aspects I had marginally taken in can become relevant or attract the rays of my attention later, and that includes the previous I that had made the experience (Husserl 1980, 205). This is possible because I can take certain acts as “substrates” on which further acts are grounded (Husserl 1980, 301, 312) and which can be brought to coincidence with them (Husserl 1980, 343). The phantasy act and the phantasy ego can interact with the real ego, so that a fictional world can become part of the real world (Husserl 1980, 351). In other words, phantasy can be the ground for subsequent modifications (Husserl 1980, 377), including for positional acts and actual stances (Stellungnahmen). If every stance comes with the possibility of cancellation and the I is the organized succession of its Stellungnahmen, then I think this is one of the presuppositions for the famous passage in the fourth Cartesian Meditation in which Husserl says that the I constitutes itself in the unity of a history.

3  Hegel on Imagination After this introduction I will now proceed to some more detailed analysis of Hegel and Husserl in turn.

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For Hegel it is crucial not to break up spirit into a series of isolated and unrelated faculties. As a result, imagination must be seen, like every other stage, as one of the modes in which intelligence functions. Intelligence is negativity, the potency of having an object from which it can abstract, and, in distinguishing itself from it, recognize itself as the identity behind the continuity of experience. The boundaries are fluid (we do not have clear-cut demarcations but moments), and the different acts (for example, the acts of recollection and memory, or reproduction in images and production of signs) refer to and grow out of one another. I will concentrate on the sections on Theoretical Spirit, from the Psychology of the Encyclopaedia (Hegel 1830b). Intelligence at first finds contents outside itself, in intuition. Its first move is to turn what exists in outward space and time into a second-degree existence for the mind. If nature is the space and time of existence, the mind is the “where and when” of representations (Hegel 1830b, § 453). Things become the possession of intelligence, taken out of their immediate singularity. Hegel calls this the inwardization of an intuition in the form of an image. Which, as it is apprehended in the universality of the I (Hegel 1830b, § 452), is inevitably more universal than intuition, even if it retains a sensible-concrete appearance (Hegel 1830b, § 457 Z). What Hegel never says here is how intuition and image differ, and it seems to me they do insofar as at some point we have drawn explicit attention to an intuition, put it in relief and taken it out of its undifferentiated flow, even if later the image has sunken into the unconscious pit of intelligence. This is how intelligence marks its images as its own; this is why for it the essential act is recognition. The movement of intelligence is a dialectic of inner and outer, Ideelsetzung-­ Entäusserung, but this movement itself is run by its telos, the production of thought, so that the whole point of these sections of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit is a self-relation known as such. The middle stage of this dialectic of intelligence in the Psychology is representation, which is a recollected intuition. Recollection here has nothing to do with memory but with internalization or inwardization (Er-innerung), and refers to intelligence’s progression from finding itself determined by outward existence to vanquishing its own autonomy and self-relation. At the end of the progression there will be no more gap between intelligence and things. At first representation is recollection in this sense. Its content is the same as in intuition, the preceding stage at which intelligence found its content, but with the added character—the form—of being known as now intelligence’s own content. In other words, intuition is pervaded by intelligence, it is the realm of images floating in me, more or less involuntarily, as internalized from previous acts: as mine. The second stage is imagination proper, which elaborates and shapes its own content, while the third stage is memory, which has signs, and language especially, as its object. This is to say that in order to have a representation I need to be able to (1) reproduce in intelligence what I have found, (2) establish a bond and a connection among images, and (3) finally give particular figurative existence once again to the products of my intelligence. These three moments can be named (1) reproductive imagination, (2) association and connection of images, and (3) the production of signs and symbols (Zeichenmachende Phantasie). They are respectively the universality, objectivity and self-objectification of representation.

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Representation lives thanks to this relation between internalization and intuition. For intelligence is the power over images, but it needs to be reminded of contents through intuition (Hegel 1830b, § 454). This relation between image and intuition is called “the subsumption of the immediate intuition under what is universal in form, under the representation which is the same content” (ibidem). What this means is that by being made the I’s possession an image becomes the permanent representation that serves as the universal subsuming particular intuitions under itself. And this shows that Hegel takes imagination to be at once the idealization in representation and the capacity for variation, on the basis of an abiding representation, of modes, aspects, and contours of intuited contents. Thus the first image, the representation, works as the norm for the variation on the further images and intuitions, which thus become idealities instead of given singularities. In the terms of the 1817 Encyclopaedia, the image held fast as a representation is the negative power which “rubs off the uneven of similar images one against the other” (§ 376). The image that has become representation can do this insofar as it is a type, and not a simple singularity. The identity between representation and intuition is not given but produced through ever renewed acts of identification and subsumption.4 We have just seen that representation needs intuition. Intelligence must be able to intuit itself in something determinate, and the various determinacies in which it mirrors itself will tell us the stage at which intelligence is moving.5 The thesis that thought needs an intuitive determinacy is as old as Aristotle’s point that we think in images, for thought needs something determinate to turn itself to. But unlike Aristotle Hegel thinks we think in names, not images. The motivation for this conclusion is apparent from the very dialectic from intuition to image to sign we have attested. In language the thing has being only as a spiritual production, and spirit is in and through it in relation to itself. Productive imagination’s symbols, metaphors and allegories are individual sensible figures, so that intelligence intuits itself in material images: it intuits in the eagle Jupiter’s force. Here the tie between symbol and symbolized remains immediate; there is no gap between nature and meaning. In the flag or the cockade, by contrast, we have signs for meanings that remain external and indifferent to them. The relation is freer because intelligence no longer needs to rely on material appearance in order to institute a significant relation to it. The relation is what intelligence has set up, and in the sign the thing’s being is now clearly intelligence’s activity. The difference between a material and a linguistic sign is that unlike a cockade, a word is not the material bearer of an externally intuitable relation; it is not red, white and blue, for it is a negated intuition, and specifically only a fleeting and vanishing sound that has a temporal rather than spatial being. The intuition that the sign is exists only as disappearing; intelligence is negative in that it does not rest at its products, nor are its products stable enduring intuitions (Hegel 1830b, § 459).

 See Ferrarin (2001, 295 ff).  For example, if representation needs an intuition we are at the level of imaginative subsumption and recognition, while if I reflect on symbols we are at the level of symbolic phantasy. 4 5

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Intelligence’s content exists as a name (a name is “the externality of intelligence to itself,” Hegel 1830b, § 462). But a name is in itself merely a singular production of intelligence. What we need is a connection endowed with permanence; memory is this abiding system, a bond of signs: the preservation of this arbitrary and external connection itself. The name “lion” no longer needs to evoke an intuition or image to be understood, grasped, and used meaningfully. Memory has sublated in the sign all reference to sensible presence. In understanding a name we need not associate with it an image or an actual meaning because the name is now seen by intelligence as the sign of its signified. This amounts to a recasting of the hierarchy of the senses. Insofar as it is mediated by the productive imagination and transformed into a sign, intuition is only insofar as it is sublated: that is, it loses spatial and pictorial connotations to become temporal existence as spoken language. It is now, in Hegel’s words, vanishing sound, “a disappearing from existence while it is,” thus “a second existence, higher than the immediate one” (Hegel 1830b, § 459). The primacy of sight is effaced in favor of hearing; space gives way to time. Thus in Hegel productive imagination— unlike in Leibniz, for whom it was still a characteristic production of hieroglyphics for the eyes (and reasoning, however blind, must take its bearings by a vision of signs)—supplants all priority of sight in order to make itself intelligence manifest in time: we no longer need to see determinations.6 Speaking generally, we can conclude that thinking is operative from the outset, from the earliest or still dormant stages of spirit, and not once signs, or a self-­ conscious I, have been introduced. There is a definite logic to nature and finite spirit well before the introduction of language. This is the same thesis we find in the logic and the Encyclopaedia: thought gives itself a reality, and conversely all reality must be understood in light of its concept. The logos manifests itself in the logic, in nature, in spirit: this self-actualization or Sichselbstentäusserung is one of the basic traits of thinking.7 Three specific consequences regarding imagination I would like to draw are these. Firstly, as we have seen, imagination internalizes the given and reifies the rational. Unlike in Kant, in Hegel imagination is first reproductive, and only thereafter is it productive. But reproduction is tantamount to the “issuing forth of images from the I’s own internality, that is now the power over them” (Hegel 1830b, § 455). That is, the sense of replicating the given manifold in the mind, implicit in the requirement that the reproduction be faithful to the object of experience, is disappearing; besides, by productive imagination Hegel means a creation of signs (Zeichen machende Phantasie), not a schematic effect of the understanding over the intuition of space and time.  See Ferrarin (2007, 135–58), from which I am here drawing several considerations.  This general thesis finds recurrent applications throughout his sytem. For example, in the Phenomenology language is spirit’s Dasein (Hegel 1807, 376, 1977, 308–9). Or, time is the Dasein of the concept (Hegel 1807, 584, 1977, 487). In the Encyclopaedia, nature is “die Idee als Sein, seiende Idee” (Hegel 1830a, 393). The soul is an existence among others that spirit gives itself (Hegel 1830b, § 403 A). For a fuller treatment, see Ferrarin (2016, 2019, chapter 3). 6 7

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Secondly, in this new form, i.e., semiotic phantasy, intelligence is a universal that objectifies itself in a particular intuition. Thirdly, unlike in the tradition stemming from Aristotle and reverberating to most pre-Kantian philosophy, memory and imagination are not the flip sides of the same coin. Far from being the remnant of sensation in images, memory is rather the liberation from images and the exclusive focus on signs, and for this reason Hegel relates it etymologically to thought (Gedächtnis – Gedanke). In turn, imagination is not defined by or exclusively related to images. To translate the progression of intelligence into apparently non-Hegelian language, the dialectic of intelligence works as the liberation from presence—not so that absence gets the upper hand, but so that the unreality of thought’s ideal connections alone is validated.

4  Husserl on Imagination Rather than the mediation and continuity of different functions of imagination, it is their discontinuity and distinctness that Husserl’s analyses aim at highlighting. I said earlier that a phantasy act can be the substrate on which subsequent intentions are grounded, so that phantasy world and real world can interact. That is not the best-known trait of Husserl’s imagination, in fact some interpreters or followers deny that, beginning with Sartre. The more familiar version, indeed the starting point for Husserl’s reflections on imagination is the neat demarcation between perception and imagination. Imagination in turn is taken as phantasy (or memory) and sharply distinguished from image-consciousness. Let us see how. Imagination is understood as a modification of perception, which is the genuinely original apprehension. This means that an intuitive content can be given in different presentations: while imagining my brother presentifies my brother to me, perceiving him is quite different. The two ways to consider my brother are alternative and cannot overlap; I cannot compare them and put them side by side, for example (Husserl 1980, 75). For in perception I intend the object as real; the object is given in flesh, as an individual here and now with its identity. This perceptual attitude is inseparable from a belief in the object’s existence (Husserl 1980, 221): that my brother is now here means I posit him, i.e., recognize him, as real. If I imagine him instead he is not given as real. And yet, he is given intuitively, as-if he were here (unlike if I write his name down, for example). As a result, all intentions to refer intuitively to my brother, as when I picture him with a moustache he has never worn, remember him in the blue sweater he had last year or imagine him in a complex narrative, are grounded on an original apprehension that alone can give me my brother as real. Only perception can teach me something about my brother in his identity and individuality. What is my image of my brother? It is always a double-seeing, seeing two in one. In imagination consciousness is divided against itself. Whereas the positional con-

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sciousness of perception is undivided, in imagination and in image-consciousness we experience a fundamental duality. Here I do not posit an object, but rather suspend all position of reality. While Husserl tends to juxtapose positional and non-­ positional consciousness, there is, as Sartre insists, a second-order positing concomitant with a negation: the positing of an as-if world when I picture my brother fighting a dragon—whereby I negate the real world he is part of—, that of recognition when I look at his photo—whereby I negate (silence and suppress) all focus on the fading colors of the aging photo. Either way, I have a conflicted positing (Widerstreit) that only exists for an innerly divided consciousness. Before we see in what ways image-consciousness and imagination differ in this duality, let us note one last aspect defining perception. As Experience and Judgment claims, perception is moved by an interest, the drive to fixation: to know and make the known a stable possession even when intuition is no longer available (Husserl 1973, § 47). We can repeatedly go back to the known object as to our property, to an invariance we have acquired (§ 48) which remains for us ever available (Husserl 1966, 10–1). That is, every impression needs a reproduction: both in terms of invariance through time and of a self-same intuitive content (the two dimensions that the A Deduction of Kant’s first Critique assigned to the schematic and the empirical functions of imaginative synthesis). In other words, rich though Husserl’s perception may be, it cannot suffice unto itself: consciousness needs reproduction, which is not part and parcel of perception (or of the living present of time-consciousness) but a presentification. In perception there is a gap between what I intend and what appears, between the present and the absent. Still, if in perception I see the aspects of the object as they are given, in an image I do not see the image’s aspects, but what is shown in and through the image, and that means I do not intend what is present in my perceptual field, but what is absent through what appears in what is present. This is what normally happens with images. But what is image-consciousness? It is not to be confused with imagination, for it is a very peculiar form of perception. When I imagine my brother I do not believe my brother is there. He is not present or real. I perform acts that differ radically from those involved in recognizing his image in a photo. What makes this photo an image of my brother? Interestingly, Husserl and Wittgenstein share much ground here, beginning with the resolute rejection that resemblance, or any other property intrinsic to the image, can help account for this reference. For Husserl in the Logical Investigations, it is only a specific act of consciousness that makes me grasp an image as an image (Husserl 1984, vol. 2, 54). A photo is a perceptual object and must be regarded as one (imagining my brother is not what it means to recognize him in the photo). And yet, if perception were all there is to image-consciousness, i.e., if the photo were a piece of paper or polyester in a frame, precisely the image-­ character of the photo would escape me. The photo is then a thing, but unlike other percepts it is a thing that we regard as a stratification of intentional objects. If the object of perception is undivided, here instead we have three terms, Bildding, Bildobjekt, Bildsujet. The image-thing, the material photo, is apprehended as an

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image-object8; the image-thing is thus the substrate (Husserl 1980, 492) for the appearance of an image which itself represents and refers to my brother. When I recognize my brother then I see in the image the subject that appears in it (Husserl 1980, 18–9). Notice that I can move from one attitude to the next at will (for example, if I want to frame the picture or repair a tear I consider the image-thing; if I try to remember the day I took the picture, I focus on the image-subject; if I appreciate the esthetic quality or color of the photo, I focus on the image-object). In sum, image-consciousness is this seeing-in. If this is not imagination, why is it not a perception? Because perception is not a seeing-in but a looking at: the observation and inspection of an undivided object. Besides, the image is unreal; it clashes with the actual present of the image-thing. Consciousness is here run through by contrast: either I look at the material object, or I consider the image, or I see in it its referent. It is this relation of representation sending us beyond the material object to its transcendent subject that is missing in normal perception. Further, if the photo hangs on the wall, perception apprehends the space of the wall as a whole. The photo instead beckons me, it wants me to look at it at the expense of its surroundings (Husserl 1980, 46–7). Its space is deliberately isolated and discontinuous with the space outside the window that the picture frame is. What I find particularly interesting and instructive in this juxtaposition between imagination and perception is where it threatens to break down: the threshold where the opposites almost merge and neat borders are blurred. For the experience of contrast within consciousness and negation of appearance does not first occur in imagination, because it is already part of what Husserl describes as illusory perception. Let us consider Husserl’s examples: he visits the wax museum and before some stairs is fooled by what he at first takes as a charming lady that turns out to be a wax figure. Or, he takes a mannequin in a shop-window for a man. His explanation of this misperception is of great interest. Normal perception is the unquestioned doxic certainty that intends a presumed object in the perceptual appearance. Normally I need not question this certainty, but if I doubt it, hesitation comes in, I become indecisive, nothingness becomes relevant until I revoke, cancel, negate the initial perception (Husserl 1980, 406–7). I decide that the man I had seen in the mannequin is a nothing (Husserl 1980, 49). The perception of the man is annulled. And yet, it is the same appearance that can be a man or a mannequin. Husserl says in the Fifth Logical Investigation that of the same phenomenon we have two perceptual apprehensions, and these are intertwined in the manner of contrast (Husserl 1984, vol. 1, § 27, 443). Because the phenomenon is “a living contradiction,” so that the phenomenon cannot be man and mannequin at the same time, we need to decide—and decision is disentangling the one apprehension from the other. Judging is dissociating. But this rests on one premiss functional to a sharp distinction: perception cannot be fiction of the percept, and fiction cannot be perception of a fictum (ibidem).

8  As Fink puts it in in Vergegenwärtigung und Bild, in the Scheinkonstitution I neutralize or nullify the material bearer and only concentrate on the image.

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I would like to stress two points about this. First, this cancellation of belief is not a phantasy; Husserl says it is a figment (Fiktum), the appearance of something real, while the image in phantasy is not, for the image does not aim at being valid (Husserl 1980, 464, 491). The Fiktum, including the mirror image that presents itself as reality (Husserl 1980, 487), is unlike the fictional imagination, for the imagination never was the certainty of a reality to begin with and therefore cannot mislead us: I cannot be fooled by the mermaid I imagine, for she is not in my perceptual field. She stakes no claim on it. Second, what is most significant in this perceptual illusion is that we do not have a simple succession of doxic stances, first ‘man’ then ‘mannequin’: we have a “double negation” (Husserl 1980, 406). In other words, we do not limit ourselves to substituting a new certainty for the old one: the old one survives in me as negated. If the cancelled belief is a negation, the old certainty bears in it the stamp of nullification and is known and retained as such a nothingness. Conversely, my new, now validated stance contains in itself the negation of the first certainty. Our consciousness is like the stage of a fight, where one certainty undergoes cancellation and is “disqualified” as the valid and qualified one takes over. What happens to the defeated doxa? To those familiar with Hegel on determinate negation especially, Husserl’s words are striking: it “does not pass over into nothing... it experiences its ‘not’, its cancellation.”9 Four conclusions I would like to draw are these. One is that, if the present judgment builds on negated past stances, consciousness is a stratification in which different layers are inseparable from, indeed necessarily related to one another. The idea of a pointlike present, a being without becoming, has rarely appeared more abstract. The second consequence is this. Cassirer writes that imagination first says not to appearance. It is the first way in which we detach ourselves from the world and give rise to a symbolic world. If Husserl is right that it is through the modalization of perception that the concept of possibility and negation first arises, so that what appears as positive is run through by negativity, critique (Husserl 1980, 428), the possibility of being otherwise, then we are always already detached from the world, and the real world given in perception already comes with negation.

9  Husserl (1980, 478 (ital. mine)): “die qualifizierte Erscheinung hat den Charakter der Unstimmigkeit, der hinweist auf den weiteren Erinnerungsgang, in dem die Qualität ‘Aufhebung’ erfährt, d.i. nicht in nichts, in keine Qualität übergeht, sondern die qualifizierte Erscheinung ihre Aufhebung erfährt im Widerstreit mit einer anderen, sich mit ihr durchsetzenden qualifizierten Erscheinung... und ihr ‘nicht’, Vernichtung erfährt”. Hans Jonas illustrates this point with the example of a scarecrow in the perception of a human being and of a bird. The bird either is scared by the scarecrow or has realized it is a fake: to it, the object is either identical to its appearance or different. For humans the negated perception that lives on implicitly in me shows I have simultaneously identity and difference. The human being does not merely replace the misperception with the correct one: for us, the ‘wrong’ perception “survives to be confronted as falsified with the right one” (Jonas 1966, 178). Jonas draws the lesson that human beings are vitally concerned with something other animals do not have: an interest in likeness and image per se, which they tend to separate from appearance and regard as such.

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The third consequence is this. After the Logical Investigations Husserl, who in 1901 had not yet fully worked out the difference between image-consciousness and imagination, treats the misapprehension of the man where only a mannequin is as the falling back from imaginative to perceptual consciousness. Later, possibly wary of the ambiguity and indeterminacy of this notion of imaginative apprehension, he is less definite about it but tends to take illusory perception more and more clearly as an example of image-consciousness. The reason is straightforward10: the mannequin is the image of a man and is on that account misleading (the wax figure in the wax museum “represents” a woman: Husserl 1984, vol. 1, 230). But images are not illusions because, as we have seen, they never were the certainty of a reality to begin with and therefore cannot mislead us. We can now rephrase this difference in a new way (Husserl 1980, 486–87): an illusion is a nullification, a negation; an act of imagination is instead a nothing. Differently stated, it did not have to pass from assertion to negation because it never was a positional act or an assertion of reality to begin with. What was it all along? A suspension—a suspension of validity, of belief, of reality. There is then a difference between the unreality of what has been negated and that of imagination and phantasy (not to mention the unreality of what might be, i.e., anticipation; Husserl 1980, 508). Closely related to the third consequence comes a fourth one. Let us leave aside Husserl’s repeated wavering and ambiguities on figment and image throughout these pages and recall that the figment in image-consciousness is not a phantasy or image. Still, if we start from the thesis that a phantasy or image is wholly unlike both image-consciousness and perceptual illusion, the risk is that we lose sight of a more fundamental point: all forms of image-consciousness require the work of imagination, even if not all forms of imagination are forms of image-consciousness. It is as if after 500 pages Husserl needed to remind himself of imagination’s role: phantasy image as reproduction in absence as well as perceptual image “are both cases of imagination [Beides ist Imagination]. This must never be forgotten and is absolutely certain” (Husserl 1980, 480; the emphasis is Husserl’s). It is important to dwell on these two last consequences because I do not want to join Sartre in the unwarranted leap he takes. Inspired by Husserl, Sartre denounces the illusion of immanence, i.e., the tendency endemic to modern philosophy, which assumed an identity in nature between sensation and imagination, to take images as residues that experience left in the mind as if they were things with their own inertia. Images are instead acts, acts of consciousness. No image lives on unless it is an image-consciousness; but this is not like Husserl’s Bildbewusstsein, for Sartre takes images mostly as mental acts. My impression is that, all similarities between Sartre and Husserl notwithstanding,11 Sartre takes his criticism of the illusion of immanence as a dogma on which he builds an absolute opposition between perception and imagination. The two are decidedly alternative and have nothing in common:  And it shows that Husserl is not simply thinking of material images, i.e., pictures, for imageconsciousness—for example there are beautiful pages on theatrical illusion: Husserl (1980, 490 ff). 11  For example, a page like Husserl (1980, 21) could have been written verbatim by Sartre. 10

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either Pierre is here in Paris or he is in Berlin and I presentify him in absence. Perception and imagination are as mutually exclusive as presence and absence, as givenness and freedom. I believe that Sartre turns to imagination because he is interested in the spontaneity and freedom of consciousness, while to Husserl imagination is one of the modes of consciousness’ constitution. For this reason Sartre tends to understand imagination at the expense of reality, Husserl in its more or less indirect relation to reality. Be that as it may, the consequences entailed are important. For Sartre there cannot be an ontology of images. They last as long as our consciousness needs them to. They are fleeting and ephemeral, have no identity and therefore cannot be iterated or repeated. Nor do they have individuality: they are plastic, a contamination of traits. Because in an image I put what I know and unlike a given percept the image cannot be inspected, I can never learn anything from it. This is the thesis of the epistemological poverty of imagination, the upshot of which is that I can understand and think in images, but not through images. I think the situation in Husserl is a lot more complicated and involved than in Sartre. While Sartre denies that in perceptual illusion imagination plays a role at all, as we have seen Husserl identifies in perceptual imagination its source. Besides, Husserl asserts the repeatability of images. Even if their temporal and spatial character is indeterminate, they can work as substrates for further acts.12 Naturally it must also be possible to have consciousness of the sameness of phantasy and percept (Gleichheitbewusstsein, Husserl 1980, 507). We have seen that Husserl argues that in images and memories I have ever new ways to refer to past perceptions. If consciousness must be able to compare the presentation of perception with the presentification of the same thing in its absence, it must be aware of its internal differentiation. What presentifications and imagination generally show is that the I is not in coincidence with itself. Distance, negation, non-identity, contrast, which seem almost absent in perception, mark the life of the imagination, as does the alterity of my past to me. If for consciousness every actuality includes its horizon of latent and predelineated potentialities, and if every presence rests on presentifications of absent and gone phases, it is not surprising that Husserl takes consciousness as constituted in temporal, mutually intertwined layers. Unlike Sartre, Husserl talks about cases in which perception and imagination converge to yield important conclusions about reality (what would happen, he asks, if I threw this stone at that house?).13 Another case is this. Husserl is closer to Merleau-Ponty than to Sartre when he claims that the case of the phantasy of the hidden face of a three-dimensional object, although given in a possible continuation of perception (Husserl 1980, 314, 226–7; here phantasy is the Einfüllung of an impression), is a mixture (Mischung, Husserl 1980, 455) between imagination and perception.

12 13

 Husserl (1980, 551; 529). On the iteration of acts in presentification, see Husserl (1959, 133).  Husserl (1980, 455–6): there is a “moment” of positionality in this phantasy.

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5  Conclusion Most importantly, and here I come to my conclusions, if we took Sartre as a lead we would never be able to understand one of the most innovative and fundamental traits of Husserl’s imagination, its relation to truth. If I read a fairy tale, my descriptions and judgments do not aim at reality and yet are “actual” as are the affective acts in which we live (Husserl 1980, 379, 383). Such stances can be compared to the judgments we carry out regarding a theatre play: here, to quote Husserl, judgments “have a kind of objective truth, even though they refer to fictions” (Husserl 1980, 520, Husserl’s emphasis). A novel or a play have “intersubjective existence” (ibid.), unlike a private phantasy. The problem may not be only with Sartre, however. Husserl shows a remarkable ambivalence towards imagination. Starting from a conception of imagination as modification of perception risks making imagination derivative in nature, which can hardly be squared with the constitutive role imagination has for Husserl at various levels. Imagination pictures centaurs, dragons and mermaids, Husserl’s favorite and recurrent examples, but it is also crucial in phenomenology as a methodological tool for eidetic variation and intuition. Unlike sciences of facts, eidetic sciences rest on intuition rather than perception. And the examples illustrating this are always geometry and phenomenology. In mathematics, if I imagine a figure I prescribe a system of possibilities to it (Husserl 1980, 456). Rather than cognitively poor as in Sartre, imagination is here the source of knowledge. Upon closer inspection, though, the modalization of perception’s belief is precisely the required neutralization that results in pure possibilities (Husserl 1980, 559). These are unreal like the essences of Ideas I. Here essences, independent of facts, are ideal possibilities and the object of pure original intuition in phantasy (§ 4, § 7, § 19). This is the decisive point: imagination gives essences in intuition: it is not an empty or abstract intending, and since knowledge always requires an intuition for Husserl, the intuition of eidetic intuition/variation is higher than that of perception, which is based on facts. In the 1920s and 1930s Husserl insists more and more on this point until he writes in the Cartesian Meditations (§ 34) that every fact can be treated like the example of a pure possibility once we have transferred the object of perception to the unreality of an as-if world. For essences can be given either in individuals or as pure possibilities (Husserl 1980, 508), but once we focus on the relation between essence and example it is phantasy, not experience, that grasps ideal relations in their necessity. This is why Husserl writes that phantasy may be subjective alright, but pure possibilities intuited in phantasy are objective (Husserl 1980, 569). In Experience and Judgment (Husserl 1973, § 97c), he claims that pure phantasy is the original source of a pure a priori. In the free variation analyzed in these pages we find the very striking and to my knowledge unprecedented link between imagination and necessity. For Husserl like for Hegel then escapism is not what is most important to imagination. Imagination is not essentially alternative to or disconnected from reality. For all its unreality, in fact because of its unreality, imagination helps us make sense of

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reality. Without it we would not be able to accomplish anything concrete. Reality and unreality vitally need one another—so does my anti-positivist conclusion suggest. If that is true, however, it must also be said that unlike Husserl Hegel seems to assign imagination virtually no role to play in philosophy. It prepares its own overcoming as memory and language in the Psychology, but that only tells us something about the forms of contents not yet thoroughly identical to them. That is, it only tells us something about representation, which is the way things are at first for us. But philosophy is about transforming representation into thought. Necessity only pertains to thought, not to representation. On the other hand, without the daring and counterintuitive activity of a speculative imagination dialectic could never invert the ordinary conception of thought animating modern philosophy. Dialectic needs imagination to mobilize—melt what is frozen in—our representations.14

References Bernet, Rudolf. 2004. Conscience et existence. Perspectives phénoménologiques. Paris: PUF. ———. 2006. Intentional Consciousness and Non-intentional Self-Awareness. In Passive Synthesis and Life-World, ed. Alfredo Ferrarin, 2006, 269–289. Pisa: Edizioni ETS. Ferrarin, Alfredo. 2001. Hegel and Aristotle. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Logic, Thinking, and Language. In Von der Logik zur Sprache. Stuttgarter Hegelkongress 2005, ed. R. Bubner and G. Hindrichs, 135–158. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ———. 2016. Spontaneity and reification. What does Hegel mean by Thinking? In System und Logik bei Hegel. 200 Jahre nach der Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Luca Fonnesu, 81–104. Hildesheim: Olms. ———. 2019. Thinking and the I.  Hegel and the Critique of Kant. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1807. Phenomenologie des Geistes. Werke, vol. 3. ed. Eva Moldenhauer, and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1830a. In Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Wissenschaft der Logik. Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 8. Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp. ———. 1830b. In Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Die Philosophie des Geistes mit den mündlichen Zusätzen. Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 10. Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp. ———. 1969. In Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel. Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp. 1969–71. ———. 1977. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1950–1987. Husserliana. The Hague: Nijhoff Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer 1988–2004; Cham/Heidelberg/New York/Dordrecht/London: Springer 2011–. Husserl, Edmund. 1959. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion. Husserliana, ed. Rudolf Boehm, vol. 8. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1966. In Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten, 1918–1926, Husserliana, ed. Margot Fleischer, vol. 11. The Hague: Nijhoff. 14

 I have defended dialectic’s imaginative core in the Introduction to Ferrarin (2019).

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———. 1973. Experience and Judgment, ed. L. Landgrebe. Trans. J.S. Churchill, and K. Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1980. Phäntasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwartigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925). Husserliana, ed. E. Marbach, vol. 23. The Hague: Nijhoff. ———. 1984. Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Husserliana, ed. U. Panzer, vol. 19/1–2. The Hague: Nijhoff. Jonas, Hans. 1966. The Phenomenon of Life. Towards a Philosophical Biology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1781/1787. Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, 1998. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1940. L’imaginaire. Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Paris: Gallimard.

Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, and the Paradox of Expression Elisa Magrì

Abstract  For Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, the concept of expression is crucial to understand meaning and signification in a variety of contexts, including the aesthetic, anthropological, and psychological domain. However, they also point out the paradoxical nature of the notion of expression, in that it presupposes what it is supposed to explain, namely its principle of determination. In my reading, both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty endorse a common strategy to avoid the paradox, and their approach is rooted in the use of genetic descriptions. In this way, they bring to light the active side of receptivity  without producing any  hypostatization of a prior Logos. Before addressing their common strategy, I briefly present the earlier articulation of the problem of expression in Hegel’s Science of Logic. Keywords  Hegel · Merleau-Ponty · Expression · Manifestation · Genesis

1  Introduction In section §49 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant describes the work of the genius in the following way: “[…] Thus, genius really consists in the happy relation, which no science can teach and no diligence learn, of finding ideas for a given concept on the one hand and on the other hitting upon the expression for these, through which the subjective disposition of the mind that is thereby produced, as an accompaniment of a concept, can be communicated to others” (Kant 1908/1913, 317, Kant 2001, 194–5). This passage is particularly interesting not only because it tackles directly the notion of aesthetic creativity, but also because it describes the complex way in which aesthetic meaning is generated and communicated through an act of expression. Essentially, Kant argues that the work of genius consists in bringing to light aesthetic ideas, which share significant similarities with the ideas of reason in that they strive towards something that lies beyond the boundaries of experience. Aesthetic ideas consist in associations of concepts and representations E. Magrì (*) School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Ferrarin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Phenomenology, Contributions To Phenomenology 102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_8

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for which no determinate concept can be found to designate them. Kant refers, for instance, to the use of metaphors and similes that link together concepts such as virtue and beauty with images or feelings that are rooted in our sensible experience. Due to their nature, aesthetic ideas are able to serve ideas of reason by stimulating the mind through representations that arouse new and multiple images or associations. This inspires the mind to appreciate the value of ideas that are otherwise irreducible to human representation, as in the case of Friedrich II’s poem, which Kant cites in section §49. Here, the poem inspires the idea of a cosmopolitan disposition through the poetic description of a beautiful summer day. Finding the appropriate representation for a concept or idea is what Kant calls “finding the right expression.” The capacity responsible for expression is imagination, which forges a new connection of representations out of those available through experience. In the aesthetic field, imagination engages in free associations that are not governed by the rules of understanding, such as spatiotemporal constraints or laws of causality.1 In the aesthetic domain, imagination creates something new that can be communicated to others. Thus, expression is creative, not bounded by the rules of understanding, and open to the variations enabled by the artist’s faculties. In this regard, it is noteworthy that Kant associates the notion of genius with that of expression. The task of finding the appropriate and apt expression for an idea is a process that requires spontaneity and creativity. The artist is not constrained by some given rules, such as – for instance – the imitation of the artworks of her predecessors. On the contrary, Kant emphasises that the process by means of which the work of genius comes to expression is in itself indeterminate, for the artist herself does not know the rules, but institutes them with her creation. The notion of expression is, then, a shortcut for a process that is irreducible to any antecedents and yet it generates a product that is communicable, thereby creating a bond between the artist and the product as well as between the artist and her fellows. From this point of view, it is significant that, already in Kant, the notion of expression calls into question not just the creative powers of the artist, but rather and more fundamentally “a process of mediation” (Sassen 2003, 177) between imagination and reality. This corresponds to the institution of a possibility, which is not constrained by imitation or by rules of reasoning. Yet, while for Kant such process of mediation depends on the productive role of imagination, Hegel and Merleau-­ Ponty acknowledge the ontological pervasiveness of expression in all aspects of thought and subjective experience. In doing so, they develop further the relation between expression and institution in a way that revises and contextualises the productive role of imagination within a genetic explanation of meaning. In the following, I wish to explore this approach by looking at both Hegel’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of expression. Due to the complexity of Hegel’s interpretation of the problem, my discussion of Hegel requires two distinct steps that draw on Hegel’s Science of Logic as well as on Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, which are preliminary to the analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s account. 1  For a discussion of the productivity of imagination in both mathematical cognition and aesthetics, see Crawford (2003). See also Ferrarin (2015) for a unifying account of Kant’s view of reason.

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2  F  rom a Logical Point of View: Hegel’s Critique of Expression in the Science of Logic Hegel was particularly concerned with the explanatory power of expression beginning with its logical structure. Indeed, in the Science of Logic, it is possible to find a compelling argument for the concept of expression. Before considering this, I would like to briefly point out two important aspects of Hegel’s logical project. For Hegel, the logic can be considered both as a self-standing and presuppositionless form of speculative activity (as this is developed in the Science of Logic), and as the middle term between nature and spirit within the systematic architectonic of the Encyclopaedia. According to the last paragraph of the Encyclopaedia, logic relates to nature and spirit in three different syllogisms that explain the whole structure of the relations between being and thought.2 In both cases, however, logical categories do not refer to transcendental faculties, nor can they be applied to reality as mere external forms. On the contrary, the dialectical passages of the Science of Logic show that the logic does not rely on any externally given assumptions in order to validate its own categories, forms, and processes. At the same time, the dialectical consistency of the logic provides the necessary medium for the scientific treatment of both spirit and nature in the Encyclopaedia. In the following, I will concentrate on Hegel’s discussion of logical categories as mind-independent determinations of thought, before contextualising the relevance of expression in the dimension of Anthropology.  More precisely, I wish to draw attention to the passages of the Science of Logic that involve the deduction of the concept (Begriff).3 The genesis of the concept as a distinct logical form represents a turning point in the Science of Logic in that it establishes the principle of self-reference that is crucial to vindicate the independence as well as the presuppositionless character of logical thought. This can be further explicated by contrasting the concept with the categories of expression (Äusserung) and manifestation (Manifestation) in the Doctrine of Essence. Both expression and manifestation, for Hegel, presuppose what they are supposed to explain, namely the principle of their logical determination. More specifically, the lack of transparency of these categories reflects a lack of normative determination: does expression involve a relation between an essence and its outer manifestation, or is expression the same as the content that is expressed? Hegel proceeds by demonstrating that both alternatives fail to explicate that expression is a process that is entirely self-conditioning. On Hegel’s view, expression is not the shining through of a pre-existing essence, or a combination of forms depending on the context, but rather a process that brings forth its principle of self-determination. From this point of view, the categories of expression and manifestation described in the Doctrine of

 For a discussion of the place of these syllogisms in Hegel’s philosophy see Nuzzo (2004).  See also Houlgate (2000), Schick (2014), and Magrì (2016a, 2017) for an expanded analysis of this passage.

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Essence reflect a form of intellectual understanding that fails to justify how logical thought is both self-expressive and self-determining. It is possible to illustrate Hegel’s first critique of expression by considering the example of force. In Hegel’s Science of Logic, force stands for an essential relation between wholes and parts, which represents the dialectical development of the category of apperance. An example of this is gravitational force, which animates matter, although Hegel does not  commit to any account  of positive sciences in the Logic.4 Hegel seeks to show that appearance brings forth a dialectic that stands in critical tension with the Kantian thing-in-itself.5 As a result of this, the categories of the Doctrine of Essence bring to light both the possibilities and the limits inherent in the intelligibility of appearance. In this context, the first paradox of expression revolves around the tautological character of force. To begin with, the notion of force stands for an expressive relation between passivity and self-reflection (Hegel 1986a, 179, Hegel 2010, 456–459). Hegel argues that force must be either posited as a factum elevated to the dignity of an explanatory principle, or it must be conceived as the activity of animation of the whole. Yet, since force is not a thing in either case, it can be solicited and put in motion only by another force. By entering such an infinite cycle of solicitations and externalisations, force turns out to be a tautological form, for it does not suffice to explain its underlying essence, but it presupposes itself all over again. Accordingly, Hegel’s argument is meant to show the inconsistency that is inherent in the notion of expression as explanatory category. Conceived as the appearance of an underlying essence, expression becomes an occult process of animation. The category of manifestation addresses only partly the limits of expression. Unlike expression, manifestation is linked to the categories of modality, referring to the metaphysical activity of an absolute totality, which actualises itself by bringing forth its attributes or modes. This is why manifestation is not a formal connection among parts; on the contrary, it defines the modality according to which totalities exist (Hegel 1986a, 201, Hegel 2010, 478). In this sense, manifestation is the actualisation of a possibility. The absolute develops by bringing forth its own necessity, which can only be established by contrast and reference to the realm of possibilities. Indeed, according to Hegel’s treatment of modality, possibility can only be defined in relation to necessity. For example, if A denotes possibility, then the negation of A is not necessary. Accordingly, if A denotes necessity, then it must be the case that A. In this sense, Hegel considers necessity as the actuality of the absolute, which does not preclude contingency, but contains it. It follows that the notion of manifestation overcomes that of expression, for manifestation does not consist in the reflective shining of something into another, but it is a self-differentiating movement. This also suggests that the absolute is an entirely self-subsisting entity that does not have any kind of self-relation aside from the “tranquil coming forth of itself” (Hegel 4  Hegel’s account of the category of force contains an implicit criticism of Newton, according to whom matter and force are two fixed and dead abstractions (Cf. Ferrarin 2001, 206–209). 5  For a discussion of Hegel’s categories of essence in light of Hegel’s critique of the Kantian thingin-itself, see Longuenesse (2007).

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1986a, 220, Hegel 2010, 490). In other words, by identifying the absolute with the very activity of manifestation, the notion of Manifestation fails to explicate how the absolute is self-determining both within itself and in relation to its other. The self-­ differentiating movement of the absolute ends up becoming a dogmatic metaphysical principle as long as it does not determine or make explicit its reason to act. Thus, Hegel’s argument is that both expression and manifestation fall into the paradox of presupposing what they are supposed to explain, namely the principle of their logical determination. In contrast to this, the concept (Begriff) displays the structure of self-reference that allows for the overcoming of the paradoxes of expression. What is relevant in this passage of the Science of Logic is Hegel’s account of the genesis of the concept as a form that comes out of reciprocal action (Wechselwirkung). Unlike the infinite cycle of force, reciprocity consists in the reciprocal conditioning of two substances that are passive and active at once, and that do not therefore maintain their relative opposition, but rather transform into each other. The most salient aspect that distinguishes reciprocity from both expression and manifestation is that the former does not depend on the difference between inner and outer, or between necessity and contingency. Reciprocity is a dynamic relation that allows the active side to reverse its role and to become passive through the interaction with its other. In this way, not only does reciprocity consummate the very distinction between passivity and activity, but it also contributes to the sedimentation of their unity in the form of a self-­ referential activity. It is indeed by instituting this form of self-reference within the dialectical determination of substantiality that the concept is eventually generated as the general principle of subjectivity, namely as the power of self-determination. As such, the concept is presented as a drive that is not in need of external justification, for it is in itself a principle of movement and self-actualisation. The concept is indeed defined as the drive that moves forward the entire system of logical determinations (Hegel 1986a, 471, Hegel 2010, 677), and also as the drive of subjectivity, for the corporeity (Lebendigkeit) of the living being is a “reality immediately identical with the concept.”6 To put it differently, the concept is the generative power that holds together being and thought, activity and passivity, without falling into the paradox of presupposing either itself or its other as absolutely given. It is noteworthy that, since the concept results from the sedimentation of reciprocal action, it does not correspond to a transition to an alleged higher ontological order. It is rather deduced genetically as the principle that brings forth the movement of the logic while providing unity to all the previous categories. These are eventually identified as the proper determinations of the concept. In this sense, the concept satisfies the logical requirement of independence from external constraints, while being open to alterity due to its radical 6  Cf. Hegel (1986a, 475, 2010, 680): “The living being has this corporeity at first as a reality immediately identical with the concept [Die Leiblichkeit hat das Lebendige zunächst als die unmittelbar mit dem Begriff identische Realität]; to this extent the corporeity has this reality in general by nature.” I have defended a view of self-reference as a key element of both Hegel’s logic and subjectivity in Magrì (2017).

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c­ apacity for determinability. While the categories of expression and manifestation need to shine through a medium or to be made explicit by an overarching notion, the concept is the principle that guarantees freedom from external constraints and self-­ reference. Accordingly, it appears that Hegel contrasts expression with a more complex view of self-relation, akin to a passive form of self-determination. Self-­reference, considered as the result of a process that actualizes the capacities to act and to respond to alterity, brings to light the principle of self-determination that is distinctive of subjectivity in general. Naturally, this account provides only the genesis of a principle, whose development stretches across different dimensions, building into more complex theoretical and practical forms I cannot here discuss. I suggest, however, that the critique of expression in the Logic is consistent with the role that expression plays in Hegel’s  philosophical anthropology, which bears important implications for understanding the relation between the concept and its emergence at the level of subjective experience.

3  Hegel’s Appraisal of Expression in the Anthropology Hegel’s Anthropology represents the first part of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in the Encyclopaedia. Hegel’s account of subjectivity is particularly interesting in that it appeals to a form of scientific investigation, which consists in developing a “rigorous form” (die strenge Form) that results from the manifestation of the concept (Begriff) in the sphere of living beings: Just as in the living creature generally, everything is already contained, in an ideal manner, in the germ [Keime] and is brought forth by the germ itself, not by an alien power, so too must all particular forms of the living mind grow out of its concept as from their germ. Our thinking, which is propelled [bewegt] by the concept, here remains entirely immanent in the object, which is likewise propelled by the concept; we merely look on, as it were, at the object’s own development, not altering it by importing our subjective ideas and notions. (Hegel 1979 §379, Addition, Hegel 2007, 7)

According to Hegel, it is possible to undertake a scientific exposition of the intelligibility of spirit in light of the concept. In this sense, subjectivity coincides with the process whereby the concept becomes finite. It is not the subject that thinks according to the rules of the concept, but it is rather the concept that thinks within the subject. This is the reason why, contrary to the biologic process of growth, the development of the concept does not cause any alteration in the state of the self-­ knowing spirit. It is not subjectivity that changes through the different parts of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (Anthropology, Phenomenology, and Psychology), but it is the concept, taken in the form of its subjective existence, that unfolds according to different stages of psychophysical, theoretical and practical realisation.7 7  See Hegel (1979 §403, Remark, 2007, 88): “The soul is the existent concept [existierende Begriff], the existence of what is speculative.”

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In my view, we can make sense of Hegel’s claim by taking seriously the argument of the Logic  according to which  the concept corresponds to a principle of self-­reference that eludes the difference between inner and outer.  In particular, I wish to indicate the sense in which the manifestation of the concept within subjective spirit counts as an expressive phenomenon that does not reproduce the paradox of expression. My reading will concentrate on those sections of the Anthropology that address more closely this aspect. Let’s proceed by considering how the manifestation of subjective self-reference becomes apparent at the level of corporeality. In discussing sensation, Hegel points out that the content of sensation either stems from the external world or pertains to the inwardness of the soul (Hegel 1979 §401, Addition). Sensations are prima facie physiological and depend on changes and variations affecting sense organs. Yet sensations are also felt by the living being, hence they underpin sensitivity to felt qualities of the environment. This is why sensations are also considered in so far as they “embody themselves,” that is, are manifested through the motions of the body (this includes gestures, emotions, pain and other physical manifestations), which reveal the permeability of the psyche to the influence of nature. From this point of view, Hegel’s philosophical anthropology offers an account of embodiment (Verleiblichung), which is based on spontaneous adaptability and manifestation of the inner through the outer, connecting the sentient soul to the felt body. Most notably, this process does not presuppose any kind of idealisation, for Hegel distinguishes between Verleiblichung (embodiment) and Verkörperung (materialisation) as two different senses of inhabiting a corporeal dimension. The notion of Verkörperung appears in the Lectures on Aesthetics, where the work of art is explicitly defined as the materialisation of a universal idea such that the artist has to “grasp only those characteristics that are right and appropriate to the essence of the matter in hand” (Hegel 1986b, 217, Hegel 1975, 164). The form of art that mostly mirrors such idealisation is, for Hegel, sculpture (Hegel 1986b, 381– 2). Hegel argues that sculpture allows the artist to overcome particular details related, for example, to the shape of the body, in order to convey a universal and essential idea that is grasped and elaborated by the artist. The Greeks excelled in this art of reproducing the liveliness of human bodies with scrupulous fidelity. The use of the notion of embodiment in aesthetics indicates that the body is here idealised or transformed in order to let spirit penetrate it. In this sense, in aesthetics, the living body (Leib) cannot be reduced to the organic or physical body (Körper). Yet works of art are products; as such they reflect the spirit of the artist and express universality.8 From this point of view, the categories of expression and manifestation illustrated in the Doctrine of Essence appear closer to the notion of Verkörperung, not to Verleiblichung, which involves the dynamics of becoming a subject. More precisely, for Hegel, the exteriorization of inner sensations gives rise to an involuntary system of sign relations, since by shaping itself into a sign of inner sensation, this embodying become visible to others (Hegel 1979 §401, Addition). The 8  See Ciavatta (2017) for a discussion of meaning in relation to asethetic expression in both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty.

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living body has its own existence that ranges from a variety of different and individual expressions. For instance, the voice is capable of various modifications, while laughter is indicative of the individual’s level of culture (Hegel 1979 §401, Addition). In this respect, the body in Hegel’s Anthropology is the locus of expressive phenomena. The individual described by the Anthropology draws on a system of spontaneous and imitative processes that link her experience to that of the environment. This is why the feeling subject resembles a tree that is inseparable from its leaves and dies, if repeatedly stripped of them (Hegel 1979 §402, Addition). In the Hegelian metaphor, the leaves stand for subjective life, which is rich in activity and experiences that shape individual existence. Viewed in this way, the individual body does not simply manifest itself to others, but it is also fulfilled and enriched by its communication with the environment. This implies that sensations and feelings form together a complex system between outside and inside, so that the anthropological individual cannot be absolutely separated from other selves or from the environment, since it lives in a system of concrete relationships. With habit this initial state is subject to a significant change: by means of habituation expression undergoes a process of mechanisation, which reduces the free expansion of bodily manifestation in order to make it an instrument of the self (Hegel 1979 §410). Habit is second nature precisely because it is a form of voluntary embodiment, by means of which the subject gives the body its own expression, thereby accomplishing the transition from involuntary to voluntary embodiment (Hegel 1979 §411, Addition).9 Unlike involuntary embodiment, the self that is generated through habituation shapes the body from within by consciously adapting and adjusting herself to contexts and situations. This stage coincides with the emergence of consciousness, that is to say with the egoic awareness of one’s own abilities and skills. In this light, the process that takes place in habit recalls the dynamics of reciprocal action of the Logic, whereby an iterative relation enables the transition to self-reference as the primary form of self-relation. For this reason, habit is only partially a mechanism, for it facilitates the genesis of self-awareness on a bodily level of experience, which is precondition to conscious thought and language.10 The relevance of habit for the genesis of the self is also evident from Hegel’s discussion of madness and derangement, which he describes in terms of alterations of the affective qualities that permeate individual experiences (Hegel 1979 §408, Addition). On Hegel’s account, the individual affected by mental illness struggles to centre on oneself and to detach from her feelings and sensations, hence she finds it difficult to own herself. Habit facilitates detachment from particular feelings by training subjective dispositions to respond to contexts and situations in a personal manner. In this sense, while habit fosters forgetfulness of contingent feelings and desires, it is at the same time indicative of a more fundamental self-ascription of one’s stance to the world. As Hegel states, “in habit one enters a relationship not to a contingent individual sensation, representation, desire, etc., but to one’s own self, 9  See also Ferrarin (2017) for an account of the passive genesis of the “I” in Hegel, which is akin to Husserl’s. 10  I have discussed Hegel’s account of habit and its relation to psychology in Magrì (2016b).

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to a universal mode of action which constitutes one’s individuality” (Hegel 1979 §409, Remark, Hegel  2007, 134). For Hegel, self-reference does not necessarily equate to self-consciousness or to self-knowledge, for it provides a primordial ground for individual self-appropriation. In this way, the psyche is also free to move and engage in further acts that expand her range of actions and movements, thereby developing consciousness and intelligence. Due to the relevance of passive self-awareness for the analysis of habit, Hegel would possibly advocate dialectical therapy and dialogue as ways to bring to light trauma and to potentially heal disorders of emotion regulation by restoring habitual modalities of self-relation. From this point of view, the emergence of the concept within subjective spirit does not coincide with either expression or manifestation. The concept does not inhabit subjective spirit as an ideal that becomes manifested in human form, nor does it represent an independent logos. On the contrary, the concept manifests itself in the sphere of subjectivity by instituting activity in passivity, as the learning habit that enables the subject to self-appropriate her experience and to inhabit situations by embodying and owning herself. In this respect, Hegel’s critique of expression does not only bring to light the relevance of bodily experience, but it also suggests that expression is a process by means of which self-determination is gradually developed and appropriated by the self at the very levels of sensing and feeling.

4  Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Expression In this section, I would like to consider the problem of expression in Merleau-Ponty drawing on some interesting affinities between Merleau-Ponty and Hegel. As Landes (2013) has shown, Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the pervasiveness of expression in all aspects of experience and praxis (Landes 2013). Like Hegel, however, Merleau-Ponty seeks to uncover the self-determining ground of expression, which institutes the condition of possibility for intersubjective communication. Following Landes (2013) and Vanzago (2016), it can be shown that Merleau-Ponty’s account of expression does not presuppose any absolute anteriority of reason or meaning.11 For Merleau-Ponty, the past, the ideal, and the present are instituted and  In his seminal study on Merleau-Ponty and the paradox of expression, Bernhard Waldenfels stressed the difference between Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of expression and common versions of logical paradoxes. While the latter can be solved by distinguishing between different levels of explanations, such as between objective language and meta-language, Merleau-Ponty’s view of expression “can neither be converted into a unified determination nor be sublated in a more comprehensive or higher determination” (Waldenfels 2000, 92). From the start, Waldenfels evokes, without explicitly naming it, a Hegelian model. It is not only the reference to sublation, but more fundamentally the admission that the problem posited by Merleau-Ponty calls into question the analysis of a process, not a content or a proposition. The process in question is the manifestation of meaning, which appears indirectly as embedded in different dimensions (linguistic, aesthetic, historical etc.) and involving a corporeal medium (the Leib). According to Waldenfels, while the problem of expression is pervasive in Merleau-Ponty’s work, it appears in the early writings “a tendency to diminish the enigma of expression in favour of an anteriority of experience, in favour

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posited by the subject in order to be interrogated. In this sense, expression needs not to be confused with the manifestation of a pre-existing logos, for it coincides with the institution of the very possibility of sense. In my view, this conceptual strategy is aligned with Hegel’s argument, showing implicit and striking resonances between the two philosophers. In order to elucidate my argument further, I wish to focus on the relation between thought and language in both the Phenomenology of Perception and The Prose of the World. Part I, Chapter VI of the Phenomenology of Perception is dedicated to the analysis of speech as deliberate power of signification. While in the previous chapters Merleau-Ponty explores the intentionality of the body, particularly from the point of view of its motor capacities and spatiotemporal configuration, Chapter VI deals with the function of meaning generation through inner and outer speech. From the very beginning of this chapter, the issue that Merleau-Ponty raises is whether the relation between language and signification depends on some intellectual ability or of a passivity of the event” (Waldenfels 2000, 94). In a sense, Waldenfels suggests that, in works like the Phenomenology of Perception, a form of hypostatization is at stake, as if the phenomenon of expression is meant to proceed from an originary Logos that can never reach its full potential. On Waldenfels’ view, expression for Merleau-Ponty is fundamentally constrained in that it has already begun before the subject. This is the proper “alienness” that inhabits the phenomenon of expression and that makes it impossible for us to conceive of it according to the Aristotelian notion of energeia. The crucial ambiguity that Waldenfels ascribes to Merleau-Ponty consists in the fact there cannot be any univocal answer as to how the process of expression is set in motion, hence it is not clear whether and how expression is supposed to fill some ontological gap. However, more recently, a number of scholars have argued that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of expression must be read, especially in works like the Phenomenology of Perception, as sense in movement (Morris 2004), that is, in terms of actuality of meaning which involves more radically the body-world relation. As Morris writes in his fascinating study, “expression is the movement in which non-sense folds into sense” (Morris 2004, 89), or to put it in other words, expression is the intertwining between the order of temporality and the order of bodily experience, including the dimension of learning, and particularly of learning habits, which create the link between expression, sense, and perception. On Morris’ view, temporality is key to solve the paradox of expression, for what is expressed comes into being in expression, as the child becomes the adult (Morris 2004, 85). From a similar point of view, Hass has argued that the problem of expression in MerleauPonty is central to the processes of knowledge and communication with others (Hass 2008, 160). However, on Hass’ reading, the drive that animates the process of expression is “not necessitated by some Hegelian telos” (ibid.), for it is contingent upon the work and abilities of the people that give rise to it. More recently, Landes has investigated the pervasiveness of concept of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s corpus in order to show that expression appears across different fields, including science, ontology, perception, language, thought, politics, and aesthetics (Landes 2013). For Landes, “the paradoxical logic of expression is not the “secret” of Merleau-Ponty’s texts, but rather the style of his every philosophical gesture and is thus illustrated across his corpus” (Landes 2013, 4). In contrast to Waldenfels, Landes argues that the very dimension of the paradox in MerleauPonty requires its own, distinct phenomenology. This means that there cannot be any absolute passivity, nor any anteriority, for expression is “any enduring response to the weight of the past, the weight of the ideal, and the weight of the present situation, broadly construed” (Landes 2013, 10). For a conceptual reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression across the Phenomenology of Perception and his later works, see also Vanzago 2016, who emphasises how language, gestures, and thought are all forms of expression that are irreducible to given meanings, for they institute the very possibility of sense.

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if the experience of the body is supposed to contribute in a different way to our understanding of the relation between language and thought. Starting with a consideration of aphasia (i.e. language impairment, which often results from strokes or trauma), Merleau-Ponty notices that the dissociation between thought and language at stake in aphasia does not amount to a mere privation of linguistic skills, as if the patient simply missed a certain stock of words. Rather, Merleau-Ponty points out that “behind the word we discover an attitude or a function of speech that conditions it” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 180). The notion of “attitude” echoes Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the intentional arc that underpins the relation between perception, thought, and movement. In the case of Schneider’s apraxia, the intentional arc is supposed to explain in what sense Schneider’s inability to perform certain movements upon command needs to be associated with a more general lack of existential freedom. Having his physical abilities intact, Schneider had lost a basic form of bodily orientation provided by the intentional arc, which projects us into space towards the accomplishment of our movements.12 In this way, Merleau-Ponty proposes an existential analysis against both the mechanistic and intellectualist interpretations of apraxia. Most notably, his view centres on the role of the body-schema, namely the primordial habit-matrix of the body, which makes the latter an “expressive unity that we can only learn to know by taking it up” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 213). The body-schema is inseparable from bodily experience, and it is responsible for the way we relate to the world in an anticipatory manner, generating meaning in perceptual acts of apprehension that are embedded with affective and existential qualities. For this reason, Merleau-Ponty argues that any rupture in the power of signification does not underlie any split between concrete and abstract capacities, but rather an alteration in the structure of the individual’s intentional relatedness to the world. In the case of aphasia, what is affected is not speech as opposed to thought, but the capacity of mastering verbal speech as one’s own attitude to communicate and express oneself. Taken as an attitude or as a manner of being, speech allows one to inhabit a situation that is pervaded with sense. We do not look for words as mere instruments, nor do we recall verbal images as if we possessed a mental lexicon. On the contrary, language is available to us as a form of spontaneous expression that guarantees consistency and coherence across our everyday experience. It follows that, if speech is a manner of expression among other forms, then the power of communication is not restricted to verbal acts. Indeed, individuals affected by aphasia understand meaning not on the basis of the semantic content of verbal speech. Instead, they draw on the meaning that their bodily experience contributes to index. The word “red” that some patients may be unable to subsume under the category of colour is still related to the individual’s experience of tones and colours independently of its verbal sign. In other words, meaning is generated and appropriated on the basis of one’s own experience, which represents a system of affective, motor,  For a discussion of the body-schema, see Mooney (2011) and (2020). Matherne (2014) has also convincingly shown that Merleau-Ponty’s account of projection is indebted to Kant’s view of productive imagination.

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and kinaesthetic capacities. Thanks to such repertoire of meaning, the subject progressively appropriates her experience of the world and expresses such competency by partaking in intersubjective practices of communication. Accordingly, the expression of meaning is tied to both self-experience and intersubjectivity. This connection rests, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, on two main facts. First of all, signification is crucially dependent on the experience of learning as well as of being exposed to the others’ acts of signification. However, learning does not consist in being instructed to designate things according to the rules of a given linguistic community. In a very dense passage, Merleau-Ponty remarks that “if the child can know himself as a member of a linguistic community prior to knowing himself as a thought about Nature, this is on condition that the subject can be unaware of himself as universal thought and can grasp himself as speech, and on condition that the word, far from being the simple sign of objects and significations, inhabits things and bears significations” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 183). Here, it is claimed that the child can be unaware of himself as universal thought, and then that the mastery of language by inhabiting specific situations facilitates the child’s belonging to a linguistic community. What is universal thought? Is it a universal logos that pre-exists ontologically any possibility of speech? In my view, Merleau-Ponty denies this option, for he suggests that the process of signification consists in the dialectical awakening of thought through speech and vice versa. This cannot be achieved without the interaction between at least two subjects, hence signification is crucially dependent on the power of intersubjective communication, by means of which the child learns to inhabit situations, hence to train his bodily awareness to different contexts, prior to becoming conscious of social and verbal rules. Accordingly, the notion of universal thought refers to the institution of sense of which individuals become gradually aware by entering practices of communication, which institute culture and tradition. As Merleau-Ponty argues in his 1954–1955 lectures on institution and passivity, “the individual institution of the true [is] in connection with [an] institution that is more than individual: it takes up an intention which precedes it (the originary Stiftung of geometry) and it creates an intention out of it which survives it and will go further (the actual Stiftung of a new sense) and by which there is forgetufulness of origins” (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 51). In these lectures, institution corresponds to Merleau-Ponty’s translation of Husserl’s concept of originary foundation (Urstiftung), as this appears in the Crisis and particularly in The Origin of Geometry essay. Urstiftung represents the primal establishment of a given meaning, for which a genetic analysis of its constitution, including its forms of cultural acquisition and transmission, is required. Merleau-Ponty radicalises Husserl’s insight, suggesting that the generation of meaning is a process that, while building on the individual apprehension of sense, is interlocked at the same time with history and culture in a way that reactivates new possibilities of thought and expression. Thus, Merleau-Ponty retrieves the Husserlian concept of originary foundation in a dialectical fashion in order to understand not just how communication is expressive of meaning, but also how self-consciousness builds on intersubjective practices of expression.

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Furthermore, the notion of expression connects self-experience and intersubjectivity at the level of gestures. Merleau-Ponty does not exactly take a stance against any clearly identifiable antagonist positions, yet he makes clear that gesture cannot be reduced to the recognition of some laws (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 191), for the sense of the gesture is apperceived within the horizon of my body-schema. A threatening gesture affects the horizon individuated by my body, thus it enters my own field of experience and I unfold its possibilities in virtue of the concordance (or discordance) established between the sequences of acts of the other person and my own existential sense of orientation in space. This suggests that, while I understand the sense of the gesture thanks to the open possibilities instantiated by my body-­ schema, my total grasp of the gesture is also a fallible process, which is open to revision. As Merleau-Ponty notices, I may not understand emotions in the expressions of people that belong to a different cultural milieu (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 190). Similarly, I do not understand the dog’s sexual gesture or the beetle’s. Yet the sense of the gesture is “taken up” and followed out because both the other person, the animal, and I partake in the possibilities projected by motor intentionality. With regard to this, Merleau-Ponty insists that taking up the sense of the gesture is an act of communication that is not achieved through interpretation or any other detached, epistemic process. As he writes: “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 intention which can be read in the other person’s behaviour” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 190–1). If gestures had to depend on intellectual interpretation, it would not be possible to understand the gestures of animals. Merleau-Ponty’s idea is that gestures cannot be identified with mental images that we simply observe or elaborate on. Quite the contrary, gestures are powers of expression that provoke alterations and changes in my own field of experience, to which I respond by adjusting and attuning through my body-schema. Thus, the sense of the gesture is understood, that is appropriated, in that it “merges with the structure of the world that the gesture sketches out and that I take up for myself” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 192). In light of these aspects, it is possible to reconsider the relation between language and thought. Thought is not manifested by language but sedimented and taken up in intersubjective acts of communication (Vanzago 2016). This is why Merleau-Ponty holds that, if any ideal meaning or form is constituted in acts of signification, this is not an ultimate fact or a transcendental category, but rather an attitude, namely a form of habitual coherence between acts and sense that is rooted in the experience of being someone. In this respect, it is noteworthy that The Prose of the World contains a number of references to Hegel’s dialectic. These passages help to clarify in what sense expression is tied to a process that constantly renews and generates itself rather than being the result of idealisation or manifestation. In one particularly evocative passage, Merleau-Ponty writes that: “the Hegelian dialectic is what we call the phenomenon of expression, which gathers itself step by step and launches itself again through the mystery of rationality” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 85). This reference to the Hegelian dialectic indicates that the institution of sense is a process that systematically develops itself, appropriates itself and is

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thereby projected into further possibilities of development. Expression is then a shortcut for a dialectical process that occurs in history, society, and even more so at the level of subjective experience. Since I cannot address here the implications of this view at the level of intersubjectivity,13 I would like to restrict my conclusions to the explanatory power of the notion of institution as opposed to the paradox of expression. In Merleau-­ Ponty’s account, expression does not lead to the paradox of a logos that precedes consciousness. Expression corresponds to a process of bodily and affective institution that links individuals to a universal power of communication enabled by the experience of owning one’s bodily experience. This also grounds intercorporeality as the experience of other subjects as living beings who partake in a common and shared world. Certainly, intercorporeality is not the answer to all the problems and issues posited by intersubjectivity. Yet it provides the condition of possibility for expression and communication. Indeed, if the social world is a permanent, existential dimension of encountering others and partaking in their acts and meanings, it is because the experience of one’s own self underpins a system of coherences that make possible mutual communication. Accordingly, expression does not compel us to choose between our own dimension of sense and that of the others. For Merleau-Ponty, the problem of expression is not a problem of correspondence between my own mental representation and another’s. Expression alerts us to the fact that meaning is rooted in self-experience and sedimented in intersubjective acts, which are receptive to changes and alterations brought about by history and culture. In this regard, it is worth noting that sedimentation does not consist in a mere stratification of sense, passed on from generation to generation. Sedimentation does not consist in the sheer act of letting something be for the sake of historical continuity, for it essentially a process of Sinngebung (giving meaning or sense-giving) that is enabled by the experience of inhabiting the world through one’s own experience.

5  Conclusions Far from suggesting any asymmetry between logos and flesh, or between anteriority and posteriority, both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty reconceive the Kantian nexus between expression and institution. Most notably, they conceive of expression in dialectical terms as a process that generates sense on the basis of bodily self-­ awareness, which is rooted in habit as well as in intersubjective forms of communication. For both of them, expression is inseparable from the process of self-appropriation, which informs the whole sphere of receptivity, opening up further possibilities of meaning production. In light of these affinities, it is now possible to pull together the threads and consider the most salient difference between Hegel’s and Merleau-Ponty’s account of expression. To be sure, the concept in 13

 For a discussion, see Daly (2014).

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Hegel stands for the principle of self-reference that facilitates the intelligibility of the deduction of logical categories. As I have argued, the dimension of self-­ reference also provides the ground for investigating subjective experience, including embodied phenomena. Yet, even though Hegel acknowledges the power of communication enabled by bodily experience, the universality of the concept is not tout-court synonymous with intersubjectivity, for the concept appears across different dimensions and only in the logic, in the form of pure thought, does it achieve fullest clarity. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty refers to expression as a power of intersubjective communication, namely as a field of possibilities that opens up acts of commitment, sharing, and partaking in a common world. Thus, it is important to stress that the Hegelian Begriff does not amount to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intersubjectivity. It is however symptomatic that both Hegel and Merleau-Ponty insist on the immanence of sense, grounding expression on the self-determining capacities that are reactivated by the self at both levels of self- and other-experience. Thus, re-­reading Hegel and Merleau-Ponty in light of the paradox of expression helps to contextualise and bring to light a common strategy that is rooted in the concepts of genesis and institution. Whether these are understood in terms of Hegel’s systematic philosophy or in those of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the institution of sense brings to light the process of owning oneself as a way to vindicate the open dialectic between self and world. Acknowledgments  I wish to thank Anya Daly, Timothy Mooney, and Alfredo Ferrarin for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, and for improving the English style. The completion of this work was made possible by a research grant funded by the Irish Research Council.

References Ciavatta, David. 2017. Embodied Meaning in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty. Hegel Bulletin 75: 45–66. Crawford, Donald W. 2003. Kant’s Theory of Creative Imagination. In Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. Critical Essays, ed. Paul Guyer, 143–170. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Daly, Aly. 2014. Does the Reversibility Thesis Deliver All That Merleau-Ponty Claims It Can? European Journal of Philosophy 24 (1): 159–186. Ferrarin, Alfredo. 2001. Hegel and Aristotle. Cambridge: CUP. ———. 2015. The Powers of Pure Reason. Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 2017. Hegel and Husserl on the Emergence of the I out of Subjectivity. Hegel Bulletin 75: 7–23. Hass, Lawrence. 2008. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy. Bloomington: Indianapolis University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1975. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T.M. Knox, vol. I. Clarendon: OUP. ———. 1979. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Dritter Teil: Die Philosophie des Geistes. Bd. 10 (vol. 10). In Werke in zwangig Bänden, ed. E. Modelnhauer and K. M. Michel. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1986a. Wissenschaft der Logik. Bde. 5-6 (vols. I and II.). In Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. E. Modelnhauer and K. M. Michel. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

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———. 1986b. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Bde. 13–15 (vols. I, II, III.). In Werke in zwangig Bänden, ed. E. Modelnhauer and K. M. Michel. Frankfurt a.M.: Surhkamp. ———. 2007. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Trans. M. Inwood. Oxford: OUP. ———. 2010. The Science of Logic. Trans. George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: CUP. Houlgate, Stephen. 2000. Substance, Causality, and the Question of Method in Hegel’s Science of Logic. In The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, ed. Sally Sedgwick, 232–252. Cambridge: CUP. Kant, Immanuel. 1908/1913. Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). Akademie-Ausgabe Bd. 5 (vol. 5). In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, herausgegeben von der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Georg Reimer. ———. 2001. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. Paul Guyer, and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: CUP. Landes, Donald A. 2013. Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression. London: Bloomsbury. Longuenesse, Béatrice. 2007. Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics. Trans. N.J.  Simek. Cambridge: CUP. Magrì, Elisa. 2016a. Hegel and the Genesis of the Concept. Symposium. Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy 20 (2): 122–141. ———. 2016b. The Place of Habit in Hegel’s Psychology. In Hegel’s Philosophical Psychology, ed. Susanne Herrmann-Sinai and Lucia Ziglioli, 74–90. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. Hegel e la genesi del concetto. Autoriferimento, memoria, incarnazione. Trento: Verifiche. Matherne, Samantha. 2014. The Kantian Roots of Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Pathology. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (1): 124–149. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1973. The Prose of the World. Ed. by C.  Lefort, Trans. J.  O’Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2010. Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955). Foreword by Claude Lefort. Trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. D.A. Landes. London: Routledge. Mooney, Timothy. 2011. Plasticity, Motor Intentionality and Concrete Movement in Merleau-­ Ponty. Continental Philosophy Review 44: 359–381. ———. 2020. The Body Schema and Its Skills. Forthcoming chapter of a book publication on Merleau-Ponty. Morris, David. 2004. The Sense of Space. New York: SUNY. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2004. Hegels Auffassung der Philosophie als System und die drei Schlüsse der Enzyklopädie. In Hegels enzyklopädisches System der Philosophie, ed. Hans-Christian Lucas, Burkard Tuschling, and Ulrich Volgel, 459–480. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog. Sassen, Brigitte. 2003. Artistic Genius and the Question of Creativity. In Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. Critical Essays, ed. Paul Guyer, 171–180. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Schick, Friedricke. 2014. Freedom and Necessity: The Transition to the Logic of the Concept in Hegel’s Science of Logic. Hegel Bulletin 35 (1): 84–99. Vanzago, Luca. 2016. Metamorfosi. La questione dell’espressione nella filosofia di Merleau-­ Ponty. Lebenswelt 9: 31–46. Waldenfels, Bernard. 2000. The Paradox of Expression. In Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, 89–102. New York: SUNY.

Adorno on the Meaning of Phenomenology Giovanni Zanotti

Abstract  In this paper I reconstruct Adorno’s arguments against the phenomenological project as developed by Husserl in the early phase of his thought, with particular focus on the dialectical nature and meaning of such a critique. Primary references are Adorno’s article Husserl and the Problem of Idealism, published in 1940, and his book Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, published in 1956. I argue that, for Adorno, Husserl’s attempt must be understood as both logically impossible and theoretically productive. After laying down the general framework of Adorno’s reading in the first three sections, I examine his criticism of Husserl’s “involuntary dialectic” in detail, also with the help of an independent analysis of some ambiguities in Husserl’s concept of “categorial intuition”. In the last section, I explain why and under what conditions, according to Adorno, the original impulse of Husserlian phenomenology toward an intact knowledge of “things themselves” needs to be maintained in spite of all. Keywords  Adorno · Husserl · Dialectical critique · Logical investigations · Categorial intuition

1  Introduction Adorno devoted many of his philosophical energies to Husserl. The Marxist sociologist who advocated a “last philosophy” instead of the traditional “first philosophy” (Adorno 2013, 40), the musicologist and man of letters who fought against the scientific ideal of knowledge even in its stylistic and expressive consequences, also thought that the man whom he considered “the most static thinker of his period” (Adorno 1986, 121) deserved the attention and passion of an entire life. Of course, this attention resulted in the most severe criticism of Husserl’s philosophy. However, it should be remembered that Adorno’s own method of philosophical analysis as such is precisely the method he calls “immanent critique” and which he claims to G. Zanotti (*) University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Ferrarin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Phenomenology, Contributions To Phenomenology 102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_9

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have borrowed from Hegel. To Husserl’s credit, no thinker – not even Hegel himself – was subjected to Adorno’s immanent critique more intensely and minutely than he was. It is true that, throughout his life, Adorno’s confrontation with Husserl was always essentially focussed on the Logical Investigations (particularly on the Prolegomena and the Sixth Investigation), with some references to the Ideas, rare references to the texts of the late 1920s, and (nearly) no references at all to the Crisis of the European Sciences. This does not amount to carelessness, but to a deliberate choice. In Adorno’s view, the Logical Investigations already contain phenomenology in its whole revolutionary potential – that is to say, in the intact dignity of its unresolved contradictions. Like other thinkers, Adorno considers the transcendental evolution of Husserl’s philosophy a “subtly modified neo-Kantianism” (Adorno 2013, 2), that is, straightforward idealism. According to Adorno, some problems are resolved by the late Husserl, the “static thought” is made more dynamic, but at the price of losing the originality of the phenomenological falsehood and therefore the originality of its own truth. Here I will reconstruct Adorno’s argument, with a special focus on its dialectical nature and meaning, and without discussing its plausibility in a comprehensive way. Also, the problem of what (if anything) remains of Adorno’s criticism after Husserl’s transcendental and dynamic turn will be almost entirely left out of the following considerations. However, at least some of Adorno’s critical moves probably remain relevant even for the Husserl of the Crisis, and perhaps for the phenomenological project as such.

2  Adorno on “First Philosophy” Adorno had already begun his Husserlian studies at the age of 21 in his dissertation on The Transcendence of the Material and Noematic in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1924). The project expressed by the Logical Investigations was then criticized by the transcendental perspective of Adorno’s mentor, Hans Cornelius, the attack to intentionality being carried out in the name of the “unity of consciousness”. A similar point of view was defended in 1927 in Adorno’s first postdoctoral dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) that was rejected by Cornelius, The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche. Although Adorno’s peculiar focus on the social and historical world already made first appearance in this text, it was not until the 1930s, with the overcoming of the so-called “transcendental phase,” that the philosopher Adorno became himself.1 This, too, was largely accomplished by means of Husserl. From 1934 to 1937, in Oxford, during the first phase of his exile, Adorno drew up an extensive manuscript on Husserl that was, with substantial changes, much later to become the final version of his criticism, the Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Against Epistemology: A Metacritique). The declared aim of the Oxfordian research was already the working out of a “materialistic logic” through  See Wolff (2006).

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the immanent critique of idealism in its most advanced form.2 At the end of the 1930s, during his American phase, Adorno published two articles. The first was called Zur Philosophie Husserls and was later included into the Metacritique. The second was written in 1939 and published in 1940 in the Journal of Philosophy with the title Husserl and the Problem of Idealism. The Metacritique appeared first in 1956, long after Adorno’s return from his American exile, in a moment when he was already concentrating his theoretical efforts on Hegel (the first of the Three Studies on Hegel was composed in the same year) and thereby developing his major philosophical project of an “open dialectic” (Adorno 2010, 36) – or, as he would come to call it 10 years later, a negative dialectic. At the end of his life, Adorno referred to the Metacritique as his most important book after Negative Dialectics, and more importantly, he referred to the Metacritique’s Introduction – written in the 1950s – as the major elucidation of his own philosophical program, together with The Essay as Form.3 The Introduction to the Metacritique and the American article published in 1940 will be the primary focus of my analysis. It may first be worth noting an oft-neglected detail. Beyond his theoretical engagement with Husserl’s thought, Adorno also offers some interesting, although very rapid contributions for a history of the phenomenological movement, whose premises and results he situates within the general development of contemporary philosophy. The premise is the cultural context of the late nineteenth century. He interprets it as dominated by the crisis of the systems, which, to him, means the same as the crisis of idealism. The skepticism toward truth that derived from this crisis expressed itself in the pervasiveness of philosophical relativism and, more specifically, of psychologism. Except for neo-Kantianism, he says, no philosophy was tolerated in Germany which did not swear on psychological premises (Adorno 1986, 123). On the opposite pole, the result is the existential and ontological mood which was dominant in Germany during the 1930s and which Adorno qualifies as plain irrationalism, as being both dogmatic and devoid of content. Heidegger’s “jargon of authenticity” was, for him, simultaneously a betrayal and a prosecution of the original phenomenological impulse. In the middle stands the enigma Husserl, whom Adorno cryptically defines as “the rationalist of irrationalism” (Adorno 1986, 127). Husserl emerges therefore as a crucial point of mediation between crisis and conservative reaction, between the fall and restoration of idealism. For the same reasons, however, he is also viewed by Adorno as an exemplary figure. The book on Husserl contains Husserl’s name only in its subtitle. Here, in fact, criticism of Husserl primarily means criticism of epistemology (or better, “theory of knowledge”: Erkenntnistheorie) as such. Adorno writes in the Preface: The question I shall broach – by means of a concrete model – is the possibility and truth of epistemology in principle. […] Instead of disputing individual epistemological issues, micrological procedure should stringently demonstrate how such questions surpass themselves and indeed their entire sphere. (Adorno 2013, 1–2; my emphasis) 2 3

 See Tiedemann (1997).  See Tiedemann (1997, 386).

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The “entire sphere” of such questions as logical absolutism, intentionality, intuitive fulfilment, categorial intuition and pure Ego is nothing less than theory of knowledge, which is conceived in turn as the last and most dramatic form of what Adorno calls “first philosophy” (Erste Philosophie). This concept lies at the heart of the Metacritique’s Introduction, the great ouverture which is actually the epitome of Adorno’s overall philosophical project. “First philosophy” means a philosophy that aims to deduce the totality of being from one first principle, no matter its specific nature. In this sense, empiricism, too, belongs to first philosophies inasmuch as it tries to ground the whole of valid knowledge on the immediacy of sense-certainty. At the basis of such projects lies a need for security, for possession, which expresses itself theoretically as a need for irrefutable certainties. This need is all but obvious for Adorno. Far from being an unquestionable spiritual impulse, it has its roots in anguish, will to power, and ultimately in an internal coercion of thought, the coercion of predetermination, the abolishment of the New – or, as Adorno calls it, the constraint to say B because A has been said (Adorno 2013, 32). To this extent, however, Adorno’s position is far from original, and it simply reproduces an old challenge for philosophy – it could be easily subsumed as a case of the classical, Nietzschean genealogical critique of systems. Still, Adorno adds something genuinely new, which is condensed in the concept of immanent critique. The claims of first philosophy, like any other claim, must be confronted with their own premises, measured on their own criterion, before being declared to be false. In the Three Studies, Adorno writes that “the concept of determinate negation... sets Hegel off from Nietzsche [...] as well as from all irrationalism” (Adorno 1993, 77–78). The need for spiritual security must be shown as not only derivative, but contradictory, and thereby false. Indeed, as Adorno tries to demonstrate, every first philosophy necessarily fails on its own premises, for the First always needs the Second, that is, the one principle cannot even be thought without the manifold that it transforms into chaos, into contingency, in order to dominate it. There is a set of interrelated German terms that occur throughout Adorno’s analyses, expressing what may be seen as the heart of Adorno’s Hegelianism, however problematic this may be: Verweis, Zurückverweis, Anweisung, Bezug, all of which are more or less translatable as “referring back.” The key to understanding most of Adorno’s arguments is the “referring back” of one concept to another, that is to say, its mediatedness, which precisely determines any isolated concept as abstract in the Hegelian sense. Now, for Adorno, the categories of mediation and mediatedness return the final verdict on any attempt of first philosophy, provided mediation is conceived as purely negative, critical, dynamic, and is not in turn hypostatized as a new first principle, as Adorno thinks Hegel ultimately does: Mediacy [Vermitteltsein] is not a positive assertion about being but rather a directive to cognition not to comfort itself with such positivity. It is really the demand to arbitrate dialectic concretely. Expressed as a universal principle, mediacy, just as in Hegel, always amounts to spirit. If it turns into positivity, it becomes untrue. (Adorno 2013, 24)

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Any single statement, any single concept is untrue insofar as it is mediated, as it contains abstraction, reflection, thought. Without thought, however, there is no knowledge, and no first principle can avoid mediation. Even the empiricist sense-­ datum, if it is to be able to ground knowledge, must be the concept of the sense-­ datum and not the single, empirical fact.4 As a thought-determination, every “primum” is thought, different from the object it subsumes, and is therefore a part and not the whole. Adorno concludes: The first and immediate is always, as a concept, mediated and thus not the first. Nothing immediate or factical, in which the philosophical thought seeks to escape mediation through itself, is allotted to thinking reflection in any other way than through thoughts. (Adorno 2013, 7)

First philosophy is therefore torn by internal dynamics. It can never rest. It cannot help but getting involved in antinomies which it can never solve in its own terms. Every new possession reproduces the conflict that is immanent to possession itself on an enlarged scale. The coercion to linear deduction – like any coercion, as Adorno says – tends immanently to its own abolishment. Any inclusion is an exclusion. By the very act of establishing itself as a compact whole, systematic thought rejects that which is not identical to it, and which it needs at the same time for its own internal constitution. “The inclusiveness [of such philosophies] is their break” (Adorno 2013, 13). If one looked for the logical structure of Adorno’s most celebrated sociological thesis, that is, the “irrational rationality” of antagonistic society, which is “seamless through its discontinuities [nur vermöge ihrer Brüche bruchlos]” (Adorno 1993, 86; emphasis mine), such philosophical grounding should likely be located precisely in this passage of the Metacritique. As a consequence of its own dynamics, first philosophy is forced at the same time to become more what it is and to fall increasingly into absurdity. It becomes what it is because it finally reveals itself as what it has always secretly been: subjectivity. The strive for an unshakeable ground forces the nature-dominating subject to subjectivism, it transforms ontology into Erkenntnistheorie: “epistemology” in the foundational sense. Erkenntnistheorie is “the scientific form of first philosophy” which wishes “to raise the absolutely first to the absolutely certain by reflecting on the subject” (Adorno 2013, 22). In this sense, Adorno claims, every first philosophy is idealism, and is ultimately method. In finding its own ground, however, it loses any ground at all, since it withdraws into the immanence of consciousness and deprives itself ever more of that very objectivity it had sought do dominate as its primary goal. After the crisis of the great idealistic systems, and therefore the crisis of the illusion that thought and world coincide, philosophy tends to turn into mere method, mere subjective procedure, and finally into that tautological “point without extension” that is mentioned by Wittgenstein at the end of the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 2001, 69–70). Spirit is left with the tautologies of logical positivism on the one side, and with skeptical confusion on the other.

 See Testa (2011).

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3  The Antinomies of the Phenomenological Project Husserl faces precisely this scenario. According to Adorno, Husserl’s fight against psychologism in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic is an attempt to re-establish the ideality and objectivity of truth while avoiding speculative dogmatism. In other terms: an attempt to ground a non-idealistic ontology by means of scientific reflection. This project, however, Adorno claims, is contradictory from the very beginning. While reading the complex, convoluted arguments of the Metacritique, one immediately feels the pervasiveness of two dimensions even on the expressive plan: paradoxicality and sublimation. Husserl’s philosophy appears paradoxical to Adorno because his attempt to simultaneously evade the subjectivism of positivism and the subjectivism of idealism is carried out with both positivistic and idealistic tools. On the one hand, enlightened thought cannot avoid the heritage of self-­ reflection. It cannot avoid, so to speak, the irreversible step which injected subjectivity and negativity into first philosophy, thus transforming ontology into Erkenntnistheorie and the “absolutely first” into the “absolutely certain.” Husserl’s project therefore appears to be too late an attempt to restore ontology by means of Erkenntnistheorie. Husserl’s ideal unities claim to be something like non-factual facts. They must be pure, ideal, eternal, non-contingent truths, in short: truths of reason, in the Leibnizian sense. At the same time, reason must be expelled from them, for the weakest trace of subjective participation to absolute truths would undermine their absoluteness and expose them to psychologistic attacks. This immanence of subjectivity to reason was precisely the speculative motive of the critical turn away from pre-Kantian rationalism to transcendental idealism, a move that Adorno considers the great acme of reason’s self-consciousness – and this is the motive that the Husserl of the Logical Investigations tries to repress. Hence the primary and problematic importance of the concept of givenness in Husserl’s phenomenology. Truths of reason without reason need to be given to consciousness and appropriated by evidence in the very same way as the sense-data of empiricism. They must be as opaque to reason as the famous, positivistic “stubborn facts” (Adorno 1986, 128). Thinking is no longer activity, but mere contemplation and passive acceptance. The Kantian spontaneity of thought must, for the sake of reason, be substituted by a quasi-sensual receptivity. For Adorno, this curious mix of rationalism and positivism is indeed the ground for Husserl’s success in early twentieth-­century Germany: he “made this tremendous impression [because] the tendencies by which he became an enemy of the psychologistic positivism of his time […] have their roots in positivism itself” (Adorno 1986, 123). This is why, according to Adorno, the pivotal concepts of phenomenology are all paradoxical: categorial intuition, contingent a priori, the pure Ego, even the notion of intentionality itself as a noetic-noematic structure (Adorno 1986, 133). Adorno would certainly argue that many hermeneutical problems of later phenomenological scholarship, such as the alternative between idealism and realism in the different phases of Husserl’s thought, could only be solved dialectically, that is, by ­recognizing

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them as the expressions of Husserl’s own internal, primary and unsolved contradiction. On the other hand, the strange “facts” of phenomenology must be devoid of any factual, contingent, temporal character in order to be the solid ground of knowledge they are supposed to be. However, the enlightened, disenchanted reason has become too smart not to detect factuality in every single bit of the world. Even the Cartesian Ego, for the late Husserl, is precisely “a little bit of the world” and must therefore be expelled from the “region of pure essences.” The price for the removal of contingency from the world is the removal of the world. Hence the sublimating character that Adorno sees in phenomenology. In Husserl’s concepts, and even in his style, Adorno feels a distant, pale, rarefied atmosphere. He repeatedly compares Husserl’s “essences” to the “essences” of the contemporary Jugendstil, to Liberty art, which he likewise defines as “a paradoxical truce between romanticism and positivism” (Adorno 1993, 97). In the region of pure essences, he sees a region of ghosts. Husserl’s motive appears to him as the resignation of reason, the retreat from reality and the giving up of the ambition to understand it. Adorno approves Hegel’s statement that “[philosophy’s] content is no other than actuality [Wirklichkeit]” (Hegel 1975, 9),5 but he interprets Wirklichkeit as empirical, that is, as historical reality and nothing else. Husserl instead proceeds in a negative way, that is, by means of elimination, diminution, subtraction. The phenomenological epoche is “reduction” in more than one sense. It puts reality into brackets and produces a new world which is absolutely identical to the empirical one with respect to its content (facts are not modified by becoming essences), but with a minus sign. Its sole new determination is its not being real. The organon of such conceptual movement is absolute doubt, which Adorno treats in the same way as skepticism is treated in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, that is, as an abstract negation and at the same time as a merely subjective procedure, aiming at learning how to swim before swimming. Being mere method, reduction is “idealistic.” It does not aim at criticizing the existent world, but at re-establishing it just as it is on allegedly firmer ground. On the contrary, Hegel’s determinate negation is critical and, in this sense, “materialistic” (however paradoxical this may sound), inasmuch as it is the tool for thought to forsake its own autarchy and open itself to every single bit of the world. In the Metacritique, Adorno speaks of the “harmlessness of any method” [die Harmlosigkeit alles Methodischen]: Only specific [bestimmt] and never absolute doubt has ever become dangerous to the ideologists. Absolute doubt joins of itself in the parade through the goal of method, which is to produce being out of method itself. […] Doubt simply shifts judgement to preparing for assuming the vindication of pre-critical consciousness scientifically in secret sympathy with conventional sensibility [Menschenverstand]. (Adorno 2013, 11–12; translation altered)

And in the Three Studies:

 Quoted in: Adorno (1993, 67).

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Hegel felt the sterility of all so-called intellectual work that takes place within the general sphere without dirtying itself with the specific [...]. The dialectic expresses the fact that philosophical knowledge is not at home in the place where tradition has settled it, a place where it flourishes all too easily, unsaturated, as it were, with the heaviness and the resistance of what exists. Philosophical knowledge begins only where it opens up things that traditional thought has considered opaque, impenetrable, and mere products of individuation. (Adorno 1993, 80–81)

4  “Involuntarily Dialectic” in the Logical Investigations 4.1  Logical Absolutism Husserl’s ideal is rigorous science. This ideal, Adorno notes, is not itself submitted to the epoché, although it should be. Husserl aims at a rebuilding of first philosophy through a rigorous description of data. This project involves two steps (Adorno 1986, 125). The first is the theory of logical absolutism and is carried out in the Prolegomena. Husserl detaches logical truths from the world, which means detaching them from empirical facts and from human consciousness at the same time. These two moves are, in fact, one and the same. To protect logic from the empirical world, Husserl must expel not only physical causality from it, but thought as such, for thought can be nothing else but human thought, that is, it refers back to human acts and then to psychology. However, once logical laws are no longer conceived as acts, they lose their intrinsic functional character and can no longer be applied to anything. By losing their object, logical laws become objects themselves, they are reified into a mysterious datum with no reference either to subjectivity or to the world. They become “stubborn facts” and can no longer be properly understood, but only passively, positivistically accepted. According to Adorno, this real-ideal dualism “is possibly the most extreme χωρισμον [sic] which has ever been suggested since Plato” (Adorno 1986, 125). Adorno objects that to transform logic from functional activity into an object in itself (an sich) means to deny logic as such, for logical acts refer back to thinking subjects, and even to conceive the possibility of a logic without human beings is no less than logically absurd. From the all-too correct need to preserve truth from identification with the psychological acts of real individuals, Husserl draws the wrong conclusion that truth must be an ideal object with no necessary reference to empirical reality. This is because he does not see the third possibility which Adorno learned from Durkheim’s theory of collective consciousness.6 For the single empirical  person, Adorno argues, logic has indeed an absolutely binding validity that is independent from individual psychological processes. Such validity, however, does not rest on superhuman objectivity; rather, it is the objectified result of a history, the tool for the most urgent human need – the domination of nature –, standing in front of individuals as a second nature, as if it were an

 See O’Connor (2004, 127–148).

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independent thing, in precisely the same way (and for the same reasons) as “social objectivity,” which the sociologist Adorno defines as both a human product and something independent from individual human beings.7 Logical and linguistic validity is human and not individual, for it is social. If one would object that such theory of the interhuman, yet not transhuman validity still exposes logic to relativism, since it still presents logic as somehow derivative, Adorno would probably answer with Marx’s and Engels’s words: Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises [voraussetzungslos], we must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history”. (Marx and Engels 1970, 48)

In other words: There is no possible way in heaven and earth to imagine a more binding character for logic – but also, despite all antagonisms, a more emancipatory function – than its origin in the most fundamental depths of human life. In one of the most crucial passages not only of the Metacritique, but of his entire work, which clearly resounds with echoes from the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno writes: Validity and rationality themselves are for such an interpretation of logic no longer irrational and not an inconceivable in-itself simply to be accepted. They are rather the demand, more powerful than all existence, that the subject not fall back into nature, revert to a beast, and leave behind that small advantage whereby humanity, self-perpetuating natural creatures, goes beyond, however powerlessly, nature and self-preservation. But logical validity is also objective by adopting the standard of nature in order to master it. Every logical synthesis is anticipated by its object, but its possibility remains abstract and is actualized only by the subject. They need each other. (Adorno 2013, 80; emphasis mine)

For this same reason, of course, Marx’s and Engels’s statement is also false. For “matter” is itself a concept. Hence, the material “premise” cannot explain thought more than, inversely, thought explains and mediates matter. The idealistic claim for a “presuppositionless” philosophy (voraussetzungslose Philosophie), which was defended by Hegel and the Hegelian Left and attacked by Marx and Engels, is sublated, so to speak, into Adorno’s ideal of a dialectic which “is not a standpoint” (Adorno 2004, 4). If such an ideal can be at least consistent, it is because (negative) dialectic is no first philosophy. Subjective thought does not move from a first principle; rather, it follows the self-movement of objective thought in all its mediations. “Critique means nothing other than the confrontation of judgement with the mediations inherent to judgement” (Adorno 2013, 153). It would be fatal, too, to identify the ubiquity of mediation with the exclusion of immediacy  – it would be a fall back into idealism and first philosophy, into the autarchy of thought. On the contrary, as Hegel himself claims, everything contains both mediation and immediacy, and Adorno seems to interpret this as the vindication of an irreducible natural moment, as an objective constraint to thought that is independent from thought itself. For Adorno, immediacy exists as a moment, as the possibility of genuine, non-predetermined experience, as the dazzling insight: “This is the way it is [So ist es]” (Adorno 1993, 108). As he says in the quoted passage:  See Zanotti (2014, especially 71–76).

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every logical synthesis is anticipated and somehow required by its object, like the butcher of Plato’s Phaedrus (one of Adorno’s favorite references). Inversely, however, no synthesis can actually exist without subjective mediation. Being a mere moment, immediacy is in no position to ground knowledge; rather, as Hegel says, immediacy itself is essentially mediated (Hegel 1962, 162). Subject and object are constantly fused, intertwined; subjective thought is and is not identical with objective thought; concepts are and are not their objects; and, according to Adorno, it is precisely this contradiction that generates the dialectical movement of concepts, that is, the critical confrontation of every concept with its own object.

4.2  Categorial Intuition In Adorno’s view, however, the prejudices of first philosophy prevent Husserl from consciously delivering himself to dialectic. The category of mutual mediation is the point where Husserl’s project fails, and, specifically, where the second step of his strategy falls into inescapable contradictions. After establishing his extreme dualism between ideal and real in the Prolegomena, Husserl must somehow reunite what he separated. This task is assigned to the concept of intentionality and is developed mainly in the last two Investigations. Here, Adorno says, Husserl “involuntarily [gives] an example of the Hegelian method” (Adorno 1986, 120–121), he becomes dialectical against his will. Here, the truths of reason become given data, logical objectivism makes room for immanent analysis of consciousness, and rationalism reverses itself into positivism. Here, it could be argued, the premises are already posited for the subsequent subjective-transcendental turn of Husserl’s philosophy. The problem is to find access to consciousness for such strange “objects” as logical truths. While intentionality secures such access in the Fifth Investigation at the level of meaning and understanding, Husserl’s fundamental concern about knowledge – that is, evidence and intuitive fulfillment  – only finds an answer in the Sixth Investigation and with the help of an additional concept: categorial intuition. According to Adorno (and not only to Adorno), this is the cornerstone of the Logical Investigations and even of phenomenology as such. For the same reason, however, it is also the most antinomic point of Husserl’s thought. Categorial intuition is meant to provide an intuitive fulfillment for non-sensual elements of judgments. If, Husserl argues, knowledge is intuitive fulfillment, and if judgements contain formal elements that cannot find their fulfillment in sensual intuition, there must be a non-­ sensual intuition that does the same service to categorial elements as sensual intuition does to the remaining parts of the judgement. First, Adorno objects that, as the “must” betrays, such discovery is hypothetical and not phenomenological. Categorial intuition is not gained by means of categorial intuition. Secondly, and more crucially, the concept of categorial intuition expresses the impossible idea of an immediate knowledge of what is mediated, and therefore an impossible attempt to identify immediacy and mediation – or, rather, as it has been noted, immediacy

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and determination.8 Adorno’s argument is remarkable.9 Immediacy belongs to the act of achieving the synthesis of judgement, that is, to the act of judging; as an act, it is lived subjective experience, and in this sense, it is immediate. However, the simple judging, on Husserl’s terms, is an empty intention. To “fulfill” it, that is, to verify its truth, requires reflection on the judgement itself, interpretation, abstraction, confrontation with other judgements, and hence, mediation. In other terms: Either an act is immediate, and then it is not knowledge, or it involves conceptual determination, reflection in the Hegelian sense, and then it is not immediate. “Immediate knowledge” is the square circle. As Kant taught, in fact, what is intuitive cannot be conceptual, and a categorial intuition would be a non-intuitive intuition, just as an ideal, that is, not real being, would be for Adorno a non-being being. Immediacy, which certainly exists as a single moment, dissolves as soon as the process of thinking is put into motion. This process is subjective, and the notion of categorial intuition entails all the paradoxicality of Husserl’s own phenomenological attempt – the removal of subject, of synthetical activity, of Kantian spontaneity, the removal of man. Adorno’s argument about categorial intuition applies far beyond the realm of what is strictly meant by “categorial intuition” in the Logical Investigations, and ultimately points to the problem of sensation. Adorno’s reference here is no longer the Introduction, but the first two figures of the Phenomenology of Spirit, sense-­ certainty and perception. Before developing this final point, it may be helpful to put aside Adorno’s own considerations on categorial intuition and try to elucidate them through a more detailed analysis of this cardinal Husserlian concept, as this is developed in the Investigations. According to an account that is widespread, especially (but not only) among Heideggerian scholars, Husserl’s categorial intuition would be the self-givenness of an object’s meaning, as opposed to mere sense-data. It would be “being” in the Heideggerian sense. As Heidegger says in the Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time: “Originally, one does not hear noises, but the creaking wagon, the tram, the motorcycle, the north wind” (Heidegger 1985, 368). This would be categorial intuition. The problem is that in the Logical Investigations there is no such a thing – or, rather, there is, but it is not categorial intuition. That objects of intentional acts are given to consciousness provided already with their meaning, and not as chaotic sense-data, is indeed one of Husserl’s central theses. However, this topic appears in the Fifth Investigations, long before the discussion of categorial intuition, and Husserl uses the term “apprehension” (Auffassung) to designate it. Sense-data, which are present in consciousness as real intuitive contents, are “apprehended” by the intentional component of consciousness, by means of which an object is immediately and primarily “given” as meaningful, as the creaking wagon, etc. On the contrary, the acts through which categorial elements are both signified and intuitively given have nothing primary in this sense. Husserl repeatedly stresses that they are synthetic, polythetic and grounded on simple, monothetic, “founding” acts. The  See Miller (2009).  See Adorno (1986, 129–132).

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elements they intentionally refer to are formal and syntactical: “and,” “or,” “not” and so on, and “being,” too, but in the strict sense of the copula. The term for such acts is “forming” (Formung). Their task is to syntactically articulate simpler objects, which are nevertheless already given as intentional objects without the intervention of categories and are therefore all but mere sense-data. In both cases, Husserl uses the word “surplus” (Überschuss). In the first case, however, he means the intentional surplus with respect to real, non-intentional sensual contents; in the second case, he means the categorial surplus with respect to a non-categorized, “simple” intentional object. They are two different surpluses. Or are they not? There is a single passage in the Logical Investigations which points in the latter direction, thereby seemingly contradicting the whole construction of Husserl’s argumentation  – a passage so imperceptible that one is tempted to consider it a Freudian slip. In the Sixth Investigation, Husserl discusses the example of the words “white paper” (weißes Blatt), where the German termination “-es” of the adjective, considered an implicit predication (“paper that is white”), represents a case of categorial act, a formal surplus beyond the simple signifying acts “white” and “paper.” Then, he suddenly adds: Is this form not also repeated, even if it remains hidden, in the case of the noun “paper”? Only the quality meanings contained in its “concept” terminate in [sensual] perception. Here also the whole object is known as paper, and here also a supplementary form is known which includes being, though not as its sole form, in itself. (Husserl 2001, 273)

According to Husserl’s own premises, the answer to his rhetorical question should be: of course not. The intentional act “paper” does not contain any categorial forming, since behind “paper,” if one carried out the analysis, they would find nothing but sense-data. These are apprehended, not formed, by an act that constitutes them for the first time as a simple, monolinear intentional object. Still, Husserl betrays some hesitation on this point, and this could give some credit even to Heidegger’s interpretation of categorial intuition.

4.3  Sensation Husserl’s hesitation points precisely in the same direction as Adorno’s suspicions, since it is a hesitation about where and to what extent the synthesis should be located. It is true that this problem is reshaped and clarified by the late Husserl with the help of the concept of passive synthesis, but at the level of the Logical Investigations, the first laying down of the phenomenological project, Husserl’s slip might have some relevance.10 It seems as if, for a single moment, Husserl had suspected that not only explicit, articulating acts, but the whole realm of human experience is permeated by syntheses. This is also expressed by his terminological  It can also be conjectured that if Adorno had dealt with the idea of a “passive synthesis”, he might have found it no less antinomic – and interesting – than categorial intuition itself.

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oscillation between “apprehension” and the more compromising “interpretation.” Of course, as he considered even the objective correlatives of explicit, judgmental syntheses as “given” in categorial intuition, he would a fortiori have thought the same about those implicit syntheses that first constitute the perceptual object in its own sense. Nonetheless, his need for pure objectivity was so strong that he was perhaps forced to (nearly) neglect the fact that an articulation, a complexity, a structuring activity – in a word: a mediation – is present even in the most elementary principle of his phenomenology: the intentional object. He did not see the subject in the very point where subjective intervention begins, and, precisely for this reason, he did not recognize the content which is therein revealed as drastically other than subject. The point is sensation; the content is physical matter. According to Adorno, sensation is the real outrage for Husserl. The hyle, deprived of all intentionality, reminds of the irreducible natural-somatic moment and, at the same time, of the primitive mediation between thought and its counterpart: two constantly intertwined, yet non-identical sides. It reminds that thought is the thought of man and not of pure consciousness, and that it is therefore a part of that very nature it seeks to dominate. Sensation, Adorno says, is “a threshold. The materialistic element simply cannot be rooted out of it. Bordering on physical pain and organic desire, it is a bit of nature which cannot be reduced to subjectivity” (Adorno 2013, 155; translation altered). This is why Husserl inverts the order of priorities. By conceiving sensation as an addendum, as a mere function of fulfilling perception, he properly starts from the already constituted intentional object. The intentional object, however, is the object of perception, and, as Hegel shows, is therefore already mediated by an entire set of determinations. The phenomenologist Husserl begins with perception, and thus he skips the first step of the other Phenomenology: sense-certainty. Making perception his proper ground, he banishes both mediation and nature. For the sake of pure thought, he forgets thought as human thinking. He turns the concept into a given, so that he can turn any given into concepts. The self-forgetfulness of thinking activity is the price he must pay for his renewed, paradoxical idealism, for the idolatry of thought. As Adorno claims at the end of the Metacritique: “All reification is a forgetting” (Adorno 2013, 221).11

5  Husserl, Hegel, and the Dialectic of Thought Adorno’s criticisms, as they have been presented here, are relevant for phenomenology inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as phenomenology is conceived as pure contemplation and science of idealities. It is debatable to what extent these features are maintained by the late Husserl. Of course, much changes with genetic phenomenology and the full acknowledgment of subjective constitution, although such a  This well-known formulation had already been used in a letter to Benjamin (Adorno and Benjamin 1994, 417), and then repeated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 191). 11

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concept as “reduction”, for example – be it phenomenological or transcendental – seems to fall under Adorno’s critique right to the end. More generally, however, Adorno sees in transcendental subjectivism a simple reversal of Husserl’s primitive objectivism. The shift from pure essences to the transcendental Ego means for him the substitution of one form of first philosophy with another – maybe a more coherent, but also a less original, one. As Adorno repeatedly claims, Husserl’s – but also Kant’s, Fichte’s, even Hegel’s  – transcendental Ego, too, refers back to the real individual Egos from which it has been abstracted, and it is therefore no less mediated by them than vice versa.12 The development of Husserl’s philosophy appears to Adorno to be a prosecution of the “involuntary dialectic” [Dialektik wider Willen] which he had already seen at work in the Logical Investigations.13 And nonetheless, to Adorno this movement of thought deserves the greatest respect from its very beginning. In the American article on Husserl, he writes: His [Husserl’s] struggle against psychologism does not mean the reintroduction of dogmatic prejudices, but the freeing of critical reason from the prejudices contained in the naïve and uncritical religion of “facts” which he challenged in its psychological form. It is this element of Husserl's philosophy in which I see even today its “truth”. (Adorno 1986, 124)

“Today” is 1939. At the beginning of World War II, the Marxist Jew who had been forced into exile celebrated the actuality of Husserl’s philosophical impulse. This declaration sounds even more impressive if compared with Adorno’s similar claim about the actuality of another thinker. In the Three Studies, just after the quotation about Wirklichkeit,14 Adorno opposes Kant’s “humility” to Hegel’s “hope.” Kant famously writes in the Critique of Pure Reason: I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the preconception that it is possible to make headway in metaphysics without a previous criticism of pure reason, is the source of all that unbelief, always very dogmatic, which wars against morality. (Kant 1963, 29)15

Here is Hegel’s “reply”: The sealed essence of the universe has no power that could withstand the spirit of knowledge; it is compelled to open itself to it and lay out its riches and its depths and offer them for its enjoyment. (Hegel 1964, 36)16

And here is Adorno’s conclusion: In formulations like this, the Baconian pathos of the early bourgeois period is extended to become that of a mature humankind: we may yet succeed [daß es doch noch gelinge]. Seen against the resignation of the current era, this impulse establishes Hegel’s true contemporary relevance. (Adorno 1993, 68)

 See for example Adorno (1993, 14–17).  See Adorno (2013, chap. 4, especially 224–234). 14  See above, 7–8. 15  Quoted in: Adorno (1993, 67). 16  Quoted in: Adorno (1993, 67). 12 13

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In both passages emerges the one ideal that animates every single line of Adorno’s work: intact knowledge. An ideal not that far from the classical struggle for unconditional knowledge (which is not the same as knowledge of the unconditional). It is the ideal of thought’s freedom, for, as Adorno says at the beginning of the Metacritique: “Thought, by actively beholding, rediscovers itself in every entity, without tolerating any restrictions. It breaches, as just such a restriction, the requirement to establish a fixed ultimate to all its determinations” (Adorno 2013, 4). “Restrictions” as such are the sole criterion of falsehood for a philosophy that renounces to be a first philosophy, just as the “ruin of illusion” [der Zerfall des Scheins] is its sole criterion of truth (Adorno 2013, 39). At the same time, however, this ideal is the Hegelian, and then Husserlian, desire to saturate oneself with the fullness of objectivity, to know the things themselves, to know them as they really are, or, as Adorno says, “from the inside out”.17 Critical philosophy that is aware of subjective mediations nonetheless, or precisely because of this, needs objective truth to break the social veil of appearances, to overcome “facts” and attain things. According to Adorno, Husserl never managed to free himself from idealism, because he criticized it from within by remaining involved in idealistic presuppositions. His original drive then reversed itself into its own opposite.18 This, however, is precisely what “involuntary dialectic” means. Husserl’s tragedy is that his “things themselves” are not the things themselves at all, but abstractions of thought that are not recognized as such, and only because of this they become false. The path he went through with the integrity and radicality of his rigorous philosophy, despite thought’s self-forgetfulness, is the path of thought itself. “Husserl’s antinomies,” as the subtitle of the Metacritique calls them, are not eccentricities or contingent mistakes, but some of the inescapable stakes of the present: individual and universal, reason and world, theory and experience, method and things. And, like Kant’s antinomies for Hegel, they are the very driving force of the dialectical movement. Dialectics does not mean to avoid such contradictions, but to consciously reflect on them, to transform Husserl’s “involuntary” movement into a voluntary one, to carry it out right to the end, and thus to break its own presuppositions. And this, to Adorno, is what knowledge means. Husserl’s splendid failure is the necessary premise for something different from the claustrophobia of systems. His first philosophy is just one step behind “last philosophy” and the happiness of thought.

 “The farther Hegel takes idealism, even epistemologically, the closer he comes to social materialism; the more he insists, against Kant, on comprehending his subject matter from the inside out” (Adorno 1993, 68). 18  See Adorno (1986, 120). 17

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 1986. Husserl and the Problem of Idealism. In Id. Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden, ed. R.  Tiedemann in cooperation with G.  Adorno, S.  Buck-Morss, and K. Schultz, vol. 20/1, 119–134. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1993. Hegel: Three Studies. Trans. S.W. Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. ———. 2004. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. London: Routledge. ———. 2010. Einführung in die Dialektik. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 2013. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Trans. W.  Domingo. Cambridge: Polity Press. Adorno, Theodor W., and Walter Benjamin. 1994. Briefwechsel 1928–1940. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1962. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1. Trans. E.B. Speirs and J.B. Sanderson. New York: The Humanities Press. ———. 1964. System der Philosophie. Erster Teil. Die Logik. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag. ———. 1975. Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Trans. W. Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1985. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Trans. T.  Kisiel. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. E. Jephcott. Stanford: The University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Logical Investigations. Trans. J.N.  Findlay, vol. 2. London/New York: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel. 1963. The Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. N. Kemp-Smith. London: Macmillan. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1970. The German Ideology. Trans. C.  Dutt, W.  Lough, and C.P. Magill. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Miller, Jared A. 2009. Phenomenology’s Negative Dialectic: Adorno’s Critique of Husserl’s Epistemological Foundationalism. The Philosophical Forum 40: 99–125. O’Connor, Brian. 2004. Adorno’s Negative Dialectic. Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Testa, Italo. 2011. La Metacritica di Adorno nella costellazione contemporanea. Epistemologia dialettica e post-empirismo. In Percorsi della dialettica nel Novecento, ed. M.L. Lanzillo and S. Rodeschini, 93–124. Roma: Carocci. Tiedemann, Rolf. 1997. Editorische Nachbemerkung. In: T.W.  Adorno. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, 385–386. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Trans. D.F.  Pears and B.F. McGuinness. London/New York: Routledge. Wolff, Ernst. 2006. From Phenomenology to Critical Theory. The Genesis of Adorno’s Critical Theory from His Reading of Husserl. Philosophy & Social Criticism 32: 555–572. Zanotti, Giovanni. 2014. La psyché démodée. Psychanalyse et objectivité sociale chez Adorno. Meta. Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy VI (1): 67–97.

Ricœur as a Reader of Hegel: Between Defiance and Nostalgia Gilles Marmasse

Abstract  The paper aims to analyse the use made of Hegel in the work of Paul Ricœur. Hegel is constantly called upon as an interlocutor in Ricœur’s writings, but he is denounced as often as he is approved of. Hegelianism is a temptation, for Ricœur, because Hegel proposes a philosophy of mediation, and because mediation is also the horizon of Ricœur’s project. At the same time, Hegelianism is deceiving, in Ricœur’s view, insofar as it holds that it is possible to get around the hard work of practical, iterative mediation. But there is probably a misunderstanding in Ricœur’s interpretation of Hegel’s “absolute knowledge”. Hegel actually does not try to transgress the limits of possible experience, but he wants to think of the unification of opposites within experience. Keywords Ricœur · Hegel · Sittlichkeit · History

I would like to discuss here the use made of Hegel in the work of Paul Ricœur. That use is marked by both fascination and ambivalence—by a certain injustice, but also by an intimate understanding. As it stands, this sort of relationship between Hegel and his successors is not unusual, as Ricœur himself points out. In the article “Hegel aujourd’hui” (Ricœur 2006, 174–194), for instance, he declares that the contemporary success of Hegel is remarkable, given that interest in him springs from those postHegelian philosophers, like Kierkegaard or Marx, who committed parricide against him. Moreover, he says, Hegel is read in astonishingly diverse disciplinary and epistemological contexts—by theologians, for instance, as well as by structuralists. Finally, Ricœur says, Hegel provokes contradictory judgements, because he is for some a thinker of divinity and order, and for others a thinker of humanity and of liberty. Hegel is constantly called upon as an interlocutor in Ricœur’s work, but he is denounced as often as he is approved of. Ricœur sometimes presents Hegel’s thought as a simple moment in a broader movement; in such cases, he is treated G. Marmasse (*) University of Poitiers, Poitiers, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Ferrarin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Phenomenology, Contributions To Phenomenology 102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_10

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favourably. And Ricœur sometimes reproaches Hegel for aiming at an unattainable ‘absolute knowledge’. In fact, this is the objection which he raises most often, for Ricœur criticises Hegel for transgressing the rules of a philosophy which is conscious of its limits. I will discuss here the questions of meaning, of politics, and of history, my aim being to understand why Hegel is typically presented by Ricœur as a ‘temptation’ which one must renounce. More specifically, I will show that the key to understanding the relationship between Ricœur and Hegel, which is at the same time passionate and critical, lies in Ricœur’s account of “imperfect syntheses”, which he presents as contrasting with that which he finds too perfect in Hegel’s mediation.

1  Hegel and the Conquest of Meaning For Ricœur, Hegelianism is above all a philosophy of meaning. For Hegel, he explains, experience speaks itself, and proposes an order. The task of philosophy is, therefore, to discover that this order is precisely that of our thoughts, and to render it transparent to thought. Philosophy, Ricœur says, shows up in Hegel as a wager: that the meaning of reality can be mastered and presented by the philosopher (see Ricœur 2006, 176–177). But Hegel’s originality, he says, lies in his claim that meaning establishes itself progressively. We go from experiences which are poor in meaning to richer ones (Ricœur 2006, 179). This progress happens dialectically, by the work of the negative—that is, by contradictions which we live through dramatically or which we think according to a logic of opposition. Now, Ricœur emphasises, it is the subject which appears as these oppositions arise and are overcome. For Hegel, the progress of the meaning and that of the subject go together. In a sense, the more meaning there is, the more consciousness there is. It follows that subjectivity does not constitute itself in fleeing experience and its inevitable discomfort, but in confronting it. Subjectivity does not look down on experience; it is born from it. And because experience is contradictory, we can say that one does not become oneself except in alienating oneself. Subjectivity is born from working one’s way, painfully and exhaustingly, across experience: the richer that experience is, the more acute subjectivity is (Ricœur 2006, 186–187). Ricœur insists, moreover, on the link he sees between Hegel and Freud. These two authors share a point of thought, but they look out in opposite directions from it. Hegel has quite intensely understood the force of human desire: for him, man is not only a thought, but also a vital force. This is most clearly visible in the text on mastery and servitude in the Phenomenology. More precisely, Ricœur argues, human desire for Hegel is not animal desire, because it is desire for another desire. This desire, which aspires to reciprocity, brings with it the problem of recognition. Now, we find something equivalent in the Freudian theme of Oedipus. Just like the problem of master and slave, that of Oedipus is about the production of a reciprocity from a situation of inequality. But the two authors do not share the same orientation. Freud looks backwards, in the sense that he is carrying out a sort of archaeology of

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desire. Hegel, on the other hand, examines the series of experiences by which man makes himself an adult and enters into more and more elaborate cultural experiences. Hegelianism, Ricœur says, thematises a movement which distances us from our biological roots. It reflects the progressive constitution of meaning which draws us out of our infantilism and our archaisms. All the same, the root is not destroyed. One can only progress if one is, so to speak, re-rooted. And Freud thematises the sublimation of instinct. In both authors, Ricœur says, one finds the idea of progress through regress, of a deepening of origins which happens at the same time as the movement upwards towards a more and more elaborate culture. Yet Ricœur is troubled by the concept of ‘absolute knowledge’. In particular, he thinks that the overcoming of ‘spirit’, and then of ‘religion’, in the movement described in the Phenomenology marks the abandonment of a ‘rationalist’ and ‘humanist’ point of view (ibidem, 180). Ricœur barely defines the concept of absolute knowledge, but apparently understands it in contrast with the Kantian theme of the limits of knowledge. Kant insists that human experience cannot raise itself up to an Archimedean point, but is inevitably situated. Hegel, on the other hand, takes up the point of view of the whole. Of course, he is always examining the limits of knowledge—but these limits, for him, are always to be overcome (ibidem, 191). For Ricœur, Hegel can be criticised by asking oneself whether philosophy is really capable of finding a meaning for everything: do there not exist in human experience components which are discordant, or insignificant? And we can criticise Hegel too, says Ricœur, for his inability to admit the presence in this experience of something which is irreducibly fragmentary, which cannot be totalised—encounter, for instance, or love, or the approach of death… Furthermore, Ricœur notes, we should ask ourselves whether Hegelianism is able to conceive of evil. Ricœur does not clearly formulate this last objection, but it is clear that he criticises Hegel for being content to thematise the absorption of evil into discourse, and so to have turned away from thinking, as Kant did, about regeneration or conversion. Of course, Ricœur argues, Hegel is perhaps closer than is usually believed to the philosophy of interpretation which Ricœur himself defends. For this philosophy also rests on the conviction that we are not in the absurd. Yet interpretation, Ricœur says, always starts from a certain perspective, not from the whole. That is, in a sense, the weakness of interpretation, which is always in a certain sense circular: when I try to understand something, I grasp it with what I am. All the same, such a philosophy is freed from the excesses of absolute knowledge. One can say, in a certain manner, that, for Hegel, knowledge is safe, while, for Kant or in a philosophy based on Kantianism, freedom—free knowledge—conceives of itself as at risk. In other words, Kantianism opens up a path towards a philosophy of hope, while Hegelianism remains a philosophy of reminiscence. Ricœur therefore says that Kant deserves more praise, for such a philosophy truly has something utopian about it. It throws itself into the future, it is imaginative, it invents figures for the realisation of mankind. And that is precisely what Hegelianism refuses at the most fundamental level. Nonetheless, Ricœur emphasises, a philosophy of interpretation will be serious only if it is quasi-Hegelian, or at least in debate with Hegel (ibidem, 192).

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However, we see that Ricœur does not analyse the Hegelian concept of absolute knowledge based on Hegel’s many texts on philosophy, or based on Hegel’s ­philosophical approach in the Phenomenology and the Encyclopaedia. Rather, as many commentators do, he simply bases his reading on notions of knowledge and absoluteness taken in their traditional senses. That is what leads him to think that Hegel wants to transgress the limits of possible experience, whereas he in fact wants—at least, in my reading of him—to think of the unification of opposites within experience. Hegel does not argue that philosophy is not situated, recalling, for instance, that Plato and Aristotle, as Greeks, could not fail to approve of slavery (see Hegel 1992, § 482 R.). It is no less clear, in Hegel’s mind, that his own philosophy is expressive of the modern spirit. If the epithet ‘absolute’ is taken to be identical with ‘super-human’, the concept of absolute knowledge is of course unacceptable, and Ricœur’s criticism of it is quite justified. But if ‘absolute’ is understood to mean ‘unifying’, the concept of absolute knowledge becomes interesting once more, and Ricœur’s objections to it, it seems to me, become questionable. What is all the same interesting about Ricœur’s critique is that it contests the idea of a fundamental unity of experience, capable of being seized theoretically, and one which consequently places philosophy in a position of sovereignty over the other sciences. Ricœur is a trustworthy witness for the humbling of philosophy in contemporary thought: philosophy cannot nowadays claim, as it could in Hegel’s time, to master meaning; it must rather admit that meaning makes us at the same time that we make it. In other works, philosophy must recognise that it is dependent on a preexisting cultural state of affairs which it cannot give a full account of. Philosophy is a science of culture among others, at best capable of describing partial experiences. But its finitude is also what drives it to work, and what makes it fruitful: because meaning is not totalisable, because truth cannot be possessed, philosophy’s task is endless. Even if Ricœur’s critique of absolute knowledge is simplistic, it deserves to be heard.

2  Thinking Sittlichkeit in Its Scope and Its Contradictions Now, Ricœur’s reticence about a knowledge which presents itself as definitive does not show up only with the question of meaning in general. One finds it in practical matters, too. But Ricœur’s ambivalence is remarkable here. First, he takes up for himself the debate between Kant and Hegel on morality. Of course, he does not align himself entirely with Hegel, but he nonetheless remains close to him. The Kantian conception of morality, Ricœur says, is certainly fundamental, but it has only a limited meaning. It allows one to think about the autonomy of a responsible subject, who recognises himself as capable of doing that which at the same time he believes he must do (Ricœur 1986, 279). Nonetheless, if the rule of universalisation of maxims of the will is the criterion by which a moral agent assures himself of his good faith, it cannot be considered the supreme principle of practical reason.

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For Ricœur, Kant is wrong to make obligation the essence of moral behaviour, which has so many other aspects. One sees that already with Aristotle, who discusses ethical excellence using the concepts of model, of preference, and of reasonable orientation. Hegel’s anti-Kantian critique returns, in a sense, to these Aristotelian intuitions. In particular, Ricœur says, the author of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right is quite right to oppose himself to the neglect of desire within Kantian morality, and to the mortal dichotomies which that morality develops: form against content, duty against desire, a priori against the empirical… “Human behaviour […] cannot bear the sort of dismantling which the transcendental method condemns it to, but requires, quite on the contrary, a sharp sense of transitions and mediations” (ibidem, 277). In contrast to Kant, Hegel proposes a dialectical conception of ethical action. Ricœur insists particularly on the power of the analysis of the will which is found in the introduction to the Principles. The will universalises itself, first of all, in the sense that it is capable of transcending every content. Of course, it must, in a second stage, realise itself in something particular. All the same, it does not give up its liberty, because it is capable, in a third stage, of grasping itself in its movement towards particularity. In fact, Ricœur says, the “singularity” (in the emphatic sense) of the willing subject is nothing else than this reflexive grasp, through the will, of the meaning of its own instantiation in some particular. What does Hegel’s analysis give us? It allows us to get away from the unpleasant dichotomy between, on the one hand, a rationality which is undetermined while universal and, on the other, a particularity which is inevitably irrational (ibidem, 281). It allows us indeed to conceive of the action of a subject which is meaningful while at the same time being a determinate individual. Secondly, the power of Hegel’s thought comes with showing that action is rooted in a community, and more precisely in a moral state whose ground is made up of the foundational traditions of this community. The analysis of the Principles thus appears as a valuable challenge to political atomism (see Ricœur 1990, 296). For Ricœur, Hegel’s Sittlichkeit should be understood as the network of values which defines what is permitted and what is not within a community. It guarantees the progressive victory of the organic link over the exteriority of the only juridical relation—an exteriority which is reinforced by that implied in the economic relation. Hegel thereby returns to the Aristotelian conviction that ‘the good of man’ is only perfectly worked out within a city (Ricœur 1986, 282). One should hold onto this idea, Ricœur says, not simply because of its intellectual power, but also because it expresses a demand that remains unrealised today. The State, as Hegel understands it, only exists ‘in intention’, in a programmatic way (ibidem, 285). And in fact today, Ricœur argues, the State is withdrawing, in the sense that the theme of the institutional mediation of liberty and of desires is losing its influence. Contemporary humanity is nowadays more drawn to the idea of a savage freedom, outside of institutions, while institutions seem to it essentially constraining and repressive. Hegel, says Ricœur, associates ‘absolute freedom’, when no determinate institution is considered legitimate, with the Terror as it appeared in the French Revolution. On Ricœur’s understanding, Hegel thinks that it is only within

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institutions that the capacities of man can bloom. That is why we have an obligation to serve institutions (Ricœur 1990, 297). At the same time, Ricœur sets out a number of reservations about the Hegelian theory of the State, which amount to criticising Hegel’s State as excessively sure of itself, and thus authoritarian. First, Ricœur criticises the German philosopher for believing that there could be a science of praxis: “There is nothing more theoretically destructive, nor more practically dangerous, that this pretention to knowledge in ethical and political matters.” (Ricœur 1986, 285) In fact, the domain of action is, ontologically, that of changing things, and, epistemologically, of the probably. When a person or a party claims for itself a monopoly over knowledge of the practical, it claims the right to do people good in spite of what they may want. It is only the recognition of the intermediate status of ethical rationality, and of the probabilistic character of any predictions about the course of human affairs, which guarantees that thought will remain sober and open to criticism and discussion. Furthermore, asks Ricœur, can we follow Hegel’s indictment of any moral conscience which is not a product of Sittlichkeit? It is difficult to do so, he says, for those who have lived through the totalitarian phenomena of the twentieth century. We no longer believe in a State which is essentially fair. In other words, we no longer hold that a conscience which is separated from the ethical order would necessarily have gone wrong. It may happen that Sittlichkeit becomes oppressive—even barbaric—and that freedom of conscience and moral rigour take refuge in a small number of incorruptible, fearless individuals. Reacting to what he sees as Hegel’s excessive confidence in the State, Ricœur insists that there need be nothing wrong in invoking morality against it (Ricœur 1990, 298). Lastly, while he makes reference to Éric Weil, for whom the Hegelian State is to some degree liberal, Ricœur nonetheless attacks spirit, as Hegel conceives it, for it is a ‘hypostasis’ which is raised above individual consciousness and intersubjectivity. To illustrate this point, he cites § 258 of the Principles, which seems to him unacceptable: “The final goal [of the State] possesses the highest right with regard to individuals, whose supreme duty is to be members of the State.” The difference between consciousness and spirit, for Ricœur, comes down to the fact that the latter is not directed towards another which it is lacking, but is entirely self-sufficient. For Ricœur, spirit as Hegel conceives of it puts an end to the separation between rationality and existence. Now, in this full possession of meaning, intentionality is abolished as an aim. The ontology of Geist transforms, in a way which is quite unwarranted, the institutional mediation of the State into a transcendent instance which no longer needs humanity in order to think itself. Hegel’s mistake, says Ricœur, is to hold that the spirituality of spirit is distinct from that of individuals. In moving now to critically evaluate Ricœur’s position, I note three points. –– First of all, when we talk about Hegel’s objective spirit (or, more precisely, about Sittlichkeit, which is its highest moment), are we really talking about a “hypostatization of the spirit, raised above individual consciousness and even above intersubjectivity”? (Ricœur 1986, 283) Certainly, for Hegel institutions do not come out of agreement between individuals: they have their origin in themselves and

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confer onto their members a universalised will.1 Nonetheless, they do not exist outside of individual consciousnesses.2 If we are right in understanding the concept of hypostasis here as something which transcends individuals, Ricœur has made a diagnostic error. Sittlichkeit is, to be sure, objective, in the way, for instance, that a law is: it imposes itself onto a singular subject who does not create it himself, it is articulated in itself and with other ethical institutions. Nonetheless, Sittlichkeit does not appear with the exteriority of a thing, because it has the status of a will — a unified, public will, expressing the essential will of individuals. –– Further, for Hegel, if philosophy can adequately reason about politics, politicians—the monarch or the great man, for instance—do not themselves have philosophical knowledge. Hegel insists, rather, on the fact that there is no special competence demanded of the prince, and that belonging to the dynasty is enough to qualify him for his role (see Hegel 2011, § 280). Moreover, the great man is presented in Hegel as in a certain sense ‘naïve’ (see Hegel 1996, 416). The philosopher’s knowledge always comes too late, and always limits itself to thinking what is, without saying what ought to be. It thus makes little sense to denounce this ‘absolute knowledge’ which Hegel supposedly attributed to politicians and to the State. –– Lastly, the objective spirit is, in the general economy of spirit, a moment of contradiction. For Hegel, spirit’s grasp of the world is inevitably fragile. For instance, the good which I possess may be stolen from me (cf. abstract law). In the same way, some action or other which aimed at my happiness or that of another can reveal itself to be harmful (cf. morality). And political legitimacy is only ever local and provisional (cf. ethical life). It is a pity that Ricœur was not more sensitive to the opposition which Hegel sets up between objective and absolute spirit.3 Objective spirit, for Hegel, is incapable of entirely unifying itself in itself, and of truly reconciling itself with the world around it. While the works of absolute spirit—works of art, religious representations, philosophical doctrines—, which present us with a complete reconciliation between the subject and the object, are in a sense immortal, the institutions of the objective spirit—particular peoples— are run through with corruption and death. Ricœur seems to be unaware of the degree to which, for Hegel, the objective spirit is finite. Nonetheless, if Hegel is in no way unaware of the fact that some aspect of illegitimacy hinders the activity of the State, it is true that he downplays this illegitimacy. Here, Ricœur’s criticisms regain some of their power. For Hegel, there is illegitimacy when a political action does not embody the State’s spirit. Of course such a dimension of illegitimacy cannot be entirely suppressed at the level of objec1  See Hegel (1955), 113: “What prevails in a state is the habit of acting according to the general will (nach allgemeinem Willen) and of assigning the universal as one’s goal.” 2  See ibidem, 110: “The stuff in which the rational achieves existence is human knowledge and will.” 3  Even if he sometimes refers to it: see Ricœur (2006), 184.

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tive spirit, but it is supposed nevertheless simply to be a residuum. Ricœur, by contrast, emphasises the character of evil within politics: “There exists a specific sort of political alienation, because politics is autonomous.” Even when the intention of the State is reasonable, the State nonetheless acts through decisions, and thus inevitably submits its citizens to the risk of the arbitrary. Political evil, Ricœur says, consists in the totalitarian dreams of removing this paradox. Against this fantasy, politics needs a particular sort of vigilance (judicial independence, access to information, etc.). Ricœur emphasises the imperfection of the link between the form of the State, which can be rational (a constitution, an honest bureaucracy, an education in liberty for all through public discussion…) and the force which characterises it, which is potentially irrational (for the State enjoys, to use Max Weber’s words, a monopoly on legitimate violence).4 Once again, here we see Ricœur’s concern for thinking in terms of a synthesis which is at once real and incomplete.

3  Renouncing Total Mediation in History For Hegel, the thought of the State ends, as we know, with that of history. “Renouncing Hegel,” a chapter of Time and Narrative devoted to history, is remarkable for its violence and, at the same time, for the intensity of the homage which it renders to Hegel, who is treated there as the major interlocutor. But what is the meaning of the debate on history between these two authors, and how are we to explain the special place which Ricœur thinks Hegel holds? The analysis of Hegel’s philosophy of history in Time and Narrative comes in the course of a reflection on historical consciousness. The task is, more exactly, to understand, when one recounts something historically, what allows us to unify the three dimensions (the three ‘extases’) of past, present, and future. While most of the classic authors studied in Time and Narrative (particularly Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger) are, Ricœur says, incapable of thinking together of the flow of time and of its unity, Hegelianism, Ricœur says, proposes a mediation. In his speculative philosophy of history, Hegel claims to unite the past, the present, and the future thought the concept. Still, for Ricœur, we have to get past this solution, whose ambitiousness makes it at the same time seductive and unacceptable. Denouncing the pretention of Hegel’s solution is, then, the way for Ricœur to make his own solution credible, solution which consists of recognising that we can only grasp ourselves in our historical condition through a number of finite transactions between ‘waiting’, ‘traditionality’, and ‘initiative’. More precisely, Hegelian history, in Ricœur’s view, essentially expresses itself in the present. He cites a passage from Reason in History: The moments which Spirit seems to have left behind, it still possesses in its depth of its present. Just as it has passed through its moments in history, it must pass through them in the present—in its own concept. (Ricœur 1955, 183)  See Ricœur (1993, 14–15).

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These formulations, for Ricœur, prove that the opposition between the past and the future is inessential for Hegel, and that for Hegel the philosopher ought only to examine that which avoids temporal becoming. Of course, Ricœur concedes, Hegel holds that the progress of liberty happens in time. Nonetheless, within this temporalisation, speculative knowledge must be satisfied with grasping the eternal. The concept of ‘return to oneself’ reveals that the successive character of layers of history, for Hegel, is only accidental, so that the speculative viewpoint ought only to grasp in the past those signs of maturity which have a definitive meaning. The succession of historical configurations of world history are to be absorbed in the present depth of spirit (see Ricœur 1991, 362). Furthermore, Ricœur objects to the notions of ‘reason in history’ and the ‘ruse of reason’. First of all, the concept of reason in history is for Ricœur a mere ‘credo’. It may be true, Ricœur admits, that the Hegelian system considered in its entirety shows the validity of this concept. But in the philosophy of history itself, it functions only as a postulate, abruptly introduced. And the ruse of reason, Ricœur says, is only the ‘apologetic equivalent’ of the concept of reason. It is, for Ricœur, the pretence which allows one to justify evil in history by presenting it as something in the service of reason. Hegel’s history thus reveals itself, Ricœur says, as a ‘shameful theology’—which is especially disquieting, as Hegel’s project is supposed to be the secularisation of theology. And this equivocation between a humanist and a theological orientation shows up, Ricœur argues, in the ambiguity of the concept of spirit, which is both human and divine (see ibidem, 365–369). Ricœur also criticises Hegel for claiming to totalise the spirits of different peoples into a single world spirit. In fact, says Ricœur, there is a vast gulf between the concept of Volksgeist and of Weltgeist. It is this desire to bring together things which are objectively separate which betrays most clearly Hegel’s urge to collapse all difference into a single sameness. For instance, says Ricœur, he habitually analyses all of the aspirations of different peoples to liberty in the same way. But is there anything connecting them, Ricœur asks, beyond a simple family resemblance? Furthermore, how much weight should we give to the idea that the passion of great men guarantees by itself the meaningful transformation of history? Today, says Ricœur, we are far more aware of the influence of the anonymous forces of history. And we are shocked by the lightness with which Hegel deals with those who have suffered and died on account of history. Is it really a consolation that the sacrifice of men and whole peoples is useful? Confronted with the victims of history, the instrumentalisation of suffering seems intolerable to us. Lastly, says Ricœur, the very project of a philosophy of history of the sort Hegel undertakes is outdated, for the idea of history conceived of as a totality has become alien to us (see ibidem, 369–370).5 We must recognise, Ricœur says, that there is nothing anodyne about giving up the Hegelian ambition to think of a total mediation of history. Quite to the contrary: 5  Ricœur writes about the victims of Auschwitz: “Victimisation is that underside of history which no ruse of reason can legitimate, but which rather makes clear the scandal of any theodicy of history.” (ibidem, 340)

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the failure of Hegelianism leaves us bitter and abandoned. There is a paradox here: the reasons given by the adversaries of Hegel are, in general, weak, and even given in bad faith. But it is nonetheless a fact that Hegel’s project has lost all meaning for us. We have become incapable of thinking that effecting freedom would be the supreme stake of history, or that this would be the key which allowed us to understand the paths the latter has taken. We no longer believe, in a word, that history can be reduced to a general, unifying principle. We henceforth understand ourselves as finite, in the sense that, in history, we are affected by events without being able to tell if we produced them or if they simply happened to us. There is something noteworthy: when it is a question of ethics and politics, Hegel is a positive figure for Ricœur, even if a rather one-sided one; however, when it a question of history, Hegel is a mediating figure, but also one Ricœur contrasts himself with. Nonetheless, the rejection of Hegel in Ricœur’s analysis is not presented as a personal position. Rather, it is a feature of the age: in our day, says Ricœur, one can no longer be Hegelian, alas… We must reckon the importance of the abandonment of Hegelianism as a philosophical event, because it is in a large part a matter of the abandonment of a native ambition. What has changed is not so much the understanding of history, as the manner in which philosophers understand themselves. That is why the renunciation of Hegelianism is in part a work of mourning (see ibidem, 372). We may well ask, nonetheless, whether Ricœur reads Hegel’s texts in a manner which is entirely rigorous. –– It is, first of all, remarkable to find him asserting that Hegel was only interested in a spirit which was constantly identical with itself. There exist in fact numerous texts in Hegel on the obsolescence of past empires and the impossibility of a return to the past. Furthermore, Hegel’s texts on the vanity of any anticipation of the future only make sense if we grant that the future is irreducible (cf. Hegel 1955, 290). In particular, it is because history is a continual flux that it is useless to seek to draw any lessons from it (see Hegel 1996, 11). The passages which Ricœur cites, which we noted above, can only be correctly interpreted if we keep in mind Hegel’s proposed analysis of how each age follows on from another. These passages mean, in fact, that spirit—which, in history, appears in the figure of successive peoples—remains constantly itself, in the sense that its identity as a subject is not yet underway, in spite of the variety of its particular incarnations. Rather than contesting the reality or importance of the difference between past, present, and future, these passages are a variation on § 382 of the Encyclopaedia, which asserts that spirit, as liberty, can preserve itself in an affirmative manner through all exteriority and all negation of this exteriority. For Hegel, a subject can transform itself and nonetheless subsist as such. That is why he writes that “what spirit is now, it has always been,” (Hegel 1955, 183) while at the same time theorising about an effective transformation of spirit. –– We find in Ricœur, when he writes about the difference between objective spirit and absolute spirit, the same blindness about history as about politics. Typically, he criticises Hegel for conceiving of Weltgeist and Volksgeist together, and in a

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way which is contradictory. Now, for Hegel, there is indeed a contradiction here, but it is implied by the belonging of history to objective spirit: on the one hand, each people realises the global spirit, in the sense that it unifies itself and universalises itself by giving itself a constitution and by constructing an empire; on the other, each people realises this only in a manner which is partial and provisional. That is why each people is condemned to corruption. –– It is also on the basis of this contradiction that we ought to understand the concept of the ruse of reason. That does not mean an occult, omniscient power, but rather the way in which reason incarnates itself in peoples and individuals. More precisely, it expresses the thesis according to which history is, in the economy of the spirit, a moment of unilateral objectivity, so that the universal realises itself in the particular, not through infinitisation but through sacrifice. That there is a ruse in historical reason is not a sign of its sovereignty, but rather betrays its incompleteness. The ruse of reason expresses the fact that history develops within peoples who, while autonomous, only ever defend egoistic reasons, and therefore are condemned to disappear. Of course, the philosophy of history thinks of diverse people in a unified way. But history itself is not in any way free from finitude. Ricœur does not seem to take seriously the thought of unhappiness in Hegel’s philosophy of history, and so, despite what he may say, turns Hegel into an adversary too easy to overcome. Ricœur breaks with Hegel’s metaphysics of history, for which we can hardly condemn him. In his mind, the task of philosophy is not to conceive of the progress of liberty which is assured by the succession of peoples and of empires, but rather to grasp what in the narrative of history allows us to respond to the aporias of phenomenological description as well as to the aporias of the cosmological description of historical experience. For Ricœur, the problem of narrating history is not that of finding an allegedly objective plan of history, but of tying together heterogeneous elements. This is the challenge posed to the historical consciousness, the function of philosophy being simply to understand how historians proceed. If Ricœur’s treatise has something grandiose about it, it is nonetheless a pity that he attributes to Hegel a number of choices which the latter can hardly have made—and that on the other hand he neglects a number of problems which are at the heart of Hegel’s inquiry, like, for instance, those of the transformation of consciousness and of institutions, of the identity of peoples, and of the transmission of culture.

***

Ricœur consistently argues that we must resist Hegelianism, that it is a dangerous temptation for philosophy, and that, once we have vanquished this temptation, we remain in mourning for Hegelianism. The reader must ask herself: why does Ricœur at the same time value Hegel so highly, and yet show such hostility towards him? Especially as, at least in Time and Narrative, Ricœur seems to dismiss Hegel with ease, and even casually. Do we not find, in the dramatization of his relationship with his predecessor, a rhetorical move designed to celebrate an intellectual gesture which is in fact far more limited than it appears?

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We understand the paradoxical relationship between Ricœur and Hegel when we realise that the former continually proposes (or, rather, discovers) syntheses, but ones which are imperfect. Those objects which Ricœur most often studies are characterised by their duality. For instance, in The Voluntary and the Involuntary, man appears as a mixture of will and of character; in Oneself as Another, personal identity is found in ipseity and sameness; and in Time and Narrative, time is described on the basis of the soul as well as of the world. There is, nonetheless, an aporia, because neither pole of the duality can either absorb its other, or entirely ground it. Nonetheless, as Jean Greisch (2001, 74) emphasises, the two poles are not equal. There is the infinite, and there is the finite: on the one hand, thought, choice, openness to the other, and, on the other, nature, the given, being closed upon oneself. It is because of this disproportion that one can discover no unity between the two poles, and that no such unity can remain valid once and for all. The answer to the aporia can only ever be practical and progressive. It consists in constructing local, provisional measures for unity, which can however never be entirely satisfactory. Hegelianism is a temptation, for Ricœur, because Hegel proposes a philosophy of mediation, and because mediation is also the horizon of Ricœur’s project.6 But Hegelianism is deceiving, Ricœur says, insofar as it holds that it is possible to get around the hard work of practical, iterative mediation by proposing a theoretical, instantaneous mediation. Ricœur understands Hegel’s totality by contrast with the Kantian idea: “Our mourning for absolute knowledge […] leads us back to the Kantian idea. […] How can we speak of mediations, even imperfect ones, except if we do so within the horizon of a limit-idea which would, at the same time, be an idea which guides us?” (Ricœur 1991, 461) Ricœur is perhaps attracted by a sort of irenics. But this attraction is then transformed into a regulative idea, which drives the production of finite articulations, acceding each time to the irreducibility of each pole. As Ricœur says about narrativity as a response to the aporias of time, this articulation is less a matter of resolving aporias than of making them work, of making them productive. In an article on Hannah Arendt, he writes, tellingly, that the crime of totalitarianism is to wish to impose a univocal conception of the good, to erase the trial and error of history through an authoritarian organisation of power. In fact, says Ricœur, “there is no absolute knowledge which puts a stop to the polemic about ends.” (Ricœur 1999, 175) There is no solution to the paradox. We must not just start from that paradox; we must maintain ourselves in it.

6  The taste for synthesis starting from opposite poles can also be seen in Ricœur’s intellectual interests: a believer who reads Freud and the structuralists, a phenomenologist who likes analytic philosophy, a Leftist consciously influenced by Heidegger, etc. But it would be wrong to see him as an eclectic. On the one hand, Ricœur was always ready to privilege one tradition over another; on the other, he does not set the objects of his inquiry alongside each other, or try to reduce one of them to the other, but rather tries to make each work on the other in order to develop a third way.

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References Greisch, Jean. 2001. Paul Ricœur, l’itinérance du sens. Grenoble: Milon. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1955. In Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. J.  Hoffmeister. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1992. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830). In Gesammelte Werke, ed. W. Bonsiepen and H.C. Lucas, vol. 20. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1996. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (Berlin 1822/23). In Vorlesungen, ed. K.H. Ilting, K. Brehmer, and H.N. Seelmann, vol. 12. Hamburg: Meiner. ———. 1986. Du texte à l’action. Paris: Points-Seuil. ———. 1990. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Points-Seuil. ———. 1991. Temps et récit III. Paris: Points-Seuil. ———. 1993. Morale, éthique et politique. Pouvoirs 65. ———. 1999. Lectures I. Paris: Points-Seuil. ———. 2006. Hegel aujourd’hui. Esprit, March–April 2006 (first published in Études théologiques et religieuses, 1974). ———. 2011. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. In Gesammelte Werke, ed. K. Grotsch and E. Weisser-Lohmann, vol. 14/1. Hamburg: Meiner. Ricœur, Paul. 1955. Histoire et vérité. Paris: Seuil.

Méditations Hégéliennes vs. Méditations Cartésiennes. Edmund Husserl and Wilfrid Sellars on the Given Daniele De Santis

Abstract  The goal of the present text is to analyze some aspects of Husserl’s own phenomenology against the backdrop of the quite famous or infamous critique of the “Myth of the Given” proposed by the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in his Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Indeed, whereas Sellars’ volume is usually deemed the (“textual” and “theoretical”) source of what has been recently referred to as the “Hegelian Renaissance” characterizing analytic philosophy, Husserl and his transcendental phenomenology are on the contrary seen as the very expression of a new “form” of “Cartesianism.” Now, after a quick discussion of Sellars’ “diagnosis” of the Myth of the Given, the present essay elaborates on the general “Hegelian” character of his argumentations (as they are understood by Robert Brandom); finally, an analysis of Husserl’s alleged Cartesianism in the late text known as Cartesian Meditations will be provided bearing upon the notions of “evidence” and “synthesis.” As we firmly believe, our remarks will show not only that Husserl does not at all fall prey to the “Myth,” but also that his understanding of the concept of reason can help us avoid some of the implications directly flowing from Sellars’ position. Keywords  Husserl · Sellars · Brandom · McDowell · Myth of the Given · Cartesianism · Hegelianism 1. As is quite known, Anglo-American philosophy (or “analytic philosophy”) has gone through a true “Hegelian Renaissance” over the past decades: both John McDowell and Robert Brandom are usually regarded as the most representative philosophers of the recent “Hegelian turn” or “re-turn,”1 the former mainly dealing with the question of the relationship (and its articulation) between mind and world, the latter giving rise to an inferential approach to pragmatism and thus to a 1  See Rockmore (2001) and Redding (2007), notably the interesting historical considerations in the introduction (1–20).

D. De Santis (*) Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. Ferrarin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Phenomenology, Contributions To Phenomenology 102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_11

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pragmatist treatment of semantics. Moreover, according to a broadly accepted historiography (which from time to time assumes the tone of a “philosophical hagiography”), such a Kehre is to be traced back to the writings of Wilfrid Sellars: both to the pars destruens contained in his renowned dismissal of the “Myth of the Given” and to the pars construens of his “inferential” stance on meaning. This being recognized, the present text will proceed as follows: rather than commenting upon the proper name of Hegel by associating him with such and such a phenomenological theme (as the title of this volume would indeed suggest), we will be addressing some aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology based upon what might be called the “textual roots” of such an alleged general Hegelianism. Now, in order for the label “general Hegelianism” to not just be a fancy, yet empty box, we must (i) first firmly anchor its meaning and sense in a specific text and, then (ii) yield a determination of its significant core. As for the former, the text we will be commenting on is the short, nevertheless groundbreaking essay by Wilfrid Sellars usually known as Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (presented as the University of London Special Lectures on Philosophy (1955–1956). Hereafter EPM). Even though the connection might at first appear “ephemeral,” if not even obscure and abstruse, the Hegelian tone is clearly and explicitly suggested by Sellars himself. In § 20 (Section III: The Logic of “Looks”) an imaginary “interlocutor” (i.e., a “logical atomist”), arguing that the “logical space of physical objects in Space and Time rests on the logical space of sense contents,” refers to the book as Méditations Hégéliennes. Indeed, immediately after attacking on Sellars, the interlocutor shouts out: “your incipient Méditations Hégéliennes are premature.”2 As McDowell comments thereupon, in fact: “It is clear that Sellars intends his campaign against the Myth of the Given to be understood as Hegelian, at least in spirit” (McDowell 2009, 91). With a bombastic yet unperceived “Augustinian” emphasis (“littera est occidens, nisi adsit vivificans spiritus,” De Spiritu et Littera. Liber Unus, 4.6), McDowell strives to bring to the fore the Hegelian belebender Geist, as it were, underlying Sellars’ Méditations. And such a sapere secundum spiritum of Sellars results, as McDowell does not fail to point out, in the notion of “conceptual capacities” as already at work, not only in reasoning, but also in perceptual experience.3 In so doing, McDowell takes EPM’s overall project to be developed in parallel with Hegel’s critique of “immediacy” in the first three chapters of the Phänomenologie des Geistes.4 2. Now, unlike McDowell, whose philosophical agenda might be described as an attempt to take Sellars’ Hegelian “critique of sense data theories” to the next level, in the following we will bring to the fore, and exploit, the allusion to Husserl’s 2  Sellars (1997, 45): “‘Until you have disposed, therefore, of the idea that there is a more fundamental logical space than that of physical objects in Space and Time, or shown that it too is fraught with coherence, your incipient Méditations Hégéliennes are premature.’” 3  McDowell (2011, 31): “Reason is at work, that is, in the perceptual presence to rational subjects of features of their environment”. On McDowell’s Hegelianism, see Aportone (2011, 75–77). 4  “I presume that no philosopher who has attacked the philosophical idea of givenness or, to use the Hegelian term, immediacy, has intended to deny that there is a difference between inferring that something is the case and, for example, seeing it to be the case” (Sellars 1997, 13). On this, see Selivanov (2012).

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Méditations Cartésiennes clearly “implied” by what one could call EPM’s “exoteric title” (Méditations Hégéliennes). As Sellars points out at the very end of § 1: “If, however, I begin my argument with an attack on the sense datum theories, it is only as a first step in a general critique of the entire framework of givenness” (Sellars 1997, 14). As the passage explicitly suggests, “givenness” is a concept broader than “given” in the sense data theorists’ understanding of it: indeed, if the former stands for, or designates, the “entire framework,” the latter is to be held as nothing else but a specification thereof. That being acknowledged, our paper’s aim is threefold. We will strive to: (i) Present the different nuances of the theoretical core of what Sellars means by “the Myth of the Given” (§ 3 a, b, c); (ii) Make clear what is truly “Hegelian” in Sellars’ Méditations Hégéliennes (§ 4); (iii) Elaborate on what is properly “Cartesian” in Husserl’s Méditations Cartésiennes (§ 5, 6, 7). 3. In order to make explicit the semantic “shades” of what is usually assumed to be given, Sellars begins with a preliminary list: “Many things have been said to be ‘given’: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even givenness itself. […] Often what is attacked under its name are only specific varieties of ‘given’. Intuited first principles and synthetic necessary connections were the first to come under attack” (Sellars 1997, 14). One might already be wondering whether the specific critique of the sense data variety could be legitimately transferred to the more general framework of givenness. For, in Sellars’ view, it seems that the sense data variety entails, so to say, a sort of metonymical value: what is said of it can be immediately applied—synecdochally—to the more general framework. If this is the case, we should first try to unpack what is given according to the sense data variety and then see in what sense, and to what extent, it can be “generalized” and therefore taken as expressing features characterizing the givenness as such. In order to do so, we shall distinguish three different orders of arguments in Sellars’ reasoning: the first is explicitly designated by Sellars himself as “epistemological”; the second might be referred to as “metaphysical,” while the third one as “genetic.” (a) The epistemological argument is by far the best-known aspect of Sellars’ own diagnosis of the Myth as propounded by sense data theorists. As he himself points out: Now, if we bear in mind that the point of the epistemological category of the given is, presumably, to explicate the idea that empirical knowledge rests on a “foundation” of non-­ inferential knowledge of matters of fact, we may well experience a feeling of surprise on noting that according to sense-datum theorists, it is particulars that are sensed. For what is known, even in non-inferential knowledge, is facts rather than particulars, items of the form something’s being thus-and-so or something’s standing in a certain relation to something else. (Sellars 1997, 15–16)

This passage is worth quoting for three reasons. First of all, it describes the Myth as derived from the epistemological assumption of a foundation resting on

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“non-inferential knowledge.” Secondly, it already paves the way for applying that diagnosis to a wider conception of the Given, including—according to Sellars— “items of the form something’s being thus-and-so or something’s standing in a certain relation to something else.” The third reason, which for the sake of our problems here is the most important one, is that such statement might be taken as referring to the phenomenological notions of Sach-Verhalt (or “something’s standing in a certain relation to something else”) and So-Sein (or “something’s being thus-and-so”), with which Sellars was familiar following his translation of M. Schlick’s too famous or infamous essay Gibt es ein materiales Apriori?5 The epistemological argument allows thereby for a widening of the original sense of the Myth by pointing toward a new variety, that is to say, the “categorial” one: “To reject the Myth of the Given is to reject the idea that the categorial structure of the world, if it has a categorial structure, imposes itself on the mind as a seal imposes an image on melted wax.” (Sellars, “The Lever of Archimedes” in Sellars 2007, 229–257).6 It seems then that the epistemological critique of the sense data variety, according to which there is a foundation resting on a “non-inferential” level, can be also applied to a wider notion such as the categorial (the non-inferential level being, alternatively, that of particular sense data or of categorial states of affairs). Accordingly, the generalization leads Sellars to maintain that “givenness” [i.e., not just such and such a Given] is “a fact which presupposes no learning, no forming of associations” (Sellars 1997, 20). (b) The metaphysical argument upon which the Myth relies is the result of a confusion or, better, a conflation between two orders: the logical space of causation and the logical space of reasons or, in a more traditional terminology, of causa et ratio.7 In a certain way, the epistemological and the metaphysical argument support each other: indeed, the epistemological thesis that “a sensation of a red triangle is the very paradigm of empirical knowledge” (Sellars 1997, 25) leads straightforwardly to claiming that what is causally given possesses—as long as it is so “given”—a normative value. If, in other words, “sensations” are “the very paradigm of knowledge,” then the causal occurrence of Empfindungen is in itself a “cognitive or epistemic fact.” Or—to go the other way around—once we lose sight of the distinction between causa and ratio, any causal occurrence already presents, or “imposes” itself as intrinsically rational.8

 Moritz Schlick, “Gibt es ein materiales Apriori?” in Schlick (1938, 28), on the Gesetzmässigkeit des Soseins. 6  In this sense, arguing that the phenomenological conception of the Given would not be subject to Sellars’ critique because it takes the Given itself as having a structure of its own, which nevertheless is not necessarily and intrinsically imbued with concepts (“avente una struttura (quindi non bruto), ma una struttura propria e autonoma (quindi non necessariamente intrisa di concetti”, as is claimed by Lanfredini 2012, 527), is not enough of an argument yet. 7  For this expression, we are of course referring to Carraud (2002). 8  As Sellars (1997, 24) points out: “the grammatical similarity of ‘sensation of a red triangle’ to ‘thought of a celestial city’ is interpreted to mean, or, better, gives rise to the presupposition that sensations belong in the same general pigeonhole as thoughts—in short, are cognitive facts.” 5

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Unlike (a), it does not seem immediately apparent the extent to which (b) might be applied to the general framework of givenness: in what sense could the confusion between causa et ratio, between the causality of sensations and the normativity of knowledge, be transferred to a different sense of the Given, such as the categorial variety? Or, to rephrase the question at stake: how could a state of affairs ever be considered as given in the sense in which a sensation is indeed causally given? Appealing to Sellars’ later reflections in Science and Metaphysics could provide an answer to this question. In these lectures, the variety of the given Sellars is struggling with is that of the so-called “constraining element of experience” or “brute fact” that, as he goes on to point out, is “postulated” rather than “found by careful and discriminating attention,” being nothing else than “a theoretical construct:”9 (Sellars 1968, 9) what is causally given turns into what is “independent” and “non-­ conceptual,” and yet “guides minds” while not belonging to the “concept.”10 The Myth “arises” then as soon as what is is independent of the mind and exercises an external yet conceptual constraint on it: what is, as long as it is given in the way it is, is already conceptually articulated. In this new model, the confusion between causa et ratio (confined to the “basic variety” of the Myth) turns into the larger conflation of esse et concipi (upon which the former is nothing but a sensualistic variation). In this case, then, not solely sensations, but also states of affairs might perfectly match Sellars’ account. (c) If we switch now to what we labeled the genetic argument, we find ourselves confronted with the phenomenologically key notion of evidence. In Sellars’ view, the idea of evidence is connected to the conception “that there are certain ‘inner episodes,’” which “occur to human beings and brutes without any prior process of learning or concept formation,” and which “are the necessary conditions of empirical knowledge” as providing the “evidence” for all the other knowledge (Sellars 1997, 32–33). It is indeed genetic not only because it supports the misleading conception of a piecemeal acquisition of knowledge from “internal” to “external,” or from “private” to “public” dimension. It is “genetic” in the strict sense that evidence is the keystone of both the “epistemological” and the “metaphysical” arguments: it is the psychological (ψυχή meaning Bewusstsein, notably “consciousness” in general) “conjunction” of epistemology and metaphysics, of the empirico-­ epistemological claim of a non-inferential ground and the metaphysical conflation of both causa et ratio and esse et concipi.11  See also Sellars (2002, Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 11).  See the analysis by Benoist (2004, 522–523). 11  Sellars (1997, 77) himself explains: “The idea that observation ‘strictly and properly so-called’ is constituted by certain self-authenticating nonverbal episodes, the authority of which is transmitted to verbal and quasi-verbal performances when these performances are made ‘in conformity with the semantical rules of the language,’ is, of course, the hearth of the Myth of the Given. For the given, in epistemological tradition, is what is taken by these self-authenticating episodes These ‘takings’ are, so to speak, the unmoved movers of empirical knowledge, the ‘knowing in presence’ which are presupposed by all other knowledge, both the knowledge of general truth and the knowledge ‘in absence’ of other particular matters of fact. Such is the framework in which traditional empiricism makes its characteristic claim that the perceptually given is the foundation of empirical knowledge”. 9

10

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4. The “general Hegelianism” we have been expounding so far or, better, its “roots” in the texts of Wilfrid Sellars entail, in their order: (A) A critical core consisting in a network of three arguments whose interweaving might be represented as follows : Evidence

Epistemological Argument

Non-Inferential Foundation

Metaphysical Argument

Causa/Ratio

Esse/Concipi

The concept of “evidence” does not only pave the way for both the “epistemological” and the “metaphysical” arguments, it also brings about their interconnection in the understanding of a non-inferential foundation: it is no chance that Sellars describes it as “the hearth of the Myth of the Given” (hereafter the “threefold critique”); (B) A sort of strong historical “counter account” of its own origins according to which the “dismantling” of the theoretical building grounded on the key notion of evidence (leading to both the epistemological and metaphysical argument) refers to the tale of an anti-Cartesian (or anti-representationalist) “birth” (in this regard, Robert Brandom’s interpretation of Sellars is paradigmatic: “The fundamental concept of the dominant and characteristic understanding of cognitive contentfulness in the period initiated by Descartes is of course representation”12). It is interesting, then, that whereas Hegel saw his idealism as fulfilling the tradition of thought initiated by René Descartes as the Father of modern philosophy,13 the general Hegelianism whose beginning is rooted in EPM depicts itself as an “exodus” out of the philosophy of the cogito. The less Cartesian, the more Hegelian—this seems to be the motto or the manifesto. From such a perspective, EPM’s exoteric title’s implicit reference to E. Husserl’s Méditations Cartésiennes is far from being secondary or merely otiose. In other words, the hidden allusion to Husserl is to be broadly understood and construed as expressing the Auseinandersetzung with the philosophy usually taken to be the most lucid representative of both the theoretical and historical variation on the so-called “Myth of the Given;”  Brandom (1994, 93); see also 9–11 (“From Cartesian Certainty to Kantian Necessity”) and Chapter 2 (“Toward an Inferential Semantics”). For a more detailed analysis, see Brandom (2000), notably 45–77 (“Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism”); and Brandom (2011, 203– 206), where it is explained that “representationalism” entails “semantic atomism,” “non-inferential knowledge” and a generalization of “semantic nominalism.” 13  Hegel (1959, 331 and 335): “[…] with him [Descartes] the new epoch of philosophy begins. […] Descartes started by saying that thought must necessarily commence from itself.” 12

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(C) What scholars usually refer to as Sellars’ “conceptual holism”: one can have a concept “only by having a whole battery of concepts of which it is one element;” namely, “one has no concept pertaining to the observable properties of physical objects in Space and Time unless one has them all” (Sellars 1997, 44–45). As Robert Brandom in fact comments: “the inferential notion of semantic content is essentially holistic. […] In his masterpiece ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, Sellars exploits this consequence of his insight into the significance of inferential connections to concept-use, even in the case of responsive classification” (Brandom 1994, 89–90). It was Hegel, as Brandom goes on by setting forward a quite unusual parallelism, “who first appreciated the line of reasoning, made familiar to us by Quine in ‘Two Dogmas’—namely, that if the content of a claim must at least determine what follows from it […], then since what a claim commits one to depends on what collateral commitments are available to serve as additional premises […], the significance of undertaking any particular commitment cannot be determined without appeal to the contents of all those collateral commitments.” (Brandom 1994, 92) There are then three key elements characterizing the core of what we have been referring to as the “general Hegelianism” that we shall consider during our analysis of the Méditations Cartésiennes: the “threefold critique,” the “historical counter account” and the idea of “conceptual holism.” 5. If we turn to Husserl,14 it is hard, at least at first glance, to resist the temptation to agree with Sellars’ “threefold critique.” Is not phenomenology a paradigmatic example of a true “evidence-philosophy” rooted in the concept of intuition as the ultimate and firm anchor of all knowledge and according to which what is given, as long as it is so given, displays an unshakable epistemic value (as we are told in Husserl 1950b, 52: “every originary giving intuition [jede originär gebende Anschauung] is a legitimizing source of cognition”)? In other words, such being the true question that Sellars’ own Méditations Hégéliennes bequeath us: what is Cartésien in these Méditations, in such a “new kind of transcendental philosophy” that, according to Husserl, might be labeled “new Cartesianism” even if it has rejected “nearly all the well-known doctrinal content of the Cartesian philosophy”? (Husserl 1950a, 43). It is easy to acknowledge that the so-called basic variety of the given, and thereby the confusion between causa et ratio, does not apply. Already in the Second Investigation, Husserl pointed out that “To define the presentation of a content as the mere fact of its being lived [Erlebtsein], and in consequence to give the name ‘presentations’ to all lived contents [alle erlebte Inhalte], is one of the worst conceptual distortions known to philosophy” (Husserl 1984b, 170). If, in fact, we try to imagine—as Husserl goes to say—“a consciousness prior to all experience [vor allen Erfahrungen], it may very well have the same sensations as we have. But it

14

 See Soffer (2003).

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will intuit no things, and no events pertaining to things, it will perceive no trees and no houses, no flight of birds nor any barking of dogs” (Husserl 1984b, 80).15 This being asserted, we will have to confront the larger variety of the given, where the notion of evidence leads to conflating esse et concipi, rather than causa et ratio. To this end, we will have to submit the Third Cartesian Meditation on “Constitutional Problems. Truth and Actuality” (Die Konstitutive Problematik. Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit) to close scrutiny: for, it is in this section that Husserl ties together the concepts of “evidence,” “being” and, last but not least, the “given.” 6. What is “evidence” if, as Husserl already remarked in the Prolegomena, it cannot be understood as a “causal consequence of certain antecedents”? (see Husserl 1984a, § 19). In order to answer the question, we need to introduce a “more pregnant concept of constitution:” “phenomenological constitution has been for us, up to now, constitution of any intentional object whatever” (Husserl 1984b, 91). In Meditation II, Husserl takes “constitution” to refer to any analysis of the “intentional correlation” ego-cogito-cogitatum in a strict regressive manner: that is, from the cogitatum through the many cogitationes up to the one ego. In Meditation III, by contrast, Husserl introduces a further and decisive constraint: “It has not mattered up to now, whether the objects in question were truly existent [seiende] or non-existent [nichtseiende] […]. On the contrary, under the broadly understood titles reason and unreason, as correlative titles for being [Sein] and non-being [Nichtsein], they are an all-embracing theme for phenomenology.” Two aspects are worth being stressed in order to shed some light on this passage: (i) As for the former differentiation between seiend and nichtseiend, Husserl makes it clear that it is not “excluded from the field of inquiry by abstaining from decision about being or non-being of the world”. In other words, the conceptual pair “seiend-nichtseiend,” as referring to the world (and already excluded in Meditation I by the “transcendental reduction”), is not tantamount to the same concepts as “correlative titles” for reason and unreason (Vernunft and Unvernunft) as discussed in Meditation III. In a nutshell: the “more pregnant concept of constitution” includes—unlike the less pregnant one—both being and non-being but solely as long as they are correlative titles for “reason” and “unreason” respectively. And in this latter sense they (both being and non-­ being) are indeed “an all-embracing theme for phenomenology.”16 As a consequence, (ii) When Husserl himself maintains that “the predicates being and non-being” do relate “not to objects simpliciter, but to the objective sense,” that is to say, to  See also Husserl (1984b, 405): “Closer consideration shows it to be absurd in principle, here or in like cases, to treat an intentional as a causal relation, to give it the sense of an empirical, substantial-causal case of necessary connection.” 16  We can perceive the difference with respect to the following passage from the Logical Investigations: “It makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or is fictitious or is perhaps completely absurd” (Husserl 1984b, 387). 15

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what is “meant, purely as meant”—by being and non-being he cannot mean here the same as being and non-being as preceding the reduction and therefore bearing upon the world (i). The distinction between two senses of Sein leads to a differentiation within the dreadful notion of Gegebene. As Husserl points out in Meditation III: “There is need of a constitutional theory of what is always given as being [als immer seiend gegebenen] and that is likewise always presupposed: a constitutional theory of physical nature, of man, of human community, of culture and so on” (Husserl 1950a, 98). In this passage, notably in the phrase “always given as being” [als immer seiend gegebene], Sein refers to what is given before the reduction and that is not yet a correlative title for reason (i). There seems then to be a difference, say, between what is given as being (before the reduction) and being which (once accomplished the reduction) is nothing but a correlative title for reason. By analogy with (A), we might represent the just sketched state of affairs as follows: “As always given as being”

Reduction

Being = Given

Being

≠

Given

Pregnant Concept Correlative Title for Reason

Self-Givenness

of Constitution

The diagram is to be read, from left to right, in the following manner: what precedes the reduction (the equivalence being = given) is to be taken as meaning the same as Sellars’ conflation of esse et concipi; what is imposes (or gives) its ontological seal on the melted wax of consciousness. Yet, as we move right, the phenomenological reduction breaks the above equivalence once and for all and brings about a transformation of both “being” and the “given”. The latter concept then turns into the notion (introduced in Meditation III) of Selbst-Gegebenheit, while the former is to be construed as a “correlative title” for Vernunft. The aspect to stress is that the accomplishment of the reduction does not affect only the idea of “being,” but that of “given” as well: there occurs a differentiation within the notion of Gegebene which corresponds to the differentiation within the notion of Sein. As was already the case with Sellars, here, too, the notion of “evidence” connects two concepts: it relates the concepts of “self-givenness” and “being” to each other as a correlative title for “reason.” 7. The notion of evidence—and Husserl speaks of “evidence as self-givenness” (§ 24: Evidenz als Selbstgegebenheit und ihre Abwandlungen)—polarizes all the ambiguity of the phenomenological discourse. On the one hand, it consists “in the self-appearance, self-exhibition and self-givenness of a thing, a state of affairs, a universality, a value and so on…” (Husserl 1950a, 92). In this sense, as Sellars says,

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many things “have been said to be given”); on the other hand, however, “every right [Recht] comes from evidence, hence from our transcendental subjectivity itself; every imaginable adequation originates as our verification, is our synthesis, has in us its ultimate transcendental basis” (Husserl 1950a, 95). Rather than connecting—as in Sellars’ “threefold critique”—the epistemological argument and the metaphysical “confusion,” the notion of “evidence” brings about that what is given (as before the reduction) is now self-given as the result of a synthesis. This is what Husserl means by “being” as a correlative title for reason. As a consequence, when he contends that by accomplishing the “epoché we effect a reduction to our pure intention (cogito) and to the meant, purely as meant,” Husserl means that “being” is reduced, not to its being represented (as in Brandom’s analysis of “the period initiated by Descartes”), but to its self-givenness (Selbst-­ Gegebenheit) as the result of a synthesis or, once again, as a “correlative title” for reason (Vernunft) as a system of syntheses. Moreover, over the course of Meditation IV Husserl does not fail to explicitly recognize and stress the distinction between two forms of synthesis: there is indeed a “passive” as well as an “active” form of synthesis. As is well known, the former is based on the notion of “association” as a title for intentionality and is thereby “a fundamental concept belonging to transcendental phenomenology;” on the contrary, the so-called active synthesis is the one that “on the basis of objects already given […] constitutes new objects originally:” “in collecting, the collection; in counting, the number; in dividing, the part; in predicating, the predicate and the predicative state of affairs; in inferring, the inference.” (Husserl 1950a, 111–114). If, at this point, we recall what Sellars claimed about the “epistemological argument” and the non-inferential foundation (“a fact which presupposes no learning, no forming of associations”), we can argue not only that Husserl does not at all fall prey to such a “reproach,” but that he points out the relations between two levels of synthesis, and thereby of evidence, which rule out, once and for all, that very same critique. For, if it is the case that Husserl thinks of predicative evidence in terms of difference between mediate and immediate judgments, it is also the case that the “immediate” ones bear directly upon “pre-predicative” evidence, not, to quote Sellars, “as a fact which presupposes no learning, no forming of associations”, but precisely as a network of “associations” (i.e., of passive syntheses). 8. Let us summarize our arguments up to this point and move toward the conclusion. After having introduced and explained the essential core of Sellars’ “Myth of the Given” (what we referred to as “the threefold critique,” entailing two variations upon the Myth, the “anti-Cartesian tale,” and the “conceptual holism”), we have switched to the Cartesian Meditations. We have shown not only that Husserl’s phenomenology (as a philosophy of Gegebenheit kat’exochen) is not at all subject to that critique, but also tried to expound on what Husserl means by Cartésien. Indeed, once the reduction is performed and accomplished, the concept of “being” is reduced, not to its being-represented (as directly and polemically claimed by Brandom), but to its being “self-given” as a correlative title for a system of syntheses.

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In a nutshell: evidence is precisely this “synthetic-self-givenness” to consciousness. Husserl goes on to differentiate the concept of synthesis by emphasizing a distinction between active (predicative activity of reason) and passive synthesis, the latter being made out of “associations” construed as a “transcendental” concept. In so doing, Husserl does not simply avoid, but seems to be even able to overcome once and for all the Myth as rightly denounced by Sellars. This latter aspect allows us to make a further point. As is quite known, John McDowell rephrases Sellars’ understanding of the Myth by saying that it entails the “idea that the space of reasons […] extends more widely than the conceptual sphere” or that it is “made out to be more extensive than the space of concepts.” (McDowell 1996, 6 and 7) All the ambiguity derives from the English word “reason,” which might be taken as translating two different German words, thereby meaning two different notions: Grund as well as Vernunft. “Reason” might then mean Grund in the sense in which the reason (Grund) for a judgment “lies” in another judgment— like in Sellars’ motto “to give and ask for reasons,” which is usually translated “im Geben und Verlangen von Gründen” (or, as Davidson used to claim, “only a belief can be a reason [it would read: Grund] for another belief”); yet, reason might also mean Vernunft as the faculty of inference.17 In this case, of course, the former meaning immediately leads to the latter; to give or ask for reasons means to give or ask for Gründe and then for connections of judgments in such and such an inference.18 The purpose of such an assimilation or conjunction of Grund and Vernunft is to undermine the idea itself of a “foundation” (Grund-legung) of the logical dimension upon the non-logical one, which would also be “non-inferential.”19 Brandom points out: “Sellars’ suggestion is that the key element missing from the parrot and the measuring instrument […] is their mastery of the practices of giving and asking for reasons, in which their responses can play a role as justifying beliefs and claims [beliefs and claims meaning Gründe].” Then, as he goes on to say: “To grasp or understand a concept is […] to have practical mastery over the inferences it is involved in [in this case he means Vernunft].”20 Now, as we already know, Husserl  As Brandom (2009, 2–3 points out): “To be a rational being [i.e., to have Vernunft] in this sense is to be subject to a distinctive kind of normative appraisal: assessment if the reasons [read Gründe] for what one does—in the sense of ‘doing’ that is marked off by its liability to just that sort of appraisal. Rational beings [read with Vernunft] are ones that ought to have reasons [read Gründe] for what they do, and ought to act, as they have reason to [read Grund]”. 18  Brandom (2009, 4): “Reasons are construed as premises, from which one can draw conclusions.” 19  The key passage upon which McDowell’s and Brandom’s interpretation rely is the famous § 38: “I do wish to insist that the metaphor of ‘foundation’ is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former” (Sellars 1997, 78). See Brandom (1994, 90–91, 2011, 87), where he claims that for any judgment “to be a potential bit of knowledge or evidence […], it must be able to play a distinctive role in reasoning: it must be able to serve as a reason for further judgments, claims, or beliefs, hence as a premise from which they can be inferred.” See also McDowell (2009, 221–223). 20  Or, in other words, “The parrot does not treat ‘That’s red’ as incompatible with ‘That’s green,’ nor as following from ‘That’s scarlet’ and entailing ‘That’s colored’” (Brandom 1994, 89). 17

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takes Vernunft to refer not to “an accidental and factual faculty” (Husserl 1950a, 92)21 but to a “system” of syntheses, of which the so-called predicative one (“reason” meaning here a judgment’s being grounded (Grund) upon another one in an inferential connection22), as a form of active synthesis, is not but a specification. If it is the case that, in Husserl, “the space of reasons extends more widely than the conceptual sphere”, it is not because there would be “non-conceptual” reasons (as Gründe), but precisely because “reason” (namely, Vernunft) embraces active (predicative or inferential) as well as passive (pre-predicative or associative) forms of syntheses (that is to say, of evidence and self-givenness).23 If now we return to our “logical atomist,” we cannot forget that he referred to Sellars’ writing as “incipient,” namely, not yet fully accomplished Méditations Hégéliennes; it is as if Sellars himself were somehow aware of his being only halfway through it. If we consider now the developments of such Méditations, it might be pointed out that whereas McDowell mainly focused on taking to the next level both (A) and (B), Brandom, in turn, developed further (B) and (C). Now, these developments of that “incipient” Hegelianism have thus far led to two variations on what has been recently labeled “Myth of the Thought” (Mythe de la pensée24), meaning that all forms of reason are assimilated to the “inferential” one (as it happens in Brandom), or that all norms and constraints of experience stem directly from “within the practice of thinking” (as claimed by McDowell 2009, 105). As we might want to claim and argue by rephrasing Rorty: it seems necessary to go back to those incipient Méditations—and to the “critique” of the Given they propound—in order to usher them out of their Hegelian stage and into the stage of a phenomenological self-comprehension. Acknowledgment  This work was supported by the European Regional Development FundProject “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).

 See Husserl (1950a, 92).  Consider the following passages from the Prolegomena (where Husserl speaks of both Grund and Begründung): “A group of isolated bits of chemical knowledge would certainly not justify talk of a science of chemistry. More is plainly required, i.e., a systematic connection in the theoretical sense, which means finding grounds [Begründung] for one’s knowing, and suitably combining and arranging the sequence of such groundings” (Husserl 1984a, 14–15); “The unity of science involves unity of the foundational connections [Begründungszusammenhängen]: not only isolated pieces of knowledge, but their grounded validations themselves;” “Connections of validation [Begründungszusammenhängen] are not governed by caprice or chance, but by reason and order” (Husserl 1984a, 15 and 18). 23  It is interesting to notice that Brandom takes up the concept of “synthesis” by explicitly interpreting it in “linguistic” terms Brandom (2009, 52–77): “Autonomy, Community and Freedom”, 78–108: “History, Reason and Reality”. For an analysis of the problem of synthesis in Husserl, see De Santis (2018a, b); for what concerns the notion of reason, see De Santis (2018c). 24  Benoist (2004). 21 22

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