Husserl: German Perspectives 9780823284481

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Husserl

Husserl German Perspectives

John J. Drummond and Otfried Höffe, Editors

Translated by

Hayden Kee, Patrick Eldridge, and Robin Litscher Wilkins fordham university press New York 2019

Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Drummond, John J., 1945– editor. Title: Husserl : German perspectives / John J. Drummond and Otfried Höffe, editors. Description: New York, NY : Fordham University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019004355 | ISBN 9780823284467 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Husserl, Edmund, 1859–1938. Classification: LCC B3279.H94 H88125 2019 | DDC 193—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004355 Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

contents

Introduction john j. drummond and otfried höffe

1

Part I phenomenology and its methodology 1.

The Problem of Psychologism and the Idea of a Phenomenological Science sonja rinofner-kreidl

2.

Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Motives Leading to Its Transformation ludwig landgrebe

3.

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What Is Phenomenology? jan patočka

4.

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The Phenomenological Method of Eidetic Intuition and Its Clarification as Eidetic Variation dieter lohmar

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Part II aspects of intentionality 5.

Intentionality and the Intentional Object in the Early Husserl karl schuhmann

6.

The Significance of Objectifying Acts in Husserl’s Fifth Investigation verena mayer and christopher erhard

7.

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The Phenomenology of Time Following Husserl klaus held

9.

163

Objectifying and Nonobjectifying Acts ullrich melle

8.

141

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Phenomenological Concepts of Untruth in Husserl and Heidegger rudolf bernet

239

vi

Contents Part III subjectivity and culture

10. Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Monad: Remarks on Husserl’s Confrontation with Leibniz karl mertens

265

11. Husserl’s Phenomenology: Philosophia Perennis in the Crisis of European Culture elisabeth ströker

288

12. Philosophy of Culture and Cultural Anthropology as Transcendental Phenomenology ernst wolfgang orth

Acknowledgments List of Contributors Index

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343 345 349

Husserl

Introduction John J. Drummond and Otfried Höffe

Edmund Husserl, generally regarded as the founding figure of the philosophical movement of phenomenology—or, more precisely, transcendental phenomenology— exerted an enormous influence on the course of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy. This influence was both positive and negative. The subsequent developments of, for example, existentialism, hermeneutics, and deconstruction were defined in part by how they both assimilated and departed from Husserlian views. The course of what has come to be called “continental philosophy” cannot be described without reference to this assimilation and departure and, among the many successor approaches, phenomenology remains a viable alternative. In addition, problems addressed by Husserl—most notably, intentionality, consciousness, the emotions, and ethics— are of central concern in so-called analytic philosophy. So, Husserl’s views remain central to many contemporary philosophical discussions. The aim of this volume is to collect and to translate previously untranslated articles written by important German-speaking commentators on Husserl; hence, these German perspectives detail not only Husserl’s phenomenology but point toward his confrontation with other significant 1

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figures in the history of German-language philosophy, both ancestors and heirs. In selecting articles to translate, we have focused our attention on three problematics within phenomenology: the nature and method of phenomenology; intentionality (the “main theme of phenomenology”1) along with its attendant problems of temporality and subjectivity; and intersubjectivity and culture. Finally, we have selected commentators from a time span that encompasses both Husserl’s contemporaries and our own. Phenomenology for Husserl is a descriptive science of the essential structures of experiences and of their objects just as experienced. Husserl rejects both empirical naturalism and neo-Kantian idealism. Against both, he insists that philosophical reflection return, as he put it, zu den Sachen selbst—to the things themselves, the matters at hand, exactly as they are given to us in experience. The experiences and their objects are to be described free of both epistemological presuppositions and metaphysical constructions about how things are. These descriptions address the issue of how objective knowledge arises in and for the experiencing subject. They are in the ser vice of an account of reason, understood by Husserl as a striving for “evidence,” that is, for experiences in which the subject directly, distinctly, and clearly intuits the things themselves. These evidential experiences take dif ferent forms in knowing and the theoretical sciences, in valuing and the axiological sciences, and in willing and the practical sciences. In all three domains, however, experiential life is aimed at living a life of reason, of having evidence for one’s judgments and beliefs, and of taking responsibility for those judgments and beliefs. While studying mathematics in Vienna from 1881 to 1882 and again from 1884 to 1886, Husserl attended the philosophy lectures of Franz Brentano which profoundly influenced his philosophical development. Husserl then studied with Brentano’s former student Carl Stumpf at Halle and in 1887 submitted his Habilitationsschrift titled Über den Begriff der Zahl: Psychologische Analysen (“On the Concept of Number: Psychological Analyses”). In this work Husserl turned to the philosophical analysis of the methods and foundations of mathematics. Husserl would later extend this kind of analysis to logic and, ultimately, to all experience. Husserl served as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887 to 1901. During that period, he wrote the Philosophie der Arithmetik (Philosophy of Arithmetic),2 the first four chapters of which are a slight revision of his Habilitationsschrift. In this work Husserl also seeks to clarify the relations between mathematics and logic and to consider the possibility that a philosophical account of mathematics and logic could serve as the foundation for all other theoretical sciences insofar as it could serve as a theory of science. He aims

Introduction

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to offer an account of those experiences that are sufficiently secure to provide evidence for more complex experiences, including mathematical experiences. To carry out this project, Husserl utilized Brentano’s “descriptive psychology,” but by the time of the work’s publication, Husserl was already dissatisfied with parts of it—in particular, the account of the “inauthentic” presentation of the higher cardinal numbers—on account of their “psychologism.” Husserl came to recognize that these analyses reduced the ideality of numbers and their relations to the reality of psychological acts and their relations; put differently, they reduced the transcendence of the logical content of the experiences to the immanence of their psychological contents. Husserl’s sustained and definitive critique of psychologism in logic appeared in 1900 in the prolegomena to Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations),3 and the critique is generalizable to any empiricist philosophy that reduces the ideality and objectivity of meaning to subjective, psychological or mental contents. Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl’s contribution to this volume is a detailed discussion of the nature of psychologism and the efficacy of Husserl’s critique. Rinofner-Kreidl notes that the underlying—and more important—problem concerns the question of what a philosophical science should look like, the problem she calls the “problem of scientificity.” She argues, first, that the critique of logical psychologism reveals that the problem raised by psychologism is fundamentally a problem of determining the proper philosophical standpoint and, second, that this critique consequently played a central and decisive role in the development of Husserl’s phenomenology. This proper standpoint incorporated a commitment to the presuppositionless description of essential structures of experience, and from this perspective, Husserl was able to see that his initial response to psychologism was inadequate insofar as it focused on the consequences of psychologism rather than its presuppositions. The rejection of psychologism requires an account of the relation of the objective or transcendent content of experience to the mind. Husserl’s task in the second volume of Logical Investigations,4 then, is to provide an account of how ideal meanings are related both to a subject’s experiences and to the objects, whether existent or not, of such experiences. Central to this account is the notion of intentionality, which in Husserl’s view encompasses all of phenomenology. Brentano had revived this notion, and under his influence and because meaning and objects are inseparable from psychological experiences, Husserl first adopts Brentano’s method of descriptive psychology. Husserl soon recognized, however, that the name “descriptive psychology” misleads both because it invites misunderstanding as referring

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to an empirical science and, more importantly, because it focuses attention solely on the subjective conditions of objective knowledge. More specifically, descriptive psychology restricts the proper object of description to what is really inherent to psychological experience. So, whereas Husserl in the first edition of the Investigations identifies phenomenological contents with the really inherent, psychological contents and distinguishes these phenomenological contents from intentional contents, by the time of the second edition in 1913, he recognizes that an account of intentionality cannot focus exclusively on the subjective conditions of objective knowledge and defines phenomenological contents as inclusive of both really inherent and intentional contents. On the basis of this insight, he develops the notion of intentionality in radically new directions in the first volume of a planned three-volume work titled Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy), also published in 1913.5 What had intervened between the first and second editions to motivate this change? First, by focusing on the subjective aspects of experience without any appeal to the intended object itself, Husserl came suspiciously close to a psychologism that transforms ideal meanings into aspects of the experience. Husserl tried to avoid such a conclusion by claiming that the subjective aspects of the experience accounting for the significance of the object were an instantiation of an ideal essence. This was thought to preserve the ideality of objective meaning. But it did so at the cost of incorporating a notion of ideal essences that, precisely because it is prior to experience, could not be justified on phenomenological grounds. Second, Husserl’s distinction between empty and full intentions cannot be adequately articulated apart from references to the significance belonging to the object itself. Empty intentions make present (vergegenwärtigen) to the mind an object that is, in actuality, absent (expressive, linguistic experience is the exemplar), whereas full intentions intuitively present (gegenwärtigen) an existent object to the mind (here perception is the exemplar). When the full intention presents the object as it was emptily intended, the full intention is a fulfilling intention. Since fulfilling acts intuitively present the objects emptily intended, the sense of the fulfilling act, if it is to be truly fulfilling, must be rooted, at least in part, in the object itself rather than in an ideal meaning-species. It is the sense of the object, the significance it has for us in its actual presence, that fulfills or disappoints what was emptily intended. Only then can we speak of the veridicality or truth of experience. The implication of this is that we must bring the object just

Introduction

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as it appears in an experience within the scope of a phenomenological description of that experience. Such considerations led Husserl to undertake a thoroughgoing epistemological critique of experience that eventually resulted in his mature transcendental phenomenology. From a methodological point of view, Husserl was led to develop his notion of the phenomenological or transcendental reduction as the proper means to focus his research on intentionality and the correlation of subject and object. The phenomenological reduction is a methodological device that is, first of all, a change in attitude. Husserl notes that our ordinary experience takes for granted the existence of a world of objects. In the change to the phenomenological attitude, we suspend our participation in that natural, naïve belief in the existence of the world and its objects so as to consider objects exclusively as they present themselves in experience. This is dif ferent from Cartesian doubt whose distinguishing characteristic is its negation—that is, its methodological counting as false—of the positing of an object’s existence or the validity of a judgment. What is distinctive about the phenomenological reduction is not the negation of the general positing characteristic of ordinary experience but its withholding affirmation of that positing. The content is not negated; the acceptance of the naïve belief in the existence of the world is suspended in order to hold those experiences reflectively before ourselves as experiences whose structures and validity are to be examined. The objectivities given in experience are not lost to reflection but are instead considered only as presumed existents. They remain available for reflection just insofar as they are experienced, although the existential index attaching to them has been neutralized. Their status as objects of experience has been modified such that they are now viewed exclusively in their being as objects of the experience in which they are experienced. There are three implications to this change of attitude: (1) our attention is turned to the intentional correlation between experience and objects just as experienced; (2) our attention is turned from objects as having significance for us to the significance objects have for us (i.e., as meaningful for subjects in determinate ways); and (3) our attention is turned to the subject of experience and to the first-personal perspective that inescapably belongs to experience. Having adopted this phenomenological attitude, we are no longer focused on experiences as real entities or events in the world, as was the psychology of the time. Instead, the phenomenologist seeks to discover the essential (intentional) structures of any possible experience

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and of objects as experienced. Hence, the phenomenological reduction has a transcendental character, revealing the first-personal perspective of any possible experience and revealing the subject as a source (in part) of the meaning of things insofar as the subject brings an experiential history, interests, concerns, and commitments to its encounter with things such that certain features of things become salient for the subject. Husserl refined and expanded his understanding of phenomenological methodology over his career, and it was further refined by subsequent phenomenologists. The essays by Ludwig Landgrebe, Jan Patočka, and Dieter Lohmar address this methodology. Landgrebe explores the continuity in Husserl’s thought—both methodological and substantive— throughout his career, but also the reasons why subsequent thinkers differed and deviated from Husserl’s views. Two motifs, according to Landgrebe, characterized Husserl’s early philosophy: an “eidetic-psychological” one concerned to disclose essential structures of experience, and an “ontological” one that sought to preserve the objectivity and ideality of meaning. For Husserl, these two motifs were inseparable, but his first followers tended to focus on one or the other of them. The philosopher who best understood the unity of these motifs in Husserl’s thought was Martin Heidegger, who reinterpreted Husserl’s phenomenology in a way that, according to Landgrebe, was an attempt to express “the proper intention of phenomenology in a more precise form.” Landgrebe explores this Heideggerian reinterpretation in its relation to Husserl’s original motivations. Patočka also considers the relation between Husserl and Heidegger, but his discussion is rooted in Husserl’s later discussions of intersubjectivity in Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis.6 His aim is not primarily to disclose the differences between Husserl and Heidegger— although he does do that—but to find the point of unity between them so that their philosophies can both be called “phenomenology.” Patočka finds this unity in phenomenology’s radical reflection on the crisis of humanity by way of a methodology that in its consideration of the human strives for an impartiality that annuls the presuppositions of the positive sciences. Lohmar takes up another leg of phenomenology’s methodology: eidetic intuition achieved through imaginative variations of both experiences and entities. This methodology, when applied to the essential structures of consciousness, opposes an empirical psychology that must rest on empirical generalizations. Lohmar clarifies the sense in which eidetic or imaginative intuition is a form of cognition and how it yields knowledge of a priori structures in Husserl’s sense, that is, necessary and universal structures, without falling into a kind of Platonism that hypostasizes what is essential

Introduction

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to a type. He also explores the intimate connection between “free phantasy” or imaginative variation and the resultant eidetic intuition. In concluding, Lohmar discusses a series of potential difficulties with the notions of eidetic variation and intuition. Husserl’s methodology is aimed at opening up a field of transcendental research, namely, the subjective achievements in which the object is disclosed in a determinate manner. These achievements have a certain kind of priority over the objects they disclose, and the investigation of them reveals how it is that we come to experience the objects in those determinate manners, how our dif ferent experiences are related to one another— and, therefore, how the dif ferent kinds and levels of objectivity are related— and, finally, how our experience confirms or disconfirms in fulfilling intentions what was merely emptily intended. The development of this specifically phenomenological methodology led Husserl to important revisions of his early writings on intentionality. Much of the existing commentary on Husserl’s account of intentionality focuses on the later theory with its controversial notion of the noema. Nevertheless, certain features of his early account are fundamental to understanding aspects of the later views, and the essays by Karl Schuhmann, Verena Mayer and Christopher Erhard, and Ullrich Melle investigate important features of the early theory. Schuhmann challenges the widely held view that Husserl’s early account of intentionality was a simple and direct development of Brentano’s theory. Husserl’s theory developed, according to Schuhmann, as a response to the account of intentionality in Kazimierz Twardowski’s On the Content and Object of Presentations.7 Schuhmann notes that Twardowski and Husserl shared Brentano as a teacher and that Twardowski thought Brentano’s theory inadequate to address Bolzano’s problem of objectless presentations.8 He argues that Husserl’s account, which differs from both Brentano’s and Twardowski’s, satisfactorily addressed this problem. Later developments in Husserl’s theory, he concludes, were the result of attempting to address problems other than the Bolzano problem. Mayer and Erhard’s and Melle’s essays take up Husserl’s notion of “objectifying acts.” These are experiences that present an object either emptily or intuitively, and they differ from non-objectifying acts. Mayer and Erhard trace in detail Husserl’s reconstruction of the concept of presentation (Vorstellung) and his transformation of Brentano’s thesis that all acts are either presentations or founded on presentations into the thesis that all acts are either objectifying or based on objectifications. This study reveals that, for Husserl, the intentionality-characteristic of any particular

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experience depends upon objectivating acts. Since all other kinds of experiences beyond the objectifications in perception (of things) and judgments (of states of affairs pertaining to things) depend on these underlying objectifications, the intentionality of these other kinds of experience—their directedness to an object— can be properly understood only in the light of the notion of objectifying acts. Mayer and Eberhard are careful to note, however, that although non-objectifying acts are grounded in objectifications, they cannot be reduced to the objectifying acts. Whereas Mayer and Erhard take a microscopic look at objectifying acts, Melle takes a macroscopic look at the distinction between objectifying and non-objectifying acts. The latter, in reacting to the objects presented in objectifying acts, reveal further, nonmaterial determinations of objects, most notably, the value of the objects or states of affairs presented. A value, in turn, motivates desire, choice, and action. Melle explores the distinction and relations between the three classes of experience (logical-cognitive or intellective, evaluative, and practical) in order to reveal how Husserl tried to navigate between two theories of reason— a pure intellectualism on the one hand and a pure emotivism on the other— and how these two views of reason affected Husserl’s accounts of the three domains of reason (logical-intellective, axiological, and practical), each with its own form of justification. Husserl envisioned these three domains of reason in a determinate relationship: axiological reason is grounded in and dependent upon logical-cognitive reason and practical reason is grounded in and dependent upon axiological reason. The discussions of objectifying and non-objectifying acts point in the direction of Husserl’s ontology of possible objects of experience. The study of the intentional correlation, however, is also concerned with the structures of subjectivity, the most important of which for Husserl is the nontemporal structure of the living present that underlies the temporalization of the subject’s experiences (and of objective time). Klaus Held’s essay considers Husserl’s account of the consciousness of inner time in order to provide a critique of Husserl’s discussions of the temporality of the phenomenal field. Focusing on the latter allows Held to articulate more clearly both the structure of time as the dimensional character of the phenomenal field and the manner in which transcendent objects and their temporality are disclosed within the phenomenal field. Intentionality has an internal telos that is realized in the movement from empty intentions to fulfilling intentions. The recognition of the identity between the object as meant in the empty intention and the object as experienced in the fulfilling intuition is the experience of truth. Rudolf Ber-

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net’s essay indirectly clarifies the notion of truth by examining the concept of “true untruth” (as opposed to falsity) found in Heidegger. Heidegger’s understanding of truth is rooted in Husserl’s idea that truth is oriented to the “conditions, circumstances, and scope of the manifestation of the true essence of beings,” but Heidegger’s exploration of untruth pushes him beyond Husserl’s analysis of truth. The guiding idea for the concept of true untruth is Husserl’s discussion of how empty intentions can involve truth as agreement with reality but yet fall short of truth in the sense of an evidenced or fulfilled intention. It is the latter notion that is the fundamental sense of truth. Hence, the empty intention is “untrue” in the sense that it lacks evidence, although it can be true in the sense of agreement; it is a “true untruth” as opposed to false. Heidegger in Being and Time presents a similar account, although his account of untruth appeals, by contrast, to a comportment of Dasein that at once discloses and closes off the thing’s uncovering such that the thing appears with a sheen of superficial evidence. Bernet argues further that the later Heidegger shifts the center of the account of true untruth from Dasein’s comportment to the event of unconcealment, the “letting things be,” and Dasein’s free openness to this event. The final group of papers attends more directly to questions of intersubjectivity, history, and culture raised in Husserl’s late works. Karl Mertens explores Husserl’s phenomenological interpretation and reappropriation of Leibniz’s monadology. Mertens argues that the differences between Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity and Leibniz’s monadology are serious enough to defeat any attempt to construct a phenomenological monadology. According to Mertens, monadological thinking cannot solve the phenomenological problem of intersubjectivity, and phenomenological thinking cannot yield a properly metaphysical monadology, for there can be no phenomenological grounding for the idea of a monad determined by a complete concept. From the phenomenological perspective, a subject’s experience of the world is always limited and incomplete. Mertens argues, furthermore, that Husserl’s attempt at a monadology reveals the weakness in the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity, for by starting with a subject’s limited experience, phenomenology cannot account for the communalization which is presupposed in the recognition that an individual’s experience is limited. Elisabeth Ströker, in a lecture delivered on the fiftieth anniversary of Husserl’s death, takes up a recurring theme in Husserl’s phenomenology: the crisis of European culture and, more specifically, the crisis of reason that manifests itself in the failure of the positive sciences to understand their origins and their lack of a fully scientific methodology. Husserl’s

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phenomenology, in Ströker’s view, is an attempt to return to those origins—to things and states of affairs simply as they present themselves to experiencing subjects—and to proceed with a rigorous methodology to examine them and articulate their essential structures. Only in this way are we able to understand higher-order cultural achievements of the sort we find in the positive and formal sciences. These sciences belong to a tradition and, Ströker notes, Husserl extended his analyses to consider the formation and transmission of traditions, including the dangers lurking in tradition when we passively accept its results without actively appropriating their truth. It is that passive acceptance that motivates the crisis in European culture that so concerned Husserl. Husserl’s aim, for Ströker, was to restore the original Greek idea of philosophy as a guide to living well on the basis of rational insight. Finally, Ernst Wolfgang Orth considers the relations among the philosophy of culture, cultural anthropology, and transcendental phenomenology. Husserl’s concern was to focus on the nature of rational subjectivity, rather than the human as such, in order to ground the sciences and develop a philosophical science. To the extent that humans are rational beings, Husserl’s philosophy thematized humans, but, so the argument goes, it was concerned with humans only as instances of rationality rather than in their existential reality. However, Orth argues that Husserl began his philosophizing with anthropological motives and that Husserl’s later philosophy realizes an expanded philosophical anthropology or, better, “anthropological philosophy.” This anthropological philosophy integrates philosophy and anthropology in a manner that rises above particular anthropological orientations and clarifies the very notion of orientation itself. The articles collected in this volume, written by a broad range of commentators from contemporaries of Husserl to contemporary philosophers, manifest a broad range of phenomenological concerns. Taken together, they display the centrality of the issues Husserl addressed in his phenomenology and of the ways his work has been interpreted in the years since his death to the philosophical discourse of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Notes 1. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 187 [translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom as Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2014), 161].

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2. Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik, ed. Lothar Eley (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970) [translated by Dallas Willard as Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003)]; for “Über den Begriff der Zahl,” see 289–339 [“On the Concept of Number,” 305–358]. 3. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Erster Band, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed. Elmar Holenstein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975) [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970)], 1:51–247. 4. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984) [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970)]. 5. The second and third volumes were published posthumously as Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952) [translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989)]; and Drittes Buch, Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) [translated by Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book, Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980)]. 6. Respectively, Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973) [translated by Dorion Cairns as Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960)], and Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954) [translated by David Carr as The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970)]. 7. Kazimierz Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen: Eine psychologische Untersuchung (Vienna: Philosophia Verlag, 1894) [translated by Reinhardt Grossmann as On the Content and Object of Presentations: A Psychological Investigation (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977)]. 8. Cf. Bernard Bolzano, Wissenschaftslehre: Versuch einer ausführlichen und großtenteils neuen Darstellung der Logik mit steter Rücksicht auf deren bisherige Bearbeiter (Sulzbach: J. E. v. Seidel, 1837), 1:304.

The Problem of Psychologism and the Idea of a Phenomenological Science Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl

The so-called psychologism controversy is, in the narrow sense, a controversy concerning whether the task of establishing the validity of the logical laws rests on logic or psychology. In the broader sense, it concerns the delimitation of the boundary between philosophy and psychology. The fact that the dispute concerning the relationship of philosophy to the other sciences at the end of the nineteenth century erupted in a psychologism controversy (or, the fact that this controversy could become the venue for the dispute concerning the relationship of philosophy to the positive sciences) is indicative of a problematic specific to its time. This problematic showed philosophy to be tightly intertwined materially, personally, and institutionally with psychology, which was diversifying rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century in its line of inquiry and method as it was striving to gain independence. The case of psychophysics and experimental psychology makes it clear that this process was greeted by psychologists as one that made their research more scientific because it separated it from philosophy. It was this tendency that ultimately prevailed despite isolated protests raised for the sake of the quality of psychological research (e.g., from Wilhelm Wundt). Viewed externally, the historical end of the psychologism 15

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controversy was ushered in with the institutional division of philosophy and psychology. Viewed substantively, it lies in the restriction of the former epistemological or metaphysical logic to formal logic. At the same time, the separation of modern logic from the old philosophical logic, much like the separation of experimental psychology from philosophy, was promoted as a way of making their work scientific. It thus does not seem exaggerated to understand the psychologism controversy as a symptom of philosophy’s struggle for legitimation in the postmetaphysical era. This struggle was conducted internally as a dispute concerning direction and externally as a dispute concerning boundaries. In both cases the delimitation that was called for or rejected rested upon the (implicit) presupposition of a determinate conception of philosophy and science. If the psychologism controversy is in fact such a symptom, then this strengthens the suspicion that its institutional and definitional termination cannot count as a “natural” end to the dispute, and that this dispute extends far beyond the primary controversy concerning the foundation of logic. The greater historical meaning of the psychologism controversy is not to be sought in its immediate object, but rather in that of which the controversy is a symptom. The fundamental problem is the problem of scientificity. It is the task of philosophy to clarify where this scientificity of the sciences is grounded and in the process to ground itself as scientific. With an eye toward the justification of claims to knowledge, this way of stating the problem can be developed in various directions and named in dif ferent ways: “genesis versus validity,” “empiricism versus apriorism,” “relativism versus absolutism,” and “subjectivism versus objectivism,” among others. Which terminology is selected and how it is understood is essentially dependent upon one’s view of the matter.1 Beyond all terminological and polemical disputes, every philosophical approach must take a stance on the problem of scientificity. Historical inspection shows that both psychologistic (e.g., Beneke, Lipps) as well as antipsychologistic conceptions of logic (e.g., Bolzano, Cohen) either were passed off as “rescue attempts” for a philosophical science or were intended as a scientific substitute for a philosophy that no one was willing to advocate any longer. Proponents and opponents of psychologism as well as the representatives of distinct psychologistic and antipsychologistic approaches disagreed about the concept of a philosophical science. The myriad definitions of psychologism proposed by the various parties also show that a conflict of scientific standpoints was at stake in the psychologism controversy. How psychologism was defined determined which strategies were pursued in combating or defending it. In a conflict of standpoints, it is to be expected neither that the

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opponents in the dispute will reach an agreement concerning premises nor that there are only material differences and not methodological ones. In this dispute, the exchange of material solutions to problems offers fewer prospects for acquiring knowledge than does reflection concerning the (respective) manners of stating the problem. To the extent that the psychologism controversy is to be understood as a conflict of standpoints (or, to the extent that it was conducted in a way that is representative of a conflict of standpoints), a confrontation between psychologistic and antipsychologistic arguments only promises to advance knowledge if it occurs on the basis of a determinate standpoint. This essay clarifies the connection between the problem of psychologism and the problem of scientificity in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. First, I will summarize the principal arguments in the critique of logical psychologism from the first volume of Logical Investigations (Prolegomena to Pure Logic, 1900), interrogating the justification of this critique as well as its underlying concept of psychologism. Then I will advance the thesis that the problem of psychologism is a problem of standpoint and as such played a decisive role in the development of phenomenology. Specifically, this is so because the transition from the descriptive psychology of the second volume of Logical Investigations (Investigations in Phenomenology and the Theory of Knowledge, 1901) to transcendental phenomenology can be traced back to Husserl’s insight into the inadequacy of the critique of psychologism in Logical Investigations. The expansion of the line of inquiry that resulted from this insight occurred on the groundwork of a new conception of philosophical science. According to the tenor of the contemporary critique and of the recent reception of Husserl’s work, the critique of psychologism in Logical Investigations is recognized as overcoming an early psychologistic phase of phenomenology and as a refutation of psychologism that is fundamentally compelling. Although the later development of phenomenology is exposed to incomparably stronger criticism, the following considerations are intended to show why—in view of what can be called “philosophical progress in questions of foundations”—we should maintain an opposite evaluation of this developmental trend, even though it provided no progress with respect to the material arguments against logical psychologism. (The fact that there is progress in the awareness of the problem admittedly does not exclude the possibility that transcendental phenomenology produces new problems [of foundations] in other respects.) The methodological orientation of the question requires that the discussion of the problem of psychologism fade into the background in the context of the doctrines of intentionality and meaning.

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The first volume of Logical Investigations seeks to lay the foundation for a pure logic as a universal doctrine of science. Logic is pure to the extent that it is a theoretical science that establishes its own foundations (fundamental concepts, principles) rather than inheriting them from other sciences. The initial contention of antipsychologism (“logical idealism”) is that only logic can ground itself. Accordingly, logic is an autonomous fundamental science. It is not dependent on other sciences. On the contrary, all knowledge in the individual sciences, with respect to its formal conditions, is dependent on pure logic. The principal arguments against a psychological interpretation of logic advanced in Prolegomena can be condensed into two groups: arguments against psychologism relating to its presuppositions and arguments against psychologism relating to its consequences. Arguments against psychologism relating to its presuppositions include: 1. Psychologism presupposes (explicitly or implicitly) that logic is applied logic or normative logic. This presupposition is unjustified. The sense-content of logical laws contains neither a relation to a thinking subject and the nomological connection of experiences of thinking nor a normative (regulative) claim (“If you want to think correctly, you must think in a way prescribed by the logical laws”).2 Every normative discipline rests upon a purely theoretical discipline whose object is the purely theoretical content, separated from all normative content, of the discipline concerned. The laws of pure logic can, for didactic reasons, be interpreted as normative. However, this interpretation concerns only their practical application, not the content of the propositions themselves. 2. Psychologism neglects or obscures the difference between the logical connection of the contents of thought and the psychological connection of the experiences of thinking. It presupposes that there is no essential difference between the two domains, so that it would be possible to speak of the one domain (logical laws) in the terminology of the other (experiences of thought). The real [reale] relationship of cause and effect takes the place of the logical relation of ground and consequence. It is a mistake to confuse the two, for doing so contradicts the proper essence of the logical objects. The law of noncontradiction, for example, is not about the inability to think two propositions that contradict one another at one and the same time but the objective incompatibility of the contents of those propositions.

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3. Psychologism disregards the difference between the sciences of idealities and the sciences of realities which is grounded in their respective object domain and the character of their respective laws. The laws of the empirical sciences are laws concerning matters of fact. The propositions of logic pronounce nothing concerning real objects and events. No logical law is a law of matters of fact. In particular, neither in accordance with their justification nor their content do logical laws presuppose anything psychological (“factuality of psychic life”). In Prolegomena to Pure Logic, the conflict between psychologism and antipsychologism bears the title “logical absolutism (logical idealism) versus relativistic (skeptical) psychologism.” In this title, the point of departure and the direction of the critique become clear. Its objective is to demonstrate the countersensical consequences of psychologism. Arguments against psychologism relating to its consequences include: 1. If the psychologistic interpretation of logic were correct, then logical laws would be psychological laws referring to experiences of thinking, and accordingly they would be laws of matters of fact acquired by means of inductive generalizations. As such, they would have only probable validity. Formal-logical laws, however, have a validity that is exact and necessary in the strict sense (independent of all experience). 2. Psychologism is, as an individual or specific (anthropological) relativism, a form of skepticism. It cancels itself out by violating the conditions of possibility of any theory whatsoever, specifically (a) the subjective-noetic conditions (e.g., evident judgments are to be distinguished from non-evident judgments) and (b) the objective-logical conditions (e.g., each science is a science on the basis of the unity of the connection to its grounding, which is why sciences presuppose the validity of the rules of deduction).3 Psychologistic approaches confuse the subjective-anthropological unity of cognition (a methodological unity of the specifically human attainment of cognition) with the objective-ideal unity of the content of cognition (the idea of the theoretical unity of truth). Psychologism is that position in the dispute about the grounding of the validity of logical laws according to which this validity can ensue only with the help of psychological regularities. These are generalizations of assertions about real acts of thinking. The universal hallmark of psychologism

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is an objective reductionism that reduces logic’s realm of objects to that of psychology and that results in a methodological and nomological reductionism. If the objects of logic are not ideal meanings but rather real, psychic experiences of meaning or thinking, then it is legitimate and appropriate to investigate these objects with psychological methods and to determine their mutual relations with the help of psychological regularities. Psychologistic conceptions of logic rest upon a mixing of domains that results not merely from a provisional delimitation of a domain too broadly defined but rather one that has a fundamental character.4 The view opposing logical psychologism, which can be designated as “logical idealism,” maintains, on the contrary, that the reductionism of psychologistic logic is untenable because, on the one hand, it is incompatible with the essence of logical objects as ideal objects, and, on the other, it leads to absurd consequences. The concept of validity, which includes no relationship whatsoever to a (real or ideal) subject, cannot be traced back to the fact of validity, that is, to the factual recognition of validity. An act of recognition of this kind presupposes the validity of logical laws. The central position in Prolegomena’s critique of psychologism is occupied by the refutation of the thesis that logic is nothing other than a technology of (correct) thinking and that it is thus legitimate to carry out a psychological investigation of logic.5 According to the opposing view, that of the critic of psychologism, the conception of logic as a normative discipline can only refer to the fact that logical laws provide a norm for correct thinking in their application to real acts of thought. A thinking that is to be correct must accord with logical laws. The norm prescribes which means must be embraced if a determinate goal is to be reached. To the extent that this goal—to think correctly— can be recognized as purposive, logic has the characteristic of a practical discipline. (What Husserl calls “normative logic” and occasionally “methodological logic” could less ambiguously be called “instrumental” or “practical logic.”6) At the same time, there is no normative judgment underlying the goal itself. The advocate of a normative logic does not maintain that it is good to judge correctly. Consequently, she also does not attempt to justify the recognition of norms by way of a philosophy of value or a moral philosophy in which she seeks to prove the validity of certain values. The task of logic as a normative science is merely to formulate the universal conditions of conformity (or nonconformity) to a norm, specifically the norm of scientificity (or theoreticity). As Husserl writes: “For it is of the essence of a normative science that it establishes general propositions in which, with an eye to a normative standard, an Idea

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or highest goal, certain features are mentioned whose possession guarantees conformity to that standard or sets forth an indispensable condition of the latter. A normative science also establishes cognate propositions in which the case of non- conformity is considered or the absence of such states of affairs is pronounced.”7 Drawing on a distinction made by Max Weber, one could say that normative logic establishes the conditions of fulfillment of a relation to a value without itself performing valuations. In this sense, it is characteristic of normative logic to describe norms, not to posit them. The critic of psychologism does not reject a normative interpretation of logic as such. The logical (and mathematical) laws have a “natural right to regulate our thought.”8 In its function as the universal doctrine of science, logic is normative with respect to the formal conditions of scientificity.9 If, however, the normative interpretation of logic serves as the basis [Grundlage] for a psychological grounding [Begründung] of logic, then the charge of confusing fields applies to this interpretation. Normative logic belongs to the “prejudices” of psychologism because it legitimizes the approach of psychologically grounding logic: The idea of normativization produces a relation between the logical object and psychic act, and with that it gives rise to the impression that psychic acts are of pressing relevance with respect to logic. A naturalistic fallacy is on hand if one maintains that the normativity of “ought” statements (“You ought to judge correctly”) is to be derived by establishing matters of fact about real processes of thought. The refutation of normative logic in Prolegomena is not to be understood eo ipso as a refutation of a naturalistic fallacy. Whether this objection pertains to a psychological logic in any given case depends on the position that logic takes with respect to the normative character of judgments. A normative interpretation of logic that takes itself to be an application of pure logic and whose laws are elucidated in reference to the logical ideal of consciousness in general does not represent a naturalization of the idea of correct judgment. On the contrary, we have a naturalistic reductionism in a psychological grounding of logic when two conditions are met: (1) One denies that a pure (theoretical) logic constitutes the basis of the normative interpretation (logical normativism). And (2) one does not merely make an assertion concerning acts that recognize logical norms as valid (i.e., an assertion concerning the facticity of validity), nor merely one concerning the factual (non)conformity to the conditions for the fulfillment of norms; rather, one presents statements of fact of this kind as grounding norms (naturalistic normativism). If one holds only (1) but not (2), then we have a psychologistic interpretation of logic.

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But this interpretation does not rest—at least, not necessarily—on a naturalistic fallacy. Just as it cannot be assumed that every psychologism is characterized by naturalistic normativism, neither can it be assumed that every logical normativism is connected to a psychologistic approach. Only when the latter is taken into account can it be established conversely, with Husserl, that an antipsychologism that operates with a normative logic cannot achieve an adequate critique of psychologism. When Husserl speaks in §41 of Prolegomena, in reference to the historical positions in the controversy, of an antipsychologistic normative logic, this refers to the selfunderstanding of some critics of psychologism and not to his own conception. A normative interpretation of logic can be the common presupposition of psychologistic and antipsychologistic positions. A conception that is not only normative, but, in accordance with assertion (1) above, normativistic, can be advanced in naturalistic-empiricist and in objectiveidealistic form. Husserl’s own, non-normativistic, logical idealism is incompatible with both approaches. This nuanced assessment of the situation is admittedly still unsettled if the close connection of normative and psychological interpretations of logic in the introduction to Prolegomena is made the starting point of the investigation by identifying the problematic of psychologism versus antipsychologism with the option of logic as technology versus a pure, theoretical logic.10 If logic were an essentially normative discipline, then its theoretical basis would have to lie outside of itself in another discipline that would investigate the material content of logical rules. If psychology is introduced as this fundamental science of logic, then logic is dependent on an empirical, inductive discipline with respect to its grounding. A view opposing pure (purely theoretical) logic is only at issue in the normative interpretation of logic if this interpretation is presented as the only justified conception of logic.11 In this case, logical psychologism follows as a consequence of the normative conception, for this conception regards the validity of logical laws as grounded in their norm-giving function, that is, in the recognition of a relation of validity between logical laws and the thinking subject. The logical norms could be grounded on the relation to real subjects and also on an ideal, logical consciousness in general [überhaupt] that would serve the real subjects as a model for their meaning-intentions and judgment-formations. There is a relation to real thinking subjects on hand wherever one understands by “normative judgment” not the proper, logical norms, but rather methodological propositions, that is, propositions that give technical prescriptions for the production and critique of scientific cognition.12 A theoretical discipline, by contrast, is directed purely

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toward the investigation of “matters that really belong together theoretically, in virtue of the inner laws of things.”13 The fact that there is no place whatsoever in theoretical logic for the relation to a real or ideal subject means that in it the “relation of all researches to a fundamental valuation as the source of a dominant normative interest” is entirely lacking.14 For an evaluation of the psychologism controversy, it is essential to take into account the presuppositions contained in the argumentation of the generic positions. Both the justification of psychologistic reduction as well as its refutation rest upon determinate presuppositions. In Husserl’s case, the distinction between sciences of idealities and sciences of realities is at stake. A science is the ideal unity of a context of justification [Begründungszusammenhang], that is, a connection of truths, in which the connection of things, to which the truths are related, comes to objective validity: “Nothing can be without being thus or thus determined, and that it is, and that it is thus and thus determined, is the self-subsistent truth which is the necessary correlate of the self-subsistent being.”15 That is not to deny that a historical, psychological, or anthropological mode of observing scientific activity and its results is equally possible. However, it is to deny that modes of observing of this kind, which are related to determinate realizations or conditions of realization, could contribute anything to the question of the universal, formal conditions of the possibility of scientific cognition.16 This question can only be answered by logic as pure, ideal science. The advocate of a psychological grounding of logic, on the contrary, assumes that sciences of idealities and sciences of realities do not present absolutely heterogeneous domains. She thereby forfeits the claim of logic, as ideal science, to a rational grounding because she takes it to be dispensable. Those who advocate this approach do not acknowledge that there is a fallacy in the attempt to ground the validity of logical laws with the help of a science of matters of fact. Only from the opponent’s standpoint can it be maintained that a fallacy exists, and only on the assumption that it is valid to accept a strict partition of real and ideal science. Talk of “confounding domains” only makes sense when multiple domains are distinguished as heterogeneous. By contrast, the logical idealist, for whom the heterogeneity of psychic and logical objects and laws is evident, cannot accept the thesis that logical idealism maintains an inadmissible multiplication of entities and that a psychological grounding of logic is for that reason in order. It thus seems, so far as a noncircular grounding of their respective positions is concerned, that logical psychologists and logical idealists are on an equal footing. If we do not want to settle here for (methodological

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or scientific-systematic) arguments of practicability, then the problem must be posed as an ontological problem. It cannot be assumed that the solution to this problem can be provided with the help of a logic that views itself as free of metaphysics. It is necessary to take a position explicitly concerning the relationship between logic, epistemology, and metaphysics. That is precisely the problem hanging over the first volume of Logical Investigations. This conspicuous problem remains untreated because the argumentation assumes that the key to the solution of the problem is not to be found in the presuppositions of psychologism but in its consequences. Investigating these is supposed to show that acknowledging or rejecting the strict distinction between sciences of idealities and sciences of realities is not a matter that can be left up to subjective caprice. The goal of the demonstration is to confirm the legitimacy of this distinction. If this goal is achieved, then it must be accepted that logical psychologists and logical idealists are admittedly on an equal footing when it comes to the dependency of their respective arguments on determinate presuppositions, but not when it comes to the legitimacy of these presuppositions. That is where the dispute is to be decided. Prolegomena seeks to achieve this goal with the help of a refutation of psychologism based on its consequences. Now, under what conditions can a reductio ad absurdum appear as a means suitable to this end? The strategy of refuting psychologism from its consequences depends on rendering inoperative the presupposition that leads to the stalemate between proponents of psychologism and logicists where the demonstrability of their positions is concerned. Specifically, this concerns the presupposition that the first and chief object of the psychologism controversy is an ontological assertion.17 Husserl declares the suspension of this presupposition by prefacing his investigations with a determinate definition of skepticism. According to this definition, the only skepticism that comes into question as a position opposing logical absolutism is logical or noetic skepticism. By this he means all theories “whose theses either plainly say, or analytically imply, that the logical or noetic conditions for the possibility of any theory are false.”18 Husserl’s assertion that every psychologism (and empiricism) is a form of skepticism pertains exclusively to this epistemological skepticism, not, however, to metaphysical skepticism, which “[tries] to limit human knowledge considerably and on principle.”19 It seeks especially to “remove from the sphere of possible knowledge wide fields of real being, or such especially precious sciences as metaphysics, natural science, or ethics as a rational discipline.”20 Only epistemological skepticism, not metaphysical skepticism, is to be rejected as countersensical. The concrete

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per for mance of the critique of psychologism in Prolegomena consists in demonstrating, with respect to various psychologistic approaches, that and how these approaches (contrary to the conception of their proponents, e.g., Mill, Bain, Sigwart, Lipps, Erdmann, Cornelius) lead to epistemological skepticism. Epistemological skepticism is by definition a theory that violates the conditions of the possibility of any theory whatsoever: it violates both the subjective conditions of cognition and the objective-logical conditions grounded in the concepts “object,” “proposition,” “truth,” “theory,” and so on.21 If logical psychologism in the above sense is to be understood as an epistemological skepticism, then it is not merely the case that a psychological theory has been set in the wrong place (or with the wrong grounding claims), but rather that there is no theory here at all. And if that is the case, then it is impossible to ground the validity of the logical laws, as was asserted, through a psychological theory. What about the positive side of the critique, which is called for even if the refutation of a psychologistic grounding of logic succeeds based on the skeptical consequences of this approach? Is a self-grounding of logic possible? If the validity of the logic’s fundamental principles (principle of identity, principle of noncontradiction, principle of excluded middle) is presupposed in every grounding, then it is evident that these principles cannot themselves be deductively grounded. Their validity can only be discerned as evident, that is, can only be designated as “grounded” [begründet] on the basis [Grundlage] of a nondeductive concept of “grounding” [Begründungsbegriff ]. The logical principles are not themselves to be grounded again by means of precisely these principles. Having said that, however, the logicist also cannot argue against a psychological grounding of fundamental logical principles by appealing to the circularity of grounding (understood in the usual sense). The assertion that psychology presupposes the validity of the logical laws is to be stated more precisely by explaining that a psychology does indeed have to proceed in accordance with the rules of logic if it is to be a science; it cannot say, however, that it employs the validity of logical laws as premises of its grounding. Inferences, then, are made in accordance with logical rules, but not from them. In such a case, there is not a direct circle (cirulus in demonstrando), but rather a reflexive circle.22 Of all sciences, only pure logic is not circular, for (1) in its case what is to be demonstrated (the conclusions) and the premises of the proof are homogeneous and (2) pure logic does not prove the principles governing the deductions in question in these deductions themselves but rather posits them as evidently discernible axioms. With this clarification, however, the problem is not solved. For someone who does not acknowledge

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the presuppositions of these considerations—that logical objects have an ideal characteristic— also will not see the necessity of a self-grounding of pure logic. Instead, she will be satisfied with the possibility of an inductive acquisition of logical axioms from matters of fact that have been established concerning psychic experiences. ( Here, then, the matter can be decided by means of a reductio ad absurdum.) In relation to the self-grounding of a psychologistic or logicistic position— and only in relation to this (i.e., by disregarding the argument based on consequences)—the decision for one’s own standpoint is not the result of successful arguments but is presupposed in every argument. The objection of a petitio principii can only be alleged in the case of deductive attempts at grounding, not against groundings that consist in exhibitions of evidence. An appeal to evidence, however, from whichever side it arises, can only end the dispute without both sides acknowledging the material result as binding.23 Only a decision reached by means of probative [beweisende] argumentation has an intersubjectively compelling characteristic: “That we should, however, be able to convince the subjectivist personally, and make him admit his error, is not important: what is important is to refute him in an objectively valid manner. Refutation presupposes the leverage of certain self-evident, universally valid convictions.”24 These convictions—for example, that truth is an idea and as such supratemporal—relate once more to the presupposition of an “essential, quite unbridgeable difference between sciences of the ideal and sciences of the real.”25 Even if the argument from the consequences of psychologism were unimpeachable, the psychologism controversy would still be decided from the standpoint of pure logic. However, the problem of psychologism would not be resolved without remainder to the extent that the proper problem of an antipsychologistic conception would still need to be mastered. The assertion of logical absolutism goes beyond the claim that logical psychologism is not and cannot be grounded. The logical idealist asserts that there are ideal meanings that are to be acknowledged in their objectivity even if they are never grasped as objects in an act of thinking. If the logical idealist wants to defend her position, she must clarify the sense of this assertion of ideality. In this connection, Husserl claims that he can get by without metaphysical assumptions. The distinction between reality and ideality is introduced in Prolegomena by means of a reference to the evidence of ideal objects that are utterly independent from the subject. How then is the ideality of logical objects, thus understood, to be kept free of metaphysical assumptions? Regarding the positive, systematic execution of an antipsychologistic position, the weakness of the

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Husserlian critique of psychologism from 1900 seems to lie precisely here: it is burdened with an ontological mortgage which it cannot shed as long as it wants to advocate a logical idealism; on the other hand, it cannot pay off this mortgage in the context of the phenomenological doctrine of knowledge, for this doctrine does not allow the thematization of such assumptions. The psychologism controversy is a controversy concerning the implementation of a determinate definition of logic. Of no less importance for the outcome of the argument is the definition of psychology that has been laid down by proponents and opponents of psychologism. The kind of psychologism that one wants to advocate or oppose depends on one’s conception of psychology. The critique of psychologism in Prolegomena is a critique of the grounding claim made by a natural-scientific, explanatory psychology in the domain of logic. When Husserl, in the second volume of Logical Investigations, inquires into the positive relationship between psychology and logic, he does this on the basis of a descriptive psychology. The capability and boundaries of this psychology’s accomplishments are determined by the so-called principle of presuppositionlessness. According to this principle, one cannot use metaphysical, physical, and psychic assumptions if they cannot be fully demonstrated phenomenologically in the description of the contents of intentional experiences. According to the concept of science in Prolegomena, descriptive psychology is not a science.26 It is description, not theory, even though it serves a purely theoretical interest, namely that of founding pure logic,27 and it is to be understood as scientific in the sense of freedom from metaphysics.28 According to Husserl, “[Descriptive psychology, or phenomenology of cognition, is a] philosophical completion of a pure mathesis in the widest conceivable sense, which includes all a priori, categorial knowledge in the form of systematic theories. This theory of theories goes together with, and is illuminated by, a formal theory of knowledge which precedes all empirical theory, which precedes, therefore, all empirical knowledge of the real, all physical science on the one hand, and all psychology on the other.”29 It is the task of descriptive psychology to determine the relationship between psychology and logic with the help of an investigation of intentional experiences and their contents. Descriptive psychology is to deliver a description of the origin of the fundamental logical concepts in determinate types of acts and to explicate a doctrine of the intentionality of consciousness that clarifies how a consciousness must be constituted such that an objective relation to objects [objektive Gegenstandsbeziehung] is possible for it. A major problem for the doctrine of meaning

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in the second volume of Logical Investigations is to clarify, on the basis of an analysis of consciousness (i.e., an analysis of the real [reellen] contents of consciousness), the sense of the assertion of the ideality of logical objects. In this context one can expect an answer to the question whether the antipsychologism advocated in Prolegomena is, contrary to Husserl’s own conception, to be understood as a conceptual realism.30 The content of purely logical representations (concepts) and the validity of logical laws are independent of whether they are thought by anyone. That is the fundamental thesis in which Husserl’s “idealistic intentions in logic” are expressed.31 In the second volume of Logical Investigations, it is stated to that end that the objective validity of thoughts and truths is not made “as if he [an individual— SR] were concerned with contingencies of his own or of the general human mind.”32 Rather, they are seen into, discovered. Everyone who sees into them knows that their ideal being does not amount to a psychological “being in the mind”: “the authentic objectivity of the true, and of the ideal in general, suspends all reality, including such as is subjective.”33 What is the meaning of this talk of “suspension” [Aufhebung], which manifestly refers to the refutation of skeptical relativism in Prolegomena? If there were no objectively valid meanings, propositions, and truths, then subjective being, too, would be suspended to the extent that no real beings would be cognizable. Cognition of something presupposes that thing’s being thought. The fact that there is correct cognition, and that truth is ascribed to what is thought, is not dependent on the experience of thinking in question. If what is thought in this sense were dependent on the experience of thinking, then what is thought would be as manifold and diverse as the experiences of thinking, which would make an objective identification and determination of objects— and with them all understanding of others and oneself—impossible. Psychic being in the mind cannot be ascribed to a meaning. If that is the case, then it becomes questionable how the independence of logical meanings from thinking can be made intelligible other than through the assumption of an autonomous meaning-objectivity existing independently from mind in opposition to the manifold of real occurrences of thinking. One possible answer is that meanings are ideal unities which, as one and the same, can be thought by any given subject at any given time. It is this idea of an intentional unity of thought that Husserl defends when he speaks of a “properly understood conceptualism.”34 The sense of “true, genuine ideality” is accordingly nothing other than “unified meaning in the dispersed multiplicity of experiences.”35 Is the independence of meanings from thought thus to be

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understood merely as independence from any given current performance of thinking and not as a hypostasization of meaning-entities? “Ideality of unities of meaning” would then mean “identical producibility possible at all times,” that is, omnitemporality in the sense of an intention toward the same object that is possible at any time. Yet there are expressions in Logical Investigations that go beyond this interpretation and that do so in such a way as to provoke the objection of Platonism from the critics of pure logic. In this way, it could be established, for instance, that there are innumerable meanings that “owing to the limits of human cognitive powers” will never be expressed and never could be expressed.36 It is not at all evident what the conception of independence from thought as omnitemporality is supposed to mean in relation to ideal objects whose producibility is ruled out for every possible time. Of course, the trait of omnitemporality excludes the dependence of the meaning-content from individual meaningacts, but it nonetheless fundamentally preserves a relation of the logical objects to the sphere of a subject that exists temporally and judges in time.37 If, by contrast, every relation to temporality is suspended, then one will no longer be able to accept this standpoint as conceptualism, unless Husserl’s remark concerning the “limits of human cognitive powers” does not relate to the principled transgression of the boundaries of cognizability; instead it relates merely to the restricted number of meaning-unities that are realizable by a consciousness within these boundaries. Obscurities of this sort offer anti-Platonists a target for their critique, just as by the same token the leading principle of the descriptive-psychological investigation of meaning-acts must remain suspect to advocates of anti-psychologism: “Logical concepts, as valid thought-unities, must have their origin in intuition: they must arise out of an ideational abstraction founded on certain experiences, and must admit of indefinite reconfirmation, and of recognition of their self-identity, on carry ing out anew this abstraction.”38 When objections are raised against Husserl’s early critique of psychologism from both sides—from proponents and opponents of psychologism alike—this is grounded in the matters at hand [Sache] themselves. Given this state of the problematic, it may appear doubtful that the problem of psychologism was, as Husserl himself initially assumed, resolved once and for all with Logical Investigations. Because of their commitment to the principle of presuppositionlessness, the descriptive-psychological investigations of the second volume of Logical Investigations cannot rebut the objection of Platonism directed against Prolegomena. On the other hand, where descriptive psychology is concerned,

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a psychological investigation that does not raise a reductionistic grounding claim in relation to logical objects is not exposed to the objection of psychologism. If, in accordance with the methodological composition of descriptive psychology, there is no possibility that the epistemological investigations of the second volume of the Logical Investigations could lead to a logical psychologism, then the problem of subjectivization arises nonetheless in relation to the approach taken by the phenomenological doctrine of meaning. Since identical meaning is determined as an identity of a species that is individuated in acts of meaning and is thus to be acquired through reflection on those acts, Husserl’s early conception of meaning can be designated a “subjective” or “noetic conception of meaning.” The separation of the concept of meaning from the acts that give meaning is achieved with the introduction of a noematic conception of meaning in the lectures on the doctrine of meaning from 1908.39 Accordingly, identical meaning is to be extracted from the idea of categorial objectivity as such and from the objective content (of a proposition). This revision to the doctrine of meaning was made possible by surpassing the actphenomenology of 1901. The expression “descriptive psychology” is just as ambiguous as the expression “psychologism.” In both cases, it is only by taking into account the respective concrete conception of psychology that an evaluation of the material position becomes possible. Merely acknowledging the distinction between genetic and descriptive psychology is not sufficient to fend off the suspicion of psychologism. Thus, the following observation, for example, from an opponent of phenomenological anti-psychologism is thoroughly justified: The word “phenomenology” was originally, even for Husserl himself, the name for the pure description of cognitive states of affairs that— even for other standpoints, especially psychologism and phenomenalism—must precede all epistemology. It has become a name for a special method of epistemology. We can clarify the sense of this method by saying that, every epistemology must first clarify the sense of our concepts before it can operate with them. Now, this clarification can only occur if one seeks to grasp just this sense, and to grasp it as purely as possible, to bring it to self-givenness, in order then to describe it purely. Every other way is a detour that does not instruct us concerning the sense of our judgments themselves, but at best concerning the evolution of this sense and thus, viewed materially, it presupposes precisely this sense.40

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To this characterization of phenomenology there corresponds an opposing nominalistic position, one that “regards it as impossible to achieve a phenomenological description of the content of our concepts by simply plunging oneself into this content, and accordingly does not regard the results of Husserlian phenomenology as evident results of a pure, unbiased description.”41 This example makes it clear that the approach of a critique both of psychologism and of antipsychologism is dependent on the determination of the generic position and on the presupposed conception of psychology.42 The mere fact that logical objects can be made in various ways into objects of scientific investigations does not result in psychologism or subjectivism, neither in the formation of psychological theories nor in logic. In this connection, Husserl’s observation is on the mark: “as if subjectivity in the psychological sense disagreed with objectivity in the logical sense!”43 If, however, a grounding claim referring to a nonpsychological domain of objects is asserted from psychology (metabasis), then every psychology to which this claim pertains has the characteristic of psychologism. Epistemological psychologism, which determined the confrontation of phenomenology with the problem of psychologism after 1903, was designated “metaphysical skepticism” and excluded from the discussion of Logical Investigations.44 The assertion of this psychologistic standpoint would be “All knowledge as a conscious phenomenon is subject to the laws of human consciousness: the so-called forms and laws of knowledge are merely functional forms of consciousness, or laws governing such functional forms, i.e., psychological laws.”45 When Husserl abandoned the claim to a definitive refutation of psychologism after Logical Investigations, this pertained to both logical psychologism and metaphysical skepticism. Already in 1900, the latter had been excluded from the polemical intent of Prolegomena. Metaphysical skepticism is not countersensical; its “claim to validity is a mere question of arguments and proofs.” 46 In contrast to the problem of logical psychologism, the problem of epistemological psychologism remains open in the second volume of Logical Investigations. Due to the claim to exclude all metaphysical problems and assertions (the principle of presuppositionlessness) and to the definition of epistemological psychologism as a metaphysical skepticism, there is no discussion concerning whether descriptive psychology can guarantee that its investigation of psychic acts does not culminate in an epistemological psychologism. (This would occur by setting a psychology of cognition in the place of epistemology.47) For Husserl’s new conception of the problem of psychologism after 1900, the following question would point the way: How can one establish a

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pure critique of cognition that makes possible a non-Platonic and nonpsychologistic critique of psychologism, that is, a rejection of logical and epistemological psychologism? The change in the way of stating the problem of psychologism ensued with the help of the idea of the phenomenological reduction, which Husserl developed in the years 1903 to 1907. This was a methodological measure that resulted in a change in the object domain of phenomenological statements. Under the condition of the withdrawal (epochē) of all existencetheses, judgments were no longer made concerning the objects of experiences nor concerning the experience of objects in the sense of the act-phenomenology of Logical Investigations. By making the intentional relation as such into an object, judgment was passed exclusively concerning the mode and manner of the experience of objects. If all (implicit) presuppositions concerning the existence of act and object are omitted, then one can speak of “pure intentionality” or “pure subjectivity.” This is the “working field” of transcendental phenomenology.48 To the extent that the newly grounded phenomenological idealism was understood to be the only allowable kind of metaphysics, the phenomenological reduction made good on the promise to respond explicitly to the problem of metaphysics. In 1900/01, the question of the existence of the external world was, as a metaphysical question, excluded from the investigation, and phenomenological analysis was restricted to the real [reellen] contents of consciousness, while logical analysis was occupied with ideal contents. A consequence of this was that descriptive analysis could not deal with the Platonism objection, which was related to the objectivism of the ideal contents. In the context of the intentional idealism of the later years, both the real as well as the ideal objects were investigated merely in their function as act-correlates. On the one hand, the domain of objects available to phenomenological analysis was thereby expanded, and on the other hand, the objection of a hypostasization of meaning-entities became untenable. Regarding the problem of psychologism, the introduction of the phenomenological reduction had an essential consequence: The ontological price of a refutation of logical psychologism is avoidable as soon as the problem of logical psychologism is placed in the context of an ontologically neutral phenomenology that makes its judgments from within the epochē. But has the state of evidence in the dispute between advocates of psychologism and antipsychologism thus been clarified to the extent that a decision would be possible that would be independent of particular standpoints and that could be carried out merely argumentatively? That is not the case.

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One can understand the phenomenological reduction as an instrument for making presuppositions explicit. Husserl’s claim to make possible a presuppositionless ultimate grounding with the help of the reduction is not an obviously unachievable claim only if it is understood in a gradualistic sense with regard to the “matters themselves,” that is, the phenomena. In the attitude of the phenomenological reduction, every phenomenon is given in such a way that in it no presuppositions are contained that cannot be “excluded” by means of absorption in the phenomenon. The assertion that the material content of the phenomenon in question could at some time be utterly exhausted (that is, utterly cognized), by contrast, is not a necessary constituent of a phenomenology of consciousness. Not certainty, but purity of the phenomenon is necessary if an investigation is to be a phenomenological investigation. The phenomenological reduction can only be a suitable instrument of the philosophical critique of cognition if the idea of philosophy that underlies it is presupposed as valid. This is the conception of philosophy as an ultimately grounding universal science whose domain of objects circumscribes the senses or propositions of all scientific and nonscientific experiences. This conception of philosophy is a posit that, with regard to the problem of psychologism, seems to lead to a paradoxical situation: The epochē makes possible a new, “neutral” way of posing the problem of psychologism by anticipating the decision in favor of an antipsychologistic position. The preceding refutation of logical psychologism is the condition of the viability of the phenomenological reduction. For the pure relation of intentionality can only become the object of investigation if it is available in objectified form, that is, in objective unities of meaning. These unities must have an ideal characteristic if they are not to be reduced to conscious experiences, a reduction by means of which consciousness would cease to be intentional, that is, would cease to be consciousness. On the other hand, pure phenomenology can only be understood as pure idealism (i.e., as nonmetaphysical idealism) if epistemological psychologism is rejected. If the idea of a transcendental phenomenology is the presupposed fundamental norm of all the phenomenologist’s descriptions, then the theory of the phenomenological reduction (which is to reflect the new way of posing the problem of psychologism) can be designated as a “normative discipline” in the sense of Prolegomena. The phenomenologist cannot assert that this fundamental norm is to be acknowledged. What she can assert is merely that if a philosophy is to be possible as rigorous science in the sense of the phenomenological (and eidetic) reduction, then logical and epistemological psychologism must be rejected. The procedure of phenomenological description can only be applied if the assertions of

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logical and epistemological psychologism are not valid. (It is objectively impossible—i.e., in accordance with the thing [Sache] and not merely the constitution of the subject—to endorse the standpoint of logical and epistemological psychologism within the attitude of the epochē.) That does not mean, however, that the falsity or countersensical nature of psychologism can be demonstrated with the help of pure descriptions. Only the material content lying in the pure phenomena, in the absence of all transcendent (“naively” ontological) interpretations, will be established. As pure phenomena, even the assertions of proponents and opponents of psychologism can be made into the object of phenomenological investigation. In this way, phenomenology, as a neutral science of sense, can generate communication between the generic positions in the dispute concerning logical psychologism. It can only be said that epistemological standpoints (e.g., empiricism or rationalism) are indifferent when it comes to the opposed positions in the psychologism controversy (concept realism or psychologism) if one is not concerned about the systematic integration of epistemology and logic into one consistent philosophical edifice. The obscurities connected to the logical idealism of Prolegomena do not ultimately rest on the fact that the distinction between realism and idealism is applied both in ontological and epistemological meanings.49 In 1900, the relationship between logical idealism or psychologism and “metaphysical skepticism” was naturally not regarded as a problem, since metaphysical skepticism remained excluded from phenomenological inquiry. One finds only the following observation: “When metaphysical subjectivism [i.e., skepticism— SR] thus favors epistemological skepticism, the latter, contrariwise, if taken to be self-evident, seems to provide powerful arguments for the former.”50 That epistemological skepticism, as Husserl labeled psychologism in logic in 1900, facilitates a metaphysical skepticism (i.e., in the later terminology, a transcendental or epistemological psychologism) can likewise be established from the standpoint of pure phenomenology. However, the cautious formulation in Prolegomena does not yet assert (and cannot assert because of the restrictions of descriptive psychology) that the inverse does not hold: The critique (refutation) of logical psychologism does not eo ipso facilitate a critique (refutation) of epistemological psychologism. Whether that is the case depends much more on the way in which the problem of psychologism is embedded in the given nexus of thought. For transcendental phenomenology, logical and epistemological antipsychologism are necessary if the idea of a scientific phenomenology is to be realizable. It is a reflex of phenomenology’s way of thinking and a judgment on the defi-

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cient awareness of the problem in the historical psychologism controversy when Husserl declared, from the viewpoint of the 1920s, that the “fundamental, transcendental psychologism, which is lethal to the possibility of a scientific philosophy, is yet totally unscathed by refutations of the psychologism in pure apophantic logic or of parallel psychologisms in formal axiology and [theory of] practice.”51 If the origin of the idea of the epochē lies in the problematizing of the relationship between the first and second volumes of Logical Investigations, and if the related obscurities in fact are to be eliminated only with the help of a redetermination of the phenomenological critique of cognition, then it is not surprising that Husserl’s interest in the question of psychologism distinctly shifts after 1900/01 from a refutation based on the consequences to an understanding of the presuppositions of both the psychologistic and the logicistic position. This interest concerns in the first instance the way of posing the problem of psychologism in view of the grounding of a phenomenological philosophy, and only in the second instance the material problem that is to be clarified through description. It is also owing to the interest in the presuppositions of thought that, after the introduction of the phenomenological reduction, Husserl no longer asks which arguments are to help in the refutation of psychologism and skepticism. Rather, he asks which manner of procedure can aid in securing the non-reducibility of the ideal to the real without (implicit) ontological assertions and thereby cut off in advance the skeptic’s charge of dogmatism.52 The central position of the phenomenological reduction is thus confirmed. If this is not successfully defended, then only two ways remain open where the problem of psychologism is at issue: either recourse to the dogmatic position of Prolegomena, or the concession that phenomenology’s critique of psychologism has failed. The new look for the problem in the psychologism question was integrated into the more pronounced methodological interest of later phenomenology. This becomes clear in the considerations concerning the mode of experience of real and ideal objects in Experience and Judgment (1939) and Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), which seek to implement concretely the idea of a genetic phenomenology. This same orientation toward questions of method holds for the determination of the relationship of philosophy and psychology in the Encyclopedia Britannica article (1927) and in Crisis (1936). While the years following Logical Investigations stood under the sign of a rigid delimitation of pure phenomenology from all psychology, Husserl promised in the 1920s and 1930s a definitive clarification of the psychologism problem precisely from a discussion of the relation between philosophy and psychology. In the center of this analysis stands the

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idea of an eidetic-phenomenological (“rational”) psychology as propaedeutic to transcendental phenomenology. The foundational shift of the problematic had already been completed a few years after the publication of Logical Investigations. According to this shift, the primary object of phenomenological interest is no longer the relationship between logic and psychology but that between philosophy and psychology. With that, the balance of power between pure logic and phenomenology was also reversed. In 1900/01, the latter merely had the role of an appendix to pure logic. When in the 1920s, by contrast, logic once again became the preferred object of phenomenological investigations, this occurred in the context of a transcendental logic that sought to clarify the validity-sense of logical objects through a recourse to the accomplishments of transcendental subjectivity. For pure phenomenology, there is no longer a logic as an independent positive science in the sense of Prolegomena. Pure phenomenology is universal critique of theoretical, practical, and evaluative reason: philosophy of pure subjectivity. It has at times been opined that the difference in the approaches to the grounding of logic in early and late phenomenology can be traced back to the fact that the latter forfeits the primacy of theory in favor of beginning from the life-world. In Prolegomena, Husserl doubtless understood the primacy of pure, theoretical logic as an antidote against logical psychologism. But is it also true that late phenomenology bases and can base its logical foundation and critique of psychologism upon the forfeiture of the priority of theory (epistemology) in favor of a life-world praxis? Since the objectivity of logical objects can also be grounded in other ways than the one taken in Prolegomena (e.g., through convention or consensus), it should be noted that the subjectivity- objectivity distinction intersects with the theory-practice distinction. Moreover, various approaches that can be distinguished in relation to the determination of the concepts “objectivity” and “subjectivity” can be characterized with respect to their position in the “intersectional space” of the two distinctions. In view of the psychologism question, the conception of logic represented in the Prolegomena is to be designated as “objective-theoretical,” while the point of view of the second volume of Logical Investigations is “subjective-theoretical.” (The expression “theoretical” is here understood merely as standing in opposition to praxis. In this meaning, the theoretical orientation contains both theories in the strict sense of Prolegomena and purely descriptive investigations.) The proposal of a life-world– practical approach, or a pragmatic- constructional one, aims at an objective-practical foundation.

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In later phenomenology, the look of the problem had in fact changed in such a way that in a certain, restricted sense, one can speak of a “practical” orientation, specifically, a subjective-practical one. In §8 of Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl establishes that already in the case of the merely normative function of logic—without the norm in question having been recognized as a practical setting of an end— a certain intention aimed at practical usefulness is present, and thus a transgression of the purely theoretical interest. Admittedly, the distinction between theory and practice “is after all a relative one: because even purely theoretical activity is indeed activity—that is to say, a practice (when the concept of practice is accorded its natural breadth); and, as a practice, it is part of the universal nexus comprising all practical activities and is subject to formal rules of universal practical reason (the principles of ethics), rules with which a science pour la science can hardly be compatible.”53 With regard to this seeming convergence with a pragmatic foundation of logic one should keep the explanatory addendum in view: Only under the presupposition of a “natural breadth accorded to the concept” can one speak of praxis and a relativization of the theory-praxis distinction. The distinction between theoretical and practical interests, or between theoretical and practical logic, is not canceled.54 The new, “practical” orientation consists in revealing the purely theoretical interest as a praxis in the sense of a habitual scientific-ethical orientation. The purely theoretical interest is still foundational for every science. Logic is primarily pure, theoretical logic. But if it is not a grounding with reference to praxis that constitutes the difference we seek from the procedure in Prolegomena, then where does this difference lie? It is not the theory-praxis distinction that is decisive for the distinct strategies in the critiques of psychologism in early and late phenomenology, but rather the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. It is a difference in the methodological framework of the critique of psychologism, not in the determination of the relationship between pure and practical logic. This setting of the framework is closely connected in both early and late phenomenology with the question of scientificity. In 1900, Husserl aimed to end the conflict of opinions concerning the definition of logic and to delimit an objective material composition of logical doctrines, “a sum total of substantial propositions or theories.”55 In this way, he aimed to make logic into a science.56 The general goal was thus to exclude subjectivism in the sense of the dependence of logical conceptions on personal convictions or philosophical systems and in the sense of a psychologistic grounding of logic.57 In Formal and Transcendental Logic, the lack of a clear

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awareness of its goals and methods, as well as its “fundamental sense,” is named as the chief deficiency of traditional logic. Because of this lack, logic’s “sure progression from stage to stage” has been impeded, so that “logic, after thousands of years, has not yet entered the steady course of a truly rational development—it has not become, as its peculiar vocation unconditionally demanded, a science.”58 But Husserl now sees the reason for the failure of a scientific logic up to this time in the objectivistic attitude of logical investigations, which separates the logical objects from every relation to subjective acts of thinking. A transformation in phenomenology’s conception of science underlies this turn against objectivism: Pure logic, as “objectivistic” universal doctrine of science, is not the fundamental science, but rather pure phenomenology, whose object is the intentional relation (conceived in abstraction from existence). Phenomenology’s chief opponent is thus no longer logical psychologism, which makes impossible a pure logic as science but rather epistemological psychologism, which makes impossible a philosophy as science. Against this background of the problem’s development, it should be noted that the rejection of a normative grounding of logic in Prolegomena was founded not only on the theorypraxis distinction. It must be counted as equally essential that in this way every relation to the subject was excluded. Such a relation would have been incompatible with the absolute validity of logical laws according to Husserl’s conception at the time.59 The idea of normativizing thinking entails the idea of something that thinks. On the other hand, pure phenomenology’s specific subjectivity-standpoint, which also distinguishes a subjective (noetic) and objective (noematic) thematic in logic, is not grounded in a cancellation of the theory-praxis distinction (or especially in the question of logical normativism).60 In Prolegomena, the exclusion of the subjective dependency of logical contents is grounded, on the one hand, in the approach to the critique of psychologism as a refutation of skeptical relativism, and on the other hand, in early phenomenology’s conception of the subject. According to the latter, even the concept of a transcendental subject is to be counted among the subjectivistic tendencies because it was understood in the sense of a species relativism, that of the reason characteristic of humankind.61 In early phenomenology, the antagonisms in the psychologism controversy were cast as the opposition “psychologism vs. logical objectivism.” Thus, both empiricism and “subjectivistic,” idealistic apriorism were assigned to the side of psychologism. The opposition could also have been stated “psychologism vs. objective-logical apriorism” but not “psychologism vs. apriorism.” The shift of the problem that occurs with the introduction of the phenomenological reduction manifests

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itself in the new determination of the antagonisms. Now, the problem of psychologism is discussed according to the opposition “psychological naturalism vs. transcendental philosophy.” In the context of phenomenological idealism, a nondogmatic answer to the problem of logical psychologism becomes possible for the first time. Of course, the attempt is made to grasp the peculiarity and irreducibility of ideal contents of consciousness by means of a description of those contents. However, this attempt is no longer connected with the claimed refutation of the psychologistic position. This forfeiture of a refutation does not arise from a retraction of the distinction between ideality and reality, but rather from a new interpretation of this distinction. Pure phenomenology can only make assertions concerning this distinction in reference to the various modes of givenness of ideal and real objects. It cannot set up absolute ontological assertions. This abstention results from the insight that psychologistic and antipsychologistic positions (as they were discussed in Prolegomena) are both bound to a standpoint. The reflection on the problematic of epistemological psychologism discovers another manner of being bound to a standpoint. The problem of epistemological psychologism lies in the question, what distinguishes a philosophical critique of reason from the psychology of cognition? Seeing a problem in this question at all presupposes that it is posed from the standpoint of a philosophy of consciousness. In pure phenomenology, as a descriptive-intuitive philosophy of consciousness, a definitive solution to the problem of epistemological psychologism is, however, impossible. As opposed to the refutation of logical psychologism in Prolegomena, a refutation of epistemological psychologism that argues against psychologism under the assumption of the invalidity of psychologism is excluded. The irrefutability is based on the fact that the conception of consciousness is determined by an essential ambiguity. This “transcendental semblance” is not to be set aside once and for all. Consciousness must be conceived as both the pure (nonempirical) function of intentionality and as empirical instance (psychic subject). The critique of epistemological psychologism is directed against a confusion of the philosophical and the natural attitude, or against a confusion of their respective problematics. A metabasis is present when the question of the possibility of cognition (quid iuris) is not distinguished from the question of the real conditions of cognition (quid facti). The latter question is posed under the presupposition that cognition is actual. In this sense, the radical, philosophical question of the possibility of cognition is presuppositionless: It refrains from taking over any “natural” claims to cognition.

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The early Husserl’s critique of psychologism is to be understood as a defense of the idea of science as such against subjectivistic tendencies. The revision of the problematic that took place between 1903 and 1907 places the critique of psychologism in the ser vice of a defense of the idea of philosophy as rigorous science. The guiding idea is now the following: If there is to be a scientific philosophy at all— a science of subjectivity that cannot be reduced to explanatory or descriptive psychology—then a methodological approach must be found that makes it possible to adhere to the fundamental characteristic of philosophy as doctrine of consciousness while at the same time excluding a naturalization of consciousness. Because of the “transcendental semblance” attached to the concept of consciousness, the exclusion of naturalism is only possible by habituating [oneself] to the attitude of the phenomenological reduction and in this way establishing the distinction between philosophical and psychological analyses of consciousness. In Logical Investigations, the discussion of the problem of psychologism was supposed to decide whether a reduction of ideal objects to real objects (of sciences of idealities to sciences of realities) was legitimate. In the context of transcendental phenomenology, the problem of psychologism is related to the question of the legitimacy of a reduction of the domain of transcendentality to the domain of positivity. To the latter belong both real science and ideal science in the sense of Prolegomena. The sphere of transcendental subjectivity poses no ontological expansion of the positive world. It is the domain of the relation of pure intentionality that is transcendental, and this is not part of the empirical world. “Just as the reduced ego is not a piece of the world, so, conversely, neither the world nor any worldly object is a piece of my ego, to be found in my conscious life as a really inherent [reeller] part of it, as a complex of data of sensation or a complex of acts.”62 If there is talk in phenomenology of an “intentional (irreal) closure” of the world in the pure subject, there is no ontological interpretation of the pure object-relation associated with this. The result of the phenomenological reduction—the orientation not toward the objects of experience but toward the manner of the experience of objects (i.e., of the world as appearing world) means the following with respect to the distinction of reality and ideality: The real and the ideal are not ontologically but rather functionally distinguished, according to the manner of relation to the real and the ideal (“mode of givenness”). Since pure phenomenology speaks of objects exclusively in their function as intentional objects of conscious experiences, it is possible to say of any object that it is “ideal” to the extent that it is made into an object merely as

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an intentional unity and not as transcendent to consciousness. The previous distinction between real and ideal objects thus becomes subordinated to this methodologically grounded ideality of the intentional relation. At the same time, it holds even of the logical objects that transcendental phenomenology does not change the world but leaves it just as it is. Logical and epistemological psychologism are problems of grounding, that is, problems that only present themselves when occasioned by the reflexive assurance of the validity of products of thought. Both with respect to the evidential circumstances in Prolegomena (according to which the self-grounding of logical idealism and of psychologism can only succeed with the help of evident assertions concerning the ontological structure of the world) as well as with respect to the rejection of the “prejudice of worldliness”63 in pure phenomenology, it can be declared from the standpoint of later phenomenology that the thesis of logical psychologism (in the sense of Logical Investigations) is just as dogmatic (i.e., unphilosophical) as that of transcendental psychologism, even if the latter is associated with a logical antipsychologism. The decision concerning the existence or epistemological function of a nonempirical ego cannot be made with the help of empirical science. However, in the context of transcendental phenomenology, the actuality of this ego is equally indemonstrable where cognition is concerned because every cognition presupposes a relation to an object. The function of intentionality cannot occurrently (i.e., in its perfor mance) be its own object unless an infinite regress of consciousness is to be accepted. “Subjectivity of pure consciousness”—in a nonegological sense (prior to Ideas I)— and “pure ego”—in an egological sense (after Ideas I)— are dif ferent names for the function of pure intentionality, which, as the groundwork of the phenomenological doctrine of consciousness, is not to be objectified or reduced to a causal relation. The last question put to the phenomenologist in the context of the problem of psychologism is the question, how is it possible that a subject can be understood both as empirical ego and as nonempirical ego? The fact that the ambiguity of consciousness as psychic and pure consciousness cannot be set aside means, on the one hand, that an epistemological psychologism is not definitively excluded. On the other hand, however, it also means that overcoming it is possible at any time by means of a change of attitude. The decision as to whether there is to be a philosophy in the sense of pure phenomenology resides with every individual thinking subject. The only thing that is certain according to this idea of philosophy is that there is no philosophy if the transcendental

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semblance of consciousness is taken back into the facticity of the empirical subject. What is to be learned from the preceding considerations concerning the greater historical meaning of the psychologism controversy? As was seen in the development of phenomenology, the special characteristic of the problem is that the presuppositions of the problematic are an essential constituent of the problem and its possibilities of resolution. In the systematic nexus of phenomenology, it was a consequence of the close association of the problem of psychologism with the idea of a philosophical science that, according to Logical Investigations, the emphasis in the dispute lay on the side of methodological questions. That the respective definition of psychologism determines, as was established at the outset, the choice of strategies for combating or defending psychologism has been confirmed by the development of phenomenology. But it has also been confirmed that in questions of standpoint, reflection on the presuppositions of argumentative strategies retains decisive importance. That can lead to a revision of the problematic even if the refutation of psychologism has been successful under the given “strategic” presuppositions. In the development of phenomenology following Logical Investigations, this did in fact occur. The problem of psychologism thereby reveals itself to be a problem of standpoint to the extent that it provides an occasion to clarify phenomenology’s philosophical standpoint. There are good reasons for no longer concerning oneself with the historical psychologism controversy to the extent that this is understood in the narrow sense as a controversy concerning the groundwork of logic. The inter- and intradisciplinary problematic that underlies this controversy has changed in the meantime. However, there are also good reasons for taking seriously the psychologism controversy in the broader sense as an expression of a fundamental philosophical problem that is alive in all historical configurations. That problem is the determination of the subjective in the field of tension between subjectivity and objectivity and in its relation to the dimensions of positivity and transcendentality. Translated by Hayden Kee Notes This essay originated as part of my collaboration with the interdisciplinary special research division Modernity: Vienna and Central Europe around 1900 at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz. I thank the Austrian Science Fund (Vienna) for supporting this research project.

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1. In this way, a psychologistic conception can smoothly merge into a sociologism or biologism. That can be seen, for example, in Wilhelm Jerusalem’s pragmatically oriented response to the conflict concerning logical foundations, “Apriorismus and Evolutionismus,” in T. Elsenhans, ed., III. Internationaler Kongreß für Philosophie: 1. bis 5. September 1908 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1909), 806–814. Dif ferent evaluations of the respective opposition views likewise depend on the standpoint of the statement and designation of a problem just as much as differing material opinions do. Thus the “subjectivism” immanent to pragmatism is rejected, from the standpoint of phenomenology, as a relativistic anthropologism, while, conversely, Richard Rorty just as decisively rejects the “subjectivism” of the philosophy of consciousness as a form of mentalism. Disputes of this kind stand above history to the extent that their core content is current in philosophizing at every time in some form and terminology. 2. That the logical laws have no essential relation to a subject is an assertion that, according to the conception of the “logical absolutist,” applies not only to the concrete, individual subject but also to a consciousness in general: “It does not seem to me helpful, furthermore, to relate the law to [an ideal] consciousness in general. In [an ideal thinking] all concepts (more exactly all expressions) would be used with absolutely identical meanings: there would be no flux of meanings, no ambiguities or quaterniones terminorum. The laws of logic have, however, no intrinsic, essential relation to this ideal, which we rather construct to fit them.” Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Erster Band, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed. Elmar Holenstein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 108; cf. 97 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 127; cf. 118–119]. 3. The subjective-noetic conditions of cognition are not the real conditions “rooted in the individual judging subject, or in the varied species of judging beings (e.g., of human beings), but ideal conditions whose roots lie in the form of subjectivity as such and in its relation to knowledge.” Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:119 [136]. With respect to the cognitionfunction of judgments, Husserl appeals to a consciousness in general, a move he rejects in relation to the validity of the pure, logical laws presupposed in all cognizing. 4. See Husserl, 1:21–22 [55–56]. 5. Cf. esp. Husserl, 1:§§11–16. 6. For example, Husserl, 1:168–169 [175–176]. 7. Husserl, 1:41 [71]. 8. Husserl, 1:161 [170].

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9. Husserl, 1:§6. 10. Cf. Husserl, 1:22–24 [56–57]. 11. Analogously, one could speak of a “theoreticism” if a normative interpretation were excluded as such. This standpoint would be equally reductionist as the psychologistic position, although it would concern not the proper essence of logical objects, but rather the grasping and presenting of them. Whether or not psychological investigations have a psychologistic characteristic depends on whether or not they make a grounding claim for the domain of logical objects. From this it becomes clear that psychological considerations presented in the context of the propaedeutic or didactic of logical theories, for example, are not to be understood as psychologisms, aside from the (unusual) case where grounding claims are raised in this context. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:28–29, 153, 163 [72–73, 163–164, 171]. 12. For example, Husserl, 1:161–167 [169–174]. 13. Husserl, 59 [86]. 14. Husserl, 68 [86; trans. modified]. 15. Husserl, 231 [225–226]. 16. Husserl, §§62–69. 17. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 111–112 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 337–338]. 18. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:120 [136]. 19. Husserl, 120 [137]. 20. Husserl, 120–121 [137]. 21. Cf. Husserl, 164, 238–241 [172, 232–234]. 22. Cf. Husserl, 69–70, 164–165, 168–169 [95, 172–173, 175–176]. 23. For example, Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:113–114 [339–340]. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:123 [139]: “It [individual relativism] is a doctrine no sooner set up than cast down, though only for one who recognizes the objectivity of all that pertains to logic. One cannot persuade the subjectivist any more than one can the open sceptic, a man simply lacking the ability to see that laws such as the law of contradiction have their roots in the mere meaning of truth, that from these it follows that talk of a subjective truth, that is one thing for one man and the opposite for another, must count as the purest nonsense.” The skeptic, too, can refer to evidence, specifically to the evidence of the present experience of the mode of appearing of something. By contrast, it speaks to the conception of skepticism as a self-refuting (theory of) knowledge concerning the impossibility of (a theory of ) knowledge when Husserl introduces as an argument against

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skepticism the consideration that skepticism puts into question even the evidence of the “I am” and “I experience this and that.” Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:128 [143]. Only under the presupposition that this experience of evidence must be understood in such a way that it does not ground (or fulfill) an objective claim to knowledge can one deny the skeptic this evidence by drawing on the self-refutation argument. 24. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:123 [139]. 25. Husserl, 1:181 [185]. 26. See Husserl, 1:223 [227–228]. 27. Husserl, §64. 28. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:225–226 [221–222]; Logische Untersuchungen, 2:124–125 [348–349]. “An epistemological investigation that can seriously claim to be scientific must . . . satisfy the principle of freedom from presuppositions” (2:19 [263]). 29. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:27 [265; trans. modified]. 30. Cf. Husserl, 2:115–116, 127–131 [340–341, 350–353]. 31. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:89 [111]. 32. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:100 [325]. 33. Husserl, 2:100 [325]. 34. Husserl, 2:147 [368]. 35. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:220 [217]. 36. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:110 [333; trans. modified]. 37. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Prague: Academia/Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1939), 312 [translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks as Experience and Judgment (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 260]: “Objectivities of the understanding make their appearance in the world (a state of affairs is ‘discovered’) as irreal; after having been discovered, they can be thought of anew and as often as desired and, in general, can be objects of experience according to their nature. But afterwards we say: even before they were discovered, they were already ‘valid’; or we say that they can be assumed— provided that subjects which have the ability to produce them are present and conceivable—to be producible precisely at any time, and that they have this mode of omnipresent existence: in all possible modes of productions they would be the same.” 38. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:10 [251–252; trans. modified] (emphasis SR). 39. [The reference is to Husserl’s lectures on the theory of meaning from the Summer Semester of 1908. See Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre: Sommersemester 1908, ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague: Marinus Nijhoff, 1987).—HK]

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40. Cf. Ernst von Aster, Prinzipien der Erkenntnislehre: Versuch zu einer Neubegründung des Nominalismus (Leipzig: Quelle and Meyer, 1913), iv. 41. Von Aster, iv–v. 42. Aster, for example, does not understand his critique of antipsychologism as psychologistic because he does not classify that which is immediately given (with which, according to him, one must begin) as psychological. 43. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:123 [139; trans. modified]. 44. See Husserl, §33. 45. Husserl, 1:121 [137; trans. modified]. 46. Husserl, 1:121 [137]. 47. In fact, Husserl would later declare that the difficulties adhering to epistemological psychologism in Logical Investigations were “not yet entirely overcome.” Edmund Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 160 [translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 152]. 48. The eidetic reduction will be set aside in the present context, although it universally secures the phenomenal constitution of nonindividual objects. It is obvious that phenomenology’s claim to be a science can only be fulfilled on the groundwork of eidetic judgments. In relation to the problem of psychologism, the phenomenological reduction nonetheless has priority. Only with its help can the Platonism objection be rebutted without falling prey to the “counter-dogma” of psychologistic subjectivism. In a letter to Julius Stenzel dated March 28, 1934, Husserl observes, “I also note that, following the suggestions of Scheler and Heidegger, you, too—as is now common—regard me as something like a Platonist, or, what amounts to the same thing, you confound the phenomenological and the eidetic reductions.” Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, Band 4, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Kluwer, 1994), 428–430. 49. For example, Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:190–191 [193]; Logische Untersuchungen, 2:111–112 [337–338]. 50. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:121 [137]. 51. Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 346 [translated by John Scanlon as Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 258–259; trans. modified]. 52. “It is not the task of epistemology to refute skepticism, but rather to eliminate the embarrassments in which cognition finds itself enmeshed through reflection on its own possibility, and to clarify this possibility: the essence of cognition and the correlations with the object that belong to

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cognition. Of course, the motives that force one to skepticism are thereby removed while skepticism remains there as countersense for those with insight (which does not change the fact that it is irrefutable).” Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie: Vorlesungen 1906/07, ed. Ullrich Melle (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 405. 53. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 36 [32]. 54. “Logic becomes normative, it becomes practical; with a suitable change of attitude, one can convert it into a normative-technological discipline. But intrinsically it is itself not a normative discipline but precisely a science in the pregnant sense, a work of purely theoretical reason—like all the other sciences.” Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 35 [31]. 55. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:20 [54]. 56. Cf. Husserl, 1:48–49, 51–52 [77–78, 80–81]. 57. The Logos article of 1911 sets out for this same destination in taking a stand against the “perspectivism” in the (historicist) philosophy of the time and seeking to ensure an objective doctrinal composition for philosophy and thereby the capacity for advancement in the sense of the positive sciences. See Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos 1 (1910–11): 289–341 [translated by Quentin Lauer as “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 69–147. 58. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 38–39 [35]. 59. Husserl, §11c. 60. According to the above, the reasons for the “attenuation of ontology” in late phenomenology lie both in the new determination of the subject-object relationship as well as in the method of phenomenological investigation. Anyone who ascribes an objective-practical orientation to late phenomenology (as ontology of the life-world) takes a different view: “Insofar as Husserl integrates the philosophy of logic into the transcendental reformulation of phenomenology after Ideas I, the possibility is presented to him of attenuating the theoreticism of logic (which is tightly bound up with the ontology of ideal states of affairs and the conception of categorial intuition). . . . To the extent that phenomenology is pushed back into the foundational sphere of transcendental subjectivity, the ontological costs of the avoidance of psychologism can be cut.” Carl Friedrich Gethmann, “Phänomenologische Logikfundierung,” in Phänomenologie im Widerstreit: Zum 50. Todestag Edmund Husserls, ed. Christoph Jamme and Otto Pöggeler (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 192–212, 204. The author goes on to comment that “methodologically” the later Husserl “tendentiously overcomes idealism, . . . but ontologically still adheres to the dualism between reality and ideality” (207). If that were true, then admittedly the acquisition of phenomenological idealism—the cutting of

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the “ontological costs” of the critique of psychologism—would once again be bartered away. If there is an objective-practical approach to be found in pragmatically founded proto-logic, then what is at issue in it is the attempt to reduce the problem of psychologism to the question of logical psychologism and to establish an anti-psychologism “without having to bear the high costs of mentalism and idealism” (210). But there is certainly nothing without a cost in philosophy. The price paid for the “foundation of logic that begins with the pragmatics of language (and is thus not mentalistic) and is oriented towards an operationalistic theory of meaning (and is thus not idealist)” (209) is the forfeiture of the investigation of the subject of consciousness whose philosophical interest (in the phenomenological sense) aims at a “final” grounding of the possibility of cognition. 61. For example, Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 1:130–131, 216–217 [145–146, 214]. 62. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 65 [translated by Dorion Cairns as Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 26]. 63. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 479.

Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Motives Leading to Its Transformation Ludwig Landgrebe

When Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, the work of an as yet all but unknown private lecturer, first appeared more than sixty years ago, its publication was meant to usher in one of the greatest transformations that German philosophy had undergone since the conclusion of the epoch of idealism. From the very beginning, the apparent opposition between the antipsychologism of the first volume and the “psychological” investigations of the second volume constituted a stumbling block for critics. The further development of Husserl’s phenomenological method allowed the coherence of the two approaches, which seemed prima facie irreconcilable, to become ever more clearly apparent. Looking back thirty years later in his Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl gave the decisive interpretation of this coherence and thus ended the discussion of this question once and for all. However, the ambivalent reception to which Logical Investigations was subjected remained characteristic of the fate of all of Husserl’s later works. Following the publication of Logical Investigations and Husserl’s subsequent teaching in Göttingen, an extensive school formed around Husserl. In spite of this, the majority of Husserl’s students at the time (who also labeled themselves “phenomenologists”) felt the need to reject the next 49

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work to appear from the school’s leader, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, even though this work presented only the consistent continuation of those beginnings and developed the principles of phenomenological method in a comprehensive problematic for the first time. This paradoxical situation, which always presented the greatest difficulties for the understanding of phenomenology and its proper goals, was repeated in the further development of Husserl’s thought [Gedanken] in the years following World War I. Admittedly, during this period Husserl no longer enjoyed an extensive influence over a school as he did during the Göttingen years. Nonetheless, here too arose once again the discrepancy between what he himself wanted and the way in which his students interpreted and further developed his ideas. It went so far that he felt it necessary, in the afterword to Ideas,1 to draw a sharp line between his phenomenology and all further developments influenced by it. From then on, he stood firm: in the interest of scientific tidiness, when one speaks of phenomenology and “phenomenological,” one must distinguish precisely between phenomenology in Husserl’s sense and phenomenological directions in a broad sense. This unique relationship of Husserl’s phenomenology to its workings out would be less conspicuous if one could determine turns and breaks— and, in this sense, periods entirely distinct from one another—in Husserl’s development. However, entirely to the contrary, Husserl’s work developed in a completely continuous manner such that even its final form must be regarded as the consistent unfolding of a fundamental motif that was already operative in the first writings.2 Thus we are given occasion to reflect [Besinnung] on the grounds out of which this so continuously developing philosophy could come to experience further continuations that diverged in such varied ways and that deviated so completely from one another. In the following, I will show how transformations of this kind, in their incremental emergence, are grounded in the manner in which Husserl’s ideas themselves developed. This by no means occurred as a consequence of banal misunderstandings (although of course there were some of these too), but rather with a certain inner necessity. This sketch of phenomenology is drawn in view of the motives lying in phenomenology itself that led to its transformation by Husserl’s students and other thinkers influenced by him. A presentation of the complete history of phenomenology’s influence is not intended. I will restrict myself to the essential philosophical consequences and reinterpretations, to the extent that these emerged by the end of the 1920s. In doing so, I will settle for a more summary discussion, without going into the details of the individual representatives, of the first period of the

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formation of the phenomenological school, which includes Husserl’s teaching in Göttingen after the appearance of Logical Investigations up to roughly World War I.3 By contrast, emphasis will be placed on the transformation of the concept of phenomenon and phenomenology that Martin Heidegger undertook in Being and Time. The relationship of Husserl’s phenomenology to the Göttingen school can be surveyed relatively easily; one can highlight how its representatives were more inclined to take up individual motifs that Husserl had emphasized more firmly at one time or another in his development than they were to take possession of the whole of Husserl’s fundamental tendency. Heidegger’s transformation in Being and Time, by contrast, involves an attack on precisely this fundamental tendency.4 A discussion of the sense of this transformation is thus especially suitable for leading us to the question concerning the ultimate presuppositions of the method practiced by Husserl and the limits of this method.

Intentionality in Husserl and in Brentano The fundamental, driving motif in the whole development of Husserl’s phenomenology is the doctrine [Konzeption] of intentionality that is specific to him. However often he may have emphasized this, and however obvious it may sound today, the importance of this doctrine and the consequences that result from it were largely misunderstood, even by his students. Only in this way was it possible for individual motifs of phenomenology (eidetic intuition, analysis of intention as a new psychological method, and so on) to be isolated and for their inner unity—initially concealed from Husserl himself—to be overlooked. This was facilitated by the fact that Husserl had adopted the word and concept of intentionality from his teacher Franz Brentano and initially viewed himself as proceeding wholly in accordance with Brentano’s ambitions. It only became clear to Husserl much later, looking back on the course of his development, that he had already transformed this concept of intentionality from the very moment of taking it over, indeed that he had really only taken over the word intentionality, as he himself later said. Insofar as the subject matter [Sache] was concerned, Husserl had something entirely dif ferent in view from the outset. Thus, it was possible for a common term to conceal a profound difference, and in a way that was at first quite misleading even for Husserl himself. In order to understand this, we must take a look at Brentano’s concept of intentionality. It will then become clear how the questions that Husserl posed as early as in Philosophy of Arithmetic (his first published work) would not have been possible at all if he had consistently

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remained at Brentano’s standpoint. Much less would the analyses of Logical Investigations have been possible. Brentano saw the critical part of that work as in many respects a continuation of views that he had already advanced, although he expressed grave objections concerning the constructive efforts of Logical Investigations, as became clear from the correspondence between them. The difference in manner of expression is already most instructive. Brentano never speaks, as Husserl does, of the “intentionality of consciousness,” but only of the intentional relation, the relation that individual acts have to something, to their intentional, “mental” object. This implies that individual, distinct acts are contrasted in our consciousness for reflective inspection. Each of these acts is distinct from the others in that it has a different intentional object, and indeed that each has its own. The idea that two or more descriptively distinct acts could have identically the same [dasselbe] intentional object—an idea that played an important role for Husserl from the beginning—is quite foreign to Brentano. He speaks only of how distinct acts can have an equivalent [die gleiche] intentional relation without asking, however, whether such talk of “equivalence” [Gleichheit] does not first gain its sense from the fact that these acts have identically the same object. For other wise it cannot at all be indicated in what respect the distinct acts are supposed to be equivalent [gleich]. Of course, Brentano saw that the intentional relation is a relation of an entirely unique kind. It is not necessarily a relation between two existing objects; it is possible (for example, in phantasy presentations) that one member of the relation does not exist at all. Admittedly, Brentano did not advance beyond this observation in his fundamental clarification of this “relation.” His main interest pertained to the classification of the basic kinds of intentional act, of “psychic phenomena.” However, this classification did not make use of purely descriptive means; rather, in many cases it allowed perspectives of an argumentative kind to become decisive. All the same, this plan of a new classification of “psychic phenomena” in itself already contributed much toward clearing up the problematic of consciousness. In this respect, its significance for Husserl’s development is not to be underestimated. Faced with the rigidity of traditional philosophy when it comes to distinguishing “faculties of the mind” [Gemütsvermögen], kinds of act, and the like, one comes to see that the fundamental concepts of the philosophical doctrine of consciousness are in need of radical revision. Decisive for distinguishing Brentano’s conception of intentionality from Husserl’s is that in Brentano’s investigation of the intentional relation, all epistemological questions are consciously excluded from the outset. For

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him, the task of a psychological description of psychic phenomena remains exclusively a matter of establishing the fundamental classes, investigating their reciprocal relationships, and establishing that the intentional relation cannot be a relation in the usual sense. The question concerning the relationship of the intentional object to the actual, the actually existing, object, and with it also all the problems of evidence, do not as such concern him. They have nothing to do with psychological description and thus must be set aside from the outset. Brentano thus stands fully and consistently on the ground of an epistemological realism. For him, a probable inference, as a causal inference to the thing that causes the acts, counts as the sole path from psychic phenomena with their intentional objects to the actual object, to the “external world.” This can also be seen from the fact that he conceives psychic acts, which are subject to classification, in principle as undergoings [Erleidungen], a concept that, as a genus for all conscious phenomena, can by no means be acquired by way of pure description. (In such description, those experiences in which we are given to ourselves consciously as actively comporting ourselves part ways with those states in which we know ourselves to undergo something.) On the contrary, this concept can only arise through deliberation on the origin [Herkunft] of acts, on their causation through external stimuli. Deliberations of this kind, however, go beyond what is accessible by pure description. By contrast it must now be shown that Husserl, already in his earliest research, stood upon a dif ferent ground. That is not to say that he himself was aware of this, much less that he stated it. The point is rather that his approach can be shown to make sense only under this presupposition. The first philosophical task to which he put himself was that of clarifying the concept of number as the fundamental concept of mathematics. From the outset it was clear to Husserl that the analysis of the concept of number belongs to psychology.5 That is, of course, an idea that was familiar and obvious to him from traditional psychologism, aside from the fact that the way in which he executes this idea contained in itself already in embryo the “sublation” [Aufhebung] of psychologism (in the double, Hegelian sense of an overcoming that at the same time brings out for the first time the proper correctness of that which is overcome). He inquires into the act through which something like number [Zahl] (understood as cardinal number [Anzahl]) comes to consciousness, and he finds it in the presentation of a totality [Inbegriffsvorstellung]: “Any object of a presentation, whether physical or psychical, abstract or concrete, whether given through sensation or phantasy, can be united with any and arbitrarily many others to form a totality [Inbegriff ], and accordingly can also be counted. For

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example, certain trees, the Sun, the Moon, Earth and Mars; or a feeling, an angel, the Moon, and Italy, etc. In these examples, we can always speak of a multiplicity, and of a determinate number.”6 Such a totality originates “in that a unitary interest— and, simultaneously with and in it, a unitary noticing— distinctly picks out and encompasses various contents.”7 The collective connection through which the presentation of a totality comes about consists in our conceiving these contents, however disparate they may be, together “in one act”: “In this manner the contents are present simultaneously and joined together. They are one. And it is by means of reflection upon this unification of the separate contents through that complex psychical act that the general concepts multiplicity and determinate unity originate.”8 It was only possible for Husserl to pose such questions and to attempt in this way to clarify a fundamental mathematical concept because from the beginning his conception of the essence of consciousness deviated from Brentano’s. Husserl inquires regressively from numerals [Zahlzeichen] back to the phenomena of consciousness that indicate them and that lend sense to them. With a numeral we can connect an entirely empty, “inauthentic” [uneigentliche] presentation or an “authentic,” more or less fulfilled one. An authentic presentation is one in which the process through which we reach the cardinal number is conducted step by step, consciously, and originally [schrittweise bewußtseinsmäßig ursprünglich vollzogen]. Thus, Husserl seeks the way of producing upon which we advance from mere numerals to the authentic presentations that indicate numerals. He is aware that, at least for lower numbers, this path can always be traveled, indeed, that numbers can draw their original sense only from such an original process of production. Already at this time, he grasped this production [Erzeugung] as a performance [leistende Tätigkeit], a “collecting” [Zusammennehmen] guided by a unitary interest. Thus, his focus is already directed toward consciousness as productive consciousness. Looking back on these investigations he would later rightly characterize them as the first attempt “to go back to the spontaneous activities of collecting and counting, in which collections (‘totalities,’ ‘sets’) and cardinal numbers are given in the manner characteristic of something that is being generated originaliter [ursprünglich], and thereby to gain clarity respecting the proper, the authentic, sense of the concepts fundamental to the theory of sets and the theory of cardinal numbers.” 9 It was thus expressed in his later manner of speech, “a phenomenologico-constitutional investigation; and at the same time, it was the first investigation that sought to make ‘categorial objectivities’ of the first level and of higher levels . . . understandable on the basis of the ‘con-

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stituting’ intentional activities, as whose achievements [Leistungen] they make their appearance originaliter [ursprünglich], accordingly with full originality of their sense.”10 This is, of course, an interpretation of the sense of his investigations in Philosophy of Arithmetic from the perspective of horizons first obtained much later. And we by no means intend to say here that this sense of his approach was already at that time clear to him in this way. Rather, we are saying that a procedure of this kind was only possible because his questions even then—though without knowing anything of their proper goal—were already moving in this direction. That is to say, if it is to be traveled at all (as it was in those investigations), the path from numerals back to the conscious processes out of which they originally draw their sense presupposes, at least in embryo, a concept of intentionality according to which intentionality is to be understood as an act of meaning [Vermeinen]. Only then can the question of the “authentically supposed,” of “authentic” presentations in general, be posed in a way that makes sense at all. Only then can signs, notwithstanding all the inauthentic presentations that they initially and frequently awaken, be interrogated with respect to what is authentically meant by them, what toward which the intention is authentically directed. Deviating from Brentano, the talk of intentionality is thus taken literally. It is conceived as an intending that goes forth from inauthentic to authentic presenting. In other words, it is conceived as a striving that is directed toward a production, specifically toward generating [Herstellen] an authentic presentation. Of course, Brentano was familiar with the difference between authentic and inauthentic presenting, and it played a major role in his analyses. But his analyses stuck with the discovery of these various kinds of intentional relation to an object, which he contrasted with one another in a purely static way. He did this, one might say, without taking into consideration the dynamic aspect of the transition to an originally giving presentation, the transition from the intending of what is merely symbolically indicated to its fulfilling intuitive exemplification [Veranschaulichung]. And precisely this was central for Husserl from the outset. Or, if his lines of inquiry are to be made intelligible at all, it must be taken as central, though he himself was not aware at the time that he had thereby given to the concept of intentionality a conception deviating entirely from Brentano’s. Thus, he was not interested in simply drawing out the individual modes of intentional relation. Rather, he was interested above all in intentionality as a link, so to speak, that connected the individual acts with one another in such a way that unfulfilled acts refer to fulfilling ones in a manner befitting consciousness [bewußtseinsmäßig]. This

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is what Husserl, in Logical Investigations, would call the syntheses of transition of fulfillment or disappointment, and what had materially [der Sache nach] already become thematic here [in Philosophy of Arithmetic]. This problem cannot even turn up within Brentano’s lines of inquiry (though he was close to striking upon it in his investigations of adequation), to say nothing of obtaining the central significance that it had from the beginning for Husserl. It is only through grasping this significance that one can make the decisive step beyond the atomizing perspective of sensualism. This perspective is still operative in Brentano’s isolating classification of individual kinds of acts, even though he had already overcome sensualism in a dif ferent respect with his discovery of intentionality. When Husserl later emphasized time and again that the essence of consciousness is synthesis, synthetic achievement, this was only the genesis of the seed that can be detected in those earliest investigations. We also find already laid out here the radical break with the traditional determination of the concept of consciousness in which whatever pertains to presentation and cognition always stood in the center. All the problems of classification— questions into the foundation of emotional comportment [Gemütsverhaltens] and of willing in presenting, and so on—thus become problems of the second rank. Consequently, Husserl’s convergence with the Leibnizian doctrine of the monadic actio is connected with this new conception of intentionality, as he would later attempt to grasp intentionality as the primal striving of the monads. All determinate acts of cognizing, feeling, desiring, willing (as one distinguishes them from one another into classes) can then only be understood as modifications of this primal striving. Intentionality as intending thereby becomes a fundamental structure of consciousness that lies deeper than all the determinately definable “intentional experiences” that one can distinguish from one another in reflection. It is still a long way, of course, from the first beginnings in Philosophy of Arithmetic to these fully developed consequences. Here it is enough to show that this destination was already established at that time. An essential difference between Husserl and the representatives of the dominant psychologism is that Husserl did not initially become aware of his bias toward a psychologistic grounding of mathematical concepts. However, given his primary interest in questions of the foundations of formal mathematics, he soon ran into difficulties with this approach, concerning which he would retrospectively state, in the foreword to Logical Investigations:

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Where one was concerned with questions as to the origin of mathematical presentations [Vorstellungen], or with the elaboration of those practical methods which are indeed psychologically determined, psychological analyses seemed to me to promote clearness and instruction. But once one had passed from the psychological connections of thinking, to the logical unity of the thought-content . . . no true continuity and unity could be established. I became more and more disquieted by doubts of principle, as to how to reconcile the objectivity of mathematics, and of all science in general, with a psychological foundation for logic.11

With that, the central problem of Logical Investigations (or, the unity of its two main problems) is indicated, namely, the problem of bringing the ideal unity of the logical into harmony with the multiplicity of its subjective modes of givenness. Husserl only gradually realized how his concept of intentionality contained the power to overcome these problems. He became aware of how it offered the possibility, on the one hand, of establishing the ideality of the logical once and for all in the critique of psychologistic doctrines, and, on the other, of clarifying for the first time the sense of this ideality in subjectively oriented investigations. ( These investigations were still designated as “psychological” in the first edition of Logical Investigations.) He saw himself pushed by this tension “more and more toward general critical reflections on the essence of logic, and on the relationship, in particular, between the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content known.”12 As a mathematician, the error of the psychologistic subjectivization of the contents of thought must have been clear to him from the start. However, his argumentative refutations of psychologism would never have obtained their penetrating power if his thoroughly new conception of the essence of consciousness had not been at their basis from the outset. (At best, they could have led to an aporia concerning ideal objectivities, the domain of “propositions in themselves” [Sätze an sich], as in Brentano.) This doctrine is the driving force of all the arguments in the first volume of Logical Investigations, and these arguments only have the ancillary function of helping this doctrine emerge. It makes it possible for the first time to bring the ideality of the logical into connection with subjective experiences: only if consciousness is conceived as a meaning [Vermeinen], as intending in the sense of a performance [leistenden Tätigkeit], can one retain ideality without thereby falling prey to the “Platonism” rightly criticized by Brentano. The question then arises concerning what is authentically meant in acts,

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concerning the sense of the intentions that these acts consciously [bewußtseinsmäßig] bear in themselves. And no epistemological argument can dispose of the fact that precisely in the presentations of the number five, for example, this ideal, identical unity is what is meant.13 Given in the manner appropriate to consciousness [bewußtseinsmäßig] is the fact that various acts, regardless of the diversity of their real [reellen] content, can have the same intentional object (in the strict sense of identically the same). This assertion would necessarily have appeared absurd to Brentano, with his purely static isolation of the various modes of intentional relation. It acquires its sense, however, as soon as intentionality is understood as [an act of] meaning [Vermeinen]. With that, the questions that Brentano and all psychology had ceded to epistemology— questions concerning the “actual” object that may “correspond” to experiences— are integrated into the domain of analytic description. They turn up as problems concerning the distinction between emptily intending acts and acts that actually give the object itself. They cannot be solved in the analysis of isolated acts. Rather, they can only be solved in view of the syntheses of transition in which what was previously emptily meant, emptily indicated, expected, or phantasized, and so on, comes to a self-giving, gives itself in the manner appropriate to consciousness [bewußtseinsmäßig] as “itself there,” whereas the empty intendings “refer” to the fulfillments. This conception of the intentional object as the pole of a multiplicity of intendings related to it is only the later, felicitous designation of facts that Husserl had in sight from the beginning. One thereby avoids the embarrassment surrounding the sense of the transcendence of ideal objectivities (concerning the place where they are properly to be found, since they certainly cannot be components of the real external world, which ultimately led Brentano to deny that they exist at all). For meaning, intending is, taken quite generally and in accordance with its sense, already a “being outside” with objects, and it no longer requires first specifying a path from the immanence of acts to transcendent objects. Objects, whether real or “ideal,” are determined in their being as poles of identity, as what is identically meant in a multiplicity of actual or possible acts related thereto. The question concerning the actual being of these objects is thus reduced to the problem of characterizing the intentional achievements [Leistungen] in which objects give themselves in the manner proper to consciousness [bewußtseinsmäßig] as “themselves there.” In the case of ideal objectivities, these achievements are spontaneously productive activities. It is obvious that the unity of the two motifs that dominate the thematic of Logical Investigations did not initially come clearly to light for Husserl.

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According to the context, one or the other was more strongly emphasized. In the critique of psychologistic doctrines it was natural for the main emphasis to be placed on working out the ideality of the logical. This was the case to such an extent that critics saw this emphasis as the essential thing and believed they had to accuse Husserl of falling back into psychologism in the second volume. They did not see that it is precisely the concept of intentionality developed in the second volume that first provides the ground supporting the critique of psychologism in Prolegomena. In order to understand this ambivalence in the reception (which Logical Investigations found both among critics and disciples) it is necessary to linger at somewhat greater length with these beginnings and especially with the difference between Husserl and Brentano.

Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Phenomenological School The universal significance of the new concept of consciousness admittedly did not yet emerge in Logical Investigations. Here, Husserl was concerned above all with grounding formal logic anew, and intentional structures were taken into account only insofar as was required for this purpose. However, even here there already reside the motives for a further expansion of the problematic. Initially, the essence of intentionality as synthesis (synthetic achievement) became clear to Husserl in operations with numbers. He soon became aware, however, that this is only a special case and that all logical objectivities in the broadest sense, all categorial objectivities (of which the objects of formal mathematics constitute only a part), pose similar problems. Logical operations find their expression in linguistic structures, in propositions, etc. These must be interrogated regarding their significance as what is authentically meant in them. One must ask, where does what is meant come to authentic, fulfilled (i.e., intuitive) givenness? This leads to the distinction between sensuous and categorial intuition, intuition of the universal as opposed to the sensuous intuition that gives an individual. The latter is important not merely for the sake of contrast. Rather, it involves at the same time the question concerning the structure of those acts that make something present [vorstelligmachenden Akte] ( later called “doxic acts”), which provide the foundation for logical operations, for the formation of general concepts and general judgments.14 The most obvious example of sensuous intuition that gives an individual is external perception. For that reason, it forms—with its modifications of memory, phantasy-presentation, and so on—the next topic of Husserl’s research. As early as the publication of Logical Investigations, he had developed this topic

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in extensive investigations that he originally wanted to publish directly subsequent to Logical Investigations. This did not come to pass. However, these topics were developed and deepened ever anew in the lectures from Husserl’s first years in Göttingen, and they belong to the lectures that at the time had the strongest influence on the formation of Husserl’s school.15 [In these lectures,] the distinction between these analyses and psychological analyses in the usual sense becomes ever more clear. Indeed, this was a distinction that was already inherent in the fundamental doctrine of intentionality. Perception, presentiation [Vergegenwärtigung], memory, and so on are admittedly phenomena of consciousness. But if their proper essence—that through which alone they can be understood—is intentional achievement, then in analyzing them one must always at the same time keep one eye on the intentional objects, on what is meant in the way in which it is meant and what can be brought to self-givenness through their interconnections. That is, to every feature of the object there must correspond a structure of consciousness in which precisely this feature comes to givenness. We thus require, in exact correlation with the analyses of consciousness, an immersion [Vertiefung] into the essence of intentional objects and their structures, a reflection on the being-characteristic of the entity that becomes the object of consciousness. Admittedly, the intentionality of consciousness had already at that time received increasing recognition in psychology, but only as a purely psychological problem. The Husserlian concept of intentionality as achievement [Leistung] first made it possible to treat questions concerning the essence of objects in strict correlation to the structures of consciousness. It was for these questions that Husserl then took up the old term ontology, with a transformation of its meaning: ontology of the thing in correlation to the achievements of consciousness in which it comes to givenness. This was the sense of the task that Husserl assigned himself with his analysis of sensuous perception and its modifications. Here is a further difference from the psychology of the time: it was not inductive, empirical contingencies that were at stake in these correlations, neither on the side of consciousness nor on the side of the objects. At stake instead were essential connections, essential structures of both the intentional achievement as well as what is achieved in it (i.e., the entity that comes to self-givenness). This too was an insight that originally forced itself on Husserl in his preoccupation with the fundamental questions of mathematics, namely, the insight that not only formal mathematics, arithmetic, and set theory concern idealities, but that, in its way, geometry does as well. Specifically, geometry is concerned with the essential structures

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of spatial shapes in general in such a way that the insights of geometry have the characteristic of an unconditioned universality that cannot be acquired empirically. However, a physical thing, as it is given in perception, is subject not merely to the essential laws that pertain to its spatial shape; it always has some color or another, and as an actual thing that is not merely a phantom it stands in a causal nexus with other things. Those are not accidental facts any more than conforming to the laws [Gesetzlichkeiten] of its spatial shape is. They are essential connections belonging to the structure of physical things: a physical thing cannot be a physical thing at all without these structures. And to every objective structure of this kind there correspond psychic achievements in which the object comes to selfgivenness as an entity with this structure. It is constituted [sich konstituiert], as Husserl expressed it at the time. Thus, the correlativity between the essential structures of intentional objectivities and the essential structures of the experiences in which these objectivities come to givenness was inherent from the outset in the fundamental doctrine of intentionality as achievement, and it was incrementally unfolded on its basis. Programmatically, there arises at the same time the requirement that for every kind of objectivity, every kind of entity, there must be correlatively a proper kind of self-giving in intentional achievements, that is, in corresponding self-giving experiences. If, then, consciousness is to be grasped in the full scope of its achievements, then all of the kinds of objectivities must be taken in their essential structure as clues. One can then inquire regressively into the conscious events that correspond to these objectivities with respect to which the talk of entities (and in the case of self-giving, talk of entities of this or that kind that truly are) obtains its sense. This implies at the same time that alongside the “analytic” a priori (the formal logical-mathematical essential structures that were, in their correlation to the corresponding achievements of consciousness, the primary topic of Logical Investigations), there appears on the objective side the synthetic a priori. Alongside formal ontology, material ontologies appear, the first example of which is the a priori insights of geometry that were then followed by the remaining structures of spatial-physical being. Fi nally, the essential structures of nonphysical being—of personal and other being— appear (though at first this was admittedly demanded programmatically more than it was actually developed, something that only occurred later with the drafts for the second volume of Ideas): all of this in correlation to the corresponding achievements of consciousness. The universal significance [Bedeutung] of this correlationism was, to be sure, only gradually worked out by Husserl in the decade up to the

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appearance of Ideas (1913). That it would develop in this way was by no means certain from the outset, even after the publication of Logical Investigations. Thus it is all the more comprehensible that this correlationism was not fully appreciated by his students and all those, such as Max Scheler, who, though strictly speaking not his students, were influenced by Husserl. Rather, for the most part it was only one of the two motifs that came into the foreground more or less independently from the other: on the one hand, emphasis was placed on the descriptive-psychological motif, which showed its fecundity above all for the new formation of psychopathology;16 on the other hand, emphasis was placed on the ontological motif (as in Reinach, Geiger, and Conrad-Martius). Here it was specifically eidetic insight [Wesenserschauung] that was regarded as Husserl’s essential achievement and the proper core of phenomenology, not only for the question concerning entities and their regions but also in descriptivepsychological analyses. Use was made of the appeal to essential insights to a much more liberal degree than in Husserl, and without giving an account, as Husserl had, of the methodological uniqueness of “seeing essences” [Wesensschau]— something that frequently brought phenomenology into ill repute as an intuitionism lacking a method. Of course, Husserl’s students generally acknowledged his fundamental principle—that every kind of objectivity must have its mode of intuition—but they did so without actually making the connection of self-giving intuition and the being- character of the objectivities given into a problem, and without even understanding self-giving as an intentional achievement. In general, things remained in a more or less “static” correlationism between intention and object. Hence, even that principle could be interpreted in the sense of a “turn to the object” (as is done frequently down to the present day), as a theory-free eidetic seeing of the actual in all of its domains. With this interpretation, however, one forfeits precisely the essential aspect of Husserl’s ontological approach: it was not intended to provide naïve realism with a good conscience and to lead to a flight from subjectivity, but rather to make its problematic more profound. Thus, the first phenomenological school with its disseminations was characterized by an ambivalence: the two principle motifs of Husserl’s phenomenology—the eidetic-psychological and the ontological—were taken up and pursued not in their inseparable cohesion, but instead more or less separated from one another. In stating this, we do not mean to express a critique of that school, in which there unfolded a collaboration of rare intensity and fecundity sustained by the highest ethos. We intend only to render historically intelligible from the uniqueness of his work’s devel-

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opment the remarkable nature of Husserl’s reception and influence. And here it is revealed that on a higher plane the ambivalence was in principle the same one that had already been operative in the reception of Logical Investigations. Once again, this reception was grounded in a failure to understand the proper sense of Husserl’s original conception of intentionality. This can also be seen from the fact that the essential deepening that Husserl had given to the concept of intentionality in his analyses of temporal consciousness right after the publication of Logical Investigations was all but disregarded. In these analyses, the entire import of his concept of intentionality as achievement is already revealed. These analyses represent the link by which Husserl’s transition to the problematic of the phenomenological reduction becomes intelligible. The context in which Husserl in 1905 first fleshed out the lectures on inner time consciousness shows that it is the problems of external perception17— already addressed for the revision of Logical Investigations— that led Husserl into this domain. The analysis of the structure of external perception leads to the question concerning the ultimate unities in the stream of consciousness out of which all synthetic-constitutive achievements are built. According to Brentano’s doctrine, these ultimate unities are the acts that, as the objects of inner perception, are distinguished from the objects of outer perception. The acts themselves, in the way in which they become accessible in reflection, are for him the ultimate givennesses. Husserl, however, for whom, owing to his doctrine of intentionality, every givenness of an object is the result of a synthetic achievement in which this object is constituted, could not stop at this point. The acts themselves must also be interrogated with respect to the intentional achievements on the basis of which they are given for reflection as immanent unities. Indeed, every act is itself already something temporally extended [Erstrecktes] in consciousness, a unity of duration in which the various phases of its enduring can be distinguished from the whole of the completed, constituted act. Thus, Husserl arrived at the temporal flow of consciousness with the multiplicity of its sequential phases [Ablaufphasen] in which the acts themselves are constituted as a unity: they are not simply ultimate pregivennesses, but rather they are themselves the products of intentional achievements. This implies that the investigations of inner time consciousness are by no means concerned merely with obtaining the consciousness of time, of temporal duration, and of temporal relationships as some sort of objectively pregiven and fixed magnitudes. Every assumption, every assessment or conviction concerning objective time, every positing of an

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existent [Existierendem] that transcends the stream of consciousness, such as positing time itself [der Zeit] as the “form” of objective objects [objektiver Gegenstände], is excluded from the outset. The inquiry is not into existing time, but only into phenomenal time and the immanent time of the flow of consciousness itself.18 The issue is the manner in which the acts themselves and, correlatively, the manner in which the intentional objectivities that come to givenness in the acts come to awareness as temporal, and thus the manner in which an immanent unity is constituted in general as enduring. This occurs in the original flow of impression and retentional holding-on-to [Behalten] as a minimal achievement of intentional synthesis. But what is accomplished in it? Not merely the bringingto-givenness of temporal duration that is already on hand somewhere in advance or the bringing-to-givenness of differences in temporal duration. This psychological question concerning the origin of temporal consciousness is already clearly separated from the phenomenological question posed here. The former is “directed toward the primitive formations of time-consciousness, in which the primitive differences of the temporal become constituted intuitively and properly as the original sources of all the evidences relating to time.”19 This psychological question relates only to the becoming conscious of duration and of differences in duration, to the threshold values that are decisive for grasping the differences in duration, etc. (whereby, however, this duration is already conceived as measurable somehow with objective measures so that objective time itself is already presupposed). In the Husserlian investigations, by contrast, an entirely dif ferent question is posed from the outset, namely this: How do we come at all to sense something as temporally enduring, temporally extended, purely in itself and not in relation to something else? Somewhere the impression of temporal duration and of the flowing of time must originally arise so that anything that can be given to us at all can be measured and compared in its duration. Every measurement of time already presupposes the original consciousness of temporal succession, duration, and extension. The inquiry is into the possibility of this consciousness, and thus not into the impression of something that is already there in advance and is then merely grasped, but rather into something that first comes to be in this original temporal consciousness. Original temporal consciousness thereby acquires the characteristic of a productive consciousness. It is no mere grasping of pregiven time, but rather, in its original flowing it first forms time in general and thereby forms the possibility of any kind of grasping of a pregiven succession or a pregiven duration. In this sense, Husserl designates the flow of internal temporal

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consciousness as absolute subjectivity, for whose moments there really cannot be any names at all.20 For names, of course, are always names for the kind of thing that is itself already temporal, not for the kind of thing that first forms time, but for the kind of thing that already somehow exists in a time that has already been pre-given. This is not presupposed for those [other] structures of temporal consciousness, so Husserl can even say “there is no time of primordially constituting consciousness.”21 That is, its achievement is not an event that plays out in time, but rather it is that in which time is first formed and which gives sense to any talk of time and temporal structure of any kind whatsoever. It can thus be seen that with these questions Husserl is moving in a dimension that for the most part had previously not been entered upon or seen by philosophy at all.22 And these insights do not emerge in this context as a totally new revelation but are rather only the consequence of the doctrine of intentionality as achievement that originally guided him. It thus also becomes clear, of course, that consciousness cannot be conceived as a mere succession, a chain of cogitationes in the sense of the tradition (though Husserl preserved this manner of speaking into his last years). On the contrary, the fundamental structure of consciousness is something entirely dif ferent from every thing explored by psychology with its distinction of acts (among which the act of thinking always takes a distinguished position). Indeed, one can say that the expression “consciousness,” when used for this sum of achievements, is rather misleading and directs one into the orbit of a tradition that Husserl had abandoned. There are structures in whose construction [Aufbau] what we customarily call consciousness presents only a determinate, already quite high level of consciousness. The concept of consciousness as achievement—intentionality as achievement, this original doctrine that guided Husserl from the beginning—reveals its whole meaning for the first time with the penetration into this dimension of questioning. It renders intelligible how all further continuations of phenomenology right up to its latest period and the claim to universality posed by the phenomenological method are only the consequences of this approach. This was not at all understood by the students of the time. Rather, these investigations were taken up only as a special problem of psychologicalphenomenological analy sis. Indeed, in a similar sense, Brentano had already— earlier and publicly, though unbeknownst to Husserl—projected a diagram of time, and his concept of proteraesthesis [Proterästhese] points in a similar direction to Husserl’s concept of retention. But for Brentano, it remained a purely psychological problem that was not

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brought into connection with the fundamental questions of epistemology and ontology. And it could not at all be brought into connection with them because Brentano’s concept of consciousness remained within the abovementioned boundaries. The transition to the achievements of time- consciousness is the first step toward grasping consciousness as self-producing: the achievement of intentionality is the lowermost production [Schöpfung] of itself as a flowing, streaming consciousness. That does not mean production into pregiven temporal space but rather production of the possibility of flowing [Verlauf ] in general. At first blush, this claim may sound exaggerated. Does consciousness not have its beginning and end in time? Is it not bound to organic processes, and does it not pass away with them? All this talk of processes existing [seienden] “in time” already presupposes the time, and it is precisely this time whose self-forming is supposed to become intelligible here in the first place. However, in order to grasp consciousness in this way as self-producing and thereby as first giving the possibility of temporal succession in general, and in order to avoid falling prey to the temptation of projecting it as a temporal event in an already pregiven time, we require the universal exclusion [Ausschaltung] of all positings and assumptions that transcend the pure stream of consciousness. This exclusion must be undertaken methodologically.23 In the analyses of isolated contexts and syntheses of acts, such as those of perception, this reduction purely to consciousness and what is supposed in it as it is supposed was not a particularly difficult problem. And in this sense, the reduction was also applied by the phenomenological school wherever it was a matter of analytic investigations of intentionality. But as soon as time-consciousness with its self-producing characteristic enters into view, it is no longer possible to treat the reduction as a merely methodological device for bringing off purely introspective psychological analyses and to leave undecided the being-characteristic of intentional objectivities. Rather, with the problem of consciousness, the problem of being [Sein] in its universality is also unrolled. For every entity [Seiende] is certainly determined in some way or another through its relation to time. It is in time, temporally enduring, or “extra-temporal,” which also surely includes a certain relation to time. If the most original and deepest achievement of consciousness is thus grasped as time-formation, then it is only consistent that every kind of entity [Seiendes], too, cannot be understood in its origin other wise than on the basis of achievements of consciousness. Consciousness is then no longer an entity, or an occurrence in a determinate entity, but rather absolute subjectivity, whose moments have “no names” because all names, in accordance

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with their original meaning, designate already constituted entities. But precisely in this case we require a proper methodology in order to work out absolute subjectivity in this purity and to fend off all the objectivizing tendencies that force themselves upon us time and again. Thus, it was certainly no accident that Husserl, immediately after working out the lectures on temporal consciousness, increasingly directed his attention to reflections on the phenomenological reduction. Already in 1907, two years later, he presented the reduction in lectures for the first time, and from then on it was a central theme for him until his death. For Husserl, this did not mean turning away from materially directed research toward deliberations on method, as is often maintained. Rather, our considerations up to this point should let it be seen how for Husserl the reduction is nothing other than the entry way into the fundamental questions of metaphysics. It is not something that can be done away with beforehand once and for all. On the contrary, every phenomenological analysis in ever new and ever deeper layers bumps into the necessity of the reduction in order to advance from all previously constituted being [Sein] to ultimately constituting, absolute subjectivity.24 Only on the basis of the phenomenological reduction is phenomenology put in a position to make its claim to universality, specifically, the claim that it is able to clarify the sense of all talk of the being of entities by returning to the achievements of subjectivity in which entities are constituted. Being and consciousness are thus inseparable correlates. The world, the totality of entities, is functionally dependent on consciousness. It is nothing other than a system of intentional poles in which the intentions of communally experiencing subjects meet one another in unanim ity and are validated. That means at the same time that every thing that we can meaningfully speak of as an entity is an index for achievements of consciousness in which this entity is to be brought to givenness. Talk of a transcendence that is absolutely inaccessible to consciousness is just empty words with which we cannot authentically present anything for ourselves at all. Every question concerning the sense of being— concerning that of which it might make sense at all to say “it is” or “it is in this or that way”— can only be a question concerning the achievements of consciousness in which this being [Sein] shows itself [sich ausweisen]. All experiences that give meaning to the words of philosophy and metaphysics must be consistently demonstrable [aufweisbar], and the method of this demonstration [Ausweisung] is universal intentional analysis. That is, in brief, the idea that grounds the phenomenological method’s claim to universality. If it is actually and comprehensively executed in ever new steps of the reduction,

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then there can remain nothing outside that could be a possible topic for philosophy at all. It would exceed the limits of these observations to go beyond these hints and attempt a presentation of the difficult problematic of the reduction with all the paradoxes to which it leads and that are resolved in its execution. Introduced in the first volume of Ideas (which appeared alone at the time) in the form of a much-compressed program, the phenomenological reduction was the teaching least understood by students and contemporaries. With its introduction, the moment is marked after which the Göttingen phenomenological school, much as it had failed to recognize the systematic import of the previous step (in the analysis of time), almost without exception denied Husserl a following that could have formed the bridge from the older intentional-analytic investigations to the reduction. And so it came to pass that, instead of being understood as a consistent continuation of motives already broached in Philosophy of Arithmetic and Logical Investigations, the central position taken by the reduction in Ideas was understood rather as a departure from Husserl’s original tendencies and as a frustrating approach to an idealism in the Neo-Kantian mold. The interpretation of Husserl’s ontological turn as a “turn to the object” had already come to be overly taken for granted. This misunderstanding was facilitated by the fact that one can find in the mode of expression of Ideas many external accommodations to Neo-Kantianism (especially that of Natorp), which, under the circumstances, could deceive a reader regarding the fundamental differences.25 With the publication of Ideas, Husserl had hoped to make available to his students for the first time a comprehensive presentation and manual. Instead, paradoxically, the work fundamentally marks the end of the Göttingen phenomenological school, which was also brought about soon thereafter in an external sense by the outbreak of World War I and by Husserl’s appointment to Freiburg. From then on, Husserl was really a solitary thinker. A broad, school-forming influence such as he had enjoyed in Göttingen was denied him in Freiburg. From then on, on a case-by-case basis, his influence acted on isolated personalities who took up and reinterpreted his teaching.

Heidegger’s Being and Time and the Problem of a Limit to the Phenomenological Method The most important of these reinterpretations will be the object of the following considerations. It takes place in the exposition [Auslegung] of the concepts of phenomenon and phenomenology in Heidegger’s Being and

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Time and in the critical allusions to Husserl’s method that permeate this work. I will show that Heidegger’s reservations concerning Husserl’s method are much more radical and pertain much more to the whole than all of the reservations expressed against his teaching by Husserl’s earlier students. At the same time, Heidegger clearly was not aware of undertaking a reinterpretation of phenomenology. On the contrary, he was convinced that he was only expressing the proper intention of phenomenology in a more precise form. This becomes even clearer from Heidegger’s remarks to the draft of the article “Phenomenology” for the Encyclopedia Britannica (which Husserl composed shortly after the appearance of Being and Time) and from Heidegger’s letter to Husserl from October 22, 1927.26 The severity of the dissociation from “existential philosophy” that Husserl then carried out in 1930 in the “Afterword” to his Ideas, however, 27 shows that these differences could not be overcome through this discussion. Looking back at this discussion, it certainly must be said that neither of the two philosophers was able to survey the position of the other in its full scope. It can easily be shown that many critical statements on both sides rest on misinterpretation. Nonetheless, there remains a deeper, substantive reason for the opposition, which can be explained in terms of the divergent approaches of the two thinkers. If we begin by inquiring into the convictions common to both thinkers, we find above all a fundamental methodological principle of phenomenology that was recognized by Heidegger without reservation just as it was by the older phenomenological school. This is the principle that every kind of entity has its own way of giving itself that is appropriate only to it, and that meaningful philosophical statements can only be made on the basis of this self-giving. Specifically, Heidegger grasps this fundamental principle in a certain variation that Husserl had already given to it some years prior to the composition of his Ideas. In this variation, the fundamental principle presents itself in the form of a demand to establish a “natural concept of the world” [natürlichen Weltbegriff ]. This problem of the natural concept of the world was for Husserl by no means posed merely as the problem of a description of entities free of theory. It had rather a determinate function within the total context of the systematics that culminated in the doctrine of the phenomenological reduction. This function can briefly be characterized as follows. As has already been mentioned, the clues guiding intentional analysis, as the universal exposure of the achievements of consciousness, are prescribed by objectivities, by the various modes of being of objects [des Gegenständlichen]. Each of these sketches out an appropriate kind of conscious

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achievement in which entities of its region come to givenness. Thus, if the question concerning the achievements of consciousness is to be properly posed, it requires above all the insight into the structure and layering— the founding relationship—of the objectivities themselves. Only in this way can one understand what is properly and originally the object of experience—what are correlatively the lowest and most primitive achievements of consciousness— and what, by contrast, is already a constituted object of a higher level— and correlatively what is an achievement of consciousness at a higher level. The dominant tradition of natural science suggests certain prejudices concerning the original object of experience, specifically the prejudice that the object, as it is presented in the “exact” determination of natural science, is an entity in the proper and original sense. According to this prejudice, every thing else is merely superstructure, a matter of pasting “value predicates” onto this purely “objective object” [objectiven Gegenstandes] and the like. But one thereby fails to recognize that the object in the sense of mathematical-physical natural science is itself nothing original, nothing that is immediately given in experience, but rather much more a product of certain “idealizing” methods that are exercised on what is immediately experienced—methods that have a determinate goal and already presuppose an abstract dismantling of the world as it is encountered in original, immediate experience.28 So if one wants to find the actual, original division of entities, of objects in their various domains (regions)—what then becomes the guide for the question regarding the associated achievements of consciousness— one must demolish this plethora of prejudices that, dazzled by the ideal of exact cognition, has accumulated over the centuries. One must penetrate to entities as they are immediately given in experience. One must penetrate to the world of pure experience. In other words, one must obtain a “natural concept of the world.” The problem of the natural concept of the world had already been introduced by positivism, but here in particular the original intention was perverted into its contrary. For the conviction remained dominant that such a natural concept of the world could only be obtained by dissecting the world into sense data as its ultimate elements in which (entirely in the spirit [Sinne] of the mechanistic-sensualistic mode of thought) one was supposed to find what properly and originally is, the ultimate givennesses of experience. For Husserl, by contrast, the demand for a natural concept of the world obtained a new importance and was reinterpreted in the sense of the primary principle of phenomenology. He did this by allowing only those experiences that are free of the prejudices of natural science to count as actually original experience and by pressing forward from the already

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mathematized world to the immediate, human surrounding world [Umwelt], later called the “life-world.” But in contrast to the older phenomenological school, which also saw a theory-free immersion in the essence of objects as the fundamental requirement of phenomenological methodology, though without directing its attention to the world-concept itself, for Husserl it was precisely this world-concept wherein his problematic and the task of establishing pure experience always retained an ancillary function: prior to the performance of the reduction and prior to the constitutive analyses of consciousness that are to be carried out on the basis of the reduction, guiding clues must be obtained by isolating [Herausstellung] the world as it is disclosed in original experience. For Heidegger, in this statement of the problem is found one of the most important of the stimuli received from Husserl. Being-in-the-world is for Heidegger a fundamental structure of Dasein. To understand the world in its relation to Dasein, and to understand Dasein itself in the way in which it originally is worldly and has world—this is the topic of fundamental ontology.29 Of course for him it is not embedded, as it was for Husserl, in the systematics of the reduction, which he rejects. That does not mean that for him this problem of the natural concept of the world comprises merely a description of entities in their essence free of theories, as for Husserl’s older students. Rather, in Heidegger the problem is made more profound such that even his reason for rejecting the reduction is entirely dif ferent from that of those earlier students. Where this newfound profundity lies can be made clear from the discussion of the concept of phenomenon presented in the Introduction to Being and Time. Taken generally and formally, phenomenon means “that which shows itself in itself.” Within this formal concept of phenomenon one can distinguish the vulgar concept of phenomenon from the phenomenological concept. The vulgar concept is the one recognized by the older phenomenological school as the sole decisive concept. It refers to appearances in the Kantian sense, that is, what is accessible through empirical intuition. But this is precisely what is not at issue in the phenomenological concept of phenomenon. On the contrary, seen once again in the horizon of the Kantian problematic, what is to be understood phenomenologically by phenomenon can be grasped by saying “what already shows itself in appearances, prior to and always accompanying what we commonly understand as phenomena (though unthematically), can be brought thematically to selfshowing [and] what thus shows itself in itself (‘the forms of intuition’) are the phenomena of phenomenology.”30 Accordingly, we can understand these phenomena as the conditions of the possibility of experience that

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remain unthematic and veiled in normal experience directed toward entities. A phenomenon is “something that essentially belongs to what initially and for the most part shows itself, indeed in such a way that it constitutes its meaning and ground.”31 Phenomena in this sense are thus not entities as they are immediately given in experience, but rather what constitutes the being of entities, in other words, what allows us to understand the extent to which we can meaningfully speak of their being in a given case: “The phenomenological concept of phenomenon, as self-showing, means the being of beings [entities]—its meaning, modifications, and derivatives.”32 But phenomena in this sense are nothing other than the structures of Dasein itself in relation to which all talk of being and entities receives its sense. Unveiling these structures is the task of fundamental ontology, which provides the groundwork for every further ontological question. Here too (just as for Husserl), instead of the realistic “turn to the object” (which was characteristic of the older phenomenological school) there is the turn back into the depths of “subjectivity.” Heidegger, however, avoids the terms consciousness, subject, and subjectivity in order to preclude the possibility of an interpretation of his analysis that would fall back into the orbit of the traditional subject-object problem. Confronted with this, Husserl could, of course, object that it is precisely the structures of subjectivity—of consciousness and its intentional achievements—that have become thematic here (subjectivity as the condition of the possibility for any givenness of entities whatsoever), provided that the talk of “consciousness” is taken in the comprehensive and profound sense in which he took it. And apparently, the same turn that Husserl had first performed with complete clarity in Ideas was there in Heidegger, too. But why, then, do we find in the place of “absolute subjectivity” and its intentional achievements the finitude of Dasein, and why the rejection of the reduction as the entryway to the veiled depths of subjectivity? It might seem obvious that, in inquiring into the reasons for this difference, one should stick to the passages in Being and Time from which it emerges that, for Heidegger, intentionality is merely “comportment toward entities.” Then his objection—that one can understand any given comportment toward entities only on the basis of the structure of being-in-theworld and that conversely one cannot illuminate being-in-the-world through intentional analysis— appears comprehensible. Seen in this way, intentional analysis retains its proper sense, though this is only a subordinate sense, specifically, that of the investigation of a determinate and specific structure of being-in-the-world.33 However, it is clear that this conception of intentionality satisfies at best only the usual psychological

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concept of intentionality and not Husserl’s concept. For if intentionality is understood as achievement, and its deepest layer as temporalization, the formation of time, then it certainly cannot mean mere comportment toward entities that have already been given. Rather, its achievement must be the self-forming of time, the formation of the possibility of allowing entities to be encountered at all. Comportment toward entities is in Husserl’s sense merely a determinate layer of intentionality, specifically that of act intentionality, of the individual acts in which we comport ourselves in a receptively grasping way (as, e.g., in sensuous perception) or in a spontaneously active way (as, e.g., in predicative judging). Nonetheless, it would be wrong to seek to deduce the difference that separates Heidegger from Husserl merely from such a manifest misunderstanding of the import of Husserl’s concept of intentionality and to thereby be done with the matter. The reason must lie deeper and it must still obtain even when this superficial misunderstanding has been removed. One indication of the direction in which we must look is given by the numerous passages in Being and Time in which Heidegger opposes the theoretical “just viewing” [nur hinsehen] of the “impartial observer.” [Heidegger takes this to be] the way in which, according to Husserl, the structures of subjectivity that make experience and having a world possible— and on their basis, the sense of being in general— are to be disclosed. It cannot be the reflection of the impartial observer that achieves this, but only the performance of existence itself. All philosophy has the sole function of letting the metaphysics that has always already occurred in Dasein become explicit. It will not suffice simply to trace this opposition back to the difference in personality between the two thinkers (as was often done at the time) by saying, for instance, that in the one case it is a matter of a contemplatively directed attitude and in the other a more active-decisionistic attitude.34 Rather, we must attempt through interpretation to find the substantive reason—which, admittedly, is nowhere expressed—for this difference and from its salient manifestations to probe its real core. In fact, Husserl’s method is a method of universal reflection, and the stance of the reflecting phenomenological ego can be none other than that of the “impartial observer” if the structures of consciousness are actually to be unveiled by reflection in the universality of their achievements. When Heidegger opposes the “impartial observer,” this implies an attack on the core idea of Husserl’s phenomenology. Specifically, it is an attack on the idea that grounds his method’s claim to guarantee a universal entry way to all philosophical problems. That this connection between the stance of the

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phenomenologizing ego (as an “impartial observing”) and the phenomenological method’s claim to universality necessarily obtains can be made intelligible through the following consideration. Through the reduction, every positing that transcends consciousness is bracketed. The phenomenologist steps back to observe the interconnections of consciousness and its achievements. In them he does not have (if intentionality is actually understood in its depth as achievement) an isolated subject, encapsulated in its immanence. Rather, he has the whole world as it is meant by him and built up in his intentional achievements. It can easily be shown that objections that this procedure leads to a worldless immanence, solipsism, and so on rest on a misunderstanding of the concept of intentionality. These objections are not capable of bringing forth anything cogent against Husserl’s method or of setting the discussion concerning the import and potential limits of this method on solid ground. According to the phenomenological reduction, the totality [All] of entities—including me myself, the one who philosophizes as this human being in the world, and also the “others”—becomes intelligible as something that constructs itself [sich Aufbauendes] from the inside out [von innen her] through achievements of consciousness. Of course, this presupposes not only reflection in general on some conscious process or another, not only a turn of the gaze in general from the straightforward, thematic objective direction back to the experiences that constitute objects, but it also presupposes that reflection is universal: it cannot remain merely occasional [gelegentlich] and possess only an instrumental function in one or another context of practical comportment. Even in extraphilosophical, daily life, such occasional reflection takes place often enough; I turn from the direction of objects back to my experiences, perhaps to assess whether they deceive me. In this case, I am interested in doing something as a practical human being, and reflection serves only this action; it is occasional, and my factual interests—what I factually am and that for which I factually strive— are thereby affirmed. Through the reduction, however, all that is bracketed; not only my doxic positings but also my practical goals and my volitional positings. I am no longer engaged in their per for mance, but rather comport myself toward them and my collected experiencing as an impartial observer. Only in this way can reflection become universal and can all the achievements of consciousness be unveiled. The occasional, reflective turn that stands in the ser vice of some practical objective, potentially even in the ser vice of an objectively directed cognitive practice, cannot be universal at all. It is satisfied when it has

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reached its respective goal, at which point it is given up as an attitude and attention returns to the straightforward direction toward objects. In universal reflection, as made possible through the performance of the reduction, I myself, as a factual human being with goals and desires, am also bracketed alongside every thing else. Of course, this by no means implies that the phenomenologist ceases to be a human being. It means only that, for the question concerning the sense of being and every determinate being-thus [Sosein], this fact must be disregarded. Taking it into account can contribute nothing to answering this question. Only through bracketing this fact and through universal reflection do the essential correlation of being and consciousness and the functional dependency of being on achievements of consciousness become accessible. The question, then, no longer concerns my factual being, my interests that are conditioned by the moment and its decisions. Rather, this fact of my self as a human being in the world, always in a determinate situation, becomes an indifferent initial example by means of which I can make clear, amongst other things, the structure of factual human Dasein as it always is in its determinate situation.35 There thus obtains a necessary interconnection between the universality of the phenomenological method and the attitude of impartial observing. Only in it can the proper essence of subjectivity and its achievements be unveiled in their full scope. Therein is resolved at the same time the old idea that true being only discloses itself in theory, except that the sense of this idea has undergone a transformation: theory, the theoretical seeing of the “impartial observer,” is not immediately [geradehin] directed toward entities but is directed in the correlative perspective toward entities qua achievement of intentionality. That is, it is directed toward the achievements of consciousness in which being is constituted. As achievements that were previously “anonymous,” or concealed, these are the topic of phenomenology. They are not something that was simply there in advance. Rather, this is the kind of recourse in which subjectivity first posits itself as constituting subjectivity and first acquires itself. All occasional reflection on achievements of consciousness adheres to the common prejudice that something is there (a conscious event) that simply plays out in correlation to being. Here, however, this idea is overcome by making reflection universal and by allowing no being [Sein] simply to stand. On the contrary, one inquires regressively from all being [Sein]. Indeed, one even inquires behind the being of experiences themselves, and they are grasped as experiences that first produce themselves in inner time consciousness, the consciousness that forms time itself. The sense of the theoretical seeing of the “impartial observer”

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thereby also receives a new character. It is not the simple theoretical seeing of a subject that already exists [seienden] in the world, the simple interrogation [Vernehmen] of something that always already is. Rather, it is a seeing in which subjectivity first unveils itself for itself as time- and worldforming subjectivity and in doing so becomes aware of itself as the condition of the possibility of all talk of being and entities. If we keep these connections in view, it becomes comprehensible that an attack on one of Husserl’s core ideas is contained in Heidegger’s rejection of “impartial seeing,” specifically the idea to which the Husserlian method’s claim to universality clings. We can disclose the ground of this rejection only by bringing to mind the fundamental tendency of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein. According to it, we can say in advance that Heidegger rejects Husserl’s method because to his mind it does not really take seriously Dasein’s original experience of itself, that is, because the originality of Dasein’s existence cannot become accessible by means of this method. According to Heidegger, Husserl’s method can only lead to an “idealized subject” and not to the innermost essence of Dasein, the facticity of its existence. In fact, it must halt just before this. Thus, precisely what constitutes “subjectivity” in the most proper and radical sense is not unveiled by Husserl’s method, but rather remains concealed. What might be the significance [Sinn] of these considerations, and have we actually touched on a limit of the phenomenological method with them? Is it true that in this method the facticity of Dasein does not become accessible? In order to arrive at an answer, let us recall that the method of intentional analysis is a method of guiding clues. That is, an entity, as it is initially simply given in the multiplicity of its achievements, becomes the clue guiding the regressive inquiry into the synthetic achievements in which it is constituted. What stands before us in experience as an entity is a product of these achievements, and they become accessible in the regressive questioning from the completed product back to the way in which it is formed in consciousness. For example, for a perceived thing, there emerges first the distinction between the thing itself and the manner in which it is meant in a given case, the manner in which it is given in profiles [Abschattungen] first from this side, then from that side. These profiles, too, are nothing ultimate, but rather the product of an apperception of sensuous data, which are themselves again not mere data but already constituted unities to which a multiplicity of sequential phases is to be assigned as that which constitutes them. Thus, we inquire regressively from every pregiven unity into the multiplicity that constituted it all the way back to the

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lowermost synthetic achievement, the temporalization of inner timeconsciousness. Husserl himself labeled this procedure “regressive”: regress from the objective unity back to the constituting multiplicities and from there the reconstruction of the objectivities out of their ultimate intentional structural elements. Every unity in the broadest sense (according to which an “act,” too, is itself already a constituted unity) becomes a guiding clue for regressive inquiry, and without such clues there would be no starting point whatsoever for reflection on intentional achievements. It is precisely in this way, too, that the question concerning the being of the human itself—the finite, being-in-the-world subject—is posed. I myself—this human being, bearer of this name, living here and now, with these customs, intuitions, and life-goals acquired through my upbringing, tradition, and so on, with this vocation—am a product of a self-apperception in which I come to givenness for myself as this determinate [human]. However, as the objective thing is not given only for myself as something constituted in my own nexus of experience, but as an objective thing, so is it given in this way for others who experience alongside me. So too am I, in the way in which I conceive myself, not merely the product of my own intentional achievements, but rather am intersubjectively constituted as such and such a human. I can descend as deep as I like into my own, as it were, solipsistically conceived nexus of experience, and I still will not find there what constitutes me as this par tic u lar personality. The fact that I know myself as the bearer of this name refers already to the intentional achievements of others (the parents who gave me this name), and my intuitions and so on refer to the upbringing that I have received. Thus, as this particular human being, I am not only the human being I conceive myself to be, but also at the same time I am the one who counts as this human being for others, my fellow human beings. That is, as this finite, worldly existing human being, I am the product of intersubjective intentional achievements that I arrive at through regressive inquiry. However— and this is how we must now understand the sense of the Heideggerian objection in Being and Time—am I actually thereby grasped as myself, in the core of my self as this unique existence? Am I not grasped merely as one object among other objects, as the bearer of roles that are assigned to me in my being with others, just as, indeed, in being given a name there is implied the assignment of a role (henceforth and for the rest of my life I shall count, for myself and for all others, as the one thus named). But, among all those experiences before which I am led in regressive inquiry from the completely constituted “I, this human” and which constitute my self-apperception, do I even find those experiences through which

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I am brought before the core of my self? Beyond every thing that I am in the world for others, beyond all roles that are assigned to me in my being with others, do I find in this way those experiences through which I am brought before myself and in which the absolute uniqueness of my own existence is announced, the facticity “that it is and has to be”36? As an experience that absolutely isolates me, places me before the uniqueness and finitude of my Dasein, and that calls me back from all interweavings in worldly togetherness Heidegger sees, above all, anxiety. This anxiety is the “anxiety before the nothing” that rises from the depths of Dasein and is no longer an intentional experience like being afraid of something in which a determinate givenness of the surrounding world is disclosed. In other words, in regressive inquiry there can be found, in accordance with their essence, only those experiences that have a determinate intentional achievement, namely the constitution of an objective unity, such as of me myself as a human being in the world in the way in which I am for myself and for others. In regressive inquiry, however, one cannot find those experiences that have no such achievement, to which no such objective identical unity is to be ascribed as the constitutive product of these experiences. These experiences have only, as it were, the characteristic of an index for what I am in truth (this finite Dasein that has been placed before the nothing) and they announce to Dasein its innermost essence in a way that it keeps locked up for the most part. It is precisely these experiences that make the proper “essence” of Dasein visible and out of which it must be grasped in its core. They provide no clues for any kind of intentional analysis because there is no objective product displayed as their achievement from which one could regressively inquire into them. Hence, Heidegger must deny the sufficiency of intentional analysis where it is a question of actually understanding the finite human being in its way of being worldly. And one could interpret his objections by saying that they arise from a further radicalization of the problem of the natural concept of the world. This was the task that Husserl set for himself, namely, that of granting the original experience of world and of human worldly being its proper due. In Husserl’s manner of analyzing the worldly being of the human, tracing it back to the constitutive achievements of selfapperception, the innermost tendency of his own project would not be carried through to its end, namely, the complete production of the view from the inside of every thing that is pregiven as an entity in straightforwardly directed experience. For the human being, as the product of selfapperception, would still be, as it were, the “human being from the outside,” not the human being grasped from the core of its interiority as it announces

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itself in those experiences that bring it before its finitude. According to this critique, the ultimate ground of all self-knowing of the worldly subject in its finitude has not been brought to light. This is a self-knowing that comes alive only in the performance of existence [Existenz] and in the resoluteness that shoulders anxiety but that is silenced beforehand in reflection on these experiences. This self-knowing, as it is announced in anxiety and the call of conscience, is for Heidegger an ultimate ground of existence, something operative prior to all philosophical reflection [Besinnung]. It is the self-knowing of Dasein in its facticity. The facticity of Dasein, as its innermost, essential core, should not be confused with the fact of being human [Faktum des Menschseins] in the Husserlian sense. We emphasize this in order to avoid in advance an objection that suggests itself. It is not the case that with this facticity Heidegger left standing— simply in the spirit [Sinne] of realism—an unresolved objectivity that was not traced to constitutive achievements, an ultimate, simply pregiven fact over against constituting absolute subjectivity. The selfapperception of the worldly human being in which this human being factically always finds itself can actually be exhibited as a product in the Husserlian method. It is a constituted achievement. It constitutes for Husserl the worldly fact of being human [des Mensch-seins] as the way in which one always has oneself in advance and is aware of oneself as this determinate human being in this determinate surrounding world. But this way of the having itself of the worldly, constituted human being is something totally dif ferent from the knowing-of-itself in those experiences in which the facticity of Dasein announces itself. Facticity, in Heidegger’s sense, is by no means what it is to be a fact (a worldly fact) in Husserl’s sense. Heidegger’s facticity is the ground of all possible manifestation. The methodological place in which it appears for Heidegger is thus the same as that in which for Husserl absolute subjectivity appears as it is unveiled through the method of reduction and guiding clues, inquiring regressively from constituted being. Even this fact is not, but rather it temporalizes itself; it is formative of time and world and is therewith the ground of the possibility of every pregiving of an entity in experience. It would lead us too far afield to go on to show (1) how the problem of the a priori is hereby posed, admittedly in a misleading analogy [with Husserl], but, nevertheless, once again completely dif ferent from how Husserl posed it; and (2) how the manifestation [of the a priori] cannot be a direct reflection on experiences but is rather an interpretation that regresses from the immediate expressions in which facticity is manifested. We can only emphasize once again that precisely this problem of the a priori, of obtaining an

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approach [Ansatz] to ontology, was Heidegger’s real insight in Being and Time, within which the existential analytic of Dasein has only an ancillary function. The ontological insight obtained from it is this: the experiences in which the facticity of Dasein announces itself manifestly resist intentional analysis in the Husserlian sense. There is nothing to be said about them that could be found as their constitutive achievement on the path of reflection. In other words, the being of Dasein—or, its innermost structure, facticity— cannot be grasped according to the schema of an object constituted as a unity in subjective multiplicities. That is, human Dasein cannot at all be grasped in this way. To speak more generally, the idea of being is not to be grasped solely by means of the idea of the object in the way the latter becomes the guiding clue for constitutive analyses in the multiplicity of its intentional species [Artungen]. In point of fact, to be, for Husserl, is to be an object. And it is precisely this equation that Heidegger opposes. With it, a peculiarity of Husserl’s phenomenology is indicated, and the essential purpose of this contrast [with Heidegger] was to allow this peculiarity clearly to emerge. We can no longer discuss here to what extent a limit of the phenomenological method is thereby reached. Husserl himself, especially in his late reflections, emphasized the necessity of a metaphysics whose central theme would be the question concerning facticity. His investigations from the thirties concerning the teleological structure of subjectivity can be understood as the transition to this metaphysics. To what extent these are still to be counted as phenomenology remains an open question. Thus, even here Husserl’s work opens a path into the future. Only through immersion in the open possibilities of the continuation of this work will it be possible to show how its approaches perhaps bear within themselves the power to take up into themselves as moments all of the further developments this work has inaugurated as well as the problems introduced by these developments. Translated by Hayden Kee Notes 1. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 11 (1930): 549–570. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie, Drittes Buch, Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. M. Biemel (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1971), 138–162 [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book,

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Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 405–430]. 2. Oskar Becker has already suggested the continuity in the development of Husserl’s Phenomenology. See his “Die Philosophie Edmund Husserls,” Kant- Studien 35 (1930): 119–150. 3. For the details, see Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, vol. 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960). 4. This is true at least with respect to the latent critique of Husserl’s ideas that pervades Heidegger’s Being and Time. However, for the claim that, seen as a whole, the relationship is not one of mutual exclusion, but rather reciprocal complement, see Ludwig Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phänomenologie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1963), 87 and 137–138. 5. Cf. Husserl’s habilitation treatise “Über den Begriff der Zahl,” in Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik, ed. Lothar Eley (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 289–339 [translated by Dallas Willard as “On the Concept of Number,” in Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 305–358]. 6. Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik, 16 [17]. 7. Husserl, 74 [77]. 8. Husserl, 45 [46]. 9. Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 90–91 [translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logik (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 86–87]. 10. Husserl, 91 [87, trans. modified]. 11. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Erster Band, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed. Elmar Holenstein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 6 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 42]. 12. Husserl, 7 [42]. 13. See Husserl, 174–175 [180], one passage out of many from which it emerges how this new concept of intentionality forms the groundwork for the critique of psychologism. 14. For the conclusive treatment of this problem, see Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1948) [translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks as Experience and Judgment, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973)]. 15. Cf. W. Schapp, Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung (Halle: Niemeyer, 1910); H. Hofmann, “Untersuchungen über den Empfindungsbegriff,” in Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 26 (1913): 1–136; P. F. Lincke, Die

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phänomenale Sphäre und das reelle Bewußtsein (Halle: Niemeyer, 1912); P. F. Lincke, Grundfragen der Wahrnehmungslehre (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1918). These treatises serve as an example of how Husserlian intentional analysis— especially of perception—was taken up and advanced. 16. Here one might give special mention to the writings of L. Binswanger and A. Schwenninger, but the psychopathology of K. Jaspers and Kretschmer’s Körperbau und Charakter (Berlin: Springer, 1921) [translated by W. J. H. Sprott as Physique and Character (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1925)] are also informed to a great extent by phenomenology. Psychology itself was built up on a phenomenological basis by A. Pfänder. His circle of students went on to attend especially to the ontological problematic. 17. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), ed. Rudolph Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 1–98 [translated by John Barnett Brough as “The Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time from the Year 1905,” in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 1–103]. 18. Husserl, 4–8 [4–8]. 19. Husserl, 9 [9]. 20. Husserl, 75 [79]. 21. Husserl, Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, 78 [83]. [Landgrebe quotes “Es gibt keine Zeit des urkonstituierenden Bewußtseins,” but the passage Landgrebe is referring to reads “Von einer Zeit des letzten konstituierende Bewußtseins kann nicht mehr gesprochen werden” (“We can no longer speak of a time that belongs to the ultimate constituting consciousness”)—HK.] 22. See Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phänomenologie, 182–183. 23. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, 4–8 [4–8]. 24. See Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phänomenologie, 100–110, 173. 25. Husserl and Natorp were good friends and right at that time in close personal contact. Husserl subjected Natorp’s General Psychology of 1912 to close study and made it the object of many seminars. 26. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), esp. xv, 590–591, and 600–601 [translated and edited by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer as Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 35–68 and 136–137]. 27. See note 1 above. 28. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954) [translated by David Carr as The Crisis of the European Sciences

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and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970)]. 29. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1927), 52 [translated by Joan Stambaugh as Being and Time (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 53]. 30. Heidegger, 31 [30]. 31. Heidegger, 35 [33]. 32. Landgrebe provides no citation, but this is also a direct quote from Sein und Zeit, 35 [33]—HK. 33. Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 115 [112–113]. 34. [Reading “dezisionistische” rather than “derisionistische”—HK.] 35. Let it be mentioned here that the possibility of such a bracketing of factical subjectivity and its facticity must appear problematic in light of Husserl’s late work. Cf. Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phänomenologie, 173, 205–206. 36. [“Daß es ist und zu sein hat.” Landgrebe provides no citation, but this is a direct quote from Sein und Zeit, 134 [131]—HK.]

What Is Phenomenology? Jan Patočka

With the beginning of this century there arose a new philosophy, one that attempted to bring about a style of thinking different from previous styles. As true philosophy, it is not meant to work in the wake of the special sciences, their methods, and their familiar lines of inquiry. Rather, it is meant to see through the prevailing prejudices in daily life and in natu ral cognition and with this perspicuity to work out both its proper methodology and its original lines of inquiry and to establish a completely autonomous field of knowledge. In doing so, phenomenology wants neither to be nor to renew a formal-abstract discipline; rather, for all its high generality, it wants to be a very concrete discipline. Phenomenology concedes to positivism that philosophy cannot be an isolated science, and that there would be no place for it if it wanted to concern itself with exploring the real structures and lawfulness of things. But phenomenology is also not a discipline that reflects a priori, in logical formality, on presuppositions and conditions of possibility. Phenomenology does not want to presuppose even logic but to investigate its ground and basis. It does not want to investigate reality but the appearing of every thing that appears. Since phenomenology conceives this task as a philosophical and foundational one, it cannot ac84

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cept the subordination of the problem of appearance to psychology, which proceeds as a natural science and is based in the natural sciences. Phenomenology must thematize appearing as such, wherever and however it may be found; it must owe its procedure only to appearing as such and not yield to any of the current prejudices about the appearing of what appears, prejudices that sprouted from the traditions of metaphysics and of the individual sciences. Thus, phenomenology was and is truly the most original philosophical direction of the century, one that also imposes or imposed the greatest demands: to establish anew the autonomy of philosophy; to bring about a philosophy as rigorous science; to develop a metaphysics that is finally generally accepted; to pose anew the fundamental problem of philosophy, the question of being; to lead the whole of metaphysics back to its ground and to penetrate into this ground; to free the question of truth from its traditional sclerosis; and to open for the whole of philosophy another beginning. That these great ambitions contradict one another in part arises from the fact that the fundamental problematic of phenomenology—the question of the ultimate ground of the appearance of that which appears— received two radically dif ferent answers from two great thinkers, even though both adhered to [the practice] of drawing out appearances just as they give themselves from the “things themselves,” and in the process to realize what alone is suited to helping the cause of phenomenology to its limit. Phenomenology would be in a bad way if it should not succeed in bridging the oppositions between the two fundamental doctrines in a way that uncovers the ground of their difference—and indeed phenomenologically— in the things themselves, and if the thing itself could not decide the contested points. To that end we must seek in both thinkers those motives that exhibit commonalities; we must attempt to work out the unifying feature behind and beneath the opposition. This unifying feature ought not lead to an eclecticism but to a critical response to both doctrines. In what sense is the younger phenomenological doctrine a completion of motives that had been abandoned in the older? In what sense can adhering to the older doctrine on certain positions illuminate the difficulties of the younger? Those are examples of some of the lines of inquiry to be attempted here. Above all, however, this essay should aid to a return “to the things themselves.” I will begin with things just as they show themselves and as they appear, and I will stay with this self-showing without surrendering to speculation.

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Husserl’s late work Crisis has shown that science and traditional metaphysical philosophy begin with constructed concepts and never push beyond to something like pure, unbroken experience.1 It is not the phenomenological reduction but rather this exposure of the modus procedendi of science and traditional philosophy that is the starting point of the phenomenological method. To wit, when construction has been exposed as a procedure of disciplines that advance by mathematical projection and experiment, an almost self-evident task is revealed: to return, regressively questioning and critiquing, to the genuinely original experience upon which every construction must ultimately rest. This task is not merely a reflective one, as Husserl believed when he took the original “givenness” of the present thing as guaranteed in the intentionality of consciousness. The prejudice that something originally given can be seized in “immanent perception” is [ here] rejected, and with it the associated method of objective clues. One discovers the self-showing of the things by interrogating the appearing things regarding what allows them to appear as they appear and by attempting by way of inquiry-driven distinctions to break through to this ground of what appears. Of course, this deconstruction of constructions by no means implies that this [task of phenomenology] can be conducted without any anticipation, without the guidance of a fundamental idea. The diversity of phenomenological projects, the very differences among concrete descriptions and analyses of phenomena, depends upon that guiding idea which directs the great progression of phenomenological work, the progress toward concrete experience. It is clear that one catches sight of dif ferent phenomena when one adheres to intentionality as the ground of the appearing of what appears (that is, when one adheres to the thought of the original restriction of all experience to an objective correlate, the concept of consciousness) than one does when one departs from the fundamental experience of the relatedness to being and the nihilation that occurs in the ground of Dasein and relinquishes the concept of consciousness and intentionality as the ultimate ground of experience. It is nonetheless the thrust into phenomena, their fullness and their interconnection, that must decide the matter concerning the guiding ideas. These must then be tested in their relationship to one another; one must be mindful of where these deviate from one another, where they are in conflict. The sources of conflict must be considered more exactly. Above all else, one must have great confidence in discerning where the sources of original experience and their unimpeded course flow and where these have been impeded or even obstructed by the

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remnants of constructions. Husserl believed that a pure view of phenomena could be obtained through the singular procedure of the reduction. That was doubtless an illusion, for we must inquire time and again into the historical sedimentation of the positings of being. But the attempt to lay bare the original structures of experience must be undertaken continuously on a provisional level, for only in this way can one, through further questioning, penetrate deeper. This conquest of construction, initiated in phenomenologically oriented philosophy, is no mere theoretical concern, pertaining only to philosophers in their professional interest. Construction, as such, is indispensable and not dangerous. Its danger begins to show itself where it is molded into an abstract ontology, into a conception of the essence of beings. This, however, as the history of modern science and philosophy testifies, has been taking place for three hundred years, and this whole period down to the present day can be designated as a triumph of construction. In repeated advances, modernity has replicated the foundational process called subject-object division, the mathematical outline of being, the progressive specialization from the point of view of an “objective” structure, and the reducing [Zurückführung] of every as yet “nonobjective” remnant to an objective ground. Technical civilization is nothing other than the setting to work of this project, which gradually comes to appear self-evident because it has become important, even indispensable, for life. I spoke of “repeated advances” because this process has been interrupted by interludes of reflection: by the intellectual movement in Germany from 1770 to 1830, and by the philosophical turn in the first decades of our century. Soon enough, however, the triumph of unreflective construction continued and achieved ever new successes. Reflection becomes ever more difficult because the successes are ever greater. Only today is it possible to see that the most constructivist sciences, having endured crises, are beginning to reflect upon their own constructivist character, and this is an utterly new factor to be valued as an important stage upon this path. Reflection is so difficult for a number of reasons. For one, there is no alternative of similar completeness available. Furthermore, where practical success is the goal and where human beings are to be helped, we must always begin with construction. The “self-evidence” of construction makes those who oppose it and who draw attention to the fact that its nature jeopardizes human beings appear as insidious enemies of humanity and its supposedly obvious ambition, “progress.”

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Today there are significant attempts to ground scientific and practical procedures on an observation of anthropological relations that is “suitable for humans,” that is, on a fundamentally phenomenological manner of observation. Such a field seems to be found in psychotherapy. The possibility of posing the problem in a similar way seems obvious in upbringing [Erziehung] and pedagogy [Erziehungswissenschaft]. As a field wrought by philosophy, theology shines through the obfuscations of the modern efforts to ground a purely theonomic theology that is nonetheless— contradictio in adiecto— a theology legitimated by appeal to human experience, and [having endured these efforts,] the possibility of returning the fundamental experience of the divine to human beings also shines through. There might also be occasion to consider a similar critical reflection in the field of the political and thereby to sketch in a positive way a humanization of the most important field of human action (not a “humanizing” in the sense of the familiar “ideal of humanity” but rather a phenomenology of doing, acting, and making, including work, following roughly the initiatives of Hannah Arendt). It should perhaps also be noted that these last observations agree with Edmund Husserl in his work Crisis to the extent that these facts and possibilities seem to point out that the present crisis of humanity is not remediable unless a new science comes into sight, one whose projections of being no longer begin with constructions. Admittedly it is questionable whether today we are already in a position to accomplish this new science, whether the new projection will not be a long time in coming, and whether we are not condemned to tarry still in provisional matters and the critical preliminary stage. And yet, as was indicated above, there are omens that announce the turnaround, and even the conflict of phenomenological conceptions and systems seems to show the following: a phenomenology cannot be redeemed by a constructivist manner of observation, but only by a deepened phenomenological manner of observation. Heidegger says in Being and Time, §7: The expression “phenomenology” signifies primarily a concept of method. It does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research in terms of their content, but the how of such research.2 The term “phenomenology” differs in meaning from such expressions as “theology” and the like. Such titles designate the objects of the respective disciplines in terms of their content. . . . The word only tells us something about the how of the demonstration and treatment of what

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this discipline considers. Science “of” the phenomena means that it grasps its objects in such a way that every thing about them to be discussed must be directly indicated and directly demonstrated.3 As far as content goes, phenomenology is the science of the being of beings— ontology.4

That implies that, in accordance with its object, phenomenology is not a new science, but rather, since its fundamental concerns coincide with those of philosophy (which, as ontology, is the oldest science and the origin of all remaining sciences), it is the oldest of all sciences.5 Husserl’s first sentence in the introduction to Ideas I reads: “Pure phenomenology, the way to which we seek here, the unique position of which relative to all other sciences we shall characterize and show to be the science fundamental to philosophy, is an essentially new science which, in consequence of its [fundamental] peculiarity, is remote from natural thinking and therefore only in our days presses toward development.”6 The “fundamental peculiarity” of this science of “phenomena” is that its phenomena, which also underlie the other sciences, emerge in an attitude that has only recently been defined, an attitude that modifies the sense of the phenomena of these sciences in a determinate way. So, in any event, in the latter case we have an entirely new science with phenomena for its object, and in the former case we have a method of that science which is oldest of all with respect to its theme. “The fundamental feature,” the new attitude, could admittedly be approached just as a method, and then it would rightfully read, “primarily the method.” But “primary” would then mean only as much as “introductory,” “functioning as access to the proper matter.” For Heidegger, “primary” designates the original, that upon which every thing depends and in which the essence of the thing consists. For Husserl, however, the essential is the acquired basis of the modified phenomena themselves, upon which the entirely new science arises. This is, for him, the proper theme of phenomenology. Thus, he continues, “To understand these modifications or, to speak more precisely, to bring about the phenomenological attitude and, by reflecting, to elevate its specific peculiarity and that of the natu ral attitudes into the scientific consciousness—this is the first and by no means easy task whose demands we must perfectly satisfy.” The first, but not the central task: the center is the basis itself, and thus Husserl adds, “if we are to achieve the realm of phenomenology and scientifically assure ourselves of the essence proper to phenomenology.”7 We see here an opposition delineated, and we can guess already from the quoted texts that it will be no simple assignment to

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obtain insight into the scope and background of this opposition. One senses commonalities, yet what clearly emerges in the end is an opposition. Husserl made inroads toward pure phenomenology by seeking an appropriate subjective entry to his “idea of pure logic.” He could not find this in the empirical psychology of his contemporaries. More suitable was Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Point of View with its idea of the certainty of being and the intentional relation as fundamental characteristics of psychic phenomena (both fundamentally refer to Descartes, although Descartes never thought out the idea of intentionality in a subjective direction, even though this was suggested by him). It was not adequate, however, for acquiring the “elements for a clarification of cognition.” Here it was a matter of epistemological—read, philosophical— problems, more specifically a matter of philosophical methodology. The discovery of the dynamic character of the intentional relation (intention—fulfillment with identical object-relation) and its analysis turned this relation into intentionality and intentionality into the essence of the mental [Geistigen]. That meant at the same time that the dynamic-intentional has a universal significance: There is intention-fulfillment not only in the domain of individual being, in the sensible but also in the domain of the ideal, the categorial, and so on. A philosophical-methodological project thereby became possible which allowed the advantages of empiricism and an “intuitive” rationalism to be united. This project shared with empiricism direct, intuitive access to phenomena; the endeavor of turning the philosophical problematic into an intuitive one resting on direct manifestation [Aufweisung]; and an aversion to construction from abstract principles. It thereby became possible, with the help of categorial fulfillment and eidetic intuition, to overcome empiricism’s one-sidedness, its adherence to that which is individual and contingent. The same principle of dynamic intention also offered the prospect of a purely structural consideration of everything mental while excluding external influences, above all those of the mathematical projection of nature, for the subject-object relation (res cogitans— res extensa) no longer had to be treated causally; rather, it sufficed to conceive and dissect it purely intentionally-structurally. To that end, a tidy elimination of every causal manner of consideration was required, the naturalistic (i.e., Cartesian) one as well as the theological-transcendent one (as Descartes himself employed). The solution was provided by a most perspicacious and original analysis of Descartes’s methodological skepticism, an analysis that distinguished in his procedure two independent components: a suspension of judgment, or a bracketing of the thesis, the so-called epochē, a limbo that refrains from decision; and the actual initiation of

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doubt. For the purposes of the exclusion of a causal consideration, one does not need to go as far as doubt; the limbo—the exclusion or bracketing— suffices. Of course, this must not be restricted to individual theses but rather must apply to the “general thesis of the natural attitude,” that is, the conviction, preceding (instinctively) all individual theses, that the totality of beings exists in an absolute way independently of every thesis. This “general thesis” is related above all to nature, that is, to the aggregate of physical things and processes, upon which in natural succession living things and the mental also depend. If I set the general thesis out of action, then the belief in this world-totality (whose being is, in accordance with its sense, independent) is suspended and along with it the belief in every thing transcendent to consciousness. These transcendent beings can then be “reduced to the purely immanent,” for the objective world is not canceled or weakened through doubt but preserved in the form of objective correlates of intentional acts with all their apparent characteristics. They now receive the sense of phenomena, and the subjective receives the sense of pure (i.e., purified of the objective being-thesis) phenomenon. Appearances form a realm, and the researcher can thematize them in a pure, inner intuition and subject them to eidetic abstraction and insight in order to capture their pure essence. Thus, a perspective upon an as yet unknown field of research opens up, a field infinite like nature is in each of its fields. Yet it is the field of a wholly dif ferent, undreamt-of science, where the sense of the research as dependent upon the sense of that which is researched is entirely reversed. For if up until now the research project of “natural science” was directed by the thought of the absolute being of the world and, according to its sense, the dependence of mind, now by contrast the objective is seen and investigated in its noncausal, essential-structural dependence upon subjective correlates (i.e., in its structural constitution). Instead of comprehending the structure of the universe on the basis of the mathematical-constructivist projection of a res extensa, one builds up intuitively (in the sense of intentionality) from the ego cogito cogitatum. With Walter Biemel’s publication of The Idea of Phenomenology: Five Lectures as the second volume of Husserliana,8 we know that the thought of this reversal and methodological alteration of sense in the reduction to pure immanence that does not conflict with transcendence in self-givenness was there previously as a methodologically mature working through of the reductive procedure. The lectures contain neither the thought of a general thesis nor a clear distinction of epochē and skepticism, although in their place there is the thought of a building up of objectivity in pure immanence, that

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is, constitution.9 If, then, the thought of the epochē appears in its purity, as an act of freedom capable of suspending all theses regarding beings, then the question naturally arises whether the suspension here characterized is actually carried far enough, namely, that it would be able to show its full import. Specifically, it becomes clear that the suspending of suspension [Suspension der Suspension] prior to the entrance into subjectivity is motivated by something that can have no ground in the epochē itself. Husserl says, “with good reason we limit the universality of [this epochē]. Since we are completely free to modify every positing and every judging and to parenthesize every objectivity which can be judged about if it were as comprehensive as possible, then no province [Gebiet] would be left for unmodified judgments, to say nothing of a province for science.”10 Accordingly, this restriction takes place for the sake of the founding [Fundamentierung] of a science. This science quite clearly bears features of a positive science, of a science of beings in themselves. The pure phenomena are admittedly designated as irreal.11 They are irreal, however, only insofar as they are devoid of theses concerning every thing transcendent, that is to say, insofar as they do not belong to the real-transcendent world. The sense of their being is modified; there is no longer any world-being [Weltsein]. Nonetheless, they are, it makes sense to say of them that they are, and the suspension of positing halts before them, that is to say, precisely the justification to posit them as being is explicitly declared and emphasized. They are not real, but not all beings need to be real, that is, dependent upon the world. On the contrary, we are poised to discover a mode of being of beings [Seinsweise des Seienden] that is neither real nor ideal— and yet, they are beings all the same. The science of pure phenomena is accordingly a science of beings, a positive science. As such it has an infinite field, one to be cultivated in progressive research, although it is inexhaustible. It even bears unmistakable features of an ideal of science unique to the positive special sciences, namely, the accumulation of knowledge through progressive research in the continuity of generations. Indeed, it also bears certain features that show it to be related to ancient episteme, namely absoluteness, the incontrovertibility of the truths achieved through it. Modern science, by contrast, has an essentially hy pothet ical character. However, Plato’s episteme (and so too Aristotle’s) is not a science of beings (beings in our sense are for Plato the objects of doxa) but one of ideas, which the moderns designated as unreal and nonactual. Husserl’s ideal of science is in fact quite clearly informed by its relation to psychology. In the treatise Philosophy as Rigorous Science, [the science of pure phenomena] is claimed as the groundwork of a psy-

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chology that is scientific in the true sense (and also as the groundwork of a true critique of reason), which, to be sure, must not mean that it is a science like psychology. Its relationship to psychology is better conceived of as analogous, mutatis mutandis, to that of mathematics to natural science, that is to say as a relationship of one positive science in the modern sense to another, where each science grows and progresses by itself and has its particular object as well as its own characteristic method. For phenomenology, this is the priority of intuition, in the sense of the originality of reflection and eidetic seeing, over the deductive-constructivist procedure that predominates in the mathematical disciplines. Admittedly there are explanations, both in the treatise Philosophy as Rigorous Science as well as in Ideas I, that testify that Husserl assigns to phenomenology first the task of investigating the essence of the being of the psychic in the form [Gestalt] of pure phenomena. Although he asserts that one can never approach the essence of the psychic through contingent experience and experimentation, he combats naturalism on the strength of judgments concerning the essence of the being of physical things [des dinglichen Seins] and of the psychic, and the fundamental difference between the two: physical things have their identical “nature” in the manifold of their sides and effects, whereas the psychic has its essence without existing as identical in the manifold of appearances. By way of summary, one could perhaps interpret the beginning of the introduction to Ideas I in the following manner: Husserl seeks a new fundamental science of philosophy called pure phenomenology.12 This new fundamental science, in its systematically pure grounding and execution, is the first of all philosophies and the indispensable precondition for every metaphysics and any other philosophy (by metaphysics Husserl understands the science of fact [Wissenschaft vom Faktum]).13 Its first task is to determine in a rigorously scientific way the sense of the modification that phenomena (physical, psychic, historical, etc.) undergo when they become pure phenomena. That is to say, the task is to distinguish the phenomenological attitude from the natural attitude. But what does it mean to distinguish the phenomenological attitude from the natural attitude? Is the alteration of attitude merely subjective, to be defined through an act of the subject? If that were so, then one would not yet understand the achievement [Leistung] of this attitude. With respect to their content, the phenomena themselves remain afterward what they are. In this they are not modified. What pertains to them, insofar as one can say of it that “it is,” remains what it was. What is modified, however, is this “is,” the sense of their being. What is at stake in this attitude,

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then, is the sense [Sinn] of the being of pure phenomena in comparison to the sense of the being [Seinssinn] of what is given in the natural attitude. The sought-after science (and to seek means to question), then, is on the way toward the question of the being of pure phenomena (and with that also toward the question of the being of consciousness and of the object of consciousness). It inquires about being, for the result—which arose in questioning—of the fundamental operations of the epochē and reduction is an ascertainment of the way in which the being of the world and the being of consciousness can be delineated and the way in which they relate to one another. Husserl, however, believed he could achieve this [result] with a science of types, like the modern positive sciences which always have a being as their object, one that they seek to evaluate in their infinite progress over the course of generations and through the additive accretion of the results of research. If one looks at the situation in this way, then this Husserlian questioning is certainly something profoundly dif ferent from the systematic collection and articulation of experiences on the basis of pure immanence, and accordingly something profoundly dif ferent from answering. The Husserlian questions go toward being, toward something that determines the fundamental sense of beings in the mode of the world and in the mode of consciousness, whereas answers make statements in which this sense is already presupposed and which thus fundamentally cannot further determine this being [Sein]. The answers given by the object of the desired science thus fundamentally cannot answer the questions that arise in the conception of the epochē and in the thought of a reduction of worldly beings. In this way, Husserl seeks one science and finds two. He seeks the fundamental science of philosophy. Metaphysics has long been viewed as such a science. As is generally known, however, metaphysics has fallen into disrepute in modern times because it cannot demonstrate itself to be a positive science in the sense of constant, apodictic progression on the firm ground of a secured object. That toward which Husserl strives coincides to a great extent with what Kant imagined when he spoke of a metaphysics that will be able to come forward as a science. Even Kant, in the famous paragraphs of the second introduction to Critique of Pure Reason where he describes the evolution of a science, measures philosophy by the yardstick of positive science.14 However, whereas Kant had logic, mathematics, and mathematical natural science in mind as models, Husserl had a scientific psychology, a science of mind. And while Kant saw the turn to the objective a priori (instead of empirical fumbling about) that must lie ready in

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the human mind as the foundational move for a science, Husserl finds the decisive act for the grounding of his philosophical science in the epochē as suspension of all validity of the world, indeed of every objective validity whatsoever. He spoke not so much of a metaphysics as science but rather of a new critique of reason.15 Pure phenomenology, we see, takes the place of traditional metaphysics. If that is the case, then it would perhaps be obvious to pose the following problem: does what Husserl conceives as an answer (i.e., as a genuine science of phenomenology) actually suit the fundamental question? And does the answer, in order to be developed correctly, require a suitable question? Is the epochē a stance [Haltung] that has been appointed to serve as an introduction into the realm of pure phenomena, and thereby a being with an as yet unexamined sense of being; or is it in essence an act that, conducted in its full universality, allows our gaze to be conducted away from beings in general and toward being— and not merely toward the being of pure phenomena,” but rather toward the sense of being in general? And then again, does one obtain a being of a dif ferent being-sense from that of the res (for the res cogitans, too, is still a res, even if it lacks the attribute of extensio) simply by suspending the thesis of the transcendent in order to be able to view the purely immanent in absolute presence? Is the reflective having of the self what is original? Is what is viewed in this having the essence of the self? Is it not then above all to be approached and as such conceived as the weightiest, the fundamental accomplishment of the subject, if ontic truth is seen as certainty, as a fundamental accomplishment of the “subject”? Has there not become visible, precisely through the epochē and in the being commonly designated as “subject,” what must necessarily be respected in this original grasping: the possibility not only of presenting beings, but prior to that, the possibility of grasping being? Must not the laying of the foundation of philosophy as science have come up short with this Husserlian formulation of the problem? What, then, for Husserl was the resultant answer from his line of inquiry into the question of the sense of the transcendental stance [Haltung]? What is the sense of the being of pure phenomena? They are “absolute being,” the “nulla ‘re’ indiget ad existendum,” because they are themselves surely the fundamental res: “The realm of transcendental consciousness as the realm of what is, in a determined sense, ‘absolute’ being, has been provided us by the phenomenological reduction. It is the primal category of all being (or, in our terminology, the primal region), the one in which all other regions of being are rooted, to which, according to their essence, they are relative

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and on which they are therefore all essentially dependent.”16 The sense of this primal region, then, is to be the foundation, the sub-stratum of all other being: “The theory of categories must start entirely from this most radical of all ontological distinctions—being as consciousness and being as something which becomes ‘manifested’ in consciousness, ‘transcendent’ being.”17 It is clear: in the ontological line of inquiry, not much new has been achieved in comparison to Descartes. The fundamental division of finite modes of being is the Cartesian one. Only the immanence [of res cogitans] was emphasized; the sense of the res extensa faded into being an object, and the relation of the two is turned into one of intentionality rather than a causal-objective one. But the regions of being are not the only concepts of being that arise in this context. There is also talk of essence, of categories and a primal category, of ground and grounded. All that surely demands a systematic treatise concerning its sense. But that task was omitted, for one was in a rush toward the construction of a science of the pure phenomena, a wholly new science. Then again, was the Husserlian idea of the possibility of a doctrine of “purified subjectivity,” of an original kind of conception of the “subject,” groundless? Simply asserting this, too, would be one-sided. One cannot simply regard this subjectivity as that toward which the way is exclusively and originally opened in the epochē. The epochē, more radically conceived, opens the way to the being of beings of every mode of being. But what is required for the “purification of subjectivity” is not only the epochē but also insight into a historical nexus of conceptions of being. The epochē is in a position to guide [our] view from beings to being. It can breach the prejudice of the absolute mode of being of the transcendent, of beings in the mode of res extensa. But is it capable of remedying the prejudices in the conception of being that have resulted from a murky tradition, from the confounding of being with beings, and from the lack of the problem of being in its points of orientation? The epochē warns us not to regard beings as the only possible theme of knowledge, and it explodes the corresponding prejudice. But it is insufficient to reveal the distortions, masks, and burials that occur in being itself. Only a historical procedure is capable of that, one that exposes traditional interconnections, opaque assumptions, and uninterrogated components in the current representations and conceptions of being. These must then be seen through in their supposed obviousness, and their dogmatic inertia is, so to speak, to be hunted out. “Purified subjectivity” can first be targeted when the roots of the prejudice of the genuine grasping of the self in a reflective gaze (which can grasp nothing but the res cogitans), and the ground upon which these roots grow have been

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uncovered. The theoretical stance [Haltung] of a pure gaze is, however, fundamentally a comportment [Verhalten] that presupposes a “for the sake of itself” [Um willen seiner] (and as such more than a “pure” gaze, which would be a present gaze), and the “for the sake of” [presupposes] a “nonindifference,” a “something is at stake” [es geht um etwas]. And these are all structures which are, of course, to be grasped reflectively, but which allude to an essentially responsible and acting being that therefore is to count as original and takes priority over the representing comportment with which the Cartesian approach is predominately, if not exclusively, concerned. In this way there comes into view not only the more original temporality of human experience, awaiting, and the situation in which we already find ourselves, but so too the phenomenon of responsibility [Verantwortlichung] as giving over [Über-antwortung] and with that also the task of grasping the “subjective” essence as free, ethical, ontologically one with understanding. If this is a dogmatic-metaphysical formulation of the problem, then the whole of German Idealism beginning with Fichte, and even Kant with his efforts to overcome the dualism of the representing and the freely acting ego, must be called “dogmatic.” (This aside is meant as a comment concerning the critical position-taking of a contemporary philosopher who suspects that the agenda of a dogmatic metaphysics lies in the critique of the primacy of consciousness and reflection.18) The conception of phenomenology as a method of ontology thus gives impulse to two sciences, both of which admittedly are not to be addressed as new but rather as renewed through this method: ontology as the search for the answer to the question of the sense of being and ontology of human life, which one could also call the theory of the soul. The theory of the soul is a new science in the sense that it stands in fundamental opposition to the Cartesian ontology of the res cogitans and seeks the theory of a mode of being that is fundamentally not that of the res. This “fundamental ontology” is made possible by unfolding anew the question of being, for this is where human Da-sein, as the site of being (in the understanding of being), must naturally be targeted. Thus, human life must not be conceived as a “present-at-hand” res cogitans, to be viewed in the distance of reflection, or as conscious being [Sein] present-at-hand, but rather as something that comports itself to itself in its understanding of being. This means that grasping the self is not a pure seeing of a being by the same being, a “pure, intellectual intuition”; rather, it is itself conditioned and guided by an a priori. Neither the naive nor the reflective, philosophical grasping of the self is ever without an interpretation, without an a priori preliminary understanding, as

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one can see best in the example of the Cartesian cogito, which admittedly possesses the absolute certainty of self-grasping, but only for the present moment. As such, it presupposes a mathematical conception of time, that of the tradition. The concept of reflection itself is profoundly modified in the moment where one sees that “consciousness” is not the fundamental concept of all understanding (understanding here taken as comportment toward beings) but is rather before all else an understanding of being that, itself unthematic, allows beings to be presented thematically. Selfconsciousness can be nothing other than the turning-toward this being [Seienden] in its relation to being, a turning that is itself guided by an understanding of being. This turning-toward by no means needs to release the kind of being of the targeted being in a manner corresponding to that kind of being. In that case it is no original understanding that has, on the basis of the critical destruction of inherited prejudices, become for the first time an insight; it is an “average” and leveled-off understanding. Presupposing the concept of consciousness as something ultimate behind which it is impossible to advance any further belongs to those attempts to state the ultimate limits of philosophical interpretation. Such attempts take as a basis a certain way of interpreting being in order to absolutize that way (e.g., the impossibility but also the superfluity of ontology, because being cannot be defined and is moreover a self-evident concept, one that is not to be further analyzed). It is thus a vain struggle to attempt to reach consciousness in pure reflection. For grasping this being depends, as far as the horizon of its understanding has been cleared, upon what we can never achieve of our own accord from a knowledge-project as a projecting because we do not have the presuppositions of our life at our command. On the contrary, they command our life. We have only historical experience, which teaches us that these presuppositions are, in a certain sense, variable, and that being “clears” itself in dif ferent ways. Thus, we can never maintain that we have reached the limits of the knowable, a definitive [grasp] of the a priori. One can thus characterize the Husserlian standpoint in the following way: it is the continuation of the metaphysical pursuit of the concept of being without a clear, explicit differentiation of the ontological difference between being and beings. In this difference, however, lies the proper sense of the epochē, when conceived generally. If the question concerns being, the answer offers a being, as was already the case with the Presocratics: Thales inquired into the being of things, what they “really” are, and he answered “water,” a being that can be employed as a “model” for the variability of being.19 With the epochē, Husserl too performs the step back

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from beings, he seeks (inquires into, questions) being, and he answers through a being, the cogitatio of a cogitatum. He renews Cartesian metaphysics with the Kantian concept of the transcendental. With the clarification of phenomenology as a methodological concept, one does not need to abandon the concept of a philosophy as rigorous science, understood in opposition to Weltanschauung-philosophy, which purports to be a doctrine of beings.20 Admittedly, phenomenology is no positive science. That follows from the fact that it does not posit beings and carries out its research within this restraint— that is to say, it follows from the fact that phenomenology stands fundamentally within the epochē, and indeed not in a restricted one, but a general one. For that reason, it can also be called, albeit paradoxically, a science of the nothing. For the object of philosophy is indeed nothing of which one can say “it is” [es ist] (a being); rather, “there is” [es gibt] this object; it is this “there is” itself.21 With such a conception, one is certainly capable of something that the Husserlian conception of the ground of the “new, unheard-of science” of phenomenology was not capable of: finding a justification in life itself for the fact that something like the epochē is possible. For Husserl, this act of freedom comes “as though shot from a pistol” and is itself a grounding ground, one that cannot be further grounded. Heidegger’s treatise “What is Metaphysics?” sought to accomplish this [further] grounding. The epochē may not be a negation, a denial. All the same, it belongs to those attitudes that are of a negative nature. It is a nonaffirming and a nondenying, a limbo, a mode of comportment grounded in nihilating. To what extent is the epochē a nihilating comportment? To the extent that it is a non-use of theses. A freedom, a nonboundedness through beings, is experienced. Prior to the unfree judgment-comportment, which is dependent upon beings, a sphere is discovered where beings do not rule, where they compel neither affirmation nor denial. How would such a comportment, a freedom of this kind, be possible if an experience of the fundamental possibility of distance from every activity, even judging, were not at its basis? The epochē starts with a characteristic of the thesis, with its nonobligatory characteristic. The possibility of an epochē and its limbo is inherent in the experience of nihilation. Only on the basis of this limbo can a new interest awaken, an interest in that which is precisely not a being. One could summarize in the following way: On the one hand, it is not the epochē that establishes the limbo upon which the phenomenological reduction is built up, but rather the epochē presupposes the experience of

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the limbo, the nihilation, to which every repelling (negative) attitude refers as its origin. On the other hand, the limbo of the epochē must remind us of the transcendence of Dasein and of that which must not be spoken of as a being [seiend] (and thus must be spoken of as a nonbeing [also als nichtseiend]). Like logical denial, the epochē is also native to the sphere of logical acts and comportments. For that reason, it cannot count as the proper origin of what it pretends to unveil. What it does unveil is a “region,” a “plane,” which stands outside of that which is the object of a thesis and which can accordingly be called a being [seiend]. Husserl himself called this region “pre-being” [Vorsein] and identified it with transcendental consciousness because he did not bring the epochē to its conclusion and believed he had to insist upon a subjective basis because other wise there would be no object for a theory that could be called rigorous science. In fact, the epochē is only evidence of nihilation and the possibility, even in the theoretical realm, of proceeding through the presence of nihilation up to the brink where one can and must leave the territory of beings. The epochē tends toward the purely theoretical performance of a “step back” behind beings. The origin of this “step back,” however, cannot be grounded in the epochē itself, for the epochē presupposes the dominance of logic in the “general thesis,” that is in the interpretation of the original relation to beings as thesis, and as such as a logical positing, as assertion. Phenomenologically viewed, the “thesis” of the world as universe of beings is not a possible act since the universe of beings must first be presented, which is however impossible, and the world as horizon is precisely not an object and as such also cannot be an object of a judgment thesis. The “general thesis” is thus a problematic concept: it means either a logical thesis, in which case it cannot be carried out; or it means an attuned disclosure, in which case it is not a thesis. By way of contrast, the situation is clarified if one does not insist that the primary relation to the world is a thesis, something theoretical involving objects, but rather sees instead that it is contained in an affective finding oneself so [Sich-Befinden], that is, in the “sphere of feeling,” and that this is where the disclosure of beings as such and as a whole originally takes place. This limbo brought about by the epochē suffers from the difficulties introduced above: (1) it cannot be performed without restriction, or else it leads in nihil; (2) as theoretical, it cannot be initiated, since one never reaches “the whole” as an object. The difficulty with the epochē—that it is a theoretical act capable of bringing beings into limbo— can be remedied by re-

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vealing the limbo brought about by the epochē as a nihilating comportment. This nihilating comportment is grounded in the original “nihilation” and opens access admittedly not to a being (of whatever sort), but to an “open district” of what has been cleared, of what can “withstand” Dasein who understands being. Thus, what Husserl intended as transcendental, as absolute consciousness is, in the proper sense, no such thing but something perfectly distinct from every objective (present-at-hand) as well as subjective being [Seienden]. From these considerations, if they are cogent, it seems to follow that an interpretation of “What is Metaphysics?” is possible that can implicitly be characterized as a confrontation with the Husserlian epochē as the core of the reduction. Or it can be interpreted as, among other things, containing such a confrontation. Husserl’s attendance at the inaugural lecture makes it probable that questions ought to have been addressed there that most profoundly concern both phenomenological philosophies. Husserl’s fundamental problem was to ground philosophy upon the epochē and reduction as a phenomenologically rigorous, but positive, science. Husserl claims to ground phenomenological philosophy, as a positive science that justifies all the theories of the individual sciences, upon said methodological procedure, and in this way also to arrive at a metaphysics (metaphysics of mind) that will finally be able to come forward as science. To this claim Heidegger opposes his conception of phenomenology grounded upon the nihilation of the nothing. This conception cannot accept the traditional dominance of logic in philosophy (philosophy as doctrine of reason), which begins in modern times with Descartes. The Husserlian epochē certainly initiates the surmounting of this dominance, but cannot radically and consistently execute it, instead coming to a halt at the indeterminacy of the thought of the natural attitude’s “general thesis.” By contrast, Heidegger attempts an all-out attack on the dominance of the logical by attempting to show that one of the presuppositions of logic—negation—is grounded in the pre-logical, in Dasein’s openness to being, specifically in nihilation. The idea of philosophy as a positive science proves to be a vestige of Cartesianism in phenomenology. The starting point of the whole lecture shows already that the horizon of the entire investigation is philosophy in its relationship to positive science, and thus also the concept of philosophy as rigorous science. According to Husserl, philosophy as rigorous science should flow into a metaphysics that comes forward as science. Metaphysics is thus that which is initially asked about. As proper philosophy, metaphysics ought not be presented by talking about [Besprechen] its subject matters but by

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giving voice to [Aussprechen] them. It is characterized (provisionally) by the fact that each of its questions encompasses the whole of its “field” and that the questioner is herself put into question at the same time. This putting-into-question of the questioner turns into the putting-intoquestion of the scientist, which, of course, Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” also considered. It was Husserl himself who strove to anchor the sciences in their essential ground at a time when their fields had come far apart through specialization. It is established in agreement with him that this anchoring is today “dead.” Phenomenology wanted precisely to renew this anchoring. The entrance into phenomenology was nonetheless the reduction and its core, the epochē— a much more “negative” attitude than every negation, a way into the philosophical beyond every science of the world, beyond every science of actual beings. The sciences are without exception primarily characterized through this relation to the world: whether exact or historical sciences, they pursue beings in order to approach the essence of the things in question. Science answers to the thing [Sache] itself (one of Husserl’s requirements, which he also demands of philosophy), and, in bondage and subordinate exclusively to the thing, it wants to help the thing come into its own [zu ihr selbst verhelfen]. For the thing is not capable, as it were, of being itself on its own [von sich selbst]. In short, there is talk of an “irruption” of the being “human” into the whole of beings (into the universe) in order to allow a being to “emerge” into what it is and how it is. The thing itself needs this irruption and emergence [Einbruch und Aufbruch], which cannot come to it from itself, for so far as it is not akin to Dasein’s type it is not capable of coming into a relationship to its own being, and so far as it is akin to Dasein’s type it is not capable of coming into an explicit relationship to its own being. This irruption can occur, however, only on the basis of what exists as an original relationship not toward beings but toward being— something therefore that is no being and for that reason also precisely is not, thus, from the standpoint of beings, toward non-beings [Nichtseienden]. But this relationship is the ground of the appearing of what appears. Appearing is thus, in its ground, to be sought outside of beings. This ground, being, however, is the object of metaphysics. Since it is not a being, it must be, regarded from the point of view of beings, a nothing. This now mobilizes the question of the lecture: What about this nothing? Upon first glance this characterization (science wants to know all beings in the world and nothing further; the scientific attitude takes its lead from beings and nothing further; it grapples with beings and nothing further) seems to be something superfluous and gratuitously added. In actu-

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ality, that which lends to science the power of the irrupting emergence of beings is expressed in the “nothing.” The discussion of the concept of the nothing that then follows is at one and the same time a confrontation with logic. Is it an accident that this took place in the presence of the great phenomenologist, who in his most radical endeavor of thought (the reflection on the epochē in Ideas I) remains subject to the dominance of this logic to such an extent that he downright recoiled before the nothing? In the face of the thinker, that is, who for this reason remains a prisoner of the subject-object relation (in a transcendental version) and a transcendental idealism? In any event the investigation now takes a detour where it is shown how logic fails when faced with the concept of nothing, how it is incapable of formulating this concept and for that reason can only repudiate it. Yet is this repudiation proof that there is nothing of issue with the nothing [dass es mit dem Nichts nichts an sich hat]? Certainly, the nothing is not a being to which a concept in the proper sense always refers within a context that must have already been illuminated. In the case of the nothing there is nothing of the sort, and the concept itself says as much. What, then, is the use of the concept? Logic certainly cannot use it, but is that a proof against the nothing? “The nothing” is after all a logical objectification. Logic is capable of circumscribing the nothing in no other way than by such an objectifying operation. For it, the nothing is the utter negation of the totality of beings. With that, the nothing is subordinated to a logical operation; it derives from negation. Such an operation, however, is not at all achievable; it is an empty intention. It conflicts with the essence of fulfillment, which in canceling [a thesis] always presupposes a partially positive thesis. One can “realize” a negation only on the basis of something positive. Moreover, the totality of beings can never be positively realized—that conflicts with the necessarily horizonal givenness of the individual. In spite of this, the information provided by logic, the denial of the totality of beings, is not entirely devoid of sense. It suggests a confusion of two concepts of wholeness: wholeness as the sum of beings (something unrealizable), and a whole as the phenomenon without which appearing as such is not possible, the condition of the possibility of appearing. This whole is what is open in appearing, the “world” in the sense of a district that must already be opened to Dasein if Dasein is to understand and perceive [vernehmen] beings. This whole is thus no being but beyond beings. It is felt as a whole, opened up in accordance with mood. This mood holds together even that which is most disparate and fragmented in our activities

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and makes them always into something derived from, and first disclosed by, a whole. That implies that what appears in any given case can address us if we relate to it through an antecedent disclosedness, if we find ourselves attuned within it. There is, however, a fundamental mood that refuses and closes off each and every address whatsoever. Nevertheless, this mood still bears the characteristic of the “as a whole.” No comportment that stands in the open, no taking care of something [Besorgen], and no concern [Fürsorge] is possible here, nor a pure looking at and assimilating in a beholding that is interested in the pure look. All and every thing that turns up in this “disclosedness” has the characteristic of repulsion [Abweisung]: one can strike up nothing with it. No possibility presents itself. This mood offers the experience of the nothing, of nonaddress, of no possibility. While material denial can only be fulfilled through a replacement, there is no alternative here, no replacing, but a pure dwindling. It can also be put like this: beings offer no possibility of a “halt” here, no target; they slip away as soon as the attempt is made to touch them. One learns through this experience that our customary being-in-the-world is a matter of supporting ourselves upon things we have seized— a supporting of ourselves that here fails. The negation of the totality of beings is impossible; the slipping away of beings as a whole, by contrast, is a fundamental occurrence of Dasein. What is this slipping away more specifically? Nothing other than the unveiling of Da-sein as such. Da-sein is not a being that is simply there but a being that understands others and itself, that is, a being to whom beings appear. In the slipping away of beings, which repels us and says nothing, the following becomes clear: Only on the basis of something that is not a being [etwas Nichtseiendem] could beings appear to us. Only by “transcending,” by taking the “step back” behind beings, does Dasein understand beings and do things and it itself appear to it. In the “step back,” then, Dasein learns that it is fundamentally “uncanny” [unheimlich], that it is “not at home among things.” It experiences that which is strange [die Fremde], the strangeness [Befremdlichkeit] of beings as such, that is, the strangeness of their being. In this way, in the presence of the nothing, it gains experience of being, and without the possibility of this experience it is precisely not Dasein, not understanding, something to which beings stand open, to which beings reveal themselves, something itself open. It is thus the nothing of beings, as experience of the being of what is experienced, that forms the constant point of relation from out of which the lucid comportment toward beings that stands in the open can unfold. What is not a being [das Nichtseiende], being [itself], is that point of sup-

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port around which a light, open district forms itself within which the appearing of beings is possible. This district is the how and what of beings that can address us; yet being itself is only present in refusing itself, and that means that being withdraws itself by indicating beings to us and referring us to them. The district of the open, within which beings open up, is thus necessarily linked with the self-withdrawal of being that intrudes in the form of the nothing. Since, however, being is the condition of the possibility of understanding, of the projection of possibilities and thus also of appearing, the human being or its “mind” can never be grasped as something purely “positive,” as a light that approaches things and illuminates them with its rays. Nor [can it be grasped] as a light that “constitutes” objectivity. Thus, one fundamentally cannot get by with the concepts of “consciousness,” even when it is defined through intentionality. Even when we disregard the fact that the kind of being of consciousness remains undetermined or is even (when it is grasped in pure, inner reflection) something constituted, present-athand, “consciousness” remains a thoroughly positive being, incapable of yielding a surmounting and so also incapable of yielding an appearance, the emergence of the “there is” [es gibt] in its fundamental strangeness. Or, more precisely, either “consciousness” implies, without itself suspecting it, the transcending toward that which is not a being [zum Nicht- Seienden], in which case it is, however, in its positivity a misleading concept (and it is in this way that, for example, even Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity seems to vacillate between a transcending and a traditional-positive concept of consciousness). Or consciousness is (as it was, for example, for Brentano) a being without transcendence, in which case, however, the problem of the appearing of beings has not even been posed, much less solved. And this would also be the place to go into the question as to why Heidegger did not go the way of an explicit confrontation with the epochē and reduction, but instead went this indirect way that is so difficult to penetrate. The answer is contained in part, I believe, in the lectures The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which have now been made available.22 Here, three components of the phenomenological method are distinguished which we can now understand, specifically from the perspective of a confrontation with Husserl: (1) the reduction, concerning which it is stated: We call this basic component of phenomenological method—the leading back or re-duction of investigative vision from a naively apprehended being to being— phenomenological reduction. We are thus

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adopting a central term of Husserl’s phenomenology in its literal wording though not in its substantive intent. For Husserl, phenomenological reduction . . . is the method of leading phenomenological vision . . . back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).23

(2) construction, the projection just mentioned; and (3) the destruction that belongs to the reductive construction, that is, a “process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must necessarily be employed, are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn.”24 But why did Heidegger retain the title “reduction,” when it could have led to disastrous confusion? In light of what has been presented above, were there not two determining reasons for this choice? First, in spite of what is ultimately the starkest of material differences, there is nonetheless in both procedures something common, namely that which we designated as the “step back from beings,” the limbo of the nonemployment of theses of beings. Second, because at the time of Basic Problems, which is also the time of Being and Time, the hope of a common procedure still existed, Heidegger sought an ontological interpretation of the material achievements of phenomenology. This is probably also the meaning to be found in the remark on page  38 [MH] of Being and Time,25 which, Heidegger would later explain, was the proper justification for the dedication of the work to Edmund Husserl.26 There, Heidegger talks about how his own investigation should be seen as “steps forward in disclosing ‘the things [Sachen] themselves’”27 and how this is owed above all to Husserl. Does that not hint clearly enough at the fact that the one standpoint (of ontology as the matter [Sache] of phenomenology) was acquired in a reflective confrontation with the Husserlian approach? Here we have simply endeavored to discover how this reflection could have gone. I have commented above concerning “construction” and “destruction” when I discussed the “fundamental ontology” of human Dasein. The charge is occasionally raised against some of Husserl’s students that they have interpreted Husserl by way of Heidegger, without respecting the former’s own scientific intention; this, so the charge goes, did not consist in establishing a new metaphysics (this is maintained in spite of Husserl’s

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numerous statements to the contrary) but in developing the method of a historically bound, “topical” reflection on the conditions of the possibility of the respective naively objective approach. It is curious that precisely Heidegger emphasizes so strongly the methodological characteristic of phenomenology and connects this with a fundamentally historical reflection. A critique of Heidegger’s procedure must before all else be oriented toward his relationship to Husserl’s fundamental concepts and the manner in which they have resulted from thinking through Husserl’s fundamental starting point with the concepts of the general thesis, the epochē and the reduction. A question that has caused much confusion may now be clarified: is there in Heidegger a reduction or at least the epochē? The Heideggerian concept of construction, of the projection of the being of beings in view of these beings, presupposes, we believe, an epochē, but not a reduction in the Husserlian sense. That Heidegger does not explicitly mention the epochē, however, stems from the fact that he saw it as a nihilating comportment grounded in something that lies deeper, namely, nihilation, which delivers itself originally before the being of beings as a whole. Now would be an opportune moment briefly to address the following question in a positive way: what does phenomenology mean for us? What has lifted it to the singular position that distinguishes it in the thought of the present? Phenomenology is neither an academic philosophy dedicated to fostering a scholarly tradition,28 nor is it a philosophy that wants to assert its vitality by helping to change the world, that is, a philosophy that is or wants to be revolutionary. It is a reflection, specifically a reflection on crisis. It must investigate the crisis of humanity down to its first origins, for it wants to lay bare positive science and scientificity in general in their roots. That, however, demands a path to origins of a radical kind and a striving for an impartiality that also must remove the prejudices of the positive sciences from the path of its reflection. In this radicality there is nothing else to match phenomenology, and it goes in the opposite direction of every thing else that has occurred, in obfuscated naivety, as science and philosophy. The discoveries that offer themselves up along this way are manifold, but there is one that is of paramount importance, and both luminaries, Husserl as well as Heidegger, have worked on it in common: the discovery of the essential Cartesianism of our entire epoch, if one—to employ the Heideggerian terminology—views Cartesianism as the aggregate of the ontic consequences of the ontological approach of substance dualism, that is, Descartes’s doctrine of the two thingly modes of being. The

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endeavor to offer a searching way in opposition to the fundamental concept of modernity that has here been exposed—that is phenomenology. Translated by Hayden Kee Notes 1. [Reading “nie mehr” instead of “sie mehr”—HK.] 2. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1927), 27 [translated by Joan Stambaugh as Being and Time (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 26]. 3. Heidegger, 34–35 [32–33]. 4. Heidegger, 37 [35]. 5. [Reading “Philosophie” instead of “Phänomenologie”—HK.] 6. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 3 [translated by F. Kersten as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), xvii]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen I. 7. Husserl, 3 [xvii]. 8. Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Fünf Vorlesungen, ed. Walter Biemel, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973) [translated by Lee Hardy as The Idea of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999)]. 9. A. J. Bucher, H. Drüe and T. M. Seebohm, eds., Bewusst sein— Gerhard Funke zu eigen (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975), 76–78 [Patočka is here referring to his contribution to this volume, titled “Epochē und Reduktion: Einige Bemerkungen”—HK.] 10. Husserl, Ideen I, 65 [60—Patočka’s citation corrected and Kersten translation modified—HK]. 11. Husserl, 6–7 [xx–xxi]. 12. Husserl, 3 [xvii]. 13. Husserl, 8 [xxii]. 14. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B VII–XV [translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood as Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106–110]. 15. Edmund Husserl, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft; Naturalistische Philosophie, Abteilung IV. Cf. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos 1 (1910–11): 289–341 [translated by Quentin Lauer as Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1965), 71–147].

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16. Husserl, Ideen I, 174 [171]. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, ed. F.-W. von Hermann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975), 175 [translated by Alfred Hofstadter as Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 124–125]. 17. Husserl, Ideen I, 171 [174]. 18. Gerhard Funke, Phänomenologie— Metaphysik oder Methode (Bonn: H Bouvier Verlag, 1966), 176 [translated by David J. Parent as Phenomenology: Metaphysics or Method (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987)]. 19. Cf. Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, 453 [318–319]. 20. Heidegger, 17 [12–13]. 21. Heidegger, 13–14, 18 [10, 13–14]. 22. Heidegger, §5: “The character of ontological method; The three basic components of phenomenological method.” 23. Heidegger, 29 [21]. 24. Heidegger, 31 [23]. 25. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 38n1 [36n5]. 26. Spiegel-Interview with Martin Heidegger [September 23, 1966], published as “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Der Spiegel 30 (Mai, 1976): 193–219 [trans. by William J. Richardson as “Only a God Can Save Us: The Spiegel Interview,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (New Jersey: Transaction, 1981), 45–67]. 27. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 38 [36; trans. modified]. 28. [Reading “Schulphilosophie” instead of “Schalphilosophie”—HK.]

The Phenomenological Method of Eidetic Intuition and Its Clarification as Eidetic Variation Dieter Lohmar

Husserl’s phenomenological method is a descriptive analysis of acts of consciousness. It seeks not only to be an empirical-psychological investigation of factual consciousness but to determine the essential, necessary structures of consciousness. It aims at those structures and laws that must necessarily be present in every possible case of a determinate conscious achievement. The goal is thus an a priori determination of the structures of consciousness. The distinctive traits discovered in this investigation are independent of each empirical case investigated and independent of the person. The methodological advance decisive for realizing this aspiration, an advance that Husserl utilizes in his phenomenology in opposition to empirical psychology, is so-called eidetic intuition (or “ideating abstraction” or “intuition of the universal).1 This method is supposed to ensure that in describing the particular characteristics of conscious processes, one does not simply undertake an enumeration of psychological-empirical facts. Empirical facts provide only a limited point of departure for inductions; they can never encompass all cases and they can even change under certain circumstances. Eidetic intuition (or, the eidetic method) claims that we not 110

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only relate to empirical-accidental facts but unveil a priori (necessary) interconnections that pertain to every future case and absolutely to every possible case of a particular conscious phenomenon. In Logical Investigations, the method of eidetic intuition is carefully justified, specifically by working out its cognitive character. The presentation of the method itself is found, however, only in concretely conducted analyses and in the very terse presentation in §52 of the sixth logical investigation. Here we already see a facet of phenomenology’s claim to want to be and to be able to be an ultimately grounded and thereby a self-grounding science: eidetic intuition, as a fundamental method of cognition, is worked out as a case of cognition in the context of the analysis of cognition in the sixth investigation. That is to say, it essentially possesses the same characteristics as other cases of cognition. Ideating abstraction is in the first instance an everyday human capacity for insight that can and must be methodologically refined so that it can serve as the basis for a specifically phenomenological analysis of consciousness. Over the whole course of the development of his thought, Husserl adhered to and further developed the eidetic method.2 In Logical Investigations, Husserl still understood his phenomenology as “descriptive psychology.” Admittedly, he realized shortly thereafter that this designation is misleading.3 Phenomenology is not meant to be merely a collection of accidental facts and empirical inductions. For systematic reasons, phenomenology depends on its descriptive work being supported by methods that allow a priori insights—universal cognitions that are independent of every par tic u lar factual case. Phenomenology seeks to make statements concerning consciousness in general, that is, statements concerning every possibly occurring form of consciousness. Thus, Husserl must show in what methodologically governed way phenomenological description can hit upon what is, in Husserl’s sense, a priori, that is, what is essential, what stays the same and must stay the same in every possible individual instance of the object described. Thus, phenomenology’s claim to be a grounding science and not just an empirical science depends on whether the method of eidetic intuition can be grounded as a form of cognition. In the following section, I will briefly develop the analysis of the cognitive character of eidetic intuition from the sixth logical investigation as a par tic u lar form of categorial intuition. I will also discuss the oftenexpressed suspicion that the method of eidetic intuition amounts to a Platonism. Next, I will deal with Husserl’s clarification of the method of eidetic intuition as “eidetic variation” in the lectures on Phenomenological Psychology

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from the summer semester of 1925. Therein the function of phantasy will be the focal point. Finally, I will pursue five systematic, intimately interrelated questions concerning eidetic method. The first two questions arise within the technical clarification of the eidetic method, while the last three questions go beyond this and discuss the sense and the necessary limitations of this method: (a) How can I ensure that I have actually gone far enough in my variation, that is, to what extent and in what way can I approach the ideal of “endless variation”? (b) How can I be sure that I have not gone too far in the variation of the initial example and thereby overstepped the potential for variation of “the same” example, that is, overstepped the limits of the “concept” with which I conceived the initial example? (c) Is the procedure of eidetic variation and the attentive, intuitive singling out [aufmerksame Herausschauen] of what is invariant thus not also a method for getting to know our “concepts”? (d) Since almost all our concepts concealed cultural senses that can be dif ferent from community to community, are we not because of this forced to narrow considerably the method of eidetic variation? (e) Does not the bonding [Bindung] of variants to a mundane initial example imply a limitation of the variation that could only be offset [aufzuheben] by the performance of the transcendental reduction?

Eidetic Intuition as a Form of Cognition in Logical Investigations The analysis of the cognitive character of eidetic intuition is provided by the sixth logical investigation. Eidetic intuition—here, Husserl also calls it “ideating abstraction” or “intuition of the universal”—is founded on the simple intuition of individual objects in the same way as the other elementary forms of cognition. In the sixth logical investigation, in his theory of categorial intuition, Husserl shows the differences between simple perception and founded categorial intuition.4 The objects of simple perception can be grasped “directly”; they are “immediately given,” intuitive “in one blow.” This implies that the objects of perception are already “there for us” in a single act-level [in einer Aktstufe]; that is, they can be intended in one act-level and perhaps even given. Categorial intention and categorial intuition, by contrast, require a series of acts with articulated and founding acts that are then

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consolidated by an overarching act with a new intention at a higher level. In this founded, categorial act of cognition, something is then intended and perhaps also given that was not yet meant and could not have been given in the simple, founding acts of perception. It is only with categorial intention, and the fulfilling categorial intuition, that there is knowledge. This relationship between founding, simple acts and the cognitions founded by them is one-sided and constant. That is, running through all the various founding perceptions is the condition of the possibility for the intuitive execution of the categorial act. In the simplest cases of categorial intuition, the founding acts can be simple perceptions. However, on the basis of the same model of cognition, there are also categorial acts at higher levels that can ultimately reach the level of systematically interconnected theories. One difficult question concerns the fulfillment of categorial intentions: sensuous sensations fulfill sensuous perceptions, but what fulfills categorial acts? More broadly, we must decide whether the extension of the concept of intuition from sensuous perception to categorial intuition is truly justified. For this, Husserl presents the so-called “syntheses of coincidence” [Deckungssynthesen] between partial intentions that arise [sich einstellen] between the founding acts. At issue here is designation of the human mind’s ability to notice in the passage from perceptions that merge into one another that there are common sense-elements [Sinnelemente] present in the preceding and following perceptions. Of course, these sense-elements belong, on the one hand, to the same sense [gleichsinnig], but, nevertheless, in varying determinations. That is to say, in the syntheses of coincidence between partial intentions of the founding acts, we notice that the same partial intentions occur, although they occur with dif ferent nuances of sense, modes of attention, and degrees of fulfillment. The function of the syntheses of coincidence in categorial intuition can be best illuminated with an example. I see an object, perhaps a green book. In this total perception, all the elements belonging to the sense of this object are already implicitly intended, although they are not explicitly noticed. Then, I explicitly and deliberately direct myself to the moment of color, although it is still the book that I perceive. One could say that I now see the book “right through” the explicitly noticed green color. In the transition from the total perception to this emphatic, specific perception, there arises [sich einstellen] a coincidence of sense between the previously only implicitly intended green moment of the book and the moment of the green color that is now explicitly and deliberately noticed. Both intentions direct themselves on top of the same partial intention, but they have

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entirely dif ferent characteristics: the one is implicit, unnoticed, and rather incidentally executed, while the other is actively, deliberately executed, explicit, and aimed at an individual element of the sense of the whole. The synthesis of coincidence between these two partial intentions is the intuitive givenness that intuitively fulfills for us the synthetic cognitive intention “The book is green.” Someone could object that in the first total perception, we already, as it were, “knew every thing” that the emphatic emphasis then made explicitly conscious to us. However, it is precisely this achievement that presents the difference between the distinctive traits that we incidentally perceive in a perception and the explicitly cognized distinctive traits. When we perceive various objects, it can happen that some feature of an object suddenly “strikes” us, something we previously had seen the whole time without making it thematic for cognition. On the basis of the transition from the total perception to the ensuing, emphatic, specific perception of the distinctive trait, we are in a position to cognize that this object possesses this distinctive trait. In eidetic intuition, then, we again find precisely the same elements that signal the here presented simplest forms of cognition. The intuition of the universal (which we then label with a universal name, e.g., “blue”) is thus only possible for us while we run through a series of perceived or phantasized blue objects.5 The intuitive character [Anschaulichkeit] of the intention directed toward this universal (i.e., the feature common to all the individual cases) is satisfied by a continuous [durchgehend] synthesis of coincidence among the “blue” sense-elements occurring homogenously in all of these cases. If one describes eidetic intuition as a specific form of categorial intuition, as Husserl does in §52 of the sixth investigation, then eidetic intuition also possesses the three-fold structure characteristic of categorial intuition: total perception, specific perception, and categorial synthesis. In running through the articulating acts, a partial unity of coincidence arises among the intentions directed to the moment of color. In the case of eidetic intuition, the names of the phases are thus “perception,” “the generation of variants along with the syntheses of coincidence that arise among the variants,” and finally “the singling out and objective conceiving of what is invariant.” The fulfilling syntheses of coincidence among the articulating acts can appear only when multiple acts directed toward individual cases have been run through. Admittedly, questions and concerns obtrude here: How can we be sure that the common feature is present in absolutely every possible case? Husserl’s

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answer is that the “surety” sought here is by no means possessed in advance, but rather only after the per for mance of the process of eidetic intuition. If, in free transformations in perception and phantasy, we imaginatively transform [umfingieren] the object in question in indefinitely many possible variants and observe in all of them the same element, then we can be sure that this element must also be present in further cases. That is to say, this element is necessary, a priori in the sense characteristic of eidetic intuition. However, this Husserlian notion of a priori must not be equated with the Kantian a priori in the sense of “valid prior to all experience” and “independent of all experience.”6 All extended objects necessarily have a determinate color; all tones necessarily have a determinate intensity and duration, etc. The a priori of eidetic intuition that shows itself in this way has, therefore, its own species of necessity and universality. Of course, such variation in phantasy presupposes that I already have a vague, albeit roughly determined, presentation of the object that is to be envisaged in all pos sible variations. Our pre sentation (e.g., of “blue”) is vague; nonetheless, it is already suited for meaningfully limiting the formation of variants. The theory of eidetic intuition is no geneticpsychological theory; that is, it is not supposed to explain how we arrive at concepts. Eidetic intuition is a method that can intuitively give us universal objects (i.e., concepts and the cognition of universal structures of consciousness). For Husserl, the theory of eidetic intuition is also concerned with establishing the justification of concepts on the basis of a fulfilling intuition, which in this case is the intuition of the universal. Our concepts must conform to this intuition. For that reason, it is not circular when we, phantasizing or perceiving, direct ourselves in articulating acts to blue objects in order to make the universal “blue” intuitive for ourselves. We always already possess vague presentations of universal concepts, but these presentations are not yet intuitively clarified concepts. In a mysterious way, we are even in a position to perceive objects as such (e.g., as blue) with this vague preknowledge. However, this capacity somehow rests—as Kant once put it—“in the dark depths of the human soul” and it depends on the way in which we acquire the conceptual functions requisite for the synthetic unification of what is sensuously given into perceived objects. At the time of Logical Investigations, Husserl still did not possess a theory of the origin of concepts in experience. The detailed analyses of this topic—of the genesis of types [Typus] grounded in experience— are only to be found in his late, genetic phenomenology.7 Next, I will discuss in greater detail the modifications of the eidetic method made there.

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In the act of ideating abstraction, we thus grasp the special union of coincidence that arises among the specific advertences [Sonderzuwendungen] that have been passed through (perceptions, memories, or phantasies) as the intuitive givenness of the species “blue.” The specific advertences are directed toward all conceivable variants of the object. As in an act thematically directed toward the identity of a thing, here too the union of coincidence among specific perceptions serves as the intuitive fulfillment for the intention directed toward identity. However, it is not here the identity of individual things that is given, but rather the identity of the universal. Through the series of specific perceptions of individual objects, and in the overlapping of their intentional constituents, the same color appears. In the act of eidetic intuition, the possibility of the intuition of the universal and of identifying syntheses directed toward this universal reveals itself [sich erweisen]. In this way, the universal emerges as an object of cognition in the full sense of the word. The syntheses of coincidence, too, can be described more exactly. In the case of the intuition of the species “blue,” a peculiar union of coincidence between the articulating acts arises. One perhaps describes it most fittingly as a sharply contrasted domain of self-preserving coincidence and a “margin” of difference and diversity.8 This blurred “margin” corresponds to the variety of blue moments sensuously given or phantasized in the specific advertences; it originates, as it were, in the spectrum of the same color or in the variety of objects as individual objects. In accordance with this basic model, the intuition of universals at higher levels can also be made intelligible. We can perform ideating abstractions that are on their part founded on categorial intuitions. In this way, for example, the concept of color can be made intuitive by running through individual colors, and the concept of perception can be made intuitive by ideatively running through individual acts of perception.9 With the question concerning the mode of givenness of universal concepts, Husserl stands in a critical line of succession stemming from English empiricism, especially that of David Hume. Hume sought to clarify critically the meaning of individual and universal names by resolving them to their corresponding intuitions. Husserl’s extension of the concept of intuition to include categorial intuition allows him to apply this “sensecritical” procedure to universal concepts. It thus seems all the more astonishing that Husserl is accused of Platonism. Of course, upon hearing the phrase “eidetic intuition,” one thinks at once of the Platonic ideas, which can be “seen” in an esoteric way. When one accuses Husserl of Platonism, the method of eidetic intuition is usu-

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ally falsely interpreted as the seeing of something like Platonic ideas, that is, of ideas that belong, as they did for Plato, to their own proper domain of being that is foundational for the sensuous world. Plato’s ideas require their own, esoteric kind of seeing, one that is not accessible to everyone without the help of maieutics. However, it is fundamentally perverse to understand Husserl’s essential seeing on the model of Plato’s. For in the concrete execution, it can quickly be seen that what is at issue for Husserl is a precisely conceived methodological conception that has simply been named with an infelicitously chosen term. Husserl never advocated a Platonism. Nonetheless, the appellation “eidetic intuition” facilitated this misunderstanding, and the fact that Husserl chose it clearly shows that he was not even aware of the risk of being misunderstood as a Platonist. He held Platonism to be a long dead “mythical” or “metaphysical hypostasization” that one could leave to rest.10 This somewhat naive attitude toward the virulence of such doctrines (which were “long dead” in his eyes) led immediately, however, to the false interpretation of the eidetic method and the criticism that Husserl himself was a Platonist. The most important difference from Plato’s position lies in Husserl’s desistance from hypostasizing essences. For Husserl, essences, like all categorial objects, belong to the irreal objects of the understanding. These do not present their own domain of being. Rather, they are merely objects of cognition that always demand realization in empirically real tokens or structures of real objects. Here, too, the seemingly Platonic talk of “participation” has for Husserl very nearly the opposite sense. For Plato, sensuous objects must participate in ideas. Sensuous objects can only be objects—they can only exist—by participating in the ideal world of ideas. For Plato, the ideas are eternal, the authentic reality, while sensuous things are real only insofar as they preserve, as it were, a part of the reality of the world of ideas in the sensuous. The Platonic ideas are more real than the world of the senses. Husserl, by contrast, formulates the relationship between irreal formations [Gebilden] (such as eidē) and reality in conscious contrast to Platonism: “Every sort of irreality . . . has manners of possible participation in reality.”11 The relationship of “participation” is thus precisely the reverse of what Plato conceived. It is not reality or human thinking that can participate in ideas, but rather irreal ideality can and even must participate in reality; it must be intuited, thought, and grasped in spoken and written signs. Essences, the essential structures of consciousness and reality, are thus not already real for themselves. They rely upon a sensuous realization in the actual world, the world in which we live. For Husserl, our real world is the only reality.

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The Clarification of the Eidetic Method as Eidetic Variation A further problem for the eidetic method is the relationship between phantasy and perception within it. In Logical Investigations, the positional characteristic of those acts that are supposed to attach to the initial intuitive [intuitiven] act and to represent all possible cases of the same object was initially regarded merely as indifferent.12 For the fulfillment of an intention directed toward a universal object, however, it is of decisive importance that among the founding acts there is at least one intuitive [intuitiver] act, that is, an act that gives the object itself. Intuition [Intuition] is the name for that kind of apprehension belonging to sensuously given intuitions that apprehends the given as the object itself. Other modes of apperceiving are usually also possible, for example, the kind that apprehends something as a sign (symbolic-signitive) for something else or as a figurative presentation (pictorial-signitive) of the object that is properly meant. In Logical Investigations, Husserl writes that ideating abstraction must be built up upon at least one intuitively [intuitiv] presenting act. Interestingly, however, this act, which presents the initial example, may also be an imaginative presentation. The initial example may be pictorially signitively presented; that is, it may intend the presented individual instance of a concept with the help of an image of it: “Our consciousness of the universal has as satisfactory a basis in perception as it has in parallel imagination.”13 Husserl also maintained this position later. In Phenomenological Psychology, Husserl elaborates: “The fundamental achievement upon which every thing else depends, is the shaping of any experienced or phantasized objectivity into a ‘variant,’ shaping it into the form of [an] arbitrary example and [a] guiding ‘model.’ ”14 There are, however, problematic aspects in this position. A phantasized initial example certainly makes sense with respect to a situation in which we cannot begin with a perception owing to external circumstances. For example, we may want to consider the essence of a chair when one is not present, the essence of a sad mood when we are not sad, or the essence of a memory when we are not remembering anything. In the last example, the difficulty is easily solved since I can awaken a memory at any time. However, in the case of mood, this is not so easy, and in the case of the chair, a presentiation [Vergegenwärtigung], too, can properly suffice. And, of course, it makes no difference whether I now see red or imaginatively present it to myself. The same is true for tones. The problem with using objects of phantasy as initial examples lies in the fact that they can be pictorial intentions. With respect to intuitiveness

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[Anschaulichkeit], pictorial intentions occupy a certain middle position between intuition [Intuition] (i.e., the intuition [Anschauung] of the thing itself) and signitive intention that relies on a sign. Pictorial intentions reveal some characteristics of the object meant. For example, a sketch of a path through a city has a bend where the street makes a curve, a cross where there is, for example, an intersection. By contrast, I can present in images many things that do not exist. For example, Escher’s well-known images present staircases that close in upon one another and always lead upwards. Initial examples from phantasy can belong in the realm of fiction, poetic inventions that never have been and never can be. There are thus objections against choosing a point of departure for eidetic intuition in an imaginative presentation that need to be taken seriously. Intuitive [intuitive] perception seems here to be a better guarantee than phantasy for rationality (i.e., for Husserl, proximity to intuition and sustained orientation in intuition). The demand for at least one intuitively [anschaulich-intuitiv] given case thus presents a certain “dialectically” functioning limit to the sense [Sinngrenze]. Here, however, one must further differentiate according to the object. If, for example, it is a matter of insight into essential laws such as “Every color is extended” or “Every tone possesses a duration,” then one can also begin with an example from phantasy. Phantasized colors and tones are equally suitable. However, it is important to notice that phantasy functions in a dif ferent way in these initial examples. Specifically, it functions in a simple mode that does not imply consciousness of an image. Husserl calls this mode “mere phantasy.”15 Alongside this one intuitive [intuitiven] act (which is directed toward the initial example), there can and must occur acts of phantasy in the further process of the intuition of the universal, specifically, acts that vary the initial example in accordance with phantasy. This variation of the initial example makes it possible in principle for me to make the essence of a thing intuitive to myself on the basis of a single, intuitively [intuitiv] given example. I can do this by departing from the intuitively given initial example and then forming all the possible variants in phantasy. There is an obvious question here: Is it not necessary to present in unrestrained phantasy unlimitedly many conceivable (perhaps even infinitely many) variants of the object in order that the universality of what has been presented can actually be reached? Husserl’s later clarification of the procedure of eidetic intuition in the Phenomenological Psychology lectures also seems to point in this direction. In Phenomenological Psychology (1925), and as early as in Ideas I (1913), Husserl explicitly indicates the necessity or the preferential position of imaginative,

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“free” variation. In Logical Investigations, by contrast, the positional quality of the variational acts was regarded merely as indifferent.16 In Ideas I, it is clearly stated that seeing the essence “can be effected on the ground of a mere presentiation [Vergegenwärtigung] of exemplifying particulars” alone,17 and that in the framework of the sciences of essences, “free phantasies acquire a position of primacy over perceptions.”18 The application of phantasy variations is “necessary,”19 and this compels Husserl to state “that fiction makes up the vital element of phenomenology as of every other eidetic science, that fiction is the source from which the cognition of ‘eternal truths’ is fed.”20 In the lectures on phenomenological psychology, the definitive form of the eidetic method as “eidetic variation” is worked out. According to this elaboration, we begin the procedure with “any experienced or phantasized objectivity” from which we depart as from an initial item and guiding model which we then freely vary in phantasy.21 In the process of running through the par ticu lar variants, there arises an “overlapping coincidence” among the particulars,22 and what is invariant in all the variants is intuitively singled out. The properly categorial achievement is then built up on these syntheses of coincidence; that is, they are the conceptual groundwork [Auffassungsgrundlage] (the presenting content) for the intuition of the universal. Admittedly, it is no longer sensuous contents that are at issue in the syntheses of coincidence between intentional components but givennesses that can arise only in the transition between intentional acts.23 In opposition to the vague presentation of a concept that we initially have, seeing an eidos is the self-givenness of the universal itself. Of course, it is not to be understood as a sensuous seeing, but (as already elaborated above) as an intuition in the sense of categorial intuition.24 In eidetic variation it is not a question of actually producing all possible variants. This would not be possible, since in practice we must break off the process of variation at some point. What guarantees the universality of the seen invariants is thus the consciousness of the free “and so on freely” [und so weiter nach Belieben] that is effected along with all the variations.25 The additional sense [Sinnzusatz] that comes with this “and so on freely” is the decisive new element in the method of eidetic variation.26 A free variation, unrestricted so far as the further number of instances is concerned (i.e., a variation that is infinite in the idealized case27), must be run through in order to see the pure eidos. The requirement that in the procedure of eidetic variation an unrestricted variation of the initial object must be undertaken in phantasy is

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an important condition for fulfilling the claim to the complete extension of the sample specimen surveyed: “An indifference towards actuality is put into play in a free activity, and thereby that which stands there as actuality is, as it were, transferred to the realm of free phantasy.”28 Free phantasy ought to ensure that the given universality is not just a factual commonality of a restricted region of the world.29 The factual actuality of the individual cases that occur in the variation is thus irrelevant.30 Indifference with respect to the factual, the merely empirical facts, is an essential characteristic of the eidos.31 The procedure of eidetic variation thus allows us to transform the vague concepts with which every science must necessarily begin into clear concepts on the basis of actual intuition. This a priori knowledge, which is fundamental for all empirical sciences, begins at first with simple, “approximately intuitive” [anschauungesnahen] concepts, such as color, tone, brightness, timbre, and spatiality, among others. When we, in the further elaboration of science, then come to more complex concepts, such as the concept of a natural thing, or that of the human being, it then becomes clear that these concepts exhibit many dif ferent dimensions, each of which requires “an entire infinite science” for its development.32

Five Systematic Questions on the Process of Eidetic Variation A number of systematic questions tie in with the variation of the meant object in phantasy. (a) How can I ensure that I have actually gone far enough in my variation? How can I approach the ideal of infinite variation, and how close must I approach it in order that the goal of determining the eidos can actually be reached? (b) How is variation restricted? That is, how can I be sure that I have not gone too far in the variation of the initial example? Does the limit of the possibility of variation of “the same” not also depend on the concept with which I have conceived the initial example? And to what extent do I know this concept at all? (c) The last phrasing of the second question directs our attention to the following conjecture: In addition to being a method that makes the universal intuitive, is the procedure of eidetic variation, and the attentive, intuitive singling out [aufmerksame Herausschauen] of what is invariant, not also a method for acquainting ourselves with the content of our concepts in the first place?

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(d) The fourth question results from the analysis of the preceding ones, which shows that in almost all of our concepts there is a hidden cultural sense that can be dif ferent from community to community. This compels us to narrow considerably the achievement potential of the procedure of eidetic variation. (e) A further question can be tied in with this necessary constraint. It concerns the relationship of the two foundational methods of Husserlian phenomenology, namely, the transcendental reduction and eidetic variation: Does not the bonding [Bindung] of the variants to a mundane initial example imply an imperceptible limitation that can only be overcome [aufzuheben] through the performance of the transcendental reduction? Concerning (a): The second phase of eidetic variation is the formation of all possible perceptions, memorial images, or phantasies of the initial example or of an object similar in kind (i.e., if a tone is at issue, then another tone, and so on). In the ideal case, infinitely many variants ought to be considered with an eye toward whether the common trait sought actually occurs in all the possible cases, that is, whether it is actually invariant and accordingly a priori. If we satisfy ourselves with perception alone in our selection of all possible cases, then we necessarily remain prejudiced by a relatively small, narrowly limited domain of different cases of the same object. Even if we take memories into account, the situation is not yet changed. One only approaches the ideal goal of bringing all the possible variants before the eyes in an infinite variation by employing phantasyvariation, but the ideal case remains in practice unattainable. For all of the phantasy-variants I can form, it is only a finite number of them that can ever be considered. Here a fundamental limit becomes apparent, one that we cannot overcome in the process of variation. The only possible solution that seems to offer itself here is induction from a finite number of cases to all cases, but, as is well known, this solution itself presents considerable problems. One cannot achieve a priori certainty with induction, and Husserl thus felt himself motivated to distinguish his procedure of eidetic variation from empirical induction. Eidetic variation is not an inductive procedure. Utilizing phantasy for the production of variations is also impor tant because Husserl’s eidetic intuition is an attempt to disengage oneself from empirical facts and to discover what is necessarily invariant in all possible cases (and not only in all actual cases). Eidetic variation is a complex process that manifests methodological problems in many places, problems that

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endanger attaining the ideal goal of reaching “all possible” variants. The turn to phantasy and the insight that phantasy-variation is to be connected with the requisite character of arbitrariness [Beliebigkeitsgestalt] [in the variations] overcomes part of the problem. Through the use of phantasy, it is thus not only the cases that have factually come to my attention that I can survey. This already constitutes a clear difference from induction on the basis of empirical information. Still, Husserl sees clearly that the process of variation always remains restricted in practice. That is, as “finite” beings, we always and necessarily can make reference in the experience we have actually had only to a finite multiplicity. At some point, we have to “break off” every process of variation.33 In reply to the objection against Husserl’s procedure of eidetic variation implicitly contained in this observation, Husserl takes the following measure: Every individual variation must already exhibit in itself a sense-element [Sinnelement] that points forward to a further variation of the initial example, makes this further variation possible, and even demands it. Every variant must, therefore, bear within itself co-meant content [Mitmeinung des Inhalts]: I can always carry this variation further, indeed without limit. Of course, this “I can” (ever again) is an idealization of a factually limited possibility. Nonetheless, it is a positing that is rationally motivated.34 Husserl calls this the “form of arbitrariness” [Beliebigkeitsgestalt] of the variants. Concerning (b): The freedom of phantasy in variation is not limitless, for we always begin with the vague presentation of a concept or a structural connection in consciousness that we seek to turn into an intuitive presentation. For purposes of the procedure, this vague presentation of a concept is incorporated, as it were, into the intuitively given initial example, which we thereby take as a guide or model and vary, always presenting only similar objects. Beginning with the initial example, we proceed over and over again to “copies” [Nachbildern] that must still be similar to the model.35 Thus complete freedom does not reign here, since the variation remains and should remain a variation preserving the same, and it is thus not a complete change, that is, not a change that transgresses the limits of the genus. No variant is permitted that does not belong to the initial example according to its genus: “A color can only alter to another color and not, for instance, to a tone.”36 Free variation is bound by the preliminary sketch [Vorzeichnungen] contained in the vague concept.37 Husserl’s proposal of a similarity-variation of the initial example is thus supposed to remove the difficulty that lies in the open question concerning the limitation of variation. But if, in principle, I can convert any given object into another by means of variation, then in what way has variation

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been limited? Husserl’s proposal in Phenomenological Psychology requires that the variants resemble the initial example. The initial example guides the formation of the imaginative variation: “Thus similar images are continually to be won as ‘copies’ [Nachbilder], as phantasy-images which are all concrete resemblances of the original.”38 However, Husserl does not explain what “concrete resemblance” means with respect to its content [inhaltlich]. However, the concept of similarity is for its part a name for multifarious problems. One could even assert that with the reference to similarity, no problem has yet been solved but, on the contrary, new ones have merely been generated.39 Still, this proposal also has its good aspects: Husserl at least attempts to solve the problem of limiting variation, and indeed in a manner that, while demanding similarity, is oriented toward the intuitively given. One of the obvious disadvantages of this proposal is that it relocates the sought-after ability to limit variation in the enigmatic depths of human consciousness, that is, in our capacity to ascertain what kind of objects are still (only just) “similar” to one another, and which no longer appear similar to us. Concerning (c): Nonetheless, let us try to approach the problem of limiting variability in yet another way: If objects are similar to one another, this means that they are not completely the same, yet still display enough common characteristics to fall under the same concept as the initial example. The common elements of sense [Sinnelemente] are the distinctive traits that we formulate in our elaboration of the concept: a chair has a surface for sitting on and legs that support this surface, and perhaps a backrest. Admittedly, we are now confronted with a new difficulty, for in so doing the concept has obviously been presupposed in various respects. It has been presupposed that we know what exactly the concept means [meint], what it “signifies” [bedeutet] or “says” [besagt], and which elements of sense [Sinnelemente] it “contains within itself.” For a procedure that is in the first place supposed to clarify what a concept “is” by bringing about the intuitive fulfillment of an intention directed toward a universal, all too much depends— according to the first objection—on the confident use of a concept and on the recognized content of that concept as already known beforehand. Even if one does not view exact knowledge of the content of a concept as a condition of its use, (for example, in perception or imaginative variation), one has again arrived with the presupposed, confident use of the concept in perception and phantasy at one of the enigmatic depths of human consciousness. We can somehow sense, or decide in accordance with feeling, what can still count as “chair,”

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“perception,” or “memory,” and what no longer counts. However, we do not know exactly how we do this and upon what basis such an opinion rests. We here see the fundamental difficulty: we do not know exactly how our concepts function in perception (and in phantasy), and furthermore we do not know exactly whether it is actually concepts in the full sense of the word that make our perception possible. This diagnosis may sound puzzling to some readers at first, but it is connected with the genetic concept of a concept, that is, with the concept of a type. Husserl determines the genetic concept of a concept—the presentation of an object that we obtain from homogeneous experience—as a type. The type is a presentation containing those constituents of sense that in my preceding experiences have shown themselves to be reliable with respect to an object or a group of objects.40 Types thus concern a product or a sediment of passive syntheses that have not been deliberately effected by an ego and that arise, as it were, “behind our backs,” (without awareness or deliberateness) in the experience of perceived objects. Nonetheless, these passive syntheses lead to an abiding acquisition. That is to say, in further perceiving we can have at our disposal the achievement [Leistung] of the type; we can, for example, apperceive other objects as “similar to previously seen objects.” In doing so, the type guides syntheses in our perception by giving us reason to expect the “typical” elements of an “object of this kind.” This typical tracing also codetermines the boundaries of phantasy-variation in the eidetic method.41 In variation, we orient ourselves, so to speak, with respect to the spectrum that occurs in the previously known group of typically similar objects. The type’s elements as regards content are thus “present to us in perceiving”; that is, we can apply them without question and with them perform our objectivating [objektivierend] syntheses. However, we know the conceptual content of our types only approximately, in a vague and not fully particularized way. An important feature of a type is that in its original form, as long as it has not been transformed by further communication with names and intersubjectively canonized concepts, it is still prelinguistic. This can be seen, for example, from the fact that we very often cannot even name the elements of a type that we can apply confidently in usage. We see this, for example, in the difficulty we have describing to someone the face of a certain person. We can recognize this person at once, but we cannot grasp the particular traits and the proportions of his face in words. This is not possible for us. Similarly, it is almost impossible to explain the difference between cows, dogs, and horses to someone using concepts alone. Nevertheless, in

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concrete perceptual situations, we are completely confident in our application of a type. Eidetic variation, with its demand for the free variation of an initial example, reveals itself as a reflective-experimental procedure. With its help, we can thus—with conscious attention— ascertain the extent to which we can imaginatively modify the presentation of an individual case without thereby overstepping the limits of the concept (i.e., without imagining “something dif ferent”). Through eidetic variation, we thus uncover in a certain way not only the intuitiveness, but also the limits of our concepts, which we ourselves cannot arbitrarily determine. There are thus interpretations of eidetic variation that understand it as a procedure that is also suitable for making clear to us the content of our concepts.42 In addition to producing an intuition of the universal, one can thus also meaningfully speak in another respect of “clarifying” concepts, specifically of a clarification with respect to content. This sounds strange at first, for when we apply a concept, surely we must have at least an approximate idea [Vorstellung] of which elements in regard to content are contained in it. In order to understand the respect in which the procedure of eidetic variation can tell us something about the content of our concepts, one must take into consideration some general aspects of the theory of types. First, it should be made clear that in general phenomenology does not begin with the presupposition that we already possess concepts that we then merely apply to intuitions in perception, as Kant characterized the fundamental cognitive activity. In Logical Investigations, Husserl begins with the descriptive-eidetic analy sis of our perceptual and cognitive achievements as though we initially do not at all know what a concept is and what it achieves. Nor are alternative conceptions of concept acquisition, as, for example, empiricist or pragmatist theories, taken up. Perception is then understood as apprehension, that is, as an interpretation and a synthetic assemblage of intuition, the result of which is a sensuous presentation of the perceived object. Husserl initially did not advance a theory concerning the function of concepts in this synthetic bonding. It becomes clear, however, that the selection of sensuous elements [sinnlichen Elemente], the interpretation of the constituent parts, and the kind of assemblage depend on the “concept” that we apply in perception. Nonetheless, in the eyes of phenomenology, when it comes to perception, the “concept” (in the full sense of the word) is not yet the decisive tool for making possible this synthetic achievement. The place of the concept is rather to be seen in cognition, that is, in the categorial acts that intend something as an instance of a universal concept and, as the case may

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be, also intuitively cognize it, a cognition that is also communicable. That is to say, the concept as it functions in perception is something dif ferent from the concept that functions in an expressible cognition. Admittedly, this view is only implicit in Logical Investigations; it is not explicitly expressed. Only in Husserl’s genetic philosophy (from circa 1920) is the difference between these two variants of the concept more clearly worked out. It becomes clear that the function that makes possible for us the perception “of something” does not yet concern a universal concept [Begriff mit einer Allgemeinheitsform]. Perception is a matter of a type that is a connection of presentations that has been formed in our own experience and that is also transformed in further experience. The demarcation of a type from a concept can best be made intelligible with a glance back at the genetic emergence of a type. A type at first unifies only the distinctive traits of objects that have already once been given to the individual subject in perception. One can also here see (and broadly equivalently) the connection of a limited group of individual objects, that is, a group of objects familiar to me that stand in a relation of similarity. A type thus does not yet possess the form of universality, but rather merely that of a commonality of finitely many objects. Some limitations and peculiarities of types in opposition to universal concepts now become intelligible: If a person has only seen dogs of a certain size, then, upon coming across an unusually large specimen, it is difficult to convince her of the correctness of the assertion “This is a dog.” What types I have depends on my perceptual history; they are by no means universal. We come here to a further element of types, specifically, the intersubjective norming [Normierung] of the use of types. This norming cannot be reduced to the perceptual history of the individual person. In conversations that typically take place between children and adults, we establish the use of the type; that is, we norm it in accordance with convictions shared within our group. When a child points to a cow, for example, and says “woof,” parents intervene and correct the child’s use of the type. Through these norming interventions, along with one’s own further experience, the type receives its further formation.43 As a sediment of these norming interventions, we acquire a limit, imposed upon us by the community, for the use of types, which are at the same time designated with concepts. During the detailed introduction to the use of language, a person’s types undergo an additional transformation when it is established what an

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“individual object” is as opposed to a “universal object,” that is, a universal concept. Only for the latter do we then apply naming conventions of the form “an A,” for example, “a dog.” The types of individual objects and those of universal objects are admittedly already separated through various contexts of experience. Other wise, the regulation of their use would be without a basis in experience. For example, when it comes to individual objects, we can ascribe a particular history of movement and change to them. However, from these very general considerations, let us now return to the application of the type in the perception. The function of types in perception is to make it possible for us to know when we perceive an object what in sensibility is suited to present it and what is not. That is to say, we “know” with the help of the type acquired in experience that the backrest and the seat, as well as the legs, belong to the chair we see, while the floor, the mild aroma of cigarette, and my toothache do not belong to the presentation of the chair. To the process of perception belongs a phase in which we examine our sensuous givenness for what is suited to the sensuous presentation of this object. In the process, the type “tells” us what is suited to the presentation. For example, when we see the shape and color of a lemon and at the same time notice a mild, fruity aroma, we readily incorporate this aroma into the presentation of the lemon.44 If, on the contrary, we perceive a book, we will not incorporate the aroma into the presentation. When perceiving, we must out of what is sensuously given interpret what is suited at once as something and, to be sure, as a determinate constituent element of the typified percept. We must, as it were, add a determinate sense to it. We clearly notice this, for example, when we consider the example of the duck-rabbit familiar from Gestalt theory: The duck’s beak can be “regarded,” “interpreted,” “construed” as a beak or just as easily as the ears of the rabbit.45 Types are thus also a tool for this activity of interpreting. Furthermore, we must synthetically connect the newly construed parts or aspects of the object and take (apperceive) the sensuously given complex, the content of which has already been newly construed, as this object, for example, this chair, a lemon, a rabbit, or a duck.46 Of course, to a certain extent, the sense-elements [Sinnelement] of the object always remain “behind the back” of the perceiver—we have them available to us in perception, but we are not explicitly aware of them. One can thus employ the procedure of eidetic variation to determine more exactly the constantly implicit boundaries of our concepts and their senseelements [Sinnelemente].

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Let us consider a concrete example: this chair here. When we attempt to bring the essence of this object to intuition, we must, following the method of eidetic variation, modify the initial example in variants that are similar to it, that is, variants that are still chairs. This works as long as we limit ourselves to the concrete specifications. Every variant has a “surface for sitting,” “legs for support,” and perhaps a “backrest,” too. But now we must go into somewhat greater detail, for the “backrest” is clearly a sensuous element [Sinnelement] that does not unconditionally belong to a chair. Moreover, it is not necessary for a chair to have four legs. It can also have three, or more than four. We could also be dealing with a stone suited for sitting, or the stump of a massive tree. But in these cases, we would not be so sure when it comes to determining the concept. If we actually want to call the stump or the stone a “chair,” this might just be a metaphorical determination. In addition, we note that the sense-element of the “artifact,” of the “thing produced for a purpose,” is even more lively in the case of the sawedoff tree than in the case of the stone that is suited for sitting. There is, therefore, a noticed gradation of metaphoricity that shows us that the element of the “produced for a particular purpose” definitely belongs to the concept. If we now imagine skillfully produced objects whose “sitting surface” is not level but steeply inclined so that this purpose is no longer fulfilled, then the name “chair” becomes entirely metaphorical. It is a work of art [Kunstwerk] that no longer fulfills the purpose that a chair ought to have, namely, that of “being suited for sitting.” Consequently, what constitutes the final boundary of variation is the function of the object, specifically, a function that is relative to our body. This refers back to the incorporation of our universal presentations into our everyday practices. Our body expects something determinate here, a determinate achievement [Leistung]! This becomes clear when we vary the height of the sitting surface and determine that an artifact that has the shape of a chair but that is much too high for one to be able to sit on it is only to be called a chair in metaphorical speech. Now let us reverse matters: If we lower the sitting height to just above the floor, then we notice that this artifact (e.g., a straw mat) is, for the normal Middle European, no longer something “for sitting.” Here we strike upon a hidden cultural component of the “something for sitting.” For traditional Japanese and many other Asians, the body’s practical presentation is not directed toward an elevated sitting surface raised above the floor by supporting legs. A mat on the floor is already “something for sitting” and the chair conceived by us is not something for sitting at all!

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In this way, we become familiar not only with the material elements of our regionally informed concept of a chair. We notice also that what we conceive in a universal presentation depends on our cultural socialization, and that this socialization can conceal elements found only in variations performed at the boundaries of our concepts. Concerning (d): In this way it can also be seen, however, that a critical limitation of the capacity for the performance of eidetic intuition is necessary. Intuition of the universal cannot be applied without differentiation to every kind of concept. In particular, one can with the help of eidetic variation note cultural senses clinging to concepts and objects, but one can by no means regard them as universal and general [universell und allgemein]. Of course there are other, more technical limitations to eidetic variation. For example, complexly compound concepts (hat-of-the-Danubesteamship-captain [Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitänsmütze]), metaphorical concepts (canard [Zeitungs-Ente]), or concepts produced through specific definitions (computer, telephone, helicopter) cannot be made intuitive with this procedure. A fundamental limitation reveals itself in concepts that contain cultural senses. They cannot be made unambiguously intuitive in the procedure of eidetic variation. Thus, the sense of the concept “God” is for the ancient Greeks and other peoples with polytheistic religions connected with plurality. By contrast, it might seem to a person who employs the procedure of eidetic variation in naively reflecting on the comparison of cultures as though the singular form were essential to the concept “God.”47 Eidetic intuition, one must conclude, is only appropriate for a determinate kind of concept with a proximity to intuition, namely, concepts whose individual instances can by and large be completely given in inner or outer sense. This must be maintained for the purpose of limiting the application of eidetic intuition. Other wise, one must restrict the theory of eidetic intuition with the important addendum that a reduction of complex concepts to simple ones that can be intuitively fulfilled must precede variation. Such a reduction was presupposed by classical empiricism, for example. In this way, I can admittedly see a computer and note its “reactions,” but in doing so I by no means grasp the essence of a computer (e.g., as a device for processing information). What “blue” is can be grasped in the comparative survey of many different blue things, in which survey one pays attention to the common moment of color. If we vary and run through many different sorts of color—“red,” “green,” “blue,” and so on—we can see the common essence of color. One

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can also in this way experience the essential determinations of the central activities of consciousness, such as perception, memory, phantasy, and so on. To this extent, eidetic intuition still achieves for phenomenology what it is supposed to achieve, even without the necessary critical reflection on its applicability and the limits of its applicability. However, what “justice” is, is not to be experienced in this way. Other wise, most philosophical questions would quickly be answered by eidetic intuition. This seemingly naive hope could have motivated some of the first phenomenologists.48 Concerning (e): Even if one keeps the regional nature of all our concepts attentively in view and brackets all objects with cultural senses, a significant problem remains for the procedure of eidetic variation: it could be the case that we never attain the pure eidos. That is, it could be the case that we never determine what holds for all possible cases of the object but rather that we always determine only what is factually common to a limited sample of the totality of all realities. Here Husserl mentions the ideally unlimited variation of the presentation of tones. If we vary the presentation in such a way that we restrict ourselves to “arbitrary tones in the world”— that is, to “tones heard or able to be heard by human beings on the earth”49 —then there obtains a “secret,” “unnoticed bonding [Bindung]” of variation to our earth and “our factually actual world.”50 A restriction [Beschränkung] to what is merely regionally common can occur if we do not consciously and deliberately suspend every binding to pregiven actuality: “the eidos is actually pure only when every bonding [Bindung] to the actuality given beforehand is in fact most carefully excluded.”51 We must attempt “consciously to put out of play” these bonds,52 which may be difficult to notice. A primitive, natural attitude can already effect such a bond: “Every fact and every eidos remains related to the factual world.”53 We can only escape this “hidden world-positing and bonding to existence . . . when we become aware of this bond and consciously put it out of play.”54 Only through the complete separation [Lösung] of variation from the factual world do we attain “complete purity” of the eidos, that is, the “absolutely pure eidos.”55 Here it seems as though Husserl would like to unite his two fundamental methods: eidetic variation, as completely free variation, seems possible only if the transcendental reduction is performed. In my view, however, this is misleading. Complete freedom from the factual can and must already be attained in the individual steps of variation through the arbitrariness [Beliebigkeitsform] in the variants. The transcendental reduction, as the bracketing of the claims to validity of all intentional acts, serves a

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dif ferent purpose, namely, the critique of these claims to validity, which the natural attitude universally connects with objects.56 A further argument against the here suggested suspicion that eidetic variation can only be free with the help of the transcendental reduction lies in the structure [Aufbau] of Husserl’s writings. Both in Ideas I and in Phenomenological Psychology, and even in Cartesian Meditations and Crisis, there is the possibility of a mundane eidetic science of consciousness, of a successful eidetic without the transcendental reduction. A further—apparently merely methodological— question emerges here: at what point in the procedure is the sought-after “freedom from the factual” actually attained? Is it already attained in the phase of the variation of the initial example, or only upon attaining the self-given eidos? Husserl placed great value on the fact that the variations themselves by and large (or even completely) already break loose from the factual. Other wise, the danger that we commit ourselves in the variants of the initial example to a merely local, widespread commonality that cannot actually claim universal validity persists. The question as to how we actually bring about the independence of the formation of the variants from every thing factual thus has not yet been answered, nor has the question as to whether this independence can actually be attained. Of course, one can object that every variant of the initial example is and always remains a factual variation, executed by me here and now. The eidos, by contrast, as an ideal object, is actually independent from every thing factual. But here a dif ferent sense of “to be independent of” has crept in unnoticed. For with this expression, what is meant is surely that only the eidos in the Platonic, ontological sense can actually be independent of the factual. It is thus the ontological independence from dif ferent regions of being that is meant. However, in Husserl’s phenomenology, irreal, ideal objects of the understanding, such as an eidos, do not form an equally valued ontological counterpart to the domain of real objects. They remain always a moment dependent upon reality. They are objects of cognition, and as such they do not form an independent domain. The particular achievement of the procedure of eidetic intuition thus reveals itself in two important respects: first of all, in the possibility of making our universal presentations intuitive, but, moreover, in the discovery of hidden sense-elements [Sinnelementen] in all of our concepts.57 Translated by Hayden Kee

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Notes 1. There is comparatively little secondary literature on eidetic intuition: R. Bernet, I. Kern, and E. Marbach, Edmund Husserl: Darstellung seines Denkens (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1989), 74–84; J. N. Mohanty, “Individual Fact and Essence in Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 19 (1959): 222–230; E. Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970), 137–168; and B. Hopkins, “Phenomenological Cognition of the a priori: Husserl’s Method of ‘Seeing Essences,’ ” in Husserl in Contemporary Context, ed. B. Hopkins (Dordrecht: Springer, 1997), 151–178. I would like to thank the participants of the reading group for Husserl’s texts at the Husserl Archives of the University of Cologne for many critical suggestions. 2. An edition of research manuscripts on the topic of essence and seeing of essences has been planned in the Husserliana series. [This volume is now available as volume 41 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl, Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der eidetischen Variation: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1891–1935), ed. Dirk Fonfara (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012).—HK] 3. On the relationship of phenomenology to descriptive psychology, see Husserl’s “Report on German Writings on Logic from 1895–99,” in Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910), ed. Bernhard Rang (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 203–208 [translated by Dallas Willard as Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 247–253]. 4. For the theory of categorial intuition, see Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 674, 676–680 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 786–787, 788–792] and Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, 4th ed. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1948), 299–325 [translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks as Experience and Judgment, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 250–269]. See also Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), 111–136; R. Sokolowski, “Husserl’s Concept of Categorial Intuition,” Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. Philosophical Topics 12 (1981 Supplement): 127–141; D. Willard, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1984), 23–241; D. Lohmar, “Wo lag der Fehler der kategorialen Repräsentanten?,” Husserl Studies 7 (1990): 179–197; T. M. Seebohm, “Kategoriale Anschauung,” Phänomenologische Forschung 23 (1990): 43–66; D. Lohmar, Erfahrung und kategoriales Denken

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(Dordrecht: Springer, 1998), 178–273; and D. Lohmar, “Husserl’s Concept of Categorical Intuition,” in Hundred Years of Phenomenology, ed. D. Zahavi and F. Stjernfelt, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), 125–145. 5. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:111–115, 176–178, 225–226, 690–693 [337–340, 390–392, 432, 799–802]. 6. In a footnote from Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl indicates that he always uses the concept of the a priori in this sense, which is not to be confused with Kant’s concept of the a priori. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 255n1 [translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logik (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 248n1]. 7. Cf. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, §83. 8. Cf. Husserl, 418–419 [346–347], and Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 78 [translated by John Scanlon as Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 58]. 9. Eidetic intuition (or, eidetic variation) that leads to higher levels of universality is extensively presented in the lectures Phänomenologische Psychologie, §9(e). 10. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:127–128 [350–351], and also the “Draft of a ‘Preface’ to the Logical Investigations,” in Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen: Ergänzungsband, ed. Ullrich Melle (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 272–329 [translated by P. J. Bossert and C. H. Peters as Introduction to the “Logical Investigations”: A Draft of a Preface to the Logical Investigations (1913) (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975)]. Here, Husserl insists that the accusation is unjustified and that it stands in contradiction to his theory. For Husserl, a metaphysical hypostasization of essences clearly lay in a mythical obscurity that was not worthy of discussion. The lapidary statement from 1911 that “eidetic insight conceals no more difficulties or ‘mystical’ secrets than perception” shows that he still assessed the risk of misunderstanding to be low at that time; cf. “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos 1 (1910–11): 315 [translated by Quentin Lauer as “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1965), 110]. In Ideas I (1913) we also find the assertion that “mystical thoughts” are to be “cleanly eliminated.” See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 16 [translated by F. Kersten as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure

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Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 11]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen I. 11. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 163 [155]. 12. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:691–692, 670 [800, 784]. 13. Husserl, 691; cf. 670 [801, 784]. 14. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 76 [57; trans. modified]. 15. Husserl, 73 [54]. 16. On free phantasy in eidetic variation, see Husserl, Ideen I, 145–148 [157–160]; Formale und transzendentale Logik, 206, 254 [198–199, 247]; Erfahrung und Urteil, 410, 422–423 [340, 349–350]; and E. Ströker, “Husserls Evidenzprinzip,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 32 (1978): 3–30. Thomas Seebohm holds the view that, substantively, there is already phantasy variation in the Logical Investigations (“Kategoriale Anschauung,” Phänomenologische Forschung 23 (1990): 14–15). One could also see a variational procedure already in the determination of the concepts “material,” “quality,” and “fullness” in the fifth investigation. Here, the content of these concepts is made intuitive by means of deliberate variation of the respective other moments of the act. 17. Husserl, Ideen I, 145–146 [157–158]. 18. Husserl, 147 [158–159] 19. Husserl, 148 [160]. 20. Husserl, 148 [160]. 21. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 76 [57]. 22. Husserl, 77 [58]. 23. On the question concerning the character of the syntheses of coincidence as given content and groundwork for fulfillment of categorial intentions, see Lohmar, “Husserl’s Concept of Categorial Intuition,” 125–145. Here, the enduring function of sensuousness for the fulfillment of categorial intentions is also investigated. 24. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 85 [63–64]. 25. Husserl, 77 [57]. 26. Husserl, 79 [59]. 27. Husserl, 79 [59]. 28. Husserl, 86 [64]. 29. Cf. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, 419–425 [347–351]. 30. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 74 [55]. 31. This aspect of the juxtaposition of fact and eidos can already be found in Husserl, Ideen I: “Pure eidetic truths contain not the slightest assertion about matters of fact” (17 [11]). 32. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 93 [70]. 33. Husserl, 77 [57].

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34. Cf. A. Aguirre, “Die Idee und die Grenzenlosigkeit der Erfahrung: Kant und Husserl,” in Philosophie der Endlichkeit, ed. B. Niemeyer and D. Schütze (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1992); and my contribution “Warum braucht die Logik eine Theorie der Erfahrung?”, in Phenomenology on German Idealism, Hermeneutics, and Logic, ed. R. Dostal, L. Embree, J. N. Mohanty, J. J. Kockelmanns, and O. K. Wiegand (Dordrecht: Springer, 1999), 149–169. 35. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 77 [58]. 36. Husserl, 75 [56]. 37. Husserl, 89–90 [67–68]. 38. Husserl, 72 [54]. In another passage, we read, “following it as a model, I shape multiple fancied copies as things and fictions concretely similar to it” (71 [53]); the initial object is a “guiding ‘model’ ” (76 [57]); and within variation, we pass over “from copy to copy, similar to similar” (77 [58]). 39. Cf. my contribution on the topic of similarity, “Wittgenstein, Husserl and Kant on Aspect- Change,” in Husserl et Wittgenstein, ed. Sandra Laugier (Stuttgart: Verlag Frommann-Holzboog, 2004); and also R. N. Smid, “Ähnlichkeit als Thema der Münchener Lipps-Schule,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 37 (1983): 605–616. 40. On Husserl’s theory of types, see Erfahrung und Urteil, §83, and A. Schütz, “Typus und Eidos in Husserls Spätphilosophie,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze, Bd. 3 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 127–152; and Lohmar, Erfahrung und kategoriales Denken, 245–254. It is especially important to know that there are not only types as what is common to many objects, but also types of individual objects. Cf. my “Husserl’s Types and Kant’s Schemata,” in The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003), 93–124. 41. Concerning the transition from the typifying intention directed toward an object to its intuitional illustration in eidetic variation, Husserl writes, “Passive synthesis . . . is everywhere our support for putting into play the activities of relating and of constituting logically universalizing universal concepts and propositions” (Phänomenologische Psychologie, 99 [75]). 42. Cf. Klaus Held’s introduction to Edmund Husserl, Die phänomenologische Methode: Ausgewählte Texte, Teil 1 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985), as well as Ulrich Claesges, Edmund Husserl’s Theorie der Raumkonstitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 29–32. 43. [Reading erhält rather than enthält—HK] 44. Kant chooses a comparable formulation for his description of apperception (i.e., the perception of something as something). Cf. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A120–121 [translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood as Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 238–239].

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45. On this example from Gestalt psychology, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Psychology— A Fragment [formerly part 2 of Philosophical Investigations], trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009), §§118–137. 46. Indeed, one can compare Husserlian types with Kant’s schemata of concepts. See my “Husserl’s Types and Kant’s Schemata.” 47. See, for example, Husserl’s identical statement in the “Vienna Lecture” (1935), in Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 335 [translated by David Carr as The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 288]. Husserl’s attempts to secure something identical everywhere in dif ferent life-worlds must thus be regarded with considerable skepticism. The success of an analy sis that seeks such universal distinctive traits depends not only on eidetic variation, but also on conducting comprehensive historical and cultural comparisons. The insight that corresponds to this requirement is that what was once seen differently in another time or another culture cannot count as universal. 48. On the history of the phenomenological movement, see Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982). 49. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 74 [55]. 50. Husserl, 74 [55, trans. modified]. 51. Husserl, 74 [55, trans. modified]. 52. Husserl, 74 [55]. 53. Husserl, 74 [55]. 54. Husserl, 74 [55, trans. modified]. 55. Husserl, 74 [55]. Many of the same passages can be found in Erfahrung und Urteil, 422–426 [349–352]. On the application of the text of §9 in Erfahrung und Urteil, see D. Lohmar, “Zu der Entstehung und den Ausgangsmaterialien von Edmund Husserls Werk ‘Erfahrung und Urteil,’ ” Husserl Studies 13 (1996): 31–71. 56. Cf. D. Lohmar, “Die Idee der Reduktion: Husserls Reduktionen und ihr gemeinsamer methodischer Sinn,” in Die erscheinende Welt. Festschrift für Klaus Held, eds. H. Hüni and P. Trawny (Berlin: Duncker und Humboldt, 2002), 751–771. 57. In Ideen I, and also in later presentations, Husserl writes that seeing the a priori—the “ideation” undertaken in the eidetic procedure—is also applied in mathematics. Admittedly, we are for the most part not aware that we are here performing an eidetic procedure, for we have not yet “learned to look

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into the inwardness of mathematizing activity and to witness how universalities arise out of necessities there” (Phänomenologische Psychologie, 87 [65]). Cf. Husserl, Ideen I, 17–22 [12–17] (and also Erfahrung und Urteil, 425 [351–352]), where Husserl presents pure geometry as an eidetic science, that is, a science of essences (cf. also Husserl, Ideen I, 24, 137, 149 [18–19, 149, 160–161]), and works out the close interconnection of judging concerning essences and judging in the mode of “in general” [überhaupt]. Judgments in the general mode can also have the characteristic of essential universality. Geometrical “axioms” ( here specifically understood not in the modern sense of arbitrarily posited assumptions, but rather in the ancient sense of immediately evident judgments about spatial figures) are due to eidetic intuition. From these axioms (i.e., primitive essential laws), one can derive all valid propositions concerning the realm of spatial figures (cf. Ideen I, 151–152 [162–163]). The geometer’s object is thus not actually drawn figures but rather ideally possible figures. The variants that the geometer forms in the ideating method can thus originate from actuality, but also from phantasy (cf. also Ideen I, 147 [158–159]). Decisive for the results is what is invariant in all possible cases. Geometry as an eidetic is hereby radically distinguished from all sciences of experience. Bernhold Picker also refers to geometry as a model and inspiration for the eidetic method in “Die Bedeutung der Mathematik für die Philosophie Edmund Husserls,” Philosophia Naturalis 7 (1961): 266–355.

Intentionality and the Intentional Object in the Early Husserl Karl Schuhmann

If intentionality is the heading for the problem that— according to Husserl’s words in Ideas I—“encompasses the whole of phenomenology,”1 then it must be maintained that Husserl was definitely not a phenomenologist from the start.2 In his first published book, the Philosophy of Arithmetic of 1891, the concept of intentionality plays no role,3 and the same is true of the manuscripts for the book on space he planned in 1893.4 In the following year, Husserl published “Psychological Studies in the Elements of Logic,”5 which Husserl had already completed by the end of 1893 following his efforts dealing with the problem of space. In these studies, and the accompanying manuscripts on intuition and representation,6 the concept of “intention” turns up for the first time with any elaboration. With it, Husserl identifies an interest proper to representational presentations (and only to them),7 specifically their interest in fulfilling what is meant by means of them in an intuition that gives the intended thing itself. What is intuited is as such always the content of an intuiting act.8 By contrast, in the case of representation, the intended object, because it is not itself “there,” is no immanent content that is itself present in consciousness.9 141

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Rather, consciousness directs itself beyond the given content to this nongiven object. The “Psychological Studies” remained a fragment. As Husserl would later testify, it was owing to the conception of intention as interest developed in these studies that they were not published.10 In the end, with “interest” one usually designates the singling-out of given objective contents. But can this determination simply be applied to the intending character of presenting acts without further ado? Until 1893, Husserl, following Brentano, accepted at face value the view that “intentionality” means having contents. However, there then appeared in 1894 the book On the Content and Object of Presentations by Kazimierz Twardowski,11 who, like Husserl, was a student of Brentano’s. This work forced Husserl to turn to the previously neglected problem of intentionality (and with it the question concerning the relationship of consciousness to its contents) and, in pursuit of the problems introduced by Twardowski, to draft his own doctrine of intentionality. Considering this situation, a two-fold thesis will be advanced here. On the one hand, a historical thesis: Husserl’s early concept of intentionality is due to his confrontation with Twardowski.12 Further, a substantive thesis: this concept presents a satisfactory solution to the problem introduced by Twardowski. (In what follows, this problem will be designated as the Brentano-Bolzano problem.) Each of these two theses has a polemical flipside. The flipside of the historical thesis: contrary to a widespread conception, Husserl’s concept of intentionality is not the direct further development of the corresponding conceptions of his teacher Brentano. And the flipside of the substantive thesis: Husserl’s later theory of noesis and noema is not a further internal development of his original concept of intentionality but is the result of other problems and influences. To support these theses, I rely (even if to a lesser extent) on the fifth logical investigation from 1901 and a review of the above-mentioned work of Twardowski that Husserl penned in December 1896.13 Above all, however, I draw on the fragment “Intentional Objects” from the summer of 1894.14 Neither of the last two works, incidentally, was to appear during Husserl’s lifetime. They were first published in 1979 from his estate. The Bolzano-Brentano problem had been discovered by Twardowski, who then confronted Husserl with it. The most obvious way to present it is in the version Husserl himself gave it in a letter from July 7, 1901, to Anton Marty,15 who was also a student of Brentano’s and was, as such, also interested in this question. Husserl says there that every presentation has

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an object (for it presents something)—[and yet,] not every presentation has an object (for there is not something corresponding to every presentation in actuality).16 The latter conception of the existence of “objectless presentations” had been defended by Bolzano,17 against which Brentano had identified universal relatedness to an object as a hallmark of all psychic phenomena. According to Brentano, psychic phenomena are characterized by “reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity.”18 It is obvious that there are no real things to be found in psychic phenomena (nor in presentations, or acts built up on them—judging, or feeling and desiring). In the seeing of a house, there is no house. However, it was less clear how one could nonetheless identify the content of an act with its object in such a way as to be able to speak of an immanent objectivity of the act. Unlike Husserl in “Psychological Studies,” Twardowski at least saw a problem here. Before going into that, we should mention two specific Brentanian doctrines that are of significance for our discussion. First, the doctrine of the reducibility of all statements to existential propositions. According to Brentano, judgment is not simply the connection of two presentations. (The connection of the simple presentations “tree” and “green” does not, according to him, result in the judgment “the tree is green,” but merely in the composite presentation “green tree.”) The proper logical form of the judgment “the tree is (not) green” would then be “the green tree is (not),” or “there is (not) the green tree.” Second, in this context Brentano states a distinction between attributive (or enriching) and modifying predicates of propositions. Propositions that explicitly assert the nonexistence of their subject (e.g., the proposition “This man is dead”) seem to resist Brentano’s thesis concerning the reduction of all propositions to existential propositions. Brentano concedes that in order to be true, this proposition does not exactly presuppose the existence of a man. By contrast, he maintains, its truth requires the existence of a dead man. The illusion that propositions of this kind do not permit reduction arises from the fact that one conceives of these propositions according to the model of ordinary propositions. In most cases, it is the predicate of a proposition specifically (as in the proposition “this man is educated”) that enriches the subject with an attribute. In the above case, by contrast, the subject is completely modified or changed by the addition of the predicate. An educated man is a man, whereas a dead man, by contrast, is not; a big house is a house, but a phantasized house, by contrast, is not. And a lot of money is money, but counterfeit money is not money.19

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Now to Twardowski. Like Brentano, he is convinced that every act has some content, that is, an intentional or immanent object. For him, too, this is not the object independent of thought, but rather, as he expresses it, its psychic image in the presentation.20 Anton Marty had shown that three functions are assigned to every name (roughly speaking, to every substantive).21 A name makes it known that whoever uses it currently presents something, possesses a determinate content (i.e., has a meaning), and denominates a determinate object. Likewise, according to Twardowski, the three elements act, content, and relation to an object are assigned to every presentation (that can be designated with a name). Now, in any presenting act we only ever present one thing, the presented. We do not present two dif ferent things, a content and an object. In order to do justice to this fact, Twardowski draws on Brentano’s distinction between attributive (or, as he prefers to say, determining) and modifying predicates. Further, since he understands presenting as a depicting, he compares the relationship between the content and the object of the presentation to the relationship between an image and what it depicts. We call the content of a presentation “presented” in the determining sense (for with this determination we distinguish it from a content that is not presented), just as we call an image “painted” in the determining sense as opposed to, for example, an image that is etched or stitched. The object, by contrast, can be called “presented” in two senses. On the one hand, in a modifying sense. Here it is not a question of the actual object, the thing out there in the world, but only of the object as presented. Only intentional existence is ascribed to this object; that is, it is nothing other than the content of the relevant presentation directed to it. In the same modifying sense, a “painted” landscape, too, is certainly no true landscape but only the image of a landscape. On the other hand, the object can also be called “presented” in a determining sense. Here it is a question of an actual object, and in this case the attribute “presented” means that in addition to many other relations [Relationen] in which the object stands to other objects, it stands in a relation [Beziehung] to a presenting being. Even the predicate painted can be asserted of an actual landscape in a determining sense. In such a case, this landscape is distinguished from other landscapes in that it has been painted, while other landscapes have not prompted a painter to paint them. Now, when looking at an image we are generally supposed to be directed to the subject presented (the thing depicted) and not to the image as a real object (we are supposed to say “the image is a success” and not “the image is bad”). In the same way, the object [Gegenstand] is for the most part the primary object [Objekt] of presenting, while

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the content is only the secondary object [Objekt]. “What is presented in a presentation is its content; what is presented through a presentation is its object.”22 It is from this standpoint, then, that Twardowski solves the Bolzano problem of presentations to which, either de facto (like the golden mountain) or according to their essence (like the round square), no object corresponds. These presentations, too, have some content (an intentional object), but the objects corresponding to them do not actually exist. Thus, these presentations are not objectless in every respect; their objects are only presented and are not also actual. All objects, Twardowski concludes, have intentional (phenomenal) existence, but only the objects of an acknowledging judgment also exist in actuality.23 By way of summary, we can say that Twardowski solves the BrentanoBolzano problem in principle in favor of Brentano by adhering to the view that all presentations have objects. He responds to Bolzano’s concern about objectless presentations with the distinction between the intentional and the actual object. While Brentano’s proposition has absolute validity for intentional objects, Bolzano is right, according to Twardowski, when it comes to actual objects. In any event, with this distinction between two species of objects, Twardowski’s solution to the Brentano-Bolzano problem begins on the side of the object. It is precisely this approach that Husserl contests in his manuscript from 1894 on the intentional object. As Husserl himself later confirmed, this manuscript presents a “reaction against Twardowski.”24 The published text of the manuscript consists of two parts: a critique of Twardowski’s solution and the development of Husserl’s own proposal.25 Let us first consider Husserl’s critique. Husserl initially casts doubt on Twardowski’s determination of the content of a presentation as a depiction by means of which presentations are supposed to be related to their objects. In order to bring forth depictions of highly complicated constructs such as art, science, or differential calculus, a “veritable cyclone of phantasms” would have to play out in consciousness. Nor do absurd presentations depict anything.26 Further, Husserl rejects Twardowski’s identification of the meaning of a name with the content of a presentation. Such contents tend to vary drastically in dif ferent acts and in dif ferent individuals (upon hearing the word “tree” one person might present a fir tree, while another might present the written letters “t-r- e- e”). 27 Meanings, by contrast, are strictly identical (in all of the cases mentioned, precisely the same thing— the “tree”—is meant). In general, all act contents, as parts of these acts, are just as individual and

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psychically real as the respective acts themselves. Meanings, by contrast, are idealities.28 Husserl’s principle objection, however, pertains to Twardowski’s doubling of image and thing depicted, thus his doubling of the merely intentionally existing object and the true object (i.e., the object acknowledged in an affirmative existential judgment). Twardowski had sought to distinguish these as the secondary and primary objects of presentation. But in no way does a presentation offer us two objects, not even in the diminished form of a primary and a secondary object. Regardless of whether or not the presented object exists, the presentation always presents only a single object. “The same Berlin that I present exists. . . . The same centaur that I present does not exist.”29 As stated in Logical Investigations, this means that “the intentional object of a presentation is the same as its actual object . . . and that it is absurd to distinguish between them.”30 If there is no round square, then it exists neither outside of the presentation nor within the presentation. Other wise, the proposition asserting its nonexistence would “no longer be strictly universally valid.”31 It would have validity only for what exists outside of the presentation and not for what can be found within it.32 This means that, according to Husserl, the distinction between two species of objects does not allow one to come to grips with the Bolzano problem. Where there is no real object, there can also be no “merely” intentional object. And, conversely, where such an object exists, one will not find a duplicate in the form of a (secondary) intentional object; it would be of no use, anyway. But what, then, is supposed to be classified with talk of actually and merely intentionally existing objects, if not objects? Here, Husserl turns in the direction of the presenting subject, as was typical for him as an emerging phenomenologist. Specifically, he does this with the help of a pair of concepts,33 taken over from Brentano, that had already played a fundamental role in Philosophy of Arithmetic: the distinction between authentic and inauthentic presentations, or modes of expression.34 Talk of true, real, or existing objects is doubtless an authentic mode of speech that designates precisely what it means and how it means it. Talk of intentionally existing objects (i.e., of contents of presentations as immanent objects) is, by contrast, of an inauthentic nature. The acts themselves contain no objects whatsoever, neither immanent nor real ones (the former do not exist at all, whereas the latter do not exist in the acts that present them but in the world). To speak of intentional objects means authentically to speak of our presentations (of them). Thus, in the authentic sense, the distinction between intentional and true objects only classifies our presentations (in accordance

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with their objective content) into those that correspond to objects and those for which this is not the case. Thus, with respect to objects, this classification is only an inauthentic, or “quasi-classification,” comparable to the classification of determinate and indeterminate objects. Ultimately, one can predicate something of a determinate lion running about somewhere just as well as one can of “the lion” in general (where it remains undetermined which lion). “But how,” Husserl asks, “are we to have, besides the determinate lions, also indeterminate ones running around in the world?” His answer cannot be misunderstood: “The classification of lions into determinate and indeterminate is no classification of lions—as, say, that into African and Asiatic—but is rather a classification of presentations” of lions, specifically a classification “into those where the reference to objects is determinate and those where it is indeterminate.”35 In the same measure, classifications of possible and impossible, or of existing and nonexisting objects, are also inauthentic classifications of objects—that is, they are authentically classifications of our presentations of objects. In each of these cases, the given presentation belongs to one of the two classes of the relevant disjunction, depending on whether or not its objective content—that is, its meaning— can be integrated into judgments of a determinate form. For example, the proposition “the object of a determinate presentation does not exist” means that the meaning of this presentation can occur only in valid existential propositions of the form “A does not exist.” Twardowski’s assertion that the objects of some presentations have only intentional existence can thus be reconstructed to say the meaning of some presentations deploys its function only in certain judgment-complexes of the form “There is no A.”36 Husserl thus interprets Brentano’s thesis that all presentations are related to content or an object to mean that, in any given case, presentations exist that possess a certain intentionality and the characteristic of “meaning” [meinen] something through their meaning [Bedeutung]. The circumstance that objects of some presentations exist while those of others do not (the Bolzano problem) thus amounts to the circumstance that meanings in which objects are meant can only be classified without contradiction (i.e., in harmony with other judgments) partly into valid judgments of the form “A exists” and partly into those of the form “A does not exist.” On first blush, such a solution might awaken the suspicion that the burden of proof for whether or not certain objects exist has simply been relocated—from the given judgment (concerning the given content of the presentation) to judgment-complexes— and has thus been handed over to other judgments. It thus seems that the decision concerning the existence

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of the content of the presentation has effectively been evaded. The logically consistent judgment-complex is supposed to guarantee the validity and soundness of the given judgment— but what guarantees that this judgment-complex is sound on the whole? At this point Husserl introduces a concept that not only is designed to solve this problem but also explains how inauthentic speech comes into being in general. It explains, that is, why we—as happened to Twardowski— do not always and infallibly see through inauthentic modes of speech as such but instead first require a reflection on speech in order to notice its inauthenticity. This concept is that of assumption. It is assumptions that, according to Husserl, govern individual judgments as well as whole judgment-complexes. It can be counted among the strengths of Husserl’s position that he does not leave off with the analysis of isolated judgments; instead he keeps in view the circumstance that in our ordinary thinking and speaking, we always execute series of interconnecting judgments. Their unity is brought about by a common assumption that is sustained in the sequentially ordered judgments and controls them all. Here, too, it is once again typical for Husserl the phenomenologist that he recognizes a subjective moment in this process as what is responsible for its unity, to wit, a kind of assumption which the subject (more strongly, which, most commonly, a community of subjects) makes and under which presupposition then thinks and judges. Assumptions (one can compare them, to some extent, to Kuhnian “paradigms”) are themselves for the most part not at all thematic in our presenting and judging. They are “as a rule not actually thought” but remain dispositional,37 although they form the unreflective presuppositions that we take for granted and under which we present and judge. They are the key to the correct or authentic understanding of judgment. They are, as it were, elliptical, insofar as, for obvious reasons pertaining to the economy of thought, their implications are not made conceptual and do not need to be. In short, they are the indispensable means for the understanding of inauthentic judgments. One could compare them to clefs in music, to the extent that these establish as which tones the notes on the staves are to be read without the key itself becoming a constituting part of the piece of music that is to be performed. Assumptions (or, as Husserl also calls them, hypotheses, or presenting positings) are operative wherever presentations or judgments are objectless in the strict sense. But this determination presents not only Husserl’s solution to the Bolzano problem; it reaches considerably further. For Husserl, in the sense of the Brentanian theory of judgment, object-containing presentations and judgments are only those in which existence is asserted. How-

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ever, according to Husserl (who here to some extent anticipates the “reism” of the late Brentano), it is in the first instance the objects of our experienced world that have existence: “as a matter of fact the expressions ‘an object’ and ‘an existing, true, actual, authentic object’ are fully equivalent.”38 “Something and something existent are equivalent concepts.”39 For Husserl, in keeping with this most economical ontology with its absolute concept of existence, it is not only (as in Bolzano) those presentations that factically intend something nonex istent or impossible that count as inauthentic presentations (i.e., presentations that are objectless in the strict sense). Rather, to the extent that in them something nonreal is presented or judged, all presentations, as well as the judgments that operate with them (i.e., with the meanings presented in them), are inauthentic. In this context, Husserl mentions mythical judgments (“Zeus is the highest of the Olympian gods”), religious judgments (concerning God), poetic judgments (concerning Red Riding Hood), and judgments of phantasy (concerning a lindworm), as well as scientific judgments of arithmetic and geometry, insofar as, indeed, neither numbers nor geometrical figures are part of the real world of experience. Yet these various provinces may differ from one another and however little they may have in common with one another, they all deal with objects that, in the absolute sense, do not exist. Accordingly, judgments about them are “judgments which seem to be about the presented objects.”40 In truth and in the authentic sense, however, these are judgments about our objectifications of them, precisely to the extent that determinate assumptions are operative in these objectifications. Thus, these judgments are not categorical, in spite of their grammatical form. Rather, they can be reduced to hy pothet ical judgments. Provided that we make determinate assumptions that can be explicated in antecedent propositions, the relevant judgments apply. For example, “If the Greek myths were true, then Zeus would be the highest of the Olympian gods.” What presents itself in this way as a seemingly categorical judgment is in truth “categorical” only in an inauthentic sense. That is, it is a judgment in the mode of the “as if.” We speak, judge, and operate as if the respective presuppositions applied and possessed validity in actuality. In doing so, the form of the judgments in question is adapted to judgments about existents. “Zeus is a god” is a judgment that formally may not look dif ferent from the judgment “this stone is heavy.” This device for economizing thought allows one tacitly to pass over the respective assumptions (in the normal case, whoever hears the relevant judgments will, for her part, tacitly complete them). It can scarcely do any harm, provided one is and remains aware of it. As with any other judgment, existential judgments are naturally also

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possible in the framework of such assumptions. Mathematical existence (e.g., of the kind “there is a solution to the equation ‘3 + 2=x’ ”), or mythological and poetic existence (“in Greek my thology there are nymphs, while in German folk tales there is a Little Red Riding Hood”41) intend only inauthentic existence, that is, “relative existence” (as opposed to absolute existence). Such existence is relative to the assumptions presupposed in such judgments, which for their part do not at all need to apply. That is to say, in truth they need not correspond to anything. One can say that Husserl hereby introduces a concept of modified existence.42 As opposed to Twardowski, however, Husserl does not apply this concept ontologically. With it, he does not mean a species of attenuated existence that would obtain alongside actuality. Rather, he designates with it a derivative existence in opposition to the absolute existence of actuality. What is posited as existent in this derivative way is in the end relative to an assumption performed by the one who judges, and this assumption is in turn the only real aspect of this pseudo-existence. Brentano had already tested his thesis of the reducibility of all judgments to existential judgments with the proposition “a centaur is an invention of the poets.” In this sentence, it is clearly not the existence but the nonexistence of the centaur that is asserted. The existence demanded by this sentence, according to Brentano, is certainly not that of centaurs, but much more that of poets and the determinate acts of fiction accomplished by them.43 Quite in the spirit of this analysis, Husserl, too, now explains that the proposition “Zeus is the highest of the Olympian gods” is to be reduced to the existence of certain psychic beings and acts accomplished by them. The proposition is to be understood as saying that “the ancient Greeks believed that there is a god, Zeus, and that this same god is the highest of the Olympian gods assumed by them.”44 As has already been suggested, the unique thing about Husserl’s concept of assumption lies in the fact that it does not necessarily (as has been previously discussed) mean only the implicit antecedent proposition of an individual judgment (i.e., the presupposition under which the judgment stands and is arrived at). Rather, it can be extended to what Husserl calls a “general assumption.”45 Here it is a question of those assumptions mentioned above that govern entire judgment-complexes and that are responsible for the fact that these groups of judgments form a whole and can be treated as though they were genuine existential judgments. In the case of mathematics, for example, the axiomatic groundwork of this science comprises the general assumption through which mathematics is first made possible in general. All propositions validly deduced from this groundwork

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are thus nothing other than assumptions dependent on more fundamental assumptions, although they have the appearance of existential propositions.46 In this way, “multitiered inauthenticities,”47 can also be found in other domains of inauthentic speech. The identity of “Zeus” and “highest Olympian god” is asserted as though it were not merely an identity of two meanings but an “identity of the object meant,” just like in the case of the identity of Napoleon with the victor at Jena.48 However, with Zeus there is no object given at all. Rather, his identity with the highest Olympian god is asserted under the general assumption that Greek mythology is true; only on the basis of this my thology is judgment pertaining to it “true” (in an inauthentic sense). In this way, there is no need to presuppose any sort of objective existence for the understanding of such judgments (disregarding the existence of those hy pothetical judgments themselves in which the relevant assumptions, or the judgments constructed upon them, are performed). As Wolfgang Künne aptly puts it, matters are no different with the intentionality of an objectification than they are with the aiming of a drawn bow toward a target. The bow need not unconditionally be fired toward a factually existing target but can also “be aimed towards a point— and many bows towards one and the same point— even though there is no object there to be shot at.”49 For aiming a bow does not eo ipso imply determining a (fictive) target point. Or, as Husserl says in Logical Investigations, “the object is meant” means nothing other than “to mean it is an experience.” But the object, purely as supposed object, is “nothing in actuality.”50 General assumptions can be deployed even if no one recognizes that this has taken place. Thus, the ancient Greeks took the divine figures of their my thology for real beings. In such a case it is a matter of “critical reflection,”51 and thus fundamentally a matter for philosophy, to expose those presuppositions as such—to demythologize, as it were, the relevant presented worlds. However, general assumptions can also be consciously made, such as in the field of poetic fiction, which concocts determinate heroes and interconnected events. In the first case, the inauthentic judgments are erroneously passed off as authentic ones. We live in them and bank on their objects as though they possessed true existence, whereas there are actually only presenting acts on hand in which certain meanings are embodied. In the second case, by contrast, “effecting the assumption” means at the same time letting it be undecided, and thus abstaining from participation. This is what happens when the modern researcher of antiquity “places himself upon the grounds of the myth, without actually claiming it for himself.”52 On both occasions, a new world—namely, the world of Greek myth—arises before the eyes of the one who judges by means of the general assumption.

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The only difference is that the ancient Greek mistakenly took this world to be part of actuality, whereas the modern researcher, by contrast, recognizes it to be an intrinsically closed world of semblance. This, then, is the fundamental achievement of general assumptions: through them new worlds arise alongside the real world (the worlds of mathematics, of poetry, and of myth, for example). We can then deal with the objects of this world formally in exactly the same way as we do with those of our world of experience. Of course, it would be fundamentally mistaken to attempt for this reason to draw an ontological parallel between these worlds and the given world. For nothing can change the fact that only the real world is ontologically existent. What is real about the other worlds are the presenting and judging acts that we perform in this real world by means of which we effect those assumptions that are constitutive for the other worlds. The objective content of those acts is thus nothing beyond the “governing meaning” in them.53 Thus Husserl, already in the manuscript from 1894 here under discussion, has “radically executed the reduction of the worlds containing objects that do not authentically exist to existing presentations in the one unique world.”54 Seen ontologically, there is—to repeat again— only this one world; all remaining worlds are pseudo-worlds that we populate with pseudo-objects by dealing with the meaning-content of the relevant acts as though we were dealing with genuine objects. Husserl most succinctly expressed his conception of intentionality, and of intentional and real objects, as he developed it in confrontation with Twardowski in the following words: “The ‘world’ of the myth, the world of poetry, the world of geometry, the actual world: these are not ‘worlds’ of equal status. There is only one truth and one world, but manifold representations, religious or mythical convictions, hypotheses, fictions.”55 Husserl’s solution to the Brentano-Bolzano problem impresses, all in all, through its intellectual elegance. In ontology, it adheres to Occam’s Razor by only admitting one single species of existence and one single world of existing objects. As one can say in view of the fifth logical investigation of 1901, all thing-like unities— that is, the “psychical and physical things”56 —belong to this world. If one conceives— once again in agreement with the fifth investigation—of intentional acts as real occurrences in psychical things (empirical egos), then a “place in life” is thereby guaranteed for every thing that reaches beyond perception of the world. The fundamental characteristic of this world of experience is thereby retained. This is already the case simply to the extent that all acts related to other “worlds” through assumptions adjust to the primary acts in which we make judgments about this world (i.e., the former imitate the latter in an inau-

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thentic way). Of course, all secondary “worlds” are ontologically nugatory, that is, they do not stand in a relationship of depiction, analogy, or any other kind to the true world. Nonetheless, by means of assumption, they are capable of developing a brilliant abundance and a diversity that more than compensates for the Franciscan poverty of the early Husserlian ontology. Here, the motto holds: entia sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.57 It is a peculiarity and very nearly a hallmark of psychical things that they are capable of generating such a motley diversity of worlds. Therein lies the essence of intentionality.58 What Husserl once said about the intentionality of representation can be repeated here: its functioning “is an occasion for astonishment.”59 According to Nietz sche, Western metaphysics since Plato’s time has worshiped the delusion that behind the one and only given world, one must posit a world of “ideas” as the allegedly true world. In the process, this world of ours is degraded to a merely apparent world.60 Assuming this diagnosis, one can say that Husserl’s project is immune to suspicions of metaphysics. Husserl had already chided Twardowski precisely for a “false duplication” of objects according to which we are always necessarily directed to intentional objects,61 but only in passing and accidentally sometimes also directed to actual objects. For Husserl, by contrast, “object” means the existing, the true object. The true world—which is at the same time the only world—is the actual world. Only it exists in the absolute sense. “There are no dif ferent modes of existence,”62 although there certainly are dif ferent (namely, authentic and inauthentic) modes of presenting and talking about it.63 This solution advanced by Husserl to the Brentano-Bolzano problem agrees with Bolzano on the ontological level and, in contrast, with Brentano (in a modified sense) on the epistemological level. If Husserl’s project leaves something to be desired on many points, then this is not so much because of fundamental problems that he whitewashes or covers up but to the project’s immaturity. Many questions are not adequately discussed in the manuscript “Intentional Objects” (partially because of its polemical orientation against Twardowski, but also because of its fragmentary character). This is true, for example, of the point of contact between the spheres of cognition and being, namely, the psychical subject. An analysis of perception in accordance with the principles of Husserl’s project is lacking. Is perception itself intentional or not? Is there perhaps a non-intentional core to perception that is associatively interwoven with presentations and thus with intentionality? What role is ascribed to perception in relation to presentation and judgment?64 Is the world of perception a world of mere things,

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or is it experienced “with the same immediacy as a world of objects with values, a world of goods, a practical world,” as Husserl puts it in Ideas I.65 How exactly do intuitive and conceptual presentations stand in relation to one another within a presentation? What takes place on the side of the act when people such as Dionysius the Areopagite or Hermes Trismegistus suddenly turn up as fictions? And what do we really perceive in the perception of a star that ceased to exist millions of years ago?66 In general, in this draft Husserl emphasized above all the difference between valid existential judgments and those that are valid only under assumptions. The uniqueness of the dif ferent “worlds” of presentation is, however, not worked out here. Even if the world of mathematics and that of literature are equally products of the capacity for presentation, the two will not stand on an equal footing for long, and their respective relationships to real actuality deviate considerably from one another. Still, with all that, one has only outlined secondary tasks that need not present any insurmountable obstacles for Husserl’s project as such. In closing, let us briefly go into the question of how Husserl’s later transcendental-phenomenological position appears viewed from the perspective of the early Husserl. First of all, one must insist on the following point: the drafted manuscript from 1894 may certainly be called phenomenological just as much as, for example, the philosophy of Ideas I. For the manuscript describes a regress to subjective acts to which certain constitutive achievements are attributed. This is true of all acts that stand under assumptions (hypotheses or positings). However, the late Husserl, by contrast, understands as constitutive not only inauthentic presenting, but all acts, including those of the fundamental sphere of perception. According to him, even the acts in which truly existing objects are given stand under a kind of general assumption, the “general positing of the natu ral attitude.”67 Just like those [previously discussed] assumptions, it can— and this is the normal case—be implemented in such a way that we naively live in it without perspicuously seeing it as such. However, one can also expressly emphasize it as such in critical reflection, as the transcendental phenomenologist does. This takes place by means of the transcendental reduction. The transcendental reduction thus has for natu ral consciousness the characteristic of an exclusion. For the transcendental phenomenologist, however, what is excluded is provided “with an index” of being left undecided and it becomes the “principal topic of research.”68 This is quite comparable to the case of myth, an object of research for which the modern researcher is grateful even though, of course, she cannot truly make the myth her own.

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That is to say, the later Husserl levels off the sharp distinction between truly existing objects and the meanings of presentations to which nothing corresponds in actuality in favor of the latter. All consciousness is now a positing, and even authentic consciousness (thinking, cognizing, speaking) is understood according to the model of inauthentic consciousness. This means that, aside from the consciousness of the transcendental phenomenologist, there is only inauthentic consciousness in dif ferent formations. Viewed ontologically, the difference between what Husserl in 1894 called authentic and inauthentic consciousness is no longer the difference between existents and nonex istents but the difference between two degrees, or modes, of inauthentic existence. True and absolute existence lies beyond our world in a transcendental subjectivity. All objects, generally speaking, are the intentional objects of transcendental subjectivity, and they possess a kind of intentional existence that reminds one of Twardowski. Where the early Husserl was concerned to use and understand the term being in its “normal sense,”69 the late Husserl, by contrast, saw himself compelled explicitly to invert and pervert the “sense commonly expressed in speaking of being.”70 The being of the true world threatens to flow together with the being of all irreal worlds (including dream worlds). It is no wonder that Twardowski’s duplication of the object also returns in the late Husserl. In the framework of transcendental phenomenology, all actualities are “represented” [vertreten] by senses and propositions that correspond to them.71 Husserl’s insertion of the “noema” between consciousness and object belongs in the framework of this theory of representation [Stellvertretungstheorie]. This noema is a hybrid, hardly any dif ferent from Twardowski’s object, which was simultaneously the content and object of consciousness. It simultaneously is supposed to “reside” in consciousness,72 and yet it is not supposed to be really inherently [reell] contained in consciousness. If elements that recall Twardowski’s position return in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in this way, then it nonetheless should be said that this is not a matter of a (possibly unconscious) adaptation of motifs that Husserl had originally overcome. It is not a question of a belated revenge by Twardowski, so to speak. Rather, here one must reckon with influences that do not arise from the complex of problems that Twardowski’s attempt to solve the Brentano-Bolzano problem had originally prompted Husserl to tackle. Translated by Hayden Kee

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Notes 1. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 337 [translated by F. Kersten as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 349; trans. modified]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen I. 2. Husserl himself once called his manuscripts from the period prior to 1894 “still prephenomenological;” see Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910), ed. Bernhard Rang (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 475. These manuscripts, as will be shown, constitute the decisive evidence for Husserl’s development of the concept of intentionality. 3. The expression “intentional” occurs, as far as I can tell, only once in this work, specifically with the announcement that according to Brentano not “every relation comprises its terms intentionally;” see Philosophie der Arithmetik, ed. Lothar Eley (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 68 [translated by Dallas Willard as Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 71]. 4. Published in part 2 of Edmund Husserl, Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1886–1901), ed. Ingeborg Strohmeyer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983). 5. Edmund Husserl, “Psychologische Studien zur elementaren Logik,” in Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910), 92–123 [translated by Dallas Willard as “Psychological Studies in the Elements of Logic,” in Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 139–170]. 6. Edmund Husserl, “Anschauung und Repräsentation, Intention und Erfüllung,” “Intentionale Gegenstände,” and “Appendix IV” [to “Anschauung und Repräsentation,”] in Aufsätze und Rezensionen, 269–302, 303–348, 406–411 [translated by Dallas Willard as “Intuition and Repräsentation, Intention and Fulfillment” and “Intentional Objects” in Early Writings, 313–344, 345–387, 452–458]. 7. Husserl, 406; cf. 298 [452; cf. 341]. 8. Husserl, “Psychologische Studien,” 104 [151]. 9. Husserl, 107 [154]. 10. Karl Schuhmann, Husserl- Chronik: Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 41. 11. Kazimierz Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen: Eine psychologische Untersuchung (Vienna: Philosophia Verlag,

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1894) [translated by Reinhardt Grossman as On the Content and Object of Presentations: A Psychological Investigation (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977)]. 12. Here I find myself in partial agreement with Bernhard Rang to the extent that he remarks in his “Editor’s Introduction” to Aufsätze und Rezensionen (xxxi) that Husserl “conceived his theory of intentionality as a response to the theory of objectless presentations.” By contrast, Hermann Philipse would like to see only “a second factor” in Twardowski’s book— with the result that he must insert some “tensions” that are not present in Husserl’s theory. See Hermann Philipse, “The Concept of Intentionality: Husserl’s Development from the Brentano Period to the Logical Investigations,” Philosophical Research Archives 12 (1987): 305. 13. Edmund Husserl, “Besprechung von K. Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen,” in Aufsätze und Rezensionen, 349–356 [translated by Dallas Willard as “Critical Discussion of K. Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen,” in Early Writings, 388–395]. 14. Husserl, 303–348 [345–387]. This manuscript is a fragment in a twofold respect. As Husserl notes on the envelope, it comes from a larger work titled “Presentation and Object,” of which it is the second part (455). This fits with the fact that Husserl paginated it as pages 35 to 65. The first part of this work is presumably lost. Furthermore, the manuscript does not end at page 65. Parts of the sequel (labeled by Husserl as a “paragraph” of the manuscript) are available in bundle K I 62 at the Husserl Archives (not published in Aufsätze und Rezensionen). Part 1 had established “that there is assigned to every presentation a meaning- content” (303 [345]). Part 2 then showed—Husserl calls this “a main result of the reflections of the past section”—that “the meaning alone is the inner and essential determination of a presentation” (336 [376; trans. modified]). According to Husserl’s note on the envelope, the bundle [Konvolut] K I 62 deals with the question “whether a dif ferent object corresponds to dif ferent parts of a meaning,” and the work was to be continued with the determination of the “varied relation of meanings to objects” (cf. Schuhmann, Husserl- Chronik, 42). The fundamental topic of this work (a work that, with its intended division of chapters and paragraphs, was clearly planned to be quite comprehensive) is thus the concept of meaning, beginning specifically with the determination of the concept of presentation by its meaning-content [Bedeutungsgehalt]. Insofar as the “Psychological Studies” conclude with the assertion that with the designation of representations as presentations, a well-founded concept of presentation is still yet to be developed (“Psychologische Studien,” 119 [165]), I suspect that the entire work on “Presentation and Object” was

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conceived as a continuation of the published “Studies.” After this, Husserl saw himself motivated (by the appearance, among other things, of Twardowski’s book— and, incidentally, also by William James’ Psychology) to give up the originally intended sequel. (See “Intuition und Repräsentation, Intention und Erfüllung,” 269–302 [313–344].) Husserl appears to have worked on the complex of topics contained in “Presentation and Object” into the winter of 1894, at which time he then turned to work on the planned second volume of Philosophy of Arithmetic. 15. Cf. Bernhard Rang’s introduction, in Aufsätze und Rezensionen, xxxi. 16. Cf. Edmund Husserl, “Briefentwurf Husserls an Marty vom 7. Juli 1901,” in Aufsätze und Rezensionen, 420 [translated by Dallas Willard as “Draft of a Letter by Husserl to Marty,” in Early Writings, 474]. 17. Cf. Bernard Bolzano, Wissenschaftslehre (Sulzbach: Seidelschen Buchhandlung, 1837), 304 [translated by Rolf George as Theory of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 88. Bolzano determines these as presentations “which have no object at all, and hence also no extension” [trans. modified]. 18. Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Leipzig: Dunker und Humblot, 1874), 115 [translated by A. C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and L. L. McAlister as Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. O. Kraus (New York: Routledge, 1995), 68]. Incidentally, in this passage, Brentano himself indicates that these are “not entirely unambiguous expressions” [trans. modified]. As will be shown in the following, this ambiguity sparked a discussion within the Brentano school that led to Husserl’s conception of intentionality and intentional object. 19. Cf. Brentano, Psychologie, 283–289 [165–172]. 20. Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, §1. 21. Anton Marty, Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1908), 292–293. 22. Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, 18 [16]. 23. Cf. Twardowski, 25 [22–23]. 24. Letter to Meinong from April 5, 1902. Reprinted in Alexius Meinong, Philosophenbriefe, ed. R. Kindinger (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1965). [Also reprinted in Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, Band 1, ed. K. Schuhmann (The Hague: Kluwer, 1994), 144.] 25. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 303–311 [345–352] and 311–338 [352–378]. 26. Husserl, 305 [347]. Cf. the parallels in Logical Investigations. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague: Marti-

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nus Nijhoff, 1984), 68–69 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 299–300]. 27. Husserl had already formulated a similar thought in 1890: “Words or letters, accompanied by indistinct and unclear phantasms . . . —when closely examined, these are our thoughts”; see “Zur Logik der Zeichen (Semiotik), in Philosophie der Arithmetik, 352 [translated by Dallas Willard as “On the Logic of Signs (Semiotics),” in Early Writings, 31]. 28. “Besprechung von K. Twardowski,” 349–350 [388–389]. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:104–106 [329–330], where Husserl determines the identity of meaning more specifically as “identity of species.” 29. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 305–306 [347–348; trans. modified]. 30. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:439 [595]. In Logical Investigations, Husserl concludes from this that “it makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or is fictitious, or is perhaps completely absurd. I think Jupiter as I think of Bismarck” (2:387 [559]). 31. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 310 [352]. 32. Accordingly, in the manuscript on phantasy from 1898, Husserl said that objects of phantasy-presentations do not exist in truth. Specifically, they not only do not exist “outside my consciousness,” but rather they do not exist “at all, even in my consciousness.” Edmund Husserl, Phäntasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung: Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwartigungen; Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925), ed. Eduard Marbach (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 110 [translated by J. B. Brough as Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 119]. This is repeated in Logical Investigations: If there is no god Jupiter, then he exists neither mentally (i.e., he is not immanent to the presentation of him) nor extra-mentally, but rather “he does not exist at all” (387 [559]). 33. B. Rang, in his introduction to Aufsätze und Rezensionen (xxxvn1) has already quite rightly alluded to the following remark from Philosophy of Arithmetic: “In his university lectures Franz Brentano always placed the greatest of emphasis upon the distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ or ‘symbolic’ presentations. To him I owe the deeper understanding of the vast significance of inauthentic presenting for our whole psychical life” (193n1 [205n1]). In this work, and also in the “Psychologische Studien” of 1893, the difference between authentic and inauthentic presentations admittedly still coincides with that between intuition and representation (presentation through signs). See also Husserl’s note from February 11, 1894, concerning the fundamental significance “for all of psychology of the classification of presentations into authentic presentations, or intuitions, and representations (inauthentic)” (cited in Schuhmann, Husserl- Chronik, 40).

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34. According to Husserl, the whole of arithmetic has grown out of the “fact that we are almost totally limited to symbolic concepts of numbers,” that is, from the most extreme restriction of our capacity for authentic numerical intuition (Philosophie der Arithmetik, 7 [7]). 35. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 313 [354–355]. Adolph Reinach, the Munich phenomenologist and student of Husserl, took up this problem anew, clearly with an eye to this passage. (Evidently, this manuscript had been circulated in Munich in 1904. The inscription on its envelope reads “manuscript from Prof. Husserl in Göttingen (Return!).” This clearly pertains to the circulation of the manuscript in Munich and not—as is suggested in Aufsätze und Rezensionen, 456 [in the editorial comments by Rang, the editor of this volume of Husserliana—HK]—to an intended loaning of the manuscript to Meinong.) Reinach distinguishes the individual lion from the general concept “the lion.” However, the proposition “the lion is found in Africa” does not mean “that alongside lions as individual objects, the concept ‘lion’ is also to be found in Africa.” For the subject of the proposition here is not the concept as a general object, but rather the object that falls under the concept. “The fact that things that are lions are to be found in Africa entails by no means any further detrimental consequences.” Adolph Reinach, “Die obersten Regeln der Vernunftschlüsse bei Kant,” Kant- Studien 16 (1911): 224, 227. 36. Cf. Husserl, “Besprechung von K. Twardowski,” 351–352 [391]. 37. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 329 [369]. 38. Husserl, 312 [356]. 39. Husserl, 330 [370]. 40. Husserl, 318 [359; trans. modified]. 41. Husserl, 328 [369]. 42. Cf. the (somewhat imprecise) presentation in Rang’s introduction to Husserl’s Aufsätze und Rezensionen, xlv. 43. Brentano, Psychologie, 286–287 [169–171]. 44. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 317 [358]. 45. Husserl, 328 [368]. 46. For this reason, Husserl says “The geometer does not make conditioned judgments. If at all, only critical reflection on their status leads him to knowledge of the true situation” (329 [369]). 47. Husserl, 326 [366]. 48. Husserl, 317 [358]. 49. Wolfgang Künne, “Edmund Husserl: Intentionalität,” in Philosophie der Neuzeit, Band 4, ed. J. Speck (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1986), 185. 50. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:386 [558; trans. modified].

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51. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 329 [369]. 52. Husserl, 317 [358]. 53. Husserl, 338 [378]. 54. Rang, introduction to Husserl, Aufsätze und Rezensionen, xlii. Admittedly, Rang might see this reduction first performed in the fifth logical investigation of 1901. 55. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 329 [369]. 56. Schuhmann here refers to Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:363–364 [541]. However, the quoted material is not found verbatim anywhere in Logische Untersuchungen.—HK 57. “Entities are be multiplied beyond necessity” (pace Occam).—HK. 58. This determination of intentionality is supported by the manuscript “Intentional Objects,” according to which intentionality is indifferent to whether or not its objects exist [Bestehen] and to that extent is to be ascribed to all objectifications. In the “Psychologische Studien,” by contrast, Husserl had granted intentionality only to those representing objectifications [repräsentierenden Vorstellungen] that mean something that is itself not given in the objectification, while presentations [Präsentationen] and intuitions intend nothing that lies beyond them. Whether there actually are two concepts of intentionality here “that have little more in common with one another than the name” must be left an open question (Rang, “Introduction,” xlix). At any rate, both can be conveyed by means of the concept of perception to the extent that this is an intuition (and thus fulfillment of mere intentions) but also the groundwork for grasping existence with respect to all objectifications. Jupiter and Bismark are objectified in the same way, but not perceived in the same way. 59. Husserl, “Psychologische Studien,” 120 [166]. 60. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable.” 61. Husserl, “Intentionale Gegenstände,” 308 [350]. 62. Husserl, 326 [366]. Of course, one must concede that in this passage Husserl (what was neglected above) views existence in the sense “of therebeing [Dasein], of existence within real actuality” as a restricted concept of existence, as opposed to which he also wants to accept “truths, propositions, concepts” as existing objects in the full sense of the word (326 [366–367]). To that extent, Husserl, like Brentano, here remains a “Platonist.” However, it is not easy to see how this is to be reconciled with the assertion that the only true objects are those that “correspond” to presentations (333–334, 335 [373–374, 374–375]), and accordingly that anyone who perceives “is capable of expressing an evident existential judgment” (461). 63. Impressed by Brentano’s late reism, the late Marty, too, came very close to this Husserlian position. For him, too, there is only one single

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concept of existence, which is why he likewise rejects the idea of immanent objects. “What actually exists is not a peculiarly modified doppelgänger of the actual object residing in us, but rather only the real psychic event” (Untersuchungen, 415–416). “In the subject, there is given only the real event of presenting or a presenting as such” (406). The talk of things that are only to be found “in” consciousness or also “outside” of it is only a form of speech, a façon de parler without any ontological relevance. 64. Presumably, Husserl took on these questions in the (as yet unpublished) manuscript on perception from the year 1898. 65. Husserl, Ideen I, 58 [53]. 66. Barry Smith provides an acceptable solution to questions of this kind in the framework of the early Husserl’s theory of intentionality. “Acta cum Fundamentis in Re,” Dialectica 38 (1984): 157–178. 67. Husserl, Ideen I, 60–61 [56–57]. 68. Husserl, 159 [171; trans. modified]. 69. Husserl, Aufsätze und Rezensionen, 332 [372]. 70. Husserl, Ideen I, 106 [112]. 71. Husserl, 310 [322]. 72. Husserl, 210 [221; trans. modified]. Concerning Twardowski, Husserl had said that he conceived the presented object “as one literally residing in the presentation” (“Intentionale Gegenstände,” 309 [351]). This employment of the term residing [einwohnen] in the early Brentanians goes back to Brentano himself. In his determining psychical phenomena by the intentional inexistence of their objects, he indicated that Aristotle had already “spoken of this psychical residing” (Brentano, Psychologie, 115n3 [The footnote Schuhmann refers to here is not found in the English translation]).

The Significance of Objectifying Acts in Husserl’s Fifth Investigation Verena Mayer and Christopher Erhard

The fifth logical investigation is the locus classicus of Husserl’s phenomenology of intentionality—the “directedness” of all consciousness to something. Unlike his teacher Franz Brentano, who rather brusquely introduced intentionality as the characteristic feature of psychical phenomena, Husserl took up the task of describing intentional experiences, or acts, in their microstructures. At the beginning of the fifth investigation (§§1–21) Husserl elucidates the structure of individual acts and defends the thesis that intentional experiences are structured events, which are characterized by three essential aspects: Acts always have an intentional content or sense (matter [Materie]) through which they aim at an object. They possess a quality—they belong to a certain act-type, for example, judgment, perception, enjoyment. And they always involve sensations, that is, they have a phenomenal aspect. After introducing this threefold structure (material, quality, and sensation) of individual acts, Husserl applied himself to the question of how distinct act-types systematically relate to one another (§§22–45). In doing so, Husserl not only defined intentional matter and its relation to quality but also uncovered the so-called objectifying acts, that is, acts that are related to 163

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objects in a privileged manner and which form the basis of all other acts. These acts also stand at the center of the sixth investigation’s theory of knowledge, insofar as they are the intrinsically normative structures that can be fulfilled or disappointed. Thus, §§22–45 play the role of a fulcrum between the fifth and sixth investigations.1 Husserl proceeds by analyzing and reinterpreting, in detail, a theorem from Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874):2 (FB) All mental phenomena are either presentations or they are based upon presentations.3

Husserl progressively modifies this theorem; he first replaces “mental phenomena” with “intentional experiences,”4 then “based upon” with “founded in,” and finally he introduces the concept of objectifying acts. Thus, Husserl’s own version of Brentano’s theorem declares: (FH) Each intentional experience is either an objectifying act or is founded in one.

The process of this reformulation leads us down a winding path in chapters 3 through 5, which leads from a detailed critique of Brentano’s theory of “mere presentations” (chap. 3) and a systematic analysis of “nominal presentations” (chap. 4) to the classification of objectifying acts (chap. 5).5 Chapter 6 is primarily terminological in nature; Husserl discerns no fewer than thirteen meanings of “presentation,” among which only the first four are relevant for chaps. 3 to 5. Husserl’s approach in these chapters presents itself as a complex network that consists in phenomenological description just as much as it consists in arguments from the philosophy of language.6

Brentano’s Theorem, Intentional Matter, and “Mere Presentations” (§§22–31) Presentations as the Basis for All Mental Acts: A Historical Sketch Brentano’s thesis (FB), as he presents it in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, is only a variant of the already widespread idea that presentations form the basis and essence of all psychical acts. Following Hume, psychologists such as Wundt understood presentations as mental events arising from the fusion of sensations, arising from them but not differing from them. In contrast to this, Brentano (somewhat like Lotze) understands

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presentations as complex acts, which indeed contain sensations, but acts also, for example, localize, unify, and subordinate sensations under concepts, and—most notably—they relate sensations to objects. Presentation, then, distinguishes itself from a sensation-complex in that it has an intentional relation, through which it lends all other acts not only a content but also an object. Brentano articulates his thesis thus: “Accordingly, we may consider the following definition of mental phenomena as indubitably correct: they are either presentations or they are based upon presentations.”7 The latter—that is, psychical phenomena that are based on presentations, are judgments on the one hand, and feelings and acts of the will on the other hand. Consequently, judgments and feelings do not have their “own” objects; they only relate to objects given in presentation.8 This classification of mental experiences goes right back to Descartes, who likewise distinguished between three types of cogitationes: presentations (ideae), “as when I think of a man, or a chimera, or the sky, or an angel or even of God”; volitional acts or emotions (voluntates sive affectus), as when I desire or fear something; and judgments (iudicia) as when I affirm or deny something.9 The epistemologist is interested above all in the distinction between presentation and judgment. The difference does not primarily lie in the fact that presentations are simple whereas judgments are complex. Rather, presentations are already able to combine ideas of things and properties. Judgments, however, stake a truth claim: they assert that things really are or are not in the way that the presentation merely displays them. Mere presentations are the remainder after the Cartesian doubt experiment: they make no assertion about what is the case, but they nevertheless present objects and, in a certain way, provide the material for all other acts. Husserl observes in §23 that with respect to this traditional concept of mere presentation, the examples provided are: “all cases of mere imagination, where the apparent object has neither being nor non-being asserted of it, and where no further acts concern it, as well as all cases where an expression, e.g., a statement, is well understood without prompting us either to belief or disbelief.”10 Frege also considered the second group of cases in his Begriffschrift. Here he distinguishes between “content” [Inhalt] ( later, “thoughts” [Gedanken]) and “judgment” [Urteil]: “−A” designates the mere thought that A; in contrast to this “⊦A” means the judgment that A is true.11 As justification, Frege cites the fact that in proofs, we hypothetically accept thoughts, without already deciding their truth or falsehood; the distinction between thoughts and judgments is thus already a necessity in formal demonstrations. Frege also agrees with Brentano’s thesis insofar as he clearly distinguished

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thoughts from presentations in the empirical psychological sense (sensationcomplexes): thoughts possess an intentional relation and contain concepts. There are, however, differences. Thoughts, for Frege, are not psychical acts but abstract entities that are “grasped” in psychical acts. Furthermore, according to Frege, thoughts are always logically structured: they already have the form of judgments, while presentations for Brentano as well as Descartes can be simple “ideas.” Moreover, Frege advanced the position that thoughts refer to truth-values, which his contemporaries found odd.12 In general, it is already formally clear that the judgment-layer “docks on to” the content-layer, so that judgments are suited to thoughts, in the sense that the latter form a “foundation” for judgments. In a certain way, the situation seems to be the same for emotive and volitional acts. Such experiences do not appear as true or false but resemble presentations in that they simply and immediately just “are.” Indeed, they require “content” and an “object,” which presentation obviously gives them. One can then, again in Frege’s sense, say that in a specific respect the presentation is “colored” by virtue of feelings or impulses of the will; it receives emotive or volitional qualities. Thus, even these types of acts are intrinsically dependent upon presentations. At any rate, this is how Brentano expresses his dependence-thesis, which he generalizes in the second volume of the Psychology: “We speak of a presentation whenever something appears to us. When we see something, a color is presented; when we hear something, a sound; when we imagine something, a phantasy image. In view of the generality with which we use this term it can be said that it is impossible for conscious activity to refer in any way to something which is not presented.”13 It is this “remarkable” thesis, as Husserl calls it, that Husserl comes phenomenologically and argumentatively to analyze, modify, and reconstruct through the concept of objectifying acts.

Thematic Orientation (§§22–23) Chapter 3 of the fifth investigation concerns the question of how Husserl’s concepts of quality and matter relate to Brentano’s conception of presentation and the theory of psychical phenomena that is bound up with it. What sense does it make to declare that “imaginative-presentations” are the basis of all acts? If Husserl’s analysis is correct, then what are the quality and matter of such acts, and to what extent are these moments—or abstract parts [Momente]— detectable in other acts? Alternatively, one can take this chapter as a critique of the traditional approach to epistemology and as a lesson in phenomenological eidetic analysis, even though Husserl

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proceeds argumentatively. That is to say, the tradition, and with it contemporary empirical psychology, isolates supposed components of mental acts, which are in truth only theoretical constructs and are not phenomenally present in experiences. By contrast, eidetic analysis does not disassemble individual acts but instead seeks to hold on to constants through series of variations. It also hits upon essential distinctions, and thus enables one to clarify concepts.14 In applying concepts, this process makes already extant (but not yet reflectively clarified) differences accessible, which is why its results are “immediately apparent.” The evidence attained through this method is coextensive or congruent with prereflexive intuition. This method, however, is not free from error as Husserl makes clear in §27. In par tic u lar, differences that are evident in intuition lose their power to convince once they are “conceptualized and asserted,” insofar as they are subject to interpretation. The possible scope of interpretations and associated theoretical interests must therefore be made explicit from the outset: hence the somewhat laborious argumentative preamble. It is important, then, to understand that what marks Husserl’s approach is not just a methodological divergence from the tradition. Rather, one must not postulate anything as an independent object if eidetic analysis has shown it to be a dependent one (in the sense of the third investigation). In general, the data we start from are holistic totalities, namely acts, and as Husserl will later clarify in Ideas I, acts that have a structured relation (in both a temporal and content-bound sense) to specific types of prior and subsequent acts. The fact that eidetic analysis cannot extract mere presentations as providing a basis for two central cases, namely, perception and judgment, shows already that Brentano’s thesis is on these grounds false. This holds, as said above, only once the possible meanings of the thesis have been argumentatively laid out. The talk of presentations is so vague that it first requires a preliminary conceptual clarification. Only when the ambiguities of Brentano’s thesis have been laid bare, can eidetic intuition decide anything.

Arguments Against Brentano (§§24–26) In chapter 2, Husserl introduces the distinction between matter and quality (§§20–21) which seems to suit Brentano’s thesis nicely: one could regard the presentation, that it is going to rain, as the material of the judgment “it is going to rain” whereas the judging itself is its quality. Husserl, however, draws attention to an important contrast between Brentano’s thesis and his own conception: The matter and quality of acts are dependent parts

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or “moments” of acts. They cannot emerge “per se” [ für sich] but are abstracted from series of acts. Material and quality as such are founded in one another, albeit in somewhat distinct senses: matter is not thinkable without quality and vice versa. Not only the material, then, but also the quality makes up the essential, inner determination of the act; it is not “externally” attached to the act, as though it could be omitted. Against this one could claim, with Brentano, that while indeed no judgment can arise without presentation, the opposite is certainly possible. Now one intuitively wants to agree with Brentano that presentations form an important class of intentional experiences, which seem to be linked with other acts. So there is no wish, which does not contain a presentation of the wished-for, and in an entirely abstract sense, judgments presume some content with some relation to an object or state of affairs. Husserl then sets for himself the task of integrating the basic class of presentations or thoughts into his theory of matter and quality (qua moments) and to thereby join his own description of “psychical contents” to the epistemological tradition. Next, there follows an initially plausible description of the connection between matter, quality, and presentation. If Brentano’s thesis (FB) is true, then presentations must be divisible into (presentation-)quality and (presentation-)matter, and the composite totalities of these must be the basis of all other acts.15 The matter of an act itself would then contain a qualitative moment, that is the presentation-quality; other qualities, such as the judgment-quality, would be built upon this material. However, since presentations could not arise without the presentation-quality, the distinction between matter and quality would not make any sense here. What Husserl had designated as “intentional essence” in chapter 2—the conjunction of matter and quality—would be a genuine unity here; presentations would be understood as “pure quality” without specific material, and they would then be fundamentally distinct from all other acts. Can such an exceptional status be justified? Here Husserl sees the following difficulty. Let us accept that “presentation” is a specific type of act— a lowest differentia—just like “judgment” or “recollection.” If there is no separate matter, no “content,” then we would not be able to distinguish between the presentation “pope” and the presentation “emperor.” Or instead let us assume that “presentation” is not a lowest differentia within quality but a quality that permits various differentiations. The presentation “pope” would then be quite dif ferent in nature from the presentation “emperor,” and presentations would again be fundamentally distinct, at a deeper level, from all other acts—not because of their content but because of their category. That seems implausible and is not supported by our in-

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tuition. Rather, intuition tells us that an identical presentation-quality unifies the representations “pope” and “emperor” and that a distinct “content” separates them. There remains then a third possibility: presentations are also divisible into matter and quality, and so here too, just as in all other acts, the specific content and the intention are given through the matter and the act-character is given through the presentation-quality. In short, adopting the position that presentations enjoy an exceptional status over and against all other acts, in that they are not analyzable into matter and quality, ultimately leads to the opposite position—that matter and quality are distinguishable within presentations as well. If we accept these results, then Brentano’s thesis loses its plausibility. The word presentation now seems to enclose a twofold meaning: the first part of the thesis—“all psychical phenomena are either presentations”— evidently refers to presentations as independent acts with a content and a presentation-quality. The second part of the thesis—“all psychical phenomena are founded in presentations”—refers to presentation-contents, or matter in Husserl’s sense. Why should we then follow the “gratuitous assumption” that in complex acts yet another presentation-quality must be added to the presentation-content, according to which we, for instance, execute a judgment or perceive something? Evidently, presentation performs the function of lending other acts a “content”; however, this occurs only through the presentation-content, which would then be identical to the content of a corresponding judgment. Yet this is exactly the function that the matter performs. Husserl admits that there can be act-types which are also founded in a presentation-quality, such as expectation, but that this would always be the case, as Brentano’s thesis claims, now seems highly unlikely.

Perceptions and Judgments (§§27–31) In both of the following examples, Husserl examines the assumption that there is something like “mere presentations” that form the basis of all other acts. These would be “mere” presentations in the sense that they do not assert the existence of the presented thing. One can imagine oneself winning the lottery, without thereby really believing or doubting it. For some philosophers, the thesis (FB) seems to be plausible first and foremost in two classes of acts: perceptions and judgments. In the case of perceptions, it is clear that they at least present something, even if it turns out to be illusory; regarding judgments, one can “leave them open,” in that one can strip away the judgment-quality while preserving a presentation. Husserl

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leaves his argumentative strategy to one side in his discussion of these two cases, and instead makes use of “inner perception,” or rather, as he calls it in a supplement to the second edition, “ideational phenomenological inspection of essence.”16 The following considerations should therefore be immediately apparent to anyone who reproduces them with the help of intuitive examples. The presentation thesis makes general claims that should provide evidence for the two special cases. In the case of illusory perceptions, whose deceptive nature has not yet been exposed in further perception, one could say that it is an act of presentation that has had a perceptual quality superimposed upon it; if this quality is removed, then there remains a leftover “mere presentation”— a presentation without an existential-judgment [Existenzurteil]. Whoever succumbs to an optical illusion, and has become aware of it, then sees the same thing and has the “mere presentation” of it. The optical illusions that were often scrutinized at the time provide us with a wealth of examples. Husserl discusses the following case: upon visiting a Panopticum Waxworks, someone believes he has come across a woman who is waving but realizes just a moment later that it is in fact a wax-figure.17 Now it would be absurd to suppose that one could explain this perception by reference to a mere presentation to which a perception-quality was first joined and later removed. Rather, one better understands the experience in the waxworks if one grasps it as a succession of two types of perception, the matter of which presents the same waving woman in both cases, albeit with divergent qualities. Both cases have to do with a perceptual apprehension of the same thing, though in one case we perceive the woman as a reality and in the other case as a fiction: the case concerns the same matter with two different act-qualities. Husserl explains this experience as a sort of dynamic process: “Two perceptual interpretations, or two appearances of a thing, interpenetrate, coinciding as it were in part in their perceptual content. And they interpenetrate in conflicting fashion, so that our observation wanders from one to another of the apparent objects each barring the other from existence.”18 Husserl describes here a sort of gestalt switch, where both forms have distinct ontological statuses. It is not just that a “mere presentation” is modified by the arrival of a perceptual judgment, even if “perceiving something as a fiction” comes quite close to a “mere presentation.” Rather, acts that share the same matter but have conflicting qualities alternate with one another. The second example, judging and understanding, hypothetically assuming or considering a judgment, also comes to the same result. At first, it seems as though judgment consists in a judged presentation (a thought), which arises from a mere understanding or supposing without a judgment-

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quality. This is the Fregean view of what takes place in mathematical proofs. Indeed, Husserl holds it to be an eidetic law that each judgment has a corresponding presentation-act and this is because one can in fact receive and understand a judgment without thereby evaluating it as correct, and because such an understanding evidently must precede a judgment-decision de jure. This presentation-act, however, is not a part of the judgment itself but is in some way on equal footing with it. This is clear if one takes Brentano’s theory of judgment literally. Brentano says: “By ‘judgment’ we mean, in accordance with common philosophical usage, acceptance (as true) or rejection (as false).” 19 Now this accepting or rejecting should contain the whole act of presentation in the sense of an open-ended supposition. This now seems even more absurd than the case of perception: insofar as we accept a content as true, we no longer “leave it open.” It makes no sense, then, to assert that the whole presentation-act is contained in the act of judging. Rather, the quality changes in the transition from merely understanding to judging: both are in turn independent acts with identical matter, which have a dynamic connection with one another instead of one “containing” the other. Intuition shows the true character of judging, which remained mysterious in Brentano’s theory of judgment. Judgment now appears as a type of answer to a question posed in contemplation, and not as a mere assenting to a presented state of affairs. Phenomenologically, judging means to affirm a hypothesis, or to fulfill an assumption, similar to the way an expectation or a hope would be fulfilled through a specific act. Thus, Husserl dissolves a seemingly formal relation into a dynamic connection. At the same time, the very broad traditional concept of judgment is now delimited to those acts which are founded in experiences of affirming.20 This solution will be fully worked out in the sixth investigation, along with its theory of knowledge, evidence, and truth, and will also receive a systematic backdrop in the later, “genetic” phenomenology. From all this, it follows that no special phenomenological role can be attributed to presentations. Rather, all acts with the same content have a dependent moment (an abstract part) in common, the matter or apprehension-sense, which provides them with an object. Acts with the same matter can then exhibit contrary qualities, as the example of the waxworks has shown. Thus, perception ascribes being to the object, which the perceiving-as-fictive then dismisses. Similarly, judgment ascribes reality to a state of affairs and, contrary to this, a hypothesis “posits” the state of affairs as fictitious. Brentano’s thesis, in the form that has been discussed up to this point, therefore cannot be maintained. Husserl

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later extracts the concept of objectifying acts from the idea of contrary positional-qualities.

Brentano’s Principle and Nominal Presentations (§§32–36) A New Version of Brentano’s Thesis (§§32–33) At the start of chapter 4, Husserl summarizes his considerations up to this point and emphasizes the ambiguity of the concept of presentation: presentation can either mean a certain act-quality or the act-matter (intentional content). These result in two incongruent readings of (FB).21 On the first reading, Brentano’s principle is false because not every act contains a “mere presentation,” whereas the second reading is true in that every act has a content or “sense.” In the rest of the fifth investigation Husserl endeavors to find another concept of presentation qua act-type, such that (FB) would as a consequence be univocally true. In other words: which act-types can be regarded as founding qualities, if they cannot be Brentano’s “mere presentations”? Husserl’s first step in this direction consists in understanding “presentations” to be those acts that are expressible through names; these are the so- called nominal acts. Husserl’s reflections here take on a conspic uous “linguistic-analytical” character insofar as he falls back upon linguistic phenomena such as names or naming to describe this new class of acts. He presents nominal acts thus: But our proposition at once achieves a new and unobjectionable sense, if a new concept is made to underlie the term “presentation,” one not strange and remote, since talk of names as expressing presentations leads up to it. . . . But we can employ the term [presentation] to cover acts in which something becomes objective to us in a narrower sense of the word, one borrowed from the manner in which percepts and similar intuitions grasp their objects in a single “snatch,” or in a single “ray of meaning,” or borrowed, likewise, from the one-term subjectacts in categorial statements.22

Phenomenologically, this means that names channel our attention to a (definite) thing and “prepare” us, as it were, for possible predications: names present intentional objects to us in the categorial form of sub-jects [Sub- jekten] or “objects-about-which [Gegenständen- worüber],”23 an object of which something can be asserted.24 By virtue of names, we are “directed” to something in an exceptional manner. In the previous excerpt, the modal and struc-

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tural features of nominal acts overlap: the type and manner of the act (how such and such an act is executed) and the structure of the act. Concerning the first, nominal acts are directed attentively to the “named”—the subject “lives” in them, as Husserl often writes. Concerning the latter, nominal acts have a “single-rayed” structure. “Living” in them, we grasp one unified intentional object (however complicated the composition of its content may be). Thus, nominal acts are also called monothetic or “single- rayed” acts.25 In short: an experience is a nominal act directed to X precisely on the condition that it is a categorial act that is attentively directed to X in a single ray. Thus, we can reformulate (FB): (FB*): Each intentional experience is either a nominal act or is (at least) founded in one.26

Characteristic of (FB*) is that, with the second disjunct, it is no longer the case for the nominal concept of presentation that “the presentation underlying an act must also cover all the matter of the act that it underlies.”27 If one judges, say, that the sun is bright, then this judgment, as a consciousness of a state of affairs, contains a nominal act which is directed at the sun, though not the state of affairs as a whole. For the rest of chapter 4, Husserl defends (FB*) against objections, objections aimed mainly at the concept of naming and Husserl’s fundamental distinction between naming and judging.28 It is important to note that Husserl’s own version of Brentano’s theorem—that is, (FH)— does not negate (FB*) but rather appears to be a derivative of it, a “secondary consequence.”29

The Essence of Nominal Acts (§§34–36) On Names Husserl strives to show that the categorial “single-rayedness” [Einstrahligkeit] of nominal acts constitutes a criterion demarcating them from all other acts, which are eo ipso “multirayed.” Specifically, one must sharply distinguish nominal acts from propositional acts. In order to define nominal acts more precisely, Husserl elucidates the concept of names (qua expression of a nominal presentation.)30 By names Husserl not only means proper names (e.g., Napoleon) and descriptions [Kennzeichnungen] (e.g., the victor at Jena): “Here we note that words and word-groupings that are to count as names only express complete acts when they stand for some complete, simple subject of a statement (thereby

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expressing a complete subject-act), or at least could perform such a simple subject-function in a statement without change in their intentional essence.” As examples of names in this sense Husserl mentions: “ ‘The horse,’ ‘a bunch of flowers,’ ‘a house built of sandstone,’ ‘the opening of the Reichstag,’ also expressions like ‘that the Reichstag has been opened.’”31 In §33, we find three further examples: “S is p,” “the being-p of S,” and “the fact that S is p,” where only the latter two function as names, since, according to Husserl, they name states of affairs or facts. In contrast to this, the statement “S is p” gives expression to the performance of a consciousness of a state of affairs, insofar as a “thesis is enacted, and on it a second dependent thesis is based, so that, in this basing of thesis on thesis, the synthetic unity of the state of affairs is intentionally constituted. Such a synthetic consciousness is plainly quite dif ferent from setting something before oneself in a single-rayed thesis.”32 Consequently, according to Husserl, a linguistic expression “N” is a name if and only if (i) “N” functions as the logical subject within an assertion or is able to function as such a subject without altering its meaning.

Equivalent to this syntactic and semantic characterization is the phenomenological (act-theoretical) elucidation: “N” is a name if and only if (ii) the utterance of “N” intimates a single-rayed (simple), whole (closed, complete) nominal act.

What is striking about the previous examples is that a definite or indefinite article appears which, according to Husserl, plays a central role— whether or not it is indicated by its own word (compare Jones or the Jones; the Latin homo).33 It guides our attention to a (definite) object, which is offered up for a possible predication.34 This is, for instance, not the case with the mere substantive “tree,” which may awaken numerous associations and memories of trees or other things, but not in the way that “the tree”— in a suitable context— enables our mind’s eye to direct itself to a particular tree. The expression “a tree” also achieves this, according to Husserl, in that it allows us to think of the natural type tree.35 This orientation of our attention, by virtue of the nominal act which stands “on its own two feet,” also establishes the “complete” and “closed” character mentioned in (ii). Single-rayedness also means that nominal acts are directed to their object “in a single stroke,” so to speak, without needing to presuppose any other acts. Single-rayed intentionality does not have to be “built up” first— as is typically the case in judgment.36

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The categorial nature of names is reflected in the role that nominal acts play in initiating a predication. Although, for example, a person appears to me in the same way (with respect to content) in both nonexpressed and nominally expressed perceptions, the named object is constituted “with a new form (and with, so to say, the characterizing costume of its role) of which the nominal form is the adequate expression.”37 Naming Jones (“Jones!”) on the basis of a visual perception is essentially dif ferent from “merely” seeing Jones. Seeing is not naming.38 These paraphrasings make clear why Husserl does not automatically accept plural expressions, such as “Romeo and Juliet,” as names. When one grasps such an expression, one is not directed eo ipso to one attentionally privileged object but two: Romeo, Juliet—so long as one does not understand “Romeo and Juliet” as the proper name of Shakespeare’s play. According to Husserl, such plural terms have a conjunctive synthesis as their basis, which does not grasp both figures in a single “grip.”39 Nominalization is nevertheless possible here; a name can be made from a plural expression, for instance “the couple Romeo and Juliet.” Since the expressions “Romeo and Juliet” and “the couple Romeo and Juliet” are distinct with respect to meaning, the former expression is not a name because of (i) above. Prima facie Husserl’s concept of names seems to be too liberal. One might think, for instance, of the syncategorematic expression and. Can one not say “and is a particle”? Is “and” thus a name? However, one quickly sees that the sentence offends against (i) since “and” is not being used but rather mentioned; that is, it has undergone a shift of meaning.40 It actually means “The word ‘and’ is a particle.” Positing versus Nonpositing Names Husserl observes (and this is central for the following) that a name can express a nominal presentation regardless of whether the designated objectivity appears as existing or nonexisting; thus, he speaks of positing and nonpositing names or nominal acts. If one uses the name “the president of the USA” “in [its] normal sense in genuine discourse,”41 then the interlocutor knows that the person exists; the situation is dif ferent for expressions such as “Romeo’s beloved.”42 Regarding the division of names into positing and nonpositing, at the end of §34 Husserl considers the possibility of whether this relation is not describable by analogy with Brentano’s thesis from chapter  3: might it not be the case that positing names are founded in nonpositing ones? Is

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it not plausible that there are judgments of existence that are based upon nonpositing names? With this question, Husserl takes the opportunity (in §§35–36) to engage in fundamental reflections upon the relationship between names and judgments. Does the positing performance of a nominal act imply that one judges that the respective objectivity exists? Does it follow from this that positing names can be analyzed as judgments? Husserl denies both of these: After saying all this, we may maintain generally that there are differences between names and assertions which affect their “semantic essence” or that rest on the essential difference of presentations and judgments.43 An assertion can never function as a name, nor a name as an assertion, without changing its essential nature, i.e., its semantic essence.44

Husserl concludes that there are two qualitatively distinct types of nominal acts, that is, positing and nonpositing.45 Furthermore, Husserl extends this distinction to propositional acts, that is, those acts that are expressed in statements. Chapter 5 yields the solution to the problem of the qualitative unity of the genus of ultimately founding acts [letztfundierende Akte], where Husserl defines objectifying acts— a definition that is supposed to be sufficiently comprehensive to re spect acts that have dif ferent positional characters. But what is Husserl’s argument that there is an essential difference between naming and judging? Naming versus Asserting One could suppose, to clarify things, that positing names can always be supplemented by attributions without thereby changing their sense, for example, instead of “the president of the USA” one could say “the president of the USA currently in office” or “the really existing president of the USA.” Yet even then, according to Husserl, it is not asserted that the president of the USA exists: “even here naming differs in sense from saying.” The positing can be achieved merely through “that aspect of the act expressed by the definite article.”46 This description from §34 is essentially complemented by the arguments in §35. There, Husserl’s argument is aimed at the thesis that reference to individual things through descriptions [Kennzeichnungen47] is always and necessarily accompanied by judgments (determinative predications) which the

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subject simulta neously performs.48 He begins with the following expressions: i. “the minister now driving up” ii. “the minister—he is now driving up” iii. “the minister who is now driving up” iv. “the minister” v. “he—he is a minister” vi. “he—he exists—he is a minister” It is clearly not implausible to paraphrase (i) as (ii) or (iii); in this case it is conceivable that determinative predicates, expressed through parentheses or a relative clause, “can in a certain sense really function as logical subjects.” Yet even then the nominal reference is not exhausted in such a predication, since the latter only concerns a “part of the subject-name.”49 If one also wishes to explain away, in like manner, the descriptively simpler designation the minister, one comes up against insuperable difficulties, or, more precisely, a regress. The transition from (iv) to (v) and from (v) to (vi) suggests this: if one were to analyze “he” in (v) any further, then one would have to formulate (vi); but in (vi) the “complete name” he occurs, “and so [we] are involved in an infinite regress.”50 According to Husserl then, it is impossible to comprehend each positing, singular term or name as a name that has been supplemented by “determinative predications.” Names cannot be analyzed away as descriptions à la Russell- Quine.51 If we carry this “grammatical” finding over to the expressed acts, we find that not all positing, intentional experiences are propositional in nature.52 Dependencies between Names and Sentences How exactly, then, do expressions such as (i), (ii), and (iii) relate to one another according to Husserl? Is it not evident that one can only accomplish a nominal act of the form (i), if one can also accomplish acts of the forms (ii) and (iii) along with the judgments they enclose? Is it not the case that judgments are primary over and against names? Husserl rigorously takes these intuitions into account: “Undoubtedly many names, including all attributive names, have ‘arisen’ directly or indirectly out of judgments. . . . A certain mediacy therefore enters phenomenologically into the essence of the attributive presentation, which our talk of origination, derivation and also of ‘referring back’ expresses.”53 According to Husserl, these are “ideal, lawful connections,” “essential relationships” that nonetheless have

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implications for empirical-genetic connections. Thus, definite descriptions such as (i), for example, are dependent upon judgments of the type “the minister is now driving up” for their fulfillment. In other words, when such a judgment is based in current perception, the intention expressed in (i) is fulfilled. It is absurd to assume that one could accomplish (i) without being able, in principle, to make the corresponding judgment. These are connections grounded in the intentional and “genetic” horizons of their respective acts.54 Nevertheless, these dependencies should not be confused with the fact that “attributive names” are neither judgments nor do they necessarily include actual judgings [Urteilsvollzüge]. The source of the validity of such names must not be mixed up with the act of naming itself. This holds a fortiori for simple nominal acts such as proper names or “essentially occasional expressions,” which, according to Husserl, do not include any reference back to confirmatory judgments.55 Nominalization of Sentences Finally, in §36, Husserl demonstrates that even if assertions are in the subject position of sentences, the difference between the nominal and propositional is not negated. This is because—under certain conditions—assertions can “function as full and complete names.”56 Let us review Husserl’s example: A. The rain has set in. B. That the rain has set in is delightful (or: the fact/the circumstance that it is raining is delightful). C. The rain has set in; it is delightful. The fact expressed in (A), according to Husserl, can be denoted in various ways, for example, through expressions such as “this” or “this fact,” but also in event propositions, such as “the rain has set in.” Husserl takes this as an indication that assertions such as “it is raining” can function like names by virtue of a semantic operation. Through such an operation, the matter of the act changes from propositional to nominal. Thus in (B), one intentionally relates to the state of affairs “the rain has set in” in a nominal act; if one says only (A) “the rain has set in,” then one relates to the same state of affairs, albeit in a propositional act. While in (A) one accomplishes a judgment through the “combination” of two presentations (rain and its occurrence or its “setting in”), one posits the occurrence of the rain in acts like (B) or (C), but one is no longer judging in the authentic sense.57 In

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particular, according to Husserl, this should emerge from (C), since the anaphoric “it” temporally follows after the accomplishment of the judgment “rain has set in.”58 The same is true when referring to reported speech, such as when one says: “ ‘The value-added tax is going up,’ Angela Merkel has announced.” As in §35, Husserl only alludes to “ideal, lawful connections”: The state of affairs comes more “primitively” to consciousness in the judgment: the single-rayed intention [(B), (C)] towards the state of affairs presupposes the many-rayed judgmental intention [(A)], and a reference to the latter is part of its intrinsic sense. But in each manyrayed conscious approach there is rooted, in a priori fashion, an essential, ideal possibility of transformation into the single-rayed approach, in which a state of affairs will, in the pregnant sense, be “objective” or “presented.”59

Summary: Ten Theses Husserl’s theses concerning names and sentences, or nominal and propositional acts, can be summed up as follows: 1. Nominal acts are categorial acts with logically/conceptually structured matter, which are directed to some object or other. 2. A nominal act is either positing or nonpositing. 3. A subject S can accomplish a nominal act only if S is in the position to also accomplish this as a partial act of a propositional act. 4. S can accomplish a nominal act without simultaneously accomplishing a propositional act. 5. Nominal and propositional acts are distinct acts (with respect to their matter). 6. Nominal acts are included in all propositional acts as partial acts. 7. Nominal acts form a genuine subset of single-rayed acts. 8. Each non-nominal expression (each non-nominal meaning) can be nominalized; with this a semantic modification occurs (a change of the matter). 9. Nominalizations have the exceptional function of contributing to the constitution of higher order objects; only through the nominalization of a propositional meaning do, for instance, states of affairs (facts) as such become explicitly, intentionally accessible.60 10. Nominal acts are indispensable for epistemological contexts, since they provide subjects for (categorial) judgments.

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It follows that nominal acts, insofar as they are primary building blocks of intentional experiences, represent constitutive and irreducible partial acts of propositional acts: no sentence without names.61 Nominal acts, however, can only exercise their “power to determine” in connection with propositional acts. It is as though names bear sentences within them, in which they can occur as an “object-about-which”; thus, no names without a possible sentence. We read in the Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre: What if there were a nominal presentation that could not be inserted into a valid, propositional act-of-identification [Identitätsakt]? Could one then still say that this presentation presents something, that it has a presented, named object? However an object may be constituted beyond its categorial form [sich außerkategorial konstituieren]; within a categorial consciousness it is only an “object-about-which,” presented nominally, and posited nominally in judgment-consciousness.62

In this sense, regarding categorial acts, Husserl introduces a propositional context-principle, according to which names only make sense and realize their nominal intentionality within a judgment. Nevertheless, thesis (vii) implies that there are single-rayed acts, e.g., thing-perceptions [Dingwahrnehmungen], which possess intentionality completely independently of propositional embeddings. Single- or multirayedness, according to Husserl, is not a language- dependent property of acts, even though he situates his analyses in the linguistic expression of nominal acts as the paradigmatic representatives of single-rayed acts in the fourth and fifth chapters of the fifth investigation. Husserl accords linguistically articulated acts a methodical priority, not an explanatory one.63 This view is unproblematic unless one adopts the questionable view that intentionality is eo ipso dependent upon judgment and language.

Brentano’s Theorem and Objectifying Acts (§§37–43) A Common Genus for Positing and Nonpositing Acts (§§37–38) What is the purpose of Husserl’s detailed discussion of names and assertions? It is supposed to show that the property “single-rayed” distinguishes nominal acts from propositional acts. A difference within the matter comes to light here, which applies equally to positing and nonpositing acts.64 Yet Husserl still searches for a unified quality of acts, which would unequivocally meet Brentano’s theorem (FB).

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In order to avoid the threat of dividing founding acts into positing and nonpositing acts, Husserl introduces in chapter 5 the concept of objectifying acts, which is meant to denote the sought-after unitary genus. We must therefore show “that there is a qualitative community between nominal and propositional acts; we shall therefore end by demarcating yet another new concept of presentation, wider and more significant than the former, which will give us a new, most important interpretation.”65 But to what extent can positing and nonpositing nominal or propositional acts belong to one and the same genus? According to Husserl, the generic community is based upon the possibility, to be able to assign to each element of the class “objectifying acts” a materially identical yet qualitatively antipodal “counterpart” within that same class.66 To put it other wise: if e is an act of the genus G of objectifying acts, then there is an act e* within G, which possesses the same matter and the same representing content as e, yet has the opposite positional quality.67 This complex property should allow objectifying acts to be univocally classified. Let us consider the act of seeing a chair, expressed as “this chair.” The corresponding nominal act is usually a positing one; that is, the chair appears to me as in fact existing. That can change, however, for example, when I discover that the chair’s color and form are constantly changing as I approach it, while every thing else remains the same. Perhaps I now begin to carry out the epochē and no longer take a position on the question of the chair’s existence or nonexistence. The positing nominal act has changed; now there is a nonpositing or a neutral act before us, which has the same matter as the unmodified act. Both are so similar to each other that assigning them to one and the same genus seems to be justified, in that I still have a sensory intuition of the chair as being determined in such and such a way. We have similar justifications for the corresponding, modified, propositional acts. As a counter example, consider joy that the sun is shining, that is, an emotive act.68 Underlying this joy is the conviction that the sun is in fact shining. If this conviction is neutralized or revised by other convictions or perceptions, then this typically has the consequence that the joy disappears69 —or at least it would be modified. Unlike perception, there is no genuine qualitative counterpart to joy.70

Act-modifications (§§39–40) Before Husserl formulates his definitive version of Brentano’s thesis, he introduces various types of modifications of acts.71 The operation that

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defines objectifying acts (i.e., being able to assign to each act a qualitative counterpart) is to be distinguished from the possibility of assigning to each act a presentation of a higher order, that is, one that is reflexively directed to this act (§41). In this sense, the complex property that defines objectifying acts (having a “mere presentation” as a counterpart) would be trivially satisfied since to “each possible act . . . there is a presentation which relates to it, and which can as readily be qualified as positing as nonpositing.”72 In contrast to this “presenting objectification,” the qualitative modification concerns solely the quality; it is noniterable and only applicable to experiences— one cannot “neutralize” a chair. Repeating the qualitative modification in this context means something like a “return” to the original act-type (if I negate the “neutralization” of a perception of a chair, then I come back to a positing perception). Qualitative modifications, together with the “imaginative” modifications, belong to the so-called compliant [konformen] modifications. Both are characterized by the fact that they do not affect an act’s matter.73 While the qualitative modification only results in the conversion from a positing to a nonpositing quality, the imaginative modification changes the representative content of the act (sensations)—as when one closes one’s eyes and presents the chair just seen to oneself. Husserl already established in §21 that quality and matter alone do not completely individuate an act.74 The material modification of (objectifying) acts comprises the conversions from nominal or single-rayed to propositional or multirayed acts.75

Husserl’s Reinterpretation of Brentano’s Theorem (§§41–43) Since Husserl believes he has univocally determined objectifying acts as a qualitatively unitary genus, he fi nally arrives at the version of (FB) that is valid in his eyes: (FH) Each act is either an objectifying act or contains such an act as a part of it.76

What consequences does this principle have for the structure of intentional experiences? We can draw a few evident conclusions: 1. Objectifying acts alone are the bearers of the matter of an act: nonobjectifying act-qualities contribute nothing to the intentional content (matter) of the act.

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2. The principle (FB*) set out in chapter 4— each act is a nominal presentation or is founded in one— appears as a true, albeit “merely . . . secondary offshoot” of (FH),77 since each objectifying act is either a single-rayed (nominal) or a multirayed (propositional) act, which is established on the basis of a single-rayed (nominal) act. The ambiguity of “presentation” in the sense of an act’s matter and quality also characterizes in a certain way the relationship of (FH) and (FB*), as (FH) speaks of the foundation of all qualities in objectification, while (FB*) asserts the foundational role of single-rayed acts, which highlights a material difference.78 However, through his new terminology, Husserl avoids the ambiguity of the unclarified conception of presentation. 1. Each composite act is “eo ipso qualitatively complex” and founded in its partial acts or their matters or qualities;79 to be composite then means to be composed of multiple partial acts, which for their part (can) have diverse qualities.80 2. Each composite act is founded in simple nominal/single-rayed acts.

The Significance of Objectifying Acts What is the significance of Husserl’s objectifying acts? The intentionality of an experience essentially depends upon objectifying acts. For Husserl intentionality is primarily an intrinsic characteristic of objectifying acts. This clarifies the intuition that all other types of acts must first “present” their object, thus giving expression to an asymmetrical dependency. In this way, objectifying acts contribute to guaranteeing the unity of the genus “intentional experiences.” In a functional respect, Husserl’s objectifying acts are equivalent to Brentano’s “mere presentations.” However, in Husserl these elementary acts can be positing just as well as nonpositing; moreover, Husserl sees in basic acts a much greater potential for objectification (i.e., categorial objects) than the nominalist or “reist” Brentano, who only accepts individuals into his ontology. This, however, does not mean that nonobjectifying qualities, like, for example, feelings, are reduced to the objectifications that underlie them; there are irreducible differences here, as Husserl already emphasized in §15 of the fifth investigation. To be afraid of something, for example, does not mean to execute acts of fearing and presenting which would be loosely bound by association or simultaneity. Rather, there is a distinctive unity of foundation, according to which the fearing presupposes the presenting,

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although one then “lives” in the fearing and not in the “mere” presenting. Despite the unity of foundation, in Logical Investigations Husserl argues for the thesis that nonobjectifying acts contribute nothing to the constitution of intentional objects. Husserl has no place here for an (objective) property such as “fearsome.” Only in Ideas and Lectures on Ethics and Theory of Values does Husserl arrive at the insight that each intentional experience has (explicitly or implicitly) an objectifying character.81 Thus each act-type corresponds to a specific intentional objectivity, whose existence or nonexistence is posited in the act. Each (veridical) act has its own objectivity. Thus, Husserl defends what one could call a doxical universalism, without thereby succumbing to a doxic reductionism. Each act is explicitly or implicitly a manner of believing and as such is oriented to truth, evidence, justification, and “being”: “Every non-objectifying act allows objectivities to be drawn from itself by means of a shift, a change in attitude. Essentially, therefore, every act is implicitly objectifying at the same time. By essence, it is not only built, as a higher level, upon objectifying acts but is also objectifying itself according to what it adds as something new.” 82 All “acts in general— including acts of emotion and acts of willing— are ‘objectifying,’ ‘constituting’ objects originally; they are necessary sources of diverse regions of being and, with this, also sources of the relevant ontologies.”83 A fear, for example, is not itself a belief, but it intrinsically involves the evaluative doxa, that the object is fearsome and is therefore harmful to the subject. The intentional object has an implicit value for the subject.84 Considering the matter historically, Husserl self-consciously ascribes to himself the merit of having for the first time liberated the concept of presentation from all of its confusing ambiguities:85 “The whole of epistemology suffers from the lack of an analysis of the concept ‘presentation’; it lacks the essential delimitation of the genus ‘presentation’ in the sense of objectifying acts.”86 The decisive systematic significance of objectifying acts consists in preparing the ground for the epistemology of the sixth investigation. This is because these acts are constructed in such a way that they can enter into “identifying syntheses.” Such identifications represent a necessary condition for acts of knowing, in that the paradigmatic case of knowledge consists, according to Husserl, in converting a mere opining directed at X into an intuition of X. In this way, objectifying acts show themselves to be acts that can be true (“convincing” [triftig]) or false (“unconvincing” [untriftig]), which Husserl describes as the central normative characteristic of intentionality.87 Husserl’s concept of objectifying acts thus represents the first step toward understanding the truthfulness

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[Wahrheitsfähigkeit] of intentional phenomena. Objectifying acts ultimately manifest the teleological structure of consciousness, which is intentionally directed to the “evidence,” “being,” and “self-givenness” of its objects. Objectifying acts have an “all-pervasive teleological structure, a pointedness toward ‘reason’ and even a pervasive tendency toward it—that is: toward the discovery of correctness . . . and toward the cancelling of incorrectness.”88 It appears that the convoluted paths that Husserl pursues over the course of the fifth investigation’s final chapter also offer many points of contact for contemporary (analytic) discussions. Husserl’s critique of Brentano’s principle should not just be regarded as a lesson from the history of philosophy but as a fruitful contribution to the contemporary discussions in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Translated by Patrick Eldridge Notes 1. As a rule, §§22–45 are neglected in the secondary literature; exceptions include Q. Smith, “On Husserl’s Theory of Consciousness in the Fifth Logical Investigation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 37, no. 4 (1977): 482–497; H. Pietersma “Assertion and Predication in Husserl,” Husserl Studies 2 (1985): 75–95; M. S. Stepanians, Frege und Husserl über Denken und Urteilen (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, and Zurich: Schöningh, 1998); and R. D. Rollinger, “Names, Statements, and their Corresponding Acts in Husserl’s Logical Investigations,” in Husserl’s Logical Investigations Reconsidered, ed. D. Fisette (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003), 133–161. The following commentary will show that this neglect is unacceptable since there are many connections to current debates. 2. Husserl refers to this principle already in the introduction and §10 of the fifth investigation. E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 354, 379–384 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 534, 553–556]. 3. Cf. F. Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Leipzig: Dunker und Humblot, 1874), 111 [translated by A. C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and L. L. McAlister as Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 65]. 4. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:391 [562]. 5. Verena Mayer will comment on chap. 3, while Christopher Erhard will comment on chaps. 4 and 5.

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6. Indeed, Husserl’s arguments always retain the function of disclosing aspects of experiences. This holds generally for Husserl’s phenomenological method, which makes use of deductive-inferential processes only to make the things themselves visible. Cf. E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976) [translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom as Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014)], §§71–75. Hereafter referred to as Ideas I. 7. Brentano, Psychologie, 111 [65]. 8. Husserl also refers to Brentano’s thesis later in this sense: judgments can also give objects, just like “mere presentations”; cf. U. Melle, “Objektivierende und nichtobjektivierende Akte,” in Husserl-Ausgabe und HusserlForschung, ed. S. Ijsseling (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Springer, 1990), 35–49 [translated by Patrick Eldridge as “Objectifying and Nonobjectifying Acts,” in this volume]. 9. R. Descartes, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, vol. 7 (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1904 [1641]), 37 [translated by D. A. Cress in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 71]. 10. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:444 [599]. 11. G. Frege, Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens (Halle: Verlag von Lous Nebert, 1879 [translated and edited by J. van Heijenoort as “Begriffsschrift,” in Frege and Gödel: Two Fundamental Texts in Mathematical Logic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 2–3]. 12. Cf. V. Mayer, “Wahrheitswerte und Wahrheitsbegriff,” in Das Wahre und das Falsche: Studien zu Freges Auffassung von Wahrheit, ed. D. Greimann (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003), 181–202. 13. Brentano, Psychologie, 261 [153]. 14. Cf. T. Piazza, A Priori Knowledge: Toward a Phenomenological Explanation (Frankfurt a. M. and Leicester: Ontos, 2007). 15. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:444 [599]. 16. Husserl, 456 [607]. 17. See Husserl, 458 [609]. 18. Husserl, 459 [610]. 19. Brentano, Psychologie, 262 [153]. 20. Whether Husserl really holds to this delimited concept of judgment in the following raises another question, which is beyond the scope of this essay. What is interest ing is that even Frege’s conception of judgment, from the beginning, contains such a dynamic. Frege writes in Begriffsschrift (2

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[11]) that signs such as “−A,” that is, the combination of the content-line with a content A are meant “to produce in the reader merely the idea [Vorstellung] . . . in order to derive consequences from it and to test by means of these whether the thought is correct”; thus only then may the judgment ⊦A be executed. 21. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:475–476 [621]. 22. Husserl, 477; cf. 478 [622; cf. 623]. 23. E. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre: Sommersemester 1908, ed. U. Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 94–99. 24. On this topic, see the distinction between “sense and understanding” in the sixth investigation, where Husserl shows that nominal acts are categorial acts, that is, logical “acts of thought,” the intentional content (material) of which has a logical form. Nominal acts intend “nominals” (cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:685–687 [796–797]), which can function as subjects of propositions on their own. 25. In the second edition of Logical Investigations, Husserl subsumed nominal acts under the well-known concept of “single-rayedness” [Einstrahligkeit] from Ideen I (501–502 [639–640]); see also Ideen I, §§118–119). 26. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:479 [623]. 27. Husserl, 479 [623]. 28. See Husserl, 496–499 [636–637]. 29. Husserl, 518–519 [651]. 30. Husserl already discussed the ambiguity of the phrase “expressing something” in the first (§§5, 6, 11, 12) and fourth investigations (§4). The articulated linguistic expression “A expresses X” can imply three things: (1) X is the reference-object of A; (2) X is the meaning of A; (3) X is a meaningexperience [Bedeutungserlebnis] that intimates A. Here expressing in the sense of intimation is decisive, cf. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 38–41 [276–278]. 31. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 481 [625]. 32. Husserl, 491–492 [632]. Interestingly, Husserl also counts determinate sentence parts of complex sentences among names. Thus the expression “A” in the sentence “B, because A” functions somewhat like a name; hence, according to Husserl, we do not perform the judgment A when we utter this sentence, rather we name the corresponding state of affairs (see 477–478, 494–495 [622, 633–634]). 33. See Husserl, 493 [633]. 34. Husserl emphasizes this function of names in his critique of Mill’s conception of proper nouns in the first investigation. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 63–65 [296–298]. See also E. Husserl, Logik: Vorlesung 1902/03, ed. E. Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 182. 35. Cf. E. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre: Sommersemester 1908, 68.

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36. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, inv. 6, §§46–48; cf. E. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. L. Landgrebre, 4th ed. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1972) [translated by J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks as Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973)], 63. 37. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:687 [797]. 38. See Husserl, 461–462 [611–612]. 39. See Husserl, 481, 501–502 [625, 639], inv. 6, §31; Husserl, Bedeutungslehre, 66–69; E. Husserl, Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie: Vorlesungen 1917/18, Mit ergänzenden Texten aus der ersten Fassung 1910/11, ed. U. Panzer (The Hague: Kluwer, 1995), §35. 40. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:329–330 [513]. 41. Husserl, 482 [625]. 42. Husserl’s claim that nominal acts as such can either be positing or nonpositing is sometimes criticized: see Rollinger, “Names, Statements, and their Corresponding Acts”, 140 and E. Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970), 41n47, 96–101. Would it not be more plausible to accept that a propositional act (e.g., the conviction that . . . exists) takes on this role? A defense of Husserl’s thesis of nonpropositional doxic acts must deal with his idea of pre-predicative perception with its “existence-meaning [Seinsmeinung]” (Urdoxa), which is continually confirmed in concordant passive syntheses of experience. Cf. A. D. Smith, “Perception and Belief,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62 (2001): part 4. 43. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:488–489 [630]. 44. Husserl, 494 [633–634]. 45. See Husserl, 483 [626]. One can see that the concept of act-quality is dif ferent here in comparison with its introduction in §§20–21 of the fifth investigation; from this point forward, the quality does not primarily designate the type of an act (e.g., perception, judgment, fear, and so on) but rather that moment of an act that he will later call the doxic or thetic character (see Ideen I, §§103–117, 129). See also the schemata in Stepanians, Frege und Husserl, 234; M. Tavuzzi, Existential Judgment and Transcendental Reduction: A Critical Analysis of Edmund Husserl’s “Phänomenologische Fundamentalbetrachtung” (Ideen I, §§27–62) (Milan: Massimo, 1982), 51; J.-S. Heuer, Die Struktur der Wahrheitserlebnisse und die Wahrheitsauffassungen in Edmund Husserls “Logischen Untersuchungen” (Ammersbek bei Hamburg: Verlag an der Lottbek, 1989), 35, 39. 46. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:482 [626]. 47. Husserl speaks of “attributive names” and “an attribution which enriches the name” (486–487 [628–629]).

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48. This thesis is a weaker form of the above-mentioned supposition, that naming is actually judging. 49. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 486 [628]. 50. Husserl, 486 [628]. 51. Cf. J. N. Mohanty, Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning (The Hague: Kluwer, 1969), 97–100. 52. Husserl also does not subscribe to the thesis, commonly held today, that each nonpropositional act presupposes a propositional one. Exceptions to this thesis we find in single-rayed perceptions of individual things. Such questions are still hotly contested today; see E. Tugendhat, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1976), lecture 6; T. Crane, Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford, 2001), chaps. 1 and 4; and M. Montague, “Against Propositionalism,” Noûs 41, no. 3 (2007): 503–551. 53. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:486, 488 [628, 630]. 54. Husserl compares these connections to constructions from arithmetic and geometry, like the way that a pentagon “refers back to” a square or the number 5 to the number 1. Husserl deals thoroughly with this theme of “referring back” in a genetic perspective in his late work Erfahrung und Urteil. 55. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:552–556 [682–685]. Husserl, however, mentions here certain “point[s] of view of logical validity” (489 [631]) that in some sense compel a rational subject “to be unable to start with the words ‘this S’ without thereby ‘potentially’ conceding that there is an S” (489 [631]). See also 85–92 [313–319]. 56. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:490 [631]. 57. Therefore, states of affairs are categorial and founded entities, which are constituted through higher level categorial acts. Cf. the first investigation (§12), the fifth (§§17, 28), and the sixth (§§44–48). The plausibility of Husserl’s above considerations also depends upon whether he has good reason to accept states of affairs as a novel ontological category. On states of affairs in Husserl generally, see A. Süßbauer, Intentionalität, Sachverhalt, Noema. Eine Studie zu Edmund Husserl (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1995), parts 3 and 4. 58. The anaphoric demonstrative should therefore have an ostensive dimension—Husserl says that it “points a finger to the state of affairs” (see Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:492 [632]). 59. Husserl, 492 [633]; see also Husserl, Bedeutungslehre, §18. 60. Cf. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, esp. §§58–60; Husserl, Ideen I, §119. 61. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:479 [623–624]. There seems to be a certain “atomistic” tendency in Husserl, since nominal acts can also be

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accomplished independently of propositional acts. A more precise reading and consideration of later works—for example, Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre and E. Husserl, Formale and transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974 [translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969)]—presents a nuanced and more contextualistic picture. It is critical, however, to ask what names are involved in sentences such as “something exists” or “it is raining.” In his lectures Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, Husserl refines his view and recognizes explicitly nameless sentences; see Husserl, Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, §40. He aligns himself with Frege and analyzes “something exists” as a quantified functional-judgment. An impersonal sentence such as “it is raining” on the contrary is in Husserl’s eyes an Inexistence-proposition [Inexistenzsatz] of the form “rain exists hic et nunc (among other entities).” However, the categorial judgment “S is p” assumes a paradigmatic function as before, which is evident not least in the genetic analyses of Erfahrung und Urteil. 62. Husserl, Bedeutungslehre, 62, 94. 63. In Erfahrung und Urteil, Husserl shows that single-rayed perceptions are the genetic basis for all other act-types. Cf. the distinction between categorial and aesthetic syntheses in E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. M. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952) [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989)], §9; see, in particular, 20 [22]: In a single-rayed perception “the thing presents itself persistently as something which is such-and-such, even if no concepts, no judgments in the predicative sense, are mediating.” Hereafter referred to as Ideen II. 64. The two pairs of concepts, positing/nonpositing and nominal/ propositional (single rayed/multirayed) allow for four possible combinations (see Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:501 [639]). 65. Husserl, 498 [637]. 66. Husserl, 505, 508 [642, 644–645]. 67. “Representing contents” are to be understood as sensations in the case of perceptions. Husserl took these to be nonintentional experiences with a phenomenal character, for example, pain and tone sensations, which are intentionally apprehended without being intentional themselves. See the sixth investigation, §§25–28; 53–58. 68. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:401–405 [569–572].

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69. Here the details of the revisions certainly play an important role. There is the well-known phenomenon of the cognitive impenetrability of feelings. 70. It is critical to ask here whether or not among joy and other emotions there is also a type of neutralization, which might occur for instance when, after having initially perceived a phenomenon in a positing act, we then have a purely aesthetic perception of it—that is, without existential interest—and rejoice in that. 71. On the meaning of Husserl’s early conception of modification, see Stepanians, Frege und Husserl, chap. 10. 72. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:505 [642]. 73. Husserl, 512 [646–647]. 74. Husserl, 433–435 [591–593]. 75. The qualitative modification in §40 of the fifth investigation is a precursor to the neutrality-modification in Ideen I (cf. §§109–114), which in turn is closely related to Husserl’s epoché; see Pietersma, “Assertion and Predication in Husserl.” 76. This version of (FH) can be regarded as equivalent to the statement of (FH) at the outset of the chapter. 77. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:514 [648]. 78. Husserl, 519 [651]. 79. Husserl, 515 [649]. 80. See also Husserl, 416–419 [580–581]. 81. Cf. E. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethink und Wertlehre: 1908–1914, ed. U. Melle (The Hague: Kluwer, 1988), 322–325. 82. Husserl, Ideen II, 16 [18]. 83. Husserl, Ideen I, 272 [234]. 84. The foundation of all acts in objectifying acts of the kind discussed here (judgments, perceptions, etc.), however, does not change. See Ideen I, §§ 37, 95, 116–117; Ideen II, §§4, 7, 11. See also Q. Smith, “On Husserl’s Theory of Consciousness in the Fifth Logical Investigation” and D. Lorca, “Husserl’s Theory of Consciousness in the Fifth Logical Investigation,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30 (1999): 151–165. Sartre too emphatically defends the thesis that each act-quality contributes to the constitution of an intentional object; see J.-P. Sartre, “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité,” Nouvelle Revue Française 52 (1939): 129–132 [translated by Joseph P. Fell as “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 1, no. 2 (1971): 4–5]. 85. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:520–527 [652–657]. 86. E. Husserl, Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie: Vorlesung 1902/03, ed. E. Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 150.

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87. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:654–655 [767–768]; see also, for instance, J. McDowell, Mind and World: With a New Introduction by the Author, (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), xi–xii: “To make sense of the idea of a mental state’s or episode’s being directed towards the world . . . we need to put the state or episode in a normative context.” 88. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 168–169 [160].

Objectifying and Nonobjectifying Acts Ullrich Melle

Determining the difference and the relationship between objectifying and nonobjectifying acts is of fundamental significance for Husserl’s attempt to establish a middle way between two theories of reason: intellectualism on the one hand and emotionalism on the other. Intellectualism knows only of logical-cognitive reason, and for it, the spheres of emotional and practical acts are only particular areas for the application of logical reason, whereas in the emotionalism of a Windelband or Rickert, logical reason is reinterpreted as an emotive-evaluative reason.1 To these monistic theories of reason Husserl opposes a pluralistic theory of reason, which he grounds in a parallelism between types of reason. The number of types of reason depends upon the classification of types of acts. There are as many basic types of reason as there are basic types of acts; to each basic type of act, according to Husserl, belongs a specific type of justification [Rechtsausweisung] and rational validity. Husserl holds strictly to the Kantian classification of act-types, that is, intellective acts, evaluative feeling acts, and volitional acts. Correspondingly there are three types of reason: logical-cognitive, axiological, and practical reason. 193

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Insight into the phenomenological a priori of correlation [Korrelationsapriori] is bound up with the performance of the phenomenological reduction. According to this correlational a priori, rational validity and objective existence are inseparable correlates, and consequently, there are as many basic types of rational consciousness as there are basic types of objectivities [Gegenständlichkeiten]. The question concerning the classification of act- and reason-types is therefore essentially tied to the question concerning the division of regions of objects; a pluralistic theory of reason must have a corresponding pluralistic theory of objects. A phenomenological theory of reason possesses a two-tiered structure. The adjudication [Rechtsprechung] of reason in the relevant spheres of acts does not occur arbitrarily but according to principles. The corresponding sciences of principles establish the superstructure of the theory of reason. These sciences of principles are then grounded in a rational critique [vernunftkritisch zu begründen] by means of a phenomenological description of the kinds and connections of acts—with their noematic correlates—that fall within the scope of the principles and, above all, a description of the teleological connections of fulfilment that exist in these connections of acts. To this two-tiered structure of the phenomenological theory of reason there corresponds a two-tiered justification of the pluralism and parallelism among the types of reason. The first— still provisional—level of justification [Begründungsstufe] shows that corresponding to the supposed number of types of reason there is a number of parallel theories of principles; at the second and ultimately valid level of justification, this parallelism of the types of reason, which is suggested by the parallelism of the theories of principles, is identified through comprehensive phenomenological descriptions of the corresponding spheres of acts. With respect to the first level of justification, Husserl attempted to show, primarily in his ethical-axiological lectures of 1908/09, 1911, and 1914, that there are formal-axiological and formal-practical principles analogous to formallogical principles such that, in addition to formal logic, there exist parallel and analogous disciplines of formal axiology and praxis [Praktik]. With respect to the second, phenomenological, rational-critical [phänomenologischvernunftkritischen] level of justification, which alone actually justifies the pluralism and parallelism of the types of reason, we find only the first approaches in these ethical-axiological lectures. As Husserl states in his 1911 lecture, one gets entangled here in a “veritable jungle of difficulties,” a jungle with “lurking monsters.”2

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For Husserl, objectifying acts are logical-cognitive, intellective acts; to the nonobjectifying acts belong acts of feeling and willing. Taking up the image of the “lurking monsters,” one could describe objectifying acts or objectifying reason as such a monster: objectifying reason, the reason of the understanding, threatens to engulf the nonobjectifying types of reason.3 The nonobjectifying acts are in fact dependent upon objectifications in a twofold manner: on the one hand, they are founded in objectifying acts; on the other hand, without the underlying objectifications, they are “so to speak, mute and in a certain way blind,” as Husserl puts it in his 1914 lecture on ethics.4 The objectifying understanding must first “provide the eye of the intellect” to axiological and practical acts.5 Logical reason, as Husserl states in the abovementioned lecture, exerts an undeniable and complete authority. Even within the sphere of willing and valuing we orient ourselves by knowing and thinking logically; we judge the values of objects and ascribe practical determinations to them, and, what is more, axiological and practical principles can, of course, only be judgments. How, then, is it possible—in the face of logical-cognitive reason’s superiority, its omnipotence—to still speak of parallel types of valuing and willing reason? Husserl applies the method of analogy to provide axiological and practical reason their own legitimacy over against the validity of logical reason. From the standpoint of a science of principles and rational-critical justification, the theory of objectifying reason is, as a matter of fact, much further developed than the theory of nonobjectifying types of reason. According to Husserl, the entire history of ethics has never marked a clear distinction between material [materialen] and formal principles nor any analogous development of an ethical analytic corresponding to the logical analytic. As Husserl explains in his 1914 lectures, with the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle did not become the father of ethics in the way he became the father of logic.6 Since the sphere of objectifying reason is in fact more precisely researched and better known, according to Husserl in the 1911 lecture, “what is emphasized and known in the sphere of objectifying reason [should] offer us an analogical guide for the exploration of parallels in the other spheres.”7 The following considerations do not seek to be anything more than an introduction to the range of problems that can be found in Husserl’s phenomenology of the nonobjectifying rationality of feeling and willing. In essence, I will limit myself to showing that, in Husserl’s description of feeling- and willing-intentionality, two analogies [Analogizierungen] either

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vie with one another or stand side by side, although they must actually be inwardly bound together, namely, the analogy with perception on the one hand and the analogy with positing judgment on the other. First, I will examine Husserl’s initial determination of the distinction between objectifying and nonobjectifying acts in the Logical Investigations. Then, I will go into more detail regarding Husserl’s lecture on ethics of 1908/09, in which Husserl poses questions concerning an axiological knowledge founded in the intuition of values [Wertanschauung]. In connection with this, I will turn to a discussion of Husserl’s theory of value-perception [Wertnehmung] as analogous to external perception [Wahrnehmung]. In closing, I will examine Husserl’s analogy, prevalent in Ideas I and also in his 1914 lecture on ethics, between feeling- and willing-acts and acts positing being. Husserl first developed the distinction between objectifying and nonobjectifying acts in the fifth logical investigation in connection with a profound critique and revision of the basic theory of Brentano’s descriptive psychology, namely, that presentation [Vorstellung] is the foundation for all acts of consciousness. This distinction also plays an important role in the sixth logical investigation: the starting and end point of the sixth investigation is the problem of whether nonobjectifying acts can, like objectifying acts, be brought to expression, a problem that Husserl designated in Ideas I as “one of the oldest and most difficult problems in the theory of meaning.”8 Setting out from this problem and on the way toward its solution, Husserl developed in the sixth investigation the fundamentals of his theory of knowledge, such as the theory of syntheses of fulfillment and of categorial intuition. The sixth investigation provides a more detailed determination of objectifying intentionality through the painstaking description of the relation between intention and fulfillment in the objectifying acts of perception and thinking. The starting point and core of Husserl’s analyses of acts is the distinction between an act’s quality and its matter [Materie] in §20 of the fifth investigation. For Husserl, quality and matter are two mutually dependent, abstract moments of a concrete act that together form the intentional essence of an act. The matter is the act-moment that gives the act its objective [gegenständlich] relation and its full determination with respect to content. The matter fixes not only which objectivity the act means but also “the properties, relations, categorial forms that it itself attributes to it.”9 The act-moment “quality” then determines in which way the act relates to the given objectivity through the matter in the “how” of its determina-

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tions. “Quality only determines whether what is already presented in definite fashion is intentionally present as wished, asked, posited in judgment etc.”10 In the sixth investigation, the act-components that give or present the object are determined through the more comprehensive concept of representation [Repräsentation]. The matter is a moment of the representation; it is the sense of the apprehension. Along with this, the sensation-contents and the form of the apprehension belong to the presentation, and they determine “whether the object is presented as purely signitive or intuitive or in a mixed fashion. Here too belong the differences between a perceptual and an imaginative presentation, etc.”11 Instead of matter and quality Husserl will later speak of apprehension, apperception, and sense-giving on the one hand, and positing, thesis, and position-taking on the other hand. The appearing [das Erscheinen] of an object transcendent to consciousness, the being-directed-to-it, constitutes itself for Husserl at the very lowest level of the apprehension, the apperception of nonintentional, experienced, sensuous [stofflich] content that is immanent to conscious. This is the wellknown, oft-discussed and criticized “content-apprehension schema.” The paradigmatic case of applying this schema is the perception of a spatiotemporal thing with respect to its sensuous determinations: immanently experienced [erlebte] color-sensations are apprehended or interpreted as adumbrations of the color-determinations of an object transcendent to consciousness. The distinction between matter and quality, apperception and positing or position-taking, implies an essential differentiation in the concept of intentionality: the intentionality of apperception and the intentionality of position-taking are fundamentally dif ferent. In Brentano, the intentionality of matter or apperception is reserved for a basic class of psychical phenomena, presentations [Vorstellungen]. Brentano famously distinguished between three basic classes of psychical phenomena: presentations, judgments, and the class of feeling- and willing-acts. Overlaying this tripartite division then is the bifurcation of psychical phenomena into acts that give an object and those that involve reactively taking a position [reaktivstellungnehmenden]. The psychic phenomena of the second and third classes take a positive or negative position with respect to the object given through presentations: judgment is an acceptance or rejection of a presented object with respect to its being; emotive and willing acts relate to the presented object as loved or hated, liked or disliked. The question of truth and reason may be addressed only to position-taking acts; only here does the difference between insight, evidence, and blindness exist.

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Husserl revises the fundamental determinations of Brentanian psychology on two essential points: first, he simultaneously rejects Brentano’s conception of judgment and ascribes an object-giving accomplishment to acts of judgment. Whereas presentations have a single-rayed nominal matter, judgments possess a multirayed propositional matter. The object that comes to givenness through the material of a judgment is a state of affairs. As is generally known, in the sixth investigation Husserl even sought to detect a representation within categorial acts and to bring his content-apprehension schema to bear upon them.12 Second, for Husserl presenting objects is not so much the achievement of an independent act as it is that of a nonindependent act-component. The matter or representation or apperception (regardless of whether it is single-rayed or multirayed) necessarily requires completion through an act-quality. This act-quality that supplements the act-material must, according to Husserl, be an objectifying act-quality. Only objectifying act-qualities or positings (or position-takings) can immediately combine with some material to form an independent act. Only in such a combination with an objectifying act-quality in the formation of an independent objectifying act can the matter also serve to provide an object for a nonobjectifying act. For this reason, Husserl also speaks in Logical Investigations of primary and secondary intentions in connection with objectifying and nonobjectifying acts.13 The nonobjectifying acts consequently are a founded complex [Fundierungskomplex] comprising a full objectifying act and a nonobjectifying act-quality. For Husserl, in Logical Investigations, objectifying act-qualities are only those act-qualities involving belief,14 those that “mean” existence [Seinsmeinung] and posit being [Seinssetzung], and their counterparts in the form of mere presentation, of leaving open-ended, of abstaining-frompositing-existence. It is noteworthy that for Husserl in Logical Investigations not only do emotive and volitional acts belong to the category of nonobjectifying acts but also intellective acts such as questioning and supposing [Vermutungen]; hence, in Logical Investigations, the distinction between objectifying and nonobjectifying acts is not coextensive with the distinction between intellective acts or acts of the understanding on the one hand and emotive and volitional acts on the other.15 In the sixth investigation, Husserl shows that valid relations to objects, namely, in the sense of knowing an objectively existing object, establish themselves in identificatory [identifikatorischen] syntheses of fulfillment, in the transition from emptily meaning an object to a fulfilling intuition of the object itself, just as it was meant. Accordingly, Husserl also defines objectifying acts in the sixth investigation as those acts “whose synthesis of

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fulfillment has the character of identification and whose synthesis of disappointment has the character of differentiation.”16 In the transition to the fulfilling, self-giving [selbstgebend] intuition, the thesis, the positing, is tested and verified [bewährt und bewahrheitet].17 The questions pertaining to correctness [Recht] and reason are directed to the positings, the position-takings. The rationality of a positing, its insightfulness, its evidence, is not, “a merely postulated and entirely incomprehensible character, which has the miraculous [wunderbare] property of bestowing on the judgment, upon which it depends, the character of correctness,” as it is for Brentano according to Husserl.18 Rather, it is the unity of the positing with the fulfilling, self-giving intuition. In Logical Investigations, we find no mention of a nonobjectifying reason; the question concerning the correctness [Recht] and validity of nonobjectifying acts has not yet been posed. The determination of nonobjectifying acts proves to be ambiguous, and it is in this ambiguity that the remaining challenges for Husserl’s theory of reason emerge. On the one hand, Husserl stresses the intentionality of, for instance, liking and desiring: “These are all intentions, genuine acts in our sense. They all ‘owe’ their intentional relation to certain underlying presentations.”19 On the other hand, these nonobjectifying acts— such is the conclusion of the sixth investigation— can only be expressed as the objects of an objectification reflexively aimed at them. They cannot on their own lend meaning to an expression in the way a perception or other intuitive act immediately receives expression. The reason for this is obvious: nonobjectifying acts have no objective [gegenständlich] relation other than what the underlying objectifying act constitutes. “While, therefore, where acts function meaningfully, and achieve expression in this sense, a ‘signitive’ or intuitive relation to objects is constituted in them, in the other cases the acts are mere objects, and objects, of course, for other acts which here function as the authentic carriers of meaning.”20 One could say, according to the terms of Logical Investigations, that the nonobjectifying acts make no contribution to the constitution of objects. All value- and practical-determinations would therefore be apprehended as mere reflective determinations [Reflexionsbestimmungen]. One cannot then speak of reason in the Husserlian sense with respect to nonobjectifying acts. In the second part of the 1908/09 lectures, as we see in the margins of the lecture manuscripts, Husserl agonized over the difference between objectifying and nonobjectifying evaluative-acts. In the first part, in a manner analogous to the refutation of logical psychologism and skepticism in

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Prolegomena,21 Husserl refuted axiological-ethical psychologism and skepticism and established formal-axiological principles which are analogous to formal-logical principles. The starting point of the second part is the objectivity of value (which was secured in the first part) and the related epistemological problem. The problem concerns “how we are supposed to go beyond the fact of a value-estimation [Wertschätzenden] occurring in a feeling to a predicate that makes a claim to objectivity.”22 Obviously, knowledge in the proper sense, thus knowledge of values too, can only be an act of the understanding. But then what role does the evaluating feeling play in axiological knowledge? Value judgments do not speak to factually occurring feelings but rather, according to Husserl, make a claim to knowledge with respect to objective axiological determinations of objects. These axiological features are founded in thingly [sachlich] determinations. Husserl often also called these axiological features nonessential object-determinations, which means that they do not belong to the “nature” of the object; they belong in “another dimension” than the natural [naturhaft] object-determinations.23 “The axiological objectivities are founded in the nonaxiological ones in such a way that the latter objectivities are and remain finished and complete objectivities, so to speak, even when we cross out, as it were, the axiological predicates which we may ascribe and really accord to them.”24 Here Husserl hits upon a double meaning in the concept of understanding: if we take “understanding” in the widest sense, axiological predicates are also objects of the understanding. As predicates they “are subordinate to the formal laws of predicates in general,”25 and those are formal-logical laws of validity for judgments or the correlative formal-ontological laws. “With this,” Husserl says, “the complete dominion of the formal-ontological understanding is asserted.”26 A narrower conception of the understanding encompasses only value-free objects or object-determinations. If we are speaking of theoretical predicates as opposed to axiological predicates, then this narrower concept of the understanding is in play. Axiological predicates are accordingly founded in theoretical predicates; these remain what they are even if the axiological predicates are crossed out. “Theory does not lead to any values.”27 That something is valuable cannot be discovered through theoretical means; values are originally given only in evaluative emotive-acts [Gemütsakte]. “It seems that emotive-acts must irrefutably be taken as the constituting acts for values.”28 Only after we have discovered value-determinations in value-feelings [wertfühlen] can we observe them in a theoretical, scientific manner. If, however, emotive-acts are supposed to present objective value-determinations [gegenständliche

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Wertbestimmungen], then must they not be objectifying acts? “We see that evaluating acts are essential for the constitution of values; but reflecting upon how they could function constitutively, we become lost in obscurity. Indeed only objectifying acts can constitute.”29 Concerning factual [sachlicher] object-determinations, justifying predications in judgment ultimately refers back to pre-predicative intuition— in the case of sensible objects, that is external perception. Following the method of analogy, we are led to ask whether axiological knowledge in the form of value-predicates is not also analogously grounded in a type of value-intuition or value-perception. Husserl had in fact attempted, primarily in a number of research manuscripts, to identify and phenomenologically describe a value-perception analogous to external perception. Like external perception, value-perception should be an apperception, the apprehension of sensations. Already in §15 of the fifth investigation, where Husserl specifically engaged with the intentionality of feelings, he distinguished between intentional feeling-acts and feeling-sensations— sensory pains and pleasures—which are of the same rank as sensory-contents and, like these, are not intentional experiences. Just like sensory-contents, feelingsensations can be objectifyingly apprehended and thus yield, according to Husserl’s analyses in §15, the pleasure-tinted object, “bathed in a rosy gleam.”30 But this objectifying apprehension of the feeling-sensation is, in Husserl words, “purely presentational”;31 we have an essentially new nonobjectifying mode of intention in liking and being pleased, that is, the intentional feelings that relate to the affectively colored, presented object. In his later theory of value-perception, a feeling or value-apperception takes the place of a purely presentative apprehension. The empirical apperception constitutes the factual content; the emotive-apperception, the acts of liking and disliking, constitutes the value-content of the object. This value-apperception is founded in the empirical apperception, just as the feeling-sensations are founded in the sensory contents. Here too, according to Husserl, value-perception is analogous to external perception in that it is a continuous, unitary consciousness in which empty components of feeling-apperception suitably pass over into feeling-plenitudes [Gefühlsfülle]. Husserl writes in a research manuscript from 1909/10: Just as a [perception] is an apprehending and meaning [meinendes] consciousness of a thing, the other is an apprehending and meaning consciousness of a value, and just as to the essence of the former belongs the possibility of unfolding as a synthetically continuous,

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varying [auseinandergehendes] consciousness, in which a unity is given in a unitary consciousness, the object as something identical unfolding itself and in which there proceeds the play of actual, ever new objective determinations or the transition from empty to full, from less complete to more complete givenness of these moments, and viceversa, so it is in the case of pleasure. The consciousness of pleasure [Gefallensbewusstsein], which is founded in object-consciousness, is a unitary consciousness and in an analogical sense it unfolds itself, gives itself etc.32

In the same manuscript Husserl also speaks of “hedonic identification” in addition to the presenting-intellective one.33 The different analyses and descriptions that Husserl undertook in research manuscripts concerning value-apperception are in no way unified and they are full of problems, which above all concern the application of the content-apprehension schema and the feeling-character of value-perception as well as its relationship to emotional affects [Gefühlsaffekten], which Husserl called authentic feelings in a manuscript from 1911.34 In spite of these difficulties in the phenomenological account of sentient value-apperception, Husserl held fast to the analogy between the sentient experience of values and perception. Husserl writes in his lectures on ethics from 1920: “Just as sensory data are the material [Material] for the experience that we call the perceptual experience of things with their immanent thing-appearances, so are sensory feelings the material for our value-apperception, for the experiences in which we evaluatively grasp and enjoy, say, a melody or symphony, a poem, etc. in the unity of a synthetic feeling.”35 The theory of value-perception is Husserl’s attempt to demonstrate that in the sphere of the emotions, there is, analogous to perception, an achievement that gives an object. “In certain ways one must say,” writes Husserl in the lecture of 1908/09, “something also appears in value-acts; there appear value-objects and, to be sure, not merely objects having value but values as such. If we like something, then it is not just what is liked that appears, as it would appear if there had not been any liking but still the same founding act of objectification; rather, the liked stands before us as liked, or as the pleasing, the beautiful as beautiful, the good as good. We have appearances of the pleasing, appearances of beauty, appearances of the comfortable, etc.”36 How does the distinction between objectifying and nonobjectifying acts stand, if nonobjectifying acts also have appearances of objectivities that are specific to them? In response to this question, Husserl reverts to the terms

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of Logical Investigations. “Objectifying acts are,” he writes, “not complications of a consciousness that brings to mind an object and of taking a position [Stellungnahme] toward what is objectively known. The first would already be a full objectifying act. Conversely, the valuing act is just such a complication. An objectifying act is that which presents the object in an evaluative meaning [Meinen] and there the valuing is still present with it.”37 Therefore, paradoxically, it is only the nonobjectifying acts that have in themselves a relation to something objective, to wit, through the objectification that founds them. Although we can speak of an objectification’s relation-to [Beziehung-auf ] solely in a teleological-normative sense with respect to a relation of identity with other objectifying acts, the directedness of nonobjectifying acts indicates “something in the act itself enabling the founding of what manifests itself. . . . Thus, one can say in a more authentic sense that joy is directed to that which is presented, while we cannot actually say anything about an objectification.”38 The theory of value-perception, value-appearance, and valueapperception, however, now requires a revision of Logical Investigation’s understanding of nonobjectifying acts as act-qualities founded in objectifications. Now the nonobjectifying act of valuing is a founded apperception and no longer just a founded position-taking. The founded apperception, however, unlike the founded position-taking, is not directed to the object of the founding presentation but rather to its own object: “Evaluating acts are not directed to objects but to values. A value is nothing existent [nichts Seiendes]; a value is something related to being or nonbeing, yet it belongs to another dimension.”39 The directedness of nonobjectifying valuings then no longer seems to be so profoundly distinguished from objectifying perception and is more akin to other founded apprehensions, such as sign- or image-apprehension. Just as perception on its own is not yet cognitive reason, so a valueperception on its own is not yet evaluative and volitional reason. Cognitive reason is the reason of judgment, and the reason of judgment is existence-positing, doxic reason; it is a supposing that something exists or that something is composed in such and such a way. A value-perception as the analogue of external perception would certainly harmonize with an intellectualistic theory of reason. Specific [spezifische] thinking and knowing would be similarly built on external perception or value-perception: in the former case factual objects would be known, and in the latter value-objects would be known.

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The question of correctness [Recht] and of reason is properly directed to the spontaneous positings, the taking of positions by the ego [IchStellungnahmen]. For an intellectualist theory of reason there would only be one type of position-takings that is subordinate to the norms of correctness, namely, the positings of judgment. One can only rightfully speak of a pluralism and parallelism of types of reason if it is possible to distinguish among multiple basic types of position-takings. In addition to the theory of value-perception as an analogue of external perception and axiological determinations as analogues of sensory-factual determinations, we also find in Husserl’s phenomenology and theory of nonobjectifying acts the analogizing of (i) liking and willing with supposing in judgment and (ii) axiological and practical determinations with the modes of being [Seinsmodi]. “To the class of cognitive acts,” Husserl writes in his lectures of 1914, “stands opposed, as an essentially new class, the class of emotive acts, the acts of feeling, desiring, and willing that obviously divide themselves into closely related genera. Here, new basic types of position-takings appear, new types of supposing, of opining [Dafürhaltens].”40 The taking-asbeautiful [Für- schön-halten] and taking-as-good [Für-gut-halten] are analogous to taking-as-being [Für-seiend-halten] and taking-as-being-so in judgment. Thus, Husserl speaks more often of the widest concept of valuing, which encompasses all position-takings, even the doxic. All positiontakings are subordinate to conceptions of the “ought” [des Sollens]; in all cases one can pose the question of correctness, “and so, if you will, pose the question of value.”41 Valuing and willing are not knowing, predicating, and existence-positing. However, there is within all judging, preceding it, a valuing and a resoluteness in the sense of a position-taking, a voting [Votierens]. According to Husserl in his lectures of 1914, emotive- and volitional-acts are to be grasped as a type of existence-modalization [Seinsmodalisierung], “albeit in a new dimension.”42 The analogizing of the emotive and volitional acts with doxic theses also has priority in Ideas I. As in Logical Investigations, the analogy consists primarily in the modalizations of the originary form of doxa, that is supposing, doubting, questioning, and so on. The concept of thesis extends over all spheres of acts. Besides the doxic theses, we find theses of liking and willing. With respect to the noema, there corresponds to each positing a noematic character. The “possible” and “questionable,” like the “likeable” and “obligatory” [gesollt] are not predicates of reflection but characters, which we grasp in the object as such. Each thetic act-character—whether it is doxic, evaluative, or volitional—bears within itself a positionality; it is potentially existence-positing. “It is an essential law that every thesis of whatever genus,

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by virtue of doxic characterizations belonging inalienably to its essence, can be transformed into current, doxic positing. A positional act posits, but in whatever ‘quality’ it posits, it also posits doxically; whatever is posited by it in other modes is also posited as being, only not currently.”43 The noetic liking-thesis is correlated to the noematic character of “likeable.” If the doxic potentiality of this liking-thesis is transformed into an actual doxic positing, then “likeable” is predicated of the object. In this way, according to Husserl, each thesis “not only constitutes new noematic characters but rather, with their addition, new existent objects are constituted eo ipso for consciousness. Corresponding to the noematic characters are predicable characters in the object possessing a sense, and these are actual and not merely noematically modified predicables.”44 In this sense, the emotiveand volitional acts are “necessary sources of dif ferent regions of being and, with this, also sources of the relevant ontologies. For example, evaluative consciousness constitutes, over against the mere world of things, a new kind of ‘axiological’ objectivity [Gegenständlichkeit], a ‘being’ of a new region, insofar as, precisely by means of the essence of the evaluating consciousness in general, actual [aktuelle] doxic theses are prefigured as ideal possibilities that bring into relief objectivities with a new kind of content— values—as ‘meant’ in the evaluating consciousness.”45 Apprehending emotive and volitional acts as theses analogous to existence-theses and correlatively apprehending the axiological and practical determinations as “modalities of being in an extremely extended sense” is, however, just as inadequate as the theory concerning value-perception as the analogue of external perception when it comes to being able to speak of an axiological and practical reason that would be parallel and analogous to cognitive reason.46 The variations of doxic ur-theses—supposing, questioning, doubting, and so on—refer back (with respect to their rational justification) to a determinate ground of justification pertaining to their basic form [Grundform]: for instance, supposing is rational if something speaks in favor of the doxic ur-thesis. The justification of doxic ur-theses in turn lies within intuition, in its sense fulfilled through intuition. In the framework of Husserl’s phenomenological theory of reason, the question concerning how intuition justifies emotive- and volitional-theses cannot be avoided. Constitution in the genuine sense is not a matter of thesis but of apperception. As merely thetic characters, axiological and practical determinations would not be genuine object-determinations. At one point in Ideas I, in §116, Husserl seems to take this into account. Unfortunately, without further phenomenological exposition, Husserl declares in relation to the noematic correlates of the feeling and willing noeses:

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On the one hand, there are new characters that are analogous to the modes of belief but at the same time they possess in their new content the possibility of being doxologically posited. On the other hand, new kinds of “construals” are also combined with the new kinds of inherent aspects; a new sense is constituted, one that is founded on that of the underlying noesis, while at the same time encompassing it. The new sense brings a totally new dimension of sense into play here. Constituted with it are no new determining parts of the mere “things,” but instead values of those “things,” values or, better, concrete value-objects, e.g., beauty and ugliness, goodness and badness, the object of use, the artwork, the machine, the book, the action, the deed, and so forth.47

Our everyday environment, the world in which we live, is for us neither solely nor primarily a world of mere things. “In ordinary life we have nothing whatever to do with natural Objects. What we take as things are pictures, statues, gardens, houses, tables, clothes, tools etc. These are all value-objects of various kinds, use-objects, practical-objects. They are not objects that can be found in natural science.”48 We can of course orient ourselves to these value-objects, use-objects, and practical objects in a theoretical-knowing manner; we can turn them into objects placed in the subject-position of a propositional judgment. Yet a purely theoreticalcognitive understanding would lack any axiological and practical objects. Only for a feeling and willing being [Wesen] are there such objects. In feeling and willing a new dimension is constituted as well as ever-new layers of determination, a dimension opposed to that of factual-natural properties. It is clear that without further supplementation, the theory of valueperception cannot be joined to the theory of liking- and willing-theses, as the analogy with the relationship between perception and judgment would have it; nevertheless, Husserl could only abandon the method of analogy at the risk of compromising the unity of the concepts of reason and constitution. In spite of the precarious situation of emotive and volitional intentionality between the objectifications that found them and the objectifications they found in turn, Husserl could not but attempt to bring the distinction between intention and fulfillment regarding intellective acts to bear upon nonobjectifying acts, a distinction that makes the constitution of emotive and volitional objects possible. Translated by Patrick Eldridge

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Notes 1. See Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, ed. U. Melle (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 62–63. 2. Husserl, 205. [All English translations of Husserl’s works are mine unless other wise noted.—PE] 3. Husserl, 333. 4. Husserl, 68. 5. Husserl, 68. 6. Husserl, 37. 7. Husserl, 205–206. 8. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. K. Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 291 [translated by D. Dahlstrom as Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2014), 251]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen I. 9. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. U. Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 430 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, ed. D. Moran, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2001), 2:121–122]. 10. Husserl, 429 [2:121]. 11. Husserl, 624 [2:245]. 12. Husserl, 695 [2:296]. 13. Husserl, 515 [2:167]. 14. [The word belief appears in English in the original article.—PE] 15. Husserl, 737, 781 [2:325 and Edmund Husserl, “Selbstanzeige,” translated by P. Bossert and C. Peters in Introduction to the Logical Investigations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 6–7]. 16. Husserl, 585 [2:218]. 17. “Positing has its original ground of legitimacy in originary givenness.” Cf. Ideen I, 316 [272]. 18. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 334. 19. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:404 [2:108]. 20. Husserl, 585 [2:218]. 21. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Erster Band, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed. E. Holenstein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975) [translated by J. N. Findlay as “Prolegomena to Pure Logic,” in Logical Investigations, ed. D. Moran, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2001), 1:51–247].

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22. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 254. 23. Husserl, 262. 24. Husserl, 261. 25. Husserl, 261. 26. Husserl, 261. 27. Husserl, 268. 28. Husserl, 277. 29. Husserl, 277. 30. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:408 [2:110]. 31. Husserl, 409 [2:111]. 32. Ms. A VI 7, 11a/b. 33. Ms. A VI 7, 10a. 34. “What I have cared to denote as the act of liking in my older and newer manuscripts, is the spontaneous ‘holding for valuable’ [Für- werthalten] that ‘emanates from the ego,’ value-perception, or value-positing. This is opposed to the ‘being-affected-by-the-object [Durch-das-objektAffiziertwerden] emanating from the object,’ the affect of pleasure or joy, the authentic feeling, which is enjoyed or suffered” (Ms. A VI 8 I, 88a). 35. Ms. F I 28, 83b. 36. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, 323. 37. Husserl, 338. 38. Husserl, 336. 39. Husserl, 339–340. 40. Husserl, 59–60. 41. Husserl, 62. 42. Husserl, 105. 43. Husserl, Ideen I, 270 [233]. 44. Husserl, 243 [209]. 45. Husserl, 272 [234]. 46. Husserl, 260 [224]. 47. Husserl, 266–267 [229–230]. 48. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. M.Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 27 [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 29].

The Phenomenology of Time Following Husserl Klaus Held

The double meaning in the title of this essay is intentional. The following reflections aim to show how a phenomenology that, in searching for the original idea of a phenomenological philosophy, goes beyond Husserl (and which, in this sense, follows Husserl) must pose the problem of time. I will also touch upon Husserl’s work, but this essay does not “follow Husserl” in the sense of providing an exposition of the problem of time in Husserl’s work.1 The original idea of phenomenology becomes visible when we commence our reflections with the intention that allowed Husserl to discover his own path for thinking. This intention resides in his goal of overcoming the prejudicial biases in philosophy’s vacillation between the extreme one-sidedness of psychologism and that of a pseudo-Platonic objectivism.2 The original insight that set Husserl on this path was the discovery of the phenomenal field of modes of givenness.3 The phenomenal field, the realm of the appearing-of-what-appears, forms a “between”4 that from the start demolishes the Cartesian dualism of an objective outer world and a subjective inner world.5 Thus, neither the “objective time” of events in the world confronting us nor the time that is often supposed to be merely 209

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“subjective time” can be the proper theme of a phenomenological analysis of time. Instead, the proper theme is the time that measures the phenomenal field in its fluctuation.6 It seems, however, that as soon as Husserl had gained access to the dimension of the “between,” he immediately blocked it with his Cartesian self-interpretation,7 and this is true as well for his exposition of the problem of time. In the first place, the latter is posed as a problem of “innertime consciousness” in its “immanence.” Second, the concrete analysis remains oriented toward the consciousness of a “transcendent object.” These objections are justified, but such a broad-brushed critique is unhelpful. First, I try to make the critique more precise by reorienting Husserl’s original insight in order to prepare a phenomenological analysis of time more in keeping with his aforementioned insight. Next, I outline the approach to such an analysis. Finally, I suggest what this analysis implies for a phenomenology understood, as in Husserl, as a theory of constitution. The “immanence of consciousness” of which Husserl speaks in the context of his Cartesian self-interpretation is accessible in reflection. This reflection has the basic function of enabling the disclosure of the phenomenal field of modes of givenness. To begin, then, we should recall the simple sense of reflection. In the prephilosophical attitude, a person apprehends what confronts him as something present “in-itself”—that is, as something existent—while being unconcerned about whether and how it is given or appears from moment to moment. He is, as Husserl puts it, totally infatuated with this initself. He skips over its current appearance-for-him, although he is aware, albeit unthematically, of the relativity to himself of what, as an experiencing subject, he encounters. In a broad sense, the in-itself appears before him thematically as an identity. It so appears because it differentiates itself from the multiplicity of its actual or possible modes of givenness or appearance. The superiority of the person engaged in phenomenological reflection over the person in the natural attitude consists solely in his seeing that the identical in-itself, taken for granted in the natural attitude, is a for-him. This is the case because the identity of the current in-itself receives its concrete determinacy only from its relatedness to an actual multiplicity of ways of appearing-for-the-thinker. In the phenomenological epochē, the one reflecting does not participate in the belief in the encountered identity’s being-in-itself, but that does not mean that he holds such a belief to be illegitimate. It means only that he thematizes the manifold

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of modes of givenness or modes of appearing, which remain unthematized for the person in the natu ral attitude, in their function of mediating identity.8 It is clear, even from this elementary phenomenological reflection, that the manifold of appearances is the fundamental theme of phenomenology. The discovery—as a consequence of this reflection—of the sphere of appearances can be fruitful insofar as the analysis of individual cases sheds light on the ways in which dif ferent manifolds of modes of givenness function as conditions for the natural-attitude encounter of identities corresponding to the experiencing of manifolds and, thereby, for encountering the different “objectivities” (in the widest sense of the term) that are thought of as existent in themselves. Husserl refers to this as constitutional analysis. In this respect, the manifold of appearances has the character of the “between” mentioned at the beginning, since one and the same appearing functions constitutively as an appearing-of and an appearing-for. As appearing-of, the modes of givenness are the manifold of determinations in which the existent meant as an in-itself presents itself from itself. As appearing-for, they are modes of enacting the experience (understood in the broadest sense) through which the individual who encounters something in the world orients himself toward the identity he encounters. As modes of enactment, the modes of appearance are possibilities for the ability to effect something and, in this sense, they are, as Husserl puts it, “capabilities” [Vermöglichkeiten]. The possibilities for effecting something can also be the present determination’s modes of self-presentation, since in prephilosophical life they are not thematized as subjective potentialities. Rather, they basically act as conditions of identity that remain unthematized. In the passage through these possibilities, unthematized by the agent, the agent focuses [polarisiert] his attention on the identical in-itself. Insofar as the in-itself is given to an agent only when he steps beyond the sphere of the manifold of appearances and moves toward identity, it may to that extent be called “transcendent.” Were Husserl, in contrast with transcendence so understood, now to designate the sphere of appearance as “immanence,” such a linguistic usage could, perhaps, be justified. However, Husserl does not draw the previous distinction in terms of the difference between the sphere of appearances and the supposed identity. Instead, he makes a Cartesian move and draws the distinction in terms of the difference between the agent and the supposed identity. That is, the dimension of appearing is relocated to the “interior” of the agent and is now called immanent in this sense. Herein lies Husserl’s decisive self-misunderstanding,

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by virtue of which an unbiased entry into the phenomenal dimension he discovered— and thereby also to the temporality of this dimension—is made difficult and in many ways concealed. The following briefly sketches the mistake in this Cartesian self-interpretation. By transcending the unthematically functioning phenomenal sphere, the identity that is thematic acquires the character of irreality or ideality.9 It appears as an identity that in principle is never grasped immediately in its determinacy, since the determination in which it presents itself is present in the manifold of the transcended phenomenal sphere. By contrast, the agent is aware—though unthematically—of the coincidence of the appearing-of and the appearing-for in the immanence of this sphere. Therefore, he is anxious to transfer the transcendence of the thematized identity into the immanence of this sphere whose unthematized functioning is indifferent to the self-presenting of the present determination and to the enacting of possibility.10 But in the transition of thematicity into functional unthematicity, the thing encountered loses its character as a thing appearing as an identity that can be secured as something existing in itself. The agent must experience the fact that the thematizing identification and the unthematically functioning appearance can never be brought into alignment. Owing to the unthematicity of the appearing, however, the incongruence itself remains unthematic. Hence, he resorts to a constantly renewed, thematizing identification with which he pursues the functioning appearing. However, he can never overtake it, since this always already anticipates thematicity. In this sense, experiential life is suffused by a pulling [Gespanntheit] in the direction of evidence, a primordial tendency to locate thematizing in the appearing itself, which thematizing, however, precisely thereby withdraws.11 Husserl has this irresolvable pull [Gespanntheit] in mind when he designates intentionality as the basic condition of conscious life experiencing the world. In the intentional relaxation focused on identity the agent experiences himself as the one who must bear this stretching [Spannung], first of all in activity or spontaneity, wherein he focuses [polarisiert] his attention through the manifold of appearances to an identical in-itself such that he himself emerges as something like an identical anti-pole to the object-pole. In other words, with the constitution of the identical objectivity, a persisting and stable identity of the agent— even if in a dif ferent manner from that of the objectivity—is for the first time constituted. This means, however, that the duality of the identity-poles object and ego is by no means the basic situation that phenomenological reflection encounters. It is, therefore, a misunderstanding to conceive the outline of the phenomenological problematic

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on the basis of the Cartesian difference between the two poles of subject and object. Since the unthematically functioning manifold of appearances is also an enactment of possibilities, one must not conclude that the “immanence” of this sphere must be construed, over against the transcendent identity, as an immanence-in-the-subject. For only in the dimension of the fundamental accord between enactment and presenting-itself can the intentional tension [Gespanntheit] establish itself. In this tension, the subject emerges as a pole of enacting which has the object as its opposite. Thus, in an analysis of its constitution, the subject is to be explained by the dimension of appearances and not conversely.12 The possibility of the distinction, on the basis of which we reflectively interpret the appearing as the indifference or accommodation of two events—the self-revelation of determination and the enactment of possibility— arises first through the separation of the identity-poles: the entity-in-itself and the agent. This polarization presupposes, however, the dimension of the manifold of appearances, which is transcended in the double-poled positing of identity and which, consequently, intentionally mediates between the poles. Only because the phenomenal field is a constitutive ground and intentional center could its thematizing delineate the concrete path on which Husserl got to the bottom of the prejudicial vacillation between psychologism and objectivism mentioned at the outset. Husserl’s divergence from the primacy of the dimension of appearance— the Cartesian relocation of the appearing to subjective immanence— can be explained by the fact that he had already allowed himself to be led astray by the reflection whose thematizing of appearing as appearing had to be indubitable. In this reflection, the one reflecting and the subject of intentionality—the agent of the ways of being given as his own capacities— are identical; hence, Husserl could become addicted to the fascination with Cartesian self-certainty and thereby resort to the model of interpreting modes of givenness as cogitationes, their agent as ego cogito and the object-pole as cogitatum. Since only the ego cogito comes into consideration as the bearer of such a fundamental intentional structure, the phenomenological exploration of the phenomenal field must appear as an unfolding of a universal “egology,” and the return to the ground of this field, that is, the inquiry into its temporality, must appear as a progressively deeper egological reflection. Husserl’s original, normative scientific ideal of presuppositionlessness, which he held right to the end, was superimposed on the Cartesian scientific ideal of an ultimate grounding in self-certainty. On Husserl’s Cartesian view, the problem of time presents itself in the unpublished analyses from the 1930s as a question of, so to speak, a

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radically ego-focused self-reflection:13 the agent of the appearing tries in a certain way to catch himself in his own activity—in his “I function,” as Husserl says— and thereby discovers that he can always only chase himself in his self-thematizing. In this belatedness (reflection as a retrospective awareness) three things are assumed: (1) the differentiation of the agent from himself, through which he is able to thematize himself—or “ontify” himself, as Husserl says; (2) the unity of the agent with himself, through which he can identify himself with himself in the self-thematization; and (3) the movement of unity-with-oneself in the difference-with-oneself. To begin with the third, Husserl infers from this a pre-objective “flow”: as preobjective, this flow cannot be a manifold of temporal loci but rather, in accord with the second point, a standing and solitary unity, that is, a present. However, per the first point, since the possibility of selfthematization—the “incipient reflection” (as Brand has aptly put it14)— must be contained in this standing unity, the present is determined at once as something standing as one and as streaming. In other words, it is determined as something that becomes manifold in its motion, as a pre- objective “community with itself,” and in this sense as a “living present.” This should be the primordial form of the egological enactment of appearances and thereby the ground of all constitution. It seems apparent to me that the living present, so understood, is a reconstruction and not phenomenologically intuitable. The construction itself consists at root in the fact that the aporia of a thinking that wants ultimately to ground itself in the iterated reflection of the ego is elevated to the solution to problems that, so formulated, are insoluble.15 But the aporetics of the living present arises in Husserl’s work only because and so long as phenomenological reflection is misunderstood as a Cartesian attempt at a fundamental grounding in egoicality. The entanglement in this aporetics can be undone in a reorientation of this reflection toward the original phenomenological insight. This insight already made clear that the identity of the agent is to be explained by the dimension of the appearing and not vice versa. The “depth dimension” of the living present, in which it questions phenomenology in return, is consequently not to be determined primarily as a unity of the “I function,” but as a unity of the dimension of appearing. The identity of the “I function” is first realized in the genesis of a constituting in the intentional opposition to an actively generated identity of an objective initself. This opposition, however, presupposes a pre-objective passivity. Therefore, the analysis of the living present as a regressive inquiry into this passivity cannot— contrary to Husserl’s self-interpretation—be a re-

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flection on egoicality. Hence, it would be improper to characterize the primordial time of the living present as a subjective time, which obviously does not mean that it is an objective time. It is rather—as supposed from the beginning—the dimensional character of the phenomenal field itself. This claim sounds strange given the fact that ever since the Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Inner-Time Husserl expressly declared “inner-time consciousness”—in contrast to objective time—as the theme of the phenomenological analysis of time. In fact, Husserl always portrayed “authentic time” as something subjective, that is, as a form of the “stream” of cogitationes. This subjectivity of time seems initially to confirm itself in the reflection on the living present. Aside from Husserl’s Cartesian self-misunderstanding, however, nothing compels us to interpret the primordial passivity of this present as a weakened activity or spontaneity on the part of the one reflecting on his own living present. If—freed from this interpretation— one understands it as a movement of the unthematized, functioning phenomenal field, then it becomes clear, precisely through the return to the living present, that time as a phenomenological theme is something pre-subjective. Husserl’s analyses of the living present also bring to light that he declares the egoic agent as a standing ego-pole to be something itself genet ically constituted.16 With this insight the Cartesian spell is broken; Husserl himself, however, did not further develop the consequences of this. The following shows how the phenomenological analysis of time, which addressed the consciousness of inner-time, can, as consequence of the lastnamed insight and in an immanent critique of Husserl’s original disclosure of the phenomenal field, lead to something beyond itself. The manifold of modes of givenness differentiates itself from every selfidentical agent as well as from the identical in-itself in having the character of multiplicity. The constitution of encountered identities should be “explained” by this multiplicity, since, according to Husserl, phenomenology as a theory of constitution that returns to the field of the modes of givenness is “the only actual and genuine way of explaining, of making intelligible.”17 Now multiplicity can only explain identity if it can show that the latter is—in whatever manner—already contained in the former. In accord with the already noted connection of basic phenomenological reflection to the natu ral attitude’s naïve, straightforward belief in objects, constitutive phenomenology begins with an explanation of the occurrence of an objective, identical in-itself. If the unity of the object (in the widest sense of the word) is now somehow to be made intelligible by the manifold

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of the phenomenal field, then there must already be unity in this field. Husserl claims that this unity is originally found in nothing other than its dimensional constitution [Verfasstheit], that is, in its temporality. More precisely, the modes of givenness of an identical in-itself are gathered in the unity of a single present correlative therewith. Husserl’s attention is thus turned toward the present as it is understood from his early analyses of time up to his later work. Accordingly, the fundamental question to be directed phenomenologically to the phenomenal present [Erscheinungsgegenwart] is wherein this unity consists and how it can have a unifying function, first, for the identical in-itself and then, second, for the identity of the agent. How does the identical in-itself obtain its unity from the unity of the present of the field of modes of givenness? Husserl answers that what confronts us becomes identifiable, that is, first becomes something over against me that I encounter, by virtue of its passage through the present of the phenomenal field. Hence, provided something or other appears to have an objective character for me— that is, appears as an identical something that I, regardless of my enactment, believe to be something existing (transcendent)—it is not directly given in an unmediated present. First and foremost, the remembered and the expected—more generally, things made present [Vergegenwärtigt]—are not given in an unmediated present. For reasons I cannot go into here,18 Husserl cites memory as the primordial form and basic model of making something present [Vergegenwärtigung]. How does memory first enable unmediated givenness in the passage through the phenomenal field that Husserl and Heidegger both term “presencing”? The answer can be found in Husserl’s well-known analysis of retention [Retentionalität]. Presencing is intrinsically dimensioned, that is, moved and stretched, such that the consciousness of an absolutely unmediated primal givenness in the momentary Now—the primal impression—is accompanied in the same momentary Now by a continuous implicationnexus of retentions, that is, by embedded near-memories [ineinandergeschachtelten Nah-Errinerungen] in which consciousness at once lets the given unthematically slip away from the primal impression and retains it therein. To more clearly demarcate retention as unmediated memory Husserl refers to memory as “recollection.” By virtue of the capacity of retentionally formed horizons to be awakened, anything that has once confronted me in a presentation can be recalled as an identity. In the constitution of what can be recalled, the ceaselessly proceeding flow of presentations generally congeals into a succession of identifiable Nows. The

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transcendence of an identical thing, that is, its supposed subject-irrelative existence, rests fundamentally on a making-present [Vergenwärtigung]. That is, this transcendence is conditioned by the fact that the supposed in-itself as such is released from primal presencing, but in this—in the preobjective field of the unity of primal impression and retention— a temporal index of the present has in a certain way been preserved. In this way, the present contrasts itself in its identity with the manifold of the phenomenal field of presentation and can thus appear in the independence of something existing in-itself. In brief, for Husserl the basic form of the identity of the in-itself is the capacity of the Now to make itself present again, and this, for its part, is an objectification of the form of the present and, by extension, the form of the identity of a current presencing. In this sense, the primordial constitution of objectivity in general takes place in innertime consciousness.19 And so the decisive question is: what guarantees the unity of the presentation itself? Why is it that presentation always takes place in the present, in regard to which what is made present [das Vergegenwärtigte] can in general appear only as attributable to a determined pre sent and thereby as identifiable? This question is possible only through a radicalizing of the epoché. In On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), Husserl showed that the condition of the possibility for this question is the occurrence of the identity meant as transcendent in the presentation of the pregiven objective identity. From a constitutive and analytic perspective, to “explain”—in the sense of the previously introduced quotation from Husserl—means, for the constitution of time, to take as a guiding clue what is objectively constituted as an entity in objective time in order to ask how it comes to pass when it—that is, what was presupposed with the choice of the guiding clue as self-evident—in fact comes to pass. The answer to this question belongs in static phenomenology as a “phenomenology of guiding clues.”20 With this question phenomenology still lets itself be guided by the intentionality of the natu ral attitude. To explain intentional transcending— conceived more radically21—from a constitutive and theoretical perspective means to ask about the sufficient reason for the fact that the phenomenal field can in general be intentionally transcended toward an objectivity meant as in-itself. Genetic phenomenology yields the answer to this question. The radically genetic account may no longer use the objectively intended identity as a guiding clue; instead, the unity that makes possible such an identity must reveal itself purely in reference to the phenomenal field. Thus, genetic phenomenology at root does nothing other

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than exhibit the origin of intentionality. If the unity of the phenomenal dimension is nothing other than its temporality and if phenomenology in its final form as a theory of genetic constitution is in the end nothing other than the return to this temporality as the basis of the account, then it is manifest that, as Husserl has himself said in Crisis, that “the constitution of every level and sort of entity is a temporalization.”22 If the phenomenal present is to accomplish what genetic phenomenology requires, then the individual presentational presents [Gegenwärtigungsgegenwarten] must in their flowing movement possess some pre-objective unity, that is, a particular determination on the basis of which we can separate them from one another without recourse to the entity-in-itself objectively known in them. According to both the early Husserlian analyses of time as well as the later genetic analyses, the respective primal impression provides them this determination— and thus the givenness of something originally and immediately given in the presentation. This primal impression should form the intersection between the retentional and corresponding protentional (unthematized near-expectant) consciousnesses belonging to the presentational consciousness [Gegewärtigungsbewusstseins]. This consciousness should be centered in the primal impression, that is, its movement should be at once brought to a standstill and unified in this manner. It is easy to recognize, however, the circularity of this explanation. Husserl understands the temporality—thus, dimensionality in the sense of the primordial, internally moved extension—of the presentation as its form, that is, as that by which the absolute “Heraclitean flux” of the manifold of appearances possesses its unity.23 The constitutively fundamental identity of what is “made present,” of what transcends, is made intelligible by the present understood as a formal unity. Only insofar as this—as a consequence of the presentation—has genet ically preserved its formal, that is to say temporal, identity can it appear to consciousness. The formal identity of the present cannot, therefore, be due to the identity of such a material [inhaltlich] determination. Husserl attributes this precisely to primal impression. In primal impression, a pre-objective, yet nevertheless material (“hyletic”), determination is given to the presenting consciousness. This determination is for that reason declared to be a “datum of sensation.” “Sensation” is there the alias for the oxymoronic pre-objective having of an object. And “datum” is the alias for the “flake” of material identity that from outside “snows” into the mere formality of the pure movement of presencing. Husserl himself saw the untenability of such a theory of data,24

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but he still did not abandon the discussion of primal impression in his late manuscripts. He did drop the sensualistic construct of quantizing the hyletic data given to the pure flow of consciousness but not the idea that the pre sentational flow owes its unity, which brings it to a standstill, to something like a “primal impulse” as a preformation of material determinateness.25 This primal impulse functions, in particular, as a unifier by centering around itself the presentational present, that is, the living, not yet objectified flow of retention and protention. This idea presupposes that within the breadth of the field of the present a limit-point of the most current actuality allows itself to be distinguished. To be sure, it is undeniable (1) that a person reflecting on the present can ask what in this present is, in the strongest sense, actually now, and (2) that a person can reduce any field of presence infinitesimally to a limit point of actuality. Yet with this reduction one always avails oneself— even if, in comparison with the theory of hyletic data, in a more covert form—of the identity of a transcendent object, which identity must first be explained. The Now is itself a traversable continuum and thus is not originally a boundary but a number, as Aristotle had already defined time. For this reason, the reduction to a limit-point of actuality never comes to an end. Only in the Now as the limit of movement can the movement of presentation, as proposed in the theory of the primal impression, be brought to a halt as a unity. One can speak meaningfully of the Now as a limit only in relation to an already objectified temporal duration that one presents as divided into two partial phases wherein the punctual Now marks the place where it is divided. The objective temporal duration, in which such Nows are distinguishable as points in time, constitutes itself first of all in the traversable continuity of the field of presence, while retention makes possible the consciousness of the form of identity of such temporal points. Therefore, in speaking of primal impression, even after the retraction of the doctrine of sensory data, there is already presupposed the first thing needing explication, namely, the original genesis of an “objective” unity. One cannot avoid a petitio principii even if one says that the primalimpressional impulse starts not with an object existing in objective time but with the agent of the presencing. Since the impulse is supposed to have a unifying function for the present of this presencing, the impulse-giving presencing is for its part utilized as an identical. Hence, instead of the “objective” unity of the object-pole, it is the unity of the ego as an enactmentpole that is now tacitly presupposed. But, as noted earlier, this pole-identity requires a genetic constitution referring back to the present unity of the

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dimension of appearances. Neither an affection of the presentation by an impression coming from without nor a self-affection by an identity remaining within lends itself to provide its unity qua present. The phenomenological analysis falters here, because it either orients itself directly toward the relation to the object or, at the very least, remains indirectly oriented toward it through the presupposed idea of the enactment-pole that can appear only opposite an object. Labeling the genet ically original presencing as “pre-objective” does not help, as its present unity—however hidden it may be—is derived from an impulse in an original impression or a self-affection, or it is never problematized as a unity at all. Consequently, we can make headway only if we succeed in exposing the presuppositions by which the construction of a primal impression or self-affection imposes itself and by suitably replacing them. The introduction of a pre-objective identity-impulse is necessitated by the fact that the unity that grants priority to the movement of presencing is conceived as something distinct from this movement; the form of “Heraclitean” flowing and its affective-impressional-hyletic content as what stands in place are distinguished. Accordingly, it appears one can continue the analysis fruitfully only if one does not make this distinction.26 On the other hand, the distinctions between form and content and between standing and streaming are attempts to comprehend more precisely the difference between unity and multiplicity in relation to the present of presencing. Nor should one deny this distinction, for on it rests the distinguishability of modes of givenness and the objective in-itself. To account for the identity of the phenomenal field’s in-itself, the analysis must show a unity-inthe-moved-multiplicity for this field itself and thus determine more precisely the “vitality [Lebendigkeit]” of the phenomenal present. The distinction between unity and multiplicity, which phenomenological reflection at first seeks to grasp in the distinctions between form and content or standing and flowing, conveys itself in the “vitality” of the living present and in this sense disappears therein. But it reappears in a different way as the difference between form and content. The living present, in which the present shall constitute itself genet ically and to which the transcendent owes its identity in the making present, must, as the genetic ground of this plurality, differentiate itself from the presents capable of making present these plurals; that is, it must be uniquely one. From a phenomenological point of view, however, this cannot mean that, in its uniqueness, it would be only a notional, reconstructed principle of possibility. And it is not such a principle, since at every moment we experience the fact that in every one of the many phenomenal presents in which

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the world confronts us, one appearing—the unthematic concurrence of the enactment of possibility and the self-manifestation of an existing determination—is operative. The one and only dimension of this single concurrence is the living present. Thus, one must say that this unique present governs or permeates the many presents in some way. The many phenomenal presents differentiate themselves through the multiplicity of self-presentations of each different determination, that is, through their materiality [Inhaltlichkeit]. Consequently, it seems that the form of the present must be the uniquely single present as distinct from this materially conditioned difference. Accordingly, the difference between unity and multiplicity in the phenomenological analysis of the present is inescapably to be grasped with the help of the reflective concepts of “form” and “content.” Nevertheless, should the completely untenable notion of a primalimpressional, primal-affective impulse or presentational center be held at a distance, it is still advisable initially to verify separately that both the form and the content of the presentational field possess the posited character of unity-in-multiplicity. This further analysis, therefore, must first thematize the unique present as the form of the many phenomenal presents, and it will have to make clear that the constant “continuum” of the flowing multiplicity in each phenomenal present can also be understood without recourse to something like primal impression as a standing unity. Second, we must investigate how the par tic u lar individual presents differentiate themselves materially and in this way form unities. The problem of understanding them as a unity-in-multiplicity arises with respect to their materiality as well as their form. That is, these unities are no longer to be relocated into a primal-impressional, primordial point of origin, whereby their unity is determined under an abstraction from the flowing manifold; rather the task is to show just how the identity of the content encompasses this multiplicity. It must come to light through this double verification of concrete unity-in-multiplicity for the unique living present and the many particular presents that the problematic, reflectively conceived distinction between form and content, which has hitherto been retained, becomes obsolete: insofar as there is nothing other than unity-in-multiplicity on both sides, they must coincide. First, the form of the continuous stream in the individual present must itself be determined as a unity. Hence, making no use of the auxiliary structure of the primal-impressional, presentation-centering original point entails abandoning the tripartite Husserlian articulation into primal impression, retention, and protention. By all appearances, the latter two

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remain—the keeping-hold-of that allows things to slip away and the closing-in-on that keeps things at a distance. Still, the formulations, with which we attempted to paraphrase what Husserl meant by the terms retention and protention, show that the terms (as understood by Husserl) are related to the centering, “actual” Now of primal impression. The retentional holding-on is a holding fast at the place of this Now, and protentional closing-in-on is a drawing into the place of this Now. And this Now is equally the relational place where the retentional letting-slip-away and the protentional closing-in-on are accomplished. It is not done, therefore, with a simple amputation of the primal impression; the movements that Husserl has determined as retention and protention must be other wise interpreted. Coming and going, the two characteristics of time, are experienced in the present itself in the form of retention and protention; in the consciousness of internal time, we are aware that the present of our presencing itself has a twofold slope: the transitoriness of the lived Now presents itself both as a constant depletion and as a constant advent. Husserl has in fact connected these two experiences of time with one another in the intersecting point of the primal impression, but he also separates them precisely by the manner of their connection. To speak figuratively, they appear as two radiating beams going in opposite directions but with a common origin. This image is also suggested by Husserl’s choice of words. It is no accident that the two compounds with -tention remind us of the basic word in Husserl’s phenomenology: “intention.” If one understands retention and protention in some form— even as a “preformation not yet making objective”—as modes of intention, and thus, as a mode of transcending self-unfolding (tendere) of the pole of enactment toward an identical initself, then from the start they will be ineffectual for the determination of the phenomenal dimension in its genetic originality. The tendere referred to with this concept can, in any case, also be other wise understood: as the tension [Gespanntheit], that is, the dimensionality of the present, in which intentionality first emerges. Then retention and protention suggest that the dimension of appearing is in itself extended— stretched, as it were—in two ways, namely, insofar as the slope of its transitoriness-in-itself is as much a coming as a going. It has, therefore, the character of ambiguity. Since Husserl described retention and protention as preformations of intention, he needed something like a primal impression as a relational pole for their directionality, and he distinguished their opposed directions by it. The presentational consciousness encompasses such protentional and retentional sectors. Thus, Husserl was unable to see that the movement of

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the phenomenal field, which appeared to him as retention and protention, could not properly be distinguished by such sectors of differently directed awareness. Rather, it is equivocal in its transitory entirety. The present appearing as a whole has in itself a countermoving extension. Husserl could not recognize this countermoving character, since he obscured the possibility of an unbiased description of the phenomenal field by importing, in a moment of Cartesian self-misunderstanding, the double polarity of the agent and the identical in-itself. That Husserl misunderstood the inherently countermoving dimension of the present of the appearing reveals itself more precisely in the way he interpreted retention and protention as primary memory and primary expectation. As a letting-slip-away-in-the-holding-on-to, retention should found forgetting, and as a holding-on-to-in-letting-slip-away, it should found recollection. The secretly guiding model for this entire interpretation is the attentiveness that an agent devotes to an object in question. Forgetting and remembering are basically construed as attentiveness that is, respectively, diminished in its grade of intensity or newly heightened. The corresponding metaphors are “sinking” and “waking.” Every thing that has passed through a present is, as retained, “available”; that is, latent memory is the basis of forgetting. A footnote in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time betrays the fact that Husserl thinks this way. In the footnote Husserl, in reference to the factual “limitation of the temporal field,” says: “idealiter a consciousness is probably even possible in which every thing remains preserved retentionally.”27 But with this, the double phenomenon of remembering and forgetting is fundamentally misunderstood. If one wants to lay down a founding relation between these two, then one must say exactly the opposite—that forgetting founds remembering. For it is only because the field of presence is fundamentally and not just factually limited that consciousness can return “again” to the content of a presentation. In this limit is reinforced the circumstance that what already appears in the presentation escapes, slipping into hiddenness. While what appears escapes, it can for the first time appear out of the resulting distance as something withdrawn and thereby capable of being objectively recalled.28 It is not a coincidence that the designation for what is historically identifiable, the “epoch,” has the fundamental sense of stopping, inhibiting, or restraining—thus, a withdrawing. A familiar phenomenon is that, in departing, that is, in a withdrawing, what confronts us first truly comes to givenness.29 The original movement of withdrawal productive of unity-in-discontinuity is the genuine ground for the fact that “the time of history, our own as well as our common

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history, in which we live and experience, [has] not the form of a continuous event as a succession of results in an uninterrupted causality.”30 This is not seen in Husserl’s notion of retention: precisely in the withdrawinginto-unavailability—thus, in the movement that makes possible the discontinuity of forgetfulness—lies the condition for the possibility of a memorial holding-on-to. The movement of appearing, of presentation, consists in this withdrawal. At the same time, however, the inner extension has the opposite character, which comes to the fore in Husserlian protention, but, again, only in a distorted way. Regarding protention, it has often and rightly been shown that Husserl at root understood this movement only as inverted retention, and correspondingly, that he once explicitly designated pre-anticipation as inverted memory.31 What gets lost here is unmistakably the peculiarity of the future, its surprising character. One says that the novel, in its unavailability, does not lend itself to the kind of anticipation one has concerning a reliable memory. But with this objection the critique still falls short; it still appears to be the case that what-is-held-on-to, thanks to the continuity of the retentional holding-on-to, is reliably available to our holdingon-to, whereas there is no such continuity as a bridge to the future. The entire idea is off kilter. As already shown, it is not the continuity of a retentional holding-on-to but rather the withdrawal that makes possible the discontinuity of forgetting that builds the bridge to the past. It is precisely this withdrawal that also deprives us, in another way, of the possibility of knowing our way around the available future. Husserl was unable to bring the surprising character of arrival in the phenomenal present into his analysis for the same reason that he misjudged the withdrawing character of this present. The slipping-away—understood as a withdrawal in contrast to its formulation as a consciousness of a retentional continuity—pervades the entirety of the presenting. It makes possible in equal measure the original connection to the past in forgetting and remembering as well as fundamental uncertainty in the face of the future. From this slipping-away we can now distinguish an arrival that, once again, is understood only inadequately by protention, but which likewise determines the entirety of the phenomenal present. When the withdrawal makes the entirety of the appearing unavailable—and precisely thereby makes the past “available” via the original forgetting, to wit, makes it identifiable out of the distance—this entails that the appearing as a self-presenting, a realizing of determination in the light of a self-revelation, fundamentally occurs in the countermovement to the continually waiting withdrawal, the departing into darkness, the self-occluding. This being the case, the ap-

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pearing as a self-revelation is to be characterized as a constantly unexpected arrival, and in this respect Husserl’s critics are right when they say that Husserl in the theory of protention has missed the future’s originally surprising character, the irresolvable novelty or unexpectedness of the originary character of the advent of presencing.32 The appearing’s proper movement, or dimensionality, lies in its countermovement of the appearing with the withdrawal. The appearing occurs not only in the countermovement but as withdrawal’s countermovement. The dimension of the phenomenal present—as first formulated—not only has the character of ambiguity, but it first and foremost gives dimension to the phenomenal field.33 As dimension, the appearing is a present. The guiding question was how this, as a form, possesses its unity-in-multiplicity. Insofar as the explanation was, with the assistance of the notion of primal impression and its implications, which remained hidden in Husserl, consistently held at distance, there came to light the actual unity through which the phenomenal present is a dimension: the countermotion of withdrawal and emergence of determination. The original, “formal” multiplicity of the appearing is a duality, namely, the contrariety of emergence and withdrawal. The relation between these opposites is itself one, and as extension it builds within itself the place of the phenomenal field. But with this result the initial question is not fully answered. The question was not only about the unity of a unique phenomenal present but also about how a phenomenal present isolates itself from other phenomenal presents as a par ticular unity. This question remains open, because the individual phenomenal presents apparently differentiate themselves through their respective contents and because there arises the task of showing the unity-in-multiplicity for the content of the presencing, a task that up to now has only been shown with respect to its form. The unsuccessful attempt to determine the particular phenomenal present through a primal-impressional point of origin or limit-point of the Now as a unity rests upon the fact that the objective directedness, which should initially be explained by the pure appearing, is secretly vindicated by it. To avoid this mistake, it is advisable, in contrast to Husserl’s analysis of the consciousness of time, not to start solely with experiences that possess the character of “having an object” sensu stricto. These are all kinds of perceptions. Since the intentional relation of agent—mode of givenness— identical-in-itself is present in these, Husserl made them the exemplar for phenomenological analysis. Because perception is, in the widest sense, a

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theoretical comportment, many critics of Husserl, from Heidegger’s analysis of the tool in Being and Time to Hans-Ulrich Hoche’s attempt at a purely noematic phenomenology, have pursued the path of orienting phenomenological analysis primarily toward praxis. Certain (though not all) actions by themselves display present unities— as Hoche, drawing on challenges from linguistic analysis, has argued34 — such that the attempt always to narrow the field of presence into an infinitesimal limit-point proves to be artificial, and the question about the “actual Now” proves to be senseless. This observation is valuable. It is to be examined only in two ways: first, what consequences does this have for the determination of the present of the appearing? If this observation bears no fruit for a philosophical explanation of appearing, then it is phenomenologically meaningless. Hence, one could certainly infer also that the phenomenological thematization of appearing does not have the universal philosophical meaning that is here ascribed to it. Whether this conclusion is unavoidable depends on the answer to the second question: does the return to everyday talk about actions suffice to explain satisfactorily the unity of the present that they possess? If it becomes apparent that a recourse to the present of appearing is necessary, then—at least in this respect—the universal significance of the phenomenological problematic is confirmed. According to Hoche, it is primarily goal- oriented or fruitful actions that, in our everyday understandings of them, display for a speaker’s consciousness a satisfactory determination of the present.35 The question as to whether such actions can be analyzed into partial actions that would then be “really Now” proves itself in common speech to be only an apparent problem because the artificial question about an action’s divisibility arises only when we speak abstractly of “action” in general and do not, by contrast, speak of a concrete action to which belongs a determinate “result” or “standard outcome,”36 to which corresponds a “rule” easily followed in the unadorned action.37 I can become clear about this rule in the reflective, verbal account I give in a determinate situation to a dialogue partner or myself.38 With these observations, the rug is certainly pulled out from under a “Now-point theory” of action.39 But this does not fully answer the question regarding what delimits a concrete action as a present unity. Each “result” or “standard outcome” of a concrete action can, as even Hoche admits, be understood (1) as a goal that along the way to realization is achieved by preceding partial goals or means, and (2) as just such a partial goal or means. So, judged not only from a reflective standpoint, but even

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for the naïve agent, every action can contain partial actions as independent natural unities, or can itself be contained as a partial action in a more comprehensive action. Thus, the present range of an action, and therewith its unity, comes about when the agent—whether in the naïve, nonobjectivating compliance with a rule or in the objectivating reflection on the action is irrelevant40 — cuts, as it were, the means-goal hierarchy. And this depends, as Hoche notes,41 on the particular situation. More concretely, however, this means that the situation tells me what counts for me as a current goal, that is, what appears worthwhile in my concrete action, what in the widest sense appears as good. Hence, the unity of an action depends on this appearing-as-worthwhile. The thematizing of appearing is, however, the subject of phenomenology. In perception and all intentional acts that build upon it or can be interpreted according to its model, the appearance of what is meant as identical occurs as the appearing of an entity. It takes place as an appearing-as-existing. In actions, by contrast, there occurs an appearing-as-good. Therein, something aimed at or something worthwhile—thus, a goal of action in the broadest sense— is thematically given as an intentional identity. The phenomenal field, however— corresponding to the aspects, perspectives, the self-presenting views, and so on in the perceptual model— shapes the situation that unthematically motivates the action. More precisely, it shapes the modes of “affective” being-involved or being-concerned in the transition through which it comes to a setting, a holding firm, a modification, or a canceling of the goals of action. The being-involved mentioned above—that is, the entire field of affect, if one wants to hold on to the misunderstood, traditional title—is in fact an appearing, a showing-itself, a revelation of determinateness, and is so as the accomplishment of possibilities. This was Heidegger’s great discovery in Being and Time concerning this field, achieved against the traditional interpretation of the truthlessness of affects. Heidegger conceived the phenomenal character of this field as disclosedness [Erschlossenheit]. This disclosedness, which is “moodful” in the broadest sense, indicates the shape of that appearing in which action is constituted.42 Thus, one finds here the material determinateness to which the current actional present owes its unity. This determinateness would now be distorted—precisely as the formal determinateness of the individual present—if one were to understand it from the outset as something intended as an identity, that is, understand the goal of action as an “object.” This does give the concrete, individual action its content, but this content constitutes itself in the pre-objective

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material nature of the respective “moodful” disclosedness. Thus, the question is, in what does this have its pre-objective unity? To whom does each current mood owe its determinateness? When we methodically and strictly deny recourse to objectivity, the only remaining response is that particular moods find their determining boundaries exclusively in one another. Whatever receives its determination purely from a difference existing in some relation to a second, and not through some sort of relation to a third, stands in contrast to this second thing; the being of A is then defined through the not-being of B and vice versa. Consequently, all par tic u lar moods must allow determination as variants of a primal polarity of opposed moods, and to this corresponds the result in the phenomenal field: if moods give rise to the concern that originally motivates action—that is, sets it into motion as an act—then they can only have this “effect” because in their horizon this or that appears as detrimental or beneficial to life. This horizon, however, must itself be determined by the polarity that is in this way objectified. This means that in the moodful disclosedness, the movement of vitality manifests itself in switching polar states. Life as an overall condition is considered a bridge between birth and death. Accordingly, the polarity of states, between which vitality moves as a crossing over, can be determined only by birth and death. The incline of this crossing is ambiguous: ascending from birth and descending into death. Let the one mode of the disclosedness of vitality be designated as natality,43 the other as mortality. Under the first mode fall all the moods in which the movement of life appears in the light of levity, facility, renewal, awakening, freshness and the like. Under the second form [we find] the moods in which the same movement is experienced as a descent, heaviness, pressure, depression, and so on. The bipolarity of moodful appearings itself provides the particular presents their original material determination (and this means unity), and it is, of course, by virtue of this that in each case a definite mood prevails in whose horizon a particular goal of action and, thereby, concrete unities of action can constitute themselves. Admittedly, the prevalence of one mood over its polar opposite requires elucidation. It could seem to mean that such states simply follow upon one another, extrinsically alternating. But this notion already presupposes the delimitability of the respective presents from one another, and it is this that must first be explained. The fundamental question is, through what does the particular present consolidate itself into a unity. The answer results from the fact that states that are determined only by their opposition to their opposite cannot, as already emphasized, limit

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one another merely externally in the sense that the termination of state A in the sequence of time is the beginning of state B. They must also determine one another internally; that is, the presence of state A in its entire inner extension or tension [Gespanntheit] is nothing other than the copresence of the opposing state and vice versa. Thus, the external sequence of these states is only an overturning of the inner relations of polarity between their presence and copresence, which governs all moodful presents. Every such present has the basic character of the ambiguity of its bipolar moods. The change of presents results from the fact that in each case one side of the ambiguity presses itself forward and the opposing side pushes back. But precisely therein does the copresent side retain its copresence such that it, for its part, stands ready to press forward. The inner unity of the phenomenal present consists in this tension. This is the inner extension, the movement as a unity-in-multiplicity. In short: the dimensionality of disclosedness—of the appearing as present. This already implies that the discussion of the question concerning the inner material unity of any phenomenal present leads to the same goal as the previously discussed question concerning the inner formal unity of the individual phenomenal present. The answers agree not only in [asserting] that the tension between two opposed sides of an ambiguity constitutes the dimensional tension of the unity of the present. The two sides themselves turn out— not yet in words but arguably in accordance with the matter at hand—to be the same on both paths of thought. When this is made visible, then the task originally posed is accomplished: the distinction between form and content in the determination of the phenomenal field as present is overcome. The formal ambiguity of the phenomenal present consists in the countermotion of emergence and withdrawal. These designated the slope, opposed in itself, of the traversing motion of the movement of the presentation. Such an opposition of the slope of movement, however, is also uncovered with the bipolarity of moodfulness. The movement here proves itself to be that of a life characterized by both natality and mortality. The material as a continual repetition of birth, as a life movement determined as a becoming born anew is nothing other than—in a formal treatment— the movement of the arrival of the unexpected new. And the reverse movement of withdrawal is life as perpetual death—as a fading into darkness before which the light of emergence withdraws from determination as light. The determination of both sides of the ambiguity initially meant “formally” and their determination in a material conception coincide. Thus is the dualism of form and content, which should account for the distinction

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between the unique [that is, formal] and the particular present, overcome in phenomenology at its root, namely, in the concept of the phenomenal present. But this does not yet eliminate the duality of unity and multiplicity. It must also survive, since the phenomenal present is experienced in the singulare tantum of uniqueness and in the plurality of particular presents. This difference is explained by the fact that the living phenomenal present is, as an inner extension, a unity-in-multiplicity. As such, it can be interpreted in two ways:44 If it is interpreted as a unity, then it appears as a state—that is, the opposed moods stand out against one another as abiding unities, which means that the “Heraclitean flux” of the inner countermotion congeals, resulting in many particular presents. If, conversely, the inner extension is interpreted as a plurality, then it appears as movement. However, in comparison to the sequence of states, this is experienced as the only thing persisting in this change. The model to which the analysis was oriented changed in the transition from the formal (A) to the material (B) consideration. The results of the first consideration were attained in starting with Husserl’s model of perception— even if not strongly committed thereto. The results of the second consideration arose from the orientation to everyday behav ior, as selected in their full significance for phenomenological analysis for the first time by Heidegger in Being and Time. When the same determination of the phenomenal present results from both approaches—as was shown here—then two plausible inferences may be drawn. Either the convergence of results was possible because theoretical presencing (thus, in the widest sense a perceptual-like presencing) is a derivative mode of the practical (or vice versa) or because both ways of presencing in the phenomenal present have their common root in a third thing—which has been offered here: the common root is moodfulness [Gestimmtheit]. Husserl is unsuccessful in penetrating to this root, in construing the dimension of appearing discovered by him as a primordially attuned disclosedness. Husserl scarcely suspected that what he called the “living” present is not only the unity of standing and streaming, of nunc stans and nunc fluens but also in the literal sense “living,” namely, in the sense of moving between birth and death in the inner extension of life. Hence, he treats the problems of birth and death, as well as sleep, in a manner that must be characterized as insufficient. He has devoted a great deal of attention to these themes in the C-Manuscripts and other later texts—influenced, perhaps, by his reading of Being and Time. But, if I am correct, he basically never progressed beyond the recognition of birth, sleep, and death as limit-

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problems. Husserl in his late period basically still thinks of the unique, single living present in terms of how it is evinced in the already cited texts from Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time: as an “ideal” infinite continuum of holding-onto. The factual ruptures and eclipses in this continuum—its origin out of an archaic obscurity in birth and its immersion again into such obscurity in death—appear as limits toward which the decline of the brightness of the appearing in consciousness asymptotically approaches. And this, despite, on the other side, Husserl’s recognizing with increasing clarity that the absolute of consciousness—we might more appropriately say, the unique phenomenal present—is a fact.45 Since Husserl did not recognize the meaning of moodfulness,46 he could not figure out that in sleep, in the mortality of withdrawal, and in the natality of emergence of determination, the phenomenal present has dimension not merely as a factual outer limit but in its inner movement or extension. Still outstanding is the answer to the question about the way in which the phenomenal dimension in its primordially countermoving unity can function genet ically as the ground of intentionality. It is to be remembered that intentionality for Husserl is in no way—or even in the first instance—a static relation, which we declare with the statement that “consciousness is consciousness of something.” Intentionality means primarily a “teleology,” as Husserl says. That is, it means the agent’s being-out-for [Aussein], mediated by the phenomenal field, the possession of identity and the inevitable tension between unmediated appearing and having an object present in this being-out-for. Teleology so understood occupied Husserl more and more during his lifetime, and in the end it came to constitute in Crisis a predominant theme extending from the elementary forms of worlddisclosedness to the scientific objectification of the world.47 The condition for the teleological-intentional restlessness [Hingespanntheit] toward unity must in general lie, in a strict sense, in a preobjective and pre-egoic tension [Gespanntheit], that is, in the countermotion of the phenomenal dimension in its moodfulness. This extension as motion has the character of unity-in-multiplicity. In this relation of unity and multiplicity, therefore, a connection in accordance with which the plurality presses toward unity must prevail. The original multiplicity lies in the dual movement of self-withdrawal or mortality and the arrival-of-determination or natality. In the countermotion or ambiguity in which these two sides are complementarily dependent on one another (the copresence of the one side in the other), neither side has primacy. However, if we attempt to determine the entirety of the countermovement as a whole in which the two sides form a complementary

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unity, then natality or arrival will be prevalent. For what occurs in general in the phenomenal present—whether determined in its particularity through the predominance of mortality-disclosing or natality-disclosing moodfulness—is always the advent of determination. Even in disappearance, in the transition into forgetfulness, an appearance nevertheless still always occurs. The obscurity of withdrawal and the light of the emergence of determination are, on the one hand, imbalances [Einseitigkeiten] complementarily dependent upon one another, of which light is not “positive” in the sense that the obscurity can be determined according to the metaphysical tradition only as stéresis, privatio of light. On the other hand, light as the single whole of complementarity itself still possesses a primacy that we linguistically recognize, for example, when in dating things we reckon nights as days. The teleological tendency I questioned earlier results from the fact that in the particularity of states of disclosedness or moodfulness, the manifold of the phenomenal present manifests itself. Were the agent fixed only on the manifold, that is, if his life moved only in a blind alternation between one-sided moodful states, then he would be not a human but an animal, which, according to Nietzsche,48 is tied to the moment and thus cannot “act” in the genuine sense, but is led by instinctual drives that trigger the particular states. By contrast, the human can preemptively plan and freely remember. This means, however, that the human rises above the one-sided moodful states in the execution of the countermovement itself, that is, of the appearing as appearing. Thereby, his life, like that of the animal, runs its course between birth and death. Thus, the human itself must always execute the transition into being human. What he must achieve in the process is the reflection of simple natality existing one-sidedly in opposition to mortality—and he must achieve it as natality. Hence, the human exists in the phenomenal present in such a way that he acts out this transition from simple natality or emergence to its reflection. That this achievement— and thus being human— occurs is philosophically only an additional fact. However, the human already becomes aware of this pre-philosophically. This occurs in the primordial feeling of wonder considered by philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. This is no bipolar, one-sided moodfulness; rather, it is that moodfulness in which rising above bipolarity occurs. In it the predominance of birth as birth or arrival as arrival discloses itself, that is, the countermotion itself as a unity that is not one-sided. Wonder declares itself in the surprise that “there is something rather than nothing.” In wonder it comes to light that appearing occurs in the contrary motion—more precisely, it takes place as a motion contrary

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to withdrawal. With this, a continuation of the phenomenological analysis of time, not only in the spirit of Husserl’s original insight but also beyond it, leads to, among other things, the result that the basic affectivity constituting human existence is not anxiety but wonder.49 Without having formulated this insight in this way, Husserl’s exposition of intentionality is nevertheless directly based on the consequences of this insight. The prevalence of natality as natality means that the phenomenal present is disclosed to the human as its agent in such a way that in it is a pre-objective movement from the multiplicity to a unity. In a being that, despite being unchained from the moment, undergoes varying one-sided states of disclosedness, this tendency must lead to the objectification of an identity. The unity of appearing as appearing can appear for such a being only insofar as it presents itself as something unaffected by and outlasting changing states, as an in-itself or identity. This is the genetic origin of the identity-in-itself out of—in Husserl’s terms—the “primitive teleology” of a presentation. In regard to the sense of this teleology, Husserl, in his late period after writing the Bernauer Manuscripts, more and more clearly awarded to protention a priority over retention.50 Therein, however, was prepared the recognition that protention—as I claim—is something entirely dif ferent from upside-down retention. The teleological pull toward unity determines the movement of the “living present” of the phenomenal field. A consequence of this situation is a relative justification for maintaining the primacy of perception in Husserl’s analyses. Husserl elevates perception to the basic analytic model as the kind of presentation in which the tendency toward unity, on the strength of which the human agent transcends the field of modes of appearance toward objective identity, is most visible. The purely disinterested perception—that is, a perception not influenced by a one-sided moodfulness—is for Husserl obviously prephilosophically related to wonder, in which the unity of appearing as appearing emerges. This unity transcends the one-sidedness of polar moodfulness. To this extent, Husserl’s orientation toward aísthesis and theoría, which he shares with the tradition begun by Plato and Aristotle, remains unsuperseded.51 However, insofar as this orientation blocks the view of the phenomenal field in its countermoving dimensionality, it requires—as demonstrated— supplementation by a new orientation toward the praxis that is rooted in moodfulness. Translated by Robin Litscher Wilkins

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Notes This essay first appeared in Perspektiven der Philosophie, Neues Jahrbuch 7 (1981): 185–221. 1. Cf. Lebendige Gegenwart: Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des transzendentalen Ich bei Edmund Husserl, entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik (The Hague: Martinus Mijhoff, 1966), and the literature mentioned in its bibliography. 2. This has been made clear by, among others, Elisabeth Ströker in her introduction to Edmund Husserl, V. Logische Untersuchung (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1975), xvii–xx, and Paul Janssen’s Edmund Husserl: Einführung in seine Phänomenologie (Freiburg: K. Alber, 1976), 32, where Janssen appropriately says, “Husserl found his philosophy in the attempt to critically master two extreme standpoints.” 3. Jan Patočka too has clarified this in his groundbreaking essay, “Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Möglichkeit einer asubjektiven Phänomenologie,” Philosophische Perspecktiven 2 (1970): 324, 328. 4. Cf. Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), 172, 184. 5. Cf. Patočka, “Der Subjektivismus,” 331–332. Heidegger’s thought readily settles in the aforementioned realm, as Tugendhat (Der Wahrheitsbegriff, 262), in my opinion, rightly observed. Therein lies its inner relation to Husserl’s original insight and its genuine phenomenological character, which Heidegger himself claimed for his thought; cf., for example, even in the late period, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 48, 90 [translated by J. Stambaugh as On Time and Being (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 42, 72]. 6. In the same sense, cf. Patočka, “Der Subjektivismus,” 331. 7. Cf. Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, 69–70. 8. This, according to Patočka, “Der Subjektivismus,” 328, is the meaning of the epochē. 9. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. P. Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 174 [translated by D. Caims as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 165–166], and Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 174 [translated by J. Scanlon as Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 133–334]. 10. Cf. E. Husserl, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, ed. W. Szilasi, Frankfurt a. M.: V. Klostermann, 1965), 35 [translated by Q. Lauer as

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“Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 109]. With regard to the whole problem, cf. Antonio Aguirre, Genetische Phänomenologie und Reduktion (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), §25, 132–137. 11. Cf. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 92–93. 12. The connection that is here only sketched is developed in more detail in my “Husserls Rückgang auf das phainómenon und die geschichtliche Stellung der Phänomenologie,” Phänomenologische Forschungen 10 (1980): 89–145. This essay discusses phenomenology’s inner relation with the concept of appearance in Protagoras, Plato, and the ancient skeptics. This is more precisely explained in a later essay; cf. Klaus Held, “Die pyrrhonische Skepsis aus phänomenologischer Sicht,” in Geschehen und Gedächtnis: Die hellenistische Welt und ihre Wirkung; Festschrift für Wolfgang Orth zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. J.-Fr. Eckholdt, M. and S. Sigismund (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2009). 13. These are contained for the most part in the C-Manuscripts in the Husserl Archives, but they can also be found in other manuscripts, the most important of which I have specified in my Lebendige Gegenwart (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966). After the publication of the present essay, the C-manuscripts were edited by D. Lohmar; cf. Edmund Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, 1929–1934: Die C-Manuskripte (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2006). 14. Cf. Gerd Brand, Welt, Ich und Zeit: Nach unveröffentlichten Manuskripten Edmund Husserls (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955), 61–62; see also 74. 15. With this formulation, I quote a relevant oral critique by Ulrich Claesges, which he voiced in view of the treatment in part 3 of Lebendige Gegenwart where I attempt to solve the aporias of the living present in connection to Husserl. 16. In the same sense, cf. already Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 100–101 [translated by D. Cairns as Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 66]. 17. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 171 [translated by D. Carr as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 168.] 18. Cf. Ludwig Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phänomenologie (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1963), 200–201, and my essay “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität

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und die Idee einer phänomenologischen Transzendentalphilosophie,” in Perspektiven transzendentalphänomenologischer Forschung, ed. U. Claesges and K. Held (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 58. 19. For more on the entire problematic, cf. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), ed. R. Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 64–69 [translated by J. Brough as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 66–71), as well as my Lebendige Gegenwart, 31–32; and Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 191–192 for the most important citations. 20. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Zweiter Teil: Texte aus dem Nachlass, 1921–1928, ed. I. Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 41. 21. Cf. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 109 [75]. 22. Husserl, Krisis, 172 [169]. 23. This expression recurs frequently in Crisis. 24. Cf. Husserl, Krisis, 127 [125]. 25. Husserl alludes to Fichte’s “incomprehensible impulse” in Phänomenologische Psychologie, 487. [Held incorrectly refers to p. 287; the supplementary text containing the reference is not included in the English translation—RLW.] 26. Ludwig Landgrebe says the same in “Reflexionen zu Husserls Konstitutionslehre,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 36 (1974): 475–476. 27. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, 31 [32]. 28. Cf. Hans- Georg Gadamer, Kleine Schriften III (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1972), 232. 29. Gadamer, 232. 30. Ludwig Landgrebe, “Meditation über Husserls Wort ‘Die Geschichte ist das große Faktum des absoluten Seins,’” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 36 (1974): 122. 31. With respect to this entire problem, cf. Lebendige Gegenwart, 39–43. 32. My identical critique in “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität,” 58–60. was also meant in this way. 33. A conception of the countermovement of the phenomenal present is further developed in my “Zeit als Zahl: Das Pythagoräische im Zeitverständnis der Antike,” in Zeiterfahrung und Personalität, ed. P. Rohs (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 13–33. 34. Cf. H.-U. Hoche, Handlung, Bewußtsein und Leib. Vorstudien zu einer rein noematischen Phänomenologie (Freiburg: Karl Alber Verlag, 1973), 279–281. 35. Hoche, 324. 36. Hoche, 322.

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37. Hoche, 297. 38. Hoche, 298–299. 39. Hoche, 280–282. 40. Hoche, 297–299. 41. Hoche, 298–299. 42. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1957), 137 [translated by J. Stambaugh as Being and Time (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 133]. 43. With this concept I incorporate a suggestion from Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 374 [357] (cf. all of §72) and a thought from Hannah Arendt’s Vita Activa oder vom anderen Leben (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1960), 15–16, 165–167, and Über die Revolution (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1974), 270–272. H. Saner has also taken up the idea of natality in “Memento nasci: Vorbemerkungen zu einer Philosophie der Geburt,” in Überleben und Ethik (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1988), 242–244. 44. For a more precise analysis of the possibility of this doubled perspective and of the connections developed in the foregoing passage, cf. my Heraklit, Parmenides und der Anfang von Philosophie und Wissenschaft. Eine phänomenologische Besinnung” (Berlin: deGruyter, 1980), 299–300. 45. Cf. above all Landgrebe’s last work. In addition to the already cited essays, in this context, see “Facticity und Individuation,” in Sein und Geschichtlichkeit: Festschrift für K.-H. Volkmann- Schluck (Frankfurt a. M.: V. Klostermann, 1974), 275–277; and “Die Phänomenologie als transzendentale Theorie der Geschichte” Phänomenologische Forschungen, no. 3 (1975): 22–24. 46. The significance of mood for Heidegger’s development of phenomenology beyond Husserl is further discussed in my “Die Endlichkeit der Welt: Phänomenologie im Übergang von Husserl zu Heidegger,” Philosophie der Endlichkeit, ed. B. Niemeyer and B. Schütze (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1992); and “Grundstimmung und Zeitkritik bei Heidegger,” in Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, ed. O. Pöggeler and D. Papenfuss (Frankfurt a. M.: V. Klostermann, 1991). 47. On this point, cf. Guillermo Hoyos, Intentionalität als Verantwortung: Geschichtsteleologie und Teleologie der Intentionalität bei Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). For more about the fundamental meaning of teleology for the final form of Husserlian phenomenology, cf. also my “Gott in Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie,” in Philosophy Phenomenology Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl, ed. C. Ierna, H. Jacobs, F. Mattens (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010). 48. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” in Werke in drei Bänden, ed. K. Schlechta (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1954), 1:211.

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49. For a phenomenological interpretation of wonder, cf. my “Krise der Gegenwart und Anfang der Philosophie: Zum Verhältnis von Husserl und Heidegger,” in a special edition of Studia Phenomenologica 3 (2003): Kunst und Wahrheit: Festschrift für Walter Biemel zu seinem 85. Geburtstag, ed. M. Diaconu. 50. Cf. also my “Phänomenologie der ‘eigentlichen Zeit’ bei Husserl und Heidegger,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik 4 (2005): 251–273 [translated as “Phenomenology of “Authentic Time” in Husserl and Heidegger,” in On Time— New Contributions to the Husserlian Phenomenology of Time, ed. D. Lohmar and I. Yamaguchi (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 91–114]. In this essay, I have taken up the reflections of the present text in new ways and, I hope, have brought them a considerable step forward. 51. Husserl himself indicated this connection, which leads from wonder regarding perception to scientific theory, in the Vienna lecture from which Crisis originated.

Phenomenological Concepts of Untruth in Husserl and Heidegger Rudolf Bernet

This article traces how Heidegger’s development of a specific phenomenological understanding of truth in Being and Time owes a debt to Husserl’s conception of truth as laid out in the sixth logical investigation. The critique of “traditional conceptions of truth”—ubiquitous in Heidegger’s texts on the essence of truth— does not primarily have Husserl in its sights, and only pertains to his concept of truth in a very limited way. Furthermore, the article shows that Heidegger’s later determination of truth as “un- concealedness” [Un-Verborgenheit] does not entail any deep schism with his earlier theory and that it moves along certain paths that were not so foreign to Husserl. Even though Husserl never thematically analyzed the concept of “concealedness” [Verborgenheit], Heidegger nevertheless remains bound to a specific phenomenological concept of truth oriented to the conditions, circumstances, and scope of the manifestation [Offenbarung] of the true essence of beings. An adequate presentation of either the chronological development of Heidegger’s concept of truth or of Heidegger’s relationship to Husserl’s concept of truth is beyond the scope of this article.1 However, given the extensive and concordant secondary literature on this theme,2 there is no 239

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pressing need for such a presentation. Rather, I wish to limit myself to casting new light on Husserl and Heidegger’s concepts of truth from their understanding of untruth [Unwahrheit]—not just because the question concerning the essence of truth has always already been closely linked with the experience of untruth in philosophy but also because it was precisely the uneasiness over untruth as a central philosophical problem that, above all else, led Heidegger beyond Husserl’s concept of truth. It remains to be seen how integrating untruth into truth’s essential being then compels Heidegger to develop a new concept of falsehood, separate from this true untruth, a falsehood that is entirely and essentially distinct from the traditional understanding of incorrect judgment (i.e., judgment not in accordance with real ity). The question concerning untruth brings to the foreground of the investigation a negativity that inhabits not only truth as it is phenomenologically understood but also a phenomenological concept of falsehood, that is to say, one thought on the basis of the appearance of things. The practical interest in understanding true untruth as concealedness and mystery, as well as understanding falsehood as disguising, mixing up [Vertauschung], and explicit pseudo-manifestation [PseudoOffenbarung], forms the point of departure for the following perspectives on Husserl’s and Heidegger’s understanding of truth. I will take my guiding conception of untruth (as distinct from falsehood) from Husserl’s discussion, in the sixth logical investigation, of “empty” talk concerning a state of affairs of which the speaker has no originary intuitive experience. According to Husserl, these empty assertions belong to the group of unfulfilled, purely “signitive” intentions which also comprises the unfulfilled, partial intentions of external perception.3 Heidegger, in Being and Time, understands this empty talk as a comportment, one that he more specifically determines as an “absorption in something that has been said” on the basis of “hearsay of something that has been said.”4 One can say that for Husserl too this presentation of the essence of untruth through the example of undemonstrated assertions does not in any way mean he modelled his concept of truth on assertions. Heidegger’s critique of what he considers to be a derived or degenerate [entartet] concept of truth— developed solely in the context of predicative sentences—therefore does not target the position of the Logical Investigations. That is because, according to Husserl, the truth of an assertion is never ultimately founded on the truth of another assertion but always on an originary, intuitive experience that verifies and demonstrates it.5 Also, Logical Investigations already reveals the concept of an experiential type of truth, which Husserl extends

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to include cases of perception unmediated by language. It is only through the relation to an intuitive experience that assertions gain a relation to truth; and since we also find relations of emptiness and fulfillment and of greater or lesser intuitive fullness within intuitive experience,6 there are also experiential truths, which lack any relation to an assertion. Considered more closely, Husserl does not presuppose the traditional concept of true predication [Aussagewahrheit] when he determines empty talk as untrue; quite to the contrary, he disavows it. If one focuses solely on whether an assertion “agrees” with real ity (as per tradition), then an empty statement could just as well be true as it could be false. It is only “untrue” if one understands truth (phenomenologically) as demonstrating [Ausweisung] (the meaning of) an assertion through originary, intuitive experience. In that case, Husserl agrees with Heidegger that truth does not concern an “agreement of two things which are present-at-hand,”7 but rather concerns the result (which is always open to revision) of searching for an agreement between saying (or supposing) something and experiencing it, as it shows itself from itself, that is to say, as it is intuitively selfgiven. We can experience empty talk as untrue only if a relation to truth belongs in principle to each per for mance of speech [Vollzug des Redens]. Empty talk is therefore “un-true” (and not simply lacking any truth), because the truth claim residing within it has not been redeemed. It lacks the readiness to measure its contents directly against a falsifying or verifying experience of the state of affairs to which it refers, although it does not lack the possibility or even the obligation to do so. The statement or supposition may indeed be unintuitive—“empty” of any intuition of the thing—but it is not therefore barren of any relation to truth. For Husserl, it is evident that—just as empty talk is enlivened by an implicit truth claim—man’s entire life is oriented toward the cognition of truth, at least in principle. According to Husserl, the relation to truth, which is presupposed in the experience of empty talk as untruth, is founded in an interest in knowledge [Erkenntnisinteresse], which is never entirely lacking in man. Logical Investigations presents this interest in knowledge primarily as a pretension to truth, in need of justification, or as a desire [Begehren] for intuitive confirmation.8 According to Husserl, this interest in knowledge ultimately comes to fulfillment exclusively through the intuitive selfgivenness of the meant thing itself. The degree of satisfaction this interest enjoys is equivalent to how close the thing comes to intuitive, confirmatory appearance, how much the act of knowing is able to accommodate all the richness and nuance of the object, or how close the knower comes to the thing itself.

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Heidegger too assumed (with Aristotle) that a relation to truth belongs to all human comportment and that this relation amounts to the most essential determination of human existence [menschlichen Sein].9 This ubiquitous relation to truth, according to Heidegger, must not be understood as a mere faculty or ability but as an existential [existenziell] and fundamental mode of Dasein’s comportment that it never ceases to enact: “to understand [the truth] as something for the sake of which Dasein is.”10 All his life, Heidegger, like Aristotle before him, put off Plato’s question concerning a Good “beyond being” (and thus beyond truth), and he had nothing but suspicion for the (Husserlian) efforts to differentiate between theoretical, axiological, and practical truth as well as their corresponding modes of human comportment. For the early Heidegger, truth always stems from a mode of comportment, which Aristotle called “aletheuein” and which Heidegger called “uncovering” [Entdecken].11 A comportment is uncovering if it “[takes] entities out of their hiddenness” and allows them to show themselves “in the ‘how’ of their uncoveredness,”12 that is, if it opens up or discloses the being with its relevance [das Seiende mit der ihm eigenen Relevanz]. Truth then is not something simply “there” as something available and present-at-hand; it is the result of human effort. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger does not understand this effort as a consciousness of fulfillment, which brings a supposition and the intuitive givenness of a thing into agreement, but rather as a comportment that overcomes the concealedness of a thing and “let[s the thing] be seen in [its] unhiddenness ([its] uncoveredness).”13 This comportment of opening up a previously closed understanding of a being is so characteristic of a human that the human’s mode of being must be understood, within fundamental ontology, as existential “disclosedness” [existentiale “Erschlossenheit”] or as “being-uncovering” [Entdeckendsein].14 Now if a vital relation to truth is inherent in untrue comportment, and if, according to Heidegger, this relation to truth is grounded in a disclosedness’s mode of being [Seinsweise einer Erschlossenheit], which manifests itself in the comportment of disclosing, then (untrue) “hearsay” must also be understood as a mode of disclosedness.15 Like “empty talk” in Husserl before, “hearsay” in Heidegger is also untrue in the sense of an unrealized openness to, or striving for, the truth. In contrast to Husserl’s Logical Investigations, in Being and Time Heidegger barely touches on the difference between predicative and prepredicative truth and not at all on the (synthetic) experience of an intuitive fulfillment with its degrees of evidence or truth. He devotes himself primarily to the examination of those modes of comportment that let beings

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show themselves as they are in truth. What interests him especially is how man’s being must be constituted if he is to be the privileged being who not only reveals [offenbart] the true being of beings but also, and above all, his own true being. One can (in agreement with the positive footnotes on Husserl) read Being and Time’s elucidations of the essence of truth (especially in §44c) as an attempt to give expression to the preconditions of verifying, fulfilling experiences, which were passed over silently in Logical Investigations. Thus, the most important preconditions do not so much concern man (who is constantly open to truth) in his modes of comportment or his specific interests but their grounding in Da-sein, whose mode of being is essentially always already under the spell of the manifestation [Offenbarung] of the true being of beings. Following this interpretation, we must understand the theory of truth in Being and Time as a (still transcendental) alternative to the phenomenology of the transcendentally constituting subject, which Husserl advanced in Ideas I as an answer to the question he neglected in Logical Investigations, namely, what is man’s mode of being such that he is capable of true knowledge? This interpretation finds support in the fact that Heidegger does not speak of a transcendental subject constituting a thing’s true being but of a correlation or “correspondence” [Entsprechung] between Dasein’s comportment and things showing themselves as they are. Like Husserl, Heidegger emphasizes in Being and Time the dynamic or active effort of the subject (understood anew as Dasein),16 although this “activity” is already understood, even in the early Heidegger, as a sort-of-prompted response to the manifestation of the being of beings. This (intentional) comportment, described as an “uncovering” or (synonymously) as a “letting-show-itself” of the true being of beings is now grounded (transcendentally) in Dasein’s openness or “transcendence” or authentic “disclosedness” [“Erschlossenheit”] or “resoluteness” [“Entschlossenheit”]. Resoluteness, as Dasein’s most fundamental mode of being, is thus the condition of possibility for uncovering the true being of beings, considered from the standpoint of fundamental ontology. Since we must now understand this condition existentially as an actually performed mode of being (i.e., as a possibility that is always already and necessarily actualized), then disclosedness means that Dasein always exists with some relation to the truth: “What is primarily ‘true’—that is, uncovering—is Dasein. ‘Truth’ in the second sense does not mean Being-uncovering (uncovering), but Being-uncovered (uncoveredness).”17 Now what of Dasein’s comportment [daseinsmäßiges Verhalten], which does not uncover a being’s true being but rather ascribes to it a false being? And what are the fundamental- ontological conditions of such a

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distorted [verfälschenden] comportment, that is, Dasein’s mode of being wherein he mistakes the true being of things and (especially) his own true being? In the case of such a false comportment [Fehlverhalten], is Dasein’s being-in-the-truth (or its existing in relation to the truth) negated or only led in a false direction? And since Dasein is especially inclined to be mistaken about his own being, does this false comportment exhaust the whole scope of what “untruth” (as distinct from “hearsay”) means? “Truth” in Logical Investigations is equivalent to “agreement,” more specifically, to an agreement between supposing, positing, or claiming that a state of affairs is so and so and its intuitive appearance or self-givenness as such. Insofar as this is a specifically phenomenological (and not traditional) concept of truth, Husserl determines the agreement as a phenomenon, which is grounded in the mode of givenness or appearance of a determinate supposition and a determinate state of affairs.18 The supposition is an act of consciousness, and as such it is always self-given as an experience (although not as an object of a perception)— self-given, incidentally, as already noted, not just as an intention but also as an experience enlivened by an interest in knowledge inclined toward truth. The state of affairs too must first be self-given so that the extent of its agreement with the supposition can come to intuitive givenness. Since the supposition can only be verified [bewahrheiten] in the thing’s intuitive mode of appearance, Husserl tellingly identifies truth with the experience of “evidence,”19 or the phenomenon of accordance with the phenomenon, or the experience of the supposition with the phenomenon of the self-given thing. As the phenomenon of agreement between a subjective and an objective phenomenon, truth has dif ferent facets and, according to the theory in Logical Investigations, it can be unfolded into four dif ferent concepts of truth.20 The agreement always reveals itself in the experience of an intuitive fulfillment of a supposition, which consciousness experiences through a corresponding appearance of the object. Husserl’s third concept of truth makes it particularly clear that a being can never be true in itself, that is, independent of its agreement with a supposition or claim. For Husserl, the appearing of a thing is not true but rather makes a supposition true. The mere appearing of a thing (without any relation to a supposition) is, for Husserl, not just untrue (like empty talk) but indeed lacks any relation to truth in general. Conversely, the knowing subject, with its interest in knowledge, can only actually (and not just potentially) stand in the truth, when it repeatedly tests its suppositions against the givenness of the things themselves.

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Heidegger’s understanding of truth as Dasein’s “being-uncovering” and as the being’s “being-uncovered,”21 or as “unhiddenness,”22 still follows the Logical Investigation’s model of the theory of truth, despite his renunciation of the concepts of knowing and consciousness, and in spite of the characterization of Dasein as a subject and the thing as an object. In Being and Time Heidegger also holds that the appearing thing, in and of itself, cannot be true without a relation to an uncovering Dasein.23 However, if one accepts the position that Heidegger increasingly adopted himself—that is, that the mere appearing of a being can already be called true—then this is only possible because he came to understand the appearing as “unhiddenness,” which is not the result of some effort on the part of Dasein to uncover or to “[take] entities out of their hiddenness,”24 but rather the result of the being’s own emerging out of hiddenness or its self-uncovering-being. Already in the sixth logical investigation, Husserl’s specific phenomenological concept of truth corresponds to a specific phenomenological concept of falsehood. Like truth, falsehood must also make itself manifest, and it does this, according to Husserl, in the experience of nonfulfillment, or nonevidence, which reveals the nonagreement of the supposition with the supposed thing’s appearing. Husserl called this experience of nonfulfillment “disappointment,” and the nonagreement manifest therein he called “conflict.”25 The conflict shows itself in its own phenomenon, namely, disappointment, and Husserl specifies that this disappointment is the experience wherein a state of affairs shows itself to be (or appears as) “other” than it was supposed to be: I was wrong to think that “A [is] red, when it shows itself to be ‘in fact’ green.”26 As this quote shows, Husserl considered falsehood to be a mode or modification of “truth” and specifically as an untruth that is more intimately connected with truth than empty talk. Hence he follows Aristotle’s wellknown theory, although he understands falsehood (consistent with his phenomenological concept of truth) as an experience of a nonagreement, a conflict that “we may say, presupposes a certain basis of agreement.”27 The experience of falsehood only comes to light when one seeks to establish an agreement between one’s own supposition and the self-given thing, but this attempt fails, already putting one on to a new path toward truth. Husserl rightly remarks that the experience of disappointment preserves within it the basic conditions of a synthesis of fulfillment, even as the object presents itself other wise from the way we meant it.28 If the conflict between the supposition of the thing and the thing’s self-givenness were total, then the supposed thing would not be given at all, and thus my suppositions

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pertaining to it could neither be true nor false. Diverging slightly from Husserl, who defined “evidence” as the “ ‘experience’ of truth,”29 one could also say that the experience of disappointment (which shows that a supposed determination of the object is false) is an experience of evidence [Evidenzerlebnis] through and through and indeed an especially beneficial realization [Erkenntnis]. The description of untruth in the sense of falsehood in Being and Time still follows largely the model of Logical Investigations. Like Husserl (and Aristotle), Heidegger still understood falsehood (in which one misses [verfehlt] the sense of the being) as a mode or negative modification of the truth. If truth is understood as the interplay of Dasein’s uncovering-being and the being’s covered-being, then this suggests that untruth in the sense of falsehood is grounded in a covering-over comportment of Dasein. This miscomportment [Fehlverhalten] thoroughly modifies the being’s mode of appearing: “That which has been uncovered and disclosed stands in a mode in which it has been disguised and closed off.”30 If this covering up is nevertheless able to come to light as a failed [verfehltes] comportment, then it must be because the being’s true being still shines through its disguised and closed-off way of appearing, that is, in its appearing “in the mode of semblance.” For falsehood to reveal itself as such, then, illusion [Täuschung] must already give way to dis-illusion [Ent-täuschung]. It is necessary to experience a nonagreement, a conflict, and indeed this experience must not only concern the interrelation of Dasein’s comportment and the being’s self-showing but also—more exactly—the discrepancy between an uncovering and a covering comportment, on the one hand, and the discrepancy between the revelation and concealment of the being’s sense, on the other. Parallel to the truth-constituting, uncovering comportment, Heidegger is pursuing the existential-ontological foundation of the covering-over miscomportment [Fehltverhalten]. Authentic “disclosedness” [“Erschlossenheit”] or “resoluteness” [“Entschlossenheit”] accompanies “fallenness” as a mode of being of the Dasein who mistakes [verfehlt] the true being of beings and mistakes its own true being: “Because Dasein is essentially falling, its state of Being is such that it is in ‘untruth.’ ”31 Husserl’s exploration of falsehood’s conditions of possibility takes a different path—at least in Logical Investigations. Husserl places all his hopes in the investigation of possible or impossible meanings and compatible or incompatible objects as logical conditions of true and false knowledge.32 Considered more closely, this concerns the analytic and synthetic conditions of truth and falsehood, that is, the clarification of whether intuitive fulfillment is a priori and in principle possible or impossible, especially in

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the case of statements [Aussagen]. It is only in Husserl’s later work that this logical theory of truth, which investigates the “laws of authentic thinking,”33 is made complete by a transcendental logic of truth.34 One can find, however, already in the Freiburg lectures on logic of 1920/21 a phenomenological description of the modes of comportment that mistake or cover over the true sense of objects. Husserl here specifically mentions “distortion” [Ausmalung] as well as “mixing,” “overlapping,” “obscuring,” “fusion,” and “repression.”35 That Heidegger founds untruth (in the sense of falsehood) upon a disguising and closing-off comportment of Dasein, which in turn is existentialontologically founded on Dasein’s fallen mode of being, still does not clarify how untruth can reveal itself as such. We have seen that, in order to describe this, Husserl appeals to “disappointment” as an experience of contrast and determines this as the experience of the truth of an untruth. Being and Time proceeds in an analogous way. A disguised being is uncoveringly covered over [entdeckend verdeckt]; it appears with the sheen of superficial evidence.36 Dasein is never completely and definitively ensnared by this lure of false evidence or untruth—at least when it comes to its own being—because it can, of course, forget but never actually lose its true being. The experience of false untruth as semblance-truth [Scheinwahrheit] is, for Heidegger, ultimately derived from the fact that Dasein is “in the truth and in untruth equiprimordially.”37 Dasein preserves— even in the fallenness which covers up its own true being—the possibility of a disclosing relationship to its own true being. Even in fallenness, the “voice of conscience” still calls.38 Even if a being should appear in a disguised or obscured way, the light of its true being sometimes shines through. Interestingly, in Being and Time Heidegger does indeed give an account of truth as “unhiddenness” [Unverborgenheit] and yet still lacks the concept of a true hiddenness.39 For Heidegger, hiddenness is still synonymous with closedness and thus with falsehood or an untruth that mistakes [verfehlenden] true being. Nevertheless, insofar as this untrue self-hiding of true being [unwahre Sich-Verbergen des wahren Seins] stems from a covering-over comportment, it will always remain in principle open to the possibility of being uncovered in a disclosing comportment of Dasein. In Being and Time, therefore, not only is there no true hiddenness, there is also no absolute or definitive untrue hiddenness. The fact that (disclosed) truth is primarily the result of overcoming (covered) concealment or untrue hiddenness does not permit us to say that Being and Time already understands the authentic disclosure of truth as its simultaneous concealment or as a disclosure that is equiprimordial with a true hiddenness. Noting that Heidegger’s later

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theory of aletheia as “un-hiddenness” stems from a progressive unfolding of the concept “unhiddenness” as we find it in Being and Time cannot permit us to forget the differences between those accounts, as that would lead us into an anachronistic interpretation of his early magnum opus. In Being and Time, unhiddenness and hiddenness remain opposed concepts, much like the traditional concept of negation retains its validity there. Only his renewed reflection [Besinnung] on the alpha privatum of the Greek concept of truth leads Heidegger to think disclosedness and hiddenness through one another—not in a dialectical unity but rather a unity based on conflict. One can still detect a reference (of which perhaps even Heidegger was not aware) to Husserl’s theory of truth from the sixth logical investigation in Heidegger’s later understanding of hiddenness, a conception of untruth that no longer has anything in common with untruth in the sense of “disguisedness and closedness.” In the sixth logical investigation, Husserl distinguished the case of a false cognition [Erkenntnis], which announces itself in the experience of a disappointment, from the case of a cognition that is indeed true but nonetheless incomplete. He understood this incomplete or “inadequate” cognition as an experience where the supposition about a thing and its intuitive givenness, even though not in conflict with one another, nevertheless only partially agree with one another.40 This is a genuine consciousness of fulfillment, but it is the kind where the thing, as it appears, intuitively fulfills the correlated supposition only partially. As Husserl would say: the supposition reaches “beyond” the scope of the thing’s actual self-givenness.41 According to Husserl, then, there are more or less complete agreements between the supposition and the self-given thing, that is, “gradations” and “graded series of fulfillment”42 and thus “degrees and levels of evidence” as well.43 There is adequate and inadequate truth.44 Each supposition or perception directed at an external object “oversteps” the thing’s essentially adumbrative and (therefore) always incomplete selfgivenness insofar as the supposition concerns the whole thing, which can never come to full appearance. Nevertheless, the intuitive fulfillment of such a supposition can become richer as more and more of the thing steadily appears through perceptual processes, as one draws nearer and nearer to the thing’s complete self-givenness. In a supposition concerning a spatial thing, those determinations that are not (yet) fulfilled through adumbrative appearances need not, of course, be false. They are like dependent moments of a supposition that intuitive fulfillment has already confirmed as being more likely true than untrue, although the truth of those moments

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has yet to be proven and the possibility of their turning out to be false cannot, in principle, be excluded. These are essentially distinct from the case of empty talk, in that the currently unfolding course of experience not only motivates their pretension to truth but also supports it. Although the Heideggerian vocabulary of hiddenness and closedness remains foreign to Husserl,45 one can also say that the intuitively empty or unfulfilled “partial intentions” within a consciousness of fulfillment are related to the aspects of a thing that have not yet to come to appearance or that remain hidden.46 The unfulfillment or untruth of the partial intentions is so closely connected with the already displayed truth of the rest of the supposition’s moments that it would be better to designate them as potential truths. This type of untruth, in the sense of potential truth, must be distinguished just as much from the untruth of empty talk as from false untruth, and should rather be more precisely designated as hiddenness, as that which has not yet come to appearance [einem noch nicht in Erscheinung Getretenen] or an untruth that belongs essentially to what appears and what has already appeared. Putting a finer point on it, one could say that where a supposition is only partially fulfilled, the supposed thing simultaneously shows and conceals itself, or the shown truth is connected to the untruth of a withdrawing revelation. If the appearing of a thing is less an accomplished fact than it is a promise, then what reveals itself remains mysterious. Given the essential inadequacy of all experience of things [Dingerfahrung], which Husserl always emphasized, this permits us to understand that the appearing of a thing is, at the same time, a concealing. The more that shows the more it hides, since each thoughtful response [denkenden Eingehen] to the thing intensifies its ultimately unsolvable mystery. Such an account essentially agrees with the new understanding of hiddenness as true untruth, as Heidegger first articulated it in his 1930 summer semester lectures and then expressly worked out in his 1930 article “On the Essence of Truth.”47 The first precondition of this new understanding of truth is that we no longer identify hiddenness with false untruth, nor with closedness or disguisedness. The second precondition is that false untruth is no longer grounded in fallenness, that is, in one of Dasein’s modes of being, wherein Dasein misunderstands, disguises, forgets, or misses its own being. The most important consequence of this new understanding of truth (as un-hiddenness) is that the understanding of falsehood as “unhiddenness [where] distortion predominates, i.e., where something is, but where this something presents itself as what it is not” 48 expands the concept to include a pseudos, which can no longer be blamed on a false comportment

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of Dasein. A second consequence is that it becomes conceivable for Dasein’s own true being to withdraw in a way that is not grounded in a fallenness and thus does not imply any self-deception. This new determination of untruth arises from the insight that unhiddenness and hiddenness— and thus truth—do not primarily concern the uncovering of beings but the unconcealment [Entbergung] of their modes of being— regardless of  whether or not it concerns a being such as Dasein [daseinsmäßiges Seiende]. Already in Heidegger’s lecture course from the summer semester of 1930, the contribution that an active comportment of Dasein makes to the disclosedness of the true being of beings is diminished. “Unhiddenness” is no longer understood as a kind of “robbery,” that “snatch[es beings] out of their hiddenness”49—as it was in Being and Time—but rather designates the mode of being of something that “has been brought out of its hiddenness [“der Verborgenheit enthoben” ist].” “Uncoveredness” becomes “deconcealment” [Ent-borgenheit] and the role of “man” is to “preserve and secure [Wahren und Verwahren]” this.50 Parallel to this new understanding of unhiddenness, there is also a modification to the meaning of “hiddenness.” Unlike in Being and Time, here Heidegger clearly sets hiddenness apart from “distortion” [Verstelltheit] and falsehood, but he does not designate it as “untruth” or as an essential aspect of the truth [Wesensmoment].51 Finally, in this lecture course, even “distortion” is no longer a false comportment of Dasein, or something to be blamed on Dasein’s fallenness; instead it concerns the way a being gives itself, in that it pregives itself as being something which in truth it is not at all.52 Hence a new possibility opens to ascribe falsehood to a being in cases where Dasein does not allow itself to be deceived or play any immediate role in the genesis of the illusory appearance. With this new concept of falsehood, philosophy finds its way back to the everyday meaning of “false.” For instance, we speak of “false gold” when a deceit is exposed, and we recognize the metal as worthless. On the basis of this new phenomenological understanding of falsehood as the pseudo-unconcealment of a pseudo-being, we can also clarify the power of the false to resist unveiling [erklärt sich auch die durch keine Enthüllung zu brechende Macht des Falschen]. According to Heidegger’s own assertion in 1930, the article “On the Essence of Truth” takes a decisive step beyond both the above-mentioned lecture course as well as Being and Time. Here, Heidegger not only thinks of truth as “unhiddenness” through the Greek word aletheia as deconcealment [Entborgenheit] but he also determines it through the Greek notion

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of physis as “upsurgent presencing [aufgehende(s) Anwese(n)].”53 The paper also clarifies the essence of that which finally unconceals itself in this unhiddenness. This essence does not concern an individual being (whether it be a being like Dasein or not), nor does it concern one of its modes of being (be it authentic or inauthentic); instead it concerns “beings as a whole.”54 Parallel to this is a shift in the understanding of Dasein’s contribution to the event of the unconcealment of the true being of beings. The talk of a violent “robbery” gives way to “letting” the event of unconcealment happen, or “letting things be [Seinlassen].”55 Even the “disclosing” of the true being of beings is no longer thought on the basis of an uncovering comportment of Dasein; rather Heidegger describes it as “openness”56 to the event of unconcealment, which no longer has its ultimate foundation in one of Dasein’s authentic comportments or modes of being. Thus, it is not as if Dasein had no role to play in the event. But it corresponds to an authentic mode of existing that no longer fits with the vocabulary of “resoluteness.” In determining the authentic mode of being that responds to the unconcealment of true being, Heidegger places the concept of “freedom” alongside the concept of “letting-be” from “On the Essence of Truth” and other writings from the 1930s: “Ek-sistence, rooted in truth as freedom, is exposure to the disclosedness of beings as such.”57 More carefully considered, Dasein possesses neither freedom nor truth but the truth as freedom possesses or commands Dasein.58 Heidegger’s own peculiar concept of “freedom” has at least this in common with the more familiar conception, namely, that it concerns a freedom “to” [zu] and a freedom “from” [von]. As regards the first, Heidegger speaks of a “being free for [zum] what is opened up in an open region.”59 Now, however, Heidegger describes “the concealing of what is concealed” as an inseparable, essential moment of this unconcealment,60 understood as being open in an open region. If what is hidden belongs essentially to what is open, then this can only mean that what appears to a Dasein characterized by “openness” will remain immersed in a depth-dimension of mystery. If we follow Heidegger and determine truth as unconcealment, we must then designate mystery’s own mode of concealing as “untruth.” However, because mystery’s concealment is supposed to belong to the essence of unconcealment, conversely, we cannot avoid acknowledging that “untrue” mysterious concealment belongs to the essence of truth. What we earlier designated as “true untruth” and distinguished from untruth as “falsehood,” Heidegger now calls “un-truth proper [eigentliche Unwahrheit]” which he identifies with mystery, considered as the “proper counter-essence of truth [das eigentliche Un- wesen der Wahrheit].”61

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Such a paradoxical understanding of truth is only intelligible if, first, the supposed co-belonging of the unconcealed and concealed preserves their difference. The unconcealed and the concealed cannot be the same with respect to their mode of givenness or mode of being. Second, this theory of the essence and nonessence of truth can only satisfy the demands of a specifically phenomenological concept of truth on the condition that not only does the unconcealed reveal itself but the concealed as well, that is, the concealed must announce itself in the unconcealed. “On the Essence of Truth” fulfills the first condition by pointing to the ontological difference between a being and “beings as a whole”: “Precisely because lettingbe always lets beings be in a particular comportment that relates to them and thus discloses them, it conceals beings as a whole.”62 The second condition, then, would only be satisfied if there is a mode of unconcealing or letting-be of beings, which at the same time allows the mystery of beings as a whole to shine through, which “lets it in” or does not “forget” it. Heidegger’s text clearly draws our attention to how the mystery of beings as a whole always appears alongside the self-showing of a determinate being,63 but that man may or may not let in this appearing of the concealed as concealed. This letting in of the mystery of beings as a whole constitutes the essence of human freedom or, more precisely, the essence of “Da-sein,” who “preserves the first and broadest un-disclosedness, un-truth proper.”64 This proper un-truth of concealment is the origin of all truth, it is “older” than Dasein and Dasein’s letting concealment be.65 Dasein can only preserve it but not produce it. Taken as pure hiddenness, “un-truth proper” is not, however, a “truth” or “un-hiddenness,” and as such Being and Time’s thesis that there is no truth without Dasein remains valid despite the new understanding of the un-truth of the concealed.66 Heidegger rethinks Dasein’s “letting-be”—wherein a being reveals its true being—on the basis of the concealment of beings as a whole or, more precisely, on the basis of the unconcealment of this concealment. “Freedom” is first and foremost the free “openness” to the mystery that circumscribes each revelation of a being. This freedom, however, remains a freedom from, namely, the liberation from the “forgottenness of the mystery” or “forgottenness of concealment.”67 Such a forgetting of concealment is indeed a human comportment, but it is one that does not arise “from mere human incapacity and negligence” but rather has its source in concealment itself,68 that is, in the “proper counter-essence of truth.” What holds for the forgetting of beings as a whole (i.e., for un-truth proper) also holds for covering up [Verdecken] an individual being’s true being (i.e., for untruth in the sense of falsehood). False uncovering, which consists in “not

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let[ting] beings be the beings that they are and as they are” and which “cover[s] up and distort[s]” beings, “must derive from the essence of truth”69—and thus not from the essence of Dasein as fallen. Thus, it is certainly no coincidence that Heidegger replaces “fallenness” [Verfallens] with the term “errancy” in “On the Essence of Truth.”70 Errancy and fallenness share a common “turning toward what is readily available,” but this turning toward is now understood as a “turning away from the mystery,”71 which again does not have its ground in the being of Dasein but rather in the concealment of the mystery, that is, an event that as the proper counter-essence of truth whose essence it always codetermines. If the concealment that belongs to truth only shows itself insofar as it conceals, then it is no wonder that Dasein forgets or overlooks, first and foremost, the mystery that belongs to the essence of truth. The most important difference between the theory of truth in “On the Essence of Truth” and the one in Being and Time does not so much lie in the transition of Dasein’s mode of being as “disclosedness” to “letting-be” or from “fallenness” to “errancy”; rather it lies in the introduction of the concept of “mystery” as a concealment or un-truth proper that essentially belongs to the unconcealment of truth. In this respect, Heidegger’s description of Dasein’s “turning toward and from” true being, that is, its “to-and-fro,” has not changed much from the one in Being and Time.72 The essential difference between the two texts rather results from the foundation of these true and false modes of Dasein’s being and comportment in the unconcealing concealment of the truth of the “Being of beings.”73 In “preserving” the mystery of being and in forgetting it, Heidegger affirms that true being’s unconcealment depends on man, but human comportment can no longer be understood as the transcendental condition of truth’s emergence. The appearing of a being’s true being has its condition in its own happening or in a hiddenness, which underlies all unconcealment of truth as un-truth proper. We can interpret Heidegger’s revaluation of hiddenness as a coherent development of his understanding of truth on the model of the Greek aletheia that he already laid out in his earlier masterpiece, although in “On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger frees hiddenness from Being and Time’s merely negative description of it as undisclosedness or distortion. Yet one cannot deny that despite its fidelity to a phenomenological determination of truth and its mystery, this development of Heidegger’s thinking takes a further step away from Husserl’s thinking. Now indeed one can call a thing’s intuitive self-givenness “true” according to Husserl’s theory in Logical Investigations, but its truth is derived from its ability to verify a subjective

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supposition or assertion. This intuitive self-givenness of a thing for Husserl (in opposition to the later Heidegger) can never be untrue; rather at most it can conflict with or falsify a supposition about it. For Husserl, truth may indeed concern the phenomenon of an agreement between noetic and noematic phenomena, but the primordial phenomenon [Grundphänomen] thus remains the intentional supposition of a conscious subject, which can comply with the appearing thing or set itself against it. It is not as though the phenomenon of the knowing-subject’s openness to the way things show themselves intuitively were completely foreign to Husserl. Rather, the meant thing’s intuitive self-givenness is the ultimate criterion of truth for Husserl. Yet what shows itself does not open its own framework for an understanding proper to it; rather, it places itself in the pregiven framework of a subjective supposition, which it then either confirms or disappoints. In Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Truth,” however, the primordial phenomenon of truth is the way that a being’s true being removes itself from hiddenness and steps into unhiddenness. Dasein’s freedom, to either turn toward or away from the event of truth, first arises from the presuppositionless event of such a (mysterious) unconcealment. We can no longer speak of a confirmation or disappointment of a preconceived opinion, but we may still speak of a movement, one that Husserl never ceased to strongly emphasize, namely, a mutual rapprochement between a thing that never completely appears all at once and a human comportment that allows itself to be taught by the thing’s appearing. We can understand this mutual rapprochement between human comportment and thingly appearance as an approach toward an agreement, but from Heidegger’s standpoint (even the early Heidegger), we can no longer understand this agreement as a synthesis—neither as a synthesis of identification nor as a synthesis of intuitive fulfilment. Furthermore, we could, with Husserl, understand hiddenness as an essential moment of (inadequate) truth, and thus ascribe falsehood to a rash neglect of this hiddenness, but we cannot make—as we can with Heidegger—the understanding of falsehood’s true being into a condition of access to the truth. For Husserl, falsehood is the negation of truth, and thus truth cannot be understood as the overcoming of a double—false and true—hiddenness. Heidegger, even in his later writings and lecture courses, held on to this “negative” understanding of truth and “positive” understanding of falsehood. He thus lands himself in the predicament of wanting to ground false untruth in the proper un-truth of hiddenness, while still maintaining a distinction between them. Heidegger’s lecture course of the 1942/43 winter semester is representative of this line of inquiry; I will conclude with this

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text which bears the (unfitting) title Parmenides, published as volume 54 of the Gesamtausgabe. This lecture course, which is remarkable by any standard, provides detailed phenomenological descriptions of true and false beings’ modes of appearance as well as the appropriate [angemessenen] human acquaintance with mystery— all of which “On the Essence of Truth” only formally designates.74 Here I will limit myself to a brief presentation of Heidegger’s analysis of the false being’s mode of appearing and I will put aside his historical-conceptual [begriffsgeschichtlichen] investigation of the transformation of meaning that occurred in the transition from the Greek pseudos to the Latin falsum. In his 1942/43 lecture course, Heidegger was no longer satisfied with merely pointing to the origin of untruth (in the sense of falsehood) in untruth proper (in the sense of hiddenness and mystery). He now grounds their relationship by proving that neither form of untruth implies a negation of truth and showing that both forms of untruth derive from two forms of hiddenness, the first of which is explicitly manifest as true unhiddenness and the second as false unhiddenness.75 What I have termed “true untruth” is called “lethe” in Greek, and “untrue untruth” is called “pseudos.”76 Both forms of untruth have an essential relation to truth, and since truth is understood as the Greek aletheia, that is, as unhiddenness, both forms of hiddenness have their own kind of unconcealing or appearance. The mode of appearance of the “secret in the mystery [Geheime(n) des Geheimnissvollen]” as a form of (proper) hiddenness that essentially belongs to the essence of unhiddenness, is “characterized by its insignificance, in virtue of which the mystery is an open one. . . . The ‘open mystery’ in the genuine and strict sense . . . occurs where the concealing of the mysterious is simply experienced as concealedness and is lodged in a historically arisen reticence.”77 How, then, is one supposed to conceive of pseudos or false untruth’s mode of appearance, since it differs from mystery as lethe? How does the unhiddenness of a false hiddenness differ from the mystery’s true unhiddenness? How can false concealment appear in such a way that one would take it to be a true unhiddenness? How does the false, usurped form of unhiddenness betray itself in the appearance of the pseudos? How does one find one’s way back from falsehood to truth as genuine unhiddenness? To characterize false untruth, or improper concealment [uneigentlichen Verbergung], in his 1942/43 lecture course, Heidegger remains faithful to the already familiar vocabulary of “covering [Verdecken],” “dissembling [Verstellen],” “veiling [Verhüllen],” and he adds to their ranks the new term “hiding [Verhehlen].”78 Heidegger understands this false concealment as a specific form of appearing, that is, as a false unhiddenness: “The covering

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involved in pseudos, however, is always at the same moment an unveiling, a showing, and a bringing into appearance.”79 Heidegger’s earlier texts designated these pseudos-appearances as “mere seeming [Schein]” and determined this mere seeming as an event “where something is, but where this something presents itself as what it is not.”80 The 1942/43 lecture course notably abandons the use of negation in trying to determine mere seeming and replaces the expression “what it is not” with “appear[ing] differently than it is ‘in truth’ ”: “insofar as dissembling not only sets ‘something else’ before [us] . . . but lets something appear other wise than it is ‘in truth,’ dissembling also unveils and hence is a kind of disclosure.”81 The main focus of Heidegger’s account of the difference between a true and a false unhiddenness shifts from the “as what” something appears to be (or not to be), to the “how” of its appearing, or to its “kind of disclosure.” If one thinks of truth on this basis, how a mystery discloses itself while remaining concealed, that is, on the basis of its “inconspicuous openness [unscheinbaren Offenheit]” and its “retrieval in secrecy [Bergung in Verschwiegenheit],” then false appearances must be given in a conspicuous mode of pseudorevelation that sticks out like a sore thumb. Unlike the earlier texts, here Heidegger is no longer satisfied with the remark that “one” lets such pseudo-disclosures go unnoticed and is thus “turned toward what is accessible”; instead he gives expression to the ontological-historical conditions of the triumphant march that false seeming celebrates in our culture. Our culture hardly admits any more that “what is closed off” [das Verschlossene] (as it is still called in Being and Time) makes itself known as such. Our culture covers over the hiddenness of the mysterious as much as it does the distorted superficiality of false seeming (and thus all attentiveness to the “how” of appearing) with a massive layer of information that is supposedly factual, since it is “objective.” The relentless production of ever new things and new information about them not only conceals the hiddenness of a mysterious world but also systematically conceals its own work of concealment. Once our culture loses its sense for the mysterious and its inconspicuous openness, it will also completely fail to understand how promoting the hasty disclosure and public display of anything and everything is in truth bound to a process of massive repression and concealment. Foucault—like the true Heideggerian that he was— devoted exemplary analyses to this process of concealment, on the basis of which the compulsion toward unlimited public-ization [Ver-öffentlichung] and public supervision [öffentlichen Kontrolle] first becomes intelligible, primarily through the example of how our culture deals with human sexuality.

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If this chronico-historical [zeitgeschichtliche] and ontological-historical [seinsgeschichtliche] diagnosis is correct, then this means that, for contemporary humanity, more than ever, any direct access to truth as the unconcealment of the mystery of being is irremediably blocked. On the basis of this tragic insight it becomes more understandable why Heidegger, in the lecture course of 1942/43, would hold that the origin of untrue untruth is true untruth, while nevertheless at the same time emphasizing that already with the Greeks the access to true hiddenness necessarily leads to the examination of untrue unhiddenness, in the sense of falsehood.82 The contemporary un-Greek man’s openness to the event of the unconcealment of truth as mysterious unhiddenness only amounts to the effort of “deconcealing” [Enthehlen] a “concealed” hiddenness [“verhehlten” Verborgenheit].83 The “letting-be” of true being’s unconcealment indeed remains a “gift” [Geschenk], but not one that strikes us like a lightning bolt out of the blue. Philosophical thought and artistic creativity must first reawaken in us the sense for the meaning of the hidden and show us the path toward a distinction between true and false hiddenness. The question concerning the essence of truth, as the question of the truth of being, can no longer spare—indeed less so than ever—the arduous detour of questioning after the true essence of the false and its ontological-historically conditioned way of appearing in a culture of pseudo-phenomena of pseudo-truths of pseudothings:84 “It could indeed be so difficult to find the truth, and therefore we find it so rarely, because we do not know, and do not want to know, anything about the essence of the false.”85 Translated by Patrick Eldridge Notes 1. The most important texts for Heidegger’s concept of truth include: M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977) [translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)], §44; Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 17 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994) [translated by D. Dahlstrom as Introduction to Phenomenological Research (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)], chap. 1 and §50; Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, ed. M. Michalski, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 18 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002) [translated by R. Metcalf and M. Tanzer as Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy (Bloominton: Indiana University Press, 2009)], §22; Platon: Sophistes, ed. I. Schüßler, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 19

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(Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992) [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Plato’s Sophist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)]; Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, ed. P. Jaeger, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 20 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979) [translated by T. Kisiel as History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana Unviersity Press, 1985)], §31c; Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, ed. W. Biemel, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 21 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976) [translated by T. Sheehan as Logic: The Question of Truth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016)]; Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie, ed. F.-K. Blust, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 22 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993) [translated by R. Rojcewicz as Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana Unviersity Press, 2007)], §59; Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, ed. K. Held, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 26 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978) [translated by M. Heim as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. O. Saame and I. Saame-Speidel, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 27 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996); Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt— Endlichkeit— Einsamkeit, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 29/30 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983) [translated by W. McNeill and N. Walker as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)], §§71–73; Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. H. Tietjen, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 31 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982) [translated by T. Sadler as The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002)]; Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet, ed. H. Mörchen, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 34 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988); Sein und Wahrheit, Teil 1, Die Grundfrage der Philosophie and Teil 2, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, ed. H. Tietjen, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 36–37 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001) [translated by G. Fried and R. Polt as Being and Truth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015)]; Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 65 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989) [traslated by R. Rojcewicz and D. Vallega-Neu as Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012)]; Besinnung, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 66 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997) [translated by P. Emad and T. Kalary as Mindfulness (London: Continuum, 2006)]; Parmenides, ed. M. S. Frings, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 54 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982) [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Parmenides (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)]; Wegmarken, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann,

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in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 9 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976, 2004) [translated by W. McNeil as Pathmarks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)]; Vorträge und Aufsätze, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 7 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000); Holzwege, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, in Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 5 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977) [translated by J. Youn and K. Haynes as Off the Beaten Track (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)]. 2. The most influential and still current standard monograph is E. Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970). D. Dahlstrom’s Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) is especially commendable for its consideration of Heidegger’s texts only recently made available in volumes of the Gesamtausgabe. Other texts worth recommending include J.-F. Courtine, “Le préconcept de la phénoménologie et la problématique de la vérité dans Sein und Zeit,” in Heidegger et la phénoménologie, ed. J.-F. Courtine (Paris: Vrin, 1990), 349–379; C.-F. Gethmann, Dasein: Erkennen und Handeln: Heidegger im phänomenologischen Kontext (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993); F.-E. Schürch, “Le sens de la négativité dans l’aletheia. Heidegger et les deux voiles,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 106 (2008): 304–329; F.-W. von Herrmann, Hermeneutische Phänomenologie des Daseins. Ein Kommentar zu “Sein und Zeit,” vol. 3 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2008); R. Bernet, “Intention und Erfüllung, Evidenz und Wahrheit,” in Edmund Husserl: Logischen Untersuchungen, ed. V. Mayer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 189–208. 3. E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. U. Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 586–592 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1970), 710–715]. 4. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §44b; 296 [266–267]. 5. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:599–606 [722–728], where Husserl introduces the distinctions between mediate and immediate, as well as authentic and inauthentic fulfillment. 6. On the “gradations of fullness,” see Husserl, 2:610–614 [731–735]; on the “graded series of fulfilment” in external perception, see Husserl, 2:614–631 [735–748]. 7. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 299 [267]. 8. In the sixth investigation of the Logische Untersuchungen Husserl writes that an empty “meaning intention . . . is as it were desirous of [its object]” (2:605 [2:726]), is aware of its “privation,” that is, it is “in need of fullness” (2:607–608 [2:728–729]), and that without intuitive fulfilment it remains “unsatisfied” (2:567 [695]).

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9. Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 299 [269]: “Dasein, as constituted by disclosedness, is essentially in the truth.” 10. Heidegger, 301 [270]. 11. Heidegger, 288 [260]. 12. Heidegger, 290 [262]. 13. Heidegger, 290 [262]. 14. Heidegger, 301 [271]. 15. Heidegger, 295 [265–266]. 16. Cf. Heidegger, 294 [265]: “Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities. Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery.” 17. Heidegger, 292 [263]. 18. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:566 [694]: “In this transitional experience, the mutual belongingness of the two acts, the act of meaning, on the one hand, and the intuition which more or less corresponds to it, on the other, reveals its phenomenological roots.” 19. Husserl, 2:650–651 [764–765]. 20. Husserl, 2:651–656 [765–770 21. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 220 [263]. 22. Cf. Heidegger, 290 [263]: “letting [entities] be seen in their unhiddenness (their uncoveredness).” 23. Cf. Heidegger, 300 [270]: “Because the kind of Being that is essential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein’s Being.” 24. Heidegger, 290 [262]. 25. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:574–576 [701–702]. 26. Husserl, 2:575 [702]. 27. Husserl, 2:575 [702]. 28. Cf. Husserl, 2:575 [702]: “Each conflict presupposes something which directs its intention to the object of the conflicting act; only a synthesis of fulfilment can give it this direction.” 29. Husserl, 2:652 [2:766]. 30. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 293 [264]. 31. Heidegger, 294 [264]. 32. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:632–641 [749–756]. 33. Husserl, 2:716–720 [820–824]. 34. E. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. P. Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974) [translated by D. Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977)].

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35. E. Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918–1926, ed. M. Fleischer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 78–83, 192–200 [translated by A. Steinbock as Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syntheses: Lectures on Transcendental Logic (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 121–126, 243–251]. 36. Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 293–294 [264]: “Being towards entities has not been extinguished, but it has been uprooted. Entities have not been completely hidden; they are precisely the sort of thing that has been uncovered, but at the same time they have been disguised. They show themselves, but in the mode of semblance.” 37. Heidegger, 303 [272] and also already in §44b (295 [265]). 38. Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §§54–60. 39. Heidegger, 290 [262]. 40. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:646–651 [761–765]. 41. Husserl, 2:574–575 [701–702]. 42. Husserl, 2:610–616 [731–736]. 43. Husserl, 2:651 [765]. 44. Husserl, 2:646–650 [761–764]. 45. Regarding Heidegger’s expression “But only insofar as Dasein has been disclosed has it also been closed off” (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 294 [265], Husserl remarked in the margins of his own copy: “Witty, but self-evident, when properly boiled down” [my translation—PE]. 46. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:574–575 [701–702]. 47. See M. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 88 [62]. M. Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1930),” in Wegmarken, 177–202 [136–154]. 48. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 91 [64]. 49. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 294 [265]. 50. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 90 [64]. 51. Cf. Heidegger, 91 [64]: “Untruth is not just hiddenness, but distortion.” 52. Cf. Heidegger, 91 [64]: “distortion . . . where something is, but where this something presents itself as what it is not.” 53. Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1930),” 189–190 [145]. 54. Heidegger, 189 [145]. 55. Heidegger, 188, passim [144, passim]. 56. Heidegger, 184–185 [142]. 57. Heidegger, 189 [145]. 58. Cf. Heidegger, 191 [146]: “However, because ek-sistent freedom as the essence of truth is not a property of human beings; because on the contrary humans ek-sist . . . only as the property of this freedom.”

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59. Heidegger, 186 [142]. 60. Heidegger, 194 [148]. 61. Heidegger, 194 [148]. 62. Heidegger, 193 [148]. 63. Heidegger, 194 [148]: “it happens that concealing appears as what is first of all concealed.” 64. Heidegger, 194 [148]. 65. Cf. Heidegger, 193–194 [148]: “The concealment of beings as a whole, un-truth proper, is older . . . than letting-be itself, which in disclosing already holds concealed and comports itself toward concealing.” 66. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 300 [270]. 67. Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1930),” 195, 197 [149, 150]. 68. Heidegger, 191 [146]. 69. Heidegger, 191 [146]. 70. Heidegger, 196 [150]. 71. Heidegger, 196 [150]. 72. Heidegger, 196 [150]. 73. Heidegger, 198 [151]. 74. Cf. Rudolf Bernet, “Le secret selon Heidegger et ‘La lettre volée’ de Poe,” Archives de Philosophie 68 (2005): 379–400. 75. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, 30–37 [20–25]. 76. Heidegger, 42–44 [29–30]. 77. Heidegger, 93 [63]. 78. Heidegger, 45, 47 [30, 32]. 79. Heidegger, 45 [30]. 80. Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 91 [64]. 81. Heidegger, Parmenides, 64–65 [44]. 82. Cf. Heidegger, 32 [22]: “If for the Greeks the counter-essence to unconcealedness is falsity and accordingly truth is unfalsity, then concealedness must be determined on the basis of falsity. If, in addition to this, concealedness permeates the essence of unconcealedness, then the enigma arises that in the Greek sense the essence of truth receives its character from the essence of falsity.” 83. Heidegger, 55 [37]. 84. Heidegger, 64 [43–44]: “And the essence of the false is not itself something false. It is so far removed from that that the essence of the false might even participate in what is most essential to the essence of the true.” 85. Heidegger, 64 [44].

Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Monad: Remarks on Husserl’s Confrontation with Leibniz Karl Mertens

A peculiarity of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is that it forcefully declares its opposition to certain philosophical traditions, even as it draws on them as integral to its self-understanding. The emphatic innovator is really a spirited conjurer of points of contact with tradition. This is true not least for Husserl’s relationship to traditional metaphysics. On the one hand, Husserl decisively rejects this tradition insofar as, for him, metaphysical thinking combines all the attributes of a phenomenological cabinet of horrors. It is speculative, naïve, operating with “absurd [widersinnig] things in themselves”;1 it is obscure2 and dogmatic.3 On the other hand, there are justly renowned representatives of traditional metaphysics, above all Descartes and Leibniz, to whom Husserl programmatically returns whenever he understands his transcendental phenomenology as a new Cartesianism or a new monadology.4 Husserl’s connection to the metaphysical tradition must obviously be understood as a critical investigation of it, by means of which what is phenomenologically tenable is separated from what is untenable. Husserl is clearly not interested in Descartes or Leibniz as representatives of the metaphysics that he criticizes; rather, he is interested in them insofar as he 265

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sees in their philosophies a germ of thought that can be phenomenologically interpreted and appropriated. For this reason, Husserl’s Descartes or Leibniz cannot be identified with the historical Descartes or Leibniz. Transcendental phenomenology is a modified Cartesianism, a modified monadology. As a modification of philosophical-historical thinking, something is pregiven to phenomenology, something to which it must be related in its transformations. Other wise, the connection to tradition would be nothing but a label without a philosophical point. The following considerations attempt to illuminate Husserl’s recourse to the metaphysical tradition, using as an example his interpretation of Leibniz. The discussion is limited to Husserl’s programmatic suggestions found in the framework of his theory of intersubjectivity. In accordance with the view outlined, I want to assume initially that in crucial respects an affirmative appeal to Leibniz, for Husserl, would be completely senseless. He cannot extract from Leibnizian metaphysics a single idea by which his own philosophy can or should be considered a phenomenological transformation of monadology. I begin with a sketch of what in the broadest sense could be considered the fundamental problem common to Leibniz and Husserl while investigating the crucial differences in approach between Leibniz’s monadology and the phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity. I will then show that these differences are so serious that the attempt to create a phenomenological monadology ultimately is not feasible.5 To put it simply and pointedly: either Husserl carries out a form of monadological thinking, and consequently fails to solve the phenomenological problem of intersubjectivity, or he offers a possibility for satisfactorily clarifying the problem of intersubjectivity phenomenologically, but as a result his philosophy loses the framework in which it could be called a monadology. Husserl takes the first path in his failed attempt at a theory of intersubjectivity in the famous— or infamous—fifth Cartesian meditation. He suggests the second path in scattered textual passages and manuscripts which he admittedly has never organized into a unified whole.

Similarities in Leibniz’s and Husserl’s Statements of the Problem of Subjectivity Even when the ties between transcendental phenomenology and Leibniz’s monadology gain their full systematic weight in the context of discussions of the problem of intersubjectivity in Husserl’s late philosophy, Husserl’s interest in Leibniz can be understood as a consequence of the philosophi-

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cal self-understanding Husserl articulates from the beginning in his conception of transcendental phenomenology.6 The project of a transcendental phenomenology is bound to the performance of the two complementary and fundamental methodological operations of the phenomenological epochē and the reduction.7 With the help of the epochē (the suspension of our beliefs regarding being)8 and the reduction (the leading back of all positings of being to transcendental subjectivity), Husserl gains a world-saturated intentional consciousness, namely, transcendental subjectivity. The phenomenological distancing from the natural attitude’s nonthematic belief in the world enables the philosophical thematizing of the constitution of any and every sense of being. Correctly understood, a being external to transcendental subjectivity is nonsensical, since every sense of being is constituted in it.9 All entities, consequently, are to be understood by means of a clarification of the intentional structures of transcendental subjectivity in the sense of being specific to them. Accordingly, transcendental subjectivity does not denote an entity distinct from other entities but an endless sphere, a universal field of sense-making. To describe and analyze this sphere, a distinctive form of transcendental experience emerges in Husserl’s late philosophy.10 The sketch of the phenomenological field of investigation is conjoined with a deepened reflection on the subjectivity of the subject. In Husserl’s last phase, that of genetic phenomenology, this subjectivity is no longer understood, as it was in his early transcendental phenomenology, as an empty I-pole presupposed—but not more closely thematized—in phenomenological analysis. On the contrary, it proves to be a concrete subject determined by the entire fullness of its intentional life, whose original dimension Husserl endeavors to reveal in his analyses of passive synthesis in the primordially flowing consciousness of time. According to Husserl, Descartes, despite his historic achievement of uncovering transcendental subjectivity, failed “to make the ego accessible in the full concretion of its transcendental being and life, and to view it as a sphere to be pursued systematically in its infinitude.”11 It is to Leibniz’s credit that in his conception of the monad he thematized the subject in its concreteness. In this context, the structural parallels between transcendental phenomenology and Leibniz come to the fore in Leibniz’s understanding of the monad as a subject that, in accordance with its internal rule of development, generates an infinitude of perceptions that reflect the infinite fullness of the universe and of God.12 Hence, Husserl can positively connect to Leibniz’s determination of the monad as an individual representation of the whole universe in order to identify—as he puts it in the fourth Cartesian

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meditation—“the ego taken in full concreteness . . . in the flowing multiformity of its intentional life, along with the object meant— and in some cases constituted as existent for him—in that life.”13 Nevertheless, Leibniz’s and Husserl’s shared notions of the subject that comprises the infinite fullness of worldly determinations within itself poses a problem for philosophical thinking. Depending on one’s emphasis, this notion of subject can still be formulated from two opposing sides: 1. If monads are characterized by their universality or, more specifically, the infinite fullness of their immanent, worldly determinations, then it is not clear how the monad can be understood as a subject distinct from the world that it perceives and that appears to it. Moreover, it is not clear how such a monad has an individual character by which it can be distinguished from other monads. 2. In starting from the concreteness or individuality of the monad, another question arises: How can the monadic subject be characterized by universality or an infinite fullness of worldly determinations? Subjectivity and individuality seem to rule out universal world-fullness [Weltfülle]. As a subject, the monad fundamentally stands over against the world; because of this, determinations of the world cannot at the same time be determinations of the subject. As an individual, the monad only comprehends the world under various aspects, never as a whole. The monad must, consequently, be determined such that it disallows both the finitude-breaking and finitude-fixing moments in the concept of a monad. To do the one is to show how the monad, characterized by universal world-fullness, can be understood as a finite subject and individual. To do the other is to show that the monadic subject and individual is not separated from the world or other monads by an insurmountable gap. A monadology, therefore, has the task of making comprehensible the compatibility of the subjective and individual with the objective, intermonadically harmonious conception of the world. Leibniz and Husserl try to accommodate both aspects with the idea of an inherently perspectival monad. But to each “perspectival” means something dif ferent. This difference is intimately associated with the distinction between metaphysical and phenomenological thought. Whereas Leibniz begins with the assumption that there is a rational order directed by God and is able to ground the world of our experience from an external standpoint, the phenomenological interpretation of the sense-formations in our experience is committed to the principle of an internal recognition of our conscious life. Given

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this difference in methodological orientation, it is no surprise that Husserl “in all [his] deliberate suggestions of Leibniz’s metaphysics” nevertheless maintains a basic distance from Leibniz’s metaphysical thinking.14 With his notion of an individual substance or monad Leibniz responds to a central problem in the traditional ontology of substance. His response is that every determination predicable of an individual, insofar as it can only ever be a general determination, does not say what this individual is as it is itself. With his doctrine of an individual substance as a complete concept or complete being, Leibniz develops the idea of the individual characterized by the totality of its determinations. The complete concept says what the individual is as it is itself.15 To the individual substance in Leibnizian metaphysics belongs the entirety of all worldly determinations such that the individual substance seems to coincide with the world. Hence, the first problem sketched above: How are we to understand the fact that the monad can at the same time have a subjective and individual character?16 Leibniz attempts to solve this difficulty, first, by thinking of monads as fundamentally dependent upon both the universe perceived by them and the divine substance. He expresses this relation with his famous metaphor of a mirror.17 As a mirror of God and the universe, the finite subject is directed toward that which it reflects. This is pregiven to it objectively as something separate from itself. The same thought is implied by the Leibnizian determination of a monad as a representation of God and the universe. Furthermore, it is created by God. The perceptions and strivings of the monad from perception to perception do not owe themselves to a creative act of the finite monad itself.18 Second, Leibniz connects the metaphor of the mirror with that of monadic perspective.19 God and the universe mirror each other in a multitude of monads differentiated from one another by their respective perspectives—roughly comparable, as Leibniz repeatedly emphasizes, to the view of a city from various standpoints.20 Finite substance, per Leibniz, is an individual among other individuals. The determination of its perspective admittedly requires a more precise explanation. Since an individual substance is to be understood as a complete concept, its perspective cannot be understood as a restricted, fragmentary view of the world bound to a particular standpoint. For nothing can be excluded by this perspective. Leibniz instead clarifies the perspectivity of monadic perception in terms of various grades of clarity and distinctness within the represented totality.21 In connection with this, monads differentiate themselves by the level of the intensity in their striving.22 The multiplicity of monadic

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individuals owes itself to the possibilities for variation in the patterns of clarity and distinctness of the perceived infinity as well as the corresponding gradations of the intensity of striving. At the same time, these determine first and foremost the decisive difference between divine and finite substance. While the perceptions of the latter are always perspectival in the sense outlined, this is fundamentally untrue of God’s perceptions. God perceives every thing with the highest level of distinctness.23 Leibniz’s metaphysical determination [Bestimmung] of the monad as a representation of God and the universe already points toward the solution to the second difficulty—the possibility of an objective, interindividual, concordant consciousness of the world. Since all worldly determinations are perceived by monads, the idea of their universal harmony is understood not so much as a solution to the problem of intermonadic agreement but more as an explication of an indispensable aspect of this theory. God creates the monads in such a way that they mirror the same universe.24 This implicitly requires the una nim ity of perceptions among them. Since monads as individuals still perceive the same totality differently, a divinely established equivalence of the dif ferent ways in which the finite substances embody the same universe is required.25 Hence, the perspectival grasping of the world [Welterfassung] does not endanger the unity of the world perceived by the individual monads. The monadic perspective is the embodiment of an admittedly individual totality that is perceived idiosyncratically but completely. The world grasped perspectivally in each case is at the same time the world of all monads. In this regard, the multiplicity of monads has no constitutive significance for the objective grasping of the world. The monad has no window. As an autonomous individual, it owes its agreement with the perceptions and strivings of other monads to God alone and not to a mutual influence of monads upon one another.26 Turning to Husserl, one can address a problem comparable to Leibniz’s: through transcendental phenomenology’s theoretical approach with its notion of constitution, all objectivity in the end is something that the subject, in a certain way, produces. Therefore, how the world-constituting subject can be understood as a finite subject that does not create its objects must be clarified phenomenologically. The required clarification manifests the commitment of Husserlian philosophy to the intuitively given or what is given in itself as the basis of a phenomenological legitimation.27 Given this basic methodological orientation, there is also thought a moment of fundamental inaccessibility that implies an approach toward a finite subjectivity. For even if Husserl in the course of his philosophical development always emphasized more clearly the active and productive character

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of the constitution of sense,28 the processes of constitution investigated by phenomenology remain dependent upon something that is not a product but a presupposition of sense-formation [Sinnbildung]. By referring back [Rückverwiesenheit] to what is intuitively given, something can be brought to evidence in the phenomenological sense— and phenomenologically this means to either confirm or disconfirm. The recourse of phenomenological analysis to something pregiven enables us to properly understand the spontaneous and creative moments of the meaningful achievements it thematizes as achievements of a finite subjectivity.29 Consequently, what Husserl claims as determinative of the finitude of transcendental subjectivity does not reject the antithesis of divine creation, as Leibniz alleges but rather recalls the moment of dependence upon the pregiven, a moment that is indispensable to our experiential life.30 The phenomenological determination of the transcendental subject’s individuality depends upon an appeal to our finite experience rather than a metaphysical distinction between a finite and a divine grasp of the world. The constitution of the world is on all levels an “oriented constitution,” in which a “central constituent [Zentralglied], in accordance with orientational modes of givenness” is singled out.31 As with Leibniz, this centricity [Zentriertheit] implies a fundamentally perspectival grasp of the world constituted in the intentional life of consciousness. In contrast to Leibniz, however, the methodological commitment to the phenomenological analysis of my conscious life’s intuitive givenness of objects themselves leads to the fact that, for Husserl, the centricity of subjective experience [Erlebnis] has a sense that connects to our ordinary perspectival experience [Erfahrung]. Perspective, consequently, is grounded in the subject’s being bound to a standpoint that provides a fundamentally limited and always merely fragmentary experience of the world.32 Consequently, if the exposition of transcendental experience must begin with the limitations of “each one’s own subjectivity [my emphasis],”33 the task of phenomenology is to make comprehensible, starting from the centricity of the finite experience of the self, the intersubjective experience of the world and the sense of the objective world based upon it. Once again, in contrast to Leibniz, Husserl faces, first, the problem of the intersubjective unanimity of the world experienced by concrete subjects. Since Husserl’s concrete subject is not all-encompassing and independent but is rather limited in its subjective experience, it is fundamentally dependent upon other subjects distinct from itself for the constitution of an objective world. Accordingly, on Husserl’s account, we cannot dismiss the problem of a subject’s egological closed mindedness (egologisch Verschlossenheit) even while

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unanim ity in registering the world is introduced as the principle of a universal harmony. The possibility of a conception that can appeal to God as the sufficient ground of every thing that exists is not available to a phenomenological theory, which begins from the experience of each individual conscious life. Perspectival centricity as the limit of transcendental experience can be overcome only if unanim ity in the experience of the world can be made comprehensible as a constitutive achievement of a communalization [Vergemeinschaftung] of finite monads, a communalization that is possible for the subject itself.34 Thus, the problem of determining the infinitude of monads or subjects is not simply posed differently in Leibniz and Husserl. It is posed from completely opposing sides. Leibniz, against Spinozistic ideas concerning the negation of multiple finite substances, is anxious to account for their very plurality.35 To do this, he must make comprehensible monads as perspectival representations of the infinitude of the universe in their difference from divine substance and their distinctness from one another. By contrast, Husserl’s major difficulty, in departing from the concrete transcendental-phenomenological subject’s limited experience of the world, is to demonstrate the possibility of an objective apprehension of the world that as intersubjective overcomes the limitations of merely individual experiences and makes intelligible the experience of one world. The former threatens the loss of finitude; the latter must avoid a dangerously excessive finitude.

The Problem of a Phenomenological Theory of Intersubjectivity as Monadology The fifth Cartesian meditation occupies a special place in the controversy regarding Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity insofar as it is the systematic draft published by Husserl himself on this problem.36 In truth, Husserl redeems his claim to a phenomenological reformulation of Leibniz’s monadology—in such a way, in fact, that with this attempt at a monadology he inadvertently brings to light the failure of a phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity. To clarify this thesis, it is necessary to explain a few critical places that stand out in the fifth meditation.37 At the beginning of the fifth meditation, Husserl first formulates a fundamental suspicion about transcendental phenomenology which has thus far been developed only as an “egology”: “When I, the meditating I, reduce myself to my absolute transcendental ego by phenomenological epochē, do I not become solus ipse; and do I not

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remain that, as long as I carry on a consistent self-explication under the name phenomenology?”38 To be able justifiably to quash the objection regarding solipsism, Husserl radicalizes the statement of the problem in an introductory methodical step. He introduces a thematic epochē, which shuts out any intentionality that references the sense-instituting achievements of another subjectivity. With the help of this innovative abstract epochē, Husserl attains a uniquely reduced sphere—the so-called primordial sphere. Granted, even the primordially reduced transcendental ego is not without a world. But this “world” is only “my world,” a “world” in quotation marks— without the sense of others and, above all, not including the constitutive achievements of other transcendental subjects. Consequently, the primordially reduced ego must ask how, within its sphere of ownness, the other can constitute itself in its sense as other.39 Doing so will show not only how the sense of other egos is evinced in the transcendental subject but also how it is possible for the ego to gain access to other co-constituting transcendental subjects, by what sense-constituting achievements the ego can first acquire the dimension of a transcendental intersubjectivity.40 The thematic epochē, as the disconnection of the sense of the other, of what is not myself, differs from the phenomenological epochē by virtue of its skeptical character. It has the specific sense of a thematic cancelation, which cannot be claimed of the phenomenological epochē.41 With the aid of this thematic epochē, Husserl sets up his solution to the problem of intersubjectivity. This has serious implications for the further analysis of the constitution of intersubjectivity. For, in the fifth meditation, Husserl, taking as his starting point the sphere distinguished by the thematic epochē, attempts to develop the sense of others and their co-constitutive, transcendental achievements. As a result, however, Husserl develops the phenomenological theory of the experience of others within the framework of the fundamental divide between self and other. According to Husserl, the understanding of the sense of another subjectivity rests upon an analogizing appresentation, in which the other attains its sense by a transfer of sense from my subjectivity. The gap between what is originally and reliably presented within one’s own sphere of experience and what is merely appresented— and not in a fulfilling presentation—as an analogue of myself remains in force in Husserl’s attempt to solve the problem of intersubjectivity.42 Accordingly, in formulating the problem of possible solipsism, in the methodical approach of the thematic epochē, and in working out the proposed solution of an analogizing appresentation, Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity fixes in place a primordial subject over against which stands something that is fundamentally not a subject and can be experienced

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only in an appresentation rather than in itself. Every other [conscious being], every not-myself, attains its sense as an analog—as a modification of myself—from my subjectivity through empathy. As itself it remains fundamentally inaccessible.43 Although Husserl explicitly attempts to ground his theory of the communalization [Vergemeinschaftung] of individuals in his conception of the experience of others, the justification for this talk of a communal relationship must here be contested since a genuine reciprocity within the limits of Husserl’s theory cannot be established. Therefore, the classic objection to Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity is to be accepted.44 Husserl’s fifth Cartesian meditation is both phenomenology and monadology. His transcendental subject turns out in fact to be a monadological subject. Like Leibniz’s monad, it lacks a window through which it can gain access to the sense- constituting achievements of another subject. There is no way out of the monadic world. In contrast to Leibniz, however, Husserl’s constituting subject as a concrete subject is not self-sufficient. It requires another transcendental subject to be able to constitute an objective world. Monadic insularity and dependence on other subjects, however, mutually exclude one another. And so, Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity comes to a head in an aporia. It is now clear where Leibnizian metaphysics and Husserlian phenomenology must part ways. In the context of a phenomenological analysis, one cannot assume the determination of monads by a complete concept, since there can be no original experience of such a totality. Experience— even transcendental experience—is always limited experience; other wise, it would not be experience. Instead of resorting to the metaphysical principle of a divinely ordered harmony, the phenomenological task is to make intelligible the meaning of an intersubjective objective world, even while departing from the finitude and centricity of the subjective experience of the world. The “windowless” character of monads is not phenomenologically acceptable. In a manuscript written in 1922, Husserl emphasizes this explicitly: “A monad therefore has windows, in order to absorb influences by others.” 45 A phenomenologically suitable theory of intersubjectivity, not comparable to Leibniz’s, is, therefore, to be attained in Husserl’s interpretation of the so-called sphere of transcendental experience.46

Possible Approaches to a Phenomenological Theory of Intersubjectivity In phenomenology a perspectival conscious experience takes the place of the monadically represented totality of the Leibnizian universe. As a

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limited experience of the world, it nevertheless refers to what is beyond the limits. What is beyond the limits is not itself present but is nevertheless co-given and is as a matter of principle convertible into phenomenological givenness. Under the title of horizon-structure, Husserl thematizes the referential relation of what is given in itself to what is co-meant, a comeant that can, in turn, be converted into self-givenness in further experience but that nevertheless always remains afflicted with unfulfilled co-intentions. In this process, the concrete subject’s experience of the world is codetermined by aspects of the constitutive achievements of other subjects. These aspects, for their part, relate to specific possibilities of the conversion of the things co-meant in what is itself given. A phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity must therefore interrogate the concrete transcendental subject regarding the way in which, in its oriented world constitution, the intentional achievements referring to the sense of other experiential centers are involved. Only through the involvement of other subjective perspectives in the sphere of transcendental self-experience can something like an intersubjective communalization be manifested and made intelligible. And only through this can it be shown how in a reciprocal horizon-formation intersubjective unities of sense and a common world constitute themselves. This communalization is at the same time a presupposition for all experience of the otherness of others.47 For others are other to me neither as mere analogs of myself nor because of their fundamental inaccessibility. Rather, they are other to me because they confront me in the process of communalization as someone with whom I come to grips.48 Therein I experience the other as someone who differentiates himself from me insofar as he addresses me or resists me, insofar as he surprises me and eludes me. The moment of a fundamentally open intersubjective experience thus belongs to the constitution of social sense-unities. The infinitude emerging in this context and the universality of the phenomenological analyses of concrete subjectivity and intersubjectivity imply something completely dif ferent from the totality of infinite determinations—utilized by Leibniz in determining the monad—that are differentiated only by the grades of clarity and intensity of monadic striving. The complete concept of the monadic individual is, to a certain extent, replaced phenomenologically by the incomplete infinitude of transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which, inherently incomplete and interminable, can only be experienced as an infinitude in carrying out the progressive formation of a horizon. Instead of the Leibnizian

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equivalence of the dif ferent perspectives of a pregiven multiplicity of monads in the same totality, we find the endless and open process of the communalization of dif ferent individuals, which provides an endless field of work for phenomenological analysis. With the analysis of the horizon-intentionality of consciousness, the fundamental problem of a phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity shifts from the question concerning the constitution of the other as a coconstituting subject within the primordial sphere to the exposition of coconstituting achievements of the other within transcendental experience, which is essentially already an intersubjective experience.49 Moreover, the concept of the horizon, as explained within the framework of a theory of vision and perception, is not fully fixed. With its help the frequently criticized one-sidedness of the orientation to consciousness in the context of Husserl’s intersubjectivity-problematic can be broken. For this, the integration of the horizons of bodily togetherness, of common actions, and of communication seem to be especially promising candidates. To what extent an intersubjective horizon-formation, so understood, fundamentally leaves the approach to phenomenological monadology behind must briefly be outlined. Husserl has analyzed, above all in Ideas II, the body as a center of orientation, as a sensing and functioning “ego-body.” To the horizons of my transcendental self-experience belong not only the possibilities tied to my own bodily centricity (Zentriertheit) but also those of other bodily entities that, in their bodily behav ior and expression, are given to me to be understood as others.50 Nonetheless, even in Husserl’s late manuscripts, his steps in this direction do not lead to a fundamental correction of the concept of empathy.51 This is because a consistent account of the horizonal structure of bodily others and of their achievements as constitutive of a common world would have led to substantial revisions in the character of transcendental phenomenology. Not only would the analysis of consciousness have been considerably augmented by the inclusion of the sense-constituting achievements of bodily togetherness. It would, along with the analysis of bodily experience already on hand, become phenomenology’s fundamental theme, cutting across the pervasive constitutional-theoretical gap between constituting and constituted. Husserl himself, in the context of discussing the relation between space—or the spatial object of perception— and bodily kinesthesia, had already been confronted with this problem in his early analyses of perception without yet drawing out the relevant theoretical consequences.52 This problem is exacerbated in relation to the constitutive significance of the corporeality of the other. Hence, it is hardly

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surprising that the intentionality of one’s own and of the other’s body, in the sense of a phenomenologically primordial experience, is first laid out, not by Husserl but in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.53 The motility of the body as an “organ of the will” [Willensorgan54] is at the same time the presupposition for the determination of the practical possibilities of the “I can.”55 According to Husserl, this underlies the togetherness and separateness in which the horizons of social behav ior are formed.56 One continually finds in Husserl hints of an analysis of the formation of sense out of the practical communalization of concrete subjects. Even here, however, a consistent phenomenological analysis of the senseconstituting achievements of a communal behavior would have led to a substantially modified conception of transcendental phenomenology. This would, if nothing else, have given rise to a new determination of the structure of the primordially flowing consciousness of time, which is attained largely in the analysis of perceptual acts.57 For its part, while referring back to corporeality and social behav ior, the open society of monads communicates in “social actions.”58 By means of communication, horizons of understanding are constituted—horizons that also demand specific forms of confirmation [Bewährung].59 Nevertheless, recourse to an analysis of the originally communicative experience of others and their sense-constituting achievement is out of the question for Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, grounded, as it is, in the philosophy of consciousness. Linguistic communalization, for Husserl, is always founded on the constitutive achievements of consciousness. The openingup of a possible reciprocity in the relation between consciousness and language, by contrast, would have led to a revision of the relation Husserl recognized between pre-predicative and predicative experience. The early Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the philosophy of language clarify the fact that the path Husserl charts does not lead directly to analytic philosophy of language but opens phenomenological possibilities that could have been exploited with regard to a satisfying solution of the problem of intersubjectivity.60 With the elaboration of such approaches to the intersubjective formation of horizons, a phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity certainly distinguishes itself from Leibniz’s view. Even if corporeality in Husserl cannot be understood in the sense of a merely spatial extension, a spatial boundedness of the phenomenological subject comes into play with the “designation of the body as a field of localization.”61 Leibniz can take this into account in his concept of the phenomenal world, but not for the sphere of spiritual monads that metaphysically ground the phenomenal world.

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Fi nally, the approach to social behav ior and speech implies a reciprocity among subjects that directly opposes the metaphysical determination of spiritual monads, since, on a phenomenological understanding, concrete subjects are capable in principle of expanding their perspectival limitation only as a result of acting and speaking. In intersubjective reciprocity they can respond to, confirm, encourage, or correct one another The approach to a bodily, practical, and communicative communalization of subjects that constitute a world in their respective horizons of togetherness is thus tied to a fundamental departure from monadological thinking. It makes little sense to understand Husserl’s phenomenological monadology as a philosophical guide to the solution to the problem of intersubjectivity. At best, Leibniz’s monadology can be understood as a foil from which the problems and possibilities of a nonmetaphysical thinking can be critically articulated. Moreover, the brief, concluding sketch should indicate that it might be the case that the windows of the phenomenological “monad” are at the same time windows in Husserl’s conception of transcendental phenomenology—windows that open up to a revision of Husserl’s explicit self-understanding of his transcendentalphenomenological analyses. Translated by Robin Litscher Wilkins Notes 1. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus, Nijhoff, 1963), 166, 182 [translated by D. Cairns as Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 139, 156]. 2. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 206 [translated by D. Carr as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 202]. 3. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Erster Teil, Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. R. Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 79, 144, 183. 4. The application of the concept of metaphysics within the framework of phenomenology itself must be distinguished from the relation to the tradition of metaphysical thinking that is characterized by a rejection of traditional metaphysics or an approval of its representatives. Even so, Husserl’s determinations of this concept of metaphysics are not consistent.

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In the five 1907 lectures, Husserl understands metaphysics as “the science of beings in an absolute sense”; see Die Idee der Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 23 and cf. 32 [translated by L. Hardy as The Idea of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 19 and cf. 25]. Although Husserl here gives priority to phenomenological epistemology (23 [19], cf. 3 [61], 32 [25], and 58–59 [43–44]), in 1913, in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, phenomenology itself takes up the function which Husserl assigned to metaphysics in 1907. See Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, ed. K Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976) [translated by D. Dahlstrom as Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen I. In 1913, he designates the absolute given as absolute being [Sein] (Ideen I, 91–94 [77–80]); see also Rudolf Boehm, “Zum Begriff des ‘Absoluten’ bei Husserl,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 13 (1959): 218–220. Husserl fi nally uses the concept of metaphysics to designate a scond philosophy grounded in the fundamental science of phenomenology as first philosophy (Erste Philosophie, 1:14, 188n., 394; see also Boehm’s “Editor’s Introduction,” xvi–xvii). As first philosophy, of course, phenomenology assumes the role of a successor discipline to traditional metaphysics; see Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 166 [139]. 5. Here I agree with Klaus Erich Kaehler’s thesis [in “Die Monade in Husserls Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 57 (1995): 692–709]. At the end of his article he states: “The problem of a transcendental monadology as phenomenology is insoluble” (709). Furthermore, I would like to thank Klaus Erich Kaehler for his helpful critical comments on an earlier paper of mine about Husserl’s relation to Descartes and Leibniz [“Subjekt und Monade: Zur Ambivalenz cartesianischer und leibnizianischer Motive in Husserls transzendentaler Phänomenologie,” in Cognitio humana— Dynamik des Wissens und der Werte, XVII: Deutscher Kongress für Philosophie; Workshop-Beiträge, ed. C. Hubig and H. Poser (Leipzig: Institut für Philosophie, Universität Leipzig, 1996), 1:653–660]. In the article, I interpret Husserl’s appeal to Leibniz’s philosophy as a possibility for transcendental phenomenology in overcoming Cartesian fundamentalism; what follows will be about fixing the boundaries of the attempt at a phenomenological monadology. With so much room for interpretation, it is obvious to me that the assessment of Husserl’s philosophical-historical regress depends upon the particular questions asked. In this respect, the negative conclusion of the current confrontation must be fundamentally understood in the context which is developed here.

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6. The monadological conception is found in Husserl’s work as early as 1908 [cf. Stephan Strasser, “Grundgedanken der Sozialontologie Edmund Husserls,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 29 (1975): 3–4]. For more on Husserl’s overall preoccupation with Leibniz, see Herman Leo Van Breda, “Leibniz’ Einfluss auf das Denken Husserls,” Akten des Internationalen Leibniz-Kongresses Hannover 1966, Band 5 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1971), 138–145. 7. Husserl only gradually worked out the functions of these methodological devices that were already introduced in the early drafts of a transcendental phenomenology. Above all, Husserl in the 1920s clarifies many of the inherent ambiguities of his earlier works—particularly of Ideas I of 1913—through a deepened systematic self-reflection [see Elisabeth Ströker, “Einleitung,” in Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen: Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie, ed. E. Ströker (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1977), xv–xvi]. See esp. the second part of the lectures on First Philosophy from 1923/24, which Husserl subtitled “The Theory of Phenomenological Reduction” [Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, ed. R. Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959)]. 8. Klaus Held, “Einleitung,” in Edmund Husserl, Die phänomenologische Methode: Ausgewählte Texte, Teil 1, ed. K. Held (Stuttgart: Reclam 1985), 36. 9. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 117 [84]. 10. Husserl, Die Pariser Vorträge, 11 [translated by P. Koestenbaum as The Paris Lectures (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 11]; Cartesianische Meditationen, 69–70, passim. Cf. Tobias Trappe’s concept of transcendental experience in Transzendentale Erfahrung: Vorstudien zu einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre (Basel: Schwabe, 1996). 11. Husserl, Die Pariser Vorträge, 12 [12; trans. modified]. 12. Cf. Heinz Heimsoeth, “Unendlichkeit im Endlichen,” in Die sechs grossen Themen der abendländischen Metaphysik und der Ausgang des Mittelalters, 3rd rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1956), 74. 13. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 102 [67–68]. Cf. Strasser, “Grundgedanken,” 4–6 for further information on the decisive Leibnizian principles on which Husserl draws. Strasser also discusses the variations in Husserl’s recourse to Leibniz (6–9). Renato Cristin also notes similarities in the thought of Leibniz and Husserl in “Phänomenologie und Monadologie. Husserl und Leibniz,” in Studia Leibnitiana 22 (1990): 163–174, esp. 166–168. 14. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 176 [150]; cf. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Dritter Teil, 1929–1935, ed. I. Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 20. 15. Cf., for example, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discours de Métaphysique, ed. H. Lestienne (Paris: Alcan, 1907) [translated by R. Ariew and D.

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Garber in Leibniz: Philosophical Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989)], §8; Leibniz’s letter to Arnauld from June 1686, in G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–1890), 2:54: “For that which unambiguously encompasses and differentiates a completely determined, certain Adam must include all his predicates in an absolute sense. It is only this complete concept which determines the general concept as an individual (qui détermine rationem generalitatis ad individuum)” [my translation—RLW]. It is important to note that this brief description only addresses the grounds of the Leibnizian theory of the individual [Individuum] in a partial and one-sided way. The above sketch could be completed first with Leibniz’s doctrine of primordial powers, which are grounded in substances, to which the derivative powers of the physical world can be traced, and with his thoughts on the immateriality of substance which is distinguished by simplicity [unicity] or indivisibility. In this case, the grounds for this can be understood in the context of Leibniz’s critique of Descartes. For more on this point, see Klaus Düsing, “Substanzmetaphysik und Philosophie des Organizschen,” appendix to Die Teleologie in Kants Weltbegriff, Kantstudien: Ergänzungsheft 96 (1986): 248–249. For Husserl’s connection to the simplicity and indivisibility of monads in the framework of his phenomenology of time- consciousness, see Strasser, “Grundgedanken,” 10–11. In this context of critically focusing on the question of the possibility of an individual as well as a supraindividual [überindividuell] objective perception of the world, the above reduction of the problems seems to me to be justified. 16. Even if one grasps the complete determination of the individual [Individuum] as an answer to a philosophical problem, it is thereby in no way established that or how the individual substance as complete concept is comprehensible. Horn expresses a similar reservation with regard to Leibniz’s logical and ontological approach to the determination of the individual substance of monad when he writes: “It cannot be doubted that there is such a logical-ontological double- or identity-approach in Leibniz’s work. Because of this, the question can only be, how can one comprehend this incomprehensible approach?” [ J. C. Horn, “Einleitung,” in G. W. Leibniz, Grundwahrheiten der Philosophie: Monadologie, trans. and ed. J. C. Horn (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1962), 19]. 17. See, for example, Leibniz, Discours, §9; Monadologie, §§56, 83 [translated by P. and A. Schrecker as “Monadology,” in Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965)]. 18. Cf. Leibniz, Discours, §14; Monadologie, §§ 38–52, esp. §§47–48; Leibniz’s letter to Bierling from August 12, 1711: “Monas seu substantia simplex in genere continet perceptionem et appetitum, estque vel primitiva

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seu Deus, in qua est ultima ratio rerum, vel est derivative, nempe Monas Creata . . .” / “The monad, i.e. the simple substance, possesses—in general— presentative and appetitive functions. It is either the primary monad or God, in whom all things are grounded—or it is something derived from this, a created monad.” Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, 7:502. 19. For the metaphorical understanding of this way of speaking, see also A. Gurwitsch, Leibniz: Philosophie des Panlogismus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974), 228–289, which refers to Dietrich Mahnke, “Leibnizens Synthese von Universalmathematik und Individualmetaphysik,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 7 (1925): 305–612. (Cf. Gurwitsch, Leibniz, 228n130). 20. Cf., for example, Leibniz, Discours, §9; Monadologie, §57. 21. Cf. Wolfgang Bartuschat, “Zum Problem der Auslegung bei Leibniz,” in Hermeneutik und Dialektik, Band 2, ed. R. Bubner et al. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1970), 219–222. Of course, Leibniz continually referred to the imprisonment of the soul within a body [see Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement Humain, preface, in Die philosophischen Schriften 5:51; Monadologie, §63], through which it signals its perspective—its specific standpoint (see Monadologie §62). But this claim must not be understood as a purely metaphysical claim. Instead, with the reference to the corporeal boundedness of perspective, Leibniz supplements the metaphysical identification of the soul or spiritual determinateness of the monad through phenomenal description grounded first and foremost in the metaphysics of spiritual substances. 22. Cf. Düsing, “Substanzmetaphysik,” 250–251, 254. 23. Cf. Leibniz Monadologie, §§48, 60; Théodicée, §403. 24. Cf. Leibniz, Monadologie, §57. 25. Cf. Leibniz, Discours, §14. Cf. Gurwitsch, Leibniz, 240–242. 26. Cf. Leibniz, Monadologie, §§51–52, 56. 27. Husserl, Ideen I, 51 [43]. 28. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, ed. P. Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 175–176, 188–189 [translated by D. Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 197–198, 211–212]; Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. L. Landgrebe (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1972), 235–239 [translated by J. Churchill and K. Ameriks as Experience and Judgment (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 200–203]. 29. Hans- Georg Gadamer in particular emphasized that, in the context of constitution, the talk of productive or creative moments must obviously not be understood in the sense of a real creation or production; see his “Die phänomenologische Bewegung,” Philosophische Rundschau 11 (1963): 32.

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30. In this context, the understanding of the idea of constitution, which vacillates between the production and the presentation of intentional senseformations, allows itself also to be understood as a consequence of a theory that attempts to understand the subject as the source of any sense of being, without thereby wanting to abandon the idea of a finite subjectivity of the subject. (See my “Das Problem des perspektivischen Sehens in Husserls Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung,” in Blick und Bild im Spannungsfeld von Sehen, Metaphern und Verstehen, ed. T. Borsche et al. (Munich: Fink, 1998), 57–60, as well as Klaus Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität und die Idee einer phänomenologischen Transzendentalphilosophie,” in Perspektiven transzendentalphänomenologischer Forschung, ed. U. Claesges and K. Held (The Hague; Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 24; Held interprets the double meaning of the concept of constitution as a difference between static and genetic constitution. 31. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 161 [134]. 32. This connection to the usual sense of our talk about perspective does not apply to Leibniz’s understanding of the perspectivity of monads. Here the monadic perspective has nothing to do with a limitation grounded in spatial boundedness to a standpoint. The talk of a perspectival perception of the universe is always to this extent fundamentally metaphorical for Leibniz. Of course, in Husserl’s work the concrete subject’s perception of the world— except of course in the limited domain of visual perception— can only be considered “perspectival” in a metaphorical sense. In contrast to Leibniz, however, Husserl’s reference to perspectivity in the context of phenomenology must still be understood in the sense of an incomplete perception of the world. 33. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 243 [236]. 34. Cristin, “Phenomenology and Monadology,” 169–170, points to the fact that Husserl also understands intermonadic unity as harmony. Admittedly, for Husserl this concept has a meaning opposed to its meaning in Leibniz. 35. Cf. Bartuschat, “Zum Problem der Auslegung bei Leibniz,” 219; Düsing, “Substanzmetaphysik,” 250–251. 36. Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity in the form he gave it in his fifth Cartesian meditation was the decisive reference point for all critical commentaries until the appearance of the three Husserliana volumes Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). For an examination of the deficiencies of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity, see especially Alfred Schütz’s classic critique of Husserl, “Das Problem der transzendentalen Intersubjektivität bei Husserl,” in Alfred Schütz, Gesammelte Aufsätze, Bd. 3, ed. I. Schütz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,

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1971), 86–126 (first published in 1957), and Michael Theunissen, Der Andere: Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965). Furthermore, the weaknesses of Husserl’s theory of the perception of others have in the critical aftermath to Husserl prompted multiple systematic attempts at a phenomenological conception of intersubjectivity or of the social. Cf., for example, Bernhard Waldenfels, Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs: Sozialphilosophie Untersuchungen in Anschluss an Edmund Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971); and Klaus Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität.” Several newer monographs that take into consideration the texts published in Hua XIII–XV address Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity (see also Held, ibid.). Cf. Ichiro Yamaguchi, Passive Syntehsis und Intersubjektivität bei Edmund Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982); Richard Kozlowski, Die Aporien der Intersubjektivität: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Edmund Husserls Intersubjektivitätstheorie (Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, 1991); Geog Römpp, Husserls Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität und ihre Beduetung für eine Theorie intersubjektiver Objektivität und die Konzeption einer phänomenologischen Philosophie (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992); Julia V. Iribarne, Husserls Theorie der Intersubjektivität, trans. M. Herlyn (Freiburg: Alber, 1994); Dan Zahavi, Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996) [translated by E. Behnke as Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001]. Taking into account the research manuscripts in Hua XIII–XV leads, in most of the newer works, to a weakening, if not a revision, of the classic critiques of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity. 37. A summary of the major steps in the constitution of the experience of others [Fremderfahrung] can be found in Kaehler, “Die Monade in Husserls Phänomenolgie,” 696–701. 38. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 121 [89]. 39. Husserl, 124–126 [92–95]. 40. Cf. Kaehler, “Die Monade in Husserls Phänomenolgie,” 696. 41. Although the phenomenological epochē brackets our positing of existence in order to make it possible to thematize—without concurring with its validity—what is in a certain manner within the brackets, the thematic epochē is characterized as a disconnection in the proper sense [Elisabeth Ströker, “Das Problem der epochē in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls,” in Phänomenologische Studien (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987), 50 (first published in 1971); cf. Ströker, “Einleitung,” xxiii–xxiv, xxvii–xxix.] 42. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 138–141 [108–111].

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43. Cf. Kaehler, “Die Monade in Husserls Phänomenolgie,” 699. For a detailed critical discussion of analogical apperception in Husserl’s work, see Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität,” 34–36. 44. See supra n. 36. 45. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Zweiter Teil, 1921–1928, ed. I. Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 295. Husserl continues, “It is the window of empathy.” According to the above sketched critique, it is hardly the case that the windows of the monad are from a phenomenological perspective suitably determinable. For a positive adoption of the talk of the windowlessness of monads, see a text originating around 1908: “And the monad has no window, the monads do not interact with each other but have instead a universal accord. It makes no sense to want to affect consciousness through something physical. But changes in the appearance-group ‘body x’ in my consciousness implies a change, and a necessary change, in the corresponding appearance group ‘the same x’ in every consciousness.” Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Erster Teil, 1905–1920, ed. I. Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 7. See also Strasser, “Grundgedanken,” 7–8. 46. Such a theory of intersubjectivity neither pursues a metaphysicalspeculative path in which unanim ity is established as something already attained and as beyond any standpoint; nor is it merely relegated to an egologically accentuated transcendental subjectivity. Cf. also the two possible answers to the question of a justifiable monadology which Kaehler outlines (“Die Monade in Husserls Phänomenologie,” 705–709). According to Kaehler, monadicity is doubly transgressed in phenomenology: first, through the transition from the fact of “I am” to the eidos of a possible other like myself; second, through the recourse to the fact of the selfmanifestation of others as an uncircumventable beginning point of phenomenology. In the second overstepping, experience—including the possibility of error— shows itself to be a dimension of intentional life that cannot be further grounded (ibid., 707–708). 47. The concept of the analogizing empathy of others does not do justice to this experience of otherness. For more on this point, see Kurt Rainer Meist, “Monadologische Intersubjektivität. Zum Konstitutionsproblem von Welt und Geschichte bei Husserl,” in Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 34 (1980): 588. Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität,” 42, speaks critically of a “quasi-doubling of the I.” 48. For the idea of controversy in this context, cf. Berhard Waldenfels, “Fremderfahrung zwischen Aneignung und Enteignung,” in Der Stachel des Fremden (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 64–65.

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49. Zahavi, Husserl and die transzendentale Intersubjektivität, 11–15 [16–22], has attached significant importance to the difference between a constituted and a constituting intersubjectivity for a proper understanding of a Husserlian phenomenology of intersubjectivity. For Zahavi, the analysis of constituting intersubjectivity is the crucial problem of the Husserlian theory of intersubjectivity. “In the first place, we are of the opinion that Husserl’s analyses on the theme of constituting intersubjectivity are of philosophical value in their own right, and should therefore not always be placed in the shadow of his analyses of constituted intersubjectivity. . . . And in the second place, it is our claim that a presentation whose theme is constituting intersubjectivity can in fact illuminate the question concerning constituted intersubjectivity. . . . An investigation of constituting intersubjectivity has the precise task of establishing to what extent constitution is indeed dependent upon intersubjectivity, and must determine, on this basis, the legitimacy and possibility of the constitutive performance of a solipsistic subject (or perhaps also reject the value of such performance). To anticipate the results of our analysis, it will turn out that on the basis of Husserl’s later research manuscripts on the problem of intersubjectivity, it is possible to defend the view that at the end of his deliberations, Husserl revised the hierarchy of founding. . . . In other words, it will be demonstrated that Husserl’s analyses of the concrete experience of other— analyses that always take the route of spatial experience of foreign lived bodies considered as physical bodies— already move within an intersubjective dimension, so that the scope of the primordial reduction must be reconsidered” (ibid. 15 [21–22]). In this context, it is revealing that the fifth meditation’s attempt is intelligible at all only if one proceeds from an experience that is already socially determined. The manner of posing the problem of the theory of intersubjectivity as developed in the fifth meditation cannot even be understood in the terms introduced there. On the contrary, with the formulation of the initial suspicion regarding solipsism that introduces and justifies the efforts of the fifth meditation are brought to bear senseconstituting achievements that intrinsically presuppose our intersubjective experience. Only because the constituting subject of phenomenology always refers over and above itself to other co-constituting subjects can we understand why solipsism (and, in the account of the Cartesian Meditations, the primordially reduced world) must be overridden in transcendental phenomenology. In the primordial sphere itself, there is no problem of solipsism, much less starting points for the possibility of overcoming this problem. In other words, the entire phenomenological monadology of the fifth meditation already makes implicit use of a genuinely intersubjective experience. 50. Husserl, Intersubjektivität, 3:651, 664–665.

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51. Husserl, 654–656; of course, Husserl has clearly seen here the constitutive role of the other for the perception of my physical being as a body (cf. ibid., 655n1). 52. Cf. Hermann Ulrich Asemissen, “Strukturanalytische Probleme der Wahrnehmung in der Phänomenologie Husserl,” Kantstudien Ergänzungsheft 73 (1957): 25–34, who accounts for the reciprocity in the foundation of the spatial object and the conditions of the possibility of its perception in a critical analysis of the concept of adumbration and sensing (see esp. 26 and 34n52). See also Ulrich Claesges, Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1964), 99–101; Claesges highlights this problematic referencing the two aspects the constitution of the body as res extensa and kinaesthetic system. 53. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard 1945) [translated by D. Landes as Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2012)]; see also Bernhard Waldenfels, “Das problem der Leiblichkeit bei Merleau-Ponty,” in Der Spielraum des Verhaltens (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 29–54. 54. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, ed. M. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 151–152 [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 158–159]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen II. 55. Husserl, Ideen II, 257–268 [269–280]. 56. Cf. Husserl, Intersubjektivität, 2:169–170; Intersubjektivität, 3:477–478 and passim. In this context what is most important is the possibility of a clash of purposes (Intersubjektivität, 2:224–225) through which the horizons of action of the transcendental self-experience are essentially limited. 57. For suggestions of an alternative understanding of time, see Wolfgang Kersting, “Selbstbewusstsein, Zeitbewusstsein und zeitliche Wahrnehmung. Augustinus, Brentano und Husserl über das Hören von Melodien,” in Zeiterfahrung und Personalität (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 86–88. 58. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 159 [132]. 59. Cf., for example, Intersubjektivität, 2:473–476. 60. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 213–241 [179–205]. 61. Cf. Ideen II, 151 [158–159].

Husserl’s Phenomenology: Philosophia Perennis in the Crisis of European Culture Elisabeth Ströker

In his work on Auguste Rodin, Rilke writes, “One day people will recognize what made this artist so great: that he was a worker who desired nothing more than to give himself completely, with all his strength, to the humble and difficult world of his craft. There was a kind of renunciation of life in this, but with patience he gained it back: for the world came to his work.”1 Fifty years ago, Ludwig Landgrebe used Rilke’s words at the academic memorial ceremony for Edmund Husserl—not in Germany, where a remembrance honoring the ostracized was not allowed in 1938, but in Prague, where the then famous Cercle Philosophique of the German and Czech universities commemorated its only honorary member, who had just found his final earthly resting place in Freiburg. Landgrebe, one of the most faithful of Husserl’s students, saw in Rilke’s words the motto of the life and work of his great teacher. Landgrebe’s memorial address was directed toward the deceased for whom philosophy had been more than just an occupation and vocation—it had become fate in a trinity unique to him alone: (1) a constant, self-consuming work bordering on obsession; (2) a patience, never failing, with the matters that concerned him; and (3) a “renunciation of life” that, of course, did not 288

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correspond to self-denial in a narrowly eccentric scholarly world but to an unrelenting, impassioned will to objectivity, which is the most extreme selfdiscipline of the kind of thinking that understood itself as a tool, impersonal, and put into the hands of anyone who wanted to make Husserl’s questions her own. What worried Husserl? And what tool was it with which he tracked these worries in ever new attempts, and in the process again and again remodeling, improving, and refining it the minute his mission compelled him to do so? Fi nally, what world was it that, in the unabbreviated sense of the phrase, “came to his work” [zu seinem Werkzeug kam] as though it  wanted to reward him for what he had exacted of it by personal resignation? Edmund Husserl was granted fifty years of a life of intense research. To the day, it is another fifty years that separate us from his death. One would need to survey a full century, then, just to pursue here the fundamental lines of Husserl’s vastly ramified research, and to construe April 27, 1938, as the caesura precisely in the middle of a century, a caesura that separates the genesis of Husserl’s works from the history of its impact for us. Our reflection, however, must be modest. Thus, we look back, not to what determined Husserl’s work between the habilitation treatise at the University of Halle in 1887 and the last notes from Freiburg in the summer of 1937, but to what endures of that work for our generation. Rather than the dramatic development of his thought and its vast expanse, we should consider the driving and enduring fundamental motive of his philosophizing, along with the manner in which Husserl— step by step, doggedly, and with a steely consistency— pursued this philosophizing and ultimately, with full awareness, handed it over in its never-to-be-achieved final form to those who came after him. Today, we find Husserl both more difficult and easier than did his contemporaries: more difficult, because we can no longer be the comrades of a philosopher whose uncommon formative power benefited a generation that he led to a novel and unprecedented way of philosophizing. Moreover, this generation found itself carried by an impulse that did not allow this way to be enshrined by a newly established system, but rather led into the middle of the open and interminable world of experience in the proper sense. It is precisely this world, then, that requires those specific, new tools [Rüstzeug] that Husserl connected with the concept of phenomenology. According to this concept, phenomenology essentially was to be a determined philosophical method, a strictly ruled procedure that, according to

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its own claim, was to surpass even the positive sciences in conceptual and intellectual rigor. It was in this way that phenomenology commenced with Husserl. With Husserl’s first phenomenological work, Logical Investigations, it began—near the threshold of the twentieth century—its rapid triumph over expired “isms” of the past and philosophical speculations that had become brittle. It did this by letting it be known at the same time what this new philosophical tool was to be designed for. “Toward the things,” its motto resounded, or, even more emphatically, “to the things themselves.” Whatever else was to be understood more precisely under this motto, it meant in any event that the “things” of this kind must first of all be uncovered once again from beneath the layers of theoretical, philosophical, and scientific construction of a centuries-old tradition in order to expose them at last without disguise to an unprejudiced view. And what this meant was taking the things and occurrences of the world plainly as phenomena, solely based on how they appear. That was, as became apparent, anything but a trivial program. Viewed positively, Husserl’s firm renunciation of philosophical construction and deduction also contained phenomenology’s fundamental demand for the most extreme sensitizing and cultivation of seeing. For Husserl, the practice of seeing in the broadest sense not only needed to exhibit and show— and, later, increasingly disclose, reveal, and expose—it also needed to be disciplined into a determinate, analytic penetration into the internal structures of things. Husserl defined these “internal structures” with the concept of the “essence” of the thing— a concept that was at times open to misunderstanding. Today, Husserl is more accessible than ever, and this cannot solely be because of the removal of certain misunderstandings over time. Rather, it is because we have an advantage greater than merely looking at Husserl from a historical distance. Husserl published all too little of his work. The printed word was of little importance to him. To whatever considerable extent it was at his disposal, to the same extent he perceived the detailed literary elaboration of his work only as an irksome hindrance to his proper task: to research. Thus, what sporadically appeared, with its imposing intellectual precision and linguistic clarity, offered no concessions to readers’ desires for rapid appropriation. An austere rigor, occasionally perceived as dismissive, lies over these works. Husserl never penned a genuinely introductory or summarizing presentation of his views, let alone a popu lar treatise. Although collectively his published works were presented as “introductions” to phenomenology, they are scarcely anything more than the most extreme con-

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densations of long, arduous investigations. Above all, they barely reveal that behind nearly every page that Husserl committed to print were dozens of others that he withheld. Who, apart from Husserl’s later coworkers and pupils, knew that his estate would bring to light over forty thousand stenographic pages? And the notes, some still in shorthand, concealed not only countless detailed phenomenological studies but also fundamental elaborations of the phenomenological enterprise as a whole: critical reflection on its objectives in general and self-critical reflections on Husserl’s own activity in particular. Today, Husserl’s countless surviving elaborations and drafts are known, works from every phase of his creative work, including the final years of politically enforced silence. They have been made largely accessible in the intervening years through the four decades of archival research into his estate. We are thus better able to see what Husserl wanted and continued to want through all the transformations and advancements of his richly ramified research. These endeavors were directed toward a telos that could determine, admittedly only by way of perpetual approximation, Husserl’s own as well as future phenomenological research. According to Husserl’s conviction, however, this telos must determine phenomenological research, if philosophy as a whole was not to remain merely a clever intellectual game without commitment but was to achieve something in our world. Here, an unmistakable trait of Husserl’s phenomenology comes to light: phenomenology is a philosophia perennis, a continuous exertion of thinking. Specifically, it is an exertion arising from out of the methodologically restrained force of seeing [Schauen], of insight [Einsehen] emerging from the inexhaustible sources of looking [Hinsehen]. It is, however, only with increasing insight into the whole of Edmund Husserl’s immense life’s work that we are capable of grasping in detail what constituted that telos, by what and from what it was determined for him at its core. This core was imperceptible to the early Husserl. It could only emerge more distinctly before his own eyes to the extent that the tool of phenomenological seeing— accomplished step by step in the light of what was at any moment seen—became increasingly differentiated. Husserl first sought and found his way in mathematics— that is, in the surest of all sciences, which preordains every step clearly and distinctly, leaves no place for personal caprice and playing around with uncontrolled thoughts, and which counts results as valid only on the strength of proofs that can be verified at any time. The rigor of mathematics—its complete objectivity and impersonality, in which not someone but thinking itself unfolds—was for Husserl a model for philosophical

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research that never faded. Seen in this way, Husserl always remained a mathematician. Soon, however, following a dissertation that still pertained to a purely mathematical topic, Husserl posed to himself questions of a dif ferent kind. These focused on the validity of mathematical and— even more fundamentally and universally—of logical truths. How and whence could one grasp these, especially as they cannot originate in experience? One must keep in mind that Husserl grew up in an age where the natural sciences had vigorously nourished the post-Enlightenment optimism concerning progress and the unbroken faith in the continuous improvement and expansion of the quality of human existence. The sciences achieved this not only through their own ever more powerful development but above all through their technical efficiency, which had become tangible since the middle of the nineteenth century. The scaffolding, however, to which these sciences owed their apparently unlimited load-bearing capacity, was mathematics and, ultimately, formal logic. It was not only the case that coming to grips with the problem of their validity and clarifying the sense of their validity was of interest to a philosophical penetration into the formal sciences. This endeavor would also lead to the “basis of the validity” of the mathematically structured empirical sciences. Husserl recognized early on that he had stumbled into a domain of problems beyond which the sciences had advanced without being aware of doing so. He recognized that they had forgotten— and continued to forget in the efficacy of their constant progress—what the sense of their activity ultimately was and out of which origins it was drawn. But was such forgetting of origins on the part of the sciences anything more than the dark side of their positivity, a darkness that clearly could not diminish the luster of their achievements even for a minute? Was this regressive inquiry into the sense and origin of the validity of the positive sciences really necessary? Was Husserl’s incessant drilling for “sources,” “beginnings,” “origins,” “ultimate grounds”— all of which appeared to be less important to the success of the sciences—necessary? Husserl’s lifelong passion for clarifying the sense of the sciences certainly did not arise from a need to be original. If it was far from the mind of his fellow philosophers to want to appear effective by asking the most bizarre questions possible, so it was for Husserl. However, he was vigorously and unerringly animated by the conviction that, in the age of the expanding sciences, it was the undeniable task of philosophy to confront these sciences decisively, instead of avoiding them and fleeing to other topics in the comfort of the sidelines. Philosophy had to interrogate the sci-

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ences and their means with respect to what in them did not become questionable to the sciences themselves amidst the gleam of what is taken for granted. Now, philosophy has always had all sorts of questions to ask, even of the sciences. But what was it that prompted Husserl to inquire in particular into the sense and ancestry of their validity? Along with only a few contemporaries, Husserl recognized a danger that had already become apparent with the rise of modern science. For he saw— through all the advancing specialization and segmentation of the sciences, through all their organization and institution, their increasing assemblage of instruments and apparatuses—that there was no internal clarity corresponding to this external unfolding of the sciences and their technique. Husserl found the sciences—he sensed it at first more so than he skeptically perceived it—increasingly directed toward a praxis ser viceable for life. This was by no means to be criticized, much less rejected. However, this orientation distanced science more and more from its original idea and the objective for which it had once arisen, and it exhausted the substance of science. Husserl soon clearly expressed this, and more than two decades before taking up the thematic proper to Crisis, he had already written: “[T]he advances of science have not enriched us in treasures of insight. The world is not in the least more intelligible because of them; it has only become more useful for us.”2 Nothing wrong with this utilitarian view. Throughout his life, Husserl remained an admirer, as he repeatedly stated, of the “technical [kunstmässigen] invention” of scientific thinking and its ingenious “technique” [Technik], for science owed its success to both. However, scientific cognition is not what allows us to understand this cognition itself. Even if, admittedly, it is cognition, insofar as it instructs us in what is the case under determinate instrumental provisions, it is still not insight, which allows us to grasp what scientific cognition means for our world of everyday life and thereby for us. Husserl did not shy away from speaking of a “plight, grown intolerable, of reason.” His task was to put an end to this, specifically “through work that clarifies, makes distinct, and grounds ultimately.”3 To clarify, to make distinct, to ground—how can science thereby regain something of its intelligibility, which has been lost in science’s technical business? Husserl’s first studies in pure logic already show that this could not  be done with the customary attempts at conceptual clarification and the analy sis of logical inference and discursive argumentation, the

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likes of which had been taken up anew by then contemporary positive philosophy. By contrast, phenomenology’s fundamental imperative of exact seeing required viewing logical entities in such a way that the modes of cognition belonging to them could also be interrogated. For logical entities—as well as all objects of thinking and cognizing— are only given to us “in” acts of thinking and cognizing. Above all, however, they belong to such acts in such a way that it is only insofar as we relate to objects in these acts that we can investigate how and what these objects are. Accordingly, it is not only the how of the objects of cognition (the question concerning the totality of their properties) but also the what (and thus the problematic of their modes of being) that falls into the investigative dimension of the modes of cognition of objects. This state of affairs not only became fundamental for Husserl’s phenomenology; it remained absolutely determinative. With it, Husserl touched on the fundamental topic, which under the heading of intentionality initially concealed more than it disclosed: that subjective intuiting and thinking are capable of directing themselves to things that lie outside of them, that stand opposed to them, things that are objects [Gegen-stand] in the literal sense. They are not in consciousness but beyond it, present as objects in the world, and in such a way that we are capable of cognitively reaching them, of “meeting” them and, in the case where we do not meet them—that is, where we err—of cognizing this, too. Husserl did not cease to see a wonder and a profound philosophical riddle in this intentional structure of our consciousness in which all problems of subject and object, thinking and being, reason and actuality are enclosed. It does not allow itself to be completely deciphered. However, to the extent to which it allows itself to be unveiled, one can at least clarify how our consciousness functions cognitively. And to that extent, at any rate, one can understand (1) what it means to cognize something and not merely to mean it; (2) what it means to say that something is or is not this as opposed to that; and (3) what ultimately is contained in our words when we speak of the being or nonbeing of things, or even of the being of the world and ultimately of our own being. It was here, then, and nowhere else, that one would find those “matters” that were to be investigated for phenomenology: not in the things and affair-complexes of the world but in the modes of relation in which we, as subjects, make worldly occurrences—and among these ourselves too—into our objects.

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With this determination of its material domain, however, Husserl had obviously taken phenomenology up on its promise in a much more fundamental way than first appeared to have been done in departing from the question of truth in formal logic. Phenomenology first of all had to attack much more basic modes of cognition than logical or other scientific ones and make them accessible to phenomenological analysis. These were modes of seeing and thinking in which the subject, prior to all science, relates itself to the world cognitively and does so very well, even if it knows nothing at all about science. For the task of clarifying the sense of the sciences, however, this implies first and foremost the insight that the edifice of theoretical science is not something intelligible of itself and that the “world of science” is not something that—like a second world, so to speak— could be erected in detachment from the world of our everyday practical life, even if this is done for the purpose of allowing an other wise absent kind of objectivity finally to enter into this world with the help of scientific formulas. With this, then, Husserl sketched out a fully determinate regress for phenomenology, a recourse to the original modes of the encounter between subject and world. For it was only out of and from these modes of encounter that scientific acts of cognition were to be made perspicuous in their objectifying achievement. Husserl’s endeavor to push forward to the final, attainable origins of our relations to the world—to grasp these purely and to keep our view of them free from every thing that could tarnish it—ultimately forced him to that radical methodological measure that marks the turn to transcendental phenomenology: the transcendental reduction. Husserl thereby took up the customary transcendental problematic (which concerns the conditions of the possibility of cognition) in his own way. At the same time, he radicalized it in that he rendered inoperative the validity of all judgments about being and beings. Indeed, he “bracketed” our collective naive faith in the world in which we unreflectively presuppose the actuality of the world. In this much discussed reductive step, in the inhibition of all commonly executed validities, Husserl found the decisive means for making precisely these validities themselves into the object of phenomenological analyses of origin. This is not the place even for a provisional elaboration of these analyses, or even to sketch in the coarsest of detail the microscopy driven ever further by Husserl (indeed, driven precisely in the direction of the question of sense and validity). Ultimately, the most important result of these analyses was this: in principle, subject and world do not relate to one

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another as though the one simply comes upon the other, as though the subject at best could set out merely to explore the world in passive reception and then merely discern ever more exactly how it is allegedly in itself. Husserl’s analyses culminate rather in an insight that we constantly keep concealed from ourselves as we unreflectively live in the world—that the world, with every thing in it, is a world constituted by us; a world that does not possess its being-sense of its own accord but rather receives it in reference to us. What we in our usual looking in and at the world itself think we must find or even reject in the sense is in actuality our part: brought forth from the inexhaustible, infinite stream of subjective intentional life as an “ultimately achieving life,” there is sense, achieved and founded in multifaceted intersubjective interweavings. It is a sense that is posited and thereafter validated in experiences, struck out in the conflict of experience, critically corrected and only in this way accessible to rational legitimation. The circumstance that, as Husserl pointedly said, “reason alone determines what actuality is” had many consequences for the further unfolding of his phenomenology. Above all, there was this one: the illumination of the sense of the truth of the sciences ultimately announces itself to be more than a self-appointed task within a limited epistemological problem perspective. The task was accordingly not merely to illuminate reason in all the attainable transcendental conditions of its possible achievements in order that anything like world and actuality can be understood at all; beyond that, reason was to be interrogated with respect to the way in which it operates as concrete reason while constituting a par tic u lar historical actuality. I will not discuss here how Husserl—methodically and consistently exploiting his intentional-analytic tools— eventually also became aware of domains of phenomena such as history and tradition and not least in terms of their significance for the foundation of phenomenology itself. The fact that phenomenology finds itself in a tradition— and has to understand itself as a philosophical inheritance with a long past (a fact fiercely denied in the beginning)— opens up, however, not merely a new depth dimension for the problematic of its self-elucidation and self-grounding. For Husserl, the problem of the clarification of the sense of the sciences thereby also moves into a new light: theoretical sciences were not simply there timelessly from the very beginning of time but rather arose at a particular time and entered into history— and not just sometime somewhere, but more than two thousand years ago in classical Greece as the original site of a philosophy that continues to be influential today. Clearly, these

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sciences would henceforth have to be followed back into deeper layers of their historical-genetic constitution with respect to that upon which the probing glance inquiring into their essence falls. In the process, the phenomenological glance also has to affirm its own historical contingency. It has to grasp itself as looking back from a concrete present situation that justifies this phenomenological glance in the first place and makes it urgent. Phenomenological seeing is henceforth also a “seeing” of one’s own historical situation, from which it acquires its perspective. With that, Husserl’s question concerning the sense and validity of the sciences also enters into a new initial position and into a new horizon of problems. That Husserl registered the general situation of his time as a crisis situation by no means occurred merely from a vantage point partly determined by his personal life fortunes. Spiritual and political turmoil had already awakened in him an awareness of a crisis on our continent in the first decades of our century. Husserl merely shared this awareness with many of his contemporaries. Thus, Husserl could quite rightly refer to the “frequently treated theme of the European crisis.”4 These remarks are found in the introduction to that much noticed Vienna double lecture from May 1935, which became the nucleus of a new work, the last from his own hand, titled The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy. Husserl provided a fundamentally new aspect for the crisis-theme, however, by developing the historical-philosophical idea of European humanity and revealing in it the essential function of philosophy and the sciences that have emerged from it. For the crisis under discussion was, for him, essentially a crisis of European philosophy; and only from philosophy could one grasp what Husserl then analyzed as the crisis of the European sciences and, having said that, as the crisis of European culture. Naturally, this crisis did not concern the scientificity [Wissenschaftlichkeit] of the sciences, which had never been in doubt, but rather “what they, or what science in general, had meant and could mean for human existence.” Husserl continues, “The exclusiveness with which the total worldview of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity.”5 At stake are thus questions that concern the sense of human existence and its loss of sense, the reason and unreason of human beings, their freedom and responsibility. Reason, however, we later read, “allows for no differentiation into ‘theoretical,’ ‘practical,’ ‘aesthetic,’ or whatever,” but designates “that which man qua

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man, in his innermost being, is aiming for, that which alone can satisfy him.”6 From the beginning of modern times, scientific reason had been positivistically restricted to the mere exploration of objective facts, and in the process, all human evaluative opinions were excluded. This exclusion brought with it a loss of the vital significance of the sciences, something Husserl had identified early on as a disappearing of the intelligibility of the sciences. Now, interpreting this disappearance as a crisis of science meant, for Husserl, grasping it essentially as a symptom of an impotence on the part of the one science that was the common foundation for all positive sciences: philosophy. With the ascent of the modern sciences, philosophy had increasingly forfeited its own scientificity, even though it had once, through Plato, set the measure and guideline of scientific rigor. Of course, it had done this in such a way that all questions concerning the human being as a rational being were resolved in ancient philosophical science. Accordingly, what later came to light as a crisis was ultimately the decay of the unity of philosophy, science, and a truly humane form of human existence determined by rational insight. It was precisely in this decay that Husserl saw the shortcoming of “a rational culture.” For him, however, it was not a dark fate, an impervious destiny. On the contrary, according to Husserl, it can be made “understandable and transparent against the background of the teleology of European history that can be discovered philosophically.”7 So as not to misinterpret this teleology in the sense of a dubious historical metaphysics, one must regard Husserl’s conception of history as it comes into play in the context of his transcendental phenomenology. One must also understand the concept of the “European”—in both the breadth and peculiarity of its meaning as intended by Husserl—from the perspective of questioning developed by him. Here, of course, Europe does not designate a continent that could be geographically defined. Husserl explicitly includes within the concept the collective culture of the Western world. Europe—that is for him a determinate “spiritual shape,” a “unity of a spiritual life” that transcends national differences,8 decisively molded by science as the binding inheritance of Greek philosophy. This does not entail any kind of privileging with respect to other peoples and human groups. All the same, there is something unique contained in this— Husserl also circumscribes it with an “entelechy”—which, once it had broken out in Greece, seems to be enacted in being human as such.9 Not, however, as though it were a question of a purposiveness in the man-

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ner of biological development. “There is,” Husserl writes, “essentially no zoology of peoples.” For they are all spiritual unities and as such they never have, not even in the European cultural sphere, an attained or attainable, mature, final shape. When Husserl goes on to add that what is unique to spiritual Europe also becomes palpable to non-European human groups and a motivation for them to Europeanize, he is not thereby predicting a factical development, the likes of which has been distinctly on display only in recent decades with the globalization of science and technology. Rather, he saw the possibility of this development as having been given from the very beginning in the telos of Greek philosophy, in the primal phenomenon of spiritual Europe. It was the singular feature of Greek philosophy, however, that it posited a determinate idea of truth against the truth of prescientific life. It sought unconditioned, ultimately grounded truth—and, thus, a truth for which one could only recently be responsible. However, this entails an infinity—not just of tasks but of infinite tasks. Greek philosophy broke free from the spell of the finite questioning of everyday life and put an “ideal praxis of pure thought” through idealization and construction in the place of real praxis, thus converting a prescientificpractical interest into a purely theoretical interest. In doing so, philosophy became a science of ideas: producing and examining ideas, yet, with every validation in the realm of facts, only ever approaching ideas and never attaining them once and for all.10 In mathematics—initially with the discovery of the infinite, then in the mathematization of nature since Galileo—this inheritance of ancient philosophy has remained operative. However, here—as distinguished from in philosophy itself—it has brought about something unusual. Husserl discovered that with mathematical science, “an entirely dif ferent temporality,” and with it a new form of historicality, had come into the world. For the insights of modern natu ral science do not consume themselves like other insights. After the method of successfully acquiring these insights (secured through critical controls) has been developed, they are imperishable in a unique way, and their production and validation through however many people, when and wherever, always brings forth identically the same thing so far as sense and validity are concerned. On the other hand, however, along with what is cognized in this way, new material for further research tasks is always also delivered. Science, then, understood in this way, is an open infinity of tasks. At any given time, a finite number of these tasks has already been “settled” and their resolutions are preserved in enduring validity through all transformations of

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historical time—resolutions that nevertheless can continually be “superseded” by others in an interminable, open futural horizon. It is not only that the basis for the progress of the sciences is found here; Husserl also came across the concealed reasons for a noteworthy loss due to the sciences. For what is it supposed to mean that from now on methodological criteria for scientific rationality, objectivity, and truth sustain an advancement of insights among which one at least is neither found nor envisaged: namely, cognition of the human being as subject? For a subject as subject is simply not to be found among the objects of physical science. The world—as physicists describe it, if not profess truly to cognize it—is a world of pure objects. And yet, it is all the same not a dif ferent world from the one in which we exist as human subjects and in which alone we can exist. How did this paradox remain unquestioned for so long? Husserl saw that the exact sciences, along with their grounding, had already arrived at the stage of a completed objectivism. For with the incipient quantification of the world of experience, scientists had understood the confirmation of mathematical-functional interconnections in experience as nothing other than the “discovery” of something existing in the world without the support of the subject. With that, however, a fundamental transformation of the sense of the world had taken place. Since that time, this transformation has been taken for granted, a fact that must be accepted and that cannot be historically annulled. This transformation is also not a falsification of sense, as though it had to be unmasked as a deceptive semblance. (In contrast to this, should it then be possible to see through the true sense of the world as such?) If vague speculations were not to be given free reign, but rather phenomenological analysis were to be set in motion, then this analysis had to face the following assignment: to make intelligible this transformation of the sense of our world by objective science and to do this in such a way that it not only emerges as such a transformation of the sense of our world; rather, it must be done in such a way that at the same time the self-suspending of the subject within the mathematically physically objectified world can be grasped, specifically, as the subject’s own deed and achievement. Where to begin with such difficult investigations? Was Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology even equipped for this task? Or was phenomenological seeing not overburdened here, if it was still the “given” in the “how of its being given” that was at issue? Did these questions posed by Husserl not already imply that phenomenological intentional analysis would here come to its limits? For it must surely encounter modes of con-

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sciousness here in which the subject runs up against the unfamiliarity and opacity of the things that increasingly confront it in a world more and more pervaded by science. Here it is Husserl’s idea of the transformation of the sense of the world through modern European science in particular that contains the key to an attempt at a resolution, one that can be realized only in the mode of a phenomenological analysis of constitution. For it is not just that the transformation of the world through science falls, from a transcendental phenomenological perspective, within the jurisdiction of world-constituting subjectivity, and—trivially—must be recognized in its endowings of sense [Sinnstiftungen]; rather, it is decisive that, for Husserl, what previously had not been grasped and penetrated in our modern world needed to be grasped specifically as the sedimentation of multifaceted sense-endowments [Sinnstiftungen] that had led the way but were no longer perceivable in actual, everyday observation. At any rate, for Husserl, there was only one way to offset the evergrowing deficit of sense of our modern world and our own human existence: through regressive historical inquiry into the problems of the primeval constitution of scientific objects; that is, through a sense-historical penetration (something admittedly quite foreign to conventional history) into the concealed depth-layers of acts of constitution that had previously been performed, ultimately leading right back to the recovery of the buried basis from which the sciences had originally grown. Only from this basis could the sciences first be made intelligible with respect to what once determined in detail the activities of their production; and only from this basis could it be made comprehensible what the sciences do to this basis— the “life-world,” as Husserl describes it—and what they do in continuously transforming it. Accordingly, as intentional-historical analysis, phenomenological analysis demands nothing less than to work back from the multifaceted givennesses of our presently experienced life-world, through the manifold layers of sense of scientific constructs (their concepts, hypotheses, theories) to their constitution from prescientific, life-worldly givennesses. It was from these givennesses that the original sense of those constructs was once produced in vital activity, only then to be overlaid by later sense-formations and thus to be modified. Still, this original sense remained sedimented in all these layers of sense. To grasp positive science as a sedimented sensehistory, and thus to learn to see its objectivities no longer as static constructs fashioned all at once and forever but as constructs that came to be in various tiered formations. To do this requires at once reactivating anew

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the thus sedimented layers of sense in order to make intelligible again from where we now stand how, in a former production, they came to be the kind of givenness that has today become strange for a way of seeing unmediated by phenomenology. Husserl himself was able to illustrate this concept of a sense-genetic reconstruction of the sciences only exemplarily, as he did above all in exhibiting the individual steps in the constitution of geometrical magnitudes by means of operations from prescientific spatial formations, and in the progressive quantification of nature in Galilean-Newtonian mechanics. For the latter, he also drew on life-worldly givennesses in order to make visible through these examples how modern science had arrived at a knowledge of nature possessing a new kind of calculability and precision. Furthermore, through a consistent manipulation and continuation of Husserl’s historical-genetic constitutional analysis, the sense-constitutive problematic of the life-world itself can be fundamentally unfolded. For this entails a world that, on the one hand, is to be exposed in a determinate phenomenological problem-perspective as the foundation of the validity of the sciences and, on the other hand, (especially in its respective historical constellation since the beginning of modern science) has also always been a life-world molded by science. Thus, it is fundamentally nothing other than the process of the technicization of the sciences that Husserl grasps as the modern transformation— and covering over—of the sense of the life-world. And Husserl saw perfectly well that this also entailed, in a certain way, a scientific constitution of the life-world. Because the results of scientific research gradually struck the life-world (namely, by converting it into objects and events ser viceable for life and in this way assimilating it more and more), science in turn long ago obtained a “basic function” for the life-world, at least in its modern, European concretions. With this alone, however, little would have been attained for the phenomenological mastery of the Crisis-thematic if a path did not make itself available for sense-genetic-constitutive analysis such that the subject, which subject is in the life-world in the same manner that the subject of science is) at the same time recognizes in this analysis its duplication and identity. What Husserl—henceforth taking the life-world as a “guiding clue” for the transcendental investigation of subjectivity— analyzed in detail in this connection belongs to what is most difficult but also, ultimately, to what is most fruitful in what transcendental phenomenology undertook to illuminate. Here too, this is owing not least of all to the integration of the sedimented sense-history of the subject itself in its self-constitution.

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Only with the two together, however—the clarification of the sense of the objective sciences through reactivation of their sense-sediments and the genetic-constitutive self-illumination of subjectivity, an “interplay” in which “the one must help the other”11— could Husserl see phenomenology approaching what he ultimately envisioned as the concrete goal of all research into the origins of modern science. It was a goal he had envisioned since he had taken the sciences into account as the essential and unifying molding force of spiritual Europe, and he also recognized the danger they presented to our experience of sense amid the dichotomy between science’s great usefulness and its deeply buried total sense. The goal Husserl set was nothing less than restoring the original idea of philosophy through transcendental phenomenology. To renew (“quite earnestly,” as Husserl once affirmed) philosophical science in the manner in which it had been in Greek antiquity the guide to a successful life from well-rounded rational insight, and to do this specifically with respect to the fundamentally transformed conditions generated by the objective sciences for the European world at the beginning of modernity— could Husserl earnestly hope thereby to meet the crisis of European culture, which he grasped as a crisis of reason that had atrophied to merely scientific rationality? Was it possible in this way to recover that reason which, after the ancient model, would not allow a division into theoretical, moral, and whatever other kind of reason—when it was precisely this one reason itself that had produced this division with modern science, and indeed even, as it were, conceded it? We cannot conclusively and honestly answer this question today. Too much of Husserl’s estate pertaining to this context remains undisclosed: too little has been made accessible from his (in the broadest sense) ethical studies, from his investigations of practical reason, and from the endeavors to embrace practical reason and theoretical reason (and with a methodologically restricted reason of scientific positivity in particular) in a unity that would be transparent to the last detail. The cautionary judgment offered here, however, does not preclude Husserl’s availing himself for this last question what he had revealed concerning the cohesiveness, if not the unity, of theoretical and practical reason. Husserl demanded for the sake of philosophy that we must “by radical reflections, seek for ourselves singly and in common the ultimate possibilities and necessities, on the basis of which we can take our position towards actualities in judging, valuing, and acting.”12 The fact that these words, alongside many others, are to be found in a passage in Husserl’s work where one might well be least inclined to look for

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them—namely, in the introduction to his transcendental-phenomenological groundwork of formal logic— seems to me to be illuminating in multiple respects, and especially for the cohesiveness of theoretical and practical reason as Husserl saw it. For it is not just that Husserl here led these “radical reflections”—namely, sense-genetic analytic reflections—into the field of formal logic, which he had chosen for his entry into phenomenology three decades earlier. Rather, it appears to be much more decisive that the radical reflections on “ultimate possibilities and necessities” are here supposed to be of significance for responsibly taking a position regarding our actuality. Of all places, how could a postulate of this kind end up in the context of formal logic? If one surveys what Husserl had always understood by “ultimate possibilities” of this kind, these could be understood in the purely theoretical sense. For Husserl dedicated all his might to seeing and seeing into, to analyzing and clarifying the theoretical structures of subject and world. The ultimate possible insight—that was, for him, firstly and lastly, clear and distinct insight, insight into evidence in which, correctly understood, there lay for him at the same time the sole defensible sense of truth, and the one to be secured against every conceivable objection. But how should this kind of “necessity” of reflection reach beyond the theoretical-scientific field into practical necessity for our valuing, acting, and position-taking? It could hardly have become clear in these brief remarks that in the course of time a noteworthy transformation took place in Husserl’s thought, one that concerned not just transcendental phenomenology (though it was executed in it) but ultimately the interpretation of the sense of philosophy as a whole. Husserl had already altered his understanding of intentionality and constitution to the effect that present in all judging is “an acting, a practical directedness to aims or ends.” That is to say, in the formation of judgments of whatever kind, we are already “in all seriousness, productively active.”13 That implies, however, that philosophy itself is a fortiori not merely a matter of a theoretical interest purely living itself out. Rather, it is, in the broadest sense of the concept, a praxis, at any rate a “kind of praxis.”14 This insight of Husserl’s came into effect phenomenologically in connection with the Crisis-thematic in particular. The enduring distinction between technological praxis in the broadest sense and that philosophical activity in which theoretical reason is operative under the idea of a theoretical interest that persists in the face of all technology aside, as Husserl repeatedly emphasizes, theoretical reason is an activity, and as an activity, it is in a position to encroach upon all other

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praxes as well. Of course, it does not encroach as though it could prescribe concrete maxims of conduct to praxis. As theoretical praxis, its concern is a dif ferent one, namely, that of delivering the means required for arriving at clarity in the presuppositions and the sense of technological acting and of rendering this acting accountable by means of insightful judgment resting on the ultimate grounds attainable. It was not just casually that Husserl in the end, in self-critical reflection on philosophical praxis, bound his idea of ultimate grounding with that of self-responsibility. Indeed, he ultimately equated absolute, theoretical justification with self-responsibility, without thereby having executed a sudden metabasis eis allo genos [change into another genus] from his phenomenology of theoretical reason into that of practical reason. It was precisely in this equation that Husserl sought to comply with the idea of reason that was to be opposed to—and, in turn, employed against— that “shortcoming of rational culture” in the modern Western world. The goal was thereby not to forfeit the field to a scientific, technically limited rationality, but rather to open the way for a new rational humanity [Humanität] and a humanness [Menschheit] that would first come of age by means of it. Was this Husserl’s philosophical dream— a late, great hope? Was it a philosophical pioneering for those who were to come after him and who were to carry further a philosophy that was designed to be continued? Husserl understood his phenomenology as nothing less than “fertile soil for a methodical working philosophy,” as an infinite “ground of experience.”15 And he regarded himself, right up to the end, only as a “beginner” in what he was pleased to designate as “work with the hands” on this fertile soil. We know just how much of this soil—in spite of the not so small number who work it today in many parts of the world— still remains fallow and perhaps will remain forever uncultivated. And we also know that the trinity of work, patience, and sacrifice that constituted Husserl’s life cannot be repeated, and it cannot be repeated in a deeper sense, too, for every human life is unrepeatable. Husserl often remarked that he could not live without clarity. It is only against the background of his collected life’s work that one can measure the weight of these words. Certainly, Husserl would not deny the title of true philosopher to those among us who endeavor to be—in Husserl’s most profoundly humane sense—incapable of life, and who strive to remain so for their entire lives. Translated by Hayden Kee

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Notes Lecture delivered on April 27, 1988, at Freiburg University at the memorial ceremony for Edmund Husserl on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. 1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, trans. Daniel Slager (New York: Archipelago Books, 2004), 66. 2. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie, Drittes Buch, Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. M. Biemel (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1971), 96 [translated by T. E. Klein and W. E. Pohl as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book, Phenomenology and the Foundation of the Sciences, trans. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 82]. 3. Husserl, 96–97 [83]. 4. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 314 [translated by David Carr as The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 269]. 5. Husserl, Krisis, 3–4 [5–6]. 6. Husserl, 275 [341]. 7. Husserl, 347 [299]. 8. Husserl, 318–319 [273–274]. 9. Husserl, 13–14, 320–321 [15–16, 274–275]. 10. Husserl, 25–32, 324 [28–34, 278–279]. 11. Husserl, 59 [25]. 12. Edmund Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 10 [translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logik (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 5–6]. 13. Husserl, 175–176 [167]. 14. Husserl, 9, 35 [5, 32]. 15. Husserl, Krisis, 104 [100].

Philosophy of Culture and Cultural Anthropology as Transcendental Phenomenology Ernst Wolfgang Orth

The relationship of modern transcendental philosophies to anthropology— and the phenomenology grounded by Husserl takes itself to be a transcendental philosophy—is ambivalent. On the one hand, the recourse to subjectivity for the purpose of grounding the sciences, and especially for acquiring an adequate epistemology and methodology, entails a definite thematization of human beings. The human faculty of cognition, the human capacity for experience [Erfahrung und Erlebnis], its meaningful action, and human reason in general are thematized and interrogated in order to arrive at ultimate, logically binding structures and an adequate interpretation of the world. On the other hand, transcendental philosophy always strives to disconnect the consideration of concrete human beings in the name of the “purity” of its doctrine. That is true already of Descartes’s discovery and investigation of the cogito sum, but it is especially true of Kant’s critical philosophy as a philosophy of formal consciousness in general beneath which no real being—whether ontic or ontological— may be placed.1 Husserl’s struggle against psychologism, and with it anthropologism, may be viewed as an ultimate tightening of this imperative for purity. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction, with its 307

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decisive disconnection of the world and of worldly humanity (and that means human beings in general), seems to underscore this emphatically and with an ultimate radicality. Even Martin Heidegger—who criticized Husserl’s transcendental-philosophical turn and who seems to have discovered and advanced an anthropological perspective with his fundamental ontology conceived as a hermeneutic of Dasein—protested against the misunderstanding (as he saw it) that his thought was anthropological. Indeed, in the end he even turned against humanism. It thus seems that his stance cannot be compared to transcendental philosophy’s usual verdict against anthropologism. Nonetheless, it remains evident— even for Heidegger—that a philosophy that grounds science and makes intelligible the possible binding character of an orientation cannot appeal to an accidental fact if it does not want to fall prey to relativism or the so-called naturalistic fallacy. An empirical, mundane reality of the anthropological type homo sapiens or animal rationale cannot be philosophy’s grounding basis—at least not if this human being is merely one empirical fact among others. But is this empirical human being, then, just one fact amongst others, a fact like every other fact? It was not Heidegger—with his philosophical interrogation of the human being as existing and as Dasein that understands being—who first thematized the fact “human being” in a fundamentalontological way (i.e., in the sense of prima philosophia). Traditional transcendental philosophy had already not entirely looked past the fact “human being.” Transcendental philosophy discovered the human being— as, for example, in Descartes’s thought—as the important orientation. Heidegger, relying on neo-Kantianism, against which he raised the discovery of “facticity,” built upon this, but he still employed neo-Kantianism’s formal motives when he sought to render this facticity intelligible. 2 However, transcendental philosophy seems only to thematize the human being as an impor tant orientation in order then to isolate in the human being “pure” structures of orientation, “pure” categories, and then to treat them in isolation. What is left of the human being, which is precisely what constitutes the variety of human reality—the physiological, biological, social, historical, and cultural human being with its mythical and aesthetic attitudes—is then left to be whatever it may be. Alternatively, it is either handed over to the corresponding special sciences as a research theme or left to live in history, culture, and politics. At the same time, transcendental philosophy attempts—with reference to the transcendentality that has been read off of the human subject—to understand this merely

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anthropological human being as having a special dignity that is characterized as reason, freedom, responsibility, and creative power. Of course, with that, both anthropology— especially so-called philosophical anthropology— and transcendental philosophy appear dubious. Reason, freedom, responsibility, and creativity empirically seem to be something entirely dif ferent from what they are in transcendental theory. Even more, what is passed off as a transcendental determination of human beings could just be an accidental, historical, or other wise empirical form. Or, conversely, what is presented as the concrete, empirical reality of human beings turns out to be merely a transcendental-theoretical construction. Precisely here, in this disastrous choice between objectivism and idealism, the late Husserl would see the dilemma of philosophy, which is unavoidably directed toward human beings. Objectivism—itself a concrete cultural anthropology—is out of the question. But idealism, to which Husserl feels closer, must be modified and is in need of critique: “Idealism,” Husserl writes, “was always too quick with its theories and for the most part could not free itself from hidden objectivistic presuppositions; or else, as speculative idealism, it passed over the task of interrogating, concretely and analytically, actual subjectivity, i.e., subjectivity as having the actual phenomenal world in intuitive validity.”3 Here, Husserl chooses a fundamental anthropological fact as the point of departure for his basic philosophical consideration, namely, “actual subjectivity as having the actual phenomenal world in intuitive validity.” This is to be understood as an original, normal finding: “The man of everyday life is after all not without reason.”4 But at stake here is not a revision converting his transcendental philosophy, much less his transcendental-phenomenological reduction, but a modification and consistent deepening and refinement of these. For, “correctly understood,” the new statement of the task implies “nothing other than carrying out the phenomenological reduction and putting transcendental phenomenology into action.”5 It is my thesis that the early transcendental philosopher Husserl (the Husserl of Ideas I) begins, without providing an account of it, with anthropological motives, and that his theorems of intentionality and the reduction led him, in the course of his constitutive and geneticconstitutive analyses, to an explicit anthropology. This concept of anthropology that Husserl then attains in his later philosophy is admittedly an expanded one. To the same degree in which anthropology becomes impor tant for transcendental philosophy, transcendental philosophy acquires increasing significance for anthropology. At stake here is thus not

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the external juxtaposition or addition of two disciplines but an attempt at integration. Fundamentally, there are three conceivable disciplines or disciplinary forms: Anthropology as (an) individual science(s), whether it (they) belong(s) to the natural or to the human sciences. No philosophy that wants to avoid relativism and objectivism can be based on this anthropology. However, with respect to its theoretical foundations, this anthropology can be grounded along with or critically determined by philosophy. Approaches and contributions to such an anthropology are to be found already in Husserl’s further development of Ideas I in Ideas II, where the term anthropology even occasionally occurs. These investigations belong in the domain of phenomenological research into constitution. Anthropology as an isolated, more or less explicit, and more or less far-reaching relation of philosophy to significant anthropological circumstances or basic anthropological facts for the purpose of determining and founding philosophy itself. In individual cases, this form of anthropology can contain useful perspectives, though it is always exposed to the danger of taking on uncritical commitments. Husserl already seized upon individual anthropological motifs in the early elaboration of his transcendental phenomenology, although without designating these as anthropology. A philosophical anthropology that is better called anthropological philosophy. It should secure a critically accountable integration of first philosophy and anthropology, and thereby at the same time better determine traditional anthropological research— and its results—as an individual science. In this last conception of anthropology, the human being is at once the base and the vanishing point of every possible orientation, and above all of every orientation concerning orientation—that is, of philosophy. Husserl’s late philosophy suggests such a conception. The term anthropology, in the sense of philosophical anthropology, only became the explicit title of a problem for Husserl in 1931  in his Berlin lecture “Phenomenology and Anthropology.”6 However, with regard to the anthropological thematic, this contribution is rather vexing. Specifically, it seems to want to oppose the “growing turn to philosophical anthropology” “in the young philosophical generation of Ger-

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many.”7 Here, Husserl mentions only the influence of Wilhelm Dilthey by name. However, his target is surely the philosophical-anthropological interests of Scheler and Heidegger that arose out of his own school and that he saw as a threat to his transcendental phenomenology.8 He holds that “a principled decision between anthropologism and transcendentalism must be possible,” one that is “elevated above all historical formations of philosophy and anthropology or psychology.” 9 Husserl once again plainly argues the case against anthropologism and for transcendental phenomenology and its main method, the transcendentalphenomenological reduction. Throughout this lecture, one also finds formulations that, especially in light of later texts, bring to mind the conception of anthropological philosophy. Husserl poses the problem of transcendental-phenomenologicalanthropological application, admittedly without solving it: “As a human being standing in the world I pose . . . all questions about my fate. Can I give all these up? But must I not do so, if the being of the world is and remains subjected to an epochē? This being the case, . . . I shall never again return to the world and to all those questions about life for the very sake of which I have philosophized and have striven for scientific knowledge as a rational and radical reflection upon the world and human existence.”10 Husserl had already in 1917 felt this tension between the scientism of his vocation (as the philosopher of philosophy in the sense of rigorous science) and the actual demands of human life.11 But he wants to remain a scientist, even in philosophy. Thus he says, varying Bacon’s words, “one must put the thumbscrews not to nature, . . . in order to force her to betray her secrets, but to consciousness, or the transcendental Ego.”12 He now—when he speaks of a “hermeneutic of the life of consciousness”— conveys his view in a language that admittedly veers in the direction of Dilthey and Heidegger. But the context in which this formulation stands reveals Husserl’s classic position: “Genuine analysis of consciousness is, so to say, the hermeneutic of conscious life, where the latter is taken as that which continuously intends entities (identities), and constitutes them within its own self in manifolds of consciousness that pertain to those entities in essential ways.”13 Here Husserl wants to fight back against a misunderstanding by means of which “the sense of the reduction is missed,” specifically by saying “I, this human being, am the one who is practicing the method of a transcendental alteration of attitude [i.e., the reduction],”14 as if the ego were nothing “other than just a mere abstract stratum of this concrete human being.”15 However, in the Crisis of 1935 and the following year, Husserl returns to precisely this point, partially to reject it and partially

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to agree with it once again. For now, in Crisis, he formulates positively “that each transcendental ‘I’ within intersubjectivity (as co- constituting the world in the way indicated) must necessarily be constituted in the world as a human being; in other words, that each human being ‘bears within himself a transcendental “I”.’ ”16 And he continues—as in his lecture from 1913!—“not as a real part or a stratum of his soul (which would be absurd) but rather insofar as he is the self-objectification, as exhibited through phenomenological self-reflection, of the corresponding transcendental ‘I.’ ”17 Thus, transcendentality can now be grasped in the concrete, worldly human being—in the anthropological type “human being.” It is not grasped, however, as a special organ or essential layer that one could for its part posit absolutely and in isolation but as self-reflection [Selbstbesinnung]—as the implementation of an attitude that makes the human being precisely into a human being. This is no mere recourse to conceptions of the human that are, so to speak, approved and familiar—to conceptions of the human being as an entity [Wesen] that is capable precisely of self-reflection. Rather, what is achieved and made evident— over a lengthy course of transcendental-phenomenological analyses and arguments—is that the human being as a concrete, worldly entity is compatible with that entity’s transcendental function. Already in November 1932, a year after his Berlin lecture, Husserl had formulated the thesis “that universal anthropological cognition encompasses all cognition of the world in general as well as all human relations to the world in general, the universality of human strivings, valuings, actions in which humans shape their world and thereby put a ‘human face’ on it.” “Thus universal science is also the science of the human being.”18 This includes natural science, which indeed presupposes the corresponding accomplishments of the human being.19 In this sense, what Husserl here calls “universal human science as anthropology” appears precisely in the function of a prima philosophia and a new theory of science. As early as 1917, Husserl even prioritizes human science over natu ral science: “It is not the sciences of nature but the human sciences that lead into the ‘philosophical’ depths; for the philosophical depths are the depths of ultimate being.”20 Of course, here one should allow that the concept “human science” must be differentiated. One must distinguish between the plural human sciences as cultural sciences of experience and the singular human science as the science of philosophical reflection. It is clear, precisely with regard to the conception of a philosophical anthropology, that the two cannot be radically separated. But

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how they interrelate—precisely that is the decisive problem for a theory of science and philosophy.21 To return to the question concerning the emergence of the anthropological motif in Husserl’s incipient transcendental philosophy: Initially, the thematization of so-called consciousness, a thematization decisive for Husserl’s philosophy, is nothing other than the reference to a fundamental anthropological fact, namely, the human capacity for fiction, the capacity to let something “hover” before oneself [sich etwas vorschweben lassen]. In Ideas I, Husserl writes: The inventive consciousness is not itself invented and there belongs to its essence, as to any other mental process, the possibility of a perceiving reflection which seizes upon absolute factual being. No countersense is implicit in the possibility that every other consciousness, which I posit in empathic experience, is nonex istent.22 But my empathizing, my consciousness of whatever sort, is originally and absolutely given not only with respect to its essence but also with respect to its existence. Only for an Ego, or a stream of mental processes, in relation to itself, does this distinctive state of affairs exist.23

This so-called “distinctive state of affairs” is the anthropological datum. But it is a sui generis datum, one in which existence and essence are linked and interwoven. The ratio essendi and ratio cognoscendi of consciousness seem to coincide here (precisely that constitutes the peculiarity and essentiality of its facticity). As part of his theoretical interests, Husserl would first investigate the side of essence (i.e., of possibility), and thus he seems initially to head for a traditional idealistic transcendental philosophy. But the anthropological, indeed existential, motif remains active even in the later transcendental-phenomenological teachings. Here one finds first of all the famous transcendental-phenomenological reduction. As an attempt to doubt, the epochē, which underlies the reduction, “belongs” (as we succinctly read) “to the realm of our perfect freedom.”24 This is not a freedom that has been fetched or found somewhere along the way; it is the freedom that human beings always already have as human beings. The possibility of the epochē-attitude, as an expression of human freedom, is presupposed for the operative epochē and for the method of reductions. Even what Husserl calls the “phenomenological sphere” and the phenomenological concept of phenomenon is initially only the description of an elementary anthropological state of affairs, namely, the fact that human beings

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can thematize something and in this thematization they can at the same time put [that something] into question.25 The thematization does not function without a minimum of distance, and the putting-into-question would not even get off the ground without a minimum of thematization. Husserl speaks of the ability— and this is an ability of human beings—to hold judgment in abeyance or even to withhold it. But every withholding of judgment also establishes or fixes a judgment. Every orientation is as it were a play between distance and identification, without which, incidentally, human orientation would be impossible. Thus, even our linguistic understanding, which is always bound to signs, always runs between the poles of a living, engaged attitude and “objectification.”26 Husserl’s fundamental theorem is ultimately the theorem of intentionality, which provides a general formulation for the above-mentioned findings. This formulation is the determination of consciousness as consciousness of. With this general designation (which was, incidentally, already obtained by means of a reduction), Husserl certainly did not want to endorse or establish an anthropology. Instead, it primarily serves purely transcendental-phenomenological interests. But the more precise analysis of the fundamental intentional context led him to an increasingly complex point of view. Specifically, consciousness does not simply have intentionality in order then to relate to something (objects); it itself is intentionality. It itself is the play of distance (difference) and identity. It is worldhood [Weltlichkeit] and being-in-the-world. In the interconnection of hyletic components within the noetic domain and the intertwining of one consciousness with another (perhaps across determined, so-called objective differentiations among noemata), Husserl comes to a subject that is necessarily organized in a worldly way: to human beings and their culture. The difficulties of research into the reduction, on the one hand, and the findings of research into constitution, on the other, led Husserl to this result. Husserl increasingly recognized that it is false to suppose that the so-called transcendental-phenomenological reduction, as a sort of methodological panacea, could lead to the ultimate transcendental structure. The reduction is much more a pluralistic procedure, and one must speak of reductions.27 Of course, every reduction has an orienting value when it is executed and interpreted correctly, but it always leads only to elaborated and primed ultimates. On the other hand, the research into method, which runs parallel to the reductive method, shows that the subject, so important for the reduction and seemingly definable once and for all, can present itself in thoroughly distinct constitutive manipulations. Precisely in accordance with the fundamental theorem of intentionality, the subject can

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never be something purely subjective as opposed to something purely objective. The alliance of reductive and constitutive research leads to three important results for anthropology and cultural anthropology. 1. The so-called transcendental subject must necessarily be localized and sensuously organized, that is, it must become manifest as corporeality.28 2. The factually functioning subject always and unavoidably finds itself in potential or actual intersubjective contexts, and it implies, indeed internalizes, the alter ego. Corporeality, thematized as in (1), is in turn important for this intersubjective integration.29 3. In addition to noetic intentionality, one must pay heed to noematic intentionality. This means that not only the noeses formalized in the analysis of consciousness constitute and lead to objects, but constituted objects, too, already refer in their sense to other objects. What has been culturally produced can itself serve functionally. The model for this is language, which, of course, is not made intelligible simply by explaining it as an expression of linguistic noeses. The signs and symbols that are operative in language have for their part certainly already been actively developed and as such they are noematic. They in turn play a role in the further work of worldly orientation. This work is called “noematic intentionality,” into which the human being (also as an intersubjective entity) has always already been placed.30 It is crucial here to understand what question Husserl wants to address with the problem of intersubjectivity. It is not a question of how I, this concrete human being (who has been, as it were, entered into the civil registry) enter into an interpretive community, as if we are self-contained and complete strangers to one another. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl says “if the two original spheres have already been distinguished . . . the experience of someone else has done its work,”31 that is, when two concrete subjects confront one another. That means that human beings are entities that as such are already determined by intersubjective implications that they have internalized. Now we can understand why Husserl, in Cartesian Meditations, formulates two theses that appear to contradict one another: (a) “The other man is constitutionally the intrinsically first man,”32 and (b) “I myself am the primal norm constitutionally for all other men.”33 Husserl has thereby made a twofold discovery. First, he presented

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a fundamental determination of the anthropological type “human being,” namely, that the human being can only be understood from a constitutive genesis as an entity both localized in the ego and intersubjective. Second, he changes the research conditions of first philosophy to the extent that it has now been established that transcendental-philosophical research always relies on the achievements of concrete human beings, and that at the same time it can and must equally remain a transcendental phenomenology. In Crisis, Husserl asserts the necessary integration of the transcendental ego and the concrete human ego as the unmistakable discovery and unavoidable starting point of every radical investigation. With that, a peculiar problem of application presents itself. At this point, of course, it must be conceded that there is no obvious solution to this problem of application, for as an intentional entity, the human being is an entity that is in principle unfulfilled. That is, intentional achievements must be performed; they cannot be simulated. For the play between distance and proximity (to oneself and the world), between difference and identity (with oneself and the world), there is no fixed calculus that can be anticipated in advance. It is a fundamental problem of all culture that, on the one hand, in generating culture human beings always rise above culture, and yet again, on the other hand—precisely in such distancings, for example, critical distancing—they remain suspended in its constructs. Culture is the great instance of application, the medium that devours every thing—including distancings from it. With this question one runs into ultimate difficulties within Husserlian phenomenology. It is a matter of what one might call the optimizing of human existence. On the one hand, this optimizing could—misguidedly— be seen in a hypostasized life-world as substratum, in, as it were, fixed forms of simple, happy, or successful existence. This attempt at optimizing would be a regression. The other form of optimizing can be sought in a thinking and striving that goes beyond human beings. Such discoveries, however, should not be misunderstood as simple contributions to a factual anthropology in the sense of simple anthropological description—they are orienting parameters based in reductive considerations. But they are not the human itself. In Ideas II, in §§19–29, Husserl analyzes the identity of the ego with respect to the question of the demonstrability of the ego pole. It is shown that it is no longer possible to conceive an ontological magnitude of any kind. If one were to take Husserl’s analyses seriously as a factually descriptive, anthropological finding, then they would necessarily lead to existential despair, for a factual conception of the ego comes

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undone here. Husserl speaks of the ego as “engaged practically as setting the scene [der praktisch Inszenierende].”34 But the pure ego is not a “real [reelles] moment” in a temporal flow in which it “steps forth” and again “recedes,”35 although this temporalization is nonetheless the pure ego’s most original production: “Thus, instead of generatio and corruptio, to the pure Ego there pertains only the essential property that it has its stepping forth and its receding, that it begins to function and hold sway actively and that it ceases to do so. The phrases ‘it steps forth’ and ‘acts in the specific sense of the cogito become an event in the stream of consciousness’ mean the same, since the essence of such acts consists precisely in their being intentional lived experiences ‘carried out’ by the pure Ego.”36 The “essential property” named here is obviously just a function between a “stage” and an actor, both of which are as such nothing. It is a question here only of transcendental-philosophically reductive considerations that discuss the possibility of grounding human cognition and anthropological research, but that must refuse the concrete human being a factual foothold. The human being must gain this foothold in culture. Of course, the being of the human being is itself determined by its ability to perform reductions. At the same time, however, the human being is confronted with the task of not absolutizing the individual reductions but of applying them to its concrete being-human [Menschsein], a being-human that in any event is nothing other than application. Every other alternative—the recourse to something substantial that is in itself concrete and dormant, such as, for example, nature—would be “dull” “Egolessness.”37 The human being can only be grasped as a cultural entity, just as the world can only be understood as the world of human beings. The analyses Husserl here draws upon (from Ideas II) attempt only to elucidate reflexively the background of this thesis. After reading them, one can no longer allege that Husserl in ontologizing about the person posits a pure ego, assuredly to be understood solipsistically, at the origin of all things [Dinge], or that he offers the life-world as a truly substantial basis of an unambiguous human reality. In the sciences, even in those of the life-world, it is always a matter of possibilities that, when hypostasized or posited absolutely, can also be impossibilities. It is a matter of “invention” and “reinvention.” Admittedly, Husserl asks himself, “Can I do other wise than [begin] from my human, present being?” He answers, “With respect to myself and the world, actuality precedes every possibility.”38 Being human in the present day—the present reality—is, however, a cultural reality that has come to be and whose reality is not to be grasped according to the old metaphysical models as an ontological substance.

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Rather, it manifests itself temporally as human functioning. Such temporality, however, leads to a “critical idealism” that leaves all simple ontologizing behind it, in accordance with which the concept crisis is also thought in the concept critical. That is why “human life itself” is, for Husserl, “a limit idea lying at a perpetual distance, an idea that itself in turn contains an infinitude of limit-figures.”39 The essence of the human being is no longer a substantial essence in the sense of the tradition but temporalization; its “essence” lies in the future, that is, in the capacity for a representing, envisioning anticipation [repräsentierenden, vergegenwärtigenden Antizipation]. The consciousness of temporality constitutes the cultural significance of the human being. And culture is nothing other than the shaping of time [Zeitgestaltung]. In this context, it must be conceded that we have to depart from what has accumulated culturally, what has become present as a cultural reality and, as such, maintains relations to past and future. In this concession, of course, philosophy makes a fundamental turn toward philosophy of culture, which is no longer merely one philosophical discipline among others.40 The cultural world is the world of human beings. It is not the world of mere nature. Thus, it seems obvious that the world is better grasped by phenomenology than it can be by the social sciences, which are oriented toward the ideals of natural science. Of course, such a conception presupposes that there is unanimity concerning the meaning of phenomenology. But as is well known, the word phenomenology awakens very dif ferent ideas. For that reason, I would like to state once again that I am concerned with the phenomenology developed by Husserl. Even with the theme limited in this way, the determination of a phenomenological philosophy of culture and cultural anthropology remains difficult enough. Specifically, even with Husserl, we seem to be dealing with at least two phenomenologies. First, there is phenomenology as the description of phenomena in their original givenness, unfalsified by constructed opinions and functions. This phenomenology grasps the given vividly in pure intuition—in essential intuition, to invoke the ominous phrase—just as it gives itself in original experience. The “thing itself” is presented in its own essential structures and in accordance with its ontological status. According to this phenomenology, culture is described appropriately when it is placed in the framework of a regional ontology, and cultural phenomena are appreciated in the meaning or meaningfulness specific to them. This occurs in accessing a so-called proper and original experience, which is to be distinguished

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from a merely symbolic experience.41 Precisely when it comes to grasping cultural phenomena adequately, this Husserlian-phenomenological way of proceeding has been appreciated even by researchers who stand at a distance from phenomenology.42 Second, however, there is phenomenology as epistemology, as transcendental philosophy. This phenomenology seeks to investigate the possibilities of consciousness, especially the possibilities of cognition and cognitive commitments. In doing so, it also pursues goals pertaining to the theory of science that are to serve all sciences and their rational coherence. Of course, this phenomenology also begins with an intuition, specifically the intuition that all experience and theory with which the sciences operate is accomplished and processed by a factual consciousness. At the same time, however, this consciousness is distinct in its structure from the empirical (mundane) human being that brings it about. It is transcendental. However, the validity of what is meant by consciousness—beyond itself and the things meant— cannot be compelled by a mere, quasi-passive, intuitive grasp. For consciousness—human experiencing and theorizing—is fluid; it has temporal and thematic horizons by virtue of which presentiation [Vergegenwärtigung] in one intuition loses its self-evidence. Presence, instead of being directly graspable, threatens to become a mere limit concept, something merely contrived. And with that, presentiation through intuition seems to become questionable as well. For that reason, Husserl here complements intuition with the method of reduction and reductions. Reduction and the reductions, however, have an operative characteristic that first and foremost arranges the theme of research in question. They are reflexive and critical, not merely intuitively accepted.43 For the tenability of the Husserlian doctrine, a great deal depends on whether the coexistence of intuitions and reductions is systematically possible, or whether this is merely a matter of bringing together heterogeneous elements. Even in his later philosophy, Husserl emphasized that “along with phenomenological reduction, eidetic intuition is the fundamental form of all particular transcendental methods (that both of them determine, through and through, the legitimate sense of a transcendental phenomenology).”44 It follows from this evidence that Husserl excludes the external juxtaposition of a merely phenomenological (descriptive) phenomenology as intuitive with a transcendental phenomenology as employing the reduction. Indeed, intuition too is explicitly identified as a transcendental method. With that, even the “principle of all principles”—“that everything originarily (so to speak, in its ‘personal’ actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being”45—proves to be very much

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in need of interpretation. And Husserl himself adds an interpretation when he continues, the given is to be accepted—“but also only within the limits in which it is presented.”46 Understanding these constraints is a concern of the methods of reduction as transcendental-phenomenological reflection. Thus, one best does justice to the Husserlian conception of transcendental phenomenology if one recognizes in it the connection of intuitions and reductions in an integrative methodology. Of course, two emphases still remain: a more intuitive one and a more reductive one. If, according to Husserl, eidetic intuition and the phenomenological reduction jointly constitute the sense of transcendental phenomenology,47 then this raises a question: what unifies the accomplishment of intuition and that of the reduction? Both are intentional accomplishments of a living consciousness. Intuition means nothing other than the thematization of something given as such, with the equiprimordial effect that one can identify it and recognize it in repeated thematizations. Intuition is “insight” and “evidence.”48 It is characteristic of such intentional thematization that consciousness is ever more fully immersed and engaged in the thing thematized. Specifically, this implies “accepting that which is originarily offered in its ‘personal actuality,’ so to speak.” But consciousness cannot fully and completely identify itself with what is grasped and identified in intuition. Without a certain distance from what is grasped in intuition, it would not know that it was grasping, and thus it would not grasp (anything) at all. This distance is a fundamental peculiarity of intentionality.49 It is presupposed for an intuition that is “normal,” in accordance with which the given in each case is “faithfully” described. But it remains incidental and unthematic. Now, it is characteristic of the reduction that it explicitly thematizes precisely this distance and the circumstances of its appearing— and thereby also the circumstances of the given. That is the sense of the original designation of the reduction as epochē, as withholding of judgment.50 In a replicating intuition, the reduction makes one conscious of what occurs in intuition. It attempts to thematize and measure the distance that belongs to every intuition. That is why Husserl also names the epochē a “withholding of judgment.” Withholding is here the opposite of engagement and immersion in the thing.51 At the same time, the reduction still remains intuitive and is even meant to lead to further intuition. But it thematizes the distances that necessarily accompany intuiting, precisely in order to investigate the “boundaries of the given.” One can now understand why the reduction must proceed in several steps:52 A whole system of possible distances must be investigated. Since this takes place within an

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intentional horizon, an investigation of this kind can succeed in quite distinct respects.53 Thus, intuition and reduction must be related to one another. This relation also makes it possible for Husserl to define the phenomenological concept of phenomena (as opposed to that of all other sciences and the natural conception of the world)54 while at the same time allowing him to draw the usual concept of phenomena into phenomenology by means of a “change of attitude.”55 That means that every intuition contains reductive or epochal moments, and that every reduction also produces intuitions. Of course, the reduction more and more precludes a hypostatization of the given and thereby relativizes the claim of ultimate, intuitive insights. It is important that Husserl, precisely in the context of the epochē and reduction, brings the concept of human freedom positively into play as a presupposition of the reduction.56 This concept of freedom can be seen as closely connected to the concept of “attitude.” It is only because the human being has an attitude that it can have a relation to the world and to itself. It is not just a passive, functioning piece of the world but an agency functioning in the manner of experience. “Attitude” means the manifestation of a relation and is at the same time the possibility of interpreting this relation in turn, that is, of having a relation to one’s relation. Reductions and attitudes belong together. It must be established that there is no really fundamental, objective analog of this relation called “attitude”; to that extent, it is always already presupposed as a living functioning. Although attitudes are always documented in manifest systems (just as meanings always make themselves known in something expressed), attitudes as such are not intuitively determinable in the conventional sense. So meanings, for example, are always codified in systems of expression. However, the fact that expressions have meaning cannot be codified; it is a matter of attitude. Husserl also makes use of this attitudinal characteristic, as an original possibility of human beings, with regard to the determination of the phenomenological concept of phenomenon. Here he speaks of “a wholly different attitude”57 and calls for a “style of attitude” that is “entirely altered in contrast to the natural attitude in experiencing and the natural attitude in thinking.”58 It is the attitude that makes the fundamental “attitude” aware of itself. This means that, just as the reductive and epochal motifs already lie in a “normal” intuition, so too must every new attitude grow out of a preceding attitude. The relationship of one attitude to another is accordingly an implicative-explicative one. One finds good reasons for Husserl’s sharp distinction between “natu ral” and “phenomenological”

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(or “transcendental-phenomenological”) attitudes in the summons to a keen awareness of method as a necessary “transformation of sense.” But this cannot be a radical divide between two entirely “distinct worlds” because the one “world” qua constituted is supposed in the first place to be made intelligible through the other qua constituting, and both are interwoven with one another. It is precisely this interweaving that is to be understood; it is more a “transformation in the given sense” than a “transformation of sense.”59 Attitudes also imply “always already having an attitude” and at the same time the possibility of having an attitude toward this having an attitude. Such attitudes are always linked with the formation of sense. Senseformation is the original meaning of constitutive achievement. Even the “natural” [natürliche] and the “naturalistic” [naturale] attitude form sense, and this is not simply a mere occurrence, a mere functioning, but intentional functioning.60 Husserl explicitly developed the idea that the phenomenological reduction (which actually must be performed in the pluralism of a multitude of reductions61) is not just a unique attitude but an attitude toward attitudes: “What is educational [!] in the phenomenological reduction, however, is also this: it henceforth makes us in general sensitive toward grasping other attitudes.”62 The designation of the reduction as “operative,”63 as “advance priming” [Herauspräparierung] of transcendental structures,64 as “artificial attitude”65 underscores once again its methodological character, which is of course based in our average (“natural” [natürlichen]) attitude comportment, which is not artificial: “we constantly slip, quite effortlessly, from one attitude into another, from the naturalistic [naturalistischen] into the personalistic, and as to the respective sciences, from the natural sciences [naturwissenschaftlichen] into the human sciences.”66 The obvious thing to do now might be to ascribe directly a culturalphilosophical meaning to the transcendental-phenomenological considerations outlined above. At any rate, an important thesis concerning human beings is implied here: the human being is a free, sense-forming entity that bestows sense upon itself and its world in the corresponding attitudes. Its flexibility and plasticity make themselves known in the manifold possibility of attitudinal transformation. Its freedom manifests itself in its competency for bestowing sense. And sense-bestowal is only possible under the presupposition of a minimum of free activity.67 That means that the human being is a cultural entity. Indeed, it is nothing less than the origin of every culture. For the difference between the cultural world and the merely

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natural world is grounded for the first time with the uniquely human characteristic of having attitudes, a characteristic that has no naturalistic, objectivistic analog. The cultural world is the world of living and manifest sense-bestowal. Of course, the manifestation of sense as a cultural world seems to restrict human freedom. For the cultural world, too, as a quasi-objective world, stands now in opposition to the individual human being. It can certainly understand this world as its own, as a human world. But it also shows it a forceful, objective power, even to the point of “alienating” it. This results precisely from the fact that this sense-bestowal is also intersubjective, social, and historical. Yet before the problem of transcendental genesis and transcendental intersubjectivity is worked out (or, at the least, separated from these Husserlian doctrines), the human being is understood as a historical, intersubjective, cultural entity whose relations to others of its kind are essentially not merely natural but cultural (should we say “attitudinally conditioned”?). This human being is with unexceptional normalcy already a cultural entity: “The man of everyday life is after all not without reason; he is a thinking being, he has the καθόλον [universal], unlike the animal, hence he has language, description, he makes inferences, he asks questions of truth, he verifies, argues, and decides in a rational way.”68 However, this minimal characterization of the human being is inflated by Husserl with a certain pathos. With a view toward his remarks in First Philosophy and Crisis, one can add that the human cultural world is centered on a highest value, called “rationality” and “responsibility,” whose realization (precisely as culture) is absolutely mandated.69 The human is to “make itself true.”70 Weighty objections can be raised against Husserl’s conception and against the interpretation of Husserl based upon it, objections that add up to the charge of subreptions and a (or even many) μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος [change into another genus]. Has Husserl not simply run together the transcendental and the cultural, the latter of which is, of course, worldly (and thus in radical opposition to the transcendental) in order to furnish culture with the trappings of transcendentality and recommend his transcendental philosophy as a timely cultural endeavor or accomplishment? Of course, that would itself be a well-known cultural-historical phenomenon. For in a similar way, the philosophy of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel made transcendental philosophy into a formidable cultural program and impregnated the real culture with transcendental philosophy. The Neo-Kantianism of the twentieth century followed German Idealism in this pursuit.71 [According to this objection,] Husserl has thereby both

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endangered the precise sense of his transcendental method, whose meaning concerns only epistemology and theory of science, and also neglected important individual features of cultural reality. Of course, we should not overlook the fact that there are a number of felicitous Husserlian texts in which the cultural world—including the historical and social worlds—is described and analyzed in its essential peculiarities with circumspection and acumen. But here the development of a transcendental phenomenology does not at all appear to have preceded as the condition of the possibility of such a cultural phenomenology. In these descriptions and analyses, neither a transcendental egology nor a transcendental genesis and intersubjectivity is always presupposed as developed doctrine. It seems that here the other, the merely phenomenological, solely descriptive phenomenology once again becomes operative. We find in Husserl descriptions and expositions of the cultural world that occasionally are even presented entirely divorced from transcendentalphilosophical considerations, or that at least seem to require no such transcendental deliberations for the reader’s understanding. These can be found especially in Ideas II,72 Ideas III,73 and in the volumes on intersubjectivity,74 but also in the particularly “transcendentally” oriented Cartesian Meditations.75 The cultural world is described and made intelligible in part by integrating natural factors in this world (e.g., biological, evolutionary, physiological, and psychological moments). Such descriptions often recall portrayals familiar from Dilthey. Sometimes they even have a certain repetitive characteristic, and they create the impression (especially the texts from the estate) of something like an author attempting to attune himself to particular cultural situations. When we consider such descriptions in Husserl’s so-called working papers (one could also speak of practice papers), a suspicion forces itself upon us, one that threatens transcendental phenomenology: Husserl’s concept of constitution is apparently nothing other than the transfer of the concept of sense-formation from the domain of cultural experience. The actuality of the cultural world forms itself and is experienced on the basis of the tendency of historical and social human beings to bestow sense. The cultural world owes itself to a human activity of apprehension that consists in the fact that humans, who in acting understand and in understanding act, give sense to a material (perhaps “mere nature”) that cannot per se be further determined. These activities occur in interactive processes that are themselves instances of acting-understanding. The processes are characterized by a complex interweaving of performances and ever significant, but also ambiguous, actualities in which the subjective potentially appears

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objective and the objective potentially appears subjective. In this way, humans first create a world and understand themselves in a world that is in each case socially and historically pregiven. And this world is by definition always already a cultural world. To the same extent that humans create, they understand; and insofar as they understand, they create. Constitution becomes the bestowal of meaning, in which the difference between passivity and activity remains strangely in limbo.76 Thus, cultural experience (and equiprimordially with it, cultural activity—and there is, in fact, no activity other than cultural activity) seems to be the paradigm of every experience. This even means that the cultural supplies the unthought and always already concretely lived basis for the “original” concept of constitution that was first conceived strictly epistemologically and methodologically. Culture would then be an operative concept in Eugen Fink’s sense.77 An accusation not seldom directed at Husserl—that his phenomenology is still beset with unnoticed naturalisms— must now be inverted: Husserl’s (supposedly transcendental) phenomenology is a culturalism. In fact, there is an interpretation of Husserl (or, better, a cannibalizing of Husserlian phenomenology) that amounts to such a culturalism. It is, admittedly, for the most part a culturalism that would like to free itself of certain endeavors that are invariably linked with culture. In place of the ethos that is required for every culture, “naturalness” is introduced. At issue is the long sought-after, proper foundation of every world, and the human therapeutic as such—the life-world. However, it is precisely the concept of the life-world that shows that Husserl’s attempt to work out simple structures for the purposes of clarification is anything but a simple, hasty fallback to things taken for granted. As is well known, Husserl’s concept of the life-world is the result of an explicit reduction; that is, it is in limine a transcendental concept.78 The topic was not a late discovery of Husserl’s; it was merely its elaboration under the title “life-world” that ensued only after a lengthy development of thought. The topic itself was— even if schematically, nonetheless with a decisive importance—the object of transcendental research under the title “general thesis of the natu ral attitude” as early as the time of Ideas I.79 It belongs to the “considerations fundamental to phenomenology,” according to the title of the second part of Ideas I, whose first chapter takes up the “(general) thesis of the natu ral attitude,”80 while the third and fifth chapters are dedicated to the phenomenological reduction.

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What the “natural attitude” (as the attitude of the “ego with its natural environment”) and the “life-world” have in common is that they are both names for average, simple experience. They are, as it were, the least common multiples of a factually occurring orientation. They are names, acquired through transcendental phenomenology, for attitudes of human orientation that have not yet been transcendentally understood. Both the natural attitude and the life-world can also be designated as cultural actualities. But they are cultural worlds of an absolutely minimal sort; they are “natural” in the cultural sense of the word. Our usual culture, which Husserl also describes, tends to go beyond such simple relationships. It is a disadvantage of Husserl’s analyses that he does not always clearly set the more developed cultural systems (which he describes as mundane) apart from the description of the attitude of the natural world and, above all, from the so-called life-world. Of course, the natural attitude, the life-world, and more developed cultural systems are all mundane, but not every thing mundane is life-world or natural attitude. Husserl thematized the general thesis of the natural attitude in order to study the field of things taken for granted (which are experienced and putative but also unavoidable) and to assess the validity claims that turn up there so that no incorrect use could be made of them. To that extent, then, the general thesis was “disconnected” so that it could be made intelligible as the correlate of transcendental consciousness. Thus, the natu ral attitude was no sooner thematized than it was once again left behind in order to investigate the structure of transcendental subjectivity itself. The cultural meaning of the natural attitude, too, thereby remained almost unnoticed at first. More and more, the suspicion arose for Husserl that this natural attitude and its world as such were not adequately in view: “actual subjectivity” was “overlooked.”81 That means that the natural attitude and its world had to become the object of a more precise, descriptive phenomenology, a phenomenology, however, that had to carry out its work within the framework of a transcendental phenomenology. For that reason, in the further development of this problematic, Husserl distinguished the concept of the life-world from that of the general thesis of the natural attitude by seeking to consider more broadly the content of the natural attitude. Thus, Husserl can consistently call the explicit attitude of the research work in this field the “reduction to the life-world.”82 As early as Ideas I, Husserl had identified intersubjective moments in the natural attitude. However, that was done only very abstractly. Later, above all in Crisis, the whole breadth of the concept of intersubjectivity, including its historical implications, was taken into consideration. For the his-

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tory of the structure of the ordinary orientation, the life-world is now genet ically the first; it is the name for the genet ically first, already operative experience. At the same time, aside from this genetic feature, it is in static considerations the name for the level of unquestioned experience or orientation within every more developed culture. It is, as it were, the character of the self-evidence [Selbstverständlichkeitscharakter] of every (cultural) form of life. It must be noted that even complicated, reflected accomplishments of a culture that go far beyond the natural attitude receive, in precisely this culture (through a sort of melting down into the “everyday” and as “everyday”), a certain character of self-evidence.83 Husserl obviously sought to conceive of this, too, as [an aspect of the] life-world. Invariants of this life-world structure include the intuitive character of experience; the manageable relation of concrete subjects (common circles of communication); and the lived, subject-relative, natural world-actuality, which is not experienced theoretically but practically. This character of the life-world lets all the moments of an elementary cultural actuality be recognized. To that extent, the phenomenology of the life-world is in fact also the phenomenology of culture and cultural anthropology. Admittedly, it is a question only of forms—indeed, forms of concreta. The structure of the life-world, which remains the same, is variously realized and manifested in various cultures.84 As it turns out, however, with the attempt to develop an ontology of this life-world, these invariant life-world structures threaten to explode conceptually as soon as their content is to be more fully described phenomenologically.85 On the one hand, Husserl must keep the structuredness of the life-world free from all scientific determination (in the common sense) so as to present it in its “genuineness,” obviousness, and anonymity;86 on the other, he must distinguish between a “naïve and natural straightforward attitude” and a “consistently reflective attitude toward the ‘how’ of the subjective manner of the givenness of life-world,”87 and thus to make the case for the latter, that is, for a science of the life-world. Husserl accepts as trivial that the ordinary sciences “build upon the life-world as taken for granted in that they make use of whatever in it happens to be necessary for their particular ends. But to use the life-world in this way is not to know it scientifically in its own manner of being.”88 And finally, Husserl explicitly adds that the reduction “to the life-world which is valid for us prescientifically by no means suffices.”89 It is only a way station on the path to the “genuine transcendental epochē.”90 It is Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological discovery, which announced itself to him paradigmatically in the topic of the life-world, that

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the ability to perform the transcendental reduction and the goal of the reduction can only be made intelligible through the mediation of the factual functioning of conscious life. The idea of the most elementary, concrete, thinkable, and living reality of action is, however, the life-world. As reality, this life-world manifests itself as a cultural actuality; but no such “elementary” cultural actuality is in all its appearances sure to be identical to the mere structure of the life-world. Of course, in any given case this structure of the life-world can manifest itself only one way or another in cultural worlds that are relatively simple but nonetheless different, that is, precisely in the so-called life-worlds. Husserl’s concept of horizonal intentionality would already forbid an absolute self-sufficiency and stability of a pure life-world. Thus, the life-world is really just an idea, a form of a concretion. This becomes clear in Husserl’s Crisis, which discusses not only the portentous life-world but also, for example, European culture and its history. For this European culture is certainly no mere life-world. Here Husserl makes it evident that the “transcendental ego” (of Ideas I) “must necessarily be constituted in the world as a human being.”91 This human being is a concrete, cultural human being of a complex culture and not the human being merely of a restricted life-world. In regards to the history of philosophy (e.g., with a view toward the culture of European science), Husserl declares that “idealism,” which recognized the significance of human subjectivity, “was always too quick with its theories” and for just that reason “could not free itself from hidden objectivistic presuppositions”; for “as speculative idealism, it passed over the task of interrogating, concretely and analytically, actual subjectivity as having the actual phenomenal world in intuitive validity.”92 This actual subjectivity with its actual world cannot be the life-world; the life-world is merely a convenient, relatively elementary preparatory investigation for this “actuality,” or, cultural reality [Kulturwirklichkeit]. “The difference between empirical and transcendental subjectivity” is admittedly methodologically “unavoidable”; but “also unavoidable [is] their identity,” which until now, however, has also remained “incomprehensible.”93 Transcendental-phenomenological analysis now shows that “each human being ‘bears within himself a transcendental “I”’—not as a real part or a stratum of his soul (which would be absurd) but rather insofar [!] as he is the self-objectification, as exhibited through phenomenological selfreflection, of the corresponding transcendental ‘I.’ ”94 The mundane culturality of human beings and their explicitly transcendental, methodological activity are here brought together under the concept of reflection (or self-

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reflection). Transcendentality and mundanity should not be hypostatically isolated in opposition to one another. They are, of course, necessarily distinguished on the path to the clarification of the truth of the world and of the human being. Still, ultimately the mundane can only be made intelligible by the transcendental; but with equal necessity “the” transcendental is manifested also as world, that is, mundanely— and specifically as the world of human beings. “Only by starting from the ego and the system of its transcendental functions and accomplishments can we methodically exhibit transcendental intersubjectivity.”95 Where method is concerned, transcendental philosophy applies. However, what it seeks to make intelligible has always already manifested itself as a concrete, historical-social, human being and its world. In this sense, it is possible to speak even of an a priori of manifestation in Husserl.96 And thus it is possible, beginning with the transcendental-phenomenologically illuminated knowledge of this situation, to gain “an ultimate comprehension of the fact that each transcendental ‘I’ within intersubjectivity (as co-constituting the world in the way indicated [namely, that of transcendental intersubjectivity]) must necessarily [!] be constituted in the world as a human being.”97 Thus, if she is to lay bare the so-called transcendental structures, a scientist who seeks to clarify the ultimate sense of possible science and to do this as a transcendental philosopher must take into account the fact that, as a researcher, she is this concrete human being belonging to a culture. For that reason, in the passage from Crisis leading up to the last quotation, Husserl spoke of the ego attained in the epochē as an ego by “equivocation,” “although it is an essential equivocation.”98 The familiar and, as it were, prominent reductions of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology serve to make this unavoidable equivocation intelligible.99 It cannot be set aside, for occasional meanings (and essential equivocations are recorded in such meanings) remain what they are even when one has seen through them. They are not objectively codifiable attitudes. The culture, as human world, is the transcendental occasion plain and simple.100 Reflection is always reflection on an occasion and is thus determined situationally. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, then, cannot now be viewed as a covert or naive culturalism. Nor may his life-world and culturalphenomenological considerations be regarded as a conversion to a modern variant of the philosophy of life [Lebensphilosophie] that moves away from transcendentalism—as well as every culture— toward primitiveness [Ursprünglichkeit] and naturalness. The interwovenness of mundanity and transcendentality in a factual, human understanding of self and world

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is to be recognized phenomenologically as a necessity. The motif of transcendentality is given and can be grasped in that minimum of reflection, of the attitudinal activity, without which there would be no culture.101 In this respect, Husserl’s doctrine flows into a peculiar anthropology. In its wake there is no denial of transcendental phenomenology, nor does it render transcendental phenomenology superfluous.102 Husserl has not parted with transcendentalism; instead he concretized and refined it. However, he also has not “idealistically” forgotten the concrete world (the mundane); he attempted, as much as possible, to render it intelligible. For this reason, the phenomenology of culture also cannot be one regional ontology alongside many others. For initially, culture surely has only one opposite: nature. There would thus remain only two “ontological” domains, culture and nature. But even this distinction can still be relativized. For nature, when spoken of in its full meaning, belongs itself in the domain of a culture. Even the invention of the mere term nature as a cultural μή όν [nonbeing], as mere material free of determination, is already a culturalhistorical performance, a first cultural determination, just like the mere name of chaos is a first cultural performance. However, the notion of an independent and meaningful nature grasps the concept of nature more as an “other” culture. In this respect, many a naturalism is merely an inverted culturalism. Seen in this way, regional ontologies can only be ontologies within the domain of the large theme of culture. One can only speak of a distinction between nature and culture when there is already a culture in place to produce this distinction. If there were only culture or only nature, then, fundamentally, there would be neither. There would be sheer indifference. This consideration is anything but a mere frivolity; it shows instead the kind of horizon of possibilities and tasks that opens up before us once the thing we call culture has become thematic in even the most elementary form. If, however, the conventional distinction between culture and nature lies within culture, then this must modify our conventional understanding of the concepts “nature” and “culture.” Nature is the magnitude in which the moment of one’s own attitudinal activity has, as it were, fallen to the zero point. It is only passively oriented, without the least self-activating orientation. Culture is, by contrast, activity, attitude, orientation. At the same time, however, it becomes clear that any attitude such as cultural actuality requires “materiality” and manifestation. That is, such an attitude requires objective stabilization in which cultural activities, if they do not quite fall to zero, nonetheless come to rest,

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as it were. They become “second nature.”103 Nature has the characteristic of the “in itself”;104 however, what it is in itself (i.e., beyond every culture, even beyond, e.g., the activity [Tun] of the natural sciences, with their ends and goals) remains intrinsically open. A radical distinction between nature and culture is thus still entailed even when one regards nature merely as that with which the egoical or the cultural rubs shoulders. Husserl seems occasionally to see it in this way when he considers “objective,” “physical nature” (including “the soul as experientially connected with the body”) and then understands nature “as the realm of inductive experiential properties”;105 or when he, on the other hand, sees “cultural predicates” as “specifically irreal predicates.”106 However, even the cultural “in itself” (which would then, admittedly, be more of a “for itself”) is already as such inconceivable without contingent contents. Human acting, which is essential for cultural actuality, shows the same peculiarity: it is in equal measure mental impulse and physical occurrence.107 Cultural actuality is not the sum of something called “culture” and something in itself natural; it is in any given case a characteristic and integral interference of moments of activity, on the one hand, and moments of manifestation, on the other. On the level of his specifically transcendental-phenomenological considerations (and thus long before the lines of thought of Crisis), Husserl arrived at the thesis that transcendental subjectivity must manifest itself necessarily and from the beginning. This is a compelling consequence of his concept of intentionality. Since transcendental consciousness has “in itself” hyletic data,108 the “pure ego” has “sensations” necessarily localizing it in a surrounding world.109 Husserl takes up a cultural-phenomenological mode of expression when he writes in 1925: “The universal form of humanity [Menschentum] is, precisely regarded, equivalent with the ‘natural concept of the world [natürlichen Weltbegriff ]’ as the general concept of any world that is and can be encountered as the world for all conceivable ‘human beings.’ Freely imagined [ frei fingierte] human beings are necessarily imagined as human beings of a world that is, for them, an environing world [Umwelt], but one in which they themselves must be counted.”110 The natural concept of the world includes within it “naturally [!] the essential concept of the individual human being, the essential concept of a humankind [Menschheit] within which the individual is an individual.”111 It includes “the essential concept of a culture (to be understood in the broadest possible sense), of a physical and organic nature. Thus, even the distinction between nature (pure nature) and culture belongs herein.”112 The distinction between the concepts of culture and nature is a distinction within and on the basis of

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the natural concept of the world. And the significance of this natural concept of the world is to be an elementary and unavoidable cultural actuality. If culture and nature are distinctions made on the basis of a “natural” [!] cultural actuality, then it is in itself an interesting question what determinate cultures in each case consider to be culture in a unique, emphatic sense, and what they oppose to culture as nature. The prospects of a phenomenological science of culture emerge here, a science that must also always keep the history of cultural activity in view and that, at the same time, can serve the possibilities of other sciences. Here, the manifold ambiguity not only of the concept of culture but also of culture itself comes into view: 1. Culture always stands opposed to a nature that it views in one way or another, and it simultaneously works on it. 2. Culture also stands opposed to other cultures in spatial juxtaposition and temporal-historical succession. To that extent, cultures have relations, and the question poses itself whether or not the epitome [Inbegriff ] of all relations is in turn a culture, or even culture per se. Here the problem of the plurality and unity of cultures announces itself. 3. Finally, cultures are, on the one hand, living profiles of human acting that have come to be within the determinate boundaries of traditions and circumstances; on the other hand, they are an awakening of new possibilities and ideals, indeed ultimate ideals and forms of life. Here we see repeated the question concerning the alternative between the plurality of cultures and the universality of the one culture of humanity. A “conservative” and a “progressive,” a “realistic” and a “utopian” moment can be distinguished. A manifest, profiling confinement to tradition and an enlightenment that expands boundaries confront one another, as do the vita contemplativa and the vita activa. Both of these moments are to be found in Husserl. The progressive moment manifests itself in a moralizing speculation on a rational future for human beings as a “limit idea.”113 In a social-historical light, the conclusion of Crisis,114 in particular, apparently seeks to realize a culture of absolute human responsibility. In the same work, however, one also finds much evidence for the theorem of the finitude of the human being; and, as is well known, the life-world itself is occasionally interpreted as an overdeveloped human being’s therapeutically understood option to pull back.

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The specifically cultural-phenomenological lines of inquiry that turn up here depend in their precise formulation on a more exact grasp of Husserl’s more developed concept of intentionality. Just as—already at the time of Ideas I—the noesis as well as the hyletic and noematic moments belong to intentionality, in the same way, the introduction of functional, technical, and other wise manifest factors belongs to a fully developed intentionality of cultural phenomenology. This is not a plea for naturalism or objectification. On the contrary, there resides here the possibility of finding an attitude for the contingent and functional moments of our existence. It is quite possible to appraise the factual and contingent from the standpoint of intentionality; it is impossible, by contrast, to do the opposite. On the basis of these considerations, one can also grasp more precisely and with greater nuance the concept of cultural relations, the qualified determination of relationships of distance and proximity within and between cultures. In his late work, anyway, Husserl found a formula with which he brought to expression the characteristic human task of balancing the conservative and progressive, the realistic and utopian, the traditional and the enlightening [Aufklärerische]: “To be human is to be finite in a way that is constantly aware of the infinite.”115 Admittedly, a modification of Husserlian phenomenology resides in our considerations. World is here understood as a cultural world. Thus, whoever seeks a formula for the world seeks a cultural formula. At any rate, that seems to follow from a decisive further development of the Husserlian theorem of intentionality. With that, we do not take our leave of transcendental philosophy; rather, we emphasize its methodological sense, which only ever opens up conditioned scientific possibilities. Precisely here lies the rationality of such a transcendental philosophy. Human beings only ever understand themselves and their world from within determinate situations in which they explore relations that they must initially focus upon themselves. If one places these relations under the norm of intentionality—as Husserl surely did—then the concept of intentionality must be expanded. It circumscribes not only the fully transparent activity of an ego that has absolute command of itself (this is only a limiting value) but also factual, functional determinations of the most various kinds— and of the most distinct degrees—of activity and passivity (up to and including the limiting value of sheer, self-less nature). The inescapable human attitude of relating every thing to the human being leads ever again, in the course of a sort of self-optimizing tendency, to the illusion of the total intentional self-mastery of the human being. The interweavings

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of noematic and intersubjective intentionality, however, teach us that human beings need orientation, that they are always already pre-oriented through “something else” and thereby find themselves in constellations and configurations. Thus, they must find a judicious equilibrium (though, admittedly, by definition it can never be struck once and for all) between the two extreme values. The forms of such attempts at equilibrium are called culture. They can—indeed, must—be more or less conscious, up to the limiting values of mere occurrence. Precisely in the example of very concrete cultural relations, one can study the diversity of intentional relations. The sense of such relations extends from direct, sympathetic, and spiritual exchange between human beings all the way to technical and ultimately unconscious, quasi-natural influences in space and time. If total, egological and intentional transparency is an illusion, then, of course, to an equal degree, the recognition of the sheer force of the factual and its selfless functions is the loss of culture and world. But such a “recognition,” as a conscious farewell to all egoicity, would be a contradiction in itself. Translated by Hayden Kee Notes 1. H. Plessner, too, judged Descartes’s and Kant’s meaning in this way. But he saw Kant as the most important predecessor of philosophical anthropology. Cf. H. U. Asemissen, “Helmuth Plessner: Die exzentrische Position des Menschen” [“Helmuth Plessner: The Eccentric Position of the Human Being”], in Grundprobleme der großen Philosophen: Philosophie der Gegenwart, Band 2, ed. Josef Speck (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1973), 146–180, esp. 151–153. 2. In “Dasein” and the “existentials” of Being and Time, one can still see translations of the neo-Kantian “consciousness in general” and the “categories,” specifically in the medium of facticity. Cf. the Davos Disputation of 1929 between Heidegger and Cassirer in Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1973), 243–268 [translated by Richard Taft as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 193–208], as well as Cassirer’s review of Heidegger’s Kantbuch in Kant- Studien 36 (1931): 1–26. 3. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 272 [translated by David Carr as The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 337].

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4. Husserl, 270 [336]. 5. Husserl, 272 [337]. 6. The essay first appeared in the American journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (1941): 1–14. Cf. Edmund Husserl, “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie,” in Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 164–181 [translated and edited by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer as “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 485–500]. 7. Husserl, “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie,” 164 [485]. 8. In 1931, Husserl spoke of “my antipodes, Scheler and Heidegger,” and he set “Dilthey and Heidegger” in relation with one another. Cf. Karl Schuhmann, Husserl- Chronik: Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 379, 381. 9. Husserl, “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie,” 165 [486]. 10. Husserl, 173 [493]. 11. In a letter from August 2, 1917, Husserl wrote to Gustav Albrecht “life is generally hard, and I yearn for the peace that the natural conclusion of this earthly being must provide. Admittedly, I do not yet feel myself sufficiently religiously prepared and the end of my philosophical life yearns for the ultimate religious-philosophical conclusion. Unfortunately, duty requires that I bring my many years of work to completion and press, especially as these works provide the scientific fundaments for a reconciliation between the naturalistic worldview, which dominated the past epoch, and [the] teleological worldview. In the end, the teleological is the true worldview. I struggle constantly against unfavorable circumstances, in part those which lie in myself, in my weak powers.” Cf. Schuhmann, Husserl- Chronik, 212–213. 12. Husserl, “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie,” 177 [497]. 13. Husserl, 177 [497]. 14. Husserl, 172 [493]. 15. Husserl, 173 [493]. 16. Husserl, Krisis, 189–190 [186]. 17. Husserl, 189–190 [186]. 18. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Dritter Teil, 1929–35, ed. Iso Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 480. 19. Husserl, 3:481. 20. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 366

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[translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 376]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen II. 21. Whereas Husserl still sought to ground the scientificity of the sciences in a rigorous, scientific philosophy, Heidegger separates the thinking that is philosophizing from the mere sciences, which, according to him, do not think in the proper sense. Dilthey remained undecided on this question. Cf. E. W. Orth, “Dilthey und die Gegenwart der Philosophie,” in Wilhelm Dilthey und die Philosophie der Gegenwart (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1985), 7–27. 22. Husserl’s later doctrine of intersubjectivity would restrict such a claim. However, the view could well persist that I must begin from my Ego in order to clarify any possible intentional interconnections. 23. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 97 [translated by F. Kersten as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenolog (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 101]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen I. 24. Husserl, Ideen I, 62 [58]. 25. Husserl, 3 [xvii]. 26. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Erster Teil, Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 100. 27. Husserl, Ideen I, 73 [72–73]; Ideen II, 174, 180 [183, 180–181]. 28. See Husserl, Ideen II; cf. also Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch, Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) [translated by Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book, Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980)]. That is the motif of Plessner’s Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch of 1928 (3rd ed., Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975), which was already prepared in 1923 with Die Einheit der Sinne [cf. Anthropologie der Sinne: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003)]. 29. Cf. E. W. Orth, “Anthropologie und Intersubjektivität. Zur Frage von Transzendentalität oder Phänomenalität der Kommunikation,” Phänomenologische Forschung 4 (1977): 103–129. 30. Cf. Husserl, Ideen I, 235–236., 237, 295–313 [245–247, 247–248, 307–325]. Cassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923/1925/1929) can, among other things, also be understood as a (noematic) philosophy of

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culture of this kind. See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 3 vols. (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1956) [translated by Ralph Manheim as The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955–1957)]. 31. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser (The Hagues: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 150 [translated by Dorion Caims as Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 121]. 32. Husserl, 153 [125]. 33. Husserl, 154 [126]. 34. Husserl, Ideen II, 98 [104; trans. modified]. 35. Husserl, 103 [110]. 36. Husserl, 103–104 [110]. 37. Husserl, 107 [114]. 38. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, 3:519 (from 1933). 39. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der Phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 162. 40. According to Cassirer, the “critique of reason thereby becomes the critique of culture” (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 1:11 [80]). He demands, in opposition to anthropomorphism, a “critical-transcendental anthropomorphism.” See Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1920), 116. 41. Husserl initially developed this distinction following Franz Brentano in the context of his Philosophie der Arithmetik, ed. Lothar Eley (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 190–194, esp. 193–194 [translated by Dallas Willard as Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 200–207, esp. 205–207]. Scheler writes in his essay “Phänomenologie und Erkenntnistheorie” (1914) that, in view of self-givenness, “phenomenological philosophy is a continual desymbolization of the world.” Gesammelte Werke X: Schriften aus dem Nachlass, Band 1, Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre, ed. Maria Scheler (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1957), 384 [translated by David R. Lachterman as “Phenomenology and Theory of Cognition,” in Selected Philosophical Essays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 143]. Admittedly, “self-given is not the same as ‘indubitable’ or ‘irrefutable’ ” (ibid., 382 [140]). How one is supposed to understand a culture without any symbolization may appear difficult. One must understand the term symbolic in opposition to proper, intuitive, that is, without additive constructed moments. On intuition in Husserl and the concept of essence, cf. Husserl, Ideen I, 13–20, 176–178 [8–15, 187–190]. On ideation and intuition, cf. E. W. Orth, “Ideation, ideierende

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Abstraktion,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfriend Gründer (Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe Verlag, 1976), 4:52–54. 42. Cf., for example, Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 2:16n1 [12]. 43. Cf. E. W. Orth, “Phänomenologische Reduktion und intentionalanalytische Orientierung. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Sprachphilosophie,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 7 (1980): 319–344, esp. 330–332, 341. Husserl distinguishes (in B II, 6/1–2) a “naive-direct phenomenology and the phenomenology of the phenomenologizing ego—phenomenology of phenomenology” (cf. Schuhmann, Husserl- Chronik, 372). 44. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 106 [72]. 45. Husserl, Ideen I, 51 [44]. 46. Husserl, 51 [44]. 47. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 106 [72]. 48. Husserl, Ideen I, 176 [188]. On the concept of evidence, see Elisabeth Ströker, “Husserls Evidenzprinzip. Sinn und Grenzen einer methodischen Norm der Phänomenologie als Wissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 32 (1978): 3–30. 49. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty also emphasize this fact of distance. The problem is the appropriate qualification of this distance. 50. Husserl, Ideen I, 64 [59]. 51. To that extent, the human being is, according to Scheler, the “one who can say no” in opposition to the animal, “who always says ‘yes’ to reality.” Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, in Späte Schriften, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Bern/München: Francke Verlag, 1976), 44; English translation: The Human’s Place in the Cosmos, trans. Manfred S. Frings (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 39; trans. modified. Scheler sets Husserl’s concept of reduction in connection with the fundamental human attitude [Grundhaltung] of “launch[ing] a strong ‘No’ against this kind of reality” (42 [37]). Of course, the distance here in question lies not only in the “no,” but also in every human “yes.” 52. Husserl, Ideen I, 69/66. 53. Husserl spoke of the “horizonal structure of all intentionality” (Cartesianische Meditationen, 86 [48]); [according to his own testimony] he still lacked the “doctrine of horizonal intentionality” in the Logical Investigations and first developed it in Ideas I. Edmund Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 207 [translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logik (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 199]. Even comparatively simple intentional systems have their “horizons,” which point beyond what is actually evident (Cartesianische Meditationen, 18–20, [translated by P. Koestenbaum

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as The Paris Lectures (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 17–19] as “meaning more” (Cartesianische Meditationen, 20 [Paris Lectures, 19], cf. 86 [Cartesian Meditations, 48]). 54. Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester; 1925, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 188 [translated by John Scanlon as Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester; 1925 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 144]. 55. Husserl, Ideen I, 1–9 [xvii–xxiii]. 56. Husserl, 62–63 [57–59]. 57. Husserl, 3 [xvii]. 58. Husserl, 5 [xix]. 59. Cf. also Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970), 200. 60. Cf. Husserl, Ideen II, 178–185 [188–194]. 61. Cf. Husserl, Ideen I, 68 [65–66]; Ideen II, 179 [189]. 62. Husserl, Ideen II, 179 [189]; cf. 179–185 [189–194]. 63. Cf. Husserl, Ideen I, 68–69 [66]. 64. Husserl, 182 [193]. 65. Husserl, Ideen II, 180 [189]. 66. Husserl, 180 [189–190]. Alongside the general distinction between “natu ral” and “phenomenological” attitudes (which also turns up as the distinction between “natural” and “philosophical mental attitudes,” or “natu ral” and “philosophical thinking” [Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie: Fünf Vorlesungen, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 3, 17 [translated by Lee Hardy as The Idea of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 61, 15], Husserl also worked out more specialized attitudes. Within the “natural” [natürliche] attitude, he groups the “natu ral” [naturale] (related to nature) attitude and the “personal” or “cultural” (related to human beings and the human world) attitude. Finally, upon these attitudes, further attitudes can be built up that are characteristic of whole types of sciences, for example, the “natural-scientific” and the “human-scientific” attitudes. Cf. Husserl, Ideen II, 332–372, esp. 359–372 [344–382, esp. 369–382], 372–377 [382–386]; Phänomenologische Psychologie, 381. There can be as many possible reductions as there are possible attitudes. 67. Leibniz and Lotze, for example, held activity to be determinable in principle only as mind [Geist], where for Lotze the passivity of suffering also belongs to mental activities. 68. Husserl, Krisis, 270 [336]. 69. Cf. Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 1:203–207: “The Idea of a Philosophical Culture”; Erste Philosophie, 2:203–228; Krisis, 9–12, 273–276 [11–14, 338–341].

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70. Husserl, Krisis, 11 [13]; trans. modified. Cf. Gerhard Funke, “Kritik der Vernunft und ethisches Phänomen,” in Neuere Entwicklungen des Phänomenbegriffs, ed. E. W. Orth (Freiburg: Alber, 1980), 33–89. Funke has worked out the role of the ethical in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology especially clearly. 71. On German Idealism’s culture of reason and its aftereffects in Husserlian phenomenology, cf. Werner Marx, Vernunft und Welt: Zwischen Tradition und anderem Anfang (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), especially the first three essays. 72. Husserl, Ideen II, 200 [210–211]. 73. Husserl, Ideen III, 59–70 [51–60]. 74. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, ed. Iso Kern, 3 vols., (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). 75. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 159–163 [131–136]. 76. This indecisiveness does not seem to be untypical of the use of the “hermeneutic” method or of the theory of the linguistic world picture. Husserl was himself aware of the complexity of the concept of constitution. For example, he explicitly distinguishes between “original constitution” and “the understanding-experience within constitution and within what is already constituted, the understanding of which is all the more complete the more the constitution is revealed” (Husserl, Ideen II, 360 [370], cf. 366 [376]. 77. Eugen Fink, “Operative Begriff in Husserls Phänomenologie,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 11 (1957): 321–337. 78. Husserl, Krisis, 105–193 [103–189]. 79. Husserl Ideen I, 3, 56–58 [xvii, 51–53]. 80. Aside from Ideas, the topic of the general thesis can also be found in Phänomenologische Psychologie, 465–470 (from 1925). Cf. E. W. Orth, “Generalthesis,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter (Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe Verlag, 1974), 3:270–272. 81. Cf. Husserl, Krisis, 272 [337–338]. 82. Husserl, 138–145, 150 [135–141, 147]. 83. As is well known, the concept of intuition was expanded by Husserl into the concept of “categorial intuition.” This must in turn be distinguished from the supposed intuitiveness that consists in the intimate or routinized familiarity with complicated issues such as, for example, those of a vocational world in which we feel ourselves at home. A pseudo-intuitive obviousness of this kind belongs to every culture, no matter how complicated and complex it may be. Even the nonintuitive is lived or experienced in a pseudo-intuitive way. 84. Husserl, Krisis, 141–142 [138–139]. 85. Werner Marx has investigated the problematic of the relationship between life-world, life-worlds, and special worlds. Werner Marx, Vernunft

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und Welt, especially the essays “Vernunft und Lebenswelt” (45–62) and “Lebenswelt und Lebenswelten” (63–77). Cf. also Elisabeth Ströker, ed., Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979). 86. Husserl, Krisis, 114, 140–144 [111–112, 137–141]. 87. Husserl, 146–148 [143–145]. 88. Husserl, 128 [125]. 89. Husserl, 150 [147]. 90. Husserl, 154 [151]; cf. 158–159, 155–156 [155–157, 152–153]. 91. Husserl, 190 [186]. 92. Husserl, 272 [337]. 93. Husserl, 205 [202]. 94. Husserl, 190 [186]. 95. Husserl, 189 [185–186]. 96. Cf. E. W. Orth, “Husserls Begriff der cogitativen Typen und seine methodologische Reichweite,” Phänomenologische Forschungen 1 (1975): 138–167, esp. 157. 97. Husserl, Krisis, 189–190 [186]. 98. Husserl, 188 [184]. Husserl here draws on the linguistic doctrine of essentially grounded equivocations [Äquivokationen aus Wesensgründen] in the context of the so-called occasional meanings as he had developed it in Logical Investigations. In Formale und transzendentale Logik, Husserl calls such equivocations “internal shiftings of intentionality and its products [Leistungen], shiftings that are tied together, and demanded, by essential interconnexions” (Formale und transzendental Logik, 158 [177]; cf. “Horizonal Structure of All Intentionality,” Cartesianische Meditationen, 86 [48–49]; cf. Formale und transzendental Logik, 207 [199]). Thus, Husserl shows also in Krisis “The ‘I’ that I attain in the epochē . . . is actually called ‘I’ only by equivocation—though it is an essential equivocation since, when I name it in reflection, I can say nothing other than: it is I who practice the epochē.” “The primal ‘I,’ the ego of my epochē, . . . can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability” and to that extent is insurmountable; however, it can “through a par tic u lar constitutive accomplishment of its own [make] itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally” (Husserl, Krisis, 188 [184–185]; cf. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, 3:586, 388–393). 99. Reductions of this kind, which can lead to a priori benchmarks and mutually correct themselves, are (1) the structure schema ego-cogitocogitatum, (2) transcendental factical temporality, (3) the concrete monad-ego with its habitualities, and (4) concrete transcendental intersubjectivity as the name for the collective nexus of all possible intentionalities. Cf. Orth, “Husserls Begriff der cogitativen Typen,” 158–163.

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100. On the transcendental-phenomenological role of occasionality, see Orth, “Husserls Begriff der cogitativen Typen,” 166; Orth, “Phänomenologische Reduktion,” 335–338, 341–343. Cf. also Klaus Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität und die Idee einer phänomenologische Transzendentalphilosophie,” Perspektiven transzendentalphänomenologischer Forschung, ed. U. Claesges und K. Held (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 3–60, esp. 5–6, 13, 25. Held does not draw on Krisis, 188–189 [184–185]. 101. Analogously, “Reflection” [Besinnung] plays a role for Dilthey. For this reason, his philosophy of life is precisely not to be interpreted irrationally. Life is, for Dilthey, cultural life, in which reflection grows and which cannot then be placed on this or that side of life. 102. Cf. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, 3:480–487. 103. Husserl, Ideen II, 364 [374]. 104. Husserl, 364 [374]. 105. Husserl, 362 [373]. 106. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 502. 107. On the concept of acting, see E. W. Orth, “Phänomenologie und Praxis,” Phänomenologische Forschungen 3 (1976): 11–13. 108. Husserl, Ideen I, 194, 198–199, 227–228 [205, 209–210, 238–239]. 109. Husserl, Ideen II, 153 [160–161]. On the biological, physiological, and locational aprioris, cf. Husserl, Ideen, 3:109, 114 [94, 100]; Krisis, 482; Phänomenologische Psychologie, 108, 197–199, 326 [81–82, 150–151]; Formale und Transzendentale Logis, 211–212 [203–204]. 110. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, 492–493. 111. Husserl, 493. 112. Husserl, 493. 113. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, 160, 172–173 [132–133, 145–147]; Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 2:162. 114. Husserl, Krisis, 272–276 [337–341]. [What Orth here refers to as the “conclusion of the Crisis” was published as the concluding §73 in the German Husserliana edition (269–276), while it appears as Appendix 4, “Philosophy as Mankind’s Self-Reflection; the Self-Realization of Reason” in the English translation (335–342).—HK] 115. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, 3:389. [“Das menschliche Sein ist Sein in der Endlichkeit derart, daß es beständiges Sein im Bewußtsein der Unendlichkeit ist.”—HK]

acknowledgments

The editors thank the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung for their generous underwriting of the translations in this volume. Without that support, the volume would not have been possible. We also thank the following publishers (as well as authors) for permission to publish translations of the articles. Translated by permission from Verlag Karl Alber, part of Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg: Rudolf Bernet, “Phänomenologische Begriffe der Unwahrheit bei Husserl und Heidegger,” Heidegger und Husserl: Heidegger-Jahrbuch 6 (2012): 108–130. Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, “Das Psychologismusproblem und die Idee einer phänomenologischen Wissenschaft,” Phänomenologische Forschungen. Neue Folge 2 (1997): 3–34. Karl Schuhmann, “Intentionalität und intentionaler Gegenstand beim frühen Husserl,” Phänomenologische Forschungen: Perspektiven und Probleme der Husserlschen Phänomenologie 24–25 (1991): 46–75. Translated by permission from Tijdschrift voor Filosofie: Jan Patočka, “Was ist Phänomenologie?” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 44, no. 4 (1982): 643–676. Translated by permission from Felix Meiner Verlag: Dieter Lohmar, “Die phänomenologische Methode der Wesensschau und ihre Präzisierung als eidetische Variation,” Phänomenologische Forschungen (2005): 65–91. Translated by permission from De Gruyter: Verena Mayer and Christopher Erhard, “Die Bedeutung objektivierender Akte,” in Edmund Husserl: Logische Untersuchungen, ed. V. Mayer, 159–187 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008). The following articles are translated by permission from Springer Nature: 343

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Acknowledgments

Ullrich Melle, “Objecktivierende und nicht-objectivieriende Akte,” in Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung, ed. S. IJsseling, 35–49 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990). Karl Mertens, “Husserls Phänomenologie der Monade: Bemerkungen zu Husserls Auseinandersetzung mit Leibniz,” Husserl Studies 17, no. 1 (2000): 1–20. Elisabeth Ströker, “Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie: Philosophia Perennis in der Krise der europäischen Kultur,” Husserl Studies 5, no. 3 (1988): 197–217. Ernst Wolfgang Orth, “Kulturphilosophie and Kulturanthropologie als Transzendentalphänomenologie,” Husserl Studies 4, no. 2 (1987): 103–141. The rights for “Phanomenologie der Zeit nach Husserl,” Perspektiven der Philosophie. Neues Jahrbuch 7 (1981): 185–221, have reverted to Professor Held and we thank him for permission to translate and publish his article. We are most grateful to our translators—Hayden Kee, Patrick Eldridge, and Robin Litscher Wilkins—for their efforts, care, and dedication in preparing the translations. Gratitude is also due Eray Gündüz for securing the permissions detailed above and to Thomas Lay, Eric Newman, and Michael Koch of Fordham University Press for shepherding the manuscript through to publication.

Contributors

Rudolf Bernet is professor emeritus of philosophy and the former director of the Husserl Archives at the University of Leuven. He is the author of several books, including La vie du sujet: recherches sur l’interpretation de Husserl dans la phénoménologie (1994) and Force— pulsion— désir: une autre philosophie de la psychoanalyse (2013), as well as numerous articles. Christopher Erhard is a postdoctoral research assistant and assistant professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Munich, working in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind. He has coedited Die Aktualität Husserls (2011) and Wozu Metaphysik? (2017). Klaus Held is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Wuppertal. He has authored several books, including Lebendige Gegenwart: Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des transzendentalen Ich bei Edmund Husserl (1966), Phänomenologie der politischen Welt (2010), Phänomenologie der natürlichen Lebenswelt (2012), and Europa und die Welt: Studien zur weltbürgerlichen Phänomenologie (2013). Ludwig Landgrebe (1902–1991) served as Edmund Husserl’s assistant at the University of Freiburg and later taught at the University of Kiel and the University of Cologne. He is the author of Was bedeutet uns heute Philosophie (1948), Phänomenologie und Metaphysik (1949), Der Weg der Phänomenologie (1963), Phänomenologie und Geschichte (1968), and Faktizität und Individuation: Studien zu den Grundfragen der Phänomenologie (1982). Dieter Lohmar is professor of philosophy and the director of the Husserl Archives at the University of Cologne. In addition to many articles, he has published five monographs, including Erfahrung und kategoriales Denken: Hume, Kant and Husserl über vorprädikative Erfahrung und prädikative Erkenntnis (1998), Edmund Husserls Formale und transzendentale Logik (2000), Phänomenologie der schwachen Phantasie (2008), and Denken ohne Sprache (2016). 345

346

Contributors

Verena Mayer is professor of philosophy at the University of Munich. She is the author of Edmund Husserl (2009) and coeditor of Die Moralität der Gefühle (2002), Edmund Husserl : Logische Untersuchungen (2008), Ethics, Emotions and Authenticity (2009), and Die Aktualität Husserls (2011). She has authored numerous articles on phenomenology and early analytic philosophy. Ullrich Melle is professor emeritus of philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the former director of the Husserl Archives. In addition to editing several volumes of Husserliana, the critical edition of Husserl’s works, and Life, Subjectivity and Art: Essays in Honor of Rudolf Bernet, he has published numerous articles on Husserl’s phenomenological development and his ethics. Karl Mertens is professor of philosophy at the University of Würzburg. He is the author of Zwischen Letztbegründung und Skepsis: Kritische Untersuchungen zum Selbtsverständnis der transzendentalen Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls (1996) and numerous articles on phenomenology, the philosophy of action, and ethics. He is also the coeditor of Wahrnehmen, Fühlen, Handeln (2013) and Die Dimension des Sozialen (2014). Ernst Wolfgang Orth is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Trier. His many writings include Bedeutung, Sinn, Gegenstand (1967), Natur, Kultur, Zeit (1999), Edmund Husserls Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Vernunft und Kultur (1999), Was ist und was heißt “Kultur”? (2000), and Die Spur des Menschen (2014). Jan Patočka (1907–1977), born in then Czechoslovakia, was one of the last students of both Husserl and Heidegger. He was barred from teaching by the Czech government from 1951 to 1968 and then again from 1972 until his death. He lectured at the so-called Underground University, but was for the most part unable to publish, although he did circulate typescripts of his writings. Some of his major works have been translated into English, including The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem (2016), An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology (1996), Plato and Europe (2002), and Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (1996). Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl is professor of philosophy at the University of Graz. She is currently coeditor of the journal Husserl Studies. In addition to publishing many articles, she has edited or coedited seven volumes and authored Edmund Husserl: Zeitlichkeit und Intentionalität (2000) and

Contributors

347

Mediane Phänomenologie: Subjektivität im Spannungsfeld von Naturalität und Kulturalität (2003). Karl Schuhmann (1941–2003) was professor of philosophy at the University of Utrecht from 1975 until his death. He was a cofounder of the journal Husserl Studies and edited the critical edition of volume 1 of Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie as well as a volume chronicling Husserl’s life and thought. His books include Die Fundamentalbetrachtung der Phänomenologie (1971), the twovolume Die Dialektik der Phänomenologie (1973), and Husserls Staatsphilosophie (1988). Elisabeth Ströker (1928–2000) was professor of philosophy at the University of Cologne. She authored many articles and her monographs include Philosophische Untersuchungen zum Raum (1965), Einführung in die Wissenschaftslehre (1973), Phänomenologische Studien (1987), Husserls transzendentale Phänomenologie (1987), and Wissenschaftsphilosophische Studien (1989).

Index

absolute subjectivity, 66–67, 72 abstraction, ideating, 116, 118 act intentionality, 73 actions, 226–27 act-modifications, 181–82 act-moment, 196–97 act-quality, 170, 198 acts, 3; Brentano on, 55–56, 63; categorial, 173, 189n57, 198; cognitions and, 113; of consciousness, 110, 196; emotive and volitional, 204–5; feeling and willing, 197; intuitive, 118; matter and quality of, 167–68, 196; mental, 164–66; non-objectifying, 8, 184, 195–96, 198–204; objectifying, 163–64, 166, 181–85; objects and, 146; positing and nonpositing, 180–81; presentation of, 183; propositional, 180–81, 189n61; of recognition, 20; structures of, 163–64, 172–73; type and manner of, 172–73; unified quality of, 180; variational, 119–20; world and, 152–53. See also nominal acts act-type, 163, 172, 193 actual Now, 226 actual objects, 153 affects, 227 Albrecht, Gustav, 335n11 aletheia, 247–48, 250–51, 255 ancient Greeks, 151–52, 296, 298–99 anthropologism, 311 anthropology, 10, 330; cultural, 315, 318; human being of, 312, 315–16; phenomenology and, 310–13; philosophy and, 10, 310–11, 313; transcendental philosophy and, 307–9, 313 anti-Platonists, 29 antipsychologism, 16–18, 22, 26–27, 30–31, 49

anxiety, 78–79 appearance, 232–33, 290; intuitive mode of, 244; manifold of, 211, 218; phenomenology on, 84–85; ultimate ground of, 85 the appearing, 225–28 apprehension, 126, 197 appresentation, 273–74 a priori: analytic and synthetic, 61; of Husserl, Kant versus, 115; knowledge, 121 arbitrariness, 123 Aristotle, 195, 242, 245 asserting, naming versus, 176–77 assertions, 240–41 assumptions, 149–53 attitude, 93, 321–22, 339n66. See also natural attitude attributive names, 178 authentic presentations, 54–55 authentic time, 215 The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Heidegger), 105–6 being: of beings, 92; consciousness and, 67, 94; of entities, 72; epochē and, 98–100; as ground, 102; Heidegger on, 75; of pure phenomena, 94; res and, 95; turning-inward, 98 Being and Time (Heidegger), 9, 51, 230; on affects, 227; on empty talk, 240; on hiddenness and un-hiddenness, 247–48, 250; on Husserl, 106; on intentionality, 72; limits to phenomenological method, 68–80; on ontology, 79–80; on phenomenology, 88–89; on phenomenology of truth, 239; on phenomenon, 71–72; on truth, 239, 242–43, 247–48, 253; on untruth, 246–47

349

350 being-human, 317 being-in-the-world, 71–72, 77–78, 314 beings, 103; in limbo, 100–1; nothing of, 104; presenting, 95; science and, 92 being-uncovered, 243, 245–46 Bernet, Rudolf, 8–9 Biemel, Walter, 91 body, 129, 276–77 Bolzano, Bernard, 142–43, 145–46, 148–49, 152 Brentano, Franz, 2–3, 7, 158n18; on acts, 55–56, 63; on consciousness, 65–66; on existential judgments, 150; Frege and, 165–66; Husserl and, 51–52, 54–55, 142–43, 147–49, 164, 166–69, 198–99; on intentionality, 51–59, 197; on judgment, 168, 171; on presentation, 147, 164–69; on psychic phenomena, 52–53, 143, 165; Psychology from an Empirical Point of View by, 90, 164, 166; Twardowski and, 142, 144 Brentano-Bolzano problem, 142, 145, 152–53 Brentano’s thesis: act-modifications and, 181–82; arguments against, 167–69; new version of, 172–73; perceptions and judgments, 169–72; presentations as basis for mental acts, 164–66; reinterpretation of, 182–83; thematic orientation, 166–67; unified quality of acts, 180 Cartesian Meditations (Husserl), 6, 272–74, 286n49, 315–16 Cartesian self-interpretation, 210 categorial act, 113, 173, 189n57, 198 categorial intention, 112–14 categorial intuition, 59, 112–14, 116, 340n83 categorial nature, of names, 175 categorical judgment, 149 categories, 96 cogito, Cartesian, 97–98, 307 cognition, 39, 43n3, 90; acts and, 113; categorial act of, 113; concepts in, 126–27; eidetic intuition, as form of, 112–17; presupposition and, 28 coincidence: in eidetic intuition, 114, 116; syntheses of, 114, 120 communalization, 274–78 complementary unity, 231–32

Index comportment, 242–44, 246–47, 249–50 concealedness, 239, 251–52 concealment, 255–56 concepts: in cognition, 126–27; color, 115–16; complex, compound, 130; with cultural senses, 130–31; eidetic intuition and, 115, 130, 132; God, 130; intention, 141; nothing, 103; number, 53–54; perception and, 124–27, 161n58; sense-elements and, 124, 126, 132; of type, 125; universal, 127 consciousness: as absolute subjectivity, 66–67; achievements of, 65, 67, 69–70, 72, 74–76, 277; acts of, 110, 196; authentic, inauthentic, 155; being and, 67, 94; Brentano on, 65–66; concept of, 86, 98; as consciousness of, 314; directedness of, 163; eidetic science of, 132; epistemological psychologism and, 39; fluidity of, 319; of fulfillment, 242; horizon-intentionality of, 276; immanence of, 210; inner-time, 210, 215, 222; intentionality and, 52, 57–58, 60; intentional structure of, 294; Logical Investigations analyzing, 27–28; phenomenology of, 33, 111; philosophy and, 40–42; as positive being, 105; presentational, 218; presentation of totality to, 53–54; reality and, 117; reflection in, 98; representation and, 141–42; self-consciousness, 98; stream of, 63–64, 66, 215; structures of, 65, 110; as synthesis, 56; teleological structure of, 184–85; temporal, 64–67; temporal flow of, 63; time and, 63–66, 75; transcendental, 95–96, 100–1; Twardowski on, 155 constitution, 283n30, 301, 324–25; genetic, 218; reduction and, 314–15; sense-constitution, 274, 276–77, 286n49, 302; in transcendental phenomenology, 270–71 construction, 86–87, 105–6 constructivism, 88 content-apprehension schema, 197 correctness, 204 correlation, 194 correlationism, 61–62 The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy (Husserl), 6, 35, 297, 311–12, 316; on constitution,

351

Index 218; on life-world, 328; on new science, 88; on teleology, 231; on traditional metaphysics, 86; on utilitarianism, of science, 293 critical idealism, 318 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 94–95 cultural anthropology, 315, 318 culturalism, 325, 329 cultural phenomenology, 324 cultural senses, of concepts, 130–31 cultural worlds, 324–26 culture, 316, 318–19, 330–33 Dasein: being-uncovered, 243, 245–46; comportment of, 242–44, 246–47, 249–50; construction, destruction of, 106; fallenness, errancy and, 253; finitude of, 78–79; freedom of, 252, 254; Heidegger on, 9, 71–73, 75–76, 78–80, 242; letting-be, 252–53; openness of, 251; relationship to its own being, 102; transcendence of, 100, 104 datum of sensation, 218–19 deconstruction, 86 deductive grounding, of logic, 26 Descartes: cogito, 97–98, 307; on ego, 213–14; ego cogito of, 213; Heidegger on, 107; Husserl on, 212–15; Husserl’s fifth meditation on, 272–74, 286n49; on ideas, 166; Leibniz and, 265–66; on mental experiences, 165; methodological skepticism of, 90–91; ontology of, 97; res cogitans, 96–97; on subject and object, 212–13 description, phenomenological, 33–34 descriptive psychology, 3–4, 27, 29–30, 62, 111 determination, 220–21, 227–28, 231–32 determination, in phenomenal sphere, 212 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 311, 324 dimensionality, 222–23, 225 disappointment, experience of, 245–46 disclosedness, 104, 227–28, 232, 242, 246, 251 doxical universalism, 184 doxic positing, 204–5 doxic reason, 203–4 doxic reductionism, 184 doxic theses, 204–5

dualism, 209, 225, 229–30 duplication, of objects, 153, 155 dynamic intention, 90 ego, 213–15, 316–17, 328–29, 331 ego-body, 276 ego cogito, 213 egoicality, 214–15 egology, 213, 272–73, 324 eidetic analysis, 166–67 eidetic insight, 62 eidetic intuition, 110–11; a priori of, 115; categorial intuition and, 114; coincidence in, 114, 116; concepts and, 115, 130, 132; as form of cognition, 112–17; method of, 129; in Phenomenological Psychology, 119; phenomenological reduction and, 320–21; procedure of, 119; of the universal, 114, 116, 130 eidetic method, 112, 118–21 eidetic-phenomenological psychology, 35–36 eidetic variation, 111–12, 118–21; free variation and, 126, 131–32; imaginative, 124; perception in, 122; phantasy for production of, 122–23; procedure of, 120–24, 126, 128, 130–32, 135n16, 137n57; pure eidos in, 131; as restricted, in practice, 123; systemic questions, on process of, 121–32 eidos, 131–32 emergence, 102–3 emotionalism, 193 emotive and volitional acts, 204–5 empirical intuition, 71 empirical psychology, 110, 167 empirical science, 3–4, 111, 292 empiricism, 38, 90 empty intentions, 4 empty talk, 240–42 epistemological psychologism, 31–34, 39 epistemological skepticism, 24–25 epistemology, 184, 319 epochē, 94, 181; being and, 98–100; Heidegger on, 101, 107; limbo of, 99–101; pure phenomena, 95; radicalizing, 217; skepticism versus, 91–92; thematic, 273; in transcendental phenomenology, 267

352 Erhard, Christopher, 7–8 essence, 117; of colors, 130–31; of human being, 318; intentional, 168; of nominal acts, 173–80 Europe, 297–99, 301–2 evidence, 2, 246–47, 320 existence, 5, 149–50, 155, 161n62 existential judgments, 149–50, 170 experience, 2–3; of disappointment, 245–46; intentional, 164, 183; mental, 165; nexus of, 77; object of, 4–5, 8; original, 70–71; phenomenology on, 5–6; structures of, 87; subjective, 274; of thinking, 28; three classes of, 8; transcendental, 271–72; of truth, 246; of world, by subject, 9, 275 Experience and Judgment (Husserl), 35, 45n37 expressions, 174–75, 177–78 facticity, 79, 308 fallenness, 253 false concealment, 255–56 false hiddenness, 255–56 falsehood, 240, 245–47, 250, 254 false unhiddenness, 255–56 false untruth, 249, 254 falsity, 8–9, 262n82 feeling: intentionality of, 201; willing and, 195, 197 feeling-sensations, 201 finitude, of Dasein, 78–79 Fink, Eugen, 325 Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl), 35, 37–38, 49 foundation, unity of, 183–84 freedom, 99, 251–52, 254, 323 free phantasy, 7, 120–21, 123 free variation, 123, 126, 131–32 Frege, Gottlob, 165–66, 171 fulfilling acts, 4 fulfilling intention, 8–9 fulfilling intuition, 8–9, 198–99 fulfillment, 58; of categorial intentions, 113; intuitive, 116, 124, 242, 244, 248–49, 254; of supposition, 244 full intentions, 4 fundamental assumptions, 150–51 fundamental mood, 104 fundamental ontology, 97, 106

Index general assumptions, 151–52 genetic phenomenology, 171, 217–18, 267 genetic philosophy, of Husserl, 127 geometry, 60–61 German Idealism, 97 gestalt switch, 170 Gestalt theory, 128 givenness, 57, 59, 67, 69–70, 86; of identical in-itself, 216; intuitive, 116, 244, 271; natural attitude and, 210–11; of objects, 63; sensuous, 128 God, 130, 268–70 Göttingen, 49–51, 60, 68 ground, 96; appearance, as ultimate, 85; being as, 102; of logic, as deductive, 26; of logic, psychological, 21, 23, 25; of phenomenology, 99, 101, 111 hearsay, 242, 244 hedonic identification, 202 Heidegger, Martin: on anxiety, 78–79; The Basic Problems of Phenomenology by, 105–6; on being, 75; on Cartesianism, 107; Dilthey and, 311; on epochē, 101, 107; on human being, 77–79; Husserl and, 68–69, 72–73, 78–80, 106–7, 239–40, 308; on impartial observer, 73–75; on methodology, of phenomenology, 107; “On the Essence of Truth” by, 250–52, 254–55; Parmenides lectures, 254–55; on phenomenology, of Husserl, 6, 51, 68–80, 105–6, 225–26; on primary method, 89; on reduction, 105–6; on true untruth, 8–9; on truth, as being-uncovered, 245; “What is Metaphysics?” by, 101. See also Being and Time (Heidegger); Dasein Heraclitean flux, 218, 230 hiddenness, 245, 247–50, 253–54 history, 297–98, 301 Hoche, Hans-Ulrich, 225–27 holding-on-to, 64, 223–24, 231 horizon-intentionality, of consciousness, 276 horizon-structure, 275 human being, 77–79, 308–9, 312, 315–19, 333. See also Dasein human science, 312 Hume, David, 116, 164 Husserl, Edmund. See specific topics

Index idealism, 328; critical, 318; German, 97; logical, 26–27, 34, 41; objectivism versus, 309; phenomenological, 39; pure, 33 ideality: of meaning, 3; reality and, 40–41; science of, 23 ideal objects, 58, 132 ideal science, 23 The Idea of Phenomenology: Five Lectures (Husserl), 91–92 ideas: Descartes on, 166; Platonic, 116–17 Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (Husserl), 4, 49–50, 119–20, 313; on intentionality, 141; manuscript of, 154; on natural attitude, 325; on noema, 205–6; on objectifying and nonobjectifying acts, 196; on perception, of world, 153–54; phenomenological reduction in, 68 ideating abstraction, 116, 118 identical in-itself, 211–12, 216, 223 identical meaning, 30, 145–46 identification, thematizing, 212 identity, 151, 212–15, 217, 219, 227 image, 144, 146 imaginative modifications, 182 imaginative-presentations, 166 imaginative variation, 124 immanence, 3, 96, 210 immanence-in-the-subject, 213 immanent perception, 86 immanent unity, 63–64 impartial observer, 73–76 impressions, primal, 219 inauthentic judgments, 148–49 inauthentic modes of speech, 148 inauthentic presentations, 54–55, 146, 154 independence, 132 indeterminate objects, 147 individual monads, 269–70, 275 individual objects, 127–28 individual substance, 269, 281n16 the in-itself, 210–12, 216–18, 331 inner perception, 169–70 inner-time consciousness, 210, 215, 222 intellectualism, 193, 204 intention: categorial, 112–14; concept of, 141; dynamic, 90; fulfilling, 8–9; intuitive character of, 114; pictorial, 118–19

353 intentional contents, 4 intentional essence, 168 intentional existence, 155 intentional experiences, 164, 183 intentional idealism, 32 intentionality, 3–4, 7, 333–34; as achievement, 60–61, 65, 72–73; act, 73; Being and Time on, 72; body and, 276–77; Brentano on, 51–59, 197; concept of, 63, 333; consciousness and, 52, 57–58, 60; of feeling, 201; as fundamental theorem, 314; as having contents, 142; horizon-intentionality, 276; in Husserl and Brentano, 51–59; Husserl on, 142; Ideas I on, 141; of natural attitude, 217; objects and, 161n58; pure, 32; relation of, 52, 55, 58, 90; of representation, 153; Schuhmann on, 7; as synthesis, 59; as teleology, 231 intentional object, 52–53, 58, 145–46, 172 intentional objectivities, 61, 66, 184 intentional objects, 146–47 “Intentional Objects” (manuscript) (Husserl), 161n58 intentional relation, 52, 55, 58, 90 intentional structure, 294 intentions, empty and full, 4 internal structures, 290 intersubjective norming, 127 intersubjectivity, 6, 266, 314; communalization, 275; horizonformation and, 275; phenomenological theory of, as monadology, 272–74; phenomenology of, 274–78; transcendental, 273, 275, 285n46, 323; Zahavi on, 286n49 intuition: categorial, 59, 112–14, 116, 340n83; differences in, 167; empirical, 71; fulfilling, 8–9, 198–99; as insight and evidence, 320; judgment and, 171, 320; perception and, 126; phantasy in, 119; in phenomenology, 93; presentation and, 161n58; selfgiving, 62; sensuous versus categorial, 59. See also eidetic intuition intuitionism, 62 intuitive fulfillment, 116, 124, 242, 244, 248–49, 254 intuitive givenness, 116, 244, 271

354 intuitive perception, 119 intuitive self-givenness, 199, 253–54 irruption and emergence, 102–3 judging, naming and, 173, 178 judgment-complexes, 147–48 judgment quality, 169–71 judgments, 143, 150–51; Brentano on, 168, 171; categorial, 149; concept of, 186n20; content and, 165–66; existential, 149–50, 170; inauthentic, 148–49; intuition and, 171, 320; names and, 176; objects and, 165; perception and, 169–72, 206; value, 200 justification, 194 Kant, Immanuel: a priori of, 115; classification of act-types, 193; critical philosophy of, 307; Critique of Pure Reason by, 94–95; as dogmatic, 97; Husserl and, 94–95; Neo-Kantianism and, 68, 308, 323 knowledge, 121, 243–44 Künne, Wolfgang, 151 Landgrebe, Ludwig, 6, 288 language, 127–28, 240–41, 277 Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time (Husserl), 215, 231 Leibniz, Gottfried: Descartes and, 265–66; Husserl, subjectivity and, 266–72, 278; on individual substance, 269; metaphysics of, 268–70, 282n21; on monadic actio, 56; monadology of, 9, 272, 278; on monads, 268–70, 275, 278; on subject, 267 lethe, 255 letting-be, 252–53, 257 life-world, 70–71, 301–2, 317, 325–28, 332 likeable, 205 living present, 220–21 logic: deductive grounding of, 26; mathematics and, 2–3; normative, 20–22, 37, 47n54; the nothing and, 103; object of, 19–20, 25–26, 31; practical, 37; psychological grounding of, 21, 23, 25; psychologism in, 3; psychology and, 15–16, 23, 25, 27; pure, 18–22, 24–26, 36, 90, 293–94; science and, 18, 37–38; theoretical, 22–23; truth and, 247

Index logical axioms, 25–26 logical idealism, 26–27, 34, 41 Logical Investigations (Husserl), 290; act-phenomenology of, 32; act-qualities in, 198; on antipsychologism and psychological investigations, 49; on descriptive psychology, 29–30; on doxa, 204; eidetic intuition in, 110, 112–17; on falsehood, 246; on grounding formal logic, 59; on intentional object, 146; intuitive act in, 118; on logic and science, 18; on meaning, 27–29, 151; on objectifying and nonobjectifying acts, 196, 198–99, 202–3; on phenomenology, as descriptive psychology, 111; on psychologism, 17, 24, 31, 35–36, 40, 42, 57; on psychology and logic, 27; reception of, 63; on transcendental phenomenology, 17; on truth, 240–44, 253–54; unity of foundation, 184; on variational acts, 120 logical laws: logic, psychology and, 15; psychologism on, 19–20; subject and, 43n2; validity of, 22–23, 25, 38 logical objectivism, 38 logical operations, foundation of, 59 logical psychologism, 17, 25, 30–34, 38–39 Logische Untersuchungen (Husserl), 3–4 Lohmar, Dieter, 6–7 Marty, Anton, 144, 161n63 mathematical existence, 149–50 mathematical presentations, 57 mathematics: foundations of, 56–57; of Husserl, 291–92; the infinite in, 299; logic and, 2–3 matter and quality, of acts, 167–68, 196 Mayer, Verena, 7–8 meaning: act of, 55; ideality of, 3; identical, 30, 145–46; intending and, 58; Logical Investigations on, 27–29, 151; object and, 147, 157n14; thought and, 28–29 Melle, Ullrich, 7–8 memory, as recollection, 216 mental acts, 164–66 mental experiences, 165 mental phenomena, 164 mere presentation, 164–65, 167, 169–70, 172, 183

Index Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 277 Mertens, Karl, 9 metaphysical skepticism, 24, 31, 34 metaphysics, 23–24, 67, 86; concept of, 278n4; of Descartes, Leibniz, 265–66; ground of, 85; of Leibniz, 268–70, 282n21; Nietzsche on, 153; pure phenomenology and, 95; science and, 101; subjectivity and, 80 methodological skepticism, 90–91 methodology, 99; of phenomenological reduction, 5, 32; of phenomenology, 5–7, 35, 50, 68–80, 107, 111; of philosophy, 90; scientific, 9–10 mind, 28, 105 modified existence, 150 momentary Now, 216 monadic actio, 56 monadic individual, 275 monadology, 9, 266, 272–74, 278 monads, 268–70, 272, 274–75, 278, 283n32, 285n45 mood, 103–4, 118 moodful appearings, 228 moodfulness, 230–32 multiplicity, unity and, 220–21, 225, 230–31, 233 multitiered inauthenticities, 151 mundanity, 328–30 mystery, 255 names, 64–67, 145, 172; attributive, 178; categorial nature of, 175; complex sentences as, 187n32; Husserl on, 173–80; judgments and, 176; positing versus nonpositing, 175–76; proper, 173–74; sentences and, 177–80 naming: asserting versus, 176–77; judging and, 173, 178; seeing and, 175 natural attitude, 267, 322, 326; eidos and, 131; general thesis of, 91, 101; givenness and, 210–11; Ideas I on, 325; intentionality of, 217; objects and, 131–32; phenomenological attitude versus, 93–94, 339n66 natural concept, of world, 70 naturalism, 93, 330 naturalistic normativism, 22 naturalistic reductionism, 21 natural science, 70–71, 84–85, 91, 292 natural type tree, 174

355 nature, 330–32 Neo-Kantianism, 68, 308, 323 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 195 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 153 nihilating comportment, 100–1 noema, 7, 204–6 nominal acts, 172; essence of, 173–80; Husserl’s ten theses of, 179–80; positing versus nonpositing, 175–76, 180–81, 188n42; propositional acts and, 189n61; structures of, 173 nominalization, of sentences, 178–79 non-objectifying acts, 8, 184, 195–96, 198–204 nonobjectifying qualities, 183 nonpositing names, 175–76 nonpositing nominal acts, 175–76, 180–81, 188n42 normative logic, 20–22, 37, 47n54 normative science, 20–21 normative structures, 164 normativism, naturalistic, 22 norming, 127 nothing, 102–4 Now, 216, 219, 222, 226 numbers, 3, 53–54 object-determinations, 199–201 objectification, 7–8, 182, 217 objectifying acts, 163–64, 166, 181–85; nonobjectifying acts and, 8, 184, 193, 195–96, 198–204 objective identity, 217 objective presentation, 147 objective structure, 87 objective time, 209–10, 215 objectivism, 38, 300, 309 objectivities, 5, 45n37, 61, 66, 184, 211 objectivity, 3, 7, 36 objectless presentations, 7 objects, 206; acts and, 146; actual, 153; commonality of, 127; content and, 166; determinate and indeterminate, 147; duplication of, 153, 155; existence, of world of, 5; of experience, 4–5, 8; givenness of, 63; ideal, 58, 132; individual versus universal, 127–28; intentional, 52–53, 58, 145–46, 172; intentional and true, 146–47; intentionality and, 161n58; judgments and, 165; of logic, 19–20, 25–26, 31;

356 objects (cont.) logical entities as, 294; meaning and, 147, 157n14; natural attitude and, 131–32; in natural science, 70; ontological turn to, 68; perceptions of, 116, 171; of phantasy, 118–19, 121–23; primary and secondary, 144–46; real, 58, 132, 146; relation of, 220; senseelements of, 128–29; sensuous, 117; subjects and, 5, 212–13; true, 146–47, 153; turn to, 68, 72. See also subject-object observation, in phenomenology, 88 omnitemporality, thought as, 29 On the Content and Object of Presentations (Twardowski), 7, 142 “On the Essence of Truth” (Heidegger), 250–52, 254–55 On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (Husserl), 215, 217 ontological independence, 132 ontological turn, 68 ontology: Being and Time on, 79–80; fundamental, 97, 106; of Husserl, 60, 62, 68; in late phenomenology, 47n60; phenomenology as method of, 97; of possible objects of experience, 8 openness, 251 optimizing human existence, 316 Orth, Ernst Wolfgang, 10 otherness, 275 painted landscape, 144 Parmenides (lectures) (Heidegger), 254–55 partial actions, 226–27 participation, 117 passive syntheses, 125, 136n41 Patočka, Jan, 6 perception: in analysis, 233; concepts and, 124–27, 161n58; in eidetic variation, 122; of God, 270; immanent, 86; inner, 169–70; intuition and, 126; intuitive, 119; judgment and, 169–72, 206; of objects, 116, 171; phantasy and, 115, 124; sensation and, 190n67; sense-elements in, 113; of something, 127; syntheses of coincidence, 114; total, 113–14; types, in process of, 128; value-perception, 196, 201–4, 206; of world, 153–54

Index perspectival monad, 268 perspectivism, 47n57 phantasy, 112; free, 7, 120–21, 123; in intuition, 119; objects of, 118–19, 121–23; perception and, 115, 124; for production of variations, 122–23; variation, of meant object in, 121–22 phantasy-presentations, 159n32 phantasy-variation, 122–23 phenomena, 86; Being and Time on, 71–72; entities versus, 72; mental, 164; phenomenological reduction, 87; psychic, 52–53, 143, 165, 197 phenomenal field, 215–17, 220, 222–23, 228 phenomenal present, 216, 218, 220–21, 224–25, 229, 232 phenomenal sphere, 212 phenomenological attitude, 93, 339n66 phenomenological contents, 4 phenomenological description, 33–34 phenomenological idealism, 39 Phenomenological Psychology (Husserl), 118–20, 124 phenomenological reduction, 6, 33, 38–39, 66–67, 71, 74–75; correlation in, 194; eidetic intuition and, 320–21; Ideas I on, 68; methodology of, 5, 32; phenomena and, 87; psychologism and, 32, 46n48; in transcendental phenomenology, 267 phenomenological sphere, 313–14 phenomenology: anthropology, 310–13; on appearances, 84–85; Being and Time on, 88–89, 239; on consciousness, 33, 111; cultural, 324; culture and, 332–33; as descriptive science, 2; as epistemology, 319; on experience, 5–6; genetic, 171, 217–18, 267; ground of, 99, 101, 111; of guiding clues, 217; of intersubjectivity, 274–78; intuition in, 93; late, 47n60; of life-world, 327; manifold of appearance in, 211; meaning of, 318; as method of ontology, 97; as methodological concept, 99; methodology of, 5–7, 35, 50, 68–80, 107, 111; observation in, 88; as philosophy, 84–85, 209, 305; practical approach in, 36–37; problematics of, 2; psychology and, 65–66; pure, 34–36, 39, 41, 89–90, 93,

Index 95; of reason, 194; as reflection, 107; as science, of phenomena, 89; science and, 38, 88–90, 102; self-grounding of, 111; transcendental, 5, 17, 32–33, 40–41, 154–55; of truth, 239 phenomenology, of Husserl: as descriptive analysis, of acts of consciousness, 110; as descriptive psychology, 111; development of, 50; on directedness, of consciousness, 163; doctrine of intentionality in, 51; eidetic analysis, 166–67; founding, 1; Heidegger on, 6, 51, 68–80, 105–6, 225–26; intersubjectivity in, 266, 272–74; methodology, 111; on modes of relation, 294; phenomenological school and, 59–68; as philosophia perennis, 291; as philosophy, 305; questioning in, 94; research in, 289–91; science of, 89–90; seeing in, 291, 294–95, 297; on time, 209–10, 215; transcendental, 154–55 “Phenomenology and Anthropology” (lecture) (Husserl), 310–12 Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty), 277 Philipse, Hermann, 157n12 philosophical praxis, 305 philosophical science, 10, 40, 303 philosophy: anthropology and, 10, 310–11, 313; consciousness and, 40–42; genetic, 127; methodology of, 90; phenomenology as, 84–85, 209, 305; psychology and, 15–16, 35–36; science and, 10, 15–16, 40, 85–87, 95, 101–2, 292–93, 303; scientificity in, 16; transcendental, 307–9, 313 Philosophy as Rigorous Science (Husserl), 92–93 Philosophy of Arithmetic (Husserl), 2–3, 51–52, 55–56 pictorial intentions, 118–19 Plato, 92, 117, 153, 242 Platonism, 29, 32, 116–17 positing, doxic, 204–5 positing names, 175–76 positing nominal acts, 175–76, 180–81, 188n42 position-taking, 204 positivism, 70 practical logic, 37

357 pre-being, 100 predicate, 143 predication, 174, 241 pre-objective identity-impulse, 220 presencing, 216 the present, 216–18, 220–22, 224–29, 232 presentation: of act, 183; in acts of consciousness, 196; apprehension and, 197; authentic, 54–55; as basis for mental acts, 164–66; Brentano on, 147, 164–69; concept of, 184; content of, 144–45, 147–48, 168–69; imaginative-presentations, 166; inauthentic, 54–55, 146, 154; intuition and, 161n58; judgment and, 149; mathematical, 57; matter, quality and, 168; mere, 164–65, 167, 169–70, 172, 183; objective, 147; objectless, 7; phantasy-presentations, 159n32; phenomenal field of, 217; primary and secondary object of, 146; representational, 141–42; sensation in, 164–66; of totality, 53–54; Twardowski on, 145; unity of, 217, 219–20; as vague, 115; worlds of, 154 presentation-act, 171 presentational consciousness, 218 presentation-content, 169 presentation-quality, 168–70 presenting-itself, 213 presenting objectification, 182 presuppositions, 28, 33, 148 primal impression, 217, 219, 222 primary object, 144–46 problem of scientificity, 3, 16 Prolegomena to Pure Logic (Husserl), 18–22, 24, 27, 33–36, 38, 59, 199–200 proper names, 173–74 propositional acts, 180–81, 189n61 propositions, 143, 150–51 protention, 219, 221–24 pseudos, 255–56 psychic phenomena, 52–53, 143, 165, 197 psychological investigations, 49 “Psychological Studies in the Elements of Logic” (Husserl), 141–43 psychologism, 3; antipsychologism and, 16–17, 22, 26–27, 30–31; arguments against, relating to consequences of, 19; arguments against, relating to presuppositions of, 18–19, 24;

358 psychologism (cont.) controversy, 15–16, 23, 27; descriptive psychology and, 30; epistemological, 31–34, 39; logical, 17, 25, 30–34, 38–39; in Logical Investigations, 17, 24, 31, 35–36, 40, 42, 57; on logical laws, 19–20; logical objectivism versus, 38; normative logic and, 20–22; phenomenological reduction and, 32, 46n48; Prolegomena on, 59, 199–200; pure logic on, 26; reductio ad absurdum, 24; science and, 40; scientificity and, 17; as skepticism, 24, 199–200; subjectivism and, 31; transcendental, 34–35 psychology: analyses of, 60; appearance in, 84–85; concept of number in, 53; descriptive, 3–4, 27, 29–30, 62, 111; eidetic-phenomenological, 35–36; empirical, 110, 167; logic and, 15–16, 23, 25, 27; phenomenology and, 65–66; philosophy and, 15–16, 35–36; as science, 92–93 Psychology from an Empirical Point of View (Brentano), 90, 164, 166 psychotherapy, 88 pure ego, 317, 331 pure eidos, 131 pure gaze, 97 pure idealism, 33 pure intentionality, 32 pure logic, 18–22, 24–26, 36, 90, 293–94 pure phenomena: epochē and, 95; science of, 92, 94, 96 pure phenomenology, 34–36, 39, 41, 89–90, 93, 95 pure subjectivity, 32, 40 purified subjectivity, 96–97 putting-into-question, 102 qualitative modifications, 182 quality: act-quality, 170, 198; judgment, 169–71; matter and, 167–68, 196; nonobjectifying, 183; presentationquality, 168–70 quasi-classification, 147 questioning, Husserlian, 94 Rang, Bernhard, 157n12, 159n33 rational being, 298

Index rationality, 323 reality: assertions and, 241; consciousness and, 117; ideality and, 40–41; of psychological acts, 3; science of, 23 real objects, 58, 132, 146 real world, 152 reason: actuality and, 296; adjudication of, 194; axiological and practical, 195; doxic, 203–4; intellectualist theory of, 204; justification and, 194; phenomenology of, 194; in science, 297–98; three domains of, 8; types of, 193; valuing, willing in, 195 recognition, act of, 20 recollection, memory as, 216 reduction, 341n99; constitution and, 314–15; Heidegger on, 105–6; method of, 319; transcendental, 5–6, 132, 295, 327–28; transcendentalphenomenological, 307–9. See also phenomenological reduction reductionism, doxic, 184 reductive construction, 105–6 reflection, 87, 304; in consciousness, 98; phenomenology as, 107; transcendental-phenomenological, 320; universal, 73–75 reflective gaze, 96–97 regressive questioning, 76–78 Reinach, Adolph, 160n35 relation: intentional, 52, 55, 58, 90; modes of, 294; objects of, 220; subject-object, 90; to truth, 241–42 relative existence, 150 remembering, forgetting and, 223 renunciation, 288–89 representation, 141–42, 153, 197 res, 95, 97 res cogitans, 96–97 res extensa, 96 retention, 217, 219, 222–24 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 288 Rinofner-Kreidl, Sonja, 3 Rodin, Auguste, 288 Scheler, Max, 62 Schuhmann, Karl, 7 science: axiomatic groundwork of, 150–51; of beings, 92; empirical, 3–4, 111, 292; essential ground of, 102; European, 301; human science, 312; of

Index idealities and realities, 23; life-world molded by, 302; logic and, 18, 37–38; metaphysics and, 101; natural, 70–71, 84–85, 91, 292; new, 88; normative, 20–21; objective, 300; origins of, 292; of phenomena, phenomenology as, 89; phenomenology and, 38, 88–90, 102; philosophy and, 10, 15–16, 40, 85–87, 95, 101–2, 292–93, 303; physical, 300; psychologism and, 40; psychology as, 92–93; of pure phenomena, 92, 94, 96; reason in, 297–98; sedimented sense-history of, 301–3; segmentation of, 293; sense of, 292, 295–96, 300, 302–3; tasks of, 299–300; theoretical, 296–97; utilitarianism of, 293 scientificity, 15–17, 297 scientific methodology, 9–10 secondary object, 144–46 sedimented sense-history, of science, 301–3 seeing, 175, 291, 294–95, 297, 302 self-consciousness, 98 self-givenness, 244–46, 248, 275; intuitive, 199, 253–54; of the universal, 120 self-giving intuition, 62 self-grounding: of phenomenology, 111; of pure logic, 25–26 self-knowing, 79 self-reflection, 213–14, 312 self-revelation, 224–25 self-thematization, 214 self-understanding, 266–67 sensations, 163–66; datum of, 218–19; feeling-sensations, 201; perceptions and, 190n67 sense: of apprehension, 197; cultural, 130–31; of science, 292, 295–96, 300, 302–3; of truth, 304 sense-bestowal, 322–23 sense-constitution, 274, 276–77, 286n49, 302 sense-elements: concepts and, 124, 126, 132; of objects, 128–29; perceptions in, 113; variation in, 123 sensuous givenness, 128 sensuous intuition, 59 sensuous objects, 117 sentences: complex, 187n32; names and, 177–80; nominalization of, 178–79

359 skepticism, 25, 44n23, 46n52; epochē versus, 91–92; metaphysical, 24, 31, 34; methodological, 90–91; psychologism and, 24, 199–200 space, 141 spatial shape, 61 speech, inauthentic modes of, 148 states, presence of, 228–29 stream of consciousness, 63–64, 66, 215 Ströker, Elisabeth, 9–10 structured events, 163 structures, 60–61, 72–73, 75; of acts, 163–64, 172–73; of consciousness, 65, 110; of experience, 87; horizonstructure, 275; intentional, 294; internal, 290; life-world, 327–28; of nominal acts, 173; normative, 164; teleological, 184–85 Stumpf, Carl, 2 subject: in anthropology, 315; experience of world, 9, 275; Husserl, Leibniz on, 267; logical laws and, 43n2; object and, 5, 212–13; physical science and, 300; world and, 295–96 subjective achievements, 7 subjective time, 209–10, 215 subjectivism, 31, 37, 43n1 subjectivity, 36, 302–3; absolute, 66–67, 72; Husserl, Leibniz on, 266–72, 278; metaphysics and, 80; pure, 32, 40; purified, 96–97; time- and worldforming, 76; transcendental, 40, 105, 271, 273, 331 subject-object: division, 87; relation, 90 substance, 269, 281n16 suspending of suspension, 92 syntheses: of coincidence, 114, 120; consciousness, 56; intentionality, 59; passive, 125, 136n41 systematic theories, 27 teleological structure, of consciousness, 184–85 teleology, 231–33, 298 temporal consciousness, 64–67 thematization, 313–14 thematizing identification, 212 theology, 88 theoretical praxis, 304–5 theoretical sciences, 296–97 theoreticism, 44n11

360 theory, of theories, 27 things themselves, 85 thinking: cognizing and, 294; experience of, 28 thoughts, 28–29, 166 time: authentic, 215; consciousness and, 63–66, 75; objective and subjective, 209–10, 215; retention, protention, 222; self-reflection and, 213–14; world and, 79 tones, 119, 131 totality: of beings, 103; presentation of, 53–54 total perception, 113–14 transcendence, 91; of Dasein, 100, 104; of identical thing, 216–17; of the in-itself, 211; of logical content, of experience, 3 transcendental consciousness, 95–96, 100–1 transcendental experience, 271–72 transcendental “I,” 328 transcendental intersubjectivity, 273, 275, 285n46, 323 transcendentality, 312, 324, 329–30 transcendental-phenomenological reduction, 307–9 transcendental-phenomenological reflection, 320 transcendental phenomenology, 5, 32–33, 40–41, 154–55, 265; anthropologism and, 311; constitution in, 270–71; cultural phenomenology and, 324; egology and, 272–73; epochē and reduction in, 267; intersubjectivity in, 274–78; Logical Investigations on, 17; phenomenological versus, 319; as philosophical science, 303; selfunderstanding in, 266–67 transcendental philosophy, anthropology and, 307–9, 313 transcendental psychologism, 34–35 transcendental reduction, 5–6, 132, 295, 327–28 transcendental research, 7 transcendental subjectivity, 40, 105, 271, 273, 275, 331 true hiddenness, 247 true objects, 146–47, 153 true predication, 241

Index true untruth, 8–9, 240, 251 truth: of assertions, 240–41; Being and Time on, 239, 242–43, 247–48, 253; as being-uncovered, 245; experience of, 246; falsehood and, 240, 245, 254; Heidegger, Husserl on, 239–40; Logical Investigations on, 240–44, 253–54; logical theory of, 247; objective validity, of thoughts and, 28; relation to, 241–42; sense of, 304; of supposition, 244–46; as unconcealedness, 239, 251–52; as un-hiddenness, 252; untruth and, 239–41, 248–49 turning-inward, 98 Twardowski, Kazimierz, 7; Brentano and, 142, 144; on Brentano-Bolzano problem, 145; on consciousness, 155; Husserl and, 142–43, 145, 150, 153, 155, 162n72; on presentations, 145 type, 125, 127–28 Über den Begriff der Zahl: Psychologische Analysen (Husserl), 2 ultimate ground, of appearance, 85 un-concealedness, 239, 251–52 understanding, 200 un-hiddenness, 245, 247–48, 250, 252, 254–57 unitary interest, 54 unity: complementary, 231–32; in discontinuity, 223–24; of foundation, 183–84; immanent, 63–64; multiplicity and, 220–21, 225, 230–31, 232; particular, 225; in phenomenal field, 215–16; of the present, 229; of presentation, 217, 219–20 the universal: eidetic intuition of, 114, 116, 130; self-givenness of, 120 universal concepts, 127 universal objects, 127–28 universal reflection, 73–75 universe, 269–70, 272 untrue comportment, 242 untruth, 239–41, 246–49, 251–52, 254–55 utilitarianism, 293 validity, 20, 22–23, 25, 28, 38, 292 valuations, 21 value-apperception, 202 value-determinations, 200–1

361

Index value judgments, 200 value-perception, 196, 201–4, 206 valuing, willing and, 195, 204 variation. See eidetic variation variational acts, 119–20 vulgar concept, of phenomenon, 71 Weber, Max, 21 “What is Metaphysics?” (Heidegger), 101 wholeness, 103

will, body and, 277 willing, 195, 197, 204 wonder, 232–33 world: acts and, 152–53; natural concept of, 70; perception of, 153–54; of presentation, 154; real, 152; subject and, 9, 275, 295–96; time and, 79 world-concept, 71 Zahavi, D., 286n49