Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static and Genetic Phenomenology [Reprint of 2004 ed.] 1487520433, 9781487520434

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: On the Distinction Between Static and Genetic Phenomenologies
2: On Time Consciousness and Its Relationship to Intersubjectivity
3: On the Question of Intersubjectivity
4: The Husserlian Account of Ethics
Conclusion: The Impact of Genetic Phenomenology
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

HUSSERL ON ETHICS AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY From Static to Genetic Phenomenology

In Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity, Janet Donohoe offers a compelling look into Husserl’s shift from a “static” to a “genetic” approach in his analysis of consciousness. Rather than view consciousness as an abstract unity, Husserl began investigating consciousness by taking into account the individual’s lived experiences. Engaging critics from contemporary analytic schools to third-generation phenomenologists, Donohoe shows that they often do not do justice to the breadth of Husserl’s thoughts. In separate chapters Donohoe elucidates the relevance of Husserl’s later genetic phenomenology to his work on time consciousness, intersubjectivity, and ethical issues. This much-needed synthesis of Husserl’s methodologies will be of interest to Husserl scholars, phenomenologists, and philosophers from both Continental and analytic schools. is a professor of philosophy in the Department of English and Philosophy at the University of West Georgia. janet donohoe

New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics Kenneth Maly, General Editor New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics aims to open up new approaches to classical issues in phenomenology and hermeneutics. Thus its intentions are the following: to further the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger – as well as that of Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Emmanuel Levinas; to enhance phenomenological thinking today by means of insightful interpretations of texts in phenomenology as they inform current issues in philosophical study; to inquire into the role of interpretation in phenomenological thinking; to take seriously Husserl’s term phenomenology as “a science which is intended to supply the basic instrument for a rigorously scientific philosophy and, in its consequent application, to make possible a methodical reform of all the sciences”; to take up Heidegger’s claim that “what is own to phenomenology, as a philosophical ‘direction,’ does not rest in being real. Higher than reality stands possibility. Understanding phenomenology consists solely in grasping it as possibility”; to practise phenomenology as “underway,” as “the praxis of the self-showing of the matter for thinking,” as “entering into the movement of enactment-thinking.” The commitment of this book series is also to provide English translations of significant works from other languages. In summary, New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics intends to provide a forum for a full and fresh thinking and rethinking of the way of phenomenology and interpretive phenomenology, that is, hermeneutics. For a list of books in the series, see page 199.

HUSSERL ON ETHICS AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY From Static to Genetic Phenomenology

JANET DONOHOE

UNIVERSIT Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2016 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. First published in 2004 in hardcover by Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books ISBN 978-1-4875-2043-4 (paper) Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Donohoe, Janet, author Husserl on ethics and intersubjectivity : from static to genetic phenomenology / Janet Donohoe. (New studies in phenomenology and hermeneutics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4875-2043-4 (paper) 1. Husserl, Edmund, 1859–1938. 2. Ethics, Modern – 20th century. 3. Intersubjectivity. 4. Time. I. Title. II. Series: New studies in phenomenology and hermeneutics (Toronto, Ont.) B3279.H94D67 2016

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C2016-900829-0

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

For my parents, Denis and Jo Donohoe

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X CONTENTS 9

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1: On the Distinction Between Static and Genetic Phenomenologies 19 a. b. c. d. e. f.

Textual Support for the Transition Static Phenomenology Genetic Phenomenology Time and Temporality Conclusion Notes

2: On Time Consciousness and Its Relationship to Intersubjectivity a. b. c. d. e. f.

Time Lectures of 1905 1907–1911 1920s–1930s: Unpublished Manuscripts Time and Intersubjectivity Genetic Phenomenology and Temporality Notes

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22 24 30 37 38 39 43 44 51 58 62 64 66

CONTENTS

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3: On the Question of Intersubjectivity a. b. c. d. e.

1905–1921 The Cartesian Meditations 1921–1935 Conclusion Notes

4: The Husserlian Account of Ethics a. b. c. d.

Early Ethics The Later Ethics Conclusion Notes

71 74 79 86 109 110 119 120 127 168 170

Conclusion: The Impact of Genetic Phenomenology

179

Select Bibliography

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Index

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X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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here are many to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for their support and encouragement in the course of creating this work. Much of the research for the text took place at the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium, for which I am grateful to the Belgian American Educational Foundation for the generous grant that made my living and working in Belgium a possibility. I am also grateful to Professor Rudolf Bernet, director of the Husserl Archives, for permission to quote from the unpublished manuscripts and for his assistance and feedback while I was at the archives. Thanks to Ullrich Melle for his support of the idea of the project and his helpful suggestions of certain resources to consult. Portions of the work have been published in different form as journal articles. Part of chapter 2 appeared as “The Nonpresence of the Living Present: Husserl’s Time Manuscripts” in The Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (2000), with Nancy Simco as editor; parts of chapters 1 and 4 appeared as “Genetic Phenomenology and the Husserlian Account of Ethics” in Philosophy Today 47 (2003), with David Pellauer as editor. I am grateful to those editors for permission to use those materials here. Thanks to Professor William Richardson, SJ, for inspiring the desire and courage for rigorous thought, and to Alison Arnett Hansel, Richard Lynch, and Dennis Keenan for their years of collegial philosophical conversations that have made me a better thinker. Special thanks to my hus9

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

band, Philip Wainwright, without whose unwavering support this project may never have reached completion. And finally, a very special thanks to my parents, who never once questioned my desire to pursue philosophy.

X INTRODUCTION

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he development of genetic phenomenology marks a change in Edmund Husserl’s thinking that occurred between 1917 and 1921. Much of the second half of his philosophical life was devoted to genetic phenomenology as a supplement to the static phenomenology of his earlier writings. This text investigates the philosophical consequences of Husserl’s development of his philosophy away from a purely static approach toward one that includes the genesis of the subject and a genetic account of the historicity of our constitution of the sense of the world. The text focuses on the three interrelated themes of time consciousness, intersubjectivity, and ethics. In each of these areas, a marked difference can be discerned between Husserl’s approach to them through static phenomenology and that through genetic phenomenology. His phenomenological philosophy prior to 1917 was not equipped to address such topics with the complexity they require. Static phenomenology has a rigid structure that focuses on complete constitution by an already fully active ego. This position lacks the framework for investigating the development of the ego and meaning through history. In moving his thought beyond that rigid structure and addressing questions of historicity, it became possible to incorporate a more organic understanding of community and a more responsible notion of ethics. Husserl’s mature ethics of community, as well as his more workable genetic intersubjective theories, would not 11

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have been possible had he not developed genetic phenomenology as an explanatory supplement to static phenomenology. Through the development of genetic phenomenology, Husserl was attempting to refine his thought and to clarify the unification of experience for the ego and the community both with respect to the surrounding worlds of each experience and the world that is common to us all.1 By investigating these themes and their relationship to a methodological shift for Husserl, a deeper layer of Husserl’s phenomenology can be laid bare, giving us a much richer picture of Husserlian phenomenology than is accepted by many contemporary critics. Those critics from contemporary analytic schools to adherents of critical theory and deconstruction to second- and third-generation phenomenologists often are familiar with and adopt a particular understanding of Husserlian methodology that ends with the static approach. This common view of Husserl does not do justice to the breadth or development of his thought. Many of the second- and third-generation phenomenologists who acknowledge their profound debt to Husserl nevertheless do not always do justice to Husserl’s philosophical project. They lay the groundwork for subsequent interpretations of Husserl that are limited to his earlier writings or view his phenomenological analysis in light of static phenomenology with only a nod toward the later genetic developments. The criticisms and misunderstandings of philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maurice Blanchot will be addressed within the body of the text. Critical theorists and deconstructionists such as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida and their followers also have a tendency to interpret Husserl only according to his static method—or at least not taking into consideration the depth of development that genetic analysis offers. Habermas is one of the few opponents of Husserl who has a broader understanding of Husserl’s work. In fact, it is possible to recognize some ways in which Habermas is indebted to Husserl for themes relating to the notions of the lifeworld and constitution. Habermas is critical of Husserl for a social theory that is grounded in constitution,2 indicating that he does not accept the transcendental intersubjective theory of Husserl that identifies intersubjectivity as constituting and not constituted. Derrrida’s early text on Husserl, written in 1953–54,3 takes up the question of genesis but does so with a seemingly very limited awareness

INTRODUCTION

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of Husserl’s genetic phenomenological method. This allows Derrida to make a critique of Husserl that is not adequately grounded.4 Many contemporary interpreters of Derrida have followed him in this misunderstanding of Husserl’s method. Some of Derrida’s misconceptions will be taken up in chapter 3. Many excellent analytic interpreters of Husserl who will not be directly addressed within this text have focused their research on Husserl’s presentation of the concept of meaning, particularly addressing that theme through the Logical Investigations and Ideas I. Such authors as Smith, McIntyre, and Føllesdal present a picture of Husserlian phenomenology that relies upon an understanding of the Fregean influences upon Husserl’s thought.5 They argue that Husserl’s concept of the noema sets up an identity between the content of a proposition and the content of intentionality. That identity, however, leads to the problematic conclusion of an impossible connection between intentional content, which they understand to be propositional content, and perceptual content, or sense.6 Other important interpreters, Theunissen as foremost among them,7 deal in depth with Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation in order to provide an account of Husserlian intersubjectivity. Theunissen’s presentation is limited precisely in its dependence upon the Fifth Meditation. Although he does mention other texts, he does not take advantage of the wealth of Husserl’s other writings on intersubjectivity and limits his account to a particularly analytic reading. He argues, then, that Husserl’s intersubjectivity is always a mediated relationship of empathy between the I and the Other. He does not recognize the transcendental intersubjectivity that can be unearthed in Husserl’s manuscripts and later texts. The more recent interest in relating Husserl to cognitive science and artificial intelligence is often equally misdirected. The philosophers of cognitive science and artificial intelligence take on the schematic approach of Logical Investigations and Ideas I and end up reducing phenomenology and perception to computational functions according to rules of intentional states. There are an endless number of experiences that cannot be described if we take all accounts to be regulated by certain functions or rules of intentionality.8 These accounts limit Husserl to what he himself has called his Cartesian Way without taking into consideration the subsequent genetic phenomenological development of Husserl’s thought beyond this limited approach to phenomenological analysis. It will become apparent in the following, however, that when one

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takes into account the whole of Husserl’s phenomenological studies, including the genetic phenomenological account, that a very different Husserl emerges. He is not limited to a description of meaning that is guided only by rules of intentionality, nor has he no recognition of historicality; rather, we encounter a thinker who is constantly critically analyzing and modifying his own work in order to provide a clearer and clearer description of meaning and experience. Of course, not everyone reads Husserl as a Cartesian. Many thinkers do recognize the importance of the methodological shift and have published helpful works from which I will draw support. Among those whose work reflects an attempt to deal with Husserl’s genetic methodology are Donn Welton, David Carr, James Hart, Antonio Aguirre, Dan Zahavi, and Anthony Steinbock. What the “corrective” approaches do not accomplish is a synthesis of these important themes in providing a view of the phenomenological experience on the whole. Although Husserl never specifically related his ethical and intersubjective thought to his more epistemological thought of the early years, the following investigation will show how these strains of thinking reinforce and lay claim to one another. Since Husserl himself did not put these questions or theories into published form, much of the task at hand is to synthesize the separate investigations into a more complete, coherent form that more easily demonstrates the connections between Husserl’s theories of genetic phenomenology, genetic intersubjectivity, and ethics. What remains as the unstated foundation of all of this is Husserl’s development of the theory of time with respect to genetic phenomenology. So the following chapters investigate the methodological differences between static and genetic phenomenology and how those differences allow Husserl to explicate his position on the deepest levels of time consciousness, intersubjectivity, and an ethics of renewal and critique. While the focus throughout this study is on the internal motivations for Husserl’s supplement of the static method with the genetic method, I by no means want to give the impression that Husserl was functioning in a vacuum. His own philosophical approach was one that stressed the importance of the unified life of the ethical subject. Thus, mention should be made of the atmosphere in which his thinking transpired. At the same time, I do not wish to place undue emphasis on the possible external motivations for the development of his thought. Husserl’s personal history

INTRODUCTION

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during the period of philosophical change coincides with a tumultuous time for Germans and Europeans in general. World War I had just ended, Europe was faced with a new order, and Germany particularly was faced with the challenge of redefining itself after its disastrous defeat. Husserl’s own sons were casualties of the war, with his younger son killed and his older son seriously injured. Such personal and family trauma did not leave him unaffected. In several of his letters to colleagues, he mentions his sons’ involvement in the war and reflects upon his inability to focus on his philosophical projects. For example, he writes to Paul Natorp in April of 1916, six weeks after the death of his son Wolfgang: “Unfortunately, although I was very productive at the beginning of the war, I was already rather weakened (due to several years of overwork). I was therefore less able to overcome the deep agitation, and was occasionally unable to do productive work. Thus all my efforts came to a halt.”9 Even beyond that, Husserl recognizes the later changes in Germany in the 1930s as having serious implications. We can sense his concern in these lines to the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov from 1933: “The great German Revolution has now become ours and our children’s fate seeing that we personally are not Aryans. . . . First of all one needs a constant supply of strength in order to put up with all the new frustrations. Therefore, my research has been stuck for several months after a line of many productive years. . . . Now the draconian exit prohibition has come into effect. And so everything is once again uncertain.”10 Given his own personal tragedy, the effect of the war on Europe, and the rise of Nazism, it is perfectly reasonable to think that Husserl might have been giving more thought to questions of responsibility for family and nation and to questions of community and ethics. It is possible that he recognized a need to alter his methodology in order to accommodate those concerns. In the final chapter, I will detail how genetic phenomenology offers a possible response to Husserl’s questions and concerns about community and ethics by elaborating how the genetic approach provides for a conception of transcendental intersubjectivity and also allows for the development of a notion of the ego’s ethical responsibility in the face of its inheritance of traditions from the intersubjective community. I argue that this ethical position of renewal and critique is made possible because of the methodological development of genetic analysis. Finally, a note on the texts used in this study is necessary. Since much

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of the material presented in this text comes from unpublished manuscripts, it is important to provide here an account of those manuscripts and their place in Husserl’s corpus. By looking at the development of Husserl’s published works, we can recognize a shift in thinking. Early texts such as Logical Investigations and Ideas I follow the static phenomenological method. Manuscripts from the same period also show the same methodological approach. What is different in the manuscripts, of course, is that often they are working notes written by Husserl in his attempts to work through specific philosophical issues that were troubling him. Those manuscripts sometimes are a bit riskier in the way they address those issues. In other words, Husserl allowed himself more latitude when working through a problem than he did in something that was being prepared for publication. Many of the manuscripts were reworked sometimes in hopes of formulating them for publication, so it is possible to see how Husserl “corrects” his own thought. Moreover, because Husserl did not publish anything between Ideas I in 1913 and Formal and Transcendental Logic in 1929, anyone wanting to understand the development of his thought must turn to the manuscripts from that interim period. The manuscripts represent much focused labor and time on Husserl’s part. Many of them are notes for lecture seminars that Husserl was teaching and reflect his current research. Since Husserl was constantly struggling to bring these manuscripts to publication, revisiting and revising them, they can be taken seriously as philosophical work. Their seriousness can also be reinforced by the fact that the same themes are addressed again and again in Husserl’s continued attempts to begin anew with an introduction to his phenomenological method.

NOTES 11. Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 2. 12. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). 13. Jacques Derrida, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1990). 14. For a detailed analysis of Derrida’s misinterpretation regarding presence, see Janet Donohoe, “The Nonpresence of the Living Present,” Southern Journal of Philos-

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ophy 38 (2000): 221–30. 15. See, for instance, David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre, “Intentionality via Intensions,” Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 18 (1971): 541–61; Dagfinn Føllesdal, “Husserl’s Notion of Noema,” Journal of Philosophy 66, no. 20 (1969): 680–87. 16. Donn Welton, The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), appendix. 17. Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, trans. Christopher Macann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984). 18. Welton, Other Husserl, p. 394. 19. “Ich war unglücklicher Weise zu Kreigsbeginn zwar in gutem Arbeitsschwung, aber schon (in Folge der Überarbeitung während mehrerer Jahre) bei geschwächten Kräften, so daß ich die tiefen Erregungen minder gut überwand und zeitweise die Fähigkeit zu productiver Arbeit einbüßte. So kamen alle meine Entwürfe ins Stocken” (Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, Teil 3 [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994], p. 123; Husserl an Natorp, 22.4.1916). 10. “Die große deutsche Revolution ist uns und unseren Kindern als ‘Nichtariern’ zum persönl. Zunächst gehört ein ständiger Aufwand an Kraft dazu, die immer neuen Aufregungen zu übertauchen. Daher stockt seit einigen Monaten meine Forschungsarbeit immer wieder, die in der letzten Reihe von Jahren sehr productiv gewesen war. Nun ist die drakonische Ausreisesperre eingetretten. Und so ist wieder alles unbestimmt” (Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, Teil 6 [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994], p. 376; Husserl an Shestov, 29.5.1933).

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X ON THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN STATIC AND GENETIC PHENOMENOLOGIES

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tatic phenomenology clearly characterizes Husserl’s work prior to 1917 and more ambiguously characterizes his subsequent work after his transition to the genetic phenomenological method. It is certainly evident, as can be seen in manuscripts after 1917,1 that Husserl began to adopt a genetic approach that culminated in an explicit emphasis in Formal and Transcendental Logic published in 1929. Indeed, Husserl’s rewriting of the introduction to volume 2 of the Logical Investigations in 1913 makes apparent that his thinking was already beginning to move toward a new method and meaning of phenomenology. In that rewriting, Husserl revised his methodology, moving away from a descriptive psychology to a “purely intuitive apprehension of essences” as the foundation for psychology.2 This indicates the beginning of the move toward a more nuanced understanding of how experience can be described and explained in a manner that is not psychological. It is this direction of investigation that genetic phenomenology ultimately develops into a much more complete explanation. The original notion of genetic phenomenology was altered several times until Husserl began to use it in a consistent manner in 1917. Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach, in their Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, indicate that from 1917 on, “Husserl seeks constantly to maintain the two-part division of pure or transcendental phenomenology 19

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into a static and a genetic mode.”3 Finding no evidence to contradict this, I fully concur with this identification of 1917 as the beginning of the concern with genetic phenomenology proper, even though Husserl did not clearly identify it as a phenomenological method until 1921.4 The time frame for the transition, however, is of less consequence than how the published works represent the two different perspectives. In terms of major published works, this places Logical Investigations, the first volume of Ideas (1913), and “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” which appeared in the journal Logos in 1910–11, firmly on the side of static phenomenology. Representative of genetic phenomenology are such works as Formal and Transcendental Logic, Cartesian Meditations, and The Crisis of European Sciences. The differences between these works make clear the transition in method. Standard interpretations coming from analytic philosophy, cognitive scientists, and deconstructionists often misread Husserl by focusing almost exclusively upon the early Husserlian texts where Husserl focuses on clarifying and describing static analysis. The reliance of many of those readers upon the early texts leads to an understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology as being an idealism, as facing the problem of solipsism, and as being weighed down by a formalism that limits its realm of investigation. The development of genetic phenomenology allows Husserl to move beyond many of those limitations, particularly with respect to the themes we will look at in this text. Many contemporary Husserl scholars do recognize the importance of the development of genetic phenomenology, but they have not described in detail its impact on these important themes of temporality, intersubjectivity, and ethics or on the intersection of these themes. The distinction between static and genetic phenomenology can be characterized in several ways. At a very basic level, it is possible to describe static phenomenology as descriptive while genetic phenomenology is explanatory. More specifically, static analysis strives for an understanding of the general structure of consciousness, focusing on the ideal laws governing the acts of consciousness. It provides a constitutive analysis of how a thing is given in experience. In so doing, it presents the ego as already fully developed, and ultimately, it winds up with a formcontent schematization that leaves much unaccounted for. It deals with consciousness as an abstract unity. Static constitutive analysis peels away

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layers of meaning that reveal temporo-spatial horizons but stops short of uncovering a deeper level of temporal horizons of historical development where the connection between the ego and a world and the ego and others, or a level of intersubjectivity, can be revealed. Genetic phenomenology, in contradistinction, provides a way to move beyond the formal structures in the description of experience. It allows for an investigation into the origins of the subject as an individual, as well as the origins of the cultural world of experience, and more carefully addresses the temporal foundation of absolute subjectivity, that is, the streaming living present. When considered in relationship to its content, the ego is revealed as having capabilities and convictions that arise in part from earlier experiences, thus giving a sense of the development of the individual. The correlate of such an ego is a world of possible corresponding experiences with its own genesis. What this means is that where static phenomenology remains on a formal level where there is no understanding of the development of an ego, genetic phenomenology provides not only an explanation of the ego and its development but also a corresponding explanation of the world and its development. This necessarily involves an engagement with questions of history and the cultural elements involved in our own and our shared experiences of the world. It allows for an acknowledgment of the way in which the ego is caught up in a world and relations that are not of its own constitution. This transpires through an account of a level of passive genesis and a prepredicative level of experience. These characteristics will be more completely developed in the following pages. Before moving on, however, in understanding this move to genetic phenomenology, it is important to recognize that Husserl never entirely gave up static phenomenology. He moved behind and beyond it to a more nuanced level achieved through genetic phenomenology but maintained static analysis as the initial approach to any phenomenological investigation. It would be impossible to carry out consistent phenomenological analyses exclusively on the genetic level. One must begin with static phenomenology and work back to genetic phenomenology.5

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a. TEXTUAL SUPPORT FOR THE TRANSITION The transition from static phenomenology to genetic phenomenology transpired between 1913 and 1921, suggesting that the locus of change is between Ideas I (1913) and Ideas II (1921). Genetic phenomenology is discussed in Ideas I, but only in a provisional sense. It is not spoken of in the same sense as Husserl speaks of it in the 1920s. In Ideas I the notion still rings of a certain psychological understanding that Husserl later abandoned in favor of the fully developed notion of a nonpsychological genesis as described above. The noetic/noematic studies that are the focus of the book fail to take into account the temporal/historical dimension, and thus they completely miss the importance of the historical sedimentation of meaning that is the focus of genetic phenomenology. Between Ideas I and Ideas II, there is a significant change of focus. Where Ideas II is willing to address such issues as kinaesthetic constitution and time consciousness, Ideas I has no place for such terms. It is virtually impossible to imagine a remark such as the following coming from the framework of Ideas I: “Finally, everything refers back, in an understandable manner, to primal faculties of the subject and from there to acquired faculties having their source in earlier lived actuality.”6 Because it is too closely tied to a structural explanation, Ideas I leaves no room for the kind of development that the above quotation from Ideas II suggests. We may conclude that Husserl’s thinking began to change significantly between Ideas I and Ideas II. In addition, the question of passive constitution first makes its appearance in the later work. The questions of kinaesthetic constitution, passive constitution, and time consciousness are subsequently more elaborately dealt with through the genetic method in Husserl’s C-manuscripts, as well as in his Analysis of Passive Synthesis (1918–26), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Cartesian Meditations (1931), and The Crisis of European Sciences (1934–37). By the time he writes Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl’s thinking on genetic constitution has achieved a certain clarity. The second part of the book focuses on an analysis of subjectivity in connection with the sense of judgments and logical entities. He is concerned with the genesis that such senses bear within themselves. Each meaning implies a “hidden” historical genesis that Husserl intends to discover through

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genetic constitutional analysis. As he suggests, “Judgments, as the finished products of a ‘constitution’ or ‘genesis,’ can and must be asked about this genesis. The essential peculiarity of such products is precisely that they are senses that bear within them, as a sense-implicate of their genesis, a sort of historicalness . . . therefore each sense-formation can be asked about its essentially necessary sense-history.”7 This question can only arise here for Husserl because he is no longer concerned merely with structural analyses of constitution, but he has turned his attention to the genetic constitution of judgments and their meaning. Genetic phenomenology also arises partially as a response to a new focus of interest: Husserl’s effort to uncover the historical sedimentations implicit in contemporary accounts of logic. In Formal and Transcendental Logic, he points out that without the genetic method of historically inquiring back (Rückfrage), it would not be possible to reveal the hidden presuppositions that are operative in modern theories of logic. It is important to uncover those sedimentations in order to remind ourselves that “logic was originally the torchbearer for method” but that it “lost this historical vocation” and consequently “has strayed utterly away from its own sense and inalienable task in recent times.”8 Likewise, Analysis of Passive Synthesis explains how meaning can be “given beforehand” without an activity of the ego. This approach testifies to an understanding of the ego as still developing, as having a history that is not fully accessible to the active ego. Static phenomenology is incapable of broaching such a subject, since it cannot account for the historicality of the subject or of the world, nor can it account for any kind of prepredicative level of subjectivity. On the other hand, it is clear, in Cartesian Meditations especially, that the role of static phenomenology has not been eliminated. Husserl observes that: “The phenomenology developed at first is merely ‘static,’ its descriptions are analogous to those of natural history, which concern particular types and, at best, arrange them in their systematic order. Questions of universal genesis and the genetic structure of the ego in his universality, so far as that structure is more than temporal formation, are still far away; and, indeed, they belong to a higher level.”9 The first three meditations clearly use the static phenomenological method, thus confirming the claim that static phenomenology is the starting point for any phenomenological investigation. In the final two meditations,

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however, Husserl broaches the issues of passive genesis, the personality of a higher order, habituality, and other themes that will be addressed in the following chapters as themes that genetic analysis can tackle. Let us begin, then, with an explanation of the static phenomenological method in order to make clear how genetic phenomenology alters and enhances Husserl’s early phenomenological approach.

b. STATIC PHENOMENOLOGY The method of static phenomenology arises primarily as a response to Husserl’s disillusionment with psychologism, which explains the fundamentals of logic and mathematics in terms of psychological processes. Husserl’s objections to psychologism are most extensively treated in the Prolegomena to Logical Investigations, where he demonstrates that meaning content is not reducible to purely psychological processes. Empirical psychology asserts that cognition is a process confined within the mind of a cognizing subject. It equates laws of logic, for example, with psychological claims about the ways in which people think. Thus, the laws of logic have a truth value that depends entirely on empirical observation. Psychologism eliminates any possibility for certainty about the correspondence between the act of cognition and the cognized object. It also draws logic itself into question while at the same time depending for its own argument on those very laws of logic. Logic loses its impact as having universal claims if it is reduced to empirical claims about the ways people think. At the same time, psychology depends upon logic in order to make those claims about the ways people think. Psychologism is highly problematic for that reason. The important thing for this study is the method Husserl develops in reaction to psychologism. The resulting method of phenomenology is inherent in the Logical Investigations but achieves a fuller explanation and development in such works as Ideas I (1913) and the series of lectures of 1907 published posthumously under the title The Idea of Phenomenology.10 The approach requires only a description of evidence, which consists of self-givenness of objects as having an objective status. This is precisely what the static phenomenological method attempts to achieve through the process of reduction. In addition to providing an alternative to psychologism, it is also

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Husserl’s aim to respond to the skepticism that had dominated the thought of prior philosophers. His rejection of skepticism is more interesting for our purposes because it leads into the phenomenological reductions that are so vital for Husserl’s project. It incited his turn to the transcendental investigation of cognition. Skepticism calls into question our ability to cognize the natural world. Husserl wanted to address the problem of cognition independently of such skepticism, based upon the fundamental reasoning that we have an experience of cognition whether or not it delivers genuine access to the world. Husserl proposes to describe cognition before engaging in doubt about its validity. To explore the depths of cognition, however, a new method independent of the skeptical argument is required, a method to open up the appropriate sphere for phenomenological investigation and thus for a proper critique of cognition. Husserl describes his new method as a way of “confin[ing] ourselves purely to the task of clarifying the essence of cognition.” He understands this process as the “first and principal part of phenomenology as a whole.”11 Static phenomenology deals with objects as correlates of consciousness by investigating, through the method of phenomenological reduction, the consciousness to which those objects are primordially given. Husserl describes the method of static phenomenology in the second edition of the Logical Investigations as a process that “does not discuss states of animal organisms” but as one that addresses perceptions, feelings, and judgments and “what pertains to them a priori with unlimited generality, as purely intuitive apprehension of essence.”12 Note here that what Husserl is concerned with is not the subjective genesis of the objects of experience but the realm of absolute subjectivity. It is the only thing given to us without profiles. It is given apodictically. It is also that to which the world is relative in the sense that the world can only have meaning if there exists a consciousness. There is no concern here for whether or not the act of cognition refers to anything beyond pure phenomena. Anything that is posited as “nonimmanent actuality” is to be excluded from consideration. Husserl makes it clear that what are ordinarily experienced are “intuitionally given physical things,” such as the coffee cup on my desk or the chair upon which I sit. Physical things that are experienced are presented as “intentional unities persisting continuously in multiplicities of appearances.”13 Those various ways of experiencing, the “concatenations” of perception, provide us with an insight into the essential structure of a

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thing by opening up for us the horizon of possible variations of our experience. The coffee cup is always given to me as a coffee cup, even though it is given from various perspectives through variations. It might be given to me in imagination, but it will still be an experience of a coffee cup. Static phenomenology, then, is recognizable by several particular characteristics: it is concerned with constitution of immanent objects; it describes the how of experience through the matter-form structure described above; its focus is on immanent experience; and unchanging objects are the locus for investigation into those immanent experiences.14 The unchanging objects involved need not be concrete, empirical objects—ideal objects can be static objects as well. The objects of static phenomenology are directly correlated to particular modes of consciousness. Since each object is directly correlated to a particular mode of consciousness, the object itself comes across as unchanging. A change in an object is correlated with a different mode of consciousness. So each object with each mode of consciousness is conceived in itself as a stable, constituted unity. Static phenomenology investigates the succession of immanent, intentional experiences that relate to the givenness of such objects. Through reductions to the sphere of pure immanence, Husserl has achieved a position of absolute givenness as the source of all meaning. This formal structure is not concerned with the contents of acts of consciousness as much as it is concerned with the apparatus by which sense appears. By way of example, consider the coffee cup described above. The experience of the coffee cup is related to an object that is meant in the experience. It matters not whether there exists a coffee cup because the focus is upon the coffee cup as experienced, the coffee cup as constituted through manifold acts of consciousness. The coffee cup is experienced from one perspective, sitting on the desk, then another, being lifted to the lips, and then returned to its original place. These manifold perspectives are united in the overall givenness of the coffee cup itself so that what is given is simply the coffee cup, as if we see through the manifolds to the unified object itself. At the same time, any one of the perspectives can be the object of examination. We can turn our attention to it specifically. It becomes clear that the object is dependent in its manifold appearances upon my relationship to it. I can view other sides of the cup; I can see the cup as comforting in its warmth; I can use the cup. Its relation to me is implied in the interrelation between perspective and unified object. There

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are features of the object that are also intended in the experience. The sensation of the heat of the coffee cup, its color, its shape, its size—all these qualities are aspects of the coffee cup that are intended together with the coffee cup itself to the extent that if the coffee cup turns out to be merely a picture of the coffee cup, then these aspects too are altered. The object is a unity. In addition, this unity is correlated with types of consciousness. The coffee cup appeals to particular senses, not to hearing, but to sight and touch. This means that we can focus on the noetic elements of the correlation. It is the sense bestowing act and the sense fulfilling acts that we can investigate through which the appearance of the coffee cup is united. For example, if I smelled the coffee and felt steam on my face, I would anticipate that the coffee cup would be warm or hot to the touch. If I then found that the mug was cold to the touch, that anticipation of the cup as being warm would not be fulfilled, and I would alter my sense of the coffee cup accordingly. Static analysis lets the investigator go one step further in determining the essential aspects of the particular object viewing it as an example of an essence that can be discovered through eidetic analysis. The black of the coffee cup is a particular of the essence “color,” while the particular shape indicates the essence “form.” Furthermore, by engaging in imaginative variations of the coffee cup, I can determine the essence of coffee cup in general, or at the extreme, of a thing in general. The limitations of static phenomenology can be seen precisely in its formal approach to experience. In explaining meanings of experience through the structure of sense data that is animated by intentionality, Husserl limits himself to those already completed objects without giving us a way to think about how meaning comes to be within that structure. He treats the meaning as already somehow there within the structure. The meaning lacks an origin, or at least the method limits our ability to ask about the origin of the meaning. This method lacks the understanding of process that arises with Husserl’s later thinking. Instead its focus is on the formal structure of the matter-form schema that cannot entirely explain the origins of objects and meanings or how their sense arises out of earlier senses. Any explanation of the “objectivity” of those objects is equally lacking. The sensory data that is given to us in experience is not what allows us to distinguish between the things we experience. There must be a more fundamental way in which we are able to gather the sensory data together to constitute objects of different intentional acts. We have to be able to explain

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more than simply the form of the object. We must be able to explain how the sense of the object has arisen from earlier experiences as well. Without an explanation of the origins of meaning and the origins of habits and convictions of the ego, we are unable to provide an adequate explanation of the sense of the object itself. The sense we give to an object can invoke a different history purely due to the content of the constitutive act. The act as seen statically cannot account for the different histories of the contents of acts. Husserl’s formal structure does not allow for the historical development of the noematic content. Robert Sokolowski provides an excellent example of this: “His analyses would find no difference in the predicates constituting the noema ‘father’ as realized in the consciousness of a person who is only ten years old, and the noema as constituted by the same person when he is sixty years old.”15 Through the sedimentation of meanings, the noema “father” must have an entirely different sense for the person who is sixty years old than it had for the person when he was ten. Static phenomenology is unable to accommodate such differences. Husserl himself alludes to this in one of his manuscripts: “Psychologically and phenomenologically-genetically one may speak of producing; phenomenologicallystatically one can only analyze the components of the appearance and the appearance itself according to its essence. Phenomenologically-statically we find, however, the essential difference between apprehension and logically connecting functions, logically manifold, forming functions.”16 Those logically connecting functions are part of the formal structure of Husserl’s static analysis, but they do not allow us to talk of the production of objects or the production of meanings of objects. The formal structure of constitution as it is presented in static analysis neglects the role and importance of a much broader awareness that is present in every perception. Each perception presupposes a background to the perceived object that necessarily plays a role in the motivation of the sense-giving activity. In other words, any subject does not see isolated objects; he or she sees objects within a context that motivates a particular understanding of the meaning of the object. With the recognition of a motivational structure, an acknowledgment of the development of cognition must be accounted for. In addition to adhering too closely to a purely formal structure, Husserl’s static analysis neglects the importance of the temporal realm. Intentionality as described in Ideas I is not a temporal structure, nor is it

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a structure that can accommodate the temporality of the subject as well as of the object of experience. Genetic constitution provides Husserl with the framework within which to offer an account of experience that will be able to adequately take temporality into consideration. Husserl believes that within his static method, there is room for a kind of dynamism because the static approach investigates the temporal collection of evidence that involves the investigation into the history of consciousness. However, this dynamic view is not the same as the later genetic thought. It is tied to the formal nature of the static method because it is still an investigation into the history of a completed perception rather than a true genetic investigation into the dynamic development of pure ego or into a temporal noema. The move to a dynamic investigation is preparatory for a true genetic analysis. The dynamic analysis that takes account of the collection of evidence in any experience of a thing is not a true genetic analysis but is a motivating factor for Husserl’s movement toward genetic phenomenology. At the same time, the static position, which focuses on constitution by the isolated ego, is incapable of constitution of an objective world available to all, a transcendent world. Transcendental intersubjectivity is necessary for such constitution, and that requires genetic phenomenology. Since static phenomenology reduced to the sphere of ownness and conceives of intersubjectivity as constituted, it does not account for the intersubjective nature of subjectivity and cannot conceive of the constituting aspect of transcendental intersubjectivity. As Husserl conceives it, true transcendence where subjectivity moves beyond itself relies upon the experience of an Other that functions as the source of all transcendence, since it is beyond that which is essentially proper to me.17 Certainly Husserl is aware of the temporal dimension even in static phenomenology as is evidenced by his lectures on internal time consciousness from this early period. And yet this formal conception of temporality does not deal properly with the stable object as genetic as much as it deals with the consciousness through which that object is given and is concerned with the temporality of that consciousness as a formal structure. Even this concern with the temporality of consciousness, however, does not adequately treat the historicity of the subject. It does not take account of the cultural contributions to the way in which any subject experiences or understands the world. It cannot, then, include any acknowledgment of the

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historical nature of the world and its meaning. Genetic investigation moves beyond a static investigation of the consciousness of given objects to the origins of objects and the origins of approaches to objects. The history of scientific and philosophical thought as contributing to our understanding of the world becomes open to investigation. From this account, it is possible to suggest that static analysis leaves unexamined two particular realms that genetic phenomenology attempts to incorporate. On the one hand, static analysis fails to provide an analysis of the social-cultural and ethical influences upon our current experiences of the world and the way we understand those experiences as well as the world itself. On the other, it does not provide an analysis of the structural elements that are precultural, or extracultural, and that organize the most basic of our perceptions allowing us to have an experience of nature that is not merely our own, but is shared with others.18 These difficulties with static phenomenology come glaringly into view when one begins to consider questions of intersubjectivity and ethics. A formal schema offers very little by way of explanation of the dynamism of intersubjectivity, since it does not include an analysis of those precultural structures. It also cannot accommodate the vacillations of ethical decision making, since it does not recognize the cultural components of the historical subject. Equally, the ethics that Husserl develops along with static phenomenology are understandably of a very formal, limited nature. We will take up the investigation into the question of the static and genetic dimension of ethics later in this project. At this juncture, it is possible to say that the move to genetic phenomenology offers one solution to the difficulties raised above. It opens a way to address the issues of intersubjectivity and ethics that is more nuanced and complete. Again, it is important to keep in mind that Husserl does not abandon the static method of phenomenology; he merely supplements it with the deeper genetic method. With that in mind, we turn to an explanation of genetic phenomenology.

c. GENETIC PHENOMENOLOGY Husserl used the term genesis in the 1901 edition of Logical Investigations, but he used it to identify the difference between phenomenology

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and empirical psychology. His use of the term there suggests that phenomenology provides a descriptive analysis of immanent experience, whereas psychology is concerned with the empirical genesis and empirical explanation of psychological events. In 1913 Husserl rewrote this note in the introduction to volume 2 of the Logical Investigations. He removed the reference to genesis, indicating that he was already beginning to think of his method of phenomenology differently and perhaps was preparing the way to use the notion of genesis in a more specific and technical way. He uses the notion of genesis in Ideas I as well, but there it differs significantly from the way it is used in his post-1917 phenomenology. In Ideas I the term still indicates a psychological sense that will later be abandoned by Husserl. He recognized that his own phenomenological investigations relied too heavily on the matter-form schema, which limited them to a psychologistic interpretation of experience. He became aware that his method needed to address the specific content of experiences as well. The proper understanding of genetic phenomenology is achieved only when Husserl moves beyond the schematic approach of static phenomenology toward an approach that involves the genealogy of the pure ego as well as the genealogy of those objects of the ego’s experience. With respect to the ego, genetic phenomenology provides an account of the individual ego’s historicality by indicating the ego’s development as an individual. This means that genetic analysis describes the development of the habitualities and capacities of the individual, concrete ego. In dealing with the object of experience, genetic phenomenology deals also with concrete objects that give themselves to the concrete ego with the sedimented history of the ego’s previous experiences. The ego is posited within the background of its experiences; they are no longer taken for granted, and the horizons of the world are historical horizons for the first time. This means that the genetic account investigates temporality in a much more sophisticated and complex manner than the static account. The pure ego involves more than an empty form filled by successive experiences. The ego is understood to exist within a cultural and historical world that carries its own history. At the same time, Husserl has not given up his focus on the basic structures of the ego. Those structures are explored in terms of the temporality/historicality of the ego and the world that allows for the shared experience of nature. In other words, the genetic

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account has a place for history, culture, intersubjectivity, and development that static phenomenology does not. In terms of the ego, genetic analysis recognizes an ego that has capabilities and convictions that have arisen over time from earlier experiences that have developed into habitualities. These habitualities allow for the world to be pregiven as a horizon of possible experiences that makes it possible for the ego to bring objects to givenness. The habitualities, which are acquired by the I, indicate the multiple layers of sense that constitute not only the pure ego but also the world the ego experiences. The process of genetic phenomenology is a peeling away of additional layers of meaning belonging to each experience that static phenomenology could not achieve. Each time we experience an object, we predicate something of it that remains a part of the experience each consecutive time we encounter that object. In experiencing an object, I do not approach it each time as if for the first time; I come to it with the prior experiences still available to me. My initial experience constitutes a sense of the object that remains when I experience the object again and, in fact, makes the subsequent sense that I constitute possible. This becomes clear if we think about the example provided above by Robert Sokolowski. Each subsequent experience of “father” adds a new dimension to the sense of “father,” so that by the time one reaches age sixty, “father” means something more than it does to the child of age ten. There is, moreover, a reciprocal relationship between the motivation of the sense and the experience. The sense of the subsequent experience is motivated by the initial sense while at the same time being the result of the experience. Repetition of these encounters with the object results in a certain habitual relationship between the subject and its consistent experience of the object. This type of explanation would clearly not be possible under the rubric of static phenomenology because the subject is there conceived as a fully developed subject. In his later works, Husserl is able to make room for the development of the subject, or what he calls “ontogenetic development.”19 Such an explanation entails the use of the concept of passive genesis as the level of prepredicative constitution. In addition, it examines the sedimentations of the experiences of a subject into its habitualities and convictions. In addition to investigating the historicality of subjects of experience, genetic analysis is concerned with the historicality of the objects of expe-

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rience. Husserl maintains that the layering of senses has a telos, which is the infinitely sedimented meaning of the object. In order to specify the genealogy of these layers of sense, the phenomenologist must engage in a genetic phenomenological analysis. This process is a way of uncovering those sedimentations of meaning and their influence upon the present experience. In some cases, this goal may be difficult to achieve. But in cases such as the above-mentioned example of “father,” one can easily comprehend how the understanding of that noema that is maintained by the sixty-year-old involves his own role as a father, which depended upon his understanding of being a new father at age thirty, which depended upon his having had a father at age twenty and may have depended upon his interaction with his friends’ fathers at age ten. In peeling away these various senses of “father,” one can see how they contribute to the present experience. Husserl in 1921 describes the process. Another “constitutive” phenomenology, that of the genesis, follows the history, the necessary history of this objectivation and thus the history of the object itself as an object of possible knowledge. The originary history of the object is traced back to the hyletic object and the immanent as such, therefore to the genesis of the object in originary time-consciousness. Included in the universal genesis of a monad lie the histories of the constitution of the objects which are there for the monad, and in the universal eidetic phenomenology of genesis these same are produced for all conceivable objects, relating to conceivable monads; and conversely one acquires a sequence of levels of the monad, which correspond to the objective levels.20

By reason of the shift to genetic phenomenology, we are no longer confronted with completed systems of constitution but are drawn into a consideration of a history of the reciprocal relationships between noesis and the emergent noema. Genetic analysis is intended to uncover the temporal becoming and the temporal relationship of one experience to the next, thereby revealing a temporal depth of any experience. This sort of temporal depth cannot be achieved through static analysis. Every noema contains within itself the history of its own past occurrences. It is the task of genetic phenomenology to provide a more complex explanation of each noema based upon a revealing of that history. The structural schematic approach of static phenomenology is obviously not sufficient for such an explanation. We can see how genetic phenomenology allows us to be con-

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cerned with the content of an experience in a way that we could not be with the matter-form schema of static phenomenology. The question of kinaesthetic constitution as it arises in Ideas II is also a telling example of the change from static to genetic phenomenological method. We see for the first time an approach to the body and the sedimentation of experiences that surpasses anything static analysis is capable of addressing. In the static analysis, the body is presented merely as that which makes possible the “representational sensations” but that is itself not represented. A genetic account of the role of movements of the body displays how various fields of experience are made accessible. In a static analysis of experience, the kinaesthetic sensations are conceived as phenomena of pure consciousness. But with the genetic analysis of the kinaesthetic sensation and the body related to it, Husserl faces the problem of how the kinaesthetic sensations motivate the understanding of the body itself as the locus of sensation. For the relation of the kinaesthetic sensations to the ego’s body happens only after the kinaesthetic experience and only through the coincidence of different kinaesthetic sensations, such as touching one’s hands together and experiencing the touching and being touched within the same hand. The process required in making such a connection is passive synthesis. Every intentional perception involves a preintentional unity that is passively formed. In order to investigate the preintentional nature of the complexes of sensations, the sedimentation of experiences as localized in the body must be analyzed, and thus the history of the convictions that arise therefrom can be traced. Such an analysis is not possible within the confines of the static method because the analysis must entail an investigation of the capabilities of the ego, both with respect to the physical and the “spiritual.” The physical is, of course, related to the body, and the spiritual is related to the individual ego’s peculiar way of doing things, its own preferences. These capabilities depend upon the sedimented experiences of the individual ego. In order to uncover those, it has to be recognized that “everything refers back, in an understandable manner, to primal faculties of the subject and from there to acquired faculties having their source in earlier lived actuality.”21 This kind of analysis, with its stress on habitus and position taking as formative of the identity of the ego, would not be found within a static analysis. Kinaesthetic constitution can certainly be analyzed using static phenomenological reconstructions, but the additional analysis of the sedimentations and habits can only be provided through genetic analysis.

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Finally, Formal and Transcendental Logic reveals with great clarity what Husserl intends to achieve through genetic phenomenology. The role of genetic analysis is to get at a more genuine understanding of the process of constitution. This involves for Husserl a criticism of his own earlier approach of static phenomenology, which he sees as having been too psychologistic, since it encourages the view that objects are constructed within consciousness out of passively given data and without open horizons: “The Data-sensualism that is generally prevalent in psychology and epistemology and, for the most part, biases even those who verbally polemicize against it, or against what they mean by the term, consists in constructing the life of consciousness out of Data as, so to speak, finished objects.” The static phenomenological approach restricts the ability to account for the “evidences as functionings that constitute what exists, [which] bring about the performance whose result in the sphere of immanence is called an existing object.”22 The phenomena are not investigated in terms of the genetic conditions for their possibility. They are not investigated in terms of the deeper level of subjectivity, that of the flow of temporality. That process that we described as the method of Ideas I is finally seen by Husserl as the starting point for understanding the phenomenological method as a whole. The later method does not treat any object as the result of a process of impressing a form upon some given matter through noesis. Such a simple duality of matter and form is eliminated by the more sophisticated genetic method. Rather, the process of genetic analysis uncovers a prepredicative experience that lends content to the matter-form schema and allows us to constitute an historical object. In uncovering the “deeper-lying genesis pertaining to the ultimate ‘cores’ and pointing back to their origination from experiences,” we can make evident the logical principles of sense.23 With this conception of genetic phenomenology, Husserl is able to incorporate temporality into the explanation of the subject, as well as the world that subject experiences. In Cartesian Meditations, it becomes clear that Husserl is firmly attached to the belief that subjectivity is fundamentally temporal and related to a temporal world object. This understanding of genesis suggests a radically new conception of the ego.24 The ego is formed in part by a passive acceptance of a cultural tradition, communicated by preceding generations, that becomes part of its sedimented relationships to the world. The process of discovering the origins of those sedimentations involves

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delving into a history broader than simply the subject itself. Since the sedimentation of meanings does not stop with the origin of a particular person, in the process of regressive inquiry, one has to inquire into constitutional achievements of prior generations whose sedimented meanings are passed on to subsequent generations. Thus the process involves an investigation into human history. Husserl was well aware of the immense difficulties of such a project. His Origin of Geometry is an effort to carry out such an investigation in one particular case, that is, with respect to Galilean geometry. That effort entails investigations that “are historical in an unusual sense, namely, in virtue of a thematic direction which opens up depth-problems quite unknown to ordinary history, problems which, [however,] in their own way, are undoubtedly historical problems.”25 The method of inquiry, however, is not one of straightforward inquiry into history. Husserl recognizes that it would be virtually impossible to identify the factual historical origin of geometry. Instead, he suggests that we can determine how geometry “had to appear, even though we know nothing of the first creators and are not even asking after them.”26 Through the regressive inquiry, we can reveal a tradition of human activity that contributes to the gradual and cumulative process of sense formation. This leads to “the deepest problems of meaning, problems of science and of the history of science in general, and indeed in the end to problems of a universal history in general.”27 Such an inquiry allows us to understand meaning as historically developed. In The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl suggests that the process of uncovering that history has a certain zigzag character to it: “Thus we find ourselves in a sort of circle. The understanding of the beginnings is to be gained fully only by starting with science as given in its present-day form, looking back at its development. But in the absence of an understanding of the beginnings the development is mute as a development of meaning. Thus we have no other choice than to proceed forward and backward in a zigzag pattern.”28 Part of this process of engaging in the zigzag analysis is to attempt to reveal to ourselves the hidden meanings in our own experiences. The inquiry back into the genesis of meaning in making us aware of those hidden meanings helps to rid us of our prejudices and to offer a way to revitalize aspects of our own history that have been banalized by sedimentation or suppressed by certain dominant interpretations. An example of this is provided by Husserl in his presentation of Galileo’s contribu-

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tions to geometry. Husserl contends that Galileo is responsible for a certain substitution of geometry for nature that becomes sedimented in the tradition of the sciences until it becomes unquestioned. This amounts to establishing an ideology when the sciences don’t recognize the necessity of discussing their own history.29 But perhaps we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves here. We must first understand the development of genetic phenomenology and how it affects Husserl’s understanding of the ego and its relationship to its world. This will initially involve a careful scrutiny of Husserl’s writings on time. However, before we can approach that, it is important to identify which texts exhibit the static method and which exhibit the genetic method.

d. TIME AND TEMPORALITY When considering the textual support for calling Husserl’s movement from static to genetic phenomenology substantial, we must also look at the difference in the way the two types of phenomenology deal with time. In his early works, Husserl admits that his formulation of the relationship between the noetic process and the hyle is provisional. It does not properly take into account the deeper level of consciousness that is characterized by the consciousness of time. Husserl is not yet prepared to bring his investigation to this deeper level, so we are left with his understanding that mental processes that endure must be “constituted in a continuous flow of modes of givenness as something unitary pertaining to the event and to the duration.”30 Such givenness of a mode of consciousness is itself a new kind of mental process. Even his writings on time at this stage are insufficient for dealing with the historical dimension of the ego and its world. As we will see in more detail in chapter 2, in 1907 Husserl gave up the schema that characterized his 1901–1905 work on time. The schema treats the sensory content of any temporal experience as neutral with respect to its temporal position, meaning that it is neither now nor past until it is associated with a temporal apprehension that animates it. Time phases are constituted “separately” from the sensory contents. When a sensory content moves from present to past, it is first animated by a present-constituting apprehension, then animated by a past-constituting apprehension. This approach gets caught in

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an infinite regress when one considers the acts of perceiving as themselves temporal objects. As temporal objects, they would have their own temporal phases that are also connected to the sensory contents. The schema also cannot take account of succession, since the unity of any event requires that the temporal modes of apprehension all be co-actual. In 1907 Husserl attempts to provide an explanation of the awareness of the act of perception and a sense of adumbrations within a unity of experience. This leads toward the idea of the flow of time that is subsequently altered in the later time manuscripts that we will address in support of our thesis. The movement in 1917 away from the concept of the flow and toward the concept of the streaming living present provides a proper conception of temporality that will fit with the new genetic approach to phenomenology. The streaming living present provides a foundation for the active ego that makes room for exploring not only the genesis of the ego but the genesis of the hyle as well. But this explanation of the streaming living present does not come out until Husserl’s C-manuscripts of the early 1920s. The problems of static analysis are thus not resolved by Husserl’s early conception of internal time consciousness. Since his early work on time is purely formal, it cannot have anything to say about the content of acts, but this is precisely where the sedimentation of meanings has its import. Temporal human experience is not purely formal. It cannot, therefore, be appropriately described through purely formal analyses of time. Because they do not address the question of time, the investigations of Ideas I could stand on their own, but once the question of time is introduced, the failings of the structural schema can no longer be overlooked.

e. CONCLUSION Static phenomenology, which characterizes the early phenomenological approach, deals with objects and the experiencing subject as fully developed. Hence, it has no need for examinations of the historicality of either the subject or of the realm of experienced things. Rather, its focus is on the formal nature of experience in an attempt to move beyond the psychologistic and skeptical philosophies that preceded it. In providing an account of phenomenological reductions to the sphere of pure consciousness, Husserl believes he has moved beyond the psychologistic and skep-

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tical accounts to a more satisfactory approach to cognition. He sets up a schema for cognition focused on the relationship between an intentional subject and its intentional objects as seen in a redefined realm of immanence. This formal structure of noeses and noemata clearly defines Husserl’s early phenomenological position. However, static phenomenology, by Husserl’s own estimation, is not entirely successful in moving beyond a psychologistic explanation of the relationship between the subject and the objects of its experiences, since it sees the senses of things as always already completed. The static approach does not take into account the complete process through which meanings are attained. The full process requires a certain temporality that is inherent in every sense and every experience. Although the early Husserl does attempt to provide a certain dynamism to his static method, through the notion of evidence, it is not the kind of dynamism that can be achieved through genetic analysis. There is a hint here of how the move from static phenomenology to genetic phenomenology has an impact on questions of intersubjectivity and ethics, but in order to understand the importance of the transition more fully, the change in Husserl’s notions of intersubjectivity and ethics in conjunction with his move to genetic phenomenology will have to be described in detail. It is important for our investigation to focus next on internal time consciousness as a foundation for addressing the question of intersubjectivity. Providing a clear explanation of the relationship of an individual to its cross-cultural and cross-generational communities is necessary before an examination of whether and how that relationship is ethical will be possible. Issues that will be vital to that explanation, for example, habitualities, instinct, passive genesis, and the streaming living present have already been alluded to. These themes will be addressed in detail once a concrete explanation has been provided of the alteration in Husserl’s thoughts about internal time consciousness and its impact on a theory of genetic intersubjectivity occasioned by the move to genetic phenomenology.

f. NOTES 11. I mean particularly C-manuscripts titled Zeitkonstitution als formale Konstitution, some of the A-manuscripts titled Mundane Phänomenologie, some of the E-manuscripts

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titled Konstituion der Intersubjektivität, and various manuscripts dealing with passive synthesis, all from this period. References to manuscripts follow the standard cataloging system of the Husserl Archives, Leuven, Belgium. Generally, the archives catalog the manuscripts thematically and chronologically within the theme. Due to the nature of the manuscripts, however, strict thematic cataloging is impossible, as some manuscripts may deal with many themes at once. I am grateful to the director of the archives, Rudolf Bernet, for permission to quote from many of the manuscripts. 12. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. II/1 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), p. 18; Logical Investigations, vol. 1, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 262. Further page references will provide the German volume and page number followed by the English translation volume and page number. 13. Bernet, Kern, and Marbach, Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, p. 176. 14. This identification is most clear in Husserl, “Statische und Genetische Phänomenologische Methode,” Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918–1926, Husserliana XI, ed. M. Fleischer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 336–45. Hereafter referred to as Hua XI. 15. See Mary Jeanne Larrabee’s analysis of the connection between static and genetic phenomenology for an insightful account of the advantages and disadvantages of maintaining the static approach in conjunction with the genetic approach. “Husserl’s Static and Genetic Phenomenology,” Man and World 9 (June 1976): 163–74. 16. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), p. 255; Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. 2, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), p. 267. Italics are Husserl’s. Hereafter referred to as Ideas II. Page references will provide the German page numbers followed by the English translation page numbers. 17. Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. P. Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 184; Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 208. Further page references will provide the German page numbers followed by the English translation page numbers. 18. Ibid., pp. 2/2. 19. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Parise Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), p. 110; Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 76. Further page references will provide the German page numbers followed by the English translation page numbers. 10. For an account of the differences between Husserl’s phenomenological method as presented in Logical Investigations and Ideas I, see Donn Welton’s extensive and helpful discussion in Other Husserl, particularly part 1. 11. Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), p. 23; The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. W. P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 18. Further page

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references will provide the German page numbers followed by the English translation page numbers. 12. Husserl, Logical Investigations, p. II 18/I 262. 13. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), p. 88; Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982), p. 105. Hereafter referred to as Ideas I. Page references will provide the German page numbers followed by the English translation page numbers. 14. See Bernet, Kern, and Marbach, Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, p. 196. 15. Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 162. 16. Edmund Husserl, MS A VI 8 I, p. 42a, cited after Kern’s transcription in Iso Kern, Husserl und Kant (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 259. 17. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil 1929–1935, ed. Iso Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 560. Hereafter referred to as Hua XV. 18. Welton, Other Husserl, p. 199. 19. See, for instance, MS C17, 83b (1932): “In seiner ‘ontogenetischen’ Entwicklung erwächst er zum Selbstbewußtsein, er wird Mensch als sich selbst als Menschen ständig erfahrender. Als Mensch wird er Vater, Bürger etc., als Mensch erwacht er von neuem im Bewußtsein seiner ‘wahren Bestimmung’, der individuellen Normidee seiner selbst.” 20. Husserl, Hua XI, p. 340. “Eine andere ‘konstitutive’ Phänomenologie, die der Genesis, verfolgt die Geschichte, die notwendige Geschichte dieser Objektivierung und damit die Geschichte des Objektes selbst als Objektes eider möglichen Erkenntnis. Die Urgeschichte der Objekte führt zurück auf die hyletischen Objekte und die immanented überhaupt, also auf die Genesis derselben im ursprünglichen Zeitbewußtsein. In der universellen Genesis einer Monade liegen beschlossen dies Geschichten der Konstitution der Objekte, die für diese Monade da sind, und in der universellen eidetischen Phänomenologie der Genesis wird dieses selbe geleistet für alle erdenklichen Objekte, bezogen auf erdenkliche Monaden; und umgekehrt gewinnt man eine Stufenfolge von Monaden, die den objektiven Stufen entspricht.” 21. Husserl, Ideas II, pp. 255/266–67. 22. See Sokolowski, Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution, pp. 207–10; Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, pp. 253/286. 23. Ibid., pp. 185/208. 24. We will examine that new conception in detail in chaps. 2 and 3 by focusing on the influence of these changes on Husserl’s notion of intersubjectivity. 25. Edmund Husserl, “Beilage III,” in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), p. 365; “The Origin

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of Geometry,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 354. Further page references will provide the German page numbers followed by the English translation page numbers. 26. Husserl, “Origin of Geometry,” pp. 366/354. 27. Ibid., pp. 365/353. 28. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), p. 59; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 58. Hereafter referred to as Crisis. Page references will provide the German page numbers followed by the English translation page numbers. 29. Husserl, “Origin of Geometry.” 30. Husserl, Ideas I, pp. 163/194.

2

X ON TIME CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO INTERSUBJECTIVITY Can one tell—that is to say, narrate—time, time itself, as such, for its own sake? That would surely be an absurd undertaking.1

I

t is not coincidental that the development of the method of genetic phenomenology is partly concurrent with the development of Husserl’s more mature thinking on time. The purpose in sketching the development of these two themes is to lay the groundwork for a discussion of the question of intersubjectivity and its relationship to the emergence of an ethical subject. It is clear from Husserl’s early static phenomenological texts that intersubjectivity was not yet explicitly an issue for him. For example, there is no significant mention in Logical Investigations of any question about how we experience the Other. In Ideas I, where the static account of phenomenology still dominates, the question of the Other is raised but is not dealt with in any systematic or satisfying way. In fact, the static phenomenological method is not able to address the question of transcendental intersubjectivity adequately. Husserl’s early work, dependent as it is on his static phenomenological method, is formal and schematic. Its rigid structure leaves little room to question the experience or the role of another ego. Husserl is confronted with a difficulty with respect to intersubjectivity—particularly since the process of reductions leads to a position of solus ipse, a methodological requirement

43

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of static analysis. The ego itself, as absolute, is the absolute ground of being. It is, therefore, also the ground of the Other, meaning that the Other is not really other but derived from the ego itself. When Husserl in 1907 begins to think seriously about the question of time, he establishes a conception of absolute consciousness as a foundation for the apprehension of time. It is at this stage, when he addresses time as a flow of absolute consciousness, that questions of history and intersubjectivity can be raised. His struggle with the issue of time consciousness in the ensuing several years is instrumental in his development of the genetic phenomenological method and contributes significantly to his attempts to work out a theory of transcendental intersubjectivity. It is clear that by the late 1920s and early ’30s, when Husserl readdresses the question of time, his conception of the genetic phenomenological method is fully developed and opens the way for a much more nuanced account of history, time, and intersubjectivity. The standard response to intersubjectivity that manifests itself as Husserl’s project of empathic analogy is a response to intersubjectivity that does not truly achieve intersubjectivity as a ground of being. Genetic phenomenology offers a way for Husserl to exhibit an intersubjective sense of being and the world. His expansion of his understanding of temporality beyond the schematic explanation provided in his early static works allows for a recognition of a primal intersubjective level of time. Let us therefore consider in more detail the development of Husserl’s thinking on time, starting with his first lectures on time consciousness given in the winter of 1905, charting those ideas through the supplementary time manuscripts from 1907–11, and examining how those ideas change in the late time manuscripts from the 1920s and 1930s.

a. TIME LECTURES OF 1905 Husserl’s earliest lectures on time consciousness critically address Franz Brentano’s theory about the formations of time consciousness. In typical Husserlian fashion, the first step involves bracketing objective time so that we might view the problem of time itself more carefully. This allows Husserl to concern himself with the apprehension of time as it is phenomenologically given, rather than with objective time as that which is tran-

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scendent, which “reach[es] beyond itself.”2 Like the phenomenological reduction in other spheres of investigation, the reduction of objective time opens up a realm where it is possible to “analyze the meaning, the ‘material,’ the ‘content’ of the representation of time—specifically, as far as its essential types are concerned and naturally not with respect to each individual case that might be cited.”3 What this means is that Husserl is interested in experiences of time per se without denying that “data ‘in objective time’ are meant in these experiences.” So the project is to “bring the a priori of time to clarity by exploring the consciousness of time.”4 The investigation of the constitution of immanent contents and immanent acts pertaining to time confirms Husserl’s claim that there is a lived experience of the temporal as temporal that is not psychological in origin. It is clear that Husserl wants to distance himself from the position held by Brentano, who is attached to a psychologistic position concerning the origin of the representation of time. Brentano asserts that temporal objects are the cause of sensations within us. The sense of an object as being in the past comes from the object itself. He sees representations of memory as having an association with present perceptions through phantasy, for each representation in the present reproduces the content of the preceding moment in order for us to have the sense of succession. In other words, in order for us to recognize a melody from start to finish, the successive notes must be maintained, but they cannot be maintained simultaneously or we would hear a singular chord, so they must be maintained in identification with different time phases. This depends upon our ability to reproduce the content in a different time phase. The contents of representation are temporally marked and construct a continuum of representations upon which we can reflect simultaneously. From this continuum of immanent objects we have a sense of succession. This sense of succession though is founded upon mere illusion, founded upon the reproduction of contents in phantasy. It reduces temporal duration to an immanent moment of sensation. Brentano’s error, according to Husserl, is in his inability to distinguish that “the succession of sensations and the sensation of succession are not the same.”5 From Brentano’s account arises the difficulty that “only the determination of the now is real.”6 All other representations are considered irreal. But there is no adequate explanation of how a real now becomes an irreal past. In his evaluation and criticism of Brentano’s position, Husserl suggests that it is a “theory of the psycho-

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logical origin of the representation of time,”7 and he dismisses it as being too psychologistic. To be truly phenomenological, we must reconsider the unity of consciouness that “encompasses intentionally what is present and what is past [as] a phenomenological datum.”8 In addition, Brentano fails to distinguish between the perception of time and the phantasy of time, or between an act, the content of apprehension, and the apprehended object. The lack of such distinctions makes it impossible to determine to what the temporal factor should be addressed. Brentano has not sufficiently explicated how time consciousness is at all possible. Husserl provides an alternative to Brentano through a schematic and formal explanation of time consciousness. This is in keeping with his static phenomenological method. The formal character of his explanation arises in response to his questioning the possibility for a “perception of succession and a succession of perception.”9 He maintains that the originary impression of something (the “now-perception”) cannot be temporally differentiated in terms of matter or in terms of temporal position. It can only be differentiated in terms of its mode of givenness, that is, whether it is given as present, past, or future. This differentiation in terms of modes of givenness relies upon the consciousness of identity that allows us to apprehend the now-perception as the same throughout its various modes of givenness. In this way we are able to understand the duration and identity of an object. Each actual now-perception is continuously replaced by succeeding now-perceptions, while the first nowperception appears in various modified degrees of givenness as it recedes into the past. The one unified time is explained as a series of successive temporal positions. Objects occupying different temporal positions are experienced as succeeding one another. The relation between objects as being either before or after one another is unchanging in the running off of time into the past. It is a relativity that is fixed even while the series as a whole is sinking into the past: The perception of a succession therefore presupposes that the points of the relation that the perception unites are not both “perceived” (perception understood in the sense of the perception of the now) in the relating act (more precisely, in the completed experience of the perception of the succession). On the other hand, it certainly does presuppose that both are perceived successively: The perception of succession presupposes the succession of perceptions.10

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The schematic explanation sets up a double continuum of phases of time that are running off into the past. One continuum is a series of apprehensions. The other continuum is a series of contents, which can only be temporal because of their unity with the series of apprehensions. Contents in themselves are temporally neutral. Through the apprehension of time, a consciousness of temporal objects in succession can be achieved. Each now of any succession is comprised of different parts that, at this stage, Husserl identifies as the “now-perception,” “primary memory,” and “primary expectation.”11 These three elements make up a “Querschnitt” or a “slice” of time. The now-perception is the apprehension of the originary now point of any temporal object. It immediately runs off into a primary memory of the now-perception. The apprehension of the now-perception is different from that of the primary memory in terms of the temporal phase of the object. The content of the primary memory is the same as the now-perception, except it is in the mode of past. In Husserl’s oft-used example of the musical melody, there is an apprehension of the starting note of the melody, the now-perception, that is immediately followed by an apprehension of the second note of the melody. The now-perception does not disappear, however. Its content, the tone, is maintained in connection with the new now-perception through the primary memory. The character of the tone changes from now to past while the apprehension is of the primary memory, which is co-actual with the apprehension of the new now-perception. Each primal now sinks further in memory as successive tones of the melody replace each other in the position of now until the melody itself ceases. Yet each apprehension of each tone of the melody is presented in its momentary phase of consciousness as “still present to me, but only as just past,”12 or as just, just past, and so forth. These two continua allow the melody itself to be viewed as both now and as a temporally extended whole. The total perception of the melody is “a continuum of these continua, which (according to their momentary phases) follow on one another continuously, phase by phase, thereby constituting the unitary consciousness of the whole temporal object.”13 It is the continuum of the continua of the temporal phases of the contents and of the phases of apprehensions. But what happens when we recollect a melody that we heard yesterday or last week? Unlike primary memory, which is presented in consciousness as what is just now past, recollection is an act of re-

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presentation (Vergegenwärtigung) of what is past and no longer held in primary memory. Recollection reproduces the objectivity that was initially experienced. It re-presents what was originally presented in consciousness. Recollection, then, has its own primary memory and is different from the original experience due to the “index of reproductive modification.”14 Even in primary memory the temporal object is presented in its originality, whereas in recollection, the object is re-presented; it is not directly intuited as it is in present perception or primary memory. This act of representing is one that is freely accomplished by the ego in the sense that it is not merely an idea but is a practical activity that can be repeated by the ego indefinitely. Husserl explains that “by an eidetic law, every memory is reiterable not only in the sense that an unrestricted number of levels is possible but also in the sense that this is a sphere of the ‘I can.’ Each level is essentially an activity of freedom (which does not exclude obstacles).”15 The freedom involved in the act of representation means that we are not restricted by what is given, but we can present again what was originally given with a certain liberty of representing it either more quickly than it was actually given or perhaps not presenting it as clearly as it was originally given. There is, however, a certain loss of clarity that is not the fault of the object being represented but is the fault of the very process of representing. The further that an experience runs off into the past, the less clearly it is brought forth in recollection. There is an important difference between an originary experience and an experience of representation. The latter can be repeated indefinitely, whereas the former is given simpliciter only once. Any further encounter with an object of originary experience must be through a representation. “Representation [Vergegenwärtigung] is the opposite of the act that gives something originally; no presentation [Vorstellung] can ‘spring’ from it.”16 Likewise, this representation is different from primary memory insofar as the latter does not involve the kind of phantasying that is necessary in order to make something present again as in the representation of secondary memory. Rather, primary memory is an extension of the now consciousness that involves a change in temporal character, but does not involve a reproduction of what was originally given. It is important to make clear that there is a difference between recollecting the original perception of a thing and recollecting the thing itself. In most cases, what is represented is the object that was originally pre-

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sented in perception. That which appears is what is represented as that which is perceived. Memory thus “does actually imply a reproduction of the earlier perception.”17 It is not a representation of the earlier perception but involves rather the object of perception. In memory “what is meant and posited is the perception’s object and the object’s now, which, in addition, is posited in relation to the actually present now.”18 The question, then, is what happens to the object itself in the various modes of apprehension. Is the object that is apprehended the same phenomenological object in the present as in the primary memory as in the secondary memory? With respect to recollection, Husserl emphasizes that it is not the conjuring up of some sort of image of the object recollected but a representation “through identity,” meaning that the object that was originally experienced is identical with the object that is represented; it is simply the mode of givenness, the temporal position, that has changed. The temporal position, however, is inextricably linked to the object such that “the time of the perception and the time of the perceived are identically the same.”19 Even as perceived time runs off into the past, so too does that content that is perceived. Husserl, then, is able to claim that It belongs to time’s a priori essence that it is a continuity of temporal positions, sometimes filled with identical and sometimes with changing objectivities, and that the homogeneity of absolute time becomes constituted indefeasibly in the flow of the modifications of the past and in the continuous welling-up of a now, of the generative time-point, of the source-point of all temporal positions whatsoever.20

In this way, Husserl has established a priori laws for temporality that establish the identity of apprehended time that is at the same time an objectivated absolute time.21 What has just been described is schematic insofar as the sensory content of any temporal experience is neutral with regard to its temporal position. In other words, the tone of a melody in itself is neither now nor past until it is associated with a temporal apprehension that animates it as now or past or yet to come. For every immanent sense content, then, there is a corresponding temporal apprehension. The time phases are constituted “separately” from the sense contents. When a sense content moves from present to past, it is first animated by a present-constituting apprehension, then animated by a past-constituting apprehension. Perception can be understood through

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“cross sections” where “in each cross section [there is] a continuity of sensuous contents terminating in a sensation and a continuity of characters terminating in the perception of the now.”22 Husserl is speaking of two separate continua. One continuum is of the sense contents, the other of the temporal phases connected to those sense contents. Husserl’s diagram is helpful here. X

A

B

C

X'

A Ab

Bc

Ac

The diagram is an attempt to show how simultaneity and succession are conceived in the schematic approach. The horizontal line X–X' is the succession of actual nows, whereas the vertical lines such as A–Ac and B–Bc are the running off into the past of any singular now. The diagonal lines B–Ab and C–Ac indicate the extended present of whichever now is on the horizontal X–X' line. When B is now, it is “simultaneous” with the Ab of the just past. When C is now, it is “simultaneous” with the Bc and Ac of the just past and the just-just past. These make up the extended present of the now C. The horizontal line represents Objective time, the vertical line represents the now and the past of the contents of apprehension, while the diagonal line represents the temporal phases of apprehension, the now-perception, and phases of primary memory. This schema, as Rudolf Boehm calls it,23 comes to be viewed as problematic by Husserl because its complexity becomes unmanageable when one begins to consider the acts of perceiving as themselves temporal objects. As temporal objects, they would have their own temporal phases

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that are also connected to the sense contents. This additional level of continua of temporal objects makes the schema difficult and leaves it open to an infinite regress. In his early works, Husserl did not accommodate this awareness of the act of perception as itself a temporal object. The schema is also unable to truly accommodate succession, as the temporal modes of apprehension must all be co-actual in order to have any understanding of the unity of an object or event. He was not prepared to deal with these difficulties in the 1905 lectures. It is not until 1907 that the formal structure, the schema, begins to make way for a more profound understanding of time and the consciousness of time that takes into account the awareness of the act of perception,24 as well as a true sense of adumbrations within a unity of experience.

b. 1907–1911 In his attempt to overcome the difficulties of his earlier schematic approach, Husserl recognizes that what is required is a way of accounting for different levels of immanence within consciousness. The immanence of the identical temporal object is differentiated from the perceptions and adumbration of perceptions. Husserl himself makes it clear at this time that he finds the schema as outlined in his early lectures lacking. It limits our ability to understand objects as being other than now. He writes of the schema, All of this is insufficient. This complicated flow of continua undergoing modification is, in itself, still not perception of the enduring sound that swells up and dies away in this way and that. The latter—the unitary objectivity—stands before me in perception; the bewildering multiplicity does not.25

To get past this difficulty, Husserl conceives that it is necessary to identify a level of consciousness where these multiplicities are unified and yet still accessible as multiplicity. The unity must be “one that points back to a certain uniquely formed and interconnected flow of consciousness.”26 If there is a unified flow of consciousness, then there can be an existing unified temporal object. Likewise, if the unified temporal object exists, then there must be an absolute flow of consciousness that gives the object its temporal unity.27

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This conception of the absolute consciousness, however, is not a proper solution to the schematic problem because it too is described as still constituted through the schema in that it is constituted through the apprehension of temporal objects. It is not long before Husserl abandons the entire schematic approach because it addresses time as “merely a matter of differences in apprehension, which would simply attach itself to the content that is experienced and that exists in consciousness, ‘animating’ it.”28 Such a schematic approach allows one to make the mistake that coexistence and succession could be simultaneously intuited because they would have the same contents present in the “now” of consciousness. Apprehensions would be available to consciousness only by being present in the “now.” Husserl himself notes, “And evidently it would also be possible that the same contents that simultaneously coexist there (and they are always supposed to coexist simultaneously in the consciousness of the now) would at the same time be successive as well, and that is absurd.”29 To deal with such absurdity, we must be able to accommodate a difference that “can never at any time be described in the way in which we described the changes in sensation that lead again to sensations.”30 In other words, the difference in temporal apprehension must depend upon something other than the temporal character of an object of apprehension that is still maintained as now. Such a difference must involve “modifications of consciousness.”31 The fault of this initial approach is partly the result of associating “primary memory” with memory. For “primary memory” conflates the distinction that Husserl tries to make in his later work between objective time and the phases of consciousness. In recognizing this difficulty, Husserl saw the need for altering his terminology. He replaced the term primary memory with retention and primary expectation with protension in the hopes of avoiding such a confusion. He recognized that “[m]emory is an expression that always and only refers to a constituted temporal object,”32 while retention and protension are expressions “used to designate the intentional relation (a fundamentally different relation) of phase of consciousness to phase of consciousness; and in this case the phases of consciousness and continuities of consciousness must not be regarded as temporal objects themselves.”33 But what is wrong with regarding phases of consciousness as temporal objects themselves? The difficulty lies in mistaking the flow of

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modes of consciousness for perceptual acts. The flow is not a “process.” It does not involve a consciousness of now as itself a now that runs off into the past. Likewise, retention is not attached to consciousness of the now as itself a now. Retention is not associated with a now in the same way that memory is. Rather, retention “that exists ‘together’ with the consciousness of the now is not ‘now,’ is not simultaneous with the now, and it would make no sense to say that it is . . . [it is] nothing in immanent time.”34 Retention intends temporal phases. The concern here is to do away with the language of contents and perception in order to focus on a more unified understanding of experience. In this period after 1907, then, Husserl begins to identify a different role for perception of objects as opposed to perception of phases of time consciousness, since the flow of time itself is not an object of perception. This means that various levels of time consciousness must be identified within consciousness, thereby allowing Husserl to establish an absolute level, the level of the time-constituting flow. In establishing an absolute level, the problem of the infinite regress that arose with the schematic approach disappears. An object endures through time as identical with itself but can also be understood as the phase of a process in time. The enduring object endures in either its changing or in its rest and if at rest can become changing and if changing can become at rest. The difference with consciousness, however, is that the consciousness flows in such a way that it is continuously changing but cannot on the whole change in the sense that the flow cannot come to a rest or flow at a different “rate.” The flow in itself does not really change, yet there is equally no way to speak of it as enduring. The relationship between the objects and the flow rests upon the difference between those that are constituted in time and those that are time-constituting appearances. The latter are “neither individual objects nor individual processes”; thus it does not make sense to ascribe the predicates of objects constituted in time to them, and it “can make no sense to say of them (and to say with the same signification) that they exist in the now and did exist previously, that they succeed one another in time or are simultaneous with one another, and so on.”35 Rather, we must say that the time-constituting appearances, or a “continuity of appearance—that is, a continuity that is a phase of the timeconstituting flow—belongs to a now, namely, to the now that it constitutes; and to a before, namely, as that which is constitutive (we cannot say

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‘was’) of the before.”36 What this description of the relationship between the constituting flow of time and those objects and processes that are constituted within the flow of time points to is the double intentionality of the absolute flow of consciousness. One intentional dimension is directed at the flow of the temporal object. The other intentional dimension is directed at the flow itself. We must be careful not to confuse this with the distinction within the 1905 lectures between contents and apprehensions. Here the flow of absolute consciousness is devoid of contents. The flow itself is the experiencing. This singular flow, the source point, can consist of many separate flows simultaneously that all exist within the unity of this absolute flow. Without the unity of the absolute flow, we would be unable to experience the sound of the radio and the touch of the computer keys simultaneously. Each is now and each runs off in its own flow, but both are connected in the single flow that is absolute subjectivity. They are not necessarily connected throughout their duration, for I may cease touching the computer keys before I turn off the radio. Thus, the flow of the one experience is not completely coincidental with the flow of the other. Yet those phases that are simultaneous remain simultaneous even as they run off into the past, so that the experience of the first cello note of Verdi’s Requiem, which was simultaneous with my experience of touching the C key on the computer, remains simultaneous with it “in the mode of having elapsed.”37 Although the first experience of the cello note and the touching of the C key have their own running-off mode, they are also each distinguished from the other only through their content. The now of consciousness is one that they share. We are conscious of those experiences as now, past, or to come. This is what Husserl terms “vertical intentionality.” The unity of the immanent object as extended in immanent time, for instance, a tone, is constituted while the unity of the flow as conscious of the object as now, past, or to come is also constituted. The flow has the unique position of being both constituting and constituted and makes it possible for us to understand the flow as a succession of phases, which is both consciousness of a succession of objects and consciousness of the succession of phases of absolute consciousness. Because the absolute level of consciousness is self-constituting, Husserl has firmly abolished any objection of an infinite regress.

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We saw in the above paragraphs how the intentionality of the identity of multiple, simultaneous experiences is described. Those are phases of the immanent objects. But how is it that the absolute temporal flow has phases that are not all actual simultaneously? How can we understand the nonsimultaneous phases of the flow itself? They are successive just as the phases of any experience are successive, with a focal point that is present and the phases of retention and protension that are just-now-past or justto-come. This means that the absolute temporal flow has the same kind of three-fold intentionality that any consciousness of an immanent object has; comprised of primal impression, retention, and protension. The important modification that these terms take on with respect to the absolute flow of time is that unlike perception, in which they refer to phases of the perceptual act, for the absolute flow, they refer to the absolute level of consciousness that constitutes itself and constitutes the perceptual act as an immanent object. At the deepest level, primal impression, retention, and protension are modes of impressional consciousness of the temporal phases of immanent temporal objects but are themselves devoid of content. The only reference that the actual phase of the flow has is to a previous or expected phase of the flow. This is what Husserl terms the “horizontal intentionality” of the flow. But as the phases of the flow run off into the past, the phase that is now, the primal impression, is consciousness of each earlier phase as a continuum of consciousnesses of phases each having run further off into the past. This is precisely why it can be considered a consciousness of succession. The unity of a duration “becomes constituted in the flow, but the flow itself becomes constituted in its turn as the unity of the consciousness of the . . . duration.”38 At the same time, it is not just consciousness of a succession of consciousness, but insofar as the immanent temporal objects are connected with the phases of consciousness, it is a consciousness of a succession of temporal objects as well. Within the flow we find “a phase of the ‘now’, namely, a phase that makes the tone-now originally conscious: the originally presenting phase.”39 But also with that phase, we find “a continuity of phases that make up the consciousness of what elapsed earlier. And this whole ‘being-all-at-once’ formed from original presentation and the continuity of phases relating to the past makes up the moving moment of the actuality of consciousness that, in unceasing change, constitutes the immanent object.”40

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These remarks on succession suggest that although the two dimensions of the double intentionality of consciousness are distinct, they are not separate. One cannot think of the earlier phases of consciousness without thinking of the immanent objectivity of those phases of consciousness. Both make up the flow of one absolute consciousness. In identifying the flow with absolute subjectivity, which is distinct from the act of perception, or the temporal appearance of an object as well as from the object itself, Husserl has established three levels of distinction. The first, and the foundation, is the flow of absolute subjectivity; the second is the immanent act; and the third is the object in external time. However, Husserl recognizes that even within the absolute flow of consciousness, there is a difficulty in assigning temporal terms to the flow itself, since there is a phase of the flow that is now, past, and yet to come.41 This suggests a need for an even deeper level of temporality that itself cannot be referred to with temporal terminology. At this stage in his thinking, however, Husserl is at a loss for how to speak of that deeper level. He refers to it, claiming that “In the actuality-experience we have the primal source-point and a continuity of moments of reverberation. For all of this, we have no names.”42 It is only in his later, unpublished manuscripts that Husserl makes another attempt to come to terms with an absolute level of temporality. The difficulties that result from Husserl’s early attempts to deal with time consciousness are particularly significant due to the limitations that they place upon an understanding of intersubjectivity. Although they address phases of the ego’s experience, since they are formal and schematic, they deal with the ego as itself formal and not as a concrete individual ego with its own history. The ego is not understood to be within a world that carries its own history with it in the way that it presents itself. This means that the ego is in many ways alone, not in a shared world. Intersubjectivity becomes something that must be derived from the ego’s experience and not foundational to the ego’s experience. In other words, the intersubjectivity that is the result of constitutive acts of the ego is already founded upon a more fundamental sense of intersubjectivity that is overlooked in these early investigations. It depends upon transcendental intersubjectivity.43 This will be developed more completely in chapter 3.

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c. 1920s–1930s: UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS Husserl’s thinking on time during this period was never formulated for publication. Hence, we must rely upon the C-manuscripts, which represent his working thoughts during the 1920s and ’30s, particularly during the period between Formal and Transcendental Logic and Crisis of the European Sciences. By this time, Husserl’s understanding of the genetic phenomenological method, as we saw in the previous chapter, is that it provides a way for us to make a regressive inquiry into both the origins of the ego and its surrounding world. It also provides for an understanding of the historical nature of experience. Although Husserl never claims so specifically, we can see that method at work in these later writings on time. It is only due to the new methodology that Husserl is able to address the most fundamental level of time consciousness, the streaming living present. What Husserl has called the flow of time becomes important in allowing us to understand perceptions of objects as occurrences within consciousness rather than simply the reappearance of the same object from different perspectives. However, the flow of time, as described in the middle period, is insufficient as an explanation of the ground of temporality because of its inability to appropriately address the origin of subjectivity. Its focus is on the temporality of the object of constitution and its corresponding temporality of consciousness, but in speaking of the absolute consciousness, it does not go far enough in addressing the complexity of the distinctions between constituting consciousness and prereflective consciousness. Any constituted object of consciousness is a synthetic unity. With each thing that is given, there is also an infinity of potentiality given. But there is also a synthetic unity of time. The synthetic unity of time is provided by the absolute flow. In other words, there is a temporalization that is concerned with the noematic object. There is also a temporalization that is concerned with the temporal manifestation of consciousness. This is noetic temporalization.44 In order to explain the genesis of the manifestation of consciousness, Husserl must resort to other language. He begins to refer to a pre-phenomenal temporality, calling it the streaming living present. It is a move further than the levels of the impression, or the flow, that are present

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in his work from 1907–11. The streaming living present is urphenomenal, meaning that it refers to a constitutionality that is not temporal. It is an attempt to address the constitution of the temporal by the temporal. The streaming living present cannot be intuited because it is not phenomenal. It is prephenomenal.45 Even at the level of the flow of temporal consciousness in the middle period of his thinking on time, it is evident that the question of the self-constitution of temporality is problematic. At this deepest level of regressive inquiry, the absolute living present is not an atom, not a point, but already contains everything, even the whole world, in the sense of validity. It is the ego as well as the hyle, where the Ich and the Nicht-Ich are inseparable. Where there is no distinction between subject and object. Husserl describes the streaming living present: This streaming living-present is not what we otherwise, already transcendentally-phenomenologically, designated as the stream of consciousness or stream of lived experiences. It is not a “stream” at all in accordance with the image of what is a properly temporal (or even spatial-temporal) whole, which within the unity of a temporal extension has a continual-successive individual factual existence. . . . The streaming living-present is “continuously” streaming-being and yet not in an apartness of being; not in spatio-temporal (worldly-spatial) being, not in a being of “immanent temporal” extension. Thus, not in an apartness of being which is called succession.46

Unlike the description of the “flow” of his middle writings, the language of the streaming living present allows Husserl to grapple with the anonymous level that is prebeing, prior to an articulated, single stream of consciousness. It is “the pre-being which bears all being, including even the being of the acts and the being of the ego, indeed, the being of the pretime and the being of the stream of consciousness as a being.”47 This prebeing of the streaming living present is anonymous and preegological. It provides the foundation for the concrete ego and its sedimented activity but is not itself ego or ego-activity. The affections and actions that spring from the streaming living present constitute the ego. It is through the “structural analysis of the primal present (the standing living stream)” that we are led to “the ego-structure and the constant substratum of the egoless stream which founds it.” We are led “thanks to a consequent inquiring back (Rückfrage), to that which makes possible and is presupposed by sedimented activity, i.e., to the radically pre-egoical.”48

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As the source of all temporalization, the streaming living present is thereby also the source of ontological sense and validity of any (even subjective) temporality. This deepest level of temporality is not for Husserl a rejection of the earlier notion of the retention/protension formulation of immanent temporality. Within the streaming living present, there is still a primal past and a primal future in addition to the primal present. The primal past and future also stream. The whole structure streams. Husserl recognizes that this position is not without its difficulties. It leads to a paradoxical position for the living present. “[T]he paradox [is] that temporalization at the same time temporalizes itself, that the living present itself, as the present living present, in turn continually leads into just-been living present, etc.”49 Since the streaming living present is anonymous, and pre-egological, we of course wonder what possible relationship it could have to an ego or an egological flow of time. Husserl seems always to be attempting to work out the ambiguous, if not paradoxical, relationship between the streaming living present and the ego. At times he stands firmly behind the notion that the streaming living present is an absolute foundation that “contains” the “universal stream of experiences,” the “life of the ego.”50 But equally, he recognizes that it is difficult to make such a claim without a proper explanation of the self-constitution of the absolute stream. He attempts, it seems, to have it both ways by also making the claim that the ego constitutes time. “I am. It is from me that time is constituted.”51 How can both of these positions be maintained at the same time? The solution lies in the usage of the term ego. In one case it refers to the transcendental ego, in the other to the transcendental ego pole. The ego pole is not really anything new at this stage for Husserl. He speaks in Ideas I of a core from which rays of intentionality initiate,52 and proceeds to call this an ego pole in Ideas II.53 However, in the C-manuscripts, the ego pole is significantly defined and explicated in contrast to that ego that is within the flow of experience. The ego as transcendental ego is a reflective taking up of a locus point within the stream that then can be understood as an ego with affections and actions, a stream of consciousness. The ego pole, on the other hand, is the foundation of the transcendental ego in that the ego pole is prior to and makes possible the original identity of the transcendental ego. It is the prereflective self-awareness of the ego.54 What we have, then, is the prereflective ego pole that makes

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possible the reflective consciousness that recognizes itself as constituting the transcendent temporal objects. As Husserl writes, “on the one side we have the temporal stream of consciousness and the transcendental ego of acts which is related to this temporality . . . on the other side we have the primal ego as the primal ground of this temporalization.”55 Or again, from the same manuscript, “I find indicated in this continual self-splitting and subsequent re-identifying of the ego, an ur-ego, which I will call the urpole, as originary functioning ego.”56 To be the foundation of the stream of consciousness, the ego pole itself must be and is outside of time. It is the source of all activity through which time becomes constituted, or rather, through which time constitutes itself. Again, Husserl explains that the transcendental ego, has this as its ground. It is innate to the transcendental ego, and through it the transcendental ego temporalizes the world. It “bears the streaming, purely associative, sub-egological temporalization in its founding construction, in its essential form that begins without the participation of the ego”57 The ego pole is here distinguished clearly from the concrete ego. We understand that the concrete ego has an intentional relationship to objective events and is itself constituted. The ego pole, by implication, is not concrete. Husserl explains that “in the stream of the living present [the ego pole] is the identical persisting pole in the changes of the immanent temporal occurrences . . . this pure ‘I’ is abstract, it is only concrete through the content of the streaming present.”58 The purely abstract ego pole is the temporal self-awareness that grounds the transcendental ego. It is the streaming that is the center of the affections through which the transcendental ego is awakened and which is the source for all constitution. It is also the point of association for hyletic data. This characterization of the ego pole suggests that the ego pole has no objective sense. It is prior to any objective sense. It is prior to reflection upon the activities of the ego, so its unity is different from that which synthesis through reflection usually provides. Since at the core of its functioning the ego pole has no objective sense, it is anonymous. Husserl is able to claim that “the primal-ego carries in itself, the counterpart, the existing, having-become ego and its surroundings, what is there for this and for me as anonymous ego as non-ego.”59 As outside of time, as the source of all activity, the ego has a unity that is passively achieved, making the ego pole in some sense both passive and active. But Husserl acknowledges that as passive, there is some-

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thing that is not of the ego pole and yet is still a part of the streaming living present affecting the ego pole. What exactly does Husserl mean by this Nicht-Ich that is within the streaming living present? It is that which is equally within the streaming living present, but which is not the ego. It is the affecting hyle: “The primally streaming and primally constituted non-ego is the hyletic universe [of actual experiential contents] which, in itself, is constituting and which already has constantly constituted; it is a temporalizing-temporal primal occurring which does not occur from egological sources; it therefore occurs without the participation of the ego.”60 So, the Nicht-Ich, the nonego, is equally primordial as the ego. It is not constituted by the ego but itself is temporalizing. It is the stream. Husserl describes it as “The primordial streaming present, understood as immanent sphere, is throughout already non-ego and everything that is constituted in it and will be constituted in it is non-ego in different levels.”61 It is, then, also a primordial source for the constitution of the temporal stream, both constituted and constituting. The two primal source points that form the basis of the constitution of existence are the primordial ego and the primordial nonego as the primordial stream of temporalizing. These two foundations are “einig,” as one.62 The difference between the two lies in how they function in the sense that the ego is active while the nonego is pure affectivity, pure hyle. Again, they are distinct but not separate so that the foundational level of temporalizing is both passive and active. What has to be made clear in this discussion is the importance and prevalence of the notion of passivity. The primordial ego has a certain pure passive synthesis that allows it to become a unity of sedimentations and habitualities through which the concrete ego is ultimately constituted. The hyle provides the primal experiential contents that do not come from the ego but that are passively associated temporalizations upon which the activity of the ego depends. Both the level of the ego and of the nonego rely upon a passivity as base. As Ludwig Landgrebe explains in his essay “The Problem of Passive Constitution,” “The ego discovers itself first in a transcendental genesis as transcendental history . . . and each hyle is, in fact, already ‘sedimented history.’”63 What this passage indicates is that the transcendental ego is already passively constituted through its history, just as the hyle itself is already passively constituted. In their connection with one another, we begin to understand that the passive level of constitution involves both the ego and the hyle in the “immanence of transcendental becoming itself.”64

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d. TIME AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY After this lengthy discussion of how Husserl’s thinking on time changed, there is still only a slight indication of how this is related to intersubjectivity. In the following chapter, the question of intersubjectivity will be addressed in detail. However, it is important at this point to indicate exactly how intersubjectivity is connected to questions of temporality. The introduction to this chapter implied that Husserl was clearly not thinking seriously about the problem of intersubjectivity in his early writings. The problem came to the fore when he began to think about time, but more precisely, it asserted itself with Husserl’s move away from the schematic understanding of time consciousness toward a discussion focused more upon absolute consciousness as developed beginning in 1908. The theme of intersubjectivity becomes most clearly broached in the late manuscripts from the 1920s and 1930s, where Husserl introduces the concept of the streaming living present. Husserl’s schematic approach to time in the years of his static phenomenological method lends itself to a purely formal analysis of the Other. When Husserl begins to use the genetic phenomenological method, his conception of time is of the flow of absolute consciousness. This, in turn, alters his thinking on intersubjectivity, although he is still limited to a strictly egological account. When he makes his final move to the foundational level of the streaming living present, the question of intersubjectivity takes on an entirely different form, as the reduction to this most primordial level reveals a foundation where the I and the Other coincide, where an understanding of history and cultural inheritance makes itself felt. In Husserl’s works, a common way of thinking about the present of the Other is by analogy with the way the ego experiences its own past. This requires an egological conception of time and can therefore be associated with the idea of the absolute consciousness of the flow of time. Because we can make our past present to ourselves and come to a selfidentity through this process, it is argued that in the same way we can make the Other present to ourselves. This analogical process is important in the understanding of intersubjectivity, but it hardly requires the indepth analysis of time offered above. There is another and perhaps more important way that these investigations into the question of time raise the

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question of intersubjectivity. The level of the anonymous streaming living present offers us a position where there is limited separation between the I and the Other. In our regressive inquiry to the origins of the ego, we are faced with a foundational level that precedes self-reflective individuation of the ego in its concrete form. This suggests that the ego has a foundation that is not of its making and that connects the ego to other egos, prior to the self-reflective individuation of any ego. With the streaming living present replacing absolute consciousness as the foundation, the question of intersubjectivity shifts its focus from an I/Other position to a question of co-constituted monads. As Husserl describes it, there is unity of an absolute self-temporalization, the absolute in its temporal modalities temporalizing itself in the absolute stream, in the “streaming living,” and primal present, the present of the absolute in its unity, its all-inclusive unity!, which temporalizes and has temporalized in itself everything that ever is. Within this are the levels of the absolute: the absolute as an absolute “human” totality of monads.65

This moves Husserl’s questioning away from a strictly egological account. The temporal reduction that results in the pre-egological level reveals a position where I am with Others in a more original way than Husserl’s analysis of empathy allows. Since this foundational level is preegological, pre-individuation, I am with the Other in a radically immediate way. Husserl describes this level as one of “coincidence with Others on an original level of constitution, my coincidence, so to speak, before there is constituted a world for myself and Others.”66 It is only on this deepest level that the identity of an ego and the otherness of the Other as itself an identity can be constituted. The identity of the ego arises through sedimentation. For the first time, through this regressive inquiry, we get a discussion of the sedimentation of the ego. At the level of the streaming living present, the ego begins to develop through the passive sedimentations coming from this preconstitutive level. This means that there are sedimentations of the ego that are not the result of the ego’s constitutive activity. What Husserl is ultimately able to say about this most primordial level is that it gives an indication that the Other is in some way prior to the I, because it is the Other who contributes to the sedimentations of my ego before I myself am even a concrete ego.

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The intersubjectivity that is present at this deepest level of time is a constituting intersubjectivity and not a constituted intersubjectivity. It is an intersubjectivity that is felt at the level of passive association for the ego. The ego at this level is not a self-reflecting ego. It does not have itself as an object of reflection. This also means that the dark core of the ego is that which is never brought to self-awareness. The ego is only able to make itself an object of reflection through the retention of the past. The streaming present always escapes such reflection. That means that the ego is always alienated from itself, distanced from itself in the sense that it can never take up its streaming present as streaming present but can only take it up as past. The dark core provides a possibility of an openness to another ego that is copresent, simultaneous to the ego pole. This is an account that undermines the more traditional accounts of Husserlian intersubjectivity that begin with an absolute subject that constitutes an other. Rather, this undermines that notion of an absolute subject and replaces it, because of the structure of the streaming living present, with a copresent, simultaneous, absolute intersubjectivity. Although this is not readily clear at this stage, it will become so in the course of the following two chapters. This theme is vitally important for the discussion of the emergence of the ethical subject. Husserl would have been unable to develop his later ethics without this complex understanding of the sedimentation that is involved at the pre-egological level of temporality. As I will demonstrate in the next chapter, that sedimentation provides the necessary link between my ego and the egos of other generations.

e. GENETIC PHENOMENOLOGY AND TEMPORALITY The role of genetic phenomenology makes itself apparent here as well. Static phenomenology allows Husserl to provide an explanation of noematic temporalization, the constitution of temporally enduring objects. Although he struggles with an account of the temporality of the act of constitution, he does not have the apparatus to provide a description of the temporality of consciousness that is satisfying. Genetic phenomenology allows Husserl to make room for the explication of the temporality of consciousness itself. He is able to account for the prereflective temporal experiencing of the ego pole because of the kind of regressive

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inquiry (Rückfrage) that the genetic method makes possible. The genetic method makes it possible to perform a radical reduction that leads back from the temporality of the transcendental ego to the temporality of the ego pole. Without the temporal reduction, it would be impossible to lay bare the fundamental pre-egological level of time. Beyond the detailed explanation of temporality that the genetic method makes possible, we will see that the temporal reduction lays the groundwork for a discussion of the development of the ego through history and the development of a social sphere through history as well. Such a discussion might be able to lay bare the social foundation of the convictions and habitualities of an ego. In asking back after origins, after a genesis, one can become aware of the cross-generational intersubjectivity that becomes so important for Husserl’s later ethics. Genetic intersubjectivity will prove to be the only way to be able to accommodate the relationship between the ego and the temporally Other. The discussion of the flow of time in the work of Husserl’s middle period does not allow for the ongoing alteration of meaning through generations. If phenomenology is to be a presuppositionless science, then once one recognizes the flow of consciousness, one must institute genetic phenomenology in order to get back to the purity of the first occurrence of a given meaning of a type of object. This is a way of recognizing the embeddedness of consciousness within history. Because subjectivity is the source of sense, this essentially means an investigation into the genesis of subjectivity. The flow of time of absolute consciousness is perhaps capable of providing an explanation for personal history, so to speak, but not of the broader sense of history that includes the history of humankind or the history of particular communities. In addition to attempting to further articulate the absolute flow of consciousness, then, the later manuscripts are also attempting to describe the historical nature of consciousness. In the ensuing chapters, we will begin to see that the subject itself is complex and characterized by more than its own constituting of the world. It carries with it a history, its own history, and a communal history. While this description has depended greatly upon unpublished manuscripts for its support, there is limited published support as well that lends credence to the manuscripts as representing Husserl’s position. For instance, Husserl writes in Formal and Transcendental Logic:

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“Static” analysis is guided by the unity of the intended object. Thus it starts from the unclear modes of givenness and, following what is indicated by them as intentional modification strives toward what is clear. Genetic intentional analysis is directed toward the entire concrete interconnection in which each consciousness and its intentional object as such actually stand. Then immediately there come into question the other intentional indications that belong to the situation, in which, for example, the one exercising the activity of judging stands. And this entails the question of the immanent unity of the temporality of life that has its “history” therein, in such a way that every single conscious experience occurring temporally has its own “history,” i.e., its temporal genesis.67

f. NOTES 11. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (New York: Vintage International, 1992), p. 541. 12. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893– 1917), ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 189; On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), p. 195. Hereafter referred to as Hua X. All emphases are Husserl’s unless otherwise indicated. Page references will provide the German page numbers followed by the English translation page numbers. 13. Ibid., pp. 188/194. 14. Ibid., pp. 10/10. 15. Ibid., pp. 12/12. 16. Ibid., pp. 14/15. 17. Ibid., pp. 15/16. 18. Ibid., pp. 16/16. 19. Ibid., pp. 189/195. 10. Ibid., pp. 190/197. 11. These terms are the original ones that Husserl was using in 1904–1905. In those early manuscripts, he refers to the “primary memory,” or the “fresh memory.” His terminology begins to change with the 1907 manuscripts. I will draw attention below to the change in terminology, as it has thematic importance. 12. Husserl, Hua X, pp. 212/219. 13. Ibid., pp. 231/239. 14. Ibid., pp. 37/39. 15. Ibid., pp. 44/45–46. 16. Ibid., pp. 45/47. 17. Ibid., pp. 58/60. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., pp. 72/74.

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20. Ibid. 21. A difficulty arises here in terms of the modes of primary memory and secondary memory. Can an object reside in both? For instance, when I listen to the first movement of Verdi’s Requiem, it is clear that I maintain the movement in primary memory to perceive the movement as a whole. However, when the second movement begins, do I still retain the first movement in primary memory, or does it fade off and need to be recalled through secondary memory? Or is it the case that it is both? I can represent the first movement, but I also retain it in primary memory so that I can have a perception of the Requiem as a whole. How is such a determination made? How do we recognize completion, or wholeness? And why does Verdi’s Requiem as performed at Symphony Hall in March 1997 cease to be available to my memory at all? What is the limiting factor of our memory, both primary and secondary? 22. Husserl, Hua X, pp. 231/239. 23. Boehm has titled section 4 of Hua X “On The Dissolution of the Schema: Apprehension-Content-Apprehension.” 24. I agree with John Brough’s analysis of the changes in Husserl’s thinking on time and am indebted to him for his introduction to the English translation of Hua X, where he makes clear his understanding of the differences between the early lectures and the writings after 1907. However, based on my study of the C-manuscripts from the late 1920s and the 1930s, I see a third move in Husserl’s development of temporality, which I will elaborate below. See also my “The Nonpresence of the Living Present: Husserl’s Time Manuscripts,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (2000): 221–30. 25. Husserl, Hua X, pp. 281/291–92. 26. Ibid., pp. 284/294. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., pp. 319/331. 29. Ibid., pp. 323/335. 30. Ibid., pp. 324/336. 31. Ibid., pp. 324/337. 32. Ibid., pp. 333/346. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., pp. 334/346. 35. Ibid., pp. 370/381–82. 36. Ibid., pp. 371/382. 37. Ibid., pp. 374/385. 38. Ibid., pp. 378/389. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. This suggestion is raised by Brough in “The Emergence of an Absolute Consciousness in Husserl’s Early Writings on Time-Consciousness,” Man and World 5 (1972): 298–326. However, he does not make the connection to the later writings as a possible solution to this limitation as I will do in the next section of this chapter. 42. Husserl, Hua X, pp. 371/382.

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43. For a thorough treatment of transcendental intersubjectivity in Husserl, see Dan Zahavi, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity, trans. Elizabeth Behnke (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001). 44. Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 48. 45. Husserl recognizes the problematic nature of such a claim and elsewhere refers to this level of time consciousness as unconscious. He is not clear in the C-manuscripts about this, however, and he never fully works out what he means by unconscious or how that fits generally into his theory. For more on this issue, see Rudolf Bernet, “The Unconscious Between Representation and Drive: Freud, Husserl, and Schopenhauer,” in The Truthful and the Good, ed. John Drummond and James Hart (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), pp. 81–95. Consider, for example, what Husserl writes about the unconscious: “Ein höherstufiges, diese Patenz schon voraussetzendes Wissen ist das die Sphäre des ‘Unbewußtseins,’ die sedimentierte Sphäre, enthüllende Wissen—und auch da haben wir zu sprechen von ursprünglicher Konstitution, wenn wir sagen dürfen, daß die sedimentierte Intentionalität noch zeitigend weiterläuft” (C3, p. 47b). 46. Husserl, C3, p. 4a: “Diese strömend lebendige Gegenwart ist nicht das, was wir sonst auch schon transzendental-phänomenologisch als Bewußtseinsstrom oder Erlebnisstrom bezeichneten. Es ist überhaupt kein ‘Strom’ gemäß dem Bild, also ein eigentlich zeitliches (oder gar zeiträumliches) Ganzes, das in der Einheit einer zeitlichen Extension ein kontinuierlichessukzessives individuelles Dasein hat. . . . Die strömend lebendige Gegenwart ist ‘kontinuierliches’ Strömendsein und doch nicht in einem Auseinander-sein, nicht in raumzeitlicher (welträumlicher), nicht in ‘immanent-zeitlicher’ Extension sein; also in keinem Auseinander, das Nacheinander heißt.” 47. Husserl, C17 I, p. 4, as quoted by James Mensch, Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 214. 48. Husserl, Hua XV, p. 598: “Die Strukturanalyse der urtümlichen Gegenwart (das stehend lebendige Strömen) führt uns auf die Ichstruktur und die sie fundierende ständige Unterschichte des ichlosen Strömens, das durch eine konsequente Rückfrage auf das, was auch die sedimentierte Aktivität möglich macht und voraussetzt, auf das radikal VorIchliche zurückleitet.” 49. Husserl, C3, p. 39a: “das Paradox, daß auch die Zeitigung sich zugleich selbst verzeitigt, daß lebendige Gegenwart selbst wieder als gegenwärtige lebendige Gegenwart in soeben gewesene lebendige Gegenwart kontinuierlich überleitet usw.” 50. Husserl, C17, p. 61a. 51. Husserl, Hua XV, p. 667: “Ich bin. Von mir aus konstituiert die Zeit.” 52. See, for example, Husserl, Ideas I, pp. 253/291. Husserl writes, “The Ego does not live in the positings as passively dwelling in them; are instead radiations from the as from a primal source of generations.” 53. See Husserl, Ideas II, pp. 97/103, § 22. The Pure Ego as Ego-Pole. Husserl writes, “we arrive at the Ego as pure Ego . . . we limit ourselves therefore to intentional lived experiences which ‘we’ have in each case ‘accomplished’ and throughout which we, or, let us say more clearly, I, the Ego that in each case ‘thinks,’ have directed the ray of the Ego onto what is objective in the act.”

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54. For an excellent elaboration of temporality and prereflective self-awareness, see Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), pp. 63–90. 55. Edmund Husserl, C2, p. 8b. “Auf der einen Seite haben wir den zeitlichen Bewußtseinsstrom und auf diese Zeitlichkeit bezogen das transzendentale Ich der Akte . . . andererseits als Urgrund dieser Zeitigung . . . das Ur-Ich. . . .” 56. Ibid., pp. 3a/3b: “Ich finde in diesem beständigen Sichspalten des Ich und sich dann wieder Identifizieren ein Ur-Ich, Ich, das ich als Urpol, als ursprünglich fungierendes Ich bezeichne.” 57. Husserl, E III 9, p. 7a: “Es trägt in sich die strömende, ohne Ich-Beteiligung constatted gehende rein assoziative unterichliche Zeitigung in ihrer Wesensform, in ihrem eigenen Fundierungsbau” (quoted in James Mensch, “Husserl’s Concept of Future,” Husserl Studies 16, no. 1: 41–64). And further explanation in Husserl, Hua XV, pp. 578–79: Die Entschiedenheit, die Gerichtetheit des Ich als Bestimmung des Ichpols ist nicht zeitlich im Sinne eines erscheinungsmässig konstituierten Dauernden; das Ich in seinen wechselnden Habitualitäten ist nicht verharrend als Zeitliches der Veränderung oder Unveränderung, als wie eine zeitliche Sache. So will es mir scheinen. In der “intentionalen,” der eigentlich ichlich aktiven Bezogenheit des Ich auf den immanenten Strom bzw. durch ihn hindurch auf Gegenstandspole, gegenständliche Einheiten, Vorgänge etc., treten (und sind) die intentionalen Modi selbst in den immanenten Strom, sie breiten sich darin aus. Aber im Ich, als dessen Bestimmung, haben sie eine besondere Einheit, und die spezifisch ichliche Zeitlichkeit, das Simultane des Ich selbst als Ich, das in seinen Habitualitäten Sosein hat, und das Sukzessive, das hat parallele und eigentümliche Deckung mit konstituiert Zeitlichem der Sachzeit, ebenso die “kontinuierliche” Einheit eines Gerichtetseins mit der extensiv kontinuierlichen Einheit, die als extensive Dauereinheit zur Sphäre des (in allen Stufen) erscheinungsmässig Konstituierten gehört. In translation: The decisiveness, the directedness of the ego as the determination of the ego pole is not temporal in the sense of a duration constituted in terms of appearance; the ego in its changing habitualities is not persisting as the temporal being of alteration or permanence, like a temporal thing. So it will seem to me. In the “intentional,” the properly egoic, active relatedness of the ego to the immanent stream, or through it to the object pole, to objective unities, events, etc., the intentional modes themselves arise (and are) in the immanent stream, they extend therein. But in the ego, which determines them, they have a special unity, and the specific egoic temporality, the simultaneous of the ego itself as ego, which has such being in its habitualities, and the successive, that has parallel and characteristic coincidence with the constituted temporal of the time of things, just as the “continuous” unity of a directedness with the extensive continuous unity, which as an extensive duration-unity belongs to the sphere of the thing constituted (in all levels) in terms of appearance.

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58. Husserl, C3, p. 42a: “Im Strömen der lebendige Gegenwart ist er der identisch verharrende Pol im Wechsel der immanent zeitlichen Vorkommnisse. . . . Dieses pure ‘Ich’ ist abstrakt, konkret ist es nur durch den Gehalt der strömenden Gegenwart.” 59. Husserl, C2, pp. 3a/3b: “und das dem Ur-Ich zum Gegenüber, zum Seienden gewordene Ich und den Umkreis dessen, was für dieses und für mich als anonymes Ich, als Nicht-Ich da ist . . . in sich trägt.” 60. Husserl, C10, p. 25, as quoted by Mensch, Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism, p. 150. 61. Husserl, C10, p. 15a: “Die urströmende Gegenwart, als immanente Sphäre verstanden, ist durchaus schon Nicht-Ich, und alles, was in ihr konstituiert ist und sich fortkonstituiert, ist Nicht-Ich in verschiedenen Stufen.” 62. Husserl, C10, p. 21. 63. Ludwig Landgrebe, The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 64. 64. Ibid., p. 63. 65. Husserl, Hua XV, p. 669: “Einheit einer absoluten Selbstzeitigung, das Absolute in seinen Zeitmodalitäten sich zeitigend in dem absoluten Strömen, der ‘strömend lebendigen,’ der urtümlichen Gegenwart, der des Absoluten in seiner Einheit, All-Einheit!, welche alles, was irgend ist, in sich selbst zeitigt und gezeitigt hat. Darin die Stufen des Absoluten: das Absolute als absolutes ‘menschliches’ Monadenall.” 66. Husserl, C17 V, p. 30, as quoted in Mensch, Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism, p. 19. 67. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, pp. 278/316.

3

X ON THE QUESTION OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness.1

H

usserl’s writings on intersubjectivity date from 1905, the same year as his first lecture course on temporality. With the development of the genetic phenomenological method in the mid-teens, his thinking on temporality and intersubjectivity changes also. As we saw above, the regressive inquiry of genetic phenomenology leads back to the flow of time, which replaces absolute consciousness as the foundation and prepares the way for the shift of focus of the question of intersubjectivity from a mundane I/Other position to that of co-constituted monads. It moves Husserl’s questioning away from a strictly egological account by supplementing what is often called a Cartesian method with genetic analysis. Static phenomenology adheres to a Cartesian approach by limiting Husserl’s investigation to a theory where the subject, the ego, is absolute. Husserl confines himself to this position through the process of reductions in static phenomenology. After the epoché, which is a bracketing of the natural attitude that any subject has to the world, the subject’s experiences are the focus of investigation without concern for the ontological status of that experienced. Rather, the objects of experience are inves-

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tigated as perceived, recollected, valued, phantasied, and so forth. The second stage of the process is the reduction that reveals the fundamental relatedness of the world of experience and the experiencing subject. Objects perceived, recollected, valued, and so on, are understood to be in correlation to the perceiving, recollecting, valuing subject. Husserl takes this process one step further in reducing again to the sphere of ownness. It is this reduction that is problematic for static phenomenology because it places the subject in a position where any intersubjectivity must necessarily be derived from an original sphere of the ego’s ownness. The sphere of ownness gives the ego a “privileged access to a sphere of being that is uniquely my own, intersubjectivity is secondary and, eventually, must be derived from this realm.”2 Genetic phenomenology, on the other hand, allows Husserl to make room for the development of an ego through history and the development of a social sphere through history as well. This is possible by understanding the genetic approach to move beyond a sphere of ownness to understand the intersubjective nature of the subject’s own being. In other words, the sphere of ownness is not really one’s own in any absolute sense but is already intersubjective. This is not a recognition that Husserl came to until the development of genetic analysis. When dealing with a purely formal structure as in static analysis, the question of the Other loses its force and becomes merely formal as well. However, when Husserl begins to consider the role of history and temporality in the life of the ego, he cannot help but consider anew the question of the Other with an urgency never before felt in his philosophy. In order to engage the prospect of inner temporality seriously, we must be prepared to move beyond any rigid adherence to static phenomenology and allow temporality to infuse subjectivity and intersubjectivity at every level. In admitting questions of temporality to the realm of intersubjectivity, Husserl is able to think about the Other as being coincident with the I. Through the regressive inquiry (Rückfrage) that is characteristic of genetic phenomenology, the social foundation of the convictions and habitualities of an ego become apparent. It is only through this inquiring back after origins, after a genesis, that one can become aware of the cross-generational intersubjectivity that becomes so important for Husserl’s later ethics. The genesis of layers of sense is not the work of the individual transcendental ego alone. Each ego inherits many layers of sense from its culture and tradition, and those are part of the ego in its historicality. Thus,

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in our investigation into origins, we would be required to look to the historical origins, of certain intellectual and ethical convictions. This includes an investigation into the notion of a cross-generational humanity as well as of a cross-cultural humanity. There is no fundamental, most primordial position to which we can retreat that does not entail the copresence of the Other. The presence of the Other is prior to the personal, self-referential I in the sense that we inherit from Others some of our first ethical convictions. Had Husserl not begun to develop the genetic phenomenological method, it would have been impossible for him to address these questions in an adequate manner. In the following, we will see how this preoccupation with intersubjectivity roughly follows the pattern we have demonstrated in Husserl’s thought thus far. However, the timing for these various attempts to find an adequate answer to the question of intersubjectivity is not as easily divided into the stages of development we identified in chapter 1. The earliest writings on intersubjectivity are in response to the problem of the Other that inadvertently arises with the development of Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction. By bracketing the world and concerning oneself with consciousness, the consciousness of an Other becomes problematic. The reduction leads us to absolute consciousness leaving us at a loss for an explanation of plurality. In these early texts, Husserl deals with this issue in a static, formal way through analysis of the external body of the Other. It is not until Ideas II, which Husserl worked on between 1912 and 1915, that the problem is addressed through a constitutional intentional analysis.3 This method persists in his thinking throughout his lifetime, as we can see in the often-discussed and more familiar Fifth Cartesian Meditation. But this approach to intersubjectivity is by no means the final word Husserl has on the issue. It may be possible to say that Husserl was dissatisfied with the Fifth Cartesian Meditation precisely because it still maintains too many elements of static phenomenology without the proper genetic phenomenological supplements. As he himself suggests, his approach in the Cartesian Meditations is “not a matter of uncovering a genesis going on in time, but a matter of ‘static analysis.’”4 It is only in the manuscripts from the 1930s that genetic phenomenology in conjunction with the deepest level of time consciousness plays a major role. Those manuscripts exhibit a continued concern for establishing a more comprehensive and satisfying theory.

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Genetic phenomenology allows Husserl to investigate the plurality present at the deepest level of time, the streaming living present. Instinct, habituality, and the community of monads become themes that can only be developed pursuant to the discovery of the coincidence of the ego and the Other in the streaming living present. Once such a coincidence is established, we can begin to see the intersubjectivity that will be of fundamental importance for a discussion of Husserl’s later ethics. As discussed in chapter 1, static phenomenology cannot be dismissed altogether but must be seen as supplemented by genetic phenomenology. The same holds true when examining Husserl’s thinking on intersubjectivity. His original investigations into intersubjectivity are of a static nature. When he begins to develop his thinking on time, and begins to use the genetic phenomenological method for an inquiry back into the origins of experience and the origins of the ego, his conception of the problem of intersubjectivity and its solution takes on a different aspect, but not one that is hostile to the static phenomenological analysis he provides in his early works. Rather, his new approach deepens the analysis, adds further dimensions that are not accessible through static phenomenology alone, and makes possible an understanding of the deeper levels of time consciousness. Genetic phenomenology permits Husserl to initiate a discussion of transcendental intersubjectivity.

a. 1905–1921 Husserl’s earliest investigations into the question of intersubjectivity are related to the method of the phenomenological reduction. It is clear that he is trying to work out the individuality of the ego in relation to other egos. Although certain themes such as questions of monadology and a universal personality of a higher order are present in these earliest writings, they are not developed in any detail, and they do not come up again until very late in Husserl’s life. His main concern is, rather, the question of empathy as a response to the problem of other minds. Husserl borrows the term empathy from Theodor Lipps but is careful to distinguish his usage of the term from Lipps’s. He is critical of Lipps’s approach, as he later becomes critical of his own initial theory of empathy. His earliest theory of empathy, like Lipps’s, is concerned most

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fundamentally with the experience of another body. The experience of the body of the Other founds the understanding of the soul of another and any proposition or judgment about the Other. The suggestion is that the body must already be present in order for any inner thoughts or feelings to be expressed. The ego has immediate sensible experience of the body of the Other: “A living body must already be there, so that there can be expressed in it, in its changing bodily processes of a certain distinguished kind, thoughts, feelings, decisions, tensions, expectations, considerations, etc.”5 It is the level of sensible experience that gives the ego a certain access to the Other. Yet, ultimately, Husserl does not want to follow Lipps in thinking that empathy can function at the level of “expression” of the mind of the Other or that the ego acquires an understanding of the Other through projection. Lipps’s claim is that the body of the Other expresses the thoughts and feelings of the Other, which the ego understands through a process of projection. When the ego experiences a certain feeling, its body expresses that feeling in a particular way. By analogy, and projection, one can claim that the body of the Other, in behaving the same way as one’s own body, expresses the same feeling. For example, when I am angry, I clench my fists. By analogy, if I see the Other clenching his or her fists, then I can determine that the Other is angry. Husserl rejects this notion that sensations somehow are an expression of the inner life of the Other. He claims rather that expression belongs to a higher sphere. He comments in a footnote about this term expression, that “by expression of the psychic we are not speaking with regard to the sensation. That the other sees when he has directed his eyes to a thing, that he has an impression when he lays his hand on a solid object, etc. we do not grasp that through ‘expression.’ Expression relates to a higher sphere.”6 Lipps leaps too quickly from the body as expression to its being an expression of internal feeling. He fails to take account of the layers of expression that Husserl recognizes.7 Husserl agrees with Lipps in rejecting the picture theory of psychology. Picture theory presents the consciousness of the Other as an object of the ego’s own immanent consciousness by way of a representation. As Husserl describes, “In an immanent picture-consciousness, a selfpresent consciousness should itself serve as a pictured object for another consciousness, it should be the case then that one of its own experiences, one of its own acts, e.g. anger, functions as an analog for the foreign

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[experience]. But that is an absurdity.”8 This approach presents the life of the Other as present within the ego’s own inner life. The present experience of the ego must serve as the foundation. More particularly, the problem with this approach is that in empathy the ego itself should not immediately experience those particulars that it empathically ascribes to the Other, otherwise ego and Other become identical. Taking the example that Husserl provides, in an empathic relationship with the Other, this picture theory would suggest that the ego is angry along with the Other rather than the ego merely re-presenting to itself the anger of the Other based on analogy with itself. Clearly, the distinction between the Other’s emotions and the ego’s emotions is necessary. In his struggle to find his own way to approach the issue, Husserl investigates the validity and adequacy of experiences through time. A very familiar Husserl is recognized in these writings. He speaks of the different perspectives that are accessible to the ego only due to the passage of time. However, different perspectives must be possible at the same time, which gives the first indication of the possibility of a perceiver who is “there” at the same time the ego is “here.” Space and time have an individualizing function in this way, distinguishing the ego here and now, from the Other there and now, from the ego here and then. But this raises the question of the unity of the individual. It is not clear how the ego can associate its here and now with its own here and then, or how the Other of the there and now is the same Other as the there and then. The most important of Husserl’s early writings relative to this study are his lectures from 1910–11 titled “Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie.”9 These lectures are important not only because they are the first systematic approach to the problem of intersubjectivity but also because Husserl himself returned again and again to them throughout the 1920s. In the lectures, Husserl expresses the need for rethinking his conception of the reduction, which leaves itself open to the criticism that it ends in a position of solipsism. In performing the reduction, the phenomenologist makes accessible the region of pure consciousness by excluding from consideration the existential status of any object of experience. This allows the phenomenologist to focus on the way objects are given to consciousness, which means being wholly concerned with the constituting acts of transcendental consciousness. How the objection of solipsism applies to this should be clear. If one is engaged purely with transcen-

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dental consciousness and its activities, the investigation is limited to the contents of a pure ego, meaning to objects only insofar as they exist for the ego. In an attempt to extract himself from such a position, Husserl presents a new version of the reduction, the “double reduction” of presentification. Iso Kern, in his helpful introduction to the first volume of the intersubjectivity materials,10 makes clear that in this new kind of reduction, the phenomenologist reflexively attributes to pure consciousness two types of activity: the “presentifying lived experience” and its intentional correlates, the “presentified lived experiences.” This means that the ego’s phenomenological experience could include the lived experiences of the Other as presentified in empathy. The reduction would not thereby lead to solipsism. As Husserl suggests, “empathy is the experience of an empathized consciousness, into which we can also exercise the phenomenological reduction. The phenomenological datum thus acquired has its temporal background and is therefore a datum of a phenomenological ego.”11 This reduction makes it possible for Husserl to speak of the lived experiences of the Other without reverting to a Lippsian projection theory, for it maintains the distance between the actual lived experience of the ego and the empathically presentified experience of the Other. Because of the distance that is recognized, one also recognizes that there is no possible way to lead directly from the ego’s experiences to the experiences of the Other in the way that we can lead from a re-presentation of memory to the actual now. Nature becomes the framework within which both aspects of this experience are available. “[Nature] could be viewed as the ‘index’ for a phenomenological regulation and coordination which includes all ‘streams of consciousness’ or ‘ego-monads’ standing together in a context of empathy.”12 Kern makes clear here that this is what allows the ego to comprehend what the Other experiences as part and parcel of the same world that the ego itself experiences. The Other is given empathically and given with it is “nature as this same nature co-bracketed and reduced to the experiences of this foreign ego and this in view of this possible system of its experiences.”13 Nature as that which we share “is thus now not only an index for my system of possible experiences of nature with the momentary and changing core of actual experience of nature, but at the same time it is an index for corresponding experiences in the foreign ego and for the systems of experiences empathized therein eo ipso along with the empathy.”14

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What the double reduction achieves is that it provides a way to understand what exists for the ego in the reduction as the same as what exists for the Other in a similar reduction of its own without the ego projecting its own experiences onto the Other. The Other is understood as having its own position with respect to the shared world. The things of the world are accessible from various points of view other than merely the ego’s own. According to Husserl’s conception of the double reduction, empathy is an experience that can also be reduced insofar as it is like everything else that is given to us phenomenologically; it has a temporal background and is a “datum of a phenomenological ego.” The data of such an empathic experience, and the experiencing ego cannot “belong to the same stream of consciousness.”15 Yet the empathic experience and the datum of empathy do belong to the same time. What this means is that the empathized Other holds a position with respect to the ego very much like the ego’s own past. If we recall from chapter 2, Husserl’s early thinking on internal time consciousness implied that the ego’s past could not be presented to it in immediate experience. It had to be re-presented through the process of recollection. That same type of thinking carries over to his early thoughts on intersubjectivity. The double reduction allows one reflexively to see both the act of re-presenting and the intentional object of re-presentation as phenomenologically pure consciousness. In this way, phenomenological experience can include the empathically re-presented experience of the Other, which includes the Other’s own lived experiences, re-presented to the ego in mediated form. The Other and the Other’s experiences cannot be originally present to the ego. But this does not mean that the ego is locked into its own experiences with no access at all to the Other. What Husserl lays out in these lectures from 1910–11 was not entirely satisfactory to him. He continued working on the project until roughly 1921, when it was put aside so that he could dedicate himself to a comprehensive systematic work, which, in typical Husserlian fashion, never got published in such a form. The project of intersubjectivity seriously takes center stage again only when he begins work on the Cartesian Meditations.

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b. THE CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS As the only systematic approach to the problem of intersubjectivity published by Husserl, the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, written in 1929, poses a problem for any conception of consistent development of Husserl’s thought. In certain ways, it represents the genetic methodology in its discussion of passive constitution. At the same time, however, its representation of such themes as community and society does not take the historicality of the ego, or the community, or the world into account. This raises a problem for the interpretation given in this study. How does the Fifth Cartesian Meditation fit into the picture of Husserl’s development that has been established thus far? Although Husserl had written a great deal about the question of intersubjectivity by the time of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, none of those writings were deemed adequate for publication. The problem was obviously difficult for him, and he was not prepared to publish any of his half-completed musings on the subject. It’s not clear exactly why he did not take the meditations in the direction of genetic phenomenology, but it is clear, as mentioned above, that he recognized the inadequacy of the static approach in this work. Unfortunately for Husserlian scholarship, the Fifth Cartesian Meditation has, for so long, been seen as his final word on intersubjectivity to the exclusion of the many pages of much more detailed and interesting reflections that he wrote on the topic throughout his life. In reading the Meditation, it is important to consider what kind of intersubjectivity it addresses. If not read carefully, it might give one the impression that Husserl intends only to investigate the problem of the existence of another ego. In fact, that is not his project here. He is more concerned, rather, with the sense of other ego. It is important to look in detail at this meditation to see how Husserl’s other writings differ significantly from it.16 Husserl begins by supplying us with the objection leveled against phenomenology—that it entails solipsism. The phenomenological reduction leads to a position where everything posited by the ego belongs to the ego itself in the sense that it is “intended in me.”17 But how can we say that Others are intended in me? This particular approach exhibits a misunderstanding of the phenomenological method, which truly would lead to

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solipsism. To be concerned with the actual existence of the other ego is to apply an ontological status to something after performing the phenomenological reduction, which explicitly refrains from applying ontological status to experience. With respect to the question of the other ego, it is not an ontological question but a question of the sense of the Other. To determine “in what intentionalities, syntheses, motivations, the sense ‘other ego’ becomes fashioned in me” is the truly phenomenological project.18 The experience of the Other begins with what is given immediately to the ego’s consciousness. This experience is not merely of an other object in the world but is viewed as a thing “governing psychically” its own organism. The Other appears in the world, then, as a psychophysical object. It is also more than that because the ego can identify the Other not only as a psychophysical object in the world but as a “subject for this world,” in the sense that the Other experiences the same world that the ego itself experiences, meaning that the Other experiences the ego in the world just as the ego experiences the Other in the world. That both experience the same objective world indicates that such a world is not exclusively the product of the ego but is an intersubjective world available to everyone from each ego’s own perspective. The question is how it is possible to maintain both positions at the same time, that is, how it is possible to claim that the world has a sense that arises from the ego’s intentional activity, while at the same time it has its intersubjective quality of existing “in itself, over against all experiencing subjects and their worldphenomena.”19 This suggests that there are two facets to the question of intersubjectivity in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation: the first is the sense of the Other who is there for the ego, a “transcendental theory of experiencing someone else”; the second, which is dependent on the first, is the “existence-sense” of the world in its “thereness-for-everyone.”20 The second, the realm of the objects that exist for everyone, can have the role of referring us to the first, that is, to other subjects who actively constitute the common cultural objects of our mutual experience. In order to establish such a level of commonality, it is necessary first to identify what belongs to the ego itself, alone. This is achieved through the reduction to the sphere of ownness. We must proceed carefully here so as to prevent ourselves from being deceived by Husserl’s language. The sphere of ownness is the founding stratum, the “essential structure, which is part of the all-embracing constitution in which the transcendental ego,

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as constituting an Objective world, lives his life.”21 To reach this stage, the ego abstracts its transcendental experience from anything that is other or alien. This means that it considers any cultural predicates, for example, as outside of the horizon of ownness because they rely upon Others for their sense—that is why they are particularly cultural. Anything that is conceived as being there for everyone, or is phenomenally objective, should be “excluded abstractively.” The ego is left with its own experience, its own sense giving as a foundation for anything other: “I obviously cannot have the ‘alien’ or ‘other’ as experience, and therefore cannot have the sense ‘Objective world’ as an experiential sense, without having this stratum in actual experience; whereas the reverse is not the case.”22 Yet this does not mean that the ego somehow gives up the objective world altogether. Rather, there is contained in the sphere of ownness a sense of “mere Nature,” which is the objective sense of the world without its foreveryone status.23 The animate organism takes on a unique position in this sphere, as it is the only object within the ego’s ownness that is experienced as animate. The ego’s animate organism is that which makes possible its perceptions. Because of its body, the ego can perceive through the various sense organs of which its body is comprised. This allows it to experience nature as well as its own body reflecting upon itself. The ego is a psychophysical unity and as such it is the ego-pole of “my manifold ‘pure’ subjective processes, those of my passive and active intentionality, and the pole of all the habitualities instituted or to be instituted by those processes.”24 This includes, then, its constituting life, the intentional life that constitutes the world, as well as the constituting life of an ego other than its own, one that is mirrored in its own ego, but is Other, is alter ego. However, it is not yet clear how this alter ego could be constituted within the sphere of ownness and still be “external” to the ego, or further, how the ego of the sphere of ownness is related to the transcendental ego. The transcendental ego is the product of the epoché whereby the ego becomes self-aware as transcendental ego constituting objectivity and constituting itself as identical, which makes the transcendental ego equally a product of “mundanizing self-apperception.”25 At this level, everything that is the ego’s own is understood as within its psyche. The psyche here is itself a phenomenon that leads us back to its foundation in the absolute ego, the transcendental ego. Here the transcendental ego is secondary. We have two levels at work here—the level of what belongs to the ego as

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“peculiarly [its] own,” but which is connected to the mundane, concrete ego. At this level, the ego has experiences that cannot be described as “objective.” This is the constituting level of experience. It is through this level of ownness that everything other, “objective,” is constituted by the transcendental ego. However, this transcendent world is not the world that is there for everyone. It has sensuous data and habitualities as the primary elements of its constitution, which means its transcendence is an immanent transcendence, a transcendence for the ego, but not transcendence for all, not objective for everyone. However, “Within this ‘original sphere’ (the sphere of original self-explication) we find also a ‘transcendent world,’ which accrues on the basis of the intentional phenomenon, ‘objective world,’ by reduction to what is peculiarly the ego’s own.”26 In order to move beyond this level of ownness to a constituted objectivity that is there for everyone, a distinction must be made between the consciousness of the ego as self-consciousness and consciousness as transcending the ego’s own being.27 If consciousness were only selfconsciousness, then we would certainly be in a position of solipsism where the ego could have no sense of someone else. But, fortunately, we are able to make the distinction and exhibit a consciousness that transcends the ego’s own being. This is the consciousness of the alter ego that so engages Husserl’s attention for the majority of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. Since the Other is not immediately accessible to the ego as the ego is to itself, a different, and mediate, mode of appearance must make experience of the Other possible. This is what is called a “making co-present” or “appresentation.”28 This is most easily explained by analogy with the front and back of an object. The front of a house is immediately presented to me as I stand looking at it, while the back of the house is appresented, made copresent while not immediately perceivable. This is an example that can be fulfilled in the sense that I can walk around the house and have the back immediately presented to me, but appresented aspects of a thing need not be fulfilled, such as the interior of my computer, which is appresented in my immediate experience of the computer keyboard and functioning screen. Such mediateness applies in distinguishing the Other from the ego in terms of the Other’s body. If the Other were as immediately presented, there would be no way to differentiate between the ego and the Other. However, appresentation or, otherwise called, analogizing apperception is necessary to make the body of the Other an animate organism.

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The process of transferring the sense of “animate organism” from the immediately perceived animate body of the ego to the body of the Other takes place through analogy. Because the body of the Other is similar to the ego’s own body, the analogizing apprehension is possible. The ego understands the Other’s body to be one like its own and therefore to be an animate organism, a body with a consciousness.29 This association of the ego and the Other indicates that “ego and alter ego are always and necessarily given in an original ‘pairing’,” which means that ego and alter ego are “given intuitionally . . . in the unity of a consciousness”30 through a passive association in which they are constituted as a pair. It is an “overlaying of each with the objective sense of the other.”31 This passive association is what allows for the transfer of sense from the ego as animate organism, to the alter ego as animate organism with the difference that the animate organism of the alter ego cannot “become actualized originarily in my primordial sphere,”32 nor can it ever be “open to fulfillment by presentation.”33 This allows us to establish the different perspective of the Other again through the animate organism of the Other, which appears to the ego as there in contradistinction to the here of its own animate organism. The presentation of the ego’s bodily organism here is co-present with the appresentation of the bodily organism of the Other there through the pairing association discussed above. The process of pairing “appresents first of all the other ego’s governing in this body, the body over there, and mediately his governing in the Nature that appears to him perceptually— identically the Nature to which the body over there belongs, identically the Nature that is my primordial Nature. It is the same Nature, but in the mode of appearance: ‘as if I were standing over there, where the Other’s body is.’ ”34 Through such a recognition that Nature is the same as if the ego were there, the ego comes to understand that its here is the Other’s there, the Other’s here is its there, and the Nature experienced by both is the same. This means that “I do not have an appresented second original sphere with a second ‘Nature’ and, in this Nature, a second animate bodily organism (the one belonging to the other ego himself).”35 Because appresentation and presentation go hand in hand, it must be concluded that the primordial nature of the ego, which is presented, has an “identitysense”36 with the nature of the Other that is appresented. It is then possible to make the claim that the appresentation of the Other leaves open

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to the ego the “possible modes of givenness available” to the Other. The ego’s horizon of possibilities is significantly broadened by the perspective or potential perspective of the Other. The importance of the perspective of the Other with respect to the objective world is that it provides a perspective of the world that is not my own but is united to my own, at the same time assuring that it is not merely another perspective of my own at a different time. The perspective of a single other ego is inadequate if what is ultimately desired is an explanation of the objectivity of the world. Thus, the investigation must be broadened to explain the “community of monads” as the foundation for “intersubjective Nature.”37 Nature is the first level of commonality upon which all other intersubjectively common aspects of our world can be established. This community of the ego and the Other becomes even broader when the ego conceives that the Other not only sees the ego as an other but also perceives other Others, as the ego itself perceives more than one Other. What this indicates is that “openly endless Nature itself then becomes a Nature that includes an open plurality of men, distributed one knows not how in infinite space, as subjects of possible intercommunion.”38 The plurality of humans is known as transcendental intersubjectivity, a community of concrete egos who share the same objective world. The notion of sociality implied so far in this investigation must be made “transcendentally understandable.” Social communalization leads to various levels and types of community. The type of community important for our project is what he calls the “personality of a higher order.”39 The social community implies a cultural world that is different from the communal Nature that is there for everyone. The social communities of different levels transform the Natural world into a cultural world. The truth of this is that “men belonging to one and the same world live in a loose cultural community—or even none at all—and accordingly constitute different surrounding worlds of culture, as concrete life-worlds in which the relatively or absolutely separate communities live their passive and active lives.”40 The ego of one cultural community is faced with other, or alien cultural communities which it can only have access to mediately through a process of empathy through which the ego “project[s] [itself] into the alien cultural community and its culture.”41 The community, like the indi-

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vidual, forms the “zero point”42 in its relation to the objective world and to other communities. Husserl is careful, however, not to treat the community as simply an individual writ large. He understands the community only as being constituted by the individuals who are considered members of that community. Given this description of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, we begin to see how that work functions as a transition between the earlier, purely static investigations into intersubjectivity and the later, more developed thoughts on the issue. The transition is most clear when we consider the two levels of transcendence that Husserl makes apparent in the Meditation: immanent transcendence and transcendence of the world. Immanent transcendence provides the foundation for the transcendence of the world and is characterized by the actualities and potentialities of the concrete ego, including its sensualities and habitualities. Understanding of this primary level is attained through the genetic process of inquiring back. It requires a connected unity through time. On this basis, the ego is able to move beyond itself to the transcendence of the world existing for all. Husserl clearly claims that this secondary level is purely static. “The objective world is constantly there before me as already finished, a datum of my livingly continuous Objective experience and, even in respect of what is no longer experienced, something I go on accepting habitually.”43 This remark suggests that Husserl’s approach to intersubjectivity in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation makes a nod toward genetic phenomenological investigation but primarily takes place on a secondary, static level. This is why we must look to Husserl’s further analyses elsewhere in order to provide a more satisfying explanation of genetic intersubjectivity, that which can be experienced and exhibited at the level of primary transcendence. Much of his development of these genetic themes is included in his attempt at a systematic work that he began in 1921. Those writings include further discussions of history, community, and the higher order personality. We turn now to those manuscripts for an explanation of Husserl’s mature understanding of intersubjectivity as it was able to arise after the elaboration of the genetic phenomenological method.

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c. 1921–1935 In 1921 Husserl addressed the question of the historicality of community for the first time. This concept becomes fundamental for his development of the problem of intersubjectivity and for his shift to the primacy of the intersubjective over the Cartesian starting point. It is only from this perspective that we have any way of talking about habituality, instinct, or the higher order we. The Fifth Cartesian Meditation gives us an idea of how Husserl’s thinking on these issues was beginning to develop, and although these themes make an appearance in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, Husserl’s treatment of them there is not nearly as elaborate or detailed as his treatment of them in the many pages of unpublished manuscripts. The latter approach is only made possible through Husserl’s development of genetic phenomenology and the conception of the streaming living present that dominates his later work on time. In the discussion of the streaming living present in the previous chapter, it was suggested that there is a coincidence of the ego and the Other at this deepest level of time consciousness. This coincidence is a connection to an other ego that does not depend upon knowledge but has a more primordial status. It is this connection, discussed in the C-manuscripts, that concerns us most fundamentally in the discussion of intersubjectivity. Husserl’s attempts to offer an explanation of knowledge of the mental life of another human being are of lesser importance for our project. Intersubjectivity of the genetic and prereflective kind, on the other hand, is much more fundamental to the topic of the ethical subject and the ethical community. An exploration of the genetic intersubjective community will make possible an understanding of the development of the ethical individual in terms of its inheritance of ethical norms from prior generations and its passing on of those norms to subsequent generations. The maturation of Husserl’s philosophy as evidenced by his development of the genetic methodology is indispensable for such a theory. At the deepest level of subjectivity, which is the streaming living present, I am not isolated into my own self. My streaming living present cannot properly be called my own. When I “return to my living streaming present in its full concretion, in which it is the primal ground and originary source of everything presently and actually accepted by me as existing, then [The living streaming present] is not mine in opposition to

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that of other humans, and it is not mine as that of a body-soul existent, that of a real human.”44 The temporal reduction to the streaming living present reveals a position where I am with others in a more original way than Husserl’s analysis of empathy allows. The ego is with the Other in a radically immediate way. It is a level where there is a “ ‘coincidence’ with Others on the original level of constitution, my coincidence, so to speak, before there is constituted a world for myself and Others.”45 The lived experience belongs to both the ego and the Other as lived. It is only distinguished as belonging to the ego or the Other when it is subsequently thematized. It must belong to both as opposed to belonging to one or the other because if it did not belong to both, it would be referring to a time that would be cosmological rather than lived human time. It is only through the process of asking back initiated by genetic phenomenology that one is able to make such a claim. From this deepest temporal level of coincidence, the I and the Other arise, but it is clear that their foundation is communal. “But it is still community (the word ‘coincidence’ refers unfortunately to coinciding in extension, i.e., to association), as in the case of my not extensively temporal one and the self-same ego supporting the streaming-constituting temporality. Community, with oneself and others, relates to an ego-pole union.”46 Still, the coincidence at this deepest level only answers part of the difficulty of intersubjectivity. There must be a possibility to account for intersubjectivity at the level of the transcendental ego as well. Before this theme can be developed, however, a much clearer idea of the unity of the ego with itself, its identity must be presented. This theme will be approached through an examination of passive genesis and the habitualities of the ego. Both of these themes contribute to an overall understanding of the connection between the transcendental ego and the Other.

Passive Genesis Transcendental subjectivity is both passive and active. Passive genesis is the term Husserl uses to indicate the prepredicative realm of constitution that is characterized by primal association. Its passivity is pure receptivity and provides that which the active framework of primal association actu-

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alizes into actions of the ego. This theme is only one of the many that Husserl was able to raise once he had begun using the genetic phenomenological method. This method emerges only in the process of inquiring back after the origins of meanings.47 Completed judgments ultimately depend upon an original passive experience that forms the basis for the origin of a new sense. This original passive experience is prepredicative, meaning that we have an encounter with the world that establishes the presence of the world for us but does not go so far as to establish a sense of the world. Even the stage of presence for us has its own history, its own process of arising, developing. Passive genesis then takes place prior to judgments. It involves nonintentional sensations but still relies on a teleological development of consciousness, meaning that it is not just random, scattered sensations but those that become organized in the formation of an ego unity. Any experience that the ego has can be evaluated in terms of its active character. The judgment made by the ego about an experience is an intentional activity assigning to the experience a certain value or position within all of the ego’s experiences. The ego develops certain habitualities by consistently judging the “same” experience in the same way. But these active position takings are founded upon a deeper level of experiential grasping, which is a passive generation. “We encounter a passive genesis of the manifold apperceptions, as products that persist in a habituality relating specifically to them.”48 Due to passive synthesis, we have an “environment of ‘objects’” that affect us and motivate activities through the operation of our habitual apperceptions. In other words, the alreadygiven objects provide the motivation for the active positions of the ego. At this primal level of passive genesis, we can distinguish two types of association. One is the association of various moments of the ego’s experience in order to form a unity, such as the association of a series of movements that constitutes the continuous traversing of the computer screen by the cursor, or the association of things on the horizon of activity contributing to the overall awareness of a scene. This kind of association lacks any particular position taking on the part of the ego. It is rather the case that the ego associates one stage of cursor movement with the other, or the objects in the periphery with those upon which the ego is focusing, automatically without any direct thought about associating those elements with one another for a unified experience. The other type of asso-

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ciation is that of earlier experiences with present experiences in an analogical way such that the current experience acquires sense through its association with prior experiences. This second type of association is linked with the development of habits. It is primarily connected to activities that the ego performs without needing to think about those activities because they have become “second nature,” so to speak. This second kind of association is a secondary passivity founded upon the first and is tied to the genesis of the ego as a fully active ego. The ego is always in the process of developing habits in the sense that each activity contributes to the sedimentation of habits or presents something new that will either become or not become a future habit. These types of activities are not ones that require any deliberation or evaluation on the part of the ego but are performed automatically. This discussion of passive genesis helps in understanding the foundational relationship of the ego to the Other. The passive genesis of the ego means that the ego absorbs certain elements from its surrounding world, thereby limiting the ego in a way that makes its activity of constitution not entirely spontaneous. It is because there is this pre-individual, passive givenness that it is possible to speak of a coincidence between ego and Other, a transcendental intersubjectivity. This vital connection between the ego and the Other is important for our understanding of the establishment of the ethical community. In understanding the importance of the Other for our own world, we can begin to see how the Other, whether that Other is like the ego or different, has a position of priority with respect to the constitution of the ego’s world. The world of meaning is one that the ego is born into and inherits in the form of sedimented meanings of the objects within the world. It is intersubjective from the start. The ego makes those things its own through the process of habituation and personal sedimentation. In order to completely understand this, we turn to an investigation of these last two terms: habituation and sedimentation.

Habituality From the passive genesis of the ego arise habits that contribute to the unity of the ego. The repeated attitudes the ego takes toward the world are progressively sedimented to form the “character” of the ego. This is how an ego actively maintains its own identity in the ever-changing situations

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of its existence. “The identity of the pure Ego does not only reside in the fact that I (sc. the pure Ego), with regard to each and every cogito, can grasp myself as the identical Ego of the cogito; rather, I am even therein and apriori the same Ego, insofar as I, in taking a position, necessarily exercise consistency in a determinate sense.”49 These attitudes the ego takes up can range anywhere from a very simple reaction to something, to a very complex decision-making process that the ego has performed repeatedly. This implies that each ego has its own individual history and style of constitutional life. Husserl recognizes this as early as Ideas II, where he claims, “The Ego remains unchanged as long as it remains ‘of the same conviction,’ ‘of the same opinion.’ To change the conviction is to change ‘oneself.’ But throughout change and unchange the Ego remains identically the same precisely as pole.”50 What this suggests is that there is an original core, the ego pole, that remains the same. Around this core, every opinion, conviction, and position of the ego gathers to constitute the ego progressively in its identity. The terms throughout change and unchange make clear that the opinions and convictions, the habitualities, are changeable. The ego is always in a position to evaluate and reassess its convictions and opinions.51 The ego has a unity of life “of actual and possible [life] that is a universal and anticipatory unity with respect to the validities of experience and to the experiencing habituality.” The unity is recognized as the ego’s style achieved by “constantly preserving itself through correcting itself as it takes up positions based on experience. This is the unity of a person as a person who always has a world: the one, single world as a fact.”52 We gather from this that the sense of the unity of the world likewise depends on the consistent habitual experience of the ego insofar as the unity of the ego is at the same time the unity of the world it experiences. The ego, then, is being constituted concurrently with the constitution of its surrounding, objective world. However, habitualities are themselves not acts of the ego. They are originally formed by acts but become thereby characteristics of the ego, rather like layers of subjectivity, that remain or are modified.53 The ego pole, which is the core around which habitualities congregate, in conjunction with those habitualities themselves, are the monad. Take, for example, a person’s first experience of having to tell a lie or tell the truth. The original act of telling a lie or of not telling a lie establishes a conviction about lie telling that is either supported by the next occasion of

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whether or not to lie or causes the ego to reexamine its conviction about telling lies if the subsequent experience is not commensurate with the original experience. Consider the child who has taken a piece of candy from a sibling. When asked whether or not she has committed the act, she tells the truth. Her sibling becomes very angry at her. Perhaps based upon this experience, the child determines that it is not so smart to tell the truth. Confronted on another occasion with a question from a sibling about whether a surprise birthday party is being planned in his or her honor, the child lies and receives the praise of a parent for keeping the secret. The child is reinforced in her conviction that lie telling is appropriate. A further experience, however, might find the child caught in telling a lie and punished for doing so. At this juncture, the child might begin to alter her conviction that lie telling is not appropriate behavior, or appropriate only in very specific circumstances. This account of habitualities seems to oversimplify the life of the subject. Moral decision making is certainly not so clear-cut as to come down to simple convictions of what is right and what is wrong. The subject is often unsure of what actions to take, or lacks convictions at all. In the case of someone who lacks convictions, Husserl would not agree that this means that the person lacks any kind of identity. Lack of identity is impossible at the most basic level of temporality. The passivity of the streaming living present still has a nascent will toward the unity of the ego and works toward synthesis. As James Hart expresses it, “When persons become divided against themselves there is still not only the desire for self-preservation and unity, but the very sense of the multiple systems is that they are repressed, disassociated, fragmented, etc., i.e., their sense is that they are tied to the ongoing ideal synthesis of the general will.”54 The case of regret or remorse for an action done can be instructive as well. In such cases, there is revealed a character from which one has wavered. One feels regret for an action that is “not like me” or “not how I want to be.” That suggests an identity of self that is manifest even by the “uncharacteristic” acts that cause one’s regret. The fact that one can engage in uncharacteristic acts or that one can be conflicted about what to do indicates a certain ambiguity in one’s identity but does not dissolve a notion of identity altogether. We sometimes surprise ourselves, but without any consistency of character at all, there would be no possibility

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of surprise. So the identity of the ego is at stake here. It is not constituted through the ego’s blind adherence to all its previous positions for fear that varying from those positions would put its identity in jeopardy. Rather, it is based upon an adherence to its positions because those are true. Each further experience of being faced with the decision of whether to lie is a way of gathering evidence for the habituality of lie telling or truth telling. But that evidence can conflict with the previous position and may cause the ego, precisely in service of truth and self-identity, to alter that previous position in order to incorporate this new experience, or to reject this experience as illusion or falsity if it cannot be incorporated. This makes possible the acceptance of each new encounter while still “remaining true” to one’s past positions. There is a sameness that is preserved through each new position taking. That sameness is established through the sedimentation of habitualities. Habitualities are sedimented in the ego. Through the process of sedimentation, the ego becomes more and more “determined” in the sense that the more a position is sedimented, the more difficult it would be to upset or unseat that conviction. There is, however, another sense of sedimentation, which is vitally important to the notion of habitualities and to the establishment of the ego’s convictions. Such sedimentation is inherited from Others who have established those convictions themselves through their own process of collecting evidence. The most obvious inheritance of habitualities occurs from parent to child. Husserl describes this transfer in a manuscript of 1931: “With the awakening of the new monad there is awakened or preawakened the parental habituality; but the new monad has a new hyle and the parental monad its own habituality (as dead); everything merges and ‘blends’ in sedimented transference.”55 What this suggests is that the sense of the ego’s experience does not arise from the ego alone but is handed down through tradition from other generations. This process connects the ego to those generations prior to it as well as to those that will subsequently inherit the tradition. We are members of a historical community that “as an existing thing in the world (which is always only the world for ‘me’ and for ‘us’) is constituted in the form of a communalized humanity as a persisting reality of a higher order, which has special persistence through the change of persons, through their becoming-born-into and dying-out-of.”56 The community does not depend upon any one individual, but egos come into and leave

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the community while it maintains its identity. Through community, then, we have a connection to other generations in that the community “gets its own sense from the present (whether it be an historical present of the community, or as in some way a political present (state), or a scientific, and historical present of its surrounding world), from the historical past and future; likewise it results in a definite sense for a communalization of those presently living with those long dead, which is historically hidden, but can possibly become explicitly conscious on the basis of this hidden traditionality (different forms of the historical tradition and of the living in tradition).”57 Thus, we get a sense here of the connection between a currently living ego to the egos of its past and the egos of its future, which manifests itself in terms of tradition. Very simply, this is about being born into a world that already has a cultural sense and leaving that world behind in the instant of human death. Tradition provides the continuity that makes for a transcendental intersubjective community. This means that the constitution of a world is not the achievement of a singular subject. Rather, any subject is historical and thus engaged in a nexus of constitutive achievements of a multiplicity of monads from across generations. The constitution of the world is achieved through the course of history and because of the entirety of monads of all generations. The past, the achievement of previous generations, is not my own achievement but is a sense that reaches beyond and at the same time has influence upon my constitution of a world. The analysis of the streaming living present makes possible this understanding of the transcendental intersubjectivity that is the foundation for the constitution of the historical world. It, at the same time, is achieved through my constitution of the world, recognizing that my constitution takes place due to the inherited sense that comes to me from other generations. Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1936) gives us a good example of what he means by the handing down of tradition, a handing down of the sense of the world. In that work, Husserl engages in a genetic exploration of the meaning and tradition of geometry. He acknowledges that it is not in order to discover the first geometer that he undertakes this project because “we generally know nothing, or as good as nothing, of the particular provenance and of the spiritual source that brought it about.”58 In spite of our lack of knowledge, there is in our understanding of geometry an implicit knowledge of geometry as an “acquisition of spiritual accom-

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plishments.”59 The importance of this example of geometry is that it holds a position of being accessible to all of us and as having a “supertemporal” objectivity. It has been passed from generation to generation, allowing it to be the “same” geometry now that it was for Galileo. Language is the structure through which ideal objectivities such as geometry are transmitted from generation to generation. The difficulty here is being able to explain the “persisting existence of the ‘ideal objects’ even during periods in which the inventor and his fellows are no longer wakefully so related or even are no longer alive.”60 The written word awakens the already-familiar significations that belong to the word. This process of awakening is passive, however. “The awakened signification is thus given passively, similarly to the way in which any other activity which has sunk into obscurity, once associatively awakened, emerges at first passively as a more or less clear memory.”61 Humans have the capacity to reactivate the originary activity that is passively handed down. The originary insight into geometry that is written down “becomes sedimented, so to speak. But the reader can make it self-evident again, can reactivate the self-evidence.”62 Such a reactivation is a possibility but not a necessity. Every time we engage in geometry, we do not have to reactivate the originary understanding of all of its theorems in order to make sense of it to ourselves. In part, this is because we have substituted drawings as representations of the “primal idealities.” Such substitution allows us to do geometry while forgetting its ontic validity and its originary meaning. This forgetfulness contributes to what Husserl identifies as the crisis of European sciences. For example, Husserl calls attention to the way in which the discovery of algebra made it possible to solve certain mathematical problems in a mechanical fashion without comprehending the solutions. Thus, the very efficacy of this mathematical discipline encourages the forgetfulness of the human insights upon which its principles are founded. We are not concerned here with this problem but with the process of the handing down of tradition. It is impossible to identify an absolute beginning to something like geometry. But it is not necessary to do so. “The presently available concepts and propositions themselves contain their own meaning, first as nonself-evident opinion, but nevertheless as true propositions with a meant but still hidden truth which we can obviously bring to light by rendering the propositions themselves self-evident.”63 It follows that a disci-

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pline such as geometry taken as an example of any cultural fact cannot have its meaning and its validity separated from its historical explanation. The process of rendering the propositions self-evident is one of inquiring back into the historical foundations of the discipline. This means that we become “conscious of its historicity, albeit ‘implicitly.’ This, however, is not an empty claim; for quite generally it is true for every fact given under the heading of ‘culture,’ whether it is a matter of the lowliest culture of necessities or the highest culture (science, state, church, economic organization, etc.), that every straightforward understanding of it as an experiential fact involves the ‘coconsciousness’ that it is something constructed through human activity.”64 The history that is revealed in the process of inquiring back into the tradition of a cultural discipline such as geometry is the “vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning.”65 This is not a historicist position. To claim that meaning is merely historical is “mistaken in principle.” Rather, historical facticities are rooted in “the essential structure of what is generally human, through which a teleological reason running throughout all historicity announces itself.”66 This notion of teleology will be explored further in the following chapter. What is important for us here is how geometry can be viewed as an example of what Husserl means when he discusses the sedimentation and passing down of tradition. The history of geometry, like all of history, is a story of innovations that both preserve and to a certain extent cover over the senses of earlier innovations. This is why Husserl advocates a properly hermeneutic approach to history that adopts a zigzag methodology that relates earlier and later discoveries in a way that clarifies both. The preceding discussions of passive genesis and habituality provide a clear understanding of the way in which the ego develops and comes to some sort of unified identity, albeit never a completed identity. They also implicitly give us an indication of the relationship between generations and the historical development of the meaning of objectivities. We now return more explicitly to our discussion of the deeper intersubjective level, which provides the ego with a base from which to develop. That base, as we will see, includes an instinctual understanding of the Other, as well as the inheritance from the Other(s) who precedes the ego. This account of the identity of the ego runs counter to many contemporary accounts from philosophers such as Ricoeur that depend upon a notion

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of narrative identity.67 They want to claim that identity depends on the narrative representation of self.68 Particularly with respect to the investigation of time as having an impact upon the identity of the ego for Husserl, Ricoeur argues that “speculation on time is an inconclusive rumination to which narrative activity alone can respond.”69 Ricoeur objects that Husserl attempts to make time itself appear and has no appreciation of the sense that time cannot appear as separated from the contents of an experience.70 This reveals Ricoeur’s misunderstanding of Husserl’s investigations into the deepest level of time, where time itself is not separated schematically from its contents as it is in his earlier time-consciousness studies. In opposition to Husserl, Ricoeur introduces a notion of narrative identity to overcome the separation between time and content of experience that he associates with Husserl. Narrative identity has intersubjective elements that again Ricoeur deems lacking in Husserl’s account. Since Husserl’s account of time, according to Ricoeur, cannot account for self-identity, it could hardly account for intersubjectivity. Narrative, or stories, is what involves us with others. Our narratives are in part formulated by others, and we help to formulate the narratives of others. Any identity is necessarily intertwined with other identities through the stories we tell about ourselves and our communities and the stories others tell about us. We can clearly recognize that the narrative identity and intersubjectivity that Ricoeur is discussing here is one that takes place at the constituted level, not at the transcendental level. He objects to Husserl’s arguments for intersubjectivity in the Cartesian Meditations on the grounds that they remain attached to a “constitution of all reality in and through consciousness, a constitution of a piece with the philosophies of the cogito,”71 from which Ricoeur has already distanced himself. Had he relied on other materials, he may have noted that the passivity he thinks is vital to a recognition of the alterity within oneself is a kind of passivity that Husserl addressed before him. Ricoeur does address a “deeper” level of intersubjectivity in Oneself as Another, where he takes on a different sense of otherness. He suggests that the phenomenology of passivity is an important avenue into understanding this otherness. In this analysis of passivity, Ricoeur again places himself in opposition to Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity from the Cartesian Meditations. He argues that Husserl’s approach is not effective at truly establishing an Otherness that is not derived or original. Instead, Husserl presupposes Otherness

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throughout the Cartesian Meditations, allowing him to establish it through appresentation and pairing. But Ricoeur is only focusing on the constituted level of mundane intersubjectivity and not taking seriously the passivity and constituting intersubjectivity located at the deepest level of time, the streaming living present. He does not recognize that the ego’s inability to take up its streaming present as streaming present but only as past means that the ego is in some way alienated from itself. This alienation is not something to be overcome through the constituted level of intersubjective storytelling. Rather, the dark core of the ego provides a possibility of an openness to another ego that is copresent, simultaneous to the ego pole. It is a level of intersubjectivity that precedes storytelling, precedes constituted intersubjectivity. This account undermines the more traditional account that Ricoeur criticizes. Husserlian intersubjectivity does not necessarily begin with an absolute subject that constitutes an other. Rather, that notion of an absolute subject is replaced by this preconstituted streaming present, and precisely because of the structure of the streaming living present, the absolute subject is replaced by a copresent, simultaneous, absolute intersubjectivity.

Instinct The discovery that Husserl speaks of something he calls “instinct” always raises eyebrows, for everyone knows that Husserl, the philosopher of consciousness, rejects the notion of the unconscious.72 And yet, especially in his later writings, Husserl does incorporate instinct into his investigations of intersubjectivity. He refers to two types of instinct. The first type is that which is involved in the appropriate reception of hyletic data, which Husserl refers to as “the original drive to Objectification.”73 The second type of instinct, which concerns us most here, is that which is inherent in intersubjectivity, or perhaps more aptly put, the instinctually inherent intersubjectivity. This mode of instinct is located on a level “deeper” than the drive to objectification. The instinct for intersubjectivity characterizes the first choice that might eventually develop into a habit through the process of association. This type of instinct clearly connects to the first. It is the how of the drive to objectification. As explained above, in his static phenomenological writings, Husserl is critical of Lipps’s theory of empathy primarily because it relies upon

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instinct as a deus ex machina for explanation of the ego’s ability to experience the body of the Other as the presence of the mind or soul of the Other. Lipps’s suggestion is that the ego experiences the Other in an immediate perceptual experience of a body that instinctually interprets that experience as one of a consciousness in conjunction with the body experienced. It is only after such an experience that the ego is able to project its own feelings onto the Other in an empathic move. For Lipps, “a certain kind of conscious life ‘lies’ in the manifestations of the life of the other [which] means that I objectivate in such a way my own conscious experience of a certain kind instinctively arising within me, shaped from the elements of my own life, and yet imposed on me from outside.” 74 Husserl objects to this view on the grounds that Lipps makes an arbitrary, or at least an artificial, connection between the body of the Other and the mind of the Other based on this instinct. Husserl is equally concerned that Lipps conceives of empathy as a process of projecting feeling rather than an analogous constitution based upon the ego’s experience of itself. He argues that Lipps does not make the necessary distinction between “the sequence of levels of the ‘expressions’ and the different intentional sense of the expressions.” On one level, “character, temperament, etc. are ‘expressed’ in the gait, in the external habits and demeanors, in the dreadfulness, etc. First there is the expression of the psychic acts and situations (we ‘see’ in the corporeal expressions the doubt, the decision, we see the anger, courage, timidity, cowardice, shame, etc.).” Yet on another, deeper level “lies the expression of the specific organism, the ‘perception’ in the free operation of the organs of perception, the gaze of the eye, the fixing or the averting of the eyes, the touching movement of the hand, the walking and thus the change of perspective, furthermore, that the body is localizer of the area of touch, etc.”75 Husserl thus insists that there are many levels of mediated and immediate experience that reveal in various ways the character of the Other. Lipps’s theory of empathy does not take these various levels into account. Lipps’s exclusive concern with the level of expression limits his ability to see the connection between the ego and the Other at the corporeal level. Instinct for Husserl is an undisclosed drive that functions behind original perceptions to reveal the subject and the world to the subject. Although it arises in part from sedimentation, this drive is teleological and as such it contributes, as will be seen in the following chapter, to what

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Husserl calls “vocation.” Instinct is responsible for that awareness that precedes any thematized encounter with the world. This means that instinct cannot provide the foundation for a phenomenological explanation of an ego’s experience unless it is grasped only as a result of a genetic process of inquiring back, which is, in part, a reconstructive process. The drive toward revealing the world is the first kind of instinct. Prior to any constitutive act of the ego, there is a background apperception that allows for determinate objects to be brought to light. The ego is driven to constitute different unified objects out of these hyletic affections. The instinct is for the arrangement of hyletic affection into objects of experience. Without this drive to reveal the world, the ego would have the dark background of hyle within which no distinctions would be achieved. The sedimentation of inherited traditions that relies upon the instinctual relationship that exists between the ego and the Other is a second kind of instinct. The Other is instinctually present to the ego in a manner not unlike the hyletic presence of the world. This is an instinct for empathy, which reveals a continuity with Others that is the result of inheritance. There is: “an instinctive primal intentionality of communalization which pre-grounds the constitution of community and in which there is a pre-awareness of community among different particulars and nevertheless ones which are bound in different particularities and still connectednesses.”76 This is a preconnectedness of egos that does not depend upon active constitution of intersubjectivity but is a passive connection functioning prior to the active constitution, prior to the ego’s self-reference.77 The instinctive primal intentionality suggests a connectedness between the ego and the Other at a most primal level, a connectedness that does not cease with the cessation of any particular ego because of the transference of tradition between generations. When a particular human dies, it “does not lose its inheritance, but rather sinks into absolute sleep. Even then it functions somehow in the totality of the monads; but this sleep cannot be converted into awakeness as would the periodic sleep of the human existence. It could only happen if this monad appears in the functional context of the human organism and has given to it the specific monad development as specific inheritance, that of this worldly human being.”78 In other words, what a monad leaves behind in this world, for example, a child whose gestures, idiosyncrasies, and even looks are an inheritance. The dead monad shows itself in a limited way through its

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progeny. These gestures, idiosyncrasies, and the like are not actively taken up by the child but are inherited at the deepest level, at the level of the ego pole. It is not out of the realm of possibility that what is inherited in this way includes ethical convictions, which only come to light in the process of renewal and critique. It is important to recognize the role of the discussion of instinct for the presentation of transcendental intersubjectivity. What instinct allows us to accept is the notion of a level of intersubjectivity that is not constituted but is preconstitutive. It allows for a connection with the Other at one of the most basic levels of the ego’s being. Without such an account, there can be no explanation of why an ego would constitute a world or others. Instinct provides an explanation of the motivation for such action. But that motivation clearly must be preconscious, pre-self-awareness. Thus, it can be discovered at the level of the ego’s streaming living present. We could argue that this is a violation of the phenomenological method, since it is not something that the self-reflectively aware ego could experience. It moves beyond an experience that is describable by the experiencing subject. Husserl acknowledges that such is the case and indicates that this is one rare case in which the phenomenologist is forced into a position of reconstructive analysis. It is a necessary reconstructive analysis without which there could not be any discussion of how the awakening ego discriminates a world within the background of indeterminate darkness of hyle, or how the ego can distinguish itself from an Other or how the Other can transfer to an awakening ego such aspects of the ego as language. It is necessary to be able to account for the fundamental structures that allow the ego to experience a world at all. Those fundamental structures involve an instinctual response to hyle and to the Other that can only be described through the reconstructive analysis that genetic phenomenology makes possible.

The Priority of the Other Husserl’s movement away from a Cartesian point of departure is symptomatic of his movement toward genetic phenomenology that allows him to question the origin of the ego authentically. This approach led to the realization that it is only in the ego’s consciousness of the Other that it can apprehend itself as a consciousness and center of activity. Intersubjective

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understanding contributes both to self-understanding and to the understanding of the world as there for many egos. It requires the Other and gives the Other a certain priority for the ego. Given the priority of the subjective in the analysis of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, this position is difficult to conceive. However, as Husserl writes in Ideas II, “What is necessary for the emergence of an Ego-consciousness in the ordinary sense? Obviously, human consciousness requires an appearing Body and an intersubjective Body—an intersubjective understanding.”79 The Other in its priority is not an Other in complete opposition to the ego but is an Other considered in terms of the community of Others who are with the ego. The ego is never, even, or perhaps especially, at the deepest level, isolated from a community of Others. Rather, the community is implied by the ego. The “primal ego implies an ‘infinity’ of primal egos, each implying each other and therefore inherently implying this infinity and thus my ego as well.” Even beyond mere implication though, Husserl wants to claim that the Other’s sense is within the ego, but the Other is also equivalent to the ego. The community of Others “lie within me in their totality of infinity, and lie in me as implying every existence in itself in each sense—each equivalent to me therein.”80 In spite of this equivalence, we recognize that the Other has a certain generative priority to the ego, since it is only because of the inherited traditions and sedimented habits that the ego has any conception of its own birth and its own death. Those aspects of the ego require the Other and place the Other in a position of priority. The phenomenologist in the process of self-reflection is still the locus of a surrounding world that has its own tradition based upon the ego’s own past. The validity of Others is constituted within the horizons of the surrounding world of experience, and the ego is capable of “getting to know them as far as possible, interacting with them, acknowledging the validity of their own existential status, connecting all of this with [my] own primordial existential status, etc.” In this process of constituting Others and getting to know them, the ego experiences the “being-occurrences of birth and death of the Other” and is able to constitute these as validities. The ego can make sense of its own birth and death because of a transference of this constitution. In other words, it transfers the experiences of birth and death of Others “back onto my own personal being which has already been constituted as a living entity” and is able to recognize then its “own human birth, my own human death.”81

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Husserl spends many manuscript pages working out the details of the importance of an understanding of the birth and death of the ego for world constitution. He claims that it is “essential” for world constitution.82 Since the constitution of the world extends beyond the individual ego, it is both prior to the birth of the individual ego and continues after the death of an individual. It also extends, then, prior to a community of concurrent egos and continues after that community as well. Constitution must be an activity that extends historically. This indicates that there must be a connection between the ego and prior egos as well as the community and prior communities. Husserl explains this in terms of the passing along of tradition, the world constitution takes place according to what has been identified as normal for a particular homeworld. Tradition is established through the identification of a typical style of constitution. Earlier, in the discussion of habituality, it became clear that the development of habits for the ego is part of the establishment of the ego’s own style of constitution. Now, it is possible to recognize that a style can extend beyond the ego to a community. The style of constitution that belongs to the community is in part inherited from prior generations into which a community of monads is born. Husserl argues that the sense of the world is a product of the constitution by many subjects with each other. It transpires “in a unity of tradition—this tradition that is constituted in the world itself beyond the ‘pauses’ of birth and death of the individual.”83 Without the accommodation of birth and death in this regressive inquiry, Husserl would not be able to argue for the sedimentation of tradition. Every subject would be constituting the world as if from a blank slate. The individual ego is not just constituting the world from its own past experiences but also constituting the world out of a historical past. The historical tradition that is recognized due to the description of birth and death constitutes the sense of the world through the sedimentation of earlier historical sense formations. The role that Husserl identifies for birth and death in understanding the connection between the ego and the Other is vital to the recognition of the priority of the Other, not only as other individual but as other community. Other phenomenologists have emphasized one or the other of these events, but no phenomenologist has provided the kind of account that allows us to comprehend the importance of both events for the ego’s relationship to the Other. Heidegger, for instance, places much stress upon the death of the subject as defining of its subjectivity, but he never

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really incorporates the birth of the subject into any account of Dasein’s being. Levinas, in more Husserlian fashion, uses the notion of death to place a priority on the Other, and he has arguably gone further in that direction than Husserl has, but Levinas, too, does not take the birth of the subject to be quite so phenomenologically problematic. He provides an account of the role of birth for the subject focusing on its role as separation. He uses notions of natality, as does Arendt, metaphorically for new beginnings, but neither of them deal so directly with the concrete notion of the birth of the individual as indicative of the ego’s relationship to other generations. In fact, Levinas wants to argue that such a relationship violates the separation of the subject and places its interiority within objective, historical time.84 Arendt does suggest that birth places the ego in a world not of its own making, but she does not go as far as Husserl in her analysis to suggest the implications for the ego’s relationship with Others.85 Husserl’s extension of the concrete birth of the subject to a metaphorical new beginning only becomes evident in the discussion of renewal and critique that will be broached in chapter 4. The Other for Husserl is, thus, “constitutionally the intrinsically first” human being.86 The personal identity of the ego from birth to death requires the Other in order that the ego can be constituted as a human being. Without the Other, the ego cannot constitute itself as human. It can only constitute itself as a presently constituting consciousness with a limited past and a limited future, certainly not with a birth or a death. This means that the position of the ego in a human community requires the priority of the Other, since the ego can only truly be a person within the community of Others. Even the ego that presently constitutes its surrounding world is an already-communalized ego in the sense that there is no possibility for constituting the surrounding world outside of an already-inherited tradition that shapes the human ego as a member of a community. What becomes readily apparent from Husserl’s later manuscripts, and especially his late writings on intersubjectivity, is that he begins to recognize that one cannot understand the self without having a conception of what is other. He spends many pages exploring how the ego’s comprehension of itself as limited and unified comes in part as a result of its confrontation with that which is different and which cannot be incorporated into the ego’s understanding of its own convictions. This notion extends to the level of community as well. A community is only a unity when it

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is placed alongside a community from which it differs. It is in part delimited by what is other or alien. Husserl refers to these two communities as the homeworld and the alienworld. The homeworld is that, mentioned above, which is the result of the establishment of a kind of style of normality within a community. The community has its own style of constitution of the world that becomes established as the normal sense of the world. The community that shares a style and inhabits the same lifeworld is understood to be the homeworld. The homeworld is that which is familiar to me because it is the place where I am understood to be normal. I share the sense of the world with those in my homeworld while the alienworld is that which is unfamiliar, where I do not have the same style of constitution or the same sense of the world.87 The two are co-relative. The relationship between them is important for the constitution of a surrounding world. When an alien community is encountered, “Precisely thereby is constituted for me and for us ‘our own’ cooperative, a cooperative of people in relation to our cultural surrounding world as the world of our human validities, our particular ones.”88 The alien is encountered, and thereby the home, that which is “our own” is constituted. The two mutually depend on one another for their delimitation as home or alien. Absorption of the alien into the home is not feasible. Such an absorption would eliminate the notion of home as well. This does not mean that the home community must be internally homogeneous. The community can contain within itself a plurality of smaller communities that are not necessarily distinct but might overlap in many ways. The church community overlaps with the political community in some ways but not in others. The determining factor in the boundaries of community is the shared lifeworld. The shared lifeworld can expand through the process of synthesizing smaller communities. This process is not, as some have suggested, an elimination of that which is unique to those smaller communities but is an encompassing of the latter into a larger community that makes room for the plurality of communities.89 Husserl’s explanation of this process is that the communities are united under the aegis of a universal ethical humanity without giving over their limits as home or alien. This concept will be more thoroughly explored in chapter 4. It is possible to recognize here that in many ways the Other has a necessary place of difference for the ego and in that respect has a certain priority over the ego. The ego depends on the Other in a profound way. The

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life of the ego can be “nothing for itself; it is one with the life of Others; it is a piece in the unity of the life of the community and reaches beyond this into the life of humanity. I cannot evaluate my life without evaluating the interwoven life of Others.”90 Clearly, the dependence of the ego upon the Other and the Other upon the ego is a necessary condition for the establishment of a community and of the higher-order we.

Community We have seen above that what is important for Husserl is the instinctual connection of the ego with the Other or Others, a connection that provides a foundation for a community that has developed across generational boundaries, that is, the community of the higher-order we. The community of the higher-order we is one that is not reducible to any individual ego but is derived from all the bearers of a certain tradition or a certain shared activity. Husserl develops this extremely important theme that is vital to the life of the ego itself in a late manuscript from the 1930s: “The finite I in the concatenation of its generation, the infinity of it. The originary tradition of procreation, the procreating individual transferring its individual existence in the created individual, tradition in the communalization of awake individuals.”91 The community of the higher-order we is not just a collection of individuals. It becomes an entity in its own right in the sense that it takes on an identity that consists of a plurality of a unique kind. The “subject” of the community is analogous to an individual subject but not strictly analogous. It is a plurality in a way that an individual clearly could not be. It is “a connected plurality of persons, who in their connection have a unity of consciousness (a communicative unity).” But is also “not a plurality, rather it is a unity founded on pluralities, and it is a substrate for ‘acts’ as act-singularities and for remaining acts, acts which themselves are constitutive unities of a higher order, which have their foundation in the individual personal acts concerned.”92 In other words, a community can be understood to act, and its actions are not merely the actions of the individuals that make up the community but can be recognized as singular actions of the community as a whole. The community itself acts. The identity of the community, for example, the family, or the sports team, or the academic community, is exhibited in the communal acts of

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having a reunion, winning the game, or teaching. These activities are said to be accomplished by the community as a whole. It is the team that wins the game and the family that has a reunion. These communities have an identity and become themselves the center of an activity, analogous in part to that of the individual ego. This conception of the community is of a current, copresent community, but the community can span generations as well, in the sense that the present community bears a tradition, just as any individual bears a tradition. The genesis of a community is, therefore, much like that of the individual and can be discovered in the clarification of the genesis of the individual. Making clear the genesis of the ego is a process of tracing back the validity of the world. This reveals “the genesis of the bearer of validity and therewith the genesis of my co-bearers, those who themselves acquire for me a sense of Being by way of a genesis; and, as the genesis of these co-bearers commences, at the same moment there commences the genesis of the communalization of my comrades.”93 Consider, for example, the academic community. Academics do not reinvent a commitment to teaching and to research each time someone joins the community. The community, as a personality of a higher order, has an identity that goes beyond that of any individual who is a part of it. The commitment to research and teaching has been a part of the academic community for generations. It is not tied to any individual and will not cease with any individual. Once it is understood how completely any individual is a member of a cross-generational and cross-cultural community of humanity, there might be a temptation to see this membership as a certain limitation of personal responsibility within such a large realm. Husserl sees this in precisely the opposite way, however. It is because of the infinite community that we are most burdened with responsibility. This issue will be taken up in the next chapter as well. What the manuscripts and late texts of Husserl explicated in the last two chapters indicate is that the readings of Husserl by many of those who philosophize in the phenomenological vein are often skewed leading to a misunderstanding of Husserl’s position with respect to both the subject and intersubjectivity. Derrida, for instance, suggests in Speech and Phenomena that for Husserl subjectivity is constituted and entails no identity with itself at the level of the streaming living present.94 He further suggests

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that Husserl’s understanding of absolute subjectivity is as “absolutely present and absolutely self-present being, only in its opposition to the object.”95 In making such claims, Derrida is not giving as much weight to the texts explicated here. These texts serve to draw Derrida’s claims into question.96 Derrida views the phenomenological project as being committed methodologically to an understanding of experience that precludes nonpresence. In Speech and Phenomena, he asserts that the phenomenological understanding of consciousness is “the self-presence of the living, the Erleben, of experience. Experience thus understood is simple and is in its essence free of illusion, since it relates only to itself in an absolute proximity.”97 Husserl’s manuscripts on time, however, have shown that the phenomenological reduction to the most primordial level, that is, the streaming living present, reveals a foundation where the “I” does not relate only to itself but where the I and the “Other” are coincident. This deepest level of time consciousness is inextricably linked to intersubjectivity, or more concisely, it is intersubjective. This is not an intersubjectivity that is constituted through empathy, nor is it an intersubjectivity that depends upon knowledge. Rather, it is an intersubjectivity at a transcendental level. From the Derridean perspective, this may seem like Husserl is reducing the Other to present or to the same self-presence as the ego, but instead Husserl is trying to show that even at this most primordial level the ego is not self-present. Rather, at the deepest level of subjectivity, namely, the streaming living present, the ego is not isolated into its own self. Its streaming living present cannot properly be called its own. The ramifications that arise due to this have been drawn out above. Notions of the ego pole, habitualities, instinct, passive genesis, and sedimentation are themes that Husserl develops due to this reading of temporality. Derrida acknowledges the importance of the investigation into time and the ramifications of that for Husserl, but Derrida does not recognize the impact of this on the question of the nonpresence of the living experience, the lack of absolute proximity of consciousness to itself that the manuscripts indicate.98 The originary transcendental intersubjectivity is revealed through the process of inquiring back to the deepest level of time, the streaming living present. At this deepest, primal level of the subject, we discover certain drives that indicate a relationship between the ego and the Other, which testifies to an intersubjective coincidence at the most fundamental level of

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subjectivity. The dark core of the ego is the unthematizable foundation of the concrete ego’s habitualities and drives.99 The being-with of the ego likewise has its foundation in the intersubjectivity of that core of the ego. This transcendental being-with does not eliminate the individuatedness of either the ego or the Other. Both are primordially present and are primordially interdependent. We can claim a certain priority of the Other precisely because passive genesis and the production of habitualities indicate the taking up of positions by the ego that are not necessarily generated by the ego alone. This position is not without its difficulties and paradoxes that Husserl himself recognized, but it is a step in identifying the experiences of the Other that are not necessarily of an egoic-constituted nature and that help us to recognize that we are with Others in a primordial way—not only with those with whom we share a present but with those from whom we inherit a past and to whom we bequeath a future. Such a representation of the subject provides for an understanding of the inheritance we each have without giving up the individual responsibility for habits and convictions. The fundamental level of the ego structure then entails the alterity that remains in some respects obscured from the ego itself. In other words, the self-presence of the ego to itself is never something that can be wholly counted upon. If it is part of the streaming living present, then Derrida’s insistence that this self-presence be “produced in the present taken as now”100 is clearly misdirected. The present of the self-presence is riddled with nonpresence. Derrida’s claim that Husserl has tried to avoid the difficulties of nonpresence through the “voice that keeps silence” and “the blink of an eye” can be drawn into question on the basis of what we have witnessed in these manuscripts.101 Clearly, meaning and selfhood do depend upon something more than the temporal unity provided by the present now and do depend upon a past that is not “present” anymore nor can be made present again. By admitting alterity into the deepest level of temporality and subjectivity, Husserl allows for an original nonpresence that Derrida does not recognize. The foregoing discussion has also given insight into the difficulties that Husserl recognizes in his own project and the attempts that he was making to understand the complexity of the alterity within the ego that might lead us to rethink the objections to the phenomenological achieve-

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ments as presented by Derrida.102 We may indeed be able to think the alterity of subjectivity without giving up the self-responsibility of the subject to which Husserl was so committed and which will be taken up in the next chapter.

d. CONCLUSION It should now be clear how radically Husserl’s late, unpublished writings on intersubjectivity differ from his early static phenomenological attempts to deal with the issue. His development of the genetic phenomenological picture of an ego as closely dependent on the Other and as having a certain unity with other generations of egos provides for a more satisfactory answer to the question of intersubjectivity. The transcendental intersubjectivity that Husserl focuses on in these late manuscripts offers a new realm for investigation into questions such as the development of the ethical subject because it provides a broader and richer understanding of the ego itself. With its instinctual connection to Others, the ego involves itself habitually in a community that has been handed down from generation to generation and to which the ego has a unique responsibility. By discovering the genesis of the ego, we are able to get an insight into the telos of the ego. These themes exhibit a very different Husserl from what is most often presented. This new image of Husserl becomes even more surprising as we interrogate his ethical writings. The picture provided in the explanation so far is one that is not often associated with Husserl. His genetic phenomenological method allowed him to bring certain issues to light that the static phenomenological method was ill equipped to do. Once the genetic phenomenological method was in place, Husserl had a forum for inquiring into the genesis of the ego, the genesis of intersubjectivity, and the genesis of the community of subjects. The process of inquiring back makes possible an uncovering of the coincidence of the ego and the Other at the deepest level of time, the streaming living present. At this deepest, primal level of the subject, certain drives are discovered that indicate a relationship between the ego and the Other. This testifies to an intersubjective coincidence at the most fundamental level of subjectivity. Transcendental being-with does not eliminate the individuatedness of either the ego or the Other. Both are primordially present and

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are primordially interdependent. The discussion of habitualities and passive genesis provides an understanding of the development of the ego that includes the influence of the Other and exhibits the extent of the responsibility that the ego has for itself. There is a certain priority of the Other precisely because passive genesis and the production of habitualities indicate the taking up of positions by the ego that are not necessarily generated by the ego alone. Passive genesis explains how the ego adopts positions on the basis of its pre-existing culture and how those positions evolve into habits that provide an identity for the ego. This relationship between ego and Other takes on a new dimension when we address the issue of community. The community, too, has an identity that is comprised of sedimented traditions that bind generations. Like the ego, the community depends on communities of Others that are alien for its own identity as a home community. This notion of community takes on ethical and universal implications when Husserl begins to speak of a universal humanity. We begin to get an idea already of the import this story of the ego and the community will have on a theory of ethics. Like his thinking on the phenomenological method, and intersubjectivity, Husserl’s thinking on ethics went through a process of maturation that will be explored in the next chapter.

e. NOTES 111. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1992), p. 132. 112. Welton, Other Husserl, p. 241. 113. For a discussion of this topic, see Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 155. 114. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 136/106. 115. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität Erster Teil: 1905–1920, ed. I. Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 62–63: “ein Leib muß schon da sein, damit sich in ihm, in seinen wechselnden leiblichen Vorgängen gewisser ausgezeichneter Art, Gedanken, Gefühle, Entschlüsse, Gespanntsein, Erwarten, Aufmerken etc. ‘ausdrücken’ können.” Hereafter referred to as Hua XIII. 116. Ibid., p. 64: “Von Ausdruck des Seelischen sprechen wir nicht hinsichtlich der Empfindungen. Daß der Andere sieht, wenn er die Augen auf eine Sache gerichtet hat, daß

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er eine Druckempfindung hat, wenn ein schwerer Gegenstand auf seiner Hand liegt, etc., das erfassen wir nicht durch ‘Ausdruck.’ Ausdruck bezieht sich auf eine höhere Sphäre.” 117. This issue will be dealt with in more detail below when discussing instinct. 118. Husserl, Hua XIII, pp. 187–88: “In einem immanenten Bildbewußtsein müßte ein selbstgegenwärtiges Bewußtsein als Bildobjekt für ein anderes Bewußtsein dienen, es müßte also ein eigenes Erlebnis, ein eigener Akt, z.B. des Zornes, als Analogon für den fremden fungieren. Das ist aber ein Unsinn.” 119. These lectures are published as text number 6, with its corresponding Beilagen numbers xxi–xxx in Hua XIII, pp. 111–235. 110. Most of Husserl’s work on intersubjectivity is presented in three consecutive volumes of Husserliana. They are titled Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Erster Teil (1905–1920), Zweiter Teil (1921–1928), and Dritter Teil (1929–1935). Full citations are provided with individual references. 111. Husserl, Hua XIII, p. 189: “[Andererseits ist aber] die Einfühlung Erfahrung von einem eingefühlten Bewußtsein, in dem wir auch phänomenologische Reduktion üben können. Auch das so gewonnene phänomenologische Datum hat seinen Zeithintergrund und ist somit Datum eines phänomenologischen Ich.” 112. Ibid., p. xxxv: “und die Natur als ‘Index’ für eine phänomenologische Regelung und Koordination betrachten, die alle miteinander in Einfühlungszusammenhang stehenden ‘Bewußtseinsströme’ oder ‘Ichmonaden’ umfaßt.” 113. Ibid., p. 228: “die Natur als diese selbe Natur miteingeklammert und reduziert auf die Erfahrungen dieses fremden Ich und das für dieses mögliche System seiner Erfahrungen.” 114. Ibid. “‘Die’ Natur ist also jetzt nicht nur Index für mein System möglicher Naturerfahrungen mit dem momentanen und wechselnden Kern wirklicher Naturerfahrung, sondern zugleich Index für entsprechende und mit der Einfühlung eo ipso eingefühlte Systeme von Erfahrungen in den fremden Ich. Und wie die Natur überhaupt, so ist jedes einzelne Naturding ein solcher Index, der also ein so vielfältiger ist, als für mich andere Ich einfühlungsmäßig gegeben sind.” 115. Ibid., p. 189. 116. I agree here with Carr’s reading (see “The Fifth Meditation and Husserl’s Cartesianism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34 [1974]: 14–35), as opposed to Mensch’s reading in Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism, for the reason that the givenness of things does not necessarily imply ontological status, as Mensch suggests, but should be taken as a concern for the how of our experience of those things. In following Carr, we free ourselves from the Cartesian prejudice that misleads so many interpreters of the Fifth Meditation. Husserl is here moving away from his Cartesianism precisely because of its ontological difficulties. Gadamer also supports this reading, as can be seen in his 1963 article titled “The Phenomenological Movement,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. D. E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 130–82. Although he takes Husserl’s transcendental reduction to mean less a move away from Cartesianism than Carr does, he still understands the phenomenological project to be more concerned with meaning and validity than ontological status. Gadamer suggests that Husserl “found a genuine radicalism missing in [Descartes’s execution of

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universal doubt] to the extent that this transcendental I that resists all doubt is still conceived by Descartes as a ‘little bit of the world,’ a substantia. And correspondingly, the way from this foundation of all knowledge of the world was not really understood as a transcendental derivation of meaning.” 117. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 121/89. 118. Ibid., pp. 122/90. 119. Ibid., pp. 123/91. 120. Ibid., pp. 124/92. 121. Ibid., pp. 125/93. 122. Ibid., pp. 127/96. 123. This conception is perilous in a certain respect in that it tends toward the solipsism that Husserl is so eager to avoid. Yet it is invaluable in the process for sorting out what comes from the ego and what comes from the Other. It helps to recognize that one cannot be without the Other because the Other completes our understanding of nature. We are not left with this strange abstraction that Husserl is referring to as “mere Nature.” 124. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 129/98. 125. Ibid., pp. 130/99. 126. Ibid., pp. 135/104–105. 127. Ibid., pp. 136/105. 128. Ibid., pp. 139/109. 129. The residue of Husserl’s earlier theory of empathy as a re-presenting is evident here, although the language is more refined and precise. Husserl has provided the appropriate distance between the ego and the Other, so that the Other’s empathized anger does not become the ego’s anger. 130. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 142/112. Italics in original. 131. Ibid., pp. 142/113. 132. Ibid. 133. Ibid., pp. 148/119. 134. Ibid., pp. 152/123. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., pp. 152/124. 137. Ibid., pp. 149/120. 138. Ibid., pp. 158/130. 139. Ibid., pp. 160/132. 140. Ibid., pp. 160/133. 141. Ibid., pp. 161/135. 142. Ibid., pp. 161/134. 143. Ibid., pp. 136/106. 144. Husserl, C3, p. 3b. “Wenn ich, mich besinnend, auf meine lebendig strömende Gegenwart in ihrer vollen Konkretion zurückgehe, in der sie der Urboden und Urquell aller für mich jetzt-gegenwärtig aktuellen Seinsgeltungen ist, so ist sie für mich nicht die meine gegenüber derjenigen anderer Menschen, und sie ist nicht die meine als die des körperlich-seelisch seienden, des realen Menschen.”

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145. Husserl, C17 V, p. 30, as quoted in James Mensch, Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 241. 146. Husserl, C16 VII, p. 5, as quoted in Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 157: “Aber es ist doch Gemeinschaft (das Wort ‘Deckung’ weist leider auf Deckung in Extension, auf Assoziation hin), so wie bei meinem, die strömend–konstituierende Zeitlichkeit tragenden, nicht extensiv-zeitlichen einen und selben Ich. Gemeinschaft mit sich selbst und Anderen bezieht sich auf Ichpol-Einigung.” 147. Husserl states in Cartesian Meditations that phenomenology was “very late in finding avenues to the exploration of association,” pp. 114/80. I agree with Bernet, Kern, and Marbach, Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, p. 202, that Husserl means by this that phenomenology was only prepared for such an investigation once the genetic phenomenological method was advanced. 148. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 113/79. 149. Husserl, Ideas II, pp. 111–12/118–19. 150. Ibid., pp. 311/324. 151. We get an indication here of what will become very important in the next chapter with respect to the responsibility of the ego to evaluate convictions and possibly change them. This theme fits in with Husserl’s overall picture of the importance of renewal and critique for philosophy as well as ethics. 152. Husserl, Hua XV, p. 404: “So hat es als Person in sich eine universale Einheit des Lebens, des wirklichen und möglichen, das in Hinsicht auf die Erfahrungsgeltungen, auf die erfahrende Habitualität universal und im voraus Einheit ist, den beweglichen Stil eines sich im strömenden Leben in seinen erfahrenden Stellungnahmen durch Selbstkorrektur ständig erhaltenden Ich. Das ist Einheit der Person als Person, die immerzu Welt hat: die eine einzige Welt als Tatsache.” 153. Of course, one cannot help but see the similarities between Husserl’s discussion of habitualities and Aristotle’s discussion of the development of virtue in each of us in Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle’s notion links the development of habits with the virtuous lifestyle. It is through virtuous actions that we develop the characteristic of being virtuous. Aristotle notes that “Characteristics develop from corresponding activities. For that reason, we must see to it that our activies are of a certain kind, since any variations in them will be reflected in our characteristics” (Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald [New York: Macmillan, 1962], p. 34). 154. James Hart, The Person and the Common Life: Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), p. 114. 155. Husserl, C17, p. 84b: “Mit der Erweckung der neuen Monade ist erweckt oder vorerweckt die elterliche Habitualität; aber die neue Monade hat eine neue Hyle und die elterliche ihre eigene Habitualität (als tote); das alles in sedimentierter Überdeckung und sich ‘mischend,’ verschmolzen.” 156. Husserl, Hua XV, pp. 138–39: “Historisch ist ein Mensch, in einem weitesten und nicht in einem prätentiös prägnanten Sinn, als Glied einer historischen Gemeinschaft. Diese ist als Seiendes in der Welt (die immer nur Welt für ‘mich’ und für ‘uns’ ist) kon-

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stituiert in Form einer vergemeinschafteten Menschheit als einer verharrenden Realität höherer Ordnung, welche das besondere Verharren hat durch den Personenwechsel hindurch, durch Hineingeborenwerden und Heraussterben.” 157. Ibid., p. 139: “Das ergibt einen eigenen Sinn von Gegenwart (historische Gegenwart der Gemeinschaft, sei es etwa einer politischen (Staat), sei es einer wissenschaftlichen, und historische Gegenwart ihrer Umwelt), von historischer Vergangenheit und Zukunft; desgleichen einen bestimmten Sinn für eine historisch verborgene und evtl. auf Grund dieser verborgenen Traditionalität ausdrücklich bewußtseinsmäßige Vergemeinschaftung der gegenwärtig Lebenden mit den längst Verstorbenen (verschiedene Formen der historischen Tradition und des Lebens in Tradition).” 158. Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 366/355. 159. Ibid. 160. Ibid., pp. 371/360. 161. Ibid., pp. 371/361. 162. Ibid., pp. 372/361. 163. Ibid., pp. 379/370. 164. Ibid. 165. Ibid., pp. 380/371. 166. Ibid., pp. 386/378. 167. Thanks to David Vessey for his helpful suggestions regarding the following analysis of Ricoeur’s account of narrative identity. 168. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 169. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 6. 170. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 23, 45. 171. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 322. 172. There are a few scholars who recognize the unconscious in Husserl. See, for instance, Rudolf Bernet, “The Unconscious Between Representation and Drive: Freud, Husserl, Schopenhauer,” in The Truthful and the Good, ed. J. Drummond and J. Hart (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), pp. 81–97. 173. Husserl, C13 I, p. 136. 174. Husserl is quoting Lipps here; Hua XIII, p. 72: “daß für mich in den Lebensäusserungen Anderer ein Bewußtseinsleben von bestimmter Art ‘liegt,’ das heißt, ich objektiviere in solcher Weise ein eigenes, instinktiv in mir sich regendes, aus den Elementen meines eigenen Lebens ausgestaltetes, und doch mir von außen aufgenötigtes Bewußtseinserlebnis von bestimmter Art.” 175. Ibid., p. 76:

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Lipps scheidet nicht die Stufenfolge der “Ausdrücke” und den verschiedenen intentionalen Sinn der Ausdrücke. Natürlich ist es eine entlegene Stufe, wenn wir davon sprechen, daß Charakter, Temperament etc. sich im Gang, im äußeren Habitus und Gebaren, in der Scheußlichkeit, etc. “ausdrückt.” Voran liegt der Ausdruck psychischer Akte und Zustande (wir “sehen” in körperlichen Äußerungen den Zweifel, die Entscheidung, wir sehen den Zorn, Mut, Zaghaftigkeit, Feigheit, Scham etc.). Noch weiter zurück liegt aber der Ausdruck der spezifischen Leiblichkeit, das “Wahrnehmen” an freier Betätigung der Wahrnehmungsorgane, das Hinsehen des Auges, das Fixieren, das Abwenden des Auges, die tastende Handbewegung, das Gehen und damit den Standpunkt Wechseln, ferner, daß der Leib Lokalisator der Tastfläche ist, etc. 176. Husserl, E III 10, p. 8b, as quoted in Hart, Person and the Common Life, p. 197–98. 177. Husserl associates this with sexual life, meaning that he is indicating that a relation to the Other already exists for the ego at the level of the sexual drive. See Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 514: “But passivity, the instinctive life of drives, can already bring about intersubjective connection. Thus at the lowest level, a sexual community is already established through the instinctual sexual life, even though it may only disclose its essential intersubjectivity when the instinct is fulfilled.” This passage translated in Dan Zahavi, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity, trans. Elizabeth Behnke (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), p. 74. 178. Husserl, Hua XV, pp. 609–10: “Eine Monade, z.B. eine menschliche, die stirbt, verliert nicht ihre Erbschaft, aber sie versinkt in absoluten Schlaf. Auch dann fungiert sie irgendwie in dem Monadenall; aber dieser Schlaf kann nicht zum Wachen werden wie der periodische Schlaf im menschlichen Dasein. Er könnte es nur werden, wenn diese Monade im Funktionszusammenhang der menschlichen Leiblichkeit aufgetreten ist und die betreffende besondere Monadenentwicklung ihm diese besondere Erbschaft, die dieses weltlichen Menschen, gegeben hätte.” 179. Husserl, Ideas II, pp. 290/303. 180. Husserl, Hua XV, pp. 587–88: “[D]aß mein urtümliches ego eine ‘Unendlichkeit’ von urtümlichen ego’s impliziert, deren jedes jedes andere und von sich aus eben diese Unendlichkeit impliziert, darunter auch mein ego, in dem alles das impliziert ist, wie eben dieses auch wieder in jedem impliziert ist. Alles in jedem erdenklichen Sinn Seiende liegt in mir—mit der teleologischen Harmonie, die Allheit als All-Einheit möglich macht. Aber alle Andern liegen in mir in ihrer Totalität der Unendlichkeit, und liegen in mir als alles in jedem Sinn Seiende in sich implizierend—jedes mir darin gleichwertig.” 181. Ibid., p. 209: Ich, der Fragende, der mich Besinnende bin doch die lebendige Stätte aller für mich schon geltenden und doch als Erbschaft meiner inneren Tradition, aus

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182. Ibid., p. 171: “Geburt und Tod als Wesensvorkommnisse für die Weltkonstituion.” 183. Husserl, C17, p. 85a: “Transzendental is die Welt konstitutives Produkt transzendental wacher Subjekte als miteinander in Wach-Konnex stehender Personen und in einer Einheit der Tradition—in der Welt selbst sich konstituierende Tradition ist über die ‘Pausen’ Geburt und Tod des Einzelnen hinaus” (as translated in Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995], p. 304). 184. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), pp. 53–60. 185. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 96–97. 186. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 153/124. 187. See Steinbock, Home and Beyond, particularly part 2, sec. 4, “Generativity as the Matter of Generative Phenomenology.” 188. Husserl, Hua XV, p. 214: “Es konstituiert sich also fremdes Menschentum, eine fremde Menschheit, als fremdes Volk etwa. Eben damit konstituiert sich für mich und für uns ‘unsere eigene’ Heimgenossenschaft, Volksgenossenschaft in Beziehung auf unsere Kulturumwelt als Welt unserer menschlichen Geltungen, userer besonderen.” 189. Anthony Steinbock claims that such an encompassing is impossible on the grounds of the very inaccessibility of the alienness of the Other. It seems to me that Husserl does not intend the synthesis to be any elimination of that alienness. However, as Steinbock rightly points out, Husserl himself recognizes a certain inaccessibility. His conception of the alien also includes some accessibility. It is only insofar as a community is accessible, while at the same time maintaining a certain inaccessibility, that one could identify it as alien at all. See Steinbock, Home and Beyond, esp. chap. 14. 190. Edmund Husserl, F I 24, p. 115, as quoted in Hart, Person and the Common Life, p. 294. 191. Husserl, C17, p. 84b: “Das endliche Ich in der Verkettung seiner Generation, die Generationsunendlichkeit. Die Urtradition der Zeugung. Die Zeugenden ihr individuelles Sein tradierend ins erzeugte Individuum. Tradition in der Vergemeinschaftung der wachen Individuen.” 192. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Zweiter Teil 1921–1928, ed. I. Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 200–201:

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Die gemeinsame, die verbundene Personalität als “Subjekt” der gemeinsamen Leistung ist einerseits Analogon eines individuellen Subjekts, andererseits aber nicht bloß Analagon, sie ist eine verbundene Personenvielheit, die in ihrer Verbindung eine Einheit des Bewußtseins (eine kommunikative Einheit) hat. Es ist ein einheitliches Substrat; wie das Ich, die Person, Substrat ist für ihre individuellen Akteinzelheiten und bleibenden Akte, so ist die kommunikative Personenvielheit Substrat: Sie ist da keine Vielheit, sondern eine in Vielheiten fundierte Einheit, und sie ist Substrat für “Akte” als Akteinzelheiten und für bleibende Akte, Akte, die selbst konstitutive Einheiten höherer Stufe sind, die ihre fundierenden Unterstufen in den betreffenden einzelpersonalen Akten haben. Hereafter referred to as Hua XIV. 193. Husserl, B I 24, p. 25, as quoted in Bernet, Kern, and Marbach, Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, p. 203. 194. A modified and extended version of this discussion of Derrida and Husserl can be found in Janet Donohoe, “The Nonpresence of the Living Present: Husserl’s Time Manuscripts,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (2000): 221–30. 195. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 84. 196. Judging from his own account in La Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl, we can conclude that Derrida has some knowledge of Husserl’s C-manuscripts. Derrida provides bibliographical information about the C-manuscripts and specifically cites manuscripts C6, C7, C12, C13, and C17 IV. See Jacques Derrida, La Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), pp. 238–43. In spite of this, it is safe to say that Derrida was working from a more established understanding of Husserl that was expounded by other authors he references, such as Tran-DucThao, Jean Cavaillés, Ricoeur, and Merleau-Ponty. 197. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 58. 198. For further discussion of Derrida’s appreciation of genetic phenomenology and its relationship to the discussion of present and nonpresence, see Françoise Dastur, “Finitude and Repetition in Husserl and Derrida,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 32 (1994 supplement): 113–30. This entire supplementary volume is dedicated to Derrida’s reading of Husserl and provides much valuable analysis of a range of issues for the two philosophers. 199. This is a moment where Husserl recognizes a certain impossibility that genetic phenomenology faces the impossibility of phenomenologically grasping the dark core of the ego. For an excellent discussion of Derrida’s relation to such Husserlian impossibilities, see Paul Davies’s response to Rodolphe Gasché in Davies, “Commentary: Being Faithful to Impossibility,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 32 (1994 supplement): 19–25. 100. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 59. 101. These two phrases are used repeatedly in chaps. 4, 5, and 6 of Derrida, Speech and Phenomena. 102. For a further discussion of language and alterity or diversity in Derrida’s work, see Len Lawlor, “Distorting Phenomenology: Derrida’s Interpretation of Husserl” Philos-

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ophy Today 42 (1998): 185–93. See also Rudolf Bernet, “On Derrida’s ‘Introduction’ to Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry,’” in Derrida and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 139–53.

4

X THE HUSSERLIAN ACCOUNT OF ETHICS I cannot expel from memory the books I have read, their contending theories and philosophies, but I am free to be suspicious and to ask naïve questions instead of joining the chorus which affirms and denies.1

I

n his post–World War I writings, Edmund Husserl sought to develop a notion of ethics that would provide for the kind of critique and ethical renewal that seemed vital for addressing the crisis of European culture. Europe was in crisis in the 1920s and 1930s, one that Husserl was to characterize as “a radical life-crisis of European humanity.”2 When so many Europeans were feeling the emptiness of their cultural values and a collapse of the order to which they had become accustomed, philosophy lacked a method by which to address the emptiness. Europeans were being inundated with what Husserl identified as the false solutions of irrationalism, antihumanism, antiuniversalism, and naturalism, not the least of which was Nazism. Husserl saw the need to extract his phenomenological method from its identification (by those who misunderstood its objective) with the natural sciences, which were failing to provide an adequate response to the crisis due to their alienation from the lifeworld. This understanding of the crisis does not take a full and concrete form until the 1930s, but it is clear that Husserl was already thinking in terms of such a crisis as early as 1922.3 In order to maintain the ethical position of cri-

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tique and renewal, however, an ability to account philosophically for the inheritance of tradition without disrupting the independence of the ethical subject is required. To accomplish such a project, Husserl must rely upon the genetic phenomenological method. The transition to genetic phenomenology makes it possible to develop an ethical theory that moves beyond the formal axiology of his earlier thought to a position that can more adequately take account of the truth of the will and the ethical relationship of an individual to his community. In the previous chapter, we saw how genetic phenomenology makes possible the elaboration of the cross-generational and cross-cultural connections of individuals. One might object, however, that such connections do not of necessity have an ethical tone. In the following, it will become clear how ethics takes on a new dimension once such an understanding of community is established. The process of a renewal of tradition in conjunction with individual critique and self-responsibility offer us a provocative way to think about ethics with respect to the individual and her historical and concurrent community. The transition to genetic phenomenology provides for a way to think about plurality in community without the elimination of ethical foundations or the elimination of the importance of inherited convictions. We will first examine how Husserl’s early adherence to the static phenomenological method limited his approach to ethics. Then, we shall see how his turn to genetic phenomenology affected his later ethics, including such issues as vocation, the truth of the will, ethical love, and absolute self-responsibility.

a. EARLY ETHICS Husserl’s early ethics, primarily explicated in lectures from 1908 through 1914, are characterized by his concern with a scientific grounding for ethics and include an exploration into the question of the categorical imperative. Like his preoccupations in the broader spectrum of his thought, his ethical investigations, too, are concerned with overcoming relativism and skepticism. This overcoming involves the accommodation of feelings and desires as formative of ethical positions. Husserl attempts to establish a phenomenological axiology founded upon an analogy with

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the structure of reason he provided in other early works. The structure that he describes as formal logic is applied, then, to a formal axiology.4 A formal axiology indicates that there are formal laws of valuing and willing as well as a hierarchy of those formal laws such that the sensuous values are secondary to spiritual values. Like formal logic, a formal axiology would provide a universal structure for ethical judgments. It would establish principles that are abstracted from the content of ethical judgments and legislate for consistency in ethical practice and ethical judgments. Husserl presents this view in his introduction to his lecture course on ethics in 1914 by suggesting that if we look at the parallels between logic and ethics with respect to “kinds of acts and kinds of reason,” it is likely that there “emerges the thought that now also logic, in the determined and narrowly limited sense of a formal logic, must correspond as parallel in an analogous sense to formal and likewise a priori theory of action.” What arises from this is “the idea of a formal axiology which for essential reasons is intimately interwoven with formal practice as an a priori formal discipline of values, i.e. value-contents and valuemeanings.”5 Just as thought requires a distinction between reason and acts that the laws of logic can provide, valuing requires a distinction between reason and acts that only laws of axiology and formal laws of practical action can provide. The analogy with formal logic functions on different levels. Like logic, there are the formal laws to which value judgments must conform in order for us to claim consistency in our beliefs or actions. These formal laws make clear that if something ought to be done, then if one desires the good but fails to do that thing, then one is irrational. Just like logic where arguments are not evaluated on form alone, but premises or the content of the argument must be evaluated in terms of their truth, so also in ethics the goodness of an action cannot be determined on form alone, but the formal axiology must take into account the truth or falsity of those consistent claims. This requires reference to the material content of an ethical claim. Determination of the material content of an ethical claim is recognized as being circumstantial. Husserl’s effort to maintain the formality of his approach while still accounting for circumstance leads him to the thought of Franz Brentano.

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The Position of Brentano Franz Brentano lectured on ethics and practical philosophy in Vienna from 1876 to 1894. Husserl attended those lectures as a student, and their impact on his own early philosophical thinking about ethics was significant. In the lectures, Brentano seeks to provide an account of ethics that includes an emphasis on the feelings and desires of the subject but also tries to avoid any lapse into subjectivism. He sees ethics as the highest practical discipline, one guiding the progress of all other sciences. Brentano’s position begins with the assertion that the right end of every action “consists in the best of what is attainable.”6 In order to determine the right end, we must rely upon inner perception, since only judgments based upon inner perception can have certainty and are fulfilled by immediate evidence. Yet the judgment of goodness is not based upon inner perception alone. If it were, we might find ourselves confronted with a position of relativism. Rather, we are able to make such claims that what one person deems as good is actually evil, for instance, the pleasure a thief derives from stealing the belongings of another. Brentano firmly holds that we are able to make the judgment that such an activity is wrong. Such a judgment is based upon an understanding that there are pleasures that derive from instinct or habit, such as sensual pleasures but that these are subordinate to a “higher class of emotional activities.”7 This higher class of emotion is common to all human beings, and anyone who differs with respect to these higher emotions is considered abnormal or perverse. Brentano identifies these higher emotions with an exalted form of love that places value outside of oneself onto the object or activity. The object or activity itself becomes worthy of love rather than being simply judged by the individual as providing pleasure. However, the question of how to determine one pleasure as better than another must still be confronted if the aim is to decide which is the best of those attainable. Clearly “better” is not a matter of quantity, for we do not judge a symphony by Beethoven to be better than one by Bach by virtue of the fact that Beethoven’s work is longer or requires more instruments. Rather, we judge that the symphony by Beethoven is better than Bach’s because we love it more. However, it seems clear that such issues of taste can only have limited analogical value for questions of ethics. For Brentano, to determine something as ethically better than something else is to “recog-

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nize oneself as someone who prefers it with a preference experienced as being right.”8 He provides several categories for and examples of how a determination of a preference as being correct can be made. Such determinations include quantity of good, quality of good, duration of good, probability of achieving good, and so forth. Ultimately, however, all of these criteria seem to come down to our feeling of the correctness of our preference. On the positive side, Brentano’s position is one that appropriately includes feelings in ethical decision making. Our feeling love for some object or activity is the basis upon which we judge that thing to be good, and our feeling preference for some object or activity is the basis upon which we judge that thing to be better. Furthermore, he maintains that our recognition of these feelings as correct implies a certain universality in that they are “directed upon conceptualized objects.”9 Although I might despise the particular thief in a particular instance, at the same time I despise thievery in general. Thus, we have the concept of the action correctly recognized as bad while also having the hatred appropriately directed toward the action experienced. The experience of being robbed, however, is the occasion for recognizing the rightness of hatred of thievery in general. As we shall see in the following, Husserl upholds two important aspects of Brentano’s theory. He never abandons the basic notion that any ethical theory must recognize the fundamental role that feelings play. He also firmly maintains that ethical reason in valuing and willing is analogous to theoretical reason. There are laws that provide a line of distinction between reason and nonreason in the realm of ethical valuing and willing just as there are analogous laws in the realm of theoretical reason.10

The Categorical Imperative Following Brentano, Husserl ultimately works out a formal axiology formulated as a categorical imperative: “Do the best that is attainable” (“Tue das Beste unter dem Erreichbaren”).11 This formulation of the imperative, obviously different from Kant’s, allows for multiple possibilities in any given situation that must be considered on the basis of what can actually be achieved in practical terms. For if the best in any situation is not achievable, then how good can it practically be? The idea is to choose the best that is practically achievable, thereby improving the possibility for

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success in performing the willed action. A lesser achievement is better than a best failure. On this premise, the best that is attainable in any situation is the appropriate object of willing. Its implementation would be an ethical action. Husserl suggests that there are three steps to this evaluative process. One must first will certain practical possibilities, then become aware of all the alternative practical possibilities, and finally select the one practical possibility that has the highest value. In this approach, the good action depends upon a process of weighing alternatives to determine which has the highest value while being most feasible within the practical domain created by each situation. It is clear that such a process depends upon the ability to place values within a certain hierarchy in order to determine which have the highest value. Husserl explains that “If we think for ourselves of the totality of the existing realizable options for the willing subject objectively determined, then there emerges according to the law of value absorption of the lesser value by the higher value.”12 The notion of absorption allows us to determine which action has the highest value, for that which absorbs all other actions and is not itself absorbed is the action of the highest practical value. One good emerges from the spectrum of achievable goods as that which has the highest value. It takes on, then, the absolute practical value because of its higher value within what is achievable. In other words, of the options that are achievable, some have a higher rank than others in terms of their value. Of those, the one with the highest rank is the one with absolute practical value. Husserl’s ordering of material values is thus based upon a principle that he calls the “law of absorption.” By this he means that we determine a material good, which we identify as the highest, and all other goods are hierarchically ordered according to their contribution to the “umbrella” good. This ordering of material values is based upon the formal axiological principle of doing the best that is attainable. Husserl is careful in these early writings to lay out a hierarchy of values. He places spiritual values on a higher plane than sensual values because the former are in a position of being able to absorb sensual values. Spiritual values include things within the realms of art, science, and rational love.13 If two spiritual values are the same in value, we turn to the sensible values that are absorbed by the spiritual values. In an effort to provide an example, Husserl suggests that “the values which we designate as ‘sensible’ are null beside values of the ‘spiritual’ level, the

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‘higher’ values, insofar as they are not prerequisite values for these [the higher values]. . . . If we have two ‘alike’ spiritual values, then the connectedness with the sensible values still gives an estimate of importance. Only in regard to this choice would the sensible be absorbed by the higher.”14 Obviously, there can be various goods that might conflict, and there would be no way of determining which good ought to outweigh any other good without applying Husserl’s formal principle of the categorical imperative. Formal axiology provides a structure through which one could determine the a priori goods that may be somehow internal to each material good.15 An experience of something can be merely a cognitive experience. One can perceive something, remember it, make a simple judgment about it; however, often an experience is not only a cognitive experience of what something is but also an experience of that thing as affecting us emotionally. In the latter case, the value of the thing is given through emotions or feelings toward the thing. Emotions or feelings function in a truth of disclosure, disclosing the value of the thing. Such emotions or feelings are founded upon more purely cognitive experiences. In order to have a feeling about a thing, the thing must first be recognized as an object of experience without it being either good or bad, either desirable or not. This helps in understanding that the value of the thing is objective in the sense that it is founded upon the objective and intersubjective activity of experiencing the thing as thing apart from its practical value. Let us take, for example, the moment of preparing to venture outside on a cold day. As I look through the closet to determine what coat to wear, I am confronted with multiple possibilities. I desire the coat to be a warm one. Several of the coats fit that description to greater or lesser degrees. The windbreaker is not as warm as the denim jacket, and the denim jacket is not as warm as the long winter dress coat but the long winter dress coat is not as warm as the down parka. My valuation of these coats as being warm or not depends both upon my experience of them as coats but then also upon my desire for certain characteristics of the coat to keep me warm. Clearly, the value judgment of the coat being warm is not separated from the experience of it as a coat, but it is a logically distinct moment of the experience. We can also understand that even if the feelings are involved here, that does not reduce the moment to a subjective or purely immanent moment, since there are objective reasons for thinking

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that one coat will keep me warmer than another. My identification of the down parka as the coat to wear today indicates the goodness of the parka. It is good both in the sense that it is desired but also in the sense that it is understood that it will meet the requirements of the desire.16 This example still depends on my desire for a warm coat that is not perhaps as clearly objective as one would want when dealing with ethical issues. Husserl recognizes the need for still further objectivity or universality in that he wants to identify goods that will be understood to be goods by all regardless of individual desires. He attempts, then, to identify a priori goods. These a priori goods would provide the content for the formal axiology that has already been explained. By material a priori Husserl means the necessary conditions for an object to be of the type that it is. In other words, the material a priori determines the essence of the type of the thing in question. We identify the material a priori through a process of eidetic variation. The role of the material a priori is to eliminate certain possibilities of variation. In so doing, we are able to establish objective value. Without the material a priori, such objective value would be impossible, for we would not be able to identify any possibility as being outside of the realm of acceptability for any thing. In other words, the material a priori allows us to determine limits of variation of possibilities when we are considering the best that is attainable. The best attainable becomes something that is viewed circumstantially but not something that is open to absolutely any possible circumstance or any possible action, since only some of those possibilities are compatible with the material a priori, and some of those that are compatible are better than others. So, for instance, of the items that I could choose to put on to go outside in the cold, the material a priori, allows me to eliminate certain items because they are not at all warm, so I limit my choices to a coat. Furthermore, of the appropriate items available, coats, it is possible to identify one coat as more appropriate than another; that is, one is warmer than another. This is again a limitation allowing me to determine the best of all possible options. This working out of the implications of the categorical imperative was later considered to be insufficient by Husserl because it suggests that the imperative assumes a position of neutrality from outside the realm of value. This situation would place the ethical individual in the position of being a spectator bereft of feelings and emotions, bereft of any particular

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attachments. On this interpretation, any ethical individual in a given situation would be expected to do exactly the same thing, given the limits of what is practically achievable. Such an account leaves no room for what Husserl will later come to identify as an individual’s particular responsibility in a particular realm of love. The later Husserl is able to see that such a universal categorical imperative would lead to a self-alienation, since every individual is subject to the categorical imperative, regardless of what his personal project might be. Husserl’s concern is that we would be required to choose to achieve the best that is objectively attainable based on external valuations without any will involved. The imperative also fails to recognize that feelings and emotions have a significant role in revealing values. Without the realm of feelings and emotions, there can be no realm of value. Although Husserl, following Brentano, claims that feelings have a role in determining the good in a particular situation, his reworking of the imperative restricts the role of individual feelings by placing the subject in an unrealistically neutral position.17 These are the themes that Husserl attempts to accommodate in his later ethical writings.18 For our purposes, it should now be clear that Husserl’s analysis of the categorical imperative, and his development of an ethics based on that notion, was coherently achieved within the static phenomenological method. However, an approach that takes account only of the best attainable does not accommodate any individual’s development as an ethical subject. It deals with ethical decision making in a purely formal, structural way. Although Husserl does not give up this formalism, he does alter it in such a way as to take on an individualistic formal structure that accommodates the development of the subject, its inheritance of values from other generations, and its absolute self-responsibility in renewal and critique of those values within community. This much more complex approach to ethics clearly cannot be explained or explored using the static phenomenological method. It requires genetic phenomenology.

b. THE LATER ETHICS19 With the introduction of the genetic phenomenological method, Husserl’s focus has shifted. His effort is to make subjectivity more clear, but also he wants to be able to take account of the world as historical. His focus in the

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early ethics, as we have seen, is on establishing the objective value of an action, even though that objective value is established circumstantially. When approaching ethics through the genetic method, the focus is instead on the development of the ego, and the thrust of the ethics shifts to the character of the ego, the ego’s personal projects that guide it in the determination of an ought, or a truth of the will, and the process of renewal and critique where the ethical role of philosophy makes itself most deeply felt. Self-responsibility can seriously be addressed only within the context of the inheritance of convictions and the sedimentation of experiences. The genetic method allows Husserl to consider how the ego establishes an ethical character because it allows him to investigate the development of habitualities, the sedimentation of sense, and passive association. In this way, then, he is also able to take account of the establishment for the ego of certain cultural traditions. The analysis of passive association attempts to explain how those traditions come to be taken up by the ego and offers a position from which Husserl can argue for the radical importance of the process of renewal and critique and for the ethical role of philosophy. Husserl’s later ethical theory arises in response to the ethical crisis of the postwar world and exhibits his increasing distance from Brentano and increasing influence of Fichte.20 As early as 1914, Husserl is lecturing on Fichte and beginning to question the cogency of the categorical imperative. He finally recognizes that his own early approach to ethics is not adequate for the development of conditions that are ripe for the renewal and critique necessary in European culture. Convinced that the role of ethics is not to define the Good as applicable to each individual case, he concerns himself with the development and characteristics of the ethical individual, the ethical attitude. In an effort to outline a more general ethical attitude as opposed to an imperative that applies objectively to each particular situation, Husserl begins to engage such notions as the “absolute ought” and “ethical love.” These themes are developed in conjunction with the ideas of renewal and critique that he presents in the Kaizo articles of 1923–24.21 This preoccupation with the development of the ethical individual and with the process of renewal and critique incorporates a new involvement with the question of the human subject as an inheritor of tradition as well as one whose convictions and desires can be subject to change. His consideration does not stop with the individual human subject, however. He includes the community of subjects in his description of the ethical life that

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culminates in the personality of a higher order. The community of selfresponsible individuals is vital for the process of renewal and critique, which can bring new life to a world in chaos. Let us here take a close look at Husserl’s later ethics, then we will examine precisely how the genetic phenomenological method makes this position possible and how the static phenomenological method is incapable of providing the means to investigate this aspect of the human subject and its experiences.

Absolute Ought and Vocation The absolute ought is a value that Husserl describes in one of his unpublished manuscripts as “rooted in the ego itself and which has arisen from love (as absolute love).”22 It is a personal ought but is absolute to the extent that it is only in adhering to this ought that I am who I am. It gives me value as a human being. It commands me to choose the best possible life “from now on in all its acts and with its total content of mental processes, that it is my best possible life, my best possible, that means, the best possible that I can live. . . . That ought is a correlate of the will, and indeed of a rational will. The ought is the truth of the will.”23 The best possible life for Husserl is one that admits of no regrets. The personal identity that one acquires through concern for the true self is the result of establishing lasting convictions and convictions that are not always purely rational. Each position that an ego freely takes in any practical situation contributes to a habitual sedimentation of convictions. Without the sedimentation of such position takings, there is no habituation, and without habituation, there is no development of convictions. Obviously, without sedimented habitual convictions, there is no concrete identity of an ego. Without these convictions the ego would be fragmented, dissipated. Husserl has not given up the formalism of his earlier ethics in that he never dismantles his adherence to a categorical imperative of doing the best that is attainable. However, this categorical imperative takes for its material content that which is determined through an absolute ought, which is, of course, different for each individual. Each individual must do the best attainable in accordance with her absolute ought. Otherwise, the identity of the individual would be threatened. This is how the categorical imperative becomes placed within the realm of the lifeworld. The cate-

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gorical imperative loses its influence as a universal that applies identically to all. Rather, it takes on the character of applying to each individual in preservation of that individual in his individuality. This becomes vitally important when we recognize the role the absolute ought plays in determining values. The absolute ought places a burden upon the individual that requires that he make certain decisions not universally upheld as being the best attainable in a situation. We might wonder how we are to determine what our own absolute ought is and how our ethical decisions develop into habits and convictions in conjunction with an absolute ought. Husserl speaks of this in terms of being called to a vocation. We feel a personal love for a particular realm of value, for instance, academic philosophy, economics, or child rearing.24 It is only when we choose our vocation in compliance with that love for a realm of value that we are following our professional duty and claiming an authentic life. Such a love for a realm of value gives life an encompassing, rational goal. In developing our habits and convictions in line with this goal, we are realizing a true self. This is our personal telos.25 Husserl does connect this notion of the telos with his earlier notion of the categorical imperative, but he complicates the issue by suggesting that the imperative is determined because of the personal telos, because of the personal realm of value and not strictly based upon what is practically the best attainable. He also complicates the matter by addressing the relationship between the individual ought and the ought of a community. The categorical imperative cannot stand on its own as a universal without consideration of the cultural and communal influences. The development of Husserl’s thinking on temporality helps him to maintain this position. The streaming living present allows for consideration of the ego in its development in the sense that the layering of the ego’s prior decisions can be understood as having an impact on the habits and character of the ego. These habits include the ego’s ethical position taking. The whole of the ego’s life, thus including the ego’s ethical life and ethical convictions, is carried along in the streaming present. Without this particular understanding of the streaming present, Husserl would not have been able to develop such an understanding of the ego’s habits and character that contribute directly to this ethical position of his later philosophy. The true self of the ego is maintained in the streaming living present through the sedimentation of ethical, as well as other, positions taken.

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We do not gain an understanding of this true self in isolation. Our personal telos can be and is influenced by others. What we identify as a realm of value is not arbitrary but involves inherited traditions that connect us with other generations and other individuals. Ethical norms, then, are not absolutely universal and timeless, nor are they absolutely subjective or historical. They are, rather, binding values that arise from the human community at different levels but that bind the community as what it is. They are “related to individuals, to groups, and to the universe of humanity: thus should each person in general behave, especially, each soldier, each priest, etc.”26 In other words, behavior is in some part dictated by the realm of value that one adopts, either for example, being soldierly or being priestly. To be a soldier entails certain values and behaviors, and the same holds true for any realm of value that one takes up. We are not, however, locked into the belief systems or value systems that we have inherited from previous generations. This is the beauty of determining for ourselves our particular vocations. Vocation is not provided for us by tradition. That does not mean, of course, that our vocation is in opposition to tradition. We come to an understanding of our vocation through the active reflection upon our own identity and our own life. It is not at first evident that a vocation is an ethical task. It is possible to think of vocation as simply what we choose to do with our “working” selves. Yet Husserl’s conception of the vocation of an individual certainly can be nothing other than ethical, since it contributes to the identity of the individual as a whole. He even suggests that the vocational choice is what makes the human being truly human. So when he speaks of vocation, he means it more broadly as a conception of our choice of who we are. Vocation as merely the job that we choose to do is not encompassing enough. It cannot be something we leave at the office, since it is so intimately connected with self-identity. Consider the following: “We seek above all to develop genetically the ethical life form as an (a priori) essential structure of possible human life, i.e. from the motivation which leads to it (the life form) out of essential grounds.”27 The very process of becoming human, then, is an ethical process. Vocation sets up for each individual his absolute ought. This seemingly relative interpretation of the best possible life is demanded absolutely of the subject and becomes thereby an absolute imperative. Although we may think that vocation is important only for the iden-

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tity of the individual human being, Husserl clearly maintains that the import is much more extensive. For it is only through the vocational commitments of each individual human that the culture of humanity is preserved. Husserl remains committed to the notion that without each individual maintaining her vocation, there will be no “rational science of human being and human community that would ground a rationality in the areas of social and political action and that would ground a rational, political technique.”28 Clearly, in order for there to be a political action or a political technique, there must be a consistent political, social realm that is only attained by reason of the consistency of each individual. Husserl writes in a manuscript from the summer of 1920 that the ethical life of humanity is developed “in the midst of the configurations of manners, of law, of the scientific life work, or religion and finally of universal language.” The norms of a community arise naturally from these other endeavors and they become parts of a universal tradition “into which each new generation grows,” since each generation experiences those things as the “natural and pre-given spiritual surrounding world.” The science of ethics then arises from these traditional norms. We take on many of these norms through passive association. It is our responsibility though to adopt a critical attitude to those norms. Thus, we can see that the “ethical stands before the individual as an objective, questionless given. And so it remains from generation to generation, although one doesn’t generally realize it, to think about the last ground of legitimacy of the demands stated in the various concrete regulations, and to put them in question, to make them into theoretical themes.”29 Husserl is implicitly setting up a hierarchy of vocations here. All individual vocations must be secondary to the universal vocation to reason. Ultimately this means that Husserl is interested in the possibility that the human community be a community of philosophers engaged in the selfresponsibility that comes primarily through the activity of philosophy. This is what makes the process of renewal and critique possible. Again, we see the ethical role of philosophy. However, before the individual’s role in the process of “thinking about the last ground of legitimacy” is explored, we need to understand how individuals, each adhering to her absolute ought, form a unified community. The community is founded upon universal ethical love, which is an infinite, absolute and universal love. It is an orientation of the will to live as a member of humanity; a will that

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cannot be usurped by any other will through the recognition by the ego that it can only realize its genuine life at that same time as it, as a member of the community of humanity, wills its own genuine humanity. Such a will is absolute. “Thereby is this will absolutely motivated. Or when I consider the possibility of a life such as I would love absolutely and unsurpassably, then I cannot help but decide to will such a life.”30 Clearly, the participation of an ego depends upon its telos as a member of humanity. That humanity is what Husserl refers to as the “higher-order we.”31 It is a bit disturbing that Husserl seems to identify the ideal community as a community of philosophers. One wonders how serious he was in this. In fact, it does seem that he was quite serious, but it also depends on what Husserl means by the philosophical life. The answer lies in what he means by the process of renewal and critique, which is the primary ethical function of reason. If Husserl’s meaning is taken that way, then the community of philosophers need not be restricted to those who have philosophical training, or who engage in the academic pursuit of philosophy, but can be the community of persons who are actively engaged in the process of renewal and critique. Such activity is open to all, although it is by no means clear whether Husserl thinks that all are capable of engaging in the activity of renewal and critique. He certainly does not present it as something that certain people are prevented from doing, but exactly whether there are minimum requirements to engage in it, the only indication is that it is an activity of reason, so one must at least have the ability to reason. Husserl treats the role of the philosopher as a vocation, but the vocation that he most often addresses in his examples is that of motherhood. So what counts as a vocation? How does anyone know to what he or she is called? What about those who do not seem to hear the call, those who spend their lives going from job to job, relationship to relationship, community to community without any seeming coherence at all? Husserl gives no clear indication of what sort of claim can be made about such people, except perhaps that they lack a stable identity. In lacking that identity does that mean they are unethical? This would be a problematic claim. Perhaps he would have to say that indeed they are a-ethical. They lack the grounds for making ethical decisions, and yet clearly they have inherited some tradition. They have perhaps taken that tradition up in an entirely passive way, however, and have not engaged in the appropriate and nec-

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essary critique of the tradition. But such laxness in critiquing tradition does not belong to them alone. Many people who would be considered as having a vocation also have not taken up tradition in a critical way. Such people are considered by Husserl to be lacking in self-responsibility. The notion of vocation is problematic for other reasons as well. A consideration of the connection between vocation and the absolute ought reveals a discrepancy between the way Husserl speaks of vocation in the manuscripts and the way he addresses it in Crisis. The manuscripts give the impression that for each person, there is a particular vocation that provides for personal identity. Each person’s vocation sets up for that person the absolute ought, the realm of value. That vocation, insofar as it provides identity, is all-pervasive. For instance, the person who chooses academia as a vocation is always an academic, even while engaging in another activity such as gardening. Yet in Crisis, Husserl speaks of vocation as if it is something that can be picked up and put down again. It is treated as if it is just one of the many attitudes that we take up with respect to the world. Consider the following excerpt: “When we actualize one of our habitual interests and are thus involved in our vocational activity (in the accomplishment of our work), we assume a posture of epoché toward our other life-interests, even though these still exist and are still ours.”32 This seems to suggest that there is indeed a parceling of time where at one time the individual is an academic, while gardening is bracketed, while at another time the individual is a gardener, and academia is bracketed. This is entirely understandable and unproblematic on one level, for certainly when the individual is writing an article for publication, he is most likely not thinking about gardening. Or while the person is gardening, she is most likely not thinking about the article she is trying to write. That realm of interest is presently bracketed. But this account becomes problematic with respect to the ethical dimension. Can one separate ethics from gardening? From academia? Or is it possible to think that the absolute ought that is set up by the choice of vocation can be maintained even while the vocation itself is bracketed? Can one garden without maintaining one’s absolute ought as it is set up by academia? It seems that the only proper answer to this is no. As shown above, Husserl refers to the absolute ought as follows: “from now on in all its acts and with its total content of mental processes, that it is my best possible life, my best possible, that means, the best possible that I can live.”33 This explanation of the absolute ought does

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not sound conditional. It holds sway from now on, in all acts. In other words, once the absolute ought has been established through the choosing of a vocation, even though the individual may bracket gardening for academia, the absolute ought is not bracketed. But there is still the question of multiple vocations. When Husserl speaks of multiple vocations, do they each set up an absolute ought, or are some vocations more primary than others? What about the mother who also wants to be a scholar? Is such a choice to be both mother and scholar eliminated by Husserl’s understanding of the ethical, vocational call? Is true identity inhibited if we try to engage in various vocations? Why does that seem to be more of a problem for a woman than a man? Presumably, since Husserl does not speak of fatherhood as setting up an absolute ought in the same way that motherhood does, he sees a man as capable of being both father and philosopher. Does that mean that fatherhood is not a vocation for a man? These questions remain unanswered by Husserl. The only answer Husserl could possibly offer would be that such multiple vocations increase the possibility that we will be put in a position that requires sacrifice. There is no hierarchy of goods when absolute oughts conflict precisely because the oughts are absolute. Thus, one ought has to be sacrificed for another. Motherhood sets up an absolute ought, as does being an academic. When those things conflict, there must be sacrifice. Consider, for example, the attempt of the academic/mother to finish an article for publication when, in the midst of writing, her infant begins to cry. The mother is faced with an ethical decision at that point. Regardless of whether she decides to attend to her child, or to let the child continue to cry, a sacrifice is involved, but there is no hierarchy of goods in this instance if in fact both motherhood and being an academic define the woman’s identity. This is what Husserl emphasizes as the tragic element of human existence. There is no escape or compromise from this situation. One absolute must be sacrificed to the other. For Husserl, every human being faces such sacrifices and those sacrifices, become part of the tragic burden that every human carries.

Community as a Personality of a Higher Order Regardless of how the issues raised with respect to Husserl’s notion of the absolute ought are resolved, it is clear that the level of transcendental

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intersubjectivity and egoic genesis that is revealed through the genetic analytic process makes possible a recognition that the position taking of an ego is not something done in isolation. The position taking ego is located in a world that has been constituted by others and shares that world with other subjects that are simultaneous but also has inherited that world from preceding generations. The world bears the intersubjective and communal values into which the ego arises. The subject is a member, then, of a historical as well as a current community comprised of other individuals who also have personal absolute oughts. Each individual needs to be true to himself, and yet, as members of the same community, we are called to the preservation of the communal self, the personality of a higher order. The personality of a higher order is the “subject” of the community loosely analogous to the individual subject. It is difficult, however, to determine to what extent it is analogous. For Husserl at times seems to suggest that there is a very strict analogy between the individual and the higher-order we, but at other times he is careful to avoid such a strict analogy. He explains the personality of the higher-order as being comprised of a many-headed connected subject. It is “a personal, so to speak many-headed and still united subjectivity.” The various parts of this many-headed subjectivity are “interwoven with one another through complex “social acts” (I-you-acts, commands, appointments, activities associated with love, etc.) that spiritually unite persons with each other.”34 The community is one that wills and strives and is realized in its very willing and striving, in the same fashion as an individual. In fact, Husserl speaks of the community as being understood “in actual analogy to the ethical life of the singular.”35 Husserl is not unbending on this issue, however. He recognizes the difficulties in drawing a strict analogy between the individual and the community and is fully prepared to acknowledge the disanalogy as well.36 Unlike the individual, the community does not always have a unified will and can be a complex combination of traditions and oughts. Its identity is not as easily maintained as that of the individual. The individual provides the foundation for the higher-order we and in that sense is required for the higher-order we. It is a personality in the sense that it has a will and can act as a unity. In this way, it has its own absolute ought to which it must adhere in order to preserve its unity. It also has its own historical sedimentations and habitualities that can be

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received by the individual through passive association. The personality of the higher order is also at the same time founded upon the individuals who make it up. Its component individuals are intertwined in the sense that the absolute ought of any one ego cannot exclude the absolute ought of the Other. Rather, the ego’s absolute ought includes the need for the Other to follow her own absolute ought. Each contributes to the absolute ought of the community. Husserl explains this connection between individuals as a living “in one another.” Our wills also work in the other and “extend themselves to the will of the Other” so that the Other’s active willing is also our own.37 The true self of the community is taken up into the true self of the individual. This happens due to the passing along of tradition. The ego, through passive association, is socialized and thereby takes up the identity of the community into its own identity. The identity of the ego involves all kinds of communal identities, for example, being Jewish, being a university professor, being American. These carry with them certain identities that become part of the ego’s own identity because the personal ethical will cannot be accomplished in isolation from the community. The community has a telos that is more than just the summation of the ends for the individuals who compose the community.38 The community (the personality of a higher order) is not merely a collection of those individuals and their absolute oughts but has an identity of its own, which cannot be in conflict with the absolute oughts of those individuals who are members of the community. Again, we see that “there arches over all single individuals in their genuine self-love and their genuine love of neighbor the idea of a social individuality as an individuality of a higher order,” which has its own individual idea, the idea of “the true human community and of a true human life in community.” This acts as the absolute ought of the community.39 The higher-order we entails the striving for the “common good” of each member of the community as well as for the whole of the community. The community would hardly be a community if our wills were always at odds. This does not mean that the individuality of each is absorbed into the higher-order we. Rather, the absolute ought is preserved for each individual in terms of her responsibility to the Other and the responsibility of the Other for her. It is only through this mutuality that a common life and common good can be established at all. This community

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becomes a “synthetic pole” of action. It is the interweaving of the individual ethical lives of subjects that “is itself of an unconditionally higher value than the individual life of living next to one another and passing one another by.”40 The community is founded upon the individuals, rather than being an already established structure in which the individual is merely a functionary, merely a part of a larger whole. The higher-order we is “secondary” in the sense that it is founded upon and arises from the multiplicity of egos. In other words, the we depends on the interaction of the members of the group whose goal is to maintain the harmony of the group. It is certainly conceivable that the we is not always harmonious, that it changes, and even that it breaks down. The importance of Husserl’s understanding of self-responsibility and the role of reason are vital to this theory of the personality of the higher order. Let us consider an example. The university community is a higherorder we in the sense that it is founded upon a collection of individuals, each of whom has his absolute ought, but it also has its own identity beyond merely the collection of individuals, and it has an absolute ought of its own. For example, a university has an absolute ought of providing education to young people and thereby contributing to the larger community of which it is a part. All members of the university community, be they faculty, students, or staff, contribute to the absolute ought of the community in that they all help the university function as a university. Likewise, the university contributes to the absolute ought of its members insofar as it provides the atmosphere for students to be students, faculty members to follow their vocation to teach and do research, and staff members to follow their vocations as janitors, registrars, librarians, and so forth. If the university did not provide this ambiance, the members of the community would not be able to follow their vocations and would not, in turn, be able to make their contribution to the life of the university. In such a situation, the university would be inhibited from performing its absolute ought. The question, though, is how this interconnectedness works across cultures and across generations. Of course, communities can be of all sorts—family, colleagues, fellow citizens—but in many cases, Husserl seems to see this higher-order personality as that community with which we share the lifeworld. This means that those who travel the same streets,

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read the same newspapers, and go to the same shops share a lifeworld that can be referred to as their homeworld (Heimwelt). The traditions of the homeworld are passed along through generations. This happens by means of habits that socialize the individual. However, the community may also contain within it that which is alien. I shop with the Russian émigrés who live in my neighborhood, and the elderly who are from a different era, and the Moslems who have a different worldview. We obviously cannot think that the lifeworld is one community with one set of convictions and one set of traditions. The lifeworld contains each individual’s convictions and traditions, as well as those of the higher order, those that are defined by the aspirations we have in common. In spite of the fact that we all have different traditions and vocations, we do share a world in which we are all engaged. We use the same currency, stop at the same crosswalks, enter the same shops. We have inherited this world and we share this world, which makes us members of a community. Any particular absolute ought has its own telos, with its own deep convictions that cannot simply be absorbed into one of a higher order. There is no sense of domination here, nor any sense of concession to a majority, but rather a sense of mutuality, a sense of a union of wills that recognizes the differences that exist within the community. In other words, in order to be a community of Bostonians, for example, we do not have to give up our individual oughts (as teacher, rabbi, shop owner, etc.). Husserl does not idealize this notion to such an extent that he does not recognize that there will be conflict. He does trust, however, that the more universal homeworld of reason, which is founded upon rules of rational behavior and ethical love, will prevail. He recognizes this as a rationalmoral telos. In addition to the vocation to which we are each called and by which we order the goods of our lives, we are universally called to the use of reason. The use of reason tends toward the evidential fulfillment of our understanding.41 So far we have spoken of the higher order we primarily view as an extension of a community of present egos to a larger community of present egos, but Husserl’s conception of this community spans generations as well. The higher-order we is one of multiple generations as well as multiple cultures and ultimately extends to the community of humanity. This involves then a notion of tradition and the passing along of tradition between members of a higher-order community. It is “the

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originary tradition of procreation. The procreating of its individual existence and passing it on in the created individual. Tradition in the community of conscious individuals.” Such passing along of tradition invokes the notion of passive association. Husserl sees this as a “coincidence of the individuals, associative products of fusion in the single individual and the carrying within one another of the own and the foreign. Thus in the pretraditional tradition. ‘Heredity originarily generative’ and heredity of the ordinary tradition, historical. All association, all coincidence is a transference of sense.”42 There is a very concrete sense, here, of the tradition passing from generation to generation in such a way as to connect every individual with an historical community having an absolute ought. For example, not only am I associated with my colleagues at the university with whom I share the absolute ought of the university; I am also associated with the now deceased or departed members of that community who have shared in its absolute ought. This is possible because of the notions of passive association and sedimentation. This notion of community sounds perhaps a bit naïve at first or even simplistic. Other theorists of community could certainly object that this sense of community is not resistant to a totalizing tendency or even to totalitarianism. Husserl is aware that a community can dominate the individual. This sort of community is one that Husserl does not recognize as a true community. Any community where individuals submit themselves to a central will is understood to be dependent upon an “imperialist unity of will.”43 Such a subordination of will undercuts the very foundation of the community that is the free decision by the members of the community to engage in a shared activity or to strive for the same goals. Husserl also argues that the imperialist unity is in fact irrational because any sense of a hierarchy of power that places any individual or group in a position of power over others eliminates true rationality that is only found in the ability of the individual to engage in the activity of freely taking up its own positions. Because the community is understood to be of a higher order, it must be grounded upon the freely acting individuals that compose the community. This means that the individuals cannot be absorbed into the community but must absorb the communal goals into their own instead. This works against a communal domination over the individual. What this depends upon is the “authenticity” of the individual, which can only be maintained through the individual’s self-responsibility that is

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apparent through the individual engagement in the process of renewal and critique. Renewal and critique allow the subject the capability of critiquing the tradition, the aims of the community, and the experience of the lifeworld that binds the community. This is a tall order for the individual subject. Husserl has no way of ensuring that the individuals composing the community will indeed take up that responsibility for renewal and critique. He thinks that he has a model for such an individual, and that is the phenomenologist.44 By this Husserl does not mean that everyone must engage in the activity of investigation of transcendental subjectivity or phenomenological analysis but that every person must work toward his own goal of pursuing a vocation through rational existence. Through such a pursuit, each person also then strives for the rational existence of the community and its communal goal. This indicates that Husserl’s community is opposed to the mindless taking up of tradition or adopting the goals of a community. It also indicates that the community is antitotalitarian or antiauthoritarian. Husserl does not suggest that this is an easy task. It is hard work to be constantly vigilant in not merely adopting the positions that have been handed down through generations but also making rational choices for one’s own vocation and thus one’s own realm of values and thereby contributing to and taking up critically the values of the community. Is it possible that this notion of community can be taken too far? Does the idea of absorption of the absolute ought of the community into my own absolute ought leave open the door for the dissolution of difference within the community and the overwhelming adherence to a singular ought of our community over against others? In other words, is it possible to hear language of the dominance of one people over another here? Does Husserl’s position lead to a possible nationalistic stance? If we consider a community that is not as diverse as Boston and recognize that many communities are in fact insulated from confrontation with significant forms of otherness, we can wonder how this picture of community refrains from a completely homogeneous translation of tradition from one generation to the next. Because of the depth to which Husserl’s analysis can now go in terms of the genetic development of any community or individual, he is able to accommodate the relationships between the ego and the temporally Other as well as the culturally Other. His analysis offers an indication of the identity of the community that crosses generational bounds as well as cul-

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tural bounds. Husserl would not have been able to provide such a theory had he not developed his genetic phenomenological method. Because it is unable to account for the historical development of the ego and the historical development of the community, static phenomenology cannot provide an explanation of the taking up of the absolute ought of a community and the formation of a higher-order we. This notion is extremely important for our discussion of the renewal and critique of the ethical life. Such renewal and critique must take place at the level of the individual in relation to his inherited traditions and its inherited absolute oughts. Renewal and critique is a personal responsibility for each and every one of us, not something that filters down to us through the renewal of institutions or communities. Those institutions and communities are only in a position to be renewed when the individuals properly take on the project of renewal and critique. This theme will be dealt with in detail below. But first, we must clarify how it is that the absolute ought of the Other becomes a value that the ego also strives to preserve. Husserl takes up this theme in his discussion of the moment of universal ethical love.

Ethical Love Without proper explanation of universal ethical love, it is difficult to understand exactly what Husserl means by the kind of identity had by the higher-order personality. Universal ethical love is the outcome of the development of the absolute ought of each individual. As we saw in chapter 3, the relationship between the ego and the Other is not always secondary or derived. The vocation of one ego cannot be accomplished in isolation but must involve a larger understanding of the community. This entails an understanding of the vocation of the Other and the Other’s true self. The vocation of the ego cannot be such as to eliminate the possibility for the Other to realize its own vocation. Hence, the theme of vocation both for the Other and for the ego is viewed within the larger realm of the vocation of the community. The relationship to and recognition of the importance of the vocation of the Other takes the form of an ethical love. This love has no boundaries, no restrictions to one community over another, but takes on the infinite nature of a universal love. In binding itself to the Other in such way, the ego is not adhering to a universal principle but is actually acting to place the Other in a position of a certain pri-

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ority over itself. Moreover, this act is not a momentary gesture but an activity that requires constant renewal and recommitment. This kind of love means that within the social sphere, the Other has a value for the ego. The ego “sees that the Other, insofar as he is good, is also a value for him, not a mere useful value, rather a value in itself. He has thus a pure interest the ethical self-work of the Other.”45 Love for the Other, then, is the kind of love that desires for the Other the fulfillment of his own absolute ought. In that respect, it is a taking up of the Other’s wish as the ego’s own. The ego can claim, “what you wish, I wish, what you strive for is also what I strive for, what you will, I will also, in your suffering I suffer and you in mine, in your joy I have my joy, etc.”46 In loving another person we love humanity as a whole. This means that Husserl’s notion of universal ethical love is not an empty formal love of humanity but a very concrete love of the Other both as being necessary for me and my absolute ought as well as for the community of humanity as a whole.47 This understanding of the universal love is not a love that is exacted from the ego but a love that the ego freely gives, not altogether altruistically, but not altogether egoistically either. It has been suggested by others, among them Philip Buckley, that Husserl’s account of the community of love is one that in its intense desire for unity eliminates the difference of the Other. Buckley maintains that the harmony of the community would have to depend upon an exclusiveness that does not allow for difference within the community. Without such difference there is no community, only pure identity: “In the communal sphere, an analogous desire for unity can have dramatic consequences. It would seek such an intense being-with-an-other (or as Husserl puts it even more strongly at places—‘being-in-one-another’) that the ensuing unity is so complete it is hard to imagine difference.”48 Such an interpretation misunderstands the complexity of the community of the higher-order we. As we have seen here, the universal ethical love must accommodate the vocation of the Other. Serious consideration of the importance of the Other is incompatible with the goal of absorbing the Other into the same. The Other’s alienness is vital to the ego’s selfidentity. I am who I am because my absolute ought is different from that of Others, just as the community to which I belong is only a community in its opposition to another community. Every community depends upon difference from Others. But equally, the absolute ought does not eliminate

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the difference within our community. One cannot overlook that the process of renewal and critique partially depends on the confrontation with the community of Others, the alien. For it is in such confrontation with the Other that we are given access to a position of critique of the community that is our own. Husserl explicitly describes the absolute ought of each individual as one that places the individual into conflict that requires sacrifice. Such conflict arises for the community as well. It is not a community that reduces Other to the same but rather allows for otherness to be recognized and loved. How, we might wonder, is such a community maintained? Husserl’s notion is that the community of universal ethical love is one that provides for the authentic self-realization of its members. Such a community must make space for plurality in such a way that no member of that community eliminates the opportunity for other members of the community to take up their vocation. This is a position that is always open to further possibilities in the sense that those possibilities provide for an expansion of the community rather than a closing-in of the community upon itself. This notion of the community of love is perhaps idealistic sounding. Certainly it is not so simple to say that every ego will love every other. The genetic phenomenological analysis helps to make the concept more understandable perhaps. Genetic phenomenology has allowed for the recognition that the ego itself, at its most fundamental level, the streaming living present, is intersubjective. The “secondary” level of the higherorder we, the community of ethical love, is derived from an intersubjectivity that has already laid the groundwork of communal interaction. Since there is a connection between the subject and the Other at this most fundamental level, it is possible to see that the community of ethical love is not one that depends entirely upon the act of constitution but is grounded in the anonymous constituting level of time that allows for a more originary connection between the ego and Other. This connection at the deepest level of temporality allows for a different conception of the love for Others that does not only transpire at the constituted level. It is a more general will toward Others that can be located at this deeper level. Husserl’s sense is that this openness to Others at the deeper level can be felt at the higher level as well. The love that he speaks of is a rational love—assuming that by rational here we do not mean calculative reason but a rationality that assumes an openness to the Other through recogni-

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tion of the Other’s importance to my own self-responsibility and my own achievement of my vocation and the life of no regrets that is my aim.

Teleology Husserl’s notion of teleology operates at the level of the subject and at the level of the community. As we saw above, however, the telos of the community is not merely a summation of the teloi of the individuals within that community. The telos of the community “encompasses all of the monads. What occurs in the motherly domain is not limited to it, but ‘is reflected throughout.’ ”49 To be “reflected throughout” suggests that the communal telos is reflected in the teloi of the individuals as well. We can understand this by considering our example from above. The telos of any particular professor at the university also reflects the telos of the university community on the whole. By teleology Husserl does not actually mean an achievable end. Rather, the telos is one that is always the aim of the process of constitution, but humanity is forever within the process and never in the position of having completed the process.50 It is an “infinite gradual process.”51 The ultimate sense of the world is an infinite telos, as well as having an infinite ground. The horizons of the world make a completed sense of the world impossible. The sense of the world is always open to further experiential verification that works in a regressive manner as well. We recognize through genetic investigation that we exist in a world that already has a sedimented sense and is pregiven in the sense of a horizon for our activities. The continued sedimentation of sense gives the world a fuller and fuller sense but never a completed sense. Husserl adds that the telos is intimately connected with the instinct of the human subject, as it is with the vocation of the subject and the community. But what concretely is the telos of the individual or the community? The absolute ought is the defining element for achievement of this ideal telos. As absolute, it applies to the Other as much as it applies to the ego in the sense that the task for the ego to maintain its own self-identity mirrors the task for the Other to maintain its own self-identity for the preservation of the identity of the higher-order we. By maintaining its own self-identity, each contributes to the identity of the Other through the contribution to the higher-order we. Each helps to constitute the higher-order and in so doing

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participates in that higher-order we, and is affirmed by the higher-order we. The telos for the ego and the telos for the Other are simply different perspectives of the same higher-order telos. The telos of each is taken up by the Other in the taking up of the telos of the higher order. We may conclude that Husserl’s account of teleology always includes an intersubjective component. If the Other is hindered in its struggle for its own identity and its own telos, then the telos of the higher-order is also hindered, and my telos is also hindered. These teleologies are inextricably linked.52 Husserl writes of the telos of the development of humanity: The telos of the community in no way, therefore, impinges upon the ability of the individual ego to take up its own telos through the free position-taking acts that constitute its identity. The freedom of the individual ego with respect to its participation in the universal we is vitally important. The telos of the individual is correlative with the telos of the commuity and is linked to the individual’s freedom, for “the I is only in We and the ‘We’ is necessarily in infinite and common relativity.” Correlative with this is “the truly existing world, truly identical always and for everyone. An existing world extending into infinity is a constructive anticipation and a rash idealization. It is not actual, it is only but the infinite telos of our freedom.”53 What does it mean that the infinite telos is not actual? It is a telos that is never fulfilled. But there is also a constitution of the we that takes place at an empirical, factual level, the correlate of which is a “concrete existing world.”54 The concrete existing world is that which exists intersubjectively for the universal authentic we and is there to be investigated by the universal will. Again, we may wonder precisely what this means. What is the concrete nature of the universal will? Husserl suggests that this notion is based upon the sedimentation of our tradition that begins with the Greeks. We are the bearers of the teleology initiated by the “becoming of philosophy.”55 This theme is directly related to the process of renewal and critique that we will take up below. As bearers of the tradition, we have a responsibility to renew the telos inherent in that tradition. “We are heirs and cobearers of the direction of the will which pervades this humanity; we have become this through a primal establishment which is at once a reestablishment and a modification of the Greek primal establishment. In the latter lies the teleological beginning, the true birth of the European spirit as such.”56

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The theme of teleology is intimately connected to Husserl’s later understanding of internal time consciousness, as described in chapter 2 of this work. Since time is conceived by Husserl in his later writings neither as a series of now points, nor extended segments of time, but as the streaming living present, it proceeds as a unity, combining both arché and telos into the ever-streaming present, thus exhibiting the infiniteness of the task of rationality. Consider Husserl’s explanation of the streaming living present, the deepest order of time. His approach to time resists the parceling of time into the past, present, and future. Time is not a formal structure of retention, protension, and now point. It is rather the streaming living present, unparcelled, undivided. Time is not segmented into a time for ethics, a time for science, a time for study. Rather, as a streaming unity, the time for ethics is the time for science and for study. We begin to see here how ethics becomes all-pervasive in this new understanding of time consciousness, teleology, and genetic discovery. It is only when we attempt to parcel our time, to parcel ourselves, that we find ourselves unable to maintain the vital unity of our humanhood. The same is true for the community of humanity. According to Husserl, however, teleology is not limited to the ethical realm. Insofar as the ethical life is to be lived on the model of the rational scientific life, the telos has the same role for both. This means that, like science, which strives methodically for the improvement and acquisition of knowledge, ethics strives methodically for the improvement of the idea of the good. But also, like science, ethics is only able to continue to strive and perhaps achieve closer approximation of the good or open up further horizons of the good. Our teleological project is, as always for Husserl, an infinite task. This is why the crisis of the European sciences is equally a crisis of European humanity. For Husserl the two cannot and should not be separated. A parceling of rationality can only lead to further crisis. The theme of infinite task suggests also the process of the infinite development of the absolute telos. The process is associated with the method of phenomenology that “can uncover a universal, absolute teleology, to which belongs the necessary awakening of the teleological idea of the human in its conscious relatedness to a realm of absolute teleological harmony (realm of ends).”57 The absolute teleology does not have some sort of objective reality, some status as already existing, nor is it “distinguishable in the already existing things of the worldliness as the form of the inductive future necessary form of structure.”58 Husserl does not see the

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telos as some already existing finality. Moreover, the fact that it is not a necessary structure indicates that it is constantly in development, suggesting yet another way in which Husserl’s thinking on these matters cannot possibly be investigated statically but requires the genetic methodology. Genetic phenomenology is indispensable for any such conception of humanity in development. The clarification of the telos of humanity requires the process of regressive inquiry. We must inquire about the sedimentation of the teleological beginning and renew that telos in our own community. We must also engage in the process of critique of that sedimented tradition in order to transform that tradition for our present unity.

Renewal and Critique This chapter began with an explanation that Husserl’s later ethics was developed in response to the postwar crisis. His commitment to the rejuvenation of his society calls for the establishment of a theory of renewal and critique based on the complex understanding of the ethical community described above. The theme of free position taking of each individual in conjunction with the community toward the rational telos of the personality of a higher order might suggest a certain unwavering singleminded struggle toward one unified end. In fact, Husserl recognizes that the process of striving for that end involves the taking up of tradition in a critical way so as to give tradition a new life for each new generation. He describes this process in his Kaizo articles of 1923–24 as the process of renewal and critique. His development of these notions of renewal and critique rounds out his analysis of the ethical life of the individual in its coincidence with the ethical life of the community. In these articles, Husserl describes the critical attitude as one that allows us to call into question our sedimented convictions as well as our inherited convictions. We do not adopt such a critical attitude from a position outside the tradition. In fact, it is necessary to take up the critical attitude from within the tradition. It is only in this way that we are prepared for a renewal of that tradition in a responsible, rather than naive, way. In fact, Husserl suggests in Crisis that it is impossible to take up a position outside of tradition. Any such position would be an acknowledgment of being free from prejudices, which is a position that itself is related to the tradition and telos of humanity.59

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By critically taking up positions that have been handed down to us from our parents, or other ancestors, we renew them as norms for our own time. But in examining them critically, it is also open to us to reject them as norms for our own culture. The role of this process of renewal is “to make vital again, in its concealed historical meaning, the sedimented conceptual system which, as taken for granted, serves as the ground of [the individual’s] private and nonhistorical work.”60 As individuals, we may perform such a renewal and critique of our own convictions and sedimented habits, but we must also recognize that the process is intersubjective. Again, in Crisis, Husserl makes clear that this process is “Not only to reawaken the chain of thinkers, the social interrelation of their thinking, the community of their thought, and transform it into a living present for us but, on the basis of the total unity thus made present, to carry out a responsible critique, a peculiar sort of critique which has its ground in these historical, personal projects, partial fulfillments, and exchanges of criticism rather than in what is privately taken for granted by the present philosopher.”61 It moves us from the position of a passive acceptance of tradition to a free position taking of renewal and this opens the way for responsible critique. Husserl shows us that the process of laying bare the origins of social tradition and habits enables us to critique those traditions and habits and allows us to consider the renewal that might be necessary in our own society. The process of critique is inseparable from the concept of human life as intimately related to ethical life. Husserl has provided us with a way to think about ethical convictions and an apparatus for criticism, not of some rigid ethical structure but of the living traditions and convictions that we witness in our own and other communities. Each individual who participates in the higher-order we is a whole with a responsibility to the larger whole. However, this responsibility does not require of him or her any relinquishing of freedom. The encounter between one community and the other is, as we saw, one that is fundamental to the development of the higher-order ethical we. By allowing for the preservation of each individual absolute ought, Husserl has offered a way to see the community as a necessary unity of multiplicity. Renewal is an ethical attitude that we must have not only as individuals but also as communities. The process of renewal is a process that involves critique of traditions and convictions we have inherited, as well

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as of those that have been personally developed. It is only through this critical process that we are able to take those inherited convictions up as our own in an appropriate fashion. We renew them as convictions for our own selves and our own community. In this process, we examine what has been passively handed down to us, and we make it a part of our active, free position taking. This is a project that involves the intersubjective community as it connects us to those from whom we receive tradition, as well as those with whom we share tradition and those to whom we will pass along tradition. Unfortunately, however, we do not always take up those traditions in a critical way. What is needed is a process of renewal and critique that can itself be developed into a habit. It is the consistent willing of conducting one’s life in accordance with the constant evaluation of one’s position takings.62 This discussion of renewal and critique reveals even more forcefully the importance of the genetic phenomenological method. Static phenomenology could not have allowed for the understanding of the taking up of tradition and sedimented values from any previous generation. It is not equipped for a discussion of the historical variations in values. Unless one is able to talk of the origin of the ego and its inherited traditions, one is not in a position to be able to critique those positions. The genetic approach to ethics gives us a way to think about the relationship of each individual to her community that preserves the plurality without doing away with an understanding of the community as an ethical whole. For philosophers, the role of renewal and critique takes on a unique form. Husserl sees the philosopher’s responsibility as fundamental to humankind. He understands philosophers as “functionaries of mankind.” It is through a personal responsibility for a sense of oneself as philosopher that one is inspired to take up a “responsibility for the true being of mankind.” The true being of humankind is “being toward a telos and can only come to realization, if at all, through philosophy—through us, if we are philosophers in all seriousness.”63 This special role for the philosopher exhibits the importance of thinking to ethical life, and the importance of the identity of the ego as provided through vocation as broadly construed, but also the importance of the connection between the ego and the Other that is made apparent at the level of the streaming living present. Vocation is not just the working part of one’s life. It must be who one is. The philosopher’s vocation also extends that concern to the who

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of Others, the who of humanity. If our vocation absorbs only part of our life, then our identity is in crisis. In the same way, the crisis that the modern world faces is due in part to the separation of philosophy from the other sciences and the parceling of philosophy into more and more limited specialties. Philosophy in particular needs to resist this separation. The vocation of the philosopher cannot be limited to some restricted focus. It has a much broader scope because it infiltrates every aspect of life as a member of a community. In Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl suggests that philosophy is in a state of crisis along with European humanity. He argues that the crisis is due in large part to the forgetting of origins, which means accepting methods and values as self-evidently given. This forgetting does not exclude the philosopher, who, as an inheritor of a tradition, can also be culpable. What is required, then, is a project of renewal that begins with bracketing the accepted positions and is followed by the genetic inquiring back after the origins of the discipline. This entails a peeling away of layers of sense in order to come to an understanding of the sedimented sense that has been passed along through tradition. But what is it that a renewed science and a renewed philosopher will accomplish? How will humanity be different once this process of renewal has been carried out? What cannot be overlooked is that, as one engages in the genetic method, one begins to understand one’s position within the higher-order we as a position of absolute responsibility. The renewal takes place on the individual level. In our description of the higher-order we, it became clear that the higher-order we is founded upon the individuals that compose it but is not limited to a mere collection of individuals. Thus, the process of renewal must rely upon the renewal of the individuals in order to attain a renewal of the community. The community cannot function separately from its members. This means that the self-responsibility of the individual is the foundation for the self-responsibility of the community. This is the only way that we can be assured that any member of the community is not forgetfully taking over the traditions of a community without the proper renewal and critique required of us all. If it authentically performs its task of renewal and critique, this community can develop into the community founded upon universal ethical love. The aims of the individual entail the aims of the Other, and a community of harmony is achieved. Husserl claims that phenomenology plays a vital role in this process.

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He suggests that the telos of philosophy, which makes itself evident in the vocation of the philosopher, is the scientific rationality founded in Greek thought. In utilizing the genetic phenomenological method, the phenomenologist is capable of inquiring back into the origins of its own tradition to discover the unity of sciences within philosophy. The Greeks understood that prescientific rationality and scientific rationality were mutually interdependent. It is that particular insight that aids in overcoming the crisis, in seeing that science can answer the deepest questions of human existence and human experience when founded upon the rigorous science of phenomenology. This science of phenomenology recognizes the origin of the sciences within human subjectivity and human history. Phenomenology thus serves as a model for the other sciences. Phenomenologists are the exemplars of a life lived in striving for rational existence. But what exactly is a rational existence? For Husserl it means recognizing and being attentive to what one does and determining the activities of one’s life or one’s vocation through reason. It means being able to justify one’s positions through reason and using one’s reason in absolute selfresponsibility. But this type of science does not have the kind of exactitude characteristic of the natural sciences.64 Phenomenology emphasizes that such exactitude is often reductive. Phenomenology’s focus should therefore be on being able to provide a meaningful approach to human questions. The sciences with their “regulative ideas” should no longer dazzle us “as though the In-itself of such sciences were actually an absolute norm for objective being and for truth.”65 The other side of this process of overcoming the crisis is the critique of tradition. Husserl suggests that one must develop this activity of critique into a habit. In our discussion of habit in the previous chapter, we saw that habit is something that becomes in some way sedimented and passive in the individual. I have the habit of putting cream in my coffee. This is not something that I think about every morning; I just do it. Yet there is a second kind of habit that Husserl is interested in developing— the habit of critique. Maintenance of this habit requires a willed effort. Such a willed effort is required in order to address the crisis effectively. To be rigorously aware of our world and our position takings within the world is an activity that requires constantly renewed effort, since our tendency is rather to allow ourselves to be absorbed in the everyday.66 Husserl’s own methodology offers a model of the process required to

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overcome the crisis. The genetic process of questioning back after the origins of thinking helps to uncover the forgotten aims and forgotten relationships of thinking to the lifeworld. It points out the complex relationship of the individual consciousness to its inherited tradition of meaning. Because this method involves the self-responsibility and renewal and critique that are so vital to Husserl’s understanding of the ethical life, we begin to see how scientific investigation, phenomenology, and the ethical life are necessarily intertwined. Such a recognition is part of overcoming the crisis. However, we would not be capable of overcoming the crisis if we understood Husserl’s position to be a replacement of static phenomenology with genetic phenomenology. Husserl is true to his own method in allowing static phenomenology to remain a sedimented part of the phenomenological movement. It is because of static phenomenology that Husserl is not swept into the whirlpool of relativism. Static phenomenology preserves the place of consciousness within the sedimentation and habituality and creates for the subject the possibility of critique and renewal. However, an objection might be raised at this point that the genetic phenomenological method supports a position of historicism, a position that allows that truth be historically relative. Historicism can be understood as a kind of perspectivism that addresses knowledge or truth through the pragmatic approaches to reality that are evident through epochs of history. Husserl was well aware of the risk of historical relativism. Even as early as “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” (1911), it is clear that he understood the need to walk a fine line between historicism and extreme rationalism. In that article, Husserl quotes Wilhelm Dilthey, criticizing the historicist position because it “destroys more thoroughly than does surveying the disagreement of systems a belief in the universal validity of any of the philosophies that have undertaken to express in a compelling manner the coherence of the world by an ensemble of concepts.”67 It results in the loss of absolute validity. To have validity in a historicist view would mean only to be a “spiritual” construction that is “held as valid.”68 The notion of unqualified validity no longer makes any sense. Husserl’s response in 1911 is that if historicism could refute the absolute validity of everything, this would imply something that can be grounded as valid; otherwise the historicist would not have a position to stand on. It is precisely this valid ground that Husserl wants to clarify. As he suggests, “if there is something there whose objective validity philo-

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sophical criticism can refute, then there is also an area within which something can be grounded as objectively valid.”69 This comment suggests a profound recognition on Husserl’s part of the dangers of historicism. But does such a position apply to his later genetic thought? In his later writing, particularly in “The Origin of Geometry,” we see that Husserl’s position with respect to historicism has not significantly changed. He clearly understands his own position as one that cannot be charged with historicism. The genetic process of inquiring back is certainly concerned with the passing along of tradition and with the historical development of meaning, but it “lays claim to a strictly unconditioned and truly apodictic self-evidence extending beyond all historical facticities.”70 That a priori, that truly apodictic self-evidence is what Husserl calls the a priori of history. All historical investigation or questioning “presupposes history [Geschichte] as the universal horizon of questioning.” The horizon of history itself is presupposed in any “intention to seek and to establish determined facts.”71 Husserl’s understanding of the complementarity of static and genetic phenomenology serves him very well in this instance. Static phenomenology allows for the knowledge of the present world as “surrounded by an openly endless horizon of unknown actualities.”72 The starting point of the phenomenological analysis secures us in the freedom to direct “our gaze upon the apodictically invariant.”73 We can engage ourselves repeatedly with that which “can be made self-evident originaliter at any time, can be fixed in univocal language as the essence constantly implied in the flowing vital horizon.”74 Even though static phenomenology recognizes perspectives, it is not itself perspectival. To recognize that perception of the world or of things in the world must always transpire from a particular perspective does not mean that the recognition itself, or the claim itself, is perspectival. It is a recognition of the way that things appear. This kind of example works for the historical perspective as well. If Husserl had given up static phenomenology for genetic phenomenology, he may truly have run the risk of historical relativism, but because he understood the need for genetic phenomenology to act as a supplement, he avoided that trap. The teleological dimension of Husserl’s approach also contributes to his avoidance of relativism in the sense that the telos serves as the ideal that draws us on in our infinite task of pursuing truth, while never claiming that complete truth can ever be attained.

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We can see, then, that the static method provides phenomenology with access to the fundamental structures of experience that are not relative to any historical era. These structures provide the starting point for the investigation into the historicality of meaning but are not themselves historically conditioned. The genetic supplement to static phenomenology allows us to grasp the ways in which meaning is historically conditioned but does not entirely destroy the structure elucidated through static analysis. Those who charge Husserl with relativism also do so on the grounds that the various communities of which he speaks have different truths based upon what is understood to be normal in each community. So what is normal, true for one community can be false for another. Husserl doesn’t accept this formulation of the difference between the lifeworlds of various communities, however. He argues that something that is valid in one lifeworld but not in another does not mean that it is in one case true and in another false but that it is in one case valid and in the other case it is not an element of the lifeworld that is experienceable or relevant. He argues that if we introduce someone into the lifeworld from outside of the lifeworld, that person will indeed see the same “thing” as we all see, but the person may see it differently than we in such a way that it is not the same world “object” with the same meaning. The outsider may not have any meaning intention, any apprehension of the “thing” as a world object. We would be unable to argue with this person about the truth or falsity of the designation of the object as anything other than mere thing. How the other person experiences the thing may complement our experience of the object, but since it is not an experience of the same meaning of the object, it cannot conflict with our experience of it. Since there is the possibility that the Other’s experience of the thing may reveal other aspects of the object that were not available to us in the first place because of our understanding of the object as world object, it is not possible to simply rule out the Other’s experience as false. Husserl is able to avoid a charge of relativism but not in such a manner that he seals his position within itself. He is able to allow for the openness of the common experience while at the same time preserving the cultural world meaning of objects.75

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Self-Responsibility The process of renewal and critique is what contributes to the awareness of self-responsibility. No longer are we able to brush off crucial questions as being already answered by tradition. No longer can we claim to subscribe to any particular way of life because we were born into a particular community. Rather, we must take upon ourselves the responsibility for each position we assume because we understand ourselves as reasoning beings who have chosen to accept or reject the culture to which we adhere. Husserl suggests as much in the third of the Kaizo articles. “The human, who lives already in the consciousness of his capacity for reason, knows himself then to be responsible for the right and wrong in all his activities, be they cognitive activities or activities of valuing or directed action with an intended actual effect.”76 It is certainly the case that vocation provides one basis upon which we judge the rightness or wrongness of our actions, and that helps us to determine the reasonability of any option, but we also find ourselves with a telos that is beyond vocation. Such a telos contributes to the ideal self we are trying to maintain. Responsibility is not limited to the individual. It is larger than merely knowing the right and wrong of our daily activities because it involves a responsibility to and for the Other, which is part of the larger telos of any individual. That larger telos is that of the higher-order personality of which each ego finds itself a part. The implication is that the goodness of the community is my concern. Thus, “I not only must desire myself as good, but also must desire the whole community as a community of good people and, insofar as I can, I must take it in my practical circle of volition and aims.” This is connected to my humanity. Being human “includes within it the will to be a member of a ‘true’ humanity.”77 The good of the community, then, becomes something that I take within myself as part of my own responsibility. Self-responsibility is not only responsibility to the self and for the self. As such, it is also responsibility to the Other. The good of humanity becomes the highest good for us all. From the previous analysis of renewal and critique, we understand that part of self-responsibility is a rational responsibility toward tradition, toward the sedimentation of norms and values. We are responsible for taking up tradition in a critical way and contributing to the telos of humanity. This means contributing through self-examination and ration-

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ality. It means “we have continuously anew the living truth from the living source, which is our absolute life, and from the self-examination turned toward that life, in the constant spirit of self-responsibility.” We have this truth within the horizons of our lifeworld. Those horizons “do not remain overlooked or veiled from sight, but are systematically explicated.”78 From the foregoing sections, we are beginning to get a picture of the individual and community as a complicated unity, not just a unity of cultures, and a unity of generations, but also a unity of disciplines. By this I mean that when we consider self-responsibility and renewal and critique, we see that the individual, in preserving its absolute ought, is still responsible to a larger sphere of life. If one decides to become a scholar, the realm of love defines one’s absolute ought as a scholar. By entering the community of scholars, that person takes up the tradition and should do so in a responsible rather than a naive way. This does not mean that when she leaves the campus each day and goes home to be a partner, or a mother, or a caretaker, that she leaves that vocation behind. Husserl is concerned with the unity of roles that an individual takes up; mother, academic, spouse are all one individual and being a scholar involves being a mother involves being a spouse and vice versa, just as being a scientist involves being a churchgoer, and so forth. These roles cannot be parceled out and isolated from one another. Without a unity of these various roles, we find a human in crisis or a community in crisis. “The philosophical-scientific doing becomes itself a branch of ethical doing and at the same time a necessary means of each ethical doing in general.”79 Husserl thus emphasizes that the philosophical-scientific project cannot be devoid of ethics. Our self-responsibility is a conscious maintenance of a united, ethical self. This life of self-responsibility is the all-pervasive life of philosophy.

Sacrifice We might be inclined to wonder how it is that such an understanding of the ethics of the social realm works in practice. Clearly, there are instances when the goods of individuals come into conflict or even when the goods of one individual conflict. How could Husserl possibly propose to address such conflicts? With respect to the individual, Husserl recognizes, in distinction from his earlier position, that there is no well-ordered hierarchy of goods from

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which one is able to make decisions regarding action. In particular, with respect to one’s vocation, goods are absolute goods that, when in conflict, require sacrifice. The ought of any individual is an absolute ought, but this does not mean that each individual answers to only one absolute ought. The absolute ought sets up a realm of subjective absolute value. This level of absolute value cannot be placed within a hierarchy of values because it is absolute. Each individual, however, is often confronted by more than one absolute value. Each subjective absolute value is equal to every other subjective absolute value. Since these values are not easily located within a hierarchy, and each is absolute, they are bound to come into conflict. When they do so, the subject is faced with the need to sacrifice one absolute value to the other, since one cannot be placed above or below the other. “An individual value is not simply a value in general, that is, under the tacit condition, that a greater value is not in question, a value whose practical feasibility would absorb the lower value in question. Rather, an individual value, a value which exclusively concerns the individuality of the person and the individuality of what is valued, can by no means be absorbed, but only sacrificed.”80 Since this absolute value is related to the absolute ought, we understand that it is related to the personal vocation of any individual. Vocation identifies a realm of love that comes into conflict with another realm of love. Consider the example that Husserl most often uses, that of the love of a mother for her child. The child has absolute value. Yet what of the needs of an aging parent that must be attended to? Clearly, the status of the mother as also herself being a child with a responsibility to her parent places the mother in a position of inner turmoil with the demands of two absolute oughts facing her at once. There is no hierarchy in this situation. Husserl does not say that the responsibility to the child is more important than that to the parent or vice versa. Rather, both are absolute subjective values for the woman. She is faced with choice, which requires the sacrifice of one absolute value to the other. In that choice, she destroys one absolute value through sacrificing it to the other. That does not mean that she must choose absolutely for one or the other. Often she will attempt to accommodate both parents and child, but in so doing, she does sacrifice the absolute value of both, and perhaps at one time she sacrifices the absolute value of one and at another the absolute value of the other. This is the result of the practical working out of the situation, and it is

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inevitably a painful prospect for any individual. Its mark is left on the individual in conflict.81 This relationship of the ego to its absolute ought is one that is not entirely rational. The sacrifice required is not one that is always based upon a rational determination of what is right but upon the absolute love for a realm of value. Again, we see how this stance is different from the position of Husserl’s early ethics that relies upon the rational adherence to a categorical imperative. Husserl has made way for feeling in these later manuscripts. “The rationality in ethical life appears to consist only in the grasping, clarifying, and recognition of this ultimately irrational factum and the consistency with which I, through my willing procure validity for this absolute ought in my life.”82 Husserl has not given up the formalism of his earlier ethics in that he never dismantles his adherence to a categorical imperative of doing the best that is attainable. However, this categorical imperative takes for its material content that which is determined through an absolute ought, which is, of course, different for each individual. Each individual must do the best attainable in accordance with his absolute ought. Otherwise, the identity of the individual would be threatened. This is how the categorical imperative becomes placed within the realm of the lifeworld. The categorical imperative loses its influence as a universal that applies identically to all. Rather, it takes on the character of applying to each individual in preservation of that individual in her individuality. This becomes vitally important when we recognize the role the absolute ought plays in determining values. The absolute ought places a burden upon the individual that requires that he or she make certain decisions not universally upheld as being the best attainable in a situation. Consider, for example, the good of hearing the Boston Symphony Orchestra as opposed to hearing the local high school band in which one’s son or daughter plays. As a mother or father, one’s absolute ought dictates that the better option is to attend the concert of the high school band. There is no objective hierarchy here. Rather, one good is sacrificed to another good based upon the absolute ought. Husserl, of course, is not the only philosopher to attempt a phenomenological account of the ethical community. Many second- and thirdgeneration phenomenologists moved Husserlian phenomenology more deliberately in the direction of communitarian ethics, but interestingly

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most of them developed an ethics or a philosophy of community that either diverges so completely from Husserl that it is difficult to see its genesis in Husserlian phenomenology any longer, or they develop their phenomenological thought along the lines of mundane phenomenology or static phenomenology. Consider on the one hand Levinas, whose account of ethics as first philosophy is avowedly indebted to Husserl, yet as wide as Levinas’s knowledge of Husserl must have been, his comments about Husserl’s philosophy are primarily limited to Husserl’s early works and to his theory of intentionality. Levinas does mention Husserl’s living present but still seems to understand it as something that is for the ego and not necessarily an anonymous foundation of the ego. Thus, he argues that Husserl cannot think of consciousness as possibly being for an Other. Levinas’s own theory of a phenomenological ethics focuses on a sense of the responsibility of the ego for the Other. He addresses himself to ethics in Totality and Infinity and Time and the Other from the standpoint of the ego’s enjoyment of the world that is interrupted by the face of the Other and the demand of the Other. While the Other for Husserl is simultaneous with the ego in the streaming living present, the Other for Levinas cannot be simultaneous. The Other for Levinas precedes me. The experience of the Other is an experience of infinity that cannot be encompassed either in the knowledge of the ego nor in the intentionality of the ego. For Levinas, subjectivity is a product of the relation with the Other where the Other can never be an object of the subject’s consciousness or the result of a constituting act on the part of the ego. He interprets Husserl as assigning the Other a position of being constituted. Levinas in “Language and Proximity” addresses the Husserlian notion of “passive synthesis” to suggest that if it is necessary for the temporalization of the subject, then the subject cannot be completely and fully intentional, since intentionality is activity, not passivity.83 Levinas, then, does seem to have a glimmer of recognition of this genetic phenomenological account that allows Husserl to develop transcendental intersubjectivity, but he seems to resist acknowledging the ramifications of this side of Husserl’s account. Levinas persists in his objection that the Husserlian account of intersubjectivity cannot be an ethics, since it is the reduction of the Other to the same. Levinas instead has developed his account along the lines of the relationship with the Other that begins with sensation. Drawing upon

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s development of the idea of the primacy of the embodied subject, Levinas suggests that sensation requires the embodiment of the subject and the Other for the thematization or signification of a response to the infinite command of the Other. It is a thematization or signification that is not an act of intentionality but is an ethical relation. It is a relation of responsibility. This movement of responsibility founds the ego. Subjectivity is constituted through responding to an Other.84 The Other appears to Husserl’s subject through a sensing that is not intentional, however, and this is an aspect of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology that Levinas misses. The Other is instinctually present to the ego at the level of the streaming living present, as described in chapter 3. This means there is a primal sense of the Other as distinct from my ego that does not depend upon intentionality. What this brief excursus indicates is that there is more agreement between Husserl and Levinas than is usually credited. Levinas’s objections to the Husserlian account of intersubjectivity and therefore ethics depend upon his reading of Husserl’s account of constituted intersubjectivity and do not take into consideration the transcendental intersubjectivity that we have explicated. But further, the ethics that Levinas propounds is one that in many ways is beyond phenomenology. It is not an ethics that provides an explanation of the ethics of community that Husserl is attempting to address. Levinas does not develop such an account out of his conception of intersubjectivity, but the Husserlian notion, precisely because it is grounded in a transcendental intersubjectivity, is not limited to being entirely on the level of constitution. So even though his account is spoken of in terms of a higher order, a founded level of community, because its founding level is transcendental intersubjectivity, the relation to Others at the level of community need not be so contrived. Husserl, then, has not reduced the Other to the same as Levinas insists. He recognizes through the anonymity of the streaming living present, and through the recognition of the ego’s always already being transcendentally intersubjective, that the ego is not primary, is not first, but has a sense of the Other even at this most fundamental, prepredicative level. In considering Levinas’s account, we can see the similarities of indicating that the Other is co-constituting of self. The Other, then, as Husserl claims, has a priority over the ego. Let us turn now to another of the second-generation phenomenolo-

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gists in this consideration of community. Hannah Arendt offers another variation of a phenomenological communitarian ethics that is worth a brief analysis here in its relationship to the Husserlian theory we have unfolded.85 Arendt presents her position in a more loosely phenomenological text, The Human Condition. There she asserts the necessity of intersubjectivity for the appearance of the public realm. And in her later work, The Life of the Mind, she insists upon “plurality as the law of the earth.”86 She wants to insist upon a distinctness of individuals while still assuring a connectedness. Arendt understands the subject to be necessarily engaged with Others. She understands the political to be an ontological element of the subject. She makes it clear in The Life of the Mind that solipsism is a trap that has haunted philosophy and that she intends and hopes to avoid it. Although she does not specifically address this remark against Husserl, it is likely that he is among those she has in mind. Where Arendt conceives of the Husserlian subject as divorced from the world and isolated, she provides her own representation of the subject as intimately wrapped up with the world and always with Others. In her presentation of the three human activities of labor, work, and action, she identifies action as the highest human activity because it is necessarily intersubjective. Action is associated with speech and deeds, each of which requires an Other or community of Others. Work on the other hand is an activity that can be carried out in isolation, and in the case of labor, it is an activity that is carried out even without individuality. It is a species activity.87 Action, however, goes on within the web of human relations.88 Such action for Arendt is associated also with the activity of thought. Action takes place in the public realm, that is the realm of the political, not that of the social. By this Arendt is stressing that the realm of the public/political is the realm where action is intersubjective but where each subject also remains distinct. The public realm is in opposition to the social realm, which is dominated by a necessity for “proper” behavior and conformity that eliminates distinctions. The web of relations and actions that constitute the public realm play an important role in the construction of the who of the ego. The most important element for the subject is its participation in the public realm, where it is fully intersubjective and thus most fully human. In her approach, Arendt relies upon a limited reading of Husserl based primarily on the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, with no real apprecia-

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tion for the wealth of material on intersubjectivity that recognizes the intersubjective nature of the subject itself. But beyond that, Arendt’s own position on the intersubjective nature of the subject fails to provide a very rigorous phenomenological account of how the ego is intersubjective. Being with others is only a derived form of intersubjectivity. For Arendt, although she insists that the ego is intersubjective, this intersubjectivity takes place on a mundane level, in the realm of the public. Husserl, however, has provided an account that recognizes the very intersubjective core of the ego itself, transcendental intersubjectivity. The ego is never alone, isolated for Husserl—the transcendental ego is transcendentally intersubjective. So while Arendt may conceive her own position as moving beyond Husserl’s, she does not stand on the solid ground of intersubjectivity that Husserl does. The ramifications of this for the political or communal sphere are that Husserl recognizes the ego to be always already communal. The higher-order we, then, is not an engagement of the ego in a community that requires stepping beyond the self but is a natural manifestation of who the ego is. One area in which Arendt and Husserl might agree, over against Levinas, is that the possibility of the excellence of the subject, or the fulfilling of the ethical self, can only transpire in the public realm. For Arendt, however, this is due to the fact that it is only in the public realm that one can create one’s individuality as distinct from others, whereas for Husserl the public realm is where one’s vocation can become a vocation for all of humanity, the philosophical vocation of absolute self-responsibility. Another area where Arendt’s analysis might actually shed light on Husserl is with her innovative notion of natality as presented in The Human Condition.89 Arendt argues that natality is a characteristic of labor, work, and action, since these all provide and maintain the world of human experience in its constant newness. Action is most closely associated with natality, however, because the newcomers into the world are capable of beginning something new in their actions in the public realm. The speech and deeds of the political realm are those of distinct individuals who contribute to the newness of that realm. For Arendt, action in the world is the possibility for new birth. My suggestion is that this notion of natality can be loosely paralleled to the ethical responsibility for renewal and critique in Husserl’s thought. The self-responsible subject as a member of the human community can bring newness to the world through critique.

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Two contemporary French philosophers who address the notion of community may shed some light on Husserl’s strengths and weaknesses as well: Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot delineates the options for the conjunction of alterity and community that is not based upon the relation of Same to Same, and he suggests that either there must be a relationship of dissymmetry that could hardly be called “community,” or community must always point to the absence of community.90 In the texts of both Nancy and Blanchot there are references to the “higherorder we” or supraindividuality as a misunderstanding of community. Nancy, for instance, writes in The Inoperative Community, “If community is revealed in the death of others it is because death itself is the true community of I’s that are not egos. It is not a communion that fuses the egos into an Ego or a higher We.”91 Nancy understands the higher We as the Ego writ large, and although he doesn’t mention Husserl by name, it is not unreasonable to think that Husserl might be in the background. Nancy wants to insist that the community is not a project, nor is it productive. It is rather the impossibility of community that is tied to the presentation of birth and death to its members. Again, Nancy claims “it is the presentation of the finitude and the irredeemable excess that make up finite being: its death, but also its birth, and only the community can present me my birth and along with it the impossibility of my reliving it, as well as the impossibility of my crossing over into my death.”92 Nancy has opted for the second of the choices presented by Blanchot and mentioned above. The community is only insofar as it undoes itself. He insists that the rupture between Being and things that are imposes the necessity of relation to Being rather than allowing for the immanence of Being to the things that are. This leads him to claim that Being is community. The question of community then becomes inseparable from the question of Being apprehended as something other than the totality of things that are.93 Blanchot’s position too is critical of a sense of community that understands it as a fusion. He claims in The Unavowable Community that “[t]he community . . . seems to propose itself as a tendency towards a communion, even a fusion, that is to say an effervescence assembling the elements only to give rise to a unity (a supra-individuality) that would expose itself to the same objections arising from the simple consideration of the single individual, locked in his immanence.”94 Again, like Nancy, Blanchot associates the founding of the community with birth and death.

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“There could not be a community without the sharing of that first and last event which in everyone ceases to be able to be just that (birth, death).”95 For Blanchot, being clearly indebted to Levinas, the way to think community is to think of it in terms of a community of lovers. The lovers experience a shared love that “excludes simple mutuality as well as a unity where the Other would blend with the same.”96 The love estranges them from each other as well as from themselves. They are separated in relationship. Blanchot suggests that they are “eternally separated as if death was in them, between them? Not separated, not divided: inaccessible, and in the inaccessible, in an infinite relationship.”97 In describing the community of lovers thus, Blanchot opts for the first of his proposed choices, the dissymmetry that is associated with the sacrifice that founds the community without presence. It is a sacrifice that undoes the community by refusing its presence, by sending those who give themselves to it “back to a solitude which, far from protecting them, disperses or dissipates itself without their finding themselves again or together.”98 That sacrifice is for the Other, for the community, but which is ever returned to itself as insufficient. Those who sacrifice are always thrown back to their solitude. To complete this intersection, we remind ourselves that for Husserl, too, the community with the Other is one that is made apparent precisely because of the subject’s inability to constitute its own birth and its own death. The personal identity of the ego from birth to death requires the community with Others in order that the ego can be constituted as a human being. Without the Other, the ego cannot constitute itself as human. It can only constitute itself as a presently constituting consciousness with a limited past and a limited future. Even the ego that presently constitutes its surrounding world is an already communalized ego in the sense that there is no possibility for constituting the surrounding world outside of an already-inherited tradition that shapes the human ego as a member of a human community. That inheritance places the Other in a certain position of prominence with respect to the ego. What is important for Husserl is the instinctual connection of the ego with the Other or Others, a connection that provides a foundation for a community that has developed across generational boundaries, that is, the community of the higher-order we. What Nancy and Blanchot both object to in this kind of description of community is a sense of immanence achieved through fusion, which is a

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reduction of the other to the same. It eliminates the possibility of singularity as far as Nancy is concerned, and it eliminates the priority of the Other as far as Blanchot is concerned. We must discover, then, whether the kind of community that Husserl means is really a community of immanence. Before proceeding, however, it is important to mention that Nancy, too, has been charged with the “refusal of radical alterity,”99 which would endanger his position on community. Robert Bernasconi has claimed that Nancy has turned his back on the dissymmetry of the relation to the Other through the adherence to an ontology that eliminates the priority of the Other.100 This would mean that even in his attempts to avoid an understanding of community that relies on some sort of fusion, Nancy slips into a disregard for radical alterity by claiming that Being is community. Furthermore, he suggests that the face-to-face relationship is secondary and constituted.101 In so doing, he is unable to escape the community of immanence. Since the same charge has been laid at Husserl’s feet, we must determine whether Husserl is capable of escaping the same fate. Is it possible to understand Husserl’s position as either of the choices laid open by Blanchot? Perhaps by looking further we can understand it as mediating between Nancy and Blanchot, allowing us to still speak of community in its absence while also recognizing the ethical dissymmetrical relation to the Other. In other words, there is a recognition of the impossibility of fusion and a recognition of the always already intersubjective nature of subjectivity that would give a certain priority to the Other, but which would not absorb the Other into the same. Husserl claims that the true self of the ego involves the true self of the Other, thereby necessarily engaging the ego in the community of Others. This does not mean that the individuality of each is absorbed in the higher-order ethical we. Rather, each individual experiences the absolute ought in terms of his responsibility to the Other and the responsibility of the Other for him. This is not unlike Nancy’s position, though the question is raised as to whether the relationship to the Other is secondary and constituted or whether it is more primordial. I would suggest that we can conceive of the relationship to the Other as in some ways both. Since we have a primordial relationship to the Other, we struggle to constitute a mundane relationship to the Other that is ethical. The primordial relationship to the Other is indicated by the subject’s instinctive primal intentionality. There is a certain revelation of a continuity with Others that is the

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result of inheritance and is not unlike the hyletic presence of the world. It is at this most primal level that we can discover the connectedness between the ego and the Other that does not threaten the singularity of each. The Other is for Husserl “constitutionally the intrinsically first,”102 which allows for the subsequent thematized encounter with the Other. It still might be objected that a constituted community runs the risk of the kind of immanence that Blanchot and Nancy find threatening. The immanence of human to human that Nancy discusses at the beginning of his essay is associated for him with totalitarianism. Nancy himself fails to avoid such totalitarianism according to Bernasconi because Nancy conceives of the commonality in Being as one that entails no exclusion. Without exclusion, however, we have another form of totalitarianism. Husserl is able to avoid such totalitarianism on two fronts. In the first instance, Husserl sees the higher-order we as dependent for its identity on its opposition to that which is alien, that which is excluded. He does not absorb the I and all Others into a commonality of Being. In the second instance, within the higher-order we the totalitarian community is protected against precisely in the ability and responsibility of the subject for thought. Renewal and critique is what hedges against the kind of communion that is totalitarian. As he expresses it in Crisis, renewal and critique is “not only to reawaken the chain of thinkers, the social interrelation of their thinking, the community of their thought, and transform it into a living present for us but, on the basis of the total unity thus made present, to carry out a responsible critique, a peculiar sort of critique which has its ground in these historical, personal projects, partial fulfillments, and exchanges of criticism rather than in what is privately taken for granted by the present philosopher.”103 The possibility for critique only arises because of the position of the alien, which is necessary and primordial in the constitution of the lifeworld. One cannot constitute a world in isolation; the lifeworld is always intersubjective and the subject itself is thoroughly indebted to the Other in constituting itself as a subject in the lifeworld. Furthermore, the subject can only displace itself for the Other insofar as it already understands itself as merely having one perspective among others. With the recognition of the possibility of other perspectives comes the possibility of critique. Husserl recognizes that the totalitarianism of the immanence of human to human is to be avoided and trusts that philosophy has a unique

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role with respect to the recognition of what Nancy calls the singularity of being. However, Husserl can perhaps be charged with falling into what Nancy apprehends as the nostalgia for community. For Husserl thinks that the true being of humanity is being toward a telos. The telos of the community of universal, ethical love. It is clear, however, that Husserl does not think such a telos is attainable. The telos is the form of the infinite process, an idea. It is the impossibility of this infinite task of critique that provides for the impossible community. The relationship between the ego and the Other is not secondary or derived. The Other’s alienness is vital to the ego’s self-identity. The ego is who it is because its absolute ought is different from that of Others, just as the community to which it belongs is only a community in opposition to another community. Every community depends upon difference from others. But equally, the absolute ought does not eliminate the difference within our community. One cannot overlook that the process of renewal and critique partially depends on the confrontation with the community of Others, the alien. For it is in such confrontation with the Other that we are given access to a position from which to critique our own community. The true community is never reified, for it is constantly in a state of change as the members change, as the others over against it change, as critique is carried out. It remains always open in recognition of its indebtedness to the Other and its responsibility for critique. This brief gloss makes it possible to suggest that given the two prongs of Blanchot’s dilemma, it is preferable to land somewhere in between. What Husserl provides is precisely what allows for the possibility of the impossible community. It is impossible only because critique is an infinite task that makes community an infinite task. It is critique that resists the totalization of communion, and it is critique, then, in which we are all involved. It is another way of allowing the present to be disrupted by that which is alien. It is an openness to the Other that brings the self again into question.

c. CONCLUSION By looking first at Husserl’s early ethical theories, we can see more clearly the major contributions that his later ethics can make. The static phenomenological method focuses on acts of consciousness through

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which valuing takes place and recognizes the noesis/noema structure in those acts. Its emphasis is on immanent experience that has unchanging objects of perception as its content. It attempts to achieve a universal objectivity for ethical choices. When Husserl supplements this with the genetic phenomenological method, he is able to move beyond this oversimplified matter-form schema. He is no longer tied into a categorical imperative with a material a priori. Instead, he is able to come to grips with the sedimentation of sense and habitualities that affect the givenness of the lifeworld. By recognizing the genetic development of the ego, he can begin to investigate the prepredicative constitution and passive association that help to account for the world of cultural traditions in which the ego finds itself. This approach is vital for the recognition of the role of renewal and critique to ethical life. The human being as a being of reason and emotion and realms of value is accommodated, rather than shut out, by this theory. Not only was Husserl able to provide an ethical theory that takes account of the feelings and emotions of individuals, but also he was able to provide a theory that allows for the tolerance and appreciation of multiplicity within a community founded on a teleological notion of universal ethical love. In addition, Husserl shows us that the process of laying bare the origins of social tradition and habits places us in the position to critically analyze those traditions and habits and allows us to consider the renewal that might be necessary in our own society. Unless one is able to talk of the origin of the ego, and its inherited traditions, one is not in a position to be able to critique those positions. The genetic approach to ethics gives us a way to think about the relationship of each individual to her community that preserves the plurality without doing away with an understanding of the community as an ethical whole. Each individual who participates in the higher-order we is itself a whole with a responsibility to the larger whole, but not a responsibility that requires of him any relinquishing of freedom. The encounter between one community and the other is, as we saw, one that is fundamental to the development of the higher-order ethical we. By allowing for the preservation of each individual absolute ought, Husserl has offered us a way to see the community as a unity of multiplicity. It is not a view of the ethical community that could have been achieved through static phenomenology alone. Husserl himself acknowledges that this is a project that requires genetic phenomenology. It is an approach that “is not to be understood

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statically, but rather dynamically-genetically.” The dynamism preserves the sense of becoming that is constitutive of both rigorous science and genuine humanity. The genetic phenomenological method appropriately provides room for that dynamic becoming thus providing genuine humanity “with a horizon of wide grown values and value elevation— thus also the community structuring itself and appropriating its idea.”104

d. NOTES 111. Czeslaw Milosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982), p. 4. 112. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), part 1, p. 2. 113. Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), ed. T. Nenon and H. R. Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), p. 95. Hereafter referred to as Hua XXVII. 114. See Ullrich Melle, “The Development of Husserl’s Ethics,” Études Phénoménologiques, nos. 13–14 (1991): 115–35. 115. See Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (1908–1914), ed. Ullrich Melle (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 3–4: Geht man nun den Parallelen von Logik und Ethik nach bzw. der Parallele der Akt- und Vernunftarten, auf welche diese Disziplinen wesentlich zurückbezogen sind, der urteilenden Vernunft auf der einen Seite, der praktischen Vernunft auf der anderen, so drängt sich der Gedanke auf, daß nun auch der Logik in dem bestimmt und eng begrenzten Sinn einer formalen Logik als Parallele entsprechen muß eine in analogem Sinn formale und ebenfalls apriorische Praktik. Ähnliches gilt für die Parallel mit der wertenden Vernunft, und zwar der wertenden im weitesten Sinn und nicht etwa der bloß ästhetisch wertenden. Das führt auf die Idee einer aus Wesensgründen mit der formalen Praktik innig verflochtenen formalen Axiologie als apriorisch formaler Disziplin von Werten bzw. Wertinhalten und Wertbedeutungen. Hereafter referred to as Hua XXVIII. 116. Franz Brentano, The Foundation and Construction of Ethics, trans. E. Schneewind (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), p. 121. 117. Ibid., p. 132. 118. Ibid., p. 134. 119. Ibid., p. 135. 110. Melle, “Development of Husserl’s Ethics,” p. 119.

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111. Husserl, Hua XXVIII, p. 221. 112. Ibid., p. 220: “Denken wir uns objektiv bestimmt die Gesamtheit der überhaupt für das Willenssubjekt bestehenden Realisierbarkeiten, dann ergibt sich nach dem Gesetz der Wertabsorption der Minderwerte durch die Höherwerte und nach den zugehörigen anderen Gesetzen, daß ein Gutes da ist, das objektiv den absoluten Vorzug hat, ja das einzigen absoluten praktischen Wert hat. Es ist dasjenige, das den praktischen Wert aller übrigen absorbiert und selbst nicht absorbiert ist.” 113. Melle, “Development of Husserl’s Ethics,” p. 122. 114. Husserl, Hua XXVIII, p. 421: “Ein Beispiel wäre etwa: Die Werte, die wir als ‘sinnliche’ bezeichnen, sind neben Werten der ‘geistigen’ Stufe, den ‘höheren’ Werten, Nullen, sofern sie nicht Vorbedingungswerte für diese sind. Aber nein, das geht doch nicht. Haben wir zwei ‘gleich’ geistige Werte, so gibt die Verbundenheit mit sinnlichen Werten doch einen Überschlag des Gewichts. Nur in der diesbezüglichen Wahl werden sinnliche von den höheren absorbiert.” 115. John Drummond explains it thus: “regardless of the differences which might exist between different material conceptions of the good, our moral activity aims at the ends mandated by the categorical imperative: rational (consistent), free (actively achieved rather than passively received), insightful (true) thinking and willing. This good presents itself as one which is instantiated in all other goods but which is nevertheless consistent with the insightful identification of different, true material goods” (“The ‘Spiritual’ World: The Personal, the Social, and the Communal,” in Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, ed. Tom Nenon and Lester Embree [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996], p. 250). 116. For more on this distinction, see John Drummond, “Moral Objectivity: Husserl’s Sentiments of the Understanding,” Husserl Studies 12 (1995): 165–83. See also Melle, “Development of Husserl’s Ethics,” p. 118. 117. The notion of the categorical imperative is usually most closely associated with Kant. Husserl understands Kant’s categorical imperative as formulated in the Critique of Practical Reason as restricting Kant from taking into account the relationship between feeling and reason. Husserl wants to be able to accommodate feeling and emotion within his ethical theory. The pure form of universal legislation that Kant’s categorical imperative entails preserves the freedom of the individual, since it is determined through practical reason, but it makes way for only one type of feeling, i.e., the feeling of respect for the law, which engenders moral action. Husserl sees this as an extreme form of rationalism that can lead to unsensing and self-immoral consequences. For more on this, see Ullrich Melle’s introduction to Husserl, Hua XXVIII, p. xx. 118. See manuscripts from the early 1920s, F1 24, p. 75a, and B I 21, p. 61a. For further references to Nachlass texts, see Husserl, Hua XXVIII, pp. xlvi–xlviii. 119. It is important to recognize at the outset that Husserl’s theory is by no means complete. He was never satisfied enough with his account to publish it, nor is there even necessarily a unified theory that deserves the name of Husserl’s ethics. I have tried here to draw together as much as Husserl had to say on the issue in order to give an indication of his theory in its incompleteness. The textual support provided in this section is adequate to give such an indication but does not eliminate all the shortcomings or ambiguities.

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120. See the helpful analysis of Fichte’s influence in Melle, “Development of Husserl’s Ethics.” 121. Husserl, Hua XXVII, pp. 3–124. 122. Edmund Husserl, B I 21, p. 53b, as quoted in Melle, “Development of Husserl’s Ethics,” p. 131. 123. Husserl, F I 28, p. 199a: “von nun ab in allen seinen Akten und mit seinem gesamten Erlebnisgehalt so leben, daß es mein bestmögliches Leben sei, mein bestmögliches, das heißt, das bestmögliche, das ich kann. . . . Das Sollen ist Korrelat des Wollens, und zwar eines vernünftigen Wollens, das Gesollte ist die Willenswahrheit.” 124. Brentano’s continued influence is evident here. Husserl insists that vocation depends upon this feeling of love just as Brentano suggests that ethical decisions depend upon the feeling of preference (as was explained above). Yet Husserl does not suggest that this love creates an objective value. It remains always closely aligned with the individual’s identity. 125. Husserl, Hua XXVII, p. 118. 126. Ibid., p. 59: “auf einzelne, auf Gruppen und auf die Allheit der Menschen bezogen sein: So soll überhaupt jeder sich verhalten, speziell jeder Soldat, jeder Priester, etc.” 127. Ibid., p. 29: “Versuchen wir zunächst die ethische Lebensform als eine (apriorische) Wesensgestaltung möglichen Menschenlebens genetisch, d.i. aus der zu ihr aus Wesensgründen hinleitenden Motivation zu entwickeln.” 128. Ibid., p. 6: “rationalen Wissenschaft vom Menschen und der menschlichen Gemeinschaft, welche eine Rationalität im sozialen, im politischen Handeln und eine rationale politische Technik begründen würde, fehlt es durchaus.” 129. Husserl, F I 28, p. 37b: Inmitten der allgemeinen Geistesentwicklung der Menschheit, inmitten der Gestaltungen der Sitte, des Rechtes, des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitslebens, der Religion und schließlich der allgemeinen Sprache, in der sich zugleich alle anderen geistigen Gebilde widerspiegeln, hat sich auch das ethische Leben der Menschheit entwickelt. Seine Grundvorstellung, seine Normen sind in diesem Zusammenhang natürlich-naiv erwachsen, sind zu Bestandstücken der allgemeinen Tradition geworden, in die jede neue Generation hineinwächst, die sie als ihre natürliche und vorgegebene geistige Umwelt vorfindet. Der Ethik als Wissenschaft geht selbstverständlich also das Ethische in Gestalt solcher traditioneller Lebensnormierung voran. Es steht dem einzelnen als ein Objektives, als ein fraglos Gegebenes da. Und so bleibt es von Generation zu Generation, ohne daß man überhaupt darauf verfällt, über die letzten Rechtsgründe der in den mannigfachen konkreten Regeln ausgesprochenen Forderungen nachzudenken, sie in Frage zu stellen, sie zum theoretischen Thema zu machen. 130. Husserl, E III 4, p. 20, as quoted in James Hart, Person and the Common Life: Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics (The Hague: Kluwer, 1992), p. 344.

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131. It is interesting to note that Husserl’s understanding of the humanity of a higher order that is founded upon universal ethical love is very much like the Russian idea of sobornost, which was prevalent in the 1840s and 1850s within the Slavophile movement. Husserl may have been familiar with this notion through his contact with the Russian scholars Shestov and Shpet, with whom he engaged in philosophical discussion both in person and through correspondence. For his correspondence with Shestov and Shpet, see Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, Teil 6 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994). 132. Husserl, Crisis, pp. 139/136. 133. Husserl, F I 28, p. 199b: “von nun ab in allen seinen Akten und mit seinem gesamten Erlebnisgehalt so leben, daß es mein bestmögliches Leben sei, mein bestmögliches, das heißt, das bestmögliche, das ich kann.” 134. Husserl, Hua XXVII, p. 22. “Die Gemeinschaft ist eine personale, sozusagen vielköpfige und doch verbundene Subjektivität. Ihre Einzelpersonen sind ihre ‘Glieder,’ funktionell miteinander verflochten durch vielgestaltige, Person mit Person geistig einigende ‘soziale Akte’ (Ich-Du-Akte; Befehle, Verabredungen, Liebestätigkeiten usw).” 135. Ibid.: “in wirklicher Analogie zum ethischen Einzelleben verstanden.” 136. Husserl’s acknowledgment of this disanalogy is quoted in the previous chapter. He claims that “The common, connected personality as ‘subject’ of the common accomplishment is on the one hand analogous to an individual subject, but on the other hand not merely analogous” (Hua XIV, p. 200). 137. Husserl, F I 24, p. 128, as quoted in Hart, Person and the Common Life. 138. Husserl, Hua XXVII, p. 119. 139. Husserl, F I 28, p. 320: “Wir ahnen auch, daß sich infolge davon über allen Einzelindividualitäten in ihrer echten Selbstliebe und ihrer echten Nächstenliebe wölbt die Idee einer sozialen Individualität als einer Individualität höherer Ordnung: oder besser die Menschengemeinschaft hat über sich in ähnlicher Weise eine individuelle Idee wie das einzelne Ich: die individuelle Idee der wahren Menschengemeinschaft und eines wahren Menschheitslebens in Gemeinschaft, die wie für das singuläre Menschenindividuum sein absolutes Sollen ausmacht” (as quoted in Alois Roth, Edmund Husserls ethische Untersuchungen [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960], p. 119). 140. Husserl, F I 24, pp. 132–33, as quoted in Hart, Person and the Common Life, p. 438. 141. Husserl, Hua XXVII, pp. 28–34. 142. Husserl, C17, p. 84b: “Das endliche Ich in der Verkettung seiner Generation, die Generationsunendlichkeit. Die Urtradition der Zeugung. Die Zeugenden ihr individuelles Sein tradierend ins erzeugte Individuum. Tradition in der Vergemeinschaftung der wachen Individuen. Was mir eigen ist, prägt sich anderen ein. Deckung der Individuen, assoziative Verschmelzungsprodukte in den Einzelnen und Ineinandertragen des Eigenen und der Fremden. So in der vortraditionellen Tradition. ‘Vererbung ursprünglich generative’ und Vererbung der gewöhnlichen Tradition, historisch. Alles Assoziation, Deckung ist Sinnübertragung.” 143. Husserl, Hua XXVII, p. 53. 144. It has also been suggested by Philip Buckley that Husserl sees mathematicians

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as a model to follow. See R. Philip Buckley, “Husserl’s Göttingen Years and the Genesis of a Theory of Community,” in Reinterpreting the Political, ed. Lenore Langsdorf and Stephen Watson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 39–50. 145. Husserl, Hua XXVII, p. 46: “Im sozialen Verhältnis sieht er, daß der andere, soweit er Guter ist, auch für ihn ein Wert ist, nicht ein bloß nützlicher Wert, sondern ein Wert in sich; er hat also ein reines Interesse an der ethischen Selbstarbeit des anderen.” 146. Husserl, F I 24, p. 69b: “Was du wünschst, wünsche ich, was du erstrebst, ist auch von mir erstrebt, was du willst, will auch ich, in deinem Leiden leide ich und du in meinem, in deiner Freude habe ich meine Freude usw.” 147. Husserl writes, “As I love the individual human who ‘takes the trouble to strive’ and as I, in loving him, love the idea of the Good, his good in him, so it is for humanity” (E III 4, p. 20, as quoted in Hart, Person and the Common Life, p. 344). 148. Philip Buckley, “Husserl’s Notion of Authentic Community,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1992): 226. See also Philip Buckley, Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992). 149. Husserl, E III 5, as translated by Marly Biemel, “Universal Teleology,” in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. P. McCormick and F. A. Elliston (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 337. 150. Husserl is in agreement with Kant here in the sense that the movement toward the telos, toward the infinite Idea is an endless, rationally oriented process. Both philosophers think this infinite ideal is not a curse. It is not some desperately longed for and never achieved aim. It is rather that which leads us on, pulls us toward the ideal in its totality and openness. The ethical telos, the community of humanity, has a regulative function for each individual. 151. Biemel, “Universal Teleology,” p. 335. 152. For a sense of how the ideal higher-order we is associated with God, see Hart, Person and the Common Life. Also, consider Husserl, Hua XV, p. 610: “Gott ist das Monadenall nicht selbst, sondern die in ihm liegende Entelechie, als Idee des unendlichen Entwicklungstelos, des der ‘Menschheit’ aus absoluter Vernunft, als notwendig das monadische Sein regelnd, und regelnd aus eigener freier Entscheidung. Diese als intersubjektive ist ein sich notwendig ausbreitender Prozess, ohne den, trotz der notwendig dazugehörigen Verfallsvorkommnisse, das universale Sein eben nicht sein kann etc.” 153. Husserl, C2, p. 23a: “Aber das Ich ist nur im Wir, und notwendig wird das ‘Wir’ in unendlicher Relativität und in gemeinschaftlicher, in der Weite der Wir-Bildung fortschreitender Vergemeinschaftung zu einem allpersonalen Wir, das echtes Wir sein will. Ein bloßes Korrelat ist aber die wahrhaft seiende, wahrhaft und für immer und für jedermann identische Welt. Seiende Welt in Unendlichkeit ist konstruktive Antizipation und voreilig idealisiert. Sie ist nicht wirklich, sie ist nur unendliches Telos unserer Freiheit.” 154. Ibid. 155. Husserl, Crisis, pp. 71/70. 156. Ibid., pp. 72/71. 157. This usage of the “realm of ends” is clear reference to Kant’s idea of the kingdom of ends as present in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. There Kant

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claims that the realm of ends is a community of human beings who are ends in themselves. It is a union of rational beings who recognize all other rational beings as ends in themselves. Common objective laws can be established on this basis. Each rational being understands himself or herself as a legislator of and subject to the common laws. Husserl agrees with Kant in suggesting that the community of humanity is the telos of each individual, and as telos it remains always an infinite horizon. It serves as a regulative ideal. 158. Husserl, C17, p. 82b: “Die Phänomenologie mag enthüllen eine universale, absolute Teleologie, zu der das notwendige Erwachen der teleologischen Idee des Menschen in seiner Bewußtseinsbezogenheit auf ein Reich absoluter teleologischer Einstimmigkeit (Reich der Zwecke) . Aber die absolute Teleologie ist nicht ein Zug der vorgegebenen Welt als solcher, ist nie etwas ‘schon Seiendes’ und im schon Seienden der Weltlichkeit vorgezeichnete, abhebbare, als Form induktiver Zukunft notwendige Strukturform.” 159. Husserl, Crisis, pp. 73/72. 160. Ibid., pp. 73/71. 161. Ibid., pp. 73/71–72. 162. Husserl, Hua XXVII, p. 64. 163. Husserl, Crisis, pp. 15/17. Emphasis is Husserl’s. 164. For further explanation of the different kinds of rationality present in Husserl’s analysis, see R. Philip Buckley, “Husserl’s Rational ‘Liebesgemeinschaft,’” Research in Phenomenology 26 (1996): 116–29. 165. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, pp. 245–46/278. 166. Buckley, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility, p. 136 ff. 167. Husserl, “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” trans. Q. Lauer, in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. P. McCormick and F. A. Elliston (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 188. 168. Ibid., p. 187. 169. Ibid. 170. Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 382/373. 171. Ibid. 172. Ibid., pp. 383/375. 173. Ibid. 174. Ibid. 175. Husserl, Hua XV, pp. 146, 166–67. 176. Husserl, Hua XXVII, p. 32: “Der Mensch, der schon im Bewußtsein seines Vermögens der Vernunft lebt, weiß sich danach verantwortlich für das Rechte und Unrechte in allen seinen Tätigkeiten, mögen es Erkenntnistätigkeiten oder Tätigkeiten des Wertens oder auf reales Wirken absehenden Handelns sein.” 177. Ibid., p. 46: “Es gehört also zu meinem echt menschlichen Leben, daß ich nicht nur mich als Guten, sondern die gesamte Gemeinschaft als eine Gemeinschaft Guter wün-

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schen und, soweit ich kann, in meinen praktischen Willens-, Zweckkreis nehmen muß. Ein wahrer Mensch sein ist ein wahrer Mensch sein wollen und beschließt in sich, Glied einer ‘wahren’ Menschheit sein wollen oder die Gemeinschaft, der man angehört, als eine wahre wollen, in den Grenzen praktischer Möglichkeit.” 178. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, pp. 247/279. 179. Husserl, F I 29, p. 6a, as quoted in Melle, “Development of Husserl’s Ethics,” p. 127. 180. Husserl, E III 9, p. 33a, as quoted in Melle, “Development of Husserl’s Ethics,” p. 132. 181. It is interesting to consider whether there is any responsibility on the part of the community for the resolution of these kinds of conflict? As far as I know, Husserl never addressed this. 182. Melle, “The Development of Husserl’s Ethics, p. 134. 183. Emmanuel Levinas, “Language and Proximity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1987). 184. Kelly Oliver, “The Gestation of the Other in Phenomenology,” Epoche 3 (1995): 79–116. 185. For an account of Arendt compared to the more common reading of Husserl, see Margaret Betz Hull, “A Progression of Thought and the Primacy of Interaction,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30 (1999): 207–28. 186. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind—Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 19. 187. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 97. 188. Ibid., p. 182. 189. Ibid., pp. 177–78. 190. Robert Bernasconi draws particular attention to this passage from Blanchot in “On Deconstructing Nostalgia for Community within the West: The Debate between Nancy and Blanchot,” Research in Phenomenology 23 (1993): 3–21. 191. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 15. 192. Ibid. 193. Ibid., p. 6 194. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988), pp. 6–7. 195. Ibid., p. 9. 196. Ibid., p. 43. 197. Ibid. 198. Ibid., p. 15. 199. See Bernasconi, “On Deconstructing Nostalgia for Community within the West,” pp. 3–21. 100. Ibid. 101. Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 105.

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102. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, pp. 153/124. 103. Husserl, Crisis, pp. 73/71–72. 104. Husserl, Hua XXVII, pp. 55–56: “alles nicht statisch, sondern dynamischgenetisch zu verstehen ist. Strenge Wissenschaft ist nicht objektives Sein, sondern Werden einer idealen Objektivität; und ist wesensmäßig nur im Werden, so ist auch die Idee der echten Humanität und ihrer Selbstgestaltungsmethode nur im Werden. So wie das Werden der Wissenschaft, sowie sie die Stufe der echten Wissenschaft, des wahren Logos erklommen hat, ein Werdenssystem absoluter Werte ist und in jeder Stufe schon realisierter absoluter Wert—nur mit einem Horizont weiterer Wertzuwüchse und Werterhebungen—so auch die sich selbst gestaltende und ihre Idee sich zueignende Gemeinschaft.”

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CONCLUSION

X THE IMPACT OF GENETIC PHENOMENOLOGY

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he picture of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology that has been elaborated here is necessary to fully appreciate the richness of Husserl’s contribution to philosophy. Many second- and third-generation phenomenologists, as well as many critical theorists and deconstructionists, have engaged with Husserl’s static phenomenological method alone and have thereby detracted from a complete understanding of the range of Husserl’s thought. By providing an explication of the development of Husserl’s thought from the static method to the genetic method, this study has given full recognition to the later writings, which allow for much more complex theories of the subject, intersubjectivity, temporality, and ethics. The genetic phenomenological method as a supplement to the static phenomenological method makes possible many vital aspects of Husserlian philosophy. Genetic phenomenology as a philosophical method is a rich and productive approach to the philosophical project because of its capacity to incorporate the development of the subject with the development of the communal understanding of the surrounding world. When Husserl ushered in the phenomenological method at the turn of the twentieth century, he brought to bear an entirely new way of thinking about the relationship of the subject to its world. No longer were philosophers faced with the barren choice between empiricism and idealism. From that

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beginning, Husserl, in his constant rethinking and rewriting, was able to appreciate the limitations of his own project. The legacy left to us by the later Husserl is a method endowed with the flexibility to understand the cultural and historical fluctuations of meaning and the ever-changing relationship between the individual and its surrounding world. It is a method capable of providing an explanation of transcendental intersubjectivity and thereby paving the way for an ethical theory endowed with a complex understanding of the ethical subject. The philosopher of the genetic phenomenological method has a unique relationship to her surrounding world. Equipped with the apparatus for investigating the many sedimented layers of meaning as they come down through generations, we are offered an insight to meaning that the static formal method could not have provided. The genetic method allows us to inquire back after the genesis of such notions as temporality, intersubjectivity, values, and community. Because of that insight, we are in the position of having something appropriate and meaningful to say about the Other, time, community, and ethics. Throughout this study, we have repeatedly seen how the development of genetic phenomenology makes possible a way of thinking that static phenomenology lacks. It makes possible the exploration of the streaming living present as the deepest level of time consciousness. At this prephenomenal level there is a transcendental unity prior to any particular articulated consciousness. The implications arising from this discovery are important although not without paradox. The ego has an ambiguous relationship to the streaming living present, being both prior to and contained by the stream. It is in fact the ego pole that acts as foundation for the transcendental ego. The ego pole is anonymous, both passive and active, and prior to the self-reflective individuation of any concrete ego. The co-constituted monads that emerge from this level make up a transcendental level of intersubjectivity not found in Husserl’s thought prior to the development of genetic phenomenology. It might be argued that Husserl should be faulted for reducing the Other to the same. This would rob the Other of its radical alterity, which is absolutely fundamental for an ethical relationship. However, Husserl is not so vulnerable to this criticism as it might at first seem. By providing an explanation of the streaming living present where the I and the Other are indistinguishable at the deepest, transcendental level, Husserl is not

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making a claim that the concrete I and the concrete Other are indistinguishable. The issue is critical, however. Why in fact is it seen as so problematic at the transcendental level to suggest a certain coincidence between the I and the Other? The ethical relationship is enhanced rather than threatened by this claim. If there were no coincidence between the I and the Other at the transcendental level, not the concrete level, then how could any relationship be forged at all? As an ethical agent, I am not inclined to treat a rock or an automobile in any ethical manner. My relationship with those items is based upon utility. They are not like me and cannot be like me. We share no time consciousness, no sedimented lifeworld, no level of meaning. A rock does not enjoy time consciousness; it is not coincident with the ego in the streaming living present. It is precisely because we share a commonality at the deepest level of time that I am called to behave ethically toward the Other. My ethical behavior toward the Other, in Husserl’s perspective, is one that does not reduce the Other to my projects but upholds the Other’s projects as having the same dignity and value as my own. Husserl’s own explanation of transcendental intersubjectivity bears out this interpretation. Once again, it is genetic phenomenology that makes the more complex and successful investigation of transcendental intersubjectivity possible. His account of intersubjectivity as presented through the static phenomenological method, and in the transitional Fifth Cartesian Meditation, is highly problematic. The static phenomenological method, as an egological account of intersubjectivity, is unable to reveal the temporal development of the social sphere. His main concern in his early works on intersubjectivity is with the question of empathy as a response to the problem of other minds. Such a question arises because of his Cartesian method of bracketing the world and concerning himself with consciousness. The formal structure of this method limits it to a foundation of absolute consciousness, which cannot explain or accommodate plurality. We have seen how Husserl became critical of Theodor Lipps’s approach to empathy as being too focused on the body of the Other. Lipps had argued that the ego understands the Other through a process of projection. It is clear that this theory lacks the depth and complexity of the later genetic theory. By supplementing static phenomenology with genetic phenomenology, Husserl opens up a new realm of investigation that makes possible

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an exploration of instinct, habituality, and the community of monads. Unless the ego has a developmental understanding of itself, the introduction of such issues as instinct and habituality simply do not make sense. Only in inquiring back after origins can the ego become aware of the cross-generational intersubjectivity that is vital for Husserl’s later ethics. We begin to understand that the presence of the Other is prior to the I when we realize that we inherit from Others some of our first ethical convictions. Through the analysis of passive genesis and the production of habitualities, we are able to see that the taking up of positions by the ego is not necessarily generated by the ego alone. The ego adopts positions on the basis of its preexisting culture. Those positions evolve into habits, thus providing an identity for the ego. The instinctual connection of the ego with the Other(s) lays the groundwork for the higher-order we that takes on an identity of its own. This permits us to raise the ethical questions of the ego’s relationship to its traditions and to Others either within or outside of those traditions. Without the possibility of investigating such issues as instinct, habituality, the higher-order we, and the theme of vocation, Husserl would not have been able to develop his later thinking on ethics. In juxtaposing his early ethics with his later ethics, we came to see the importance of the genetic phenomenological method in providing the more nuanced and human approach to ethics that we find in his later work. Genetic phenomenology allows Husserl to provide an account of the inheritance of traditions while maintaining the necessary independence of an ethical subject capable of renewal and critique. The vocation of the individual sets up for him an absolute ought. The absolute ought is not something that can be determined in isolation from a community but is of necessity something that ties the individual to a community or communities. The sense of vocation can only be determined within a community. Thus, the absolute ought is one that cannot exclude the absolute ought of the Other. The true self of a community is intimately connected to the true self of the individual. This results in what is described as universal ethical love. This is a love that the ego freely gives. Again, this theme could not have been established without genetic phenomenology, which allows an understanding of the Other as prior and not derived from the ego. In addition, the conception of the telos of the individual and the telos of a community requires the genetic phenomenological characteristic of inquiring back.

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Inquiring about the sedimentation of the teleological beginning is necessary in order to lay bare the origins of social traditions and habits and in order to renew that telos in our own community. But this should not be done in an uncritical way. Renewal and critique are the requirements of every self-responsible individual. Such a reaction to the role of the individual can only be supported by genetic phenomenology, since it is genetic phenomenology that is capable of opening up the streaming living present as a realm where the ego is with others and where the transference of tradition from other generations takes place. Husserl provides a way to think about ethical convictions and an apparatus for critique of the living traditions witnessed in our communities. Because of his development of genetic phenomenology, Husserl has been able to present a method that makes philosophy dramatically responsive to both the desire to uphold traditions and the need to brave something new. The phenomenological method can serve as a model for philosophical thinking. Its portrayal of the human being and its relationship to the human community can provide a way to think without giving up our ethical positions with respect to our traditions and our communities. The self-responsibility that Husserl demands of the philosophical community indicates a way to address philosophical crisis. The development of this theme puts philosophy in the position to face the human questions that give it relevance for human existence.

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here both German and English translations of texts are listed, entries are alphabetical according to the German text, with the English translation immediately following. Aguirre, Antonio. Genetische Phänomenologie und Reduktion. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970. de Almeida, G. A. Sinn und Inhalt der genetischen Phänomenologie E. Husserls. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. ———. The Life of the Mind—Thinking. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Bachelard, Susan. A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Bernasconi, Robert. “On Deconstructing Nostalgia for Community within the West: The Debate between Nancy and Blanchot.” Research in Phenomenology 23 (1993): 3–21. Bernet, Rudolf, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach. An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Bernet, Rudolf. “Is the Present Ever Present? Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence.” Research in Phenomenology 12 (1982): 85–112. ———. “Presence and Absence of Meaning: Husserl and Derrida on the Crisis of (the) Present Time.” Paper presented at the Third Annual Symposium of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, “Phenomenology of Temporality: Time and Language.” Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1987, pp. 33–64. ———. “Perception as a Teleological Process of Cognition.” Analecta Husserliana 9 (1979): 119–32.

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Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988. Bourgeois, Patrick. “The Instant and the Living Present: Ricoeur and Derrida Reading Husserl.” Philosophy Today 37, no. 1 (1993): 31–37. Brand, Gerd. Welt, Ich und Zeit. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955. Brentano, Franz. The Foundation and Construction of Ethics, translated by Elizabeth Schneewind. New York: Humanities Press, 1973. Brough, John. “The Emergence of an Absolute Consciousness in Husserl’s Early Writings on Time-Consciousness.” Man and World 5 (1972): 298–326. ———. “Husserl and the Deconstruction of Time.” Review of Metaphysics 46 (1993): 503–36. ———. “Temporality and the Presence of Language: Reflections on Husserl’s Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness.” Paper presented at the Third Annual Symposium of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, “Phenomenology of Temporality: Time and Language.” Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1987, pp. 1–32. Buckley, Philip. “Husserl’s Göttingen Years and the Genesis of a Theory of Community.” Reinterpreting the Political, edited by Lenore Langsdorf and Stephen H. Watson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998, pp. 39–50. ———. “Husserl’s Notion of Authentic Community.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1992): 213–27. ———. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992. ———. “Husserl’s Rational ‘Liebesgemeinschaft.’” Research in Phenomenology 26 (1996): 116–29. Cairns, Dorion. Conversations with Husserl and Fink. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976. ———. A Guide for Translating Husserl. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Carr, David. Interpreting Husserl: Critical and Comparative Studies. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1987. ———. “The ‘Fifth Meditation’ and Husserl’s Cartesianism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34 (1973): 14–35. ———. Phenomenology and the Problem of History. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974. ———. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Cobb-Stevens, Richard. “Being and Categorial Intuition.” Review of Metaphysics 44 (1990): 43–66. ———. Husserl and Analytic Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990. Dallery, Arleen, and Charles Scott, eds. Crises in Continental Philosophy. New York: State University of New York Press, 1990. Dastur, Françoise. “Finitude and Repetition in Husserl and Derrida.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 32 (1994): 113–30. Davies, Paul. “Commentary: Being Faithful to Impossibility.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 32 (1994): 19–25.

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DeBoer, Theodore. The Development of Husserl’s Thought, translated by Theodore Plantinga. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, translated by John P. Leavy. Stony Brook, NY: Nicholas Hays, 1978. ———. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, translated by David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. ———. Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Diemer, Alwin. Edmund Husserl. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1956. Donohoe, Janet. “The Nonpresence of the Living Present: Husserl’s Time Manuscripts.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (2000): 221–30. ———. “Genetic Phenomenology and the Husserlian Account of Ethics.” Philosophy Today 47 (2003): 160–75. Drummond, John, and James Hart, eds. The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996. ———. “The ‘Spiritual’ World: The Personal, the Social, and the Communal.” In Issues in Husserl’s “Ideas II,” edited by Tom Nenon and Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996, pp. 237–54. ———. “Moral Objectivity: Husserl’s Sentiments of the Understanding.” Husserl Studies 12 (1995): 165–83. Elliston, Frederick, and Peter McCormick, eds. Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977. ———. Husserl: Shorter Works. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Farber, Marvin. The Foundation of Phenomenology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943. Fichte, J. G. The Way Towards the Blessed Life or The Doctrine of Religion, translated by William Smith. London: Trübner & Co., 1889. ———. The Vocation of Man, translated by William Smith. Chicago: The Great Books Foundation, 1960. Føllesdal, Dagfinn. “Husserl’s Notion of Noema.” Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 680–87. Gadamer, Hans Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics, translated by David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Gasché, Rodolphe. “On Re-presentation, or Zigzagging with Husserl and Derrida.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 32 (1994): 1–18. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Hart, James. The Person and the Common Life. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992. ———, and Lester Embree, eds. Phenomenology of Values and Valuing. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. ———. “Entelechy in Transcendental Phenomenology: A Sketch of the Foundations of

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X INDEX absolute ought, 128, 129–45, 149, 157–59, 166, 168, 169, 182 absorption, 104, 141 law of, 124 value, 124 Aguirre, Antonio, 14 alterity, 108–109, 164, 166, 180 analogy, 62, 75–76, 82–83, 120, 121, 136 empathic, 44 appresentation, 82, 83, 97 Arendt, Hannah, 103, 162, 163 Aristotle, 113n53 association, 60, 83, 87–89, 97 passive, 64, 83, 128, 132, 137, 140, 169 primal, 87 axiology, 120–26 Bernasconi, Robert, 166, 167 Bernet, Rudolf, 16n1, 19 birth, 101–103, 163–65 Blanchot, Maurice, 12, 164–68 body, 34, 73, 75, 81–83, 98, 101, 181 Boehm, Rudolf, 50 Brentano, Franz, 44–46, 121–23, 127–28 Brough, John, 67n24 Buckley, Philip, 143

Carr, David, 14, 111n16 Cartesian, 14, 71, 86, 100, 181 Meditation, Fifth, 13, 73, 79–86, 101, 162, 181 way, 13 categorical imperative, 120, 123–30, 159, 169 cognitive science, 13 community, 84–89, 93, 99, 101–109, 120, 127–51, 155–70, 180–83 alien, 84, 104, 110 cross-cultural, 39, 106 cross-generational, 39 ethics of, 11 historical, 92, 140 home, 104, 110 intersubjective, 15, 86, 93, 150 of monads, 74, 84, 102 of Others, 101, 103, 110, 144, 168 of philosophers, 132–33 consciousness, absolute, 44, 52–57, 62–65, 71, 73, 181 as abstract unity, 20 acts of, 20, 26, 168 flow of, 51–56, 65 immanent, 75

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phases of, 52, 55, 56 pure, 34, 38, 76–78 structure of, 20 time, 22–23, 37–39, 44–65, 73–74, 78, 86, 96, 107, 147, 180, 186 transcendental, 76, 77 constitution, 82, 96–104, 144–46, 161, 167, 169 genetic, 22–23, 29, 32–35, 87–89 of immanent objects, 26, 45 kinaesthetic, 22, 34 object of, 57 original level of, 63, 87 passive, 22, 61, 79 static, 26–29 of the temporal, 58, 61 of world, 90, 93, 102, 104 convictions, 21, 28, 32, 34, 65, 72, 90–92, 103, 108, 139, 182–83 development of, 129, 130 ethical, 73, 100, 130, 149 inheritance of, 128 inherited, 120, 148, 150 sedimentation of 129, 148 crisis, 94, 119, 128, 147–53, 157, 183 critical theory, 12 critique, 119, 134, 144, 148–50, 152, 167–68 renewal and, 14, 15, 100, 103, 127–33, 141–47, 148–55, 167–69, 182–83 Dasein, 103 death, 101–103, 164, 165 deconstruction, 12 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 13, 106–109 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 153 double reduction, 77, 78 Drummond, John, 171n15 ego absolute, 44, 81 active, 11, 23, 38, 89 alter, 81–83

concrete, 31, 56, 58, 60–63, 82–85, 108, 180 dark core of, 64, 97, 108 development of, 11, 21, 31, 72, 110, 128, 130, 142, 169 ego pole, 59–61, 64, 65, 81, 87, 90, 97, 100, 107, 180 genesis of, 38, 106, 109 identity of, 34, 92, 95, 103, 129, 137, 145–46, 151, 165 pre-egological, 58–59, 63–65 primal, 60, 101 primordial, 61 primordial non-, 61 pure, 29, 31–32, 77, 90 transcendental, 59–61, 65, 72, 80–82, 87, 163, 180 eidetic analysis, 27 embodied subject, 161 emotions, 76, 122, 125–27, 169 empathic analogy, 44 empathy, 13, 63, 74–78, 84, 87, 97–99, 107, 181 epoché, 71, 81, 134 essence, 25, 27, 28, 126, 154 ethical love, 128, 132, 139, 142–44, 151, 168, 169, 182 feeling, 75, 98, 120–27, 159, 169 Fichte, J. G., 128 flow, 35, 38, 51–59, 65, 71 of absolute consciousness, 44, 54, 56, 62, 65 of modes of givenness, 37 Føllesdal, Dagfinn, 13 generations, 92–95, 99, 102–106, 109–10, 127, 132, 138–41 preceding, 35, 36, 86, 92, 93, 131, 136, 150 subsequent, 36, 86 genesis, 30–31, 35, 57, 66, 72–73, 106, 136, 180

INDEX of the ego, 38, 88–89, 106, 109, 136 empirical, 31 historical, 22 of the hyle, 38 of the object, 33 passive, 21, 24, 32, 39, 87–89, 95, 107– 10, 182 of the subject, 11, 65 subjective, 25 transcendental, 61 universal, 23 of the world, 21 good, the, 121–28, 137, 139, 147, 156–59 Habermas, Jürgen, 12 habits, 102, 108, 130, 139, 149–52, 182, 183 analysis of, 34 origins of, 28, 149, 169 habitualities, 39, 61, 65, 86–92, 95, 102, 136, 169, 182 development of, 31, 32, 108, 128 Hart, James, 14, 91 Heidegger, Martin, 102 hermeneutic, 95 higher-order we, 86, 105, 133–46, 149, 151, 163–69, 182 historicality, of community, 86 of objects, 32 of the subject, 23, 31, 32, 38, 72, 79 historicism, 153, 154 historicity, 11, 29, 95 horizons, 35, 88, 147, 154, 157, 170 historical, 31 of possible variations, 26, 32, 84 temporal, 21 of the world, 31, 101, 145 hyle, 37, 38, 58, 61, 92, 99, 100 hyletic data, 60, 97 idealism, 20, 179 identity, 129–38, 142–46, 151, 159, 165, 167, 182

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of community, 92, 105–106, 137, 142 consciousness of, 46 of the ego, 34, 59, 63, 87–96, 103, 137, 150 narrative, 96 of an object, 46, 49 of time, 49 immanence, 26, 35, 39, 51, 61, 164–67 impression, 46, 57 primal, 55 inheritance, 15, 95, 108, 120, 127–28, 165, 167, 182 of ethical norms, 86 of habitualities, 92 and instinct, 99 instinct, 39, 74, 86, 97–100, 107, 122, 145, 182 intentional acts, 27 intentionality, 13, 14, 27, 28, 55, 59, 160, 161 horizontal, 55 vertical, 54 intersubjectivity, 62–65, 144, 179 as constituting, 12, 64 in Cartesian Meditations, 79–85 and flow, 44 in genetic phenomenology, 14, 44, 86– 110 in static phenomenology, 29, 30, 43–44, 56, 74–78 transcendental, 12–15, 29, 43–44, 56, 74, 84, 89, 93, 100, 107–109, 135–36, 160–63, 180, 181 Kant, Immanuel, 123 Kern, Iso, 16n1, 19, 77 kinaesthetic sensations, 34 Landgrebe, Ludwig, 61 Levinas, Emmanuel, 12, 103, 160–65 lie telling, 90, 91 Lipps, Theodor, 74, 75, 97, 98, 181

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HUSSERL ON ETHICS AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Marbach, Eduard, 16n1, 19 McIntyre, Ronald, 13 memory, 45–53 primary, 47–50, 52 secondary, 48, 49 Mensch, James, 111n16 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 161 monad, 33, 63, 72, 74, 84, 90–93, 99, 102, 145, 180, 182 monadology, 74 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 12, 164–68 Natorp, Paul, 15 noema, 13, 28, 29, 33, 169 noesis, 33, 35, 169 nonpresence, 107, 108 norms, 86, 131, 132, 149, 152, 156 now-perception, 46, 47, 50 objective world, 81, 82, 84, 85, 90 objectivity, 81–82, 94, 95, 126, 169 originary experience, 48 Other, 62–65, 71–78, 80–89, 92–110, 141, 160–68, 180–81 absolute ought and, 137 ethical love and, 142–45 responsibility and, 137, 156 teleology and, 145–46 ownness, 29, 72, 80–82 pairing, 83, 97 personality of a higher order, 74, 84, 106, 129, 136–38, 148 picture theory, 75, 76 pleasure, 122 presentification, 77 primary expectation, 47, 52 protension, 52, 55, 59, 147 psychologism, 24 recollection, 47–49, 78 reconstructive analysis, 100 reduction, 24, 25, 43, 45, 71–74, 76–80,

82, 107, 166 temporal, 45, 62–65, 87 regressive inquiry, 57–58, 63–65, 71–72, 102, 148 relativism, 120, 122, 153–55 renewal. See critique, renewal and representation, 45–49, 75, 79, 94, 108, 162 responsibility, 15, 106, 108–10, 137, 141– 42, 146, 149–51, 156–69 retention, 52–53, 55, 59, 64, 147 Ricoeur, Paul, 12, 95–97 Rückfrage, 23, 58, 65, 72 sacrifice, 135, 144, 158, 159, 165 schema, 30, 37–39, 50–52 matter-form, 27, 31, 34, 35, 169 sedimentation, 28, 32–38, 61–64, 128–29, 145–48, 169, 183 of habits, 89, 92, 101 historical, 22, 23, 95, 136 inherited, 92, 99 and instinct, 98–99 and tradition, 95, 99, 102, 146, 156 self-responsibility, 109, 120, 127–45, 151–57, 163 sensation, 45, 50, 52, 75, 88, 160–61 Shestov, Lev, 15, 173n31 skepticism, 25, 120 Smith, David Woodruff, 13 Sokolowski, Robert, 28, 32 solipsism, 20, 76–82, 162 Steinbock, Anthony, 14, 116n89 streaming living present, 38, 57–64, 86– 87, 91, 93, 130, 147, 180–83 absolute subjectivity and, 21, 86, 97, 107 Other and, 160–61 transcendental intersubjectivity and, 97, 100, 107–109, 144, 150 subjectivism, 122 subjectivity, 22, 23, 29, 54–57, 107–109, 136, 152, 160–61 absolute, 21, 25 succession, 26, 38, 45–48, 50–58

INDEX telos, 33, 109, 130–33, 139, 145–56, 182– 83 community and, 137, 168 temporality, 20, 39, 44, 49, 56–66, 130, 144, 179–80 flow of, 35 in genetic analysis, 31, 38, 107 and intersubjectivity, 71–72, 87, 108 of the subject, 29, 38 Theunissen, Michael, 13 totalization, 168 tradition, 15, 36, 128, 131–42, 146–57, 165, 169, 183 and community, 105–106, 140, 151 inheritance of, 72, 92–95, 101–103, 120 passive acceptance of, 35, 133, 141, 149 sedimentation of, 37, 99, 102, 110 truth of the will, 120, 128, 129 values, 119, 121, 127, 130–31, 150–51, 156–59, 170, 180 sensual, 124 spiritual, 124 valuing, 72, 121, 123, 156, 169 vocation, 99, 120, 130–45, 150–52, 156– 58, 163, 182

197

Welton, Donn, 14 willing, 121–24, 136–37, 150, 159 world, 160–67, 179–80 alien-, 104 common, 12 correlate of ego, 21, 25 cultural, 21, 84, 155 ego and its, 21, 25, 37, 56, 63, 77–78, 80, 89 historicality of, 30, 31, 93, 102, 127 home-, 102, 104, 139 horizons of, 31, 32, 145 and instinct, 99–100 intersubjective, 80, 84, 93, 101, 136 life-,12, 84, 104, 120, 129, 139, 141, 153–59, 167, 169, 181 natural, 25, 84 objective, 29, 80–82, 84–85, 90 sense of the, 11, 93, 102, 104, 145 surrounding, 12, 57, 84, 89, 93, 101–104, 132, 165 and temporality, 58, 60 transcendent, 29, 82, 85 Zahavi, Dan, 14

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New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics General Editor: Kenneth Maly Gail Stenstad, Transformations: Thinking after Heidegger Parvis Emad, On the Way to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy Bernhard Radloff, Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism: Disclosure and Gestalt Kenneth Maly, Heidegger’s Possibility: Language, Emergence − Saying Be-ing Robert Mugerauer, Heidegger and Homecoming: The Leitmotif in the Later Writings Graeme Nicholson, Justifying Our Existence: An Essay in Applied Phenomenology Ladelle McWhorter and Gail Stenstad, eds., Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Second, Expanded Edition Richard Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger Peter R. Costello, Layers in Husserl’s Phenomenology: On Meaning and Intersubjectivity Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Hermeneutics and Reflection: Heidegger and Husserl on the Concept of Phenomenology. Translated by Kenneth Maly. Published in German as Hermeneutik und Reflexion. Der Begriff der Phänomenologie bei Heidegger und Husserl Richard Capobianco, Heidegger’s Way of Being Janet Donohoe, Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology