Husserl’s Phenomenology: From Pure Logic to Embodiment (Phaenomenologica, 238) [1st ed. 2023] 3031261461, 9783031261466

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Liberating Impulse of Phenomenology
Husserl’s Phenomenology
The Original Motivation of Husserl’s Phenomenology
The Tensions Inherent in Phenomenology
Contents
Chapter 1: The Refutation of Psychologism
The Arguments of Psychologism
Husserl’s Critique
Circularities
The Priority of the Epistemological Standpoint
Chapter 2: Ontological Dualism: The Real and the Ideal
The Ideal as an Ontological Category
An Objection
Subjective Accomplishment
Ontological Dualism
Causality and the World-Form
Species as Ideal Possibilities
Patočka on the Possibilities of Appearing
Categorial Representation
Chapter 3: Our Consciousness of Time
Issues
The Schema
Retentions, Impressions and Interpretations
The Time Diagram and the Constitution of the Temporal Object
The Constitution of the Perception and the Perceived
Protention and Its Time Diagram
Protention and Interpretation
Resolution
Chapter 4: The Phenomenological Reduction and the Transformation of Phenomenology
Motivating Connections
The Phenomenological Reduction
The Ego’s Relation to the Reduction
Transcendental Idealism and the Creative Power of Consciousness
Chapter 5: Others
The Task
The Account of the Cartesian Meditations: The Constitution of the Sense of the Other
The Constitution of the Actuality of the Other
Objections
The Reduction to the Living Present
Coincidence and Primal Empathy
The Common World
The Primal, Absolute Ego
Husserl’s Response
Final Remarks
Chapter 6: Embodiment
The Paradox of Human Subjectivity
Hyletic Data
Hylectic Data and Time Consciousness
Instincts and the Temporal Process
Constitution and Self-Preservation
Pleasure and Time Constitution
Self-Touch and the Constitution of the Ego as Embodied
Self-Touch and the Recognition of Others
Chapter 7: Mortality and Beyond
The Constitution of the Self as Mortal
Constitution as Teleological Process
Reason and Teleology
God as a Teleological Concept
Bibliography
Author Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

Phaenomenologica 238

James Richard Mensch

Husserl’s Phenomenology From Pure Logic to Embodiment

Phaenomenologica Series Founded by H. L. Van Breda and Published Under the Auspices of the Husserl-Archives Volume 238

Series Editors Julia Jansen, Husserl Archives, Leuven, Belgium Stefano Micali, Husserl Archives, Leuven, Belgium Editorial Board R. Bernet, Husserl-Archives, Leuven, Belgium R. Breeur, Husserl Archives, Leuven, Belgium D. Lories, CEP/ISP/Collège Désiré Mercier, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium U. Melle, Husserl-Archives, Leuven, Belgium R. Visker, Catholic Univerisity Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Advisory Editors R. Bernasconi, Memphis State University, Memphis, USA D. Carr, Emory University, Atlanta, USA E. S. Casey, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, USA J. F. Courtine, Archives-Husserl, Paris, France F. Dastur, Université de Paris, Paris, France K. Düsing, Husserl-Archiv, Köln, Germany J. Hart, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA K. Held, Bergische Universität, Wuppertal, Germany K. E. Kaehler, Husserl-Archiv, Köln, Germany D. Lohmar, Husserl-Archiv, Köln, Germany W. R. McKenna, Miami University, Oxford, USA J. N. Mohanty, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA E. W. Orth, Universität Trier, Trier, Germany C. Sini, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy R. Sokolowski, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, USA B. Waldenfels, Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, Germany

SCOPE: Phaenomenologica is the longest running phenomenological book series world-wide. It was originally founded as a companion series to the Husserliana, and its first volume appeared in 1958. To this day, the series publishes studies of Husserl's work and of the work of related thinkers, investigations into the history of phenomenology, in-depth studies of specific aspects of phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy, and independent phenomenological research by scholars from all over the world. This unique series now unites several generations of phenomenologists, including Emmanuel Levinas, Jan Patočka, Eugen Fink, Roman Ingarden, Alfred Schutz, Bernhard Waldenfels and Marc Richir. Initial inquiries and manuscripts for review should be sent directly to the attention of the Series Editors at [email protected].

James Richard Mensch

Husserl’s Phenomenology From Pure Logic to Embodiment

James Richard Mensch Faculty of Humanities Charles University Prague, Czech Republic

ISSN 0079-1350     ISSN 2215-0331 (electronic) Phaenomenologica ISBN 978-3-031-26146-6    ISBN 978-3-031-26147-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26147-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to Barbara Weber, my friend and philosophical colleague for many years.

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University for its support of the research that led to this book.

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The Liberating Impulse of Phenomenology Phenomenology along with its offspring constitutes one of the two great streams of philosophy today.1 Along with its rival, analytic philosophy, its practice has spread from its original, European base to embrace much of the world. A glance at the membership of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations shows that phenomenological societies are present in every inhabited continent. Beyond philosophy, fields as diverse as organizational studies and architectural studies employ its conceptions. Its fecundity, moreover, has resulted in a plurality of different schools and movements: Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Deleuze, Derrida, Marion, and Richir among others have their followers, commentators, and disciples. In this plethora of different practices, it is easy to forget what unites the various elements of the phenomenological tradition. A good way to see this is to recall the revolution in thinking that phenomenology brought about. In its way, it mirrors the transformation brought about by the eighteenth century Enlightenment. As defined by the German philosopher, Kant, “Enlightenment is our departure from our self-imposed immaturity [Unmündigkeit]. We are immature when we cannot use our understanding independently. Immaturity is self-imposed when its cause is not a lack of understanding. Rather, we lack the resolution and the courage to use it without being directed by another.” Kant exhorts us, “Sapere aude!” that is, “have the courage to use our own understanding.”2 The courage advocated by phenomenology is that of consulting our own experience. It is this courage that unifies phenomenology.  Such offspring include what is commonly called “continental philosophy,” insofar as it arises in relation and at times in reaction to Husserl’s phenomenology. 2  “AUFKLÄRUNG ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Mutes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines andern zu bedienen. Sapere aude! Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung” (Immanuel Kant, “Was ist Aufklärung? ” UTOPIE kreativ, vol. 59 (January 2004), pp.  5–10), p.  1. Available at https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/ pdfs/159_kant.pdf. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German in this book are my own. 1

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To see what this involves, we can turn to the etymology of the term, “phenomenology.” Coming from two Greek words, it means the attempt to explicate the logos of appearing. Logos, in Greek, has multiple meanings; the basic ones are “word,” “speech,” and “reason.” Thus, phenomenology means not just the attempt to linguistically describe phenomena—in particular, to describe how things appear as they appear. It also involves grasping the rationality of appearing. For Husserl, rationality and appearing are intimately connected. Rationality, in fact, is inherent in the structure of appearing. Such structure comes from the fact that appearing is built up in layers. Take, for example, the appearing of a three-dimensional object. It appears as three dimensional because we take the side it presents to us as but one of the many sides that it could exhibit were we to view it from a different angle. Its appearance thus betrays our previous experience of objects’ having different sides. Generally speaking, for such objects to appear as they do, we must first have had the experience of the series of perspectives—the adumbrations or shadings in Husserl’s terminology—by which such three-dimensional objects show themselves. Such experience, however, is not sufficient. We must also link the perspectives to a common referent—i.e., to the object that is showing itself in these different perspectives. This object cannot be identified with any one of its appearances; nor can it be identified with their sum, i.e., the experience we have already had of the object. The first identification would make us say that every new appearance presents us with a new object. The second identification would rule out further experience from presenting the same object. In fact, for a three-dimensional object to appear, we must first pick out a pattern of appearances in our ongoing visual experience. We must then assign these appearances to a common referent, taking it as that which is showing itself through such appearances. There are, in fact, many more stages in the grasp of a spatial-temporal object. On the lowest level, there are those that build up its temporal sense as it shows first one side and then another. The process is complicated; and, as Husserl says, we are not born with the ability to engage in it. We first have to learn how to see objects.3 Doing so, we learn how to “constitute” them, i.e., build up their presence by going through this process. The term “constitution” mirrors Kant’s threefold synthesis of apprehension, reproduction, and

 As Husserl writes, “in infancy we had to learn to see things.” For the infant, “the field of perception” does not yet contain such objects (Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff 1963), p. 112. An indication of such learning is presented by the neurologist, Oliver Sacks, in his article, “To See and Not See.” He reports that those who are born blind and have their sight restored through surgery face “great difficulties after surgery in the apprehension of space and distance—for months even years” (The New  Yorker, May 10, 1993, p.  63). Reporting on one particular individual, Virgil, he writes: “He would pick up details incessantly— an angle, an edge, a color, a movement—but would not be able to synthesize them, to form a complex perception at a glance” (ibid., 64). He was, in other words, unable to form a complex visual field, let alone represent objects as he approached them. A rewritten version of this account appears in Sachs, An Anthropologist from Mars, Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Vintage Press, 1996), pp. 244–296. 3

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recognition, through which we apprehend an appearing object by synthesizing or putting together its appearances.4 For both Kant and Husserl, this conception of constitution or synthesis is foundational for the rationality of appearing. For both, the rules of constitution, basically those of uniting multiplicities in higher level unities, are, formally speaking, the rules of logic.5 This is why logic applies to the world—i.e., why our logical inferences hold for the objects and objective relations that we observe. To constitute is to build up a sense-filled, logically coherent world. Phenomenology in its study of appearing uncovers the rationality of the world. It is not just a descriptive but also a prescriptive science. As constituted, appearing cannot violate the basic, logical rules of reasoning. Thus, a study of constitution shows that we must first constitute sensuously appearing objects before we constitute the connections that unite them into states of affairs. Such connections are the non-sensuous higher level “categorial forms” such as the logical connectives “and,” “or,” “if,” etc. A philosophy that claimed that such forms were intuitable like the objects they linked could never be backed up by experience. In Husserl’s scathing words, “Even a divine physics can no more take thinking’s categorial determinations of reality and make out of them something that can be simply intuited, than divine omnipotence can make it possible for someone to paint elliptical functions or play them on a violin.”6 To see phenomenology in both its descriptive and prescriptive aspects as liberating is to see it as embracing a call to trust our own understanding and experience. It is to liberate ourselves from all authority except that which can be traced to experience and the rationality inherent in this. This reliance on experience is, for Husserl, “the principle of principles.” This asserts “that every perception that presents something originally is a legitimate source of knowledge, that everything that is originally offered to us in ‘intuition’ (so to speak, offered in its incarnate actuality) is to be accepted as it is presented, but only within the limits in which it presents itself.” For Husserl, “no conceivable theory can cause us to err in this.”7 A theory that robs us of our autonomy is, he will argue, self-defeating. The same holds for claims that

 Husserl explicitly identifies constitution with synthesis. He writes: “What is called constitution, this is what Kant obviously had in mind under the rubric, ‘connection as an operation of the understanding,’ synthesis. This is the genesis in which the ego and, correlatively, the surrounding world [Umwelt] of the ego are constituted. It is passive genesis—not the [active] categorial action which produces categorial formations ...” (Ms. B IV 12, pp.  2–3, 1920). I am grateful to the Husserl Archives in Louven, Belgium for permission to quote from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. 5  This is why Husserl can claim that “an all-sided ... solution of the problems of constitution would obviously be equivalent to a complete phenomenology of reason in all its formal and material formations” (Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, §153, ed. Karl Schumann [Den Haag: Matinus Nijhoff, 1976, p. 359). This will be cited throughout as Ideen I, Schumann ed. 6  Husserl, Ideas I, §52 (Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology), trans. Daniel Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 2014), pp.  98–99. This will be cited throughout as Ideas I, Dahlstrom trans. 7  Ideen I, §24, Schumann ed., p. 51. 4

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base themselves on experiences available only to a privileged few. Implicit in the principle of principles is the contention that the evidence of originary experience is something that we all could possess. This means that were we properly situated, we could perform the experiments and record the observations behind, for example, a scientific claim. We also could, were we properly trained, verify the inferences made from such observations. The revolutionary import of this is that authority is based not on persons or the offices they hold. Its ultimate ground is our experience with its implicit rationality. To apply this to philosophy is to undergo a liberation. It is to free oneself from its plethora of pronouncements, schools, and authorities. In this, it shares the liberating impulse of analytic philosophy with its linguistic turn, i.e., its attempt to trace the problems that have bedeviled philosophy to the misuse of language. Phenomenology’s liberation involves the turn to appearing, specifically to the phenomenological basis for philosophical assertions. Thus, for phenomenology, it is not just enough to cite a philosophical authority to establish a given claim. One must look to the evidence and logical inferences used to establish it. This point is often overlooked in scholarly writings—including those on authors within the phenomenological stream. If we follow Husserl’s principle of principles, it is not sufficient to outline an author’s position. We must engage it phenomenologically; we have to consider the evidence and inferences that underlie the author’s assertions. The citation of secondary sources advances such engagement only when it assists us in this. Husserl’s principle of principles holds not just for philosophy, It is applicable to all the branches of knowledge with their theoretical claims. Take, for example, Darwin’s theory of evolution. Its assertion that species evolve is founded on a number of subsidiary theses or claims. There is the Malthusian thesis that species produce more offspring than can possibly survive in a given environment, the result being that individuals within a species (and closely related variants) compete for the same scare resources. There is also the claim that random variations constantly occur among the individuals composing a species. Those variations that help an individual compete, it is claimed, will help it survive and, consequently, allow it to breed more offspring. Such offspring will pass these traits to their offspring, helping them compete, and so on through the generations of evolving species. The theory, of course, involves many more claims than this. The point is that each claim has its evidence, which is available to careful observation. Each claim is also logically connected to others such that its validity or invalidity affects their role in the theory. So linked, each also finds its point of unification—its ultimate reference point—in Darwin’s theory. To phenomenologically validate Darwin’s account of evolution is thus to regard the observational evidence he provides and the logical connection of his claims. Do they fit together? Do they provide a coherent whole? Here, their ultimate point of unification is his conception of the evolution of the species. It is what ties together all the partial theories, individual observations, implications, etc. The conception serves the same role as the spatial-temporal object, which stands as the reference for all appearances that display its aspects.

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Husserl’s Phenomenology The broad stream of phenomenology is marked by its focus on appearing as such. Not all phenomenologists follow Husserl in his assertion of the inherent rationality of appearing. Many attempt to strip the Kantian influence from his thought. Some phenomenologists, notably Heidegger, replace this with the pragmatic demands imposed by our being-in-the-world. These, rather than the inherently logical structure of constitution, shape our apprehension of reality. The result is that things appear in terms of their use values. In Heidegger’s words, “The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails.’”8 The demands of our being-in-the-world—the needs this imposes on us—make us focus on the uses to which we can put the forest, mountain, river, and wind. Other phenomenologists, for example, Merleau-Ponty, begin, not with our being in the world, but rather with the embodiment or “flesh” that situates us. They focus on how this shapes our apprehension of reality. Still other phenomenologists, such as Levinas, see this shaping influence in the presence of the other person, i.e., in the ethical demands that he or she places on us. In this plurality of figures, the choice of Husserl to present phenomenology may seem problematic. Yet, in a certain sense, he stands as the central reference point for the subsequent practitioners of this stream of philosophy. Not only is he, along with Brentano, the founder of this movement. The other major figures, with the exception of Heidegger, constantly refer to him. Their acceptance and rejection of his positions shape their own approaches, which, for all their special qualities, remain within the tradition that he originates. He remains, in this sense, a central reference point. Husserl’s penchant to constantly revise what he wrote meant that relatively few of his works saw publication in his lifetime. Contemporary readers of his major works had to content themselves with Logical Investigations (1899–1901), the first volume of Ideas (published in the Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1913), the lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (1928), and the French translation of Cartesian Meditations (1931). Readers had to wait till 1950 for the German original of Meditations, while the English translation appeared only in 1960. The lectures on Internal Time Consciousness, which were organized by his assistant, Edith Stein, bears witness to the difficulties of getting his works into press. It was she, not Heidegger its nominal editor, who labored to arrange the various lectures and appendices composing it into a coherent whole. Most of the other work Husserl produced remained in manuscripts. Rescued by the Belgian monk, Van Breda, just before the Second World War, these manuscripts can be found in various archives. Working mainly in the Leuven and Cologne archives, scholars have gradually edited and published them in the Husserliana series. Together with the Documenta, it now contains more than 50 volumes.

 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1968), p. 70.

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This steady stream of work means that Husserl’s impact can be divided into two stages, the first consisting of the works appearing in his lifetime. This was supplemented by the influence of his students in Göttingen and Freiburg. This influence, however, did not follow Husserl into retirement. On the one hand, Heidegger, developed a new form of phenomenology that gradually eclipsed his own. On the other, the rise of the Nazis caused Husserl’s work to be almost completely forgotten. With many of his followers in exile, by war’s end he became almost “entirely unknown.”9 In the decades following the war, however, Husserl again became a force in phenomenology. The availability of his manuscripts and the increasing stream of publications resulting from these made him a presence in the philosophical scene. Thus, Merleau-Ponty went to Louvain to consult the manuscript that was later published as the second volume of Ideas. Many of Husserl’s insights into embodiment, including those of double touch, i.e., the bodily intertwining of the sensing and the sensed, became crucial concepts in Merleau-Ponty’s work. Similarly, others were influenced by his works as they appeared. The result was that he again became current, serving a reference point in the critiques of phenomenologists from the 1960s onward. Given this, a study of Husserl’s phenomenology has an import beyond Husserl studies. It allows the readers of other phenomenologists to see their critiques of Husserl from a Husserlian perspective. Doing so, they are invited to evaluate them phenomenologically. This means regarding the evidence and reasoning that they employ not just in such critiques, but also in the advancement of their own claims. It is with this in mind that Husserl’s principle of principles has been applied to this exposition of his work. The aim of this study is not just to outline Husserl’s positions, but also to indicate the evidence and reasoning behind them. It is to invite the reader, in the spirit of the enlightenment, to employ his own experience and understanding in evaluating them.

The Original Motivation of Husserl’s Phenomenology Husserl’s career as a philosopher is marked by a remarkably persistent motivation. In Logical Investigations published at the turn of the century, he writes that his goal is that of answering “the cardinal question of epistemology, the question of the objectivity of knowledge.” For Husserl, all his other questions “essentially coincide” with this question.10 Husserl does not so much ask whether such knowledge is possible, but rather how it is possible. His focus is on the conditions for the possibility of objective knowledge.11 This goal does not change when he adopts the stance  Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard, “Introduction,” Routledge Companion to Phenomenology (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 5. 10  Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J.N. Findaly, 2 volumes (New York: Routledge, 2001), vol. 1, p.  14. Occasionally, my translations, which follow the German text, will vary from this translation. 11  See ibid., “Prologomena,” §65–§66. 9

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of transcendental idealism. In defending his adoption of this position during the First World War, he describes his work as the continuance of his search for the conditions of the possibility of such knowledge. He writes that it simply concerns a motivated path which, starting from the problem of the possibility of objective knowledge, wins the necessary insight that the very sense of this problem leads back to the pure ego existing in and for itself, the insight that this ego, as a presupposition for knowledge of the world, cannot be and cannot remain presupposed as a worldly being, the insight that this ego must … through the phenomenological reduction and the epoché with respect to the being-for-me of the world, be brought to transcendental purity.12

Such “transcendental purity” signifies stripping the ego of its “worldly being,” i.e., its being as a causally determined object in the world. For Husserl, the causal determination of the ego or self undermines the possibility of objective knowledge. Caught in the causal nexus, the self would grasp objects, not according to their features, but rather as it has been caused to do by the functioning of its brain and senses—a functioning that would be determined by its particular biology. Bringing the ego to “transcendental purity” avoids this difficulty. But this immediately lands us in another problem—that caused by isolation of the transcendental ego. Stripped of its worldly being, is not this ego an isolated self? But how could a solitary self obtain objective knowledge? Thirty years after Logical Investigations, Husserl raises this question in the Cartesian Meditations. He writes that it concerns the objection by which we first let ourselves be guided, the objection against our phenomenology insofar as it claims to be transcendental philosophy and, thus, claims to solve the problems of the possibility of objective knowledge. It is that it is incapable of this, beginning as it does with the transcendental ego of the phenomenological reduction and being restricted to this ego.13

The difficulty is that objective knowledge does not just signify the knowledge that agrees with its object; it also means the knowledge that others can confirm. As Husserl puts this, “Considered as objective, the sense of the being of the world and, in particular, the sense of nature includes ... thereness-for-everyone, thereness as always co-intended by us whenever we speak of objective actuality.”14 What we have, in fact, is an equivalence between the two “worlds,” since for Husserl, the intersubjective world is also an objective world. It is “a world for everyone, ­accessible to everyone in its objects.”15 Given this, Husserl’s guiding motivation drives him to solve the intersubjectivity problematic. He must give an account of how “pure” egos apprehend each other, how they communicate and confirm their claims to knowledge.

 Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch, ed. Walter Biemel. (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p.  150. This will be cited as Ideen III. 13  Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), p. 174. 14  Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 124, italics added. 15  Ibid., p. 123, italics added. 12

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In Logical Investigations, the problem of objective knowledge is raised in the context of the general climate of skepticism that obtained at the end of the nineteenth century. At issue are the logical and noetic conditions for any theory. The former are required for it to be a logically self-consistent whole. Such conditions concern the validity of the inferences used to argue for the theory—for example, the inference: if p then q, but p obtains, therefore q must obtain. If we cannot assume the validity of such inferences, then we cannot put together a theory. The noetic conditions concern the possibility of something being known. They are those of evidence as stated in Husserl’s principle of principles. Now, according to Husserl, skepticism is inherent in any theory “whose theses either expressly state or analytically imply that the logical or noetic conditions for the possibility of any theory are false.”16 If the theory is self-referring, i.e., if its claims include itself, then it is “self-­ destroying” since it undercuts its own noetic and logical possibility. If it is not self-­ referring, it is meaningless. It hasn’t the meaning specified by the notions of noetical and logical possibility. Formally regarded, the skeptical theory is like the liar’s paradox. If Meno the Cretan asserts that all Cretans are liars, what are we to conclude? If Meno’s statement is true, then he is lying. But if so, then it is false that all Cretans are liars. The same holds with skeptical theories according to Husserl: If they are true, they are false. To take an example of a self-undermining theory, suppose someone, regarding Darwin’s theory, asserts that “even logic alters with the development of the brain.”17 In such cases, as Husserl writes in The Idea of Phenomenology: Thoughts of a biological order intrude. We are reminded of the modern theory of evolution according to which man has evolved through natural selection in the struggle for existence and, with man, his intellect has also naturally evolved and, with his intellect, also all of its characteristic forms—in particular, the logical forms. Accordingly, is it not the case that the logical forms and laws express the accidental peculiarity of the human species, a species which could have been different and will be different in the course of future evolution? Cognition, therefore, is doubtless only human cognition. It is something bound up with human intellectual forms, something incapable of reaching the nature of things themselves, of reaching the things in themselves.18

Such thoughts did not just occur to Husserl. Nietzsche undermines the “logical or noetic conditions” for the possibility of a theory when he writes: “we have senses for only a selection of perceptions—those with which we have to concern ourselves in order to preserve ourselves.”19 This means that “the measure of that of which we are in any way conscious is totally dependent upon the coarse utility of its becoming conscious.”20 We are conscious of things if this helps preserve us. The same holds for our knowledge. In Nietzsche’s words: “The meaning of ‘knowledge’ ... is to be  Logical Investigations, vol. 1, p. 76.  Ibid. vol. 1, p. 317, n. 8. 18  Die Idee der Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 21. 19  The Will to Power, §493, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.  J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 272. 20  Ibid., §473, p. 263. 16 17

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regarded in a strict and narrow anthropocentric and biological sense. ... The utility of preservation—not some abstract-theoretical need not to be deceived—stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge—they develop in such a way that their observation suffices for our preservation.”21 The self-­ undermining character of such assertions is obvious. If, in fact, our rationality were determined by the particular line of our evolutionary development—i.e., by the exigencies of preservation that it incorporates—then how could we know this? To assume that our “organs of knowledge” were capable of such knowledge would be to assume that they had developed such that they could objectively grasp the evolutionary process that produced them. To argue for this, however, would presuppose the objective validity of the theory of evolution. But how could we assume this if even our logic alters with the structure of our brain? Nietzsche’s biological relativism stands as but one example of a general trend that marked European thinking. Marxism, for example, asserts that everything is economically relative. Yet if we assert that all assertions are determined by the economic class of the speaker, how can we know whether or not this assertion is itself similarly determined. Would not such determination not affect Marx’s class analysis. Similarly, if we embrace historicism and assert that everything is historically relative—that is, claim that what one says is determined by one’s position in history—would not this assertion not apply to itself? The same holds for a pychologism asserting that everything is psychologically relative, i.e., dependent on a person’s psychological make-up. If this is true, then so is the assertion of such relativism. The same self-referential inconsistency applies to linguistic relativism—the claim that all statements are determined by the speakers’ particular language games.22 In all such cases, if you apply the theoretical claim to the theory itself, it loses its objective, non-relative validity. Furthermore, such claims undercut each other without leaving room for any possible mediation. We cannot, for example, decide whether everything is linguistically or psychologically relative. What, for instance, should we do were we confronted with Wittgenstein and Freud’s explanations of each other’s positions—or Marx’s explanation of both of their claims? To escape this welter of competing claims, we need to assert that there is a non-­ contingent structure of proof and evidence. No theory can maintain its validity if it undercuts the logical reasoning it employs or the evidence it presents for its premises. Husserl, thus, urges us to focus on such evidence, including the evidence for the inferences a theory employs. This focus turns us to the phenomena themselves. It makes them a subject of special study. The original motto of phenomenology was, then, to turn away from such contending theories. Its exhortation, “back to the  Ibid., §480, pp. 266–7.  To avoid such self-reference, appeal is often made to Russell’s theory of types. But as Fitch indicates, self-reference applies to all sufficiently general theories. This is because to be meaningful as a theory with “maximum theoretical generality,” a theory of theories must involve some self-reference even though this violates its strictures against self-reference. Otherwise, it would not have the sense of a theory. See “Self-Reference in Philosophy,” in Contemporary Readings in Logical Theory, eds. I. Copi and J. Gould (New York: MacMillan 1967), pp. 158–60. 21 22

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things themselves” [Zurück zur Sachen selbst], urges us to focus on the appearing that serves at basis for every assertion, every theoretical claim.

The Tensions Inherent in Phenomenology Logical Investigations indicates the influence of two opposing fields: mathematics and psychology. Husserl studied mathematics in Berlin with Leopold Kronecker and Karl Weierstrass. He gained his PhD in Vienna, with a thesis on the mathematical theory of variations (Variationstheorie) and, for a time, worked as an assistant to Weierstrass in Berlin. Returning to Vienna, he studied psychology (at that time a division of philosophy), first with Brentano, who published his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1884, and then with Carl Strumpf, the author of Psychology of Tone (two volumes, 1883/90). Working under Strumf, he wrote his habilitation dissertation, On the Concept of Number (1887). The latter became his first major work, Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), whose goal was to establish a psychological foundation for arithmetic. Brentano did not just provide Husserl with background in psychology. He also introduced him to the concept of intentionality. As Brentano defines it, intentionality signifies that “[e]very mental phenomenon is characterized by … the reference to a content, a direction towards an object … In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, and so on.” This quality, he adds, “is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.”23 Husserl will later refine and develop this concept, integrating it into his conception of constitution. It will remain, in his focus on the intentional acts of consciousness, a fundamental feature of his phenomenology. As for mathematics, the dominant influence was that of Gottlob Frege.24 His critique of Philosophy of Arithmetic led Husserl to fundamentally revise its positions in his next book, Logical Investigations. Rather than seeking a psychological basis for arithmetic, Husserl now described it as a ­science of ideal, as opposed to empirical possibilities. The former only concern the content of what we assert. The ideal relations of such content, such as that of 2 + 2 = 4, Husserl insisted, exist independently of their comprehension. The tension between the psychological and the mathematical perspectives is evident throughout Husserl’s work. On the one hand, we see the influence of Brentano in the minute descriptions of the intentional acts of consciousness. On the other, we have Husserl’s striving for the universal validity that he sees as characterizing  Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. A. C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell and L. L. McAlister, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 88. 24  As Dermot Moran points out, other influences include Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) and Frege’s teacher, Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817-1881). See his “Introduction” to the Logical Investigations, trans. J.N. Findlay, New York, International Library of Philosophy, 2001, p. xxx. 23

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mathematics. Can Husserl’s descriptions of consciousness achieve the validity and precision of mathematics? Can they form, like mathematics, a “rigorous science”? To satisfy this demand, Husserl takes phenomenology as an “eidetic science,” i.e., a science that uncovers the essential structures of the acts it describes. The phenomenologist discovers these through the method of “free variation.” He uses his imagination to vary the components laid bare by his descriptive work. The impossibility of setting aside some of these shows that they cannot be changed. They are essential to the act in question. Thus, no matter how much you vary the perception of color, such a perception also requires a grasp of extension. Similarly, an apprehension of the pitch of a tone requires you to grasp its loudness and duration. This solution, we should note, is not without its difficulties. In particular, it brings with it the problem of the ontological status of the eidetic. How is it related to the real causal relations that define the material world? Husserl writes, “My act of judging that 2 × 2 = 4 is no doubt causally determined, but this is not true of the truth 2 × 2 = 4.”25 The latter is an eidetic, not a real, empirical relation. It is inherent in the structure of counting. But as the Dutch scholar, Theodor De Boer, asks: “How can one combine the postulation of eternal norms with a naturalistic interpretation of consciousness?”26 In other words: how can a causally determined mode of judging grasp such an eidetic, eternal relation?27 Such questions, we saw, led Husserl to strip the subject of its worldly being and adopt the stance of transcendental idealism. Another tension involves the relation between appearance and reality. Phenomenology exhorts us to return to the things themselves. But what exactly are they? Are the phenomena it studies the appearing of things or the things that appear? Is it interested only in the appearance and not in the reality that appears? Husserl asserts that you cannot separate the two. We can only posit the reality on the basis of the evidence we have for it; we can speak of what appears only in terms of its appearing. A critic, however, would reply that there is a real world out there independent of my apprehension. I am subject, for example, to its causal influences whether I am aware of them or not. For Husserl, however, the belief in the universal sway of physical causality is part of the natural, scientific attitude—an attitude that achieves ascendency with the discoveries of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Like every theoretical stance, its basis, he asserts, must be the evidence we have for it. We have to see how far such evidence supports its claims. To uncover this, Husserl introduces the phenomenological epoché. Derived from a Greek term, ἐποχή, signifying a cessation or suspension, it designates the suspension or bracketing of the claim we are examining. As Roman Ingarten points out, we employ it to avoid a petitio principii.28 This is the logical fallacy of assuming, as part of one’s argument,  Logical Investigations, vol.1, p. 80.  “Zusammenfassung,” De Ontwikklingsgang in het Denken van Husserl (Assen: Van Gorcum & Company, 1966), p. 582. 27  This is the issue in James Mensch’s book, The Question of Being in Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). 28  See Roman Ingarden, On the Motives which led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, trans. A. Hannibalsson (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), p. 12. 25 26

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the conclusion that one wants to prove. We commit it whenever we assume the validity of a thesis as part of the evidence brought forward for it. We avoid this when we bracket the thesis, that is, make no use of it in our attempts to justify it. With respect to the thesis implicit in the natural scientific attitude, this suspension includes “all the objective theoretical interests, all the aims and activities belonging to us as objective scientists.”29 It includes not just the results, but also the premise of such activities. This is the belief in the existence of the world, the belief, as Husserl expresses it, that at “every moment in waking consciousness … I find myself in relation to the one and the same world … It is continuously ‘on hand’ for me, and I am myself a member of it.”30 Here, every assumption of the existence of some particular entity has, as a backdrop, the existence of the world itself. This is because, “I find [its] ‘actuality’ … to be there in advance … As an actuality, ‘the’ world is always there.” This existence includes my own. The world is “the one spatiotemporal actuality to which I myself belong.”31 Husserl calls this belief the “natural attitude.” It is an attitude that both predates science and makes it possible. With the suspension of this, the world “goes on appearing, as it appeared before; the only difference is that I, as reflecting philosophically, no longer keep in effect (no longer accept) the natural believing in existence involved in experiencing the world.”32 Thus, I cannot use this existence as evidence for the belief in some scientific claim—for example, the claim that my apprehension of the world is subject to unseen causal influences. Instead, the very belief in causality has to become a subject of investigation—an investigation in many respects like Hume’s—into the evidence we have for affirming it.33 The tension arising from this view concerns phenomenology’s relation to existence. Some believe that, in suspending the natural attitude, phenomenology abstracts from all ontological claims. In the words of the “Introduction” to The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology: The question regarding the “true nature” or the “actual existence” of the object seen is an ontological problem and thus not one for phenomenology, as a descriptive enterprise, to address. Phenomenology can “afford” to adopt this attitude because, by holding in suspension ontological questions, it neither denies their importance nor argues for or against any ontological claims; such claims are sidestepped altogether.34

Husserl, however, is not averse to making ontological claims. The very fact that he refuses to separate appearing from what appears leads him to assert that “the being  The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 135, translation modified. 30  Ideas I, §27, Dahlstrom trans., p. 49. 31  Ibid., §30, p. 52. 32  Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairs (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 20. 33  See Bk. I, sections 12-16 of A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selbey-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 130–179. Husserl calls Hume’s Treatise “a great historical event” (The Crisis, p. 89). Through it, “dogmatic” objectivism was, from the point of view of our critical presentation, shaken to the foundations” (ibid., p. 90). 34  The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, pp. 11–12. 29

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of the world ... exists only as the unity of the totality of appearances that continue to validate themselves.”35 He also declares, “Indeed, [such being] exists only so long as such validation occurs—i.e., so long as the appearances continue to give us the unity we call the world.”36 Perhaps his most striking statement in this regard comes from Cartesian Meditations, where he writes that in “the accomplishment of knowing,” which is that of constituting the object that is known, “every sort of being itself (Seiendes selbst), be it real or ideal, becomes understandable as a constituted product (Gebilde) of transcendental subjectivity, a product that is constituted in just such an accomplishment.”37 Such remarks led to the departure of many of his students. They also led to the problem of transcendental solipsism and the difficulties involving the objective knowledge that implies the confirmation of actual Others: How can a world-constituting subjectivity leave room for independent Others? At the basis of such problems is a tension in the idea of appearing. Does phenomenology, as a descriptive science, focus exclusively on appearing? Or does it also focus on what appears—the being that manifests itself through such appearances? Husserl’s refusal to separate the two leaves his phenomenology in a lasting state of tension. Does constitution apply simply to the appearance of a reality or does it reach to the reality itself? One way this tension expresses itself is in the place of the phenomena, the appearances that form the basis of evidence. On the one hand, they seem to be in our heads. We close our eyes and the world becomes black. We open them, and the world again appears. We regard our eyes in the mirror and see them as part of our heads. Such experiences make us believe that appearances are present in us. The difficulty comes when we attempt to give a phenomenological sense to this “in.” We can say that an object is “in” the phenomena—for example, we can say that a spatial-temporal object is “in” a perspectivally arranged series of perceptions as their  Beilage XIII,” Erste Philosophie, 1923/24, Zweiter: Teil: Theorie der phänomenologische Reduktion, ed. R. Boehm (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), p. 404, italics added). 36  Ibid., p. 50. Husserl also writes: “All real unities are unities of sense. ... Reality and world are simply titles for certain valid unities of sense essentially related to certain specific connections of pure, absolute consciousness, connections that bestow sense and confirms validity” (Ideen I, §55, Schumann ed., p. 120). Such texts lead Theodor De Boer to write: In psychology, sense is the result of an abstraction, of an abandonment of the supposedly independent existence of the external world. It concerns a limitation to what is phenomenal because the “actual” thing is seen as unreachable. In transcendental phenomenology, however, sense is being itself. At the end of the Fundamentalbetractung, when it is said that the world can only exist as a sense or phenomenon, with this is understood the world’s very mode of being (“Zusammenfassung,” p. 597). De Boer, here, echoes Fink’s position. Speaking of the noema (the objective sense of an entity), Fink writes: “If the psychological noema is the sense of an actual intentionality, a sense that we distinguish from the being itself to which it refers, then, in opposition to this, the transcendental noema is the being itself. ... The psychological noema refers to an object which is independent of it, an object that manifests and identifies itself in the noema. The transcendental noema cannot ... refer to an object beyond itself that is independent of it; it is the entity (Seiendes) itself” (“Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gengenwärtigen Kritik,” Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–39 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, p. 132–3). 37  Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 118. 35

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common reference point. Similarly, we can say that a melody is “in” the temporal relations, loudness, and pitches of a series of notes. But can we say that consciousness, understood as the “place” of phenomena, is “in” anything? Husserl doubts this. He writes that “the whole spatial-temporal world … is a being that consciousness posits in its experiences … but beyond this is a nothing [ein Nichts ist]”38 Thus, “the world of the transcendent res [thing],” he writes, “is utterly dependent upon consciousness … a currently actual consciousness.” As for this consciousness, it “is absolute in the sense that, in principle, nulla ‘re’ indiget ad existendum [it needs no ‘thing’ to exist].”39 Given this, we cannot say that consciousness is in anything. Considered as the realm of pure experiences, it is what first defines what being “in” means. The transcendental idealism of such remarks is unmistakable. Heidegger avoids it by asserting that Dasein (his term for human existence) is in the world. Dasein is not just dependent on the world. The things of the world form the basis for its projects—the very projects that determine the phenomena that it encounters. Thus, depending on its needs, water appears as water to drink from, to wash with, to douse a fire with, and so on. Merleau-Ponty’s strategy is to focus on the body that is the basis of our needs. We are in the world by virtue of our being embodied. Embodied, we have a spatially determined point of view, a 0-point from which we judge the near and the far. For Husserl, however, it is only through my experiences and their connections that I know that I am in the world. It is through these that I apprehend the items that I require for my projects. The same holds for my sense of my embodiment. As Husserl writes, “Nature is constituted nature, my corporeal, living body [mein körperlicher Leib] is a constituted living body.”40 As constituted, it is no different than any other transcendent “thing.” It is dependent on my constitution. The difficulty with this position is that embodiment has an end. It is, in Husserl’s words, the fact that “I know that my death is impending.”41 Does not death imply the cessation of all consciousness? To this, Husserl has no alternative but to reply: “Death is … an event in the human world, in the constituted world. Thus my worldly death, my separation from functioning intersubjectivity—the collapse of my body”—all this pertains to constituted, not to constituting subjectivity.42 Can we, however, conceive constituting subjectivity apart from the body? In Ideen II, Husserl describes the crucial role the body plays in the constitution of the world. Can such constitution proceed without embodiment? Absent a body, how could I apprehend other persons as like me, that is, as co-constitutes of a common, objective world. According to Husserl, I interpret appearing Others as subjects like myself by taking  Ideen I, §49, Schumann ed., p. 106.  Ibid., §49, pp. 104. 40  Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte, Metaphysik, späte Ethik, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937), eds. Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2014), p. 80. 41  Ms. C 4, 6b, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), p. 96. 42  Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, pp. 78–79. 38 39

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their bodies as disposable by them—i.e., as determined by their mental life just as I take my body’s behavior as determined by my own thoughts and intentions. Absent a body, I cannot speak of the similarity of our bodily behaviors. But without this, I lack any evidential basis for intersubjective recognition. 43 Moreover, lacking a body, I also lack a surrounding world. According to Husserl, I don’t have a world when “the conditions for existence in the world … are suspended … these conditions are those of the possibility of worldly apperception and stand under the title of the body.” Thus, the world is sensuously present through my bodily senses. Because of my bodily abilities, I have a world that I can move through and manipulate, using its objects for my purposes. As I move, this world unfolds perspectivally about a 0-point that is formed between my eyes. Absent this world, what would be the status of my ego? Husserl writes, “That I remain as the transcendental ego that I am—as the same personal ego—is equivalent to saying that my world remains a world.”44 The question is, “Must I have the transcendental form [Gestalt] of a human ego or, equivalently, must there be a world?”45 Given my impending bodily death, this cannot be affirmed. My death would not just signify that the transcendental ego “would lose ‘embodiment’ [Leiblichkeit].” It would also signify that the ego “would lose its consciousness of the world and leave the world order.” But can this be conceived? Can we imagine “a non-worldly mode of being”—one involving “a transition into a style of being that, in principle, cannot be accessed by worldly knowledge … a style of being that is related to a possible knowledge of a completely new type.” To do so would seem to violate phenomenology’s principle of principles. It would be to engage in an affirmation without any corresponding evidence. But “[w]hat other type of knowledge is possible?” Facing such limit problems, Husserl admits, “the transcendental, regressive inquiry … fails to reach its goal. It only leads to death and birth as transcendental puzzles.”46 These reflections on the relation between the transcendental ego and the embodied human ego occur at the end of Husserl’s life time. They are only a final example of the tensions that drive phenomenology forward, tensions that motivate Husserl to constantly revise, and refine his positions in an attempt to resolve them. The same tensions reappear in Husserl’s legacy, with different figures emphasizing different aspects of his work. They are arguably behind Ricoeur’s assessment that phenomenology is actually a movement of heretics rather than adherents. In a certain sense,  Thus, according to Husserl, “The experienced animate organism of the Other continues to manifest itself as actually an animate organism solely through its continually harmonious behavior ... The organism is experienced as a pseudo-organism precisely when it does not agree in its behavior” (Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 144). “Harmonious,” here, means harmonious with my own bodily behavior. The Other’s actions must “agree” with this in order to establish the similarity necessary for the transfer. As Husserl expresses this, the Other’s ego is “determined as thus governing his body (and, in a familiar way, constantly confirms this) only insofar as the whole stylistic form of the sensible processes that are primordially perceivable by me must correspond to what is known in type from my own governing my body” (Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 148). 44  Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 20. 45  Ibid. 46  Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 81. 43

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such heresy is a result of Husserl’s method of proceeding. He writes in the Bernau manuscripts, “As in this treatise so generally, we bore and we blast mineshafts in all possible directions. We consider all the logical possibilities to catch sight of which of these present essential possibilities and which yield essential impossibilities, and thus we ultimately sort out a consistent system of essential necessities.”47 In fact, the Bernau manuscripts were neither completed nor published in Husserl’s life time. As in so much of his work, possibilities were compared; and when the evidence led Husserl to affirm a position, he often suggested alternative possible positions which this evidence could equally support. He was also diligent in the search for the experience that would undermine his claims. The result was the constant revision and refinement of positions that characterize this and other manuscripts. Indeed, for the readers of such manuscripts, Husserl often appears not only as the founder of a set of heretics, but also as the chief among these. This should not be taken as a negative assessment. It is, in fact, this constant questioning of his own assertions, this responsibility to the evidence, whether it confirms or undercuts his positions, that prefigures both the transformations and fecundity of phenomenology in the hands of his successors. In the chapters that follow, we will follow Husserl on the journey through his main positions. In the tracing of the transformations that phenomenology undergoes in his hands, our focus will be on what remains throughout such changes. This is his constant return to experience, to the phenomena in his search to resolve the issues and tensions that open up. Our goal will be to gain a sense of the impulse that drove Husserl and those that succeed him forward—this being the liberating pull of the evidence that is available to every trained observer. Faculty of Humanities Charles University Prague, Czech Republic

James Richard Mensch

 “Wir bohren und sprengen, wie in dieser Abhandlung überhaupt, allseitig Minengänge nach allen möglichen Seiten, erwägen alle logischen Möglichkeiten und spüren nach, welche davon Wesensmöglichkeiten und Wesensunmöglichkeiten darstellen, und schließlich sichten wir so das System einstimmiger Wesensnotwendigkeiten” (Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), ed. R. Bernet and D. Lohmar [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers), 2001], p. 189). This method is evident in the bundle of manuscripts Edith Stein received. Having continually intervened in the text, Husserl left it to Stein to organize. On July 6, 1917, Stein wrote to Roman Ingarden on the state of the text she received: “Die äußere Zustand is ziemlich traurig: Notizenzettle von 1903 an. Ich habe aber große Lust, zu versuchen, ob sich eine Ausarbeitung daraus machen läßt” (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. xx). 47

Contents

1

 The Refutation of Psychologism ����������������������������������������������������������     1 The Arguments of Psychologism ������������������������������������������������������������     1 Husserl’s Critique������������������������������������������������������������������������������������     3 Circularities����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������     6 The Priority of the Epistemological Standpoint��������������������������������������    10

2

 Ontological Dualism: The Real and the Ideal ������������������������������������    13 The Ideal as an Ontological Category������������������������������������������������������    13 An Objection��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    16 Subjective Accomplishment��������������������������������������������������������������������    17 Ontological Dualism��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    19 Causality and the World-Form ����������������������������������������������������������������    21 Species as Ideal Possibilities��������������������������������������������������������������������    25 Patočka on the Possibilities of Appearing������������������������������������������������    28 Categorial Representation������������������������������������������������������������������������    30

3

Our Consciousness of Time ������������������������������������������������������������������    39 Issues��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    39 The Schema����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    44 Retentions, Impressions and Interpretations��������������������������������������������    45 The Time Diagram and the Constitution of the Temporal Object������������    49 The Constitution of the Perception and the Perceived����������������������������    52 Protention and Its Time Diagram������������������������������������������������������������    54 Protention and Interpretation ������������������������������������������������������������������    57 Resolution������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    58

4

 The Phenomenological Reduction and the Transformation of Phenomenology��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    63 Motivating Connections ��������������������������������������������������������������������������    63 The Phenomenological Reduction ����������������������������������������������������������    68 The Ego’s Relation to the Reduction ������������������������������������������������������    72 Transcendental Idealism and the Creative Power of Consciousness ������    80 xxv

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Contents

5

Others������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    85 The Task��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    85 The Account of the Cartesian Meditations: The Constitution of the Sense of the Other��������������������������������������������������������������������������    88 The Constitution of the Actuality of the Other����������������������������������������    91 Objections������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    94 The Reduction to the Living Present�������������������������������������������������������    97 Coincidence and Primal Empathy������������������������������������������������������������   100 The Common World��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   103 The Primal, Absolute Ego������������������������������������������������������������������������   105 Husserl’s Response����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   109 Final Remarks������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   111

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Embodiment ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   115 The Paradox of Human Subjectivity��������������������������������������������������������   115 Hyletic Data ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   120 Hylectic Data and Time Consciousness��������������������������������������������������   122 Instincts and the Temporal Process����������������������������������������������������������   124 Constitution and Self-Preservation����������������������������������������������������������   128 Pleasure and Time Constitution ��������������������������������������������������������������   130 Self-Touch and the Constitution of the Ego as Embodied ����������������������   136 Self-Touch and the Recognition of Others����������������������������������������������   139

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Mortality and Beyond����������������������������������������������������������������������������   143 The Constitution of the Self as Mortal����������������������������������������������������   143 Constitution as Teleological Process��������������������������������������������������������   144 Reason and Teleology������������������������������������������������������������������������������   146 God as a Teleological Concept����������������������������������������������������������������   149

Bibliography ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   153 Names Index ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   157 Subjects Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   159

Chapter 1

The Refutation of Psychologism

The Arguments of Psychologism Paul Ricoeur remarks that the Prolegomena’s “victory over psychologism” remains an essential feature of Husserl’s phenomenology. Warning against “the subjective illusion that mixes up concepts, numbers, essences, logical structures, etc., with the individual psychological operations which intend them,” he writes: “One can even say that the logicism of the Prolegomena is a permanent protective parapet around transcendental idealism.”1 In a discipline that focuses on our individual, first person experience, that, in fact, initially referred to itself as a “descriptive psychology,” phenomenology’s battle with psychologism may seem surprising. The point, however, is not to rule out psychological descriptions, but rather to free them from psychologism. At issue is the objectivity of phenomenology’s accounts of our acts and experiences—i.e., their utility in the project of securing the possibility of objective knowledge. Such knowledge is undermined when we relativize its logical and noetic conditions. Doing so, we place logic outside of any framework in which it could serve as a criterion for competing truth claims. In Husserl’s understanding, this means giving it only a contingent or hypothetical necessity. We conceive of it as a fact rather than as a form of facts. It is something which, even if it holds in a particular case, could be otherwise if the circumstances that ground it change.2 In other words, we  Paul Ricoeur, Husserl, An Analysis of his Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 30. 2  Certain remarks of the late Wittgenstein seem to indicate that his position falls under this definition. He writes: “One could conceive that certain propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were fixed and functioned as a channel for the non-fixed, fluid empirical propositions; and that this relation changed with time because fluid propositions became fixed and the fixed became fluid ... at one time, the same sentence can be treated as one to be tested by experience, at another, as a rule for testing.” “But, then, doesn’t one have to say that there is no sharp boundary between 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. R. Mensch, Husserl’s Phenomenology, Phaenomenologica 238, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26147-3_1

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make it relative to a contingent factual basis. With this, we have Husserl’s understanding of “relativism in the widest sense of the word as a doctrine which somehow derives the pure principles of logic from facts.”3 Given its contingent basis, all the inferences that we might make in establishing some objective claim would themselves be contingent. Now, psychologism distinguishes itself by seeing psychology as providing this factual basis. Its claim is that “[t]he essential theoretical foundations of logic lie in psychology, in whose field those propositions belong … which give logic its characteristic pattern.”4 Thus, psychologism argues: “What is being talked of throughout [logic]? Concepts, judgements, syllogisms, deductions, inductions, definitions, classifications etc.—all psychology, except that they are selected and arranged from normative and practical points of view.” Pychologism admits that logic is a normative and practical disciple. It specifies how we ought to think if we want to reason correctly. It issues practical regulations towards this end—for example, that we cannot derive universal propositions from particular ones. But this does not mean that logic is not part of psychology. After all, “mental activities or products are the objects of [its] practical regulation.”5 As for logic’s normative stance, we have to admit that correct thinking is simply a subset of actual thinking. The point is that psychology and its laws apply to all judgments, both the correct and the incorrect. As for the necessity claimed by the logical laws, for example, the necessity that contradictory judgements cannot both be true, psychologism replies that such necessities are psychological. They have to do with the nature of the mind. Thus, “for us to say, certainly and indubitably that things are like this or like that means that the nature of our mind prevents us from thinking of them otherwise.”6 In fact, all thinking has a certain causal necessity. As Husserl remarks, “Correct judgments and false ones, evident ones and blind ones, come and go according to natural laws, they have causal antecedents and consequences like all mental phenomena.”7 This is because thinking occurs in the brain. Given that the brain is a physically determined, causal entity, the mental events within it must be subject to causal laws. Thus, we cannot distinguish logic by claiming that it tells us, not how we do think, but how we ought to. If what the “ought” describes occurs, then this takes place in the physical, causally determined reality of the brain. The same points hold for the noetic conditions for objective knowledge. In all immediate reasoning, these conditions concern the intuitive presence of our premises. We prefer direct perceptual experience over the report of others. If we have to logical propositions and empirical propositions? The unclarity is precisely that of the boundary between a role and an empirical proposition” (On Certainty, §§96–98, eds. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, [New York: Harper Torch Books, 1972], p. 319). For Husserl, the “fluidity” of a logical law or rule makes it contingent. 3  Logical Investigations, vol.1, p. 82. 4  Logical Investigations, vol.1, p. 41. 5  Ibid. 6  Ibid., vol.1, p. 42. 7  Ibid., vol.1, p. 43.

Husserl’s Critique

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rely on their observations, the evidential weight falls on the more reliable witness. In the reasoning that begins with these observations, logicians see evidence as resulting from the forms and arrangements specified by the laws of logic, i.e., as a matter of correct reasoning from correct premises. Psychology seems to mirror this when it asserts: “Our intellectual activities must, either generally, or in specifically characterized circumstances, have such and such a form, such and such an arrangement, such and such combinations and no others, if the resultant judgements are to have the character of evidence, are to achieve knowledge in the pointed sense of the word.” It adds, however, “Here we have an obvious causal relation. The psychological character of evidence is a causal consequence of certain antecedents. What sort of antecedents? This is what we [psychologists] have to explore.”8 The relativism that results from this has already been noted in the Introduction. It is, in fact, inherent in the notion of attempting to give a causal account of thinking. Causal relations vary according to the spatial and dynamic relations of the interacting material bodies. They also vary with the material makeup of these bodies. Thus, the force impressed on a struck ball depends upon the force of the striking ball, a force dependent on its weight and velocity. The struck ball’s reaction will also vary according to its own weight and velocity. The general rule here is that caused facticities depend upon the material (and spatial-temporal) relations of the entities entering into them. If we allow logic to be understood as such a caused facticity, it too varies according to such relations. When we add to this the evolutionary view that our material nature has evolved, we return to the statement, quoted earlier, that even “logic alters with the structure of our brain.”

Husserl’s Critique As Husserl observes, psychologism’s arguments are based on a number of identifications. The first involves the contents of judgements and the acts of the judgments in which they are maintained. The content is the meaning of the judgement—the meaning, for example, of the judgement, “Socrates is mortal,” understood as the conclusion of the judgements, “All men are mortal,” and “Socrates is a man.” When we identify the contents of these judgements with the acts that maintain them, we can also equate the logical relation of contents of judgement with the psychological relation of mental occurrences. The logical inference is understood as a psychological succession of mental acts. With this, another identification becomes possible. Taking logical laws as empirical, we identify them with the psychological laws drawn from the empirical relations of mental events. The necessity of this is readily apparent. Psychology, as an empirical study of mental occurrences, formulates empirical laws of their relations. If logical laws are to be understood as psychological, they themselves must be empirical. This means that they must be considered to

 Ibid.

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be laws based on the observed facts of mental processes and inductively drawn from the same. When we integrate psychology with the natural sciences, another identification becomes possible. We take the psychological determination of mental events as the causal determination of real, spatial-temporal particulars. Here, we assert that truth “depends on the constitution of the species homo and the laws which govern this species. Such a dependence will and can only be thought of as causal.”9 In other words, we argue that since logical laws are psychological and the mental events studied by psychology are causal events, logical laws must also be causal laws. Such a conclusion, it should be noted, is not uncommon. It is implicit each time a psychologist, seeking to integrate his studies with the “hard” sciences, declares: “When someone speaks, I do not consider who is speaking, but rather what is doing the speaking.” As is obvious, these identifications transform the sense of logic. They bring about what Husserl calls a metavbasiς a[llo gevnoς—a change in its very genus.10 There are, in fact, a number of transformations at work here. First of all, if we identify logical with the empirical laws, logic can no longer be considered an exact discipline. It becomes, rather, a science whose laws can only be stated with a certain empirical indefiniteness. As Husserl notes, the so called exact laws of the empirical sciences are based on a certain “idealizing fiction.” The fiction is that there is no such thing as observational error. In reality there is always a certain “zone of inexactness” in the empirical or observational sciences—a zone within the irreducible limits of observational error. Because of this zone, no truly unique law can be said to fit the observed data. Thus a number of laws, Husserl states, could do the same work as Newton’s law of universal gravitation. The law recommends itself by virtue of its simplicity, but this does not make it empirically justified as a truly unique law. It is rather an approximation that fits the approximate state of the data.11 The consequences of conceiving a physical law as an approximation are, we should note, different from those of conceiving a logical law as such. Logical laws function as rules of inference. In chains of inference, the error of approximation should thus be multiplied. This implies the absurd claim that to reduce such error, we should always choose the shorter rather than the longer inferential chain. A second metabasis following from the equation of logical and empirical laws is the transformation of logical laws into statements of probability. This results from giving them an empirical basis. The principle, here, is that what is inductively established by experience can be overthrown by experience. The proof and the refutation, in other words, are on the same level. Because of this, induction establishes not the holding of a law but the probability of the law. Each successive bit of evidence makes the holding of the law more probable; but within this probability, the possibility is contained that further evidence could overthrow the law. Another metabasis is the transformation of logical laws into laws implying facts. This follows from the

 Ibid., vol.1, p. 81.  Ibid., vol.1, p. 95. 11  Ibid., vol.1, p. 52. 9

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definition of an empirical law. As inductively derived from individual facts, it is a generalization of the relations obtaining amongst these facts. Because of this, the empirical law implies in its content the existence of such facts, as should the logical law understood as empirically based. Yet, it is difficult to see how the content of logical laws could imply individual facts. As Husserl points out, what a proposition implies in its content should be deducible by syllogistic inference. “But,” he asks, “what forms of syllogism permit us to deduce facts from a pure law [of logic]?”12 When we identify a content of judgement with the real act in which it is affirmed, a further metabasis of logic occurs. The identification places the logical relation of propositional contents on the same explanatory level as the real relation of corresponding acts of propositional affirmation. If the two relations are really the same, then there is no distinction between the real subjective capacity, which underpins the real relation, and the logical compatibility that permits the logical relation. The metabasis that occurs by virtue of this is the transformation of a logical law into a law of subjective capacity. A law governing the logical compatibility of contents of judgement becomes, in other words, a law governing the real capability of a subject to affirm these contents in individual acts of propositional judgement. Now, if we accept this, we have no way to distinguish the logical (objective) insolubility of some problem with its factual insolubility by, say, a child or a lay person. The latter’s incapacity to provide a solution is a contingent incapacity. Logical insolubility, however, refers to the content of what is to be known. Thus, to take an example, it may be, as Husserl observes, that “the generalized solution of the n-body problem transcends all human capacity.” But this does not mean that the content of the problem fails to specify a solution.13 The case is otherwise when we wish to reach a conclusion whose content is not specified by the premises we reason from. Here, we have to say that it is logically impossible to deduce the conclusion from the given premises—this, independently of the capacity of the reasoner. The difference between the logical possibility and subjective capacity can be seen in the distinction between the validity and the applicability of a law. If, for example, the laws of arithmetic are valid, then, in following them, we will get our sums right. These laws can be instantiated both in men and machines. Both can “do” sums. Very different causal laws, however, are involved in their processes. Sticking just with machines, the arithmetic laws can be instantiated in mechanical or electronic calculators. In one case, the laws governing the instantiation are those of the gear and lever, in the other those of electronics. Given that the laws governing the instantiation or application are different, but the laws actually instantiated are the same, the two sets of laws cannot be identical. In fact, electronic calculators can misfunction and give incorrect sums. But when they do, we do not say that they fail to follow the laws of electronics. In fact, the same causal laws—those of solid state physics—are sufficient to explain machines which, from another point of view, give correct or incorrect answers. The point is that the designer of the calculator refers to

12 13

 Ibid.  Ibid., vol.1, p. 118.

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the arithmetical laws to set up the physical structure of the calculator so that it will do sums correctly. She could, however, just as well have ignored these, using the same causal laws to produce a calculator which always gave false answers. What ultimately determines her choice is not the laws of the physics of the machine, but rather the laws of arithmetic, taken as standards for doing sums correctly.14 When we take arithmetic as a branch of logic and its laws as examples of logical possibility, this distinction between validity and applicability mirrors that between logical possibility and subjective capacity. Subjective capacity concerns the applicability, not the validity of the law. For example, if the law of contradiction is to be applicable to our mental processes, we must be subjectively capable of maintaining constancy amongst our concepts. This condition for the applicability of the law is not the same as its validity. The latter depends only on certain relations obtaining once meanings are, in fact, held identical. It concerns the objective relations of the contents in question. Now, if we fail to distinguish between validity and applicability, then as Husserl says, we would have to call the law of contradiction invalid whenever we did not fulfill the condition of using expressions with the same meaning.15 With this, we have the Husserlian response to the attempt to explain logic by an appeal to the theory of evolution. The appeal only works presupposing — not demonstrating—the metabasis in question. If we do not equate real subjective possibility with logical possibility, then the only thing evolution explains is the development of the conditions of the applicability of logic to our mental life —for example, the development of the psychological ability to hold concepts stable.

Circularities All attempts to explain our mental functioning involve self-reference. This is because such functioning necessarily includes our attempts to explain it. To see what this involves, we can take the instances of Pavlov and Freud. In seeking to explain our mental functioning in natural, scientific terms, they explicitly included their own explanations. Pavlov saw our mental functioning as a result of equilibriums involving automatic responses between ourselves and our environment. He writes: As a part of nature every animal organism represents a very complicated and closed system, the internal forces of which, at every given moment, as long as it exists as such, are in equilibrium with the external forces of its environment ... The time will come, be it ever so distant, when mathematical analysis, based on natural science, will include in majestic formulae all these equilibrations and, finally, itself.16

 See ibid., vol.1, p. 50.  Ibid., vol.1, p. 47. 16  Ivan Pavlov, “Natural Science and the Brain,” in Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, trans. Gantt (New York: International Publishers Co., 1967), p. 129. 14 15

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In other words, the very laws that explain our functioning in terms of these “equilibrations” will also explain the “mathematical analysis” we use to formulate such laws. Freud makes a similar claim. He notes that “an attempt has been made to discredit scientific endeavour in a radical way on the ground that, being bound to the conditions of our own organization, it can yield nothing else than subjective results.” To this, he replies that “our mental apparatus . . . is itself a constituent part of the world which we set out to investigate, and it readily admits of such investigation.” Granting this, it follows that “the task of science is fully covered if we limit it to showing how the world must appear to us in consequence of the particular character of our organization.”17 When we analyze such statements, their self-reference shows a certain circularity. Both accounts of the determining structures of our mental apparatus are causal. Moreover, they assume that physical conditions and relations of a part of nature— those of our perceptual, mental apparatus—are causally determinative of our view of the whole of nature—i.e., the world. In Freud’s words, the part explains “how the world must appear to us.” Now, if we ask how we arrive at the causal laws employed in these explanations, the answer is that we do so by investigating the causal relations that characterize the world. We assume such relations apply to our mental apparatus since it “is itself a constituent part of the world which we set out to investigate.” If we accept this, then we have the real conditions of a part of nature—those of our mental apparatus—causally determining our knowledge of the world, the very world we draw our causal laws from to exhibit this determination. This means that the world as we know it, with its causal laws, is explained by the causally determining conditions of a part of the world; and to explain just how the part in its physical makeup determines this knowledge of the world, we appeal to the world as we know it, i.e., to its universal, natural causal laws. When we take the world as a whole and ourselves as a part, the part-whole circularity becomes evident. We explain the whole in its appearing lawfulness by a part, which is itself explained by the whole which was to be explained. Of course, we could assume that by virtue of our “organization,” we were so constituted that we are causally determined to get the causal laws correctly. But how could we know this? There is nothing in a causal law that argues for such correctness. As we saw with our example of the calculator, validity and causality are distinct categories. With this, we may note that we can, without circularity, say that the laws of our thought determine our knowledge of the causal laws that characterize the world. The circularity only arises when we interpret these laws as themselves causal laws. It is then that we explain them in terms of that which they themselves were supposed to explain. This raises the question of how we should conceive the laws of thought if they are not to be taken as natural, causal laws? In the Logical Investigations, Husserl’s answer, as we shall see, yields his division between the real conditions of nature and the ideal laws of thought, the real and the ideal being understood as distinct categories of being. With the first volume of the Ideas, the

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 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W.O. Scott, Garden City, 1964, pp. 91–92.

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answer is to pull the subject out of the world; it is to affirm that the ego “cannot be and cannot remain presupposed as a worldly being.”18 For the Ideas, the determining laws of thought are those of constitution. The constitutive syntheses of the “pure ego” determine the appearing of the world with its causal laws. Beyond this, the impasse of trying to causally explain the self’s relation to the world leads us to confront the question of appearing qua appearing. This can be put in terms of an observation that Husserl makes in Ideas I: when we use causality to explain appearing as such we make it a a link between appearing and what does not appear. What does not appear must be the cause of appearing insofar as, in seeking a cause of the latter, we assume that it is not self-caused, i.e., that appearing as such must be explained by something else. Following this logic, we take this cause as “an unknown reality, which itself, in its own qualities, can never be apprehended.”19 This inference, according to Husserl, is based on a category mistake. Causality, as an empirical concept, is based on observation. It has its basis in relations of dependency amongst appearances (Erscheinungs-abhängigkeitken). Given this, we cannot use it to explain appearing per se. To do so is to use it to explain itself. It is to return to a version of the circular argument just discussed. Causality, then, presupposes the fact of appearance — more particularly, the fact of the conscious experience of the world. This fact is thus involved in all talk of causality which has not lost its empirical basis. The consequences of this presupposition are twofold: (1) Causal relations, no matter how extended, cannot involve entities shut off from all possible experiences. (2) Causal relations, in presupposing experience, cannot explain experience per se. The nature of this presupposition may be seen by trying to derive experience from causal relations. As philosophers from Locke and Leibniz onward have affirmed, if we are limited to talk of space-filling physical processes causally determining other such processes, we never get to the fact of a conscious experience. What prevents us is the fact that cause and effect must be similar in kind. Given this, when we start with space-filling processes, we can never talk of anything other than such processes. Thus, Locke writes, we can see how a change in “the size, figure, and motion of one body should cause a change in

 Ideen III, p. 150.  Ideen I, §52, Schumann ed., p. 115. For Fichte, the necessity for this conclusion follows from the logic of ground and grounded. He writes: “By virtue of its mere notion, the ground falls outside of what it grounds.” The two are “opposed” and yet “linked” insofar as “the former explains the latter” (J.G. Fichte, “First Introduction,” The Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], p.  8). In other words, the ground explains the grounded by embodying a different “notion” or concept—one that “falls outside” of the grounded. Were the ground to express the same notion, it would be in the same position as the grounded—i.e., it would be in need of the very explanation that it, itself, is supposed to provide. Fichte’s logic, when applied to the search for a ground of experience, immediately places the ground outside of experience, since were the ground experienceable, it would itself need a ground distinct from itself. As Fichte draws this inference, when we attempt to “discover the ground of all experience,” our “object necessarily lies outside of all experience” (ibid.). 18 19

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the size, figure and motion of another body.”20 A physical change, however, is not a perceptual experience. In fact, “[w]e are so far from knowing what figure, size or motion of parts produce a yellow color, a sweet taste, or a sharp sound, that we can by no means conceive how any size, figure, or motion of any particles can possibly produce in us the idea of any color, taste, or sound whatsoever.” In other words, for Locke, “there is no conceivable connection between the one and other.”21 The difficulty, as Chalmers puts it, is that “the structure and dynamics of physical processes yield only more structure and dynamics. So structures and functions are all we can expect these processes to explain.”22 If we attempt to avoid this conclusion by equating physical processes with perception, then we seem to have an endless series of perceivers as one space-filling physical process gives rise to another. At this point, it is as sensible to say that the retina of one’s eyes see as the optic nerves leading to the brain see, as the cells they lead to see, as the cells these cells excite see, and so on. Phenomenology, with its principle of principles, i.e., in its reliance on the givenness of experience, is framed to avoid such a regress. Jan Patočka, the Czech phenomenologist, gives this principle a radical formulation. He writes that “manifesting is, in itself, something completely original.” By this, he means that “manifesting in itself, in that which makes it manifesting, is not reducible, cannot be converted into anything that manifests itself in manifesting.”23 This means not just that we cannot explain manifesting by reference to something that does not appear—e.g., an unseen ground of appearance. It also signifies that we cannot explain it in terms of what does appear. To do so is to engage in a petitio principii. As Patočka writes, “It is clear that the lawfulness of appearing as appearing cannot be the lawfulness of the special structure of what appears, in particular, it cannot be that of its causal relations. I cannot refer back to what appears to clarify appearing as such, for the understanding of appearing is presupposed in every thesis about the appearing being.”24 It is this presupposition that gives phenomenology its distinct field as a study of appearing.

 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, New  York: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 444. 21  Ibid., p. 445. Leibniz makes the same point in his analogy of the mill. “Perceptions,” he writes “... are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is, by figures and motions. And, supposing that there were a machine so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, we could conceive of it so enlarged, and yet preserving the same proportions, so that we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything to explain a perception” (Leibniz, “Monodology,” in Leibniz Selections, ed. Philip Wiener [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951], , p. 536). 22  Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2, No.3, 1995, pp.  200–219, p.  208. Accessed at https://personal.lse.ac.uk/ROBERT49/teaching/ ph103/pdf/chalmers1995.pdf. 23  Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 24. 24  “Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Möglichkeit einer ‘asubjektiven’ Phänomenologie,” in Die Bewegung der menschlichen Existenz, ed. Klaus Nellen, Jiří Němic, and Ilja Srubar (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), p. 278. 20

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The Priority of the Epistemological Standpoint Husserl writes, “Psychologism in all its subvarieties and individual elaborations is, in fact, the same as relativism.”25 Relativism, he argues, leads to skepticism. Yet, if an opponent accepts this conclusion, a further task opens up, that of refuting relativism. In the Introduction, we indicated this in mentioning how skeptical theories are undermined when they refer to themselves. Self-reference destroys them by making them inconsistent. The logician, Frederic Fitch, shows this by arguing that a theory that asserts that “nothing is absolutely true” is actually a “theory about all theories.” Since it implies self-reference, it casts doubt on its own validity. Yet, if it is really valid, then, in casting doubt on the validity of all statements, it wrongly casts doubt on itself. Thus, according to Fitch, “if it is valid, it is self-referentially inconsistent and hence not valid at all.”26 We can also say that, as a universal statement, it is invalid since it must except itself from its own claims to universality. We cannot avoid this by saying that theories about theories are of a different type than the theories they speak of. If they share none of what Husserl calls the “the logical or noetic conditions for the possibility of any theory,” then the sense and experience specified by such conditions cannot apply to them. In other words, they must reject in their own case all argument and proof that characterize the theories they speak of. They cannot avail themselves of their appeals to immediate and mediate evidence. With this, they lose all intelligibility. They become both infallible and empty: infallible because nothing can be brought forward to oppose them, empty because they are equally insupportable. To avoid this fate, some self-reference is necessary. At least in their own case, they must presuppose the opposite of their thesis. Take for example Nietzsche’s thesis: “‘knowledge’ ... is to be regarded in a strict and narrow anthropocentric and biological sense.” This means it is relative to our specific constitution. Thus, the thesis implicitly assumes that this specific constitution exists and has, objectively speaking, definite properties determining our knowledge. Such assumptions, however, stand as exceptions to the thesis. How could we claim that we know that they hold and yet assert that all knowledge is relative. Here, as elsewhere, as Husserl observes, “The relativization of truth presupposes the objective being of the point to which things are relative: this is the contradiction in relativism.”27 Since, in fact, the contradiction is with its own thesis, the thesis is inconsistent with itself. To avoid such inconsistency, we have to assume the priority of the epistemological or knowing standpoint. To draw a general lesson from Husserl’s arguments, we can say that skepticism is engendered when we assert that some other relationship is prior to and determinative of the content of our knowledge. This relation can be economic, sociological, anthropological, historical, casual, or psychological. If it really distinct in the sense of being outside the knowing relationship, then its  Logical Investigations, vol.1, p. 82.  “Self-Reference in Philosophy,” pp. 156–57. 27  Logical Investigations, vol.1, p. 87. 25 26

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11

determinations of the knowing relation cannot be “known” in the strong sense. Only if the knowing relation is understood as prior in the sense of setting its own standards could we claim to know such determinations. Thus, we cannot assert that the laws of causality determine the knowing relation without also asserting that we know such laws, i.e., grasp how they objectively function. We must have the ability to know what is actually the case. We must also be able to know that we know. Knowing, in other words, must have its own standards—such as Descartes’ clarity and distinctness—for what counts as knowledge. All theories, then , insofar as they claim objective validity, assume the priority of the epistemological standpoint. For Husserl, this priority is absolute. He writes: “Naturally epistemology must not be understood as a discipline that follows metaphysics or even coincides with it, but rather as one which precedes metaphysics just as it precedes psychology and all other disciplines.”28 If we understand priority in the usual sense according to which one science is called “prior” to another when the other draws its principles from it, two conclusions follow. The first is that epistemology cannot draw its principles from any other science since all other sciences are in their principles posterior to it. In fact, as prior to metaphysics, it cannot derive its notion of being from it or any other science. Thus, the second is that it must itself determine the nature of being. Here, ontological considerations are shaped by epistemological goals. Thus, Husserl does not directly ask whether being in its structures permits objective knowledge. He asks, rather, what must the being of subjects and objects be, if objective knowledge is to be possible? It is with this in mind that he posits the category of the ideal.

28

 Ibid., vol.1, p. 141.

Chapter 2

Ontological Dualism: The Real and the Ideal

The Ideal as an Ontological Category As the previous chapter observed, we can assert that the laws of our thought determine our knowledge of the causal laws that characterize the world. But we cannot, without circularity, assert that the laws governing our thought are themselves to be explained in causal terms. The question, then, is how should we conceive the laws of thought—the laws that form “pure logic.” Husserl’s response is to give them a distinct ontological status as “ideal laws.” As he explains this, there is a fundamental difference between “sciences of the ideal and sciences of the real.” “The former,” he writes set forth ideal general laws, grounded with intuitive certainty in certain general concepts: the latter establish real general laws, relating to a sphere of fact, with probabilities into which we have insight. The extension of general concepts is, in the former case, one of lowest specific differences, in the latter case one of individual, temporally determinate singulars. Ultimate objects are, in the former case, ideal species, in the latter case, empirical facts.1

Thus, on the one side, we have the laws that specify factual relations between temporally determinate individuals. Established by experience, they can be overthrown by experience. They, thus, yield only empirical probabilities. On the other side, we have the laws specifying conceptual relations. They concern ideal species, understood as non-temporally determinate. This division frames Husserl’s conception of pure logic. It “deals with concepts, judgments and syllogisms.” Its laws concern “meanings,” understood as “ideal unities.”2 Logic’s specific task comes from the fact that such meanings form the content of every scientific theory. In his words, “the theoretic content of a science is no more than the meaning content of its theoretical statements, disembarrassed of  Logical Investigations, vol. 1, p. 114.  Ibid., vol. 1, p. 224.

1 2

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all contingent thinkers and occasions of its judgments.”3 This content is what fills a scientific textbook, for example, a standard textbook of trigonometry or organic chemistry. Logic examines this content, testing the validity of its arguments and the consistency of its statements. At issue is the “theoretic unity” of the science, which is, Husserl writes, “in essence a unity of meaning.” Logic, as “the science of meanings as such, of their essential sorts and differences,” gives the “ideal laws” underpinning this unity.4 The distinct ontological character of its laws comes from the fact that the meanings logic examines are not temporally determinate individuals. Rather than being simply one, they have the status of species, i.e., the ontological character of being one-in-many. This is what allows a meaning to refer to many individual cases. As Husserl expresses this, “As a species, and only as a species, can it embrace in unity (ξυμβάλλειν είς ἕν), as an ideal unity, the dispersed multiplicity of individual singulars.”5 Thus, “the transfinite number, pi,” is, as a meaning, the same in all temporally determinate expressions that refer to it as such. The same holds for truth, understood as a one-in-many. If, for example, the relation 7 + 5 = 12 is true, then every particular assertion that has this as its content is true. The identical meaning-­ content is present in all particular true assertions about the sum of 7 + 5, its presence, being what makes them true. For Husserl, then, “We are conscious of truth, as we are in general conscious of a Species.”6 The necessity for this last remark can be drawn from the intersubjective character of objective knowledge. Such knowledge is not just knowledge that agrees with its object; it is also knowledge that others can confirm. Kant puts this in terms of the equivalence of objective and universal validity. The first implies the second “because when a judgment agrees with the object, all judgments concerning the object must agree with each other.” In other words, insofar as each judgment states the same thing with regard to the object, each has the same content. Their agreement with the object is their universal mutual agreement. To reverse this, universal validity implies objective validity since “there would be no reason why other judgments would necessarily have to agree with mine, if it were not the unity of the object to which they all refer and with which they all agree and, for that reason, must agree among themselves.”7 For Husserl as well, the recognition of the objective validity of a content of judgement is the same as the recognition of its universality. To recognize the latter is to see the content as the one content that can be present in all valid judgements about a well-defined relation. The recognition, in other words, involves the grasp of the content as one-in-many, i.e., as a species.

 Ibid.  Ibid. 5  Ibid., vol. 1, p. 230. 6  Ibid., vol. 1, p. 85. 7  “Prolegomena,” §18, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, 23 vols., (Berlin: Georg Meiner, 1910–55), vol. 4, p. 298. 3 4

The Ideal as an Ontological Category

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Kant uses the equivalence of objective and universal validity to distinguish what he calls a “judgement of experience” from a “judgement of perception.” The second may be defined as a judgement which is valid insofar as it expresses a relation to our own subject. It expresses what is perceptually present to me at this moment. Essentially, it is an “I see x” judgement. The judgement of experience, by contrast, claims validity as expressing a relation to the object. It claims to be valid not just for me but for everyone else perceiving the same features of an object. Otherwise put: it asserts that there is something there which I am experiencing and which others could also experience. To assert this is to claim that the content of my judgement of perception has a universal character.8 It is, in Husserl’s terms, a recognition of its ideal character as a capable of being present in the judgements of multiple others. For Husserl, language could not function without this recognition. Communication depends on our using words that are mutually intelligible. But this depends upon their having the same content for speakers and hearers. Thus, if a perceptual claim is made, the expectation is that others can comprehend and verify its content. Suppose, for example, I assert, not just that I am seeing a cloudy sky, but that the sky is cloudy. To understand the second claim is to see it as something that multiple possible others could confirm through their own perceptions. It is to grasp its content as a one-in-many. According to Husserl, the same holds for the communicative power of proper names. They too function as species. In Husserl’s words, The same person makes his appearance in countless possible intuitions, and all these appearances have not just an intuitive but also a recognitive (erkenntnismäßige) unity. Each individual appearance from such an intuitive multiplicity can be used with the same right as a basis for the synonymous naming through the proper name. Whichever experience is given, the person using the name means one and the same person or thing … he recognizes it as this definite person or thing. In naming, he recognizes Hans as Hans, Berlin as Berlin.9

To recognize Hans as Hans is, in other words, to see the individual perception within the context of unity in multiplicity. It is to grasp it as one of many possible perceptions of one and the same thing. In other words, for a name to refer in this normal way, it must function as a meaning. It has to show itself as one thing applicable to many. The name, in other words, has to contain in itself the sense that unifies an indefinite range of possible perceptions directed to the same object. As Husserl is careful to point out, the name embodies the thought of this unified range but does not presuppose the actual presence of its individual members. Because of this, we can use the name to refer to an absent person. Here, the range is composed of our remembered perceptions. In the case of a non-existent object, names have “no extension” at all. “Their generality is empty pretension.”10 The name, however, continues to intend one thing in many. It still sets up a possible recognition of a common content in a multitude of possible intuitions; but the intuitions which form the range of this content cannot be present. The recognition here is only intended.

 See “Prolegomena,” §18, in Kants ges. Schr., vol. 4, p. 298.  Logical Investigations, vol. 2, p. 199. 10  Ibid. p. 204. 8 9

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An Objection The scholar, J.N. Mohanty, sums up nicely Husserl’s position when he writes that his claim that “meanings are ideal entities” captures an essential moment of our experience of meanings. Three things, he writes, characterize it: “first, discourse and, more so, logical discourse requires that meanings retain an identity in the midst of varying contexts; secondly, meanings can be communicated from one person to another, and in that sense can be shared; further, in different speech acts and in different contexts, the same speaker or different speakers can always return to the same meaning.”11 There is, however, a natural objection to this position. It is that the meaning of an expression often shifts with a change in context. The expression “I wish you luck,” for example, has no clear meaning if we do not know the circumstances in which it is uttered. Not only do we not know what “luck” would mean, but the word “I” calls up no clear representation. As Husserl puts this, “Every expression, in fact, that includes a personal pronoun lacks an objective sense. The word ‘I’ names a different person from case to case, and does so by way of an ever altering meaning. What its meaning is at the moment, can be gleaned only from the living utterance and from the intuitive circumstances which surround it.”12 Expressions, he writes, may be classified as “objective” or “essentially subjective and occasional.” An expression is objective if it “can be understood without necessarily directing one’s attention to the person uttering it or to the circumstances of the utterance.” It is occasional if this is required. In this case, “[o]nly by looking to the actual circumstances of utterance can one definite meaning … be constituted for the hearer.” 13 In such cases, the expression does not function as a meaning, but rather as an indication. Like a mark signifying a location, it has a one-to-one relation to what it indicates. Thus, the verbal utterance “I” indicates the person speaking. It does not have any inherent meaning. Needless to say, if all expressions are essentially occasional, Husserl’s theory of meaning collapses. The indicative relation is one-to-one, not one-in-many. Thus, Derrida, in attacking Husserl’s position attempts to classify all expressions as indications.14 Husserl, by contrast, claims that in principle “each subjective expression is replaceable by an objective expression,” the latter being one that can explicitly specify its own circumstances.15 Thus, the statement, “Today, he died,” can be  “Husserl’s Thesis of the Ideality of Meanings,” in Readings on Husserl’s Logical Investigations, ed. J. N. Mohanty, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1977, p. 76. 12  Logical Investigations, vol. 1, p. 218. 13  Ibid. 14  See Jacques Derrida, “Speech and Phenomena,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 38–39. According to Derrida, “every expression” is involved “in an indicative function” (p. 38). I can only indicate, not directly show what is in my mind. For an extended Husserlian critique of Derrida’s position see James Mensch, “Derrida-Husserl: Towards a Phenomenology of Language,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Noesis Press, 2001, pp. 1–66. 15  Logical Investigations, vol. 1, p. 223. 11

Subjective Accomplishment

17

replaced by an expression specifying the time, place, and person who passed away. As such, its reference is an ideal meaning unit. For example, the assertion, “Saint Augustine died in Hippo on August 28, 430,” if true, is present in all true statements regarding the place and date of his death. If the expression, “Today, he died,” refers to this, then, as Husserl writes, “[t]he content meant by the subjective expression, with sense oriented to the occasion, is an ideal unit of meaning in precisely the same sense as the content of a fixed expression.”16 To take another example, suppose Hans uses the occasional expression, “I wish you luck.” What “I” means here is “Hans,” the very unity in multiplicity that others in referring to Hans intend. Now, if we ask why Husserl maintains that, at least in principle, subjective, occasional expressions can be replaced by objective ones, we return to the notion of being established by the refutation of relativism. The non-relative character of truth is, for Husserl, the non-relative character of the being that is the subject of a truth claim. As non-­ relative, it is capable of being expressed in unambiguous, objective terms. In Husserl’s words, “To being-in-itself correspond truths-in-themselves, and, to these last, fixed, unambiguous assertions.”17 Husserl also asserts in the same passage, “Everything that is, can be known ‘in itself.’ Its being is a being definite in content, and is documented in such and such ‘truths in themselves.’”18 Given this, being per se is definitely describable. As such, it is capable of objective expression.

Subjective Accomplishment Let us return to Husserl’s statement: “Whichever experience is given, the person using the name means one and the same person or thing … he recognizes it as this definite person or thing. In naming, he recognizes Hans as Hans, Berlin as Berlin.” How is this possible? How do we have this ability to go from a single look at a person to a recognition of him as a definite individual? What is behind our ability to grasp the look as one of many possible perceptions of one and the same thing? For Husserl, the answer lies in the perceptual process itself. To see an object, we have to (1) pick out a pattern of appearances in our ongoing visual experience, (2) assign a common referent to these appearances, and (3) recognize this referent as showing itself through the pattern of appearances. Suppose, for example, we take a box and turn it in our hands. As we do so, a pattern of appearances arises. Although the actual contents of our perceptual experience change, the perceived object is recognized as the same. We see the same object throughout its different appearances. Husserl writes in this regard, “Very different contents are thus experienced, but in spite of this the same object is perceived. Thus, to give a general principle, the

 Ibid.  Ibid. 18  Ibid. 16 17

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experienced content is not itself the perceived object.”19 Husserl’s point is that, on one level, we don’t “see” this experienced content. We see what appears through it. The difference between the two is the interpretation we place on this content. As Husserl describes this: It belongs to perception that something appears within it, but interpretation [die Interpretation] makes up what we term appearance—be it correct or not, anticipatory or overdrawn. The house appears to me through no other way but that I interpret [interpretiere] in a certain fashion actually experienced contents of sensation. I hear a barrel organ—the sensed tones I interpret [deute] as barrel organ tones. Even so, I perceive via interpretation [interpretierend] what mentally appears in me, the penetrating joy, the heartfelt sorrow, etc. They are termed “appearances” or, better, appearing contents precisely for the reason that they are contents of perceptive interpretation [perzeptiver Interpretation].20

For Husserl, then, our sensory content enters into the synthetic, constitutive process of perception by our interpreting them as appearances of some object. To take them as such is to place them in a framework of identity in multiplicity. We do so when we continually take them in the same sense. As Husserl writes in describing how “we suppose ourselves to perceptually grasp one and the same object through the change of experiential contents,” “different perceptual contents are given, but they are taken (interpreted, apperceived) [gedeutet (aufgefaßt, apperzipert)] ‘in the same sense’ … the interpretation [Deutung] according to this ‘sense’ is a character of experience which first constitutes ‘the being of the object for me.’”21 Such interpretation, then, lies at the heart of our ability to use names. In recognizing and naming Hans, we take our perceptions according to a given sense—that of Hans as a one-in-many. A three-fold structure is implicit in this account of perception and naming. On the objective side, we have the appearing object. As a one-in-many, it is the intentional object understood as an appearing sense. As Husserl writes in the Cartesian Meditations, “The object of consciousness, in its self-identity throughout the flowing of experience, does not enter into this flowing from outside. It lies included within it as a sense; it is this [sense] as a result of the intentional performance (Leistung) of the synthesis of consciousness.”22 On the subjective side, the side of what is “truly immanent” in consciousness, we have the “contents of perception.” On the same side, we also have the “perceptual acts in the sense of interpretative intentions.” The acts make the contents intentional by transforming them from senseless sense data into “representing contents”—contents which point unambiguously to the corresponding features of the object.23 They do this through assuming that the perceptual contents that form a pattern of perception have a single referent, this being

 Logical Investigations, vol. 2, p. 104, translation altered.  Logische Untersuchungen in Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Elisabeth Ströker (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992), vol. 4, p. 762. The text is from the first edition. The second edition changes “interpretation” to “apperception” and interpret to “apperceive.” 21  Ibid., 1st ed., vol. 3, p. 397. 22  Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 80. 23  Logische Untersuchungen, 1st ed., vol. 4, p. 609. 19 20

Ontological Dualism

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the ongoing perceptual sense of the object. This assumption becomes confirmed or “fulfilled” as long as the contents experienced support this interpretation. An example will make Husserl’s position clear. Suppose I notice what seems to be a cat crouching under a bush on a bright sunny day. As I move to get a better look, its features seem to become more clearly defined. One part of what I see appears to be its head, another its body, still another its tail. Based upon what I see, I anticipate that further features will be revealed as I approach: this shadow will be seen as part of the cat’s ear; another will be its eye, and so forth. If my interpretations are correct, then my experiences should form a part of an emerging pattern that exhibits these features, i.e., that perceptually manifests the object I assume I am seeing. If, however, I am mistaken, at some point my experiences will fail to fulfill my expectations. What I took to be a cat will dissolve into a flickering collection of shadows. As this example indicates, to interpret is to anticipate. It is to expect a sequence of contents that will present the object. This expectation, even if we are not directly conscious of it, makes us attend to some contents rather than others. It serves, in other words, as a guide for our connecting our perceptions according to an anticipated pattern. It also allows us to see the perceptions we have as either fulfillments or disappointments of our interpretative intention. Here, it should be emphasized that we are hardly ever aware of our interpretative intentions. Our initial learning how to form them was part of our learning how to see. As such, the process of forming them, like that of seeing, is largely automatic. Optical illusions, however, which are constructed so as to equally support two conflicting interpretations, make this process apparent. As we stare at an illusion—first one figure, then another—seems to occupy our visual field. The data remaining the same, the visual switch over is occasioned by a change in their interpretation.

Ontological Dualism The point of this doctrine is the same as that of the ideality of the laws of thought. Just as the latter was fashioned to distinguish these laws from causal ones, the ideality of the intentional object is framed to distinguish the intentional from the causal relation. What distinguishes the intentional relation is the fact that while our immanent acts and sensory content are real, the “Dasein” of the “perceived object” is “totally other.” The latter is “presented through the content but is not inherent within consciousness.”24 It cannot be physically inherent since it is present as a sense, i.e., as an ideal one-in-many. Thus, over and above any “inherent actual [eigentlichen aktuellen]” contents of consciousness, there is,” Husserl writes, “an ideal intentional content.”25 This is the content of the intentional object. Given this, it is “absurd

24 25

 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 396.  Ibid., p. 21.

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in principle … to treat an intentional as a causal relation.”26 The latter involves two realities, while the intentional relation reaches out from the real to the ideal. The above does not imply the non-reality of the physical objects we see. It does, however, insist that such objects can only appear as perceptual senses—i.e., as perceptually embodied unities in multiplicity. This is because the objectivity of a physical object—its being there for multiple perceivers—depends on what may be called the epistemological objectivity of its content. The object, to be grasped as there for myself and others, must have a content that is ideal in the sense of being one thing capable of being grasped by many. This ideality is not something that contradicts the object’s existence as a real entity; it is rather that through which it shows itself as such. This can be put in terms of the fact that to make sense of our perceptual experience is also to posit the existence of the object of this experience. Thus, the harmonious fitting together of a pattern of perceptions directed to a tree affords us the grasp of its perceptual sense. But it also allows us to posit its existence. We posit it as the referent of our perceptions. The sense, qua sense, is ideal, while the tree that we posit is real. The sense, in fact, is the means through which the reality shows itself as such. In a statement about the tree, the theses of being and sense become separated. Yet as was pointed out, the statement, as a perceptual claim, implies the perceptions which would fill out the range indicated by its sense. Even if it is not perceptually verified, this sense still remains the unifying point of an indefinite range of possible perceptions. It is still thought of as one thing manifesting itself in many possible perceptions. When the statement is verified, the theses of being and sense are reunited. The perceptions actually occur; and, by virtue of their harmonious synthesis, the object appears as one thing in many perceptions—i.e., as the one thing of which we are having perceptions. The sense that it manifests in this appearance can be compared with that of the statement. In both the statement and the actual perceptual experience, the ability to be intended as one-in many is, as Husserl says, the “ideal character” that makes the intentional object an object of thought or (in the case of perception) an object of knowledge.27 To sum up, the solution of the Logical Investigations to the problem of causality is to declare that the intentional object, as ideal, is no real part of consciousness conceived as a physical reality.28 It is thus to see the transcendence of consciousness as a function of its ability to reach out beyond its reality to grasp an ideal content of meaning. Ontological dualism is the bedrock of this solution. In the Logical Investigations, without the distinction of the real and the ideal, there is no transcendence of consciousness of the causal nexus. This solution, it must be emphasized, is distinct from that of the transcendental idealism that Husserl embraces in the Ideas. The latter sees causality as a relation between appearances, one that, in presupposing appearance, cannot explain it. What

 Logical Investigations, vol. 2, p. 108.  Logische Untersuchungen, 1st ed., vol. 3, p.12. 28  In Husserl’s words, “In no case can it be regarded without absurdity as a part or side of a mental experience, and so not as something real” (Logical Investigations, p. 110. 26 27

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does explain appearing is consciousness taken as the place of this, i.e., as a field of experiences that are understood as constituting the being of the appearing world. So understood, consciousness is positioned as “the primary category of being in general”; it is “the original region in which all other regions of being have their roots, the region to which they are essentially related and on which, hence, they are all essentially dependent.”29 As for the region of spatial-temporal reality, “It is a being that consciousness posits in its experiences … beyond this, it is a non-entity.”30 As is obvious, the ontological dualism embraced by the Ideas is as stark as that of the Logical Investigations. Rather than being between the real and the ideal, it is between being as consciousness and being as manifesting in consciousness.31 Given this division, we cannot say that the causal laws that characterize spatial-temporal reality are beyond consciousness. Rather they are posited on the basis of conscious experience. One way to see this is in terms of the claim that our experiences could have been so ordered that an exact description of nature with its causal laws would prove impossible. Normally, we take the world with its causal laws as simply a given. Husserl, however, writes: “The existence of the world is a correlate of certain multiplicities of experience marked out by certain essential formations. But it is not a matter of insight that actual experience could proceed only in such forms of connections. This cannot be inferred purely from the essence of perception per se.”32 In fact, from the perspective of the Ideas, “the correlate of our factual experience, called the ‘actual world,’ shows itself as a special case of multiple possible worlds, which, on their part, are nothing other than correlates of the essentially possible variations of the idea of ‘experiencing consciousness’ with its more or less ordered connections of experience.”33 Causality, here, rather than determining consciousness’s grasp of its object, is dependent on such “ordered connections.”

Causality and the World-Form It is easy to see why the Logical Investigations cannot embrace this solution. Its whole argument against psychological relativism assumes the reality of the subject. Moreover, the point of positioning the object as a sense and, hence, as ideal is to make it transcend the reality of our embodied consciousness. Beyond this, what  Ideen I, §76; Schumann ed., p. 159.  Ideen I, §49; Schumann ed., p. 106 31  The former is independent, the latter dependent. As Husserl puts this: “The immanent being [of consciousness] is, therefore, without doubt absolute being in the sense that, in principle, nulla ‘re’ indiget ad existendum [it needs no ‘thing’ to exist]. On the other hand, the world of the transcendent ‘res’ is utterly dependent upon consciousness, and, indeed, not some logically thought up consciousness, but a currently actual consciousness.” Ideas I, §49, Dahlstrom trans., p. 89. 32  Ideen I, §49, Schumann ed., p. 103. 33  Ideen I, §47, Schumann ed., p. 100. 29 30

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stands in the way is the Investigations ontology of real being. As Husserl expresses this, “For us what is ‘in’ consciousness counts as real [real] just as much as what is ‘outside’ of it. What is real is the individual with all its constituents: it is something here and now. For us temporality is a sufficient mark of reality.”34 According to the first edition of the Investigations, this temporality is marked by causality. By making the conditions of the past determine those of the present, causality establishes the unity of real being as something that exists through time. The result is a “thing-­ like” unity, which Husserl characterizes by comparing it to the unity described in his logic of content. This logic concerns relations of dependencies between coexistent contents. It asserts, for example, the dependency of the contents of color and extension in spatial realities. They must occur together. There are no non-extended colored objects, while an extended object without any color would not be distinguishable from its background. The unity of a thing, however, is something more than this. It is achieved by adding to these relations the relations of dependencies between succeeding contents.35 As such, it is marked by causality. Husserl, in his rewrite of the Logical Investigations, which came out at the same time as Ideas I, presents an ambiguous doctrine, since it eliminates some, but not all, of the references to the causal character of real being. The position of the first edition, however, is clear: Such being, insofar as it manifests a temporal character, possesses a “thing-like” unity. As such, it inherently falls under causal relations. We know these relationships “a posteriori by way of induction;” but, by virtue of the account of real being, we can say, “such relations are possible a priori. They are evident as possibilities.”36 Since the individual subject with its acts and contents is essentially temporal, it, too, is part of real being and falls under causality. Thus, Husserl applies to the ego or subject the above specifications. There is, first, a unity belonging to “the phenomenological ego of the moment.” This is the “unity of consciousness,” which is determined by the dependencies of its coexistent contents— the dependence, for example, of the experience of color on that of extension. There is, further, the unity of the ego existing through time. Husserl describes this unity in the following terms: Just as the outer thing is not the momentary individual complex of characteristics, but rather constitutes itself as a unity persisting in change in first passing through a multitude of actual and possible changes, so the ego first constitutes itself as a subsisting object in the unity that spans all actual and possible changes of the complex of experiences. And this unity is no longer a phenomenological unity; it has its basis in causal lawfulness.37

In other words, as subsisting through time, the ego falls under causality. As Husserl also puts this, the ego “counts for us as no more than a ‘unity of consciousness,’ as an actual ‘bundle’ of experiences, or even better as the continual thing-like unity,

 Logical Investigations, vol. 1, p. 249.  Logische Untersuchungen, 1st ed., vol. 3, pp. 260–262. 36  Ibid., p. 300. 37  Ibid., p. 364. 34 35

Causality and the World-Form

23

which constitutes itself in the experiences belonging to one ‘ego’ because this unity is demanded by both the specific and causal characteristics of these experiences.”38 This ontology of real being sets the problem Husserl faces in attempting to get the intentional relation out of causality. If the ego’s unity is based on “causal lawfulness,” then what prevents us from saying that it grasps the object as it has been causally—and, hence, contingently—determined to think it? To assert this, however, is to nullify the transcendence or reaching out of thought, precisely the thing that is supposed to characterize the intentional relation. Such reaching out is based on the claim that sense qua sense transcends the real causal nexus. But does it transcend the interpretation of consciousness? In other words, can we describe it as both the result of the interpretative activity of causally determined consciousness and as an objective criterion for this activity? The question draws its force from the fact that Husserl is attempting to secure the possibility of objective knowledge. Inherent in the concept of this last is the possibility of the object’s presence as a criterion for our knowledge. Such questions may be considered as setting the context for what may be called the dialectic of intention and fulfillment.39 As cases of mistaken identity make apparent, not every intention of consciousness is fulfilled. In fact, there is a balancing between intention and fulfillment. The dialectic between them affirms that every sense of the object is a sense intended by consciousness. But it also asserts that consciousness cannot, in its interpretative intention, inform the object with every possible sense.40 Only those senses that are fulfilled or embodied by the object’s intuitive presence pertain to it as such.41 This dialectic, as Husserl’s descriptions make apparent, is one of strict mutuality. Neither intention nor fulfillment is given the edge over the other. The most one can say is that consciousness’s interpretive, intending sense informs the object’s intuitive presence only to the point that the object’s intuitive presence fulfills or embodies the interpretive, intending sense of consciousness. Since in actual perception, we do make the theses of sense and being together, the point of this dialectic is to guarantee that when the object is there with a definite sense, it stands as an objective criterion for our statements about it. Does this dialectic, with all its careful balancing, overcome the objection just raised? If, as Husserl asserts, “interpretation makes up what we term appearance,” and if the act of interpretation is a real act belonging to a consciousness whose unity “has its basis in causal lawfulness,” what is to prevent us from saying that both the act and the resulting appearance are causally determined? In other words, as long as the act is taken as part of a real, factually contingent consciousness, the effect of  Ibid., p. 390.  Ricoeur calls this “the original dialectic of sense and presence … which is best illustrated by the empty-full relationship described in the Logical Investigations.” Ricoeur, Husserl, An Analysis of his Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967, p. 6). He writes, describing this, “Moreover, phenomenology itself is possible because intentionality goes to the sense. This is the sense which determines presence, just as much as presence fulfills the sense” (ibid., p. 7). 40  See Logical Investigations, vol. 2, pp. 252, 309. 41  See ibid, pp. 243–44. 38 39

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interpretation—the appearing sense of the object—must be taken as equally contingent. For Husserl, the effect of this intervention is not to overthrow the dialectic, but only to show its preliminary character. To overcome relativism, we require more than the affirmation of an “ideal intentional content” in perception. We must also affirm “the further fact that a form of thought dwells within all thinking, a form which stands under ideal laws, which circumscribe the objectivity or ideality of knowledge as such.”42 The purpose of this form of thought and the ideal laws compositing it is to limit the factual contingency of consciousness and, thereby, to limit the contingency of the act of interpretation and, hence, the sense that results from this act. The dominance of this form extends beyond the reality of our consciousness. It is, for Husserl, a world form, one which defines and limits the structures of reality as such. As he puts this, the “genuine logical a priori”—the laws that govern the form of thought—“tell us what pertains to the essential endowment of what is [des Seienden].” They, thus, transcend “all limitations according to spheres of reality.”43 Themselves unlimited, they apply to both subjects and objects understood as worldly existents, limiting the “empirical possibilities” of both.44 Given this, Husserl concludes: It is “nonsensical to doubt whether the actual [wirkliche] course of the world, the real [reale] structure of the world in itself, could conflict with the forms of thinking.”45 To relate this to the dialectic of intention and fulfillment is to note that, as standing under the same world form, subjects and objects are conceived in their mutual dependency. The subject is taken as the necessary condition for the possibility of the object and vice versa. Essentially regarded, they are dependent moments which “found” each other to form one independent whole—a whole governed by the world-form. Thus, the subject is taken as inherently intentional. It cannot be without objects since its essence is to be consciousness of something. The object, for its part, is essentially capable of being made an intentional object. As that which stands against the subject, i.e., as objective or Gegenständlich, it is, in principle, in relation to the subject. The dialectic of intention and fulfillment is structured by this mutual dependence. Neither intention nor fulfillment can be given the edge over the other if the interpretive intention of the subject and the fulfilling presence of the object are essentially “moments” of an embracing whole. The delicate balancing of intention and fulfillment is here the actual adjustment or “fitting in” of both subject and object into this whole. Only within it is consciousness properly consciousness of something and the object an object for consciousness. If we accept this, then we can say with Ideas I, “To every object that truly is there corresponds in principle (in the a priori of unconditioned essential generality) the idea of a possible consciousness in which the object itself can be grasped originally and perfectly adequately.

 Logical Investigations, vol. 1, p. 169.  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 315. 44  Ibid. 45  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 317. 42 43

Species as Ideal Possibilities

25

Conversely, if this possibility is guaranteed, eo ipso is the object one that truly is.”46 For the Ideas, this affirmation is based on the constitutive powers of consciousness. For the Investigation, however, it has a different basis—that of an overriding world form. One consequence of this is that, in the Logical Investigations, constitution never equals creation. It cannot, if the subject, rather than being the ground of objects, essentially presupposes them.

Species as Ideal Possibilities With this, another objection to Husserl’s solution comes to the fore. It concerns the distinction he draws between “sciences of the ideal and sciences of the real.” The two have very different ranges. The range of the first, as we cited him, is composed “of lowest specific differences,” while that of the second is made up “of individual, temporally determinate singulars.” Take for example, “pure logic and arithmetic.” These, “as sciences dealing with the ideal singulars belonging to certain genera … are separated from psychology, which deals with the individual singulars belonging to certain empirical classes.”47 This means, with regard to the laws of pure logic, “the concepts which constitute these and similar laws have no empirical range”48 In other words, “the pure laws of logic, when seen in their original content, relate only to that which is ideal.”49 Such assertions are made throughout the Logical Investigations. The difficulty they raise concerns the applicability of the world form. How can Husserl assert that the laws composing it “relate only to that which is ideal” and yet also claim that such laws “tell us what pertains to the essential endowment of what is”? Husserl’s response involves his interpretation of species as possibilities. For Husserl, the being of a universal is that of an ideal possibility.50 For the species, possibility (Möglichkeit) and essentiality (Wesenhaftigkeit) are the same.51 The species’ being as an essence is its being as a possibility. This does not mean that a species is merely possible in the sense that it, itself, may or may not be. Rather, to predicate possibility of a species is to predicate being, at least in the sense that a species’ ideal being expresses possibility. What is possible, Husserl writes, in the sense of being merely possible “is the existence of objects falling under the relevant concepts.”52 Possibility here refers “to the possible being of empirical individuals falling under

 Ideen I, §142, Schumann ed., p. 329.  Logical Investigations, vol. 1, p. 113. 48  Ibid., p. 111. 49  Ibid., p. 103. 50  Ibid., p. 86. 51  Ibid., p. 151. 52  Ibid. 46 47

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the universals.”53 Now, the fact that such instances are only possible signifies that the actual existence of a species does not depend on the actuality of its instances. Thus, the species, unlike the empirical generalization, does not imply such instances. This is why Husserl can assert that the concepts composing the laws of logic have no empirical range. They imply not actual, empirical instances, but only the possibilities of such. Possibilities, taken in themselves, i.e., as species, “are ideal objects.” They “can as little be found in the real world as numbers in general and triangles in general.”54 The reference to numbers and triangles points to the fact that Husserl conceives of ideal (as opposed to empirical) possibilities in mathematical terms. Speaking of the ideal existence of the species, he writes: “This ‘exists’ has here the same ideal sense as in mathematics; to reduce it to the possibility of corresponding particulars is not to reduce it to the possibility of anything different, but merely to employ an equivalent turn of phrase. This is true, at least, when ‘possibility’ is given its ‘pure’, and therefore non-empirical, sense.”55 Now, according to this sense, to assert the existence of a species is to assert the possibility of corresponding particulars. It is not to assert the actual existence of the latter. Frege, it is interesting to note, takes a similar position. He argues that definition in mathematics specifies the range of a concept; but such specification involves only the possibility, not the actuality, of the objects of the range. To reach this conclusion, he observes that we define a concept by specifying what properties objects must have to fall under the concept. In doing this, we specify the objects only insofar as we specify an indefinite range of them. How far they are thus specified can be brought out by the fact that it is a mistake to assert, for example, that the concept square is itself square—i.e., has, as a concept, the properties of rectangularity. This points to the fact that the properties of objects specified by a concept are not themselves properties of this concept. Thus, the roundness of circles does not imply that the concept of a circle is itself round. If we accept this, then we have to say that mathematical definition cannot be creative of mathematical objects. In fact, such definition does not involve the assertion, in a positing sense, of a single object that has the properties defined by the concept. The concept that is asserted does not have the properties, and the existence of the corresponding objects is not asserted. In Frege’s words: “Whether such objects exist is not immediately known by means of their definitions … Neither has the concept defined got this property, nor is a definition a guarantee that the concept is realized.”56 From this, the notion of “pure” or “mathematical” possibility is easily derived. The distinction Frege makes between properties of objects and the marks of concepts which specify these properties applies to concepts whose range is one of individual real objects. It applies, for example, to the concept triangle and the individual

 Ibid., p. 86.  Ibid., p. 243. 55  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 250. 56  “Selections from the Grundgesetze, Vol. I,” Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, eds. P. Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), p. 145. 53 54

Species as Ideal Possibilities

27

triangles we draw on the board. To assert such concepts is not to assert their realization—that is, the actual existence of objects falling under them. As before, such objects are conceived only in terms of their possibility. This is why Husserl can say that “possibilities are ideal objects.” It is also why he can assert that to reduce the ideal existence of a species to the possibility of corresponding particulars is not to explain this in terms of something else—i.e., a realm of real as opposed to ideal being. This follows because in defining concepts, we simply state the conditions of a range of possible objects falling under the concepts and make no presuppositions about the reality of such ranges. With this, we have the elements for Husserl’s solution to the above objection. It involves, first of all, the division of possibility into prior and posterior, in which the “ideal existence” of the species stands as the “original possibility” with respect to its instances.57 There is, secondly, a corollary to this, which states that the obtaining of a posterior possibility guarantees the obtaining of a prior possibility. Husserl writes in this regard: There is good sense in speaking of a compatibility of contents, whose actual union always has been, and always will be, excluded. But if two contents are unified, their union proves not only their own compatibility, but that of an ideal infinity of other cases, namely of all pairs of contents exactly like them and belonging to similar kinds.58

The doctrine here is that actual instances, while being a posterior possibility, guarantee the prior possibility represented by the species. Finally, there is the affirmation that the being or existence of a species represents the possibility of being-one-in-­ many. Now, a species must itself first be one before it can be one-in-many. This is the significance of Husserl’s assertion that “[u]nity as such grounds possibility.”59 Unity, for Husserl, represents the original possibility of a species’ being one-in-­ many.60 For complex species, this means that their component elements must themselves be unifiable before they can have the possibility (as a unified, complex species) of unifying a range of instances.61 When we put these points together, Husserl’s conception of the relation of the real to the ideal becomes clear. While it is true that the ideal, per se, has no empirical range in the sense that it does not imply actual existence, it is also the case that

 Logical Investigations, vol. 2, p. 253.  Ibid., p. 252. 59  Ibid., p. 254, in German: “Einheit überhaupt begründet Möglichkeit,” Logische Untersuchungen, 2nd ed., vol. 2, pp. 638–639. 60  The same assertion is made on the level of the predicability of a term. Universal predicability is a function of a term’s specific unity. See Logical Investigations, p. 265. 61  The relation between possibility and unifiability is expressed by Husserl as follows: “In the limiting case of a simple content one can define the validity of the simple species as a ‘compatibility with self’” (Logical Investigations, vol. 2, p. 252). He adds: “The difference between talk about compatibility and talk about possibility consists solely in the fact that, while the latter denotes the simple validity of a Species, the former (prior to the widening of the notion to cover the limiting case) connotes the relationship of the component Species in a Species which counts as one” (ibid., p. 253). 57 58

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actual instances guarantee the existence of the ideal taken as the realm of pure possibilities. It is because of this that we can study the factual course of consciousness and obtain essential insights. Thus, having observed a colored, sounding object— e.g., a musical instrument—we can assert the component species, color, sound, and extension are inherently unifiable and can form a complex species. To reverse this, the fact that unity guarantees possibility, i.e., the fact a species must first be one before it can be one-in-many, affects the possibility of real instances. Such instances must be considered to be impossible if the species cannot be one, i.e., if it consists of incompatible or contradictory components. Consider, for example, the plane figure, round-square. If the elements composing this figure cannot be unified, then the instance is impossible and, hence, cannot be perceived by us. The same holds for assertions that are inherently contradictory. To be verified, they require us to fit our perceptions together so as to arrive at a unified perceptual sense, a sense that will stand as a referent for our perceptual claim. Without the possibility of this sense as a one-in-many, while we may assert a contradictory claim, we can never intuitively verify it. In such a case, logical impossibility translates into empirical impossibility. Given this, Husserl’s conclusion follows: Each genuine ‘pure’ law, which expresses a compatibility or incompatibility grounded in the nature of particular species, limits, when it relates to a species of mentally realizable contents, the empirical possibilities of psychological (phenomenological) coexistence and succession. What is seen to be incompatible in specie cannot be united or rendered compatible in empirical instances.62

To apply this to the dialectic of intention and fulfillment is to see it as structured by the laws expressing the compatibility and incompatibility of species. No act of interpretation can violate them and hope for fulfillment. A sense intended by it cannot find a perceptual referent. Take, for example, the interpretative intention expressed by the words “round square.” This sense can be verbalized but cannot inform the perceptual process. This can be put in terms of Husserl’s position that expressions refer through their senses. Given that such senses, while implying reference, do not, per se, imply existence, we can speak about and refer to absent or nonexistent objects. A self-contradictory sense, however, cannot have a unitary referent. It cannot function as a one-in-many indicating a unified range of perceptions. As such, it has no hope of entering into the dialectic of intention and fulfilment.

Patočka on the Possibilities of Appearing Jan Patočka, perhaps Husserl’s most creative student, made Husserl’s doctrine of prior and posterior possibilities a central feature of his phenomenology. Having declared that appearing qua appearing is “something completely original,” i.e., 62

 Logical Investigations, vol. 2, pp. 315–316.

Patočka on the Possibilities of Appearing

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stands as an ultimate given, he links the “structure of phenomena” with “possibilities.”63 He adds: “The original possibilities (the world) are simply the field where the living being exists, the field that is co-original with it. To specify the original possibilities as a field of appearing does not, perhaps, exhaust the world’s definition; but it also does not falsify it.”64 As the last line implies, the definition of the world implies more than the field of appearing. The original possibilities of the world exceed those of the field of appearing available to us as living beings. Thus, on the side of the world, we have “the impersonal order of the totality of possibilities, possibilities not pertaining to any being in particular.” On the side of the living being that he himself is, we have “my totality of possibilities as a selection made from the sphere of the first.”65 The “impersonal order” involves pure possibility. It forms “a simple field of specific legalities”—legalities similar to those that Husserl specified by the laws of pure logic. The second set of possibilities regards these legalities in relation to us, i.e., in terms of the limits of our possible experience. In neither case, however, is there any assertion of existence. As Patočka puts this, “Appearing as such is a simple field of specific legalities. But in no sense is it an autonomous reality. It can neither produce nor explain such reality”.66 How, then, do we move from the possible to the real? There is no question, for Patočka, of a creative transcendental subjectivity that is responsible for both sense and being. What actualizes the selection of possibilities pertaining to us is “the working, active body.” This is the sentient body that is distinguished from a mere body “by the fact that the whole surrounding perspective appeals to its activity, provokes or dampens it.”67 It is the body, with its perceptual and mental apparatus, that senses, perceives, is attracted to or repelled by what it finds in the world. By virtue of our being embodied, appearing is actualized for us. Such embodiment means that we are causally determined. For Patočka, however, “[c]ausality in no way signifies the creation of the appearing as such, but rather the adaptation of the organic unity to the structure of appearing, which co-determines the world and in

 See “Corps, possibilités, monde, champ d’apparation,” in Papiers Phénomenologiques, trans. Erika Abrams. (Grenoble: Jérôme Million, 1995), p. 122. 64  “Les possibilités originaires (le monde) ne sont rien d’autre que le champ dans lequel le vivant existe et qui en est co-originaire ; le déterminer comme champ d’apparition, c’est une définition qui n’est peut-être pas exhaustive, mais n’est pas non plus erronée” (ibid., p 124). 65  Ibid., p. 123. 66  “La théorie du plan de l’apparition échappe à la difficulté propre à tout idéalisme en tant que celui-ci conçoit l’apparition comme entièrement autonome en elle-même, car l’apparition, pour être, doit être causée; le plan de l’apparition, en tant qu’irréel dans son moment fondamental, simple monde du possible, ne peut être appréhendé comme le règne d’une idéalité, quelle qu’elle soit, d’un être subjectif, etc.—L’apparition comme telle est un simple champ de légalités spécifiques, mais en aucune façon une réalité autonome, réalité qu’elle ne peut ni produire ni expliquer” (ibid., p. 126). 67  “Epoché und Reduktion in den ‘Fünf Vorlesungen,’” in Vom Erscheinen als solchem: Texte aus dem Nachlaß, eds. Helga Blaschek-Hahn and Karel Novotny (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2000), p. 132. The distinction here is between Leib and Körper. 63

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the certain partial sense grounds it.”68 In a certain sense, this remark mirrors Husserl’s position that a posterior possibility—for example, that actualized by the real psychological subject—serves as a guarantee of the prior possibility—the possibility contained in a “selection” from the “impersonal order” of the world. In another sense, however, it goes beyond it in the implications it has regarding the “adaptation” of our organic unity. Although Patočka does not reference evolutionary history, it has an obvious application here. This is because if appearing is a world-structure, then the evolution of organic beings would take account of it. Their evolution would involve their adapting to this structure if such adaptation offered a survival advantage. The evolution of sensory organs and central nervous systems would, thus, provide them with the causally determined apparatus that would make the structure of appearing applicable to their organic functioning. Their actual functioning would cause the actualization of appearing. This, of course, does not mean that we can derive the structure of appearing—its specific legalities—from this apparatus. To do so would be like attempting to derive the laws of arithmetic from the causal structures of a an adding machine. It would conflate the conditions for the validity (Geltung) of such laws with those for their applicability (Anwendung) to this machine. The calculator was constructed to follow the laws of mathematics in giving valid calculations. It instantiates, but does not create these laws. Similarly, our brains and sensory organs were adapted to take advantage of the structures of appearing. The laws having to do with our grasp of appearing are biological ones—those having to do with our brains and sensory organs. These, however, are not the laws of appearing as such. They do not concern the “specific legalities” involved here, for example, the connection between the appearing of a spatial-temporal object and the structured pattern of perceptions through which the object shows its perceptual sense. For Patočka, the affirmation of this legality holds independently of its particular biological instantiation through a particular causal process. As silent on the latter, its obtaining—i.e., its ideal determination—in no way conflicts with the obtaining of such causal laws. It does, however, act as a world-form limiting what the causal processes can bring to appearance. This cannot be otherwise, once we see such processes as determined by evolution, i.e., as adapting us to the world we have evolved in. So regarded, they are designed to make legalities of appearing applicable to the processes of our perception and, as such, act to limit its possibilities.

Categorial Representation One last issue remains before we leave Husserl’s Logical Investigations. It concerns whether or not thought can be intuitive. Certainly, I can, in a straightforward sense see the book that lies on the table. I can also see the table. But can I directly see the

68

 Ibid.

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31

relation, “on the” table? The same question holds for other relations such as conjunction, negation, and disjunction—the very relations that make up the various logical forms. As Husserl observes, “I can paint A and I can paint B, and I can paint them both on the same canvas: I cannot, however, paint the both, nor paint the A and the B”—as opposed, say, to painting the A or the B.69 The fact that we cannot paint the “and” or the “or” indicates that we cannot straightforwardly see such relations. Does this mean that they cannot be seen? Is the notion of intuitive thought a category mistake? Many of Husserl’s critics—particularly those belonging to the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition—thought so.70 Morris Schlick, for example, drew a sharp distinction between knowledge and intuition. It is “between that which can be expressed and that which cannot be expressed.”71 Thus, we can express the external relation “holding between the leaf and the desk” by saying “the leaf is on the desk.”72 We cannot, however, intuit this. The relation, “on the” is not seen. As for the internal relation, that of the greenness of the leaf, we can certainly intuit this, but we cannot express it. In Schlick’s words, “Content is essentially incommunicable by language, it cannot be conveyed to a seeing man any more or any better than to a blind one.”73 In fact, for Schlick, “Intuition is enjoyment, enjoyment is life, not knowledge.”74 For knowledge, we have to pass beyond intuition to the external relations of what we intuit. In his words, All the statements that can be made in any language about the colour of our leaf speak only of its external properties and relations. They tell us where to find it (i.e., what position it occupies relatively to other things), how it is distinguished from the colour of other objects, under what circumstances it may be produced, and so forth—in other words, they express certain facts into which the green of the leaf enters as a part or element. And the way in which the word ‘green’ occurs in these sentences reveals the internal structure of that part or element.75

For knowledge, then, we have to look at the usage of the word “green.” We have to, in analyzing language, enter into the realm of non-intuitive thought. Husserl’s counter position can best be introduced by citing a passage from the great psychological observer, William James. According to James,

 Logical Investigations, vol. 2, p. 291.  See Dermot Moran’s excellent study, “Analytic philosophy and continental philosophy: four confrontations,” in Phenomenology: Responses and Developments, ed. Leonard Lawlor (Durham, UK: Acumen Publishing Limited, 2010), pp. 235–266. 71  Moritz Schlick, “Form and Content: An Introduction to Philosophical Thinking,” in Moritz Schlick: Philosophical Papers, 2 vols., eds. Mulder and Van de Velde-Schick (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), vol. 2, p. 291. 72  The relation between the leaf and the desk is external because it does not “belong to the desk to have the leaf lying on it. The surface of the desk might just as well be empty, and the leaf might be somewhere else” (ibid., vol. 2, p. 294). 73  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 295. 74  Ibid., vol. 2, vol. 2, p. 323. 75  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 295. 69 70

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2  Ontological Dualism: The Real and the Ideal There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of the voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own.76

This passage may be interpreted in the light of Husserl’s assertion, “All thinking, particularly all theoretical thinking and knowing, is accomplished by means of certain ‘acts’, acts which appear in the context of expressive speech.”77 The conjunction, preposition, and syntactic form mentioned by William James are termed by Husserl the “categorial elements” of speech. They do not themselves refer to sensible objects. They do, however, bind together the various referring names of our speech allowing us to talk about “states of affairs,” such as the leaf’s being “on” the table. According to James, these linking elements (or, rather, the relations they point to) are felt to objectively exist. This is the case even though the relations specified by such words as to, for, and, or, is, with, etc. are not straightforwardly perceivable. Inwardly the stream of consciousness matches them with a “coloring of its own.” According to Husserl, this match is caused by the fact that there are certain “categorial acts,” acts which bring about our apprehension of the relations signified by the categorial elements of our speech. Thus, the and points to an act of conjunction, the or to one of disjunction and the is to an act of predication. With this, we have the definition of what Husserl calls the categorial activity of “authentic thought” or understanding. It is the bringing into play of those act moments which allow the formation of an interpretative intention directed towards the relationally articulated whole that we term a state of affairs. It is also the activity, through corresponding acts, of intuitively fulfilling this intention. Thus, on the one side, we have the formation of the intention, on the other we have its intuitive fulfillment. What articulates the interpretative intention is the propositional assertion, for example, “The book is on the table.” This states what we intend to see when we regard this objects together. The “on” articulates how we interpret the relation between the book and table. In a confirming intuition, the propositional intuition becomes the sense of our perceptual experience. Thus, for Husserl, our spoken and written statements about states of affairs express the formative or shaping intentions that point to corresponding intuitive fulfillments. In this, the categorial elements of our discourse serve to give our assertions a unified sense and, therefore, a unified reference to some objective correlate. Such senses can, of course, exist apart from the perceptual process. They can exist as reports, which others may or may not confirm. If they do attempt to confirm them, then such elements become perceptually interpretative, they work together to form a “unity of consciousness,” one that is perceptually directed towards a single correlate. If the interpretation is fulfilled, the correlate appears. Here, we should note that Husserl’s position is not confined to assertions about simple states of affairs. It concerns 76 77

 Psychology, Briefer Course (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1948), p. 162.  Logical Investigations, vol. 2, p. 183.

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theories as such. It is inherent in his desire to provide a “theory of theories”—i.e., an account of how theories come to be formed and how, as theories, they can be confirmed by observational data. In Darwin’s account of evolution, for example, we have an overriding claim based on the truth of subsidiary claims, each of which has its own subsidiary claims. In Husserl’s view, each claim has its intuitive evidence. Each also is logically connected to others such that its validity or invalidity affects their role in the theory. So linked, each also finds its point of unification—its ultimate reference point—in Darwin’s theory, understood as a unified whole. To perceptually validate this theory is go through the sequence of claims. At their basis stand the claims that are confirmed by the straightforward perception of individual objects. Categorial activity relates these objects into simple states of affairs. It also relates relations just as the categorial elements of discourse relate statements of relations. What we have, then, is a ladder of founding and founded acts in which every relation can serve as “material” for relating acts of a higher level. At every level there are intentions and corresponding fulfillments. Complete validation involves going through this sequence to see if the claims are supported by the evidence brought forward.78 On all but the bottom level, such validation involves the acts by which we perceive states of affairs. Husserl writes in their regard, “We call these new acts intuitions because, with the single exception of a ‘straightforward’ relation to the object … , they have all the essential characteristics of intuition. We shall find in them the same essential divisions, as they also show themselves capable of essentially the same achievements of fulfillment.”79 The necessity for such acts is the same as for straightforward ones. It is the need for the check of intuition on interpretation. As Husserl writes, How could we speak of categorial perception and intuition, if any conceivable matter could be put into any conceivable form, and the underlying straightforward intuitions therefore permitted themselves to be arbitrarily combined with categorial characters? Where, e.g., we carry out a whole-part relationship intuitively, we can normally convert it, but not in such a manner that the part, with unchanged real content, can be looked on as the whole, and the whole as the part…. We can no doubt ‘think’ any relation between any set of terms, and any form whatever on the basis of any matter—think them, that is, in the sense of merely meaning them. But we cannot really carry out ‘foundings’ on every foundation: we cannot see sensuous stuff in any categorial form we like, let alone perceive it thus, and above all not perceive it adequately.80

If the intuition that confirms our categorial connections has “the same essential divisions” as straightforward perception, it must exhibit the tripartite structure of interpretative intention, contents there to be interpreted, and the perceptual sense that is  Dieter Lohmar writes: “We might interpret this complex founded structure as a kind of Egyptian pyramid. If one component of the foundation of the pyramid is missing, then one cannot completely construct the next floor” (“Husserl’s Concept of Categorial Intuition” in One Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Husserl’s Logical Investigations Revisited, eds. Dan Zahavi and Frederik Stjernfeld (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), p. 129. 79  Logical Investigations, vol.2, p. 295. 80  Ibid, vol. 2, p. 309. 78

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the result of this interpretation. As was noted, the interpretative intention is articulated by the sense of the propositional affirmation. The perceptional sense that appears is that of the corresponding state of affairs. As for the contents, they are those that sustain the interpretation. Husserl calls them by the general name, “contents of representation—reprasentierende Inhalte.” By virtue of sustaining a particular interpretation, they “point unambiguously to the corresponding contents of the object.”81 As such, they “make the difference between ‘empty’ signification and ‘full’ intuition” and “determine a sense of the word ‘fullness.’”82 As Husserl also expresses this, what makes an act intuitive (be it straightforward or categorial) is the fact “that it places the object before us in its content, that it interprets experienced contents as representatives of the object meant.”83 The question that this leaves us with is the nature of such contents. On the one hand, they must be sensuously present to consciousness. Consciousness as real can have an immediate relation only to what is real. While interpretation, as a perceptual act, has as its goal the transcending of the real presence of these contents, it cannot dispense with this presence. On the other hand, the contents cannot be those that underlie sensuous perception—for example, the contents representing the redness and roundness of a ball. As Husserl puts this, if the categorial act moment that corresponds to a categorial form “were an immediate connection between sensuous representing contents … , the unity produced by this moment would be a sensuous unity, for example, like the spatial or qualitative configurations or other types of unity which the sensible contents in question can, in other ways, also ground.”84 The fact that the categorial form of connection is not per se sensibly perceivable and, thus, cannot produce a sensuous, individual unity rules this supposition out. A further qualification is that the contents in question must be type specific. Each of the categorial forms is the same no matter what the objects we relate. Thus, the form and is the same whether we conjoin objects given in perception or states of affairs.85 This leads, according to Husserl, to “the important truth that in all change of founding acts and interpretative forms, there is a unique representing content for each sort of founded act.”86 In other words, no matter what the objects of the founding acts are, there is, for example, one and the same representing content for the form and, another for the form or and so on. This conclusion immediately disqualifies the sensuous contents of the founding, straightforward acts from performing the required representative function. These contents differ from object to object, while the categorial forms (as well as the corresponding representing contents) of conjunction, disjunction, etc., remain the same.

 Ibid, vol. 2, p. 235.  Ibid, vol. 2, p. 299. 83  Ibid. 84  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 301. 85  See Logical Investigations, VI, §54. 86  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 298. 81 82

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Having eliminated the contents of the objects related, Husserl turns to what is left. He writes, “the phenomenological form of identification has its essential basis in the underlying acts as such, i.e. it has its basis in what these acts are and contain in addition to their representing contents.”87 In addition to such contents, there remain the interpretative intentions imposed on such contents. The contents, then, come from our real acts of interpretation. A couple of examples will make Husserl’s position clear. Suppose we assert a part-whole relation, asserting “a is in A.” According to Husserl, we first have a perception that grasps the whole, A, “immediately and in a straightforward way.” Then, “second act of perception is trained upon a, the part or dependent moment, that belongs constitutively to A.” The result is that “the perception of the whole, which continues to be active, coincides, in its implicit intention to the part, with the particular perception,” i.e., the one independently directed toward the part, a.88 We, thus, have a coincidence of intentions or, Husserl also says, “both interpretations coincide.” For Husserl this coincidence or unity can itself function as a distinct representing content. In his words, “This unity itself now takes on the function of a representative; it will count in its own right as the experienced union of acts; it will not itself be constituted as an object, rather it helps to constitute another object; it will act representatively and in such a way that A will now appear as having a in itself.”89 It is not the contents of the underlying acts which provide the experienced unity that functions as a categorial representative. The felt coincidence that so functions comes from the interpretations directed at these contents.90 This doctrine is repeated when Husserl speaks of the act of identification, the act that allows us to say, “This is the same.” The basis for this judgement cannot be the sensuous content of the object. This content changes as we view it from different perspectives. What does not change are the interpretative intentions of our various perceptions. They remain the same insofar as they are all equally directed to the object that shows itself through the different perspectives. Insofar as they are the same, they can, when synthesized, provide us with an experienced coincidence that can serve as the representing content for the asserted identity. For Husserl, then, “Identity … is not an immediate form of unity of sense contents. It is rather a ‘unity of consciousness,’ a unity which is grounded in one or another consciousness

 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 300.  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 287. 89  Ibid. 90  As Lohmar puts this: “It is decisive for the understanding of the concept of ‘synthesis of coincidence’ that what is brought into coincidence are the intentional moments of the respective acts. The fulfilling coincidence is not based on equal or similar hyletic data (‘reelle Bestände’). Such a coincidence may occur, but it does not support the intuitivity of categorial intuition. The bases of intuitivity in the case of categorial intuition are the coincidences of the intentional moments of acts, i.e., syntheses of coincidence between partial intentions. These syntheses of coincidence which occur between partial intentions now have a new function: they are apperceived as representing or fulfilling contents of the new synthetic categorial intention”—i.e., that expressed by the proposition (“Husserl’s Concept of Categorial Intuition” p. 134). 87 88

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(repeated or differing in contents) of the same object.”91 We can also say that it is not founded on the differing contents of the object; rather, this “unity of consciousness” is made up of the coincident interpretations of our different perceptions of the object. Eidetic perception offers us another example of a founded act. We begin by perceiving a number of objects of the same sort, say, a number of chairs. To perceive the eidos “chair,” we cannot rely on the sensuous contents we receive from the chairs. They differ from example to example, while the eidos or idea must apply to all particular chairs with their particular contents. Once again, the representing content must be provided by the synthesis of the recurring elements of our individual acts of perceptual interpretation. There must, as Husserl says, be “an overreaching act of identification,” one that has its initial basis in the acts of straightforward perception, namely in their recurring interpretative intentions,—for example, the fact that they all interpret their object as something to sit on.92 The doctrine behind these examples is clear. It is that “what is categorial” does not pertain to objects “according to their sensible (real) content [sinnlichen (realen) Gehalt].”93 As Husserl also puts this in discussing the synthesis of elements that results in a categorial representative “the moment of synthesis does not establish any direct connection between the representing contents pertaining to the founding acts.” It connects and is founded in what the acts are “in addition to their representing contents.”94 This is the interpretive sense as conveyed by the intentions of the acts. Husserl refers to this as the act’s “intentional matter”—defining this as the aspect of an act which “first and foremost gives it its reference to an object.”95 Husserl’s position is that “the categorial moment … unites in all circumstances their intentional materials and is in a true sense founded on them.”96 They provide its distinct representative content. On the one hand such content, as part of a real consciousness, is sensuously present and is available for inner perception—the perception, for example, of the real interpretative acts. On the other, the same content can serve as the representative of a correlate that transcends the reality of consciousness—an eidos or, equally, the sense of some given state of affairs. In Husserl’s words, “The same mental moments which are sensuously given in inner perception (and thus function within it as sensuous representatives) could, in a founded act of the character of categorial perception (or imagination), constitute a categorial form. Thus, they could thereby sustain a totally different categorial representation.”97 It all depends on their interpretation. We can focus on the contents of an individual act and interpret these accordingly or we can turn our attention to the coincidence of

 Logical Investigations, vol. 2, p. 301.  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 292. 93  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 301. 94  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 300. 95  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 121. 96  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 301. 97  Ibid., vol. 2, p. 304. 91 92

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acts, focusing on their overlapping intentional materials or senses, and interpret them as the representatives of the forms uniting objects into states of affairs. In closing, we should note that this doctrine is not without its difficulties. In particular, the term “intentional matter” has been criticized. As that which “first and foremost gives [the act] its reference to an object,” it is an interpretative sense. Sense, however, as sense, is ideal. It is not part of a real act. Husserl, in fact, writes, we must make “the important distinction … between an act’s real or phenomenological (descriptive psychological) content and its intentional content.” The examination of real content “is the task of purely descriptive psychological analysis.”98 As for the intentional content (or matter), its examination belongs to logic. Later, however, Husserl declares that such matter is “a real [reales] moment in the descriptive content of an act of presentation.”99 Such statements lead the French phenomenologist, René Schèrer, to say there is “a contradiction arising from the fact that this matter, announced as composed of the intentional content (p. 204), appertains in the analysis of §20 to the real content of the act (p.  218).”100 For Schèrer, Husserl’s intentional matter “remains a concept suspended between real content and intentional content, between the experience and the objectivity.”101 At issue here is whether a real act can contain a generic element—i.e., a sense that it can share with other similar acts. Husserl does affirm that “the categorial function is founded phenomenologically on what is universal in the objectifying acts or that it is essentially tied to the generic elements of the objectifying acts.”102 If such elements are not ideal senses, then what are they? In terms of Husserl’s continuing career, the issue is moot. The carefully worked out doctrine of categorial intuition through representing contents, though never explicitly rejected, does not appear again. Eidetic perception becomes a matter of free variation. As for the reality of consciousness with its acts and sensuous contents, this position is abandoned with Husserl’s adoption of transcendental idealism. What remains is the schema: interpreting act, contents there to be interpreted and resulting intentional sense. In spite of the difficulties of applying this to categorial intuition, it becomes central to Husserl’s interpretation of our consciousness of time.

 Logische Untersuchungen, 1st ed., vol. 4, p. 411.  Ibid. vol. 4, p. 527. 100  René Schèrer, La Phénomenologie des Recherches Logique de Husserl (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967), p. 271. 101  Ibid., p. 272. 102  Logical Investigations, vol. 2, p. 301. 98 99

Chapter 3

Our Consciousness of Time

Issues The nature of time has been a constant source of puzzlement. As Augustine admits, “If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know.”1 We all have a sense of time, but the description and explanation of it are remarkably hard to get hold of. Take, for example, the question of the reality of time. Does time have an objective reality, or is it something existing only in the mind? Aristotle lists some of the puzzles that arise when we attempt to pin down time’s existence. Can we really say that time consists of three parts: the present, past, and future? We cannot say that the past exists, since it “has been and is not.” Similarly, the future cannot claim existence since “it is going to be and is not yet.” What about the present, that is, the now? Can we really say that it is a part of time? A part measures the whole, which is made up of its parts. Thus, while we can say how many parts make up a whole, we cannot tell how many nows make up a stretch of time. As Aristotle notes, a now is analogous to a point in a line. Neither nows nor points can be summed up to give a definite quantity.2 In fact, the very notion of the now’s existence seems problematical. The now is constantly expiring—that is, lapsing into pastness. Aristotle asks: When does the now cease and become a past now? It cannot have “ceased to be in itself”—that is, in its now—“for then it existed.” But it also cannot have “ceased to be in some other now”—that is, in a past or future now—for in this second now it did not exist and, hence, could not cease to exist. If we say that it did exist (and cease) in this second now, then this now would be simultaneous with the first in which it existed.

 “St. Augustine, ‘Time Tends Not to Be,’ from the Confessions,” Bk. XI, §14, in Time, ed. Jonathan Westphal and Carl Levenson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993), p. 15. The translation will be referred to as Confessions. 2  Aristotle, “‘Time’ from the Physics” in Time, ed. cit., p.  61. This chapter is a translation of Aristotle’s Physics, Book Delta, chapters 10–14. The translation will be referred to as Physics. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. R. Mensch, Husserl’s Phenomenology, Phaenomenologica 238, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26147-3_3

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In fact, given the analogy of nows with points on a line, the first now “would exist simultaneously with the innumerable ‘nows’ between the two.”3 Aristotle attempts to avoid such difficulties by denying that time has an independent, objective existence. He makes it dependent on our numbering motion. We distinguish the before and the after of motion in terms of the places occupied by the moving object, saying, for example, “first it was here, then it was there.” Time is grasped in our numbering these places. In his words, “we apprehend time only when we have marked motion, marking it by before and after; and it is only when we have perceived before and after in motion that we say time has elapsed.”4 His meaning is clear when we regard the face of a clock (or a sundial) with the numbers printed on it. We look at the face of a clock and see, for example, the hour hand at “4.” We look again and the hand is at “5.” The two numbers are in different positions. “4” is before “5” as we move clockwise around the dial. Aristotle, thus, asserts, “when we do see a ‘before’ and an ‘after,’ then we say that there is time. For time is just this— the number of motion with respect to the before and after.”5 In other words, having noticed the pointer on two different numbers, one spatially before the other, we say that so many hours have elapsed. We can do this because the clock’s numbers increase in the direction of motion. “Before” and “after” have, in this way, been translated into co-present spatial positions marked by an ascending number system. This account gets rid of the aporia since, translated into spatial extensions, the past and future do exist in the now. As for the now, it does not vanish, but remains a spatial point on the dial. Time, in this account, is not self-sufficient. As “the number of motion with respect to the before and after,” it depends on someone to number the motion. This means, Aristotle writes, that “it is impossible for there to be time unless there is a soul.” What would remain in the absence of someone to regard and number motion would be “only that of which time is an attribute,” namely, movement.6 The suggestion, here, is that such movement would have to be thought of apart from time. This is like thinking color apart from the eye or sound apart from the ear. The attributes of sound that we concretely experience, are only realized through the ear. If we abstract from this experience, we only have the propagation of the pressure ridges of air molecules. Similarly, if we abstract from our regarding and numbering motion, we are faced with the problem of trying to conceive motion apart from time. This would be like trying to think of it as sheer change, sheer otherness abstracted from the dimensions of the past and the future. Philosophers have generally shrunk back before this difficulty, preferring instead to see time’s reality in subjective terms. Augustine, for example, having rehearsed Aristotle’s aporia, avoids the paradox of time consisting of non-entities, first, by observing that the past and future are present (and, hence, existent) within us. He

 Physics, p. 62.  Physics, p. 63. 5  Ibid. 6  Ibid., p. 70. 3 4

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writes, for example, “my boyhood, which no longer exists, is in time past, which no longer exists. But its likeness, when I recall it, is in my memory.”7 Similarly, the likeness of the future is present in our expectation. As present likenesses, both the past and the future exist. As for the present, it exists as the ongoing moment of perception. Thus, for Augustine, “there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future. For these three exist in the mind, and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of things future is expectation.”8 We measure time, not in the first instance by numbering it, but rather in terms of such subjective presence. In his words, It is in you, O my mind, that I measure time … What I measure is the impress produced in you by the things as they pass and abiding in you when they have passed: and the impress is present. I do not measure the things themselves whose passage produced the impress, it is the impress I measure when I measure time. Thus, that is what time is, or I am not measuring time at all.9

Time, then, exists as this ongoing impress of things in the mind, an impress that leaves their impressions or likenesses behind. In containing these likenesses, which are present as memories, the mind has a kind of extension in the now, one where the past and present are co-present. The same holds for the future. According to Augustine, its presence is that of anticipation. We anticipate by projecting forward the past, a long anticipation being one that projects forward a long past. As he describes this: “If a man decides to utter a longish sound and settles in his mind how long the sound is to be, he goes through that space of time in silence, entrusting it to his memory, then begins to utter the sound, and it sounds until it reaches the length he has fixed for it.”10 For Augustine, this experience of the passage of time is a subjective performance. There is time, Augustine asserts, “only because, in the mind which does all this, there are three acts. For the mind expects, attends and remembers: what it expects passes, by way of what it attends to, into what it remembers.”11 To take a final example, Kant also insists that time depends on us. For Kant, as for Augustine, to grasp temporal relations, we must turn inward, that is, regard our memories and anticipations. Outside of us, it is always now. Thus, the external perception that directs itself to the world cannot “see” the past or the future. Neither are present since the former has vanished and the latter is yet to come. In fact, at any given moment we only outwardly see spatial relations. As Kant expresses this insight, “time cannot be outwardly intuited, any more than space can be intuited as something in us.”12 Thus, I intuit time in its pastness and futurity through my

 Confessions, Bk. XI, §18, p. 18.  Ibid., Bk. XI, §20, p. 19. 9  Ibid., Bk. XI, §27, p. 25. 10  Ibid., Bk. XI, §27, p. 26. 11  Ibid., Bk. XI, §28, p. 26. 12  “Kritik der reinen Vernunft (2. Aufl.)” in Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: George Reiner, 1955), 3:52. I will refer to this work 7 8

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memories and anticipations; regarding them, however, I cannot speak of their spatial relations. I cannot, for example, say that a memory (as opposed to its object) is a given size or is to the left or the right of another memory. My memories are not out there in space; they are within me. This rather straightforward observation leads to the conclusion: “if we abstract from our mode of inwardly intuiting ourselves … then time is nothing.”13 Husserl, as we shall see, agrees with his predecessors. He also takes the presence of time to be a subjective performance. The question is: what sort of performance is this? How, for example, do we grasp the past as past? Augustine terms the past that we do apprehend “a present of past things,” a present that exists as “memory.”14 The things have departed, but their memory images remain present. They exist in the now. But as Husserl writes, “since I cannot compare the not-now, which no longer exists, with the now [i.e., the present memory image], how in the now can I know the not-now?”15 The difficulty is not just that of comparing the present image with the vanished past; it involves the fact that if the past is apprehended as a present image, then it is not apprehended as past. What we confront here is the unique character of primary memory. Such memory, if it is to be distinguished from a direct, sensuous perception, must apprehend the past as past. It must somehow “see” what no longer exists as no longer existing. It is this original apprehension that, according to Husserl, prevents us from having to compare the not-now with the now to justify our claim to know the not-now. Grasping the not-now directly, we need not compare it with anything else. Thus, to avoid the difficulty, we must talk of a perception that grasps the past directly and not through some present image. What sort of subjective performance allows us to do this? The same question occurs with regard to the future, which is also not-now and yet is grasped in the now.

throughout as KdrV. The Prussian Academy edition will be cited as Ak, and will be followed by its volume and page number. 13  KdrV, B51, Ak. 3:60. This does not mean that outer things cannot be characterized as in time. “Time,” Kant writes, “is the formal condition of all appearances whatsoever.” In this, it is distinguished from space which “serves as the apriori condition only of outer appearances” (KdrV, B50, Ak. 3:60). The point follows because “all presentations … belong … as determinations of the mind, to our inner state.” This inner state, however, “belongs to time” (ibid). Thus, when we relate our representations to an outer object, the object itself assumes a temporal character. We ascribe to it the past we recall and the future we anticipate even though, strictly speaking, we cannot outwardly intuit either. 14  Confessions, Bk. XI, §20, p. 19. 15  Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 34. See The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), trans. John Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 36. The translation of Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins will generally be taken from The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), trans. John Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991). This will be indicated with the abreviation “Br., ” followed by the corresponding page number of this translation. The words, “translation modified” will indicate the modification of this translation. Thus, the current reference is: Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 34; Br., p. 36, translation modified.

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Questions also arise regarding our ability to synthesize our memories and anticipations so as to grasp temporal events as extended. How, for example, do we grasp the flight of a bird across the garden as an extended event? Such a grasp presupposes our holding fast to our short-term memories and anticipations of the positions of its flight—this, so that we can view them together. Such memories and anticipations have to keep their order as time advances, the memories pointing to events receding into the past, the anticipations indicating events advancing towards our now. How do we grasp such receding and advance all the while focusing on the extended event? Beyond all such questions into the details of our subjective performance, a question arises regarding the nature of this performance itself. As Husserl realized, an account of our consciousness of time must also include an account of the temporality of the consciousness that grasps time. He writes in this regard, “since evidently perception and what is perceived are phenomenally simultaneous …, it follows that the perception of a temporal object must be a temporal object and that both coincide as far as their phenomenal extension is concerned.”16 If the perception of a temporal object is itself a temporal object, what is responsible for its presence as temporally extended? The perception of a temporal object occurs through a temporal synthesis of the elements composing the object’s duration. If this perception has, as an object, its own extended presence, then there must be a temporal synthesis behind this. But this synthesis, in having its own duration, would require a prior synthesis, and so on indefinitely. We can break this regress by saying that both consciousness and its object are temporally constituted, but that the process that constitutes them is not itself temporal. Husserl, in fact, embraces this position when he writes, “Time-constituting phenomena are evidently objectivities fundamentally different from those constituted in time. They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully ascribed to them.”17 This claim raises a number of questions about the ontological status of these time-­ constituting phenomena. If we cannot apply the predicates of individual objects to them, what is the nature of their being? Given that such phenomena compose the field of consciousness, what is its status? Are we led to Husserl’s conclusions that the being of consciousness is fundamentally different from that of its objects, that in some sense it forms a region of “‘absolute’ being” distinct from what is constituted through its syntheses.18 More generally, we may ask whether an account of how we apprehend time must necessarily separate the apprehending consciousness from the reality it apprehends. If it does, what does this do to the self-apprehension of this consciousness? If apprehension directs itself towards individual objects, how can consciousness grasp the pre-individual, time-constituting phenomena that make it up? At issue here, as Husserl realized, is nothing less than the status of his descriptions of the temporal process itself. How are they to be understood?

 Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 226; Br., p. 233.  Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, p. 75; Br., p. 79. 18  Ideen I, §76, Schuhmann ed., p. 159. 16 17

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The Schema Husserl commences his analysis with an early form of the reduction.19 He begins with an epoché involving “the complete exclusion of every assumption, stipulation, and conviction with respect to objective time (the complete exclusion of all transcending presuppositions concerning what exists).”20 The focus is not on such time. It is rather on “the phenomenological data … in which the temporal in the objective sense appears.” These are the “temporal interpretations [Zeitauffassungen]” and “the moments of experience that specifically found these temporal interpretations, that is, the specifically temporal contents there to be interpreted [Auffassungsinhalte].21 As is obvious, we have once again to do with the schema. Immanent in consciousness are the interpreting acts and the contents there to be interpreted. What transcends consciousness is the resulting intentional sense—the temporal in the objective sense. As before, intentional sense is, as a sense, a onein-many. It is the outcome of our interpreting the appearing data—the Auffassungsinhalte—as having a single referent. The result is the temporal object that appears through them. The application of this schema to our consciousness of time can best be appreciated by listening to a brief stretch of sound or a simple clap of your hands and then focusing on its fading (Verblassen) or subsiding (Abklingen) in the silence that follows. Such fadings form the immanent data in our apprehension of temporal departure. Our experience of such departure, Husserl suggests, is analogous to that of spatial departure, where an object grows smaller and smaller and also more obscure. “In receding into the past,” he writes, “the temporal object contracts and in the process also becomes obscure.”22 We interpret spatial contraction and increasing obscurity as departure in space. Such interpretation is something we acquired as infants as we learned how to make sense of our visual surroundings. At present, it is an unconscious, automatic part of our judging distance. Analogously, it can be said that we also came to interpret automatically the fadings we experience as temporal departure. The result of this second interpretation is the departing temporal object. Like the perspectivally appearing object, it also transcends “the really immanent content [reel immanente Inhalt],” which here consists of the fadings and the interpretative intentions attached to them.23 As a one-in-many, the temporal object, Husserl adds, “is not really and immanently given.”24 Continuing this analogy, he speaks of the fadings as the temporal perspectives (Abschattungen) of the temporal object. Just as  Bernet notes, “here we cannot yet speak of a transcendental-phenomenological reduction.” This is because Husserl still lacks the notion of the “transcendental constitution” that characterizes his turn towards idealism (Rudolf Bernet “Husserl’s Early Time-Analysis in Historical Context,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (2009) 40:2, p. 128. 20  Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 4; Br., p. 4. 21  Ibid., p. 6; Br., p. 6. 22  Ibid., p. 26.; Br., p. 28. 23  Ibid., p. 276; Br., p. 286. 24  Ibid., p. 284; Br., p. 294. 19

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a spatial-temporal object shows itself in different perspectives, each perspective representing its unity, so the temporal perspectives represent the unity of the temporally departing object. They point to it as the one thing that shows itself in the different temporal perspectives. In Husserl’s words, “The elapsed now with its filling does not remain an actually present now but presents itself in the new actually present now in a certain perspective [Abschattung]; and each such perspective represents [vertritt], so to speak, what has been in the actual now.”25 Strictly speaking, we cannot speak about an individual perspective of a spatial-­ temporal object. It is only when it is ranged alongside other such perspectives that a perspectival view can function as a view of the object. As already indicated, the intentional relation is a relation to a one-in-many, the many founding experiences intentionally referring to the unity that exists as their common referent. A single experience cannot by itself sustain this relationship. Husserl takes account of this necessity by asserting that the “elapsed duration” of a tone is “represented [repräsentiert] by means of a continuity of subsiding modifications [nachklingenden Modifikationen].” Such modifications are “the flow of perspectives in which the identical tone ‘presents’ itself.”26 The reason why these perspectives are perspectives of the departing tone is that they all undergo the same interpretation. In Husserl’s words, the departing tone appears because there is “a unity of interpretation, [Einheit der Auffassung],” one which “grasps the identical and unitary temporal phase precisely in this continuity of perspectives.”27 This grasp is not static, but rather part of an ongoing process. The tone’s ongoing departure is grasped through an ongoing fading. This, of course, presupposes that “the unity of interpretation is preserved,” i.e., that we continue to take the progressive fading of its presence as its progressive temporal departure.28

Retentions, Impressions and Interpretations According to Husserl, our consciousness of such progressive fading arises through the retentional process. A retention is a short term, primary memory. Even though no sensuous contents are there to sustain an object’s presence, we still have the experience of holding it fast. The retentional process, in which primary memory follows primary memory of some object, gives us the experience of the grasp of the object getting weaker and weaker. Through the process, we become conscious of the “fading,” the “dying-away,” the “sinking-down” of what we still hold fast. In describing this, Husserl refers, in the abstract, to individual retentions. He describes the continuity of the fading as the result of a lengthening chain of distinct retentions,

 Ibid., pp. 275–76; Br., pp. 285–86, translation modified.  Ibid., p. 277; Br., p. 287. 27  Ibid., p. 283; Br., p. 293, translation modified. 28  See ibid. 25 26

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one where “a retention changes into a retention of a retention and does so continuously.”29 The change from the retention to the retention of this retention marks the further fading of the retained object. One can describe this chain as consisting of a primary memory of a primary memory of … an original impression. Each further element of the chain modifies the impressional content making it increasingly faded. As such, each stands as a “representing content,” one that, with the appropriate interpretation, points to or “represents” the departing object. Where do such fadings come from? Husserl writes: “The content there to be interpreted [Auffassungsinhalt] that no longer can be characterized as a sensation takes on the character of a phantasm.”30 Consciousness itself generates these phantasms, which reproduce and modify the original sensation.31 The necessity for its doing so is expressed by Kant when he writes, “if I were to lose from my thought the preceding [impressions] … and not reproduce them when I advance to those which follow, a complete presentation [of an extended event] would never arise.”32 The necessity here is that of preventing the impression from vanishing as I advance to the now of the next impression. The same necessity applies to the reproduction that preserves the past impression. It, too, must be reproduced if it is not to vanish, and so on serially. Without this, we would have, at most, a flickering consciousness, an experience of sheer change, where contents appear only to disappear. It would be an experience of complete otherness abstracted from the dimensions of the past and the future. To attempt to think such otherness would be like attempting to think of movement apart from time—the aporia Aristotle leaves us with when he tries to conceive of time apart from its human apprehension. It is important to realize that we are talking here about our subjective apprehension of time. From an objective perspective, one can assert that the earth existed before humans arose and that processes, taking time, have pursued their course apart from us. Time, in such assertions, however, has a very different sense.33 It does  Ibid, p., 29; Br., p. 31.  Ibid., p. 233; Br., p. 240. 31  In a late unpublished manuscript he speaks of the functioning of temporalization as “the letting loose of retentions” (Ms. AV5, p. 6b, Jan. 1933). 32  “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” (1. Aufl.)” in Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: George Reiner, 1955), A 102, 4:79. It is interesting to note that Husserl’s copies of the Critique of Pure Reason in Leuven’s Husserl Archives are underlined and often heavily annotated. According to Iso Kern, with the exception of a single academic year, Husserl lectured on Kant continually from 1890 to 1927. By 1905, the date of his Winter Semester lectures on time, he had twice given lectures on Kant’s Prolegomena (1897–98, 1899–1900) and lectured on the Critique of Pure Reason on 1898, 1900–01, and 1902). Iso Kern gives the list of Husserl’s Kant’s lectures in Husserl und Kant (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), pp. 425–427. 33  According to Bergson, this sense involves the spatialization of time. This is apparent from the mathematical formula that science employs. To take the simplest example, to find out how far one has traveled, one can employ the formula: distance equals velocity times time. Thus having traveled 100 kilometers per hour for one hour, the formula predicts that you will have traveled 100 kilometers. You can work this formula for any time you choose. Yet at whatever time you do choose, it presents you only with a snapshot. It gives you the way the world will be outwardly intuited at that point. Here, as Bergson noted, we have to do with simultaneities—the simultaneity 29 30

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not involve memory or anticipation. The inanimate universe neither remembers nor anticipates. To experience time, however, we must do both. We must, first of all, retain what we receive from the external world. Husserl describes this in his account of the retentional process. Husserl accepts this necessity for preserving the retained in his account of the retentional process. Thus, first we have the impression, which we experience as a consciousness—say, of a tone-now. Then, “when the consciousness of the tone-­ now, the primal impression, passes over into retention, this retention itself is a now in turn, something actually existing.” 34 With the expiry of its now, this retention is itself retained by a new retention, and so on serially. Thus, the retention “changes into retention of retention and does so continuously.” The result is that “a fixed continuum of retentions arises in such a way that each later point is a retention for every earlier point.”35 What we have, then, is a chain of retentions of retentions of retentions … of some original impression. Each retention retains the impression by retaining the earlier retentions. Each, however, also modifies it insofar as the reproduction is never exact but rather more faded. The same holds for a temporal phase consisting of a number of impressions. Each of these impressions has its own continuity of attached retentions and the whole phase is retained in a continuity of such continuities “belonging to the different timepoints of the duration of the object.”36 How long is this phrase retained? How long does the series of primary memories of primary memories extend? Husserl never gives an exact answer. It would seem, however, that in the short term memory he is describing, the retained fades away within a minute. Afterwards, its recollection is a matter of long term memory. Although Husserl speaks of individual retentions, he is careful to note that the notion of an individual retention, like that of an individual perspective, is an abstraction. A retention by itself does not retain anything. Isolated, it does not point outside of itself. It has no intentionality apart from the continuity of the retentional chain. As he writes: “the running off phenomenon” of the retentional process “is a

of the hands (or number) on our temporal clock and the spatial position of the object. In his words, “all that mechanics [in calculating velocity] retains of time is simultaneity, all that it retains of motion itself—restricted, as it is, to a measurement of motion—is immobility” (Time and Free Will, An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. I. Pogson, New York: Macmillan, 1959, p. 119). His point is that the formula v =d/t does not express ongoing motion. This “algebraic equation always expresses something already done.” (ibid.). The theoretical physicist, Lee Smolin, makes a similar point. In his view, we exclude time from the world when we record motion as positions at different times. In his words, “the process of recording a motion, which takes place in time, results in a record, which is frozen in time—a record that can be represented by a curve in the graph, which is also frozen in time” (Time Reborn, From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013], p. 34. The result is what he calls “the spatialization of time” (p. 35). This occurs when we “conflate the [mathematical] representation with the reality [of motion] and identify the graph of the records of the motion with the motion itself” (p. 34). 34  Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 29; Br. p. 31. 35  Ibid. 36  Ibid., p. 28; Br., p. 30.

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continuity of constant changes. This continuity forms an inseparable unity, inseparable into extended sections that could exist by themselves and inseparable into phases that could exist by themselves, into points of the continuity.” This means that the individual “parts,” “phases” or “points” “that we single out by abstraction can exist only in the whole runningoff.”37 Thus, the retentions composing the runningoff phenomenon do not function individually. Like the perspectives of a spatialtemporal object, they only gain their reference when they are grasped as part of an ongoing process. It is interesting to note that, in the later Bernau Manuscripts, Husserl makes the same point with regard to the primal impression or experience. He asserts that, by itself, “the primal experience does not yet have the character of an intentional experience. It constantly passes into such, i.e., into a consciousness of a primary datum, in the manner of a constantly mediated intentionality.”38 This means that the impressional datum achieves an animating’ intention, i.e., becomes representing content, by constantly lapsing and being replaced. The mediated intentionality occurs through the retentions of the elapsed data. Thus, Husserl writes, “The primally present datum constantly changes into another and yet another datum. Thereby it gains an ‘animating’ interpretation, the caracter of a ‘representant,’ of a content there to be interpreted.”39 The reason for this is that the retentions of the elapsed primal data (along with the interpretations attached them) position such data in departing time. The retained primal experience or datum, as part of such data, represents or intentionally refers to a position in this elaped, departng time. The above should not be taken as making the primal datum dependent on the retentional chain that preserves it. The reverse is rather the case: the retentions are dependent on what they retain. As Husserl puts this, “Consciousness is nothing without impression.” Thus, if we successively experience the impressions a, x, y, consciousness can produce the retentions of these. It can move from a to a′ and from xa′ to x′a″, etc.; “but,” Husserl adds, “the a, x, y is nothing produced by consciousness. It is what is primally produced—the ‘new,’ that which has come into being alien to consciousness, that which has been received, as opposed to what has been produced through consciousness’s own spontaneity.”40 Given this, we have to say that “every retention intrinsically refers back to an impression.”41 In fact, it is an “a priori necessity that a corresponding perception, or a corresponding primal impression, precede the retention.”42 As he also puts this: “The primal impression

 Ibid., p. 27; Br., p. 29.  Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), ed. R. Bernet and D. Lohmar, Hua XXXIII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), p. 62. 39  Ibid. 40  Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 100; Br., p. 106. 41  Ibid., p. 34; Br., p. 36 42  Ibid., p. 33; Br., p. 35. 37 38

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is the absolutely unmodified; it is the primal source for all further consciousness and being.”43 Besides generating the retentions of the primal impressions, consciousness also produces the interpretations attached to these. It is important to recall that, by themselves, these retentions of the primary content simply present the content as fading or dying away. As such, they are insufficient to give us a sense of a content’s sinking down into pastness. For this, we have to turn to the interpretations of these fadings. The interpretations take each fading as a degree of temporal departure. Thus, the primary contents are not just subject to the retentional modifications that appear in the fading of the content. They also “carry primary interpretations that, in their flowing connectedness, constitute the temporal unity of the immanent content in its receding into the past.” To recall Husserl’s analogy: just as we interpret a spatial object’s getting smaller and smaller as it spatially departs, so we interpret a primary content’s fading as it temporally departs from the now that we occupy. Attached to each retention is, then, “a primal interpretation that is no longer constituted.” The series of such interpretations gives us the ongoing interpretation of the fading, but still retained content as sinking into the past—i.e., as departing further and further from our now.

 he Time Diagram and the Constitution T of the Temporal Object Husserl provides a pair of diagrams to illustrate the retentional process.44

 Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p.  67; Br., p.  70. According to Eugin Fink, Husserl, under the pressure of his idealism, abandons this position (see “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gengenwärtigen Kritik,” Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930-39, Phänomenologica, No. 21, The Hague, 1966, p. 143). Certain remarks in the Cartesian Meditations also indicate this. Yet in his late manuscripts, he continues to affirm it. He writes, for example, “When we speak of a primal impressional core (in a formal sense, of material, of hyle), we obviously come to the deepest level … to the hyle in the sense of the Ideen, as the core of the ‘data of sensation’” (Ms. C 4 8b, Aug. 1930  in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929-1934), Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar [Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006], p. 99). This hyle is externally provided. In Husserl’s words, “The primal hyle in its own temporalization is, so to speak, the core of the concrete present, a core that is foreign to the ego [ichfremde Kern]” (Ms. C 6, p. 4b, Aug. 1930, ibid., p. 110). In spite of this, it is really—i.e., immanently—present in the perceptual experience. In Husserl’s words, “In the streaming experience, which is called perception, there comes forward the phase-by-phase changing impressional moment as really [reel] belonging to it” (Ms. B III 9, p. 55b, 1931). Husserl can call this impressional moment or hyletic material both “foreign” and “really belonging” to the perceptual experience since, while it is integral to this experience, it is not something generated by it. Consciousness cannot produce it, but must instead receive it. 44  See Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 28; Br., p. 29. 43

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The horizontal lines represent, from left to right, the advance of time. The sinking into pastness of the retained as time advances is depicted by the diagonal lines. Thus, in the advance from A to P in the first diagram, the impressional content, A, sinks down to point A′, while the subsequent content, P, sinks down to point P′. The same holds for all the impressional contents between A and P. If we take AP to designate a stretch of time filled by a temporally extended event, then at the time, E, the event is retained as A′P′. Thus, the vertical lines give the result of this sinking down. A′P′, for example, can be seen as designating our retentional consciousness of the melodic phrase we heard at time AP. A crucial assumption here is that the sinking down is constant. If the impressional content, P, for example, sank down at a faster rate than A so that the diagonal lines connecting A to A′ and P to P′ crossed, then their temporal order would be scrambled. It would seem to us that P was further past than A. To avoid this, all the contents have to be subject to the same constant modification, the same rate, so to speak, of fading. The interpretation of this fading as temporal departure must itself be fixed. The diagram indicates these necessities by its having the diagonal lines run parallel to each other. To see this diagram as representing the constitution of departing time, we have to turn to the two intentionalities that inform the retentional process. First of all we have what Husserl calls “lengthwise intentionality” (Langsintentionalität). It proceeds from the now along the chains of retentions of retentions—in the diagram along the lengths of the lines P′P, A′A.45 To call the retentional relation an intentionality points, first of all, to the fact that each retention is of what precedes it. In Husserl’s words, “the first primal impression becomes changed into a retention of

45

 Ibid., p. 81; Br., p. 85.

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itself, this retention becomes changed into a retention of this retention, and so on.”46 Husserl adds that the intentionality that designates this “of” “continuously coincides with itself” since “the retention of a retention has intentionality not only in relation to what is immediately retained but also in relation to what, in the retaining, is retained of the second degree, and ultimately in relation to the primal datum.”47 Here, the intentionality that is synonymous with retentional relation coincides with itself since the retentional chain continuously retains itself as it undergoes as a whole a retentional transformation with each new now. Two things are to be noted about lengthwise intentionality. The first is that it is built on a series of dependences. A retention depends on that which it retains, which, in turn, depends on that which it retains and so on serially till we get to the primal impression that is presented through the chain. The second is that it is an intentionality of an increasing chain. As a result, it presents its objects in departing time. Such time is, in fact, constituted by it. As Husserl describes this: “The unity of the flow [of time] as a one dimensional quasi-temporal order constitutes itself in the flow of consciousness by virtue of the retentional transformations and the fact that such transformations are, continuously, retentions of the retentions that have continuously preceded them.”48 Husserl calls this time “quasi-temporal” since what it presents are only individual moments. It does not present what endures through them. For this, we require the “transverse intentionality” [Querintentionalität] that proceeds across the retentional chains. In following it, Husserl writes, “I do not follow the flow of the [retentional] fields … Instead, I direct my attention to what is intended in each field.”49 When, for example, a tone continues to sound, in directing myself towards the tone, “I immerse myself attentively in the ‘transverse intentionality’ [‘Querintentionaliät’]” of what I retain. In terms of the time diagram, my attention proceeds along the vertical line EA′. It embraces “the primal sensation [E] as a sensation of the actually present tone-now,” and “the retentional modifications [along the line EA′] as primary memories of the series of elapsed tone points.”50 Such retentional modifications give me the successive tone points through which the tone appears. Each retentional chain results in an “intentional experience” of a lapsing tone point. As the flow of experience continues, “the intentional phases” presenting such tone points “are displaced … they pass over into one another precisely as phenomena of one thing, which shows itself perspectivally in the flowing phenomena.”51 As a result, “the enduring tone stands before me, constantly expanding in its duration.”52 Generally speaking, the result of following the transverse intentionality is the presence of “‘objects in their ways of appearing’ [Gegenstände

 Ibid., p 81; Br., pp. 85–6, my emphasis.  Ibid., p 81; Br., p. 86. 48  Ibid., p 82; Br., p. 86. 49  Ibid., p. 117; Br., p. 121. 50  Ibid., p. 82; Br., p. 86. 51  Ibid., p. 117; Br,, p. 121. 52  Ibid., p. 82; Br., p. 87. 46 47

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im Wie] and in ever new ways of appearing.”53 Such ways of appearing are the departing appearances through which we constitutively present to ourselves the persisting object. Here, we should note that this transverse intentionality is, like the lengthwise one, also built on a series of dependencies. Each point on the vertical line of the time diagram owes its position to those that preceded it. The degree of pastness that it presents depends upon its being continually shoved down, as it were, by the retained moments that follow it. In other words, its being past depends on the time that follow it. In this sense it refers to and is “of” the retained moments that link it to the present. Husserl’s account of the constitution of appearing time signifies that we should read the time diagram from the perspective of its vertical line. It is what is given in the now. What we take as extended time is constituted from the co-present data on it. Thus, at each time point, we immanently possess the primal impressions we receive from our environment, the retentions of elapsed impressions and, as we shall see, the protentions of anticipated impressions. The extended time that we take as preceding this now point is not part of this material. The following diagram indicates this relation.

RR′ designates the immanent retained material. A′A designates the constituted elapsed time that transcends this. Thus, what, in the first set of diagrams, we took as the advance of time with its successive nows following one another is actually our product. We are the ones who take the sheer change occurring in the now and translate it into the flow of time.

The Constitution of the Perception and the Perceived Both lengthwise and transverse intentionality are many-to-one relations. The intentionality that points to the departing appearance relates the multiplicity of temporal perspectives forming the retentional chain to that of which they are perspectives— namely, the appearance itself as fixed in departing time. Similarly, the intentionality that points to the persisting object, relates the resulting temporally determinate appearances to the enduring unity that stands as their referent. The two intentionalities imply one another. Their inseparability is indicated in the diagram by the fact 53

 Ibid., p. 117; Br, p. 121.

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that all the diagonal lines with their lengthwise intentionalities end in the vertical with its transverse intentionality. What we have, here, in Husserl’s words, are “two inseparably united intentionalities, requiring one another like two sides of one and the same thing.” Both “are interwoven with each other in the one, unique flow of consciousness.”54 He adds, “By virtue of one of the intentionalities [the transverse intentionality] immanent time becomes constituted – an objective time, a genuine time in which there is duration and the alteration of what endures. In the other intentionality [the lengthwise intentionality], it is the quasi-temporal arrangement of the phases of the flow that becomes constituted—the flow of experiences that proceed back in time.”55 Because the two intentionalities are interwoven, departing time and enduring time are parts of the same flow. “There is,” Husserl writes, “one, unique flow of consciousness.” He adds, “the flow of consciousness constitutes its own unity.”56 In the lengthwise direction, this unity is constituted because each further retention retains as whole what was previously retained. Thus, the retained material continuously coincides with itself. In the transverse direction, the same retained material is unified in the duration that appears through it. Thus, for Husserl, “This prephenomenal, preimmanent temporality becomes constituted intentionally as the form of the time constituting consciousness. It is constituted in consciousness itself” as its unity.57 The point of these remarks is that, with the constitution of temporal experience, we have the constitution of consciousness itself as a distinct temporal form. In other words, before the constitution of successive and enduring time, we cannot speak of the unity of consciousness. Such constitution does not involve any action by the ego. As in the Logical Investigations, the ego, understood in the transcendental sense, has not yet made its appearance. This does not mean that we are not self-aware, i.e., do not appear to ourselves. Husserl writes in this regard: The flow of the consciousness that constitutes immanent time not only exists but is so remarkably and yet intelligibly fashioned that a self-appearance of the flow necessarily exists in it, and therefore the flow itself must necessarily be apprehensible in the flowing. The self-appearance of the flow does not require a second flow; on the contrary, it constitutes itself as a phenomenon in itself.58

Such self-appearance signifies that the perceptual experience of an enduring object carries with it a background awareness of the flow of consciousness as it departs in time. This can be put in terms of the necessary connection between the perception and the perceived. The two are inseparable since “[i]n the same impressional consciousness in which the perception becomes constituted, the perceived also becomes

 Ibid., p. 83; Br., p. 87.  Ibid., p. 83; Br., pp. 87–8. 56  Ibid., p. 80; Br., p. 84. 57  Ibid., p. 83; Br., p. 88. 58  Ibid. 54 55

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constituted, and precisely by its means.”59 The fact that to constitute the perception is also to constitute the perceived means that the appearing of an object always includes a background awareness of the perceptual process. As Husserl puts this, “It belongs to the essence of a consciousness having this structure to be at once a consciousness of a unity of the immanent sort and a consciousness of a unity of the transcendent sort.”60 This point follows because, at each instant, the same retained contents—those depicted on the vertical of the time-diagram—have a double intentionality and a double representative function. They point to the temporally departing immanent experiences or to the enduring object that shows itself through them. Thus, “in the one case, we have the presenting of something immanent; in the other, the presenting of something transcendent ‘through’ appearances.”61 Given that we cannot have one without the other, perception always involves the awareness of consciousness in its flowing. We cannot perceive something without sensing that we have perceived it.

Protention and Its Time Diagram Our sense of time does not just involve the retention of the past. It also includes our anticipation of the future. When a person hears the beginning of what she takes to be a familiar melody, she anticipates its notes. Her expectation of what is coming is fulfilled as the melody unfolds. A similar process occurs when you reach for a glass. As your arm moves toward it, the fingers of your hand open to its anticipated shape. Your arm extends to its anticipated distance. Grasping the glass, you apply just enough strength to lift its anticipated weight. Accomplishing this involves having the correct anticipations. In the performance of this action, each anticipation is matched by a corresponding perception. When the match is perfect, the action proceeds effortlessly, the flow of perceptions being just what you anticipate. If, however, you miscalculate, if, for example, you interpret the glass as being heavier than it is, your hand will fly upward spilling its contents. Here, as in the case of the melody, the interpretation brings with it an anticipation of what will be experienced. This link between anticipation and interpretation points to the schema. In our grasp of the future, we find an interpretation, contents there to be interpreted, and the resulting transcendent objectivity. Husserl terms the contents that are interpreted “protentions.” In his descriptions, they appear as the mirror image of retentions. Thus just as the retentional process has a mediated intentionality based on the fact that each later retention “is a retention of the earlier,” the protentional process has its own mediated intentionality, which, however, goes in the reverse direction. As Husserl describes this in the Bernau Manuscripts, “Every preceding protention

 Ibid., p. 91; Br., p. 95.  Ibid., p. 91; Br., p. 95–6. 61  Ibid., p. 91; Br., p. 96. 59 60

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relates to every succeeding one in the protentional continuum like every succeeding retention relates to the preceding one in the same [retentional] series. The preceding protention intentionally includes all the later. It implies them. The successive retention intentionally implies all the earlier.”62 Thus, while the retentional chain can be described as an already-having of an already-having … of an original impression, the protentional chain, as the inverse of this, is a having-in-advance of a having-in-­ advance … of a future impression. The sense of futurity implied in this having-in-­ advance results from our interpretation of our protentions. The retentions of a content, as they succeed one another, fade until they decrease to nothingness. The protentions of a content, in the succession of phantasms that we generate, increase in vividness, this succession terminating in the actually present content. We take such an increase as this content’s approach to the now that we occupy. As Husserl remarks, both retention (or primary memory) and protention are required if I am to grasp a melody. In his words: “Primary memory of the tones that, as it were, I have just heard and expectation (protention) of the tones that are yet to come fuse with the interpretation of the tone that is now appearing and that, as it were, I am now hearing.”63 The interpretation locates it in time. It gives the melody its tension of possible developments, of anticipations growing out of our retentions of the previous notes that may be fulfilled or, perhaps, frustrated. To be located in time is to have a horizon of pastness and futurity. Husserl describes this horizon in terms of intention and fulfillment. The intentionality of the retentional chains proceeds backward in time to the elapsed primal data. It has both a serial and an ultimate fulfillment, the latter being the presence of the data in primary memory. The same holds in reverse direction with regard to protention. It, too, has a serial intentionality. In Husserl’s words, “the intentionality [of the anticipation] is continually mediated in its aiming at everything in what is coming … it proceeds from one phase to the next … and, through this, to what follows this and so on to all the phases,” proceeding through them to the anticipated content.64 This intentionality is fulfilled through the protentions just as the intentionality of the retentional chain is fulfilled through the retentions. As Husserl, expresses this: the intention goes to the fulfillments or rather goes from anticipation to anticipation in the continuum of anticipations, thereby proceeding towards constantly newly fulfilled anticipations (fulfilled according to the phrase). What we confront here are two sides of one and the same process. Thus, we observe the same thing with the retentions: the intention directed to the past primal data and the retention directed to the past retentions.65

The distinction between the two is that, rather than elapsed data, the ultimate fulfillment of the protentional intentionality is the perceptual presence of what we intend. Husserl provides us with a time diagram to illustrate the protentional process.66  Die Bernauer Manuskripte, p. 10.  Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 35; Br., p. 37, translation modified. 64  Die Bernauer Manuskripte, p. 8. 65  Ibid., p. 9. 66  Ibid., p. 22. 62 63

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Here, the first vertical line, E2E11, which represents the retained data, is extended above the horizontal to include E′3E2. This new segment represents the protended stretch of time attached to the series of retentions along E2E11. The expectations of E′3E2 direct themselves to the primary data lying along the horizontal stretch E2E3. If these data occur as expected, the intentions of the protended stretch are fulfilled. With the advance of time, the experienced stretch that fulfills these protentions is, itself retained. Thus, by time E3, E′3E2 becomes the retained stretch E3E21. The result, then, is that the original protentional relation between E2E11 and E′3E2 is now a relation between two retained stretches. Thus, the line, E3E12, both reproduces the earlier retention, E2E11, with its protentional tendency, E′3E2, and reproduces (retains) the data that fulfilled this tendency. As Husserl describes this relation, “The earlier [retained] consciousness is protention, that is, an intention directed to what is later. The retention that follows this would then be the retention of an earlier retention, which is also characterized as protention. This newly occurring retention reproduces the earlier retention with its protentional tendency and at the same time fulfills it, but in such a way that a protention proceeds through this fulfillment to the next phase.”67 The reference to fulfillment occurring in the next phase or stretch of experience points to the fact that this stretch also has its protentional horizon, one that points to the stretch following it. Thus, the vertical line, E12E3, also extends above the horizontal, the extension symbolizing its protentional tendency or horizon of futurity. This horizon arises because, experiencing, we constantly anticipate. We assume that fresh experience will confirm what we have already experienced.

67

 Ibid., p. 25.

Protention and Interpretation

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Protention and Interpretation Husserl’s account of the relation of protention to fulfillment helps us understand how we form our perceptual interpretations. Such interpretations are not the work of an ego transcending the perceptual process. They develop within it, their basis being what we retain. This development occurs with the growth of our protentional intentionality. As Husserl describes this, when an experience first begins, there is no retention of it and, hence, no definitely formed protention.68 The latter begins with the formation of retentions. In his words, “The further the event advances, the more it offers for differentiated protentions, ‘the style of the past is projected onto the future.’”69 What grows up is the motivation for anticipating something as something, i.e., for interpreting it as some definite thing. As Husserl puts this, “The running off of the retentional branches … works on the protention, determining its content, tracing out its sense.” The result is an “indicating in advance, a motivation that can be seen.”70 Concretely, the result is a determination of what we intend to see as based on our retained experience. When we do see what our retained experience motivates us to see, our interpretative intention is fulfilled. This intention is formed through our protentions. As such, it shares their serial character. As Husserl describes this, “every intention, in its passing over, passes through every new intention and, in this process, it is not just the final intention that ‘fulfills’ itself … rather every intention fulfills itself. The null point [the intended event] is the fulfillment for every previous intention—this, through the fact that every later intention includes the earlier in itself.”71 Thus, to take the previous chapter’s example of intending to see a cat, the approach to the animal involves a whole series of anticipated perceptions. Each, when fulfilled, determines the cat more closely and motivates the anticipation of the following perceptions. We anticipate that these perceptions will further determine the cat, that is, fill in some detail that had previously been missing. The end intention, that of picking up the cat and holding it, contains all the previous intentions insofar as they are all involved in the approach to the animal. Here, as Husserl writes, “‘intention’ signifies the mediation of consciousness, which is always intentional, always functioning in the context of intentions, and which, in the limiting case—that of the final intention—is unmediated original consciousness.”72 Thus, the limiting case, the final intention of holding the cat, is mediated by all the intentions that form the elements of the protentional chain leading up to it. Only when we are actually holding the cat can we speak of the unmediated consciousness that comes with having the final intention fulfilled. For Husserl, then, our protentions, in expressing what we expect to see, shape the interpretative intentions that direct the perceptual process. Statically, we can regard  Die Bernauer Manuskripte, p. 37.  Ibid., p. 38. 70  Ibid. 71  ibid., p. 42. 72  Ibid., p. 40. 68 69

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the intentional relation of consciousness to its object as a many-to-one relation, the many perceptual experiences being taken as experiences of one object. Genetically, however, we have to think of the perceptual process as ongoing. Here, intentionality does not just involve the intention to interpret a succession of experiences as experiences of some particular object, it also includes the expectation that, as one continues this interpretation, the object will unfold itself until it fulfills the final intention. This developing expectation or protention is an intentional selection. Protending, we attend to some contents rather than others. We focus on those that match our protentions.73 Doing so, we seek out the pattern of perceptions that will present us with our intended reference. We also interpret these perceptions as fulfillments. As Husserl writes, in describing our hearing a tone: “As long as the tone sounds … protention continually directs itself to what comes and receives it in the mode of fulfillment, intentionally shaping it. Every primal presence is, therefore, not just content, but ‘interpreted’ content. Primal presentation is, thus, fulfilled expectation.”74 All of this happens without the intervention of the ego. As Husserl will later describe it, it is the result of “passive synthesis” rather than “active” ego-directed synthesis.

Resolution This summary of Husserl’s account of our consciousness of time allows us to understand his resolution of the issues we initially raised. We asked how we grasp the flight of a bird as an extended event. This occurs, for Husserl, through the two intentionalities that animate the perceptual progress. They allow us to grasp the successive stages of the flight and see such stages as appearances of one and the same moving object. As to the question of the place of expired and anticipated time, Husserl’s answer is essentially the same as Augustine’s. Augustine speaks of “a present of things past” that exists in our memory, “a present of things present” that exists in the ongoing moment of perception, and “a present of things future” that exists in expectation. For Husserl, too, all three times are co-present. The retentions that give us the “present of things past” are co-present both with the impressions that we presently receive and the anticipations that form “the present of things future.” Together they make up the data that form the vertical lines of the second of Husserl’s time diagrams. They are all in the nows indicated by the points of these lines. What about the issue of apprehending the past as past? If we say that retained past is present in the now, how can it also be apprehended as past? Husserl’s reply is that retention or primary memory does not give us a present image of the past. As a constitutive process, it results in a direct perception of the past. In his words, “Just as I see being-now in perception and enduring being in the extended perception as

73 74

 See ibid., pp. 3–4.  Ibid., p. 7.

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it becomes constituted, so I see the past in memory, insofar as the memory is primary memory.”75 This assertion does not mean, as some have asserted, that Husserl has given up the “the prejudice of the now,” that he has abandoned any recourse to “contents really contained in the now of consciousness” in his account of how we grasp the past.76 Husserl is only asserting that our grasp of the past through primary memory is a constitutive process just as our perceptual grasp of being in the now is. In giving their objects originally, both forms of apprehension can be called perceptual processes. As Husserl puts this: But if we call perception the act in which all “origin” lies, the act that constitutes originally, then primary memory is perception. For only in primary memory do we see what is past, only in it does the past become constituted … it is its essence to bring this new and original past to primary, direct intuition, just as it is the essence of the perception of the now to bring the now directly to intuition.77

Thus, we distinguish perception of what is now from primary memory in terms of their objects’ being either present or past. But we also say that both are forms of perception insofar as both constitutive processes grasp their objects directly. Both present, rather than re-present. They do so on the basis of contents really contained in the now—the series of retentions for the perception of the past and, for the perception of the object that presently endures, the retentions, impressions, and protentions that fill the present moment. For Husserl, it makes as little sense to seek another past beyond that which is presented by primary memory as it is to seek another present than that presented by direct intuition. Next, we come to the issue of the infinite regress that threatens to undermine the schema and, with this, the whole of Husserl’s analyses of time consciousness. If we say that time constituting consciousness itself endures, what is responsible for its duration? Don’t we have to refer back to a prior constituting consciousness that is responsible for such duration? But if this consciousness is itself an enduring, temporal object, does not the same question reoccur? The same question can be put in terms of the schema. If every appearing object is the result of interpretation and contents there to be interpreted, what about the interpretation and these contents themselves? If they appear, don’t they require a prior interpretation and contents there to be interpreted, and so on indefinitely? According to Husserl, we can only resolve this difficulty by limiting the use of the schema. We have to say that we

 Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 35; Br., p. 36.  John Brough, for example, writes: “What Husserl, in effect, insists upon is the overthrow of the prejudice of the now, the view that one could not possibly be directly and immediately conscious of the past because it is gone, lost, and that one must therefore gain access to the past through present contents, contents really contained in the now of consciousness. The prejudice of the now amounts to the claim that the only way we know the past is by keeping it around in the present in some more or less literal sense. Even the term ‘retention’ might suggest that” ( “Husserl’s Phenomenology of time-consciousness,” in Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Text Book, ed. J.N.  Mohanty and William R.  McKenna [Latham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1989], 275). 77  Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 41; Br., p. 43. 75 76

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cannot proceed indefinitely. Ultimately, we come to unconstituted contents, contents that are simply there for us—i.e., contents would be immediately rather than synthetically experienced. Instead of being grasped as an “object,” that is, as a one-­ in-­many through an interpretative act, they would be primally experienced. As Husserl expresses this: If one says that every content comes to consciousness only by means of an interpretative act [Auffassungsakt] directed towards it, then the question immediately arises about the consciousness in which this interpretative act, which is surely a content itself, becomes conscious, and an infinite regress is unavoidable. But if every ‘content’ is inherently and necessarily ‘primally experienced’ [Urbewußt], the question about a further giving consciousness becomes meaningless.78

What this signifies is that on the lowest level of constitution, the dichotomy between consciousness and content becomes collapsed. On this level, the presence of the content is the consciousness of it.79 We have, in other words, a direct non-constituted consciousness of the fadings that constitute the retentional series. We also have a direct consciousness of the protentions that constitute the interpretative act. The Bernau Manuscripts embrace the same solution. As Husserl writes there, it is not the case that the ultimate contents of consciousness “are like immanent temporal givens, which are already constituted by the ‘interpreting’ consciousness.” On the contrary, “[w]hat is really present in the innermost sphere is something ultimate, something no longer constituted, no longer a concrete unity from ‘multiplicities’ that are constituted in their turn.”80 Given that the constituted transcends its constituting elements, these ultimate non-constituted elements are genuinely immanent— i.e., they make up the “innermost sphere” of consciousness. Their non-constituted status means that they do not appear through prior modes of givenness—the modes, say, of a more ultimate time-constituting consciousness. They must, however, appear. As Husserl puts this necessity, if we are to avoid the regress, the ultimately constituting process these elements form “must not just be ‘self-perceived,’ ‘inwardly apprehended,’ but be such without requiring any further process.” It must be “an ultimate primal process, whose being would be consciousness.”81 The call here is for a level of temporal constitution, the being of whose elements is their appearing. Such elements must form the basic components of appearing as such. Finally, we come to the issue of the status of such non-constituted components. Husserl writes regarding our retentions, protentions and primal impressions: “Time-­ constituting phenomena are evidently objectivities fundamentally different from  Ibid., p. 119; Br. p. 123, translation modified.  As Brough writes: “Retention just is the direct and immediate consciousness of what is past as it elapses: It ‘really contains consciousness of the past of the tone’ (324) and nothing else. As pure— or, perhaps better, ‘sheer’—intentionality, the momentary phase is no longer bloated with apprehension- and content-continua” (“Translator’s Introduction,” in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time [1893-1917], trans. John Brough, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. p. xl). 80  Bernauer Manuskripte, pp. 178–79. 81  Ibid., p. 191. 78 79

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those constituted in time. They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully ascribed to them.”82 They are not individual objects or processes because, for Husserl, to be an individual is to persist in time. It is to be constituted in time as a “persisting presence which ‘includes,’ as non-independent components in the stream of presences, both past and future.”83 Thus, individual persisting objects endure, but retentions, protentions and impressions do not. An impressional moment is constantly lapsing. A retention is constantly being replaced by a retention of itself. The same holds for the protentions that form the protentional chain. Such elements cannot endure since, rather than being in time, they constitute, in their constantly becoming other, the time in which enduring occurs. Similarly, we cannot speak of impressions, retentions, and protentions as changing over time. Since each occupies only a moment, none has the “time” to change. This means we cannot speak of their change as fast or slow—i.e., as accomplishing much or little over some given time period.84 What, then, are these pretemporal, ultimately constituting elements? The collapse of the distinction between consciousness and content implied by Husserl’s limitation of the schema indicates that the primal level of time constitution is that of appearing as such. This sheer appearing is prior to the distinctions we commonly draw between appearing, that which appears, and that to whom it appears. Appearing here is neither the appearing of some transcendent object nor is it mediated by a subject, understood as that to whom this object appears. This point follows since the elements that appear are pre-temporal, while both subjects and objects, as existing in time, presuppose temporal constitution. In this positing of an ultimate level of sheer appearing, we find Husserl agreeing with one of his harshest critics, the Czech philosopher, Jan Patočka. It was Patočka who asserted that “manifesting is, in itself, something completely original,” that it “is not reducible, cannot be converted into anything that manifests itself in manifesting,” be this the appearing object or the subject that grasps it.85 Patočka’s point is that such appearing is prior to everything that appears. To explain it in terms of

 Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 75; Br. p. 79.  The full citation is: “Temporalization, this is the constitution of existents in their temporal modalities. An existent: a present existent with the past of the same existent, with the future coming to be of the same. Thus, in an original sense, existent = original, concrete presence. It is persisting presence which ‘includes,’ as non-independent components in the stream of presences, both past and future” (Ms. C 13, III, p. 1, March 1934; CMs, p. 274). In other words, “Every concrete individual persists in time and is what it is because, constantly becoming, it passes from presence to presence” (Ms. E III 2, p. 2 1934). An early expression of this equation occurs in Investigation II, §8 of the Logische Untersuchungen where Husserl writes: “What is real is the individual with all its components; it is a here and now. Temporality for us is a sufficient characteristic feature of reality. Real being and temporal being are not identical concepts, but they do have the same range.” LU, 3:129 84  See Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 75; Br. p. 79. 85  Jan Patocka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 24. This means that “showing itself is not any of these things that show themselves, whether it is a psychic or physical object … and yet it is still showing of those things” (ibid., p. 22). 82 83

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what appears is to assume the very appearing that the explanation is trying to account for. As Patočka puts this, “I cannot go back to what appears to explain the appearing of appearing, since the understanding of appearing is presupposed in every thesis I might make about the appearing entity.”86 The same view, we can say, applies to Husserl’s ultimate level of time constitution. Husserl’s account of temporal constitution is notable in the fact that the ego plays no part in it. The time constitution, he describes, is essentially a “passive” constitution. For Husserl, “‘Passive’ signifies here without the action of the ego. … The [temporal] stream does not exist by virtue of the action of the ego as if the ego aimed at actualizing the stream, as if the stream were actualized by an action. The stream is not something done, not a ‘deed’ in the widest sense.”87 In fact, as we shall see, Husserl later claims that the ego, itself, depends upon the layer of passive constitution. He writes, “In this pre-time [of retentions, protentions and impressions] there is constituted, in the ‘stream’ of this life, not just the pre-temporal unities (the experiences in their temporality as experiences) …, there is also constituted all the levels of existents for the ego and also, correlatively, the ego itself.”88 In other words: “The ego itself is constituted as a temporal unity. As the stationary and remaining ego, it is an already acquired (and, in continual acquisition, a continually acquired) ontical unity: the identical ego of my temporal life.”89 Such views are an expression of the position, implicit in the Logical Investigations, that defines being in terms of being an object and, hence, as something subject to constitution. The motive for doing so comes from its privileging the epistemological standpoint, the standpoint that equates being with the possibility of being known, i.e., of being an object of knowledge. What is ignored here is the conception of the subject understood as that to whom objects appear, the subject as a knower as opposed to an object known. In the first volume of the Ideas, this subject, understood as a transcendental ego, makes its appearance. As we turn towards this work, a very different conception of phenomenology will arise, one that places the ego and its acts at the center of its descriptions. The tension between this view and that expressed by the Logical Investigations and the subsequent lectures on time consciousness will, as we shall see, drive the conception of the phenomenological enterprise forward.

 The fallacy here is that of the petio principii. In Patočka’s words: “Es ist ja von vornherein klar, daß die Gesetzmäßigkeit des Erscheinens in seinem Erscheinen keineswegs die des Erscheinenden in seinen Eigenstrukturen, besonders in seinen Kausalbeziehungen sein kann. Ich kann nicht auf das Erscheinende rekurrieren, um die Erscheinung in ihrem Erscheinen zu klären, denn das Verständnis des Erscheinens ist bei jeder These über das erscheinende Seiende schon vorausgesetzt” (“Der Subjektivismus der Husserlschen und die Möglichkeit einer ‘asubjektiven’ Phänomenologie,” p. 278). 87  Ms. C 17, pp. 63a–b, Aug.1930; Zur Phänomenologishen Reducktion, pp. 179–180. 88  Ms. C 17, pp. 65a–b; Aug.1930; Zur Phänomenologischen Reducktion, pp. 180–181. 89  Ms. C 17, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 348, Sept. 20, 1931. 86

Chapter 4

The Phenomenological Reduction and the Transformation of Phenomenology

Motivating Connections Husserl saw himself as a constant beginner in phenomenology. Indeed, his work can be seen as a repeated set of “introductions” to phenomenology. The most radical of these occurs in the first volume of his Ideas with its presentation of phenomenology as “transcendental idealism,” a development that caused many of his early advocates to leave him. Enamored as they were by the Logical Investigations and its refutations of skepticism and relativism, they could not fathom why he abandoned its realistic stance—i.e., its affirmation of the physical reality of the spatialtemporal world and of ourselves as part of it. Hadn’t the Investigations managed to avoid the relativism associated with such an affirmation? Did not the turn to the realm of ideal being guarantee the objectivity of knowledge? Husserl counters these questions by asserting that this guarantee is not to be sought in the realm of the ideal—i.e. the eidetic—but in the examination of “pure experience, pure consciousness” with its “pure correlates of consciousness.” Rather than turning to the ideal, one must focus on the “sphere of consciousness” and what is “immanent” in it. He writes in explanation: Entrenched as we are in the natural standpoint …, we take everything discoverable by psychological reflection as real world events, as the experiences of animal beings. It is so natural for us to see them only as such that, acquainted as we are with the possibility of a change in standpoint and searching after a new region of objects, we do not realize that these spheres of experience are themselves that out of which the new region springs through the new attitude. This is connected with the fact that instead of keeping our focus on these spheres, we turn away from them, and seek new objects in the ontological realms of arithmetic, geometry and the like, whereby, in fact, nothing new can be won.1

 Ideen I, §33; Schumann ed., p. 67.

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This passage can be read as containing a number of assertions. The first is that when we take conscious experiences as “real world events,” we are motivated to seek “a change in standpoint.” The standpoint would be one where the psychological relativism implied by this naturalistic view of experience would no longer obtain. We thus turn to the ideal realms of “arithmetic, geometry and the like,” i.e., to the category of the ideal that was the focus of the Investigations. Husserl, however, asserts that “nothing new can be won” by this turn. Instead, we must focus on psychological experience, understood not as “the experiences of animal beings. It is here that “the new standpoint” is to be attained. What prevents us from seeing this is the fact that we are immersed in the “natural attitude.” What precisely is this? How does it invalidate our turn to the ideal? To see this, we must describe this attitude and the motivations that led Husserl to abandon it. On the most basic level, the natural attitude is simply our sense that the world is “there” (da), independently “available” (Vorhanden) for our various activities. This sense underlies all our endeavors. It is assumed in our thinking about objects. As Husserl expresses this: “The presently perceived … everything from the world of nature which is experientially known before any thinking about it, all this bears, in its totality and in every one of its articulated features, the character of being ‘there,’ of being ‘available.’ This is a character which essentially permits the establishment of an explicit (predicative) judgment of existence, a judgment agreeing with this character.”2 The agreement is with the existent’s character of being there or available. We assume that it is, inherently, there and available—this, whether or not we actually encounter and experience it. When we inquire into our own availability, the answer of the natural attitude depends on how we take our being. If we take it as the being of a spatial-temporal object, our availability is simply that of a part of the spatial-temporal world. Within the natural attitude, my assertion is: “I find constantly available, as something facing me (als mein Gegenüber), the one spatial-temporal reality (Wirklichkeit) to which I myself belong as do all other persons found within it and related to it in the same way.”3 We are related to it as parts of the same whole. As for the whole, it is the world; and in the natural attitude, “‘[t]he’ world, as reality, is always there.”4 If, however, I take my being, not as a thing, but rather as the experiences I have of things, my availability or thereness has a different character. My experiences are “real world events,” i.e., physical occurrences in my brain, but they, unlike the objects I encounter, are not independent. Rather, their availability depends on the availability of that of which they are experiences. Consciousness, here, is a kind of mirror. The contents which distinguish it are there only by virtue of the thereness of the entity whose presence is reflected in it. Thus, taken as a field of experiences, consciousness has only a dependent being. Its availability is that of its object; it is there only if the objects it experiences are present.

 Ideen I, §31, Schumann ed., p. 62.  Ideen I, §30, Schumann ed., p. 61. 4  Ibid. 2 3

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This view of the world as the primary reality is taken up by the natural scientific attitude, the view that takes everything it encounters not just as “there” [da] but as causally determined. As we have seen, the Investigations applies this view to the subject. All individual, temporal being is understood as causally determined. By making the conditions of the past determine those of the present, causality establishes an entity’s unity as persisting through time. Thus, the subject or ego, in its persistence, also possesses a “thing-like” unity falling under causal relations. According to Husserl, its “unity … has its basis in causal lawfulness.”5 As we earlier cited him: the ego “counts for us as no more than a ‘unity of consciousness,’ as an actual ‘bundle’ of experiences, or even better as the continual thing-like unity, which constitutes itself in the experiences belonging to one ‘ego’ because this unity is demanded by both the specific and causal characteristics of these experiences.”6 Such thoughts, with their assumption of the natural attitude, are behind Husserl’s statement: “My act of judging that 2 × 2 = 4 is no doubt causally determined, but this is not true of the truth 2 × 2 = 4.”7 The latter is an ideal norm for the multiplying of these two numbers. As such, it is unaffected by the causal determination of the act that performs this operation. The question that arises here, as De Boer puts it is: “How can one combine the postulation of eternal norms with a naturalistic interpretation of consciousness?”8 In other words: how can a causally determined mode of judging grasp an ideal relation? The reply of the Investigations involves the claim that the ideal relation “limits, when it relates to a species of mentally realizable contents, the empirical possibilities of psychological (phenomenological) coexistence and succession.”9 In other words, the response is that we cannot intuitively affirm a false relation, e.g., 2 × 2 = 5. Why does Husserl no longer accept this solution? What are his motivations for abandoning it? To answer, we must first note the Investigations remains on the level of the division of being into the real and the ideal. It never goes beyond this to provide an ontological principle that would unite the two. Its definitive statement in this regard is that there is a “fundamental, essential, never-to-be-bridged gulf between ideal and real laws, between normative and causal regulation, between logical and real necessity, between logical and real grounds.” Given this, “[n]o conceivable gradation could mediate between the ideal and the real.”10 This amounts to admitting that we cannot say how the ideal relation limits the real. To do so, would require some sort of mediation between the two. Patočka attempts to avoid this conclusion by speaking of the “adaptation of the organic unity [of our embodiment] to the structure of appearing.” As we noted, this

 Logische Untersuchungen, 1st ed., vol. 3, p. 364.  Ibid., p. 390. 7  Logical Investigations, vol.1, p. 80. 8  “Zusammenfassung,” De Ontwikklingsgang in het Denken van Husserl (Assen: Van Gorcum & Company, 1966), p. 582. 9  Logical Investigations, vol. 2, pp. 315–316. 10  Logical Investigations, vol. 1, p. 50. 5 6

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can be interpreted in evolutionary terms, i.e., in terms of the survival advantages that accrue by our evolving in response to this structure. In such a view, our brains and sensory organs were evolutionarily adapted to take advantage of the structures of appearing. As such, they instantiated and, hence, were limited by the ideal relations of such structures. Whatever we might think of this solution, it is clear that, with its references to evolutionary theory, it remains within the natural attitude. Indeed, for Patočka, actual “concrete subjects are things among things, standing, in fact, in a causal context [Kausalzusammenhang] with the other things of the world.”11 Thus, the attempt to relate the ideal structure of appearing to this causal context by an appeal to evolution follows the same pattern that we find in the Logical Investigations in its positing of the ideal. In both cases, the reality of the subject is assumed. The motivation, in both cases, is coming to terms with this. For Husserl, this involves overcoming the psychological relativism entailed by such reality. Insofar as his statements regarding ideal being are motived by this goal, they assume the natural attitude. Can Husserl presuppose this attitude and still maintain the primacy of epistemology? Epistemology is the science of knowing and only individual subjects, taking time to perceive, reflect, etc., can, in a concrete sense, be said to know. Acts of knowledge are thus understood as assuming the temporal reality of the subjects engaging in these acts. Given the equation Husserl draws between real, causally determined being and being manifesting itself through time, epistemology itself, according to the above, must assume the causal reality of the subject. But insofar as it does, it cannot really be described as presuppositionless. It cannot, without any ontological assumptions, ask what being must be in order that there be the possibility of objective knowledge. Since the primacy of epistemology depends on its not having assumptions given to it—i.e., on its not taking from some other science the principles of being—such primacy cannot be maintained. What we face here, then, is a decision point. Either we embrace the primacy of epistemology or maintain the natural attitude. We are driven to this decision by the assumption that real, individual being is causally determined. Is it the case that everything individual falls under causality and that reality and causality are inseparable concepts? Or is this an unexamined presupposition taken from the natural attitude? Is there a fundamental principle of being that would not presuppose such causality—a principle, embracing without prejudice, both the real and the ideal? For the Investigations, both real and ideal being are categorised as objects. The Investigations takes being as inherently knowable and, hence, as inherently capable of being an object of knowledge.12 The difficulty with this is that it ignores the being of a subject; it essentially reduces the subject-object correlation to one between objects. This can be put in terms of the distinction between real and epistemological presence. The latter is the presence of an object as known. Real, temporally determinate objects, however, have only spatial-­temporal  “Epoché und Reduktion in den ‘Fünf Vorlesungen,’” p. 126.  In Husserl’s words, “correlation with perceivability [Wahrgenommen-werden-können)], intuitability, meanability and knowability, is inseparable from the sense of being in general” (Logical Investigations, vol. 2, p. 316. 11 12

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relations to each other. They are “present” only through their causal influence on one another. To go beyond this and speak of their epistemological presence, we require subjects understood as that to whom objects appear, subjects as knowers as opposed to objects known. In other words, if presence to a subject does describe a unique, epistemological relationship, then the subject cannot fall under the categories of objective being. As a condition for the possibility of the presence of such being, it cannot itself be an object. If it were, we would have to ask about the condition for its own objective presence and posit a further subject to account for this. To strip it of its objective status, however, is to admit the subject’s “irreality.” It is to say that although it is temporally determinate, it is not an individual reality falling under causality. It is, in fact, to take the experiences composing it, the experiences that result in the presence of objects, as prior to all causal determination. Husserl at the beginning of the Ideas introduces this conception by giving these experiences the ontological status of “the irreal” (das Irreal). He writes, “It is just these irrealities which phenomenology investigates.”13 This new ontological category breaks the connection between being an individual and being causally determined. As Husserl announces, “It will become evident that the concept of reality is in need of a fundamental limitation by virtue of which a distinction must be made between real being and individual (simply temporal) being.”14 By virtue of this limitation, he can now distinguish between real and temporal being: not all individual, temporal being must be classified as real and, hence, as causally determined. Since this classification follows from assuming the natural attitude, the denial of the reality and, hence, the causal determination of the individual, temporal experiences composing our consciousness is tantamount to denying this attitude. With this, the way is open to see such experiences as the common ground of the real and the ideal. It is in them that the fundamental ontological principle uniting the two categories is to be sought. This can be put in terms of a series of motivations. The natural attitude, with its assumption of the reality of the subject, can be seen as motivating the positing of the ideal as a way to rid ourselves of the psychological relativism that follows from the assumption of such reality. The fact that the real and the ideal cannot, within their own terms, consistently specify their relation, leads to the motivation to seek a more fundamental level of being, one that would provide them with a relational ground. This connects with the motivation springing from the insight that psychological relativism could be avoided if we do not assume the subject’s reality. With this, the way is open to see the experiences composing the subject as providing the sought for ground. It is to see them, in their contents and connections, as the origin of the presence of both the real and the ideal. All of this, of course, assumes that we abandon the natural attitude. It is only then that experiences that psychology provides us offer a “new region.” For this, however, we require “the absolute method of the epoché.” It is this that breaks the hold of the natural attitude.

13 14

 Ideen I, “Einleitung,” Schumann ed., p. 7.  Ibid.

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The Phenomenological Reduction Husserl speaks of both the epoché and the reduction. The two are not really distinct. As he remarks concerning the “operation” of “the transcendental ἐποχή”: This operation will break down methodologically into various steps of “suspension,” “bracketing,” and so our method will assume the character of a step-by-step reduction. Because of this, we will speak and even speak predominantly of phenomenological reductions (or we will also speak uniformly of the phenomenological reduction with respect to the unity of them altogether).15

Thus, the reduction is simply the repeated operation of the epoché. It is a step by step “suspension” or “bracketing” of our theses in order to regard the evidences we have for maintaining them. As Husserl notes, in this suspension, “[w]e do not give up the thesis that we have posited, we alter nothing in our conviction.” We do not, for example, give up our belief in the external world. The suspension is not a form of Cartesian doubt. It is not a thesis’s “transformation into conjecture, suggestion, into indecisiveness, into a doubt.” “Nevertheless,” he adds, “the thesis undergoes a modification—while it continues to remain in itself what it is, we place it as it were ‘out of action,’ we ‘suspend it,’ we ‘bracket it.’”16 In other words, we make no use of the thesis. Thus, in suspending the natural scientific attitude, i.e., its thesis of the world as an all embracing, causally determined spatiotemporal reality, the epoché “utterly closes off for me every judgment about spatiotemporal existence.” This means, “I suspend all sciences related to this natural world … I make absolutely no use of their valid results. I refrain from adopting a single proposition that belongs to them, even if the evidence for it is perfect; no such proposition is taken up by me, none provides me a foundation.”17 What remains from this suspension are the experiences and experiential connections that give us the world in its ability to be scientifically investigated. Although the two are not really distinct, the epoché can be thought of as a reduction by focusing on what remains. We can take the epoché as the reduction of a thesis into the evidence for it. This can be put in terms of the relation of the reduction to constitution. Constitution is the connecting of our experiences and the positing of a synthetic unity—a one in many—as their common referent. Thus, we constitute a spatial temporal reality by connecting our experiences of its different sides and positing the reality as their common referent—i.e., as the unity exhibiting itself in the views we have of the different sides. The views, we can say, found its appearing. It is, itself, a founded or constituted presence. The reduction is the reverse of this process. In it, we move from the founded to the founding—i.e., to the experiences through whose connections the founded appears. If these founding experiences owe their own appearing to the connections occurring between even lower level phenomena, the reduction can be exercised again to uncover an even more primitive,  Ideas I, §33, Dahlstrom trans., p. 58.  Ibid., §31 Dahlstrom trans., p. 54. 17  Ibid., §33, p. 56. 15 16

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founding layer. Thus, in the reduction of the spatial-temporal thing, we can suspend the thesis of its reality and focus on the views that lead us to posit it. In a further step, we can bracket the positing of these perspectivally ordered views and regard the time constituting phenomena that found their presence. This “step-by-step reduction” can also be described as suspension of belief. In performing it, we suspend belief in the unconditional or original givenness of a layer of phenomena so as to focus on the lower level phenomena and connections which found this givenness. Constitution, as the reverse of this, is, as indicated, the action of founding. It is the action of connecting phenomena and of the “positing belief” in the unity that appears through such connections. This synthetic process, at least in its initial stages, is a passive one; it is unconsciously performed. We do not, for example, consciously interpret a tone’s fading as its departure into pastness. The interpretation occurs automatically. By contrast, the reduction which attempts to uncover by analysis the work of constitution is, by definition, a self-conscious effort. It is, as it were, an unnatural stance that reverses the natural work of constitution. Concretely, this effort consists breaking—i.e., suspending in thought—the connections between phenomena that allow us to posit things. Husserl describes this process in a remarkable thought experiment. The experiment consists of imaginatively disordering the connections by which we experience objects. He writes, “Let us imagine ourselves performing apperceptions of nature, but such as are continually invalid, apperceptions which are cancelled in the process of further experience; let us imagine that they do not allow of the harmonious connections in which experiential unities could constitute themselves for us.”18 Objectively speaking, the result is that, in thought at least, “the whole of nature” has been “destroyed”; and this includes the “living bodies” (Leiber) of myself and Others conceived of as parts of the natural world. In other words, with the disordering, “there are no more living bodies and, accordingly, no human beings (Menschen). As a human being, I would no longer exist, and a fortiori there would not exist for me fellow humans.”19 All the ordered connections which allowed me to posit an incarnate person as a spatial-­ temporal reality have been suspended. Now, subjectively speaking, the results of this disordering can be extended to the interpretation of experiences as mental states of a person. In Husserl’s words, If there would be something still remaining which could permit the interpretation of the experiences as ‘states’ of a human ego—experiences in whose changes identical human mental traits manifested themselves—we could dismantle these interpretations, ignore the intentional forms that constitute them, reducing them to pure experiences. Even mental states (Auch psychische Zustände) point back to the ordering of the absolute experiences in which they constitute themselves.20

The result of such disordering is, thus, the cancellation of the positing of “mental personalities, mental characteristics, mental experiences or states” understood as

 Ideen I, §54, Schumann ed., p. 118.  Ibid. 20  Ibid., p. 119. 18 19

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“empirical unities.”21 It is the dissolution of what Husserl calls the “personal ego.” Its final stage is simply experiences taken as prior to the constitution of individual unities—experiences whose connections have been abstracted from all ordering principles. Husserl, in the Ideen, continues to call the stream of such “pure” or “absolute” experiences “consciousness.” Yet the term now has the sense of an impersonal streaming. It denotes simply the experiences from which positing would occur if they were ordered into definite patterns. Once we have achieved this abstraction, what have we accomplished? For Husserl, the first result of this experiment is the reverse of the thesis of the natural attitude. We can still think of consciousness as “there” in its component experiences, even when we disorder the patterns which make them into experiences of something. In other words, after we have eliminated the conditions for the availability of the thing, consciousness still retains its availability. Rather than being thought of as a “mirror,” i.e., as dependent on the external things that provide it with experiences, consciousness “needs no thing [nulla ‘re’] to exist.”22 As Husserl expresses this, the being of consciousness, that of the stream of experience per se, would indeed be modified by a destruction of the world of things, but it would not be disturbed in its own existence. Modified, certainly! For the destruction of the world means precisely this: that in the stream of experiences … certain, ordered experiential connections and also, correspondingly, certain connections of the theorizing reason which orient themselves according to them would be excluded. But this does not imply that other experiences and connections of experiences would be excluded.23

In other words, no matter what possible experiences and connections happen to obtain, whether they result in a world or not, consciousness as a stream of experiences would continue. In this sense, it can be considered to be “absolute.” One of the consequences of this view is the fact that consciousness cannot be considered to have an outside. In Husserl’s words, “consciousness, considered in ‘purity,’ must count as a self-contained connection of being [Seinszusammenhang], as a connection of absolute being into which nothing can enter and from which nothing can slip away, a connection which has no spatial-temporal outside.”24 This lack of an “outside” follows from the fact that the presence of the spatial-temporal world is the basis for the notions of “inside” and “outside”; but this depends on the prior presence of experiences connected so as to form perspectival patterns But, considered in its “purity,” consciousness allows of all possible connections, including those which dispense with those that gives us an “inside” and an “outside.” This means that the thought of a world as “beyond” it, as there “outside” of it, “is an

 Ibid.  Ibid. §49, Schumann ed., p. 104. 23  Ibid. 24  Ideen I, §49, Schumann ed., p. 105. 21 22

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absurdity.”25 In fact, what we have here is the thought of consciousness as the ground of the presence—the thereness—of the world. If we ask for the premise of this stepwise reduction, it is simply the ultimate facticity of experience. There is no essence of perception that determines in advance the factual course of experience. As Husserl puts this: “The existence [Existenz] of the world is a correlate of certain multiplicities of experience marked out by certain essential formations. But it is not a matter of insight that actual experience could proceed only in such forms of connections. This cannot be inferred purely from the essence of perception per se …”26 In other words, this essence does not point to some underlying Kantian transcendental unity of apperception that demands that experience be ordered according to pregiven categories—for Kant, the categories for connecting perceptions so as to give us our actual spatial-temporal, causally determined world. Rather, the presence of such Kantian categories such as inherence and subsistence, causality and the like is simply the result of the factual course of experience. A change in the latter would result in either different categories or their exclusion altogether. For Husserl, the dissolution of the world is, then, a permanent possibility. Since there is no determining essence of perception, it is conceivable that experience—and not just for us, but rather inherently—teems with unresolvable contradictions, that experience, all at once, shows itself as obstinately opposed to the demand that its positings of things should ever harmoniously persist. It is thinkable that experiences’ connections should forfeit the stable rules of ordering perspectives, apprehensions and appearances, and that this actually remains ad infinitum the case, in short, that there no longer exists a harmoniously positable and, hence, existing world.27

The disordering of such connections results, not just in the dissolution of the world, but also, as we have seen, of the ego taken as the bearer of its “mental states.” In fact, as early as 1908, Husserl asked, “Must there always exist an ego and a physical nature? Cannot consciousness collapse in a tumult of formations?”28 Given that such “formations” or forms of connections have no a priori necessity, Husserl’s answer is clear. As he writes towards the end of his career: “But is it not apparent that the being (the actual existence) of nature is an open pretension on every level …?29 In other words, we constantly have the possibility that “the unity of nature resolves itself into nothing”—i.e., a “non-world” as a possible variant—“or is itself a dissolving, unlawful, only empirically regulated existence with whose collapse we must come to terms.”30 There is, here, a clear break with tradition. As the Husserlian scholar and editor, Iso Kern, observes, “In his interpretation of the facticity of world-constitution or of  Ibid.  Ideen I, §49, Schumann ed., p. 103. 27  Ibid., §49, Dahlstrom trans., p. 88. 28  “Beilage XIX, zur Vorlesung: Hat Kant wirklich das Grundproblem der Erkentniskritik getroffen,” in Erste Philosophie, 1923/24, Erster Teil, ed. R.  Boehm. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956, p. 393. 29  Ms. K III 2, Oct. 10, 1935, p. 10. 30  Ibid. 25 26

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the ‘ego of transcendental apperception,’ Husserl was aware that he was in a fundamental opposition to German idealism.” For the latter, as represented by Kant, the ego is prior to and determinative of the factual. For Husserl, the reverse is the case. In Kern’s words, insofar as world-constitution does not have a basis in a transcendental subjectivity which could guarantee the genesis and continuance of this constitution so that there would not continually exist for transcendental subjectivity the possibility of the dissolution of the cosmos and the ‘ego of transcendental apperception’—there results for Husserl a concept of transcendental idealism which is basically different from those of German idealism.31

German idealism acknowledges the dependence of the world on consciousness. It, however, does not take consciousness as ultimately factual. For Husserl, however, such facticity is precisely what permits the reduction to consciousness as an “absolute” ground.

The Ego’s Relation to the Reduction Husserl’s remarks on the collapse of consciousness and the ego in a “tumult of formations” stand in sharp contrast with the central role the ego plays in the analyses of the Ideen. The reduction, for example, is likened to Cartesian doubt, i.e., Descartes’ “attempt to doubt everything.”32 For Descartes, this attempt has two limitations. While I can doubt that anything corresponds to my experience, I cannot doubt this experience itself. Thus, I might think that I am dreaming and that what I dream is not there, but I cannot doubt the experience that the dream presents me with. The same holds for self that dreams. Suppose, for example, that a powerful deceiver bends all his efforts “to keep me perpetually deceived.” Still, Descartes writes, “there can be no slightest doubt that I exist, since he deceives me.” Given this, he concludes: “I am, I exist is necessarily true.”33 In other words, not just experience, but also that ego that experiences escape any possible doubt. The same holds for Husserl. He also takes the ego as indubitable. He writes that, regarding “life as it streams by”—i.e., the stream of experiences—he must affirm himself as “the pure subject of this life.” He has to say “straightforwardly and necessarily: ‘I am, this life is, I live: cogito.’” In fact, “[t]he intrinsic possibility of obtaining this evidence is inherent in every stream of experience and every ego as such. Each ego carries within itself the warrant of its absolute existence as an intrinsic possibility.”34 Thus, while “everything that is there for me in the world of things is in principle only a presumptive actuality” and, thus, subject to doubt, “I myself, for whom that world

 Husserl u. Kant, pp. 297–98.  Ideen I, §33, Dahlstrom trans., p. 53. 33  Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Laurence LaFleur 24 (Toronto: Prentice Hall, 1997), p, 24. 34  Ideen I, §46, Dahlstrom trans., p. 82. 31 32

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is there” am “given through an unconditioned positing that cannot be canceled or superseded in any way.” He emphasizes this point by adding: “The ‘contingent’ thesis of the world thus stands over against the “necessary” thesis of my pure ego and life as an ego, a thesis that is utterly indubitable.”35 The question that confronts us is: how can we speak about the possible collapse of the ego and yet claim that our positing of the ego is “indubitable”? Does not the ego, along with the world, fall to the reduction? A first answer comes from the fact that the reduction does not encounter the ego. The reduction proceeds to uncover the experiences that justify positing. But it never “hits upon the ego as an experience among other experiences.” It never encounters it “coming to be and passing away with the experience whose part it would be.”36 In fact, the notion of a “pure ego” involves its purity from such experiences. Rather than being constituted from them, it transcends them. The ego is, Husserl asserts, “a unique—non-constituted—transcendence, a transcendence in immanence.”37 The ego’s transcendence exists in contrast with the transcendence of the constituted with regard to the constituting. The constituted object transcends the constituting experiences by being their common referent. Its transcendence is the transcendence of a sense understood as a one-­in-many. By contrast, the ego is not a constituted sense. Its experiences constantly change, but it remains. Since, as remaining, “it cannot in any sense be taken as a real [reelles] component or moment of the experiences,” the ego’s transcendence evinces an independence of such experiences.38 While the objective unity of sense vanishes with the disordering of the experiences underlying it, the suggestion is that such disordering does not touch the ego. This, however, leaves us with the question of how we can posit the ego. According to Husserl, since it is not a component of the experiences, “it has no explicable content; it is, in and for itself, indescribable: a pure ego and nothing more.”39 But if this is so, what is the evidence for it? According to the neo-Kantian philosopher, Paul Natorp, whom Husserl cites only to dismiss in the Logical Investigations, to search

 Ibid., p. 83.  “Klar ist von vornherein so viel, daß wir nach Durchführung dieser Reduktion in dem Flusse mannigfacher Erlebnisse, der als transzendentales Residuum übrig bleibt, nirgends auf das reine Ich stoßen werden, als ein Erlebnis unter anderen Erlebnissen, auch nicht als ein eigentliches Erlebnisstück, mit dem Erlebnis, dessen Stück es wäre, entstehend und wieder verschwindend” (Ideen I, §57, Schuhmann ed., p. 123. 37  “Verbleibt uns als Residuum der phänomenologischen Ausschaltung der Welt und der ihr zugehörigen empirischen Subjektivität ein reines Ich (und dann für jeden Erlebnisstrom ein prinzipiell verschiedenes), dann bietet sich mit ihm eine eigenartige—nicht konstituierte—Transzendenz, eine Transzendenz in der Immanenz dar” (ibid., p. 124). 38  Ibid., p. 123. 39  The extended passage is: “Bei diesen eigentümlichen Verflochtenheiten mit allen ‘seinen’ Erlebnissen ist doch das erlebende Ich nichts, was für sich genommen und zu einem eigenen Untersuchungsobjekt gemacht werden könnte. Von seinen ‘Beziehungsweisen’ oder ‘Verhaltungsweisen’ abgesehen, ist es völlig leer an Wesenskomponenten, es hat gar keinen explikabeln Inhalt, es ist an und für sich unbeschreiblich: reines Ich und nichts weiter” (ibid., §80, p. 179). 35 36

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for the ego as content is to forget the fact that the ego, itself, is not some appearing content, but rather the subject to whom contents appear. In Natorp’s words, the ego is “the subjective center of relation for all contents in my consciousness … It cannot itself be a content and resembles nothing that could be a content of consciousness.” The reason for this is that to be a content is to stand over against an ego. It is to be an object—a Gegen-stand—for an ego. Contrariwise, “[t]o be an ego is not to be an object, but to be something opposed to all objects.”40 Such a pure ego is necessarily anonymous. It cannot be named or grasped in any objective manner. In the Logical Investigations, this contentless center of experience cannot be a subject of phenomenological investigation. Husserl asks, having cited Natorp, “how can we think it, if not by making the ego and consciousness, both subject-matters of our assertion, into ‘objects’? … I must frankly confess, however, that I am quite unable to find this ego, this primitive, necessary centre of relation.”41 At the time of composition of the Ideen, however, Husserl reverses himself. He writes in a footnote to this passage, “I have since managed to find it.”42 Its indescribability does not prevent Husserl from stressing its necessity: All experiences, as “mine,” he claims, must refer to it. The ego does not just “live in every explicit cogito …all background experiences also belong to it … in Kantian terms: ‘the ‘I think” must accompany all my presentations.”43 The necessity here is Kantian rather than phenomenological. Behind the positing of the ego is the thought that all appearing requires an ego as a subject to whom things appear. Presentations (Vor-stellungen) require a subject before whom the things presented can stand. It is this central referent that allows me to consider my presentations “mine.” In the second volume of the Ideen, Husserl modifies the above account. Although he continues to stress the emptiness of the ego—asserting, for example, that the “pure ego … conceals no hidden richness, it is absolutely simple”44—he does speak of this ego’s relation to the stream of consciousness. He writes that “the pure ego … is a numerical singular with regard to ‘its’ stream of consciousness.”45 Its relation to this stream is that it “is constituted as a unity with reference to this stream-unity.”46 This means, he adds, “it could not be constituted as a ‘stationary and remaining’  Logical Investigations, vol. 2, pp. 91–92.  Ibid., p. 92. 42  Ibid., p. 353, n 8. 43  Ideen I, Schumann ed., p. 123. 44  “Als reines Ich birgt es keine verborgenen inneren Reichtümer, es ist absolut einfach, liegt absolut zutage, aller Reichtum liegt im cogito und der darin adäquat erfaßbaren Weise der Funktion” (Ideen II, p. 104). 45  Ideen II, p. 110. 46  Ideen II, p., 112. The assertion of such constitution is repeated in 1920 with reference to Kant. Husserl writes: “What is called constitution is what Kant obviously had in mind under the rubric, ‘connection as an operation of the understanding,’ synthesis. This is the genesis in which the ego and, correlatively, the surrounding world of the ego are constituted. It is passive genesis—not the [active] categorial action which produces categorial formations” (Ms. B IV 12, pp.  2–3). I am grateful to the Husserl Archives in Louvain for permission to cite from the unpublished manuscripts. 40 41

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[‘stehendes und bleibendes’] ego if a stationary and remaining stream of experience were not constituted.”47 This assertion of the constitution of the pure ego is not meant to deny the assertion of the first volume of the Ideas that the ego is “a unique—non-constituted—transcendence.” Husserl, in fact, repeats the first volume’s position when he writes “pure egos neither need nor are capable of any constitution through ‘multiplicities’ [of experience].”48 Yet, he does not specify the nature of the constitution that is not “through ‘multiplicities.’” He does describe the pure ego as a “center” of acts and affections49 or a “pole” of consciousness.50 But, the nature of the constitution of this center or pole is left open. The Bernau Manuscripts, which were written 4 years later, instead of resolving this issue, complicate it by declaring that the pure ego is “super-temporal.” Thus, the reduction to phenomena of inner time fails to find it. This holds because, as Husserl writes, “not everything subjective is temporal, is individual in the sense that it is individualized through a unique temporal position.” The reference here is to the ego as “the identical center, the pole to which the whole content of the stream of experience is related.”51 This ego “is not itself temporal” because it is not a member of the stream of the temporally positioned experiences, In fact, as “the pole for all the temporal series [of its experiences],” it is, “as such, necessarily ‘super’-temporal.”52  Ideen II, p. 113.  Ibid., p. 111. 49  “Das Ich ist das identische Subjekt der Funktion in allen Akten desselben Bewußtseinsstroms, es ist das Ausstrahlungszentrum, bzw. Einstrahlungszentrum alles Bewußtseinslebens, aller Affektionen und Aktionen, alles Aufmerkens, Erfassens, Beziehens” (Ideen II, p. 105). 50  See ibid. 51  The extended passage here is: “Wir haben auf diese Weise uns zu konstruieren versucht das universelle Reich der immanenten Zeit oder der immanenten sich ‘deckenden’ Zeitordnungen. Scheinbar haben wir damit alles Subjektive—und in gewisser Weise ‘haben’ wir es—und doch wieder nicht; denn was wir haben, ist eben Seiendes, Zeitliches, und nicht alles Subjektive ist Zeitliches, ist Individuelles in dem Sinn des durch eine einmalige Zeitstelle Individualisierten. Was wir vor allem nicht im Erlebnisstrom haben, ist das Ich selbst, das identische Zentrum, der Pol, auf den der gesamte Gehalt des Erlebnisstroms bezogen ist, das Ich, das von dem oder jenem Gehalt affiziert wird, und das daraufhin sich tätig zu diesem Gehalt so und so verhält und ihn aktiv so und so gestaltet” (Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), ed. R. Bernet and D. Lohmar [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001], p. 277). 52  Ibid. The C Manuscripts repeat this position, asserting that the ego is not extended in time: “Aber sieht man nicht auch in dieser Verzeitlichung, daß das stehende und bleibende Ich während des Aktes nicht ein durch den Akt als erfüllte Zeitdauer hindurch in gleichem Sinn dauerndes ist, wie ein Zeitliches dauert, sondern daß es selbst ausdehnungslos während der sachlichen Dauer Identisches ist, stehendes und bleibendes Jetzt im Wandel seiner Vollzüge?” (Ms. C 10, p. 17b, Sept. 1931  in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar [Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006] p.  202; hereafter cited as Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934)). It is, in fact, super-temporal: “Aber die Identität des Ich ist nicht die bloße Identität eines Dauernden, sondern die Identität des Vollziehers…. Aber die fundamentale Wichtigkeit der Unterscheidungen zeigt sich dann doch alsbald darin, daß … das Ich, das immer jetzt ist und jetzt bleibt (als stehendes und bleibendes Jetzt gar kein Jetzt im sachlichen Sinne) als dieses Lebendige, dieses “Über”-zeitliche, das Ich aller Vollzüge ist” (ibid., 17b–18a; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), p. 202). 47 48

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This pole, Husserl writes, “is” and yet is not a being. In Husserl’s words, given that “‘being,’ taken as an individual being, [is] bound to a temporal position and individualized through it,” we have to say that “the ego is not such being.”53 It cannot be if it is “super-temporal.” The questions that the Bernau Manuscripts leave us with are: How can the ego “be” and not be “a being”? How can it be timeless, and yet enter into time through its acts? What precisely is its relation to the stream of experiences? A first suggestion of a solution appears in a manuscript written in 1921. In it, Husserl repeats the assertions of the Ideen about the ego’s lack of content. On the one hand, the ego “is related to a stream of experiences, in relation to which it is also dependent.” On the other, it is “quite empty” of the “material content” provided by the stream. He then calls the ego “an empty form that is ‘individualized’ through the stream: this, in the sense of its uniqueness.”54 In other words, what makes the ego unique is the content that animates it. Apart from such content, it is only a form that “informs,” so to speak, the streaming content of consciousness.55 The C Manuscripts of the 1930’s take this form as the centering of our conscious life. According to Husserl, “The ego is the ‘subject’ of consciousness; subject, here, is only another word for the centering which all life possesses as an egological life, i.e., as a living in order to experience something, to be conscious of it.”56 As he elsewhere expresses this: “I am I, the center of the egological [Ichlichkeiten].”57 To be such a “center” is also to be a “pole.” For Husserl, “The central ego is the necessary ego pole of all experience,” the two being equivalent designations of the same structure.58 This view of the ego as an “empty form” resolves the questions raised by the Bernau Manuscripts. An ego can “be” and not be “a being” insofar as it is a form or eidetic structure of being. Such a structure, insofar as it does not change with the changing content it structures, can also be considered timeless. We can also see how it “lives” through the stream of experiences and yet is distinct from it. Like a standing wave in a tidal bore, it depends on the material that passes through it. In this sense, its identity is that of something enduring continuously through such changing material. Yet insofar as the structure remains, even as the content passing through it is continually other, it is distinct from the stream. Because it is, we can describe it as “stationary and streaming.” It is stationary since from its own perspective, the

  “‘Seiendes’ als individuell Seiendes, an ‘eine’ Zeitstelle Gebundenes und durch sie Individualisiertes. Das Ich ‘ist’ so nicht ‘seiend,’” (Die Bernauer Manuskripte, p. 278, n. 1). 54  Ms. E III 2, p.  18. Citations from the unpublished manuscripts are with permission from the Husserl Archives in Leuven. 55  As James Edie expresses this view of the ego, it is “an impersonal, necessary, universal, eidetic structure,” one that, “is lived in and through each unique consciousness, each ego-life.” (“The Question of the Transcendental Ego: Sartre’s Critique of Husserl,” Husserl in his Contemporary Radiance: Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Husserl Circle, Waterloo, 1992, pp. 271–2). 56  Ms. C 3, p. 26a, March, 1931; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), p. 35. 57  Ms. C 7, p. 9b, June–July 1932; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), p. 122. 58  Ms. M III 3, XI, p. 21, Sept., 1921, my italics; see also Ideen II, p. 105. 53

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central ego (the center of the centering) does not change. It is constantly now. Yet from the perspective of the material that streams through it, it does stream. It streams away from the departing material. The ego’s relation to the stream can also be expressed in terms of the assertion of Ideen II that the ego “does not present itself one side at a time, does not make itself known through individual characteristics, sides, moments but rather is given in its absolute selfhood [Selbsheit] in its nonperspectival unity.59 As such a unity, it cannot be considered as constituted from the individual elements of the stream. It is not a unity posited from the “perspectives” of the material composing the stream. It is, instead, a persisting form that exhibits itself as constantly the same in a changing material. Thus, to answer the question of how we can posit the ego, given its purity from experience, the answer is that we posit it as the necessary form of experience—i.e., its centering—insofar as it is regarded as mine. What about the assertion that the ego “is constituted as a unity with reference to the unity of the stream of experiences”? What sort of constitution is this, if it is not the constitution of a unity of sense? The answer comes from the fact that we regard our experience as our own insofar as we are situated at its center or zero-point. Spatially, this is the point from which the “near” and the “far” is measured. Phenomenologically regarded, it is defined by the perspectival unfolding of the objects that surround me as I move through the world. The sides that the objects show all point to me as a center. Now, according to Husserl, the spatial centering that gives me my “here” depends upon the constitution of time. Thus, retention is required if I am to grasp the series of sides that objects exhibit. Similarly, protention is needed if I am to make use of what I retain to make my way in the world. Situated between my retained past and anticipated future, I thus find myself at a temporal 0-point. Given that the content that I retain positions me spatially, the “primal now” of this 0-point is always accompanied by a “here.” I always take myself as a spatial-­ temporal center. Husserl describes the constitution of the temporal aspect of this center as the constitution of “a lasting and remaining now.” He writes that “[i]t constitutes itself as a fixed form for a content which streams through it and as the source point for all constituted modifications.” The constitution of “the fixed form of the primally welling primal now” occurs along with the constitution of a “a two-sided continuity of forms that are just as fixed … the continuum of what is just past and that of futurities.”60 These situate our temporal 0 point between them. As a result, the now appears as a “fixed form,” through which time appears to flow and in which its

 Ideen II, p. 104.  “In diesem Strömen ist ein stehendes und bleibendes Ur-Jetzt als starre Form für einen durchströmenden Gehalt konstituiert und als Urquellpunkt aller konstituierten Modifikationen. Konstituiert ist aber in eins mit der starren Form des Urquellenden, Ur-Jetzt eine zweiseitige Kontinuität von ebenso starren Formen; also im Ganzen ist konstituiert ein starres Kontinuum der Form, in dem das Ur-Jetzt urquellender Mittelpunkt ist für zwei Kontinua als Zweige der Abwandlungsmodi: das Kontinuum der Soebengewesenheiten und das der Zukünftigkeiten” (Ms. C 2, p. 11a, Sept.–Oct. 1931; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), p. 8). 59 60

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moments appear to well up as present and actual. It appears, in other words, as a “primal welling middle point” of time. I stress the word “appear” since the primal source of time—that without which time constitution cannot begin—is not the ego, but rather externally received impressions.61 The real result of the process of retention and protention is, Husserl immediately adds, the constitution of “a stationary and remaining form-continuity [Formkontinuität] for what streams through it, which is always co-constituted as streaming.”62 This form-continuity is simply that of the centering of experience about the now. The central ego is the center of this form-continuity. Since the form-continuity is one of temporally streaming material, this center’s or pole’s constitution always occurs together with the constitution of this material—a constitution that involves placing the ego in time through retention and protention and, hence, making it stream relative to this material. To speak more concretely about the constitution of this form-continuity, we have to bring in the coincidence and merging caused by the retentional and protentional processes. As consciousness continually retains and protends itself, it continually places the retained and protended in coincidence. The result, in Husserl’s words, is “like an overlapping, a placing one on top of the other” of the retained and the protended material. This allows their common features to “merge” and “reinforce” each other, the result being their “shining through” the retained and protended material.63 The same phenomenon obtains with regard to the centering of experience. As the action of retention places consciousness with its centering around an ego pole in coincidence with itself, such centering stands out. It becomes a feature that we can return to again and again. This holds also for the long term memories that reproduce this result. The centering around an ego pole that is present in each of them stands out through their coincidence. As Husserl writes, “All represented experiences carry with them the representation of the ego pole. Taken as memories in an extended sense, they result in coincidence: the same pole [coincides with itself].” They also coincide with “the primal-original functioning ego of the living present.”64 The result, then, is the presence of “an ongoing structure that penetrates the whole of conscious life.” This is “the structure of the universal unity of coincidence of all the experiences of consciousness with regard to the original or represented ego that functions in them.”65 Whatever our experience, this structure is present. Whether we  Husserl, in fact, never abandons this point. As he writes in 1931: “Die Uraffektion … muß schon strömend im Gange sein, damit der Einsatzpunkt als prätemporaler Punkt der passiv konstituierten prätemporalen Zeitstrecke konstituiert sein kann” (Ms. B III 3, p. 4a). 62  The passage continues, “Dies aber ist eine stehende und bleibende Formkontinuität für das sie Durchströmende, als durchströmend immerzu Mitkonstituiertes; und im Durchströmen dieser Form ist eine wundersame Synthesis in beständigem strömendem Gang, in der sich als individuelles Sein konstituiert, was jetzt urquellend auftritt, was, das Formensystem der Soeben durchlaufend, immerfort dasselbe verbleibt, aber dasselbe in kontinuierlich anderen Modis des Soeben” (Ms. C 2, p. 11a, Sept.–Oct. 1931; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), p. 8.). 63  Ms. C 3, p. 74b, Oct. 17, 1931; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), pp. 81–82. 64  Ms. C 16, May 1932 in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, ed. I. Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 350. 65  ibid., p. 351. 61

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live through an experience in the present or represent it by remembering it, we always find it centered about a subject. This central subject or pole always remains now, always appears between the past and the future as that through which time seems to pass and that in which its moments seem to well up as now. As such, it appears, either directly or through representation, as a functioning ego. With regard to this appearing, two points should be stressed. The first is that it is a constituted appearing. It depends, as I said, on the retentional and protentional processes constituting the temporal centering that positions the welling up of moments in a central now, the now of the ego’s “primal-original” functioning. The second point is that such centering of consciousness achieves a certain objective quality as something that can be returned to again and again.66 Even though it does not change and, hence, is not constituted like a perspectivally appearing unity, it nonetheless can be considered as constituted in this return. As a self-identical structure, the centering has a one-in-many relation to the different experiences that exhibit it. The same holds for the ego or pole that is positioned as the center. With this, we have Husserl’s resolution of the question of how to phenomenologically handle the ego that cannot be considered as a content of consciousness. In his description of the structure of the centering of consciousness, Husserl reaches his goal of providing a phenomenological account of the Kantian “I think” that has to accompany all our representation. All our representations must be accompanied by an “I” since all necessarily exhibit the same centering structure. The retentional and protentional process that makes experience possible necessarily result in a central ego, understood as a subject of such experience. With this, the necessity for positing the ego achieves a phenomenological basis. Underlying the inference that all appearing implies a subject to whom things appear is the fact that appearing as such has a temporal structure that demands such a subject as its center. What about Husserl’s assertion that “I myself, for whom that world is there” am “given through an unconditioned positing that cannot be canceled or superseded in any way”? Is not this positing annulled by the disordering of experience? Husserl affirms this in a late manuscript. He writes that the dissolution of the world in a “tumult” of experiences involves, necessarily, a disordering of the constitutive series composed of retained and anticipated experiences. This dissolution means that “I would not have the spatial-temporal field of a human life. Spatial-temporality, [spatial-­temporal] being  that persists would have been nullified (wäre zunichte geworden). It would not have been nullified in a worldly sense”—i.e., the sense whereby an entity within an existing world is considered to be destroyed. “Rather being itself, the being of the world per se (das Weltsein überhaupt) would have been nullified. It would have ceased ever to have been through the loss of its validity, its  This objectivity is that of “being in the sense of truth, the sense of a positing that is correct and at any time verifiable,” i.e., of “objective being, but not in the sense of intersubjectivity [Sein im Sinn der Wahrheit, der richtigen und jederzeit Ausweißbahren Setzung. Das objektive Sein, aber nicht gerade im Sinn der Intersubjektivität]” (Ms. B II 10, p. 16a; 1925). The contrast here is with the objectivity that can be verified by everybody. An immanent object or structure, although it can be returned to again and again, is not intersubjectively verifiable. 66

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validity for me as an ego who would remain perplexed in my inner temporality.”67 Such an ego, needless to say, would not find itself as the spatial temporal centering that allows it to call its experience its own. Perplexed in its inner temporality, the context that allows it to see itself as temporal center between the retained past and anticipated future would have vanished. Thus, the necessity of the pure ego turns out to be conditional. In Husserl’s words, “That I remain who I am, as a transcendental ego, as the same personal ego, this signifies equivalently that my world remains a world.”68 The most we can say is that if I am given a world, the centering of experiences, which makes it “mine” and thus demands my presence as an ego, is an unconditional necessary.

 ranscendental Idealism and the Creative Power T of Consciousness This chapter began by observing that Husserl’s adoption of “transcendental idealism” caused many of his followers to abandon him. It is time to look more carefully into what is meant by this fraught term. First, we should let Husserl himself speak. As we have seen, the reduction of the thesis of the world to the experiences that allow its positing leads Husserl to affirm that “the whole spatial-temporal world … is a being that consciousness posits in its experiences … but beyond this is a nothing.”69 This means that “the world of the transcendent res [thing] is utterly dependent upon consciousness … a currently actual consciousness.” As for this consciousness, it “is absolute in the sense that, in principle, nulla ‘re’ indiget ad existendum [it needs no ‘thing’ to exist].”70 Such statements could be multiplied. Together, they give us a picture of transcendental idealism as the reverse of the natural attitude—the conception that sees consciousness as part of and dependent on the reality of the world. For the Ideen, by contrast, “Reality and world are simply titles for certain valid unities of sense essentially related to certain specific connections of pure, absolute consciousness, consciousness which bestows sense and confirms validity.”71 This reduction of the “reality and world” to “unities of sense” signifies a fundamental transformation. In a realistic view, constitution is the constitution of the sense of a being, it is its constitution as a sense-filled presence to a subject. Such presence is not the being, but rather its sense as it appears to us through our acts of “sense-giving” interpretation. When, however, Husserl claims, that “[a]ll real

 Ms. B I 13, VI, p. 5, Dec. 15, 1931.  Ibid., p. 4. 69  Ideen I, §49, Schumann ed., p. 106. 70  Ibid., pp. 104. 71  Ideen I, §55, Schumann ed., p. 120. 67 68

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unities are unities of sense,” this distinction is undone.72 As Theodor De Boer notes, in psychology, we distinguish sense and being. “In transcendental phenomenology, however, sense is being itself. At the end of the Fundamentalbetractung, when it is said that the world can only exist as a sense or phenomenon, with this is understood the world’s very mode of being.”73 Given that the “fundamental consideration” reverses the natural attitude, this transformation can be put in terms of the priority of epistemology. As we saw, we cannot maintain such priority within the natural attitude. The latter affirms that mental events are real world occurrences and that causal relationships are prior to and determinative of the knowing relation. The priority of epistemology signifies, by contrast, the knowing relation’s determination of what counts as reality. Being, in other words, is reduced to being known. It is taken as an accomplishment of knowing. As Husserl puts this: Genuine epistemology … has to do exclusively with the systematic explanation of the accomplishment of knowing, an explanation in which this becomes thoroughly understandable as an intentional accomplishment. Precisely thereby, every sort of being itself [Seiendes selbst], be it real or ideal, becomes understandable as a constituted product [Gebilde] of transcendental subjectivity, a product that is constituted in just such an accomplishment [of knowing]. This sort of understanding is the highest form of rationality.74

Husserl’s assertion in this passage is unmistakable. It is that “every conceivable sense, every conceivable being, whether the latter be called immanent or transcendent, falls within the realm of transcendental subjectivity as that which constitutes both sense and being.”75 As contemporary readers of Husserl realized, such affirmations transform the sense of the reduction. Initially, as Theodor Celms writes, it appears as “a leading back of every objectively (transcendentally) directed consideration into a consideration of the corresponding modes of consciousness.” As such, it signifies a reduction of the consideration of an object to a consideration of the experiences and experiential connections through which the object is given to consciousness. Husserl’s remarks on the dependence of the object on these connected experience, however, change its sense. The reduction becomes understood as “the leading back of objective (transcendent) being to the being of the corresponding modes of consciousness.”76 In this second sense, it signifies, negatively, “the denial of any positing of what is so reduced”—i.e., the objective, transcendent being—“as absolute.” Positively regarded, it signifies “the inclusion of the sense of the being of the reduced in the sense of being of the basis to which it is reduced,” this basis being  Ibid.  “Zusammenfassung,” p. 597. De Boer adds: The expressions ‘creation’ and ‘production’ do not appear in Ideen I; but when one reads the Fundamentalbetrachtung as it wants to be read, namely, as a discourse about being, then the terms which Husserl does use—‘independence’ and ‘dependence’—exactly express what he means. At that point there can be no more talk about realism or even realistic elements in Husserl’s thought” (ibid., p. 598). 74  Cartesianische Meditationen, Strasser ed., p. 118. 75  Ibid., p. 117. 76  Der phänomenologische Idealismus Husserls, Riga, 1928, p. 309. 72 73

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consciousness in its experiences.77 As Alfred Schutz, another of Husserl’s students, remarks, this transformation also affects what we mean by constitution. In his words, At the beginning of phenomenology, constitution meant clarification of the sense structures of conscious life, inquiry into sediments in respect of their history, tracing back all cogitata to intentional operations of the on-going conscious life. … But unobtrusively… the idea of constitution has changed from a clarification of sense structures, from an explanation of the sense of being, into the foundation of the structure of being; it has changed from explication to creation.78

There is, however, a problem in thinking about consciousness as creative. It is implicit in the fact that the constitutive process is dependent on material for its interpretative intentions. As we cited Husserl, the impressional data that consciousness interprets are “that which has been received, as opposed to what has been produced through consciousness’s own spontaneity.”79 If, in fact, “[t]he primal impression is the primal source for all further consciousness and being,”80 can we really speak of consciousness as “creative.” Such remarks date from the lectures on time consciousness. But, by the time of the writing of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl seems to change his position. He contrasts his idealism with Kant’s idealism, which declares that consciousness constitutes the sense of objects and, that, apart from such sense, objects are unknowable “things in themselves— i.e., entities whose sole role is to provide consciousness with a “transcendent affection.” Husserl’s transcendental idealism, by contrast, “is not a Kantian idealism which believes it can keep open, at least as a limiting concept, the possibility of a world of things in themselves.”81 This means, with regard to the supposed receptivity of consciousness to such entities, that it is “not an idealism which seeks to derive a world full of sense from senseless, sensuous data.”82 According to Fink, who worked with Husserl on the text of Cartesian Meditations, this denial of the receptivity of consciousness “exhibits the productive character of transcendental intentionality.” He adds: The mental “inner-worldly” intention is essentially receptive; it is performed with an understanding of itself as an approach to a being in itself that is independent of it … When we no longer interpret transcendental life as receptive, its special character still remains undetermined. It is the constitutive interpretation of it that first exhibits it as creation [als Kreation]. No matter how difficult and doctrinaire the determination of the essence of constitution as productive creation might sound, at least its opposition is thereby indicated to the receptive

 Ibid., p. 311.  “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl,” in Collective Papers III, ed. I .Schutz, p. 83, The Hague, 1966, p. 86. 79  Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 100; Br., p. 106. 80  Ibid., p. 67; Br., p. 70. 81  Cartesianische Meditationen, Strasser ed., p. 118. 82  Ibid. 77 78

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character of the worldly-factual (mental) life of experience, a life which fosters the notion of being in itself.”83

For Fink, this means that there is no ultimate “heteronomy” between “sensuous hyle” and “intentional form,”—i.e., between sensuous data and the interpretive acts of consciousness. In his words, “Even the hyle, which at first is presented as a non-­ intentional moment of the act, is constituted along with the intentional form of the total act itself in the depths of the intentional self-constitution of phenomenological time.”84 Fink’s use of the word, creation, is especially significant. When asked by the editors to review this piece, Husserl wrote for its “Preface,” “I have thoroughly gone through this article and I am delighted to be able to say that there is not a sentence within it that I do not make my own, that I could not expressly acknowledge as my own conclusion.”85 This conception of the creative power of consciousness was, to say the least, controversial. It provided the impulse for many of his followers to leave him. Chief among the difficulties it raises is that of the status of Others. Can a creative consciousness allow for their presence—their presence as simply more than “products” of consciousness? If it cannot, does not Husserl’s idealism condemn us to a “transcendental solipsism”—the status of being alone in the world and, hence, of lacking Others to confirm our experience and the conclusions we draw from it? Have we, in fact, in our attempt at a “genuine epistemology” reduced the sense of truth to that of “truth for me”? These are the questions that Husserl, himself, posed. As we shall see, they led him to a further transformation of his phenomenology.

 “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gengenwärtigen Kritik,” in Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–39, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, p. 143). 84  Ibid., p. 146. 85  Ibid., p. viii. Ricoeur, we should note, puts this affirmation of the creative power of consciousness in terms of the relation of sense and presence. He writes: “one last gap still remains to be filled in between what we shall henceforth call the ‘sense’ of the noema and actuality. … Transcendental phenomenology aspires to integrate into the noema its own relation to the object, i.e., its ‘fullness,’ which completes the constitution of the whole noema. … To constitute actuality is to refuse to leave its ‘presence’ outside the ‘sense’ of the world” (“Introduction to Ideas I,” in Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology, p. 23). 83

Chapter 5

Others

The Task In the Introduction, we took note of the necessity that makes the presence of Others so problematic for Husserl. It is that of answering “the cardinal question of epistemology, the question of the objectivity of knowledge.”1 The polemics against skepticism and relativism are driven by the attempt to secure such objectivity. The same holds for the Ideas’ stripping of the ego of its worldly being. If we are to solve “the problem of the possibility of objective knowledge,” “the ego,” Husserl writes “cannot be and cannot remain presupposed as a worldly being.” Only by bringing it “to transcendental purity” through the epoché and reduction can it escape the relativism that is consequent on the material-causal account of its actions.2 The epoché and reduction lead us back from objects to the experiences that justify their positing by the transcendental ego. But this is what makes the presence of Others so problematic. The ego’s experiences are its own. I cannot see out of another person’s eyes, nor feel through the Other’s skin. Neither can the Other access directly my own experiences. Given this, Husserl has to ask, “How do I get out of my island of consciousness? How can what appears in my consciousness as the experience of evidence win objective significance?”3 This question is prompted by the fact that objective knowledge requires Others—Others who can confirm our assertions about the world. How are we to account for them, once we have taken up the stance of the transcendental ego? The special nature of the difficulty we face comes from the fact that within the epoché, being is reduced to the sense of being. In Husserl’s words, “everything previously existing for us in a straight-forward way is taken exclusively

 Logical Investigations, vol. 1, p. 14.  Ideen III, p. 150. 3  Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser, p. 116. 1 2

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as a phenomenon, as a sense meant and preserving itself.”4 The Others, however, whom we require to confirm our assertions, are not simply senses resulting from our synthetic activities. If Others are to provide an independent confirmation of what we affirm, they must be more than this. As the commentator, Quentin Laurer, writes: “the Other must be a ‘real’ subject, if objectivity itself is to have any ‘sense’ at all.”5 This, however, involves a radicalization of the sense of constitution. We do not simply affirm that constitution makes present the sense of being. Rather, we take the transcendental subject as “constituting both sense and actuality of being [Sinn und Seinswirklichkeit],” including the sense and actuality of genuine Others.6 To do so is to constitute Others as actually constituting subjects. The nature of this constitution can be put in terms of the fact that “the sense of the being of the world” involves “thereness-for-everyone, thereness as always co-intended by us whenever we speak of objective actuality.”7 According to Husserl, this common world is a “correlate of uncoverable constitutive systems”—i.e., those that generate the senses of its objects.8 Their compatibility is what gives us a world of shared senses—a world where we can agree on the meaning of things, where we can confirm one another’s assertions and, thus, lay claim to objective knowledge. This world, for Husserl, is “essentially related … to constituting intersubjectivity, whose individual subjects are equipped with mutually corresponding and harmonious constitutive systems.” It presupposes “a harmony of the monads”—i.e., individual subjects. More precisely expressed, it requires “a harmony in the genesis [of senses] that is occurring in the individuals.”9 Can we establish this harmony within the transcendental attitude, the attitude that begins with the experiences of an individual subject? To do so is to see constituting Others as somehow constituted by me. I must, in other words, see myself as the ground of the constituting intersubjectivity that constitutes the objective world. In Husserl’s words, I have to assert that “there are transcendentally constituted in me, the transcendental ego, both other egos and an objective, common world as constituted in turn by a transcendental intersubjectivity that accrues to me thanks to my constitution of Others.”10 To see what this implies we have to recall that the reduction is employed to avoid a petitio principii, i.e., avoid assuming the conclusion as part of the evidence brought forward for it. To prevent this, the epoché brackets the conclusion. The  Ibid., p. 126.  “There is … justification to Husserl’s contention that there is here an approach to the problematic of existence. In explicating the ‘sense’ of the Other, which is already contained implicitly in the very conception of an objectivity which must be equally valid for all possible subjects, the theory of intersubjectivity recognizes that the Other must be a ‘real’ subject, if objectivity itself is to have any ‘sense’ at all” (Phenomenology, its Genesis and Prospect [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965], p. 159). 6  Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser, p. 97. 7  Ibid. p. 124, italics added. 8  Ibid., p. 126. 9  Ibid., p. 138. 10  Ibid., p. 117. 4 5

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phenomenologist makes no use of it as she considers such evidence. To apply this to the positing of Others is to bracket “all determinations of the phenomenal world that refer by their sense to ‘Others.’” This includes “all cultural predicates,” all senses that objects have by virtue of their “being there for everyone.”11 What is left is ­simply “the ego’s sphere of ownness [Eigenheitsphäre].”12 This consists of the experience that provides us with the evidence for Others. It is, Husserl writes, “the founding level.” As such, it is independent of what it founds. In Husserl’s words, “I cannot have the Other as experience and, therefore, I cannot have the sense, objective world, as an experiential sense without having this [first] level in actual experience.” “The reverse of this,” he adds, “is not the case.”13 The founding level can exist without the presence of what it founds. If it could not, the senses referring to Others could not be bracketed. To bracket them would suspend the founding level. Moreover, we could not regard the ego as non-worldly in an objective sense, since all the primitive senses related to its notion would involve the sense of the objective, common world. In such a case, the epoché that leads to our sphere of ownness would be impossible since intersubjectivity would be a primary category of meaning. It would be a basic category for the explication of all other meanings. Alfred Schutz, it is interesting to note, embraces these consequences. For Schutz, “intersubjectivity is not a problem of constitution which can be solved within the transcendental sphere, but is rather a datum of the life-world. It is the fundamental ontological category of human existence in the world and therefore of all philosophical anthropology.” This is because there is no level of experience more basic than the strata that refers to Others. In his words, “As long as man is born of woman, intersubjectivity and the we-relationship will be the foundation for all other categories of human existence. The possibility of reflection on the self, discovery of the ego, capacity for performing any epoché … are founded on the primal experience of the we-relationship.”14 To not take this path is to assert that within my sphere of ownness, I can find the evidence that justifies the positing of actual Others. It is to assert, in Husserl’s words, “that not all of my own modes of consciousness belong to the circle of those that are modes of my self-consciousness.”15 This means that, out of the data of the founding level, “the ego can form new types of intentionalities … with a sense of being (Seinssinn) whereby it completely and totally transcends its own being.” Their intended effect, the actual positing of someone other, is suspended by the epoché that leaves us with the first level. Yet one recognizes that what they point to has the sense of something more than “a point of intersection [Schnittpunckt] of my constitutive synthesis.”16 This recognition must, of course, be

 Ibid., p. 127.  Ibid., p. 126. 13  Ibid., p. 127. 14  “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity …” ed. cit., p.  82. What this implies with regard to Schutz’s own position is that sociology is the primary philosophy. 15  Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser, p. 135, italics added. 16  Ibid. 11 12

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transcendentally regarded as something constituted. Constitution, however, here oversteps itself. The task Husserl faces is to show how this occurs.

 he Account of the Cartesian Meditations: The Constitution T of the Sense of the Other How is such an “overstepping” possible? It is clear that it cannot occur by virtue of the synthesis of identification. That which appears as identically one in many perceptions is immanently present within them. It does not come to them from “outside.” If the Other were constituted in this way, then he would only be a “point of intersection” set up in my consciousness. As Husserl says, “he would merely be a moment of my own essence, and ultimately he and I would be one and the same.”17 This can also be expressed in terms of the different levels of constitution. Taken by itself, the synthesis of identification yields objects whose senses refer to my activity. On this level, my modes of consciousness are modes of self-consciousness insofar as their correlates point to the immanent “intentional accomplishments of [my] synthesis of consciousness.” To grasp the Other as Other, however, is to move beyond this level. This, according to Husserl, requires a second type of synthesis. Husserl uses a number of terms to describe its process: “appresentation,” “pairing,” “association” and, finally, “analogizing apperception.” Appresentation is an intending of the presence of one thing on the basis of the presence of another. Thus, on the basis of the presence of the front of an object—e.g., a chair—I also co-intend what is not immediately present: its back. The back of the chair can, of course, become originally present. I can walk around so as to view it from its back side. For Husserl, however, the function of appresentation is not limited to such examples. It can also occur in cases where I cannot make the co-intended originally present. This is because the intention to one thing on the basis of the other does not necessarily require the fulfillment of this intention. Thus, I can co-intend things, such as the interior of the sun, which I am not in any position to make originally present. I can also mistakenly co-intend things. What I co-intend is not there. My co-intending is then simply “an empty pretention.” Pairing is a special case of this process of appresentation. It requires for its basis two similarly appearing objects. Here, “two data are intuitively given and … they phenomenologically establish a unity of similarity; thus, they are always constituted as a pair.” Such constitution means that the sense, which is intuitively present in one of them, can serve as a basis for the co-intending of the same sense with regard to the other. As Husserl expresses this, the thought of one member “awakens” that of the other. There is, then, an “intentional overreaching,” one that results in the “intentional overlapping of each with the sense of the other.”18 17 18

 Ibid., p. 139.  Ibid., p. 142.

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Husserl calls pairing a “primal form” of association. We can, under this title, find innumerable examples of the phenomenon he is describing. For instance, let us say that we experience a connection between a person’s appearance—his style of dress, etc.—and a certain form of behavior. A person, for example, dressed as a postman always delivers the mail. When we encounter another person similarly dressed, we may “pair” him with the first individual. On the basis of a “unity of similarity,” there may then occur an associative transfer of sense. In harmony with our first example, we expect the second to behave in a certain way—e.g., to also deliver the mail. Here, the presence of a given style of appearance makes us co-intend the presence of the expected behavior. Association is, of course, not always correct. Even if it is based on a number of examples, the transfer of sense can misfire. As we said, there is no necessity that the co-intended be originally present. Thus, nothing, per se, requires the transferred sense to become perceptually embodied. To take our example, there is always the possibility of disguises. A person may dress himself as a mailman, not to reveal, but rather to conceal his intended behavior. At the basis of pairing or association, there is, according to Husserl, an analogizing apperception. As the term, analogy, indicates, it is essentially a process whereby consciousness acts spontaneously to set up a proportion. The intuitively given data which are constituted as a pair form the first two members of the proportion—e.g., the two persons dressed as a mailman. A sense attached to the first of these—e.g. delivering the mail—gives us a third member. As for the fourth term, it is not immediately given. It is a sense—e.g., of the second person’s delivering the mail—that is associatively determined by the other three members. Thus, when data are paired through a recognition of their given similarity, any additional sense that is attributed to the first member is transferred associatively to the second member. This process goes on more or less continuously. In Husserl’s words, “Each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally established sense to a new case, with its anticipative interpretation of the object as possessing a similar sense.”19 For Husserl, our recognition of another subject involves just such an analogizing apperception. The intuitively given data that are paired are my own and the Other’s bodily presence as we act in the world. Our appearing bodies are constituted on the primary level through the above described syntheses of identification. They are, thus, “points of intersection” of my constitutive syntheses. A third term is given by the sense I have of my ego acting through my body—i.e., controlling its movements. The body, conceived as bearing this objective sense, is understood as an “animate organism (Leib).” As for the fourth term in this proportion, the Other’s ego as controlling his own bodily movements, it is not and cannot be given immediately to me. The bodily appearance of the Other, Husserl writes, “does not prevent us from admitting that neither the other ego himself, nor his experience—appearances to him—nor anything that pertains to his own essence becomes originally given in our experience.”20 The Other’s ego thus stands as an X, as an unknown in our

19 20

 Ibid., p. 141.  Ibid., p. 139.

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proportion. This, however, does not prevent the phenomenon of pairing from occurring and, on this basis, the transfer of the sense “animate organism” to the Other in his bodily appearing. With this, the Other’s ego becomes determined as a subject “like myself”—as an ego acting through his body.21 How is this transfer of sense to be confirmed? In an identity synthesis, the sense that is established is confirmed as the perceptual process continues. It is identically present as the referent of the appearances, and, thus, is continually regiven. Here, however, we are dealing with a second level of constitution. Although founded on the first, it gives us the Other as other. What is demanded, then, is a new “style of verification”—a “type of verifiable accessibility to what is not originally accessible.”22 Now, to avoid violating the epoché, such confirmation must continue to be a matter of the founding level, the level of what is “originally accessible.” It occurs, in other words, within the sphere of ownness, the sphere that establishes the sense of three of the terms of the proportion. To maintain the transcendental attitude, then, the sense of the Other must be constituted out of the senses of this level. Concretely, this means that the “analogizing transfer” of sense continues only so long as its basis remains intact. This basis is formed by the intuitively given data whose similarity allows them to be “paired” or associatively linked. Now, in the case of the recognition of the Other, the original pairing occurs between my body and that of the Other. This means that their appearances—primarily in the matter of their action or behavior—must continually maintain a certain similarity. In Husserl’s words, “The experienced animate organism of the Other continues to manifest itself as actually an animate organism solely through its continually harmonious behavior … The organism is experienced as a pseudo-organism precisely when it does not agree in its behavior.”23 “Harmonious,” here, means harmonious with my own behavior. The Other’s actions must “agree” with this in order to establish the similarity necessary for pairing. As Husserl expresses this, the Other’s ego is “determined as thus governing his body (and, in a familiar way, constantly confirms this) only insofar as the whole stylistic form of the sensible processes that are primordially perceivable by me must correspond to what is known in type from my own governing of my body.”24 This is also the case with the “higher psychical occurrences”—i.e., those involving speech and culturally determined activities. They, too, have “their style of synthetic connections and their form of occurring which can be understandable to me through their associative basis in my own style of life, a style empirically familiar to me in its average typicality.”25 The way I verify my recognition of the Other is, then, through the continuing similarity of our behavior. The behavior that is primordially (or directly) perceived by me is taken as similar in type to my own. Proceeding from this basis, I constantly

 See Ibid., p. 143.  Ibid., p. 144. 23  Ibid., p. 144. 24  Ibid., p. 148. 25  Ibid., p. 149. 21 22

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transfer to the Other the senses of the psychic determinations that I have directly experienced in my own conduct. In this way, I indirectly experience the Other both as governing his body and as having the “higher” psychic processes that are also comprehensible through the typical behavioral manifestations that I showed when similar processes occurred in me. That throughout all of this, I remain the standard of behavior, the standard for its harmoniousness, is, of course, self-understood. As I can never directly perceive the Other’s ego, it is only through an associative transfer of the senses of my own psychic processes that he can be recognized as a subject.

The Constitution of the Actuality of the Other To see how Husserl moves from the positing of the Other as a sense filled presence to a recognition of him as a ‘real’ subject, we have to bring in his use of the spatial senses of the ‘here’ and the ‘there.’ As Husserl observes, each of us experiences his body in the mode of the ‘here.’ It is, so to speak, a permanent “zero point” by which we mark off spatial distances. The Other’s body, in contrast, is always experienced in the mode of ‘there.’ It is experienced as an object among the objects of an individual’s surrounding world. There is, then, a crucial dissimilarity between the appearing of my own body in the ‘here’ and that of the Other in the ‘there.’ Given that pairing does require similarity, we must, then, say of the Other, “its manner of appearance is not paired in direct association with the manner of appearance which my body always actually has (the mode, ‘here’).”26 What is required is, in fact, a double pairing. The pairing with the Other’s body is actually an “association at a higher level,” one founded on a more primitive association. The latter concerns my ability, via my bodily movement to change any ‘there’ into a ‘here.’ As Husserl writes, “this implies that, perceiving from the ‘there,’ I should see the same things, only in correspondingly different modes of appearance such as would pertain to my being there.”27 That, in fact, we do experience this to be the case leads to the phenomenon of appresentation. The presentation of objects from one position contains (as an implicit co-intending) an appresentation of them from another position. According to Husserl, this phenomenon also occurs with regard to our own bodies. Tied to the possibility of my movement is the fact that “my bodily animate organism is interpreted and interpretable as a natural body existing in space and movable like any other natural body.”28 Given this, the presentation of my body in the ‘here’ contains an implicit appresentation of the same body “existing in space” at some distance from the ‘here.’ I n Husserl’s words, I have the possibility of appresenting “the way my body would look if I were there.” The first pairing, then, is between my body in the modes of the ‘here’ and the ‘there.’

 Ibid., p. 147.  Ibid., p. 146. 28  Ibid. 26 27

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It is with regard to the body interpreted in the latter mode—i.e., as ‘there’—that the Other’s body comes to be paired.29 This double pairing gives us the recognition of the Other as actually other—i.e., a real subject that is capable of confirming my assertions by virtue of possessing a distinct point of view. To see this, we have to note that the two pairings by which I apprehend the Other are distinguishable insofar as the first involves possibility and the second, actuality. When the Other calls to mind the way I would look were I there, the basis of this is the possibility I have of changing my position to the ‘there.’ The Other, however, is actually experienced as being there. Now, the contents of the ‘here’ and ‘there’ exclude each other. My sphere of ownness is not such that, maintaining its unity, it can simultaneously present the world from two different positions. Thus, the fact that the pairing does involve the duality of the ‘here ‘and the ‘there,’ while I actually remain in the ‘here,’ means that I must appresent the other ego as actually other. In other words, what is “primordially incompatible”—i.e., incompatible in terms of the primordial experiences of my sphere of ownness— becomes compatible in granting the other an actually distinct sphere of ownness. This is the sphere in which the world is actually—i.e., presently—experienced from the ‘there.’ It is the sphere of ownness experienced by an actually existing Other. Husserl can, thus, say: “my primordial ego, through appresentative apperception, constitutes for itself another ego which, according to its own nature, never demands or allows fulfillment through direct perception.”30 It does not, for the appresented perception involves a ‘there’ and, correspondingly, an ego actually distinct from my own. With the constitution of the other ego, the world becomes “objective” in the German sense of word—Gegenständlich—i.e., the sense of “standing against” a subject. The transcendence involved in this is twofold. Within my sphere of ownness, I can say that the object transcends me insofar as it continually affords me more than I have up to now experienced. Thus, in the perspectival appearing of an object, no single perception counts as final—i.e., as inherently excluding the possibility of another, slightly different perception of the same object. A perspectival series thus shows the possibility of an indefinite continuance. The view of one side of the object constantly calls forth the possibility of a view of another side. This means that the spatial-temporal object, which appears in such a series, bears the sense of something capable of indefinite exhibition. Its sense, in other words, is that of an object which surpasses or transcends the sum of the actual views which I have already had of it. Transcendence, here, is a matter of the possible exceeding the actual. My actual experience of an object is exceeded by the further possible experience of it. With the constitution of other egos, however, a second, intersubjective sense of transcendence arises. At this point, as David Carr writes, “The object is not only irreducible to any particular acts of mine; it is also not reducible to all possible acts of mine, my whole actual and possible stream of consciousness, because it is

29 30

 See Ibid., p. 147.  Ibid., p. 148.

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identically the same for Others and their acts as well.”31 This second, “objective” sense of transcendence involves more than the transcendence of the possible with regard to the actual. It is a transcendence involving distinct actualities. This is because the sense of a possibility surpassing my own possibilities is one which is implicit in an actuality which also surpasses my own actuality. It requires the actuality of the Others in their perceptual experiences. The constitution of this sense of transcendence, in other words, depends upon Others who are actually other. With this second sense of transcendence, the sense of standing against a subject involves an independence that is not to be found within the sphere of ownness. Objectivity involves Others and, with this, the possibility that they can confirm or deny my assertions regarding it. Of course, such affirmation or denial would be of no consequence to me if we did not share a world. Such sharing, however, follows from the first pairing of my body in the modes of the ‘here’ and the ‘there.’ My movement from one place to another, Husserl writes, presents me with the same nature “only in correspondingly different modes of appearance.” Thus, when the Other is paired to my body in the “there,” he too must experience “the same nature, but in the mode of appearance: as if I stood there where the other’s body is.” This means that in the appresented Other, “the synthetic systems with all their modes of appearance are the same … except that the actual perceptions and … in part also the actually perceivable objects are not the same, but rather precisely those that are perceivable from there as they are perceivable from there.”32 The reference to the identity of synthetic systems reminds us of Husserl’s goal of describing the constitution of an intersubjective, objective world. Such a world is defined as a correlate of “mutually corresponding and harmonious constitutive systems.” It is the world of the shared meanings resulting from these systems. With the constitution of this world, Husserl assumes that he has reached his goal. This, as we recall, concerns “the objection by which we first let ourselves be guided”: namely, that phenomenology, “beginning as it does with the transcendental ego of the phenomenological reduction and being restricted to this ego,” cannot “solve the problems of the possibility of objective knowledge.”33 Such knowledge is a function of the world that “stands against” the subject in the sense of being an independent criterion for its claims. It involves a transcendence of the subject that the  world has by virtue of the Others inhabiting it. What Husserl claims to have established is the explication of this world in terms of the constitution occurring within the transcendental ego.

 “The Fifth Meditation …,” ed., cit., p. 18.  Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser, p. 152. 33  Ibid., p. 174. 31 32

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Objections The German edition of the Cartesian Meditations, from which the above account has been taken, was never published in Husserl’s lifetime. The 1929 lectures in the Amphithéâtre Descartes at the Sorbonne, which formed its basis, were revised with Fink’s help and published in French in 1931. Husserl continued to work on the German edition with Fink over the subsequent years until he turned his attention to The Crisis. Initially, he thought that the Meditations would be his crowning work. As he wrote to Roman Ingarten in 1930: “This will be the main work of my life, one that will lay out my mature philosophy. It will be a fundamental work of both [phenomenology’s] method and philosophical problematic.” As such, “it will require a broad exposition extending to the highest ‘metaphysical’ problematic.”34 Yet, as subsequent manuscripts indicate, he was never satisfied with the analyses of the Cartesian Meditations. The problem of Others, in fact, led him increasingly to expound the “‘metaphysical’ problematic’—this to the point that the sense of phenomenology once again underwent a transformation. To see why this was so, we have to turn to the objection that Sartre and Schutz raise to the account of the Meditations. Sartre writes that its descriptions of pairing and the transfer of sense establish only a “parallelism of empirical egos.”35 In other words, given that pairing occurs on the basis of similarity, the fact that the first term of the pair is a body interpreted as an animate (“psychophysical”) organism means that the second term must also be regarded as such. As Schutz expresses Sartre’s point: The appresenting term of the coupling is not my transcendental ego, but my own self-given life as a psychophysical I … And what is appresented by this pairing is first the object in the outer world interpreted as the body of another human being, which as such indicates the mental life of the Other—the Other, however, still as a mundane psychophysical unity within the world, as a fellow man, therefore, and not as a transcendental ego.36

The difficulty, then, is easily recognizable. Since pairing is supposed to be constitutive of the Other, the Other that is constituted by this process is not a transcendental ego; it is a worldly or embodied ego. Transcendental intersubjectivity, however, is defined as a community of transcendental egos. As is apparent from Husserl’s description of the transcendental—as opposed to the mundane, psychological— ego, the recognition of the Other as an animate organism cannot suffice to establish this intersubjectivity. As we cited Husserl, the embodied psychological ego, on being transformed into its transcendental counterpart, “loses that which gives it the value of something real in the naively experienced, pre-given world; it loses the  Karl Schumann, Husserl-Chronik, Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p.  361. See A.D.  Smith, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Mediations (London: Routledge, 2003, p. ix. 35  Being and Nothingness, ed. cit., p. 316. 36  “Sartre’s theory of the Other Ego,” Collected Papers I, ed. M. Natanson, Phaenomenologica, No. 11, The Hague, 1973, p. 197. 34

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sense of being a soul of an animate organism (Leibes) which exists in a pre-given spatial-temporal nature.”37 Thus, in establishing the Other simply as an ego of an animate organism, the process of pairing cannot reach the transcendental community that is Husserl’s goal. The same point can be put in a slightly different fashion. For Husserl, the ego is not part of the world insofar as it is seen as constituting the world. To view it as transcendental is to consider it as constituting, while to view it as a worldly or embodied ego is to consider it as constituted. The pairing of two embodied egos is, then, the pairing of two constituted products. As such, it presupposes the deeper transcendental level which results in these two. This is the level which first establishes the sense of myself as worldly—i.e., as capable of motion in space with the accompanying concepts of the “here” and “there.” It, thus, is also the level which establishes the sense of the Other as paired to my worldly being in the “there.” Now, to establish, rather than presuppose this level, we must grasp the two subjects as constituting. What we require, then, is not a “parallelism of empirical egos,” but rather one of transcendental, constituting egos. Closely related to this objection is the fact that Husserl’s argument assumes what it attempts to prove—namely, the presence of the Other as a transcendental subject. This point can be put in terms of the epoché. Exercising it, we suspend our thesis in order to impartially regard the evidence for it. In the Meditations, the thesis in question is, broadly speaking, that of the intersubjective world. Subjectively viewed, it is that of a “constituting intersubjectivity whose individual subjects are equipped with mutually corresponding and harmonious constitutive systems.” Objectively considered, it claims a harmony of the senses generated by such systems. It, thus, appears as the thesis of the world of shared senses or meanings. To establish this, I must, first, establish that there is someone else besides my “primordial” ego. I must further establish that this Other constitutes as I do and, hence, that we share the meanings of the world generated by our acts of constitution. Having performed the epoché, I cannot, therefore, make use of these theses. In other words, in evaluating the evidence which is supposed to verify them, I must keep open the possibility, first of all, that there is no Other. I must also keep open the likelihood that if the Other exists, s/he does not constitute the way I do and, hence, does not share meanings with me. In the Meditations, both theses are verified through behavior. Thus, with respect to the first thesis, it is through the embodied, appearing behavior that is harmonious with my own that I posit and constantly reconfirm my positing of the Other as an embodied subject. A break in this harmony results in the dissolution of this positing. The same holds for my positing of the Other as a transcendental subject like myself. The continued harmony of our behavior gives me the constantly reconfirmed sense of the Other as constituting the same objective world that I do. It does this by allowing me to pair the Other with myself in the ‘there’ and to take him as experiencing “the same nature, but in the mode of experience: as if I stood there where the other’s

37

 “Nachwort,” ed. cit., p. 145.

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body is.” Harmonious behavior thus permits the associative transfer to the Other in the ‘there’ of what I can primordially experience in my own case: the unchanging nature of the constitutive system with regard to the ‘here’ and the ‘there.’ Given this unchanging nature, I can take the subject existing in the ‘there’ as constituting as I do in the ‘here.’ For Husserl, then, our positing of Others as embodied subjects like ourselves and as constituting as we do both have their basis in the harmony of our behavior. The question is whether this basis leaves open the possibility of a negative result. This last would be the admission that there is a possible Other who is other in a transcendental sense—i.e., who constitutes differently from myself. Such a subject, in acting according to the senses of his world, would, of course, not behave according to the senses of my world. It is easy to see that this admission cannot be made. According to the above, the Other who is positable must, first of all, be an embodied subject. Yet the evidence for the Other as embodied—i.e., as an “animate organism”—is the same as the evidence for his for his constituting like myself. Thus, the disharmonious behavior that results in the denial of the embodied Other would also lead us to deny the presence of a constituting, transcendental Other who did not constitute as I do. This foreclosing of the possibility of a negative result points to the violation of the epoché. It indicates that in positing the Other. I must already assume that we share meanings. This point follows from the fact that an Other for whom the world had an entirely different meaning and who acted accordingly would not have a behavior harmonious with mine. Thus, he would not be recognized as a subject by me. This means that only the behavior that is in accord with the meanings which I give to the world counts as harmonious with my own and, thus, counts as evidence for the positing of the Other as a subject. Such positing must, then, assume from the beginning a sharing of meanings by myself and the Other. Crucial to this analysis is Husserl’s conception of intentional behavior, the behavior that is directed to intentional objects, i.e., to the sense filled presences that make up our surrounding world. The latter are the accomplishments of the syntheses of our consciousness. This means that in intentional behavior, situations appear to us in a certain light. They are interpreted as having a certain meaning, a meaning which prompts us to act in certain corresponding (“appropriate”) ways. Taken in this way, behavior that is harmonious with mine must be defined as behavior in accord with the meanings which I would give to a similar situation. Granting this, we can say that the behavioral evidence which I do accept as pointing to the Other presupposes that as a subject he already possesses a constitutive system harmonious with my own. It assumes that the meanings which result from this system and prompt his behavior are already shared by us. We can also say that such evidence assumes a transfer of sense to the Other from the intentional context of my actions. This follows since such senses serve as standards for my evaluation of the harmoniousness of the Other’s behavior and, on this basis, standards for positing him as a subject. If the above is correct, then the transfer of sense—or, equivalently, the world of shared meanings established by this transfer—is not something whose legitimacy can be tested by behavior. It is something by which we test behavior. Otherwise

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expressed: it is a principle presupposed by our attempt to recognize the Other through his behavior. The circularity, then, of Husserl’s explication is clear: its criterion for the sharing of meanings is the harmoniousness of behavior; its criterion for this last is the sharing of meanings. But the world of shared meanings is the underlying principle defining an intersubjective world. For Husserl, to assume it is to assume a corresponding intersubjective community. Thus, if this principle is presupposed in evaluating behavior, such an evaluation cannot, without circularity, verify the principle. One can also say that Husserl commits a petitio principii—the very thing which the epoché was designed to avoid—when he uses behavioral evidence to verify intersubjectivity and presupposes in the evaluation of such evidence the underlying principle of intersubjectivity. This, in fact, is to presuppose the very intersubjectivity he wishes to establish.

The Reduction to the Living Present These difficulties point to the fact that genuine recognition aims at the Other, not as a sense, but rather as a generator of sense. What is required is access to this generation, i.e., to the experiences and connections of experiences that result in the presence of sense. Sartre puts this point by writing, “What I must attain is the Other, not as I obtain knowledge of him, but as he obtains knowledge of himself—which is impossible. This would in fact suppose the internal identification of myself with the Other.”38 For Husserl, we know ourselves through our experiences and synthetic acts. To grasp the Other in this way would thus assume an access to his experiences and acts. It would be to harbor in one consciousness two different views of the surrounding world—i.e., views from my ‘here’ and the Other’s ‘there.’ I cannot do this and maintain my “sphere of ownness.” In fact, were such experiences and acts somehow to merge, then my consciousness would be identical to the Other’s. But this would result in transcendental solipsism. My individual, self-identical ego would be the only ego I know. For genuine recognition, then, I also require that the Other I do acknowledge be different from myself. For Sartre, Husserl’s account shatters in its confrontation with these opposing demands. For Husserl, however, in the late manuscripts, they are met by positing different levels of subjectivity. The demand for identity of self and Other is satisfied on the level of the ground; that for difference is met on the level of the grounded. As satisfying both, the process of our recognition of Others is, then, a move from the grounded to the ground. It is, in other words, an implicitly performed phenomenological reduction as it moves from the grounded to its ground, i.e., from difference to underlying identity. As such, it implicitly corresponds to the motion of the reduction. As we shall see, such recognition involves a new sense of the subject, one which sees it as an ongoing, genetic process.

 Being and Nothingness, ed. cit., p. 317.

38

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For Husserl, the reduction to the ground is “the reduction to the living present.” This, he writes, is the most radical reduction to that subjectivity in which everything is accomplished that is valid for me—i.e., to that subjectivity in which all ontological sense (Seinssinn) is sense for me as experientially apprehended, obtaining sense. It is a reduction to the sphere of primal temporalization in which the first and originary (urquellenmässige) sense of time comes forward—time as the living, streaming present. All further temporality—be it “subjective” or “objective,” whatever be the sense that these words might take on—receives its ontological sense and validity from this present.39

We reach this present through an epoché understood as “a radical ‘limitation’ to the living present,” one where we “speak only about this [present].”40 We do so by bracketing the retentions and protentions that place the nowness we occupy in time. To see this as a reduction to “subjectivity” understood the “sphere of primal temporalization,” we have to recall Husserl’s remarks on the constitution of the ego. Temporally regarded, the ego designates the centering of experiences about the ongoing now. Such centering is accomplished by the retentional and protentional processes, which position the ego as the “middle point” of time, locating it between “what is just past and what is to come.”41 As we noted, the living present occupied by this middle point appears as a “fixed form,” through which time appears to flow and in which its moments appear to well up as present and actual. As the latter, it appears as a “primal, welling, middle point” of time. When we bracket the results of the retentional and processes, this welling point remains. It continues as the stationary now that we always occupy, but now appears as the now that is streaming, that is, as the place of “primal temporalization.” This place, Husserl emphasizes, is not in time. It does not flow away, but remains now. It is stationary, and yet it streams. In Husserl’s words, “The regressive inquiry, which begins with the epoché, leads to the primary, stationary (strehende) streaming; in a certain sense, it leads to the ‘nunc stans,’ the stationary present. Properly speaking, the word ‘present’ is unsuitable in this context insofar as it already indicates a modality of time.”42 Such a modality would be the present as located between the past and the future. But with the suspension of the retentional and protentional  “Die Reduktion auf die lebendige Gegenwart ist die radikalste Reduktion auf diejenige Subjektivität, in der alles mir Gelten sich ursprünglich vollzieht, in der aller Seinssinn für mich Sinn ist und mir erlebnismäßig als geltend bewußter Sinn. Es ist die Reduktion auf die Sphäre der Urzeitigung, in der der erste und urquellenmäßige Sinn von Zeit auftritt—Zeit eben als lebendig strömende Gegenwart” (Ms. C 3, 4a, summer 1930; Zur Phänomenologishen Reducktion, p. 187). 40  “so besagt die radikale ‘Einschränkung’ auf die lebendige Gegenwart und der Wille, nur über sie auszusagen, soviel wie Vollzug der phänomenologischen Epoché hinsichtlich der Welt—und überhaupt aller irgend für uns im Voraus bestehenden (vorurteilenden) Geltungen” (Ms. C 3, p. 3b, summer 1930; Zur Phänomenologishen Reducktion, p. 186). 41  Ms. C 2, p. 11a, Sept.-Oct. 1931; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), p. 8. 42  “Die Rückfrage von der Epoché aus führt auf das urtümlich stehende Strömen—in einem gewissen Sinne das nunc stans, stehende ‘Gegenwart’, wobei das Wort Gegenwart als schon auf eine Zeitmodalität verweisend eigentlich noch nicht passt” (Ms. C 7, p.  14a, Jan. 7, 1932; Zur Phänomenologishen Reducktion, p. 384). 39

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processes, this sense of the present no longer applies. What remains is simply an a-temporal streaming understood as a constant welling up—this, outside of the context in which we could speak of temporally distinct moments. As Husserl expresses this: This streaming living present is not what we have transcendentally-phenomenologically designated as the stream of consciousness or stream of experiences. It is not at all a ‘stream’ according to the picture of a temporal (or spatial-temporal) whole that has, in the unity of a temporal extension, a continual-successive individual existence (which, in this extension’s distinct stretches and phases, is individualized through the temporal forms). The streaming living present is ‘continuous’ being as streaming and yet is not such in being apart, not such in spatial-temporal (world-spatial) being or in ‘immanent’ temporal being; thus, not such in any apartness that is termed succession—succession in the sense of an apartness of positions in what properly can be called time.”43

Husserl’s point is that the welling up of time is not, itself, to be described in terms of the apartness of time which will result from it. This means that it must be understood “as a constitution, a temporalization, a temporal becoming which is a pre-­ becoming, not a becoming in an ontical, a constituted sense.”44 Thus, the reduction to it is not a reduction to the ego as a temporal center, but rather to what is responsible for this centering. To engage in it, Husserl writes, “I must not terminate the reduction in my bracketing of the world and, with this, my spatial-temporal, real human being in the world.” I must exercise it “on myself as a transcendental ego and as a transcendental accomplishing, in short, as a transcendental life.” 45 When I do perform this reduction, I reach what Husserl terms “the genuinely original life, the continually streaming life, [which is] the pre-being (Vor-Sein) which bears all being, including even the being of the ego and its acts, including … the being of the stream

 “Diese strömend lebendige Gegenwart ist nicht das, was wir sonst auch schon transzendentalphänomenologisch als Bewußtseinsstrom oder Erlebnisstrom bezeichneten. Es ist überhaupt kein ‘Strom’ gemäß dem Bild, als ein eigentlich zeitliches (oder gar zeiträumliches) Ganzes, das in der Einheit einer zeitlichen Extension ein kontinuierlich-sukzessives individuelles Dasein hat (in seinen unterscheidbaren Strecken und Phasen durch diese Zeitformen individuiert). Die strömend lebendige Gegenwart ist ‘kontinuierliches’ Strömendsein und doch nicht in einem AuseinanderSein, nicht in raumzeitlicher (welträumlicher), nicht in ‘immanent’-zeitlicher Extension Sein; also in keinem Außereinender, das Nacheinander heißt—Nacheinander in dem Sinne eines StellenAußereinander in einer eigentlich so zu nennenden Zeit” (Ms. C 3, 4a, summer 1930; Zur Phänomenologishen Reducktion, p. 187). 44  Ms. B I 14, XI, p. 18, 1934. 45  “Wir können auch sagen, ich muß die phänomenologische Reduktion nicht abschließen damit, daß ich die Welt einklammere und darin mein raumzeitliches reales Menschsein in der Welt (und erst recht das anderer Menschen) einklammere, sondern auf mich als transzendentales Ich und transzendentales Leisten, also transzendentales Leben zurückgeworfen muß ich an diesem selbst transzendentale Reduktion üben, nämlich alle mir naiv auferlegten Apperzeptionen einklammern, die selbst schon fundierte Leistungen sind. … dieses transzendentale Ich und dieses ihm eigene transzendentale Leben ist schon ein konstituiertes Gebilde und als das einzuklammern.” Ms. C II 1, Sept. 14, 1932, pp. 8a–8b. A note on the margin adds: “Das naiv gewonnene transzendentale Ich muß selbst wieder einer transzendentalen Reduktion unterworfen werden.” This text is not included in Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934). 43

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of consciousness [understood] as a being.”46 All of this results from primal temporalization. When I regard this temporalization, I find as “constituted” formations “all the levels of existents for the ego and also, correlatively, the ego itself.”47 What we have in these late manuscripts is a reduction to the basis of individual, temporal being. The claim of such manuscripts, according to Fink, is that “time is grounded in a present which creates time and is not itself in time.” It is also, Fink adds, the belief that “the plurality of subjects is grounded in a depth of life before all individuation responsible for selves.”48 In a certain sense, Fink’s point follows automatically, once we accept Husserl’s equation of individual being and temporally determinate being. For Husserl, we recall, to be an individual is to persist in time. It is to be constituted in time as a “persisting presence which ‘includes,’ as non-independent components in the stream of presences, both past and future.”49 As he also puts this, “‘being,’ taken as an individual being, [is] bound to a temporal position and individualized through it.”50 Once, however, we bracket the results of the temporalization that results in such individualization, we can no longer speak of individuals or a plurality of individual selves.

Coincidence and Primal Empathy What remains, according to Husserl, is a coincidence of subjects. This is “[my] coincidence’ with Others on the primal constitutive level, my coincidence, so to speak, before there is constituted a world for myself and Others as a common world and, ultimately as a world for all of us.”51 In this coincidence, Husserl claims, “my ego and the other ego do not have any extensive distance in the community of our being with each other. But also my life, my temporalization, has no distance from that of the Other.”52 At the basis of this coincidence is the fact that, at the primary  “das wirklich ursprüngliche Leben, das immerfort strömende, das Vor-Sein, das alles Sein trägt, auch das Sein der Akte und das Sein des Ich, ja auch das Sein der Vor-Zeit und das Sein des Bewußtseinsstromes als Sein. Ms. C 17 IV, 64b, 1930; Zur Phänomenologishen Reducktion, p. 184. 47  “alle Stufen des Seienden für das Ich, aber auch korrelativ das Ich selbst” (Ms. C 17 IV, pp. 65ab, Aug.1930; ibid., pp. 180–81). 48  “Die Spätphilosophie Husserls in der Freiburger Zeit,” in Edmund Husserl, 1859-1959, Rècueil commemoriatif (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959, p. 113. 49  Ms. C 13, III, p. 1, March 1934; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 274. 50  Die Bernauer Manuskripte, p. 278, n. 1. 51  “Meine ‘Deckung’ mit dem Anderen, in der konstitutiven Urstufe, sozusagen bevor die Welt für mich und den Anderen als gemeine Welt und schließlich als Welt für alle konstituiert ist” (Ms. C 17, 84a, end of 1931; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 435). Immediately after this remark, the following line was crossed out: “‘dann’ tritt die Appräsentation hinzu, tritt durchgreifend in Wirkung” (ibid.). 52  The extended quote here is: “There is, indeed, community [of self and Others]—the word “coincidence” has, unfortunately, the connotation of extended coincidence (Deckung in Extension), of association … [The ego’s] life, its appearances, its temporalization have an immanent extension in 46

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level, each ego is grasped in its identity with the living present. Such a present, as before time, cannot be individualized. Thus, Husserl can write, “When, in self-­ meditation, I go back to my living streaming present in its full concretion, where it is the primal ground and source for all the things now actually valid for me, it is not for me my living present as opposed to that of other humans, and it is not my present as that of an existent with a body and soul, i.e., my present as that of a real human being.”53 What this signifies, he writes a year later, is that “I discover that ‘in my now, I experience the Other’ and his now. I discover my now and his now are existing in one.”54 This sharing of the now of the living present raises for Husserl the question of empathy. He asks, “Does there also pertain to this [living present] empathy understood as a primal empathy—not the empathy which is explicating—but rather a primal intentionality, a manifestation of the continuity with Others …?”55 The “explicating” empathy functions in the analogous transfer of sense to the Other. It explicates the Other’s bodily behavior by attempting to transfer to him my own sense of self as an acting, embodied subject. The question is whether there is an empathy before this—i.e., an empathy which exists prior to the constitution of the embodied behavior that the second empathy interprets. The same question is put in terms of the functioning of the present in which I exist, i.e., the functioning that precedes the realities which stand over and against me. In Husserl’s words, “Am I only conscious of Others in the way that I am conscious of other realities? Am I not conscious of Others in my functioning …?”56 These questions are only rhetorically posed. For Husserl, the sharing of the now of the living present is the basis of our empathetic relations. In his words, once “I deconstruct [the constituted world] and return to the primordial,” I find that “in the realm of the primordial, there also belongs all my empathy.”57 We experience

the stream’s time, and so does that which is within the stream as something materially, temporally constituted. Everything which is temporalized, everything temporalized by the streaming modes of appearances within the immanent temporal stream and then, once again, by the ‘external’ (spatialtemporal) appearances, has a unity of appearance [and hence] a temporal unity, a duration. [But] the ego as a pole does not endure. Therefore, also my ego and the other ego do not have any extensive distance in the community of our being with each other. But also life, my temporalization, has no distance from that of the Other” (Ms. C 16, p.  100a, May 1933; Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 577). The point is that such coincidence, in a nonextended sense, appears once we bracket temporal extension. 53  “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” (Ms. C 3, 3b, summer 1930; Zur Phänomenologishen Reducktion, p. 186). 54  Ms. C 17 I, Sept. 1931; Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 332. Ms. C 17 I, end of Sept. 1931: Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 332. 55  Ms. C 17 V, 1931; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 437. 56  Ms. B I 22, V, p. 22, 1934. 57  Ms. C 17 II, ca. Jan. 1, 1931; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 389.

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“primal empathy” in our experience of our living present. As Husserl expresses this: “The original source-point of time constitution is, for each individual, the experience of his present in an original mode and is, as well, the capacity of each to experience Others … i.e., the capacity of each, within his own living present, to experience Others in an original manner and with this, indeed, to experience the original coincidence between his own and the Other’s being.”58 The empathy present on this level expresses a sense of unity. Husserl, however, adds that such unity becomes mediated by appresentation. Thus, there pertains to the streaming present “primary empathy,” not “the empathy that is explicating, but rather a primal intentionality that is a manifestation of a continuity with others, which … is continually mediated as ad-presenting [als adpräsentierende].”59 “Ad-presenting” signifies “presenting in addition.” It refers to the appresentation that functions in the Cartesian Meditations account of empathy. To say that this primal empathy is “mediated” by ad-presenting signifies that what is appresented is our self-experience of our living present. To recognize the Other as a subject like myself is to recognize that he, too, is an expression of the same living present. The pre-individual present that is at the basis of my functioning is also at the basis of the temporalization of his experiences and, hence, of all his acts and syntheses. Empathy transfers this to him. It does so on the basis of our coincidence in this present. Given this, Husserl can assert: I am the subject who produces the world which obtains for me. … I am such, however, on the underlying basis (Untergrund) of an intentional producing (Bildung), a founding (Fundierung) of pre-worldly being. In this founding, my Others first exist for me. In this [founding], primordial nature, which is other (fremde), with the ego who is other both achieve their existential obtaining through a modification (appresentation). [In this founding], the ego is in coincidence with Others.60

The intentional founding here is the work of the living present. Others exist in this founding in coincidence with me. Through the work of such founding, however, they achieve, via appresentation, their “existential obtaining” as other—i.e., as distinct subjects. This can be put in terms of empathy that explicates the Other’s behavior according to “what is known in type from my own governing my body.” Such empathy presupposes the source of such governance. I bridge the gap between the appearing of the Other’s body and the appearing of my own by acknowledging a common source for the functioning that animates both of us.

 “Der Urquellpunkt dieser Zeitkonstitution ist für eines jeden Erfahrung seine urmodale Gegenwart und die Vermöglichkeit eines jeden, Andere zu erfahren, andere Ich, andere konkrete Seelenmonaden, und zunächst Andere “wahrzunehmen”, d.h. in der eigenen lebendigen Gegenwart die fremde, urmodale zu erfahren und eben damit die Urkoexistenz eigenen Seins und eines fremden Seins zu erfahren” (Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 334). 59  This assertion is presented in the form of a rhetorical question: “Zu jeder strömenden Gegenwart gehörigen Urkontinuierung (Retention); gehört dazu auch Ureinfühlung, oder vielmehr statt Einfühlung, die explizierend ist, eine Urintentionalität der Bekundung einer Kontinuität mit den Anderen, die, wie die zeitigende Verschmelzung, mittelbar, kontinuierlich mittelbar ist als adpräsentierende?” (Ms. C 17, p. 84b; end of 1931; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 437). 60  Ms. B III 4, pp. 65–66, ca. Sept. 1, 1933. 58

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The Common World The source of such functioning is the now of my living present. The fact that I and the Other share it means that we also share the passive temporalization that originates from it. With this, we have the temporal basis for our sharing a common world. This point can be put in terms of Husserl’s assertion, “I discover that ‘in my now, I experience the Other’ and his now. I discover my now and his now are existing in one…” The passage continues: [I discover] my appearances and his, what appears to me as valid for me and his appearances [as valid for him], but both as the same. Thereby, in the same experience, this other has his ‘externally’ appearing temporal extension as his continuing ob-jective present. He possesses it in coincidence with my enduring appearance [to him] and the enduring appearance of the other [to me] that is tied to this, coinciding with it point for point.61

The claim here is that the appearances we experience are “the same” in the sense that they coincide “point for point.” Husserl does not mean by this that the actual contents of our experiences are identical. Were this the case, our consciousnesses would be the same. The claim is, rather, that the temporal extensions of our objective presents—i.e., their pastness and anticipated futurity—coincide, this because our temporalizations coincide point by point. The underlying claim here is that this coincidence occurs because we both share the same, pre-individual source of our temporalizations. We, thus, share in the passive process of temporalization. Given this, Husserl can assert: My passivity stands in connection [Konnex] with the passivity of all others: One and the same thing-world is constituted for us, one and the same time [is constituted] as objective time such that through this, my now and the now of every other—and thus his life-present [Lebensgegenwart] (with whatever is immanent in it) and my life-present—are objectively “simultaneous.” Accordingly, my objectively experienced and ratified locations and the locations of every other share the same locality; they are the same locations, and these are indices for ordering my and others’ phenomenal systems, not as separated orders, but coordinated orders in “the same time.”62

For Husserl, then, we have a common world, one with publicly available objects like clocks, because the passive processes of our temporalization are synchronized. This cannot be otherwise given the commonality of the source of our

 “Ich finde das ‘in meinem jetzt erfahre ich den Anderen’ und sein jetzt; ich finde als in eins seiend mein und sein jetzt, meine Erscheinungen und seine, mein Erscheinendes als mir Geltendes und seines, aber beides als dasselbe. Und dabei hat dieses in derselben Erfahrung seine ‘äusserlich’ erscheinende Zeitdauer als seine fortdauernde ob-jektive Gegenwart, und diese in Deckung mit meiner dauernden Erscheinung und der sich damit verbindenden und Punkt für Punkt deckenden dauernden Erscheinung des Anderen” (Ms. C 17 I, end of Sept. 1931: Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 332). 62  Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, ed. M. Fleischer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), p. 343. The translation given is from Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), p. 632. Unless otherwise noted, as with the current footnote, all translations of this work are my own. 61

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temporalization. Such commonality, it must be stressed, is not ex post facto. It is, rather, prior to the individuals that share a common world. Thus, the ultimate grounding of the fact that we do share a common world is the fact that the source of the streaming departure of appearances for each of us—the very departure that is at the basis of our sense of time—is the same. As Husserl puts this, … this universal time … is a higher order time which has sprung from the intentional coincidence of souls in their being for one another. The primal source point of this temporal constitution is, for each, the experience of his primal modal present and the ability of each to experience Others, other egos, other concrete monadic souls. It is the ability, first of all, to “perceive” Others, i.e., the ability, within one’s living present, to experience Others in a primal manner and, with this, to experience the primal coexistence of one’s own and the Other’s being.63

The move from our experience of the Other’s now on a primal level to our experience of shared, universal time occurs, as we said, through appresentation. When we move from primal to explicative empathy, the initial coincidence of living presents becomes a coincidence of my living present with the appresented present of the Other. The same holds for the initial coincidence of my and the Other’s ego. On the initial level, the ego is simply my being present now. Only through the appresentation of this can we speak of the Other as a distinct ego with its own, appresented, present. For Husserl, then, “In the actual performance of empathy, my primal-modal streaming present … “coincides” with the primal-modal present of the Other. The latter, however, exists for me not as a primal modal, but rather as an appresented present.” “This primal modal present” is, he asserts, “my primal-modal ‘I am,’ … the ‘I am’ that is the presently existing ego in the strictest and most genuine sense.”64 The “appresented present” is that of the appresented Other’s “I am.” Now, according to Husserl, not just my primal present, but also the retentional process attached to it is transferred through appresentation. The result is the coincidence of our horizons of pastness and, hence, the commonality of our past. Simultaneity, in other words, includes not just the present moment, but also the past I originally experience and the appresented past of the Other. As the above passage continues: From this basis, the coincidence embraces both our horizons. My primal-modal, primal-­ impressional now, the absolute source-point of primal-modal originality, coincides, thereby, with the primal impressional source-point that is presented through empathy. The latter is, in this coincidence, simultaneous with mine in form and content. The transformational form of [my] just past repeats itself in this presentation [of the Other] and coincides, phase for phase, with [my] ongoing primal-modal transformation. Concretely, it coincides in form and content. Thus, in the living streaming present, the constituted identity of the streaming repeats itself in the sinking down in the continuously fresh past. The result is that filled time, which identically persists, coincides, phase for phase in its form and content. With

 Ms. C 17 I, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 334.  “Im aktuellen Vollzug einer Einfühlung „deckt” sich so meine urmodale strömende Gegenwart, mein urmodales Ich-bin, dessen Jetzt-Gegenwärtigsein Sein aus der urpräsentierenden Zeitigung ist (das im engsten und eigentlichsten Sinne präsent- (jetzt-) seiende Ich), mit der urmodalen Gegenwart des Anderen, die aber für mich nicht urmodale, sondern appräsentierte ist … ” (Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 343). 63 64

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this, there is constituted a temporal simultaneity of the super-monadic or the inter-monadic time of a higher level.65

We can express this transfer of “the sinking down” into pastness in terms of the functioning of the primal now—a functioning that includes the generation of retentions. As Husserl describes this, “At every level of temporalization, functioning is constantly primal functioning as the stationary present, but also as the letting loose [aus sich entlassen] of retentions—a letting loose that signifies the transformations of the ego as the ego that ‘still’ functions in the constant streaming change.” 66 This “letting loose of retentions” is the “primal functioning” of temporalization, since it places in departing time what wells up in the now. It also signifies the transformations (Abwandlungen) of the temporally situated ego since its central nowness is continually lapsing into pastness even as it is renewed as now. It is this letting loose that is transferred to the Other and “repeats itself” in his appresented living present. The same can be said, with appropriate qualifications, of the protentional horizon of my living present. When we limit ourselves to the living present, it too appears as the source of our protentional anticipations. Like retentions, they appear to well up in the living present. They appear, with retentions, as part of the a-temporal horizon that Husserl represents with the vertical line of his time diagram. Their appresentation gives us a common future, extending our common world to include what we collectively anticipate. With this, we return to Husserl’s claim that because our temporalizations coincide, the temporal extensions of our presents—i.e., their pastness and anticipated futurity that give them their senses as “objective” presents—also coincide.

The Primal, Absolute Ego As was noted, once we bracket the results of the retentional and protentional processes, we come to “a depth of life before all individuation responsible for selves.” This comment by Fink signifies that on this level, if we are to speak of an ego, it

 “… und von da aus ergreift die Deckung die beiderseitigen Horizonte. Es decken sich dabei mein urmodales urimpressionales Jetzt, der absolute Quellpunkt der urmodalen Ursprünglichkeit, mit dem einfühlungsmässig vergegenwärtigten urimpressionalen Quell-punkt-Jetzt, das in dieser Deckung zugleich ist mit dem meinen nach Form und Inhalt. Die Abwandlungsform der Soeben wiederholt sich in der Vergegenwärtigung und deckt sich Phase für Phase mit der urmodal verlaufenden Abwandlung, und zwar konkret nach Form und Inhalt, und so wiederholt sich auch die in der lebendig strömenden Gegenwart konstituierte Identität des strömend in immer weitere frische Vergangenheit Versinkenden und damit die identisch verharrende erfüllte Zeit Phase für Phase, und das Wiederholte steht Phase für Phase nach Form und Gehalt in Deckung, und so konstituiert sich ein zeitliches Zugleich der übermonadischen oder intermonadischen Zeit höherer Stufe” (ibid.). 66  “In jeder Zeitigungsschichte: das Fungieren ist ständing Urfungieren als ständige Gegenwart, aber auch ständig aus sich entlassen von Retentionen, die ichliche Abwandlungen besagen als ‘Noch’-fungieren in strömender Wandlung, die ständig ist als Wandlung” (Ms. AV5, p.  6b, Jan. 1933). 65

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must be considered a uniquely singular entity, i.e., an ego that ‘exists’ in only one example. As Fink describes this, “in these late manuscripts, the thought of a primal ego (Ur- Ich) appears, [it is] an ego that is prior to the distinction, ego-alter ego, being an ego that first allows the plural to break forth from itself.”67 Husserl’s remarks on this primal ego can be considered part of the “highest ‘metaphysical’ problematic” he refers to in his letter to Ingarten. Husserl uses various terms to describe this ego. He writes, for example, that such bracketing leaves us with the “the stationary-streaming self-present or the self-streaming, present absolute ego in its stationary-streaming life.” This ego is the “‘primal phenomenon,’ in which everything, which can be called a phenomenon, has its origin.”68 At times, he speaks of it as the coincidence of egos, i.e., their coincidence in their identity with the living present. It is in these terms that he refers to it as “a lasting primal aliveness (of the primal present that is not a modality of time).” This is the aliveness “of the totality of monads” or transcendental subjects. He adds, “The absolute itself is this universal primal present. All time and world in every sense ‘lie’ in it. [It is] actuality in the full worldly sense, the ‘present,’ itself streaming.”69 Husserl writes of this absolute: “Everything is one—the absolute in its unity: The unity of an absolute self-temporalization.” This self-temporalization temporalizes everything. Because it does, we can speak of “the ‘human’ totality of monads” as one of the “levels” of the absolute.70 This does not mean that absolute is the same as  “Die Spätphilosophie Husserls,” ed. cit., p. 113.  Italics added. In German: “So stoßen wir bald vor auf das nie herausgestellte, geschweige denn systematisch ausgelegte ‘Urphänomen’, in dem alles, was sonst Phänomen heißen mag und in welchem Sinn immer, seine Quelle hat. Es ist die stehend-strömende Selbstgegenwart bzw. das sich selbst strömend gegenwärtige absolute Ich in seinem stehend-strömenden Leben” (Ms. C 7, p. 38a, June 1932; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 145). 69  The extended citation here is: “Going back, there lies here a temporalization of temporalizations, a temporalization of the primal-temporalizing primordialities or an inner communion of the same. Thus, one can speak of a lasting primal aliveness (of the primal present that is not a modality of time) as that of the totality of monads.” This primal aliveness is the absolute. As Husserl’s adds: “The absolute itself is this universal primal present. All time and world in every sense ‘lie’ in it. [It is] actuality in the full worldly sense, the ‘present,’ itself streaming.… This present, however, can only be accessed from my primal present through a regressive inquiry proceeding by way of worldand monadic-temporality.” In German: “Darin liegt rückgewendet auch eine Zeitigung der Zeitigungen, eine Zeitigung der urzeitigenden Urtümlichkeiten, bzw. eine innere Vergemeinschaftung derselben. So ist auch zu sprechen von der einen stehenden urtümlichen Lebendigkeit (der Urgegenwart, die keine Zeitmodalität ist) als der des Monadenas. Das Absolute selbst ist diese universale urtümliche Gegenwart, in ihr “liegt” alle Zeit und Welt in jedem Sinn. Wirklichkeit im prägnanten weltlichen Sinn” Gegenwart”, selbst strömend … Sie ist aber nur aus meiner urtümlichen Gegenwart (selbst ein Gegebenes aus Rückfrage) auf dem Wege der Rückfrage über Weltzeitlichkeit und monadische Zeitlichkeit zu gewinnen” (Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 668). 70  “Everything is one—the absolute in its unity: The unity of an absolute self-temporalization, the absolute in its temporal modalities temporalizing itself in the absolute streaming, that of the ‘streaming living,’ the primordial present, that of the absolute in its unity, which is the unity of everything, which temporalizes and has temporalized everything that is anything. In this, the levels of the absolute: the absolute as the ‘human’ totality of monads (Zur Phänomenologie der 67 68

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the totality of human subjects. Human monads are temporally limited. They are born and they die. One cannot, however, assert this of the absolute, which is not temporally determinate. At most, one can say that “wakefulness, sleep, death” are “modes” of the absolute.71 They are the ways it appears on the level of human subjects with their temporally located living presents. Perhaps Husserl’s clearest statement about the absolute relation’s to the totality of monads is found in the passage: Time and world are, however, temporalized in the absolute that is the stationary-streaming now. The absolute is nothing else than absolute temporalization, and even its interpretation as the absolute that I directly discover in my stationary streaming primordiality is the temporalization of this into something primally existing. Thus, the absolute totality of monads or the total monadic primordiality is such only from [this] temporalization.72

The assertion, here, is that the “interpretation” of the absolute as the “absolute temporalization” that is present in my “stationary streaming primordiality” is based on a prior temporalization—that of the self-temporalization of the absolute “into something primarily existing”—i.e., into an individual monad with its “streaming primordiality.” The same holds for the “absolute totality of monads.” What we have here, in fact, is an ongoing process. Its initial level is that of the absolute. It is the level of “my stationary-streaming primal being” before it is individualized. The next level is that of “my self-temporalized present in the temporalized time of my ego as the [central] present for my past and future.” This is the result of the retentional and protentional processes that temporalize me into something Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 668). In German: “Alles ist eins—das Absolute in seiner Einheit: 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” (ibid.). 71  In Husserl’s words: “The absolute in [its] ‘eternity,’ persisting in the streaming change of its modes; wakefulness, sleep, death as modes. Eternity, non-temporality and temporality; the alltemporal identity of structure, the invariant form of all temporality and of what is temporalized. The invariant, stationary remaining fulness.” In German: Das Absolute in ‘Ewigkeit’ verharrend im strömenden Wandel seiner Modi; Wachsein, Schlaf, Tod als Modi. Ewigkeit, Unzeitlichkeit und Zeitlichkeit; die allzeitliche Identität der Struktur, der invarianten Form aller Zeitlichkeit und des Gezeitigten. Das invariante stehende-bleibende Erfüllte” (Ms. C 17, p. 80a, end of 1931; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p.  430). Husserl also speaks of the birth and death of humanities (Menschheiten) as modes of the absolute: “Das Absolute verharrend in Ewigkeit im ewigen Wandel seiner Modi, zunächst durch gewöhnliche Geburt und Tod—aber auch Geburt und Tod von Menschheiten etc.; Identität der Strukturform (invariante), die Form der absoluten Zeitlichkeit, die Form der absoluten Koexistenz, deren Symbol der Raum ist; aber auch die räumliche Verteilung der getrennten, entstehenden und vergehenden Gestirne; Wandel in der Koexistenz getrennter entstehender und sterbender Gestirnmenschheiten, und Generationssystem von ‘animalischen’ Spezies; Gestirn-, Milchstrassensysteme. Das Invariante: stehend-bleibende Form” (Ms. C 17, p. 95a, end of 1934; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 446). 72  “Aber Zeit und Welt ist gezeitigt im Absoluten, das stehend-strömendes jetzt ist. Das Absolute ist nichts anderes als absolute Zeitigung, und schon ihre Auslegung als das Absolute, das ich direkt als meine stehend-strömende Urtümlichkeit vorfinde, ist Zeitigung, dieses zum Urseienden. Und so ist das absolute Monadenall bzw. die allmonadische Urtümlichkeit nur aus Zeitigung” (Ms. C 1, September 21–22, 1934; Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 670).

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“primally existing”—i.e., a temporally determinate being. From the perspective of the “primal being” or “primal ego,” such temporalization is its “letting loose” of retentions and protentions. The next levels are intersubjective. We have, “through repetition in empathy: the other stationary-streaming primordiality, the other self-­ temporalized present, past, etc., and the time of the [other] self as identical [with mine] in these modalities.” The result of such acts of empathy, understood as indefinitely repeated, is the “absolute totality of monads.” With this, there becomes possible “intersubjective synthesis, the constitution of a simultaneous present,” the end result being “the primal modality of temporal co-existence: All of us in an ontological community, in temporal apartness [zeitlichen Aussereinander], in a temporalizing intertwining [zeitigenden Ineinander].”73 To describe this as a process is, in fact, to transform our view of subjectivity. It is to see it as continually proceeding from the living present, which forms its core, to the developed self that each of us is. As such, the subject cannot be identified with any particular stage of the process. It has its being in the process itself. Any genetic account of its becoming must be understood accordingly. It is not an account that details the progressive acquisition of features that remain as “sedimented layers” of our selfhood. In geology, such layers, once laid down, remain as a permanent acquisition. They are inert substrata. Here, however, such layers or stages exist, like the selfhood they form, in their motion—i.e., as part of the ongoing process of temporalization that is our subjectivity. This view of the self helps us understand Husserl’s apparently contradictory statements about temporalization. He writes, for example, “I am. Time is constituted from me.”74 But he also states that “[t]he ego is, itself, constituted as a temporal unity.” 75 Similarly, he asserts that the ego is unique in having its own streaming life. Every ego, he claims, “has its unity and its streaming life, has its immanent-­ temporal streaming of its material-factual [sachlicher] temporalization.76 This  In German, the stages are: “Mein stehend-strömendes urtümliches Sein, dann meine selbstgezeitigte Gegenwart in der gezeitigten Zeit meines ego, als Gegenwart für meine Vergangenheit und Zukunft. Dann Wiederholung in Einfühlung: fremde stehend-strömende Urtümlichkeit, fremde selbstgezeitigte Gegenwart, Vergangenheit etc. und Selbst-Zeit als in diesen Modalitäten identische. Weiter: intersubjektive Synthesis, Konstitution der Simultangegenwart. Urmodalität der zeitlichen Koexistenz, wir alle in Gemeinschaft des Seins, im zeitlichen Aussereinander, im zeitigenden Ineinander” (ibid., p. 668). 74  “Ich bin. Von mir aus konstituiert die Zeit” (ibid., p. 667). 75  The extended quote here is: “Aber die Zeitigung, die Erfahrungsbildung, die Konstitution hat verschiedene Seiten. Das Ich selbst ist konstituiert als zeitliche Einheit. Es ist die schon als stehendes und bleibendes Ich erworbene (und im Forterwerben immerfort weiter erworbene) ontische Einheit: identisches Ich meines zeitlichen Lebens als dasselbe seiende Ich all meiner Vergangenheiten, meines innerhalb der kontinuierlichen Einheitsform der Zeit verlaufenen und jetzt noch fortströmenden Lebens, das fortströmend in sich und für sich immer neue Vergangenheit als verharrende konstituiert” (Ms. C 17, Sept. 20, 1931; ibid, p. 348). 76  “Jedes Ich, das ich als anderes in originaler Vergegenwärtigung erfahre, hat seine Einheit und sein strömendes Leben, seinen immanent-zeitlichen Strom sachlicher Zeitigung, seine primordiale Natur” (Ms. C 16, May 1933, in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 576). Cf. Ms. C17, 15b, where Husserl writes “Ich sehe dann, daß jedes Ich, rein als Ich betrachtet, als 73

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assertion, as we have seen, does not prevent him from adding: “There is, nonetheless, a community [of self and others] … my ego and the other ego do not have any extensive distance in the community of our being with each other. But also my life, my temporalization, has no distance from [that of] the other.”77 For Husserl, these different assertions pertain to different levels of temporalization. The statement that “time is constituted from me” pertains to “my stationary-streaming primal being”— my being on the level of the absolute. The assertion that I am “constituted as a temporal unity” holds on the level where such primal being constitutes itself as a central present for a past and future. It is on this level that the ego “has its unity and its streaming life.” On the prior level, Husserl, can assert, “my life, my temporalization, has no distance from [that of] the other.” Similarly, it is on the prior level that Husserl can claim that as a transcendental ego, “I must necessarily believe that I will continue to live.” The level is that of “the absolute in [its] ‘eternity.’” When, however, he views himself on a subsequent level, he must admit, “I know that my death is impending.”78 The point is that, as a subject, he exists in a continuous process that results in his presence as an embodied, mortal being.

Husserl’s Response This view of the subject allows us to meet the objections raised by Sartre and others to the Cartesian Meditations’ account of recognition. Husserl, Sartre claims, establishes only a “parallelism of empirical egos.” What is required, however, is an access to the Other, not as an empirical ego, but as a transcendental, constituting ego. In other words, I require knowledge of him “as he obtains knowledge of himself.” For Sartre, this is “impossible” since it would “suppose the internal identification of myself with the Other.”79 For Husserl, this demand is met by the reduction to the living present, the very present that yields such an “internal identification.” The view of the self as a process initiating in the living present signifies that when I in seinem Bewußtseinsleben und rein darin lebend seine Individualität hat, jeder ein Ich und doch ein Anderer, derart daß schon völlige Gleichheit notwendig ausgeschlossen ist. Im Gehalt jedes Ich selbst liegt die absolute Einzigkeit, trotz der allgemeinen Form, dem allgemeinen Wesen, durch die Ich eben Ich ist.” (Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 386). 77  “Aber es ist doch Gemeinschaft (‘Deckung’ weist leider auf Deckung in Extension, auf Assoziation hin), … Das Ich … Sein Leben, seine Erscheinungen, sein Zeitigen hat ‘immanente’ Erstreckung in der konstituierten Stromzeit, und wieder das darin als sachlich-zeitlich Konstituierte. Alles Gezeitigte, alles durch strömende Erscheinungen in dem immanentzeitlichen Strom und dann wieder durch ‘äussere’ Erscheinungen (raumzeitliche) Gezeitigte hat eben Erscheinungseinheit, zeitliche Einheit, Dauer; das Ich als Pol dauert nicht. So hat auch mein Ich und das andere Ich in der Gemeinschaft des Miteinander keine extensive Abständigkeit, aber auch mein Leben, mein Zeitigen nicht Abständigkeit von dem fremden” (Ms. C 16, p. 100a, May 1933; Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 577). 78  Ms. C 4, 6b; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 96. Both assertions occur as one statement. 79  Being and Nothingness, ed. cit., p. 317.

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perform the reduction on myself I transcend myself as an individual with an individual present. What I uncover, in Husserl’s words, is a “we-present, a we-past, a we-future.” According to Husserl, “Everyone in his immanent present finds this immanent present in coincidence with the present of every other person and finds it enclosed in the present as an intersubjective present.” What this means is that “[i]n my multiple experiences [forming my intentions], I experience a world in union (in eins) with Others, Others whom I co-experience as existing in the world.”80 Husserl’s claim, then, is that I and my Others, on the constituting level, “experience a world in union” because our living presents coincide and thus form an “intersubjective present.” This does not mean that on the constituted level, we do not form an intersubjective plurality. It only signifies that such a plurality shares a single “intersubjective present.” What about the objection that Husserl’s account cannot leave room for the possibility of an Other who is other in a transcendental sense—i.e., who constitutes differently? As was noted, an Other for whom the world had an entirely different meaning and who acted accordingly would not have a behavior harmonious with mine. Thus, he would not be recognized as a subject by me. Thus, the behavioral evidence appealed to assumes in advance that the Other I acknowledge has a constative system like my own. In other words, it forecloses the possibility of a negative result. To avoid a petitio principii, such a foreclosure would have to draw its evidence from a prior level—namely that of the living present that animates our behavior. We would have to draw from this the similarity of our egological (constituting) structures. Husserl makes this claim in the following passage: Every other ego possesses an egological structure, one which I apodictically grasp as an essential structure within me. … I cannot think of my Other as other, for—in a primordiality and in a common, synthetically harmonious, intersubjective world existing in this [primordiality of the] living present, in this [present’s] previous self-temporalization and in this [present’s] apodictic anticipation of my future—there exists apodictically for me an intersubjective and objective world, a world which contains all Others in the same style of being, the style of the living present, etc.81

Reduced to its essentials, the claim of this passage is that I cannot think of an Other as other and think of him as engaged in the “primordiality” of the living present. The “self-temporalization” of this present yields a world filled with Others who possess the “same style of being”—i.e., the constitutive style of the same “living present.” What about the possibility of varying the essence or “eidos” of the ego in free variation? Could we not think of an ego that did not originate in the self-­ temporalization of the living present? For Husserl, such an attempt is doomed from the start. Free variation always starts with a given factual example. As he puts this, “The possibilities of varying in imagination the eidos [of an ego] do not float free in the air. They are rather constitutively related to me in my facticity, in my living present which I factually live, the living present that I apodictically encounter along with  Ms. A V 5, March 7–9, 1930; Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, pp. 64–5, italics added. 81  Ms. K III 12, pp. 33–34, 1935. 80

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everything lying within it that can be uncovered.”82 When, in thought, I attempt to eliminate the fact of this living present, I do not conceive of a possible variant of myself, one which could stand as a conceivable alter ego. The elimination of this fact is the elimination of my functioning. It is a cancellation of my ego’s aliveness. Given this, a conceivable Other must be an Other who exists in the living present. The same point holds, mutatis mutandis, for the Other’s “egological structure”— i.e., its “style of being” as temporally constituting insofar as this is identified with “the style of the living present.”

Final Remarks The above response to the difficulties of the Meditations’ account has been assembled from passages in Husserl’s late manuscripts. While he continued to confront the intersubjectivity problematic, the solution that we have outlined never appeared in published form. Instead of bringing it to a final form, he turned his thoughts—in part, due to the worsening political situation in Europe—to the themes that eventually resulted in his final book, the Crisis. Here, it should be noted that his unpublished manuscripts from this period continued to reaffirm the Meditation’s transcendental idealism. They repeat its characterization of “transcendental subjectivity as that which constitutes sense and being.”83 The same holds for the Crisis. There, he speaks of the “world whose being is being from subjective performances, and this with such evidence that another world is not thinkable at all.”84 These performances are not, in the first instance, those of human subjects. Rather, the reduction allows us “to discover the absolutely functioning subjectivity, to discover it not as human, but as that which objectifies itself, at least at first, in human subjectivity.”85 The world is the product, then, not of human subjectivity; it is, rather, “a product of a universal, ultimately functioning subjectivity.” As for our, human subjectivity, it is regarded as a level of the ultimately functioning subjectivity. Thus, the last citation continues: It belongs essentially to its world constituting accomplishment that subjectivity objectifies itself as human subjectivity, as an element within the world. All objective consideration of the world is a consideration of the “outer” (im “Aussen”) and grasps only what is outer (Aeusserlichkeiten), i.e., objectivities. The radical consideration of the world is the systematic and pure inner consideration of the subjectivity which “externalizes” [or “expresses”] itself in the outer (der sich selbst im Aussen “äussernden” Subjectivitaet).86

 Ms. K III 12, p. 35.  Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser, p. 118. 84  Die Krisis der europaeischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel, 2nd ed (The Hague, 1962), p. 100. 85  Krisis, 2nd Biemel ed., p. 265. 86  Krisis, 2nd Biemel ed., pp. 115–16. This assertion is repeated in the Krisis. Husserl, for example, asks: “How can it be made more concretely intelligible that the reduction of humanity to the phe82 83

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Such statements show how Husserl has transformed the idealism that characterized the Ideas and the Cartesian Meditations. The creative power of subjectivity that Husserl’s students, like Fink, Schutz, and Celms, saw as a consequence of this idealism, appears to be maintained. So does the transcendental solipsism implicit in such power. Such power, however, appears on a pre-individual level. Similarly the solipsism that Husserl earlier saw as a threat to his account is taken to characterize not the individual, transcendental subject, but rather the “absolute,” “primal” subject— the subject that externalizes itself in particular, constituting subjects. This absolute is “the only one.” It is a unique singular—i.e., a singular that is not one of many similar individuals, but simply one. Our identity with this absolute does not thrust us into transcendental solipsism since it occurs only on the pre-individual level. Thus, it cannot be said, in Dan Zahavi’s words, that Husserl embraces “a panpsychism that abolishes the difference between ego and alter-ego.”87 This follows only when we conflate Husserl’s levels of description. If we identify the level of temporal determinateness with the pre-­ individual level, then the distinction between ego and alter-ego disappears. But it does so only because we inappropriately apply the descriptions of one level to the other. If we do not, Husserl’s position is straight-forward. It is that “[m]y being in the living, non-extended primal temporalization, [understood] as the primal phenomenal stream of life, precedes my transcendental being as an identical being in transcendental life, in the extended form of immanent time.”88 It is only on this precedent level that the difference between ego and alter ego disappears. Finally, we should remark on the questions that arise once we describe the self as an ongoing process, one that sees our individual subjectivity as a self-objectification of an “absolutely functioning subjectivity.” This process gives us a genetic as opposed to a static analysis of our selfhood. Statements that appear contradictory on the level of static analysis, such as those regarding the immortality and death of the ego, while contradictory on the level of static analysis, are appropriate in a genetic nomenon, ‘humanity,’ which is included in the reduction of the world, allows this humanity to be recognized as the self-objectification of transcendental subjectivity, the subjectivity which ultimately functions at all times and is, therefore, absolute?” (Krisis, Biemel ed., pp. 155–56). This question is only rhetorically posed. Husserl writes later: “The ground had become evident to us. The problem of the fundamental validity of the world as a world, the world which is what it is through actual and possible cognition, through actual and possible functioning subjectivity, had pe se announced itself. But powerful difficulties had to be overcome in order not just to begin the method of the epoché and the reduction, but also to bring them to a full self-comprehension and, with this, to discover, first of all, the absolutely functioning subjectivity, discover it not as human, but as that which objectifies itself in human subjectivity or, [at least] at first in human subjectivity (ibid., p. 265). For further references in the Krisis to this absolute subjectivity which objectifies itself in a plurality of human subjects see ibid., pp.  115f, 155. See also A V 10, Nov. 5, 1931, pp. 20f, 23f; early references to the same subjectivity include F I 22, Nov. 1917, pp. 21ff, 37ff. 87  “The Self-Pluralisation of the Primal Life. A Problem in Fink’s Husserl-Interpretation,” Recherches Husserliennes 2, 1994, 7. Zahavi rejects this view. For an extended presentation of Zahavi’s position, see Chapter 3 of his Husserl and Transcendental Subjectivity, trans. Elizabeth Behnke (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001). 88  Ms. B II 6, summer 1930, in Zur Phänomenologishen Reduktion, pp. 174–5, italics added.

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account of its becoming. As was noted, they do not contradict each other since they apply to different stages of the ego’s genesis. They do, however, raise the issue of the self’s embodiment. We die because we are embodied with the finite lifetime that this implies. What is the role of such embodiment in the ego’s constitution? Is the body a constituted formation or is it essential to the constitutive process that terminates in the finite selfhood and life-time that we experience? How, phenomenologically, do we handle death and birth given that these are the ends and the beginnings of our experience and, as such, seem to escape description? These are the matters that we must now turn our attention to.

Chapter 6

Embodiment

The Paradox of Human Subjectivity One of the most commented upon passages of Husserl’s Crisis involves what he calls “The paradox of human subjectivity.” This involves our “being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world.”1 We confront here two views of humanity: that “of humanity as world-constituting subjectivity and yet as, itself, incorporated in the world.”2 Are the two the same or different? If they are the same, then, as Husserl asks: “How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional product [Gebilde]?”3 Husserl, in the Crisis, attempts to resolve this by asserting that “transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world,” are not “human beings.”4 In fact, within them, “nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the ‘phenomenon,’ to the world as a constituted pole.”5 This implies that the world-­constituting subjectivity is not incorporated in the world. We do not have the paradox of the constitutive source of the world being a part of the constituted world.

1  Krisis, §54a, 2nd Biemel ed., p. 182. Davd Carr, whose seminal book, The Paradox of Subjectivity, focused on this paradox writes: “These two descriptions of the subject—subject for the world and object in the world—are equally necessary and essentially incompatible” (The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999), p. 135. For Carr this incompatibility affects transcendental philosophy as such. In his words: “the practice of transcendental philosophy results in the recognition that the two views of the subject, transcendental and empirical, can be neither avoided nor reconciled. Thus, in my view it concludes in paradox” (ibid., p. 9). 2  Ibid., §54b, p. 185. 3  Ibid., §53, p. 183. 4  Ibid., §54a, p. 187. 5  Ibid.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. R. Mensch, Husserl’s Phenomenology, Phaenomenologica 238, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26147-3_6

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Husserl, however, undermines this solution by asserting a few pages later that “each transcendental ego … must necessarily be constituted in the world as a human being.”6 This means “that each human being ‘bears within himself a transcendental ego … insofar as he is the self-objectification … of the corresponding transcendental ego.”7 Given this, the paradox returns in the form of the relation between the transcendental and human subjects. How can we, as humans, both be and not be transcendental subjects? For Husserl, the paradox involves the fact that, as humans, we are mortal, but as transcendental subjects, we cannot assert this. He writes that the transcendental ego must “necessarily be constituted in the world as a human being.” Since human beings are mortal, this implies that the transcendental ego constitutes itself as mortal.8 Yet, the transcendental ego is other than the human ego. As a transcendental ego, Husserl writes, “I must necessarily believe that I will continue to live.” Yet, he adds, “[i]sn’t it a paradox” that I have to believe this “when I know that, in fact, my death is impending.”9 The paradox, then, is that I have to believe both that I can and cannot die. Husserl claims that “dying must be compatible with the inconceivability, the incomprehensibility of the cesssation of transcendental being.”10 But how can I assert this phenomenologically? As the previous chapter indicates, the answer is to be found in a genetic account of our selfhood. To regard the subject as transcendental is to focus on the level of the living present. Since the subject is coincident with the latter, we “discover it not as human, but as that which objectifies itself in human subjectivity.”11 To regard the subject as human, however, is to regard it on the level where it exists as an embodied individual. Now, a static analysis of subjectivity, which simply places these two descriptions side by side, yields the “paradox of human subjectivity.” The paradox, however, disappears once we take the ego, not as a static entity, but rather as a process. This point can be put in terms of constitution. The constitutive process, like the self it results in, has its layers. What can be said about the constitutive process on one level—e.g., that of the living present—is distinct from its properties on another level—the level of the embodied individual. From the perspective of the primordial level, the body is a constituted formation. As Husserl puts this: “Nature is constituted nature, my corporeal, living body [mein körperlicher Leib] is a constituted living body. This constitution is an ongoing, transcendental occurring in my ego.”12 Here,  Ibid., §54b, p. 189–90.  Ibid. 8  For Husserl, the very notion of a human world involves the succession of generations. Given this, “[it] must be shown that birth and death have to count as constituting events or as essential elements that allow for the constitution of the world” (Ms. E I 4; Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 171). 9  Ms. C 4, 6b; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 96. 10  Ms. C 4, 7a; ibid., p. 97. 11  Krisis, §72, 2nd Biemel ed., p. 265. 12  Natur ist aber konstituierte Natur, mein körperlicher Leib konstituierter Leib; die Konstitution (ist) das ständige transzendentale Geschehen in meinem Ego und von ihm aus und in ihm die (der) 6 7

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our sense of having a body is viewed from the syntheses we engage in with regard to the data we experience—for example, the optical and kinesthetic sensations we experience as we move our limbs. From the perspective of the level of embodiment, however, the body appears as essential to constitution. Our five senses appear as conduits for the data we synthesize. Our ability to move ourselves is seen as the cause of the change of such data. Because we are embodied, we have a position in the spatial world; because of this, we have a sense of the near and the far from ourselves. All such instances confirm our belief that constitution proceeds in and through our bodies. To have a world is, on this level, a function of our embodiment. It is a result of the “worldly apperception” that our bodies make possible. This is a world that unfolds perspectivally about a 0-point that is formed between our eyes. Absent this world, what would be the status of our transcendental ego? Could we call it our own? Husserl writes, “That I remain as the transcendental ego that I am— as the same personal ego—is equivalent to saying that my world remains a world.”13 The question is: “Must I have the transcendental form [Gestalt] of a human ego or, equivalently, must there be a world?”14 I do not have a world when “the conditions for existence in the world … are suspended.” But “these conditions are those of the possibility of worldly apperception and stand under the title of the body.” Absent a body, then, “I cannot remain as the transcendental ego that I am.” Such an ego is dependent on the constitution that the body makes possible. Given this dependence, we can see why Husserl asserts, “each transcendental ego … must necessarily be constituted in the world as a human being.” If it is to be considered as the ego of a specific individual, it must have the world that individualizes it, locating it in a specific “here.” Such an individualization involves not just the constitution of its embodiment; it is also the constitution of its body’s role in constitution. It makes possible constitutive processes and senses that would be impossible without embodiment. As the above remarks make clear, both the sense of the ego and that of the constitutive process it engages in change. The genetic account of the ego—the account that understands it as a process—is also a genetic account of constitution. Take, for example, Husserl’s description of the ego’s action. Viewed on the level of the living present, such action, he writes, is “essentially a primally welling ‘I act.’ As primally welling, it is a stationary and remaining welling up.”15 Its source is a present that is anderen Egos (Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 80). 13  Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 20. 14  Ibid. 15  The extended passage is: “Ein Akt, eine Ichtätigkeit ist wesensmäßig ein urquellendes ‘Ich tue’. Als Urquellendes ist es stehendes und bleibendes Urquellen, aber auch in eins Verströmen in stetige Modifikation des soeben Gewesenen; anderseits urquellend zugleich Vorgerichtetsein auf das soeben Kommende; dieses ganze Urquellende unter Verströmen, und Heranströmen von Kommenden ist Einheit eines stehenden und bleibenden Urphänomens, ein stehender und bleibender Wandel, Urphänomen meines ‘Ich tue’, worin ich, das stehende und bleibende Ich bin, und zwar bin ich der Tuende des ‘nunc stans’. Jetzt tue ich und nur jetzt, und ‘ständig’ tue ich. Aber das ‘Ich tue’ verquillt auch ständig, und ständig habe ich zukommendes, das aus mir betätigt wird” (Ms. B III 9, p. 15a).

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not “a modality of time,” i.e., not a present surrounded by a past and the future.16 Because of this, we cannot see such action in causal terms, that is, see it as determined by past events. Action, on this level, appears completely spontaneous. It also has to be characterized as essentially anonymous. This is because it is only through the syntheses of what wells up, i.e., the hyletic data with their retentions and protentions, that we can speak of an ego as a center of experience—i.e., have a first concept of a subject to whom action could be ascribed. Before this, we simply have the “the letting loose [aus sich entlassen] of retentions.”17 We also have the generation of protentions—in Husserl’s words, the “a primally welling being-directed-ahead towards the just coming.”18 With synthesis of retentions, the ego has a past and we can begin to speak of the determination of its actions. Similarly, with the syntheses of protentions, we can speak of its actions as teleologically determined, i.e., shaped by an anticipated future. To ask whether its constitutive action is determined or spontaneous is to forget that we are here speaking of a process, one where the sense of constitution is a function of the level of its occurring. The same holds for world-constitution. To characterize its action, we have to move to the level where temporally determined, embodied subjects take up the roles they play in making the world present. At this level, the anonymous impressional data appear as originating in our bodily senses and actions. The data become, for example, the bodily proprio-perceptions which yield the kinesthesia. As a result, the “primally welling ‘I act’” appears in the context of my bodily “I can”—for example, I can act to turn my head, focus my eyes, move forward, etc. This “I can” includes both my senses and the bodily actions that orients them. On this level, Husserl writes, the body appears as “the index for psycho-physical stimuli.” This index is such that visual data are linked to our eyes, acoustical data to our ears, and so on. Thus, the impressional data that anonymously welled up are understood in terms of our “organic embodiment in its natural objective being.” Such an understanding is implicit when, for example, we try to wake someone from sleep. In Husserl’s words, I wake the sleeping person up by shaking him, by loudly calling to him, etc. The body [is] the index for psycho-physical stimuli, the index for the lawfulness that ties its hyletic withdrawals to the organic embodiment in its natural objective being, namely a lawfulness that makes possible the immanent temporal order, the grouping of hyletic data [and, hence] worldly apperception.19

 Ms. C 7, p. 14a, July 1, 1932; Zur Phänomenologishen Reduktion, p. 384.  “In jeder Zeitigungsschichte: das Fungieren ist ständig Urfungieren als ständige Gegenwart, aber auch ständig aus sich entlassen von Retentionen, die ichliche Abwandlungen besagen als ‘Noch’fungieren in strömender Wandlung, die ständig ist als Wandlung” (Ms. A V 5, p. 6b, Jan. 1933). 18  “urquellend … Vorgerichtetsein auf das soeben Kommende” (Ms. B III 9, p. 15a, Oct.-Dec. 1931). 19  19 “Den Schlafenden wecke ich, ich schüttle ihn etwa leiblich, ich rufe ihn laut etc.; der Leib, Index für psychophysische Reize, Index für eine Gesetzmäßigkeit der Bindung seiner hyletischen Abhebungen an die organische Leiblichkeit in ihrem naturalen objektiven Sein; und zwar eine solche Gesetzmäßigkeit, daß die immanent-zeitliche Ordnung, Gruppierung der hyletischen Daten mundane Apperzeption ermöglicht” (Ms. C4, 10 b; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 102). 16 17

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Thus, with embodiment, “the immanent temporal order” of a series of touch sensations can be linked to moving a finger along a forearm, that of a succession of visual data to the bodily action of turning our heads, moving forward to get a better look, and so on. If we understand the ego or self as process, then such descriptions do not contradict Husserl’s claim that “nothing human is to be found” in the transcendental ego. Rather, we are being faithful to the evidence available at the stage of the constitutive process that we are investigating. In this, we follow Husserl’s “principle of principles.” This, as we cited him, affirms “that every perception that presents something originally is a legitimate source of knowledge.” What presents itself “is to be accepted as it is presented, but only within the limits in which it presents itself.”20 Thus, when, through the reduction, we engage in “a radical ‘limitation’ to the living present” and “speak only about this,”21 none of the evidence that that would allow us to distinguish egos is available. On this level, if we are to be faithful to the “limits” in which this present presents itself, we have to speak of the “coincidence” of egos in their nowness. Similarly, when focusing on the transcendental ego in which “nothing human is to be found,” we lack all evidence for its embodiment and, hence, for the mortality that is inherent in our organic being. On this level, we have to assert with Husserl, “Death is not an existing occurrence in the ‘I am” of the transcendental ego, but rather an event in the human world, in the constituted world. Thus my worldly death, my separation from functioning intersubjectivity—the collapse of my body”—all this pertains to constituted, not constituting subjectivity.22 This point can be put in terms of the streaming of my consciousness. Absent the positing of my embodiment, “it appears as a positive necessity that the stream of consciousness have no end.”23 It cannot have an end in the now since, in its protentions, it is always ahead of the now. Similarly, it cannot have a beginning in the now, since, in its retentions, it is always behind the present moment. Such protentions and retentions are an absolute necessity if we are to speak of the streaming of consciousness. Without them, we would be limited to the shifting contents of the now, which would not be taken as streaming towards us from the anticipated future or away from our nowness into the retained past. The consequence is that, if the stream, with its protentions and retentions, has no end, then the ego, as its transcendental pole, also has no end.

 Ideen I, §24, Schumann ed., p. 51, italics added.  “so besagt die radikale ‘Einschränkung’ auf die lebendige Gegenwart und der Wille, nur über sie auszusagen, soviel wie Vollzug der phänomenologischen Epoché hinsichtlich der Welt—und überhaupt aller irgend für uns im Voraus bestehenden (vorurteilenden) Geltungen” (Ms. C 3, p. 3b, summer 1930; Zur Phänomenologishen Reducktion, p. 186). 22  Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, pp. 78–79. 23  Ibid., p. 16. 20 21

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Hyletic Data To move from the level of this impersonal, endless streaming to the finite consciousness of an embodied individual, we have to bring in hyletic data, i.e., the actual sensuous contents (or hyle) that we retain and protend. For Fink, as we recall, “even the hyle … is constituted” once we “no longer interpret transcendental life as receptive,” but rather understand it as creative.24 Fink, in his interpretation, is basing himself on Husserl’s assertions that his idealism “is not a Kantian idealism which believes it can keep open, at least as a limiting concept, the possibility of a world of things in themselves.”25 In particular, it is “not an idealism which seeks to derive a world full of sense from senseless, sensuous data.”26 In spite of these statements, the manuscript evidence indicates that Husserl, in fact, never abandons his initial view of hyletic material—namely, that it “is what is primally produced—the ‘new,’ that which has come into being alien to consciousness, that which has been received, as opposed to what has been produced through consciousness’s own spontaneity.”27 Thus, in the C-manuscripts he speak of it as “the core that is foreign to the ego [ichfremde Kern].”28 The B manuscripts describe it as “phase-by-phase changing impressional moment” in “the streaming experience.”29 Such remarks are significant in terms of the claim that the stream of experiences can have no end. If we say that the hyle are not constituted, but rather externally provided, then the way is open to regarding the body’s senses as the conduits for the impressions making up the stream. But this implies that the streaming itself is dependent on the body. This dependence of the stream is also the dependence of the ego as its “identity-­ pole.” Husserl expresses this in terms of “the limit thought” of death. He describes death as the lessening of affectivity, the increasing incapacity to follow the sensation stimuli, the incapability to grasp oneself as a subject of capabilities and as a pole of affections and actions, which have, themselves already disappeared—ultimately as the limit of the ceasing of every element of conscious life and, with this, of the ego as the identity-pole of this life and its capacities.30

  “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gengenwärtigen Kritik,” pp. 146, 143. 25  Cartesianische Meditationen, §41, Strasser ed., p. 118. 26  Ibid. 27  Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 100; Br., p. 106. 28  Ms. C 6, p. 4b, Aug. 1930; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 110. 29  Ms. B III 9, p. 55b, 1931. 30   The German text is: “das Abnehmen der Affektivität, immer größere Unfähigkeit, Empfindungsreizen zu folgen, Unfähigkeit, sich selbst als Ich zu kennen als Subjekt von Vermögen und Pol von Affektionen und Aktionen, die eben auch immer verschwunden sind—schließlich als Limes Aufhören allen Bewusstseinslebens und damit auch des Ich als Identitätspol dieses Lebens und der zugehörigen Vermögen? Das wird wohl die beste Fassung des Limes-Gedankens sein” (C8, 5b; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, pp. 158–59). 24

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Here, the collapse of the body would be taken as “the lessening of affectivity” and ultimately as its disappearance. It would also signify the end of the ego. For Husserl, when we lose consciousness, we also lose ourselves: we confront “the disappearing of the affected ego in its being affected.”31 Husserl asks, how “could the ego act in this undifferentiated null” of affections?32 Barring any affection, “how would there be any turning towards” the affecting data?33 In the absence of any action, can we even speak of an ego? Behind such questions is the intimate relation between affecting content and the ego that feels and responds to it. According to Husserl: Content is non-ego; feeling is already egological. The ‘address’ of the content is not a call to something, but rather a feeling being-there of the ego … The ego is not something for itself and the non-ego something separate from the ego; between them there is no room for a turning towards. Rather, the ego and its non-ego are inseparable; the ego is a feeling ego with every content.34

For Husserl, the two cannot be thought apart. The intimacy of their relation is such that he can say: “What from the side of the hyletic data is called the affection of the ego is, from the side of the ego, called tending, striving towards.”35 This signifies that in the absence of affecting content, we cannot speak of an ego. There is no ego, when, for example, we fall into a dreamless sleep. As Husserl describes it, falling asleep is the “disappearing of the world-present, i.e., of the existence of the worldly things for us.”36 Hyletic data, he speculates, may continue to be present, but they cease to affect us while we sleep. The prominences they display—the contrasts that distinguish the features of the sensible world—lose their force. Their “multiplicity becomes an undifferentiated unity” in our consciousness.37 This loss is not just that of the affections that we interpret as coming from worldly things. It is also a loss of ourselves. Like death, it results in “the disappearing of the affected ego in its being affected.” Humanly regarded, phenomena like birth, death, and falling asleep point to the finitude of consciousness and the ego that is its center. Transcendentally regarded, however, they indicate something quite different. So regarded, they present the  In Husserl’s words, “Beim Bewusstloswerden ist das Schwinden nicht ein solches der Mannigfaltigkeit der Empfindungsdaten der aufgefassten Gegenstände und so von abgehobenen Gegenständen sonst her, sondern ein Schwinden des affizierten Ich in seinen Affektionen” (Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 9). 32  Ibid., p. 10. 33  Ibid., p. 11. 34  Ms. C 16, 68a; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, pp. 351–52. This inseparability is present in our apprehension of time. As Nicholas Zippel writes: “within the living present, as an always original moment …, two different and at the same time founding features cohabit: the hyletic sphere and the egological one. Consciousness identifies neither with the former nor with the latter, because both supply to the forming of its whole structure, i.e. the one of the living present” (“The Hyletic Time-Consciousness,” Corporeity and Affectivity, ed. Karel Novotný, et al., Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp. 36–37). This structure, we would say, is that of the temporal centering of experience. 35  “Was von Seiten der hyletischen Data Affection auf das Ich heißt, heißt von Seiten des Ich Hintendierien, Hinstreben” (Ms. B III 9, pp. 70a–70b). 36  Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 11. 37  Ibid., p. 9. 31

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phenomenologist with limit problems, problems that, by definition, lack the evidence for their resolution. Take, for example, the problem of when we fall asleep. We experience getting sleepy, but can we say that we experience the moment when we fall asleep or can this “only be conceived as a limit” of what preceded it?38 As Husserl points out, lacking the required data, we can never experience this moment. The same holds for the moments of our birth and death. Such moments cannot be located in the before and after of time. As Husserl writes, “a beginning of life (of a conscious life), which is supposed to have a before, a previous time, is not experienceable, not experienced, not remembered. The same holds with regard to death.”39 To experience an event is to experience it as occurring in time. Events are placed in time by having a before and an after. Birth, however, has no experienceable “before”; death has no experienceable “after.” Attempting to conceive such moments, we encounter the paradoxical notion of a one-sided border—a border of which we can experience only one side. We can approach this border as a limit, but to cross it is to face our annihilation. This is why it is “not experienceable, not experienced.” Now, if we apply “the principle of principles” to this lack of evidence, birth and death cannot be posited on a transcendental level. Remaining within the limits in which such events present themselves, they simply cannot be located in experienced time. On this level then, “[d]eath is not an event in the ‘I am’ of the transcendental ego.” On the human level, however, where our bodily senses are taken as the conduits for sensuous data, the collapse of the body is also taken as the collapse of ourselves.

Hylectic Data and Time Consciousness To move from the transcendental to the human level, we first have to trace the role of hyle in our consciousness of time and, hence, in the ego understood as its temporal center. On one level, this role is straight-forward. The stream of hyletic data is experienced as a stream of temporal moments. Each moment, in its nowness, registers the presence of a datum. Without such presence—for example, in dreamless sleep—our sense of time and, indeed, of ourselves collapses. The stream of hyletic data yields, in Husserl’s words, “the primal impressional streaming present of the concrete primal presence” of such data.40 This is not the presence of nows in time. As we earlier noted, the schema of interpretation, contents-there-to be-interpreted, and the result of such interpretation, does not apply on the original level. In Husserl’s words, “‘content’ is inherently and necessarily ‘primally experienced’” without any interpretative action by consciousness.41 We simply have the presence of primal moments and their retentions and protentions. To place such moments in time, we

 Ibid., p. 12.  C17, 74b; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 424. 40  C6, ibid.; p. 110. 41  Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, p. 119; Br. p. 123, translation modified. 38 39

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must take the retentions, the “fadings,” as appearances of the now in its departure. The same, holds, mutatis mutandis, for the protentions, which are taken as exhibiting the approach of an anticipated moment. With this, we have “the primal hyle in its proper temporalization.” This, Husserl states, is “the core that is foreign to the ego.”42 Needless to say, without this core, there would be no ego. We would have neither impressional moments nor their retentions and protentions. Without these, there would be no ego at the temporal center of experience. The presence of the hyletic datum is not just that of its nowness. It is also, of course, the presence of the content that fills such nowness. Such presence “affects” us. As we have seen, in the absence of affecting content, we cannot speak of an ego. What is the relation of such affecting content to the temporal process that gives rise to the ego? The answer requires that we discuss the role of hyle at much greater depth. It involves, in fact, a complete reinterpretation of the temporal process, one that invites us to view it as an organic process. Husserl, in his Analyses of Passive Synthesis, initiates this reinterpretation by defining “affection” as “the conscious stimulus [Reiz], the unique pull [Zug] that an apprehended object exercises on the ego. This is a pull that relaxes in the turning of the ego [to the object] and which continues in the striving … to more closely observe the object.”43 This does not mean that objects, per se, are the source of such affection. Rather, as Husserl writes, “[t]he primal source of all affection lies, and can only lie in the primal impression, and its own greater or lesser affectivity.”44 There is, here, an intimate relation between the impression’s presence and our being affected. Our being affected is the content’s presence, a presence that we experience as a temporal moment. For Husserl, as long as such affective power remains, the content remains present. Its diminishment is, then, the diminishment of the content’s presence. Husserl puts this, in terms of the retentional process, which keeps a content present but also results in its fading. He writes: “During the constant retentional modifications of the primary impression, the latter keeps its affective power as an identically constituted datum, but this power does not remain undiminished. … It is clear that the affective power pertaining to [the primal impressions] and to the whole [they constitute] continually diminishes in the [retentional] process.”45 Ultimately, the power comes to an end and, with this, there is a loss of all distinctions in the retained. As Husserl expresses the relation between retention and affectivity: “The end is, thus, a complete loss of distinctions [in the retained], a loss that stems from a loss of affective power. Since every retained trait has in the [retentional] transformation given up its affective power, it itself becomes dead.”46 The suggestion here is that retention depends upon affective power. The loss of such power is the loss of the ability to hold fast to the retained.

 Ms. C6; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 110.  Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, pp. 148–49. 44  Ibid., p. 168. 45  Ibid., p. 170. 46  Ibid. 42 43

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Husserl confirms this view when he writes that “[w]e understand this [shrinking together of the retained] not as a phenomenon of actual loss of objective distinctions, but rather as initially affective: The perspective is an affective perspective.”47 In other words, the loss of affective power brings about the loss of distinction. It does so since such power is what makes consciousness attend to the distinctions. Without such power, nothing can achieve prominence. Thus, “with the loss of its affective power, [the retained] itself becomes dead. No longer can it, as prominent, engage in the merging process; for positive affecting power is the basic condition for all life in its movement of binding and separating.”48 The same points hold, with appropriate modifications, for protention. In the Lectures on Time-Consciousness, our protentions grow out of our past experience. This is because we anticipate that the future will continue “the style of the past.” We thus “project” this style on the future. In the Analyses of Passive Synthesis, protention is a matter of the “pull” of affecting contents. Such a pull becomes greater as we proceed backward along the retained material and approach the present. Here, the pull is towards the future of the retained. As Husserl puts this: “Ceteris paribus, the primal impressional occurring in the living present has a stronger affective tendency than what has already been retained. Precisely because of this, with regard to the direction of propagation, affection possesses a unitary tendency towards the future. Intentionality is primarily directed to the future.”49 The phenomenon, here, is the reverse of the loss of affective power as the retentional chains increase. Such a loss implies that as the retentional chains decrease, the greater the affective power. Thus, when we ascend the vertical line of the time diagram, the affective power of the retained must increase with the freshness of the retentions until it reaches the high point of the present impressional moment. This increasing draw or pull of affecting content is what yields the protentional intentionality inherent in the retained.

Instincts and the Temporal Process In the Analyses of Passive Synthesis, Husserl’s statements on the role of affection in our time consciousness are somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, he speaks of the impression’s affective power as diminishing in the serial process of retaining the impression, and then retaining this retention, and so on. The diminishment is a result of the fact that the reproduction accomplished through retention is never exact but becomes more faded as the process continues. On the other hand, Husserl speaks of retention itself as resulting from the impression’s affective power. It is not the “actual loss of objective distinctions” that causes the loss of affective power, but

 Ibid., p. 172.  Ibid., p. 170. 49  Ibid., p. 156. 47 48

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rather the reverse. In the unpublished manuscripts that follow the Analyses, this ambiguity disappears. Here, the theory of affection is understood in terms of our instinctive life. Instinct becomes the primary driver of the retentional and protentional processes. Thus, Husserl, in the C manuscripts asks, “Is not original affection instinct—that is, a mode of the empty striving lacking all conception of a goal …?”50 His answer is in the affirmative: “The original affection [is] instinctive.”51 Thus, the temporalization that has been defined in term of affection becomes understood as an instinctive process. Protention, for example, which, in the Analyses of Passive Syntheses, is tied to the pull of affecting contents, now comes to be seen in terms of the instinctive desire for certain contents. As for retention, it is taken as a primal expression of the instinct to have and hold fast, which is, itself, understood as an expression of the instinct for self-preservation. The best way to approach Husserl’s theory of the instincts is through a concrete example: that of a baby placed at its mother’s breast. Husserl describes the instinctive process that drives its actions as follows: When the smell of the mother’s breast and the sensations of moving one’s lips occur, an instinctive directedness towards drinking awakes, and an originally paired kinesthesia comes into play. … If drinking does not immediately occur, how does it happen? Perhaps the smell alone awakens something else, an empty apperception, so to speak, which has no ‘conscious’ goal. If touching occurs, then the way to fulfillment is first properly an ongoing instinctive drive, which is an unfulfilled intention. Then, in fulfillment, [there are] the movements of swallowing, etc., which bring fulfillment, disclosing the instinctive drive.52

As Husserl makes clear, the infant when first placed at the breast does not know the goal of its action. It is motivated first by smell, then by touching the nipple, then by the kinesthesia of sucking and swallowing before the goal of the drive towards nourishment appears. As Husserl states the general principle: “Striving is instinctive and instinctively (thus, at first, secretly) ‘directed’ towards what in the ‘future’ will first be disclosed as worldly unities constituting themselves.”53 Husserl divides the instincts into two basic categories: non-objectifying and objectifying instincts. The non-objectifying instincts are “the first in the order of instinctive activites.” They have no object, but rather are directed to specific types of contents.54 They determine our being affected, our turning towards some contents  Ms. C 16, p. 36a, March 9, 1932; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 326.  Ms. C 13, p. 29b, 1934; ibid, p. 274. 52  In German: “Sowie der Geruch der Mutterbrust und die Lippenberührungsempfindung eintritt, ist eine instinktive Richtung auf das Trinken geweckt, und eine ursprünglich angepaßte Kinästhese tritt ins Spiel. … Kommt es nicht alsbald zum Trinken, wie ist es da? Etwa der Geruch allein weckt ein Weiteres, sozusagen eine Leerapperzeption, die doch kein ‘bewußtes’ Ziel hat. Tritt dann Berühung ein, so ist der Weg zur Erfüllung aber erst recht fortgehender instinktiver Trieb, der unerfüllte Intention ist. Dann in der Erfüllung Schluckbewegungen etc. als Erfüllung bringend, als den instinktiven Trieb enthüllend” (Ms. C 16 IV, p. 36b; ibid., p. 326). 53  “Das Streben ist aber instinktives und instinktiv, also zunächst unenthüllt ‘gerichtet’ auf die sich ‘künftig’ erst enthüllt konstituierenden weltlichen Einheiten” (Ms. A VI 34, p. 34b). 54  In Husserl’s words, “There are different, determinate and original instinctive ways of striving, ways that are originally ‘instinctively’ one with their hyletic accompaniment. This would be a form 50 51

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rather than others—for example, those contents which indicate to the infant what can provide it with nourishment. In Husserl’s words, instinct, in this instance, designates “the interest in the data and fields of sensation—before the objectification of sense data,” that is, before there is “a thematically actualizable object.” To obtain a thematic object, something more than simply being affected must occur. An “objectifying instinct” must arise. When it does, a drive towards synthesis animates the ego’s turning towards the data. The drive seeks to make objective “sense” of the data. Its goal is a grasp of a one in many, a unity which exhibits itself through the shifting fields of sensation. Husserl terms it “the original instinct of objectification.”55 To speak in this context of “affecting contents” is to see them as a “terminus a quo [a starting point] for instinctive intentions. These ultimately fulfill themselves in the constitution of ‘visual things’ (‘Sehdingen’).”56 In other words, things—not contents—are the goal of this type of instinct.57 These two instincts work together, but are distinct. The first instinct need not terminate in the second. When I sunbathe, for example, I enjoy my sensations without any objectification of them. Non-objectifying instincts drive the retentional process. Their basis is the instinctive attachment of the ego to the data that animates it. Here, of course, we cannot speak of the ego apart from such data. As we cited Husserl with regard to the “non-­ ego,” i.e., hyletic “content.” “The ego is not something for itself and the non-ego something separate from the ego … Rather, the ego and its non-ego are inseparable.” Such inseparability signifies that the ego, to be, requires such content. Because

of primal association [between the striving and the specific hyle] that is not association through ‘coincidence.’” In German: “Es sind die verschieden bestimmten und ursprünglich instinktiv bestimmten Weisen des Strebens, ursprünglich ‘instinktiv’ einig mit hyletischer Begleitung. Das wäre also eine Form der Urassoziation, die aber nicht Assoziation durch ‘Deckung’ ist” (Ms. E III 9, pp. 23a–23b). The association through coincidence (Deckung) is that occasioned by retention. The attraction to the hyle is prior to retention since retention itself, as we shall see, results from instinctive striving. 55  The term appears in a pair of rhetorical questions. Husserl asks: “Kann man von einem urprünglichen Instinkt der ‘Objektivierung’ sprechen?” (Ms. C13, 1934; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 258). Four lines later, having mentioned the non-objectifying instinct, he asks: “Sollen wir als zweites Urinstinkt … den Instinkt der Objektivierung setzen?” (ibid., p. 258). 56  Ms. C 16 IV, p. 40a; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 329. The extended passage in German is: “Da haben wir das optische Feld, darin abgehobene Daten—affizierende. Das soll also jetzt nicht sagen, daß ein Urinteresse auf sie selbst gerichtet ist, sondern sie affizieren, das sagt, sie sind terminus a quo für instinktive Intentionen. Diese erfüllen sich lettzlich in der Konstitution von ‘Sehdingen,’ wenn wir abstraktiv von den mitverflochtenen instinktiven Tendenzen absehen. Dazu gehört nun die instinktive Erregung der okulomotorischen Kinäthese—aber nicht für sich allein, sondern miterregt sind auch andere Kinästhesensysteme, von denen zunächst abstrahiert werden muß.” 57  Nam-in Lee expresses the distinction between the two instincts by writing that the nonobjectifying instincts are those “that, as particular interests, are directed to the data of sensation on account of their particular contents, e.g., on account of their beauty, sweetness, warmth, etc.” (Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993, p.  109). The objectifying instincts, by contrast, have “a universal interest which is universally directed at the objects of sensation independent of their particular contents” (ibid.).

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of this, the ego’s being is one with its striving to have and hold fast hyletic content.58 Such striving manifests itself in the “first retentionality,” namely, “that of still having, holding fast without activity.”59 Thus, if, with Husserl, we assert that “[t]he ego necessarily strives (as an ego) for self-preservation,”60 we have to say that this instinct for self-preservation manifests itself most fundamentally in the retentional process. Without consciousness’s holding on to hyletic content, each momentary impression would disappear immediately upon its appearing. Consciousness, in other words, would continually vanish with the experiences that form its content. The same holds for the ego as the “pole” or “center” of consciousness. Protention, of course, is also needed for the ego to be temporally defined. Not just retained but also protended moments are required for the temporal centering that defines it. Now, to see protention as instinct-driven is to acknowledge that the basic striving for possession is not limited to the retaining of what we have already experienced. It also manifests itself in a having-in-advance, i.e., in the anticipatory having of protention. As such it appears as a striving to acquire new contents. Protention and retention are the most basic of non-objectifying instincts. Because of their role in constitution, they exist in continuity with the objectifying instincts— i.e., those that direct themselves to objects. This can be put in terms of Husserl’s time diagram. While the non-objectifying instincts animate the lengthwise intentionality (Langsintentionalität) that proceeds diagonally along the retentional chains, the objectifying instincts express themselves in the crosswise intentionality (Querintentionalität) that proceeds through the present retentions on the vertical to the object that shows itself (or “stands out”) in their merging. Husserl describes this merging as follows: “It pertains to everything hyletic, insofar as it is there for the ego, that it moves the ego in its feelings. This is its original mode of being there for the ego in the living present. Feeling, to be determined as feeling, is nothing else but what is termed ‘affection’ from the side of the hyle.”61 The result of this affection is consciousness’s “being directed” or “striving towards” what affects it. As for the source of this affection, it is the instinctive attachment of the ego to such hyle. The same holds for the objects that occur through the merging of such data. As Husserl continues: “Ultimately, the whole hyle is united in passive temporalization including the heterogeneous [contents]. Everything homogenous, however, is united in the special mode of merging; within the total merging, [there is a merging] into fields

 This holds for striving as such. Striving is striving to have. In Husserl’s words, “Das strebende Leben. … Alles Aktleben ist strebendes, gerichtet auf Habe” (Ms. A VI 34, p. 34a). 59  “die des Noch-Habens, Behaltens ohne eigene Aktivität” (Ms. C 13, p. 38a, March 26, 1934; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 280). 60  Ms. A V 21, p. 106a. 61  “Zu jedem Hyletischen als für das Ich daseinden gehört es, daß es das Ich im Gefühl berührt, das ist seine ursprüngliche Weise, für das Ich in der lebendigen Gegenwart zu sein. Das Fühlen, fühlend bestimmt zu sein, ist nichts anderes, als was von Seiten der Hyle Affektion heißt” (Ms. E III 9, p. 16a). 58

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and then particular mergings into unities that stand out.”62 This merging includes the strivings directed to the data that are merged. It thus results in the strivings towards the objects that stand out. The result is the above described Querintentionalität— the crosswise intentionality that cuts “across” the retained to direct itself to the intentional object.

Constitution and Self-Preservation The upshot of this account is that constitution is itself seen as instinctive process. It grows out of “the original instinct of objectification.” What “corresponds ‘to the primal instinct’” Husserl writes, is “the constitution of ‘nature’ from the hyletic primal nature, or rather from the threefold material: the sensuous core, the sensuous feeling, the sensuous kinesthesia.”63 All of this material is united through the instinctively driven retentional and protentional processes. At the origin of these is the instinct for self-preservation. This instinct, according to Husserl, continues to mark the successive levels of the constitutive process. From an evolutionary perspective, we can see why this is so. An organism could not survive if it could not make appropriate “sense” of its environment. It has to grasp (i.e. constitute the sense of) what preys upon it as well as its own prey. It must also grasp the aspects of its environment—for example, the sexual displays of potential mates—it needs to reproduce. In this explanation, we make use of “the concrete ontogenesis and phylogenesis of animals [with their] different forms of sexuality and propagation according to the [different] species, i.e., the different forms of their ontogenetic styles of self-­ preservation.”64 As Husserl observes, “All [these species] have their instinct-lives: instincts for self-preservation for living in the world, breeding instincts [Gattungsinstinkten] for living in specific societies of their species, and defensive instincts with regard to other species.”65 This emphasis on self-preservation

 “Aber schließlich ist die ganze Hyle in der passive Zeitigung geeinigt, auch das Heterogene, wobei aber alles Homogene in der besonderen Weise der Verschmelzung geeinigt ist. Innerhalb der Gesamtverschmelzung in Feldern, dann Sonderverschmelzungen zu abgehobenen Einheiten” (ibid.). 63  “Das erste der Weltkonstitution in der Primordialität ist die Konstitution der ‘natur’ aus der hyletischen Urnatur, oder vielmehr aus dem dreifachen Urmaterial: sinnlicher Kern, sinnliches Gefühl, sinnliche Kinästhese. Das entspricht der ‘Urinstinkt’” (Ms. B III 9, p. 67a). 64  “Ineins haben wir konkret tierische Ontogenese und Phylogenese, je nach den Spezies verschiedene Formen der Geschlechtlichkeit und der Fortpflanzung bzw. des ontogenetischen Selbsterhaltungsstils, der Erneuerung, des Wachstums (seelisch des Bewußt-den-höheren-StufenEntgegenlebens und Sich-nach-ihnen-zu-gestalten-Strebens). Jeder ist dabei teils auf sich selbst, teils auf die Anderen, auf seine Lebensgemeinschaft und schließlich eine offene Menschheit oder Tierheit hin angelegt und bewusst gerichtet” (Ms. C 8, p. 16b, Oct. 1929; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 170). 65  “Alle haben ihr Instinktleben, Instinkte der Selbsterhaltung, als weltlich lebend und in Gattungsinstinkten als lebend in spezifischer Gemeinschaft mit ihren Gattungsgenossen und mit 62

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characterizes constitution in general. Consciousness, Husserl writes, is driven “to constitute a world that exists for it as the pre-given realm of its ‘self-preservation.’”66 This means that “[t]he ego in its egological striving (the ego in its ‘personal’ self-­ preservation) is related to its environment as a field of its activity.”67 This relation is such that, “as constituting the world, as objectifying ourselves as human beings within this world, we find ourselves living as persons within it and engaging in self-preservation.”68 There is a “transcendental” interpretation of the above. Husserl, in describing the instinctive life of the ego as having “new particular goals, constantly higher development of its interests,” writes that “nonetheless, the ego is the same. It is the ego of an inherent striving that drives it, a total instinct that is at work in all its life of acts.”69 He also refers to a “transcendental instinct—in a sense, a universal tendency that proceeds through the totality of the intentionality of the ego—a constant, ongoing universal teleology.”70 This is its drive to constitute a world “in which constituting subjectivity finds itself as worldly,” i.e., as part of a world where “the constituting ego develops itself as the ego of its harmonious validities.”71 This “total” or “transcendental” instinct is, in fact, that of self-preservation. It gives the ego “the active style of an ego constantly preserving itself through correcting itself as it takes positions based on experience.”72 Transcendentally understood in terms of constituting Abwehrinstinkten gegenüber anderen Spezies—was noch nicht genügt” (Ms. C 8, pp. 18a-b, Oct. 1929; ibid., p. 172). 66  Ms. C 3, p. 27b, March 1931; ibid., p. 37. 67  Ibid., p. 30a; ibid., p. 38. 68  “Wir und unsere Umwelt, wir als transzendentale Subjektivität und als weltkonstituierende, in der wir uns menschlich objektivierend uns in der Welt finden, in die Welt als Personen hineinleben und Selbsterhaltung üben” (Ms. C 4, p. 2a; August 1930; ibid., p. 89). 69  “In diesem fortgehenden Interessenleben und im Interessenerwerb schon Haben und in Fortgeltung Haben unter Korrektur bleibt das Ich, was es war, Ich der “Instinkte” … immer neuen besonderen Zielen, immer höherer Entwicklung der Interessen; und doch: das Ich ist dasselbe, es ist Einheit eines Strebens, das in ihm treibend ist, ein totaler Instinkt sich in allem Aktleben auswirkend, enthüllend und doch durch alle Vorhabe und Habe hindurch weiter treibend, neue Erfüllung bringend, mit denen sich das, worauf das Ich ‘hinauswill’, neu enthüllt” (Ms. C 13, p. 6b, January 1934; ibid., 254). 70  Ms. C 13, p. 13b, Jan.–Feb., 1934; ibid., p. 260. 71  Ibid. The extended citation is: “Transzendentaler Instinkt—in einem Sinn die durch die Totalität der Intentionalität des Ego hindurchgehende universale Tendenz—die ständige universale Teleologie. In der Einheit des teleologischen, des konstituierenden Lebens ist ständig konstituiert, aber konstituiert sich auch fort die Welt, in welcher die konstituierende Subjektivität sich immerfort selbst verweltlicht findet. Im Konstituieren der Welt entwickelt sich das konstituierende Ich als Ich seiner einstimmigen Geltungen, als das immerfort in der Einheit eines Fortstrebens zu immer weiter reichenden universalen Geltungseinstimmigkeiten und damit zur Fortentwicklung seines eigenen Ichseins” (Ms. C 13., p. 13b, Jan.–Feb., 1934; ibid., p. 260). 72  Ms. E III 9, Nov. 15, 1931; Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Dritter Teil, p.  404. Husserl earlier had ascribed this notion of self-preservation to Kant. He writes in 1915: “As an ego, I am necesarily a thinking ego; as a thinking ego, I necessarily think objects; thinking, I necessarily place myself in relation to an existing world of objects; and further the pure subject (the subject of the egological performance accomplished purely in the understanding) is of such a character that

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subjectivity, the drive for self-preservation is inherent in the constitution of the world. Given that the ego is defined by its world, the world’s preservation is its preservation. The coherence of its theses with regard to the world is the ego’s own coherence as situated in and centered by its world. In Husserl’s words, which we have cited in part: “The ego necessarily strives (as an ego) for self-preservation … A presupposition pertaining to this is that there be a world, at very least, that there be a physical nature which harmoniously preserves itself …”73 This implies that “a complete dissolution of a world in a ‘tumult’ [of experiences] is equivalent to a dissolution of the ego.”74 Given this, we have to say with Husserl: “[The assertion] that I remain who I am as the same transcendental ego—as the same personal ego—is equivalent to the assertion that my world remains a world.”75 My drive for self-­ preservation, thus, necessarily embraces not just my constitutive life but also the world that is its result. That “we find ourselves living as persons within it and engaging in self-preservation” signifies that the instinctive drive behind constitution objectifies itself in the constituted world that we, as constituted entities, inhabit.

Pleasure and Time Constitution To focus entirely on self-preservation is to forget that the satisfaction of an instinctive drive is experienced as pleasurable. This holds, first of all, on the hyletic level. According to Husserl, “every hyletic material,” when normally, i.e., not excessively present, “has its pleasurable affection.” The same holds for the unities that appear through its merging.76 Because of this, seeing is pleasurable. As Husserl puts this, “Here, Aristotle’s statement that ‘all humans naturally have pleasure in sensuous perception [aisthesis)] gains its truth.”77 Such pleasure is, of course, transitory. The same holds with regard to the satisfaction of other instinctive desires. The result, according Husserl, is that “[a]ll life is continuous striving, all satisfaction is it can only preserve its self-identity when it can, in all its processes of thought, maintain the objectivity it thinks of as constantly self-identical. I preserve my egological unity, the unity of my subject, only insofar as I remain consistent in my thinking. Thus, if I have once posited something—an object—I must, then, in every further positing of thought remain with this positing. It must be such that my object can and must continually count as identical for my thinking (“Kant und die Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus,” ca. 1915, in Erste Philosophie (1923/1924), Erste Teil, p. 398). 73  Ms. A V 21, p. 106a, 1916. 74  Ms. F IV 3, p. 57a, 1925. 75  “Daß ich als transzendentales Ich bleibe, der ich bin—als dasselbe personale Ich—das besagt äquivalent, daß meine Welt Welt bleibe” (Ms. B I 13 VI, Dec. 15, 1931, p. 4). 76  “Müssen wir aber nicht sagen, jedes Hyletische in einer ursprünglich bevorzugten Normalsphäre (nichts Exzessives) hat seine Lustaffektion und im Dabei-Sein, Genießen seine Lust, jede assoziative Verschmelzungseinheit, Einheit der Abgehobenheit seine einheitliche Affektion und Lust— also doch Verschmelzung” (Ms. C 16; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 321. 77  Ibid.

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transitory.”78 As he elsewhere puts this: “Life is striving in the manifold forms and contents of intention and fulfillment; in fulfillment, life is pleasure in the broadest sense; in the lack of fulfillment, it is tending towards pleasure as a pure desiring striving …”79 The same assertions are made about the ego. For Husserl, “The ego is what it is essentially in a style of original and acquired needs, in a style of desire and satisfaction, passing from desire to enjoyment, from enjoyment to desire.”80 This emphasis on pleasure is not really opposed to Husserl’s focus on the instinct for self-preservation. It represents simply the subjective side of an objective process. Thus, the drive for nourishment objectively preserves the animal since it must eat to live. The animal, however, experiences the fulfillment of this drive as the pleasure of eating. This can be put in evolutionary terms. The fact that a species seeks certain stimuli and avoids others can be taken as part of its evolutionary inherence. This inheritance is made up of those features that allowed a species’ members to survive and reproduce themselves. Thus, some animals have an acute sense of smell and gain pleasure from this. Objectively, their pleasures in the contents of odors helps them discover appropriate prey and mates. Subjectively, they follow the pleasure principle. The same dual interpretation can be made on the level of our apprehension of time. Such an apprehension, if it is indeed an instinctive process, must be accompanied by the subjective feeling of pleasure. In the absence of this feeling, the process should terminate or, at least, be severely affected. Objectively speaking, the chemical inability to feel pleasure should, therefore, impair it. Clinical evidence that this is the case comes, in part, from the neurologist, Oliver Sacks, in his accounts of his Parkinsonian patients. Such patients experience a loss of dopamine-secreting neurons in the midbrain . Dopamine is intimately associated with the subjective experience of pleasure. Direct stimulation of the dopamine pathways, for example, is experienced as pleasure; and pleasurable activities such as eating or sex increase the release of dopamine. Overall, dopamine has an important role in causing desire or wanting. It is essential to the response to stimuli that are experienced as rewarding. The loss of dopamine should thus severely affect this response. In particular, it should affect the instinctive processes of retention and protention. This seems to be  “Alles Leben ist unaufhörliches Streben, alle Befriedigung ist Durchgangsbefriedigung” (Ms. A VI 26, p. 42a). 79  The full quote is: “Leben ist Streben in mannigfaltigen Formen und Gehalten der Intention und Erfüllung; in der Erfüllung im weitesten Sinne Lust, in der Unerfülltheit Hintendieren auf Lust als rein begehrendes Streben oder als sich im erfüllenden Realisieren entspannendes Streben und sich erzielend im Prozeß der Realisierung der in sich entspannten Lebensform der Lust”(Ms. A VI 26, p. 42b). In translation: Life is striving in the manifold forms and contents of intention and fulfillment; in fulfillment, it is pleasure in the broadest sense; in the lack of fulfillment, it is tending towards pleasure as a pure desiring striving or as a striving that slackens off in the realization that fulfills it and that accomplishes its purposes in the process of the realization of the life-form of pleasure with its release of tension.” 80  “Das Ich ist, was es ist, und wesensmäßig in einem Stil von ursprünglichen und erworbenen Bedürfnissen, in einem Begehrungs- und Befriedigungsstil von begehrend zu Genuß, von Genuß zu begehrend übergehend” (Ms. E III 10, p. 8a). 78

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the case for Sacks’ Parkinsonian patients, who were victims of an outbreak of encephalitis lethargica, a disease that destroyed their brains’ ability to produce dopamine. As a result, many of these patients experienced a “decades-long ‘sleep,’” during which they “passed into a timeless state, an eventless stasis, which deprived them of all sense of history and happening.”81 One patient, Mrs. C, reported “that her sense of time and duration had become profoundly altered during the previous two decades; that although she was aware of what was happening and what the date was, she herself had no feeling of happening, but rather the feeling that time itself had come to a stop, and that every moment of her existence was a repetition of itself.”82 Another patient, Mrs. Hester Y, whose Parkinson’s disease commenced with a series of “standstills,” reported that, during such periods, “everything seems sharp-edged, flat, and geometric, with a quality like a mosaic or a stained-glass window; there is no sense of space or time at such times.”83 Sacks reports that, judging from the physiological evidence of electrical activity in her muscles, “she was truly and completely de-activated during her standstills … it was also apparent that her standstills had no subjective duration whatever. There was no ‘elapsing of time’ for Hester during her standstills; at such times she would be (if the logical and semantic paradox may be allowed) at once action-less, being-less, and time-less.”84 With the administration of L-Dopa, a dopamine precursor, such patients were, for a while, revived. When the drug was no longer administered, they fell back into their trance-like state. It is interesting to note that their perception of time during the course of their treatment, itself, varied. Sacks reports, for example, that one day, he found that his patient’s “movements were extraordinarily quick and forceful, and her speech seemed two or three times quicker than normal speech; if she had previously resembled a slow-motion film, or a persistent film-frame stuck in the projector, she now gave the impression of a speeded-up film—so much so that my colleagues, looking at a film of Mrs. Y. which I took at this time, insisted the projector was running too fast.”85 The patient experienced time like the frames (or ‘stills’) on a film. As Sacks observed: “Sometimes these ‘stills’ form a flickering vision, like a movie-film which is running too slow.”86 At other times, they are speeded up

 Awakenings (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1999), p.  23. I am grateful to Prof. Panos Theodorou (University of Crete) for pointing out some of these passages to me. He refers to them in the draft paper, “Desire and Temporality: Contribution to the Naturalization of Intentionality.” Its authors, beside himself, are: Costas Pagondiotis (Assistant Professor, University of Patras), Anna-Eirini Baka (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Crete) and Constantinos Picolas (PhD Candidate, University of Patras). Prof. Theodorou is quite critical of Husserl and draws his own conclusions from Sack’s remarks. 82  Ibid. p. 166–167. 83  Ibid., p. 111. 84  Ibid., p. 101. 85  Ibid., p. 103. 86  Ibid., p. 112, 81

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beyond the normal rate. Patients also experienced displacement of such stills, i.e., the scrambling of their temporal order.87 These temporal distortions also affected their sense of space. Sacks writes: “all [the patient’s] space-time judgements are pushed out of shape, … his entire coordinate-­system is subject to expansions, contractions, torsions, and warps.”88 Phenomenologically, we can see why this is so. Our judgements of space are largely time-dependent. Looking from the window of a car, we see some objects whiz past us while others barely seem to move. Unconsciously judging distance by the rate of an object’s angular velocity or turning, we take the former as close to us, the latter as further away. The same holds with regard to the objects in a room, we judge how near or far they are from us from the time it takes them to rotate, showing their different side to us. This dependence is obvious in Sacks’ observation: “When [the] cinematic representation achieves a certain critical rate, [Hester’s] sense of vision and of the world suddenly becomes ‘normal,’ with the movement, space, time, perspective, curvatures, and continuities expected of it.”89 When, however, the temporal dimension is disturbed, a patient experiences “a systematic disorder of space-time parameters, a systematic warping of coordinate-systems.”90 Sack’s observations not only dovetail with the view that temporalization is an instinctive pleasure driven process, they also support the view that subjectivity is itself a process. Sacks puts this in terms of activity. He writes, “The central problem in all Parkinsonian disorders is passivity—passivity and pulsivity, i.e., inertia—as the central cure for them all is activity (of the right kind).”91 Such activity requires stimulation, in Husserl’s terms, the affection of the ego by the appropriate hyletic data, data that the ego experiences as pleasurable. As Sacks expresses this: The problem, then, is to provide a continual stimulus of the appropriate kind—and if we can achieve this we can recall Parkinsonians from inactivity (or abnormal activity) into normal activity, and from the abyss of unbeing into normal being. ‘Quis non agit non existit’ [who

 Sacks reports: “Mrs Y. and other patients who have experienced ‘kinematic vision’ have occasionally told me of an extraordinary (and seemingly impossible) phenomenon which may occur during such periods, viz. the displacement of a ‘still’ either backwards or forwards, so that a given ‘moment’ may occur too soon or too late. Thus, on one occasion, when Hester was being visited by her brother, she happened to be having kinematic vision at about three or four frames a second, i.e. a rate so slow that there was a clearly perceptible difference between each frame. While watching her brother lighting his pipe, she was greatly startled by witnessing the following sequence: first, the striking of a match; second, her brother’s hand holding the lighted match, having ‘jumped’ a few inches from the matchbox; third, the match flaring up in the bowl of the pipe; and fourth, fifth, sixth, etc. the ‘intermediate’ stages by which her brother’s hand, holding the match, jerkily approached the pipe to be lit. Thus—incredibly—Hester saw the pipe actually being lit several frames too soon; she saw ‘the future,’ so to speak, somewhat before she was due to see it” (ibid., pp. 112–113). 88  Ibid., p. 344. 89  Ibid., p. 113. 90  Ibid., p. 345. 91  Ibid. 87

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does not act does not exist] (writes Leibniz); when the Parkinsonian is not active he does not exist—when we recall him to activity we recall him to life.92

He comes to this view from regarding the awakening of patients like Hester Y. He reports: “She had reached a virtual standstill, physically and mentally.” Yet, within “a half an hour after receiving her morning gram of L-DOPA, Mrs Y. suddenly jumped to her feet, and before incredulous eyes walked the length of the ward. ‘What do you think of that, eh?’ she exclaimed in a loud, excited voice.”93 Pondering this, Sacks “realized that almost all my ideas on the nature of Parkinsonism, of activity, of existence, and of time itself, would have to be completely revised.” A normal person, even after a brief interlude, “meets profound and peculiar difficulties in re-activation, that is, in resuming his previous patterns of activity.”94 One finds that one is functionally disabled even when one is anatomically healed: thus, after such an experience (or, more accurately, after such a hiatus in normal experience and activity) one finds that one has ‘forgotten’ how to use the de-activated limb, and that one must re-learn (or re-discover) how to use it all over again … Indeed, if a limb is severely deactivated for any length of time, one will lose all sense of its existence.

For Sacks, “[s]uch observations show us the truth of Leibniz’s dictum ‘Quis non agit non existit’—who does not act does not exist. Normally, then, we see that a hiatus in activity leads to a hiatus in existence—we are critically dependent on a continual flow of impulses and information to and from all the sensory and motor organs of the body. We must be active or we cease to exist: activity and actuality are one and the same.”95 What, then, are we to make of Hester, who after years of immobility “jumped up and walked in the twinkling of an eye”?96 For her, “there was no ‘elapsing of time.’” She was “at once action-less, being-less, and time-less” during her immobility,” thus verifying Leibniz’s dictum. But, with the administration of L-Dopa, “it was as if the ontological current, the current of being, could be suddenly ‘switched on’ … with no loss of action-patterns in between, nor any need to re-learn them subsequently—and this because for her no time had elapsed.”97 Such statements indicate that the subjective process of constitution, which begins with the constitution of time and continues with the constitution of the sense of body (and of the body’s role in constitution) is not just ongoing, but can also be brought to a stop. Since subjectivity is itself a process—rather than simply a matter of sedimented, inert layers, which can over time decay—it can be “switched on.” The fact that the switch is the reactivation of the dopamine circuits indicates that the process is pleasure driven. Once again, we confront a double perspective, since it is as true to say that this process is chemically driven as it is pleasure driven. As was noted, this is what we should expect from an objective, evolutionary perspective. If  Ibid., p. 346.  Ibid., p. 99. 94  Ibid., p. 100. 95  Ibid., p. 100–101. 96  Ibid., p. 101. 97  Ibid. 92 93

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the apprehension of time offers a survival advantage, then evolution would make its processes—those of retention, protention and their associated intentionalities— applicable to our mammalian brains. The laws governing their applicability—those, for example, involving the dopamine pathways—are, of course, not those of time-­ consciousness. In this, they are like the laws of electronics that make the laws of arithmetic applicable to a calculator. The two sets of laws, however, are not unrelated. The designer of the calculator intends that the calculator follow the arithmetic laws in giving sums. The process is goal driven. The same holds in the evolutionary context where the goal is a survival advantage set by the environment. The same point can be put in terms of Husserl’s view that consciousness is not a thing but a function, namely, the synthetic, interpretive function of identifying unities in multiplicities. He writes in this regard: “is not consciousness function …?” He continues, “What is necessary? … We have to examine [intentional] experiences as functions…. We have to ask ourselves: What is ‘accomplished’ in them? What kind of sense is present in them, what kind of sense is progressively forming itself in them? … How do functions synthetically, teleologically unite into the unity of a function, etc.?”98 Phenomenology’s task is to answer these questions. In doing so, it defines subjectivity in terms of those performances that allow it to form and progressively unite senses into greater and greater wholes—greater and greater unities in multiplicities. Now, to take functioning subjectivity as a process is to place these performances in a genetic framework. It is to see, for example, the performances through which time is constituted as founding those in which the apprehension of objects is accomplished. Evolution, we can say, provides the conditions for the application of such performances to our embodied subjectivity. It does not, however, define these performances. They have, we can say, their own apriori rules. To use Husserl’s words, evolution could no more account for these rules than a person could “paint elliptical functions or play them on a violin.”99 The point is that the “naturalization” of phenomenology, which comes with this “objective” perspective is not a naturalization that relativizes the laws that phenomenology uncovers. One can only come to this conclusion by conflating its laws with those that make them applicable to us.

 The extended quote is: “ist nicht Bewußtsein Funktion,… ? Was ist also notwendig? Es sind intentionale Erlebnisse, Erlebnisse als Funktionen, als relativ geschlossene Funktionen betrachten, sie betrachtend nachleben, neu durchleben, Akte vollziehen und sie wiederholend nachvolziehen und sich dabei befragen, was darin ‘geleistet’ wird, was für Sinne darin liegt und sich fortgestaltet, was man dabei tut und was dardurch für Sinnesleistung geleistet wird im Übergang zu den umfassenden Zusammenhängen in der Einheit des Lebens, wie Funktionen mit Funktionen sich zur Einheit einer Funktion synthetisch teleologisch einigen, usw.” (Ms. A VI 31, p. 19a). 99  Ideen I, §52, Schumann ed., p. 115. 98

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Self-Touch and the Constitution of the Ego as Embodied Thus far, we have limited our account of embodiment to the hyletic level. The instincts at play here do not yet pertain to an individual. This only occurs when we can posit the ego as an individual. This involves more than temporal centering. The sense touch is crucial to our ability to distinguish ourselves from our environment. When I touch other objects, I feel their properties, for example, their hardness or smoothness, their coldness or warmth. I do not, however, feel their being touched. Touching myself, however, I feel not only the body that I touch, I also feel its being touched. Self-touch is thus crucial to the constitution of my sense of embodiment since it marks off my body as mine. At work here, according to Husserl, is the phenomenon of “double sensation.” Thus, when I touch an object, I do not just feel the object, I also feel my sensations of it. When, for example, I touch a cold object with my finger, I feel both “the coldness of the surface of a thing and the sensation of cold in the finger.” Similarly, “in the case of a hand lying on the table, the same sensation of pressure is at one time taken as [aufgefaßt als] a perception of the table’s surface (of a small part of it, properly speaking) and at another time, with a different direction of attention and another level of interpretation [Auffassungsschicht], it results in sensations of my fingers pressing on it.”100 The difference, in other words, is a change in the interpretation imposed on these sensations. This doubling is not yet the self-awareness that distinguishes my body from the bodies I encounter. For this, I must touch myself. When I do so, the two parts of my body have a double functioning. Functioning as a physical object, “each [part] is, for the other, an external thing that touches and works upon it.”101 Functioning as sensing subject, each has touch sensations with the possibility of taking them in a two-fold way. The touched hand, for example, feels the touching hand’s smoothness, warmth, etc. as the properties of an external object. It also, however, feels its own sensations as it is being touched. The same holds for the touching hand. The hand that it touches is felt like an external thing; the touching hand also feels internally its sensations of touching, e.g., the pressure on its fingers. As a result, each hand is both a sensing subject and sensed object. As a sensed object, it has its real properties. As sensing subject, it has its localized sensations that spread across its surface. Each hand through the other thus becomes aware of itself as a sensing object. Each is grasped as an object that, qua sensing, is also a subject. The ability of our body to be taken as both subject and object gives it the special character of its self-awareness. It allows it to distinguish itself from all that it encounters. As Husserl makes clear, our ability to recognize ourselves in a mirror depends on the process of self-touch. He writes, “I do not see my body, the way I touch myself. What I call the seen body [gesehenen Leib] is not something seeing that is seen, the way that my body, as touched, is something touching that is touched.” What is 100 101

 Ideen II, §36, pp. 146–47.  Ibid., §39, p. 153.

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lacking here is “the phenomenon of double sensation,” a phenomenon that could only occur if “one eye could rub past the other”—that is, if one eye could touch the other.102 At that point, the eye that I see would feel itself being seen. It would experience the double sensation that it could take both as its sensations and as the sensations of the eye that touched it. For Husserl, this signifies I can only regard my eye as my own by touching it. Touched, it provides the “touch and kinesthetic sensations” that allow me to apprehend it as belonging to my body.103 Such sensations are crucial. Lacking them, we are like those patients that Oliver Sacks describes who, on waking, attempt to make room for themselves by shoving one of their own legs out of bed.104 Deprived of the sensations of self-touch, they react to and move their limbs as if they were foreign objects. This can be put in terms of the “localization” that touch provides. The kinesthetic sensations of tension that I experience in moving my hand become localized because they are constantly “intermixed” with those given by the hand as it touches objects and is touched by them. It is through touch that I experience movement as my own. It is because the visual body coincides with the tactual that it participates in this localization, i.e., is recognized as my own.105 Two things characterize self-awareness on this level. The first that it involves a certain openness. The self that is aware never collapses into the self it is aware of. The inner distance that characterizes the subject-object dichotomy is maintained. This is because on the level of touch, flesh’s relation to itself is not direct, but rather mediated: the touching through the touched and vice-versa. As was noted, we must touch ourselves to grasp ourselves as both sensing subject and sensed object. In such self-touch, the hand that positions us as sensing subject is not the hand that it touches. The spatial distinction of one hand from the other—and more generally, the spatial extension of our body as it functions in our self-presence—maintains this presence’s openness.106 Such openness, one can also say, is a function of the self’s spatial embodiment. The second characterization is our awareness of being able to move ourselves immediately. We do not move our bodies as we move some foreign object. When we move our body, we sense it as both a mover and moved. That the mover is grasped  Ibid., §37, p. 148.  Ibid. 104  Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 55. 105  In Husserl’s words, “Obviously, the body is also to be seen just like any other thing, but it becomes a body (Leib) [that is mine] only by incorporating tactile sensations, pain sensations, etc.—in short, by the localization of the sensations as sensations” (Ideen II, §37, p. 151). 106  There is here, as Maria Villela-Petit observes, a radical reformulation of our ability to transcend ourselves. Its ultimate foundation is not, as Heidegger claims, our temporality. It is our spatiality, i.e., our incarnate status. Refering to “la structure ekstatique du Dasein dans Sein und Zeit,” she writes, “Chez Merleau-Ponty, cependant, le «hors-soi» ne renvoie pas originairement à la seule temporalité comme chez Heidegger. Il renvoie tout aussi originairement à la spatialité inhérente à l’incarnation” (“Le soi incarné. Merleau-Ponty et la question du suject,” in Maurice MerleauPonty, ed. Emmanuel de Sainte Aubert [Paris: Hermann Éditeurs, 2008], p. 106). The same point holds for Husserl. 102 103

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also as moved gives us a sense of moving it immediately. In other words, I sense my hand as moving itself because it is both the subject and the object of this motion.107 Husserl writes in this regard: “the body as a field of localization is … the precondition for the fact that it is taken as … an organ of the will,” that is, as “the one and only object that, for the will of my pure ego, is moveable immediately and spontaneously.”108 The reference to the body as “a field of localization” of sensations is to the kinesthesia localized in the arm that I move. They play a double role according to the interpretation placed on them. Just as I can interpret the same sensations of coldness as the coldness of my finger or the coldness of an object, so the same kinesthesia can be interpreted as sensations of my moving my arm or as sensations of it being moved. My ability to shift from one interpretation to the other allows me to conflate the two and see my movement as spontaneous. This grasp of ourselves as freely moving our bodies develops as we learn to control our movements. Such learning, in Husserl’s account of our genesis, is an instinctive, pleasure driven process. Thus, before an infant learns to control its body, “there is a ‘joy in wild-movements’ [Freude am Strampeln], in moving the body through moving the limbs.” Engaging in this, we gradually learn to control these movements. In Husserl’s words, there is the “development of a kinesthetic system that is afterwards freely at our disposal.”109 Our ability to voluntarily control our movements does not signify the end of this instinctive pleasure in movement. Rather, as Husserl remarks, “The kinesthetic hyle is not just a process, but an instinctive process” in which the hyle is itself the source of our pleasure.110 Here, “[t]he instinctive intention and the instinctive pleasure in fulfillment do not concern a final state, but rather the whole process” of moving. The process “itself is the goal.”111 This pleasure in moving our body does not occur in isolation. Visual data also enter in: “This instinctive process exists in relation to other hyletic events…. Optical data stimulate eye movements and, with this, kinesthesia in general.”112 With the activation of our “kinesthetic system,” we move to get a better look, to more closely observe the object. The fact that this is accompanied by a certain “pleasurable affection”

 That I am both does not mean that the subject and object collapse into an undifferentiated unity. What prevents this is the openness of the body’s self-awareness, which, as noted, comes from the fact that our body’s relation to itself is not direct but rather mediated. 108  Ideen II, §38, p. 152. 109  Ms. C 16, p. 38b, March 10, 1932; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 327. 110  Ibid. 111  The extended passage is: “Die instinktive Intention und instinktive Lust der Erfüllung betrifft nicht einen Endzustand, sondern den ganzen Prozeß, kontinuierlich die Momentanintention sich erfüllenlassen und wieder als Träger neue Intention zu neuen Erfüllungen übergehen lassen, also Einheit des Prozesses der Intention-Erfüllung, das ist selbst das Telos, das ist, daß die instinktive Intention, die einheitlich von vornherein auf dieses Ineinander der Intentionalität und ihrer Entspannung geht und sich als einheitliches nicht in einer Phase, sondern im ständigen Tun erfüllt” (Ms. C 16, pp. 38b–39a, March 10, 1932; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 328). 112  Ibid., p. 39b; p. 329. 107

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[Lustaffektion] returns us to Aristotle’s assertion that “all humans naturally have joy in sensuous perception.”113

Self-Touch and the Recognition of Others The infant, of course, is not alone. Its natural helplessness means that its existence depends on the presence of Others. The development of the empathy that allows it to recognize Others as subjects like itself has its stages and is, accordingly, a gradual acquisition. Thus, initially, the developing embryo is part of the mother’s flesh. We have no real evidence that, in constant contact with the mother, it distinguishes itself from her. Even after birth, the infant’s sense of itself seems to include her. This can be expressed in terms of three of the aspects of the self-Other relation involving touch: the infant as a touching subject, the infant as an object touched by itself, and the infant as an object touched by its caregiver. Originally, all three are in an undifferentiated unity; only later are they separated out. Thus, originally, the infant takes itself as a touched object in the same way as it takes the Other as a touched object. Similarly, it takes itself as an object touched by itself in the same way as it takes itself as an object touched by the other person. The caregiver’s body is, thus, taken as its own; together, they are differentiated from the world. In other words, the original assumption is that of a union of their sensing flesh. As the phenomenologist, Gail Soffer, describes this original state, the infant does not attribute his sensations to the Other. Rather, “he expects to sense in the body of the other.” Similarly, he presumes “that the other senses via his own body.”114 The breakup of this initial sense of identity with the caregiver occurs in stages. Gradually, the child gains a sense of the otherness of the Other. Only at the end of this process, according to Soffer, is the child capable of “individualized empathy, an empathy of the form, ‘if I were there and I were x,’ where x specifies traits of the other,” then I would experience what x experiences.115 At this point, the child fully realizes that the Other has his own experiences, which are distinguished according to the features of the Other—e.g., features that manifest differences, for example, in gender, age and physical condition.116  Ibid., p. 30b, March 8, 1932; p. 321.  “The Other as an alter ego: A Genetic Approach,” Husserl Studies 15 (1999), p. 160. 115  Ibid., p. 163. 116  This increasing sense of the otherness of the Other is paralleled by a developing sense of the intentionality directed to the Other. This can be put in terms of its etymological sense, which comes from the Latin intentio, which signifies a “stretching out” and “straining towards” something. Its original object is the mother. The infant seeks to bond her to itself. Being held, it re-establishes the warmth and intimacy that it felt in the womb. The goal is a reestablishing of an identity. As the child develops, this goal continues, but in ways that increasingly acknowledge her alterity. A child, for example, will often begin by showing its mother or caregiver what he is reading by flipping the book over so that the text appears upside down. This indicates an incomplete sense of the Other as an embodied individual who sees from her (rather than from the child’s) perspective. The child 113 114

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What is the role of self-touch in this mature stage? As we recall, Husserl’s account of our recognition of Others in the Cartesian Meditations focused on the visual appearing of the Other. We recognize the Other as a subject like ourselves when his/her behavior is “harmonious” with our own. The basis for this recognition is the similarity of our appearing bodies. Yet, as the phenomenologist Lanei Rodemeyer has pointed out, “my experience of my own body is nothing like my experience of another person’s body.” Thus, the supposed “‘natural’ similarity between the two bodies would never be automatically given” as a basis for intersubjective recognition.117 The difficulty is not just that I always experience my body from the vantage point of the “here,” while the Other’s body is always regarded visually as over “there.” It is that the perceptions that allow me to grasp my body as my own are not part of my experience of the Other. I experience the Other’s body visually. I experience my own kinesthetically as I move my limbs. I feel my body when it is touched, but I do not feel other’s body being touched. Furthermore, they do not immediately respond to my will; only my body does. All these experiences are not visual, they are, as we have seen, fundamentally tactile. Touch, rather than sight, lies at the basis of the sense we have of our embodiment. For Husserl, in fact, “A subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not have an appearing body.”118 The body that appears could not be recognized as the subject’s own. How, then, do we resolve this difficulty? How do we go from our tactile perception of our body as our own to the grasp of the Other as an “animate organism” like ourselves? In the Meditations, this grasp, let us recall, is the result of a double pairing. First, I pair my animate body in the “here” and the “there.” What I appresent with regard to the possibility of my being there can, if it is a real possibility, be transformed into an actual presentation by my moving there. I can, for example, go into the kitchen and make breakfast thus making actual the behavior and intentions that I appresented from the bedroom. In the second pairing, which is that of my animate body in the “there” with the Other’s animate body in the “there,” such intuitive evidence is, of course, lacking. I can only appresent and never present to myself what another person’s intentions are. What I do in such cases is transfer to the Other what I directly experience. Thus, regarding another person in the kitchen making breakfast, the similarlity of our behavior allows me to transfer to him the intentions I would have were I in his situation. I cannot, of course, see the Others’ intentions. The pairing that I make, however, does not demand this. I can appresent what I can must learn that she does not see things the way he sees them. Doing so, he reestablishes their identity by assuming that once things are properly positioned, she will see what he sees. As part of this, he also believes that by changing his place, he actually experiences what the Other experiences. According to Soffer, equivalent attempts to reestablish identity occur in the later stages. Each of these involves an increasing sophistication of how the Other is “like” him. This implies that the turning towards the Other (the intentionality) that underlies such attempts is built up, layer by layer, as the child develops. The adult’s relations to Others—in particular, his ability to recognize Others as like himself—is informed by this development 117  Lanei Rodemeyer, Intersubjective Temporality: It’s About Time (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2006), p. 163. 118  Ideen II, §37, p. 150.

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never make present. What verifies the pairing and its transfer of sense is the Other’s appearing behavior. As long as this behavior is similar to mine—i.e., similar to how I would behave were I there in his situation—the transfer runs smoothly.119 Husserl’s account of self-touch shows what is involved in this transfer. Beyond our intentions in controlling our bodies, we also transfer the fact that we experience our flesh as both a sensing subject and a sensed object. Along with our intentions, we appresent this duality as “there” in the first pairing. Objective exteriority and sensing interiority thus both pertain to my appresented body. In pairing this with the Other’s body, I co-intend this sensing interiority. There is, in other words, an associative transfer of the sensing interiority of my appresented body (my body in the “there”) to the visually appearing body of the Other, who is also “there” in the spatially extended world. What allows me to go from the exterior appearance of the Other to the Other’s interiority is the fact that my appresented body has both aspects. I do not, of course, directly experience the other person’s sensing interiority. But this is the point of the transfer. Its basis is not just the similarity of our appearing behavior. It is my self-experience as a subject that is also an object. Taking the Other’s appearing body as also having this dual character, I can move from the other as a visual object to the other as a sensing subject like myself.120 This modified account of intersubjective recognition has practical implications. As numerous studies have shown, infants deprived of touch suffer from anxiety.121 Prolonged deprivation can result in emotional and cognitive deficits that affect their adult relations to Others.122 Persons suffering from these have difficulties in bonding  In this sense, intersubjective recognition is part of a much wider process of analogizing apperception. In normal life, whenever data are paired through a recognition of their given similarity, any additional sense that is attributed to the first is transferred associatively to the second. This process goes on more or less continuously. In Husserl’s words, “Each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally established sense to a new case, with its anticipative interpretation of the object as possessing a similar sense” (Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 141). 120  Dan Zahavi comes to the same conclusion. He writes “… my bodily self-exploration permits me to confront my own exteriority…. It is exactly the unique subject-object status of the body, the remarkable interplay between ipseity and alterity characterizing body-awareness that provides me with the means of recognizing other embodied subjects” (“Beyond Empathy,” in Between Ourselves, Second-Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness, ed. Evan Thomson, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 8, nos. 5–7, 2001, p. 161. 121  See e.g., Katherine Harmon, “How Important Is Physical Contact with Your Infant?” Scientific American, April 30, 2010. 122  The classic cases of this occur in poorly run orphanages. Lou Agosta writes, “after the fall of the Soviet Union, Romanian orphanages were understaffed, bare bones institutions that rigged up mechanical, assembly line-like ways of delivering bottled milk to infants, like feeders in a bird cage. The results were the production of symptoms developmentally similar to neurological damage, autism, and infantile psychosis (M. A. Diego and N. A. Jones 2007:161; Spitz 1946). Many of these symptoms were able to be reversed by adoptive, caring, nurturing parents, but, depending on the duration of the neglect, not all” (“Empathy and Sympathy in Ethics,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/emp-symp). The references he cites are M.  A. Diego and N.  A. Jones, “Neonatal antecedents for empathy,” Empathy in Mental Illness, T.  Farrow and P. Woodruff, eds. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 161 and R. A. Spitz, “Hospitalism: a Follow-up Report,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1946, 2: 113–117. 119

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with Others. In extreme cases, they seem to lack the ability to make the move from the visual exteriority of the Other to his or her sensing interiority. They may, for example, intellectually grasp that their actions cause Others pain, but they lack the ability to emotionally experience this. They have no empathy. From a Husserlian, genetic perspective, such deficits in our intentional life are ultimately those of touch. They affect both touch’s role in our self-apprehension as well as in our apprehension of Others as like ourselves. What is indicated here is that touch, in its foundational role, is something that must be fostered if it is to fully develop. This can be put in terms of the original unity experienced by the infant—that of its being a touching subject, an object touched by itself, and an object touched by its caregiver. The caregiver’s body, in this stage, is taken as its own. The infant’s experience of selftouch includes its being touched by its caregiver. Thus, to the point that the caregiver does not touch the child or touches it painfully, the infant’s relation to its own body is distorted. Because of this, it will have difficulty later engaging in the kind of transfer of sensing interiority and sensed exteriority required for normal intersubjective recognition. In their unconsciously teaching the infant how to touch, parents and caregivers solve in a practical way the problem Husserl confronts in the Meditations—namely, that of solipsism. Touching the infant, they show it how not only to be physically self-aware, but also how not to be alone in the world that visually appears. The fact that we are not alone, but also with Others points to a final stage of embodiment, the embodiment that is accomplished on the intersubjective level. Such embodiment, as we shall now see, involves more than the collectivity of subjects. It reaches beyond this to embrace their ideal “pole”—one that embraces both reason and the divine. Our final chapter will explore this by beginning with the fact that death, transcendentally regarded, is not a private, but rather an intersubjective affair.

Chapter 7

Mortality and Beyond

The Constitution of the Self as Mortal The previous chapter began by citing Husserl: “Isn’t it a paradox that living in the streaming present, being [in it], I must necessarily believe that I will continue to live, when I know that, in fact, my death is impending.”1 How do we know that we will die? How is the sense of this constituted for us? Limited to what we ourselves experience, this sense escapes us since death is the end of such experience. The insight here is as old as Epicurus’s insight: “Death … is nothing to us, since while we exist, death is not present, and whenever death is present, we do not exist.”2 His point is that “death is the deprivation of sensation” and what we cannot sense has no existence for us.3 For Husserl, this signifies that “[d]eath is not an existing occurrence in the ‘I am’ of the transcendental ego, but rather an event in the human world, in the constituted world.”4 In this human world, our sense of death comes from Others, i.e., from the collapse of the functioning of their bodies. The dead body that results from this collapse no longer responds to us; it repels our acts of empathetic understanding; we can no longer grasp it as a subject like ourselves. We, thus, constitute its sense as a non-responsive dead person. In this view, Husserl writes, “[t]he death of Others is the earlier constituted death. The same holds with regard to

 Ms. C 4, 6b; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 96. The German text is: “Aber ist das nicht paradox: lebend in strömender Gegenwart seiend, muss ich unweigerlich glauben, dass ich leben werde, wenn ich doch weiß, dass mein Tod bevorsteht.” 2  “Letter to Menoeceus,” The Essential Epicurius, trans. Eugene O’Connor (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1993), p. 63. 3  Ibid. See also p. 69, where he writes: “Death is nothing to us. For what has been dispersed has no sensation.” 4  Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, pp. 78–79. 1

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the birth of Others.”5 In both cases, the constitutional sequence begins with Others and their embodiment. When, in fact, I recognize them as embodied subjects like myself, I transfer to myself their mortality. This is why death is “an event in the human world.” Absent it, I have no basis for its positing. The order of constitution here is plain. It begins with the constitution of my embodiment, continues with the constitution of Others as like me, and ends in the constitution of my own death. The constitution of my death is, thus, inherently intersubjective. It cannot occur before the constitution of myself as person among persons. As such, it bears witness to the ongoing genesis of the constitutive process, a coming to be that parallels that of our selfhood. As was earlier noted, we cannot posit a plurality on the original level of this process. The evidence for this is lacking. Similarly, we cannot ascribe affections, instincts, drives and actions to individual agents until we can speak of the centring of experience and the beginnings of the constitution of our embodiment. At each level, the sense of constitution expands. What is constituted at one level becomes the data, the evidence, that constitution makes use of on the next level. The same holds for the constitution of our temporal finitude, our being bound by birth and death. The evidence for this relies on our having constituted Others as like ourselves. In this, mortality is like language. It has no sense outside of the intersubjective context. Abstracted from this, it escapes sense. The same, we suspect, holds for morality to the point that this is informed by our mortality. Its sense is also inherently intersubjective. This, of course, does not mean that the later, intersubjective stages of constitution can be viewed in isolation. If, indeed, the process of constitution—i.e., of our selfhood—is ongoing, then all the stages function together. Viewed together, they give us Husserl’s conception of life: a life that is ongoing and pervades the senses of our human world.

Constitution as Teleological Process From one perspective, Husserl’s conception of our mortality mirrors Heidegger’s conception of being-towards-death. The constitution of Others and, with this, the sense of our being-in-the-human-world gives us the sense of our death. This is the sense of an essential finitude, which, for both Husserl and Heidegger, gives our lives definition. Such definition is the culmination of the process of our embodiment, which can, from this perspective, be viewed as being (or proceeding) towards the recognition of our mortality From another point of view, however, Husserl’s conception exceeds this finitude. The constitution that continues on the intersubjective level does not end with our individual lives. It carries on through the generations, resulting in the presence of the successive sense structures that characterize history in the broad sense. Such structures, Husserl argues in the Crisis, are not random.  Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, p. 3. The same reasoning applies to the conception of my birth. As Husserl writes, “von Anderen her weiß ich, daß ich geboren bin” (C17, 90b; Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, p. 443). 5

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This final, unfinished work attempts “to to strike through the crust of the externalized ‘historical facts’ of philosophical history.” Its goal is to interrogate, exhibit, and test “their inner meaning and hidden teleology.”6 This teleology places us in the context of goals that exceed us, goals that embody rational sense structures that come together to form an all-embracing whole. Such teleology is not limited to philosophical history. It is, according to Husserl, all embracing. He writes that “teleology … as an ontological form, determines the universal being of transcendental subjectivity.”7 It does so because it is “immanent” within subjects “as the form of their individual being, as the form of all the forms in which subjectivity exists.”8 He also asserts that “teleology can be exhibited as that which concretely and individually determines, ultimately makes possible and thereby actualizes all being in its totality.”9 What is behind such statements is the fact that the constitutive process, which is responsible for such actualization, is, itself, inherently teleological. What animates it is the goal of grasping unities through the synthesis of data. Thus, we perceive an object by picking out a pattern of perceptions and taking these perceptions together (i.e., synthesizing them) as perceptions of some particular thing. The intentionality at work here intends this appearing thing. It is its goal. This teleological, goal-driven structure holds throughout the constitutive process. It is at work in the process of temporal constitution, where the goal is the grasp of an enduring unity. It is also at work in the syntheses of temporal unities, i.e., things, objects of every description. Similarly, it is present in such common-place activities as preparing dinner, where the goal—the meal we are preparing—gives the process its direction. All such processes have the same temporal form. While material causality proceeds from the past to the present to the future, teleological causality starts with the future. It proceeds from the future—the goal, which is not yet actualized—to the past and from thence to the present, which is the ongoing point of the goal’s actualization. The past, in this causality, provides the materials required to realize my goal. In the case of making dinner, the past is my having gone shopping to purchase what I need. Here, the past becomes the past, i.e., a store of resources, by virtue of the goal. The latter is what makes me recall it to get what I need. Thus, needing onions for the meal, I recall that I purchased them and placed them in the refrigerator. The fact that I purchased other things at other stores does not come to mind. The same holds for the process of perception. In this case, the past, which consists of our previous experience, gives us the material to form our perceptual intentions. This is apparent in Chap. 2’s example of attempting to see a cat under a bush on a bright sunny day. As we move towards the bush, our goal of seeing the cat makes us, for example, take this shadow as part of the cat’s ear; another to be its eye, and so forth. We can, of course, be mistaken. The material provided by our experience may not fit what we intend to see. What we took to be a

 Krisis, §8, 2nd Biemel ed., p. 16.  Ms. E III 9, Nov. 5, 1931; Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, p. 378. 8  Ibid., p. 380. 9  Ibid. 6 7

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cat could dissolve into a mass of flickering shadows, causing us to abandon the goal. Nonetheless, the goal is what determines the process. It determines the interpretative intention that we form from our experience. Granting this, we have to say with Husserl: “Teleological creatures (Wesen) live in a universal teleological temporality, a temporality in which a specific teleological causality has its form.”10 The form is that of a goal-directed process.

Reason and Teleology Husserl, in the Crisis, asserts that “reason is precisely that which man qua man, in his innermost being, is aiming for.” It is man’s goal or telos. The conception of reason here is perfectly general. It “allows for no differentiation into ‘theoretical,’ ‘practical’ ‘aesthetic,’ or whatever” type of reason. He adds, “being human [Menschsein] is teleological being and an ought-to-be … this teleology holds sway in each and every activity and project of an ego.”11 They all aim at reason. This conclusion follows from the nature of the constitutive process—the very process resulting in the becoming of our selfhood. For Husserl, constitution is inherently rational. So is the positing that it results in. The clearest exposition of this doctrine comes from the Ideas, where he calls positing an “act that is ‘rationally motivated’.”12 As for reason itself, it is understood as “reason in the widest possible sense, a sense extended to all types of positing.”13 The equivalence between reason and positing signifies, he asserts, the “general insight … that not just a ‘truly existing object’ and an ‘object capable of being rationally posited’ are equivalent correlates, but so also a ‘truly existing object’ and an object which is capable of being posited in an original, complete thesis of reason are equivalents.”14 If we accept this equivalence, then, with Husserl, we can claim that “an all-sided … solution of the problems of constitution”—i.e., problems involving the positing of various types of being— “would obviously be equivalent to a complete phenomenology of reason in all its formal and material formations.”15 Constitution, then, is not just a teleological, but also a rational process. Underlying its equivalence with reason is the fact that Husserl, like Kant, identifies the rules of reason with those of constitution. For Kant, this is expressed in the parallelism of the table of logical judgments and those of the categories. The logical judgments he lists formally express the categories, which give us rules for connecting perceptions. Because we follow the categories’ rules, logic has a field of applicability. It

 Ms. K III 4, p. 48, 1934–35.  Krisis, §73, 2nd Biemel ed., pp. 275–76. 12  Ideen I, §136, Schumann ed., p. 316. 13  Ibid., §142, p. 329. 14  Ibid. 15  Ibid., §153, p. 359. 10 11

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inherently pertains to the world that we make present by connecting our perceptions.16 For Husserl, the same point follows from the fact that the posited is a “unity of sense,” which is taken as equivalent to a “real unity,” i.e., a reality. Given this, the laws governing the constitution of a unity of sense are also those governing realities. In terms of the “material formations” of reason, this signifies that we cannot constitute a unity with the contents, for example, of sound and color without also adding spatial extension. Similarly, we cannot speak of the unity of the pitch and duration of the tone without also adding the element of its loudness. In terms of reason’s “formal” formations, we cannot assert that some quality both pertains and does not pertain to a given unity. Similarly, we cannot assert that one quality includes another as in “all A’s are B’s” and also assert that the same quality only applies to part of the other, as in “not all A’s are B’s.” These material formations of reason make up a logic of content, while the formal formations compose formal logic. The laws of both types of logics must be followed if we are to have a material and formal synthetic unity of an intending sense. It is this sense that, when intuitively present, we take as the presence of an individual, unitary being. Given the above, we can say that the rationality that finds objective expression within the logical laws governs the process of constitution. We can also say, with Husserl, that “the ordo et connexio rerum must direct itself according to the ordo et connexio idearum.” It is not, as he says, a “blind ordering” which makes this necessary.17 It is rather the fact that the forms of unification given by our formal and material logics represent our activities of connecting senses so as to constitute beings. As in Kant, these logics apply to the world. Since they govern constitution, they necessarily apply to what we posit. Furthermore, since the act of positing is teleologically directed, our constitutional activity is driven by the goal of producing rational, i.e., law bound unities. Furthermore, since the act of positing is

 For Kant, this means, for example, that in making the judgment, “the stone is heavy,” we connect the subject “stone” with the predicate “heavy.” In doing so, we are employing the category of substance. This gives us the rule for connecting the different perceptions we have of an object in terms of what underlies such perceptions. The rule, broadly stated is that what underlies the perceptions is not itself a perception, but rather a point (an “X”) of their unification. Thus, our temporally dispersed perceptions of the stone’s heaviness as we pick it up, lift it and hold it refer to this X. So do our perceptions of its color and shape as we regard it from different sides. As an object, the stone is none of these perceptions, but rather that which they refer to. Our experience of the stone (or, indeed, of any object) is, thus, not direct, but rather through the synthesis of our perceptions, that is, through a connection that makes it possible for us to posit a common referent with regard to them. Knowledge, which can only come through the categories is, thus, called by Kant, “knowledge by means of connected perceptions (verknüpfte Wahrnehmungen)” (“Kritik d. r. Vernunft,” B 161, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, III, 125). For Kant, an object is defined as “that in whose concept there is unified the multiplicity of a given [total] intuition” (Ibid., B 137; III, 111). The similarity of Kant’s and Husserl’s views in this regard is what prompts Husserl to say “What is called constitution, this is what Kant obviously had in mind under the rubric, ‘connection as an operation of the understanding,’ synthesis” (Ms. B IV 12, pp. 2–3, 1920). See also “Kant und die Idee der Transzendentalphilosophie,” Erste Philosophie (1923/1924), Erste Teil, and “Kants Kopernikanische Umdrehung,” ibid., p. 227. 17  Ideen I, §50, Schumann ed., p. 106. 16

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teleologically directed, our constitutional activity is driven by the goal of producing rational, i.e., law bound unities. This holds not just for our individual acts of constitution. It also applies to the constitution that we engage in with Others. This is why Husserl, in the late manuscripts can speak of reason —“logos” in Greek—as the ultimate goal of our constitution. For Husserl, “the world in general (Überhaupt) … has, in essential necessity, the form of the logos, of true being.”18 Since the process of constitution includes the constitution of transcendental subjectivity, he also asserts that “transcendental subjectivity brings about its own sense of being and that of every worldly reality to the level of the logos.”19 The ultimate claim here is that “the logicification (logifizierung) of transcendental subjectivity, of the totality of monads, is part of logical selfconstitution.” In other words, “the logos of the constitution of the logos includes itself,” i.e., includes its self-constitution in individual subjects.20 Such subjects, as exemplified by philosophers and scientists, have not just increasingly presented us with a rationally articulated world, they have also exhibited in the methods they used the increasing rationality that humans are capable of. The ideal that drives them is, according to Husserl, a regulative ideal. Something lying beyond all their actual accomplishments, it embraces both the “world” and the “intersubjective community.” In Husserl’s words: This teleological ideal, “world,” i.e., transcendentally [regarded], this ideal of the concretely constituting transcendental subjectivity, is not and never will be temporally given in the sense that a factual, transcendental subjectivity is. It is an idea, indeed, the idea of an “absolutely perfect” intersubjective community, a community which does take its origin from us, but lies completely and totally at infinity.21

As a teleological ideal, reason, here, is present from the beginning. The constitutive process is shaped by it. It is also, however, something to be achieved. In Husserl’s words: From the beginning, man has knowledge of the world; but in possessing this knowledge, he must first acquire it—a telos situated at infinity—through infinite work. From the beginning, man is a rational being. From the beginning, he has reason, but first he must, in the course of his history (in the levels of his historical modes of being, in his historicity), acquire reason. From the beginning, he is human and must become human.22

The Crisis, along with the Origin of Geometry, and related manuscripts trace out sections of this development.

 Ms. E III 4, p. 25, 1934.  Ms. E III 4, p. 31, 1934. 20  Ibid., p. 33. 21  Ms. E III 1, p. 4, 1931. As Husserl also expresses this: To both the “streaming, self-confirming world” and its “changing, transcendental all-subjectivity … there corresponds as an absolute poleidea, the single absolute understood in a new, super-worldly (überweltlich) … super-human, supertranscendental subjective sense. This is the absolute logos … lying beyond them [i.e., beyond both the world and its subjects] as an infinitely distant pole” (Ms. E III 4, pp. 60–61). 22  Ms. E III 10, p. 19, 1934. 18 19

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Such development can be understood as an extension of the process of embodiment discussed in the previous chapter. Individually, we bring the world to presence through our embodied senses and the syntheses performed on the data they provide us. Our individual abilities to manipulate and use things is part of our bringing the world into presence. As the Czech phenomenologist writes in regard to this, “There is always, on the one side, the thing as a means.” On the other, there is always “the bodily mediated activity that endows the means with a sense.” As a result, “I understand the things from myself, from my activity, but I understand myself, my activity from the things. There is a mutual mediation.”23 Thus, I can understand paper as something to write on and, correlatively, I can understand myself as capable of writing on it. Our embodiment in such cases includes not just our physical bodies and senses, but also the activities they make possible with regard to the things we encounter. The world that we make present exhibits this embodiment. Thus, just as it exhibits the color that our eyes make present and the sounds that our ears make available, so the world exhibits the uses we put it to. In Heidegger’s phrase, “The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails’” according to the uses we put them to.24 The same holds for intersubjective activities and the reason that informs them. The world we encounter embodies the uses we put it to. In this it mirrors our own intersubjective, progressive embodiment of the reason that is at work in us.

God as a Teleological Concept Husserl, we should note, is note is not beyond identifying God with the telos of reason. He writes, for example, “God, himself, is not the monadic totality. He is rather the entelechy lying within it; this, as the infinite telos of the development of ‘mankind’ from absolute reason, as the telos necessarily regulating monadic being.”25 This identification of God with the telos of our development, is not just a feature of Husserl’s later philosophy. As Stephen Strasser has written, “Throughout his whole life, both as a person and a philosopher, Husserl contended with the problem of God.”26 Thus, as early as 1911, he identifies the “idea” of God with that of a telos of “the most perfect [intersubjective] life in which the most perfect world constitutes itself.”27 He writes a few years later,

 “Leib, Möglichkeiten, Welt, Erscheinungsfeld” in Vom Erscheinen als solchem, Texte aus dem Nachlaß, p. 89. 24  Sein und Zeit, p. 70. 25  Ms. A V 22, p. 46, Jan. 1931. 26  “Das Gottesprobleme in der Spatphilosophie Edmund Husserls,” Philosophiches Jahrbuch der Görres-Gesellschaft, vol. 67, 1959, p. 131. 27  Ms. F I 14, p. 43. 23

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God, the absolute being, who is inherently unchanging … externalizes himself in an infinite series of self-reflections in which he depicts (abildet) himself in himself as the formations of consciousness. [He does this] first in an obscure form and then with increasing purity and lack of concealment, ultimately coming to the purest self-consciousness. In the process of this development, he splits himself, as it were, into a plurality of finite human subjects.28

This self-externalization and self-pluralization of the divine mirrors the Crisis’s description, 20 years later, of the “subjectivity that objectifies itself as human subjectivity, as an element within the world.”29 This is “the subjectivity which ultimately functions at all times and is, therefore, absolute.”30 In the 1930s, this self-externalization is described in terms of the divine will. Our striving to constitutively bring about the logos is called the “absolute will.” As Husserl describes the latter: The universal, absolute will which lives in all the transcendental subjects and which makes possible the individual, concrete being of the transcendental totality of subjectivity is the divine will. This, however, presupposes the whole of intersubjectivity—not that this precedes this will, not that this will is impossible without this whole (in the way that the soul, perhaps, presupposes the living body); rather [it presupposes it] as a structural level without which this will cannot be made concrete.31

The relation, here, is teleological. It is one in which God, taken as the logos, progressively achieves his objective presence by manifesting himself in a plurality of rationally constituting subjects. If we accept this, then we can also say with Husserl: ‘Teleology’ discovers that God speaks in us. … All the right paths lead to myself, but to me through my co-egos … They lead to God who is nothing other than the pole. The path, beginning with each ego, proceeds as his path … but all these ways lead to God, the same super-worldly (überweltlich), super-human pole; this, not as separate ways, converging at a point [in the future], but rather in an indescribable intermingling.32

The relation, here, is teleological. It is one in which God, taken as the logos, progressively achieves his objective presence by manifesting himself in a plurality of rationally constituting subjects. In a certain sense we can speak of the process of embodiment here as including God, considered as an ultimate logos. Opinions on Husserl’s theology are divided. Louis Dupré, for example, writes: No theism, however, could accept a God who is identical with transcendental subjectivity or even one who needs it as an essential part of himself. From this point of view, Husserl’s later philosophy is perhaps even further removed from a true transcendence than his earlier.

 Ms. F I 22, p. 39. This citation is from Husserl’s lectures on Fichte’s Menschenheitsideal. As such, they are part of Husserl’s exposition of Fichte’s position. Yet, in an appendix to these lectures, Husserl embraces Fichte’s doctrine as containing an insight “which is determined to become a strict theory in the future” (Ms. F I 22, p. 61). 29  Krisis, §29, 2nd Biemel ed., p. 115. 30  Ibid., §42, pp. 155–56. 31  Ms. E III 9, Nov. 5, 1931; Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil, 381, italics added. 32  Ms. K III 2, pp. 105–06, 1934. 28

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A strange observation in view of the fact that his personal convictions became increasingly theistic!33

Stephen Strasser, on the other hand, focuses on the fact that God is the “entelechy” of the monad-all. He is the infinitely distant goal of monadic development. For Strasser, “God is the principle of development who does not himself develop.”34 His transcendence is assured since, as an infinitely distant goal, he is never equivalent to transcendental subjectivity. This transcendence is also God’s objectivity. In Strasser’s words, “The God who forms the absolute idea of a pole [or goal] for developing human reason must possess an objective being, i.e., one independent of subjective reason.”35 More recently, Klaus Held attempts to strike a middle ground between these positions. He does this by making a comparison of Husserl’s conception of God with that of the Good. According to Held, “The Platonic God, [conceived] as the Good, guarantees, as the Idea of the Ideas that these Ideas can fulfill their task of serving as the archetypic pattern for the formation of our world.” Similarly, Husserl’s God, serves as a guarantee (“Gutstehen-für”) for the ultimate success of our attempts to synthesize our individual and intersubjective experiences and have such syntheses intuitively confirmed. In his words: “‘God’ for Husserl is not himself the telos of universal confirmation [Bewährbarkeit], but he is the Good that guarantees the universal accessibility of confirmation and fulfillment.” Our relation to such a God is not to “an object of intentional consciousness.” Our relation is rather one of “faith [Glaube].”36 Whatever we might think of Husserl’s theology, its optimism is remarkable given the disasters that marked the twentieth century. Because of the rise of Nazism, the Crisis could not be published in Germany. Husserl, himself, suffered increasing restrictions and isolation because of his Jewish ancestry. We may end our account of his phenomenology by speculating on the source of this optimism. How could he believe in the ultimate triumph of rationality given Nazism’s substitution of race and will for reason? The answer, we suspect, comes from his belief in the ultimate principle of phenomenology. Its principle of principles expresses a faith in evidence and the positing that follows from it. It also embodies an infinite ideal, that of the ongoing task of gathering and analyzing the evidence for what we believe and adjusting our individual and collective views accordingly. As I mentioned in the Introduction, such faith is liberating. It understands authority not in terms of persons or the offices they occupy, but rather seeks its foundation in our experience and its implicit rationality. To apply this implies a liberation from untested views and authorities, and not just in philosophy but also in life as a whole. The independence it brings comes

 “Husserl’s Thoughts on God and Faith,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 29 (2), p. 212. 34  “Das Gottesprobleme in der Spätphilosophie Edmund Husserls,” Philosophiches Jahrbuch der Görres-Gesellschaft, vol. 67, 1959, p. 137. 35  Ibid., p. 139. 36   “God in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences, Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl, ed. C. Ierna et al. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), p. 728. 33

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with responsibility. We are called on to be responsible for what we believe, for what we claim to know. We cannot live the unexamined life. Rather, we must examine and reflect upon what experience provides us with. For Husserl, in his endless investigations, this call brought a sense of freedom and self-responsibility, which sustained him in difficult times. It is this sense that I hope to have imparted in tracing the course of his work.

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. R. Mensch, Husserl’s Phenomenology, Phaenomenologica 238, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26147-3

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Author Index

A Aristotle, 39–40

I Ingarten, Roman, xv

B Bernet, Rudolf, 44 n19 Brentano, Franz, xiv Brough, John, 59 n76, 60 n79

K Kant, v–vii, ix, 14–15, 41–42, 46, 71–72, 74, 82, 129 n72, 146–147 Kern, Iso, 46 n32, 71–72

C Carr, David, 92–93, 115 n1 Celms, Theodor, 81

L Lohmar, Dieter, 33 n78, 35 n90

D De Boer, Theodor, xv, xvii n36, 65, 81 F Fichte, J.G., 8 n19 Fink, Eugen, xvii n36, 49 n43, 82–83, 94, 100, 105–106, 120 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 138 H Heidegger, Martin, ix–x, xviii, 144, 149 Held, Klaus, 151 Hume, David, xvi

M Mohanty, J.N., 16 Moran, Dermot, xiv n24, 31 N Novotný, Karel, 29, 121 n34 P Pavlov, Ivan, 6 R Ricoeur, Paul, xix, 1, 23 n39, 83 n85 Rodemeyer, Lanei, 140

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. R. Mensch, Husserl’s Phenomenology, Phaenomenologica 238, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26147-3

157

158 S Sacks, Oliver, vi n3, 131–134, 137 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 94, 97, 109 Schutz, Alfred, 82, 87, 94 Soffer, Gail, 139–140 V Villela-Petit, Maria, 137 n106

Author Index Z Zahavi, Dan, 112 n87, 141 n120 Zippel, Nicholas, 121 n34

Subject Index

A Absolute, 105–109 Absolute consciousness, xvii n36, xviii, 46 n31, 70, 80–81 Absolute ego, see Ego, absolute Absolutely functioning subjectivity, 111–112, 150 Anonymity, 74, 118 C Categorial intuition, 30–37 Causality, xv–xvi, 7–8, 11, 20–23, 65–67, 145–146 Constitution, vi–vii, xvii–xviii, 68–69, 72, 74–75, 116–118, 128–130; as a teleological process, 144–149; as creation, 80–83, 86; of our sense of time, 49–62, 99, 102, 104, 108, 127, 130–135; of Others, 85–93, 139–142; of the ego, 77–80, 98, 116–118, 136–139, 143–144 E Ego, 62, 72–80, 110–111; absolute, 105–109; a thing-like unity, 22–23, 65; coincident with other egos, 100–104, 112–113, 119;

constitution of (see Constitution; dissolution of, xix, 69, 71, 79, 130;) pure, xi, 85; requires affecting content, 121, 123, 126–127, 131 Epistemology, x–xi, 66, 81, 83 Epoché, xv–xvi, 68, 85, 87, 95, 98, 119 n21 F Facticity, 71–72 Finitude, 121, 144 G God, 149–152 I Ideal being, 25, 27, 66 Instincts, 124–131, 138 Intentionality, xiv, 23 n39, 48, 54–55, 58, 102, 124, 129, 145; lengthwise (Langsintentionalität), 50–51, 53, 127 transverse (Querintentionalität), 51–53, 127–128 Intentional relation, 19–20, 23, 45, 57–58

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. R. Mensch, Husserl’s Phenomenology, Phaenomenologica 238, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26147-3

159

160 K Kinesthesia, 118, 125, 138 L Living present, 98–99, 101–106, 108–111, 116–117, 119, 121 n34 Logos, vi, 148, 150 N Natural attitude, xvi, 64–67, 70, 80–81

Subject Index R Real being, 22–23, 61 n83, 67 Retention, 45–62, 78–79, 98, 102 n59, 105 n66, 107–108, 118–119, 122–128 S Skepticism, xii, 10, 85

O Objective knowledge, x–xii, xvii, 1–2, 11, 14, 23, 66, 85–86, 93

T Teleology, 129, 145–146, 150 Time diagrams, 49–52, 55 Transcendence, 20, 23, 73, 75, 92–93, 150–151 Transcendental idealism, xi, xviii, 20–21, 63, 72, 80–83, 111

P Phenomenological reduction, xi, 44, 68–73, 80–81, 85–87, 97–100, 109–112, 119 Primal impression, 47–48, 82, 123 Protention, 54–58, 78, 124–125, 127

W World, xi, xvi–xix, 7–8, 21, 24–25, 29–30, 64, 68, 70–72, 79–81, 86–87, 92–93, 96–97, 103–104, 110–111, 115–117, 129–130, 148–149