The Ethics of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Responsibility and Ethical Life 9781472547606, 9781441174697, 9781441162434

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Acknowledgments

In the first place I would like to thank Dr Gary Banham and Professor Joanna Hodge, not only for having introduced me to Husserl, but also for their help and support throughout the elaboration of this text. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Manchester Phenomenology Reading Group for giving me the opportunity to read Husserl alongside the above-mentioned Dr Banham and Prof Hodge, as well as Dr Roxana Baiasu, Mr Jonathan Hunt and Dr Alex Samely. The discussions undertaken in this circle have deeply contributed to the making of this work. I thank them all not only for their intellectual encouragement and stimulation but also for their friendship. I would also like to express my gratitude to the other members of staff and colleagues from the philosophy section at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Their suggestions and criticism have been most valuable. I thank Dr Ulrich Haase, Prof Martin Bell, Mr Mike Garfield, Dr Keith Crome, Dr Mark Sinclair and the late Prof Wolf Mays. I would also like to thank the Manchester Metropolitan University for having granted me a three-year research scholarship and a further research fellowship, which gave me the opportunity to undertake this project. I dedicate this book to Julie Waddington, who has not just read the various manuscripts on many occasions and contributed to them with numerous suggestions, but, above all, has encouraged me at every stage of my work. Without her unconditional support I would have never been able to undertake such a task.

List of Abbreviated Titles

Works by Edmund Husserl: CM Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, translated by Dorion Cairns, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960; Husserliana I. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Ed. Stephane Strasser. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950, repr. 1973. All the citations from Cartesian Meditations will be referenced by the abbreviation CM followed by the section and page numbers of the English translation as well as by Husserliana pagination. IP

The Idea of Phenomenology, translated by William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964; Husserliana II. Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen. Ed. Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950, repr. 1973. All the citations from The Idea of Phenomenology will be referenced by the abbreviation IP followed by the section and page numbers of the English translation as well as by Husserliana pagination.

I

Ideas. General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. First Book, translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson, New York: George Allen & Unwin Ltd: London and Humanities Press Inc., 1969; Husserliana III/1. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Erster Teil. Ed. Karl Schumann. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976. Husserliana III/2. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Zweiter Teil, Ergänzende Texte. Ed. Karl Schumann. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976. All the citations from Ideas I will be referenced by the abbreviation I followed by the section and page numbers of the English translation as well as by Husserliana pagination.

I 2nd

Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book, translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989; Husserliana IV. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie

List of Abbreviated Titles

xi

und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Ed. Marly Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952. All the citations from Ideas II will be referenced by the abbreviation I2 followed by the section and page numbers of the English translation as well as by Husserliana pagination. C

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, translated by David Carr, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1970; Husserliana VI. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Ed. Walter Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954, repr. 1962. All the citations from Crisis will be referenced by the abbreviation C followed by the section and page numbers of the English translation as well as by Husserliana pagination.

EJ

Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, translated by James Churchill and Karl Ameriks, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973; Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik. Ed. L. Landgrebe. Prague: Academia-Verlag, 1938; Hamburg: Claasen, 1954. All the citations from Experience and Judgment will be referenced only by the abbreviation EJ followed by the section and page numbers of the English translation.

PCIT

On the Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), translated by John Barnett Brough, Dordrercht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991; Husserliana X. Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstsein (1893–1917). Ed. Rudolf Boehm. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. All the citations from Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time will be referenced by the abbreviation PCIT followed by the section and page numbers of the English translation as well as by Husserliana pagination.

APAS

Analysis Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, translated by Anthony Steinbock, Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001; Husserliana XI. Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918–1926. Ed. Margot Fleischer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966; Husserliana XIV. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil: 1921–1928. Ed. Iso Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. All the citations from Analysis Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis will be referenced by the abbreviation APAS followed by the section and page numbers of the English translation as well as by Husserliana pagination.

xii

List of Abbreviated Titles

FTL

Formal and Transcendental Logic, translated by Dorion Cairns, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969; Husserliana XVII. Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. Ed. Paul Jansen. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. All the citations from Formal and Transcendental Logic will be referenced by the abbreviation FTL followed by the section and page numbers of the English translation as well as by Husserliana pagination.

LI

Logical Investigations, translated by J. N. Findlay and edited by Dermot Moran, London and New York: Routledge, 2001; Husserliana XVIII. Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band. Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Ed. Elmar Holstein. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975. Husserliana XIX/1–2. Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Ed. Ursula Panzer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. All the citations from Logical Investigations will be referenced by the abbreviation LI followed by the section and page numbers of the English translation as well as by Husserliana pagination.

Introduction

Husserl’s phenomenology has been explored and interpreted from different philosophical angles: from the field of cognitive science to Levinas’ ethicalreligious approach, and from Derrida’s deconstructive analyses to analytic philosophy. By helping to clarify many of its difficulties and obscurities, by making new questions and topics emerge, and even by pointing out critical problems and seemingly unsurpassable limitations, all these readings have contributed to a deeper understanding of Husserl’s phenomenological project. There is, however, one central question in Husserl’s phenomenology that has been systematically neglected or, even when acknowledged, has been pushed to the margins. This is the question of ethics. The deployment of a notion of ethics within Husserl’s phenomenology is, however, not free from complexity. When in the Prolegomena to Logical Investigations Husserl argues that ‘every normative and likewise every practical discipline rests on one or more theoretical disciplines, inasmuch as its rules must have a theoretical content separable from the notion of normativity (of the “shall” or “should”), whose scientific investigation is the duty of these theoretical disciplines’, Husserl is clearly indicating that his phenomenological inquiry is a theoretical description of the meaning-structures of consciousness and that, as such, cannot be normative.1 This study will still suggest, however, that this does not entail that Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry must be devoid of an ethical character. For while in the Prolegomena to the second edition of Logical Investigations Husserl does clearly say that phenomenology cannot be normative, in the First Investigation he introduces what appears to be a first principle of phenomenology. Husserl speaks here of the ‘freedom from presuppositions’ as a ‘principle of an epistemological investigation’ that is to regulate the inquiry and make of it a properly theoretical and scientific inquiry worthy of its name.2 He writes: In our view, theory of knowledge, properly described, is no theory. It is not science in the pointed sense of an explanatorily unified theoretical whole. Theoretical explanation means an ever increased rendering intelligible of singular facts through general laws, and an ever increased rendering intelligible of general laws through some fundamental law.3 But what is this fundamental law that is to regulate the elucidation of all general laws of knowledge of singular facts? Husserl invokes for the first time here the

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principle of intuition as the only source of evidence and, therefore, of meaningfulness. He writes with regard to this theoretical explanation, otherwise called phenomenology: Its aim is not to explain knowledge in the psychological or physiological sense as a factual occurrence in objective nature, but to shed light on the Idea of knowledge in its constitutive elements and laws. [. . .] It endeavours to raise to clearness the pure forms and laws of knowledge by tracing knowledge back to an adequate fulfilment in intuition. This ‘clearing up’ takes place in the framework of a phenomenology of knowledge, a phenomenology oriented, as we saw, to the essential structures of pure experiences and to the structures of sense [Sinnbestände].4 He then finishes the introduction by adding that The real premises of our putative results must lie in propositions satisfying the requirement that what they assert permits of an adequate phenomenological justification, a fulfilment through evidence in the strict sense. Such propositions must not, further, ever be adduced in some other sense than that in which they have been intuitively established.5 Husserl’s argument suggests here that phenomenology is to be regulated by a fundamental law, by means of which all general laws structuring meaning and experience can be made clear. This fundamental law, which he describes as the adequate intuitive givenness, is what frames the phenomenological inquiry and what, therefore, guarantees the validity of its discoveries. Furthermore, it could even be said that the principle of presuppositionlessness, of intuitive evidence, is what justifies the very phenomenological inquiry as an inquiry that is free from prejudices and assumptions. The introduction of this principle is then reformulated and refined in Ideas I as the ‘principle of all principles’.6 There Husserl insists, now even more assertively, that intuition is the only source of evidence and, therefore, the first principle of phenomenology. The introduction of this principle brings an obvious tension to Husserl’s formulation of phenomenology. For how can Husserl argue that phenomenology is not normative and at the same time introduce a regulative principle? Is not Husserl here simply re-introducing the same normativity that he had dismissed in the Prolegomena? Is not this tension a fatal mistake that, unwittingly, makes phenomenology normative and, therefore, a psychologistic inquiry? The present study will give reasons to think otherwise. For although the principle of presuppositionlessness might well be considered a fundamental law of evidence that takes the shape of a regulative principle, this regulative principle is not reducible to being of a normative character.7 The principle of presuppositionlessness is a ‘fundamental law’ that is rather intrinsic to the very

Introduction

3

structure of the object of the inquiry, i.e., the structure of meaning and, therefore, the structure of the phenomenologico-theoretical activity, instead of just being an external presupposed condition.8 I am suggesting that the principle of evidence, the principle of all principles, is not a moral value dependent on an empirical-historical context but rather the very inner rule boundedness of meaning. It is for this reason that Husserl can assign to the question of intuitive evidence the title of principle of presuppositionlessness, the principle of all principles of phenomenology, without falling back into normativity. For what he is arguing is that intuitive evidence signifies the limits of meaning. Namely, that whatever is not evidently given cannot be accepted, for it is not meaningful. This is important for phenomenology as inquiry, given that it applies not only to ‘transcendent’ objects of consciousness, but to consciousness itself as object of reflective thought. The principle of presuppositionlessness describes the intrinsic regulative limits of the inquiry, guaranteeing the presuppositionlessness of the inquiry. Paradoxically, however, by saying that Husserl’s phenomenology cannot be confused with a mere normative discipline, I would like to open the door to a notion of ethics by means of which Husserl’s phenomenology can be defined. Ethics is here neither identifiable with nor reducible to moral normativity. The problem with this identification is that it ignores the importance that Husserl gives all throughout the development of his inquiry to the necessity of having to justify itself according to evidence in order to guarantee that the inquiry be free from prejudice. To say that the inquiry itself demands justification signifies that every step of the inquiry must be free from presuppositions and, therefore, can only be justified if it is intuitively given and, thus, meaningful according to the fundamental law of evidence. This already intimates a demand for freedom from prejudice, from dogmatism, a demand for meaningfulness that only the principle of intuitive evidence can satisfy. This is however not a straightforward issue. For if intuition is the source of evidence and meaningfulness, and, therefore, only that which is given within the limits of intuition is phenomenologically acceptable, how can phenomenology have grasped those very limits in the first place in order to accept them as the principle of principles? If these intuitive limits, if this fundamental law as Husserl has also called it above, are given non-intuitively, then the principle of principles is not so, which means that there must be a more original principle or law that allows intuition to be grasped and accepted. If, on the other hand, one simply accepts that intuition is the principle of principles but, that in order for it to be so, it must simply be presupposed as if it was a normative value, then we would be falling back into a position of prejudice and presupposition, which the very principle denies. The development of Husserl’s phenomenology is driven precisely by this very problem concerning the issue of presuppositionlessness, rather than by epistemological concerns alone. That which defines Husserl’s phenomenology and fuels its development is neither the accuracy of the method alone nor the

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themes Husserl tackles in order to offer a fuller and more precise description of consciousness and constitution, as Donn Welton and John Drummond have argued respectively.9 Instead, the discussion that follows will suggest that Husserl’s phenomenology, and its development, can be defined instead by this demand for freedom from presuppositions and meaningfulness that pervades the inquiry from its very beginning. In his later writings, Husserl will come to qualify this demand as an ‘ethical demand’ that rests on an absolute or universal ‘self-responsibility’ [Allgemeine Selbstverantwortlichkeit], or reflective responsibility, towards the foundation of the inquiry, its methodology and its very principles.10 Furthermore, Husserl ends up assigning to this notion of reflective responsibility the degree of genesis or of the spiritual origin in which the inquiry is rooted. The origin or the foundations of the very limits of meaning is, thus, the very reflective responsibility that aims to justify every step of the inquiry, every limit and every principle. As we shall see, the principle of presuppositionlessness introduced in Logical Investigations is a self-responsible demand for evidence that is, however, not exhausted in intuition and that, therefore, has an infinite dimension that allows it to stop at nothing. This infinite reflective responsibility is precisely what reveals the ethical attitude that lies at the heart of Husserl’s phenomenology. Ethics is here the ethics of reflection. Continental phenomenology in particular has traditionally acknowledged this ethics of reflective responsibility. Nonetheless, the question of ethics in Husserl’s phenomenology has generally been understood as an added factor, as one more dimension of the inquiry. Although in this case Husserl’s phenomenology is not simply devoid of its ethical character, ethics is subordinated to the epistemological core that has been taken to truly define the inquiry. In her recent book Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity, Janet Donohoe has re-located the question of ethics within Husserl’s phenomenology, granting it the centrality that other Husserl’s scholars have denied it.11 Nevertheless, the centrality that Donohoe grants to the question of ethics is still relative to epistemological concerns. According to Donohoe, it is the development from static to genetic phenomenology that allows Husserl to re-define the notions of time and intersubjectivity within which, then, he is able to re-configure his early notion of ethics and develop it into a notion of ethics that is open to the Other and their temporality. Ethics, thus, is the result of genetic phenomenology. However, since such a development from static to genetic phenomenology seems to be simply guided by an attempt to provide us with a more complete and deeper understanding of the question of constitution, Donohoe’s notion of ethics remains secondary to epistemology. Even though Donohoe explicitly links the question of ethics with issues such as responsibility, renewal and rigorous science, the fact that the phenomenological inquiry is primordially epistemological makes these key issues become also secondary within Husserl’s phenomenology; they are simply the result of a methodological development guided by the question of constitution. Or more concretely, responsibility,

Introduction

5

renewal and rigorous science only make sense within the sphere of genetic phenomenology. This implies not only that static phenomenology would not be concerned with such questions but, furthermore, that static and genetic phenomenology would only be linked by a notion of development that emerges as a result of a will to know and, therefore, would lack any essential unity. The present study will show that the question of ethics is neither marginal nor secondary in Husserl’s inquiry and that, although phenomenology is indeed an epistemological inquiry concerned with the re-foundation of Science, the inquiry is fundamentally ethical insofar as it is pervaded by this reflective responsibility preoccupied with the very principles that regulate the inquiry and with the origins from which they emerge. In Husserl’s phenomenology, epistemology and ethics are intrinsically linked from the very outset. Thus, rather than arguing that ethics is the result of genetic phenomenology, the discussion carried out in the next five chapters will show that the development from static to genetic phenomenology is ultimately motivated by an ethical selfresponsibility, by an Ideal of renewal, that guides the inquiry from the very beginning. Phenomenology as a philosophical inquiry is a responsible attitude motivated by an ethical demand, by means of which Husserl attempts to tackle critical problems such as naturalism, psychologism and historicism with the ultimate aim of re-founding Science in a rigorous philosophy that can guarantee the becoming of an authentic humanity that is free from dogmatism. The questions of rigorousness, renewal and self-responsibility that Husserl deploys gradually between 1911 and the 1930s are not, however, exclusive to the genetic period but already appear in earlier texts like Logical Investigations and Ideas I through the questions of presuppositionlessness, regulativity and the principle of principles. The importance of this claim is that it restores the question of ethics within the very core of Husserl’s inquiry, making it possible to argue that phenomenology is an ethical project. Furthermore, by tracing reflective responsibility, rigorousness and the ethical demand to Husserl’s notions of presuppositionlessness, intuition and regulativity in his earlier texts, the discussion also shows that the notion of ethics here deployed is intrinsic to the inquiry and is what endows it with its essential unity, rather than simply appearing as an aftermath to solve particular problems within the inquiry or as a response to the monstrous events that desolated Europe from 1914 till the end of Husserl’s life. But by referring to a phenomenological ethics in the sense of responsibility I do not simply mean to speak of the question of the Other. This has been Levinas’, and to some extent also Derrida’s, approach to phenomenology. Levinas presents us with a notion of ethics that aims to overcome the alleged immanentism and solipsism of Husserl’s phenomenology. This ethical phenomenology is based upon the notion of the Other and on the relationship of awakening and responsibility that the Other maintains with me.12 In the case of Derrida, he has charged Husserl’s phenomenology with being trapped in the metaphysics of presence and has attempted to explode the question of

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identity by putting it in ‘dialectical’ relationship with the notion of alterity.13 Derrida’s implicit claim is that by compounding identity with alterity, Husserl’s epistemological phenomenology can open up to ethics. These two readings of Husserl have provoked several responses from the community of Husserl scholars. The problem with most of the responses addressed to Levinas, however, is that they seem to simply take for granted the notion of ethics that Levinas imposes on the discussion. This has led the Husserlian responses to Levinas to be mostly based on demonstrating that Husserl’s phenomenology is also an ethical phenomenology because it also places the Other in a fundamental position in relation to questions such as the ego of subjectivity, passive synthesis, intentionality, time and constitution.14 Unlike the Husserlian counterreadings of Levinas’ approach to Husserl, which have generally taken a more friendly tone, the responses addressed to Derrida’s reading of Husserl vary notably. Rudolf Bernet acknowledges the importance of Derrida’s critique of Husserl at the same time that he argues that the destabilization of presence and, therefore, of traditional metaphysics is already occurring in Husserl’s texts.15 These critical readings of Husserl’s phenomenology and the responses they have received have contributed to bring to the fore the importance that the questions of intersubjectivity, time-consciousness and presence have in the development from static to genetic phenomenology. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that the writings of both Levinas and Derrida have contributed to the making of this study in different ways, the question of ethics that I wish to address is not simply reducible to the question of the Other. The fact that when I speak of ethics I mean neither the question of the Other nor a moral philosophy of values in a traditional sense should not be taken to imply that these questions are simply to be disregarded and that, therefore, the quest for the origins of the inquiry are closed to the questions of the Other and of moral values.16 Although these two questions play indeed an important role in the development of the inquiry itself, this does not mean that such development towards the unveiling of the genesis of phenomenology and philosophy reside in these questions. Far from it, this study will show that the development of these two questions concerning the Other and moral values are the result of the ethical demand that guides the inquiry. Husserl’s own focus on the question of ethics is not always clear and varies from the so-called pre-war Göttingen ethics to the post-war Friburg ethics.17 In his early ethics Husserl maintains an axiological conception of ethics that is based on values and, therefore, reduces ethics to a notion of morality that would simply allow us to find, choose and realize the highest possible objective value that is attainable for us in each practical situation. This would help to explain why Husserl himself in Logical Investigations reduced all talk of ethics to a sub-discipline within the boundaries of a phenomenological method and made little effort to explicitly clarify the status of the principle of presuppositionlessness. The latter view on ethics, however, signifies a

Introduction

7

development insofar as it separates the terms of ethics and morality. In the Kaizo articles, Husserl disassociates ethics from morality because he no longer conceives of the ethical task in terms of the realization of the highest possible objective value. On the one hand he thinks of morality as the discipline that regulates the ‘good’ and ‘rational’ practical conduct of the human being with regard to the Other according to the ideas of love for the other. On the other hand he defines ethics in terms of a rational self-determination of one’s life according to an inherent idea that operates regulatively as its condition of possibility, namely, a telos.18 The importance of this distinction resides in another distinction mentioned earlier in this introduction between normativity and regulativity which, if only tacitly, does nonetheless pervade Husserl’s discussions on normativity and presuppositionlessness from the Logical Investigations onwards. Thus, for Husserl, morality would have to be considered as normative, insofar as it prescribes how good and evil are to be understood according to norms belonging to different empirical cultural contexts that one simply accepts or takes for granted. In contradistinction, ethics would be regulative, for it is based on a demand of self-responsibility and renewal that is taken up from within and that aims to fulfil a radical transformation of the human subject into a human being that is free from prejudice and presuppositions. The taking up of this demand, as we shall see in detail in the development of this study, is the taking up of phenomenology as the medium by which the subject wills to live an ethical life that is not reducible to the mere embracing of moral values. Ethical life, phenomenology, is concerned with the process of becoming ethical individuals by means of becoming responsible, not only for our social acts but, more importantly, for the origins of our theoretical life.19 To practise phenomenology is to live an ethical life. This study will concentrate on the role that the demand for presuppositionlessness plays, in its different reformulations, at different stages of the development of Husserl’s phenomenology. The discussion will touch on four central questions. First, I will discuss the early identification between the principle of presuppositionlessness with the questions of Evidenz and intuition, by means of which Husserl locates in the Idea of intuition the principle of all principles that is to regulate the inquiry. In the second place I will undertake a detailed analysis of the questions of intentionality and inner time-consciousness, insofar as they represent an explicit attempt to account for the origins and condition of possibility of intuitive givenness itself. This will lead me to suggest that the phenomenology of intentionality and time-consciousness manifests the ethical demand for presuppositionlessness, by means of which Husserl offers a description of the very act of self-reflection that characterizes the phenomenological inquiry. At the same time, however, they also make evident that phenomenology is limited to what Husserl calls a static field of consciousness and experience. The problem with this limitation is that although the inquiry can provide us with a description of the self-reflective act of consciousness, it cannot

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reach that which motivates the inquiry itself. The relevance of this point is that it leaves phenomenology incapable of giving an account of its motivational genesis and, therefore, grounds it on a root that it can only presuppose. It is for this reason that phenomenology, driven by this ethical demand for presuppositionlessness, takes a further step, engaging now in what is known as the genetic dimension of phenomenology. In the third place, then, I will touch on questions of affection, awakening and the unconscious, insofar as they signal a re-definition of intentionality and time-consciousness, however without the latter being dissolved within the formal limits of the act of consciousness. But while at this point Husserl has managed to reach a domain of life-experience that exceeds the form of consciousness, phenomenology has also reached its own limits, as they were formulated in Logical Investigations and Ideas I, insofar as this dimension of life-experience cannot be grasped by means of intuition. Lastly, it is at this point, following Husserl, that I will concentrate on the question of reflective responsibility [Selbstverantwortlichkeit] and on to what extent it re-defines the principle of presuppositionlessness beyond the limits of intuition.

Chapter I

Ethical Life or the Ethical Exercise of Husserl’s Phenomenology Epoché, Reduction and Intentional Explication

A. The Uncovering of Transcendental Subjectivity §1. The crisis of modern science and the Forgetfulness of life We make our beginning with a change which set in at the turn of the past century in the general evaluation of the sciences. It concerns not the scientific character of the sciences but rather what they, or what science in general, had meant and could mean for human existence. The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced, meant an indifferent turningaway from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity.1

From the early stages of Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl re-posits the core of the problem that instigated and guided the whole of the phenomenological inquiry right from the publication of Logical Investigations. However reformulated and discussed in different ways, in his later writings Husserl characterizes this problem as the ‘crisis’ or the ‘sickness’ underpinning European humanity.2 This ‘crisis’ or ‘sickness’ can be articulated in the double problem of: (a) the factualization of life [Leben] or life-experience [Erlebnis] and the covering up of its genuine meaningfulness, and (b) the loss of the self-reflective character that has uprooted modern science and philosophy from their spiritual origin. It is to this double problem that Husserl offers phenomenology as a means to respectively (a) uncover and describe the original domain of life, but (b) do it in a manner such that the inquiry justifies its own proceedings. The overall aim of the double task of phenomenology is the re-formulation of philosophy according to the Greek model, that is according to its original self-reflective and self-justifying spirit, and, secondly, the re-grounding of the sciences in their original philosophical spirit.

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It is worth noting that, from Logical Investigations to Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl opens by tracing and elucidating the origin of the ‘naivety’, the ‘illness’ or the ‘crisis’ of European humanity. In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology Husserl finds that the alienation of original human life-experience that leads European humanity to a crisis of overwhelming magnitude originates in the scientific revolution that gave birth to the modern sciences. Husserl’s argument shows how the positivist spirit of modern science impregnates Western humankind to the extent of reducing the latter’s view of the world to the practical effectiveness with which science equips society. The practical effectiveness of science on the one hand brings ‘prosperity’ to the European or Western world, yet also brings on the other hand a new conceptualization of the question of human life and of humanity in general.3 The forgetting is, thus, not a mere annihilation of the concept of experience or of life, but a covering up of the original domain of human experience with a new conceptualization of human life. Husserl understands this modern scientific conceptualization of life that guides the very aims and methodology underpinning the practical inventions and discoveries that organize modern Western society, from our practical everyday life to our commerce and wars, as the factualization of life. As Husserl puts it, ‘scientific, objective truth is exclusively a matter of establishing what the world, the physical as well as the spiritual world, is in fact’.4 In order to show what the factualization of human life in the hands of modern science entails here, Husserl undertakes a detailed discussion of the very origin of modern science. He writes: After all, the crisis of science indicates nothing less than that its genuine scientific character, the whole manner in which it has set its task and developed a methodology for it, has become questionable.5 Husserl finds the origin of the reductionism of human life to factuality in the scientific revolution itself, and, more particularly, in the loss of the genuine scientific or philosophical character that originally characterizes the birth of European humanity. According to Husserl, the loss of such a character can be traced back to the inauguration of modern physics with which Galileo guided the Renaissance. In the first part of Crisis of European Sciences Husserl characterizes the ideal of the Re-naissance as the attempt to overcome medieval science and philosophy, which had become a ‘prejudice’ themselves, in order to recover and give-birth-again to the ancient model through which Europe could regain its original philosophical spirit. This recovery or re-vitalization was to be undertaken by means of regaining ‘nothing less than the philosophical form of existence: freely giving oneself, one’s whole life, its rule through pure reason or through philosophy’.6 To put it another way, Galileo’s scientific revolution that shaped, according to Husserl, the whole epoch of the Renaissance is the attempt to bring philosophy or the genuine scientific character to the

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centre of knowledge, by making of science a self-justifying inquiry free from mythological and religious prejudices. Nonetheless, Husserl argues that Galileo’s scientific revolution lacked the necessary radicalness that would have made it succeed in its attempts to renew European humanity. For although Galileo tried to put the true philosophical or scientific character at the centre of the existence of humanity, he did so without questioning the principles of the scientific tradition in which this revolution was itself grounded. Modern science, thus, constituted itself in relation to the tradition that it inherited, i.e., geometry. The problem here is not the geometrical background of the tradition itself but the fact that Galileo never felt it necessary to question the very origin of geometry. This failure to question science’s own tradition led to the constitution of a modern science based on presuppositions of which modern science itself was not aware. Consequently, and despite the aim of Galileo’s revolution, the liberation of science from mythical-religious principles and its simultaneous re-grounding in geometrico-mathematical assumptions signify the loss of a demand for autonomy or presuppositionlessness through which science could have ruled its own existence rather than be ruled by external and unquestioned assumptions. To speak of a science that rules its own existence would mean to speak of a science that, guided by a demand for autonomy, is capable of answering for its own proceedings as well as for its origin or root [radix] and that, therefore, is presuppositionless. According to Husserl, the loss of this demand for autonomy or presuppositionlessness indicates the covering up of science’s own genuine philosophical character. It is for this reason that Husserl argues that the modern scientific revolution, under the rubric of ‘positivism’, instead of positing the genuine philosophical character at the centre of science, as it originally intended, ended up ‘decapitating’ philosophy.7 Husserl’s strong metaphor of ‘decapitation’ at this point indicates how, by losing the self-reflective philosophical character, modern science loses the reflective responsibility to inquire into the very motives that drive the human being to do science. As a consequence of this, the motives and reasons that lead the scientist to perform a theoretical activity disappear from the scientific field of inquiry, even though they are the original underlying ground of any theoretical activity. It is for this reason that Husserl’s argument goes on to suggest that the exclusion or the decapitation of philosophy led Galileo’s inauguration of modern science to lose sight of a whole dimension of existence, namely the inner original [radix] dimension of human life, and, therefore, to restrict its field of enquiry to factual existence, to a prism of geometrical ideal shapes. The forgetting of the original domain of life-experience is grounded in the loss of the radical philosophical self-reflective character that ultimately leads to the factualization of human existence. Husserl understands this process of factualization as the process of mathematization of human life.8 Briefly sketched, Husserl’s argument runs on the

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following lines. Since Galileo’s physics failed to question the precedence and constitution of the geometrical ideals on which it is based, the whole of the modern sciences are re-grounded in the pure mathematics of spatio-temporal shapes under which nature, and the human being within it, is idealized. This leads the modern sciences to be only capable of thinking the world in geometrical terms exclusively, to the point that any possible variation of the world, either in actuality or in fantasy, can only be a mere variation guided by the very limits and ideals of those presupposed geometrical shapes. The world and anything in it becomes a geometric design. As Husserl claims at this point, science does not experience the world but the formulae and the geometrical ideals that constructed it since Galileo’s revolution and that now impregnate twentieth-century science.9 This restriction of the world to a mathematical formulation that applies geometrical ideals to existence means, furthermore, the restriction of the world to physical facts insofar as the latter are all that can be measured. Since modern science is fully grounded in geometry, and since geometry is the art of measuring, then ‘all that which is’ is only insofar as it is measurable. According to this argument, and given that the objects in the world have become the effect of chains of inductions and the co-ordination of the formulae that modern science applies to nature, objective existence is reduced to the mere physical corporeality [Körperlich] of measurable physical bodies [Körper]. This geometrical factualization or mathematical corporealization not only applies to inert objects but, moreover, it also dresses up the human being itself, reducing his and her life-experience to an object-like corporeal body [Körper] that can be measured and explained through the same causal laws with which science explains the rest of the objects of nature. The problem with this reductive objectification of the human being is that it masks the original or genuine transcendental and spiritual [Geistig] life of the human being. Husserl expresses this transcendental and spiritual life through the notion of the living-body [Leib] or of an embodied consciousness, the essence of which is the permanent and unconditional experience or living of the world. The relevance of this level of life, to which science is closed off, resides, according to Husserl, in the fact that it is itself the root or origin, and, therefore, the very condition of possibility for every objectification, mathematization and idealization. As he puts it, To be sure, every induction grew into induction according to scientific method, but that changes nothing of the essential meaning of the pregiven world as the horizon of all meaningful induction. It is this world that we find to be the world of all known and unknown realities. To it [. . .] belongs the form of space-time together with all the bodily [körperlich] shapes incorporated in it. It is in this world that we ourselves live, in accord with our bodily

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[leiblich], personal way of being. But here we find nothing of geometrical idealities, no geometrical space or mathematical time with all their shapes.10 As we shall see below in more detail, Husserl understands the living-body as the most immediate and inherent ‘way of being’ through which the human being exists. I am my living-body [Leib], a spiritual organism: the primordial domain of life-experience that frames and accompanies all my perceptions, inductions and dealings with the world. This domain of experience, lived through the spiritual body or through the embodied consciousness, is, according to all this, the experience of the world-horizon in which all corporeal bodies [Körper] can be found and induced with mathematical and geometrical meanings. To speak of a level of experience that is prior to geometrical bodily [Körperlich] shapes and, therefore, to the objective space-time form in which these appear, does not mean, however, that phenomenology overcomes space and time. Rather, as we shall see in further stages of this discussion, phenomenology is the uncovering of a more original notion of space and of time at the level of embodied consciousness. For Husserl, the living-body is in itself the phenomenological spatio-temporal perceptual field whereby human life is lived and the world experienced. What this means is that instead of understanding the living-body as an abstraction from the variety of appearances of the body, namely as a result of its physical dimension, the appearances themselves [Körper] are appearances of the living-body [Leib] and, as such, they must manifest in themselves the living-body. What Husserl’s position regarding the living-body signifies here is that all corporeal shape attains its meaning not through mathematical and geometrical idealization, but, on the contrary, in correlation with subjectivity and, therefore, in being experienced. As I shall show throughout this study, Husserl’s phenomenology is an inquiry that aims to uncover the original transcendental and spiritual life of subjectivity. The fact that the living-body, transcendental and spiritual subjectivity, could not be measured, meant that it remained incomprehensible to a ‘knowledge’ that was not radical enough and that was only capable of recognizing the physical extension of our lives, namely our corporeal appearances, their shapes and measurements. As Husserl argues in Crisis of European Sciences as well as in Logical Investigations, this objectification of existence does not affect exclusively the so-called formal sciences, but is also applicable to the human sciences, particularly psychology. Consciousness, the living-body, Husserl points out, was not psychologically graspable either, for although the latter deals with the so-called subjective life, it does so objectively. That is, modern psychology is, according to Husserl, grounded in Galilean physics insofar as it defines itself as the parallel science to physics that attempts to prove the ‘real’ existence of the psyché. But in order to prove (to physics) the existence of the soul, psychology has to work with the same tools of verification and the same methodology as physics. Consequently, psychology approaches the psyché through a constructed mathematical ideal of

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the ‘real existence’ of psychic life and treats the psyché as a corporeal nature, as a substance or a quasi-geometrical body whose life responds to causal laws in objective space and time. Psychology, thus, as an extension of physics, participates in the forgetting of that other realm of life that does not respond to those mathematical principles that guide science. It is for this reason that although the early Husserl termed his inquiry descriptive psychology, the latter Husserl is always clear about the fact that the object of phenomenology, namely consciousness and its transcendental and spiritual life, can never be reduced to being a psychological entity.11 It is precisely the presumed objective validity of the geometrical ideals, and the subsequent forgetfulness of an original domain of human experience underlying those ideals, which, according to Husserl, leads Galileo’s science to become unable to deal with those ‘specifically human questions’ that are concerned with the meaningfulness of human existence.12 As Husserl writes, [Science] excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence [. . .] But can the world, and human existence in it, truthfully have a meaning if the sciences recognise as true only what is objectively established [. . .]?.13 Husserl suggests in these passages of Crisis that the restriction of Leiblichkeit to Körper implies a failure to inquire into the formation and the meaning of the geometrical ideals. Such a failure, made manifest in the loss of the selfreflective attitude that exercises the demand for autonomy or presuppositionlessness, leaves modern science with the mere capacity of applying ideals to nature, but incapable of dealing with the most burning questions – particularly those concerning the meaning of human life and experience and its history beyond its physical and factual description. The incapacity to deal with the questions that concern humankind is what, according to Husserl, leads to a widespread loss of confidence in science.14 A loss of confidence that, moreover, drove Husserl himself to declare science a dream that is over.15

§2. The Idea of renewal, or phenomenology as ethical life Husserl had already put this argument forward in the five articles he wrote for the Japanese journal The Kaizo between 1922 and 1924. The importance of these articles for the present study is that the same problem discussed above is now explicitly presented as an ethical problem, and not just as an epistemological one. The loss of the self-reflective attitude of philosophy, which has plunged philosophy into an epistemological crisis, and which, ultimately, has

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led to a loss of confidence in science, is an ethical crisis that requires an ethical response. The loss of the ideal of presuppositionlessness is not a mere epistemological problem; it is, above all, an ethical one. Husserl opens the first of this series of articles, ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’, with a lament for the same loss of confidence in science mentioned above, although in this case he speaks of it in terms of a loss of faith in Europe’s own meaningfulness, which, in turn, has led European humanity and its telos to an ‘internal untruthfulness, [to] the senselessness of this culture’.16 Husserl’s treatment of the question of faith is important here, for by deploying the question of faith he is not solely speaking of rational-scientific crises and illnesses that need rational cures. The faith in European telos, claims Husserl, is not in crisis, it is not ill, but it is shattered, it has been completely destroyed.17 Nevertheless, it is the destruction of this faith which, at the same time, allows him to call not just for cures, but for a complete and radical renewal [erneuerung], a re-birth, a re-naissance of Science and, more specifically, of philosophy. Two key points come to the fore here. The first one is that although destroyed, this faith is ultimately imperishable. The second one is that this imperishability is rooted in what appears to be a close relation between faith and philosophy (reason). If up to now we have argued that the loss of the philosophical attitude has led to the loss of confidence in science and, ultimately, to the collapse of faith in the ideal of Western civilization, Husserl’s argument in the Kaizo articles shows how the renewal, or re-birth, of faith in the European ideal (the Ideal of Science) depends on philosophy itself. It is at this point that Husserl declares that ‘something new must happen. It must take place within us and be carried out by us, as members of humanity who live in this world, forming the world and being formed by it’.18 Furthermore, Husserl defines this demand for renewal that ought to happen as being ‘an absolute ethical demand for a better humanity and a genuine [eigentlich] human culture’.19 Husserl understands this ‘ethical demand’ in the sense of ‘pure ethics’ rather than in the sense of morality, as he argues in the third of the Kaizo articles, Erneuerung als individualethisches Problem (Renewal as a Problem of Individual Ethics). There, Husserl describes ethics in terms of a rational selfdetermination of one’s life according to an inherent idea that operates regulatively as its condition of possibility, or, in other words, as ‘ethical life’; in contradistinction to morality, which he describes as the discipline which prescribes how good and evil are to be understood according to norms belonging to different cultural empirical contexts.20 Thus, while moral norms would be given externally, the renewal Husserl calls for responds to an ethical demand that is given from within and that, therefore, manifests an intrinsic Ideal. What this distinction between ethics and morality emphasizes here is that (a) the problem we are now confronting, according to Husserl, is the loss of faith in the Ideal, and (b) that the solution to that problem is an ethical one, namely, the renewal of the very Ideal.

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Husserl’s call for renewal parallels, but at the same time radicalizes, the argument introduced later in Crisis. It parallels it in the sense that the call for renewal signifies the recovery of autonomy, of the principle of presuppositionlessness, or the attitude of self-reflection, that modern science had decapitated, and as a consequence of which European humanity has reached an untenable position at a political, social and cultural level. But it also radicalizes it in the sense that it thematizes the question of ethics in relation to philosophy and the call for renewal. What Husserl is arguing here is that the nature of philosophy and, therefore, of the recovery of the meaningfulness discussed above in Crisis is not merely epistemological but it is also, and above all, ethical. The renewal of the Ideal that would allow us to restore the meaningfulness of humanity requires an ‘ethical life’.21 This signals an intertwinement between philosophy as an epistemological inquiry and the question of ethics. This intertwinement is precisely, as this study aims to show, the nest from which phenomenology comes to life as a rigorous philosophical inquiry that manifests the responsibility for returning philosophy to the core of scientific knowledge and research, and thus being capable of posing and dealing with the most pressing questions regarding the meaningfulness of human existence. Let me pursue this link here in order to begin to describe the ethical nesting of Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry. The importance of Husserl’s argument in the Kaizo articles is that it establishes with unwavering clarity that the true renewal of the Ideal of Science, and more generally of human culture, expresses an absolute ethical demand for a new and rigorous science. In other words, the renewal of human meaningfulness requires an ethical life. Ethical life, then, would correspond to a rigorous science, or, more precisely, to the rigorousness that, as Husserl explains, is unconditional, for it is that which makes the inquiry free from prejudice and dogmatism and, therefore, capable of endowing us with secure methods and firm results. What Husserl’s argument suggests in these various texts is that to speak of an inquiry that aims to be free from prejudice and presuppositions signifies living an ethical life. Nevertheless, this rigorous science of the human spirit, as Husserl himself calls it, which would serve as a foundation for a rationality of social and political praxis, is missing.22 What we miss, to put it more concretely, is the science that, in relation to the Idea of human being (and thus with the inseparable a priori ideas of individual man-community), would have achieved what mathematics of nature has achieved in relation to the Idea of nature.23 What is missing is a science of the Idea of spiritual being and, in particular, of the rational being, which encompasses ‘the entire universe of all the sciences of the spirit’.24 We miss the ‘mathesis of the spirit and the human condition’; that is to say, a spiritual science that would allow us to uncover the inner subjectivity, and its intersubjective root, by means of which the intersubjective acts and motivations are possible at a level that is not merely empirical, but rather corporeal in the spiritual sense [Leib].25 It is in this context that

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Husserl’s missing science of the human spirit would have the task of uncovering the ‘very essence of the spiritual that is manifested in the intimacy of the life of consciousness’.26 For it is in the sphere of consciousness that one is to find the regulative forms of reason as well as the a priori possibility to think those regularities freely. What this delving into the inner sphere of consciousness, carried out by means of this all-encompassing missing science of the human spirit, would reach is ‘the true and authentic humanity’ as objectively valid Idea, i.e., as telos, according to the meaning of which human culture is to be renewed. For what this missing science ultimately aims at – Husserl argues – is nothing other than the future of humanity, namely, the process of becoming an authentic humanity.27 It is in this precise context that Husserl goes on to identify phenomenology with, first, the taking up of this ‘missing science of the spirit’, the task of which is the renewal of the Idea of humanity into an authentic humanity; and, secondly, with the absolute ethical demand mentioned above, which now takes the name of ‘our responsibility’.28 A responsibility understood here in terms of an ‘ought’ upon which our philosophical task and endeavour sits.29 One of the key elements of the first of the five so-called Kaizo articles is, then, that it begins to define phenomenology as a responsible inquiry, an epistemological inquiry that is motivated and that manifests an absolute ethical demand for the renewal of the Idea, the telos, of European humanity. Within this framework, Husserl goes on to describe this ought as the responsibility to start searching for the scientific paths that no other science up to now has managed to prepare, beginning with preliminary methodological considerations. Moreover, Husserl understands that the discussion carried out in this very same article already belongs within this preparatory prolegomena of the science we are aiming to establish. Phenomenology, thus, would be the preparatory, or introductory, path towards a rational science of the human condition and its renewal; at the same time that this preliminary or introductory research would be the beginning of this new science. This suggests that phenomenology is not only ethical, insofar as it manifests an absolute ethical demand, a responsibility, an ‘ought’, towards the future of humanity, but it is also teleological in nature. And it is teleological because its task is one of searching for its own paths, its own regulative Ideal, namely, its very own ideal of science of the human spirit. The telos must be understood here as its own prescribing rule given from within as condition of possibility, rather than as an external norm that would simply have to be presupposed and that would impose certain axiomatic paths, stripping the inquiry from its essentially responsible character. This is why ‘ethics’ is not to be understood in the sense of normative morality. To speak of teleology in these terms is to speak of a phenomenological inquiry that has as its aim the realization of its telos, which is to be uncovered and renewed in the very philosophical activity that institutes (Urstiftung) it, and that does so as a response to an ethical demand,

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or that emerges out of its own responsibility. What this argument begins to briefly show is that phenomenology is the missing inquiry by means of which philosophy can manifest its true nature and be worthy of its name. The responsible task of phenomenology is the renewal of the Ideal of European humanity from which philosophy itself is born. Teleology and ethics thus come hand in hand and appear to be inseparable in Husserl’s philosophy. This is the underlying claim of this study and the basis on which this investigation of the ethical character of Husserl’s phenomenology rests. Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry departs from this context. Faced with the covering up of the inner dimension of life and with science’s inability to inquire into the origin of its inquiring, which in turn has led to the collapse of European humanity, Husserl begins a journey that aims to unveil the most primordial expression of human life. However, the uncovering of this inner dimension of life (phenomena) through which humankind aims to understand the meaning of its own existence requires, above all else, the recovery of the autonomous and philosophical character of the inquiry itself; it requires a new rigorous science without which the spiritual life of subjectivity would never be unveiled. In other words, the uncovering of the spiritual and transcendental life of subjectivity can only be undertaken within a radical and self-reflective epistemological inquiry that is rooted in an ethical demand for self-responsibility and that, therefore, is teleological in nature. Phenomenology is ethical life. This double connection between epistemology and ethics, and between ethics and teleology, allows Husserl to go on to speak of phenomenology as ethical life in terms of being an authentic personal self-examination in the sense of an ‘inspecto sui’, by means of which the human being turns her/himself into a new or renewed human being.30 It is for this reason that in Crisis Husserl speaks of phenomenology in terms of being not a revolution but a ‘complete personal transformation’ of the magnitude of a ‘religious conversion’ [religiösen Umkehrung].31 For while a ‘revolution’, like Galileo’s scientific one, simply overturns, in the sense of turning out of itself or changing itself into a different body, as the term revolutio indicates in Latin, a ‘conversion’ [conversio] transforms in the sense of turning or changing itself by going within itself (as the prefi x con indicates), or going into its own origins, into its very radicalness, its own root, namely, into its own regulative principle or condition of possibility, its telos. Thus, whereas a conversion implies a radical [radicalis] change in relation to the root [radix] or, in other words, a renewal, a revolution would never be radical enough because it is a change that never implicates the root or the origin itself. At the same time, the expression ‘religious conversion’ suggests an understanding of phenomenology as a conversion of a religious character. The term religious, rooted in the Latin religio, translates literally as ‘scrupulous consciousness’. According to this, to speak of phenomenology in the sense of a ‘conversion’ of a ‘religious’ character suggests here to speak of con-version, a turn inwards, a renewal, but undertaken with all scrupulosity,

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with all radicalness, with all rigorousness, rather than simply being a turn that falls into a ‘false religion’, literally a ‘superstitio’ or a belief built upon prejudices or presuppositions. The question of the conversion, then, elucidates that the authentic, and therefore phenomenological, self-examination embodies the renewal, the radical and rigorous transformation of the human being, and of humanity in general, as regulated by its very original Ideal. To speak of phenomenology as an ethical inquiry in terms of a conversion is to speak of an infinite self- examination, the aim of which is to ensure that the inquiry is free from presuppositions as much as one’s life is free from prejudice. This discussion indicates that Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry has a double character. As Elisabeth Ströker has also argued, on the one hand phenomenology is a concrete analysis of subjectivity, while on the other it is a ceaseless self-reflection upon its own activity.32 She goes on to say: ‘Whereas in the object-related analysis of phenomena, objectivity, reality and truth were to be made intelligible through phenomenological means, in the self-related analysis of phenomenology such intelligibility was to be ensured through a demonstration of the appropriateness and legitimacy of the means selected’.33 Thus, the uncovering of the transcendental and spiritual life of subjectivity is not only inseparable from, but, moreover, is rooted in phenomenology’s claim to self-grounding, i.e., to the self-justification of the inquiry itself. A self-justification that must be understood in terms of freedom from prejudice and presuppositions, as Husserl phrases it in Logical Investigations. This argument is important because it helps to elucidate the concept of ethics that Husserl introduces in the Kaizo articles and later on in Crisis. If Husserl’s phenomenology can be described as being eminently ethical, it is because, in the first place, the inquiry is motivated and pervaded by an (ethical) demand for uncovering the origin of the reflection and of the methodological undertakings that characterize it, aiming, thus, to become an autonomous inquiry free from ungrounded presuppositions. To define Husserl’s phenomenology as an ethical inquiry on the grounds of this ethical demand for autonomy or presuppositionlessness does not mean, however, that the inquiry is, or ever will become, fully autonomous and that, therefore, the inquiry would only be worth pursuing, and thus be ethical, if the promise of autonomy is to be fulfilled. The Ideal or telos of the renewal of humanity as a humanity that is free from prejudice is not reducible to the full realization of autonomy. Far from it, and as I shall discuss in more detail in chapters IV and V, Husserl’s notion of ethics as teleology rests upon the question of infinity; upon the fact that the inquiry unconditionally aims to be autonomous, free from assumptions and presuppositions, insofar as it expresses what Husserl himself calls in the Kaizo articles ‘ethical life’ and later in Crisis ‘a life of universal selfresponsibility [Selbstverantwortlichkeit]’ by means of which one shapes oneself into ‘the true “I”, the free, autonomous “I” which seeks to realise its innate reason, the striving to be true to himself’.34

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As briefly shown in the introduction above, Husserl had claimed in the Prolegomena that phenomenology cannot be grounded in a normative interest that acts as axiomatic principle.35 In other words, teleology does not mean normativism. Far from it, to strive to be true to oneself, to be responsible for one’s autonomy, and therefore to live an ethical life of universal self-responsibility, signifies what Husserl calls a ‘constant movement for self-elucidation’.36 Responsibility is the responsibility of reflection. Or as A. D. Smith has put it, for Husserl ‘philosophy is nothing other than absolute honesty’.37 But this honesty, this responsibility for presuppositionlessness or autonomy, is made manifest in the searching and realization of the telos from where the inquiry springs, rather than being an external moral axiom or norm that one has to simply presuppose. Thus, rather than being understood in a moral-normativistic sense, ethics should be understood as the essential necessity of all true theoretical activity and, therefore, as essential to the structure of meaning that is to ground all normative sub-disciplines. The opening paragraphs of the first Kaizo article make it clear that the problem is the loss of truthfulness of the human being, and that, therefore, the recovery of truth requires an inquiry that is not only epistemological but, above all, is ethical in a teleological sense. In the last chapter of this study I will discuss these questions in greater detail. In the meantime, the following sections and chapters offer an exposé and a first analysis of how this ethical life represented by a reflective responsibility for autonomy, for presuppositionlessness, motivates and is made manifest throughout the development of Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry itself.

§3. Epoché or the methodological attitude of phenomenology The question of epoché in Husserl’s phenomenology is the most immediate methodological expression of the requirement for an ethical life by means of which phenomenology aims to inaugurate the all-encompassing science of the human spirit, with the ultimate aim of renewing the meaningfulness of humanity. Although Husserl introduced the question of epoché for the first time in the series of lectures delivered in 1907 and published in 1947 under the name of Idea of Phenomenology, it is not until the publication of Ideas I in 1913 that Husserl offers a more systematic exposition of epoché and of its Cartesian origins. Later publications such as Cartesian Meditations and Crisis of European Sciences among others will offer further refinements, modifications and supplementations of this methodological approach. In Ideas I as well as in Cartesian Meditations and Crisis of European Sciences Husserl argues that the epoché through which the reflective phenomenological inquiry begins is grounded in the spirit of Cartesian philosophy, which Husserl saw as containing the seed of transcendental phenomenology.38 According to Husserl, Descartes was clear not only about the need for philosophy to become the root of science, but

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he was also clear about the manner in which philosophical knowledge was to acquire such a degree of absolute foundation. Descartes invested in a notion of an absolute and all-inclusive reflective science, a prima philosophia, founded on evident and indubitable immanent discernments, to which the philosopher arrives through the method of doubt. Husserl understands the spirit of Descartes’ method of doubt as a ‘sceptical epoché which places in question all his [the philosopher’s] hitherto existing convictions which forbids in advance any judgemental use of them, forbids taking any position as to their validity or invalidity’.39 Accordingly, and such is the radical impetus of Descartes’ philosophy that Husserl aims to embrace, the ‘Cartesian epoché’ already calls into question all forms of knowledge, implying not only all scientific thought but also the unscientific one, i.e., the knowledge of sense-experience. But to say that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology embraces the spirit of Descartes’ philosophy does not mean to say that the former is merely Cartesian and that, therefore, Husserl’s notion of epoché is a version of the method of doubt. In Ideas I Husserl introduces the term ‘Phenomenological Epoché’ in the following way: We can now let the universal epoché [. . .] step into the place of the Cartesian attempt at universal doubt. [. . .] Our design is just to discover a scientific domain, such as might be won precisely through the method of bracketing, though only through a definitely limited form of it. [. . .] We put out of action the general thesis which belongs to the essence of the natural standpoint, we place in brackets whatever it includes respecting the nature of Being: this entire natural world therefore which is continually ‘there for us’, ‘present to our hand’, and will ever remain there, is a ‘fact-world’ of which we continue to be conscious [. . .]. If I do this, as I am fully free to do, I do not then deny this ‘world’, as though I were a sophist, I do not doubt that it is there as through I were a sceptic; but I use the phenomenological epoché, which completely bars me from using any judgement that concerns spatio-temporal existence [. . .].40 Husserl characterizes epoché as the momentary suspension of the natural belief. To put out of play or to bracket the natural belief entails a suspension of judgement about the objective reality of something. To suspend means to abstain from presupposing that the world has or has not an objective reality previous to our experiencing of it. Accordingly, Husserlian suspension and Cartesian doubt cannot be conflated here. The phenomenological epoché does not doubt, neither does it deny the existence of a world to which I belong, in which I live, as a world that is permanently there and which one shares with other egos. At the most, the very world in which I belong might be an illusion or a hallucination and, therefore, the way in which this world gives itself

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to me might be otherwise than I originally supposed. In fact, phenomenological epoché does not even doubt that the world in which I belong and which I share with others can be a factual world measured mathematically in terms of objective space and time. Instead, phenomenology only suspends or puts out of action such or any other thesis about the world. It is for this reason that suspension does not mean Cartesian doubt. For while ‘doubt’ implies holding a negative position with regard to the existence of something, of which ‘being certain’ and ‘disbelieving’ are modalities, the bracketing effected by epoché is a matter of neutralizing or putting all such positions out of play. The problem with Descartes’ sceptic epoché is that insofar as it is a negation, it can never abandon a positionality regarding the world that always leaves the investigator in the natural attitude.41 It is only by suspending or neutralizing all positionality in relation to the reality of the world that the phenomenologist is capable of bracketing the natural attitude and, therefore, reaching a domain of life in which the world is lived and given in its own terms, as only it itself appears, namely, as phenomena. Thus, although Cartesian in spirit or origins, Husserl’s epoché is rather postCartesian, given that the inquiry does not simply operate within the boundaries established by Descartes. It is for this reason that Husserl can write that epoché, understood as the opening of the path that is to reach such a level of neutralized experience in which the world is most primordially given, ‘steps into the place of the Cartesian attempt as “universal” doubt’.42 For by putting out of play any positionality regarding the world, Husserl’s phenomenology is leaving behind the method of doubt as itself being a positionality regarding the world. Moreover, in leaving behind Cartesian doubt, epoché signifies the suspension of not only the notion of the Cartesian ego cogito but also the suspension of the mathematical structure of modern science that Descartes presupposed.43 After having discarded the sense-experience of which one cannot be sure, Descartes’ method of doubt faced the ego that carries out the methodical doubt. Driven by the ideal of science and its dualistic structure Descartes excludes the ego from the ‘Cartesian epoché’, arguing that the doubt itself would only be possible if the ego carried it out. Thus, for Descartes, the ego cogito is a necessary indubitable reality independent and detached from everything else. But if the ego cogito is left as self-evident, this is because Descartes’ inquiry presupposed the same traditional subject-object structure that frames modern science, in which the world is simply seen as an object standing against the mind. Despite his attempt to overcome the naïve objectivism that characterizes the Galilean universe, Descartes simply overturned the problem. Instead of having an objective world that pre-existed the mind, Descartes established a res cogitans that pre-existed the world and from which the meaningfulness of the world was merely deduced. Thus, although the projects of Galileo and Descartes are eminently different, the law governing the Galilean and the Cartesian universes can be said to be the same, namely, the principle of causality through

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which, by definition, the subject and the object have to be deduced from one another. The very method of doubt remained not only grounded but framed and limited by this principle, leading the method to ‘cancel itself’ and, therefore, to fail.44 As a result, instead of offering transcendental subjectivity, the ‘Cartesian epoché’ limits itself to offering us the transcendental realism of an axiomatic ego cogito. To say, however, that, in stepping into the method of doubt, epoché makes manifest a post-Cartesian step does neither mean that Husserl’s phenomenology signals a cancellation or a denial of Descartes’ philosophy nor that it should be so. As Husserl writes in the introduction to the Cartesian Meditations, Must not the only fruitful renaissance be the one that reawakens the impulse of the Cartesian Meditations: not to adopt their content but, in not doing so, to renew with greater intensity the radicalness of their spirit, [. . .], to make that radicalness true for the first time by enhancing it to the last degree, to uncover thereby for the first time the genuine sense of the necessary regress to the ego, and consequently to overcome the hidden but already felt naïveté of earlier philosophising?45 Epoché means, precisely, the ‘act’ of not accepting Descartes’ contents and of suspending the outcomes of the ‘Cartesian doubt’, in order to enhance the original spirit of the Cartesian doubt beyond its own prejudices, and thus uncover the genuine regress to the original field of consciousness, whereby the edifice of knowledge can be built. This already signals that the suspension effected by epoché does not simply begin in an abstract ‘I can’, but is rather grounded on a transcendental historic-genetic ground to which phenomenology aims to return. It is perhaps at this point that the difference between Descartes’ and Husserl’s method, as well as between the breadth of both philosophies, becomes clearer. More than a method, phenomenological epoché appears to be the attitude by means of which phenomenology begins to proceed. While Descartes’ method of doubt is rooted in a presupposed structure that never comes into question, Husserl’s epoché is the attitude that grants the inquiry the possibility of going beyond the limits of a method and, therefore, of uncovering not only the structure that presupposes the method but its constitution. In this sense, phenomenology, inaugurated by the performance of the methodological attitude of epoché, is the effecting foundation of a radical self-reflection. According to Husserl’s discussion, epoché, unlike Descartes’ method, is not presupposed by any principle or structure other than the universal and unconditional responsible demand for autonomy, whereby the phenomenological enquiry aims to uncover the rationality that structures the enquiry itself and that Descartes left ungrounded and presupposed. It is due to such a radical or scrupulous responsible demand for autonomy that it can be argued that Husserl’s methodological attitude entails the radicalness that Descartes’

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method of doubt lacked and that led the latter to a naïve philosophising. Phenomenology, as Husserl envisaged it, is the antidote to naivety. Husserl’s overall argument concerning epoché is to demonstrate that it is only due to the attitude of epoché, as expression and exercise of the universal self-responsible demand for autonomy, that phenomenology can open up to the original domain of life-experience in a Cartesian way without falling into Cartesianism.46 What does Husserl understand by this original domain of life-experience that underlies and grounds not only the positional method of doubt but even the structure that presupposes it? In Ideas I Husserl speaks of the phenomenological residuum that appears as a result of the effecting of epoché in the following way: Consciousness in itself has a being of its own which in its absolute uniquenes of nature remains unaffected by the phenomenological disconnection [epoché]. It therefore remains over as a ‘phenomenological residuum’, as a region of Being which is in principle unique, and can become in fact the field of a new science – the science of Phenomenology. Through this insight the ‘phenomenological’ epoché will for the first time deserve its name; to exercise it in full consciousness of its import will turn out to be the necessary operation which renders ‘pure’ consciousness accessible to us, and subsequently the whole phenomenological region.47 That which remains after the suspension of all position-taking in any of its modalities is pure consciousness itself. But consciousness has not a psychologistic sense here. As Husserl had already argued in Logical Investigations, consciousness is neither a box which objects can or must simply enter and which is completely detached from its objects, nor is it an entity that contains intra-mental objects.48 Rather, Husserl understands consciousness as ‘pure experience [Erlebnisse]’.49 After the disconnection of all positionality, the phenomenological residuum still amounts to a relation that, since it is not positional, can only be described in terms of neutrality, namely, as consciousness-of-something. In Cartesian Meditations Husserl describes pure consciousness or the pure phenomenon consciousness-of-something as ‘my pure living, with all the pure subjective processes making this up, and everything meant in them, purely as meant in them: the universe of “phenomena” in the [. . .] phenomenological sense’.50 This phenomenological dimension of pure or neutral experience or living is what Husserl understands as transcendental consciousness. The effecting of the epoché to transcendental consciousness also encompasses the suspension of the Cartesian ego cogito. According to Husserl, the ego to which all experiences are related in terms of this ego ‘living in them in either an active, passive, spontaneous, receptive or any other attitude, and indeed the ego in any and every sense we leave at first out of consideration’.51 The suspension of the Cartesian ego at this point is a significant step insofar as it determines that the

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phenomenological residuum is not the field of the ego but the field of the ‘cogito’ or, more precisely, the cogitationes. In similar fashion to Logical Investigations, but now in Cartesian terminology, Husserl refers to the acts of consciousness as cogitationes, that is, as the original relationship between the acts of thinking, desiring, hoping, remembering, etc., i.e., my cogitatio, and that which is desired, hoped or remembered together with its qualities, positions and so on, i.e., my cogitatum. Nevertheless, transcendental consciousness neither signals the subordination of the world to subjectivity nor does it undercut the equiprimordiality of subjectivity and world. Instead, and due to epoché as expression of the Cartesian spirit, Husserl’s phenomenology opens a new field of experience beyond an axiomatic ego. Epoché opens a prior phenomenological correlation between our cogitatio and our cogitatum, this correlation making up the field of the pure act of consciousness that defines the transcendental subjectivity that is to permit us to access a different reality. Furthermore, Husserl extends the phenomenological residuum beyond the individual act and into the concatenation of acts, that is to say, to how the acts of consciousness connect with each other forming a unity. Thus, epoché unravels the pure phenomena of my perceiving, my hoping, my desiring, etc., but as a synthesis of acts that makes up the stream of life in which the objects of the world that are perceived, desired or thought (my cogitatum) neither pre-exist the understanding of the mind (the cogitatio), nor are simply deduced from it.52 Within this context, epoché is not only a methodological step, but is the attitude of phenomenology in its attempts to overcome naïve philosophising by means of providing the inquiry with the means for self-accountability that very inquiry demands. It is only through the performance of epoché that phenomenology can reveal the transcendental life of consciousness in terms of a co-existence or correlation between cogitatio and cogitatum that is prior to the hierarchical relationship between a subject and an object that organizes the philosophical tradition, and which is what has led to the factualization of human life and, ultimately, to the loss of confidence in science and the collapse of human meaningfulness. To speak of the co-existence of cogitatio and cogitatum is to speak, as we shall see in further discussions, of a relationship in which consciousness and its object are not mere transcendent entities in relation to each other. The breakthrough of phenomenology at this beginning point is that it uncovers a notion of pure consciousness that expresses an irreducible correlation between cogitatio and cogitatum, between consciousness and the object of consciousness, in which the latter is described as an immanent transcendent or as a transcendence in immanence [reell immanenz].53 The uncovering and thematization of this relation is, in other words, the discovery of the parameters of intuitive givenness and of the phenomenological evidence [Evidenz] that can grant the inquiry its status of free and rigorous philosophy. This is a pivotal discovery of Husserl’s phenomenology and, particularly, of phenomenological epoché. For although epoché only delivers the so-called static

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frame of experience and meaningfulness within which phenomenology can account for its way of proceeding, the uncovering of any further realm beyond this frame will only be possible as an intensification of the attitude of epoché. Epoché is not only of epistemological importance insofar as it settles the limits of human experience and of meaning. Furthermore, it is also and primordially of ethical importance insofar as its aim is to account for the frame within which phenomenology emerges and proceeds.

§4. Transcendental experience and the question of ‘immanent transcendence’ In delivering the parameters of intuitive givenness and of the phenomenological evidence that can grant the inquiry its status of free and rigorous philosophy, the effecting of epoché also begins to make manifest the transformation to which science and philosophy are to be exposed at the hands of Husserl’s phenomenology. In opening the realm of transcendental subjectivity, epoché also signifies a first step towards the re-grounding of naturalistic modern science in a rigorous philosophical attitude. While, as discussed earlier, scientific experience approaches its objects-facts with a naturalized preconception of reality, Husserl’s phenomenology wants to return to a notion of transcendental experience in which the object of consciousness is given in its eidetic originality rather than in the factuality with which the naïve scientific attitude measures and constructs its objects. Two central issues are at stake in the argument here. One is the notion of eidetic science. The other is the notion of Eidos. The phenomenological task of returning to such an original transcendental level of experience in which the object appears in its own eidetic originality does not imply a cancellation or a denial of the natural and human sciences. The point, instead, is to suspend the attitude that misguides the sciences in order to re-ground them in their own eidetic possibility, so that science can deal with a notion of human existence that is eidetically meaningful instead of merely factual.54 To suspend the naturalistic attitude signifies here the suspension of the sciences not qua science but qua the apprehension of empirical facts as the primal source of experience.55 Phenomenology holds in suspension the nature of the facts as well as the notion of sensualistic experience that renders them as facts. As a result of such a suspension, epoché uncovers an essential or eidetic nature of objects that is more primordial than the factual realm of the same object, as well as a new notion of experience that is also more original than the apprehension of facts. In doing so, epoché initiates a new scientific realm, a new science altogether. This is phenomenology as an eidetic science. The deployment of eidetic phenomenology does not signify, however, the abolition of sciences in their empirical realm, but rather ‘the establishing of new sciences in their own eidetic grounding (their Essences) as

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sciences capable of dealing with Essential Being, [and as such it] is indispensable for the further advance of empirical sciences themselves’. 56 This implies the uncovering of Eidos as much as the uncovering of a more primordial sense of experience through which Eidos are self-given in immediacy. Husserl’s discussion of Eidos aims to show the difference and the intricate connection between facts and essences, in order to delimit the notion of object on the one hand and the notion of science with regard to this object on the other. He writes: Every fact could be ‘essentially’ other than it is [ . . . for . . . ] it belongs to the meaning of everything contingent that it should have essential being and therewith an Eidos to be apprehended in all its purity; and this Eidos comes under essential truths of varying degrees of universality. An individual object is not simply and quite generally an individual, a ‘this-there’ some-thing unique; but being constituted thus and thus ‘in itself ’ it has its own proper mode of being, its own supply of essential predicables which must qualify it (qua ‘Being as it is in itself’) [. . .]57 In the first place, Husserl distinguishes empirical facts from essences. The former can be experienced internally in the case of human sciences or externally in the case of natural sciences. In either case, this experience is grounded in objects qua facts. Under this notion of experience, things are apprehended individually, this individuality of the fact being understood as that which the thing actually is in a determinate context of space and time. Husserl, however, emphasizes the aspect of contingency that defines the fact qua individual, arguing that even though facts are experienced in a determinate space and time they are not limited to that space and time, for they can be apprehended in another context of space and time. If this is possible, Husserl continues to argue, it is because this fact can be understood in relation to a non-factual ideal essence that is contained within the fact. Husserl understands the ideal essence (Eidos or Wesen) as that which does not change with the place and time in which the fact is apprehended in its contingency. Thus, essences can be said to be independent from the facts, but only insofar as essences are contained in facts. For instance, we refer to an essence in terms of a particular colour, whereas we can refer to a contingent fact with examples such as box, circle, chair, book or a piece of paper. While a particular white box is apprehended as a contingent fact in a context of space and time, the whiteness of the box would not change whether that box is apprehended in a determinate context or another. While the fact is contingent, the essence is universal, for it is supratemporal and supra-spatial. This does not mean that Husserl is denying the existence of the individual object in favour of the existence of the essence. The discussion undertaken at the very beginning of Ideas I makes it clear that the aim is precisely to characterize

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the irreducible relationship between individual facts and essences. This relationship receives in Ideas I the name of ‘essential necessity’.58 Although it is true that essences are independent and therefore not reducible to individual facts, and, as such, Husserl defines them as ‘essential universalities’, it is equally true that such essences maintain an intricate and necessary relationship with individual facts.59 On the one hand, and despite the character of independence that the essence has with regard to individual facts, the eidetic universality can only be ‘intuited’ by means of grasping it in the individual object. What this means is that essential universality must necessarily be realized in an individual object if the former is to be intuited. Ideal essences cannot be grasped outside the individual object. On the other hand, however, the individual object would only be grasped in its being, in its ‘whatness’, and that means as a white box and not just as a piece of matter the qualities of which are presupposed and induced into it, if it is grasped in accordance with its essence(s). The being or the whatness of an individual fact can be apprehended only in the frame of individuality, without it being the individuality which is primordially grasped. That is to say, for instance, that the essence ‘white’ can only be intuited in this or that concrete individual material element, in this or that context of space and time, whether the latter is seen by the naked eye or imagined. We must add here, however, that the apprehension of an object by means of an intuition of its essence [Wesen] does not necessarily imply that this is to be grasped all at once in all its completeness. Even though intuition is an unmediated apprehension, the individual contingent never appears all at once but in gradual adumbrations [Abschattungen]. Since the individual can only be grasped in its essences, and the individual takes time to grasp, then so must the essences. This is clarified in Husserl’s exposé of the notion of ‘regions’.60 Essences can be more or less general. One object contains more than one essence and, thus, the cognition of an individual fact is possible through the cognition of a whole scale of essences. For instance, the essence ‘colour’ is of a higher level or is more general than the essence ‘white’ or ‘red’, the same as the essence ‘material thing’ is of a higher order than the essence ‘colour’ (for colour can only be grasped in extension). The essences of higher order receive the name of ‘regions’ and every fact is apprehended by grasping the essences that pertain to the region under which that individual fact falls. Thus, an individual fact such as a particular ‘white box’ will only be grasped as such when grasping the essences that qualify it, namely, the essences ‘white’, ‘colour’, ‘material thing’, ‘extension’, ‘shape’ among many others. The act of grasping is not a total act, but a stream in which the object can be grasped ad infinitum. I will return to this point in forthcoming chapters. Accordingly, the theory of essences can be said to be dependent on a notion of correspondence between essence and individual thing that claims to be more original than the relationship through which the philosophical tradition has generally maintained an independence of one to the other in its various forms

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of Platonism or empiricism. Despite the possibility of arguing that Husserl subordinates the individual thing to essences (which to some extent seems to be the case), it must be noted that neither essences nor facts are subordinated to their relationship. This is a cardinal point in Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology. The apprehension of essences is only possible within the perception of individual things in which essences are exemplified or illustrated. Simultaneously the perception of the individual thing, as whatever it might essentially be, is only possible through the intuition of essences.61 It is precisely this irreducible correspondence between essences and individual thing that allows Husserl to present a notion of ‘experience’ that is more original than that defended by empiricism. This is the notion of intuition as the mode of apprehension of what Husserl calls eidetic sciences and that, therefore, is not restricted only to the sensuous apprehension of facts. Intuition is the gaze that frees experience from the scope of factualities, offering us instead a mode of seeing that is able to deal with the way in which those factualities can be given at all and seen individually. Within this frame, the notion of the intuition of essences becomes the ground that is to open the sciences to their own regional eidetic fields. That is, it is through intuiting the mode in which an individual fact is grasped as an object (i.e., in accordance with the eidetic region(s) in which it falls and which are contained within it) that every particular science would be able to uncover itself as a regional ontology on which its scientific-empirical realm depends. What Husserl is arguing here with the introduction of regional ontologies is the recovery of what could be called the dignity of Science as an investigation that is capable of dealing with the being or the whatness of whatever it investigates in its respective field of work. Furthermore, the correspondence between universal essences and contingent individual facts that emerges after the effecting of epoché is, precisely, what allows Husserl to argue for a different and deeper notion of experience through which a new domain of eidetic sciences, qua regional ontologies, can be put to work. The intuition of universal essences in contingent individual facts is, thus, what frees experience from the factual naturalistic realm, at the same time that it lets experience regain its transcendental domain, that is, and as discussed above, a domain of experience described through the coexistence or correlation between cogitatio and cogitatum. If the reconfiguration of the relationship between subject and object is to be possible at all, it is due to the theory of essences, which provides us with a relation of inseparability and correspondence between essences and facts, through which Husserl is able to present a different notion of object to that of the naturalist tradition. The eidetic object is, thus, an object that is neither a merely exterior given fact nor an interior (or intra-mental) moment of thought. Instead, Husserl presents the eidetic object as the cogitatum that demands to be grasped by means of intuition, i.e., by means of a mental vision that defines the cogitatio in relation to that which is seen, i.e., the cogitatum. The

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eidetic object, thus, opens a field of experience (i.e., intuition) to which the natural standpoint cannot have access. To express the correlation between the cogitatio and the cogitatum in terms of the intuition of essences signals what can be understood to be one of the central aims of Husserl’s phenomenology. For it signifies the uncovering of the original relationship in which that which is seen by the cogito is neither merely transcendent nor merely immanent or produced in it. On the contrary, the eidetic object is grasped as a genuine or reelle immanenz in relation to the act of grasping but without being merely given within it nor posited by it (a reale immanenz).62 The eidetic object, thus, by adopting the role of immanent transcendence (i.e., reelle immanenz), becomes the pure condition of possibility for a knowledge that is capable of going beyond violence and determinism and that, instead, is a mode of cognition understood within the field of life in which consciousness and object co-exist. It is in this sense that it can be said that the theory of essences plays a central role in the discovery of transcendental subjectivity. By rendering the frame of transcendental subjectivity, phenomenological epoché opens the possibility for a different notion of life [Leben]. That is, an experience [Erlebnis] by means of which the objects of consciousness can be understood in terms of being constituted rather than constructed or deduced from the Cartesian ego cogito. Epoché to transcendental consciousness indeed delivers transcendental subjectivity. Subjectivity, here, however, is not synonymous with subject, but rather with a relationship with the world in which the latter appears in all its eidetic primordiality. What I am suggesting here is that it is only as a result of having effected epoché as the exercise of the phenomenological attitude, of the demand for autonomy that expresses ethical life, that phenomenology can claim the uncovering of ‘immanent transcendence’. Paraphrasing Patocˇka, epoché would function as the condition of possibility for thinking an object that is neither a mere given object nor a purely exterior one but which is radically other, radically different to my thought.63 This suggestion should not, however, cloud the reasons that lead us to claim that Husserl’s phenomenology is an ethical inquiry. Phenomenology is not ethical simply because it presents us with a relation consciousness-world in which the former does not impose itself on the latter and that, instead, lets it be constituted. If phenomenology is to be considered an ethical inquiry, this can only be due to the universal and unconditional demand for presuppositionlessness that guides the research and, in particular, to the expression and exercise of such a demand by means of epoché. For if phenomenology, and intuition in particular, can present us with a relation of co-existence and constitution between consciousness and world, rather than with one of construction and violence, this is relative to the ethical demand for autonomy and presuppositionlessness effected by epoché. The effecting of the demand for presuppositionlessness by means of epoché signals the quest for a notion of evidence that can define the phenomenological discoveries and, therefore, re-frame the meaning of humanity. Although Husserl associates them in Logical Investigations as well as in Ideas I, intuition [Anschauung] and evidence [Evidenz] should not be conflated and taken as synonymous terms. As

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we shall see in further discussions, the principle of Evidenz is not exhausted in intuition, and, therefore, neither is the ethical character of phenomenology. Thus far I have presented what can be defined as the frame of the opening step of Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry: the unconditional demand for evidence and autonomy or presuppositionlessness that characterizes the inquiry, the attitude of epoché that expresses that demand and, finally, the parameters of the realm of transcendental subjectivity and meaningfulness that emerge after the performance of epoché. Chapters II and III will give a detailed account of the questions of intuition and intentionality by means of which Husserl describes transcendental subjectivity and the possibility of meaning. Phenomenology, however, does not stop with the analysis and description of the structure of the act of consciousness, in which the object appears in its own terms. Instead, and driven by its unconditional demand for autonomy and presuppositionlessness, Husserl’s inquiry intensifies its proceedings in order to reach what can be called the genesis of the structure of transcendental life. Husserl distinguished between these two general tasks, coining them with the terms of static and genetic phenomenology.64 While a detailed discussion of what these two tasks entail will be undertaken in Chapter V, the second part of this chapter will introduce the frame of this genetic level. In particular I will deal here with the methodological intensification of epoché, namely ‘reduction’ and the further ‘intentional explication’, by means of which Husserl’s phenomenology reaches the spiritual structure of transcendental life whereby, as was put earlier quoting Husserl in the first of the Kaizo articles, the human being is to be capable to think freely the forms of their own reason and, thus, attain the meaningfulness of human existence.

B. The Uncovering of the Spirituality of Transcendental Subjectivity §1. The transcendental reduction The discovery of transcendental subjectivity is not to be understood as a final aim, but as a step towards the inner structure that clothes transcendental life and the intuitive experience that defines meaningfulness. I suggest calling this clothing structure ‘the spiritual life of consciousness’ or ‘the spirituality of consciousness’. The uncovering of the spirituality of consciousness is not just relevant because it can provide the phenomenologist with the origin and formation of the transcendental life, of cogitationes or thinking acts, by means of which objects are constituted in the acts of consciousness. Its relevance also resides in the fact that, by aiming to uncover spirituality, phenomenology aims to disclose the original ground from which the very phenomenological reflection emerges in the first place. In delving further into the origin of reflection, phenomenology makes manifest

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the radicalness of the demand for autonomy or presuppositionlessness that characterizes Husserl’s inquiry as a whole. Without such a new step into the origin of transcendental life, phenomenology itself as an inquiry would remain unjustified and ungrounded. Husserl introduces this further step which, in Ideas I, he terms the transcendental or phenomenological reduction. Although the way he uses the terms epoché and reduction in future writings is frequently confusing – since some times he uses reduction to refer to epoché, and epoché to refer to both as being two moments of the same – epoché and reduction are two different steps. At the same time that epoché and reduction are two different methodological moments, the two are also narrowly connected to the extent that the transcendental reduction can only be undertaken within or as an intensification of epoché and the phenomenological attitude that the latter exercises and expresses. Thus, and in a first sense, the transcendental reduction can only be effected or exercised once the natural attitude has been suspended and transcendental subjectivity has appeared for analysis, allowing for the possibility of re-effecting a suspension in order to let the above-mentioned spirituality of consciousness emerge. If on the one hand epoché is the exercise of the unconditional demand for autonomy or presuppositionlessness, on the other the intensifying reduction, insofar as it delves deeper into the origin [radix] of pure consciousness, can be understood as a radicalization of this demand. Moreover, and insofar as it is effected in order to disclose the origin of the very reflective thinking that characterizes the inquiry, reduction can be understood as the attempt to fulfil such a demand and the very phenomenological attitude. At the same time, though, I would like to suggest here that epoché itself is to be understood within the frame of the transcendental reduction. This can be observed in the fact that epoché already begins with the interest that leads the phenomenologist beyond or beneath his or her belief in the world and the facts contained in it. As A. D. Smith has argued: ‘[. . .] we must be interested in something else, something that is such that the question about the truth or falsity of our natural beliefs is simply out of place. That something else is our experiencing self [. . .]. Only if we are concerned solely with this domain does the epoché [. . .] make sense’.65 It is for this reason that epoché must be understood as an ‘operation only in relation to a certain theoretical concern, to a certain direction in which reflective thought can move’.66 This is perhaps why the phenomenological reduction is also called transcendental reduction right from the beginning, for the whole inquiry is a reflection on a transcendental experiencing domain. However, and although transcendental reduction can be taken as the indispensable measure that leads to the attitude of epoché, this does not simply mean that epoché is a mere instrument or tool which the inquiry can opt to use or not.67 As Smith writes, ‘epoché must be effected’, for if we are purely concerned with our own subjective lives, then the phenomenologist has no other option than to disregard the content of our natural beliefs as a ‘premise’; otherwise, one would be simply concerned with the reality of

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some worldly objectivity.68 For this reason, epoché is to be understood within the frame or direction of transcendental reduction, at the same time that transcendental reduction itself can be read as an intensification of the indispensable epoché by means of which Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology can only begin. To put it another way, the transcendental reduction is effected within epoché only as much, and paradoxically, as epoché is performed within the transcendental scope of the phenomenological reduction. This would help to explain Husserl’s ambiguities when referring to the steps by means of which the demand for autonomy or presuppositionlessness that characterizes phenomenology is exercised. I will return to this discussion concerning the relation between epoché and reduction and the relevance that this relation has for phenomenology in Chapter V. Meanwhile let me now concentrate on the specific task of the step of reduction. As argued, epoché suspended the natural reality of the objects of consciousness and the standpoint from which a more originary eidetic dimension of those objects of the world is apprehended. Within this frame, the task of the reduction is to suspend the experiences that epoché leaves us with. To bracket experience means that in order to uncover that which makes possible the transcendental notion of experience, we ought now to suspend those very activities through which Husserl accounts for the constitution of the object of consciousness. Elisabeth Ströker has rightly argued that the reduction is the carrying out of a critique of knowledge and of the (intentional) acts by means of which such knowledge is acquired. She states that the undertaking of such a critique has the final function of preparing for the solution of the sense and validity of knowledge.69 To put it another way, reduction aims to reveal the conditions of possibility of the objectivity that guarantees knowledge and, more generally, the meaningfulness of human existence. For this reason, and since, after epoché, (eidetic) knowledge emerges through the constitutive experiences in which the cogitatum is intuitively given in consciousness, the function of the reduction is none other than the suspension of the very acts of consciousness (together with the eidetic objects that appear in those acts). The first outcome of the transcendental reduction, thus, is going to be that consciousness is not simply reducible to acts.70 Although this becomes obvious in further texts, as we shall discuss below, Ideas I already seems to be struggling to advance this thesis. Husserl comes up with a surprising discovery here in relation to Logical Investigations, as he recognizes in a footnote.71 This surprise is the pure ego: So much is clear from the outset, that after carrying this reduction through, we shall never stumble across the pure Ego as an experience among others within the flux of manifold experiences which survives as transcendental residuum; nor shall we meet it as a constitutive bit of experience appearing with the experience of which it is integral part and again disappearing. The

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Ego appears to be permanently, even necessarily, there, and this permanence is obviously not that of a stolid unshifting experience, of a ‘fi xed idea’. On the contrary, it belongs to every experience that comes and streams past, its ‘glance’ goes ‘through’ every actual cogito, and towards the object. This visual ray changes with every cogito [. . .] but the Ego remains self-identical. [. . .] The pure Ego appears to be necessary in principle, and as that which remains absolutely self-identical in all real and possible changes of experience, it can in no sense be reckoned as a real part or phase of the experiences themselves. In every actual cogito it lives out its life in a special sense, but all experiences also within the mental background belong to it and it to them, and all of them, as belonging to one single stream of experience, that, namely, which is mine, must permit of being transformed into actual cogitationes or of being inwardly absorbed into such [. . .].72 By suspending the cogitationes, Husserl claims that the reduction renders the ‘limiting point’ [Grenzpunkt] that unites all those experiences as my experiences.73 The limiting point is my pure ego which, insofar as it remains permanently and self-identical while every experience streams past, could then be said to be the life of my own cogitationes. It is the ego, that by being and living in all my cogitationes, synthesizes them in a whole single stream of experience. Without the necessary permanence of this pure ego (whether in state of wakefulness or dormancy) all my experiences would not be my experiences, but only dispersed experiences unrelated to each other, making it virtually impossible to speak of my life in a unitary sense, as one stream of life. The cancellation of the ego, moreover, would decapitate the possibility of the phenomenological self-reflection in general, and of epoché and reduction in particular, insofar as the latter are active performances, acts or experiences belonging to the same stream of consciousness, the origin of which phenomenology investigates. The pure ego, thus, appears to be at this point of the discussion the beating pulse that, after epoché and reduction have been effected, still allows us to speak of my transcendental life, of my pure phenomenological living, of my self. Nevertheless, the pure ego is not a mere ‘fi xing idea’ or, what is the same, an axiomatic ego in relation to my experiences. Instead, it belongs with them and lives in every one of my cogitationes, making them possible qua my cogitationes. Simultaneously, however, this belonging or living in every one of my cogitationes does not imply that the pure ego is, as Husserl puts it above, a ‘real part or phase of the experiences themselves’.74 The pure ego belongs and lives within those experiences without driving them or guiding them. The pure ego does not decide my experiences, but it unites them. It is for this reason that Husserl defines the pure ego in terms of a ‘quite peculiar transcendence [. . .], a transcendence in immanence’.75 For while the pure ego is fundamental for my cogitationes, insofar as it synthesizes them as mine, and thus unites my life as mine, on the

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other hand the pure ego is not reducible to my cogitationes. To characterize the ego as immanent transcendence means, furthermore, that the pure ego is not a mere transcendent entity, res, in relation to my cogitationes, for this would imply that the pure ego is a wholly pre-constituted ego that, as discussed above, decides and even constructs my experiences. Instead, Husserl insists that this ‘quite peculiar transcendence’ is ‘a non-constituted transcendence’ and that, therefore, the pure ego cannot be understood here as a mere transcendent fi xed idea. It makes sense, then, that in order to clarify his position regarding the pure ego, Husserl prefers to identify this pure ego with the Kantian ‘ “I think” that must be able to accompany all my presentations’ rather than with Descartes’ axiomatic ego.76 In this effort to reach and gain a clear gaze of the root of pure consciousness, and once the cogitationes have been suspended, Husserl goes on to bracket ‘other varieties of the transcendent’, namely all the ‘transcendents’ that are not ‘transcendence in immanence’ and that, therefore, do not belong with the pure sphere of consciousness.77 In the first place Husserl undertakes the reduction of God, for not only the ‘divine’ Being claim to be ‘transcendent’ to the world and our own experiencing of the world, our cogitationes, but it also claims to be transcendent to the ‘absolute consciousness’, claiming thus another absoluteness outside my own consciousness.78 Secondly, Husserl extends the reduction to ‘the general objects or essences’, arguing that ‘they are too in a certain way “transcendent” to pure consciousness, [for they are] not to be found in it’.79 The suspension of essences applies to the regional essences and, furthermore, to the regional ontologies that pertain to every region of essences, arguing in this case that ‘[t]o phenomenology that proposes really to limit itself to the region of pure experience, no transcendent-eidetic regions and disciplines can contribute’.80 As examples of those transcendent essences that are to be suspended here Husserl not only lists ‘thing’, ‘spatial shape’, ‘movement’ or ‘colour of a thing’, but he also adds ‘man’, ‘human feeling’, ‘soul’, ‘psychical experience’, ‘person’, ‘quality of character’ and the like.81 Two important things must be noted here. One is that despite the suspension of essences, the world does not disappear in its totality from the phenomenological analysis. After the reduction there is still a world left – as we shall see below – but this world is immanent, or an immanent transcendence, to the pure ego (not the cogitationes). It is also important to note that the list of transcendent essences that Husserl provides as ‘example’ is not a list elaborated at random. In it, one finds a clear indication of what Husserl is after at this stage of the reduction to the pure ego of the stream of consciousness. Reduction to the pure ego is not a reduction to a mere idea of man, person or even soul [animus sive intellectus]. The pure ego, therefore, is neither a divinity nor an ideal object. Instead, the pure ego seems to be here the condition of possibility that is to allow ‘ideal objects’ to be so and to be treated as such through their corresponding ontologies. This is made clear in Ideas II whereby Husserl suggests that the task of the

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reduction is, precisely, to uncover a more original experience that takes place, so to speak, between the ego-pole and a correlate world, and through which the further constitution of the world is possible.82 It is true that the introduction of the ego in Ideas I and Ideas II is rather problematic. For although the so-called Cartesian way does not simply mean that Husserl’s phenomenology is a piece of Cartesian philosophy, it is also true that the reduction to the ego ultimately and unwittingly seems to lead to a certain loss of the world. Donn Welton argues here that ‘since the ego is understood as a synthesizing pole, its proper correlate is not world but object’.83 According to Welton, and despite Husserl’s efforts, Ideas I ‘overdetermines the asymmetry between “I” and “object” by blending this with a Cartesian ontological difference between “absolute” and “relative being” ’. ‘The world’ – he goes on to say citing Husserl in Ideas I – ‘is thereby treated as “a merely intentional being, such that it has the merely secondary relative sense of being for a consciousness”. As a result, the difference between ego and world becomes understood as an ontological priority of the ego over the world and thereby as an ontological reduction of world to a sphere of “immanence”, to the domain of the subject’.84 Although it is true that it is precisely in Ideas I that Husserl introduces the question of the hylé as the domain of experience that is already more original than the intentional act, this does not solve the whole problem. The question of the hyletic allows Husserl to claim already in Ideas I that intentionality is grounded on a non-intentional sensile [sensuelle] domain of experience.85 If we take this question seriously, then Ideas I does not simply represent a reduction of the correlate of the ego-pole to merely intentional being and, therefore, a reduction of experience to intentional acts, but rather an attempt to reach the level of experience that makes intentionality, as well as the correlate intentional being, possible. Furthermore, and insofar as it is non-intentional, the hyletic object is not simply immanent to the subject. On the other hand, the way the question is introduced in Ideas I does not lessen the problem brought up by Welton. For despite acknowledging Husserl’s introduction of the pre-intentional domain of the hyletic, the transcendental residuum emerging after the reduction is still constrained within a static egoic subjectivity organized in terms of correspondence between two poles – the noetic I and the noematic object. Although the hyletic object is not simply immanent to the subject (as Welton claims), it is nonetheless bound to the limits of the act and, therefore, is object rather than world. One possible reason for this simplification of experience to noetic-noematic correlation can be found in the role that Husserl sees in the ego itself and in the relation that the ego and the hyletic sensile experience maintain. Although in Ideas I, as argued above, Husserl already refers to the dormant ego as a moment in which consciousness is implicitly rather than explicitly aware of what is not itself, such a moment of experience is still part of the active ego of subjectivity, from which the world as horizon is, as Welton puts it above, lost. Thus, and although dormant, all experience is relative to the activity of the ego in the same way as the

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hyletic, although pre-intentional, is relative and integrated to the intentionality of consciousness. It is perhaps within this context that we can understand why, at this stage, Husserl’s inquiries seem to point towards a re-definition of the hyletic stratum into a notion of passivity that underlies the ego and the intentionality that defines the acts of consciousness. Transcendental phenomenology now seeks underneath the acts and the ego that unites them in one single stream, in order to uncover a possible horizon of experience that is deeper than (and that constitutes and motivates) the ego itself, and in which the world is re-gained in a mode other than being a mere correlate integrated in the egoicity of consciousness. This is precisely the step that Husserl takes in Cartesian Meditations when he undertakes a peculiar abstractive transcendental reduction ‘of transcendental experience to the sphere of ownness’.86 The way this reduction is undertaken is, precisely, by disregarding ‘all constitutional effects of intentionality relating immediately or mediately to other subjectivity and [delimiting] first of all the total nexus of that actual and potential intentionality in which the ego constitutes within himself a peculiar ownness’.87 As a result of this peculiar reduction within the transcendental sphere, Husserl claims the emergence of my sphere of ownness in the shape of the structure or ‘founding stratum’ of a monad, which he then goes on to define through the question of embodiment.88 Let us observe more closely the result of our abstraction and, accordingly, what it leaves us with. From the phenomenon world [. . .] a substratum becomes separated, as the ‘Nature’ included in my ownness, a Nature that must always be carefully distinguished from [. . .] the Nature that becomes the theme of the natural scientist. [. . .] What is acquired [. . .] by the natural scientist is a stratum that belongs to the Objective world itself [. . .] and is therefore itself Objective. [. . .]. But in the case of our abstraction the sense ‘Objective’, which belongs to everything worldly – as constituted intersubjectively, as experienceable by everyone [. . .] – vanishes completely. [. . .] Belonging to this ‘Nature’ and included in my peculiar ownness, I then find my animate organism as uniquely singled out – namely as the only one of them [organisms] that is not just a body but precisely an animate organism.89 I would like to concentrate on three main points. In the first place, Husserl’s reduction to ownness leaves us with a more intrinsic notion of Nature within my ownness in which I find, before anything else, my own animate organism. This animate organism is not a simple physiological body [Körperlich] but the living-body [Leib] that I move, touch, hear, smell or see; the same body that I perceive with kinaesthetically and that is my purest ownness. The relevance of the question of the Leib at this stage is that it introduces a notion of consciousness that precedes the classical mind-body split, as if my body were a Körperlich that is animated or ensouled [animatio], as is the case in Descartes’

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philosophy.90 Husserl’s notion of living-body [Leib] does not fall into a double and split dimension. This is due to the fact that the performance of epoché that brackets the natural attitude does not bracket my body in the sense of Leib, but puts out of play instead a conception of my body as corporeal object [Körperlich]. After having performed the reduction, one can still say that I am a body [Leib] which is not an instrument of my intellectus or my animus, but that is me.91 I do not have a body, but I rather am a body. My ownness is not one of property but one of being. ‘I am incarnated being [l’être]’, as Patocˇ ka once put it.92 I am, thus, a living-body, if by ‘I am’ we understand here the intricate and inseparable unity that consciousness and body are – and not just the relationship they have, as if they could be out of that relationship. The reduction to pure ownness signifies the reduction to the original incarnation of my consciousness. In the second place, Husserl characterizes such incarnated consciousness, my body, in terms of being ‘my spiritual ownness’.93 Paul Ricœur has interpreted this spiritual embodiment as ‘an autonomous positive totality [. . .] a something pre-given which, by reason of its charge of potentiality and stretch of its horizons, has the density of an I am which always precedes the I think’94. Ricœur does not simply seem to be arguing that the reduction to my spiritual ownness, to my Leib, is a reduction to a dimension of life that is more original than Descartes’ ‘mens sive animus sive intellectus’ and than an empirical psychological personality. Furthermore, he is suggesting that the reduction to ownness has opened a new domain of life within the transcendental domain of subjectivity, of the ‘I think’, of the ego that accompanies my intentional experiences. This new domain that paradoxically can only be characterized by being a spiritual density is – as Ricœur puts it above – the very potentiality for the ‘I think’, namely, for my transcendental thinking that constitutes the world. In other words, the reduction to spiritual ownness could be understood here as a reduction to a horizon of potentiality that precedes as well as stretches beyond the correlation ego-object and the intentional acts within which the ego lives and unites in one stream. This is supported by Husserl when he defines the living-body as the body to which ‘fields of sensation’ are attached.95 This sensation, however, is not to be understood here empirically but as the transcendental primordial field by means of which embodied consciousness is originally oriented towards the world, or, we can say, as the very ‘sensile’ origin of all perception – to use the same term employed by Husserl in Ideas I. The sensile origin of perception is not reducible to perceptual acts. Far from it, it stands for what can be called the spatio-temporal frame of the spiritual body by means of which the objects of the world are or can be perceived.96 As I will discuss in greater detail in Chapters IV and V, to speak of the body as the spatio-temporal frame already invokes a more original experience, a passive awareness of a world-horizon or background in which no act is being performed, but through which the world already implicitly appears. This is an important step with regard to the question of the hyletic,

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for, unlike in Ideas I, the world-horizon or background is not a noematic correlate of the ego but rather a pre-noetico-noematic level of experience. Experience, to put it another way, has been freed from the limiting scope of the act of consciousness. The relevance of this discussion will be, above all, that it makes it clear that intuitive givenness or the rule-boundedness of meaning that defines the principle of presuppositionlessness up to Ideas I is now suspended, so that phenomenology can take a further step and give an account of the very origin and motivation of such a rule. This is important because it shows that the principle of presuppositionlessness is not ultimately restricted to intuition but rather exceeds it. I shall tackle this question in more depth in Chapter V. In the third place, the reduction to the sphere of ownness undertaken in Meditation V involves, yet, a further discovery. Since my spiritual ownness is a bodily density by means of which the world is spiritually sensed prior to being perceived, then such a sensation must implicitly involve a self-sensing or a selfawareness of my own body. This is why Husserl can argue here that this body, my body, is the only one that is not just a body [Körper] but an animate organism [Leib].97 All the other bodies are bodies given ‘mediately’ in perceptual acts, but my body, me, is self-given or self-sensed ‘immediately’ (pre-reflectively), prior to the perception of any material body. This does not simply mean that one has to sense one’s own body and then go on to perceive an object, as if both were different acts. Since the awareness of my own body is immediate, it cannot be taken as an act, but rather as a pre-active moment of experience of ‘my functioning organ’, that is incrusted in any external perception.98 Perception and self-awareness are given in one stroke. To be left with this sphere of ownness, with the essence of my transcendental thought, of my ‘I can’, means, then, to be left with the spiritual sphere of my Leib, with the pre-reflective sensile awareness and self-awareness within which the world, my world-horizon, is given as pre-constituted by me and for me. To speak of pre-constitution in these terms is to speak of a passive field of experience, of consciousness, within which the world originally appears in my ownness as the very horizon of life. That is, a world that one can then go on to transcendentally constitute as his or her world by means of cogitationes, this constitution being the correlation that allows us to speak of the objectivity and the ideality of the world. Spirituality, as argued here, is the texture that clothes and that permits us to think the world at a constitutive transcendental level. Although spirituality is integral to and, therefore, cannot be lived separately from transcendental life, it can nonetheless be reached through the peculiar reduction within transcendental life that Husserl undertakes at the beginning of Meditation V. After this preliminary discussion concerning the sphere of ownness that, as suggested above, frees consciousness from the parameters of cogitationes by opening it to a more original sensile domain of experience and self-experience,

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Husserl’s Meditation V begins to engage with a wider problem, i.e., the question of the condition of possibility for objectivity. Although thus far the peculiar reduction to ownness seems to have pushed Husserl’s phenomenology back to a difficult solipsism of Cartesian magnitude, the next step aims to open the sphere of primordial ownness (me as a monad) to other consciousnesses (monads). For Husserl, thus, the conditions of possibility for objectivity reside in the conditions of possibility for subjectivity itself. This further step into the roots of subjectivity is undertaken by means of addressing the following problem: How can my body, as frame of perspective, and the other bodies as frames of perspectives, be related in a pre-constitutive manner such that we can share the same world, without the latter simply being my solipsistic world in which I let or force others to enter? The next step aims to give an account of the intersubjective origin of ownness.

§2. The phenomenological explication of the spiritual intersubjectivity of ownness That the argument regarding the question of the Other undertaken in Meditation V never fully satisfied Husserl and that he ultimately abandoned the project of a new version of the Cartesian Meditations is not a secret.99 This factor, however, should not undermine the importance of what Husserl is trying to address here and why. For whether the argument in itself is successful or not, Husserl’s discussion of the relationship with the Other in Meditation V succeeds in showing three important points. First, it shows the limits within which Husserl thought that the relationship with the Other, and, therefore, the condition of possibility for objectivity, could be argued phenomenologically. Secondly, it shows that those limits fall within a genetic scope that overflows the acts of consciousness. In other words, inter-subjectivity can be taken as a result of neither an empirical exchange of information nor as a transcendental level of communication, but as a spiritual experience of the Leib that underlies those other two levels. In the third place, it exhibits the primacy of the demand for autonomy that characterizes the inquiry. Besides the question of objectivity, the final aim behind the excavation of the domain of spiritual inter-subjectivity is to reach the (inter-subjective) historic genesis from which phenomenology as an inquiry emerges in the first place. This does not refer only to the origin of the act of reflection but to the historic genesis that generates phenomenology as inquiry. This shift also reveals that at this point Husserl’s phenomenological account of the origins of the limits of constitution and meaning that have served the inquiry as unsurpassable principle until here reside not within the structure of the (reflective) act of consciousness itself, but within a much broader field: history. I shall deal here in depth with the first two points and only partly with the third, which I will treat in greater detail in the last sections of this study.

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The inquiry concerning the relationship with the Other begins in Cartesian Meditations by addressing the classic questions of solipsism, relativism, and, therefore, sets itself to cancel such problems in order to find a condition of possibility for objectivity. One could argue at this first stage that if phenomenology stopped at the level of my sphere of ownness, then Husserl’s inquiry would be little more than a sophisticated shift capable of conquering the world from naturalism but still unable to surpass solipsism and relativism. The transcendental subject would only be an isolated one and transcendental phenomenology a mere solipsism that, at the most, would account for a universe of parallel subjective worlds. Husserl poses the problem in the following way: How can my ego, within his peculiar ownness, constitute under the name, ‘experience of something other’, precisely something other – something, that is, with a sense that excludes the constituted from the concrete make-up of the sense-constituting I-myself, as somehow the latter’s analogue?.100 Unlike with the sphere of ownness, which appears after the effecting of a new kind of reduction, the ‘uncovering’ of the genetic pre-social stratum of intersubjectivity is not the result of an abstracting reduction. Husserl, instead, speaks here of an ‘intentional explication of experiencing what is other’.101 Although the question of the limits of static phenomenology and of the reduction in particular will be treated at length elsewhere, let me offer here a brief consideration on the matter. The aim of the Fifth Meditation is not to describe an original relationship with the Other, but to fi nd how such a relationship (and not just the Other) generates the very sphere of ownness. On these grounds, one cannot simply put out of play one’s ownness and abstract a historic ‘process’ that goes beyond the temporal horizon of ownness or subjectivity. To put it another way, while reduction works when it is a matter of uncovering static structural layers vertically superposed, it cannot work when we stop talking about layers and begin to refer to genetic foundations generated horizontally so to speak, or across time and history. What we need instead, Husserl is suggesting at this point, is an explicative process that allows phenomenology to dismantle the primordial sphere of ownness, of subjectivity, in order to show how the latter is connected to the higher levels of subjectivity to which we have referred up to now. This does not mean however that the transcendental reduction is now obsolete. Although the genetic level of primordiality that generates my ownness is not accessible directly through the reduction and, therefore, phenomenology needs a further methodological step, this further method must be understood as a step that can only come into play within the transcendental reduction. Thus, and although it is true that the intentional explication goes beyond the limits of the reduction, it is also true that the former can only start from within those limits. Thus, although insufficient in a sense, the reduction still conserves a fundamental role in

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genetic phenomenology, for without it no intentional explication in the sense described above could come into play. For this very reason, and beyond the parameters of the reduction, Husserl’s intentional explication of the relationship with the Other traces the foundations of the sphere of ownness in the very experiencing of what is other and, therefore, in what is not merely immanent to my ownness. This, however, does not mean to say that Husserl’s argument should finally be read in terms such that the Other is granted the title of genesis or origin of ownness. The genesis of ownness resides within the relationship between ownness and otherness. As we shall see, Husserl’s argument leads us to a relationship in which the Other is reducible neither to a moment of exteriority nor to a mere interiority. To speak of a relation in these terms implies on the one hand speaking of a situation in which the transcendental subject cannot have other subjects as merely transcendents, for that would imply that the alter ego must be deduced from my ego. Were this the case, the other ego with his or her ownness and their world-horizons would only be an effect of my own ego and its correlative world. On the other hand, however, the alter ego cannot be either merely immanent to my ownness, for were that the case the alter ego would only be a moment of my ego, it would be me. In order not to avoid such simplifications, Husserl explicates the relationship with the Other with two simultaneous terms. One is the question of the ‘primal instituting’ [Urstiftung] whereby the Other is given birth to in me and from me, but without being a mere creation, a product of I-myself.102 The second one is the moment of the ‘encroaching [überschreitet] of the Other’ in me, in which, as Paul Ricœur has suggested, the Other is to be understood as the positive moment that precedes my ownness and from which one abstracts in order to grasp its ownness, its frame of perspective.103 This is not saying that the Other precedes me and that the grasping of the Other is that which allows me to grasp myself. Instead, it seems to be saying that in grasping the Other, this Other offers me the possibility of my own frame of perspective within which I constitute the world at a transcendental level. The Other, thus, does not offer me its world but the possibility to attain the world from my own perspective in relation to its perspective. These two moments of encroachment and primal institution should, however, be understood here harmoniously rather than hierarchically. For to understand them in a hierarchical order would either lead us to have to sacrifice egology in favour of the Other or otherness and the potentiality for my ownness that the Other grants me in favour of the ego. Husserl writes towards the end of this Meditation that ‘I cannot create Others that shall exist for me’, but that rather ‘I can only find them’.104 I would like to suggest that it is in such ‘finding the Other’ that encroachment of the Other in me can be harmonized with my institution of the Other in me. Two important aspects that shall help to grasp Husserl’s argument regarding the encroachment and the primal institution of the Other at this point are the following.

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On the one hand, the notion of ‘finding the other’ within my ownness presupposes that the Other ‘has not yet attained the sense “man” ’, and therefore has no gender, sexuality, nationality, colour or personality.105 That is, this Other cannot be taken and found as if it were an eidetic object that falls under certain regions of essences, and therefore and to some extent as a mere transcendent, for the Other is not constituted, as if it were an object. On the other hand, neither can the Other be found or grasped in all its originality. That means that I do not see the spiritual living-body [Leib] of the Other and its subjective processes or anything belonging to its own essence. For if I did, this Other would only be an extension of my own life, of my own essence; it would be I and we would be the same: the Other would be merely immanent. Instead, the Other encroaches on me, it reaches me in so far as it transcends me. Thus, rather than being given in a direct presentation, the Other can only be found. Husserl characterizes the notion of ‘finding the Other’ by means of institution and encroachment in a tripartite fashion: (1) In the first place, Husserl describes this relationship in terms of ‘analogy’.106 He writes: Since [. . .] my animate organism is the only body that is or can be constituted originally as an animate organism, [. . .] the body over there, which is nevertheless apprehended as an animate organism, must have derived this sense by an apperceptive transfer from my animate organism, and done so in a manner that excludes an actually direct, and hence primordial, showing of the predicates belonging to an animate organism. [. . .] It is clear from the very beginning that only a similarity connecting, within my primordial sphere, that body over there with my body can serve as the motivational basis for the ‘analogising’ apprehension of that body as an animate organism107. In order to avoid a full vision of the Other, Husserl begins by positing the Other at a level of being a body that is for me an animate organism only by ‘similarity’ or ‘analogising apprehension’. This means that the other animate organisms are only so by derivation from my animate organism. Nevertheless, this derivation cannot be understood in terms of ‘inference, not of a thinking act’, but as an instituting in which the Other ‘appears’ for the first time in my perceptual horizon.108 Husserl clarifies this instituting appearing of the Other by similarity with the term ‘pairing’. ‘Pairing – writes Husserl – is a primal form of [a] passive synthesis that we designate with “association”, in contrast to passive syntheses of “identification” ’109. What this means is that the Other is given birth in my ownness in as much as this Other gains its sense of animate organism by a transfer of my ownness to the Other. The sense of the Other is, somehow, an extension of my own sense. By elucidating the notion of analogical apprehension by means of a ‘pairing association’, Husserl designates the experiencing of the other as

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a perceptive moment in which the Other is not inferred or a deduction of my thinking act, nor a mere identification (it is not a transcendent) but it is rather immanent within my ownness. Nevertheless, at this stage of the discussion, analogy and pairing have only argued a notion of Other that is still a mere modification of my own life and, therefore, an immanence without its own transcendence. (2) The second step brings forth a notion of transcendence that allows the Other to become truly other, i.e., to be a transcendence in immanence. Husserl introduces here the notion of ‘appresentation’ or the experience by which the Other presents itself and makes itself co-present to my ego within my ownness, allowing the Other to re-gain its own rights.110 Or as Husserl puts it, ‘Whatever can become presented, and evidently verified, originally – is something I am; or else, it belongs to me as peculiarly my own. Whatever, by virtue thereof, is experienced in that founded manner which characterises a primordially unfulfillable experience – an experience that does not give something itself originally but that consistently verifies something indicated – is “other” ’.111 It follows from this argument that, given that the Other cannot be experienced in all its originality and cannot be fully reduced to my sphere of ownness, this Other cannot be understood as present, but as ‘co-present’ [Mit-Gegenwart] or appresented. To speak of appresentation is to speak of that moment in which something cannot be fully present and instead is partially present and partially absent. That is, and unlike any object of consciousness, the absent partiality of the Other cannot be made present in the sense that the hidden part of a tree can be transformed into the front part. The Other, unlike any object fully constituted in consciousness, will always remain partially absent as long as it is Other. This suggests that while this Other is instituted by means of analogizing apprehension and by pairing association as a modification of my ego, such an institution is not to be understood as a totalization. The Other, as long as it is other, will not be fully accessible to my ego, to my grasping. Instead, the Other is instituted in me by appresenting itself to me. I do not constitute the Other as a moment of myself, but rather I offer the Other, by analogizing it, the possibility of encroaching on me. Analogy and pairing can be read as the condition of possibility for the Other’s appresentation in my ownness. Despite this, Husserl himself still sees the Other as a mere ‘modificatum’ that ‘is not I myself but [that still] is relative to me’.112 This means that the Other is only in my primordial sphere; it is still merely immanent. Appresentation has opened the bridge towards the transcendence of the Other but it has not achieved it itself. In order to make the Other transcend my ego while remaining immanent in my sphere of ownness, Husserl brings into the argument a new step that is to be the ‘definitive’ one. Husserl calls it ‘potentiality’.113 (3) The argument can be sketched out in the following manner. My animate organism occupies the central ‘here’ whereas any Other occupies the co-lateral

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‘there’. By ‘re-cognising’ the Other by analogy and pairing, I bring its ‘there’ into my primordial sphere. It could be argued that at this stage its ‘there’ is now only my ‘there’, it is only a modification of my ‘here’, and the association is a mere assimilation through which the ego simply swallows any other ‘there’, any perspective that is appresented to it. Nevertheless, Husserl’s argument tries to go far beyond this. For Husserl, this conversion of any ‘there’ into my ‘here’ is not mere assimilation and identification, for the ‘there’ does not simply become my same ‘here’, but rather a possibility for a different ‘here’. Paraphrasing Husserl: by changing my position ‘in such a manner that I convert any There into a Here [. . .] I do not apperceive the Other ego simply as a duplicate of myself and accordingly as having my original sphere or one completely like mine. I do not apperceive him as having [. . .] the spatial modes of appearance that are mine from here; rather [. . .], I apperceive him as having spatial modes of appearance like those I should have if I should go over there and be where he is’.114 I would like to pay attention to the subjunctive mode of the verb in the preceding sentence: ‘If I should’ [wie wenn ich dort wäre]. By using this modality, it could be suggested that Husserl tries to go beyond a situation in which the ‘there’ of the Other is pre-given by the ego. It still can be said that the ‘there’ is only relative to the central ‘here’. However, the modes of appearance that the ‘Other’ has from its ‘there’ transcend me; I will only have them if I were ‘there’. Birnbaum opens here an interesting discussion through which the use of the subjunctive mode can be elucidated.115 He argues that Husserl is pointing to a double act. First, to the possibility of imagining the body of the Other, as it were by an act of phantasy which, as such, acknowledges that in reality this is not the case; and, secondly, to the act of memory. According to Birnbaum, it is possible for me to imagine myself ‘as-if’ I was seeing and even living from the ‘There’ of the frame-perspective of the other living-body due to the fact that I can remember myself being in the same position that now the other body occupies. For this reason, Birnbaum’s notion of the relationship between my ‘Here’ and the Other’s ‘There’ ends up being restricted to my ‘hereness’: ‘Through acts of phantasy I can transcend my proper “Here” and place myself in the “There” of the other body, which through these acts is experienced as a second “Here” ’.116 This argument implies, thus, that had I not actually ever been in the position that the other body occupies now, it would then be impossible to imagine myself seeing as if I were ‘there’. Consequently, the Other would have absolutely nothing to offer because it would never encroach on my ownness. For this reason I suggest not positing imagination, as Birnbaum does, as a result of memory, and instead try to elucidate a two-way relationship between imagination and memory in the sense that the act of phantasy can actually permit us to posit myself potentially ‘There’, even I have never been in such a position. This is a long discussion and cannot be fully developed here.117 As a shortcut, however, I suggest reading memory as a ‘formal’ memory, that is, as a

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memory that is not simply filled with actual contents and that, therefore, is able to co-act with imagination rather than limit it with contents. In other words, the possibility of another perspective cannot be confused with the content of the perspective ‘there’. That is, I can imagine myself being ‘There’ because I can remember myself occupying other positions in the past, and therefore I am able to imagine the possibility of seeing from somewhere else, without necessarily having been in that precise ‘There’ that I am now imagining. This point is already suggested by Husserl when he writes: ‘My entire primordial ownness, proper to me [. . .] has the content of the Here, [. . .] not the content belonging to that definite There. Each of these contents excludes the other; they cannot both exist at the same time’.118 What Husserl is emphasizing is that the adoption of the perspective ‘There’ that the Other brings with it within my ownness, does not include the content of the perspective. I institute and give the Other the ground for the Other to make itself co-present to me within my ownness; by doing so, the Other brings to me its perspective ‘There’ and, in a sense, widens and enriches my ‘here’ by giving me the possibility, the potentiality, to adopt its perspective and see as it sees. This means that I do not need the content of the ‘There’ in order to imagine the possibility of myself seeing from ‘There’. Or more precisely, I cannot have the content of the ‘There’, for the very same content denies me the possibility of the ‘There’. I cannot see what I see and see what the Other sees at the same time, in the same manner that I cannot see what I see now and see, at the same time, what I used to see when I was in my ‘past-Here’, i.e., my own ‘There’. If that were the case, not only would I be seeing exactly what I used to see and nothing else, but, furthermore, the Other would only be seeing what I see, and nothing else. The Other would not be granting me the possibility for my ownness, but I would rather be producing it as my duplicate. But this does not seem to be the case. Instead, Husserl makes it clear that the whole argument regarding the relationship with the Other is a matter of finding the ‘harmonious generation that goes on in each particular monad’, this harmony being a harmony between monads and in which the Other and I can co-exist as egos within my ownness.119 That is, a genetic or generative ground within the immanent domain of my consciousness at such a level that the Other can be in me without being me or an image of myself and that, thus, always transcends me within myself. By having introduced the possibility of reading memory and imagination as intertwined in such a way, we can now say that, first, the Other cannot be simply taken as a duplicate – however it is still merely relative to my ego, for, to some extent, it lacks ‘existence’ without mine. Secondly, the Other cannot be seen as a product of my ego; it cannot be fully presentialized, but only partially, i.e., appresented. It is true that its ‘There’ would only make sense in relation to my ‘Here’, but it is also true that by appresenting its ‘There’ within my analogizing the Other opens myself up to its ‘There’, to its otherness, offering me

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another perspective that I could have if I were to move over ‘there’. We can conclude this discussion, thus, by saying that it is in the apperception of the Other that my own primordial sphere is generated and opens up, this opening being that which frames my perspectives. *

*

*

The argument above has shown how the aim of the discussion is not the Other per se, but the relationship with the Other at a genetic level, namely, as the foundation and generation of my own ownness, of my own spiritual living body. Without such a relationship, not only would my sphere of ownness be a mere solipsism but, more dangerously still, it would remain an unjustified claim for which phenomenology would not be able to respond. In the second place, I have also shown how the discussion has set up the parameters within which Husserl thought that phenomenology could think the relationship with the Other in order to be able to give an account of the possibility for objectivity and truth. It is in this sense that Paul Ricœur writes: ‘A world of thought is constituted in Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation’.120 I would like to take here this ‘world of thought’ suggested by Ricœur as the phenomenological parameters within which to think the question of the Other, namely, the law of transcendence in immanence through which the Other is neither my object (a transcendent) nor a moment of my ego (mere immanence). Husserl’s argument emphasizes the necessity of sacrificing neither otherness nor egology, as condition sine qua non for a notion of intersubjectivity that is capable of offering a possible objectivity and, therefore, meaningfulness, of the world and of oneself as human being that lives and belongs within that world. For the world to have a possibility of objectivity, the Other must be other but always in relation to my ownness; it must be transcendence but always in my immanence. It is by means of this transcendence in immanence that Husserl’s new ‘world of thought’ is able to present us with a relationship in which the Other must be immanent in such a way that I can actually understand it without totalizing it, without fully comprehending it. I can think the Other without the Other being a mere object posited by my thought. To institute the Other as genuinely immanent is to let the Other encroach on me in order to be endowed with the capacity to grasp it and its frame of perspectives as my own possibilities. Simultaneously, institution is potentiality, for by instituting the Other I open myself up and give the Other the possibility to make itself co-present within my consciousness. However, this institution does not deprive the Other of its own rights, of its otherness. On the contrary, it aims to endow the Other with the potentiality to make itself copresent or to encroach on me as Other in a sense that, even though the Other is immanent, its otherness always transcends me within myself. It is precisely by means of endowing the Other with such a possibility that the Other is able to endow me with the potentiality for understanding it and its perspectives.

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Now that I have dealt with the first two successful aspects of the argument, let me indicate briefly here the relevance of the third. As suggested above, Meditation V shows the depth of the demand for autonomy, for presuppositionlessness, that characterizes Husserl’s inquiry by leading the phenomenological reflection into an inter-subjective ground that generates it. The reflection and further intentional explication of the relationship with the Other provides us with the inter-subjective genetic foundation that generates the reflective acts within the sphere of ownness of the phenomenologist or researcher. This intersubjective genetic foundation is not limited however to the here and now, but rather crosses the borders of a lifetime. The question of presuppositionlessness, then, rests on intersubjectivity insofar as the latter opens a gate to the question of history. It should not come as a surprise, then, that Husserl’s own Meditations are set up in a historical relationship to other Meditationes (Descartes’) and that in the very first few lines of the introduction to Cartesian Meditations Husserl already hints at the fact that his inquiry originates not only with Descartes but further back. This is clarified at the very end of the text when Husserl brings the discussion to a close by citing Saint Augustine: ‘Noli fora ires, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas’.121 This is not a marginal point. These statements regarding Descartes and Saint Augustine do not represent a mere demarcation of philosophical alliances. Instead, they aim to show that, following the principle of freedom from presuppositions that runs inherently to the inquiry, genetic phenomenology must now elucidate the roots that motivate the phenomenological inquiry at a historical level. If phenomenology did not account for a historic domain of the inquiry, the origin of phenomenology as inquiry would remain at an a-historical level, making it impossible for phenomenology to give an account of the motives that lead the phenomenology to take up this demand of self-responsibility. Ultimately, this would deprive phenomenology of the freedom it needs to guarantee that the inquiry is capable of dealing with the questions regarding the meaningfulness of human existence. It is within this frame that we are to understand the introduction of genetic phenomenology and its method. Since, as discussed above, the reduction is insufficient when having to deal with this horizontal dimension of genesis that bursts the limits of ownness, Husserl introduces the ‘intentional explication’ that defines the method of the so-called genetic phenomenology.122 Leaving aside the implications of this step for the moment, its inclusion after, but within, the transcendental reduction, helps to make manifest the depth of the ethical demand for self-grounding with which we have characterized Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry. If earlier I argued that epoché only makes sense within the frame of transcendental reduction (although the latter can only be undertaken within the limits of the former), the inclusion of intentional explication shows that although reduction frames epoché, reduction cannot be conflated with a presupposed principle from which the inquiry is deduced. Although it frames the investigation, reduction itself is the manifestation of

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the character that truly defines Husserl’s phenomenology as ethical life: the self-responsible demand for autonomy or presuppositionlessness. Even when phenomenology cannot reduce anymore, the very self-responsible demand guides phenomenology to carry on its investigation in order to uncover the genesis from which the inquiry emerges in order to ensure that the inquiry is not grounded in presuppositions. This demand for justification and presuppositionlessness orientates and characterizes Husserl’s inquiry as ‘the only radical self-investigation’, as Husserl himself puts it at the end of his Cartesian Meditations.123 The following four chapters aim to make this inner development of the inquiry more explicit. In doing so, I will offer an account of: (a) the problems that keep emerging within the phenomenological research, and how these problems shape the necessary development of the inquiry; (b) how these developments respond to a demand for living an ethical life, which, within the practice of phenomenology, takes the shape of a constant self-reflection upon the way in which the inquiry proceeds, in order to guarantee that phenomenology is not grounded in unquestioned prejudices; and (c) how this ethical life responds itself to an Ideal, to an attitude, in which Husserl ultimately aims to re-found science in order to return it to a plane that can allow it to tackle the questions concerning the meaningfulness of human existence.

Chapter II

Intuition or the Ethical Principle of Phenomenology

The notion of intuition presented in Ideas I represents a reformulation of the principle of presuppositionlessness introduced in Logical Investigations. As we shall see below, intuition is the principle of principles of phenomenology to the extent that it is what will determine and regulate phenomenology and its outcomes. The aim of intuition, according to Husserl, will be to provide us with (a) a different concept of knowledge rooted in freedom rather than in dogmatism, and, therefore, with (b) a regulative Idea the aim of which is to delimit and give an account of the structure of the inquiry itself.

A. Intuition: The Possibility of Free Knowledge §1. The straightforward acts of intuition: The role of perception Following Husserl in Ideas I, Intuition can be regarded as the transcendental experience that fulfils the signifying act or the so-called meaning-intention. To speak of the signifying act or the meaning-intention is to speak of the thinking act of aiming at something, without this implying that it reaches it or sees it with full clarity. In co-ordination with the signifying act of thinking, the act of intuition plays the role of reaching, seeing and, thus, rendering that which thought intended. This, however, is not to suggest that the act of intuition is simply an extension of our thought. One does not merely see what one thinks or intends to see. As the forthcoming sections aim to show, the act of intuition appears in Husserlian phenomenology as the field of experience that welcomes and brings to light the thing intended by our thought according to its own ‘lifeness’ rather than as our meaning-intention thinks it to be. Intuition is, instead, the mode of experience in which the object gives itself in consciousness in its very flesh and objectivity [Gegenständlichkeit]. In other words, intuition is the act that makes thought ‘authentically meaningful’ [eigentliche].1 For even though the act of meaning-intention can be said to be the intention of a meaning, in order for this meaning to become

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the meaning of an object or for the object to be fully meaningful, intuition must come into play. However, and ‘since the thought means nothing that the fulfilling intuition does not completely present as belonging to the thought’, intuition will not be understood here as an extension of thought, but as the experience that opens the possibility for thought, meaningfulness and, ultimately, for knowledge.2 How does this intuitive experience occur? How does one intuit some-thing, any-thing at all? In Logical Investigations Husserl already makes it clear that all intuition is grounded in ‘perception’. But what does Husserl mean now by ‘perception’ and in what way does ‘perception’ ground ‘intuition’? Following Investigations I and II, Kevin Mulligan has argued that, although at some point in the discussion Husserl denied the fact that content and object be independent, for Husserl ‘perception is often a matter of wordless subsumption of what is seen under concepts’.3 On these grounds, Mulligan describes the act of perception through a tripartite structure or schema act-content-object, in which the content ‘mediates’ the perception of the object.4 Mulligan sees the mediating role of the content as necessary. Otherwise, he argues, we would be presuming that the object perceived has somehow an inherent meaning prior to its perception. Were we to read Husserl this way, then we would have to end up admitting that his phenomenology is little more than ‘naïve realism’. 5 But is is the case? Is the object of perception independent of the content that mediates it, and is Husserl, therefore, a mere naïve realist? In Investigation VI, Husserl writes: In the sense of the narrower, ‘sensuous’ perception, an object is directly apprehended or is itself present, if it is set up in an act of perception in straightforward (schlichter) manner. What this means is this: that the object is also an immediately given object in the sense that, as this object perceived with this definite objective content, it is not constituted in relational, connective, or otherwise articulated acts, acts founded on other acts which bring other objects to perception. Sensuous objects are present in perception at a single act-level: they do not need to be constituted in many-rayed fashion in acts of higher level, whose objects are set up for them by way of other objects, already constituted in other acts.6 This passage seems to make it clear that the concept or content is not independent, and neither does it mediate perception.7 Instead, Husserl posits the object of the act of perception as that which gives itself in immediacy, the content being ‘as what the object is perceived’. In contradistinction to Mulligan I hold the view that the object of perception is always perceived in its content. As Husserl makes it clear in the citations above, to grasp something in immediacy can be understood as the act that grasps without being mediated or pre-determined by pre-judgements or contents of any kind. Moreover, in such

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immediacy, the act of perception grasps the thing intended by thought as a singular thing, without yet being able to see what it is. One does not need to see that the thing perceived is coloured red or is squared, for perception is an act that is not grounded on other acts and, therefore, the thing perceived cannot be seen as ‘constituted in relational, connective or otherwise articulated act’.8 Thus, and since the structural existence of things is not something available to perception, one simply grasps the thing as ‘a thing’ in its singularity. To speak of grasping some-thing in its singularity does not mean here that perception is the act by means of which one grasps the unity or identity of the thing intended. For however the act of sensuous perception performs an identification, no identity is meant in such an act.9 As Dieter Lohmar has accordingly argued at this stage, the act of perception must be taken here as ‘un-thematic’, for although it identifies, it does so without claiming identity or without having an identity of the object identified.10 Thus, when we grasp ‘a thing’, this ‘a thing’ being either ‘a tree’ or ‘a row of trees’, one only perceives them as ‘a thing’, as a whole, without capturing the ‘identity’ of the tree or the ‘plurality’ that defines the ‘row of trees’ as eidetic object. Likewise, one cannot grasp either that the thing perceived is related to a background or context of other things, for categorial relations of any kind are not visible to sensuous perception. We do not apprehend the relationship that the tree maintains with other trees or the relationship that a row of trees maintains with the rest of a landscape. Rather, I identify or see some-thing in front of me, without yet seeing its identity, i.e., that it is ‘a tree’, that it is brown and green and that its position is related to a background of other things, such as other trees, a field and a hill. To perceive, thus, can be said to be the simple glance within which a particular thing is rendered. Or in other words, it is the extraction of a singular thing from its context or background. However sensuous perception can be said to be a simple glance, this glance is understood by Husserl as a flow of adumbrations, foreshadows or perspectives [Abschattungen] by means of which the thing is outlined as ‘a thing’.11 Husserl writes: We may handle the thing from all sides in a continuous perceptual series, feeling it over as it were with our senses. But each single percept in this series is already a percept of the thing. [. . .]. It is always one and the same thing, and that not only in some purely physical sense, but in the view of our percepts themselves.12 To speak of a continuous perceptual series is to speak of a continuous glancing flow in which different perceptual moments blend into each other as one goes around the thing perceiving it with the senses. Nevertheless, every glancing moment of the flow does not perceive a different thing, but the same thing, ‘the whole’ of it, to use again one of Lohmar’s expressions, even though the

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whole is only seen ‘in’ seeing the particular adumbration or part of the object in one of the perceptual moments of the flow.13 In spite of the infinite multiplicity of glances, the act of perception can be said to be one single glance. The unity of perception, this seems to suggest, is not set by the act of glancing but by the thing perceived by the glance, however it is within the unity of the perceptive flow that characterizes the act of glancing that the thing can be given in immediacy as one and the same thing, namely, as a unitary thing. To speak of a unity of perception made out of a multiple or infinite ‘flow of adumbrations’ is not a contradiction in any sense. Even if one grasps one thing at once, without having to go around it so to speak, the single glance is constituted by a series of what Husserl calls ‘a continuous running’ in which our gaze follows the extension or the edges of the thing.14 Thus, the thing perceived claims its unitary existence as ‘a thing’ in the very manifold of percepts, in the act of perception’s very continuous running by means of which the thing makes itself available. Perception, however, is not to be associated with sensuous perception in the sense that that which the act renders is a merely ‘natural’ object that is loaded with an inherent meaning prior to being perceived, as Mulligan has suggested. Here I would like to contest the reading that gives the false option of either having to admit the independence of the content with regard to the object, or, alternatively, accept that, otherwise, one is restricting Husserl’s phenomenology to ‘naïve realism’.15 This reading does not take into account that the sensuous [reell] object of the act of perception is not synonymous with a naturalistic notion of [reale] object. That which we apprehend in the act of perception is not the reale presence of the thing, its material corporeality [Körperlich]. In order to show such a fine distinction, Husserl introduces the question of imagination, while Kevin Mulligan in his reading of sensuous perception disregards it for being parasitical on perceptual experience. However Mulligan is not wrong when saying that imagination is a mere modification of senseperception, still such a modification can be said to play an important role in the act of perception.16 Husserl writes: We define a real object as the possible object of a straightforward percept. There is a necessary parallelism between perception and imagination, which guarantees that a possible imagination (or more precisely a whole series of imaginations) having the same essence, corresponds to each possible percept, a straightforward imagination is correlated with each straightforward percept, thereby giving certainty to the wider concept of sensible intuition. We can define sensible objects as the possible objects of sensible imagination and sensible intuition in general.17 By introducing the play of imagination in the act of perception, Husserl seems to be suggesting that perception is not an act by means of which one merely

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apprehends ‘a thing’ qua its corporeal presence [Körperlich]. An object is perceivable in its singularity independently of its real [reale] existence and, therefore, the reality of the object goes beyond its materiality or empirical status. This is only possible if the act of sensuous perception that Husserl has in mind here is, even though sensuous, an act intrinsically tied to imagination. Whether the object is rendered by the naked eye (horse) or by the play of fancy (unicorn), what the act of perception renders is the ‘full bodily presence’ [Leibhaftigkeit] of the thing intended rather than its ontic corporality [Körper]. In a similar way, Edward S. Casey argues that in the act of perception ‘we contemplate imagined objects or events as possible: existent or not, an imagined unicorn is a purely possible beast’.18 Imagination is, in a sense, the seeing of the Leib rather than of the Körp of the thing intended, insofar as – Casey continues to argue – ‘the ontic status of the imagined content is neutral in character’.19 Likewise, the thing perceived is not apprehended as an ontic existent. Instead, and even though its ontic existence is not denied, the object’s ontic existence is seen through, leaving our gaze attaining the thing in its pure possibility or, as Husserl puts it in Ideas I, in its ‘thetic’ possibility [Urdoxa], or even as a neutral and ‘original belief’ [Urglaube].20 The inclusion of a notion of imagination in the act of perception does not free perception from being sensuous. The notion of imagination that Husserl has in mind at this stage is a sensuous imagination, i.e., an image that requires the senses, for its function is one of making available that which one does not see with the naked eye hic et nunc. In other words, imagination is ‘apperceptive’. It is true, then, that to some extent, imagination is parasitical on sensuous perception, as Mulligan claims above; however, imagination attains a field of apprehension of its own by means of which perception is widened. If ‘straightforward imagination’ or ‘apperception’, as Husserl calls it elsewhere, were not implicated in the act of perception, the latter would be an act unable to cross the borders of the pure empirical presence of the hic et nunc.21 Consequently, any signifying act that intended non-sensuously perceivable objects (i.e., a unicorn), or even perceivable but concealed objects (i.e., the back side of a box), would be a hopeless act, for the things intended in both cases would never be perceived and, therefore, brought to consciousness and made meaningful. In the case of the box, the straightforward imagination or apperception is, as Rudolf Bernet has precisely put it, ‘the anticipatory consciousness of possible self-givenness’, namely, it is what allows us to see the whole, even though we are not actually seeing it all.22 Thus, although perception and imagination should not be conflated, the notion of perception that Husserl has in mind here must be understood alongside an apperceptive imagination that stretches the perceptive gaze, so that the latter can cope with the adumbrative dimension of the object of consciousness. It is not only the case that imagination and perception, although different act-modalities, contribute together to the appearing of the un-thematic thing in consciousness as a whole. Furthermore, the

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inclusion of imagination shows here how Husserl has widened perception to a domain of experience in which perception is non-dependent on the natural reality of the object. Instead, perception and imagination signify a perceptual experience characterized by allowing the Leiblichkeit of an object appear in consciousness without needing to grasp its corporeal, factual reality. To speak of perception in these terms is to speak of a different kind of perception with regard to the notion of perception of naïve realism. Husserl’s move here is the redefinition of the notion of perception, rescuing it from being a mere naturalist experience and rendering it a sensuous act capable of perceiving not the actual factuality of the object but its very Leibhaftigkeit. Husserl understands this act of widened perception as the foundational act upon which further acts of intuition that render the essential structure of the Leib are founded.23 Nonetheless, as far as the straightforward act of perception is concerned, the thing presented in its pure possibility is still not properly meaningful. For, to return once more to Lohmar’s reading of perception, ‘we might say that identity is “experienced” in identifying synthesis but not thematised’.24 It is not a tree or a landscape, a horse or a unicorn, but ‘a thing’s pure possibility’, i.e., a Leib. This is supported by Husserl when he argues that the act of perception ‘does not embody any meaning’ in itself, however it founds it and makes the meaningfulness of the object possible.25 Perception, thus, holds the role of grounding or determining the meaning in the sense of giving the object intended intuitive availability. It brings ‘the thing’ intended by our thought to our intuitive gaze, by means of which the thing will gain its meaningfulness through further intuitive acts. Perception establishes the possibilities for meaning in the sense that without such an act, by means of which we differentiate a thing from others, no further intuitive act would be possible, for it would lack the correlate upon which to act. Without perception, there would be nothing to see.

§2. The role of the intuition of essences Every fact could be essentially other than it is [. . . for . . .] it belongs to the meaning of everything contingent that it should have essential being and therewith an Eidos to be apprehended in all its purity; and this Eidos comes under essential truth of varying degrees of universality. An individual object is not simply and quite generally an individual, a ‘this-there’ something unique; but being constituted thus and thus ‘in itself ’ it has its own proper mode of being, its own supply of essential predicables which must qualify it (qua ‘Being as it is in itself’).26 The distinction and the relationship between corporeal fact [Körp] and essence give Husserl the ground for the introduction in Ideas I of ‘eidetic intuition’ [Wesensanschauung].27 Wesensanschauung is the act by means of which one intuits the eidetic essences [Eidos, Wesen] that make the object perceived be what

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it is; for instance, one does not just see a factual, red, rounded box but the essences ‘Boxness’, ‘Redness’ and ‘Circularity’. Likewise, one not only sees a figure of three sides but the eidetic ‘Triangle’, the latter being the essence that makes that figure be what it is. Although the intuition of essences refers to eidetic or general essences [Eidos, Wesen], this intuitive act begins by what Husserl calls ‘concrete essences’.28 Thus, one begins by grasping the aspects of the object intended within ‘the thing’ perceived. As Levinas helps to explain, one apprehends the thing perceived as ‘reddish’ or/and ‘roundish’, while still being unaware of the exact colour and the exact shape of the object intended and perceived.29 This means that the concrete essences or ‘Eide have neither the exactness nor the perfect determination of geometric concepts’ and that, therefore, ‘a certain imprecision is inherent to them, an imprecision for which scientists are not responsible’, even though ‘the world of exact scientific concepts is derivative’ from the former.30 Following Levinas, one can say that the intuition of concrete inexact essences is at first purely sensuously determined. Given the inexactness and the sensory determination in which these eidetic essences can only be intuited, they must, therefore, be given in a flux of adumbrations [Abschattungen] in the same structural manner as perception, this flux being an infinite apprehension of the ‘same’ vague essence. When one grasps the particular aspect of redness in its vagueness (i.e., reddishness), this aspect is not grasped at once but in a series of adumbrations in which the redness is, or can be, a variant every time that it is captured in every different angle or moment from which the thing is approached by the senses.31 This variability is infinite and, therefore, the aspects and their variability are never exhausted in the flux of adumbrations in which they are captured. Nonetheless, this infinite variability of vague essences is not enough to satisfy or fulfil the meaning-intention, and an apprehension of more ‘abstract or general essences’ is needed in order for one to see the meaningfulness of the object perceived.32 Husserl writes: The particular intuitions which minister to the apprehension of the Essence may be already sufficiently clear to render possible a completely clear grasp of some essential generality, and yet not so adequate as to satisfy the main intention; there is a lack of clearness as regards the closer definitions of the interwoven essences; thus we need to scrutinise our illustrative essences more closely or to contrive others that are better suited, in which the pertinent single features left confused and obscure stand out and can then be transformed into the data of the clearest kind.33 Thus, the different concrete essential moments of redness that we first intuit sensuously are the illustration of the general or abstract essence Red. However, in order to be able to apprehend the latter one must begin by making it available by means of glancing at the moments of reddishness and scrutinizing

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them. This act of scrutinizing concrete essences is, nonetheless, not to be taken as a type of act by means of which one simply compares and distinguishes one from another and, consequently, determines the general essence by deducing it from the concrete essences. In order to show that this is not the case, Husserl introduces again the question of imagination or the play of free fancy, the role of which is central to the intuition of general essences. He gives us the example of the geometer. The geometer when he thinks geometrically operates with imagery vastly more than he does with percepts of figures or models [. . .]. In fancy it is true he must toil to secure clear intuitions, and from this labour the drawing and the model sets him free. But in actual drawing and modelling he is restricted; in fancy he has perfect freedom in the arbitrary recasting of the figures he has imagined, in running over continuous series of possible shapes, in the production therefore of an infinite number of new creations; a freedom which opens up to him for the first time an entry into the spacious realms of essential possibility with their infinite horizons of essential knowledge. The drawings therefore follow normally after the construction of fancy and the pure eidetic thought built upon these as a basis [. . .].34 On the one hand, it is true to say that the general essences can only be seen in sensuous illustrations, which are moments of the former. However, general essences, in order to be intuited qua general essences, cannot merely depend on the sensuous illustrations that we have available to us. Were that the case the general essences would lack universal generality, for one only has a limited amount of the infinite vague moments that illustrate the essence. What Husserl suggests here is that those sensuous moments, the drawings of the geometer, are preceded by imaginative constructions. Thus, the general essences are not restricted to a finite number of cases but to an infinite realm of possibilities that only imagination can assure, for even though it is true that we imagine through the senses, it is also true that we do not imagine merely what we sense. Instead, we imagine the idealities as we mean them or intend them in our thought. Imagination, thus, puts essences in sensuous expressions, in images, so we can intuit and become aware of such essences in their generality. Imagination, therefore, allows us to grasp the general essences by illustrating them. When we think the ideal object triangle, our intuition can only fulfil such thought by bringing to consciousness the general essence and not just the triangle that we see on the piece of paper. The difference is that we do not mean the particular type of triangle isosceles that one can draw on a piece of paper, but the general essence triangle that one is not able to draw but only to imagine. When we imagine ‘triangle’ we produce in our mind a continuous series of triangles, different moments; what we see, however, is the general essence and not just the particular example(s) in which we illustrate

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such generality. The same can be said of any other ideal object that we think and therefore intend. We can imagine the ideal object ‘horse’. To fulfil by intuition such an ideal object we need to imagine ‘horse’ rather than simply deduce it from the horses that we have sensuously seen. In imaging ‘horse’, we do not imagine a particular horse, a horse hic et nunc in a particular space and time, but the general eidetic supra-spatial and supra-temporal essence ‘horse’ furnished by the senses. Thus, the intuition of essences renders the essence or even the genus of an object in its generality rather than in its particularity. If perception was the way of rendering the pure possibility or, what is the same, the flesh of the object, one can say now that the intuition of essences is the capacity for seeing the essences that determine the thing perceived in its flesh, in its universal generality, or in its identity. Accordingly, we can now see how the intuition of essences plays the role of actualizing the object’s pure possibility as experienced in perception by means of rendering the essential whatness of Leibhaftigkeit and, therefore, by making evident what at first was a mere possibility. Nonetheless, no thing in its Leib is simply reducible to a single essence, a single region or even a single genus, for all objects contain an infinite possible number of essences that necessarily connect and mix with each other. Every single object of intuition has the potentiality of always being re-apprehended from different angles and different series of adumbrations [Abschattungen], grasping, accordingly, new concrete essences upon which new abstractive acts will be performed and new general essences belonging to the thing perceived will be rendered to our thought in their ideality. The fact that the thing perceived has now been rendered as ‘Red’ does not exhaust the objective ideality of the thing. On the contrary, one essence must be intuited in accordance with others. New perceptions and new intuitions return to it and reveal, in further synthetic acts, that such a thing is not just ‘Red’ but also ‘Circular’ and, likewise, that if it is ‘Circular’ it cannot be ‘Squared’. How is it possible to say that two essences or two genuses are bound together within the same object and how is it possible to discern that some essences cannot be intuited with certain others?

§3. The role of categorial intuition Up to this point, intuition has made the thing intended in the signifying act available in its flesh by means of perception and sensuous intuition, and it has also captured the general essences that define it and characterize it as what it is eidetically. In order to be able to see that the thing intended is now ‘a red and circular box’, one needs to see the ‘particles’ that connect the essences of redness and circularity with each other as well as with the essence that defines the ‘thing’ as box. In order to do this Husserl introduces a distinction between the

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so-called regional material essences such as Redness, Circularity or Boxness and (their) categories. Husserl writes: On the one side stands the material, which in a certain sense are the essences ‘properly so-called’. But on the other side stands what is still eidetic but nonetheless fundamentally and essentially different: a mere essential form, which is indeed an essence, but a completely ‘empty’ one, an essence which in the fashion of an empty form fits all possible essences, which in its formal universality has even the highest material generalities subordinated to it, and prescribes laws to these through the formal truths which belong to it. The so-called formal region is thus not something co-ordinate with the material regions (the regions pure and simple), it is properly no region at all, but the pure form of all region in general; it has all regions with all their essential diversities of content under (though indeed only formaliter) rather than side by side with itself.35 This distinction sets a difference between the material and the formal dimensions of the regional (general) essences. The formal dimension is, unlike the material region, an ‘empty’ essence, i.e., an essence that cannot be represented either sensuously or imaginatively. The relationship that the material and the formal dimensions of the essence maintain is nonetheless intricate, for while on the one hand all material essences ‘fits under’ and are subordinated to these formal essences, on the other hand these empty essences are the form of all region in general. They are intertwined to the extent that no regional essence can be as such without its formal dimension. Husserl characterizes the role of the formal dimension in relation to the regional essence in terms of prescribing laws to the material dimensions or the contents of the essence by means of which the essence can then be grasped. The formal dimension of the eidetic regions articulates or organizes material essences such as ‘colour’ or ‘shape’ with each other. Thus, the essence ‘colour’ must be articulated with the essence ‘material thing’, for colour can only be grasped in extension. These forms or ‘laws’, although an internal dimension of the very essence, are ‘the formal constitution common to all essences and regions’.36 Husserl calls these laws of articulation ‘pure logical basic concepts’ or ‘categories’ and defines them in terms of being ‘the concepts such as property, unity, identity, plurality, relation, number, whole, part, etc., through which the object-in-general is determined as something or other to the extent that they permit it to be some-thing at all’.37 Thus, for instance, the essence ‘Red’ can only be grasped by means of the logical categories through which this particular essence is, on the one hand, a part of the whole essence or genus ‘Colour’ and, on the other hand, an essence that can only be grasped in the relation with a particular extended object, i.e., as a ‘Red Box’. In this case, the object ‘Red Circular Box’ can be taken as some-thing that appears as such by means

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of logical categories such as number, identity, whole, part, etc., these categories being those which allows us to think ‘a Red, Circular Box’ as a correlate in consciousness. On this basis, categorial intuition is the act that apprehends those laws or categories and that consequently makes possible the apprehension of the object intended as a logically thoughtful relatum. It must be emphasized that categorial intuition is intrinsically and necessarily tied to the intuition of essences and perception. The intuition of a general essence would not be possible without intuiting its formal dimension, and none of them would occur unless the act of perception rendered first ‘a thing’ in its flesh. Husserl begins the exposition of the intricate relationship between acts of intuition by discussing the relation between perception and categorial intuition. An act of perception grasps A as a whole, at one ‘blow’ and in straightforward fashion. A second act of perception is trained upon ‘D’, the part or the dependent moment, that belongs constitutively to A. These two acts are not merely performed together, or after one another, in the manner of disjoined experiences; rather they are bound together in a single act in whose synthesis A is first given as containing ‘D’ in itself. Just so, ‘D’ can, with a reversal of the direction of relational perception, achieve self-givenness as pertaining to A 38. Once we have sensuously perceived ‘a thing’, then categorial intuition is the act directed towards the formal dimension of such a thing, towards its logical relations such as identity, belongingness, part-whole and so forth, which in themselves are dependent moments of the thing perceived. When the sensuous object is rendered in its flesh, then its unity, parts, features and its whatness are included in such a vision, although they are not made explicit. Thus, one can grasp a row of trees as ‘a thing’. This thing perceived contains in itself not only the ideas tree, green, leaf and so on, but it also contains the categories of plurality, unity, belongingness, etc. These categories, however, cannot be made available by perception for, qua purely formal, they are not subjected to sensuous perception nor to imagination. One can sensuously see, however vaguely, a tree, a row of trees, one can see their colour and their shape, but one cannot sensuously perceive the category of plurality that characterizes the row of trees or the idea of identity that characterizes ‘the tree’. Thus, in order to not only make the object explicit, but, furthermore, to make the thing thoughtful and properly meaningful according to its ‘whatness’, one must turn the gaze towards the logical categories, by means of which the essences that determine the object will become available, and within them, the possible meaningfulness of the object sensuously perceived. Categorial intuition, therefore, is an act founded on the act of perception insofar as the categories can only be revealed once the object intended has been made available to consciousness in the act of perception.

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Categorial intuition and perception are ‘bound’ together. The act of categorial intuition is not simply being posited on top (founded) of the act of perception, as if it were an addition to it. On the contrary, and even though they are ‘two different’ acts, ‘they are not disjoined experiences’.39 Instead, they both constitute a single act-experience with different moments or dimensions. As was the case in the act of sensuous intuition, in which different percepts are part of the same act insofar as every glance still looks at the same singular object, so one can say now that the founding sensuous act and the founded categorial act are synthesized in a single act, for they both glance at the same thing. The only difference being that while the categorial act glances at the formal dimension of the essences that constitute the thing perceived, the act of perception glances at the thing qua thing. The relationship between perception and the act of categorial intuition is, according to Husserl, established by means of reflection on the object perceived rather than on the act of perception. Husserl says: [. . .] The concept Sensuous Object (Real Object) cannot arise through reflection upon perception, since this could only yield us the concept Perception. [. . .] Not in these acts as object, but in the objects of these acts, do we have the abstractive basis which enables us to realise the concepts in question.40 This can be seen again in the example of the ‘row of trees’. The plurality of the row of trees does not reside in the plurality of the act but in the plurality of the object, i.e., in the row of trees itself. In the same fashion, we find the category of identity of the tree when reflecting on the tree perceived rather than on the act through which the tree is perceived.41 On this basis, categorial intuition is the act that enquires into the laws or logical categories that articulate essences with each other making the object in question be what it is rather than something else. This means that, in the case of an object ‘A’, the categorial intuition brings to life not only ‘D’, but, more importantly, the logical relationship between ‘A’ and ‘D’ by means of which the object is constituted and, therefore, understood. Categorial intuition does not see the property ‘D’ as an independent thing but uncovers ‘D’ as part and, more precisely, ‘D’ as part of ‘A’. In the same manner, the categorial act also renders the logical category whole and, more importantly, ‘A’ as a whole of which ‘D’ is a part. However, to grasp the logical relationship that ‘A’ and ‘D’ maintain in terms of whole and part also involves grasping other logical categories and other relationships. Thus, for instance, to grasp that the box ‘A’ is coloured with ‘D’ and that it has a shape ‘a’ involves other categorial acts by means of which one makes explicit the relation of the shape ‘a’ with the coloured box ‘A(D)’. The categorial act sees through the material essences of the object perceived (‘A’, ‘D’, ‘a’) and intuits the relationships that articulate ‘A’ and ‘D’, ‘A’ and ‘a’ and ‘a’ and ‘D’, and that therefore make the object be what it is and as it is.

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This suggests that categorial intuition is not just related to perception but also maintains a close relationship with the intuition of essences. Nonetheless, and even though categorial intuition is the act that makes the general essences of the thing perceived thoughtful by intuiting the laws that articulate them with each other, the relation between categorial intuition and intuition of essences cannot be reduced to a relationship in which the latter simply provides the material essences for the categories to act upon. Were such the case, Husserl would be giving the logical categories a position of pre-existence in relation to the material essences. That is, the categories would not need to be abstracted as if they already had an independent life outside of everything else. What this would be saying is that while essences and their concrete essential moments would reside in individual things, the logical categories would remain in the mind, working as, so to speak, thinking strategies. Were such the case, Husserl would be rehearsing a version of neo-Cartesianism in which the world, however eidetic, is only brought to life by the logical categories that our mind applies to it. Consequently, the whole notion of perception and intuition would be grounded on certain principles (the categories) that pre-exist and guide experience from the power of the mind. This would entail, moreover, that epoché has failed and that consciousness still maintains a categorial and, therefore, intellectual positionality with regard to the object rather than an absolute neutrality. But, as we shall see, this is not the case. As mentioned earlier, the logical categories are also essences, however they are empty forms for they cannot be perceived sensuously. Accordingly, categories as such need to be abstracted in order to be grasped, yet they cannot be fully abstracted by means of imagination, as was the case with material essences, for categories cannot be seen by the senses. As Husserl repeats on various occasions, one can paint ‘A’, one can paint ‘B’, one could even paint ‘A and B’, but one could not possibly paint ‘and’ on its own.42 How are we, thus, to abstract such categories? In Logical Investigations Husserl introduces the notion of Ideational Abstraction. Husserl writes: Sensuous concepts find their immediate basis in the data of sensuous Intuition, categorial concepts in the data of categorial intuition, purely with regard to the categorial form of the whole categorially formed object. If, e.g., the intuition of a relation underlies an abstraction, the abstractive consciousness may direct itself to the relational form in specie, so that everything sensuous in what underlies the relation is discounted. So arise categories, which rubric, understood pointedly, merely covers the primitive [basic] concepts in our present context.43 In the same manner that the general essence Redness is abstracted by imagination from the concrete essential moments that illustrate it, so the ideal category Part is abstracted from the relation part-whole that articulates the

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idea ‘Red Box’, the Idea Redness being part of the whole eidetic object ‘Red Box’. The category Part, however, is abstracted neither from the sensuous individual red box, nor from the material essences Redness and Boxness. Instead, it is abstracted from the articulated relation itself. In this act of intuitive ideation, neither the purely sensuous nor the material essences can be taken into consideration, and only the categorial relation part-whole counts as the data within which the category Part is illustrated and, therefore, abstracted. Husserl calls this type of abstraction ‘pure categorial abstraction’ or even the ‘pure understanding’ by means of which one grasps pure categorial concepts.44 What Husserl is arguing here is that the understanding is the capacity of the ‘pure intellect’ of seeing through material essences and intuiting the pure forms of logic, as is the case in pure arithmetic or pure mathematics.45 In the latter case, one grasps pure forms such as ‘all S is P’, but one does not grasp the material letter S or P. One is not interested in the ‘Sness’ or ‘Pness’ of S and P, for as Husserl indicates, even the letters S and P ‘point indirectly to indefinite concepts’ that can vary every time the formulae is expressed.46 What does not vary, however, is the logical form of the formulae, whether one says ‘all S is P’ or ‘every M is N’. The pure understanding, thus, is the apprehension of such conceptual invariability by means of pure ideational abstraction. To emphasize the irreducibility of pure concepts to sensuous or admixtured ones does not mean that the pure understanding, categorial intuition, is cut off from the faculty of sensibility and, therefore, from imagination. Husserl’s argument suggests that all acts of categorial intuition or pure understanding can only be performed once perception and imagination have provided the matter from which to abstract. S and P, or M and N are to be imagined or perceived and, therefore, brought to the intellectual gaze of the understanding. Thus, although the categories are only visible to the intellect, this visibility is exercised by categorial intuition in our experience of the seen and imagined. What this means is that pure understanding is the capacity of seeing through all sensuous dimensions of the object, including material essences, and of apprehending the logical insight of the object experienced. It is for this reason that, as Dieter Lohmar has also argued, when Husserl speaks of perception being a foundational act with regard to categorial intuition, we should understand foundation as a ‘one-sided foundation’ rather than as a ‘mutual foundation’.47 For, as he goes on to say, ‘categorial intuition does not refer to its object in simple, one-rayed acts but always in jointed, higher order acts which rest on founding acts’, namely, the acts of perception.48 Thus, while categorial intuition is always founded on sensuous perception, perception does not need categorial intuition in order to experience the ‘life and bones’ of a thing in its singularity. The absence of categorial intuition would only affect the thing perceived insofar as it would not be rendered thematically and meaningfully in consciousness, remaining as a vague but pure possibility that still needs to be intuited and understood.

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To say that the intuition of categories is founded on the act of perception does not mean, however, that the understanding renders a new object with regard to the object perceived. On the contrary, The working of synthetic thought, of intellection, has done something to them [objects of perception], has shaped them anew, although being a categorial function, it has done this in categorial fashion, so that the sensuous content of the apparent object has not been altered. The object does not appear before us with new real (realen) properties; it stands before us as this same object, but in a new manner. Its fitting into its categorial context gives it a definite place and role in this context, the role of a relatum, and in particular of a subject – or object-member.49 The diversity of glances falling upon a thing does not re-construct the thing. The thing originally perceived is not altered when intuited at a categorial level, but enriched and rendered according to its own lawful essential forms. Thus, if perception reaches the thing intended by thought and brings it to our intellectual gaze, categorial and eidetic intuition, insofar as they grasp the thing in its eidetic and logical constitutive existence, make the thing thoughtful and, thus, render it as properly meaningful. To bring the thing perceived to thought and, thus, to make it thoughtful, means to shape the object into a relatum, or, in other words, to put the object into a correlation of thought. As Husserl puts it, Perception remains perception, the object is given as it was before given, ‘only’ it is ‘put into relation’. Such shapings due to our synthetic function do not alter the object itself, we count them only as pertaining to our subjective activity, and we therefore overlook them in phenomenological reflections aiming at a clarification of knowledge.50 The founded categorial act not only brings to life the object in a newly enriched fashion, but furthermore, it puts the object into a relation with the subjective activity that intends it. The object appears in the relational act of co-existence within which further reflections upon it can be undertaken with the aim of a clarification of our knowledge of it. To speak of the ‘object’ as a relatum is to speak of the reell or as what in Chapter I received the name of immanent transcendence. In this sense, the relatum, however immanent to the relational act of consciousness, is at the same time regarded as transcendent to the subjective activity, for it is never grasped or understood in its fullness. Instead, we reflect on it continuously; our categorial gaze glances at it from different angles, from different perspectives to the extent that the relatum is never finished with and, therefore, is always open to further understanding. To speak of thought and that which is being thought in terms of correlation is to speak of constitution in the sense that,

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at every moment in which it acts, it reveals a new dimension of the object and, thus, the latter becomes constituted in its own objectivity, in its own ideality and in its own structural existence, but without applying anything to it. That which makes it possible to speak of constitution is the synthetic character of intuition. If intuition were not a synthesis but a process of conjoined and non-dependent acts, then the object apprehended would be a mere construction, for the object would be altered in every act of apprehension. But on the contrary, intuition is precisely a single synthetic act-experience furnished by different moments of apprehension of different dimensions of the object intended. The three different moments of the synthetic act of intuition are an intertwined experience, however one can talk of them as being different dependent moments of the same synthetic act, by means of which the object intended by thought can be reached, seen and brought to consciousness as an infinite relatum that always remains open to thought. Intuitive givenness is the frame of meaningfulness. It must be emphasized that this synthesis of intuitive acts is not to be understood as simply being relative to perception, even if the latter is not a mere naturalistic perception as we have discussed above. Even though perception is the founding act upon which the other different moments of intuition are founded, intuition is not reducible to perception. To intuit is not simply to perceive the object in its flesh, in its pure possibility, but to see within the flesh of the object perceived. Perception is intuition, but intuition is not just perception. Intuition does not remain in the flesh [Leib] of the object but also grasps its essential whatness, its being. What this ultimately shows is that Husserl’s notion of intuition signifies a seeing that is not pre-determined by the meaning-intention of thought. To intuit is to enquire without presuppositions. It is only under this condition of presuppositionlessness, within this limit of meaningfulness, that phenomenology can return to the things themselves in their own ideal objectivity, beyond their mere corporeality and the mathematical formulae that pre-shape them. Husserl clarifies the centrality of the role of intuition in section 24 of Ideas I where he says that ‘intuition is a source of authority [Rechtsquelle] for knowledge, [. . .] whatever presents itself in “intuition” in primordial form [originarily], is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself’.51 Complementing the already said in Logical Investigations, this section from Ideas I makes it clear that intuitive givenness functions here as the source that guarantees evidence. It is for this reason that intuition is then the first ethical principle that defines phenomenology as an inquiry based upon the unconditional demand for presuppositionlessness. As Husserl specifies, principle here has the sense of ‘principium in the genuine sense of the word’, namely, as ‘the absolute beginning that is called up to serve as foundation’ of all theoretical inquiry.52 An important question arises at this stage. That is, to what extent can we speak of intuition as the presuppositionless way of seeing that reaches the things in

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themselves, and at the same time speak of it as the synthetic act that fulfils (or frustrates) thought? For although one does not merely see what one thinks, the act of intuition, as discussed in this chapter, is ultimately tied to the meaningintention of pure thought and its signifying acts. As outlined above, intuition begins with perception, however it is pure thought that, in the first place, must posit before our eyes the object that perception grasps in its flesh. According to this, how can one still say that intuition is fully presuppositionless?

B. The Reason of Thought or the Ground of Intuition §1. The ‘Idea in the Kantian Sense’ If the previous part of the chapter has dealt exclusively with the realm of the act of intuition-fulfilment, the second part aims to discuss the ‘nature’ of the signifying act that intends the object that intuition gathers. The aim of this discussion is to show how the principle of presuppositionlessness is intertwined with the act of thought. As we shall see, to say that one does not simply see what one thinks does not mean that thought does not play a central role in setting the conditions of possibility for intuition. The discussion of the articulation of the autonomous character of intuition and its relationship with thought is intimately connected to the question of the relationship between universals and particulars. On the one hand Husserl founds intuition in perception rather than in thought, endowing intuition with an autonomous character. Simultaneously, Husserl also argues that perception is sensuous perception of individuals rather than of universals, even though the act of intuition manages to reach universal essences and the laws that articulate them. How is it possible to say that intuition is autonomous from thought and that, therefore, one does not merely see what one thinks, but simultaneously argue that one manages to see universals within the particulars? How can one begin by perceiving individuals but end up by grasping universal essences when, as indicated above, universals are not born out of sensuous particulars and, therefore, are not reducible to them? The way the question is posited here already indicates that, in spite of the autonomous character of intuition, pure thought must be somehow involved with the act of intuition and its founding perception if intuition is to reach, see and understand universals. What is the nature of such ‘involvement’ that still allows us to say that intuition is autonomous and presuppositionless with regard to pure thought? Husserl opens the discussion in the second Logical Investigation. He writes: [We] grasp the ideal unity of a meaning in the light of the act-character of signification. [. . .]. When we mean Red in specie, a red object appears before

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us, and in this sense we look towards the red object to which we are nevertheless not referring. The moment of red is at the same time emphasised in this object, and to that extent we can again say that we are looking towards this moment of red. But we are not referring to this individually definite trait in the object [. . .]. While the red object and its emphasised moment of red appear before us, we are rather ‘meaning’ the single identical Red, and are meaning it in a novel conscious manner, through which precisely the Species, and not the individual, becomes our object 53. Although intuition begins in sensuous acts by means of which we first perceive a thing in its pure possibility and then go on to see it as a red thing, the very founding perception is grounded on an act of presentation [Vorstellung]. Husserl understands the act of presentation as the act of pure thought by means of which one presents ‘the objects of our thinking, the objects and states of affairs seen by thought in this or that manner’. 54 To think is to mean and to intend an ideal unity (in this case the general essence ‘Redness’) rather than a sensuous particular. This does not mean that, since perception is grounded on the act of presentation of thought, intuition’s autonomy is then ultimately false. Although thought presents an object in its ideal or universal essence, the fulfilling or frustrating apprehension of such essence can only occur within the perception of the singular thing and through further intuitive abstractions and reflections. One can think of the Redness of that particular box and then see, by means of perception and further intuitions, that the colour of the box is not red but orange and that, furthermore, the object presented before our eyes is not just a box but a coffin. To take perception as grounded on the act of thinking, therefore, does not deny intuition its autonomy, for it is the act of intuition that ultimately sees and makes the object intended by thought meaningful. Husserl’s argument in Logical Investigations and in Ideas I seems to be identical, i.e., that although intuition is ultimately grounded on pure thought, this does not mean that intuitionfulfilment is a mere effect or an extension of thought. As we shall see, thought plays the role of setting the conditions of possibility without which intuition would be fully driven by perception, imagination and pure ideational abstraction but would nonetheless be blind, for it would lack any guidance on what to intuit. Were such the case, intuition would not function as the fulfilment (or frustration) of our thought, but would simply be a substitute for it, this leading us to conclude that one can only think what one sees. On the contrary, however, what Husserl is suggesting is that one can fully intuit, i.e., perceive, imagine and ideate, only in accordance with a universal ideal that guides our intuitions without pre-determining them. This argument, although already inaugurated in Logical Investigations, receives more careful attention in Ideas I, whereby Husserl characterizes the

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universal ideal that our thought means, intends, and finally posits before our perceptive gaze in the following manner: As every intentional experience has a noema and therein a meaning through which it is related to the object, so, inversely, everything that we call by the name of Object, that of which we speak, what we see before us as reality, hold to be possible or probable, think of in however vague a way, is in so far already object of consciousness; and this means that whatever the world and reality may be or be called must be represented within the limits of real and possible consciousness by corresponding meanings and positions, filled more or less with intuitional contents.55 In this passage Husserl confirms that instead of grounding thought in perception, it is perception and its intuitive founded acts that are grounded in the acts of meaning and positing. Whatever an object might be, it is so insofar as it is meant and posited by thought. Simultaneously, and in order to avoid a notion of thought that simply pre-determines the world, Husserl makes an important distinction between form and content. As suggested in the citation above, thought posits the ideal universal in its form whereas intuition fulfils it with its contents. How are we to understand this notion of form? Husserl writes that that which the act of meaning presents is ‘a self-same objective unity’.56 This ‘unity’, however, must be understood as a pure X that is an ‘empty something [without] determining content’.57 X is that which is meant in thought when ‘a conscious subject passes judgement about reality, asks questions about it, thinks it probable or doubts it, resolves the doubt and thereby passes “verdicts of the reason” ’.58 All throughout the process of intending (meaning) and fulfilling or frustrating (intuiting) an object, the object holds a unity of which consciousness and its acts never lose sight at any moment. The universal meant, its attributes, and any moment of one of its attributes sensuously intuited, are different domains of the same identical X. Even when one is apprehending a particular moment of a particular predicate and therefore the glance is concentrated on such a particularity, the glance is still connected to the apprehension of the whole X. One sees a particular moment but always as a moment of X. In other words, thought posits the ideal unity of Redness or Tree without pre-determining the essential Red or Tree that one is to intuit. To posit ideal universals, therefore, is not to present ideal contents but universal forms. What does it mean to say that the act of meaning-intention presents the universal form of Redness rather than the ideal content of Redness? It is at this point that Husserl introduces the notion of the ‘Idea in the Kantian Sense’. He writes: There are objects – and all [transcendental] objects, all ‘realities’ (Realitäten) which are included under the rubric Nature or World are

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here included – which cannot be given with complete determinacy and with similarly complete intuitability in any limited fi nite consciousness. But as ‘Idea’ (in the Kantian sense), the complete givenness is nevertheless prescribed – as a connection of endless processes of continuous appearing, absolutely fixed in its essential type, or, as the field for these processes, a continuum of appearances determined a priori, possessing different but determinate dimensions, governed by an established dispension of essential order.59 As was argued earlier, the act of intuition is an infinite act in the sense that whatever is apprehended is only so in an inadequate manner. Intuition never fully fills out the thought intended, and therefore the latter is always opened to further confirmation, cancellation and frustration in a strive for meaningfulness; in other words, meaningfulness is never definite or finally actualized. Intuition delimits the boundaries of meaningfulness without closing down any particular meaning. But in order for this openness to be possible, all the intuitive moments of a synthetic act of intuition, and so several syntheses, must be bound together in the sense that they never lose sight of the same object X. This is possible due to the ‘ideal formal universality’ that our thought posits before our gaze, namely, the X or ‘Idea in the Kantian Sense’. As Rudolf Bernet has similarly argued, the Idea in the Kantian Sense functions as the ‘goal’ that determines or regulates the formation and structuring of the horizon of possible givenness of the thing.60 The Idea, thus, is ‘the teleological anticipation of absolute cognition’.61 This Idea, qua universal form, as Husserl emphasizes in the citation above, prescribes the unity of the intuitive moments of a synthetic act as well as the unity of different syntheses, a ‘polysynthesis’, or even of different syntheses separated in time, forming thus a ‘continuum’ of appearing moments of the same ‘Idea’.62 The Idea, then, must have, as Joanna Hodge has discussed, a certain degree of determinacy so that it can have a re-identifiable consistency that permits us, not only to keep seeing the same object in the continuum of a synthesis, but to return to it by means of memory or even by means of re-presentation, so that one is able to re-think the principles of, for instance, Euclidean geometry.63 This prescription is not a predefinition of the content of what is to be intuited and made meaningful but the prescription of the form or the limit in which any ideal object that we intend is to be intuited.64 What this means is that the Idea is not to be understood as the prescription of the ideal content Red but the prescription of the universal form of Redness, this universal form of Redness being the law that unites all the different intuitive moments of Redness in a synthesis. The ideal object, then, plays the role of uniting all the acts that grasp it, not, however, due to the content (i.e., because it is Redness), but due to the rules that allow us to see that essence of Redness as Redness. How does Husserl characterize the positing of the ‘Idea in the Kantian Sense’ within our meaning-intention or thought? How is this teleological regulative anticipation possible?

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§2. The rationality of thought Husserl argues in Ideas I that the act of thought by means of which one means something in its universal ideal form can be ‘rationally motivated’, that is, it is characterized by the rational positing [Answeisung] of the ‘Idea in the Kantian Sense’.65 This does not mean that the meaning-intentional act has another internal act within itself. Instead, and as Marcus Brainard has suggested, reason is to be understood in Ideas I not as an act but more as a predicate of consciousness.66 Reason, therefore, is not a subject, a substance or even a faculty of consciousness in the classical sense, but is instead the rationality [Vernünftigkeit] that which defines or characterizes consciousness.67 On this basis, we can think of rationality as being the implicit life of the meaningintention, of the act of consciousness, that posits the universal form of the ideal object intended, namely, the Idea in the Kantian Sense. Husserl also calls this universal form the ‘a priori rule’ that allows for our intuitions of the ideal object Redness to take place in a synthetic fashion.68 The peculiarity of the rationality of consciousness seems to be, thus, that it implicitly or tacitly sets forth the form of the ideal object meant, without determining what the content of the idea of ‘Redness’ is. Or, using Husserl’s own example, ‘the system of geometrical rules determines with absolute precision all the possible forms of motion which might supplement the bit of observed moment here and there before us, but it does not indicate a single real course for the motion of the object that is really moving’.69 According to this, we could say that rationality regulates transcendental experience in the sense that it offers the limits and the possibilities of what can be thought and how it can be thought, and therefore, the limits of meaningfulness that intuition then goes on to accept and fulfil (or frustrate). This argument is also discussed in Logical Investigations and in Formal and Transcendental Logic.70 While in Ideas I Husserl speaks of rationality of consciousness in terms of being the implicit positing of the formal limits or the a priori laws and, therefore, the condition of possibility for what can be properly meaningful, in Logical Investigations he refers similarly to the ‘limits of consistency’ within which any ideal object can be rationally thought.71 It could be argued here that it is precisely due to rationality that we can speak of the possibility of the ‘inconsistency’ of, for example, ‘a squared circle’ or ‘a triangle of four angles’, to use Husserl’s own examples. To lack or not consistency or rationality, could be, furthermore, understood in terms of ‘authentic [Eigentliche] and inauthentic [Uneigentliche] Thinking’. As Suzanne Bachelard argues, expressions such as a ‘round square’ are presentable in signifying acts.72 Given that they follow the laws of pure grammar and appear as ‘wellformed unities’, they must, then, be ‘senseful’ [Sinn] and ‘compossible’.73 At the same time, however, she continues to argue that, although senseful, they are ‘improperly meaningful’ or ‘meaningless’ insofar as they remain in the

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realm of signification and lack any possibility of fulfilment in intuition.74 What Bachelard’s argument suggests is that, contrary to a senseful but meaninglessness and, therefore, inauthentic or improper [Uneigentliche] expression, an authentic or proper [eigentliche] meaningful expression would be rational insofar as it follows the universal formal rules of consistency posited by the rationality of consciousness within our meaning-intention, and, therefore, has the possibility of being fulfilled by intuition. According to this, the rationality of consciousness is that which, within the thinking act, implicitly determines the ideal object as properly meaningful, without determining its meaningfulness. To say, however, that rationality manifests the positing of such universal formal laws within the meaning-intention of our thought is not to suggest that these universal laws originally reside in the mind. Rationality is not the mere bridge that simply exports universal laws from the mind to things, so that the objects intended by our thought can be fulfi lled. Husserl’s transcendental idealism is not a barbaric intellectualism. Were such the case, intuition would lack the autonomous character required by phenomenology, for, ultimately, all that which intuition-fulfilment apprehended would simply originate in our mind. What Husserl suggests in Ideas I is that the rationality that motivates the signifying act arises from understanding. If, as discussed above, in Logical Investigations Husserl identified categorial intuition with understanding, in Ideas I he suggests that in order to posit the ‘Idea in the Kantian Sense’, this rational positing is not simply ‘blind’ but, instead, ‘it has the specific character of that “which understands” [der “einsehenden”]’.75 What does Husserl mean here by a rationality that understands?

§3. Rationality’s pure intuition Husserl introduces in Ideas I a new mode of intuition; he calls it ‘Pure Intuition’.76 Pure Intuition differs from the act of intuition-fulfilment in the fact that the latter apprehends the essences (material or formal) of the thing intended by thought, whereas Pure Intuition grasps the universal formal laws (i.e., the Idea in the Kantian Sense) that allow intuition-fulfilments to apprehend the thing intended. Whereas intuition-fulfilments are acts that grasp material and categorial essences of things, Pure Intuition tacitly grasps ‘ideals’ that are not graspable by means of perception, Wesensanschauung or even by categorial intuition at the level of fulfilment. Thus, rather than apprehending the essences of things, Pure Intuition apprehends the Idea of Thing, representing it in consciousness by the conceptual thought ‘Thing’77. To grasp the ‘Idea’ Thing is not to grasp the individual sensuous thing or any of its essences, but to grasp Thing as ‘Idea in the Kantian Sense’, as regulative limit. For this reason, and although on the one hand Pure Intuition or rationality’s understanding seems to be a new categorial act, on the other it seems also clear

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that it is not a mere intuitive ‘act’. Insofar as Pure Intuition is the rationality’s understanding, and the latter is not an act, then we could conclude here that Pure Intuition should be understood not as an act but as an implicit moment of rationality within the act. Two important questions arise at this point. On the one hand there is the question of the term ‘Thing’, and on the other the issue of the description of Pure Intuition. When Husserl introduces the term ‘Thing’ as ‘Idea in the Kantian Sense’, this does not appear to be a mere example among others but a ‘transcendental clue’.78 Early on in Ideas I he had already spoken of phenomenology being the ontological ground of all sciences, which, as such, are grounded on the ontological basis of their correspondent objects.79 Since phenomenology is the enquiry that serves as a ground for all regional ontologies, the aim of such an enquiry is, therefore, the question of ‘object-in-general’, qua object. Husserl is clear about this in the final stages of Ideas I where he writes that ‘the general problem which determines the development of the [. . .] phenomenological disciplines [is] the problem of the general constitution of the objectivities of the region “Thing” in the transcendental consciousness, or, expressed more briefly, “of the phenomenological constitution of the Thing in general” ’.80 In other words, phenomenology is not just the science that studies the eidetic dimension of objects, but, furthermore, is the science of object-in-general, namely, of the relatum of consciousness and of its noematic structure. The aim of transcendental phenomenology can, thus, be regarded as the study of the constitution of the Object in consciousness, namely, the inquiry into how an Object comes about at all so that we can perceive it sensuously and intuit it eidetically. It is within this context of constitution and origin of Thing-in-general that Husserl presents the notion of ‘intuitive “idealization” ’ and argues how this Idea Thing appears.81 He writes: Thus we start from the verbal and perhaps wholly obscure presentation of a Thing, exactly as presented to us. We freely produce intuitional representations of the same ‘Thing’-in-general and make clear to ourselves the vague meaning of the word. Since we are concerned here with a ‘general presentation’, we must proceed with the help of illustrations. We produce at random fancy illustrations of things, free intuitions, shall we say of winged steeds, white ravens, golden mountains, and the like; these in any case would be things, and presentations of them serve therefore for purposes of illustration just as well as presentations of things of real experience. Through such material we apprehend in idea and with intuitive clearness the essence ‘Thing’.82 Idealization begins once again with the assistance of imagination, by means of which we make available examples or illustrations. Imagination not only gives us certain particular things that exist in an empirical sense (red boxes,

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white cats or blue books), but it also presets us with golden mountains and winged steeds. Although Pure Intuition is not concerned with the particular existence of things and is, instead, preoccupied with the Idea Thing independently from any possible content, the Idea Thing can only be apprehended when seeing sensuous illustrative contents. This does not mean, however, that the Idea Thing is dependent on its illustrations. Husserl rather suggests that Ideas must be understood, precisely, as non-dependent, even though the capacity to grasp them requires a sensuous ground from where to abstract them. I shall return to this point shortly. Idealization of the Idea Thing is, however, never a total Pure Intuition. Although capable of bringing to consciousness the Idea Thing that is to serve as horizon for any intuition-fulfilments, Pure Intuition is not capable of rendering it in all its perfection and final adequacy. Pure Intuition is not pure because it manages to grasp the Idea in its total perfection. What makes Pure Intuition pure is that it prescribes rules or laws for the course of possible intuitions, independently of any material content.83 It could be argued that the characteristic of prescribing rules for the course of future possible intuitions is already a feature of intuition-fulfilment. It would be true to say that the intuition-fulfilment of a thing is an endless act and that every apprehension sets the parameters for further intuitions. Different essential attributes are brought to consciousness one after the other, the object gradually becoming more perfectly and clearly determined. We first see the Redness, then the Circularity of the thing, then we see it as a box, and then, in a further intuitive act, we see that the box is a coffin, and so on and so forth; the continuum is endless. At the level of intuition-fulfilment, thus, we are ‘free agents’ insofar as we are free to endow the ideal object with closer determinations, properties and changes of properties.84 We are even free to ignore certain dimensions of the thing perceived and simply concentrate on other areas. Nevertheless, such freedom is restricted to the particularity of the ideal object. Even though the object meant is an ideal and universal object in specie, our intuitive gaze never loses sight of the flesh of the same whole identical and singular relatum, regardless of the limitless number of intuitive acts performed. Intuition-fulfilment always begins with perception, and even though it sees beyond it, it never manages to see outside of the singularity of the flesh perceived. On the other hand, Pure Intuition grasps the laws through which the freedom of our intuition-fulfilments is lived. Pure Intuition apprehends the formal rules by which the acts of intuition-fulfilment abide and see beyond, but within, the singularity of the perceived. Unlike intuition-fulfilment, Pure Intuition is not restricted to a particular singularity; on the contrary, its object is the ‘Idea’ and, as such, the latter is intuited empty of all intuitional content (essences). Rather than seeing within the perceived, Pure Intuition idealizes out of the perceived in past perceptions. The Idea Thing does not originate in things but in the moment of intuitive idealization. Even though idealization begins with illustrations of

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things, the Idea Thing is not abstracted from the content of the things. Instead Pure Intuition can be said to be rationality’s capacity to understand free from the determination of the senses, while still grounded on the illustrations that the senses can present. To idealize, we can now say, is to abstract the laws of thought on the basis of imagination or sensuous perception by means of pure understanding. But what are these formal and universal or ideal laws of thought? Husserl defines these formal laws as the ‘noematic structure of the Idea’.85 He defines such a structure in a three-dimensional fashion, namely, as res temporalis, res extensa and res materialis, these being ‘the most general possible kind of infinities’ or ‘the dimension of the infinite which the Idea [Thing] implicitly contains’.86 To say, in the first place, that the Idea Thing presents itself as res temporalis signifies that ‘it presents itself in the necessary form of Time’.87 That is, Pure Intuition ‘teaches us to know the Thing as necessary enduring [. . .]. We grasp in Pure Intuition the “Idea” of temporality and of all the essential phases included in it’.88 What we grasp, then, when apprehending the Idea of temporality that constitutes the Idea Thing is the infinite character of the perceptual series of every intuition-fulfilment; we grasp the ‘endlessness’ with which our intuition-fulfilment is to enquire into its relatum. To grasp such a temporal limitlessness is to grasp the law on the basis of which the perception and intuition of any thing proceeds. In the second place, to grasp the Idea Thing in its res extensa signifies that ‘we grasp the Idea of Space and the Ideas which it includes’ (i.e., depth, distance, among many others).89 Although the thing intuited may change shape, what one grasps when purely intuiting the Idea Thing is the law that establishes that whatever is being revealed to our gaze as a thing is so qua a spatial thing, regardless of its shape – even the thing is not perceived but purely imagined. Thirdly, the Pure Intuition of the Idea Thing also reveals that Thing ‘is a substantial unity’.90 That is to say that, qua Idea, it maintains a unity every time that it is intuited. The Idea Thing is ‘always’ the Idea Thing. In summary, and paraphrasing Husserl, this formal and lawful structure of the ‘Idea’ Thing is ‘no theory or metaphysic’, but is instead the ‘essential necessities’ by means of which any-thing can ever be intuited and, thus, be brought to consciousness in its pure Ideality as relatum.91 Logical Investigations already addresses this particular argument, while formulating it differently. Husserl speaks there of ‘another set of categorial acts’ which he terms ‘universal intuition’ [allgemeinen Anschauung].92 As in Ideas I, in Logical Investigations Husserl speaks of universal intuition in terms of being a form of idealization or ‘Ideational Abstraction’ [ideieren Abstraktion] by means of which the Idea, the Universal, is brought to consciousness.93 By means of universal intuition, he writes, ‘we become aware of the identity of the universal [and thus] we contemplate a universal object [that] may be refuted by adequate future perception’.94 Husserl refers to such Universals or Ideas as ‘the ideal laws governing the connection of possibilities and impossibilities [consistency and inconsistency], [which] belong among categorial forms in specie. They

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circumscribe’, he goes on to say, ‘the ideally closed manifold of the rearrangements and transformations of categorial forms’.95 This seems to suggest the following: Pure Intuition or universal intuition abstracts categorial laws rather than categorial essences, and as such ‘to gain insight into these laws does not require an actual carrying out of a categorial intuition [but a] generalising abstraction of the comprehensive possibility [through which] the unitary, intuitive “insight” into the law is achieved’.96 The apprehension of these universal laws would not just be the apprehension of the categories, but rather the apprehension of the ideal laws that Husserl specifies later on in Ideas I, namely the ‘res temporalis’, ‘res extensa’ and ‘res materialis’ that articulate the categories or formal essences and that, accordingly, allow for categorial intuitions of any object that our thought intends. It is for this reason that Husserl describes them as ‘the pure laws of authentic thinking, the laws, that is, of categorial intuitions in virtue of their purely categorial forms’.97 Let me return now to the question of the rationality of consciousness and the pure understanding, in order to articulate in what sense rationality, Pure Intuition and the Idea in the Kantian Sense or the Universal laws ‘res temporalis’, ‘res extensa’ and ‘res materialis’ are brought together. According to the discussion thus far, we can begin by saying that that which reason understands by means of Pure or Universal Intuition is the formal constitution of the Idea, and that is precisely what it posits within the ideal object that thought intends. To put it more concretely, to posit such formal ideal rules or laws is, for instance, to posit that ‘the unity of a mere res extensa is conceivable apart from the unity which regulates the Idea of the res materialis, although no res materialis is conceivable which is not also res extensa’.98 Simultaneously, it also implies that such res extensa is only conceivable within temporality; that is to say, when perceiving a thing the process is a perceptual series by means of which the extension is revealed in a continuous running – since a spatial thing always appears to the gaze in a particular orientation and not from all angles at once. Rationality, thus, posits the logical laws of formation within the signifying act and prescribes the possibility for any intuition-fulfilment of the ideal object meant. But in order to do so, the rationality of consciousness must have had to understand or to purely intuit those universal laws from former experiences and, therefore, from previous moments of the synthesis of consciousness. It is for this very reason that Husserl’s account of rationality cannot be mistaken for a neo-Kantianism that simply claims that the object is the manifold of sense-data structured by the concepts of the understanding. What Husserl is showing here is that while the structure of the objects of consciousness already lies within the eidetic dimension of the objects, it is the characteristic of rationality to grasp such a structure and to posit it forward in every further act. In articulating rationality, Pure Intuition and the Idea in the Kantian Sense, Husserl seems to be setting the ground for a relationship between consciousness and its object in terms of constitution rather than of construction

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or deduction. By arguing that intuition is founded on perception and, at the same time, that perception is oriented by the rationality of thought, Husserl is suggesting that intuition is presuppositionless, although without being blind and arbitrary. Thus, in order for intuition to see autonomously in all of its moments, and therefore to reach the things in themselves, as Husserl’s phenomenology aspires to, the rationality of thought must prescribe the rules of our seeing. At the same time, these rules (the Idea in the Kantian Sense) are not universal in the sense of being presupposed principles. Instead, Husserl makes it clear that they must be intuited in all their purity from former relata. To speak in these terms implies that universal laws do not simply pre-exist our thought in a Platonic sense. Rationality will only be able to posit these laws within the acts of meaning-intention if it has previously understood them by means of idealization or Pure Intuition. Pure Intuition, or rationality’s understanding, work here as the weaving of the synthesis of experience, grasping the limits of experience from within our previous acts and positing them within every further act of thought, within which new objects will be able to appear.

C. The Principle of Principles §1. The principle of presuppositionlessness as Idea in the Kantian Sense The discussion carried out in this chapter so far shows that Husserl’s aim is no other than to re-ground knowledge or cognition in intuition, in order to be able to assert the priority and the respect for the things themselves over the disrespectfulness of traditional theory that, in Husserl’s view, had rendered cognition unrecognizable.99 This, however, is not entirely new from Ideas I. As seen above, in Logical Investigations Husserl had already characterized the first principle of phenomenology, that which Ideas I calls the principle of principles, as the ‘principle of presuppositionlessness’ [Prinzip der Vorausssetzungslosigkeit] that defines the ‘purely phenomenological ground’ of any ‘epistemological investigation that can seriously claim to be scientific’.100 For it is only under the auspices of this principle of presuppositionlessness that phenomenology can obtain an ‘evident clarification of what thinking and cognizing are in general’, and that any scientific investigation can obtain access to the objectivity of its object.101 It is on this basis that we can say that for Husserl ‘Intuition is a source of authority [Rechtsquelle] for knowledge, [. . .] whatever presents itself in “intuition” in primordial form [originarily], is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself ’.102 This discussion helps us to understand, then, that the preliminary task of phenomenology is to delve into the very structure and genesis of consciousness, of human experience, in order restore the dignity of cognition and ensure that cognition leads us to

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evidence. As discussed earlier in the light of the Kaizo articles, the aim of phenomenology is to re-ground science in a new philosophical attitude that is to allow for a radical renewal of science, so that the latter can attain the questions concerning the meaningfulness of the human being and thus renew humanity into a true and authentic humanity. The question of intuition has to be understood within this framework. On the one hand, intuition is the principle of principles because it takes the shape of a regulative Idea in relation to all phenomenological research. The principle of intuition plays the teleological role of being the regulative limit of all philosophical investigation under the auspices of Evidenz and that, on this basis, is to allow the return to the things themselves. On these grounds, then, the principle of intuition, qua Idea in the Kantian Sense, becomes here the essential necessity of any future respectful cognition that is to be based on the freedom from the presuppositions, naiveties, prejudice and dogmatism that have misguided both science and philosophy and that have lead them astray. To re-ground science into a new philosophical attitude (i.e., phenomenology) means to re-root it to the principle of intuition. On the other hand, however, to speak of a principle of intuition in terms of the regulative Idea also means to speak of the principle that can regulate the limits and structure of the inquiry itself and, thus, purify it from its very own prejudices and naiveties. In order for this to be possible, phenomenology must undertake a continuous and irrevocable self-reflection with the aim of uncovering and accounting for its very foundational limits and origin. Phenomenology, in other words, will only allow itself to proceed or progress under the light of intuitive evidence. Nevertheless, this self-reflectivity is unconditional. For this reason, and as we shall see in the forthcoming chapters, in order to guarantee that the inquiry is free from presuppositions, phenomenology will have to give an account of the very principle of principles itself, that is of its very own condition of possibility and of its very own origin.

Chapter III

The Ethical Extent of Phenomenology Static Intentionality and Its Genetic Possibility

A. Immanent Intuition or the Apprehension of the Immanency of Consciousness §1. The question of ‘inner perception’ and the origins of the reduction Already in Logical Investigations Husserl makes it clear that phenomenology is not a mere theory of knowledge concerned with how one goes about perceiving objects and their essences. The point is to turn our attention into the acts of consciousness, whereby the immanent transcendent objects are experienced, and to describe the phenomenon opened up by the phenomenological reflection. But by aiming at the insights of the acts of experience, phenomenological reflection is also delving into the origins of the inquiry itself and, more explicitly, into the genesis of the reflective act that characterizes phenomenology. Although the question of the reduction is not thematized until Ideas I, Logical Investigations already introduces the questions of the ‘reductive act’ that characterizes the phenomenological reflection as a science of life-experience [Erlebnis] and of the ‘inner perception’ by means of which the phenomenologist is to grasp the very domain of life-experience opened by the reduction.1 Let me begin with Husserl’s account of inner perception. In order to be able to account for a so-called inner perception that is to deliver the very insights of consciousness, Investigation V begins by making a clear distinction between two types of objects. In the first place, he makes it clear that ‘the appearing of the thing (experience) is not the thing which appears (that seems to stand before us in propia persona)’.2 On the one hand, the object that appears in experience is a thing-like object, and, qua thing, requires an infinite perception and intuition, for it always escapes or transcends the gaze of sensual perception. It is in this sense that this object is understood as an immanent transcendent object, the apprehension of which is, by default, always inadequate. On the other hand, the appearing of the thing or the act of being conscious-of, whereby the thing is presented

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in consciousness, is, unlike the object of an appearing, a non-thing-like object. According to this, Husserl argues that both ‘objects’, the appearing and the correlate of the appearing, cannot be conflated, for while the thing-like object is an immanent transcendent object, the appearing is a pure and absolute immanency. It is on the grounds of this distinction (to which I will return in more detail in the next section below) that Husserl can also differentiate between two different types of intuitive acts. Since these two types of objects are radically different in nature, then so must be the way in which they appear or are given in consciousness. On this basis, Husserl defines the perceptive act, by means of which the object-thing-like is given, as transcendent or ‘outer perception’, and, on the other hand, describes the reflective ‘perception’ of the appearing itself as ‘inner perception’. In order to show the radical difference between these two types of perception, Husserl argues that ‘the appearing of the thing does not itself appear to us, we live through it’.3 This seems to be dispelling at once both the psychologistic approach that reads the object of experience as belonging intra-mentally to the experience itself, and, on the other hand, the reading that situates the object as being fully transcendent to the act of inner perception. In contrast to these two approaches, Husserl suggests reading the appearing of the object, and, therefore, the ‘object’ of inner perception, as the notion of experience [Erlebnis] through which one lives his or her life [Leben] and whereby the world appears to us in propia persona.4 By making such a distinction, Husserl is suggesting that the pure phenomenology of consciousness is not concerned with the object of outer experience and, therefore, that the final aim of the inquiry is not to be concerned with the real [reell] or eidetic existence and the essential properties of the immanent transcendent object. For the latter, even though it appears in experience, does not form an integral part of the act of experience itself. Furthermore, and insofar as it is not part of the act, it does ‘not affect the internal, purely descriptive (or phenomenological) character of [inner] perception’.5 According to this, phenomenology is a self-reflective inquiry the object of which cannot be turned into a mere external object of inner perception. Since inner perception is not the same notion as outer perception but directed in a different direction, then the immanent experience [Erlebnis] grasped by means of inner perception cannot be simply taken as if it were the subject (an empirical ego) of the thing that appears to us. Husserl is clear about this when he writes that ‘[. . .] we must distinguish the relation of the appearing person I to the externally appearing thing, from the relation of the thing’s appearing (‘qua’ experience) to the thing which appears’6. According to Husserl, the apprehension of the act of experience is not reducible to the apprehension of an I, an empirical ego (coming either under the name of person or soul) that appears to me as a thing. What we are concerned with is the ground that allows things to appear in my consciousness, namely, the ground that makes it possible for me to be conscious of them. It is for this reason that Husserl understands this ground as

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the experience through which I live, and, therefore, as a ground that is more original than the relationship between the things ‘subject’ and ‘object’, and that, instead, signifies experience itself as the field within which I can appear as empirical ego, as a thing, to myself. To grasp such experience is not to perceive an ‘I’ but to grasp the lifeness of my empirical ego. What Husserl’s argument demonstrates here is that the inner perception of experience cannot simply be an extension of the perception of things, for were that the case we would then be treating consciousness as a thing. The problem with such an account would not only be that the world is expelled from consciousness and that, correlatively, consciousness gains a Cartesian status of self-sufficiency, but, moreover, that it would be presupposing what would have to be understood as the inner I that perceives its own experience. Within this context, phenomenology would then have to perform further reflective acts. But since the perceiver would always remain an external subject in relation to the experiencing perceived, phenomenology would fall into an infinite regress. This distinction is important for it seems to designate that that which inner perception sees is my life-experience rather than myself as a mere and traditional subject of the world. Husserl goes on then to argue that this notion of experience [Erlebnis], grasped by means of a self-reflective inner perception, is to be understood as a unity of consciousness at which one arrives by means of a ‘reductive act’.7 He writes: If we cut out the ego-body from the empirical ego, and limit the purely mental ego to its phenomenological content, the latter reduces to a unity of consciousness, to a real experiential complex, which we (i.e., each man for its own ego) find in part evidently present [. . .]. The phenomenologically reduced ego is therefore nothing peculiar, floating above many experiences: it is simply identical with their [experience’s] own interconnected unity8. Husserl understands the reduction here as the bracketing of the empirical egobody by means of which we gain access to the phenomenologically reduced ego. Furthermore, he understands the phenomenological ego as that which synthesizes a complex of experiences all interconnected and forming a unity or, what we could call, a life. This seems to be suggesting that the uncovering and the inner perception of the reduced phenomenological ego signals the capacity of phenomenology for grasping one’s own life as a unitary whole. Unlike any thing-like object that, as such, is always transcendent and gains its meaningfulness in an infinite and therefore inadequate stream of perception, one’s own life-experience is given in inner perception at once and in all self-evidence. That this is the case can be seen in the following point put forward by Husserl. The ‘self-evidence’ usually attributed to inner perception, shows it to be taken to be an adequate perception, one ascribing nothing to its real objects

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that is not intuitively presented, and given as a real part (reell) of the perceptual experiences, and one which, conversely, intuitively presents and posits its objects just as they are in fact experienced in and with their perception. [. . .] It is accordingly clear, and evident from the mere essence of perception, that adequate perception can only be ‘inner’ perception, that it can only be trained upon experiences simultaneously given, and belonging to a single experience with itself. This holds, precisely stated, only for experiences in the purely phenomenological sense.9 Since life-experience is not a transcendent object in the shape of a thing that can only appear gradually but, on the contrary, is a non-extended unity, then it must have to be given adequately. According to this, the unity of my living ego can give itself solely in all its wholeness, adequately, in evident ‘presence’. But for inner perception to be able to grasp my inner life-experience, the reductive act – as Husserl terms it above – must let nothing be ascribed to it that is not already a genuine or reel dimension of it. When this is the case, reflection opens the gate for an adequate perception that can render inner life in its ‘full presence’. Nonetheless, and even though on the one hand inner perception apprehends the full presence of the unitary stream of life in full adequacy, Husserl has also emphasized above that, on the other hand, this life-experience can ‘only’ appear ‘as in part evidently present’.10 How can my life-experience be ‘present’ and therefore be evidently and adequately given through inner perception and, at the same time, be ‘only’ evidently present in part? Already in Logical Investigations Husserl seemed clear about the temporal structure of life-experience and of the problems that the phenomenological inquiry would have to confront. Although no explicit treatment of this problem appeared either in Logical Investigations or in Ideas I, both texts include important discussions regarding the importance of the question. Even though Chapter IV of this book deals in depth with this issue, let me advance here the core of Husserl’s view and of the problem that the question of time is to signify for Husserl’s inquiry. In one of the most explicit passages of Logical Investigations where Husserl addresses the topic of time he writes: What is adequately perceived, whether expressed thus vaguely or left unexpressed, constitutes the epistemologically primary, absolute certain focus yielded by the reduction, at any given moment, of the phenomenal empirical ego to such of its content as can be grasped by the pure phenomenologist. [. . .] To this primary focus more territory is added when we reduce to its past phenomenological content all that retention, essentially attached to perception, reports as having been recently present, and also all that recollection reports as having belonged to our earlier actual experience, and when we then go back through reflection to what ‘in’ retention and remembrance is reproductively phenomenological.11

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The reflective reduction allows the phenomenologist to reach and see his or her life-experience [Erlebnis] by means of an adequate inner perception. Although on the one hand one’s inner life-experience is given adequately, on the other it is a temporal living in which the full presence is made up of the co-existence of the past experiences as we recollect them and the experiences that we retain as having been recently present. What Husserl seems to be suggesting in this short section of Investigation V is that however the inner perception of our own life-experience is adequate, life itself is a ‘temporally growing unity of the stream of experience’.12 The unity of consciousness that makes our living-experience be one singular life is conceived (already in Logical Investigations) as temporal. That is, as the unity that springs from the co-existence of unities that ‘pass continuously into one another from one moment to the next, composing a unity of change, of the stream of consciousness, which in its turn demands the continuous persistence, or no continuous change, of one aspect essential for its total unity’.13 Husserl understands this aspect to be time itself, even though this notion of time is not the time of the world of things (i.e., cosmic time), but the time that is immanent in the stream of consciousness and is that in which the stream of consciousness flows.14 What is perhaps of interest in this particular passage for our discussion here on the origin of the reduction and on the nature of inner perception is that these two questions immediately lead us to the question of time, and, therefore, to one of the kernels that is to determine the trajectory of Husserl’s inquiry. The reduction to life-experience opens the way to a perception of the phenomenological ego that synthesizes my life-experience as my experience. This perception is, on the one hand, adequate insofar as it grasps at once the full presence of my life-experience, although at the same time presence is here the flux of its own stream. In short, inner perception gains full vision of my phenomenological ego, whose presence, unlike my empirical ego, always exceeds the presence of a thing-like object. Simultaneously, though, inner perception is capable of grasping only the phenomenological ego, the synthesizer of my whole life-experience. What this suggests is that although on the one hand Husserl seems very much aware of the problematic, he is still committed not simply to a notion of the ego but to an ego that plays the role of accompanying all experiences. To be committed to this notion of ego means to be committed, moreover, to a notion of experience that is bound to the act of consciousness and, more concretely, to the unity of a synthesis of acts. If Husserl left aside the question of time in Logical Investigations and Ideas I, it is because he could already envisage how time-consciousness would demand further analyses that would take the notion of experience beyond the limits of the act of consciousness. This would have surely split Husserl’s analysis in many different directions at the same time, for what is at stake with the introduction of time-consciousness is not only the question of the act, but the questions of inner perception, the range and the nature of phenomenological reflection, etc. He nonetheless returns to the question of

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time in his lectures on time – most of them delivered just after the publication of Logical Investigations in 1901 and mostly written at the same time as Ideas I – where he posits the basis for addressing some of these problems. However, we shall first follow Husserl and see how he fleshes out in Ideas I the questions of the reduction and inner perception that he had already presented in Logical Investigations. We will also consider how, according to Husserl, the reduction can account for the insight of consciousness.

§2. Immanent intuition and the transcendental reduction This sketchy introduction to inner perception and the reduction is taken up again in Ideas I. Here Husserl makes a further distinction, now between inner perception and inner or immanent intuition, and then ties this ‘new’ notion of intuition to the transcendental and eidetic reduction(s). Husserl begins this discussion in Ideas I repeating the argument of Logical Investigations. Although the argument seems perhaps clearer and more explicit in Ideas I, the terminology deployed by Husserl falls short of any clarity at first, especially concerning the indiscriminate uses of the terms ‘inner perception’, ‘inner intuition’ and ‘immanent intuition’.15 I shall return to this problem shortly. For the time being let me go through Husserl’s own argument regarding ‘inner perception’ or ‘inner intuition’ in Ideas I, where he describes it as A ‘reflexive’ directing of the mental glance toward itself [. . .] in the form of a new cogitatio and by way of a simple apprehension. In other words, every cogitation can become the object of a so-called ‘inner perception’, and eventually the object of a reflexive valuation, an approval or disapproval, and so forth. The same holds good in correspondingly modified ways, not only of real acts in the sense of acts of perception [Aktimpressionen], but also of acts of which we are aware ‘in’ fancy [imagination], ‘in’ memory, or ‘in’ empathy, when we understand and relive the acts of others. We can reflect ‘in’ memory, empathy and so forth, and in these various possible modifications make the acts we are ‘therein’ aware of into objects of our apprehending and of the attitude-expressing acts which are grounded in the apprehension.16 Unlike ‘outer perception’ or ‘outer intuition’, which reflects on the objects of the acts of consciousness, ‘inner’ or immanent intuition is a reflection on the acts of consciousness within which the world and the objects of the world are entertained in consciousness as relata. These acts are not just the acts of sensuous perception but also the acts embedded in such perception, like for instance imagination and memory. Nonetheless, that which inner perception or intuition aims to grasp is not the properties of perception as such but the essential character of the acts of consciousness. Inner perception is,

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thus, a simple apprehension capable of seeing through ‘the perspected variable [Abgeschattetes]’ and of grasping the ‘perspective variation [Abschattung]’ in which one experiences the world and the things in it.17 It is this difference between the perspected variable and the perspective variation that, according to Husserl, marks off the difference between inner and outer perception or intuition. On the one hand, the perception or intuition of the perspected variable is carried out by means of adumbrations or series of perceptions [Abschattungen] that gather the thing qua spatial from its various angles.18 If a thing is grasped sensuously by adumbrations [Abschattungen], this is because the thing is spatial in character, whether the thing is a table, a triangle, a unicorn or even a melody. In either of these examples, the object gives itself in consciousness gradually and never in one single blow. On the other hand, and insofar as they are not some-thing spatially, the acts of perception give themselves to reflective consciousness in one blow or in a ‘simple apprehension’ rather than in a series of adumbrations.19 If the argument offered by Husserl in Logical Investigations was based on the thinghood of the object, the one offered now in Ideas I centres around the question of the spatiality or non-spatiality of the immanent-transcendent and the purely immanent object respectively. The whole argument can be summarized in the following statement: ‘where there is no Being in space, it is senseless to speak of seeing from different standpoints with a changing orientation, and under the different aspects thereby opened up, or through varying appearances and perspective shadings’.20 By contrast, though, the grasping of one’s own consciousness is the grasping of immanency with no space, with no reality. On this ground, Husserl goes on to argue that to speak of non-spatial immanent consciousness is to speak of ‘absoluteness’.21 As he explains, unlike the perception of the tone of a violin (which is given through perspectives), the experience of a feeling has no perspectives, and all we intuit when reflecting on one’s own feeling is an absolute with no aspects that present themselves ‘now in this way now in that other way’.22 What Husserl is keen to emphasize at this point is that the absoluteness of the feeling is not due to the fact that it is a feeling, but to the fact that it is immanent within our life-consciousness or, to be more precise, that it is the Erlebnis through which we live our life. This point leads Husserl to characterize the absoluteness of the immanency of consciousness in terms of being a pre-reflective background, for, qua immanent, it is ‘already there as a background, and therefore available for [inner] perception’.23 This aspect of pre-reflective absolute immanency is that which, according to Husserl, guarantees the undeniable existence of my life-consciousness. Whereas that which is being perceived does not need to exist in the form of a thing by virtue of its givenness, the perception of it is undeniable, for it is the experience of one who is ‘thinking’ it.24 The undeniable existence that characterizes my stream of consciousness, my experience, not only affects sensuous perceptions, but all experience. Even when, in reflection, we immanently

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perceive a ‘fictitious’ experience, an act of imagination or fantasy of an impossible thing, ‘that which floats before the mind may be a mere fiction, [but] the floating itself is not itself imagined’.25 According to this, then, ‘in the absolute sphere, opposition, illusion, and being-otherwise have no place. It is a sphere absolutely established [absoluter Position]’.26 To put it another way, consciousness, understood as consciousness-of, is never relative to the reality or the existence, to the consistency or inconsistency, of what one is conscious. It is within this context that Husserl’s formulation in section 49 of Ideas I can be understood now more accurately. For when he argues there that ‘no real thing [. . .] is necessary for the Being of consciousness itself’, no claim to a possible existence of consciousness, without nothing to be conscious-of, is being made.27 Husserl is simply emphasizing once again that the status of the objects, and that means their real, phantasized or compossible existence, ‘do not affect the internal, purely descriptive (or phenomenological) character of perception’.28 Heidegger, however, claims that Ideas I, and particularly section 49, signifies a relapse into a situation of absolute interiority from which the world is ‘annihilated’, leading Husserl to abandon the project of phenomenology.29 Heidegger holds the view that phenomenology, as the science of phenomena, becomes through the transcendental turn a mere science of consciousness, from which phenomena are excluded.30 Misled perhaps by Husserl’s own terminology, Heidegger seems to base his position on the view that the reduction symbolizes not a momentary suspension but a pure denial (an ‘annihilation’) of the world and of phenomena in a traditional Cartesian mode. Given this annihilation of the world, Heidegger understands Husserl’s transcendental move as the assertion of a life of consciousness that does not need the world in order to be lived. Phenomena, in other words, become dependent on absolute consciousness. Contrary to Heidegger’s reading, we can argue with Jean-Luc Marion that regardless of the Cartesian terminology deployed when claiming that ‘immanent Being is therefore without doubt absolute in this sense, that in principle nulla “re” indiget ad existendum’, Husserl’s position cannot be conflated with Descartes’.31 For although Husserl uses here a purely Cartesian formulation from Principia Philosophiae in order to claim that the Being of consciousness does not depend on the spatial thing, he is very careful not to claim that consciousness is a res in the sense of realitas.32 Had he claimed with Descartes that consciousness is a substance, he would not then have been able to maintain that the Being of consciousness differs from the being of spatial things in the sense that the former gives itself to intuition all at once rather than in shades. According to Husserl, the Being of consciousness has a necessary indubitable life, whereas that which is experienced in consciousness and that gains its meaning in being experienced has a contingent reality, due, precisely, to the three-dimensional reality of the object of consciousness. This is one of the key points of transcendental phenomenology. For what Husserl is describing here is not just the ‘nature’ of inner perception or

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intuition and of its object, but he is also determining that such an object can only be grasped as it is grasped due to transcendental reduction. In short, Husserl argues here that that which transcendental reduction holds in suspension is the contingent reality, the spatial being, of the thing experienced in consciousness. By doing this, the reflective immanent intuition not only uncovers the very life of consciousness but, furthermore, it discovers the absolute and indubitable existence of the being of consciousness. Lilian Alweiss has expressed a certain uneasiness regarding Husserl’s Cartesianism. While acknowledging that Husserl prevents any association between consciousness and substance, she also writes that ‘structurally Husserl adheres to Descartes: not only does Husserl intimate a dualism by defining consciousness (i.e. immanence) as essentially distinct from reality (transcendence), but, like Descartes, he argues that transcendence is characterised by extension. Space is the essence of transcendence and never pertains to immanence, which reminds us of Descartes’ definition of extensio as the essence of res corporea, which can never be attributed to res cogitans’.33 It is on this basis that Alweiss goes on to claim that the transcendental reduction is the suspension of the world of things. She writes: ‘we can now understand how Husserl, in a way analogous to Descartes, reaches the conclusion that “in principle the possibility exists that consciousness itself is not affected by the annihilation of the world of things”. The only area of study that can provide the absolute certainty needed is pure consciousness, and the transcendent world, in whose being doubt is conceivable, must be bracketed’.34 Although Alweiss’ account of the suspension of the world given in Ideas I is insightful, her view seems too dependent on her belief that at this stage Husserl’s position, although not fully Cartesian, still follows Descartes’ conceptual dualism. It is true, in all fairness, that Husserl’s own terminology does not help. However, it must also be said that this hardly seems to have been Husserl’s intention. Unlike Alweiss, and here following Klaus Held, it would be correct to argue that Husserl’s method of reduction is, precisely, what allows the distinct paths of Cartesian dualism – the paths of consciousness and of the ‘outer world’ – to converge.35 Although Held would agree with Alweiss regarding certain problems that arise during the introduction of the transcendental reduction in Ideas I, he also seems to suggest that it is in those very passages that Husserl distances himself from Descartes’ positions. On the one hand, it is true that the reduction announces the uncovering of an absolute consciousness that is not relative to the world of things. On the other hand, though, the manners of givenness that characterize absolute consciousness ‘are the way in which intentional consciousness carries out its lived experiences, but in the same stroke these are appearances-of-something; in other words, they are manners of self-revelation, of existing things presenting themselves’.36 On these grounds, Held goes on to argue that ‘if we were to apply the Cartesian question, asking whether we should add these lived experiences to the category of consciousness’ “outer” or “inner” world, then we could appropriately

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comprehend their richness. Lived-experiences break down this dualism; they are the In-between, that which originally opens the dimension of intentional appearance within which consciousness and the world have already met – before any subject-object rift’.37 What this argument shows is that the transcendental reduction, rather than adhering to Descartes’ dualism, shatters such a conceptualization. That which emerges after the reduction will only be Cartesian when read through a Cartesian lens. Through this lens it is difficult to grasp the strength of Husserl’s position, namely, that the reduction leaves us with Erlebnis, with pure experience, or, what is the same, with the very appearances of objects. These objects are neither ‘in’ nor ‘out’ of consciousness. But this does not mean, however, that the reduction has annihilated the world and its objects. The phenomenological reduction is not ‘reductionistic’. Instead of disregarding the world in favour of consciousness, the interest of transcendental phenomenology is to illuminate the phenomena that make up consciousness of the world. In fact, and as Held has put it, ‘the transcendental phenomenologist is interested in consciousness only as the site of the appearance of the world’.38 The transcendental reduction that leads Husserl into intentionality does not imply a two-fold schema in which consciousness and world sit one opposite to the other. The intentional objects of consciousness are instead, and as we have argued in Chapter I, immanent transcendencies to which, following the argument of Logical Investigations, such a dichotomy no longer applies. What the transcendental reduction brackets is, to put it another way, the factual actuality of the objects of the world in order to allow us to grasp their phenomenological appearing (in consciousness). Objects are as they appear, as we are conscious-of-them. The phenomenological study of such appearing is, thus, the study of intentionality.

§3. Immanent intuition or the apprehension of the Idea of Consciousness Before I engage with the questions of intentionality and constitution, let me deal here in further detail with the question of immanent intuition and with the manner in which pure consciousness can be grasped after the transcendental or phenomenological reduction has been effected. Thus far, it has been argued that the aim of Husserl’s (static) phenomenology is to apprehend the whole of the unitary life as one and at once. But in order for this to be possible, this life [Leben] must be rendered in a non-thing-like ‘shape’. It is for this reason that Husserl insists in Ideas I that consciousness must be grasped as non-spatial Being and that, therefore, it must appear self-evidently at once and adequately. Nonetheless, and as already shown above, consciousness, Erlebnis, is seen by Husserl already in Logical Investigations as a temporal flux, as a synthesis of acts that ‘pass continuously into one another, composing a unity of

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change, of the stream of consciousness’.39 Husserl expands on this point in Ideas I where he describes life-consciousness as a flux of experiences blending into one another, namely, as a flow weaved together by syntheses of retentions, primordial experiences or pure impressions and protentions.40 Within this context, one may ask then: how can one grasp one’s life-experience when the latter encompasses, virtually, the whole stream of my experiencing life as these experiences flow away as soon as they have occurred so to speak? As suggested in Chapter I, that which appears after the effecting of the reduction is the pure ego that synthesizes all my experiences. The ego is the ‘limiting point’ that remains permanently self-identical while every experience streams away. This already seems to open the question of genetic phenomenology. Nonetheless, the ego is only treated in Ideas I in a static manner. That is to say that although the ego is nothing solid or substantial, Husserl decides to leave the question of time-consciousness aside and freeze experience in the ‘ego’s primordial now-consciousness’.41 Thus, and even though the ego is what accompanies my infinite stream of experiences, this accompanying is read in terms of being the a-temporal life [Leben] of my temporal life-experience [Erlebnis]. This brings us once again to the question of immanent intuition and its ‘object’ of apprehension. The fact that Husserl delimits phenomenological reflection to the now-consciousness of the pure ego does not mean that inner perception or intuition simply becomes the apprehension of a singular experience, primordial or modified, in relation to other singular experiences that escape the reflective gaze. If, on the contrary, we restricted immanent intuition to the intuition of a single experience, primordial or not, immanent intuition would still be the intuition of a thing, the perception of a singularity, and therefore, reflective intuition would not be immanent at all. As suggested above, perception is the gradual grasping of adumbrations. To treat consciousness adumbratively would simply mean here that consciousness is a substance. This is perhaps the reason why the argument proceeds in Ideas I in a way that it seems to demand that immanent intuition must lose all perceptive character. For despite the conflicting terminology used indiscriminately throughout the text, perception must be perception of singulars and not of absolutes.42 If this is the case, and immanent intuition or perception grasps absolutes rather than particulars or profiles of a whole, what is it exactly that we grasp in immanent intuition? Husserl argues here that immanent intuition cannot be perceptive but eidetic, and that what we grasp when reflecting immanently on pure consciousness after the reduction is the ‘unitary stream of experience as “Idea” ’.43 We do not apprehend it like a single experience, but after the fashion of an Idea in the Kantian sense. It is nothing set down and asserted at haphazard, but absolutely and indubitably given, in a correspondingly wide sense of the word ‘given’. This indubitability, although also grounded in intuition, has

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a quite different source from that which obtains for the Being of experiences, and is therefore given pure in immanent perception. It is precisely the distinctive feature of an ideation that mentally sees a Kantian ‘Idea’, yet does not in doing so forfeit the transparency of its insight, that the adequate determination of its content, in this instance the stream of consciousness, is unattainable. At the same time we see that there belongs to the stream of experience, and its component factors as such, a series of distinguishable modes of presentation, the systematic study of which must furnish for the future a main task of general phenomenology.44 To speak of immanent intuition instead of inner perception not only signifies that reflection is the apprehension of pure consciousness, of the stream of life, as an Idea in the Kantian Sense rather than as a thing-like act.45 Furthermore, it also means that immanent intuition is Pure in the sense that it does not need to be grounded in previous perceptions of acts. What this means is that, unlike any outer perception, immanent intuition is not integrated by apperceptions and empty intentions that allow our gaze to run through the different sides of the object ‘at the same time’. Likewise, immanent intuition is not a categorial act, for my pure stream of consciousness is not a category nor a material essence that I need to extract from a given thing or from a set of given examples. As Donn Welton rightly observes, ‘immanent intuition is completely fulfilled’.46 He explains, ‘if I grasp in reflection my lived-experience, I have grasped an absolute Itself whose existence in principle cannot be negated’.47 In order for this to be possible, Husserl argues at this point that immanent intuition or perception takes the shape of an ideation. To speak of an ideation, of a pure intuition or even of a phenomenological intuition indicates that this is an intuitive act capable of grasping consciousness as an Idea in the Kantian Sense.48 However, and unlike the description given in Chapter II, the way Pure intuition is performed here does not entail the apprehension of the Idea Thing and the intuitive laws by means of which to grasp any thing. Instead, and because this pure intuition is now an immanent act rather than a moment within the rationality of the experience of an immanent transcendent, what Husserl seems to be suggesting that we grasp reflectively is the Idea Experience or Life-Experience [Erlebnis] and the a priori laws that allow for the apprehension of any further experience of consciousness.49 This explains how Husserl can claim ‘both that we only have a core of lived-experience, the actual Now, which is adequately given, and that in grasping it we can still infer the whole of our conscious life as existing beyond doubt’.50 The question of the Idea in the Kantian Sense, then, allows Husserl to keep in place the double claim of apodicticity and adequacy – regardless of the fact that the stream cannot perhaps be as adequately intuited as Husserl thinks in Ideas I, given that, as a stream, it is bound to overflow the power of reflection.51 This signals one of the key problems that allows phenomenology to move from a static to a genetic

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analysis. Alweiss even argues that at this precise moment of the discussion, and in order not to complicate the phenomenological reflection, the reduction is brought to a halt.52 ‘Ideas I’, she says, ‘can only naively presuppose the stream of lived experiences, since the Cartesian approach alone fails to show how we could possibly return to consciousness in its full temporalisation’.53 This seems a very correct appreciation of the situation, if we take it that in Ideas I Husserl is only interested in seizing the existence rather than the scope of consciousness, as a basis for his analyses. Self-delimited by his static aims, as Welton goes on to conclude here, Husserl has enough with the intuition of the Nowconsciousness in the ‘shape’ of an Idea capable of encompassing the endless unitary stream of experience. 54 Although it is true that Ideas I reveals a kind of naivety regarding the static but eidetic presentialization of the stream of lived experiences, it is precisely this naivety that allows Husserl to thematize and to attempt to describe the Ideal limits that define such a static lived experience. If Chapter II argued that the ideal limits of the Idea Thing are what allow us to grasp any immanenttranscendent thing, the discussion below shows how Husserl’s suggestion now seems to be that intentionality is the Ideal law grasped by pure immanent intuition that structures any lived experience, independently of the fact that all experiences cannot be given adequately to intuition. As we shall see, intentionality is not just a feature of experience but, furthermore, is that which defines the life [Leben] of life-experience [Erlebnis] in terms of being the immanent law of consciousness.

B. Intentionality: The Law of Experience and Its Possibility §1. Intentionality or the act of meaning the world Chapter II showed how the so-called outer intuition is the transcendental experience by means of which the world can appear in consciousness and be rendered as a meaningful world. There I emphasized that intuition as such is a vision that fulfils (or frustrates) our thought or our meaning-intentions of the world. Furthermore, I defined intuition as the act that renders that which thought aims at, although it only renders it according to the eidetic reality of the thing intended and not simply according to thought. In other words, the world is rendered meaningful in intuition’s fulfilment of thought and not in mere thought. Phenomenology does not fall into the naïve idealistic position that claims that the meaningfulness of the world emerges only in thought itself. But it does not fall either into a naïve realism that is based on the assumption that, because content and object are not independent, then the object of consciousness is already loaded with meaning before its

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appearing in consciousness. Instead, Husserl’s phenomenology makes it clear that the world can only be rendered meaningful by intuition if, and only if, our thought means it or aims at it, namely, if it intends it in a signifying act. But what does Husserl understand by this act, the intentionality of which brings the object to our intuitive gaze? How are we to characterize the intentional relationship that consciousness maintains with its object prior to being intuited according to the material essences and the categories that make it as it is? Husserl opens Investigation V by positing what we could call the frame of the intentional relationship with the world. Husserl writes: It is [. . .] questionable, and frequently misleading, to say that perceived, imagined, asserted or desired objects etc., ‘enter consciousness’ (or do so in perceptual, presentative fashion etc.), or to say conversely that ‘consciousness’, the ‘ego’ enters into this or that sort of relation to them, or to say that such objects ‘are taken up into consciousness’ in this or that way, or to say, similarly, that intentional experiences ‘contain something as their object in themselves’, etc., etc..55 Thus, on the one hand, the objects, whether they are asserted, wished or imagined, do not enter consciousness, as if they had some sort of meaningful position or reality previously to being asserted, wished or imagined. Intentional experience is not the operation of reproducing an object in consciousness, as if it were an act of copying. To assert, to wish or to imagine is not to import objects into consciousness. If that were the case, we would be dealing with a real (reale) event taking place between consciousness or the ego on the one hand and the object thing-like that is not in consciousness but of which there is consciousness.56 Nevertheless, and as discussed elsewhere, neither is intentional experience the act of exporting to the world an object that is ‘in’ consciousness, as if it had some sort of ideal reality previously to being an object in the world. The object with which consciousness maintains an intentional relationship is not an object that can be captured in terms of being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of consciousness. Rather, ‘the object is meant’.57 That is, the object is an object-of-consciousness insofar as it is experienced, and to be experienced signifies for Husserl to be ‘minded’ or ‘born’ in thought regardless of its existence or impossibility of existence.58 Husserl gives us here the example of the god Jupiter. In speaking of god Jupiter one does not export an object that is really immanent or mental. Nonetheless, god Jupiter does not exist externally to consciousness and therefore one cannot reduce the ‘intentional object as meant’ to the fact that it has empirical existence or exclusive mental existence. Rather, god Jupiter is described by Husserl as a particular sort of experience or mindedness [Zumutesein] in which it makes no difference if the object exists (Cologne Cathedral), is fictitious (the Babel Tower or god Jupiter) or even absurd (a regular thousand-sided polygon).59

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Husserl describes an ‘intentional act’ as the ‘mindedness’ [Zumutesein] of the object meant.60 To speak of the act in terms of being intentional is to speak of the essential characteristic that is common to all the acts that belong to the class of acts, the function of which is to refer to what is really objective, genuinely immanent or an immanent transcendent (reell). That an act is intentional and that, therefore, it refers to something as really objective signifies here that the act ‘aims at something’ or is directed towards something.61 Nonetheless, this characteristic of aiming at is not to be understood as a theoretical aiming or as a mental activity that already bears some meaningfulness of the object at which it aims.62 Instead, aiming is an act and to aim at something means here to mean-something. That which is meant is so in the act of meaning it. To put it another way, there can be no act of aiming without something being meant by it. What this emphasizes is that the act of aiming at is not an activity detached from that which is meant by it and, therefore, the act does not precede that which is meant. To follow Sartre’s analysis of this nodal point of Logical Investigations: ‘consciousness and the world are given at one stroke: essentially external to consciousness, the world is nevertheless relative to consciousness’.63 In order to understand this relationship that seems designed to evade conceptualization in terms of ‘in’ or ‘out’ of consciousness, Sartre goes on to define the act of aiming at in which the object is meant, all at one stroke, as the ‘movement of fleeing’ by means of which we relate to the world.64 ‘Consciousness’ – he concludes – ‘has no inside or outside’, but it is the fleeing in which the world is meant.65 To be consciousof-something is, therefore, to aim at or to mean it. Human experience, this seems to suggest, appears to be a synthesis of acts that mean the world. To be conscious-of-the-world is to mean the world. Or to follow now Merleau-Ponty, and insofar as consciousness is the fleeing that expresses an irrevocable relationship of meaning the world, ‘we are condemned to meaning’.66 Consciousness, nonetheless, does not flee from anything; instead, it flees itself. Consciousness is its own fleeing in which the world is meant. Although intentionality is described as ‘consciousness of identity’ (of, e.g., the Idea Box and not just that particular box) in the sense of being an experience ‘through which the “being of the object for me” is constituted’, Husserl makes it clear that the meaning that intentionality entails here as an aiming at is not reducible to knowledge. Meaning is not knowing. In order to show such an essential difference and, furthermore, to show the significance of characterizing the intentional experience of consciousness in terms of ‘meaning’ and ‘aiming at’, Husserl suggests that feelings and sensations are likewise intentional. Following Brentano, Husserl characterizes feelings as intentional acts founded on intentional presentations. Nonetheless, and unlike Brentano, Husserl also thinks that feelings are not merely dependent or associatively tacked onto presentations.67 In other words, objects of feelings are so insofar as they are felt. As Husserl puts it, ‘Pleasantness or pleasure do not belong as effect to this landscape considered as a physical reality, but only to it as

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appearing in this or that manner, perhaps as thus and thus judged of or as reminding us of this or that, in the conscious act here in question: it is as such that the landscape “demands”, “arouses” such feelings’.68 With regard to sensations, they are also defined as intentional, although ‘they are characterised by an indeterminateness of objective direction [. . .] which is of the intention’s essence [and] is determined as presenting an indeterminate something’.69 To identify sensations with such an indeterminateness does not, however, negate the fact that sensations, qua intentional, are also sensations of an Idea and not just of a thing. Here Husserl gives us the examples of ‘something’ stirring, of a rustling70. It is indeterminateness in the sense that we cannot express it verbally, even though, according to Husserl, the Idea is already being sensed. Our intentional relationship with the world is, therefore, more than a mere theory of knowledge and extends to feelings and sensations. To mean something is also to feel it, to sense it.

§2. Intentionality or the act of living the world Regardless of these differences between types of intentional acts, that which Husserl aims to characterize phenomenologically is the very Idea of the intentional act. In order to do so, Husserl begins by differentiating between intentional content, or the object as intended or meant on the one hand, and the object intended on the other.71 Let me begin with the intentional content. Different acts have different intentional contents (namely, that which is intended and meant as such in every act), even though many different contents corresponding to many different acts may have the same object. We can say’Edmund Husserl is the author of Logical Investigations’, ‘Edmund Husserl is the author of Ideas I’ or even ‘Edmund Husserl was Brentano’s student’ among many others. In every one of these intentional acts we mean a different content even though we mean the same object (Edmund Husserl). In the case of the judgement ‘Edmund Husserl is the author of Logical Investigations’, this is a complex act (the object of which is Edmund Husserl) compounded of partial acts that intend on the one hand the ‘Logical Investigations’ (as being written by Edmund Husserl), and that on the other hand intend Husserl as ‘author’ (of ‘Logical Investigations’). Complex acts are compounded of part-acts with their particular intentional references that make up the possible different contents of an object meant. All single and partial acts are intrinsically united in one total act. We now take single acts to be the ones listed above (i.e., ‘Edmund Husserl is the author of Logical Investigations’, ‘Edmund Husserl was Brentano’s student’, etc.), and our partial acts of a single act to be the part-acts directed towards ‘Logical Investigations’ as the text written by Edmund Husserl or to ‘Franz Brentano’ as Husserl’s teacher. The single acts (which, in their turn, can be complex) and

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their parts are united in a whole total act, the total achievement of which is the unity of its intentional reference.72 But in what sense are they united and what is the relevance of understanding total acts as the result of such a union? Husserl writes: To this the individual acts contribute their individual performances the unity of what is objectively presented, and the whole manner of the intentional reference to it, are not set up alongside of the partial acts but in them, in the way in which they are combined, a way which realise a unity of act, and not merely a unity of experience.73 If this is to be taken as a relevant point at all, it is because Husserl is stating that the unity of experience is not external to the unity of the act. We do not experience ‘Edmund Husserl’ and then afterwards a few singular acts that grasp Edmund Husserl as such and such, contributing thus externally to form or to enrich our central experience. Instead, our experience of ‘Edmund Husserl’ emerges through the unitary act by means of which we intend and mean ‘Edmund Husserl is the author of “Logical Investigations” ’, ‘Edmund Husserl was professor at Freiburg’ and so on and so forth. The Edmund Husserl we experience is the intentional object Edmund Husserl that emerges out of the combination of all our single, partial and total acts in which we mean or aim at Edmund Husserl as something or other. To speak of a unitary act is to speak of the core of our unitary intentional experience. What this is ultimately saying is that experience is intrinsically grounded in the intentional act of consciousness and more precisely in its intentionality. Intentional acts are not supplementations or appendices to a pre-intentional experience. All experience emerges in our intentional acts of aiming, meaning or intending something. We could even speak of a total act being compounded of single and partial acts, so every total act can become the basis for another act, and, therefore, behave as a singular act or as a partial act of a wider total or whole act. One can speak, thus, of ‘Edmund Husserl’ as a singular act that is now part of the whole act ‘German philosophers’ or ‘Phenomenological philosophers’, etc. The total experience, either in the case of ‘Edmund Husserl’ (with its single and partial acts) or in the case of ‘German philosophers’ (with its single and partial acts like ‘Edmund Husserl’ and ‘Edmund Husserl as author of Logical Investigations’) ‘is one act, one judgement, whose single, total object is a single state of affairs’.74 Moreover, such a total judgement could still work as a foundation of, for instance, a joy, or a wish. The latter are not independent but founded on the total state of affairs judged. What this suggests is that all future intentional acts that may express a wish or a joy in relation to the object ‘Edmund Husserl’ are not appendices or external additions to an already fully moulded object. Instead, judgements like, for instance, ‘I wish I could understand Edmund Husserl’s “Logical Investigations” better’ is a judgement

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internally belonging with the intentional objects ‘Edmund Husserl is the author of “Logical Investigations” ’ and with ‘Edmund Husserl’ respectively from within which the new judgement emerges. Experience, thus, is not an addition of external acts that, as such, bear an independent status and, therefore, a meaning independent from other acts. On the contrary, experience is the intrinsic connection between interdependent acts grounded and born out in each other. It is for this very reason that one could now say that to live [Leben] in our intentional experience [Erlebnis] is to live our total but plural act, or, in other words, in the unitary stream-act which is compounded of many total and single acts, judgements, joys, wishes, deceptions, etc. A unitary stream-act that, as such, always serves as a foundation for further acts which grow from within like a web that expands, this expanding being the living, being the intentionality of our consciousness, of our being. The act of intentionality is the act of the life of consciousness whereby the world is lived, either by judging it, wishing it, feeling it or sensing it among many other ways. Experience of the world is, thus, intentional insofar as the world is experienced by intentional acts or, more accurately, by means of a unitary stream-act. The phenomenological question that arises at this stage can be posited in the following manner: What is this act like? How does it intend one object and what is the essential structure that allows it to intend the way it does? Husserl characterizes the essence of this act as the combination of ‘matter’ and ‘quality’.75 Husserl gives us here the following example. The judgement ‘There are intelligent beings on Mars’, the assertion ‘There are intelligent beings on Mars’, the question ‘Are there intelligent beings on Mars?’ and the wish ‘If only there were intelligent beings on Mars!’ all share the same intentional matter even though they all differ in their quality.76 To say that these four expressions share the same matter is to say that the four have the same intentional object. To have the same intentional object still allows every expression to have different intentional contents, i.e., as wished, as asked, etc. Nonetheless, they all have the same matter. The matter, thus, is the element of the act that ‘first gives the act reference to an object’.77 In giving or establishing such a reference the ‘matter not only determines that it grasps the object but also as what it grasps it, the properties, relations, categorial forms, that it itself attributes to it. It is the act’s matter that makes its object count as this object and no other’.78 In accordance with the matter, the quality of the act determines how the object is meant, how it is manifested, i.e., as wished, hoped, asked, etc. Whereas on the one hand the matter serves as basis for the quality of the act (for without a determinate object, one would not be able to wish ‘it’ or ask for ‘it’ or hate ‘it’), on the other hand matter itself is dependent on quality (for an intentional object, a subject-matter, that is not meant somehow would be unthinkable). The relationship between matter and quality is, therefore, the relationship ‘of two mutually dependent aspects’.79 It is this mutual dependence that grounds

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the formation of what Husserl calls ‘the act’s intentional essence’.80 The essence of the intentional act of consciousness is the relationship between matter and quality, this relationship being that which allows the act of consciousness to be in an intentional relationship with the world. If we can mean the world, and we can do nothing other than mean the world, this is because intentionality is grounded in the relation matter-quality that allows and roots all acts of meaning any-thing whatever. This relationship with the world, understood in terms of intentionality or, more concretely, in terms of the essence of the intentional act, is taken further in Ideas I, where Husserl introduces a more concrete study of the intentional act-matter. This deeper study aims to elucidate the ‘nature’ of the objectifying act whereby, as discussed, an object becomes an object of consciousness or an object as meant. While many readers of Husserl tend to simply disregard Ideas I for signifying what has been known as the transcendental idealist turn that betrays the phenomenological insight of Logical Investigations, I will show (in the same way as I did in Chapter II) that the book of Ideas I is an important clarification which complements and clarifies some of the main aspects and themes of Logical Investigations, especially those concerning the question of intentionality and its inner structure and formation. In this particular case concerning the clarification of the question of the act-matter of intentionality, the study centres around the terms of hylé [ΰλη] . and morphé [μορφη].81 Hylé is understood as the ‘sensile experience’ by means of which something is born in consciousness without yet being any-thing in concreto or ideally.82 This sensile experience functions as the basic experience upon which the morphic experience acts informing or animating the sensile data of the ‘sensual’ experience by means of conferring meaning to it.83 Husserl distinguishes the hyletic phases as sensile and, as such, as nonintentional in their own right. This seems an important point, for what Husserl might have been suggesting here is that the act-matter is ultimately grounded on a non-intentional sensile level of experience or a primordial sensibility. Paradoxically, and even though this primordial sensibility is non-intentional insofar as it is alien to meaning, such sensile or hyletic phases are an essential component of the whole of the intentional act-matter and of the whole of intentional experience by means of which we bear an object in consciousness as that object meant (and meant in such a way). Without the primordial sensibility no object would ever be meant, for the morphé would have no ground, no sensual material upon which to act upon which to confer meaning. Husserl calls the necessary unity between the sensile hyletic phases and the intentional morphé the noetic phases of experience.84 The introduction of the hyletic sensile experience in Ideas I was met by many with scepticism.85 Despite this criticism, Husserl emphasizes that such hyletic experience cannot be confused with the sensations of the sensualist tradition. As he writes: ‘Consciousness is not a title-name for “psychical complexes”, for fused “contents”, for “bundles” or streams of “sensations” which, meaningless in

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themselves, could give forth no meaning to whatever mixture’.86 Experienced sensation (hylé) is not the sensuous perception whereby one perceives a represented object, as somehow already formed, but it is instead a sensile or sensual [Sensuelle, Sinnliche] experience in which something affects us without being meant, without being intended.87 In other words, it is the experienced sensation (of blue) rather than the empiricist perception of the represented object blue. To speak here of sensile experience does not involve speaking of an experience in which one imports an object into consciousness by means of the senses. The hyletic experience, instead, is a formless noetic experience in which that which is sensually experienced acts as a basic or raw material. The hyletic phases of consciousness provide the ‘stuff’ [Stoffe] upon which consciousness becomes conscious-of-something by meaning it as something.88 This ‘acting upon’ is carried out by the morphic experience by means of which what in the first place was sensually experienced gains form or becomes meaningfully formed as noema or object qua meant.89 We must bear in mind that to speak of the hyletic phases of experience as the non-intentional basic level of experience is not to say that all intentionality is grounded upon a deeper non-intentional level of experience of the world. Although it is true that phenomenology allows for an independent study of the hyletic field, the sensile hylé cannot be understood as independent from the intentional act of animation or information (morphé). Regardless of the fact that the hyletic is not itself intentional, it is nonetheless an integral component of the whole of the intentional act, and in fact a key component insofar as it provides thought with the stuff about which to mean and to aim. As emphasized above, hylé and morphé are mutually dependant elements acting as the ground of the act whereby consciousness is or can be conscious-of-something. Or, furthermore, the relation hylé and morphé is the ground that allows consciousness to be a life lived in the intentionality of the act by means of which the world is experienced at a transcendental level. This means that Husserl’s account of hylé and morphé is not an account of a dual structure. The two form one single structure that can only be studied separately abstractly, given that the hyletic can only be seen with its form and, therefore, does not exist by itself.90 Consciousness-of-the-world is the intentional correlation in which neither consciousness nor the world pre-exist each other meaningfully. This is due to the essence of the act described above in which the world is lived. If Chapters I and II have argued that phenomenological epoché uncovers transcendental subjectivity or the level of experience in which the world is insofar as it is intuited, we can now say that transcendental reduction renders the intentional field that makes transcendental subjectivity possible. If human experience is, according to Husserl’s static phenomenology, to be understood in terms of a correlation with the objects of the world, the correlation is at its heart the intentionality that characterizes the life of consciousness. Some-thing is as it is meant, but it can only be meant, and it can only be some-thing meant (a matter) when it is

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meant in a particular way (qualitatively), i.e., when it is judged, wished, hoped for, hated, loved, asserted, etc. This can be said of any intentional object, whether this is physically possible (a horse), impossible (a unicorn) or absurd (a square circle). In any case, the object is meant as that object meant and is meant qualitatively – i.e., ‘I wish I had a horse’, ‘what a beautiful unicorn!’, ‘did you draw that squared circle?’, etc. The essence of the act, the double aspect of matter-quality, grounded in the hylé-morphé noetic experience, determines the intentional object qua intentional (as noema). Or in other words, whatever is meant by consciousness is meant intentionally, and therefore complies with what one could now call the law of intentionality, and more particularly with its essence of quality and matter and the latter’s morphic and hyletic ground, which frame the possibility for intuitive evidence. But at the same time that the reduction opens up the intentional structure of consciousness and, therefore, the way in which the world and consciousness form a unity that cannot be grasped by prepositions such as ‘in’ or ‘out’, the description of this intentional structure shows with yet further clarity ‘the true sense of the reduction’.91 The description of the structure of intentionality given by Husserl in Logical Investigations and Ideas I now makes it evident that the reduction neither denies the existence of the world nor excludes the objects of our experience as both the totality of objects and the background in and against which particular objects appear. ‘The reduction’, John J. Drummond helps to further clarify here, ‘transforms neither the world nor its objects. The reduction instead transforms our activity by suspending our participation in the positing characteristic of our natural experiences’.92 It is only due to the performance of the reduction that phenomenology can claim to have uncovered a dimension of experience that, at the same time that it differentiates between consciousness and the world, also joins them in a special co-relationship of constitution rather than in a deductive one. It is for this reason that we can claim with Drummond that ‘the two notions of phenomenological reduction and of intentionality are inseparable in Husserl’s mature thought’.93 For while on the one hand ‘the performance of the reduction’ is the means by which we shift our attention to the intentional correlation that Husserl’s account of the structure of intentionality is meant to describe, on the other it could also be said that the latter is what finally justifies the reduction as the means through which we enter the phenomenological attitude.94 This is a key point for the present study, for what Drummond is inferring here is that since the reflection that characterizes the phenomenological inquiry is also an intentional act that delves back into consciousness, then the uncovering of intentionality also implies the uncovering of the essential structure of the selfreflective act that characterizes phenomenology. Thus, the phenomenology of consciousness as performed in Logical Investigations and Ideas I is a phenomenological inquiry that is not only concerned with the act by means of which the objects of the world are meant or minded in consciousness. Moreover,

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Husserl’s (static) phenomenology already shows that the inquiry aims to give an account of the act by means of which the inquiry reflectively reaches its immanent object. Husserl is already addressing the phenomenological necessity of accounting or justifying not only for the act of reflection but also for the manner in which the methodological attitude of the reduction is performed.95 I will now substantiate this claim.

§3. Intentionality: The Ideal Law of Consciousness and its primary possibility To say that whatever is meant is so according to the law of intentionality is not to say that whatever one expresses is intentional and therefore is an object of consciousness. One could think again of the following ‘ judgement’: ‘there both no there had yet?’. In this case, although something is being said, expressed verbally and therefore qualitatively, nothing is meant. Since no matter has been formed (morphé), then nothing has been meant as something rather than as something other. To say that nothing is being meant is to say that whatever has been said is not even absurd and, therefore, is not an object intentionally entertained in consciousness. The role of intentionality is, according to Husserl’s discussion in Investigation V, one of being the law of consciousness, of experience. Experiences [Erlebnisse] of consciousness are insofar as they are intentional, and that means insofar as we mean some-thing ‘matterly’ (by hylé and morphé) and ‘qualitatively’. If this is the case, then the essence of the intentional act of consciousness can be understood as the ideal limits that the law of intentionality comprises. Intentionality, therefore, is the lawfulness, the frame that limits ideally the possibility of any intentional object whatever and, therefore, the possibility of this being evidently given in consciousness. Or, in other words, intentionality is the Ideal law by means of which some-thing can become an object-of-consciousness. What I am suggesting here is, on the one hand, that intentionality is the law that shapes experience in ‘objectifying acts’.96 Accordingly, when we say that intentionality is grasped by means of immanent intuition, we are saying that that which we are grasping are the laws of the Idea Life-Experience (in the Kantian sense). Already in Investigation V Husserl refers to the ‘Ideal laws’ of all intentional acts by means of which some-thing can be entertained in consciousness intentionally.97 He writes: [. . .] we can assume only that we have here a case of law-governed connection, and of connection governed by ideal law. Ideal connections [. . .] point [. . .] to a certain ideally governed, operative belongingness of the ideatively graspable act – essences in question, which have their ‘being’ and law-governed ontological order, in the realm of phenomenological ideality,

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just as pure numbers and pure specifications of geometric patterns have theirs respectively in the realms of arithmetical and geometrical ideality. If we enter the a priori reaches of pure Ideas, we can likewise say that ‘one’ (in pure, i.e., unconditional universality) could not perform the one set of acts without being able to perform those coordinated with them, and this on account of the specific semantic essence of the acts concerned. We may say, further, that there are coordinations, interesting from the point of view of logical validity, law-governed equivalences, rendering it impossible or rather irrational to start with the words ‘this S’ without ‘potentiality’ conceding that there are S’s. In other words, that propositions containing positing names should be true, and that existential judgements which correspond to such names should be false, involves a priori inconsistency. This is one of the ideal, analytic truths which are rooted in the ‘mere form’ of our thought, or in the categories or specific Ideas which belong to the possible forms of thinking proper.98 Husserl’s suggestion at this point is that thought is governed by Ideal laws. Any object meant is thought through the act-essence (matter and quality). This essence of the act belongs to phenomenological ideality, namely, to that which ideally, a priori, could be or that which could not be. Thus, when thinking an object we think an intentional object, for insofar as it is thought it is intentional, given that it is thought by means of the essence of the intentional act, namely, the ideal limits as set by matter and quality. Furthermore, and according to the quotation above, any object meant (in thought) is by default rational, insofar as it is rationally posited within the signifying act. That is, only objects that can be thought according to Ideal laws can be rationally posited and, therefore, can be intentional objects. What this is saying is that intentionality is the objectifying act through which some-thing is objectively meant one way or another. Husserl gives the example of a proposition in a judgement in which we either express our delight, our belief or our disagreement about an intentional object the existence of which we have presented in the same judgement; e.g., ‘I wish I understood X’. Nonetheless, all judgements in which we name, posit or present an object to consciousness must be consistent and not only possible.99 That is, the judgement ‘I wish I knew X’ already implies the existence of ‘X’. The assertion of the inexistence of ‘X’ in the same judgement would be not only impossible but inconsistent, and therefore it would make the object of our thought irrational and non-presentable to our intuitive gaze. The suggestion that intentionality can be understood as the law of the Idea Life-Experience seems then to be confirmed by this argument. All intentional experience is so insofar as intentionality is the manifestation in thought of the consistency of Ideal laws or of the ‘pure logicogrammatical laws’ of meaning, as Husserl himself puts it a few sections later.100 The identification of intentionality with the so-called logico-grammatical laws seems to be one of the centripetal points of Logical Investigations as well as

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of Ideas I. What such identification suggests is that intentionality is manifested in signifying acts or judgements. That would be to say that intentionality is the ideal law of grammar and, accordingly, that all experience would be shaped in the verbal expression of thought – whether this be proper or improper, as it has been mentioned on several occasions. But to say that the intentional act can only be performed in expression would suggest that all intentional experience is reducible to meaning in expression. In other words, only that which could be expressed according to the (formal) laws of grammar could be thought and, ultimately, experienced. Were such the case, experience would then be reduced to the frame of thought and the formal grammatical laws of expression that shape it. Nonetheless, these reservations must be denied without dilation. Husserl does not simply reduce experience to formal logico-grammatical laws of speech or to mere pure thought. On the contrary, what Husserl argues is that thought, its verbal expression and the logico-grammatical laws that allow thought to mean the world in speech are rooted in experience rather than the other way round. That is, the world is meant by the signifying act, without this implying that the meaningfulness of the world simply resides in the grammatical laws of verbal signification. Although this is a prominent and explicit issue in Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis and Formal and Transcendental Logic in the 1920s, the same question is addressed in Ideas I and in Logical Investigations. Let me deal here with the earlier texts, where this question is treated statically. In Logical Investigations Husserl talks of the objectifying act of intentionality in relation to the so-called act of presentation. Chapter 3 of Investigation V argues that an act of presentation is needed for the object to become an object-ofconsciousness, so that the latter can be felt, meant or desired. For as Husserl himself puts it, ‘That an object or state of affairs should be desired, without being presented in and with such desire, is not merely not the case in fact, but is entirely inconceivable’.101 Nonetheless, this act of ‘mere presentation’, even though it seems to be a different act, is always entangled with the intentional act of consciousness. Both acts have the same matter insofar as the act of presentation presents the object that we are to desire or to hate or to mean in general in our intentional acts. This entanglement between act of presentation and intentional act is defined by Husserl as ‘an intimate liaison’ between two non-independent factors, the act of presentation being the element that underlies the intentional act in which the object is meant as that object and in that qualitative manner.102 In the same Investigation V, Husserl also claims that ‘each intentional experience is either an objectifying act or has its basis in such an act, i.e., it must, in the latter case, contain an objectifying act among its constituents, whose total matter is individually the same as its total matter’.103 The objectifying act has, according to Husserl, ‘the unique function of first providing other acts with presented objects, to which they then refer in their acts as “matter” ’.104 At the same time, though, Husserl is also suggesting that the

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objectifying act is somehow dependent on the act of presentation, for without what we could now call a primordial presentation, nothing could be objectified. According to this distinction, we can say that intentional experience is not just an objectifying act that takes place meaningfully in signification, but is also a presentation. What the discussion in Logical Investigations suggests is that intentionality is the act of objectification in the sense that it ‘logically’ constitutes an object as ‘that’ object rather than as something other, and it constitutes it in correspondence rather than in a constructive manner, as if it were a mere product. Without such an objectifying act, no further intuition or perception would be possible. Were that the case, human experience would be a mere absorption of the meaning of a world that pre-exists our thinking of it, or a mere act of construction in which even the absurd (a square circle) would be consistent and true because no intuition would be needed. For constitution and objectification to be possible, intentionality cannot be reduced to signification but must exceed it, hence, the act of presentation. Husserl returns to this question in Ideas I through the notion of the ‘primary belief’ [Urglaube] or ‘protodoxa’ [Ur-doxa].105 Following the distinction between acts of presentation and objectifying acts in Logical Investigations, Husserl now argues that all intentional modifications are grounded on a primary belief. Husserl’s position here is one of demonstrating that ‘it is essentially necessary that the basis of a given expressing always exceed the expression, that there always be a remainder’.106 As was the case in Logical Investigations, then, experience is not reducible to expression. The difference, however, is that while Logical Investigations articulates the excess underlying all expression in terms of an act of presentation that is entangled with the objectifying act, Ideas I qualifies the same underlying excess as an inherency in all positionality, in all acts of consciousness, in which something is minded, whether in an affirmative or negative mode.107 Within this context, Marcus Brainard goes on to say that ‘expression’ is, then, what ‘gives voice to the underlying doxic moment inherent in the lived experience expressed’.108 Despite the fact that the act of presentation is an act exterior to but entangled with an objectifying act and that, by contrast, the primary doxic belief introduced in Ideas I is inherent within any intentional act, it could still be suggested that in both cases Husserl is simply restricting intentionality and, therefore, experience within the limits of the act. Although experience is not just signification, it is nonetheless actual, given that the primary doxic belief that exceeds expression and thought is still inherent to the act and, therefore, is only conceivable within the limit of the static act of consciousness. To put it another way, intentionality, as Husserl describes it up to Ideas I is always static. Nonetheless, Nuno Nabais has rightly pointed out that since this primary belief [Urglaube] is not a positionality like any other but is rather an inherent and ‘permanent horizon of doxic certainty’, then that which is believed cannot count as an intentional object by its own right but as ‘its possibility’.109 The

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fact that, after having granted intentionality the title of ideal law or Idea in the Kantian Sense, Husserl now argues that intentionality is ultimately rooted in a doxic possibility is not a contradiction in terms. Rather, and if the ideal law is, by definition, an ideal possibility, the primary belief or proto-doxa could be taken here as a doxic possibility, of which the former is a modification. This is not to say, however, that the ideal possibility is now rooted in a real possibility. Doxic belief is not a real possibility in the sense that something actual or real is posited, but, on the contrary, it is the possibility of positing possible objects.110 Nabais’ thesis seems to be at this point that after the reduction, as already effected in Ideas I, the world has not simply become a noematic correlate of doxic modality or a pole-objectivity relative to the ego-pole. Far from it, the phenomenological and transcendental reduction in Ideas I renders what he calls ‘a strange reality’, namely, experience as pure possibility of appearing, of phenomenon, and, therefore, of evidence.111 This is an interesting articulation not only of Ideas I and of the question of primary belief in particular, but also of the reduction and of phenomenology as a whole. For what is being suggested here is that the reduction itself already unravels a ‘reality’ that is strange insofar as it is only the possibility of appearing and, therefore, lacks actuality or actual appearing.112 This is an important observation insofar as what is being said is that, in the first place, intentional experience is not reducible to a static act and that, in the second place, and as a consequence of this, genetic phenomenology must be understood as beginning to operate within the static phenomenology in Ideas I and not outside of it. It is for this reason that Nabais goes on to suggest that it is in Ideas I that phenomenology begins to enter a ‘fragile place between epistemology and ontology’ in which it must begin to deal with ‘the immanent non-real matter of consciousness’.113 In entering such a place or position, however, Husserl’s phenomenology faces new key and critical questions. Namely, how can this possibility of appearance and certainty be made into a phenomenological object when, by itself, it cannot be considered an act that appears but rather its ‘strange’ or alien possibility? And if it could, then how can something possible be given as possible rather than as actual (as intuitive givenness demands by default)? And if it is the case that it can, then how can we comprehend an ‘evidence’ that appears outside the criteria of evidence? These questions are key for our discussion, for what I am suggesting here is that the unveiling of the Ur-doxa represents not only Husserl’s realization that experience exceeds the acts of consciousness, but, moreover, that insofar as the primary belief as original experience bursts the limits of the act and, therefore, the limits of what can be grasped by immanent intuition, and so of meaningfulness, then phenomenology reaches the difficulty of having to describe and give an account of a domain that escapes intuitive givenness. Thus, at the same time that phenomenology of intentionality signals the uncovering of the ideal law of intentionality that makes possible immanent intuition, the

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further unveiling of the proto-doxic root (Ur-doxa) of intentionality also challenges intuition as the very regulative principle of evidence. The reason why the task of phenomenology must become the description of the possibility of evidence is because failure to undertake such a task would mean that phenomenology has to simply presuppose a genesis for which it cannot account. This signals a dramatic moment in the evolution of Husserl’s phenomenology. Phenomenology itself, guided by its ethical self-responsibility, has reached an original domain of experience that exceeds but that also grounds the intuitive field with which Husserl had earlier on identified the principle of evidence, and therefore of presuppositionlessness. The problem is that since this domain exceeds the grasp of intuition, then phenomenology must either reject such a field for not ‘fitting’ within the limits of meaningfulness and leave the principle ungrounded, or accept it but then challenge the foundations of the inquiry. As we will see in the next two chapters this point signals the beginning of the divorce between (a) intuition and Evidenz, and (b) between intuition and the principles of presuppositionlessness in the sense of being the ethical necessity that defines phenomenology.

Chapter IV

The Ethical Depth of Phenomenology Inner Time-Consciousness and the Formal Genesis of Experience

Before we begin to deal with the questions to which Husserl’s notion of the Ur-doxa has led us, and which were formulated at the end of the previous chapter, let us first return to what could be understood as a first explicit attempt to tackle those problems. This attempt is undertaken by Husserl when dealing with the question of time-consciousness, by means of which he explicitly confronts the problem of the genesis of consciousness and constitution.1 The aim of this chapter is to show that the phenomenology of time-consciousness makes manifest the ethical demand for self-grounding that defines phenomenology because it aims to uncover the genesis of the act of reflection that characterizes Husserl’s inquiry. If Chapter III has shown the ethical extent of phenomenology by means of discussing the question of intentionality and its genetic possibility as the framing of intuitive evidence, Chapter IV will define the ethical depth of phenomenology by moving from the intentional lawfulness of the act of consciousness to the temporal genesis that structures and constitutes it. Although on the one hand the inquiry on inner time-consciousness can be regarded as one of Husserl’s first explicit pieces of genetic phenomenology, on the other hand the questions concerning genesis are still treated here in a formal manner.

A. Phenomenal Time §1. Phenomenological Epoché or the uncovering of transcendent time Although one could say that Husserl’s early discussions of time contain a confusing rather than systematic thematization of epoché, it could still be argued that the inquiry starts, already in 1905, by the effecting of epoché. Husserl begins here by demanding ‘the complete exclusion of every assumption, stipulation, and conviction with respect to objective time’, namely, of ‘world time,

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the real time, the time of nature in the sense of natural science and even in the sense of psychology as the natural science of the psychic’.2 The necessity of this exclusion resides in the fact that ‘objective time belongs in the context of empirically experienced objectivity’.3 For, as Husserl argues, the ‘ “sensed” temporal data are not merely sensed; they are also with apprehensioncharacters, and to these in turn belong certain claims and entitlements: to measure against one another the times and temporal relations that appear on the basis of the sense data, to bring them into this or that objective order, and to distinguish various apparent and actual orders’.4 As a result of this, he goes on to say that ‘what becomes constituted here as objectively valid being is finally the one infinite objective time in which all things and events – bodies and their physical qualities, psyches and their psychic states – have their definite temporal positions, which we can determine by means of a chronometer’. 5 In 1909 Husserl expands the scope of epoché by saying now that the bracketing of ‘all the means of determination belonging to the natural science – no ruler, no theodolite or cathemometer, no clock, no chromoscope’ – must include ‘the natural existence of one’s own Ego and of the act of the Ego’s state’, namely, the cogito.6 It is on this basis that Husserl goes on to say that the effecting of epoché has left us with the ‘pure cogitatio’, namely, the transcendental correlation (subjectivity) underlying the cogito and the cogitatum by means of which the world appears as an immanent transcendent or as a genuine immanency in relation to consciousness.7 Time-epoché represents the attempt to uncover the temporal structure of this transcendental subjectivity and, therefore, the temporality within which objectivity can be given in consciousness. Nevertheless, Husserl emphasizes that ‘a phenomenological analysis of time cannot clarify the constitution of time without considering the constitution of temporal objects’.8 Since consciousness is always, and by default, consciousness of something time-constituting consciousness can only be revealed within the frame of the constitution of the temporal objects one is conscious of within the limits of the act of consciousness. It is for this reason that Husserl’s static framing of the question of the temporal structure of transcendental subjectivity must begin with a phenomenological analysis of the object’s ‘appearing time, appearing duration, as appearing’.9 To speak of the object’s appearing time is to speak, here, of the temporality of a genuine or reell immanenz as this appears in consciousness. Husserl terms the time of the appearing of the object as ‘the temporal object’, by which he understands not the unity of the objects in time but rather the ‘temporal extension’ or the ‘duration’ that these objects contain in themselves.10 To use one of Husserl’s examples, the object of the phenomenology of time is not here the unity and the material essential attributes that define a tone, but the duration in which a tone is perceived.11 The difference that Husserl is setting up here between an object and the object’s temporal extension does not aim, however, to make us dismiss the tone in favour of its temporal extension and, thus, reduce the object to its temporality only.

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What Husserl is suggesting, instead, is that insofar as an object can only be perceived in its enduring, or as it endures, then a phenomenological study of the essential attributes that characterize the object is only secondary to the phenomenology of temporal objectivity. The being of the object of consciousness is its temporal extension (by means of which it lets itself appear in consciousness) rather than its material or even categorial attributes. In line, thus, with Husserl’s argument in Ideas I, the being of the object is its adumbrative or gradual givenness, namely, the temporal stretch in which the object originates as object-of-consciousness in the acts of perception. Husserl understands the temporal stretch that defines the object as a durative form structured by what he terms the ‘now’, the ‘past-now’ and the ‘future-now’ or ‘now-to-be’.12 To speak in these terms does not mean, however, that perception is the clear awareness of distinct, independent and enclosed ‘now-units’ that we simply chain to each other once we have perceived them all. Husserl refers to a ‘now’ in terms of a ‘running-off phase’ or a ‘continuity that constantly expands’.13 When we perceive a tone of a melody or a phase of a tone as a ‘now’ (to use Husserl’s own examples), what we perceive is the running-off of the so-called now rather than the ‘now’ as an independent static unit. Rather than perceiving a tone or a phase of a tone all at once, what is perceived is the process in which the phase or tone runs-off into the past or elapses. To perceive a ‘now’ is, therefore, to perceive the now’s own fugacity, rather than a full atomic unit that is held in consciousness as a frozen totality, as if it were suspended out of time and, therefore, presupposed to our perception of it. Thus, what we perceive when apprehending the duration of an object is the running off of every side of a die onto a new side or of a tone into another tone. Even if we broke down a running-off-now into hypothetical ‘smaller nows’ we would find that every thematized phase has also a running-off structure, which is precisely what allows it to appear in consciousness as an object. Thus, the perception of duration of an object is not the perception of smaller thing-like atomic units called ‘nows’, but the perception of the temporal stretch of the object, this temporal stretch being the condition of possibility for the conceivability of a spatial thing which, by definition, can only appear gradually, in shades [Abschattungen]. The problem that Husserl is addressing here is that if objects appeared in consciousness in units, in fully actualized nows, then we would never be able to perceive any object in particular, for we would simply have a constellation of different unconnected sections or units rather than a constituted object-of-consciousness. We hear a melody because we hear it in its duration, as it elapses, and it is precisely such elapsing which makes it perceivable as object. In short, no-thing can be given in units, for these cannot be given in consciousness unless they elapse. According to Husserl, these ‘nows’ elapse by means of what he calls ‘a process of constant modification’ in which ‘the running-off continuity of the timepoints in question [every now] changes continuously’ into a past-now or ‘a now that has been’.14 In appearing in consciousness, tone B of a melody pushes

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tone A into the past, that is, tone A runs-off into the past or gets modified into a ‘past-now’, in the same way as tone B does when tone C begins to sound, pushing tone A into a further past. The duration of an object is, then, the process of constantly running-off or being modified into the past, and into the past of the past, until it sinks into the depths of the past. This does not mean, however, that in passing into a past-now, the latter loses quality existence or vanishes from the perceptual gaze in which it has appeared. Although every now is modified into its past, the latter remains in consciousness as a ‘retained past’ that remains present but without being merely actual.15 The role that this process of modification that structures the running-off or the now-object plays here is one of de-actualizing the object of consciousness, opening the horizon of the present of the latter beyond mere actuality. At the same time, the de-actualization of the presence of the now-object must be understood in relation to or as pertaining within a ‘beginning-point’.16 For, following Husserl’s argument, the retention of the past in the present occurs within the horizon that opens up with the now-to-be or present-to-be.17 That is, when I hear the new tone C I perceive it as C because I perceive it in relation to tones B and A, as the tone that relieves tone B into its modification. Before tone C can become C, it already is C-to-be, and it is within the frame of its own futurity that the melody can then elapse into its own past. The now’s own past remains present (even though not actual) because the present springs from and within the frame of that particular past by means of the present-to-be. According to Husserl’s argument, then, this intrinsic and necessary relation between present, past and future of an object functions as the horizon-structure that guarantees the constitution of an object-of-consciousness by means of the inter-play between the moments of de-actualization and pre-actualization. The importance of having begun with this discussion is, precisely, that it shows that consciousness is not a quasi window-like scope that simply ‘sees-and-does-not-see-units’ and that, therefore, fails to see the passing away or the running-off of one onto another. What Husserl is making clear at this early stage is that consciousness can only be experiential, perceptual, because it perceives or experiences the temporal or enduring structure that defines its objects. Consciousness of something means the experiencing of the durative phases of this something. To say, however, that the temporal essence of the object of consciousness can be defined by its constant de-actualization and pre-actualization does not mean that the object is little more than a mere blur. In order to show that the processes of de-actualization and pre-actualization through which an object gives itself to consciousness do not lead to the mere erasure of the present, Husserl shows how every phase, every now, takes what he calls its own ‘temporal position’. He writes: The object of the primary memory, which is being pushed back continuously, does not change its place in time at all, but only its distance from the

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actually present now. And this is the case because the actually present now is taken to be an ever new objective time-point, while the past temporal moment remains what it is.18 When being modified into a past-now in relation to the ever new now, the running-off-now is retained as the same now but as past-now. When tone B is pushed back but retained as tone B, what is retained is the temporal position that it occupies in relation to tones A and the now-to-be tone C, for tone B is tone B only due to the position that it fills in relation to the other tones, rather than to its material characteristics. Thus, the individuality of an object of consciousness does not reside in its matter but in the temporal positions in which the matters make it sound distinctively.19 It is on this basis that Husserl writes that ‘without the clarification of the identity of a temporal position, there can be no clarification of the identity of an object in time’.20 That is, an object appears in consciousness as an identical object insofar as it is pre-seen, sensed and retained in its own temporal position in relation to other objects. Thus, while the object is always held up in its own running-away from itself as it were, this enduring can only be conceived with its temporal position. Without the latter, objects would not appear in consciousness at all. Moreover, the constant de-actualization and pre-actualization of the object only make sense when understood in terms of being a gradual progression of modification in which every phase must still occupy a temporal position for both the de-actualizing and pre-actualizing to be possible. Otherwise, presence would be merely inert and objects would never appear, for they would already be there, omnipresent to all consciousness. It is in this sense that Husserl can argue that consciousness of an object is the experiencing of the temporal stretch in which an object appears in consciousness. But what does all this tell us about consciousness itself? How is the act of perception to be understood in order for it to be the temporal field within which the de-actualizing and pre-actualizing appearing of transcendent objects occur?

§2. Immanent time or the temporal perception of the object It is certainly evident that the perception of a temporal object itself has temporality, that the perception of duration itself presupposes the duration of perception, that the perception of any temporal object itself has its temporal form. If we disregard all [immanent] transcendencies there remains to perception [immanent intuition] in all phenomenological constituents the phenomenological temporality that belongs to its irreducible essence.21

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As suggested above, and as the citation above emphasizes, Husserl’s discussion regarding the temporal essence of the objects of consciousness is geared towards showing how the object’s temporality must necessarily imply that the perceptual modes of consciousness must have themselves their own temporal form within which the temporal objects can appear in consciousness. Husserl defines this temporality or temporal form of perception as the ‘phenomena that constitute temporal objects’ or as ‘the way of appearing of what appears’.22 As he emphasizes, immanent phenomenal objects (acts) are also ‘running-off phenomena’ [Ablausphänomene], which means that one should take the act of perception as a continuity of constant modification by means of which the act stretches out or pre-actualizes and de-actualizes itself.23 Thus, the runningoff phenomenon of perception is a unity of modification insofar as perception itself always runs-off, being modified into a retentional consciousness of the ‘now’. There is no such thing as an un-modifiable perception, for it is in the nature of perception to become a retention in memory. Husserl argues here that this is because every single perceptual phenomenon is an individual one and, as such, ‘cannot occur twice’.24 The individuality of the object-ofconsciousness, its temporal identity, is given within the individual identity of every running-off phenomena, of every act and its moments. So, an object can be grasped in its temporal identity due to the perceptual running-off phenomenon in which the object’s temporal identity appears. This running-off phenomenon is in itself an act with a temporal position among other acts with and in which it is blended. It is for this reason that, in the same way that temporal objects cannot appear twice, no perception can be performed twice either, for every perceptual phenomenon is a different and unique one, even though all perceptual phenomena can be considered of the same kind with regard to the matter, to their act-character. Within this conceptual context, Husserl goes on then to define the temporality of the phenomenon of perception in a three-fold structure, i.e., primordial impression, retention (or primary memory) and protention. One of the fi rst points Husserl makes here is that these three moments of the act of perception are not to be understood as isolated units or independent acts but as ‘modes of temporal orientation’.25 Husserl’s long argument can be illustrated in the following manner. We can imagine that we hear or perceive tones A, B, C. When hearing tone C we are having a primal impression or, as Husserl calls it, a ‘proper full perception’ of the now-phase of the object, by means of which only the actual now is rendered in consciousness. 26 Even though the previous phases of the tone or the previous tones of the melody that we are apprehending remain in consciousness while we are having a new primal impression of tone C, the previous ‘nows’ remain in consciousness only in a ‘retentional’ and therefore non-actual sense. Primordial impression (unlike retention) is perception in the ‘fully proper sense’.27 To perceive is to have an original (unmediated) impression or, as discussed elsewhere,

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a hyletic sensation by means of which the world gives itself to our consciousness originally. Although all running-off phenomenon begins with a pre-intentional hyletic primordial impression or a perception in the ‘fully proper sense’, all primal consciousness-of-the-now is pushed back into the past, into a consciousness-ofa-‘ just past now’ or ‘now that has been’ (a retention). Retention, unlike primordial impression, cannot be considered a perception in the fully proper sense, given that whatever remains in consciousness in a retention is rendered in consciousness in the mode of memory. The past-now is past-now insofar as we are not fully perceiving it anymore but remembering it. Nonetheless, retention does not occupy an inferior role within the phenomenon of perception. In fact, however primordial an impression might be, such primordiality is nonself-sufficient.28 Primordial impression, then, can render nothing on its own unless it is ‘accompanied’ by retention as well as by protention. While retention is an intention that holds the previous tones A and B(a) respectively in a non-actual present consciousness (while we are already hearing C), protention is an open intention that anticipates in an indefinite manner the new phases of the object (presumably tones D(e), E(f), and so on and so forth). This indicates an integration between retention and protention in the sense that while on the one hand the retention of the last tone E(f) has embedded in it all the previous tones of the melody (for otherwise the melody would not make sense to us as a melody), all the protentions we have had up to this point (which are now past) of each of the previous tones, leading one to the next, also remain embedded in these layer retentions. At the same time, the protention experienced now, with the tone sounding at this moment, protends forward both towards the next tone and towards the meaning of the whole melody. Thus, when tone D appears in consciousness (fulfilling its protention) in a new primordial impression (but framed by intentional retentions of A and B(a)), the tone C that has just been sounding is immediately pushed back and passes on to be held in consciousness in an intentional retention C(b(a)). Simultaneously, tones A and B sink further back into the past, while remaining present in consciousness by means of intentional retentions and, therefore, accompanying the new primal impressions of the act. Embedded in this retentional modification, however, further protentions of E(f), F(g) etc. immediately begin to loom. Two key points follow from here. (1) Rather than disappearing by means of being replaced by new retentions, consciousness-of-something always encompasses retentions and retentions of retentions, like a ‘comet’s tail’. What this means is that consciousness-of-something is consciousness of the present object, but only inasmuch as the latter is in a constant pre-actualization and de-actualization. It is for this reason that Husserl is keen to emphasize that ‘when a temporal object has elapsed [. . .] the consciousness of the now-past object by no means

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expires with the object, although it no longer functions as perceptual consciousness or as impressional consciousness’. 29 The past-now is past, but its retentional consciousness must remain somehow present, for the running-off phenomena cannot only be made out of primordial impressions; otherwise it would never run off and, therefore, would be a mere actuality. If retention did not remain in the field of presence, the latter would be reduced to an atomic unit, the temporal elapsing or stretching of any object being essentially impossible. The remaining present of the retention is what opens or stretches presence from within so that objects can appear in consciousness in their own temporality, and, therefore, be perceived in their stretching or enduring. This is what Husserl himself suggests when he elaborates in more detail on the relationship between retention and impression. Early on he establishes the ‘a-priori necessity’ that perception or primordial impression must always precede a retention. In its turn, the retention can only be exercised as a continuous annexation to and within the frame of the preceding perception. 30 Thus, when we stop perceiving a melody, retention or primary memory stops immediately, for it is purely dependent on perception or primordial impression. 31 Nonetheless, this also means that all perception fi nishes with a retention. It is perhaps for this reason that, at this point, Husserl begins to see retention as the fulfi lment of perception, and, therefore, as integrated with perception, for, as he puts it now, an object can only be ‘adequately perceived by means of retention’. 32 Thus, and while Husserl had begun by saying that retention (primary memory) and perception (primordial impression) exclude each other in the same manner as past and present seem to do, he is now suggesting that neither of them can fulfi l its performance without the other. After having spent long passages making a distinction between perception and retention, Husserl goes on to say now that ‘primary memory [retention] is perception. For only in primary memory do we see what is past, only in it does the past become constituted [. . .] presentatively’. 33 (2) In the second place, the stretching from within of the present perception must also encompass a protention or protentional consciousness that expects something to come once a tone has sounded and, therefore, is being perceived and retained. Husserl writes:

Every process that constitutes its object originally is animated by protentions that emptily constitute what is coming as coming, that catch it and bring it towards fulfilment. However, the recollective process does not merely renew these protentions memorially. They are not only there in the process of catching what is coming: they have also caught it. They have been fulfilled, and we are conscious of this in recollection. The fulfilment in recollective consciousness is refulfilment.34

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As something impresses consciousness, the latter is already intending the new tone phase of the new now and, in doing so, the first impression begins to be a retention of the first tone. The protentional consciousness that envisages a new tone, or whatever is to come, is, nonetheless, an empty expectation that is indefinite in the sense that it leaves open the possibility of what is to come. This expectation is not an expectation of tone B (after having heard tone A), but ‘is the open expectation of something, of otherwise than something or even of nothing at all’.35 It is a wholly empty expectation and, as such, it is always open to surprises. The fact that it is wholly empty does not deny, however, the future-now encompassed within the act of perception. Perception must always imply the ‘temporal necessity of protention’, for ‘without protention, retention would have very little to work with’.36 This discussion helps to clarify that the act of experience does not just elapse towards the past, simply sinking back, but must also stretch ahead. It is this ability to envisage that allows me to move, to expect, even to express that ‘I can’, and therefore, to have any experience. What this means is that without such a future horizon opened by protention, perception would not be possible. For although primordial impression is original consciousness, all primordial impression can only occur within the passage opened by the expectation of the protentional consciousness and the memory of the retentional consciousness. If on the one hand all impression becomes retention, the sinking back opens, in its turn, the horizon to a further possible impression. It is for this reason that Alweiss has also pointed out that ‘there are no innocent perceptions [impressions]’; rather, they spring from protentions that open up every time that an impression becomes retention.37 If on the one hand the impression is only possible with the trace left by the past, on the other hand this trace becomes in the protention that opens the passage to a new impression and its retentional modification. In a similar fashion, Rodemeyer (following Husserl) reads ‘protention and retention as two lines pushing into each other’, as a result of which the impression loses all centrality to end up becoming ‘the fulfilled zone of convergence of different, but similar, streams’.38 What this is ultimately suggesting is that presence is made out of past and future penetrating each other constantly, and that, therefore, the act of perception is a stretch that endures from within. It is for this reason that, as Alweiss also claims, ‘retentions and protentions should not be understood as a non-present accompanying the primal impression; rather, the deferral itself is the present, it constitutes the present as present. Protention and retention are not moments that infect the impression; rather, they turn the impression into a temporal event, into a now’.39 The importance of these two discussions is that they are determinant not only for the question of perception but, moreover, for the question of the present in Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness. The suggestions above, however, can only be sustained if the three moments of temporal orientation are not organized hierarchically. A hierachicalization of the orientations of the

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flow of consciousness would soften Husserl’s view on phenomenal time, which as he already argues in Ideas I, attempts to show that the act of consciousness, as immanent object, is not adumbrated or spatial but purely temporal, the givenness of which is not gradual but all at once.40 Neither of the three moments of orientation can be privileged over the other two and, therefore, be granted the title of being the primary source of meaning for the living present. To do so would ultimately lead us to have to argue that the privileged moment of orientation, be this protention or impression, is an originary moment that is self-sufficient and that, therefore, must spring from nowhere so to speak. Instead, and as Alweiss has also argued recently, in Husserl’s view the appearance of an object in consciousness is ‘a presentative co-appearance’.41 And that ‘although we can divide the present of an immanent temporal object into impression and the adumbrative chain of retentions and protentions, we can do so only abstractively. For they are one and the same moment’.42 That is to say, all acts of perception involve the intricate inter-weaving between protention, primordial impression and retention, these being three moments of the same temporal being that defines the act within which objects can appear in their own temporality and be constituted as objects-of-consciousness. Husserl’s arguments on phenomenal time amount, so far, to saying that the act of perception is the purely temporal apprehension by means of which consciousness experiences and constitutes what is not itself. Thus, and unlike Derrida, who has argued that presence is always ‘compounded’ by the altering non-presence of retention and protention, we must argue here that retentions and protentions are not external non-presence but, rather, always already integrating presence.43 The act of perception can only be a now, a running-off phenomenon, if retentions and protentions are inborn modifications of the impression rather than its external and, therefore, altering possibilities. This is not to say that Husserlian phenomenology simply dismisses alterity. Husserl’s position goes further than a notion of presence that needs to be constantly and dialectically negated, insofar as it dissolves presence in a givenness the structure of which is pure duration.44

§3. Re-presentation and the full stretch of transcendental subjectivity The questions of constitution and presence, however, are not merely dependent on the question of perception and primary memory. Husserl now introduces the question of ‘secondary memory’, by which he understands the re-presentation of the whole temporal horizon of the object that has fully passed away.45 Secondary memory is the re-presentation of a melody I heard yesterday, for example, and of the temporal structure that constituted such an object. Unlike primary memory, which ‘produces no enduring objectivities (either originally or

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reproductively) but only holds in consciousness what has been produced and stamps on it the character of the “ just passed” ’, secondary memory ‘constitutes an immanent or transcendent objectivity’.46 Re-presentation is a memory that re-produces without actually presenting the melody. If the primal impression is that by means of which ‘we place something before our eyes as the thing itself’, and if perception as a whole is ‘the act that originally constitutes the object’, secondary memory is, in its turn, the remembering that re-presents the ‘now’ that was originally placed before our eyes but without giving it.47 Even if one argued that to re-present is also to bring a past-now before our eyes, to consciousness, one must bear in mind that the placing back in consciousness is restricted to re-collection and phantasy, by means of which, as Husserl puts it, ‘I can re-live the present but it cannot be given again’.48 The act of re-presentation ‘is extended in time in precisely the way in which the earlier perceptual act was extended. It reproduces it; it makes the measure run off tone-phase by tone-phase and interval by interval [. . .]. Nevertheless [Husserl then specifies], the re-presenting act is not a mere repetition’.49 We re-present a melody by re-collecting its duration. This is possible because we re-collect every originally perceived tone and tone-phase by means of phantasizing. Once the tone has been re-presented in consciousness by means of phantasy, the phantasy-act passes away with the tone as phantasized, and we keep hold of it by retention. Retention is not an exclusive element of perception, but it also plays a role in secondary memory. The difference here is that what we retain is not the tone as sensed or fully perceived but as phantasized. Although phantasy passes away once it has phantasized every past tone, it is the necessary ‘ground for the re-presenting consciousness of duration, change, succession, and so on’.50 Without the act of phantasy, that brings back to consciousness that which was originally perceived (but has now become a past of which we have no perception anymore), re-presentation would be impossible. In a sense, the act of imagination is that which makes secondary memory possible. Nonetheless, re-presentation is not just phantasy of every now-running-off. As Bernet, Kern and Marbach have observed, ‘phantasy is to a certain extent a reiteration of this whole temporal fringe, [. . .] a reproduction of the whole perceptual flow’.51 The difference, though, is that ‘while primordial impression passes continuously into retention and this into retention of retention [. . .], recollection turns back temporally and reiterates a whole perception’. 52 Whereas perception is itself a perceptual flux, recollection is the reproduction of that temporal flux within which the whole temporal object is represented phase by phase. Recollection is not only recollection of every tone but of every tone as in its temporal position within every temporal position of the temporal flow of consciousness itself. This is the reason why the re-presentative character of secondary memory is vital for the constitutive temporal modes of orientation of objects-of-consciousness.

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For, according to Husserl, the virtue and the significance of secondary memory is that it renders the ‘givenness of duration and succession themselves’ or the succession that all duration implies in itself, rather than ‘the givenness of enduring objectivities’.53 In order to have a melody ‘before our eyes’, it is not enough to have an impressional consciousness of every tone (and of every phase of every tone) and a (present) retentional consciousness of every past-now together with a protentional consciousness alongside every new impression. It is true that we have argued that perception of a melody is not just perception of its tones, but of the enduring in which the melody presents itself to consciousness, and that, therefore, perception (as the relationship between impression, retention and protention) already ‘constitutes’ an object that endures in consciousness as ‘an’ object. Nonetheless, perception can be complemented by secondary memory, and it is only when this is the case that the melody (and not just the tones, their durations and the duration of the melody each one as a time-point) is rendered in consciousness in its very meaning-fullness. For to render a melody in its meaningfullness is not just to grasp its tones, the durations of its tones and the duration of the melody, but it must also imply the grasping of the succession in which the perceived (tones and melodies) endures. According to Husserl, if the succession A-B was perceived and then remembered in a perceptual primary memory, I would simply remember A’-B’; that is, I would re-present A and then B. If that were the case, ‘I would have a “perception” of the succession of these memories and not a memorial consciousness of the succession’. 54 That is to say, I would have a perception of memories, but not a memory of a perception. It is for this reason that, in order to grasp the succession (A-B)’, Husserl claims that perception requires recollection and not only retention. For although ‘retention constitutes the living horizon of the now, [. . .] what becomes originally constituted here is only the being-pushed-back of the now-phases’, holding it in my consciousness and allowing me to hear the melody as it sounds. 55 Nonetheless, the retentional perception of the now-phases does not guarantee awareness of the changes, variations, differences of tones and sections of the melody. In order to grasp the succession, likeness or difference, we need to undertake a re-production. 56 By re-producing the melody in our consciousness, ‘the past duration’ (the duration of the melody or of the tone) gives itself to consciousness, and in doing so I become conscious of the succession of the duration. That is, I grasp, precisely, the order of succession in which note A precedes B, and it is only in grasping such a succession that the object begins to be meaningfully and actively constituted rather than passively heard. Having said this, however, constitution of the object-of-consciousness by means of secondary memory must always be understood as founded on perception, or more accurately, on ‘the succession of perceptions’.57 Although this clearly does not mean that secondary memory is a reflection on perception, it does mean, nonetheless, that the secondary memory or the reproduction

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of the succession A-before-B implies, necessarily, not only perception but a synthesis of perceptual acts succeeding each other and bearing the melody as enduring, as it sounds, in consciousness.58 However responsible secondary memory might be in the constitution of an enduring object, it always requires a perceptual horizon within which it can constitute the object meaningfully. For although it is true that the full constitution of a melody requires secondary memory and not just the perceptual experience, secondary memory can only re-live the melody without properly living it, and it can only do so insofar as there has been a succession of perceptions by means of which ‘that’ melody has been brought to consciousness. Secondary memory plays, thus, a key role in the process of constitution of the objects of consciousness. Without secondary memory the world would still be perceived and lived passively, without ever coming to be actively constituted in consciousness and, therefore, explicitly grasped and thought. To summarize we can say that Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness has rendered, in its first step, a temporal structure through which perception and representation live and re-live the world respectively in a process by means of which the world is gradually constituted. If consciousness is capable of fully constituting an object as a meaningful object, this is not only due to the consciousness that lives the object in its essential temporality but also to the representation that re-lives it in a distant time without living it. At the same time, and correlatively to the double level of constituting consciousness, the object constituted seems to become what it is, first, by being perceived and lived immediately, and, secondly, by being re-produced or re-lived in memory. In the first place, and given that we cannot see (perceive) and remember (represent) the same transcendent object at the same time, we must conclude here that ‘objectivity’ or genuine immanency is, ultimately, the un-presentable presence of the object in consciousness.59 For, as argued above, the presence of the object in perceptual consciousness and the representational act of thinking it cancel each other out now. In the second place, and correlatively, transcendental subjectivity appears to be neither reducible to an implicit passive perception of the world nor to a mere implicit active re-presentation of it. Transcendental subjectivity is rather the stretching between perception and representation defining ‘consciousness-of-something’. The question that arises at this point can be formulated in the following way: How can both acts of perception and representation be integrated and synthesized in the same flow of experience? How can the temporality that defines an act of consciousness be articulated with the temporality of all the other acts? This question does not simply refer to acts of perception and of representation, but it refers also, and more importantly, to the very acts of reflection that characterize the phenomenological inquiry. Husserl’s next inquiry on prephenomenal time or the inner time-consciousness is explicitly concerned with the law that roots and, therefore, allows the reflective acts that characterize the

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inquiry to be part of the same synthesis of consciousness and, furthermore, to be reflective. For the acts of reflection not only depend on the synthesis from which they emerge but, more importantly, they also depend on the fact that they must return to and reflect on the same synthesis.

B. Pre-Phenomenal Time §1. Absolute consciousness As was the case with epoché, Husserl’s next step into inner time-consciousness is not yet methodologically thematized in 1911 with the same specificity as it will be in Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations. Although Husserl does not even mention the reduction here, he does nonetheless make a clear distinction when he says that ‘everywhere we have to distinguish: consciousness (flow), appearance (immanent object) [Objekt], and object [Gegenstand]’.60 This distinction is not simply made for the sake of clarity. What Husserl is suggesting is that the inquiry must now proceed by disregarding the objective and phenomenal temporalities in order to be able to analyse the flow of consciousness (what Husserl is also going to call ‘pre-phenomenal or pre-immanent time’ or even ‘absolute consciousness’) and the relationship that it maintains with phenomenal acts of perception, re-presentation and, finally, reflection. One of Husserl’s first and most important considerations with regard to subjective or pre-phenomenal time is the relationship that such a pre-phenomenal structure of consciousness maintains with phenomenal acts. In the early manuscripts of 1904–5, Husserl had argued that the subjective realm is in time with the phenomenal acts.61 Nonetheless, towards 1908–9 Husserl puts forward a different argument by means of which he aims to make clear that the subjective and the phenomenal realms of time-consciousness cannot simply be given in the same time-structure, even though they are constitutively correlated.62 If, on the contrary, pre-phenomenal or subjective time were correlative to phenomenal time, then the former would simply be relative to a constituted objective or phenomenal time. Subjective or pre-phenomenal time and objective or phenomenal time cannot belong to the same modality, for if they did, we would then have to say that subjective time has the same enduring structure as a temporal object and the acts in which this appears. As a result of this, subjective time would be ‘in’ time in the sense of being a constituted time rather than constitutive, and this would lead us to have to posit a yet more original constituting layer beyond subjective time. The regress, as Husserl himself indicates, would be ‘ad infinitum’.63 Every time-consciousness would have to be constituted by a more original consciousness, which, at the end, would never leave the objective sphere of time. What this ultimately entails, then, is that every new constituting consciousness would become object-like

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as soon as we re-investigate it and then account for a yet more original timeconsciousness. This is why Husserl needs to reconsider the structure of the relationship between time levels in relation to his own lectures from 1905. Otherwise, absolute subjectivity could not be absolute, ultimate, but only relative and, therefore, contingent. Within this mood, Husserl writes: It is inherently absurd to regard the flow of time as an objective movement? Certainly! On the other hand, memory is surely something that itself has its now and the same now as a tone, for example. No. There lurks the fundamental mistake. The flow of the modes of consciousness is not a process; the consciousness of the now is not itself now. The retention that exists together with the consciousness of the now is not ‘now’, is not simultaneous with the now, and it would make no sense to say that it is.64 Husserl’s argument at this point indicates that time-constituting consciousness or subjective time on the one hand and objective time on the other cannot share the same now. For if subjective time constitutes objective time, then it must follow that subjective time cannot simply be the same time as the one constituted (objective time). If everything given (appearing) as temporal, even the immanent experiences given as temporal (acts), is constituted within consciousness, then the consciousness presupposed in all constitution, which is not a whole of temporally constituted immanent experiences but a different sense of consciousness, cannot itself be temporal but rather, and as Husserl himself puts it, ‘non-temporal’.65 The introduction of the non-temporality of absolute subjectivity can be regarded as one of the important moments not only in Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness, but in the development of his whole project, insofar as it marks a clear move from static to genetic phenomenology. The non-temporality of absolute subjectivity makes manifest the necessity of escaping the limits of phenomenal time, the time of the correlation between the temporal object and the temporal act, in order for phenomenology to be able to give an account of the genesis, of the absolute subjectivity, that underlies the life of consciousness. But despite the breakthrough that this discussion supposes, Husserl’s understanding of the sphere of absolute subjectivity and the relation that this maintains with the phenomenal time of the act of consciousness will lead Husserl into what Jacques Derrida once called the ‘formalist temptation’.66 In order to be able to undertake this discussion and show the significance of the problem of formalism and the consequences that it entails, let me first return to Husserl’s own argument. Husserl understands the non-temporality of subjective time in terms of a ‘non-immanent’ temporality that can be described by means of ‘continuous change’, which, nonetheless, is a ‘change [that] is not a change’ for, insofar as it is not relative to anything else, it is a ‘presupposed continuity’ that can

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move neither faster nor slower.67 However paradoxical it may seem, Husserl grants this ‘presupposed continuity’ the status of ‘law of modification’ that characterizes the subjective or pre-phenomenal time where perception and the temporal objects constituted therein are ultimately grounded.68 Subjective or pre-phenomenal time could thus be understood as the inner-temporal law that makes experiential consciousness possible by functioning as the structure of the Ideal law of intentionality. If we said above that the latter is the delimitation of the parameters of experience, we can now say that these parameters reside in the temporal law of modification that ultimately opens and establishes the phenomenal relationship with the objects of consciousness. In other words, the pre-phenomenal flow of change constitutes phenomena. If the object’s givenness to consciousness occurs in its very elapsing, in between their pre-actualizing and de-actualizing existence within the phenomenal network of retention, impression and protention, this is due to the fact that such a network is ultimately rooted in a temporal dimension of pure change. To put it another way, the opening of the trace of the past, the sinking back and the opening of the passage to original impressional consciousness are temporal orientations of change. But what do we mean here by ‘being rooted’? Are we simply saying that the temporal structural law of intentionality is a mere static point of reference that enjoys a kind of eternal status beyond the life of consciousness? This is an important question which aims to clarify the status and the origination of the temporal law qua Ideal limit. But as such, the question posits a paradox. A positive answer to this question would certainly undermine the phenomenological attitude with which Husserl aims to go beyond naturalism and mythical beliefs, for it would simply accept a point of reference beyond human consciousness and experience but upon which the latter is ultimately dependent. On the other hand, a negative answer to the question would lead us to the conclusion that the pre-phenomenal is still phenomenal and that, therefore, something other must be uncovered beyond the Ideal limit, an Ideal limit of the Ideal limit so to speak. This position would lead us once again to the problem of infinite regress. Husserl’s first answer to this question can be found in the very argument of the ‘law’ of modification. We can speak of different modalities and, simultaneously, of the same consciousness. Pre-phenomenal time is a law and, qua law, is inherent in the acts of consciousness without being reducible to being an act itself or even to having the same modality. The law of change is internal, and such interiority necessarily guides and constitutes the acts as a flow of modification of ‘moments’, i.e., the modification of an impression into retention and, simultaneously, the modification of a protention into an impression. As suggested above and as argued at length in Chapter III, intentionality is the law (not the act) that governs the acts of consciousness (phenomena). In order to argue now that pre-phenomenal time is an inner-time inherent to the temporality of the phenomenal act of consciousness (at the same time as they are

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necessarily different modalities of time), Husserl deploys a discussion of intentionality, or, more precisely, of what he calls a ‘double intentionality’.69

§2. Double intentionality Despite the non-coinciding dimensions of time that characterize consciousness (-of-something), consciousness and the something of which we are conscious must be constituted at once. Husserl writes: There is one, unique flow of consciousness in which both the unity of the tone in immanent time and the unity of the flow of consciousness itself become constituted at once. As shocking (when not initially even absurd) as it may seem to say that the flow of consciousness constitutes its own unity, it is nonetheless the case that it does. And this can be made intelligible on the basis of the flow’s essential constitution. Our regard can be directed, in the one case, through the phases that ‘coincide’ in the continuous progression of the flow and that function as intentionalities of the tone. But our regard can also be aimed at the flow, at a section of the flow, at the passage of the flowing consciousness from the beginning of the tone to its end.70 In the first place, intentionality is the temporal regard directed towards what is not consciousness (e.g., the tone of a melody). Husserl calls this temporal regard the ‘transverse intentionality’ [Querintenionalität] by means of which the object can appear in consciousness in its own stretching presence but ‘maintaining its strict identity’.71 For although consciousness of an object-now A becomes by default ‘continuously transmuted into a consciousness of the past while simultaneously an ever new consciousness of the now is built up, during this transmutation, the consciousness undergoing modification preserves its objective intention (and this belongs to the essence of time consciousness)’.72 Thus, if consciousness is capable of perceiving an object at all, qua temporal object, this is because ‘transverse intentionality’ [Querintentionalitat] is, precisely, what John B. Brough has called ‘an overlapping intentionality’.73 As he argues, intentionality overlaps in the sense that it intends past-present-future simultaneously in every perceptual moment, and, in doing so, consciousness enters in a relationship with an object that reaches always beyond (but within) the now. When expecting, sensing and retaining, the temporal mode of our consciousness is in constant change or is an intentional flow in which what is expected, sensed and retained simultaneously remains in consciousness in its different orientations. Simultaneously to ‘transverse intentionality’ Husserl introduces the so-called longitudinal or horizontal intentionality [Längsintentionalität], which, in its turn, ‘is constitutive of the unity of this primary memory or retention [transverse intentionality]’.74 What Husserl argues at this point is that, at the same

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time that my consciousness is a retentional consciousness-of-something (a tone), by means of which that tone begins to become constituted in its temporal stretch, consciousness is also aware of itself as being aware-of-somethingother than itself. Thus, one is not only ‘transversally’ aware of the duration of the tone but is also, simultaneously and implicitly, horizontally aware of ‘the quasi-temporal arrangement of the phases of the flow’.75 If the transverse intentionality of, for instance, tone C includes a memory of a tone B, which, in its turn, includes a memory of a tone A, the horizontal intentionality directed to the memory of C comprehends, likewise, a continuity of the memories of B and A. This being aware of one’s own intentionality in which the object appears in consciousness is what Husserl understands as the flow in which our acts (phenomena) become constituted as a running-off of modal orientations in which the world appears in consciousness. But the question of double intentionality signals something of still greater importance. Husserl emphasizes that ‘this pre-phenomenal, preimmanent temporality becomes constituted intentionally as the form of the time-constituting consciousness and in itself’.76 What this means is that to say that my consciousness of the world is governed by a simultaneous selfawareness of such consciousness is not to say that pre-phenomenal time is simply presupposed. Husserl’s inquiry is not a post-naturalism which merely cancels an external given and infi nite time in order to simply re-posit it in the interiority of consciousness. Rather, the very stream that arranges or synthesizes intentional acts is itself constituted by arranging or synthesizing those acts. Horizontal intentionality, or, if we like, pre-phenomenal or subjective time, becomes rather than being given in advance, and it becomes itself when constituting the experience of the world. What this signifies is that the temporal structure of the Ideal limit of experience (intentionality) and, therefore, its Idea itself are not statically pregiven but rather become or are in formation. Thus, despite not being of the same modality or not coinciding with transverse intentionality, horizontal intentionality cannot simply be taken as an external intentionality that is added to the transverse intentionality of the acts of consciousness. If horizontal intentionality were simply additional, then transverse and horizontal intentionalities could not be internally and necessarily interrelated, as ‘two inseparably united intentionalities’ as Husserl claims them to be.77 Were such the case, the constitution of the world and of the flow would not coincide at all and the latter would be a contingent option rather than a necessary law in relation to the former. What this would finally signify is that consciousness would be restricted to a collection of mental acts the unity of which would be (if at all!) dictated from the ‘outside’ by means of re-presentation and phantasy, rather than being a lawful unity that springs from the inside and that somehow vertebrates consciousness as an integral life-consciousness. It is for this reason that Husserl insists on emphasizing that

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these ‘two inseparably united intentionalities, requiring one another like two sides of the same thing, are interwoven with each other in the one, unique flow of consciousness’.78 What Husserl is arguing, then, is a double modality of time in which the two temporal modes are eminently different and not reducible to each other, while one is the law that is inlayed or incrusted in the other. Both time layers, both intentional regards that characterize and constitute life-consciousness, must be integrated the one in the other, but without being the same. Accordingly, we can now say that the becoming of consciousness is of a different time-modality than the constitution of the acts of consciousness, although they must both occur simultaneously. That is, the experiencing of the world as formed by the temporal structure of the Ideal law of intentionality is simultaneous to the very formation of the Ideal law itself. But how does the Ideal limit become? The answer to this question lies in further defining the nature of the inner horizontal intentionality and in clarifying the relationship of necessary integration between the transverse intentionality that characterizes all acts (and, more importantly, reflective acts) and its lawful horizontal intentionality. Robert Sokolowski has made it clear that reflective acts or ‘experiences of acts take place in the same stream of consciousness in which the acts are formed’.79 This is an important observation because it establishes that reflection is not external and, therefore, a de-temporalization by means of which thought moves into a different reflective time-layer from where it can then look into consciousness, as if the latter were a transcendent object from which we can detach ourselves. Were that the case, we would be returning to the problem of the infinite regress against which Husserl warns us. For, as Sokolowski argues, this other time-layer would need a second flow of consciousness, which, in its turn, ‘would require still another account for the experience of its own acts, and so forth’.80 Instead, the phenomenal and the pre-phenomenal dimensions of consciousness cannot be understood separately, for even though we can make them individual objects of our phenomenological analysis, thanks to the reduction, one is the texture of the other and, therefore, they cannot be separated into independent units. This does not mean, however, that reflection and the stream of inner timeconsciousness can be conflated. Although on the one hand Sokolowski is clear about this, on the other hand he also argues that ‘immanent objects must already be constituted before reflection can turn upon them’, for, as he goes on, ‘they are constituted as units while we experience them. Constitution of immanent objects and experience of these objects is the same process’.81 Since horizontal self-awareness (inner time-consciousness) makes us conscious of and constitutes phenomenal acts as units (as objects), then the relationship between horizontal self-awareness and perceptual act must simply replicate the relationship between temporal object and act. Sokolowski’s view implies, then, that horizontal self-awareness is a mere thematizing act of reflection. Nonetheless, contrary to this interpretation, Husserl defines horizontal

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intentionality as a pre-reflective passive awareness rather than as a reflective and, therefore, thematizing thinking activity. He writes: [E]very experience [Erlebnis] is ‘consciousness’, and consciousness is consciousness of . . . But every experience is itself experienced [erlebt], and to that extent also ‘intended’ [bewusst]. This being-intended [Bewusst-sein] is consciousness of the experience and is either primary, original consciousness – namely, consciousness of the experience itself as the present experience; or it is secondary consciousness – that is, it is indeed the experience of a present experience, but the present experience is an experience that is the consciousness of something that is not present itself. This secondary consciousness is a re -presenting consciousness – specifically, re-presenting an experience. 82 Every experience, every consciousness-of, is itself experienced, however not in the shape of a re-presentation or, as Husserl also calls it, a secondary memory that re-lives an experience that is not present anymore by turning it into an object of attention through the power of phantasy and re-collection. Instead, Husserl refers to the ‘original consciousness’ through which one is immediately aware of oneself, rather than mediately self-aware through reflecting back on the already lived moments. As Dan Zahavi has argued, horizontal intentionality marks the tacit self-awareness of all acts without thematizing that which it is aware of; that is to say that the acts one is conscious of cannot yet be units previous to being reflected upon.83 Elsewhere he writes: ‘When Husserl claims that the intentional act is constituted in inner time-consciousness, he does not mean that the act is brought to givenness by some other part of subjectivity. Inner time-consciousness is the pre-reflective awareness of the act, so to say that the act is constituted in inner time-consciousness simply means that it is brought to awareness thanks to itself. It is called inner time-consciousness because it belongs to the innermost structure of the act itself’.84 Rather than attributing a thematizing activity to the horizontal self-awareness, as Sokolowski does, Zahavi interprets Husserl’s notion of horizontal intentionality as an intentional but immediate non-reflective passive self-awareness in which the perceptual acts are not understood as constituted units. For, as Rudolf Bernet has also put it, ‘before being able to look upon my acts as intentional objects of a reflexive perception, the “primary process” of “inner consciousness” must have already been made my own by integrating them into the flow of my experiences’, however without thematizing them as objects of any sort.85 To say, thus, that my acts are integrated within my flow by means of individuating them does not mean that individuation or singling out, as we could also call it, implies thematization. As Zahavi goes on to explain further, horizontal self-awareness, or inner time-consciousness, cannot be a thematizing act because ‘prior to reflection there is no awareness of internal objects, just as there is no distinction between

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the givenness of the act and the self-manifestation of the flow’.86 At the most, we can say that I am somehow aware of my own life as I am living it. But, yet, without knowing that such a life is a succession of intentional perceptual acts within which the objects of consciousness can endure and appear in their own temporality. This discussion reveals several important points. First, it makes it clear that the pre-reflective self-awareness in which pre-phenomenal time is manifested does not imply that original consciousness is a full self-transparency of consciousness to itself. Original consciousness, original self-awareness, is not selfknowledge. Horizontal intentionality is instead a passive intentionality that runs inherently to consciousness, constituting it passively by making consciousness aware of itself. According to this, pre-phenomenal time could be taken as the absolute consciousness or the original subjectivity that constitutes consciousness as my consciousness. The uncovering of absolute subjectivity signals, furthermore, the uncovering of the origin of transcendental subjectivity, or, as suggested elsewhere, of the temporal structure of the Ideal law that delimits the ideal possibility for any experience and of its very formation. Secondly, and more importantly, by differentiating between thematizing reflective acts and horizontal self-awareness that runs inherently in the former, Husserl is also avoiding (momentarily at least) falling into an infi nite regress. For otherwise, he would simply be arguing that the act of reflection comes out of reflection itself or of another reflection and, therefore, that absolute subjectivity is always grounded on a more original layer of time. This distinction, however, does not mean that reflection belongs in a different temporal plane from the pre-reflective flow of self-awareness that pervades all my experiences. Reflection and its immanent intuitive gaze must function within the flow, for the thematizing act of reflection is nothing other than an act of the thinking consciousness that returns to the same flow from whence it has emerged. Thus, if Chapter III showed that intentionality is an eidetic law that delimits all acts of consciousness (including reflection), the current chapter has shown thus far how intentionality is grounded on a tacit pre-reflective self-awareness (inner time-consciousness) that is not an act, but that is, nonetheless, the essential structure of all acts and, therefore, the genesis of consciousness itself. Phenomenology of time-consciousness, therefore, makes manifest the ethical self-demand for self-grounding that defines phenomenology, insofar as its aim is the uncovering of the genesis of the acts of reflection that characterize the phenomenological inquiry. Without self-temporalization, reflection would not be able to thematize any act or moment of consciousness and, therefore, would not be able to examine and apprehend consciousness as its intentional object. If phenomenology is capable of thematizing consciousness this is because the latter self-temporalizes and constitutes itself by way of the pre-phenomenal self-awareness that the reduction uncovers and which is the law that allows consciousness to give itself to itself.

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This argument has wide implications regarding the static-genetic status of phenomenology. But before we can discuss these more general implications, let me continue with other pressing questions regarding the nature of the formal law of inner time-consciousness and its very origination. These questions can be articulated in the following manner: How is this self-awareness possible? Do self-awareness and self-formation merely mean the formation of an immaterial and disembodied lawful consciousness? Is this immediate relationship with oneself a relationship of a disincarnated mind to its own mental rays?

§3. Embodiment and the Other Chapter I argued that Husserl’s notion of consciousness is one of an embodied consciousness [Leib]. This suggestion can now be fleshed out more thoroughly through Husserl’s argument of double intentionality by means of which he states that in order to perceive an object, consciousness must be simultaneously but pre-reflectively aware of itself. For since our perception is delimited by our own body’s position and perspective in relation to the object perceived, the tacit self-awareness that accompanies the act of perception must be, necessarily, an awareness of one’s own embodied consciousness. Therefore, pre-reflective self-awareness cannot merely be an awareness of a mental ray but must rather be an inherent sense of one’s own bodily, perspectival orientation and kinaesthetic zero point wherein such a perspective opens up. To take intentionality as a mental ray would presume that the ray comes from somewhere, the latter being a consciousness of which intentionality is only a property, a possibility rather than a necessity. But intentionality is the life of consciousness and the two are inseparable. Furthermore, intentional consciousness is embodied and its directedness, its openness to what is not itself, is kinaesthetic and, therefore, shaped by its very embodiedness. This is not to say that intentionality is instead a mere empirical relationship with the world. Although such a perspective is embodied, the body here is not to be understood as Körp but as Leib, and therefore as spiritual (transcendental) rather than as merely empirical. When perceiving an object we are not simply directed towards what we see, the front side of the tree or tone B of a melody, but our perception also contains an apperceptive intentional regard of what is not seen, the back of the tree or tones A or C of the melody. Simultaneously, intentionality is also corporeal [Leiblich] for our transcendental regard is integrally delimited or framed by the embodiment of consciousness. Accordingly, pre-reflective selfawareness seems to demand to be understood within the dimension of the body [Leib] rather than as a mental and disembodied awareness or as a mere factual [Körp] one. This discussion leads to an important point to which Dan Zahavi pays much attention in his work on the question of self-awareness. As he puts it, ‘Every

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perspectival appearance presupposes that the experiencing subject has itself a relation to space, and since the object only possesses a spatial location due to its embodiment, Husserl argues that spatial objects can only appear for and be constituted by embodied subjects. His thesis, however, is not merely that a perspectival appearance presupposes the existence of a body, but that it presupposes the self-givenness of the body’.87 This is an important point, for it states that horizontal intentionality or self-awareness (i.e., self-temporalization) is not the mere awareness of the existence of one’s own body. When perceiving an object one does not simply assert the existence of one’s own body by means of which, and in relation to which, one can then perceive such and such an object. Self-awareness indicates the tacit phenomenon of embodiment in every act. Self-awareness, self-temporalization, can thus be said to be the rendering of the continuous embodiment of our consciousness. The body is not pre-given and therefore is not presupposed in every intentional act of consciousness; my body or my embodied consciousness is not a stable centre of orientation to which I must always return prior to the perception of some-thing. Instead, my body is being instituted every time I am aware of something other than my consciousness. Although my body is always the same body it is always in constant movement and, as such, the body’s ‘Here’ is not always the same ‘Here’. This being the case, the body must then be tacitly and continuously self-given as a different ‘Here’. But to be self-given does not mean to be known; it does not mean that its existence is proclaimed every time as condition of possibility for experiencing anything other than itself. Instead, it signifies that self-awareness, as self-temporalization, implies the phenomenon of the formation of the body (embodiment) as the same body but as a continuum or a synthesis of different centres of perspective. At this stage of the inquiry an important question needs to be asked. Must talking of the relation to the question of the body not imply speaking of the relationship with the Other as Husserl suggests in Cartesian Meditations? Although it is true that the question of the Other is excluded from Husserl’s discussion of time in On the Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time, the argument undertaken in these lectures and discussed in this chapter can still be brought together with the question of the Other according to Cartesian Meditations and our discussion of it in Chapter I. On this basis, we can attempt to elucidate what sort of relationship the Other maintains with self-temporalization and, furthermore, what role the Other plays in the formation of the Ideal limit of experience. As argued in this chapter, intentional experience is ultimately a temporal apprehension by means of which that which is experienced appears in consciousness at the same time that consciousness, by means of horizontal intentionality, temporalizes and, thus, becomes itself as a consciousness that lives the world corporally [Leiblichkeit]. But as argued in Chapter I following Husserl’s later argument in Cartesian Meditations, intentionality (as embodied

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in a kinaesthetic frame of perspectives) must, ultimately and originally, be related to my experience of the Other. The relationship with the Other is a relationship described by the Other’s encroachment [überschreitet] on me and by my institution [Urstiftung] of the Other in my ownness. In such terms, and following Husserl, we suggested that the Other is experienced as ‘co-present’ [Mitgegenwärt] rather than as merely present in or to me, given that, qua Other, it can only be appresented.88 Moreover, such a co-presence is to be understood in terms such that the Other must first appear at the level of primordial or spiritual ownness [Leiblichkeit] and, thus, be experienced bodily in a passive synthesis rather than only by means of a synthesis of thinking acts. That is to say that the Other, qua Other, cannot be experienced as an object of consciousness by means of reflection and that, instead, it is experienced at a primordial level. As we shall see below in more detail, this signifies that the experience of the body of the Other is understood as the experience of a body that is given as paired in association with my own body. That is, that both bodies are given or constituted as a pair, and therefore given together, in one blow so to speak, but in distinctness.89 If this is read alongside the discussion undertaken in this chapter, the self-temporalizing awareness of consciousness would have to be understood, not just within the spiritual density of my body and its continuous and tacit self-givenness, but also within the relationship to the body of the Other and the givenness of such a spiritual-corporeal [Leiblich] relationship. In order to offer an account of the primordial experience of the body of the Other at a level such that the Other’s animate organism is not merely identified with mine, Husserl makes ‘instructive comparisons’ between the primordial experiencing of the Other and the representation of one’s own past. He writes: Similarly [to the appresentation of the Other in my ownness], within my ownness and moreover within the sphere of its living present, my past is given only by memory and is characterised in memory as my past, a past present – that is: an intentional modification. The experiential modification of it, as a modification, then goes on necessarily in harmonious syntheses of recollection; only thus does a past as such become modified. Somewhat as my memorial past, as a modification of my living present, ‘transcends’ my present, the appresented other being ‘transcends’ my own being (in the pure and more fundamental sense: what is included in my primordial ownness). [. . .] Just as, in my living present, in the domain of ‘internal perceptions’, my past becomes constituted by virtue of the harmonious memories occurring in this present, so in my primordial sphere, by means of appresentations occurring in it and motivated by its contents, an ego other than mine can become constituted – accordingly, in non-originary presentations [in Vergegenwärtigungen] of a new type, which have a modificatum of a new kind as their correlate. 90

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What Husserl is arguing here is that the experiencing of the Other and of my past could be compared in the sense that in both cases we are experiencing a presence that is not present (anymore) and that, therefore, transcends my primordial ownness. A first reading of Husserl’s passages concerning this comparison would surely argue that the comparison is fruitless, given that while one’s past experience was an original presentation or actual impression that has sunk into the past, the Other, qua Other, has never been available by means of an impression and, therefore, of perception. This is certainly true, but as James Dodd argues, the emphasis of Husserl’s argument must be put on the question of ‘verification’, which Dodd understands in terms of ‘preservation’. He writes: ‘the retentional modification is preserved in an intentional manifold [. . .] within which objects and events that are past can be “originally” presented to consciousness in their pastness’.91 So although the past was once present, the memory of it does not re-presentialize it again, but holds it in consciousness as past or, what is the same, as what could be called non-actual.92 It is for this very reason that Husserl calls this experience a ‘non-originary presentation’ [Vergegenwärtigungen].93 For the latter, as Dodd explains, ‘presents that which is not present, not by repeating it but by presenting it in such a way that it retains precisely the sense of not being present’ (regardless of the fact that what is presented was or was not originally present).94 What is important, therefore, is that in both cases the Other and the past can never fall into the actual present or into me and that a distance or a difference is always maintained. It is precisely that distance which transcends the actual present and my ownness and that makes the past, as well as the Other, be other to the actual present and to my ownness respectively, however still co-present. An important question arises at this point. When is the Other experienced? Husserl provides us with a straightforward answer by arguing that these nonoriginal presentations [Vergegenwärtigungen] by means of which the Other is appresented and, thus, made co-present, occur at the primordial level of selftemporalization. Husserl writes: If we return now to [. . .] the experience of someone else, we find that, with its complicated structure, it effects a similar connection mediated by presentiation [Vergegenwärtigung]: namely, a connection between, on the one hand, the uninterruptedly living self-experience (as purely passive original selfappearance) of the concrete ego – accordingly, his primordial sphere – and, on the other hand, the alien sphere presentiated therein. It effects this, first, by its identifying synthesis of the primordially given animate body of someone else and the same animate body, but appresented in other modes of appearance, and, secondly, spreading out from there, by its identifying synthesis of the same Nature [. . .].95

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The experiencing of the Other is, thus, not only a connection mediated by ‘presentiation’ or ‘non-original presentation’ [Vergegenwärtigung] rather than by presentation or re-presentation, but, moreover, is a ‘presentiation’ [Vergegenwärtigung] that occurs within what Husserl defines above as ‘the uninterruptedly living self-experience (as purely passive and original selfexperience)’.96 This is an astonishing suggestion. For how else are we now to understand this ‘purely passive and uninterrupted original self-experience’ if not as horizontal intentionality or self-awareness? What Husserl is arguing here is that the ‘presentiation’ or ‘non-original presentation’ [Vergegenwärtigung] of the Other occurs within the pre-reflective self-awareness by means of which incarnated consciousness – as argued above – temporalizes itself and, thus, becomes. What is important about the connection between ‘presentiation’ and self-awareness is the fact that by placing the Other’s ‘presentiation’ or ‘non-original presentation’ in my self-awareness, Husserl is indicating that the givenness of the Other’s animate organism cannot stem out of an act of consciousness, of an ‘I can’. Whereas on the one hand the Other is other to me within my ownness, for it is non-originally ‘presentied’ rather than originally presented, on the other hand such a ‘presentiation’ takes place by appearing uninterruptedly in my self-temporalizing flow. Furthermore, in appearing in my temporal self-awareness the Other is ‘presentied’ within the self-givenness of my spiritual body [Leib] by means of which my consciousness self-temporalizes itself and, therefore, becomes (kinaesthetically). What Husserl intimates with this argument is that the original selfexperience of my incarnated consciousness [Leib] has integrated in it the non-original self-experience of the Other. As such, self-awareness renders the co-givenness of my animate organism with the Other’s animate organism (as paired) rather than just rendering the givenness of my body and then the givenness of the body of the Other, as if the latter had to be mediated by the former. This thesis is rather explicit in Cartesian Meditations, where Husserl writes: Pairing is a primal form of that passive synthesis which we designate as ‘association’, in contrast to passive synthesis of ‘identification’. In a pairing association the characteristic feature is that [. . .] two data are given intuitionally, and with prominence, in the unity of a consciousness and that, on this basis – essentially, already in pure passivity (regardless therefore of whether they are noticed or unnoticed) – as data appearing with mutual distinctness, they found phenomenologically a unity of similarity and thus are always constituted precisely as pair. [. . .] On more precise analysis we find essentially present here an intentional overreaching, coming about genetically [. . .] as soon as the data that undergo pairing have become prominent and simultaneously intended.97 The original self-experience in which the Other is given with my ownness must, thus, be understood in a passive synthesis of association of bodies rather

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than in one of identification, as would be the case in the relationship of the ego to the alter ego. This is a difference worth noting. As James Dodd argues regarding this point, the relationship of my ego to another ego is one in which the unitary stream of ego-life opens itself up to another stream, another ego-life and, in that sense, ‘the I is not paired with its alter ego’.98 Nevertheless, Dodd adds that unlike the relation between egos, ‘the body of the other is not an alter body but it is related to my own body precisely on the level of thingly transcendence’ and that, as such, the relationship is an associative one.99 This associative pairing of bodies signals the moment in which the body of the Other is given as paired with mine in the same (horizontal) intentional passive synthesis. The givenness of the body of the Other is, thus, not just mediated by my own self-givenness. In the passive association of pairing my body and the body of the Other are given in the unity of a consciousness or immediately. The argument concerning pairing discussed in Chapter I need not be repeated here. Nonetheless, the following question shall be posed now. Does the unmediated givenness of my body with the body of the Other, within my own self-temporalization, mean that the bodies are given ‘simultaneously’ and, therefore, as one, and that, consequently, the relationship between the two is a-temporal? What sort of simultaneity is Husserl referring to here when he suggests that the bodies are intended ‘simultaneously’? If the body of the Other appeared in an a-temporal simultaneity to my own temporal and bodily self-awareness, then the body of the Other would never transcend me and therefore would not be other to me but rather a mere dimension of me. Were such the case, the bodies would not be distinct and similar but would instead be one single body. Does this simply mean, then, that the Other cannot appear simultaneously to my own self-manifestation?

§4. Associative time A close reading of Husserl’s comparison between the Other and time alongside the question of associative pairing suggests that the associative pairing that takes place within self-temporalization has in itself a temporal status. This is an important point, for the temporal structure of association is that which is ultimately going to enable an understanding of how the body of the Other is ‘simultaneously’ given as paired with mine but as a similar and distinct body. As suggested in Chapter I, the body of the Other or its bodily, perspectival orientation (i.e., its ‘Thereness’) is given with my bodily orientation (my ‘Hereness’) by means of being ‘simultaneously [horizontally] intended’.100 Nonetheless, since the bodies are two different and distinct bodies, the ‘horizontal intentionality’ (PCIT) or ‘original self-experience’ (CM) in which they are given must involve a double awareness. That is, my pre-reflective selfawareness involves an awareness that intends retentionally my own past bodily

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perspective and that, simultaneously, intends by means of imagination (protention) the bodily perspective of the Other. Accordingly, the Other’s bodily orientation is given as imagined but in relation to my memory of my other past ‘Herenesses’. Nonetheless, and since the Other’s bodily perspective is not a mere object that appears originally in perception, the Other cannot be seen as a fulfilment of a pre-set phantasy that, as a result of the ‘I can’, simply expects what first appeared in perception, as is the case with all objects of representation. That is to say, the bodily perspective of the Other is not a mere fulfilment of my bodily perspective. The uninterrupted apparition of the body of the Other (with my pre-reflective self-experience) takes place at a formal level of imagination (protention) and memory (retention) in which neither of the two brings what is remembered and imagined. To suggest that imagination (protention) and memory (retention) are purely formal means that they are not re-productive or ‘mediated’ acts but immediate. They are not act-parts of an active synthesis but a passive experience. It is for this reason that Chapter I stated that the memory of empathy, as described by pairing association, is ‘only’ a memory (retention) of past ‘Heres’, of past ‘frames of perspective’ but without the objects of those perspectives, without contents. What one passively remembers is that one was elsewhere and had other perspectives. It is on the bases of this passive memory that one is then able to imagine the Other’s bodily possible ‘There’, but without the mediation of the phantasy of the intentional object of the Other’s frame of perspective. What appears with my temporal and bodily self-awareness is the possibility of seeing as (rather than what) the Other must be seeing, were I to be ‘There’. According to this double intentional passive association, and quoting Husserl again, ‘none of the appropriated sense specific to an animate organism can become actualised originally in my primordial sphere’.101 Neither my body nor the body of the Other become an actual now in the self-temporalizing flux. Instead, my non-actual self-formation is intertwined with the non-actual appearing of the Other. What this implies is that in this passive synthesis the Other is not reducible to being neither my past nor my futurity (my object), and this is so precisely because my embodied consciousness [Leib] cannot itself become an actual now either and therefore is not graspable in such terms. To claim that the Other is my future would not be enough for Husserl, for it would place the Other in a section of my time. Instead, the temporal relationship with the Other must be placed within the level of prephenomenal time-constitution or self-temporalization. As such, the Other’s bodily orientation cannot be identified with mine and, therefore, is not reducible to being a fulfilment of my own memory. The core of this discussion is that one’s own bodily perspective, one’s own embodiment, is not a solipsistic phenomenon. Subjectivity is permanently permeated by the Other’s bodily possible frame of perspective (which appears

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as a possibility or as a potentiality paired with mine). This does not mean, however, that inner time-consciousness or temporal self-awareness, by means of which consciousness becomes, has to be understood as a flow integrated in the temporality of association. This would be impossible from Husserl’s standpoint, for it would presume that original self-givenness, the self-temporalizing formation of my own consciousness, is, ultimately, the result of the transcendence of the Other. For Husserl this would not only mean that my becoming as consciousness resides in a dimension beyond embodied or incarnated consciousness but, furthermore, that the formation of the Ideal limit of all experience is a result of a presupposed domain beyond fleshed consciousness. Were such the case, the Other would be simply replacing an absolute consciousness beyond mine that Husserl had already bracketed out in Ideas I under the name of God.102 Instead, the temporality that characterizes association must be understood within the flux of inner time-consciousness, but without being reducible to it. Positing the temporality of association within self-temporalization does not mean, however, that consciousness is a self-sufficient and self-enclosed entity. Far from it, Husserl’s own argument shows how the very becoming of consciousness is a becoming of openness not only to the world but, more primordially, to the Other. The Other cannot be presupposed to my givenness, to my self-manifestation, otherwise it would not be other (to me). The Other can only be simultaneously co-given within my own self-givenness, but without being mediated by it. It is in this context that it can be said that, for Husserl, if the Other can remain truly other to me it is because what appears in association with the temporal selfawareness of my bodily intentional perspective is the Other’s possible bodily perspective rather than its own temporal self-awareness. It is not just that my self-temporalization and the Other’s self-temporalization are not the same but, moreover, that for the Other to be truly other the self-temporalization of this Other, its very becoming, must always remain beyond me and inaccessible to me. As such, and while appearing within my self-temporalizing awareness, the Other can never become finally and ultimately identified with me, although at the same time it cannot be mere negation either. Placing the Other in my becoming, in my formation, is a way of suggesting that the Other’s ‘Theres’ play a role in the formation of my intentional life, or, more precisely, in the formation of the Ideal possibilities of experience. The Other intervenes in my self-formation insofar as that which gets associatively given with my kinaesthetic perspective is the possible kinaesthetic perspective of the Other. Self-awareness means, thus, becoming aware of my bodily perspective as paired with the possible bodily perspective of the Other. It is in this context that self-awareness can be understood as the continuous formation of the Ideal possibilities of experience and that such Ideality emerges from an ownness of consciousness that is in a constant open relationship with the Other.

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It is in the context of self-awareness and otherness, of inner time-consciousness and temporal association, that Husserl can then go on to claim that the intervention of the bodily Other in the passive synthesis of a bodily self-formation of my ideal possibilities of experience is, ultimately, the condition of possibility for what he calls ‘common time-form’ at the level of the ego. He writes: In that way the co-existence of my ego and the other ego, of my whole concrete ego and his, my intentional life and his, my ‘realities’ and his – in short, a common time-form – is primarily instituted; and thus every primordial temporality automatically acquires the significance of being merely an original mode of appearance of Objective temporality to a particular subject103. Far from being naturalistically presupposed, the common time-form that Husserl is referring to here is a primarily instituted time-form that is common insofar as it is generated in the passive synthesis in which, as we have seen, I and the Other are bodily given in distinctness but associatively. In instituting the Other and me associatively, what is ultimately and repeatedly becoming constituted in the uninterruptedly living self-awareness is a common time-form in which the frames of perspective of the embodied consciousnesses are being temporally inter-generated, although both consciousnesses are still their own and different self-temporalizations. The monadic structure and its bodily dimension that Husserl is arguing here does not dissolve in an heteronomy in which the specificity of my body, my ego and my monadic horizon as a whole loses its specificity in relation to the Other’s. Instead, the monad is guaranteed an autonomous status, without this meaning that the Other, as argued above, must simply become relative to me. While it would not be correct to speak here of heteronomy, it would be so to speak of an autonomy that is constantly being pierced by the Other. This is important insofar as it helps to understand that what Husserl is arguing with all this is the condition of possibility for an objective perception and intuition of objects of the world. To speak of common time-form and of objective perception does not mean that the other and me are to perceive objects in exactly the same way. Instead, and as Husserl once put it, it means that we are both to see red even though each one of us may see it differently.104 This leaves us with a social intersubjectivity that is rooted not only in a primordial relationship with the Other but, furthermore, in the very formation of the Ideal limits of experience as instituted in the relationship with the Other in my self-temporalization. The question of the Other is, thus, not only important for the formation of subjectivity but is also determinant in the formation of the Ideal limits of experience as condition of possibility for a phenomenological objectivity. This argument, however, is central to discussions that tend to

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accuse Husserl’s phenomenology of formalism and to which I shall now pay detailed attention.

C. The Limits of the Ethical Breadth of Phenomenology §1. The ethical depth of phenomenology and the problem of formalism Driven by an unconditional demand for autonomy or presuppositionlessness, Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness has provided us with an account of an absolute consciousness that, however temporal and embodied, is nonetheless beyond time and space. This ‘consciousness’ (in inverted commas, as Alweiss reminds us that it should be written) appears here to be the genesis of all acts of consciousness, of our life-experience, and that includes, especially, the acts of ref lection that characterize the phenomenological proceeding itself.105 Moreover, Husserl’s phenomenology of inner time-consciousness uncovers the temporal essence of the intentional act of consciousness within which phenomenology posits the regulative limits of meaning and, thus, of the very principle of principles. To put it in other words, time-consciousness is offered by Husserl as an account of the essential structure of the limit of meaning, of intuitive evidence and, therefore, of the principle of presuppositionlessness. This genetic ‘consciousness’ enveloping ref lection itself should, nonetheless, be understood as an ‘accompanying’ ‘consciousness’ that pervades and, therefore, exceeds the depth of all the acts of consciousness in which objects are experienced, insofar as it is not reducible to the activity of thought but is rather the very root of the latter. To speak here of a formal ‘consciousness’, of a law or of an ideal limit (as we have done above) that accompanies all my presentations and representations lead us to Ideas I. As discussed in Chapter I, Husserl speaks there of a pure transcendental ego, an ‘I Think’ that accompanies all our acts of thought and perception, ‘even the representations of my self’ (as Alweiss emphasizes), without which no synthesis would be possible.106 Insofar as this pure transcendental ego accompanies all my acts, including the act of ref lection, synthesizing them all pre-ref lectively as moments of my life as they are performed, Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness has reached the unconscious level of the ego, namely, the pure transcendental ego. As already discussed above, this pure transcendental ego, however embodied, should not be mistaken for a substance of any kind. The pure ego is a (self)-constituting event which works here as the ‘fundamental form of active living’ or, if we like, as the inner structure of my consciousness and that which makes manifest the mineness of my life.107 Nonetheless, and given that the pure

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transcendental ego is the essential structure of all acts, of their very form, then Husserl’s notion of a passive (pre-ref lective) unconscious is here a mere formal notion. To put it another way, the genesis of consciousness is reduced to being a formal law. This is precisely Derrida’s argument in his book on genesis where he affirms that Husserl’s phenomenology gives in to what he calls ‘the formalist temptation’.108 Following Husserl in Phenomenology on Consciousness of Internal Time, Derrida reads ‘immanent time’ as what he calls an ‘a-priori time-form’ or as the ‘possibility’ of binding all acts in one stream.109 Since inner timeconsciousness is inherent to all acts, but without being itself an act, Derrida, very accurately, calls it the passive time-form ‘inside the constituting sphere of activity’.110 Thus, and in line with our argument above, all activity of the ego, all acts of consciousness, have an inherent passive form that arranges them in a synthesis as they are being performed. For this reason, Derrida goes on to suggest that this ‘a-priori’ time-form, this ‘ideal limit’, ‘is something abstract which cannot be anything by itself’.111 In saying that the a priori time-form, or absolute ‘consciousness’, can be nothing by itself, Derrida is arguing that the origin of life-consciousness, of experience or intentionality, remains restricted within the limits of the act of consciousness. To put it another way, Husserl’s genetic phenomenology remains static. For although it is clear that absolute ‘consciousness’ is not an act but the passive form of consciousness that grounds all activity, the latter, insofar as it is inherent or incrusted in every act, remains always restricted within the sphere of activity. Contrary, thus, to Husserl’s suggestion that inner time-consciousness or absolute ‘consciousness’ exceeds the domain of the act, Derrida argues that this is not the case. For although the purely and absolutely transcendental ego is not reducible to the active ego of the thinking act, but is rather its pre-reflective pervading unconscious, the latter is nonetheless a mere dependent domain of the former. This argument sets up Derrida’s further position with regard to Husserl’s phenomenology as a whole. Acknowledging that this formalism is what defines Husserl’s static phenomenology in Ideas I and his writings on Inner TimeConsciousness, insofar as it characterizes the ideal parameters of the act of consciousness, he carries this conception into his reading of genetic phenomenology in, for example, Experience and Judgement. Although he makes it clear that Husserl’s conception of ante-predicative time in Experience and Judgement does not simply follow the account given in Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time, Derrida still claims that ‘all texts of Experience and Judgement concerned with time bring us nothing’.112 While recognizing that in the latter text the source of time is now to be attributed to a historical genesis, this historical genesis, again, is nothing other than a more interior time-form. What this means is that, for Derrida, ante-predicative time is only a new version of inner time-consciousness, of the form of consciousness, but which has now been placed at a deeper level. Thus, the later Husserl has only moved down a

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level, leaving the structure of static experience in place. Time is always a passive form that can only be found in the underground of the act of consciousness, being reducible to something on the lines of the air inside the bubble of thought. This allows Derrida to finally suggest that Husserl’s genetic phenomenology never really takes off and that, instead, always ‘remains immobilised at the level of formalism’.113 On this basis, he concludes that genetic time simply ‘widens the transcendental activity of the ego-world correlation’.114 One must concede that Derrida’s assessment of Husserl’s phenomenology of time is justified insofar as it clearly elucidates an important problem that, at this point, begins to look endemic to Husserl’s phenomenology, namely, the question of formalism and the subsequent limitations of genetic phenomenology. Neither the event of embodiment in itself nor its intrinsic associative pairing with the Other’s body solves the problem, for both remain integrated in the formal law of self-temporalization. As we shall see in greater detail in the next chapter, proof of Derrida’s acuteness is Husserl himself, when in his Lectures on Passive Synthesis in the 1920s he recognizes that his phenomenology of time-consciousness is a ‘mere abstraction’ that, therefore, needs completion.115 Thus, on the one hand we could take Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness as the irruption of genetic phenomenology (for it is clear that Husserl’s approach begins to unveil a notion of genesis that is more original than the level of active consciousness). On the other hand, however, we should also admit that Husserl’s position makes manifest certain limitations that affect the ethical breadth of phenomenology. Although absolute ‘consciousness’ exceeds the limited depth of the acts of consciousness, it does not manage to escape the frame of the activity (or passive in-activity) of the ego and remains locked within the veins of activity. In other words, Husserl’s notion of passivity up to this point is still more in-active than passive, because it is taken as the mere form of activity and, therefore, as dependent on the latter. What this means is that the ethical demand for self-grounding is only capable of accounting for the genetic structure of the act of reflection (that which is evident in intuition) but incapable of dealing with the motives that exceed the act and that, therefore, engender the phenomenological reflection, and which, as such, escape the boundaries of evidence set by the Idea of intuition. Nonetheless, Derrida’s account in his book on genesis is also reductive insofar as it filters the whole of Husserl’s phenomenology of time and genesis through the static frame provided in the lectures on ‘Internal Time-Consciousness’ and Ideas I and fails to realize that these are specifically the problems that the later Husserl will attempt to tackle, as we shall show in the last chapter.

Chapter V

The Full Ethical Breadth of Husserl’s Inquiry Genetic Phenomenology and the Question of Reflective Responsibility

Thus far we have thematized three key moments that make manifest the ethical exercise of phenomenology. In the first place we have seen how Husserl’s inquiry has uncovered and described the first principle of intuition that guides the phenomenological research and validates its outcomes as meaningful. We have also argued that phenomenology’s ethical attitude leads the inquiry to having to give an account of the law of intentionality and its inner time-structure, insofar as these are the structures that are the condition of possibility of the principle of intuition, the principle of all principles. This is important because it shows that phenomenology, as understood by Husserl, requires itself to give an account of its own very principle and its limits. This discussion has, however, also pointed out some key problems with which Husserl’s phenomenology is faced in the course of this self-examination. The chief problem has been introduced under the rubric of formalism: namely, the impossibility of Husserl’s phenomenology of escaping the boundaries of the act of consciousness and, therefore, of being able to offer any account of its own genesis beyond the act of reflection. Should this be the case, then we would not only be saying that genetic phenomenology is impossible, but that such failure is implicitly stripping Husserl’s phenomenology of its own ethical responsibility, for in failing to uncover the genesis of experience that exceeds the formal structure of the act, phenomenology is also incapable of fully accounting for the genesis of the principle of intuition that has guided the inquiry since the very beginning. This last chapter aims to argue otherwise. In order to do so I will show how phenomenology takes a definitive genetic turn that will prevent the inquiry from falling into such a cul-de-sac, by allowing it to carry out a self-examination that is not only concerned with the methodological principles that have guided and shaped the inquiry thus far, but that is also preoccupied with the history of philosophy and, more particularly, with the teleological genesis in which the very methodological principles of phenomenology are rooted.

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A. Phenomenology of Reflection §1. The un-thinkability of absolute consciousness Let me begin by digging further into the problem exposed earlier. The question of formalism introduced above must be seen in the light of another problem addressed in Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time and Ideas I. We confronted this problem briefly at the end of Chapter III when we introduced the notion of the Ur-doxa and the question concerning the possibility or impossibility of grasping it with intuitive evidence. Towards the end of Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time Husserl warns us of the same problem. He writes: We have no alternative here but to say: This flow is something we speak of in conformity with what is constituted [objective time], but it is not ‘something in objective time’. It is absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to be designated metaphorically as ‘flow’; the absolute properties of a point of actuality, of the primal source point ‘now’, etc. In the actuality of experience we have the primal source-point and a continuity of moments of reverberation. For all of this, we have no names.1 Since the flow is anterior to phenomena, and therefore it is condition of possibility of phenomena and of the temporal objects that appear in phenomena, it can then neither be considered in phenomenal terms nor as one of its correlative objects. Accordingly, Husserl describes it as ‘pre-immanent’ or ‘pre-phenomenal’.2 Moreover, insofar as language functions within the realm of phenomenal objects (transcendent or immanent), and the pre-phenomenal dimension of the life of consciousness exceeds the limits of phenomena, then the pre-phenomenal self-temporalizing awareness cannot be penetrated by language. Husserl’s solution to this problem in Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time is to describe the pre-phenomenal or pre-immanent with metaphors borrowed from the phenomenal field constituted by the pre-phenomenal. Thus, terms such as ‘now’, ‘past’, ‘present’ or ‘future’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘change’, ‘flow’, and even ‘law’ and ‘time’ are mere metaphors deployed to express that for which we have no names. In a similar fashion, Husserl writes elsewhere: In this sense it [the I] is not ‘a being’, but the antithesis to all that is, not an object (counter-stand) but the proto-stand [Urstand] for all objectivities. The I ought not to be called an I, it ought not to be called anything, since it would then already have become an object; it is the ineffable nameless, not standing, not floating, not existing above everything, but rather ‘functioning’ as apprehending, valuing, etc.3

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The question of having to recur to metaphors by means of which we can somehow ‘name without naming’, and thus ‘respect’ the ineffableness of the ‘prephenomenal’ (at the same time that we manage to describe the functioning of the inner life of consciousness), points to something more poignant. For does the lack of name-ability not simply mean the lack of ability of reflection to thematize or objectify and even to ‘see’? The problem is not that the pre-phenomenal dimension of the life of consciousness cannot be named, but, furthermore, that it cannot be thought and intuited. The temporal flow or absolute subjectivity, qua original passivity, is neither possible to experience nor express, for that would imply thematization and, therefore, the stripping of its prereflective character, of its pre-being [Vor-sein]. The difficulty that phenomenology faces at this point is to try to grasp that which changes without changing, that which is duration but without enduring (for, as Husserl himself puts it, ‘it would be nonsensical to try to find something here that remains unchanged for even an instant during the course of the duration’).4 Consequently, a possible awareness of this experiencing (this stream of pre-reflective self-awareness) that accompanies all my experiences cannot be either posited or meant and can only be described as an adverbial non-positing, non-objectivating awareness of myself as existing. 5 This is a paradoxical situation. For although on the one hand this experiencing continuously accompanies and is ingrained in all my experiences, and, therefore, is latently retained as present, the fact that this latency is what makes them possible also indicates that it must then be anterior to every experience. Moreover, and insofar as this latency is always older than experience, it must then be impossible for phenomenology to ever make it manifest with certainty.6 What the incapability of language and thought, and therefore of phenomenology, seems to indicate is that the pre-reflective experiencing that accompanies all my experiences always overflows reflection, the reduction and its intuitive character. Does this now mean that Husserlian phenomenology has reached the limits of its Ideal limits of thought and intuition and that the genesis of reflective thought cannot be apprehended at all and that, therefore, it must be left presupposed? Dan Zahavi argues that Husserl never explicitly posed nor answered such questions and attributes this ‘silence’ to Husserl’s own conception of the reflection or what he calls ‘Husserl’s original credo: Reflection is a method for investigating consciousness, and it is consequently only through reflection that we can acquire adequate knowledge about consciousness’.7 Although Zahavi does not understand such an apparent silence as a sign of failure, he does seem to think that it signals the limits of reflection. Reflective thought is not a falsifying practice that transforms what it touches. However, reflection is thematization and, as such, only that which can be thematized can be reflected upon and intuited. Accordingly, and given that the original self-manifestation that motivates all reflective acts overflows the parameters of reflection, it can be examined with regard to its functionality but it cannot be intuited. This

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inability, Zahavi argues, is due to the fact that the pre-reflective nature of the flow makes it an intrinsic and irrelational feature of our consciousness, so that it is not graspable in a frame of subject-object, of experiencing-experienced or constituting-constituted.8 To put it another way, reflection and its inherent flow do not correspond in a system of correlation, for the flow cannot be thought out as an object by a subject. Zahavi takes this irrelational feature of the spiritual flow as an unsurpassable limitation that restricts phenomenological reflection to being capable of grasping only partial and fragmented insights of the pre-reflective life of consciousness (i.e., acts).9 This unsurpassable limitation leads him to conclude that ‘anonymous’ pre-phenomenal subjectivity can be removed neither through reflection nor reduction.10 By limiting reflective thought to the thematic, Zahavi’s argument implies the limiting of phenomenology to phenomena, to that which can be thematized and intuited as a phenomenological theme. To put it another way, phenomenology is a static phenomenology incapable of inquiring beyond the acts of consciousness and its structures in which objects are self-given. Since Husserl’s phenomenology is ultimately grounded on the principle of intuition, and intuition is left powerless when confronting pre-reflective life, then all claims concerning the original nature of pre-reflective life must be un-phenomenological.11 However, and in the same sense as the limits of reflection do not signal its failure, the impossibility of grasping the pre-reflective life does not signal the failure of phenomenology either. Zahavi sees the encountering of the limits of phenomenology as ‘an unavoidable but harmless impasse’.12 ‘Temporality’, he writes, ‘contains an internal fracture that permits us to return to our past experiences in order to investigate them reflectively, but this very fracture also prevents us from fully coinciding with ourselves. There will always remain a difference between the lived and the understood’.13 On this basis, he concludes that ‘reflection cannot apprehend the anonymous life [. . .], but neither is it supposed to [for] its aim is to leave the naivety of prereflective experience, and not to reproduce it’.14 This incapability or limited task has obvious and important repercussions for Husserlian phenomenology. As Lilian Alweiss writes, ‘Phenomenology faces a strange situation of searching for an adequate apodictic beginning, which, however, always recedes and is, therefore, never apodictically present for investigation. The beginning of all beginnings is nothing that can be adequately grasped. [. . .] What comes to light here is the struggle between accepting that there is an awareness of life which lies beyond our grasp and the refusal to give up the idea of an apodictic beginning’.15 Nevertheless, to discuss whether the inquiry has or has not reached its limits – as Husserl does in Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time – does not simply mean that phenomenology must sacrifice the fundamental demand for uncovering the origin of consciousness and of phenomenological reflection. Husserl always makes it clear that phenomenology can never renounce its aim of becoming rigorous science and, more importantly,

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renounce its absolute self-grounding and self-justification. To simply accept, then, a mysterious and un-reachable (pre-) subjectivity underlying all experiences, and particularly the very inquiry that investigates those experiences, would be untenable for Husserl, for ultimately it would signify renouncing ethical life. Confronted with this cardinal problem, phenomenology’s validity as prima philosophia, as the ethical foundation of all scientific investigation, is at stake. It is imperative, then, that Husserlian phenomenology research the possibility of grasping that which has no name, that which cannot be thought, the ‘pre-being’ [Vorsein] of all that is. As Alweiss writes, ‘Indeed, if the aim of phenomenology is to return to a foundation that is purely present, then Husserl needs to uphold the claim that it is possible to make manifest this experiencing that accompanies everything that can be experienced. There is thus an Erlebnisreflexion which is different from the reflection of the immanent object since it purely makes manifest an awareness which already “is”, the assumption being that conscious life is latent and anterior to any perception yet always ready to be perceived’.16 What this means is that if phenomenology is to make manifest the level of pre-being [Vorsein], of the pre-I, it must then transcend ontology and the givenness in which all that is appears. The relevance of transcending traditional ontology and the givenness of being is that it makes possible the unveiling of a genesis that is not reducible to a mere object of an act of reflection.

§2. The Idea in the Kantian Sense as the form of genesis Husserl makes this move beyond traditional ontology, not only in some of his manuscripts and in some passages of Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time, but also in Ideas I. Let me begin by re-casting the way in which Husserl describes here the problem of the intuitiveness of the flow. He begins by describing inner time-consciousness, or the pre-reflective temporal and bodily self-awareness that accompanies and that makes possible all our experiences as our experiences, as the ‘root-form of consciousness’.17 This root-form of consciousness cannot, however, be given in one single glance. He writes: If the glance of the pure Ego, as the Ego reflects and perceptively understands, rests on some experience, there exists the a priori possibility of redirecting the glance to other experiences, so far as the bearing of this connection extends. But in principle this whole connection is never one that is or can be given through a single pure glance. [. . .]. When we speak of an experience-fringe, we have in mind not only the limits of phenomenological temporality along the lines already indicated, but differences that arise from new forms in the mode of presenting to data. Thus an experience that has become the object of a personally directed glance, and so has the modus

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of the deliberately looked at, has its fringe of experiences that are not deliberately viewed; that which is grasped in a mode of ‘attention’, and grasped with increasing clearness as occasion arises, has a fringe of background inattention showing relative differences of clearness and obscurity, as well as of emphasis and lack of relief 18. Although the act of reflection is not the same act of perception upon which the former reflects, the reflective act is also an act of consciousness that is implicitly integrated to my consciousness as it is being performed. To say that reflection is an act integrated in my life-consciousness implies saying that, qua phenomenal, the reflective act has incrusted in it the inner temporal structure, the absolute ‘consciousness’, common to all acts. The ego, then, not only reflects on itself, but it also and pre-reflectively lives the stream of lived-experiences on which it is about to reflect.19 The reflection of the ego on itself can be re-directed and thus move from one act to another in different reflective acts, so that a new punctual experience can be revealed. Nevertheless, since the reflective act is an intentional act structured by the triad of retention, impression and protention (here in the sense of expectation), the act of reflection can be directed only to punctual experiences, punctual acts or what Husserl also calls ‘nows’ or ‘running-off phenomena’.20 To understand reflection this way opens the question of the limited nature of the reflective act. When intuition glances over an act of experience, it sees that which has been posited or meant in the intentional regard of the reflective act and, simultaneously, also sees or realizes that something else has vanished (without having been seen). Reflective or immanent intuition, of course, can return to it and move towards that which escaped it. But in doing so, it is only capable of seeing (again!) another (or the same) punctual act of experience, becoming also aware once more of the horizon [Horizont] or the background [Hintergrund] that spreads beyond the power of attention, bursting the boundaries of the memory and the expectation that characterize the reflective act itself.21 Every single time reflection turns its attention towards a past actexperience, intuitive reflection (guided by the effecting of reduction) not only sees the phenomenological or transcendental theme (the immanent act) but it also ‘encounters’ the dis-appearance of the pre-phenomenal dimension of every experience. That which is constantly and inexorably missed as it is ‘encountered’ by the reflective gaze is, precisely, the latent and pre-reflective temporal and bodily flow of self-awareness that integrates all acts in consciousness making them acts of the same stream. To apprehend the stream, therefore, is not a mere matter of grasping all the lived and lived-to-be acts, but to grasp the primordial or proto-ego, the pre-I, that functions as the passive integrating force that runs inherently in my life making it my life. It is for this reason that Husserl describes it as the ‘root-form of consciousness’ that allows for the re-direction of

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the glance, and that, as such, is nothing other than that which makes up the ‘whole connection’.22 On these grounds, Husserl goes on to identify the ‘rootform of consciousness’ with being the ‘a priori possibility’ of not only every perceptual act but of also every single act of reflection.23 Husserl characterizes the ‘a priori possibility’ of thought or the ‘root-form of consciousness’, that both makes possible and escapes the powers of reflection, as ‘what is not an object’ and as that which, therefore, can only be given as otherwise than an object. He writes: Advancing continuously from one apprehension to another, we apprehend in a certain way, I remarked, the stream of experience as a unity also. We do not apprehend it like a single experience, but after the fashion of an Idea in the Kantian Sense. It is nothing set down and asserted at haphazard, but absolutely and indubitably given, in a correspondingly wide sense of the word ‘given’. This indubitability, although also grounded in intuition, has a quite different source from that which obtains the Being of experiences, as is therefore given pure in immanent perception. It is precisely the distinctive feature of an ideation that mentally sees a Kantian ‘Idea’, yet does not in doing so forfeit the transparency of its insight, that the adequate determination of its content, in this instance the stream of consciousness, is unattainable.24 To grasp the primordial ego or stream as other than an object and, therefore, as pre-being [Vorsein] means to apprehend it as a unity after the fashion of an Idea in the Kantian Sense. Although the stream can be given as unity, this does not mean that we grasp the whole of the stream. Since it bursts the temporal power of thought (memory and expectation), the unitary stream or flow of consciousness is not graspable in its entirety, for it cannot be contained and, therefore, seized as content. Insofar as the pre-phenomenological flow or stream of consciousness is not a content, it is then impossible to intuit it according to material and categorial essences. It follows from this that the unitary stream or flow can only be ‘seen’ as Idea. To refer to the possibility of ‘seeing’ the flow as Idea simply means, for Husserl, to apprehend it as pure form. This does not mean that the attainability of the stream as Idea rather than as content is the result of the freedom of the phenomenologist. Rather, the stream, the flow, can only be given as Idea because it could not be otherwise. It is, as Husserl would have it, a universal necessity. But what does Husserl understand by a pure form that lies beyond essences and why does he call it the ‘Idea in the Kantian Sense’? To speak of the Idea in the Kantian Sense as pure form is to speak of an ‘Ideal limit’ that regulates the boundaries within which an object can be brought to consciousness or be experienced.25 As argued earlier, transcendent objects are brought to consciousness (qua meaningful objects) by means of syntheses of essential and categorial intuitions that must necessarily fulfil

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the meaning-intention or the otherwise called act of thought, by means of which some-thing is firstly meant or intended. However, and in order for this to occur, every essential and categorial intuition of a synthesis must be bound together so that they never lose sight of the same object, so to speak. What this means is that all the intuitive moments of a synthesis have a horizon that regulates them or directs them towards the object, this horizon [Horizont] being the Idea in the Kantian Sense. The ‘Idea’, thus, is not the object (material or ideal) of the synthesis of intuitions but the prescriptive form in which any ideal object that we intend is to be intuited.26 Using the same example as above, the Idea in the Kantian Sense is not the prescription of the ideal content Red but the prescription of the universal form of Redness, this universal form of Redness being the law that unites all the different intuitive moments of Redness in a synthesis. The Idea in the Kantian Sense is the Ideal law or limit that frames the formal boundaries of all intuitions and moments of redness. Although it is true Ideas I only undertakes this discussion (explicitly at least) with regard to the Idea Thing (namely, the Idea that regulates all intuitions of transcendent objects), Husserl makes it clear that such an essential necessity must serve as a ‘phenomenological clue’ for the phenomenological inquiry as a whole, and, more precisely, for consciousness itself.27 If we now follow this phenomenological clue, we can see why Husserl can define the flow or the stream of pre-phenomenal life as being an Idea in the Kantian Sense or the universal form of consciousness that prescribes, regulates or delimits the reflective (immanent) intuitions of the lived-experiences. If reflection can grasp punctual lived-experiences as running-off phenomena, it is only because the universal form of the life of consciousness regulates all immanent intuitions. If this is so, then we would have to say with Husserl that the pre-phenomenal stream of life, qua Idea in the Kantian Sense, is the a priori possibility of reflective thought. But to establish that the pre-reflective stream of life is the a priori possibility that regulates all our immanent as well as outer intuitions demands a further phenomenological investigation that can provide us with an account of the origin of this a priori Ideal limit. That is to say, if intuition is the fulfilment (or frustration) of a meaning-intention of an ideal object, where does the Idea in the Kantian Sense lie in the first place? To put it differently, if intuition is the Ideal limit that acts as regulative principle of phenomenological thought, how can this thought provide itself with it in the first place? Where and how does the regulative principle of intuition originate? As argued throughout this study, that which is intuited must always be previously posited or meant by a thinking act, for there can be no intuition if there is no some-thing meant or intended in the first place. Nonetheless, the thinking act, as an act, always means ‘objects’ of consciousness, whether these are immanent or transcendent. Husserl’s description has made it clear that all ideal objects can only be intuited and made meaningful if, and only if, all intuition is prescribed by a universal form. Nonetheless, he has also made it clear that the Idea in the

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Kantian Sense is not object-like, and, therefore, cannot be a mere object of thought. If this is the case, how, then, can the thinking act mean what is not an object but pure form?

§3. Pure intuition and the rationality of consciousness As suggested in Chapter II following Husserl’s ‘phenomenology of reason’ in Ideas I, reason is not to be taken as another act of consciousness (an act within an act, as it were) but as the internal domain of the act of consciousness. Rather than reason, we may well speak of the rationality of rational consciousness or as the mode of being of consciousness when the latter opens itself up in thinking.28 Reason was thus described as the inner ‘motivation’ of the thinking act insofar as it signifies the positing of the Ideal limits that are to regulate the intuitive moments of that which consciousness is opened to by thought.29 Husserl’s argument is that if a thinking act were not rationally motivated, then it would be virtually impossible to speak of fulfilling or even frustrating intuitions. In the same way as the thought that means something is not enough in itself but needs the act of intuition to make that which is thought or meant meaningful, so the act of intuition is not enough in itself and needs the limits that the rationality of thought posits in order to be exercised. Without the rationality that posits the non-object-like Ideal limits (the Idea in the Kantian Sense), the intuitive act would have no direction and would not know where and, more importantly, how to look. It is for this reason that Husserl ultimately understands the thinking act that characterizes the noetic side of consciousness as an act of Ideation. The thinking act, the meaning-intention, insofar as it is guided by reason or by the positing of the Idea, of the pure form, is always an Ideating act. According to this, while the Ideating thinking act is the condition of possibility of intuition, reason or the positing of the Idea in the Kantian Sense is, in its turn, the a priori condition of possibility of the thinking act. Accordingly, Ideation can then be described as the positing (of the Idea) by means of which consciousness opens up to something other than itself. Furthermore, Ideation is the motivational moment inherent to the act through which consciousness is born or becomes consciousness (of something) every time an act is performed. But since reason is inherent to all acts, and that implies reflective acts, the question that now arises is, what is the Ideal form that accompanies reflective acts? What does reason posit within an act of reflection? Derrida suggests that this question remains un-answered in Husserl’s work – particularly in Ideas I. He writes: ‘Husserl never made the Idea itself the theme of a phenomenological description’.30 As Derrida argues, the Idea cannot be given ‘in person’, as a theme, for it is only the possibility of evidence and the openness of ‘seeing’ itself. It is, as discussed above, the horizon for every intuition in general but that which itself cannot be given in any intuition. On this

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basis, Derrida identifies Husserl’s notion of the Idea with the invisible or hidden sun that shows without being shown and that allows for any-thing to be given while it itself cannot be given.31 Derrida seems to conflate the fact that Husserl does not phenomenologically thematize the Idea in the Kantian Sense with the possibility of accounting for it without thematizing it. This confusion leads him to argue that the Idea will always remain beyond givenness and being.32 This implies that Husserl’s phenomenology of genesis can only be based on reason’s creation ex nihilo of the Idea. Finally, Derrida’s position seems to be that Husserlian phenomenology is ultimately rooted in a mysterious genesis that lies beyond the possibilities of the phenomenological inquiry but which, at the same time, must be presupposed to hold the inquiry together. The genesis of the life of consciousness and, therefore, of phenomenology, seems to remain beyond Husserl’s inquiry, thus condemning the inquiry to having to renounce its very first principle of presuppositionlessness. But Derrida’s position regarding the question of genesis entails, yet, a more fundamental problem. By reducing phenomenology to pure constructive thought, Derrida’s critique ends up weakening Husserl’s very notion of synthesis. Whether the Idea remains or not beyond givenness and elucidation does not affect the fact that meaning-intentions or thinking acts would still be guided by the positing of the Idea and, likewise, intuition-fulfilments would still be regulated by the Idea. Nonetheless, since the Idea would be a creation ex nihilo, there would be an unbridgeable gap between every thinking act and every Ideation. All we would have left is a presupposed matrix from which all acts would spring, without the necessity that the acts be somehow inter-related, as the notion of synthesis demands. As a result of this, consciousness would be in danger of not being a flow of experiences but a mere collection of acts. It would follow from this that every thinking act could be reduced to a mere production dictated by the Idea and, as a result, constitution would ultimately be reduced to being a construction, an imposition of the mind on the world. What this would ultimately lead to is the marginalization of the principle of principles: intuition (and its perceptual foundation). Since the world would only be a construction bursting out of a preceding consciousness that merely Ideates it, intuition would be the ratification of thought instead of its fulfilment or frustration. The meaningfulness of the world would not depend on intuition, as shown earlier, but on the Ideating rationality of thought. It is for this reason that the possibility or impossibility of the givenness of the Idea is not a marginal discussion for Husserl, but rather one of the key aspects of the phenomenological inquiry and of the phenomenological understanding of the question of experience. If the Idea in the Kantian Sense were not brought to light (although in its own light), Husserlian phenomenology would be at risk of remaining anchored in the Cartesian ego cogito and its constructive experience of the world. But contrary to Derrida’s arguments in his Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, the fact that the stream is not graspable as content and cannot

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be an object of a sensuous or categorial intuition does not mean that the Ideal insight of the stream must be left presupposed.33 It is precisely at this stage of the discussion that Husserl introduces the term ‘pure intuition’, which he describes as ‘the bringing of what is not the object of a personally directed look within the focus of pure mental vision’.34 He then goes on to argue that the Idea can only be given ‘in the wide sense of the word given’, for it ‘can only be designated through its essential nature [as] a type of insight that is all its own’.35 To say that the Idea is visible in Pure Intuition does not mean that Pure Intuition marks, simply, the objectification of the Ideal limit that prescribes all intuitions. Rather, to intuit the root-form of consciousness is to intuit it not as object but as Idea. As Husserl puts it, ‘objects cannot be given with complete determinacy and with similarly complete intuitability in any limited fi nite consciousness’.36 And then he says: But as ‘Idea’ (in the Kantian sense), the complete givenness is nevertheless prescribed – as a connection of endless processes of continuous appearing, absolutely fi xed in its essential type, or, as the field for these processes, a continuum of appearances determined a priori, possessing different but determinate dimensions, governed by an established dispensation of essential order.37 When the Idea is rendered in its own insight, then no-thing appears but the condition of possibility of any appearance whatever. To ‘see’ the Idea is to ‘see’ the regulating limits of all appearing without any-thing appearing at all. To see the Idea is to see the limits that frame seeing itself. What this means is that to see the Idea is to ‘see’ the invisible stream itself, the primordial ego or pre-phenomenal subjectivity, the sun that shows without showing. The pure mental vision of the condition of all appearing is the intuition of the form of consciousness that constitutes transcendental life by means of pre-reflectively intending (or retaining) and integrating all acts in the stream of consciousness as they are being performed. We have already described these formal limits of all experience as the permanent event of self-temporalization and embodiment that accompanies and integrates all my acts within my life stream. It is no coincidence, then, that when Husserl speaks of Pure Intuition in Ideas I he refers to the ‘intuitive ideation’ that grasps the Ideas of Temporality, res temporalis, and Spatiality, res extensa (on which depends a third Idea of Substance, res materialis, which, as such, can only affect transcendent objects of consciousness, i.e., material things).38 In line with the discussion undertaken in Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time, Ideas I suggests that the intuition of the Idea of the life of consciousness is the tacit apprehension by means of which the Ideal limits of Temporality and Space as selftemporalization and embodiment of consciousness give themselves. The Pure Intuition of such regulative Ideas, of the very limits of Intuition itself, is what Husserl calls

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the ‘origin of the presentation of space [and time], the deepest phenomenological meaning whereof has never yet been grasped, [. . .], wherein space [and time] exhibit themselves intuitionally and as the unity of appearances, and of the descriptive modes of such exhibiting “constitutes” the spatial [and the temporal]’.39 To intuit the Ideal limits is to intuit the opening or the origination of space and time as the horizon [horizont] of consciousness within which transcendent as well as immanent objects can be attained. To put it another way, the pure intuition of the Ideas of Space and Time is the continuous and tacit event of self-temporalization and embodiment whereby consciousness is conceived or born over and over again as consciousness-of-something. By uncovering the questions of Ideation and of Pure Intuition, Husserl’s phenomenology of reason has made explicit the tacit original self-awareness that runs inherent to all thinking acts and the role it plays in the phenomenological reflection. Although to grasp the immanent act and to grasp the Idea is not the same and must not be conflated, all immanent intuition of an act is dependent on the Pure Intuition of the Idea. Whenever reflection grasps the immanent object, as an object of thought, there is, inherent to the reflective act that grasps the punctual experience, an inner and more original moment that accompanies and guides reflection, i.e., reason. Reason is, thus, the Pure Intuition and the positing of the stream of the life of consciousness as an Idea that regulates and makes possible the apprehension of punctual acts in a synthesis of immanent intuitions. In order to think my act-experience as an immanent object, reason must have posited (within the reflective thinking act itself) the Ideal limit of life-experience (i.e., the Ideas of Time and Space as pure form of consciousness). If reason is able to do that, it is because reason itself also intuits, tacitly and purely, the Ideal limit of the life of consciousness from the synthesis of the life of consciousness. Like ideation, the intuitive presentation of the Idea of the spatio-temporal formation of life-consciousness is a continuous and implicit intuition that runs inherent to the activity of thought, allowing reflection to take place. In this context, reason could be understood as the inner moment of reflection or, more precisely, as the root of thinking that, within reflection itself but pre-reflectively, intuits and posits the Ideal limits of experience. Without the pure intuition and the positing of the Ideal limit of the life of consciousness, reflection would be impossible. In contrast to Derrida’s reading, then, reason not only Ideates (and, therefore, constructs ex nihilo) but it must also intuit the Ideal limit or the Idea in the Kantian Sense, in order for the notion of synthesis to be able to hold. Without such an inherent Ideation and intuitive awareness of its pure form, consciousness would not be a flow, a stream of life, but rather a mere collection of thoughtful acts the interrelation of which would have to be presupposed. The unravelling of the rationality of consciousness is the unveiling of a continuous tacit flux that, so to speak, brings acts of thought together in a synthetic flow. One can reflect

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on one’s very experiences only insofar as one’s own temporal and bodily self-awareness is already affecting and framing one’s own thought.

§4. The static genesis of phenomenology The phenomenology of reason undertaken in Ideas I can be understood as a key step towards the fulfilment of Husserl’s ethical demand for self-grounding, for self-justification and presuppositionlessness, by means of which phenomenology aims to manifest the living of an ethical life. We could now say that the questions of the Ideation and Pure Intuition of the Idea show us how the effecting of the transcendental reduction, when taken to a further level, becomes eidetic and, in doing so, helps to render the Ideal limit that orientates and grounds the phenomenological reflection itself. What this means is that we have now reached a notion of genesis, the ‘I’ that is not ‘I’ or the primordial ego that remains latent to the active experiences of the ego. To follow Alweiss once more, ‘the living presence that remains is a standing and streaming, a nunc stans and nunc fluens, which, however, is nothing but an ideal (idealiter) infinite continuum’.40 This leads Alweiss to argue that at this particular point Husserl’s phenomenology opens a cleavage between experience and consciousness. She writes: ‘The experiencing that accompanies all my experiences can never be perceived as such. Consciousness thus precedes experience, and is not only anterior to it, but remains latent’.41 She continues: ‘Consciousness in its temporalisation precedes and is always older than experience – our experience is accompanied by a trail of life that lies beyond our perceptual grasp’.42 It is for this reason that Husserl must argue that this latency can only be given as Idea, as pure form, by means of a pure intuition, namely, what Alweiss has called an ‘infinite God-like intuition’.43 This does not mean, however, that human finitude lies in contradiction to this infinite God-like intuition. What Husserl is arguing is that ‘the infinite is immanent to human knowledge’.44 By arguing that reason Ideates and purely intuits the rules that prescribe all knowledge and experience, both reflective and non-reflective, Husserl is ensuring that the phenomenologist can account for the rules that make this infinite progress of knowledge possible. It is true that the ‘continuum of appearances is guided by the Idea in the Kantian Sense, that is to say, an Idea that can never find fulfilment’.45 At the same time, however, the infinite is not beyond transcendental subjectivity. What happens, Alweiss continues to argue, supporting the argument presented above is that ‘adequate thought exceeds that which can be thought. That which lies beyond our grasp points to an “exteriority” of knowledge, which is itself immanent to thought. It is an infinity immanent to the monad’.46 To say that this infinite immanence can never be grasped and seized upon in the same sense as the phenomenologist can grasp an immanent object

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does not represent any kind of failure. The Idea is given originarilly, tacitly, within reflective thought. What is given, however, is not infi nity itself but its idea, the teleological scope of all knowledge and experience. But since the latter, qua possibility of thought, must always exceed the immanent scope of reflective thought itself, then it can only be made manifest as pure form. It could not be otherwise, if we take it that what Husserl is demonstrating here is the necessity of accounting for the genesis of reflection and phenomenology, but without falling again into the infi nite regress to which an ontological phenomenology would lead us, as he warns us in Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time. What this is saying is that the ethical demand that defi nes phenomenology can only begin to acquire a full breadth when it overcomes the restrictions imposed by traditional ontology and opens up to a radical ontology of a formal order. This point can be substantiated by the discussion undertaken by James Mensch. As he has argued, phenomenology can only avoid the kernel of the infinite regress if it manages to disassociate being from appearing. As he writes, ‘appearing should not be ontologised. It is not to be taken as a being that has its own modes of appearing. Appearing or manifestation, in other words, is its own category. It is not to be understood in terms of being’.47 On this basis, and now following Patocˇka, he suggests that ‘showing’ or ‘manifesting’ cannot be some physical, psychological or mental process, for ‘the world of phenomena, the world of phenomenal lawful order, is independent of the world of realities, of the world of actuality’.48 Instead, he concludes, transcendental subjectivity is the ‘whole system’ of ‘modes of givenness’: ‘in place of transcendental subjectivity considered as being, there is only [transcendental subjectivity as] the process of manifestation as such’.49 He furthermore specifies that transcendental subjectivity as manifestation is not a being-subjectivity but ‘the “how” of appearing that any manifestation of an object – be it person or thing – follows’.50 Mensch’s argument seems to support perfectly Husserl’s move in Ideas I, helping to show the rationale that underlies Husserl’s move when he introduces the questions of rationality, Pure Intuition and the Idea in the Kantian Sense. It is, nonetheless, and for this reason, surprising that Mensch goes on to claim that the confusion between appearing and being is Husserl’s own misunderstanding. Has Husserl not shown, precisely, that the notions of Ideation and Pure Intuition are themselves the very ‘ “how” of appearing’, the ‘lawful order’, that pervades and makes possible the manifestation of any object to consciousness, and even consciousness to itself via reflection? Has he not shown that Ideation and Pure Intuition are the manifestation of what does not fall within the category of being? Moreover, has Husserl not made it clear that Pure Intuition in particular can be defined on the lines of a pre-reflective self-awareness that pervades all our acts, perceptual and reflective, by means of which the pertinent objects of those acts can be brought to the awareness of consciousness? To grasp the genesis of consciousness, according to Ideas I, would amount to intuiting the

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pure form, the very process of manifestation, which, as such, can only be given as Idea rather than as being. For it is the horizon of infinite possibility of every apprehension rather than a finite substance or another mere act that can be grasped and posited beyond the immanent act. Although Husserl’s argument in Ideas I manages, then, to avoid the problem of the infinite regress by de-ontologizing phenomenology and turning it into a radical formal ontology, it is this very argument that pushes the inquiry into what Derrida calls the ‘formalist temptation’.51 As discussed above in greater length, the problem is not that genesis is reduced to an infinite immanent form, but rather that this form, however infinite its horizon might be, can never be anything other than the form of all acts. Insofar as this is the case, form can never escape or be independent from the act of consciousness that it structures. Genesis, qua formal genesis, is still trapped within the boundaries of the act of consciousness, for that which is given in Pure Intuition is the abstract form of the acts, ignoring a life-dimension of consciousness that stretches beyond the limits of the act. Genesis, therefore, is still a ‘static genesis’. Although in Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time Husserl himself argues that there are two intertwined intentionalities, the development of the argument in the very same lectures as well as in Ideas I ends up restricting the question of genesis to horizontal intentionality [Längsintentionalität], displacing transverse intentionality [Querintentionalität] to second place. Or in the language of Ideas I, the question of genesis is treated within the context of the Idea in the Kantian Sense and its Pure Intuition, pushing the question of the Ur-doxa or the primary belief in the world (previous to any modal positionality) aside. Despite Husserl’s effort, the rationality of consciousness does not yet provide us with a full and deep enough explication of the whole process of formation of the structures of intentional consciousness. Nor does it fully account for the genesis of the regulative principle of intuition, the very form of consciousness and experience. As a consequence of this, Husserl’s phenomenology is momentarily restricted to being purely formal insofar as it is exclusive within the boundaries of the act of thought, while, at the same time, the genesis that motivates the act of thought and phenomenology in particular remains unaccounted for. The problem with formalism is not only that the description of consciousness is limited to a formal dimension integrated within experience, but, more importantly, that the ethical breadth of phenomenology remains limited within the self-sufficiency of the intentional act and its formal ‘mechanisms’. It is at this stage that Husserl’s inquiry moves into questioning the motivational origin of the rationality of consciousness, of formal genesis of experience and, moreover, of the very principle of principles. In doing so, phenomenology begins to move beyond the limits of the intentional act of consciousness and its inner temporal-formal structure. This move, as we shall see in the text below, not only makes manifest the consolidation of genetic phenomenology but it also reveals the full ethical breadth of Husserl’s phenomenology.

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B. The Consolidation of Genetic Phenomenology §1. Affection, association and the awakening of consciousness Husserl deals with this specific question in his Lectures on Passive Synthesis in the 1920s, particularly in those sections dedicated to the themes of affection, association and awakening. There he begins by arguing that the phenomenology of time-consciousness points us only towards the ‘form of consciousness’ or the form within us by means of which every object is constituted.52 Nonetheless, he adds, ‘mere form is an abstraction’, this meaning that inner time-consciousness or the pre-reflective temporal and embodied self-awareness by means of which Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time and Ideas I describe the most intimate genesis of consciousness is only the form abstracted from its content.53 On this basis, Husserl argues that the phenomenology of time-consciousness ‘does not give us any idea of the necessary synthetic structures of the streaming present and of the unitary stream of presents’.54 Although the phenomenology of time-consciousness opens the domain of the self-becoming or self-formation of consciousness, it does so without accounting for its motivational basis. This is an important point, for Husserl seems to be reminding us now that consciousness cannot be understood as becoming or forming itself independently from the content-experience. In order to become, in order to be pre-reflectively and implicitly aware of itself, consciousness must be aware of something other than itself. This does not simply mean that the embodied self-temporalization of consciousness is now attributable to a more original phenomenon or event that causes it, as a consequence of which Husserl’s position regarding the Idea in the Kantian Sense and pure intuition would now be obsolete. Rather than retreating from Ideas I, Husserl’s suggestion here seems to be, as it was already in Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time, that consciousness is aware of itself only when being aware of something other than itself and vice versa. Neither of them is the mere cause of the other but ‘they are two inseparable intentionalities, requiring one another like two sides of the same thing’. 55 Ideas I is not obsolete, but it needs completion. It is within this context that Husserl turns his attention to the question of affection, engaging in a new phenomenology of the intentional experience responsible for providing consciousness with the content for its embodied self-temporalization or self-becoming. In other words: What makes the ‘intentional act of consciousness’ intentional? Husserl opens the inquiry on affection by returning to the temporal structure of the act of consciousness. The first step is to leave out all the modifications of the primordial impression or experience, such as retention and remembering, expectation and protention, as well as phantasy or any other willing act, leaving the inquiry with the phenomenon of ‘pure perception’ (Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time), ‘hyletic sensation’ (Ideas I)

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or what he calls now ‘the phenomenon of affection’.56 But what does Husserl understand here by affection? He writes: By affection we understand the allure [Reiz] given to consciousness, the peculiar pull that an object given to consciousness exercises on the ego; it is a pull that is relaxed when the ego turns towards it attentively, and progresses from here, striving toward self-giving intuition, disclosing more and more of the self of the object, thus, striving toward an acquisition of knowledge, toward a more precise view of the object.57 Husserl seems to understand affection as the naked moment of openness in which consciousness is solicited by what is not itself. But this ‘motivational solicitation’ must be understood as a call to the constituting cognizing attention of the ego of the lived body rather than as a causal-mechanistic ‘stimulus’ that simply determines the behaviour of the ego. Affection is the allure that pulls the sensitivity of the lived body but without the intervention of sense organs. It is as if the object appealed to be constituted as an object-of-consciousness. In grabbing the ego’s constituting attention, however, the object does not simply enter intentional consciousness as if it was entering a box. Far from it, the solicitation, the affection exercised over the ego is precisely what grants consciousness its title of intentional consciousness. At the same time, though, the affection that lures the intentionality of consciousness does not pre-suppose an already constituted object. When consciousness is called, there is only the calling of a pre-given and pre-constituted object, the raw or preformed (formless) material [Stoffe].58 The importance of affection resides, thus, in the fact that it inaugurates the yet undetermined ‘self’ of the object and, at the same time, of consciousness as an undetermined awareness-of-something (intentionality). In the affective inauguration of intentional consciousness and the pre-formed object-of-consciousness, the latter is not yet separated from subjectivity, however it is not merely immanent to it either. Husserl’s phenomenology of affection can thus be said to delimit the ground of the realm of experience down to its primordial or original moment in which consciousness is an affective hyletic sensing that manifests a unique openness to the world previously to being a world of objects. At this level of affective experience, intentional consciousness is somehow a pre-act intentionality insofar as the ‘aiming at’ or the ‘meaning something’ is not yet being acted. While something is affecting me, we cannot yet speak of an act of consciousness in which something concrete is being meant. What Husserl is arguing here is that affection exceeds the structural limits of the act of consciousness insofar as it does not need the noesis-noema pattern or the structure consciousness-intentional object. On these grounds, affection can be taken as the original moment of intentionality insofar as the pre-constituted givenness affecting consciousness is that which opens the temporal structure of any intentional act-experience.

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But how can affective pre-givenness open the time structure of all intentional experience? How does something that is not any-thing affect me? Husserl describes two levels of affection. In the first place he argues that affection is intertwined with association, and that it is in virtue of this connection that affection can be described as the phenomenon by means of which ‘a new formation of unity first comes about’.59 He writes: [. . .] within every living present (and restricted initially to the sense-data that are being unified within it), affections are constantly at work beyond themselves; we always find affective awakenings, that is, associations. The principle of constitution of hyletic objectlike formations [Gegenständlichkeit], namely as connected co-existences and successions, the principles of local systems that constantly function to individualise and their fillings, the principles according to which contrasts and inner fusions (concrescence) take place, are constantly operative. They constantly form essential conditions of affection and the transference of affection as awakening.60 In affecting the ego and grabbing its attentiveness, the ego’s gaze encounters a unity soliciting for explicit constitution. Although this (pre-)object is not yet constituted, it is nonetheless a unity that emerges by appearing through the three basic laws of association which are always operative, namely, by ‘contrast’, ‘contiguity’ and/or ‘similarity’ to or with a background.61 Of these three fundamental laws of association, Husserl grants the law of contrast the central role, when he says that ‘insofar as the most original affection is to be seen as the affection generated in the impressional present, contrast is then to be characterised as the most original condition of affection’.62 It is by means of contrast that the pre-given object can ‘present itself’ affectively as a unity separated from its surroundings. It is then no coincidence that, at this point, Husserl goes on to define this first notion of affection as ‘the lawful regularity’ or as the ‘constituting law of unity’ functioning as condition for the further perception of a Thing in particular, and, therefore, as the very awakening of the ego.63 Husserl ties this first type of affection to the awakening phenomenon of ‘something that is already given to consciousness as for itself’.64 He understands this first affective awakening of the ego as one in which affection makes the implicit explicit. This type of awakening takes place in cases in which what is now an implicit sense was once explicit and therefore associated to other partial senses. It is thus due to these previous associations, by means of which the object once gained its sense, that the same object can now be re-awakened. What is no longer non-intuitive is an element that is nonetheless in association with what is intuitive in a presentation. So, we may have forgotten several aspects (tones) of a content (melody) at the same time that we are explicitly aware of some other aspects. When this is the case, the affective force that pervades the new presentation whereby we are explicitly aware of some of those elements ‘can enable a

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retention (which is poor in or completely empty of particular affective content) to restore what is concealed in it concerning an overcast content of sense’.65 In this case, the forgotten tones of a melody are re-awoken by means of associative connectedness with other partial moments of the melody ‘by virtue of retroactive affective force that is already at work, an affective force proceeding from the intuition, from the primordial impression’.66 Although association is the means by which we can reach those forgotten elements, association would not be able to reach ‘anywhere’ without the affective force pervading all presentation. Say, for example, that a melody sounds on the radio while driving, yet the ego is busy with the road and so the melody does not yet allure it. All of a sudden – to use one of Husserl’s examples – a tone affects me ‘especially’ through its stridency and awakens the ego’s attentiveness.67 When this is the case, the ego’s attention is not only directed towards the strident tone but towards the whole melody. In doing so, the affection awakens the intentional regard towards a unity in gradual formation and the intentional regard becomes a temporal structure or what Husserl also calls ‘associative’. For in paying attention to the whole melody, consciousness opens up to the endurance of the object by returning to retentional phases as well as by orienting itself towards future ones.68 It needs to be stressed, however, that affection cannot be reduced to being an associative awakening directed only towards the past, instead it is also linked to apperception and its futurity. For this reason, affection must be understood in terms of being an openness that is structured in terms of a memorial past and a protentional future. This is highly relevant because it helps to show how, insofar as it functions only through the temporal structure of the act, affection cannot yet be fully passive. It is true that so far affection has re-shaped the act of consciousness considerably by looking at it from the angle of the intended object rather than from the angle of the intention, and, therefore, by immersing it in the margins of activity. Nonetheless, the fact that affection is associative and, therefore, apperceptive still leaves us within the area of influence of the intentional act and its temporal structure. To say that affection is still dependent on the act-intentionality and its temporal structure leads us to suggest the following two points. First, that qua associative, affection is dependent on cognitive association, and, second, that qua apperceptive, and, therefore, protentional, Husserl’s account of affection up to now remains trapped within the boundaries of the act and, therefore, within the limits of static phenomenology. It is at this point that Husserl takes a further step and questions whether affection can really be reduced to being merely dependent on association and, consequently, whether it is possible (if not necessary) to speak of affection beyond the structural limits of the actintentionality. Husserl writes: We must consider the possibility whether all the fusions and separations, through which object-like unities become in the field of the present, do not

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require an affective vivacity in order to become at all, and that perhaps they could not become it if the materially relevant conditions of forming unities were indeed fulfilled, but the affective force were nil.69 What Husserl is asking here is whether, in the light of this dependency of affection on association, the latter is enough on its own as possibility for constitution. Something can be perfectly singled out by means of the laws of association, but do these associative laws not need another affective force, a lower or even more passive degree of affection upon which the laws can be put into play? Husserl does not seem to be concerned with how the implicit sound becomes explicit, but rather with how the melody can be considered to be implicit in the first place. What is this implicitness without which the melody could not be made an object of our attention and therefore turned into an explicit object of consciousness? Husserl describes this implicit awareness with the term ‘vivacity’ [Lebendigkeit], namely, as the affective force through which although ‘something’ is (implicitly) detected by the ego, the latter does not yet turn its attention towards it.70 Vivacity is that living or experiencing of a pre-object that is not yet given as such, because the ego is not yet responding towards the allure. The vivacity of affection is, in this sense, a pre-egoic awareness or a passive consciousness of a ‘nil salient’.71 To speak of an awareness or consciousness of a nil salient is to speak of an awareness that is not yet structured by contrasts or similarities: no-thing is salient from its surroundings, even though we are already aware of it. In order to explain how this is possible Husserl further defines vivacity in terms of a gradation of intensity that can either increase alongside the ray of attentiveness or decrease down to what he calls the unconscious level of consciousness.72 To speak of the unconscious of consciousness does not mean to speak of a break down of consciousness in which consciousness would then be completely disengaged from the world. Vivacity is not a mere punctual moment of eruption that then, depending on the case, can either trigger attentiveness or descend into the unconscious. Instead, Husserl seems to understand vivacity as a latent level of awareness that pervades all consciousness up to active constitution and back to the retentional moments in which affection decreases and the object constituted gradually sinks into a more distant past until it deepens in the level of the unconscious. Although the object constituted in consciousness does not lose its identity when fading away, the consciousness of it does diminish and, with it, so does the affective force that accompanied the retentional phases of consciousness. The affective force gradually loses all intensity until it reaches the zero stage of affective vivacity. This does not mean that affection dissolves into the past until it disintegrates into nothingness. On the one hand Husserl writes that such a decrease of affective vivacity reaches a moment of ‘complete powerlessness of affection’ in which the retentional procession ‘becomes dead’.73 ‘For’ – as he adds – ‘positive

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affective force is the fundamental condition of all life in dynamic connection and differentiation; if it decreases to zero, its life ceases’.74 Nonetheless, and on the other hand, Husserl is also clear about the fact that a ‘dead’ or ‘lifeless’ consciousness is not synonymous with a full annihilation of the past. Rather, he argues that ‘within the zero-stage, all special affections have passed over into a general undifferentiated affection; all special consciousnesses have passed over into the one, general, persistently available background-consciousness of our past, the consciousness of the completely unarticulated, completely indistinct horizon of the past, which brings to a close the living, moving retentional past’.75 Thus, even when the past is long gone and completely forgotten, this past is concealed but dormant rather than disintegrated, providing us with a standing reservoir for what is constituted in the living process of the present. This standing reservoir, we should add here, must not be seen as if it were the loft or the cellar of consciousness, where the latter stores its past experiences in case it might need them again. As Husserl claims, the ‘standing reservoir’ or ‘remaining conscious’ is ‘tucked away from the ego, but at the same time quite at its disposal’, however in a passive fashion.76 Vivacious affection at its lowest grade seems to stand for the sphere of passivity, the magma that pervades all activity, allowing for all remembering. Even if it were the case that the ego never remembered an experience of a particular content, consciousness would still remain constantly but passively aware of it, however its content would not be actively present in the streaming life. It is as if life, active and passive, still had a further layer at the deep end of passive synthesis, an ‘involuntary memory’ as Donn Welton has put it, in which consciousness lives or remains conscious of its past although at an unconscious lifeless level.77 This level of remaining conscious is the original level of vivacious affection in which every previous experience passes onto becoming part of a sedimented lifeless life or a dormant horizon without which active life would not be possible. Vivacious affection is the subsoil that guarantees the possibility for a history of consciousness in which the ego (with its past and its present, as well as with its future expectations) lives. Loyal, then, to one of the first principles of Husserlian phenomenology since Logical Investigations, Husserl insists once again that consciousness is always consciousness of something, whether at a voluntary or an involuntary level. In order to elucidate the full extent of this latent involuntary affection Husserl explores the type of awakening that characterizes it. Insofar as the sedimented content has sunk back as a whole and none of its elements remains intuitive and, therefore, linked to an intentional retention, a different type of awakening is required. Husserl calls it ‘retroactive or reproductive awakening’.78 Unlike affective-associative awakening, the retroactive or reproductive awakening that characterizes affective vivacity does not begin from the still ongoing active life but rather ‘yields presentations that are not integrally cohesive with those of the living present’.79 What this means is that at

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the level of retroactive awakening, the past is not yet being explicitly searched out because there is no associative affection at work that connects us with the past. The past that Husserl is referring to here is the remote past, far beyond the past of retention and even of recollection, the main characteristic of which is its lack of explicit connection with the intentional present and its temporal structure. To speak of such a past is not, however, to speak of a senseless past. On the contrary, it is a past, the sense of which is sedimented or ‘implied in background consciousness, in the non-living form that is called here unconsciousness’.80 If this remote sedimented and purely passive past can still be considered as past, and, therefore, as my past, this is due to the fact that awakening cannot only be the remembering of certain concealed elements of a content by means of an associative stretch that begins with retention. Moreover, awakening must reach beyond the gap between active retentions and the remote. For this reason Husserl speaks of retroactive awakening as ‘an awakening that radiates back, which illuminates once more the darkened empty presentations, bringing the contents of sense implicit in them affectively into relief. Belonging here’ – he then says – ‘is the especially important case of awakening the presentations of the zero-sphere’.81 That which is awakened at this level, then, is not the forgotten content but the connection or the link to the content submerged in unconsciousness, hidden in the oblivion of memory. To produce such a connection is, according to Husserl, to produce the affective empty presentation that can lead us from an explicit to an implicit colour or to a sound and even to a forgotten period of childhood. To bring to the fore and thematize this retroactive awakening is to let emerge that which links the ‘distant’ to the ‘near’ in order to open up the retentional horizon of inner time-consciousness. This is an important discussion. Husserl is not just talking here of the possibility of remembering more or further, but he is rather redefining the very method of phenomenology. To speak of awakening the connection that allows us to reach far beyond the limits of the act of consciousness is to speak of a properly genetic method that would allow the inquiry to reach the dimensions of consciousness to which the reduction and intuitive evidence cannot have access. Self-reflection is then now identified with memory, another memory that is capable of finding a passage into the past of my past, into the past that is not present and that perhaps was never present. This development offers the possibility for reaching the unconscious ground that motivates but does not reside within the acts of consciousness. To do so also signifies that Husserl’s phenomenology has taken a further step in order to give an account of the origins that motivates the phenomenological inquiry itself. Furthermore, the development of the method into a properly genetic method that is not dependent on intuitive evidence and the formal structures of the act of consciousness, and the account given here of vivacious affection, offer the possibility for quite a radical re-shaping of intentional consciousness.

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Let me consider now what this radical re-shaping consists of and what are the consequences of it.

§2. Genetic intentionality Husserl’s phenomenology of affection has brought into question the origins of the ego and the correlation that the latter maintains with the world. It has been shown how experience exceeds the vision and the activity of the ego, expanding to a level of passivity in which it continues breathing even at the level of the unconscious. In uncovering a domain of experience that is prior to any cognitive activity, Husserl’s discussion above has also shown how, at the other end of the act-correlation, the world is given without being reduced to the objective pole of the cognitive powers of the ego. What this means is that not only the ego but also the world has lost its position of polarity in the act of consciousness. This is not suggesting that the act of consciousness, as it was described in Ideas I, was a mere duality and now it is not. Although, as discussed elsewhere, the act of consciousness has never been a mere dualistic interpretation of the relationship consciousness-world, Ideas I did describe the act as being a structure of polarities, each of which occupies the two extreme ends of the structure. In losing its position of polarity, the world has now become a permanent horizon of awareness rather than a noematic correlate to the ego. To speak of a passive domain of experience in these terms does not signify the end of intentionality. On the contrary, phenomenology of affection works here as the re-modelling of static intentionality into a genetic intentionality that overflows the acts, but without having to be purely formal or abstract. It is as if intentionality was now being defined as the pervading force that allows consciousness to reach beyond the limits of activity and to keep the dead, remote and oblivious past very much alive, without having to enclose it or retain it within the limits of the act and its temporal structure. Affection, as the level zero that penetrates all experience, should not be understood as pre-intentional but rather as the expansion of the very notion of intentionality. Intentionality has been re-formulated here as an affective openness that characterizes experience prior to any positionality and, therefore, to any thinking activity. It is as if intentionality had become an intentionality without objects that precedes and makes possible the appearing of objects, as Rudolf Bernet puts it.82 Following Husserl in various texts Bernet understands this non-objectifying intentionality as a ‘pre-givenness of the world which no longer appears in the way that an object does’.83 Nevertheless, the characterization of this genetic intentionality as the intentional regard that overflows the act of consciousness and its objectifying intentionality are not incompatible. Far from it, they necessitate each other and could not survive without each other. As Bernet has argued, ‘[t]he non-objectifying intentionality is secretly mixed as much with

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the appearing with intentional objects for the subject as the appearing of the subject for itself in the form of an object of reflection’.84 Every intentional act, thus, is penetrated by another intentionality through which the world is given in consciousness. It is within this genetic intentional horizon that the intentional acts of consciousness can then go on to gain awareness of the objects of the world, including consciousness and its structures. This move with regard to intentionality is confirmed in Formal and Transcendental Logic. Here Husserl makes a clear and important distinction between the intentional acts of judging and their logico-grammatical laws, and intentionality as the primordial transcendental logic of experience. He writes in a footnote that ‘[in Logical Investigations] no separation was yet made between, on the one hand, the syntactical as such, which makes its appearance already in the pre-predicational sphere and, moreover, has its analogues in the spheres of emotion and volition and, on the other hand, the syntactical that belongs to the specific sphere comprising judgments’.85 This lack of separation not only implies that meaning be restricted to expression but that intentionality be restricted to judgements. While, for example, the judgement ‘this colour plus one makes three’ fits the laws of grammar and is therefore harmonious, insofar as ‘the single prepositional elements are not senseless’, the judgement as a whole is, on the contrary, completely senseless.86 This leads Husserl to say that ‘the purely grammatical sensefulness [. . .] is not the only sensefulness that logical analysis presupposes’, and that, therefore, grammatical sense must be distinguished from what he calls a ‘pre-predicative sense-experience’, namely, a unity of sense that is more original and that, therefore, must be presupposed in the predicative sense of judgements.87 Husserl refers then to sense-experience in terms of the ‘universal experiential basis’ and as ‘the founding experience that is free from all conceptual and grammatical formations that characterise the predicative judgement’, but which, nonetheless, still has its own syntactical performances.88 To say that this founding sense-experience is not reducible to the logicogrammatical laws of thought or the thinking act and speech does not mean that sense-experience and the logico-grammatical laws of the acts are not related. On the contrary, and on similar lines to Husserl’s argument in Ideas I concerning the Ur-doxa, he suggests again that syntactical sense-experience is the ground of the grammatical expression by means of which we are able to express and, thus, mean the world. This has important implications for the question of intentionality. To say now that the intentional act that takes place in judgement is grounded in a primordial experience also means that intentionality is likewise not reducible to grammatical laws and that, instead, it belongs within a deeper dimension of the life of consciousness. In line with the discussion undertaken above concerning the intentional dimension of affection, Formal and Transcendental Logic also argues that intentional experience is not only the act of meaning the world grammatically, but rather a

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pre-grammatical syntax that regulates human experience and within which the world can go on to be meant. In describing intentionality as a permanent horizon of awareness that overflows the boundaries of the act of consciousness, Husserl is also offering a new account of time. Since intentionality is not now reducible to the act of consciousness, then it cannot be reducible either to the temporal structure that regulates the act. Rather than speaking of intentionality as a temporal affair, with past memories, actual impressions and future protentions, affection allows us to speak of experience in terms of a tempo-horizonal awareness in which the world is being permanently lived regardless of the ego’s activity. In short, Husserl’s phenomenology of affection opens up a presence that stretches beyond the present. This means not only beyond the actual now, but rather beyond the past-now and the now-to-be. Presence has not just been enlarged, as Welton points out, but it has drawn a notion of presence that is not reducible to the present and its formal structure. In re-drawing the question of intentionality Husserl seems to have returned to the notion of the Ur-doxa in Ideas I and to some central problems attached to it. As argued in Chapter III, Husserl’s notion of the Ur-doxa already defines a permanent horizon of doxic certainty that is inherent to every act of positionality, exceeding the positive or negative mode of expression by means of which the act minds some-thing. That which is primordially believed is given not as an object but rather as its doxic possibility; it is the possibility of positing possible objects. On these grounds, we suggested that Ideas I already opens the gates of genetic phenomenology insofar as it presents us with a notion of experience that exceeds the ego-world correlation and, therefore, the limits of the phenomenal act by means of delving into a level of a pure possibility that is even more original than the ideal possibility. This leads Husserl into an injunction. On the one hand Ideas I argues that the Ideal possibility is only a modification of the Ur-doxa and that, therefore, the latter is the very root or possibility of the former. At the same time, Husserl also makes it clear (not only in Ideas I but also in Cartesian Meditations) that no reality could appear in consciousness without being framed by an Ideal possibility. Since an experience combining all possible experiences is impossible, then the only way that a reality can be brought to consciousness is by framing it, so to speak, through the Idea in the Kantian Sense. This is a justified move if we take into account that Husserl’s task here is to describe the way in which we account for not only the process of apprehension of an immanent transcendent object, but also for the way in which the phenomenologist is capable of apprehending her or his own field of experience. Nonetheless, since the doxic belief of the world exceeds even the Ideal possibility, when Husserl introduces the Idea in the Kantian Sense as a way of framing the horizon of life-experience so that the latter can appear, the doxic belief escapes all Ideal frames. If it did not escape it, then the Ur-doxa would have to be devoid of all primordiality and

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originality [Ur] and be reduced to being an Ideal possibility. Husserl confronts a double problem. He must either leave the Ideal possibility (and, therefore, the rationality of consciousness) as origin of all experience, or posit instead the primordial belief as original possibility of all possibilities and, therefore, as being the originality that exceeds the possibility of being ideated and grasped phenomenologically. Husserl’s phenomenology of affection should be understood in relation to this problematic. The introduction of affection can be read as an attempt to re-define the Ur-doxa in order to thicken the rationality of consciousness. If rationality can be described as the Ideation and the Pure Intuition of the spatio-temporal ideal limits of consciousness that frame and make every actexperience possible, affection is introduced as the rooting of the Ideation and the Pure intuition of the embodied self-temporalization of consciousness. Rationality and affection are interpenetrated. What Husserl wants to tell us with the question of affection is that the flow of temporal and embodied self-awareness incrusted in all our acts, working as the opening of the Ideal possibility of all act-experience, needs to be permanently permeated with a primordial experience in which the world is already being lived. In order for rationality to shape and delimit the horizon of our act-experiences, consciousness must already be an intentional consciousness of something, even if the latter is not any-thing yet. If the concern of Husserl’s phenomenology is at this point the uncovering and elucidation of the genesis of reflection and, therefore, of the phenomenological procedure in general, the question of affection shows how phenomenological reflection cannot only be grounded in an abstract self-awareness but in the combination of the latter with an affective awareness of the (pre-constituted) world. This is not to say that formal self-awareness of the spatio-temporal ideal limits of consciousness has to be pushed to a second degree of importance in relation to affection. Affection can be understood as the most primordial belief, which, as such, can increase and motivate the ego to reflect. But for such an affective belief to turn into an active concrete awareness (whether self-reflective or non-self-reflective), consciousness must also be pre-reflectively aware of its own temporal embodiment. Phenomenology’s implicit elucidation of the act of reflection establishes, then, that the act of reflection and its implicit rational self-awareness that defines the phenomenological inquiry is not only dependent on the rationality of consciousness, but is instead weaved into a passive or involuntary memory by means of which the world is being permanently lived. By rooting reflection in affection or involuntary memory, Husserl’s phenomenology is taking a further step towards its own self-grounding. Husserl seems to take this claim further in Crisis of European Sciences by opening the question of affection to the notion of ‘intersubjectivity’. This further step is explicitly discussed when he introduces the question of the life-world [Lebenswelt], which he describes as the ‘Heraclitean flux’ that

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pervades all subjectivity in the shape of a ‘straightforward experience’ of the world that is prior to the knowledge of any entity.89 The life-world functions here as the ground [Boden], the a priori condition of all cultural formation, scientific knowledge or theoretical activity in general (including phenomenology). In line with the treatment of the Ur-doxa fi rst and of affection later, the life-world is described in The Origin of Geometry as ‘living’ or being ‘conscious of the world, whether we pay attention to it or not, as the horizon of our life, [. . .], of our actual and possible interests and activities’.90 Furthermore, this a priori life-world that makes possible all objectifying constitution now gains a different centre of perspective. Instead of being tied to ‘my’ bodily here and now, the life-world encompasses an intersubjective horizon. In The Origin of Geometry Husserl writes: Always standing out against the world-horizon is the horizon of our fellow men, whether there are any of them present or not. Before even taking notice at all, we are conscious of the open horizon of our fellow men. [. . .] We are thereby coconscious of the men on our external horizon in each case as ‘others’; in each case ‘I’ am conscious of them as [. . .] those with whom I can enter into actual and potential, immediate and mediate relations of empathy.91 Husserl depicts the life-world as a passive coconscious life in which the immediate experience of the world is penetrated by the world-horizon of ‘fellow men’. This fellowship, however, does not begin in the hereness and nowness of the I. Once again, Husserl renders here the ‘I’ as well as the term ‘others’ in inverted commas in order to make it clear that insofar as we speak of the life-world we cannot speak yet of subject-I and his or her ‘others’ and his and her objects. The relationship ‘I’-‘Other’ that emerges through the question of the life-world points us towards a relationship that is even prior to empathy. For to be conscious of ‘others’ is to be conscious of ‘them’ (whether present or not) as those with whom ‘I can’ enter into relation. It follows from this that the co-consciousness announced in the life-world is a relationship anterior to any relation, actual or possible. It is, in the same vein as the question of the Ur-doxa in Ideas I, the possibility of all possibilities. What this shows is that the lifeworld opens, first, the question of the Ur-doxa and of affection in Ideas I and Lectures on Passive Synthesis respectively to an intersubjective domain beyond the actual or even possible relation with the Other. Straightforward experience of the world is an awareness of a historic horizon of fellowship in which humanity co-exists as humanity beyond the finite presence of a subject and his or her community, interpenetrating and affecting each other prior to taking on any practical, theoretical or scientific activity. This marks an important step for the question of intersubjectivity and for Husserl’s phenomenology as a whole. What is being said now is that the Other

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does not need to encroach on my ego or in my mineness (as was the case in Cartesian Meditations) in order to be the Other. Instead, and if that is possible, it is because the ego is always already pierced by the possibility of that possibility, namely, by a life-world historic horizon of pre-constitution of which the ego is a full member. This notion of intersubjectivity is neither merely limited to self-enclosed egological sources nor constrained within the temporal formspan of the individual monad. Instead, it is a dimension of intersubjectivity stretching out to a domain of supra-temporality, beyond and underneath the time-form of the act of consciousness. On the one hand affection and the life-world have thickened the rationality of consciousness and, therefore, de-formalized the question of genesis, taking phenomenology to a deeper level of the origin of reflective experience. In doing so, Husserl’s phenomenology is giving an account of the condition of possibility of all cognitive evidence and, more specifically, of the root of the very principle of principles that thus far has motivated the proceeding of the inquiry. On the other hand, the affective awakening of the connection to the remote past has begun to tackle the problem that we encounter in Ideas I regarding the possibility of describing the Ur-doxa with intuitive evidence. To take affection and life-world as a re-working of the primordial belief [Urglaube] in the world, in terms such that this straightforward affective belief exceeds the present and the capacity of all re-collective memory, means that this affective belief must also escape the full intuitive view of the act of reflection and, therefore, that another type of self-reflective Evidenz is necessary here. The question that now emerges, though, is if the properly genetic phenomenological reflection can in fact grasp the primordial affective belief, the straightforward experience of life-world that roots all our act-experiences and that lies in the remote past. This problem brings into question two key points. In the first place it puts under scrutiny the range or the scope of reflection, and secondly it brings up again the question of the possibility or impossibility of attending with apodictic intuitive evidence what is only horizonal possibility and, therefore, prior to actuality. These are key questions, for what is at stake once again is the self-grounding of phenomenology and its ethical breadth.

§3. The full breadth of phenomenology: The unveiling of self-responsibility Husserl treats these two questions together in an essay dated from 1921, where he explicitly delimits the scope as well as the methodology of genetic phenomenology. He argues that while in static phenomenology ‘the object shows itself in its constituted ipseity in the way it is expected and can be expected’, genetic phenomenology, on the other hand, is concerned with ‘the history

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of this objectivation and thereby the history of the object itself as the object of possible knowledge’.92 In the first place, Husserl is pointing out that the scope of genetic phenomenology must now stretch beyond the memory and the expectations of the individual transcendental subject and into a historic intersubjectivity within which the sense-formation of all objects of consciousness (including consciousness itself) emerges. Nonetheless, and insofar as it lies beyond the power and the range of intuitive reflection and the artefact of the reduction, the intersubjective-historic genesis that permeates and generates transcendental subjectivity cannot be intuitively given. While intuitive reflection and its procedure of reduction works when trying to attain the static-transcendental level of consciousness, it is, nonetheless, left powerless the moment the inquiry attempts to attain the genetic-transcendental domain of consciousness. Moreover, to move beyond intuitive givenness signals a move beyond the limits of meaning and, therefore, a move beyond the identification established since Logical Investigations between intuitive givenness and Evidenz and, therefore, the very principle of presuppositionlessness. Husserl makes it clear within this context that genetic phenomenology thus requires a different approach. He speaks here of an elucidating disclosure, an ‘intentional explication’ (to use Husserl’s expression in Cartesian Meditations) or even of an ‘understanding’ of sense-formation and ‘of the process of becoming’, as he puts it elsewhere.93 Moreover, he asserts that to comprehend this process of becoming and its sense-formation signifies to ultimately comprehend the ‘genesis in which the unity of the monad arises, in which the monad is by becoming’.94 But how is phenomenology to ‘understand’ and ‘explicate’ if the scope of the reflection falls short of range and the reduction and intuition are powerless? How can phenomenology proceed outside the intuitive limits of meaning? In Crisis of European Sciences Husserl explicitly refers to a renewal of the phenomenological reflection. He speaks here of phenomenology as the inquiry whose task is to ‘systematically inquire back into those things taken for granted, which for all philosophers make up an unspoken ground [Grund] of their cognitive accomplishments, hidden in respect to its deeper mediating functions. Further, there must be a systematic disclosure of the intentionality which vitally holds sway and is sedimented in this ground’.95 Phenomenology, in its ethical quest for the self-foundation that would legitimize it and make it worth its name, must become a critical self-reflection by means of which the phenomenologist analyses the dynamic development of transcendental phenomenology itself. I would suggest that this self-inquiry [Rückfrage] into the ‘unspoken ground’ of one’s cognitive accomplishments that shape the development of phenomenology points towards the conceptual and methodological proceedings that define transcendental phenomenology. As Husserl terms it elsewhere, phenomenology, at this point, becomes a radical ‘archaeology’, the task of which would be to explore the unspoken origins [archai] that motivate

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the reflective act-experience that characterizes phenomenology and the genesis of the acts.96 The renewal of phenomenology into a critical archaeological self-reflection must surely entail the reconsideration of the principle of principles. The fact that intuition, the principle of all principles of phenomenology and, therefore, the ‘unspoken ground’ that has guided phenomenology up to here, is set to undergo a critical self-reflection must demand that the latter be freed from it as its unconditional principle. It is for this reason that in Formal and Transcendental Logic Husserl postulates that intuition is the beginning of all wisdom though not its end.97 This does not mean that phenomenology must now do away with the phenomenological wisdom of intuition altogether or that the static analysis led by intuition must be ultimately overcome. Husserl is clear on this question: ‘[Intuition] is a wisdom we can never do without, no matter how deep we go with our theorisings – a wisdom that we must therefore practise in the same fashion when at last we are judging in the absolute phenomenological sphere. For [. . .] it is essentially necessary that naïve experiencing and naïve judging come first’. Furthermore, this ‘naivety is not that of light-mindedness, but the naïveté of an original intuiting, with the will to confine ourselves to what the intuiting actually gives’.98 The same argument appears implicitly in Cartesian Meditations, where ‘intentional explication’ is introduced as the intensification rather than as the mere overcoming of phenomenology’s static analysis. That is, it is deployed within, but aiming beyond, the domain of the transcendental consciousness that is intuitively given in the scope of transcendental reduction. What this means is that static phenomenology and its intuitive principle is neither overcome nor substituted by genetic phenomenology. Instead, and following Welton, genetic phenomenology is a development, ‘a systematic and deeper analysis of that very foundation upon which his [Husserl’s] “introductory” static analyses rest’.99 Although Welton is right about this, he ends up reading this development in a way such that the static analysis loses its central position because genetic phenomenology replaces it by overcoming the Cartesianism in which it is rooted. This would imply that static and genetic phenomenology are two independent modules that can be practised independently, as if they did not have any essential unity binding them together. But as we have seen in Chapter I, the fact is that Husserl does not separate both analyses, nor does he think it is possible to employ genetic phenomenology independently from static analyses. Although genetic phenomenology is a development or even a fulfilment of static phenomenology and of its methodological principles, the latter remains central to phenomenological analysis and cannot be simply made redundant. This is not to say, however, that genetic phenomenology can be taken as a mere optional step in relation to static phenomenology. After having argued the case for the centrality of static phenomenology and of intuition as the necessary beginning of wisdom and static phenomenology, Husserl

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also says: ‘Eventually, however, the inquiry must end with a cognition [. . .] of results and methods’.100 Elisabeth Ströker has rightly pointed out that what Husserl is referring to here is the fact that the wisdom of phenomenology could no longer lie in any ultimate, absolute givenness that can be discovered as complete self-giving. Instead, she argues that the wisdom with which phenomenology ‘ends’ lies in an ultimate transcendental critique of phenomenological knowledge itself.101 As Husserl himself puts it, it is ‘an ultimate criticism; the criticism of those evidences that phenomenology at the first, and still naïve, level carries out straightforwardly’.102 In this critical self-examination the inquiry is concerned with bringing into question and taking as a prejudice everything given beforehand as a constitutive part of the phenomenological inquiry itself, such as the principle of intuition and the reduction guiding (static) phenomenology thus far.103 Although the inquiry always begins ‘with a certain naivety of its own’, it becomes later ‘critically intent on its own logos’.104 It is in this sense that the phenomenological performance can acquire the status of ‘a self-explication on the part of subjectivity, as it investigates the sense of its own transcendental functions’.105 The overflowing of the limits of intuition does not mean, however, that phenomenology simply abandons the principle of Evidenz and, more particularly, the principle of presuppositionlessness. As we shall see in the text below, the principle of presuppositionlessness and, therefore, the question of Evidenz remains in place, although it is not now restricted to intuition. What this means is that although intuition can still be described as a manifestation of an ethical life ethical, the ethics of reflexivity that characterized Husserl’s phenomenology are not reducible to intuition. Husserl understands this self-explicative dimension of phenomenology that now puts under scrutiny the very limits of intuition as the one philosophy (i.e., the prima philosophia) that is the genuine or original grounding of all sciences.106 By putting itself into question, phenomenology makes manifest that it cannot be reduced to being only a set of proceedings or methodological approaches. Phenomenology, to put it another way, is not reducible to the principle of intuition, the descriptive character that follows the latter and to the reduction by means of which static phenomenology begins. Phenomenology, or the wisdom of phenomenology, is rather what Eugen Fink calls a phenomenology of phenomenology.107 But how is this phenomenology of phenomenology, the prima philosophia, now to proceed? In Crisis of European Sciences Husserl describes this phenomenology of phenomenology in terms of a historic reflection [Rückfrage] on the tradition that phenomenology inherits and, by default, on the intersubjective relation that underlies and generates the transcendental phenomenologist. He writes: What is clearly necessary [. . .] is that we reflect back, in a thorough historical and critical self-reflection, in order to provide, before all decisions, for a radical self-understanding: we must inquire back into what was originally

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and always sought in philosophy, what was continually sought by all the philosophers and philosophies that have communicated with one another historically [. . .]. Together with the new task and its universal apodictic ground [Boden], the practical possibility of a new philosophy will prove itself: through its execution.108 This back-inquiry into the tradition or roots of phenomenology is a historical investigation that aims to unveil the naiveties that have permeated phenomenology itself. The purpose, however, is not just to identify and exhibit mistakes and dangers embedded in the tradition, such as the scepticism, the irrationalism and the mysticism to which philosophy threatens to succumb.109 Instead of assuming the validity of tradition, the phenomenological self-investigation is a questioning (a phenomenology) of the authority that the tradition represents, and, finally, a de-traditionalization of that tradition itself. What is important at this point, though, is that Husserl understands this de-traditionalizing phenomenological step as the very process that signals, at the same time, the re-awakening or reactivation of the spirit of philosophy that leads the very inquiry to unravel its own roots. Husserl understood the spirit of philosophy as the spirit in crisis, as hidden and forgotten in the roots of the modern tradition to which phenomenology itself belongs. To speak of the spirit is not only to speak of the very genesis of phenomenology, but also to speak of the genesis of philosophy and of European humanity as a whole, namely, it is that which motivates philosophy to begin and to be carried out and that characterizes European civilization. Within this context, Husserl understands the task of phenomenology as the re-awakening of the genesis or the spirit of philosophy and of European humanity, for it is only this way that phenomenology can access the motivating roots of its own proceeding, namely, of reflection, reduction and intuition.110 This argument is already put forward in Cartesian Meditations. There Husserl refers to the ultimate task of transcendental phenomenology as ‘a criticism of transcendental phenomenological knowledge’, this being a task that is destined to re-awaken or re-activate the very original spirit of philosophy.111 Husserl undertakes this task by inquiring back into and reawakening the impulse of Descartes’ Meditationes, which, in its turn, already signified an important transformation of an ongoing phenomenology.112 To re-awaken means here ‘to renew with greater intensity the radicalness of [Descartes’ Meditationes’] spirit’.113 Rather than simply taking for granted and continuing the doctrinal truths imposed by Descartes’ Meditationes, the reactivation of the latter’s spirit implies reflecting or meditating on the motives embedded in those Meditationes. In Husserl’s words, the spiritual origin of philosophy is to ‘begin with new meditationes de prima philosophia’, as Descartes himself did in relation to Galileo and the scientific revolution. Husserl is not committing himself to any Cartesian principle but to

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the spirit or the idea of Descartes’ inquiry: the very impulse to meditate, to reflect back. Like Descartes, and also Augustine (to whom Husserl returns in his introduction to Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time as he will also do again at the very end of Cartesian Meditations), Husserl fi nds that he must begin anew, for it is only in beginning again that the spirit of philosophy can be recovered. In later texts such as The Vienna Lecture, Husserl makes this claim even more explicit. There Husserl locates the beginning of philosophy in Plato and sets the ultimate task of the phenomenologist in the re-awakening of Plato’s idea of philosophy and, more concretely, of the spirit that defines it and makes it be philosophy. Husserl meant here exactly what he had already discussed in Cartesian Meditations, namely, the re-activation of the original spirit of philosophy rather than a mere reconstruction of Plato’s or Descartes’ philosophies. The question of genesis, thus, is intimately linked to a certain conception of history. This notion of history stemming from Cartesian Meditations and Crisis of European Sciences is not, however, a factual history. What Husserl is interested in is the inner sense of history in which phenomenology is born and inscribed, rather than in a description of the empirical development of philosophical ideas and how they relate to each other historically. Inner history, if understood as ‘the vital movement of the coexistence and interweaving of original sense-formations and sense-sedimentations of meaning’, can be nothing other than the inner-transcendental history of the world and its experience.114 What this means, then, is that the question of genesis has to be understood in terms of a teleological inner sense that exhibits ‘a unity of motivation’, as Elisabeth Ströker put it once.115 To understand this unity of motivation in the sense of being the telos of European humanity and its philosophical expression does not simply mean that this unity or telos functions independently of the philosophies that bear it. History is not planned out, but it becomes teleologically in the work of the philosophical inquiries that strive towards it. The task of phenomenology is the re-awakening of this unitary inner sense from which phenomenology itself has been born. It is on this basis that Husserl can understand the task of phenomenology as being a critical self-reflection striving towards its own genesis. To undertake a phenomenology of phenomenology is to inquire back on the very teleological origin of the phenomenological inquiry itself. Furthermore, in striving towards its own original spirit, its genesis, phenomenology reveals itself as the spirit of philosophy, namely, as the prima philosophia the function of which is to re-ground all scientific inquiry. This does not mean, however, that the aim of phenomenology is to become a doctrinal philosophical system loaded with perfect axiomatic principles that survive critique and self-questioning. As Husserl himself argues in the Kaizo articles, phenomenology is an infi nite self-examination by means of which the phenomenologist

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tends towards an Ideal limit that can never be fully reached, but without which the inquiry would lack the self-reflexive character that makes it scientifically and philosophically meaningful.116 Phenomenology is not prima philosophia because it is presuppositionless but rather, and more importantly, because it systematically aims to be so. The moment that marks the step from the static to the proper genetic level of the inquiry does not simply represent the completion of the circle that provides the inquiry with the last ground, fi nally making phenomenology a fully presuppositionless inquiry capable of resisting any further self-inquiry. Instead, ‘the endless progress of knowledge is a progress of reducing limits and dangers but it is an endless progress, and danger, sin and so on, remain to infinity’.117 What the re-orientation from static to genetic phenomenology ultimately discovers when self-reflecting on the origin of its own beginnings is the very truth or genesis that defines phenomenology as an infinite inquiry. Husserl binds the spiritual origin or the telos that drives and defines phenomenology as an infinite inquiry with the question of reflective responsibility or self-responsibility [Selbstverantwortlichkeit]. He writes in Formal and Transcendental Logic: When we follow this procedure, we have continuously anew the living truth from the living source, which is our absolute life, and from the self-examination turned towards that life, in the constant spirit of self-responsibility.118 The moment in which phenomenology brings itself into question marks the moment in which the inquiry reaches the status of original or radical investigation. Phenomenology is not only transcendental but is also radical insofar as it aims at its own genesis and, in doing so, makes itself manifest as an absolute life of responsibility that strives to apodicticity and to uproot all prejudice.119 If in Ideas I Husserl equates the principle of principles (intuition) with the principle of presuppositionlessness with which he inaugurated his phenomenological inquiry, in the latter texts, and especially after the ‘genetic turn’, it becomes clear that the latter (the principle of presuppositionlessness) is not exhausted in the former (principle of intuitive evidence). Instead, genetic phenomenology has re-discovered the principle of presuppositionlessness with which Husserl opened Logical Investigations, but now as the ‘constant spirit of self-responsibility’ that drives, pervades and defi nes the inquiry of phenomenology.120 It is this very responsible character of the principle of presuppositionlessness that allows the inquiry to turn to itself, bring its very principle of intuition into question and, in doing so, re-awaken its very own phenomenological spirit. This is confi rmed in Cartesian Meditations. Husserl writes there: ‘Must not the fruitful renaissance be the one that reawakens the impulse of the Cartesian Meditations; not to adopt their content but, in not doing so, to renew with greater intensity the radicalness of their spirit,

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the radicalness of self-responsibility, to make that radicalness true for the fi rst time by enhancing it to the last degree, to uncover thereby for the fi rst time the genuine sense of the necessary regress to the ego, and consequently to overcome the hidden but already felt naivety of earlier philosophising?’.121 To re-awaken and renew the radicalness or root [radix] of the spirit, the genesis, the telos, that defines philosophy as the Idea of European humanity means, for Husserl, to re-awaken an infinite reflective responsibility. It is for this reason that later on in Crisis of European Sciences Husserl goes on to characterize this reflective responsibility with the absolute life. He writes: [T]he ultimate self-understanding of man as being responsible for his own human being: his self-understanding as being in being called to a life of apodicticity, not only in abstractly practising apodictic science but as being mankind which realises its whole concrete being in apodictic freedom by becoming apodictic mankind in the whole active life of its reason.122 Reflective responsibility is not to be simply understood as a demand that emerges after a reflective activity and, therefore, as a principle that phenomenology simply gives to itself and accepts as a benchmark for any further inquiring. Rather than being dependent on methodology, reflective responsibility is the core of the inquiry that its methodology exercises. Reflective responsibility is the self-understanding of the human being as being called to an infinite life of apodicticity. The notion of understanding that Husserl deploys here is, however, not of a cognitive order, for the re-awakening of genesis cannot be measured by its adequate intuitive givenness, as we have already seen. Instead, and as Rosemary R. P. Lerner has suggested, ‘evidence, instead of being cognitive [intuitive] and self-transparent, is of the ethical order’.123 This does not mean that the overcoming of adequacy also entails the overcoming of apodicticity. Instead, it signals their divorce. This leads, then, to a different notion of evidence, namely, one that is apodictic but not adequate (or inadequate), and that, therefore, ‘points to the openness of questioning, to amplifications, corrections, different determinations regarding the knowledge of objectivities and of the acts themselves. It is not “miraculous” criterion, but a critical standpoint’.124 It follows from this that to self-understand and self-explicate the genesis of subjectivity amounts to realizing and re-awakening neither a chronological nor axiomatic origin from which phenomenology and the whole of philosophy is deduced, but to the self-responsible absolute life of phenomenology. In re-awakening reflective responsibility, phenomenology is unveiling the original spirit of philosophy, i.e., the principle of presuppositionlessness that, according to Husserl in Logical Investigations, defines the proper scientific character of all inquiry.125 This is Husserl’s notion of ethical life. As Rudolf Bernet has described it, it is ‘the ethical demand for

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self-responsibility; a responsibility which extends not only to theoretical statements and investigates activities, but also to human life as a whole. As envisioned by Husserl’ he goes on to say, ‘the phenomenologist accepts this [infinit] task [. . .] not out of interest in the object of his cognitive activities, but rather out of an interest in the theoretical research itself’.126 To have awoken such a spirit of reflective responsibility is to have reactivated the ethical life that lies at the heart of philosophy since Socrates and Plato and that is what, in the first place, motivates not just the principle of principles as well as the effecting of reduction and epoché, but even phenomenology itself as inquiry.

Notes

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

LI, Prolegomena to Pure Logic, §14, 33/Hua XIX/1–2, 33. LI, Introduction, §7, 177–9/Hua XIX/1, 24–9. LI, Introduction, §7, 178/Hua XIX/1, 26 [Husserl’s emphasis, emphasis added]. LI, Introduction, §7, 178/Hua XIX/1, 27 [Husserl’s emphasis, emphasis added]. LI, Introduction, §7, 179/Hua XIX/1, 28–9 [Husserl’s emphasis]. See section 24 of Ideas I/Hua III/1, 43–4. The use of the term ‘normativity’ is understood in the sense of accepting an explicit description, a moral norm, which in this case is external to the structure of the inquiry. Contrary to this notion of normativity I suggest the term regulativity [from the Latin ‘regula’, in English ‘rule’] in the sense of accepting one’s role in a certain practice, the acceptance itself being a rule that is intrinsic to the structure of the inquiry rather than external to it. LI, Introduction, §7, 178/Hua XIX/1, 27. John J. Drummond has argued, contra Donn Welton, that the centre of our attention cannot just be the question of the method; otherwise, phenomenology would be ‘the slave of a preconceived methodological prescription or formula’ (see John J. Drummond (2003). ‘On Welton on Husserl’. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, III, 318). This would lead us to the mistake of thinking that first working out the method is enough to provide a methodological rule that can guide the analysis (Ibid. 318). At the same time, however, I shall not follow Drummond to the extreme in which he argues that the question of method is merely secondary. In his view, ‘it is the actual phenomenological analyses and descriptions – rather than the method – that ought to be at the centre of our attention, for it is in this sense that Husserl develops and refines his sense of method’ (Ibid. 318). Moreover, he sustains that Husserl’s methodological reflections are ‘simply a catching up with the phenomenological descriptions themselves’ (Ibid. 325). He substantiates this view by arguing that although, for example, the phenomenological reduction represents the turning of our attention to the noetic-noematic correlation, ‘this methodological prescription follows upon an analysis of the substantive matters surrounding the notion of intentionality’ (Ibid. 323). Drummond’s position, however, has the problem that it would have to end up admitting that the analysis of intentionality emerges without methodological considerations. In any case, these two interpretations still coincide in putting the emphasis on the question of mere epistemology. Even when Welton pays detailed attention to the question of

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responsibility and ethics in Husserl’s work he seems reluctant to argue that Husserl’s phenomenology is an ethical project and, therefore, he simply assigns the question of ethics to genetic phenomenology. The question of self-responsibility is mainly made explicit in Kaizo articles, Cartesian Meditations, Formal and Transcendental Logic and Crisis. The question of the ‘ethical demand’ is thematized by Husserl in the Kaizo articles. These questions will be discussed in Chapter I and Chapter V. Janet Donohoe (2004). Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology. New York: Humanity Books. Emmanuel Levinas (1978, first published in French in 1947). Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Emmanuel Levinas (1987, first published in French in 1948). Time and the Other. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Emmanuel Levinas (1979). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Jacques Derrida (2003). The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Trans. Marian Hobson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, (see especially Chapter 4, pp. 54–69). Jacques Derrida (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Jacques Derrida (1989). Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. For studies that address the question of the Other in Husserl’s phenomenology in extensive detail, see Dan Zahavi (2001). Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique. Trans. Elizabeth Behnke. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Daniel Birnbaum (1998). The Hospitality of Presence: Problems of Otherness in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Rudolf Bernet (1983). ‘Is the Present Ever Present? Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence’. Trans. Wilson Brown. In John Sallis (ed.), Husserl and Contemporary Thought. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press. We may also add here that, regardless of the critical standpoint taken in relation to Husserl, Derrida has been one of the first critical readers to acknowledge the ethical dimension of Husserl’s phenomenology and has paid detailed attention to the relation between the questions of responsibility and method. See Jacques Derrida (1989). Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, pp. 148–52. For a discussion on an ethics of values see Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, Hua XXVIII & Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), Hua XXVII. For a discussion on the question of the Other see, among other texts, the Fifth Cartesian Meditation/ Hua I, 121–83. For a study of the development of Husserl’s notion of ethics see Ulrich Melle (1991), ‘The Development of Husserl’s Ethics’. In Études phénoménologiques, nos. 13–14, 115–35. The so-called Kaizo articles appeared in different issues of the Japanese journal The Kaizo-La rekonstruyo (Tokyo) in 1923 and 1924. They were published in German in Hua XXVII, 3–43. The first Kaizo article, ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’ is published in English in Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston

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(eds) (1981). Husserl: Shorter Works. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 326–31. I will return in more detail to these five articles in chapters I and V. Hua XXVII, 30.

Chapter I 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

C, §2, 5–6/Hua VI, 3–4. Edmund Husserl. ‘The Vienna Lecture’, Appendix I: ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity’. In Crisis, 269–99/Hua VI, Abhandlung, 314–48. C, §2, 6/Hua VI, 4. Ibid.[emphasis added]. C, §1, 3/Hua VI, 1. C, §3, 8/Hua VI, 5. C, §3, 9/Hua VI, 7: ‘Der Positivismus enthauptet sozusagen die Philosophie’. See sections §8, §9 and §10 of Crisis, 21–61/Hua VI, 18–62. C, §9h, 50/Hua VI, 50. Ibid. C, §34c/Hua VI, 129. C, §3, 7/Hua VI, 5. C, §2, 6/Hua VI, 4. Ibid. Edmund Husserl. Appendix IX: ‘Denial of Scientific Philosophy. Necessity of Reflection. The Reflection [Must Be] Historical. How is History Required?’. In Crisis, 389/Hua VI, Beilage XXVIII, 508: ‘Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous, science – the dream is over’. Unlike some commentators who have taken this sentence to mean that phenomenology as a rigorous science is over, Husserl’s statement does not refer to phenomenology but to the modern sciences and even to certain philosophical strands that have renounced the self-reflective character and, therefore, have abandoned the selfdemand for rigorousness. Edmund Husserl. ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’. In Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (eds). (1981). Husserl: Shorter Works. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 326/Hua XXVII, 3. Ibid. Edmund Husserl. ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’, 326/Hua XXVII, 4. Edmund Husserl. ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’, 327/Hua XXVII, 4. Hua XXVII, 20–1. Hua XXVII, 20ff. Edmund Husserl. ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’, 328/Hua XXVII, 6. Edmund Husserl. ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’, 328–9/Hua XXVII, 7. Edmund Husserl. ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’, 328/Hua XXVII, 7. Edmund Husserl. ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’, 328/Hua XXVII, 8. Edmund Husserl. ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’, 328–9/Hua XXVII, 8–9. Edmund Husserl. ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’, 326/Hua XXVII, 4. Edmund Husserl. ‘Renewal: Its Problem and Method’, 331/Hua XXVII, 12.

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35 36 37

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Ibid. Hua XXVII, 23. C, §35, 137/Hua VI, 140: ‘[phenomenology] is destined to effect a complete personal transformation. [. . .]: the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind’. Elisabeth Ströker. (1993). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. Lee Hardy. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 222. Ibid. Edmund Husserl. Appendix IV: ‘Philosophy as Mankind’s Self-Reflection; the Self-Realisation of Reason’. In Crisis, 338/Hua VI, ‘73-Schlusswort’, 272. Edmund Husserl. Prolegomena to Pure Logic, §13–§16, 28–39/Hua XVIII, 44–62. C, Appendix IV, 338/Hua VI, ‘73-Schullwort’, 272. A. D. Smith (2003). Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. London and New York: Routledge, 6. I, §32–§34/Hua III/1, 56–61; CM, §1–§2/Hua I, 43–8; C, §17–§20/Hua VI, 76–85. C, §17, 76/Hua VI, 77. This argument is presented in similar terms in the introduction to the Cartesian Meditations where Husserl writes: ‘[. . .] Anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must “once in his life” withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting’ (CM, §1, 2/Hua I, 44). I, §32, 110/Hua III/1, 56 [Husserl’s emphasis]. See A. D. Smith (2003). Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations, 21–3. See also Marcus Brainard (2002). Belief and Its Neutralisation. Husserl’s System of Phenomenology in ‘Ideas I’. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 62–5. I, §32, 110/Hua III/1, 56. Husserl writes in Crisis: ‘Is Descartes here not dominated in advance by the Galilean certainty of a universal and absolutely pure world of physical bodies, with the distinction between the merely sensibly experienceable and the mathematical, which is matter of pure thinking? Does he not already take it for granted that sensibility points to a realm of what is in-itself, but that it can deceive us; and that there must be a rational way of resolving this [deception] and of knowing what is in-itself with mathematical rationality? [. . .] It is obvious that Descartes, in spite of the radicalism of the presuppositionlessness he demands, has, in advance, a goal in relation to which the breakthrough to this “ego” is supposed to be the “means” ’ (C, §18, 79/Hua VI,81). C, §17, 77/Hua VI, 79. CM, §2, 6/Hua I, 47–8 [Husserl’s emphasis]. This clarifies what John J. Drummond understands as the intertwining between Husserl’s non-Cartesianism, or what I have called here post-Cartesianism, and the ‘indispensability of Husserl’s Cartesianism’ (see John J. Drummond, ‘On Welton on Husserl’, 328). On the one hand, the latter ‘is tied to the motives of defeating scepticism [. . .], of finding a firm, apodictic ground for philosophical knowledge, and of emphasizing the role of transcendental subjectivity as an agent of disclosure’ (Ibid. 328). On the other hand, however, ‘Husserl does not seek a Cartesian apodicticity (read: infallibility); he seeks only indubitability, which entails neither infallibility nor incorrigibility’ (Ibid. 328–9). As Drummond goes

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on to explain: ‘to say that a philosophical truth is indubitably grasped is to say that there is no reason to think that it will ever be negated by subsequent discoveries, but this is not to say that it will not be subject to correction in the form of refinements and qualifications’ (Ibid. 329). I, §33, 113–14/Hua III/1, 59 [Husserl’s emphasis]. See LI, V, §11–§14, 97–106/Hua XIX/1, 384–401. I, §33, 112–13/Hua III/1, 58–59. CM, §8, 20/Hua I, 60 [Husserl’s emphasis]. I, §34, 115/Hua III/1, 61. Moreover, and nearly in the same breath, Husserl argues that the notion of experience that defines these acts that form the unitary synthesis of consciousness is not reducible to explicit or actual [Aktuel] acts, but also encompasses in-actual [Inaktuel] or dormant acts, namely, passive modes of consciousness in which the latter hold an implicit or background awareness of its correlate objects (I, §35, 115–19/ Hua III/1, 61–4). Husserl re-introduces here the question of the ego as a wakeful ego that is non-Cartesian in nature (I, §35, 119/Hua III/1, 63–4). As already intimated above, the wakeful ego only characterizes the actual or explicit mode of awareness, while it remains dormant or inactive in the implicit or background experiences. Both modes of consciousness are intermingled, the explicit or actual one being surrounded by a halo of background experiences. However, and given that both types of experience are modes of consciousness, they both share the same essential characteristic regardless of the actuality or inactuality of the ego. As we shall see, neither of the modes of actuality or inactuality (passivity) has obvious priority over the other. The task of phenomenology is to describe the particularities of both active and passive synthesis and the way in which they connect. IP, 2–4/Hua II, 3–5. For as Husserl puts it, ‘Every factual science (empirical science) has essentially theoretical bases in eidetic ontologies. For it is quite self-evident [. . .] that the rich supply of knowledge which refers in a pure, unconditionally valid way to all possible objects of the [eidetic] region – [. . .] – cannot be void of significance for the study of empirical facts’ (I, §9, 64/Hua III/1, 19 [Husserl’s emphasis]). More precisely, what here is being put out of play is not only the GalileanCartesian frame but also what Husserl calls ‘the misunderstanding and the prejudgement of the empiricist’, namely, the presupposition of the identification between ‘experience and primordial dator act’ (I, §19, 82/Hua III/1, 35). Husserl argues that empiricism, in its ‘most praiseworthy’ motivation to overcome scholasticism in order to assert reason as the only source of truth, takes for granted the fact that ‘the requirement of a return to the facts themselves is identified with the requirement that all knowledge shall be grounded in experience’ (I, §19, 83/Hua III/1, 35). The problem, however, is that, on the one hand, empiricism understands ‘essence’ [Wesen] or ‘idea’ [Eidos] as opposed to facts, as if one meant the denial of the other. In the second place, empiricism also restricts experience to the sensualistic experiencing of these facts. According to Husserl, this leads empiricism to mistake the lack of prejudice with the rejection of every judgement that is not grounded in the sensualistic experiencing of the facts of nature. I, §18, 81/Hua III/1, 34.

Notes 57 58 59 60 61

62 63.

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72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

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I, §2, 53/Hua III/1, 9 [Husserl’s emphasis], [the term ‘for’ is my interpolation]. I, §2, 53/Hua III/1, 9. I, §2, 53/Hua III/1, 9 I, §9–§12, 64–70/Hua III/1, 19–27. This should make it clear that Husserl’s notion of ideas cannot be conflated with Platonism. The fact that, on the one hand, essences and facts are inseparable, and, on the other hand, that the apprehension of the former can only occur within the apprehension of the latter, already puts Husserl’s position at odds with Plato’s. While for Plato essences survive facticity, and for that very reason noein, knowledge, must be purified of all sensuous experience, for Husserl, on the contrary, the apprehension of the essence is inseparable from the apprehension of the individual contingent through perception. IP, 2–4/Hua II, 3–5. Jan Patocˇka (1996). An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology. Translated by Erazim Kohák and edited by James Dodd. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 84–93. Edmund Husserl. ‘Static and Genetic Phenomenological Method’. In APAS, 624–34/Hua XI, 336–45. A. D. Smith (2003). Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations, 27–8. Ibid. 25. See Elisabeth Ströker (1993). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology, 60–67 A. D. Smith. Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations, 28 Elisabeth Ströker (1993). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology, 61. Ibid. I, §57, 173f/Hua III/1, 110: ‘In the Logical Investigations I took up on the question of the pure Ego a sceptical position which I have not been able to maintain as my studies progressed’. I, §57, 172–3/Hua III/1, 109 [Husserl’s emphasis]. I, §57, 172/Hua III/1, 109. Ibid. I, §57, 173/Hua III/1, 110. I, §57, 173/Hua III/1, 109. I, §59, 175/Hua III/1, 111. I, §58, 173–4/Hua III/1, 110–11. I, §59, 175/Hua III/1, 111–2. It is worth emphasizing that although essences are what make (eidetic) objects be immanent transcendencies, such immanency is genuine in the correlation to the cogitationes, but not in relation to the pure ego. I, §60, 178/Hua III/1, 114. I, §60, 177–8/Hua III/1, 113–114. I, 2nd Book, §25–§29, 111–27/Hua IV, 105–20. Donn Welton (2000). The Other Husserl. The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 107. Ibid. 109. Husserl’s text in italics and double quotation marks. See I, §85, 246–9/Hua III/1, 171–5. I will return explicitly to the question of the hylé at several stages of the argument. CM, §44, 92/Hua I, 124. CM, §44, 93/Hua I, 124 [Husserl’s emphasis].

180 88 89 90

91

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95 96

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CM, §44, 96/Hua I, 127 [Husserl’s emphasis]. CM, §44, 96–97/Hua I, 127–8 [Husserl’s emphasis]. Husserl argues in Crisis of European Sciences (C, §17/Hua VI, 76–80) that in ‘bracketing’ the unscientific thought or the world of sense-experience, Descartes excludes the living-body [Leiblichkeit] from the ego cogito. This exclusion, whereby Descartes aims to be left with the pure ego and its apodictic life, is, however, based upon the identification between sensible experience and livingbody and, thus, on the failure to recognize an essential difference between both, namely, that the living-body is not to be understood as a mere sensible experience, i.e., as Körperlich. As a result of this confusion, Descartes loses what for Husserl is the inner depth of the human being, our spirituality, for by identifying the living-body with sensible experience Descartes is, furthermore, restricting spirituality or the living-body to a sense-experience that is exterior to our intellectus sive animus. As an immediate result of this confusion, Descartes identifies ego cogito with intellectus or animus, as the life of apodicticity from which spirituality is excluded. What Husserl aims to show with such an argument is, firstly, that Descartes’ philosophizing presupposes the human being as two-dimensional, i.e., mens sive animus sive intellectus on the one hand and mens corpus [Körperlich] on the other hand; and, secondly, that Husserl’s notion of spirituality cannot be mistaken for Descartes’ notion of soul [animus]. Descartes understood ‘animus’ in a mathematical sense, namely, in terms of that which gives life or that ‘ensouls’ something that does not have it, presupposing, thus, that both are separated and external from each other. Husserl breaks radically with this conception through a different notion of life (Leiblichkeit), by means of which he attempts to characterize human life as a living body that is not to be ensouled but that, qua body, is already living. Leiblichkeit suggests a notion of life that neither is grounded nor results from a situation of separation. The use of the terms spiritual and spirituality in this study are synonymous of Leiblich and Leiblichkeit, but not of soul (animus) in the Cartesian sense. I will return to this specific discussion in those sections dedicated to the question of intersubjectivity. Jan Patocˇka (1996). An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology, 143. CM, §44, 98/Hua I, 129 [emphasis added]. Paul Ricœur (1967). Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology. Translated by Edward G. Ballard and Lester Embree. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 122 [Ricœur’s emphasis]. CM, §44, 97/Hua I, 128 [Husserl’s emphasis]. The question of time cannot be dealt with here. I have reserved the whole of Chapter IV for this issue. However, when reading Leib or spiritual experience in the current discussion, this must not only be taken in the terms of the spatial frame that the body opens up, but must always be understood in temporal terms. Consciousness is not only incarnated but is also eminently temporal. CM, §44, 97/Hua I, 128. My body, or part of my body, can also be made into an external object of perception [Körper]. If this is possible, it is, precisely, ‘because I “can” perceive one hand “by means of” the other, an eye by means of a hand, and so forth – a procedure in which the functioning organ must become an Object and the Object a functioning organ’ (CM, §44, 97/Hua I, 128 [Husserl’s emphasis]).

Notes 99

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106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

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For a detailed account of the different reasons that drove Husserl to abandon the project of publishing a German version of Cartesian Meditations, see Donn Welton (2000). The Other Husserl, 133–56. CM, §44, 94/Hua I, 126 [Husserl’s emphasis]. CM, §49, 106/Hua I, 137 [Husserl’s emphasis]. CM, §50, 111/Hua I, 141 [Husserl’s emphasis]. Paul Ricœur (1967). Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology, 119. Ricœur translates Husserl’s term ‘überschreitet’ as ‘transgresser’. Nonetheless, in English, Ballard and Embree prefer the term ‘encroaching on’ to the phrase ‘to go beyond’ used by Cairns in his translation from ‘überschreitet’ and even to the more literal expression ‘to transgress’. They consider that ‘to go beyond’ is too weak a translation and that ‘to transgress’ implies a moral tone that forbids its use in this context (see footnote 6 of p. 119). CM, §60, 141/Hua I, 168. CM, §50, 108/Hua I, 138. It is precisely for this reason that I shall not use the personal and possessive pronouns ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ and ‘his’, ‘her’, ‘their’ when referring to the Other. In order to avoid any personification of the Other, whether this is masculine, feminine or the inclusion of both, I shall from now on refer to the Other as ‘it’. By doing so, I only mean to neutralize the Other rather than having to restrict ‘it’ to a pre-given nature that defines ‘it’ previously to ‘being found’. See CM, §50 and §51, 108–113/Hua I, 138–43. CM, §50, 110–11/Hua I, 140 [Husserl’s emphasis]. CM, §50, 112/Hua I, 142. CM, §51, 112/Hua I, 142. [Husserl’s emphasis]. CM, §50, 109/Hua I, 139. CM, §52, 114–115/Hua I, 144 [Husserl’s emphasis]. CM, §52, 116/Hua I, 145. CM, §53, 116–17/Hua I, 145–6. CM, §53, 116–17/Hua I, 146 [My emphasis]. Daniel Birnbaum (1998). The Hospitality of Presence, 72–4. Ibid. 73. See Chapter IV. CM, §54, 119/Hua I, 148. CM, §49, 108/Hua I, 138. Paul Ricœur (1967). Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology, 115. CM, §64, 157/Hua I, 183 (trans. ‘Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man’, from De vera religione, 39, n. 72). CM, §49, 106/Hua I, 137. CM, §64, 153/Hua I, 179–80 [Husserl’s emphasis].

Chapter II 1

J. N. Findlay’s 1970 English translation of the second edition of Logische Unterschungen, as well as the 2001 Dermot Moran’s new edition, renders the term Eigentliche as ‘authentic’. Nonetheless, Dorion Cairn’s 1969 English translation

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of Formale und Transzendentale logic renders the German term eigentliche as ‘proper’. With the adjective ‘authentic’ and the noun ‘authenticity’ I designate the meanings ‘consistent’ and ‘consistency’ both in the logical and the ethical senses that Husserl attributes to it. LI, VI, §37, 261/Hua XIX/2, 648. Kevin Mulligan (1995). ‘Perception’. In Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 207, 213. Ibid. 169, 172 and 206. Ibid. 169. LI, VI, §46, 282/Hua XIX/2, 674 [Husserl’s emphasis]. For a rich discussion concerning the ‘non-intermediary’ relation between content and act and the importance that this question has for Husserl’s notion of wholes and parts, see Gary Banham (2004). ‘Formal Ontology, Intentional Contents and Intentional Objects’. In Proceedings of the Husserl Circle at Georgetown University. Georgetown, Washington: Academx, 75–90. LI, VI, §47, 282/Hua XIX/2, 674. LI, VI, §47, 285/Hua XIX/2, 678–9: ‘One might [. . .] say that our unity is plainly a unity of identification, that the intention of the serially arranged acts coincides continuously, and that so the unity arises. This is certainly right. But unity of identification is unavoidably distinct, does not say the same as the unity of an act of identification. An act means something, an act of identification means identity, presents it. In our case an identification is performed, but no identity is meant’. Dieter Lohmar (2002). ‘Husserl’s Concept of Categorial Intuition’. In Dan Zahavi and Frederik Stjernfelt (eds). One Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Husserl’s ‘Logical Investigations’ Revisited. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 126. LI, VI, §14b, 220ff/Hua XIX/2, 589–92 and I, §42, 134/Hua III/1, 78. LI, VI, §47, 284/Hua XIX/2, 677 [Husserl’s emphasis]. Dieter Lohmar (2002). ‘Husserl’s Concept of Categorial Intuition’, 126–7. LI, VI, §47, 284/Hua XIX/2, 678. Kevin Mulligan (1995). ‘Perception’, 169. It is worth flagging up that Mulligan’s position is not entirely unjustified. He is right in pointing out that there is some type of incompatibility between denying that content and object be independent, and then saying that we directly see things, their states and events (as Husserl does in Investigation VI). However, as John J. Drummond has suggested, perhaps one must read this discussion within the Logical Investigations as an attempt to confront logical psychologism. In order to establish a response to psychologistic views of epistemology, Husserl offers a first distinction between the ideal, logical content of the presentation and the object to which the presentation is directed. However, Drummond argues that this first response to psychologism (descriptive psychology) is problematic. For Husserl identifies here phenomenological contents with inherent, psychological contents and distinguishes them from intentional contents. In Investigation I, Husserl identifies meaning with objective idealities, the act of consciousness being the instantiation of the ideal in the particular. The expressive act intends here an object by

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means of conferring the ideal meaning on a sensible sign. It is upon these grounds, then, that Mulligan’s position would hold. Nonetheless, Investigations V and VI clearly re-define this description given in Investigation I. As Drummond goes on to argue here, since fulfilling acts of intuition present the objects emptily intended in expression, the sense of the fulfilling act is now rooted in the object itself rather than in ideal meaning-species. For this reason, Drummond concludes, ‘it is the sense of the object, the significance it has for us, that confirms or disconfirms what we intend. Only if this is true does it make sense to speak of the fulfilment or disappointment of an intention’. See John J. Drummond (2003). ‘On Welton on Husserl’, 319–23. Kevin Mulligan (1995). ‘Perception’, 194. LI, VI, §47, 285/Hua XIX/2, 679–80 [Husserl’s emphasis]. Edward S. Casey (1977). ‘Imagination and Phenomenological Method’, 74. Ibid. Although the question of neutral positionality or original belief [Urglaube] is not yet thematized in Logical Investigations, it seems plausible to suggest that the question of Urdoxa in Ideas I and of ‘affectivity’ in the 1920s Lectures on Passive Synthesis originate in Husserl’s discussions of perception, imagination and intuition in the Sixth Logical Investigation. LI, VI, §47, 286/Hua XIX/2, 680–1. Rudolf Bernet (1979). ‘Perception as a Teleological Process of Cognition’. In T. Tymieniecka (ed.). Analecta Husserliana, vol. IX, 122. LI, VI, §47, 283/Hua XIX/2, 676. Dieter Lohmar (2002). ‘Husserl’s Concept of Categorial Intuition’, 127. LI, VI, §5, 196ff/Hua XIX/2, 552–8. I, §2, 53/Hua III/1, 9 [Husserl’s emphasis]. I, §21–§23/Hua III/1, 39–43. I, §3, 54–6/Hua III/1, 10–12. Emmanuel Levinas (1973). The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans. André Orianne. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 117. Ibid. I, §41, 130–1/Hua III/1, 73–5. I, §73-§74/Hua III/1, 136–9. I, §69, 197/Hua III/1, 128–9. I, §70, 199–200/Hua III/1, 131 [Husserl’s emphasis]. I, §10, 67/Hua III/1, 21–2 [Husserl’s emphasis]. I, §10, 67/Hua III/1, 21–2. I, §10, 67–8/Hua III/1, 22–3. LI, VI, §48, 287/Hua XIX/2, 681–2. LI, VI, §48, 287/Hua XIX/2, 681–2. LI, VI, §44, 279/Hua XIX/2, 669. This is not to say, however, that an intuition of the act is not possible; what it is saying is that the intuition of the perceptive act and the intuition of the category of plurality that resides in the object perceived are radically different types of intuition. The perception of the perceptive act would be a so-called inner intuition, whereas the perception of the category of plurality would be a categorial intuition. By making this distinction Husserl points out the difference between

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the so-called inner intuition and outer intuition. While ‘inner intuition’ is the apprehension of the acts by means of which the immanent or genuine [reell] transcendent is rendered, ‘outer intuition’ is the apprehension of the reell objects and their objectivity. I will refer explicitly to the question of ‘inner intuition’ in Chapter III. LI, VI, §51, 291/Hua XIX/2, 688–9. LI, VI, §60, 307/Hua XIX/2, 713 [Husserl’s emphasis], [the term ‘basic’ is my own interpolation]. LI, VI, §60, 306–7/Hua XIX/2, 712–13. LI, VI, §60, 306/Hua XIX/2, 712. LI, VI, §60, 307/Hua XIX/2, 713. Dieter Lohmar (2002). ‘Husserl’s Concept of Categorial Intuition’, 129. Ibid. LI, VI, §49, 289/Hua XIX/2, 685–6 [Husserl’s emphasis]. LI, VI, §49, 290/Hua XIX/2, 686–7. I, §24, 39/Hua III/1, 43–4. I, §24, 39/Hua III/1, 43–4. LI, II, Introduction, 237/Hua XIX/1, 113 [Husserl’s emphasis]. LI, II, §23, 274/Hua XIX/1, 168. This is not only the case of ‘material essences’ such as Redness or Unicorn, but also applies to objects that can be thought without having been sensuously perceived or imagined ever before. This can be seen, for instance, in mathematical analyses in which the Idea of ‘a curve of the third order’ that we have never sensuously seen is provided (LI, VI, §52, 293/ Hua XIX/2, 692). When this is the case, we likewise draw on paper or in our mind an intuitive image of a curve of the third order as an analogy of the Idea here in question, in order to help us ‘see’ such a general or universal Idea. But even though we draw a curve in one direction or in another, on a paper or in our mind, what we mean is the Idea and not the particular that analogizes the Idea. That is to say, that which we present before our eyes and that which is to be intuited is the Idea and not the particular. I, §135, 374/Hua III/1, 278 [Husserl’s emphasis]. I, §131, 365/Hua III/1, 271. I, §131, 367/Hua III/1, 272. I, §135, 377/Hua III/1, 281 [Husserl’s emphasis]. I, §143, 397/Hua III/1, 297 [Husserl’s emphasis]. Rudolf Bernet. ‘Perception as Teleological Cognition’, 126. Ibid. I, §131, 366/Hua III/1, 272. Joanna Hodge (2005). ‘Authenticity and Apriorism in Husserl’s Logical Investigations’. In Proceedings of the Husserl Circle at Georgetown University. Georgetown, Washington: Academx, 98–9. As Hodge has suggested, the Idea in the Kantian Sense is closer to the form of a schema for the development of a kind of theorizing than to the form of the full, and restrictive, determinacy of Platonic or Hegelian concepts. Joanna Hodge. ‘Authenticity and Apriorism in Husserl’s Logical Investigations’. 98. I, §136, 379–81/Hua III/1, 283–4. See Marcus Brainard (2002). Belief and its Neutralisation, 202–4.

Notes 67 68 69 70 71 72

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Ibid. 203. I, §136, 380/Hua III/1, 283–4. I, §144, 398–9/Hua III/1, 299. LI, VI, §63, 312/Hua XIX/2, 721 and FTL, §12–§19, 49–69/Hua XVII, 42–58. LI, VI, Chapters 4 and 8/Hua XIX/2, 632–45 and 710–34. Suzanne Bachelard (1968). A study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic. Trans. Lester Embree. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1–10. As Bachelard points out, though, this is not simply saying that all expression is signification and that therefore it is senseful, regardless of being meaningful or not. Expressions such as for example ‘the book not why yes did’ would not only be meaningless but would also be senseless or nonsense [Unsinn] and therefore would lack any signification whatsoever, for they do not fit the rules, the grammar, that allow us to express and signify (see Ibid. 10). Suzanne Bachelard. A study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, 1–10. I, §136, 381/Hua III/1, 283. I, §149, 415/Hua III/1, 312. I, §149, 411/Hua III/1, 309. Ibid. See I, §9/Hua III/1, 19–20. I, §149, 411/Hua III/1, 309. I, §149, 415/Hua III/1, 312. I, §149, 412/Hua III/1, 311. Ibid. I, §149, 413/Hua III/1, 312. I, §149, 411/Hua III/1, 312. I, §149, 415/Hua III/1, 312 and I, §150, 415/Hua III/1, 313. I, §149, 415/Hua III/1, 312 Ibid. I, §149, 415/Hua III/1, 313 Ibid. Ibid. LI, VI, §52, 292/Hua XIX/2, 690. Ibid. Likewise in Ideas I, Husserl emphasizes that the Ideational Abstraction (or Pure Intuition) is an act that begins with imagination. Nonetheless, imagination, at least in the sense that Husserl seems to use the term here, cannot possibly be responsible for the whole act of Ideational Abstraction of universal ideal forms. Imagination plays the role of presenting illustrations out of which we may abstract universals, however imagination does not have the power of putting formal abstract laws in images for the latter cannot be grasped by the senses. LI, VI, §52, 292–3/Hua XIX/2, 690–1. LI, VI, §62, 310/Hua XIX/2, 717–18. LI, VI, §62, 310/Hua XIX/2, 718. LI, VI, §62, 311/Hua XIX/2, 720. I, §150, 417/Hua III/1, 316. Elisabeth Ströker (1993). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology. 17. LI, Introduction, §7, 177–9/Hua XIX/1, 24–9. LI, Introduction, §7, 177/Hua XIX/1, 24. I, §24, 92/Hua III/1, 44 [Husserl’s emphasis].

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Notes

Chapter III 1

LI, V, §4–§6, 86–9/Hua XIX/1, 363–70. LI, V, §2, 83/Hua XIX/1, 359. 3 LI, V, §2, 83/Hua XIX/1, 360 [emphasis added]. 4 Since the connection pointed out here is not evident when the terms Erlebnis and Leben are translated into English, it is worth emphasizing that in German the term Erlebnis (experience) is rooted in the noun Leben (life). In order to be able to convey what Husserl might mean when using such terms, this study will refer to Erlebnis with the hyphenated term ‘life-experience’. I shall return in more depth to this particular question in the text below. 5 LI, V, §2, 83/Hua XIX/1, 358. 6 LI, V, §2, 84/Hua XIX/1, 360. 7 LI, V, §4, 86/Hua XIX/1, 363. 8 Ibid. 9 LI, V, §5, 86/Hua XIX/1, 365–6 [Husserl’s emphasis], [emphasis added]. 10 LI, V, §4, 86/Hua XIX/1, 363. 11 LI, V, §6, 88/Hua XIX/1, 368. 12 LI, V, §6, 88–9/Hua XIX/1, 369. 13 LI, V, §6, 88/Hua XIX/1, 369. 14 Ibid. 15 I, §38, 123–4/Hua III/1, 67–9. 16 Ibid. [Husserl’s emphasis]. 17 I, §41, 132/Hua III/1, 75–6. 18 I, §42, 134–5/Hua III/1, 76–7. 19 I, §38, 123–4/Hua III/1, 68–9. 20 I, §42, 135/Hua III/1, 77–8. 21 I, §44, 137ff/Hua III/1, 80–3. 22 I, §44, 139/Hua III/1, 81. 23 I, §45 p142/Hua III/1, 84. 24 I, §46, 143/Hua III/1, 85. 25 I, §46, 144/Hua III/1, 86. 26 I, §46, 145/Hua III/1, 86. 27 I, §49, 152/Hua III/1, 92. 28 LI, V, §2,83/Hua XIX/1, 358. 29 Martin Heidegger (1972). On Time and Being. Trans. J. Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row, 44. 30 Ibid. 62–3. 31 Jean-Luc Marion (1998). Reduction and Givenness. Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 82. 32 While Descartes’ passage from Pricipae Philosphiae, I, sec. 51, reads ‘per substantiam nihil aliud intelligere possumus, quam rem quae ita existit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum’, Husserl’s version in Ideas I, 49, 152/Hua III/1, 92, ‘nulla “re” indiget ad existendum’ ignores the term alia in alia re and accepts re only in quotation marks. See Jean-Luc Marion. Reduction and Givenness, 82–4. 33 Lilian Alweiss (2003). The World Unclaimed: A Challenge to Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 24–5. 2

Notes 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45

46 47 48

49

50

187

Ibid. 25–6. Klaus Held (2003). ‘Husserl’s Phenomenological Method’. In Donn Welton (ed.). The New Husserl: A Critical Reading. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 24. LI, V, §6, 88/Hua XIX/1, 369. I, §78, 220/Hua III/1, 149. I, §82, 238–239/Hua III/1, 165. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter the change in terminology is progressive throughout Husserl’s work. I have opted to keep Husserl’s own terminology in every text rather than running ahead and converting all talk of inner perception into immanent intuition. I, §83, 239/Hua III/1, 164–5. I, §83, 240/Hua III/1, 1656 [Husserl’s emphasis, emphasis added]. Although the term ‘Idea in the Kantian sense’ is coined in Ideas I, Husserl already describes ‘inner perception’ in Investigation V (LI, V, §10, 96–7/Hua XIX/1, 382–3) in terms of an Ideation the aim of which is to grasp ‘the pure phenomenological generic Idea of intentional experience or act’ (or also put in Brentano’s terminology, ‘the essential feature of “psychical phenomena” ’). Although the issues of Ideation and of intentional life as Idea are only mentioned in passing, they are nonetheless intimated. For this reason, Ideas I could be read as a continuation of Logical Investigations in which this particular claim is fleshed out and established as the core of the phenomenological inquiry. The shift in terminology from inner perception in Logical Investigations to immanent intuition in Ideas I cannot be read as a break but as further clarification after the identification of further problems. Donn Welton (2000). The Other Husserl, 141–2. Ibid. 143. While I am treating ‘pure intuition’ as an act here, Chapter V will suggest that according to the last part of Ideas I, which Husserl entitles the ‘Phenomenology of Reason’, it is possible to take pure intuition as a ‘moment of an act’ rather than as an ‘act’. This interpretation has already been deployed in Chapter II when I referred to ‘outer’ or transcendent intuition. In order to delve into this discussion with regard to inner or immanent intuition, we need first to explore in detail Husserl’s writings on time, as I will do in the next chapter. Husserl’s treatment of the questions of the Idea in the Kantian Sense and of Pure Intuition are never free of difficulty and easily lead to confusions. Taking this into account, let me clarify here once again that while Chapter II argued that Pure Intuition was rationality’s understanding and that, therefore, it should not be taken as an act but as an implicit moment of the act, the present discussion is not dealing with the rationality of consciousness but with an act of immanent intuition. Although we can speak of intuition being pure in both cases, as Husserl does, we must differentiate the two intuitions as belonging to different levels. Donn Welton (2000). The Other Husserl, 143.

188 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85

86 87

Notes

See Chapter V. Lilian Alweiss (2003). The World Unclaimed, 32. Ibid. 32. Donn Welton (2000). The Other Husserl, 144. LI, V, §11, 98/Hua XIX/1, 384–5. LI, V, §11, 98/Hua XIX/1, 385. LI, V, §11, 99/Hua XIX/1, 386. LI, V, §11, 99/Hua XIX/1, 386–7. LI, V, §11, 99/Hua XIX/1, 387. LI, V, §14, 103/Hua XIX/1, 396. LI, V, §13, 102/Hua XIX/1, 392–3. LI, V, §13–14, 102–5/Hua XIX/1, 391–401. Jean-Paul Sartre (1970). ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. Translated by Joseph Fell, vol. I, no. 2, 4. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962). The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith. London and New York: Routledge, XIX. LI, V, §15(a), 107–9/Hua XIX/1, 402–5. LI, V, §15(a), 109 /Hua XIX/1, 405. LI, V, §15(b), 111/Hua XIX/1, 410. Ibid. LI, V, §17, 113ff/Hua XIX/1, 414. LI, V, §18, 115/Hua XIX/1, 416–17. LI, V, §18, 115/Hua XIX/1, 417 [Husserl’s emphasis]. LI, V, §18, 115/Hua XIX/1, 418. LI, V, §20, 119–122/Hua XIX/1, 425–31. LI, V, §20, 120/Hua XIX/1, 426. LI, V, §20, 121/Hua XIX/1, 429–30. LI, V, §20, 121–2/Hua XIX/1, 430 [Husserl’s emphasis]. LI, V, §21, 122/Hua XIX/1, 431. LI, V, §21, 122/Hua XIX/1, 431. I, §85, 246ff/Hua III/1, 171–5. The sensile hyletic experience cannot be confused with the intentional sensations discussed above in this chapter. While sensations are intentional, sensile hyletic experiences are non-intentional. The latter are, nonetheless, a component of the former or of any other intentional act. In order to have a sensation of a rustling sound, one must first ‘be affected’ by the so-called sensile hyletic. This is the act upon which sensations return in order to sense something in particular, even when this something is ‘indeterminate’. I, §85, 246–247/Hua III/1, 173. I, §85, 249/Hua III/1, 174. For an account of various criticisms see J. N. Mohanty (1970). ‘Husserl’s Concept of Intentionality’. In T. Tymieniecka (ed.). Analecta Husserliana, vol. 1, 100–32. I, §86, 251/Hua III/1, 176. I, §85, 248/Hua III/1, 173.

Notes 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104 105

189

I, §85, 248/Hua III/1, 173. The noema and the object cannot be confused. A multiplicity of noemata can refer to an identical object. However, this differentiation does not amount to arguing that the noema act as the ‘mediation’ between noetic experience and intentional object, in a similar way as Dagfinn Føllesdal (1982) does in ‘Husserl’s notion of the Noema’. In Hubert Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (eds). Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts:The MIT Press, 73–80. The problem with this view is that it would entail that the noema must have an ontological or ideal existence independently from the intentional object (and from the act). This creates a tripartite structure with something on the lines of a double act: one act directed to the object, the other to the noema. As John J. Drummond has argued, ‘mediator-theories [. . .] replace the intentionality of acts with a different relation of the intensionality of sense, making the intentional directedness of an experience a function of the intensional directedness (referentiality) of a meaning. For Husserl, however, meaning and reference flow from the act. Intentionality belongs first and foremost to conscious acts: acts intend objects as significant. The claim that our experience is intentional means that a meaning-intending experience meaningfully directs us to an object. Only by virtue of this is the meaning or sense referred to the object’. See John J. Drummond (2003). ‘The Structure of Intentionality’. In Donn Welton (ed). The New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 65–92. Lilian Alweiss (2003). The World Unclaimed, 40. John J. Drummond (2003). ‘The Structure of Intentionality’, 70. Ibid. 70–71. Ibid. 71. Ibid. Ibid. LI, V, §22–§31, 128–45/Hua XIX/1, 441–73. LI, V, §35, 152–4/Hua XIX/1, 484–90. LI, V, §35, 154/Hua XIX/1, 489 [Husserl’s emphasis], [emphasis added]. The laws of consistency differ from the law of possibility in the following sense. A ‘squared circle’ is possible insofar as it is ‘thinkable’ – however improperly [Uneigentliche], i.e., it can be imagined or perceived ideally in one’s mind. By contrast, an object such as ‘the book why did not’ would be inconsistent and un-presentable (or irrational) to our intuitive gaze. In the case of impossibility, although it can be presented and thought according to the so-called pure laws of grammar, the object will be impossible insofar as it will not find fulfilment in intuition. In cases of inconsistency, the object would simply not be such an object because it would not be meant as ‘that’ object, because it cannot be thought as some-thing. LI, V, §38, 162/Hua XIX/1, 503. LI, V, §23, 129/Hua XIX/1, 443–4. LI, V, §23, 129/Hua XIX/1, 444. LI, V, §41, 167/Hua XIX/1, 514 [Husserl’s emphasis]. LI, V, §41, 167/Hua XIX/1, 514–15 [Husserl’s emphasis]. I, §104, 298–300/Hua III/1, 215–17.

190 106 107 108 109

110 111 112

113

Notes

Marcus Brainard (2002). Belief and Its Neutralisation, 191. I, §106, 301/Hua III/1, 218–19. Marcus Brainard (2002). Belief and Its Neutralisation, 191–2. Nuno Nabais (1998). A Evidência da Possibilidade: A questão modal na fenomenologia de Husserl. Lisboa: Relógio d’água Editores, 17. Since this text is only available in Portuguese, the citations are my own translation and, therefore, my own responsibility. Ibid. 27 Ibid. 22–5. In Reduction and Givenness, 29–39, Jean-Luc Marion has argued a similar point. Following Husserl in the First Investigation and in the Idea of Phenomenology, Marion refers to an ‘absolute givenness’ that is anterior to signification and its fulfilling intuition, and that is the donation that ‘gives the given the opportunity to appear’. Although there can only be givenness when something is actually given (for the former is something on the lines of an interior horizon rather than an external cause), the latter ‘can only appear in the appearing in which it appears’ (Ibid. 29–39). Nuno Nabais (1998). A Evidência da Possibilidade, 25.

Chapter IV 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

I concentrate here on Husserl’s writings on time up to 1917. These comprise the 1905 lectures and appendices up to 1910, edited by Edith Stein in a first draft in the summer of 1917 and later published by Martin Heidegger in 1928, as well as the earlier and later notes and manuscripts dated from 1893 to 1911. All published in Hua X, 1966, edited by Rudolph Boehme. All these text are included in the English edition of On the Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917).Translated by John B. Brough, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. PCIT (1905), §1, 4–5/Hua X, 4. PCIT (1905), §1, 7/Hua X, 7. Ibid. Ibid. PCIT (1909), §51, 350/Hua X, 338–9 [Husserl’s emphasis]. PCIT (1909), §51, 350/Hua X, 339. PCIT (1905), §7, 24/Hua X, 22–3. PCIT (1905), §1, 5/Hua X, 4–5. PCIT (1905), §7, 24/Hua X, 23. PCIT (1905), §7, 24/Hua X, 22. PCIT (1905), §7, 25/Hua X, 23. PCIT (1905), §10, 30/Hua X, 28. PCIT (1905), §10 and §11, 30–1/Hua X, 27–31. PCIT (1905), §11, 31/Hua X, 29. PCIT (1905), §11, 31/Hua X, 30. PCIT (1905), §7, 25/Hua X, 23.

Notes 18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33

34 35 36

37 38

39 40

41 42 43

191

PCIT (1905), §31, 66/Hua X, 64. PCIT (1905), §31, 69/Hua X, 68. ‘The tone-point in its absolute individuality is held fast in its matter and in its temporal position, and it is the latter that first constitutes individuality.’ PCIT (1905), §31, 66/Hua X, 65. PCIT (1905), §7, 24/Hua X, 22 [terms ‘immanent’ and ‘immanent intuition’ are my own addition]. PCIT (1905), §10, 29/Hua X, 27 and PCIT (1905), §9, 28/Hua X, 26. PCIT (1905), §10, 29/Hua X, 27. Ibid. PCIT (1905), §10, 29/Hua X, 28. PCIT (1905), §9, 27/Hua X, 26. Ibid. PCIT (1909), §50, 338/Hua X, 325–6. PCIT (1905), §11, 31–2/Hua X, 30. PCIT (1905), §13, 35/Hua X, 34. This does not mean to say that the object, now qua constituted, simply disappears from our consciousness. On the contrary, the end of perception is followed by what Husserl calls ‘fresh memory’ by means of which the object is conserved in a present consciousness but in a past mode (PCIT (1905), §11, 32/Hua X, 30). The object might expire but not our consciousness of it. Nonetheless, all fresh memory (which is only a type of retention) is followed by new fresh memories with which the object keeps sinking in an ever more remote past. Every fresh memory undergoes a modification until it disappears – however the disappearance is not a final one, for all objects of perception (followed by phases of fresh memory) can be re-presented in phantasy in what Husserl calls ‘secondary memory’ (see PCIT (1905), §14 onwards/Hua X, 35). PCIT (1905), §16, 40/Hua X, 38. PCIT (1905), §17, 43/Hua X, 41 [Husserl’s emphasis] [the term ‘retention’ is my own addition]. PCIT (1905), §24, 54/Hua X, 52–3 [Husserl’s emphasis]. PCIT (1905), §24, 54–5/Hua X, 53. Lanei Rodemeyer (2003). ‘Developments in the Theory of Time-Consciousness: An Analysis of Protention’. In Donn Welton (ed.), The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 137. Lilian Alweiss (2003). The World Unclaimed, 49. Lanei Rodemeyer (2003). ‘Developments in the Theory of Time-Consciousness’, 134. Lilian Alweiss (2003). The World Unclaimed, 44–5. For a reading that ends up privileging protention over retention and impression, see Lanei Rodemeyer (2003). ‘Developments in the Theory of Time-Consciousness’, 132–49. For a reading that privileges primordial impression over retention and protention see Daniel Birnbaum (1998). The Hospitality of Presence, 108–12. Lilian Alweiss (2003). The World Unclaimed, 35. Ibid. 37. Jacques Derrida (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, 64.

192 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55

56

57 58

59

60 61

62 63 64 65 66

Notes

As suggested by Jacques Derrida (2003). The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 64–6. See PCIT (1905), §14–§23, 37–54/Hua X, 35–52. PCIT (1905), §14, 38/Hua X, 36. PCIT (1905), §17, 43/Hua X, 41. PCIT (1905), §18, 45/Hua X, 43. PCIT (1905), §19, 48/Hua X, 46. Ibid. Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern and Eduard Marbach (1993). An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 104. Ibid. 105. PCIT (1905), §18, 44/Hua X, 42. PCIT (1905), §18, 44–5/Hua X, 42–3. PCIT (1905), §18, 45/Hua X, 44. It is important to bear in mind that not all objects-of-consciousness are fully constituted by default. We may have only impressional consciousnesses of melodies that simply remain in ‘fresh memory’ before vanishing and, thus, before we can constitute them enough by re-producing them (even if it is only partially and erroneously). If we only perceive a melody (by original impressions, retention and protention), we apprehend it enough so as to follow it as it sounds, as to re-cognize it as a melody. Nonetheless, we have the freedom to let it pass and vanish at that point. Husserl refers to secondary memory as an effect of the freedom of the ‘I can’. As he writes: ‘A priori the re-presentation of an experience lies within the domain of my freedom’ (PCIT (1905), §18, 44/Hua X, 42). See also PCIT (1905), §20, 49–50/Hua X, 47–8. What this is suggesting is that I am as free to let a melody pass without paying attention to it, as I am to return to it by means of secondary memory and, therefore, of reproduction. PCIT (1904), §20, 197/Hua X, 190. PCIT (1905), §27, 60/Hua X, 58. ‘In order to represent a now intuitively, I must bring about a perception. [. . .] But I must not do it in such a way that I represent the perception; rather I represent the perceived, that which appears as present in the perception. [. . .] the perception is not meant and posited in the memory; what is meant and posited is the perception’s object and the object’s now, which, in addition, is posited in relation to the actually present now.’ Even though one could re-present sections of a melody while listening to the same melody, we are not perceiving it but re-presenting it, and then the object is not being itself given. PCIT (1911), §54, 382/Hua X, 371. PCIT (1905), §7, 24/Hua X, 22. ‘It is certainly evident that the perception of a temporal object has a temporality, that the perception of duration presupposes the duration of the perception, that the perception of temporal form itself has its temporal form.’ PCIT (1908–9), §50, 340–2/Hua X, 326–8. PCIT (1909), §50, 344/Hua X, 332. PCIT (1909), §50, 345/Hua X, 333 [Husserl’s emphasis]. PCIT (1909), §50, 346/Hua X, 333–4. Jacques Derrida (2003). The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 64.

Notes 67

68 69 70 71 72 73

74

75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83

84

85

86 87

88 89 90 91

92

193

PCIT (1909), §50, 338–46/Hua X, 324–34 and PCIT (1909), §54, 370/Hua X, 361–2. PCIT (1909), §50, 338–9/Hua X, 326. PCIT (1905), §39, 85/Hua X, 80 and PCIT (1909), §54, 389/Hua X, 380. PCIT (1905), §39, 84–5/Hua X, 80 [Husserl’s emphasis]. PCIT (1905), §39, 86/Hua X, 82 and PCIT (1905), §30, 64/Hua X, 62. PCIT (1905), §30, 64/Hua X, 62. Brough, John B. (1977). ‘The Emergence of an Absolute Consciousness in Husserl’s Early Writings on Time-Consciousness’. In Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick (eds.). Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 84. PCIT (1905), §39, 85/Hua X, 81 and PCIT (1911), §54, 390/Hua X, 378. While Churchill’s first translation rendered Langsintentionalität as ‘longitudinal’ intentionality, Brough renders it as ‘horizontal’. Since the English text quoted in this book is John Barnett Brough’s translation of PCIT, I shall follow its terminology for referential purposes. PCIT (1911), §54, 393/Hua X, 380. PCIT (1911), §54, 393/Hua X, 381. PCIT(1905), §39, 87/Hua X, 83. PCIT(1905), §39, 87/Hua X, 83. Robert Sokolowski (1964). The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 91. Ibid. 89. Ibid 91. PCIT (1911), §41, 301/Hua X, 291 [Husserl’s emphasis]. Dan Zahavi (1999). Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press (see especially part 2, 49–90). Dan Zahavi (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 90. Rudolf Bernet (2005). ‘Real Time and Imaginary Time. On the Husserlian Conception of Temporal Individuation’. In Gary Banham (ed.). Husserl and the Logic of Experience. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dan Zahavi (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology, 90. Dan Zahavi (1999). Self-awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation, 92 [Zahavi’s emphasis]. CM, §50, 109/Hua I, 139. CM, §51, 112/Hua I, 142. CM, §52, 115/Hua I, 144–5. See also CM, §55, 126–8/Hua I, 154–6. James Dodd (1997). Idealism and Corporeity. An Essay on the Problem of the Body in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 31. The argument discussed here by Dodd is already spelt out by Husserl in very similar terms in PCIT in relation to the question of the re-presented past, as discussed above. Although in Cartesian Meditations Husserl employs the same term [Vergegenwärtigungen] employed before in PCIT, a confusion may arise insofar as the same term is rendered in different ways in different translations. While John B. Brough’s translation of PCIT translates Vergegenwärtigungen as ‘re-presentation’, Dorion Cairns in Cartesian Meditations translates it as ‘nonoriginary presentations’ and also as ‘presentiations’.

194 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

Notes

CM, §52, 115/Hua I, 145. James Dodd (1997). Idealism and Corporeity, 31. CM, §55, 127–8/Hua I, 156 [Husserl’s emphasis], [emphasis added]. CM, §55, 127–8/Hua I, 156. CM, §51, 112–13/Hua I, 142 [Husserl’s emphasis], [emphasis added]. James Dodd (1997). Idealism and Corporeity, 27. Ibid. 28. CM, §51, 113/Hua I, 142. CM, §51, 113/Hua I, 143. I, §58, 175/Hua III/1, 110–11. CM, §55, 128/Hua I, 156. Edmund Husserl (1901). ‘Draft of a Letter by Husserl to Marty’. In Early Writings on the philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. Translated by Dallas Willard, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1994, Appendix IX, 48/ Hua XXII, 419–26. See Lilian Alweiss (2003). The World Unclaimed, 54–5. Ibid. 55. I, §28, 51/Hua III/1, 51. Jacques Derrida (2003). The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 64. Ibid. Ibid. 117. Ibid. 121. Ibid. 119. APAS, §27, 173/Hua XI, 128.

Chapter V 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14

PCIT (1909), §54, 382/Hua X, 371. PCIT (1909), §54, 386/Hua X, 374. Edmund Husserl. ‘Die ‘Bernauer Manuskripte’ über das ZeitbewusBtsein (1917–18)’. In: Hua XXXIII, 277–8. PCIT (1911), §54, 370, in: Lilian Alweiss (2003). The World Unclaimed, 68–9. Lilian Alweiss (2003). The World Unclaimed, 67–8. Ibid. 70. Dan Zahavi (1999). Self-Awareness and Alterity. A Phenomenological Investigation, 184. Dan Zahavi (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology, 91. Ibid. 92. See also Dan Zahavi (1999). Self-Awareness and Alterity. A Phenomenological Investigation, 189. Dan Zahavi (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology, 92. Dan Zahavi (1999). Self-Awareness and Alterity. A Phenomenological Investigation, 190–1. Ibid. 190. Ibid. Ibid. Zahavi’s position does not assume, however, that phenomenology must simply take for granted a pre-reflective life that always resists the phenomenological

Notes

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33

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inquiry and, therefore, the phenomenological demand of self-justification. Thus, and as he puts it further on in the same text: ‘[The subjectivity of the subject] cannot be thematised, but this does not prevent it from being given. Not only is it characterised by its radical self-manifestation, but we even encounter its evasiveness every time we try (and fail) to catch it in reflection, i.e., the reflection points towards that which both founds it and eludes it, and these features are not deficiencies to overcome, but rather the defining traits of its pre-reflective givenness’ (Ibid. 196). Lilian Alweiss (1999). ‘The Presence of Husserl’. In Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 30, no. 1, 59–75 [emphasis added]. Ibid. 69. I, §83, 239/Hua III/1, 166. I, §83, 239–40/Hua III/1, 166 [Husserl’s emphasis]. I, §77, 215–16/Hua III/1, 145. See PCIT (1905), §7–§10/Hua X, 19–29. I, §83, 240/Hua III/1, 166–7. I, §83, 239/Hua III/1, 166. Ibid. I, §83, 240/Hua III/1, 166–7 [Husserl’s emphasis] [Emphasis added]. See part C in Chapter II. I, §143, 397/Hua III/1, 297–8. I, §138–§142, 384–96/Hua III/1, 286–8 and I, §149–§150, 415–6/Hua III/1, 309–16. Marcus Brainard (2002). Belief and its Neutralisation, 203. I, §136–§137, 379–84/Hua III/1, 282-–6 and I, §142, 395–6/Hua III/1, 295–7. Jacques Derrida (1978/1989). Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, 138–9. Ibid. 142. Ibid. 147–8. It is worth noting that in The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, Derrida does acknowledge that ‘Husserl believes in an “intuition” of this possible infinity of connections’ (Ibid. 97), an ‘intuition of the Idea in the Kantian Sense’ (Ibid. 98). This is not ‘an actual intuition of the infinite totality of chains of connections, but an intuition of the very indefiniteness of this totality of the chain of connections’ (Ibid. 98). Derrida understands this intuition of the Idea as a ‘concrete intuition’, the latter being ‘the very movement that constitutes the pure present’ (Ibid. 98). If a few years later, in Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, Derrida maintains that there is no such intuition in Husserl’s philosophy, this is because he finds that this ‘revolution’ that Husserl projected in Ideas I is ‘phenomenologically’ unfounded. He says: ‘How is an intuition of what is not yet there possible? How can nonbeing and absence be immediately and concretely apprehended?’ (Ibid. 98). Derrida’s incredulity resides in the understanding that ‘with Husserl, the origin and the foundation of any act and any intentional aim are in a positive thesis of being’ and, therefore, all intuition must be ‘fulfilled by an originary presence’ (Ibid. 98). Although on the one hand Derrida’s position can be phenomenologically justifiable, on the other

196

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

Notes

hand is also based on the pre-conception that phenomenology must always operate ontologically and that a move beyond ontology is either impossible or un-phenomenological. As argued above, however, the level Husserl is beginning to deal with is not one of being and ontology but of pre-being, of the pre-I or of the primordial or proto-ego, and of transcendental phenomenology beyond traditional ontology. I shall return to this discussion later on in this chapter. I, §83, 240/Hua III/1,166–7 [emphasis added] and I, §149, 415/Hua III/1, 311–12. I, §143, 397/Hua III/1, 297–8 [emphasis added]. I, §143, 397/Hua III/1, 297. Ibid. [Husserl’s emphasis]. I, §149, 415/Hua III/1, 312–13 and I, §150, 415–19/Hua III/1,309–13. I, §150, 418–19/Hua III/1, 314–16 [Husserl’s emphasis]. Lilian Alweiss (2003). The World Unclaimed, 68. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 133. Ibid. Ibid. 132. Ibid. 133. James Mensch (2004). ‘Manifestation and the Paradox of Subjectivity’. In: Proceedings of the Husserl Circle at Georgetown University. Georgetown, Washington: Academx, 26. Ibid. 26. See also Jan Patocˇka (2002). Plato and Europe. Trans. Petr Lom, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 24–32. James Mensch. ‘Manifestation and the Paradox of Subjectivity’. 27. Ibid. 28. Jacques Derrida (2003). The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 64. APAS, §27, 173/Hua XI, 128. Ibid. APAS, §27, 174/Hua XI, 128. PCIT (1905), §39, 87/Hua X, 83. APAS, §32, 197–8/Hua XI, 148–9. APAS, §32, 196/Hua XI, 148–9. Although Husserl still uses the expression ‘hyletic’ in APAS, it must be noted that the treatment of the hyletic in Ideas I and APAS might not be exactly synonymous, the difference residing in the fact that in APAS the hyletic is not organized through a noetic-noematic structure. APAS, §33, 200/Hua XI, 152. APAS, §33, 205–6/Hua XI, 157–8. APAS, §32, 197/Hua XI, 149 and APAS, §33, 200–1/Hua XI, 153. APAS, §32, 197/Hua XI, 149. APAS, §33, 201/Hua XI, 153. APAS, §36, 221/Hua XI, 172. APAS, §36, 222/Hua XI, 173. APAS, §36, 223/Hua XI, 174. APAS, §33, 203/Hua XI, 155.

Notes 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91

92

93

94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101 102

197

APAS, §33, 203/Hua XI, 154. As Husserl also argues, it can also be the melody that affects me as a whole in the first place, awakening then my attentiveness to one of its parts. APAS, §34, 214/Hua XI, 165. APAS, §35, 214–15/Hua XI, 166. APAS, §35, 215/Hua XI, 166. APAS, §35, 216/Hua XI, 167. APAS, §35, 219/Hua XI, 170. Ibid. APAS, §35, 220/Hua XI, 171. APAS, §37, 227/Hua XI, 177. Donn Welton (2000). The Other Husserl, 276–8. APAS, §36, 221/Hua XI, 172. APAS, §37, 228/Hua XI, 178. Ibid. APAS, §38, 230/Hua XI, 181. Rudolf Bernet (1994). ‘An Intentionality without Subject or Object?’. In Man and World, 27, 244. Ibid. 244. Ibid. FTL, §86, 212, footnote 2/Hua XVII, 189. FTL, §89a, 216/Hua XVII, 192 and FTL, §86, 212/Hua XVII, 188. FTL, §89a, 217/Hua XVII, 193. FTL, §89b, 218/Hua XVII, 194 and FTL, §86, 212/Hua XVII, 188. C, §44, 156/Hua VI, 159. Edmund Husserl. ‘The Origin of Geometry’. In Crisis, Appendix VI, 358/Hua VI, Beilage III, 369 [emphasis added]. Edmund Husserl. ‘The Origin of Geometry’. In Crisis, Appendix VI, p358/Hua VI, Beilage III, 369. Edmund Husserl. ‘Static and Genetic Phenomenological Method’. In: APAS, 634/Hua XI, 336. Edmund Husserl. ‘The Phenomenology of Monadic Individuality and the Phenomenology of the General Possibilities and Compossibilities of Lived-Experiences. Static and Genetic Phenomenology’. In: APAS, 640/ Hua XIV, 38. See also CM, §49, 106–7/Hua I, 137–8. APAS, 640/Hua XIV, 38 [emphasis added]. C, §30, 116/Hua VI, 118 [emphasis added]. Edmund Husserl. Erste Philosophie. In Hua VIII, 29. FTL, §105, 278–9/Hua XVII, 246. See also C, §30, 115–16/Hua VI, 118, where Husserl speaks of an ‘original self-exhibition’ that is a considerable expansion of the very concept of intuitiveness and, therefore, the reason why the latter ‘may lose its sense altogether through a new attitude’. FTL, §105, 279/Hua XVII, 246. Donn Welton (2000). The Other Husserl, 9–10. FTL, §105, 279/Hua XVII, 246. Elisabeth Ströker (1993). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology, 228. FTL, §107c, 288–9/Hua XVII, 255 [Husserl’s emphasis].

198 103

Notes

FTL, §104, 276/Hua XVII, 244. For Husserl’s own discussion on the question of reduction see Erste Philosophie (1923–4). In Hua VIII. 104 FTL, §104, 273/Hua XVII, 242. 105 FTL, §104, 274/Hua XVII, 242. 106 FTL, §103, 272/Hua XVII, 240. 107 Eugen Fink (1988/1995). The Sixth Cartesian Meditation. The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Trans. Ronald Brunzina. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 12. 108 C, §7, 17–18/Hua VI, 16. 109 C, §1, 3/Hua VI, 1. 110 There have been several criticisms on the question of European tradition, Derrida’s being perhaps one of the most challenging ones (see Jacques Derrida (1978). ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. In Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. London and New York: Routledge). Derrida’s challenge resides in arguing that Husserl’s (as well as Heidegger’s) notion of tradition is somehow Eurocentric, insofar as – to use Simon Critchley’s terms – ‘philosophy tells itself a story which affirms the link between individuality and universality by embodying that link either in the person of Socrates or by defining the (European) philosopher as “the functionary of humanity”, but where at the same time universality is delimited or confined within one particular tradition, namely the Greco-european adventure. Philosophy demands universal validity or is defined by this demand for universal validity, yet it can only begin here in Europe’. Following Edward Said, Critchley goes on to say that ‘such philosophical sentiments do not seem far from the core belief of imperialism: namely, that is the responsibility or burden of the metropolitan powers to bring our universal values to bear on native peoples; that is, to colonise and transform other cultures according to our own world-view and to conceal oppression under the cloak of mission’ (Simon Critchley (1999). Ethics-Politcs-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and contemporary French Thought, London and New York: Verso, 128–9). This criticism is insightful and should, therefore, be borne in mind. Moreover, it could even be extended not just to phenomenological thought but to Western philosophy in general. However, two more important issues are at stake here. First, and to continue with Critchley’s argument, ‘if we provisionally admit that there is a racist or imperialist logic in philosophy [. . .] then could it ever be otherwise? That is, would it be conceivable for philosophy, or at least for ‘we European philosophers’, to be in a position to repeat another origin? Wouldn’t his be precisely the fantasy of believing oneself to speak from a standpoint of the excluded without being excluded, of wishing to speak from the margins whilst standing at the centre, that is to say, the fantasy of a romantic anti-Hellenism or rousseasque anti-ethnocentrism?’ (Simon Critchley. Ethics-Politcs-Subjectivity. 129). In the second place, and with regard to Husserl’s phenomenological standpoint, the question of tradition and traditionalization is tied together with what appears to be a notion of de-traditionalization. Husserl’s questioning back into the European tradition, that leads the phenomenological inquiry back into its Greco-philosophical origin, is, however, an infinite inquiry which, therefore, does not simply stop when it reaches this point. As Husserl argues in ‘The Vienna Lecture’, ‘every spiritual shape exists [. . .] in a particular unity of historical time in terms of coexistence and succession; it has its history.

Notes

111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

123

124 125 126

199

So if we pursue the historical interconnections, beginning, as is necessary, with ourselves and our nation, the historical continuity leads us further and further from our neighboring nations, and thus from nation to nation, from one time to the next. In antiquity ultimately, we are led from the Romans to the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Persians, etc.; clearly, there is no end. [. . .] Through such a procedure mankind appears as a single life of men and peoples bound together by only spiritual relations, with a plenitude of human and cultural types which nevertheless flowingly interpenetrate one other. It is like a sea, in which men and peoples are the fleeting formed, changing, and then disappearing waves [. . .]’ (See ‘The Vienna Lecture’. In C, Appendix I, 274). This suggests, then, that the genetic phenomenological inquiry is not interested in the Europeanness of mankind so much as in the humanness of Europe and, therefore, the human origin of philosophy. Although this does not lessen the angle of the problem discussed above regarding the seemingly imperialistic tendency of Western philosophy in general and, perhaps, of Husserl’s phenomenology in particular, it does nonetheless offer a different view by means of which it can be suggested that Husserl’s historico-genetic phenomenology is not simply destined to the Europeanization of mankind but it is interested in opening the doors of Europe and philosophy to its own original and pervading immemorial past. If phenomenology is an infinite inquiry guided by a reflective responsibility that aims to uncover all its previous naiveties, then surely the very question of philosophy must at some point be put under scrutiny. Only under this umbrella can the claim of transcendental phenomenology becoming the critical-historical reflection upon the origin of tradition and the re-active making of a whole new sense of tradition beyond the naiveties of objectivism and naturalism be taken seriously. CM, §63, 152/Hua I, 178. CM, §1, 1/Hua I, 43. CM, §2, 6/Hua I, 47–8. Edmund Husserl. ‘The Origin of Geometry’. In Crisis, Appendix VI, 371/Hua VI, Beilage III, 383. Elisabeth Ströker (1993). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology, 230. Hua XXVII (3rd article). Lilian Alweiss (2003). The World Unclaimed. 137. FTL, §105, 279/Hua XVII, 246 [Husserl’s emphasis]. FTL, §104, 276/Hua XVII, 244. Ibid. CM, §2, 6/Hua I, 47–8. See Husserl’s essay ‘Philosophy as Mankind’s Self-Reflection, Crisis’, Appendix IV, 340/Hua VI, 275. Rosemary R. P. Lerner (2004). ‘The Situation of the “Beginning Philosopher”: Dilemmas regarding First Philosophy and “first evidence” ’. In Proceedings of the Husserl Circle at Georgetown University. Georgetown, Washington: Academx, 183. Ibid. LI, Introduction, §7, 177/Hua XIX/1, 24. Rudolf Bernet (1979). ‘Perception as a Teleological Process of Cognition’, 131.

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Index

absolute consciousness 35, 85–6, 118–21, 125, 133, 135–42, 143, 193 abstraction 13, 37, 62, 63, 67, 74, 75, 185 affection 8, 153–60, 161–5 Alweiss, Lilian 86, 90, 113, 114, 135, 142, 150 analogy 43–5 apperception 47, 54, 156 appresentation 44, 128 association 43–5, 128, 130–4, 153–60 Bachelard, Suzanne 70, 185 Banham, Gary 182 belief (primary or original [Urglaube]) 54, 102–3, 152, 162–5, 183 Bernet, Rudolf 6, 54, 69, 115, 124, 160, 172 Birnbaum, Daniel 45, 191 body [Leiblichkeit] (and embodiment) 12–13, 37–45, 47, 126–31, 132–4, 137, 154, 180 Brainard, Marcus 70, 102 Brough, John B. 121, 193 Cartesianism 20–5, 36, 62, 80, 84–7, 90, 168, 177–8 Casey, Edward S. 54 constitution 4, 6, 11, 30, 33, 36, 39–40, 59, 64–5, 72, 75, 87, 98, 102, 105–6, 114–23, 147, 155, 157, 164–5 crisis 9–15, 169 Critchley, Simon 198 Derrida, Jacques 5, 6, 114, 119, 136–7, 146–7, 152, 175, 195, 198 Descartes, René 20–3, 35, 37–8, 48, 85–7, 169–70, 177, 180, 186

Dodd, James 129, 131, 193 dogmatism 3, 5, 16, 50, 77 Drummond, John J. 4, 98, 174, 177, 182, 183, 189 ego (pure) 6, 23, 24, 33, 36–45, 79–82, 88, 91, 103, 106, 128, 131, 134–7, 142–4, 148, 150, 154–8, 160, 162, 163, 165, 172, 178, 179, 180, 196 epoché 20–6, 29–33, 38, 48, 62, 97, 105, 196, 118, 173 ethical life 7, 14–20, 30, 49, 142, 150, 168, 172, 173 evidence 2–4, 25, 26, 30, 31, 65, 77, 80, 98, 103, 104, 105, 135, 137, 139, 146, 159, 165, 171–2 Fink, Eugene 168 formalism 119, 135–7, 138, 139, 152 freedom 1, 3, 4, 19, 48, 50, 57, 73, 77, 144, 172, 192 Galileo Galilei 10, 11, 22, 169 genesis 4, 6, 8, 31, 40, 42, 48, 49, 76, 78, 104, 105, 119, 125, 135–8, 140, 142, 147, 150–2, 163, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172 genetic phenomenology 4, 5, 6, 8, 23, 31, 40, 41, 42, 48, 88, 89–90, 103, 105, 119, 136, 137, 138, 152, 153, 162, 165–7, 171, 175, 199 givenness 2, 7, 25, 26, 39, 54, 60, 65, 69, 84, 86, 103, 107, 114, 116, 120, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 142, 147, 148, 151, 160, 166, 168, 172, 190, 195

208

Index

Heidegger, Martin 85, 190 Held, Klaus 86, 87 history 14, 40, 41, 48, 138, 165–6, 170, 198 Hodge, Joanna 69, 184 hylé 36, 96–9, 179 hyletic 36, 37, 38, 96–8, 111, 153, 154, 155, 188, 196

Kant, Immanuel

35

Idea in the Kantian Sense 66–72, 75–7, 88–9, 103, 142, 144–7, 149–53, 162, 184, 187, 195 idealization 12–13, 72–4, 76 ideation 63, 89, 144, 146, 147–51, 163, 187 imagination 45–6, 53–5, 57, 60, 62–3, 67, 72, 74, 83, 85, 115, 132, 183, 185 immanent or inner intuition 78, 83–90, 99, 103, 109, 143, 149, 183–4, 187, 191, immanent transcendence 26, 30, 35, 64 impression (primordial) 110–16, 120, 129, 143, 153, 156, 191 inner time-consciousness 7, 105, 117–18, 120, 123–6, 133–6, 138, 140, 142–3, 153, 159 institution 42–4, 47, 128 intentionality 6, 7, 8, 31, 36, 78, 87, 90–104, 105, 120, 121, 126, 127, 136, 138, 154, 156, 160–2, 166, 174, 189, 193 horizontal intentionality 121–6, 127, 130, 131, 152 transversal intentionality 121–6, 152 intersubjectivity 4, 6, 40–9, 134, 163–6, 180 intuition categorial intuition 58–66, 71, 75, 144, 145, 148, 183 eidetic intuition or intuition of essences 55–8, 60, 62, 64 Pure Intuition 71–6, 89, 146–50, 151–3, 163, 185, 187 universal intuition 74–5

Marion, Jean-Luc 85, 186, 190 meaning-intention 50, 56, 65, 68, 69–71, 76, 90, 145–7 meaningfulness 2–4, 9, 14–16, 20, 22, 25, 26, 31, 33, 47–9, 51, 55, 56, 60, 65, 69–71, 77, 80, 90, 92, 101, 103–4, 147 Melle, Ulrich 175 memory involuntary memory 158, 163 primary memory 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 121 secondary memory 114–17, 124, 191, 192 Mensch, James 151 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 92 Mohanty, J. N. 188 Mulligan, Kevin 51–4, 182–3

Lerner, Rosemary R. P. 172 Levinas, Emanuel 1, 5, 6, 56 limits (of phenomenology) 135–7 living-body [Leib] 12, 13, 38, 43, 45, 180 Lohmar, Dieter 52, 55, 63

Nabais, Nuno 102–3 naïvety 10, 22–6, 51, 53, 55, 77, 90, 141, 167–9, 172, 199 natural attitude 22, 32, 38 noema 36, 39, 68, 72, 74, 97, 98, 103, 154, 160, 174, 189, 196 noesis 154 ontology 29, 103, 142, 151, 152, 196 Other 4–7, 37, 40–9, 126–35 ownness 37–40, 49, 128–30, 133 pairing association 43–5, 130–2, 137 passive synthesis 6, 24, 39, 43, 117, 124, 125, 128, 129, 130, 132, 134, 137, 148, 163, 178 Patocˇka, Jan 30, 38, 151 perception 13, 29, 38–9, 50–5, 56, 58, 60–8, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78–85, 88, 89,

Index 97, 102, 107, 109–18, 120, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 134, 135, 142, 143, 144, 153, 155, 179, 180, 183, 187, 191, 192 phenomenological (intentional) explication 31, 40–2, 48, 152, 166–8, 172 Plato 29, 76, 170, 173, 179, 184 pre-phenomenal 118, 120, 122–3, 125, 139, 140, 141, 143, 145, 148 Pre-reflective 39, 84, 124–6, 130–2, 135–6, 140–3, 145, 148, 149, 151, 153, 163, 194, 195 Presentialization 46, 90, 129 presuppositionlessness (freedom from presuppositions) 1–8, 11, 14, 16, 12–20, 30–3, 39, 48–50, 65, 66, 76, 77, 104, 135, 147, 150, 166, 168, 171–2, 177 principle of principles 3, 5, 50, 76–7, 135, 147, 152, 165, 167, 171, 173 protention 88, 110–14, 116, 120, 132, 143, 153, 156, 162, 191–2 rationality 16, 23, 70–6, 89, 146–52, 163, 165, 177, 187 reduction (phenomenological/ transcendental) 31–40, 41, 42, 48, 78, 80–8, 90, 97–9, 103, 118, 123, 125, 140–1, 143, 150, 159, 166–9, 173, 174

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renewal 4, 5, 7, 14–20, 77, 166–7 responsibility 4–8, 1, 16–20, 48, 104, 138, 165, 171–3, 175, 190, 198, 199 Ricœur, Paul 38, 42, 47, 181 rigorous science 4, 5, 16, 18, 141, 176 Rodemeyer, Lanei 113 Saint Augustin 48 Sartre, Jean-Paul 92 Smith, A. D. 20, 32 Socrates 173, 198 Sokolowski, Robert 123, 124 static phenomenology 5, 41, 87, 97, 99, 103, 136, 141, 156, 165, 167, 168 Ströker, Elisabeth 19, 33, 168, 170 teleology 17–20, 69, 77, 138, 151, 170 telos 7, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 170–2 time associative time 131–5 inner time-consciousness 6–8, 82, 88, 105, 113, 117–19, 123–6, 133–7, 142, 153, 159 Welton, Donn 4, 36, 89, 90, 158, 162, 167, 174, 181 Zahavi, Dan

124, 126, 140, 141, 194