The new yearbook for phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy. Volume 17 9780429061158, 0429061153, 9780429588372, 0429588372, 9780429590313, 0429590318, 9780429592256, 0429592256

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The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XVII Part I: Phenomenology, Idealism, and Intersubjectivity: A Festschrift in Celebration of Dermot Moran’s Sixty-Fifth Birthday Part II: The Imagination: Kant’s Phenomenological Legacy Aim and Scope: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl’s groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer. Contributors: Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Lilian Alweiss, Timothy Burns, Steven Crowell, Maxime Doyon, Augustin Dumont, Richard Kearney, Mette Lebech, Samantha Matherne, Timothy Mooney, Thomas Nenon, Matthew Ratcliffe, Alessandro Salice, Daniele De Santis, Andrea Staiti, Anthony J. Steinbock, Michela Summa, Thomas Szanto, Emiliano Trizio, and Nicolas de Warren. Submissions: Manuscripts, prepared for blind review, should be submitted to the Editors ([email protected] and [email protected]) electronically via e-mail attachments. Timothy Burns is Clinical Professor of Philosophy in the Dougherty Family College at the University of Saint Thomas, Minnesota, USA. Thomas Szanto is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland; and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS), University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Alessandro Salice is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at University College Cork, Ireland. Maxime Doyon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Université de Montréal, Canada. Augustin Dumont is an Assistant Professor in German Philosophy at the Université de Montréal, Canada.

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy General Editors Burt Hopkins, Burt C. Hopkins, University of Lille, France John J. Drummond, Fordham University, United States

Founding Co-editor Steven Crowell, Rice University, United States

Contributing Editors Marcus Brainard, London, United Kingdom Ronald Bruzina, University of Kentucky, United States Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, United States Thomas Seebohm, Bonn, Germany Thomas Sheehan, Stanford University, United States

Consulting Editors Patrick Burke (Gonzaga University, Italy), Ivo de Gennaro (University of BozenBolzano, Italy), Nicholas de Warren (Pennsylvania State University, United States), James Dodd (The New School, United States), R. O. Elveton (Carleton College, United States), Parvis Emad (DePaul University, (Emeritus), United States), James G. Hart (Indiana University, United States), George Heffernan (Merrimack College, United States), Nam-In Lee (Seoul National University, Republic of Korea), Christian Lotz (Michigan State University, United States), Claudio Majolino (University of Lille, France), Dermot Moran (University College Dublin, Ireland), James Risser (Seattle University, United States), Michael Shim (California State University, Los Angeles, United States), Andrea Staiti (Boston College, United States), Panos Theodorou (University of Crete, Greece), Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann (University of Freiburg, Germany), Olav K. Wiegand (University of Mainz, Germany), Dan Zahavi (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Andrea Zhok (University of Milan, Italy)

Book Review Editor Molly Flynn, Assumption College, United States The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy is currently covered by the following indexing, abstracting and full-text services: Philosophy Research Index, International Philosophical Bibliography, The Philosopher’s Index. The views and opinions expressed in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board except where otherwise stated. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy is published annually by Routledge. More volumes in the series can be found on: www.routledge. com/New-Yearbook-for-Phenomenology-and-Phenomenological-Philosophy/ book-series/NYPPP

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XVII Part I: Phenomenology, Idealism, and Intersubjectivity: A Festschrift in Celebration of Dermot Moran’s Sixty-Fifth Birthday Part II: The Imagination: Kant’s Phenomenological Legacy Edited by Timothy Burns Thomas Szanto Alessandro Salice Maxime Doyon Augustin Dumont

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Timothy Burns, Thomas Szanto, Alessandro Salice, Maxime Doyon, and Augustin Dumont; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Timothy Burns, Thomas Szanto, Alessandro Salice, Maxime Doyon, and Augustin Dumont to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-18369-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-06115-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Notes on contributors

ix

PART I

Phenomenology, idealism, and intersubjectivity: a Festschrift in celebration of Dermot Moran’s sixty-fifth birthday

1

  1 Editors’ introduction

3

TIMOTHY BURNS, THOMAS SZANTO, AND ALESSANDRO SALICE

  2 Husserl’s account of action: naturalistic or anti-naturalistic? A journey through the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins

8

ANDREA STAITI

 3 Essence, eidos, and dialogue in Stein’s ‘Husserl and Aquinas. A Comparison’

22

METTE LEBECH

  4 Twenty-first-century phenomenology? Pursuing philosophy with and after Husserl

37

STEVEN CROWELL

  5 Merleau-Ponty and developing and coping reflectively

59

TIMOTHY MOONEY

  6 Grief and phantom limbs: A phenomenological comparison

77

MATTHEW RATCLIFFE

  7 Back to space

97

LILIAN ALWEISS

  8 Hating as contrary to loving ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK

113

vi  Contents

  9 Do arguments about subjective origins diminish the reality of the real?

134

THOMAS NENON

10 God making: An essay in theopoetic imagination

145

RICHARD KEARNEY

11 Husserl’s awakening to speech: Phenomenology as “Minor Philosophy”

161

NICOLAS DE WARREN

PART II

The imagination: Kant’s phenomenological legacy

175

12 Editors’ introduction

177

MAXIME DOYON AND AUGUSTIN DUMONT

13 Kant and Husserl on the (alleged) function of imagination in perception

180

MAXIME DOYON

14 Imagination and its critical dimension: Lived possibilities and an other kind of otherwise

204

ANDREEA SMARANDA ALDEA

15 The hidden art of understanding: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Kant’s theory of imagination

225

SAMANTHA MATHERNE

16 Are fictional emotions genuine and rational? Phenomenological reflections on a controversial question

246

MICHELA SUMMA

17 “Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität”: Remarks on Husserl on Kant’s Einbildungskraft and the idea of transcendental philosophy (with a note on Kurd Laßwitz)

268

DANIELE DE SANTIS

18 Imagination and indeterminacy: The problematic object in Kant and Husserl AUGUSTIN DUMONT

288

Contents  vii PART III

Varia307 19 Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics as the ultimate science of reality

309

EMILIANO TRIZIO

Index

331

Contributors

Andreea Smaranda Aldea is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kent State University. Prior to joining KSU, she was Lecturer in Philosophy and Postdoctoral Mellon Fellow at Dartmouth College (2012–2017). She received her Ph.D. in 2012 with a dissertation entitled ‘Phantasie and Philosophical Inquiry – Thinking with Edmund Husserl.’ Her dissertation explores the role of the imagination in Husserl’s transcendental eidetic method. Recent notable publications include a special issue of Continental Philosophy Review on the historical a priori in Husserl and Foucault (co-edited with Amy Allen, Penn State), as well as articles on the imagination, method, and critique in Continental Philosophy Review, Husserl Studies, Hegel Bulletin, and Axiomathes. Dr. Aldea is currently working on a monograph entitled Transcendental Phenomenology as Critique – Limits, Possibilities, and Beyond; she is also co-editing a special issue of Husserl Studies (with Julia Jansen, KU Leuven) on the imagination, modalities, and method. Lilian Alweiss is Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin where she has done extensive research in modern European philosophy with a special interest in phenomenology and the works of Kant and Wittgenstein. Topics addressed in the past include intentionality, non-existence, skepticism, and moral responsibility. She is also the author of the book The World Unclaimed: A Challenge to Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl and is currently working on a book, Self and Embodiment. Timothy Burns is Clinical Professor of Philosophy in the Dougherty Family College at the University of Saint Thomas, Minnesota. He received his doctorate in 2015 from University College Dublin. He has authored several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on issues of empathy, community, and communal experience within phenomenological philosophy. His work has appeared, among other places, in Human Studies, Phenomenology and Mind, The Humanistic Psychologist, the New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, and in multiple collected volumes dedicated to social phenomenology and the work of Edith Stein. He is currently preparing a monograph on the phenomenological writings of Edith Stein. Steven Crowell is the Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. He has authored numerous articles on phenomenology, as well as two books: Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (2013) and Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology (2001). He edited The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism

x  Contributors (2012) and, with Jeff Malpas, Transcendental Heidegger (2007). Currently he co-edits Husserl Studies with Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl. Maxime Doyon is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy of Université de Montréal. He earned his Ph.D. in 2009 from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. He works primarily in phenomenology and philosophy of perception. Augustin Dumont (1984) received his Ph.D. from the Université Saint-Louis–Bruxelles (Belgium) in 2011. He is currently Assistant Professor in German philosophy at the Université de Montréal (Canada) since 2015 and holder of the Canadian Research Chair in Transcendental Philosophy since 2016. He is most notably the author of L’opacité du sensible chez Fichte et Novalis. Théories et pratiques de l’imagination transcendantale à l’épreuve du langage (J. Millon, 2012) and De l’autre imprévu à l’autre impossible. Essais sur le romantisme allemand (LIT-Verlag, 2016). Richard Kearney holds the Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and is author of many books on modern European philosophy and literature. His books include Strangers, Gods and Monsters (2002), Anatheism (2009), Carnal Hermeneutics (2015), and The Wake of Imagination (1988). He is also a novelist and poet and Director of the international Guestbook Project. Mette Lebech holds degrees in philosophy from the universities of Copenhagen, Louvain-la-neuve, and Leuven, wherefrom she obtained her Ph.D. in 2005. She has been a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Maynooth, Ireland, since 1998. She has lectured and published widely on human dignity, friendship, various topics in bioethics, and the philosophy of Edith Stein. Her publications include On the Problem of Human Dignity. A Hermeneutical and Phenomenological Investigation (Köningshausen und Neumann, 2009), The Philosophy of Edith Stein: From Phenomenology to Metaphysics (Peter Lang, 2015), and, as co-editor with HannaBarbara Gerl-Falkovitz, Edith Steins Herausforderung heutiger Anthropologie (BeundBe Verlag, 2017). She is a past founding President of the International Association for the Study of the Philosophy of Edith Stein (IASPES). Samantha Matherne is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Riverside in 2013. Her primary research interests lie in exploring the relationship between perception and aesthetics in Kant and post-Kantian traditions, including phenomenology and neo-Kantianism. She is currently at work on a book on Kant’s theory of imagination. Timothy Mooney is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Philosophy at University College Dublin. He received his BA and MA from the National University of Ireland and his Ph.D. from the University of Essex. He co-edited The Phenomenology Reader with Dermot Moran (Routledge, 2002) and has authored a number of studies on phenomenology, deconstruction, and process philosophy. His major teaching and research interest is the phenomenological philosophy of embodiment, with particular reference to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Thomas Nenon is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. He worked as an editor at the Husserl Archives and as Instructor at the University of Freiburg before moving to the University

Contributors  xi of Memphis. His teaching and research interests include Husserl, Heidegger, Kant and German idealism, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of the social sciences. He has served as a review editor for Husserl Studies, as a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and as Director of the Center for Humanities at University of Memphis. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and has edited, authored, or co-authored multiple books in the field of phenomenology. Matthew Ratcliffe is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria. Most of his recent work addresses issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychiatry. He is author of Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (Palgrave, 2007), Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford University Press, 2008), Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World (MIT Press, 2017). Alessandro Salice is Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of University College Cork. Previously, Alessandro held postdoctoral positions at the University of Graz, University of Basel, University of Vienna, and at the Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen. His expertise stretches from classical accounts of collective intentionality and joint action to phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and moral psychology. Recently, Alessandro has edited The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality. History, Concepts, Problems (Springer, 2016), together with Hans Bernhard Schmid. Alessandro is co-editor of the Journal of Social Ontology. His papers have been published in several journals, including Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences, European Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Frontiers in Psychology, Topoi, and the International Journal of Social Robotics. Daniele De Santis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Charles University, Prague. He has published extensively on Husserl and phenomenology. He is the editor of Die idee ed essenze. Un dibattito su fenomenologia e ontologia (Milan, 2015). Andrea Staiti is the Rita Levi Montalcini Professor of Philosophy at the University of Parma (Italy) and Visiting Scholar at Boston College, where he formerly worked as an Associate Professor. He has published several articles and books on phenomenology, neo-Kantianism, the problem of naturalism, and personhood. Anthony J. Steinbock is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Phenomenology Research Center at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His many publications include Moral Emotions (Northwestern University Press, 2014), Phenomenology and Mysticism (Indiana University Press, 2007), Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Northwestern University Press, 1995), and the English translation of Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).

xii  Contributors Michela Summa is a Junior Professor for Theoretical Philosophy at Würzburg University. She earned her Ph.D. from KU Leuven and the University of Pavia and worked subsequently as a postdoc in Heidelberg and Würzburg. In the summer semester 2018, she was Guest Professor for Phenomenology and Hermeneutics at Kassel University. She is co-editor of the volume Imagination and Social Perspectives. Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology (Routledge, 2018) and author of Spatio-temporal Intertwining. Husserl’s Transcendental Aesthetic (Dordrecht, 2014), as well as of several articles and book chapters focusing mainly on the phenomenology of time, space, intersubjectivity, social experience, and imagination. Thomas Szanto is currently a Senior Researcher at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS) at the University of Copenhagen. In the past few years, he has held postdoctoral research positions at CFS and, before coming to Copenhagen, at University College Dublin, collaborating with Dermot Moran. His recent publications include the co-edited volumes The Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’ (Routledge, 2015) and The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Emotions (Routledge, forthcoming). His journal articles at the intersection of phenomenology, social cognition, social ontology, and the philosophy of emotions have appeared in Frontiers in Psychology, Human Studies, Midwest Studies of Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Philosophy Compass, and Synthese. Emiliano Trizio taught at the University of Paris Pantheon Sorbonne, at the University of Lille III, and at Seattle University. He is currently Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Nicolas de Warren is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. He is currently writing a book on forgiveness as well as a book on the impact of the First World War on German philosophy. He has most recently published Philosophers at the Front. Phenomenology and the First World War (Leuven University Press, 2018).

Part I Phenomenology, idealism, and intersubjectivity A Festschrift in celebration of Dermot Moran’s sixty-fifth birthday

1 Editors’ introduction Timothy Burns, Thomas Szanto, and Alessandro Salice

There’s an adage usually reserved for hosts of late night talk shows. It has even become the title of David Letterman’s most recent Netflix program, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. Chances are, if you’re reading this journal, Dermot Moran needs no introduction. Nevertheless, and because this is a Festschrift after all, an introduction and some recognition of his many accomplishments are in order. Dermot Moran was born in Stillorgan, County Dublin, Ireland in 1953. (We’re afraid that if someone publishes a Festschrift in celebration of your sixty-fifth birthday, there’s no keeping your age out of the matter.) He was educated at Oatlands College where he studied applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry in preparation for university. He was awarded the Higgins Gold Medal for Chemistry in 1968 and the Institute of Chemists of Ireland Gold Medal for Chemistry in 1970. He enrolled at University College Dublin (UCD) on an Entrance Scholarship to study languages and literature, and in 1973 he graduated with a Double First Class Honours Degree in English and Philosophy. Upon graduating from UCD he entered Yale University as the recipient of the Wilmarth Lewis Scholarship for graduate study. He accumulated a mere three degrees from Yale, graduating with an MA (1974), MPhil (1976), and PhD (1986) in philosophy. Moran returned to Ireland to teach philosophy. He held positions at Queen’s University Belfast and St. Patrick’s College Maynooth before he was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy (Metaphysics and Logic) at his alma mater in 1989. Presently, he is the inaugural holder of the Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy at Boston College, where he is also the Chairperson of the Department of Philosophy. He has held more visiting and distinguished professorships than it would be polite to name because we would inevitably leave one off the list. Moran is no slouch when it comes to service to the profession either. He is the founding editor of International Journal of Philosophical Studies, published by Routledge and still managed out of the philosophy department at UCD. He has been a member of the Governing Authority of University College Dublin since 2009. He served as Chairperson of the Programme Committee, Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP), from 2009 to 2013, and was elected President of the Executive Committee of the same in 2013. In 2018 he will preside over the XXIV World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing. He has, over the years, been on the steering committee or boards of dozens of philosophical societies from the Mind Association to the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. From 1982 to 2018 he convened eighteen major conferences worldwide. In 2012, in honor of his scholarship and outstanding academic career, the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), of which he has

4  Timothy Burns et al. been a member since 2003, granted him the highest honor it can bestow, the Gold Medal. He was the first philosopher to be granted this distinguished award, which “aim[s] to identify and recognise inspirational figures – the stars of the knowledge economy – to celebrate the achievements of higher education in Ireland and to inspire future generations.”1 There are more awards and distinctions that we could list, and there are numbers we could point out that might make a sane person’s head swim. He has been awarded more than fifteen major grants and fellowships for his research, which are cumulatively valued at over 1,000,000 euros. He has been the supervisor, member of dissertation committee, or external examiner for approximately fifty doctoral dissertations, including one member of this guest editorial team. He has mentored thirteen postdoctoral fellows, including the other two members of this guest editorial team. And in 2003 The Encyclopedia of Ireland included an entry on Dermot Moran. Moran’s Yale dissertation was entitled Nature and Mind in the Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study in Medieval Idealism. It is also in this regard that Moran’s career and record of scholarship stand out from the crowd. He is one of a few philosophers working today to have developed not just competencies but true specializations in at least two distinct eras in the history of philosophy and on both sides of the analytic–continental divide. He can count among his areas of expertise the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, existentialism, and medieval philosophy – especially the Christian Neoplatonism of Eriugena, Eckhart, and Cusanus. Thus, in choosing the theme for this Festschrift, we had our work cut out for us. We settled on three motifs that have permeated Dermot’s work from its inception and continue to motivate it today: phenomenology, idealism, and intersubjectivity. Accordingly, the contributors of this volume – all of whom have crossed academic paths with Moran at various stages of their careers and have intensively collaborated with him on multiple occasions, engage with one or more of these core motifs, while some explicitly reflect on Moran’s take on them in his publications. In their methodological and thematic orientation, they aptly reflect, we believe, both the breadth and depth of Moran’s philosophical outlook. Andrea Staiti’s (University of Parma) contribution to this volume engages with Moran’s 2014 article, “Defending the Transcendental Attitude: Husserl’s Concept of the Person and the Challenges of Naturalism.” In so doing, Staiti seeks to clarify in what sense Husserl’s account of action is correctly described as anti-naturalistic. His article presents and assesses Husserl’s account of action as found in the forthcoming and much anticipated Husserliana publication of Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. He argues that Husserl’s description of action charts a course between an anti-naturalistic construal of action as non-reducible to natural causality, and a broadly naturalistic refusal to assign to actions a non-natural cause. After presenting what he describes as the “anatomy of action” for Husserl, Staiti offers a description of the subtle interplay of passivity and activity for the constitution of deliberate, goal-oriented actions. In closing, he argues that contemporary debates over free will can learn an important lesson from a Husserlian account of action. Husserl redirects our attention from the question of the position of actions within nature to the question of the position of actions within consciousness. Hence, as Staiti puts it, “The pressing

1 The Royal Irish Academy. “Gold Medal Award Ceremony.” www.ria.ie/news/grants-andawards-gold-medals/gold-medal-award-ceremony. Accessed 10 April 2018.

Editors’ introduction  5 philosophical issue is . . . no longer the ontological status of actions in a uniformly deterministic nature, but rather the ontological status of the body as the locus of freedom within the nexus of nature.” Mette Lebech’s (National University of Ireland, Maynooth) contribution to the present Festschrift draws from another Festschrift published some eighty-nine years previously, the 1929 edition of Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (notably the historical forerunner of the present journal), which was issued in celebration of Husserl’s seventieth birthday (albeit belatedly because of difficulty in procuring funding). Lebech’s article works at the intersection of our themes of phenomenology and intersubjectivity in her analyses of Edith Stein’s understanding of essence and eidos and offers an eidetic analysis of the intersubjective occurrence of dialogue. Steven Crowell’s (Rice University) article, “Twenty-First-Century Phenomenology? Pursuing Philosophy with and after Husserl,” is another of our contributions that directly engages Moran’s work. Crowell turns to Moran’s Introduction to Phenomenology, which paints the philosophical movement as inextricably tied to the twentieth century and as both a brilliant breakthrough and as a fractured movement with an uncertain future. Crowell attempts to “extricate” phenomenology from the twentieth century in order to see what a twenty-first-century phenomenology might look like. He suggests the return of transcendental phenomenology, and in so doing he rejects the “story” of twentieth-century phenomenology that Moran’s Introduction offers, especially its reading of Heidegger’s rejection of Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Crowell offers, alternatively, a transcendental reading of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein that he argues can resolve a paradox that arises at the very heart of Husserlian phenomenology. Ultimately, Crowell suggests that twenty-first-century phenomenology ought to return to transcendental phenomenology and embrace as our own the “ultimate philosophical self-responsibility” that phenomenology proffers when it is understood as seeking the clarification of meaning, carried out on the basis of evidence that each of us can produce for him or herself. In his contribution, Tim Mooney (University College Dublin) considers Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and habitual movement in relation to Hubert Dreyfus’s account of skilled coping. At issue is the question of whether reflection and conceptual contents completely drop out of the picture when one is fully engaged in episodes of skilled coping. According to Mooney, Merleau-Ponty affirms that everyday reflection, with its objectifications and analyses and syntheses, is integral to a developed perceptual life. Acquired skills help open up the space for the reflective activities in which we take a distance, as subjects, from the things in our environment taken as standing against us. Together with language, our habitualized bodies allow for the explicit recognition of objects and the thematic investigation of their properties; the cognitive stage of awareness is both the outcome and the ultimate destination of an integrated process of human perceptual development. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of objective thought nonetheless ensues in a dissociation of reflection from the skillfully acting body. Having characterized all reflections on the body as variants of objective thought which involve a departure from the world of practical engagements, he passes over the contribution some of them make to coping in the flow. Merleau-Ponty’s position thus appears closer to Dreyfus’s account than other commentators are ready to admit. This problem is surmountable though, since elsewhere he points toward a more balanced view of engaged perception that could accommodate what Mooney describes

6  Timothy Burns et al. as “little reflections” – small episodes of reflective thought that arise in response to situations of resistance which do not threaten to send skillful acting completely off the rails. In “Grief and Phantom Limbs: A Phenomenological Comparison,” Matthew Ratcliffe (University of Vienna) makes the case that grieving over the loss of a loved one and the experience of losing a limb of one’s own body are structurally similar in a number of important ways. Another person, he argues, can come to shape how we experience and engage with our surroundings in a way that resembles the contribution of our own bodily capacities and dispositions. Ratcliffe maintains that the boundary between the experience-shaping contribution of bodily capacities and the contribution made by potential, anticipated, and actual relations with another person is blurred. In other words, the boundaries between bodily and interpersonal experience are indistinct. Though there are important physiological, neurobiological, and indeed phenomenological differences between the two experiences, they are importantly similar. When I lose a loved one, something that was previously integral to my ability to experience and engage with the world, to perceive things in structured ways that reflect a coherent system of projects, cares, concerns, and abilities, is now absent. Comparisons between bereavement and losing part of one’s body are not mere analogies that convey the closeness of a relationship. The two phenomena are structurally isomorphic in a number of important respects. These serve to illustrate how the habitually taken for granted world is shaped by one’s bodily capacities, one’s projects, and one’s relations with other people in a unified way. Lilian Alweiss (Trinity College Dublin), like Mooney and Ratcliffe, discusses the phenomenology of embodiment in her article, “Back to Space.” The targets of her argument, however, are interpreters of Husserl’s account of embodiment – in particular Edward Casey – that read it in such a way as to reduce our understanding of space to place. While the tradition of modern philosophy and science holds that place merely “takes up space,” insofar as any representation of spatial relations or positions can only be determined within one absolute and infinite space, the claim now is that phenomenology reveals the opposite: space is not an infinite given magnitude in which bodies can be located and through which bodies can move, but space is a system of relations holding between things. Places taken together make up space. Alweiss argues that this is a misunderstanding of Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment in light of a proper account of the relationship between place and space. Rather, she argues, first, that an appeal to embodiment does not question the priority of space. Second, she argues that Husserl’s aim is not to question our scientific conception of space but to show that there is a conceptual continuity between intuitive and geometrical conceptions of space that has been severed by the modern outlook. Anthony J. Steinbock (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) turns our attention to two intersubjective acts within the affective sphere in his article, “Hating as Contrary to Loving.” Steinbock’s concern can be expressed in a few short questions: What is the relation of hating to loving? Are the two acts coeval? Do they stand in a dialectical relation? Or instead, is hating founded in loving, and if so, in what way or ways? Steinbock begins with a consideration of how and where the phenomenological problem of hating emerges. Loving and hating, like some other emotions discussed in his book Moral Emotions, belong to the sphere of revelation or revelatory givenness. In this regard, the descriptions of loving and hating are primarily in service of articulating the phenomena of vocations and exemplarity as modes of personal revelation.

Editors’ introduction  7 It is within this framework that he investigates the relation between loving and hating and will ultimately suggest how hating is founded in loving. After establishing the context in which hating emerges and after describing some of its essential characteristics, he focuses on the question of whether there is a symmetry between loving and hating, as for example between liking and disliking. Or is there a dialectical relation, or even a relation of co-primordiality at work between these two emotions? Against all of these options, Steinbock argues that loving and hating are not coeval or parallel movements, and further, that hating is founded in loving as a movement that is contrary to loving. The movement of hating gets its bearer-of-value-feed, as it were, from loving. In hating, one closes down or is destructive of what can appear as value, negating or diminishing “from” the movement of loving, which is a revealing-revealed movement. This means, then, that when one hates one has to do so already within the ongoing movement of loving. Thomas Nenon’s (University of Memphis) article, “Do Arguments about Subjective Origins Diminish the Reality of the Real?” reviews criticisms that Tom Sparrow and Quentin Meillassoux, from the so-called “speculative realism” camp, level against transcendental philosophy in general and phenomenology in particular. Of specific concern is the allegation of “correlationism,” a philosophical approach that insists on “the irreducibility of subject and object, thinking and being.” Against this, Nenon argues that correlationism, as a criticism of phenomenology, falls flat for want of understanding the transcendental tradition. Furthermore, he asserts that it does not accurately describe the phenomenological project, or any philosopher since before Kant. “God Making: An Essay in Theopoetic Imagination” by Richard Kearney (Boston College) revisits the concept of theopoetics as a divine becoming human and human becoming divine. It develops an “anatheist” reading of poetic re-creation (God after God) in terms of theopoetic imagination in Western philosophy, literature, and culture. It then applies this hermeneutic reading to the contemporary art work of Irish artist Sheila Gallagher. Nicolas de Warren’s essay, “Husserl’s Awakening to Speech: Phenomenology as ‘Minor Philosophy,’ ” outlines a novel way of approaching, reading, and writing about Husserl’s texts. de Warren argues that, although Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy is seldom considered from either the point of its materiality in language or as a form of discourse, Husserl did conceive of his thinking as requiring an original form of writing and of fashioning philosophical discourse. When one approaches Husserl’s oeuvre from this perspective, his phenomenology can be seen as a type of “Minor Philosophy,” by which the author means, a type of doing philosophy that struggles to create novel philosophical concepts within established – inherited and institutionalized – dominant languages of philosophy. All these contributions, directly or indirectly, touch on the work of Dermot Moran, thereby once again showing how rich and insightful his philosophical production has been. We dedicate this special issue to him as a sign of our gratitude and admiration. We wish him many more years of health and passionate engagement with the philosophical community.

2 Husserl’s account of action: naturalistic or anti-naturalistic? A journey through the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins Andrea Staiti1 Abstract: My goal in this paper is to present and assess Husserl’s account of action in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. I argue that Husserl’s phenomenological description strikes a unique balance between an anti-naturalistic construal of action as non-reducible to natural causality, and a broadly naturalistic refusal to assign to actions a non-natural cause like ‘the will.’ After discussing Husserl’s definition of actions, I present Husserl’s anatomy of an action, which can be simple or composite and, accordingly, break down into a primary and a secondary component. In the third part I turn to consider the living body as the source of actions, and I offer a description of the subtle interplay of passivity and activity for the constitution of deliberate, goal-oriented actions. I conclude with some remarks about the philosophical lesson that we can learn about the problem of free will from these analyses. Keywords: Husserl, action, naturalism, freedom, body

Introduction In a recent paper titled “Defending the Transcendental Attitude: Husserl’s Concept of the Person and the Challenges of Naturalism” Dermot Moran writes that: “[t]he phenomenological tradition recognizes persons as embodied, intentional meaning-making historical beings, embedded in social contexts and acting on the basis of motivation rather than causation” (Moran 2014, 43). In particular, with regard to Husserl, Moran emphasizes that: “his approach to the person is resolutely anti-naturalist” (Moran 2014, 47). Assuming that a characteristic trait of persons is agency, and granted that, as Moran contends, “his approach to the person is resolutely anti-naturalist,” it might seem obvious that Husserl defends an anti-naturalistic view of action. What that means exactly, however, is far from obvious. An anti-naturalistic view of action

1 I have presented earlier versions of this paper at Boston College, University College Dublin, the University of Crete, the University of Roma Tre, and the University of Parma. I would like to thank all those who gave me feedback and helped me improve the paper. I had the opportunity to read ample sections of the Studien at the Husserl Archive of the University of Cologne thanks to a generous fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. Let me add a word of thanks to Ullrich Melle, Thomas Vongehr, and Andrea Cimino for allowing me to include references to the forthcoming volume of Husserliana where the Studien will be published.

Husserl’s account of action  9 could be construed as the belief that actions are special, non-natural events whose occurrence somehow breaks the chain of natural causality. Or else it could amount to the view that actions exist in a noumenal realm and only have indirect effects in the world. Talk of motivation rather than causation, as Moran writes in the above quote, could be wrongly taken to mean that actions, unlike all other happenings in the universe, do not, in any respect, stand under the laws of nature, or that actions are simply un-caused – a claim that would be at odds with Husserl’s talk of “motivational causality” (Husserl 1989, 227, my emphasis) as the nomological principle of the personalistic world of culture.2 In sum, granted that Husserl’s view of action is and has to be, in some sense, anti-naturalistic, it is imperative to spell out what is distinctive about Husserl’s anti-naturalism. In this paper I attempt to show that Husserl’s antinaturalistic approach to action is distinctive in that it also accommodates a number of intuitions and desiderata that are nonetheless compatible with a contemporary naturalistic agenda. In other words, for Husserl, although they happen within the nexus of nature and they are constrained by empirical-natural causality, actions are sui generis events that cannot be construed as the necessary effect of some cause, be it a natural antecedent or a non-natural cause like an immaterial ‘will.’ Husserl’s analysis of action thus (surprisingly!) resonates with Gilbert Ryle’s famous rejection of volitionism, i.e., the view that actions are the causal consequences of purely mental events called ‘willings’ (see Ryle 2000, 63), and with recent naturalist proclamations that: “There is no such thing as ‘will’ ” (Flanagan, Sarkissian and Wong 2017, 23). By placing Husserl’s analysis of action within the context of the naturalism dispute, I hope to provide further detail and nuance to Moran’s perceptive statements about phenomenology in general and Husserl in particular. For this purpose I will draw primarily on a set of recently edited texts from Husserl’s Nachlass that are part of a voluminous body of materials assembled under the heading Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. The editorial history of the Studien is complex and I will not attempt to reconstruct it here. Suffice it to say that the Studien are a set of writings spanning the decade 1909–1920 and devoted to what Husserl calls an un-philosophical phenomenology, that is, a descriptive-psychological phenomenology geared toward a classification and interpretation of basic conscious phenomena prior to any direct consideration of the traditional problems of philosophy.3 This paper is divided into three parts. In the first part, I present Husserl’s phenomenological classification of actions. In the second part, I turn to Husserl’s discussion of practical possibilities and what I call the ‘anatomy’ of an action. Actions can be simple or composite and, accordingly, break down into a primary and a secondary component. In the third part, I turn to consider the living body as the native soil of agency, and I offer a description of the subtle interplay of passivity and activity for the constitution of deliberate, goal-oriented actions. I conclude with some remarks about the philosophical lesson that we can learn about the problem of free will. Before turning to the concrete phenomenological analyses let me remark that the purportedly un-philosophical character of the Studien should not mislead us

2 For a more thorough discussion of this point see Staiti (2014, 214–219). 3 For a more detailed description of the Studien and their editorial history see Melle 2014.

10  Andrea Staiti into thinking that they are philosophically irrelevant. On the contrary, Husserl follows here his characteristic tendency to suspend the terms in which philosophical problems are formulated by the tradition in order to examine the very presuppositions that underlie received formulations. The traditional problem ‘haunting’ Husserl’s analyses of action in the Studien is the freedom of the will; however, rather than taking sides for one of the customary alternatives (determinism, indeterminism, compatibilism, etc.) Husserl resorts to phenomenological descriptions to re-frame the problem. As I mentioned above, Husserl’s phenomenological description questions the very idea of construing action as the effect of some natural cause. Thus, Husserl’s account of action is certainly anti-naturalistic, but it is also incompatible with ghost-in-the-machine volitionist conceptions, since it disputes the very causal framework that is common to both naturalistic and volitionist conceptions of ‘the will.’4

1.  The scope of action One of the main themes in the Studien is agency. In particular, Husserl endeavors to provide what we could call the ‘anatomy’ of an action. What are the essential components of an action (assuming that actions have a mereological structure)? How do actions differ from other law-governed happenings in nature? What is the relationship between ‘the will’ and individually occurring actions? The first step to begin approaching these questions is to tentatively define what an action is. This is not just a matter of fixing one’s terminology. It is rather a matter of descriptive psychology, namely, clarifying what we mean by ‘action’ by way of pointing toward a delimited class of subjective acts that share some essential characteristics. One view that is variously represented in the history of philosophy distinguishes actions from other kinds of movements that are ascribable to the subject in terms of deliberation and choice. Let us take as a representative example Rudolf Hermann Lotze, a leading figure in nineteenth-century German philosophy whose influence on Husserl is still largely underappreciated.5 Lotze writes in his Outlines of Practical Philosophy (1885): “We [. . .] restrict the term ‘action’ (Handlung) to those cases in which an idea (Vorstellung) of different possible modes of action, further, an idea of their different value, and, finally, a decision between them, have preceded; the last of which we attribute [. . .] to the free determination of our will” (Lotze 1885, 25, translation modified). Hence, on Lotze’s account, only a tiny fraction of the movements we initiate and carry out qualify as actions. Not only is an explicit decision necessary in order for a movement to count as an action, we also need to have considered and rejected other possible courses of actions after pondering their respective value. A diametrically opposed view would hold that since we are agents, we somehow act all the time; that is, the presence of deliberation and choice is not necessary in order for a movement to count an action. In fact, most of the movements we carry out are non-deliberated and they stem from our involvement, or, as Heideggerians would put it, skillful coping in

4 This aspect of Husserl’s analysis is not taken into consideration in the sparse relevant literature on the phenomenology of agency, such as Melle (1997). 5 See Staiti (2016) for discussions of Lotze’s influence on Husserl.

Husserl’s account of action  11 a meaningful environment, rather than resulting from our envisioning and evaluating a set of possibilities, as Lotze would have it. Where does Husserl stand within the spectrum between these two opposites? In his recent book Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger Steven Crowell argues that while acknowledging the existence of meaning-governed movements that do not follow deliberation, Husserl favors deliberative agency and thus takes the kind of intentionality characterizing consciously chosen actions to be at work also in non-deliberated actions. In Crowell’s words: “The key to Husserl’s analysis of willing is his claim that intention-in-action has the same categorial structure as decision-will” (Crowell 2013, 264).6 By contrast: “What is needed is an approach to the categorial structure of action that arises from the description of non-deliberated action” (Crowell 2013, 267). Crowell is right that in Husserl’s lectures on ethics there is a kind of primacy of deliberated action, which sets the criteria for agency as such. One of the interesting aspects of the Studien, however, is precisely the attenuation of that primacy. Here, for example, Husserl invokes the analogy between different operations of consciousness and claims that in the same way in which not all judgments involve affirmation or negation, but rather can be simple judgments, not all actions necessarily involve decision.7 There has to be something like a “simple willing” that does not involve decision (Hua XLIII/3, 35). Hence, Husserl’s classification of action in the Studien is much more inclusive than Lotze’s. It is not, however, as inclusive as to include all kinds of volitional movements. One element remains constant: Husserl never gives up the description of actions as founded acts (Hua XLIII/3, 24). In other words, in order for a volitional movement to count as an action there has to be something that I want to happen in the world and, correspondingly, a presentation of the event that my action is meant to bring about. The presentation does not need to be entertained as a separate, purely contemplative act, although that does happen, for instance, when we are trying to do something very difficult and we first pause to deliberately contemplate our goal and figure out how to achieve it. The presence of a presentation intentionally directed toward a definite event is the descriptive criterion invoked by Husserl to mark the difference between actions and other volitional movements. Scratching an itch, for instance, is definitely a volitional movement but it is not typically and necessarily accompanied by a definite presentation of some event that I want to happen in

6 Note that ‘intention-in-action’ is a phrase stemming from John Searle and deliberately borrowed by Crowell to characterize Husserl’s view. 7 I cannot delve into the details of Husserl’s complex theory of judgment here. Husserl’s point, in short, is that the basic function of judgment is to constitute state-of-affairs and that affirmation or negation are higher-order stances on state-of-affairs that have already been constituted and are proposed to the subject for consideration. For instance: if I am seeing a brown table and I judge ‘the table is brown,’ I am not affirming or denying anything. The assertive (behauptende) mode of the judgment is not a form of affirmation (Zustimmung) on par with and alternative to negation (Ablehnung). Rather, it is the basic doxic mode of belief in which all perceptual and judgmental activity occurs. If I am considering the state-of-affairs evoked by the judgment ‘the table is brown’ and, subsequently, after actually seeing (or failing to see) the brown table, I give (or deny) my assent, in addition to judging I am affirming (or denying) that which the judgment posited, i.e., the judgment’s Satz (‘positum’) as presenting the stateof-affairs in question. For a thorough discussion of Husserl’s theory of judgment see Staiti 2015 and Staiti 2017.

12  Andrea Staiti the world. Similarly, reaching for my water bottle and taking a sip while typing up a paper is a complex volitional movement that involves at least control over my body and awareness of unpleasant feelings like thirst. Nonetheless, it is a categorially different movement from the decision to interrupt my writing, stand up, and go get a bottle of water from the fridge. This second kind of movement has a beginning and an end. Both are presented as such and guide the whole execution of the necessary steps. It can happen as a simple willing, i.e., there is no need for a solemn decision following a previous act of deliberation, as it might be the case, for example, when I first wonder whether I am really that thirsty to justify interrupting the flow of my work. What is the difference between the first and the second movement, i.e., between taking a sip from my water bottle and interrupting my work to go get water from the fridge? Phenomenologically, the difference is between a movement that is fully integrated in the ongoing flow of my life, without having definite boundaries, and a movement that has been consciously initiated, that can be isolated and described as such and that is founded in a presentation of the event that I want to happen in the world. To use a key Husserlian distinction, what we have when we interrupt our work to go get water is a sort of attentional or attitudinal change, i.e., a change in the “archontic” or “ruling thesis” (Husserl 2014, 261). In the first form of movement, the activity is subordinated to the overarching action of writing, whereas in the second form of movement this overarching project is temporarily suspended or inhibited, and the ruling project is getting water from the fridge.8 It is important to notice, however, that this second kind of movement is not necessarily deliberated in Lotze’s sense, i.e., it does not need to follow a consideration of other courses of action and a solemn moment of decision. I can simply interrupt my work, stand up, and go get water. Unlike the situation where I just take a sip from a bottle that is already there, and the ‘archontic thesis’ is still writing a paper, the interruption of my previous activity does involve a moment of decision, but Husserl is painstaking in distinguishing this kind of fiat (so be it!) from the second-order decision following a foregoing intent that has been formed and contemplated as such, but whose realization was deliberately postponed. The fiat in a simple act of willing is merely a “differential,” which is “immediately modified in a creative will” (Hua XLIII/3, 36). By contrast, if while working I explicitly formulate to myself the intent (Vorsatz) ‘I will go get water in half an hour,’ what I experience is an “empty, un-fulfilled volitional striving” (Hua XLIII/3, 37), of which my future action constitutes the corresponding fulfillment. Nothing in the Studien suggests that the intentionality of deliberated action as the fulfillment of a foregoing intent provides the categorial structure for simple willings, given that the fiat does not constitute an empty intention of its own that the action will eventually fulfill. By contrast the intentionality of simple willings is straightforwardly directed toward the state-of-affairs that I want to happen in the world and the fiat, as a non-independent moment of volitional intentionality, marks the distinction from a mere hope or wish, where I do not commit to being the one who is going to bring about the state-of-affairs at stake.9

8 My gratitude to an anonymous referee for this point. 9 As an anonymous referee pointed out to me, Husserl’s conception of fiat comes close to contemporary discussions of trying in the philosophy of action, which does not need to amount to a distinct mental activity preceding and possibly ‘causing’ the action. Since I am not familiar

Husserl’s account of action  13 Hence, at a minimum, an action is distinct from other classes of volitional movements by the fact that it introduces an interruption in the ongoing flow of life and that it is guided by a presentation of a state-of-affairs that (1) I want to happen in the world and (2) whose happening I want to bring about myself. The state-of-affairs in question does not need to be presented in a separate, contemplative presentation and the fiat that marks the interruption as well as the commitment to bringing about the state-of-affairs in question does not need to happen as a solemn decision, as is the case when I set out to do something that I previously established as one of my intents. Husserl’s classification of actions is thus much more liberal than Lotze’s, but it is not as liberal as to include all movements that persons as agents carry out in the world, and it certainly does not include cases of so-called ‘skillful coping.’ To be sure, ‘building a cupboard’ is an action by Husserlian standards. In order to build a cupboard I must interrupt whatever I was doing before (I cannot build a cupboard in passing or ‘on the side’ while actually doing something else!), I must have some founding presentation of the realized cupboard, and I must commit to being the one building it (fiat). Skillfully working with a hammer in order to build a cupboard, if by that we mean the actual hammer strokes considered as movements in their own right, is not an action, but a kind of volitional, and yet subordinated movement in the overarching project of building a cupboard. The overarching action of building a cupboard does not consist of single hammer strokes as micro-actions. The single hammer strokes are necessary components of the actual action ‘building a cupboard,’ but they are not actions in their own right. Theorists of skillful coping have traditionally focused on movements such as hammer strokes, tennis shots, and the like, and they rightly pointed out that they must be analyzed in terms of meaning and normativity even though they are not deliberated movements driven by conscious representations. As we will see in the third part, something akin to skillful coping, i.e., the play of our involuntary and yet fully volitional and meaning-laden bodily movements, has a key function for the constitution of actions; however, such movements are not themselves actions, and hence they should be kept phenomenologically distinct from actions. Given this understanding of action and the three elements outlined above (interruption viz. change in archontic thesis, founding presentation, commitment viz. fiat), what is it that marks the difference between state-of-affairs that I can actually want to bring about and state-of-affairs that I can merely hope for? In other words, what is the criterion to identify processes in the world as good candidates to become my own actions? In order to answer these questions we need to turn to Husserl’s analysis of the relationship between actions and practical possibilities.

2.  Actions and practical possibilities Husserl begins his analysis with the relatively uncontroversial claim that “The ‘I will’ entails the ‘I can’ ” (Hua XLIII/3, 1). But how is that entailment to be understood?

with this literature, I will not address it here; however, I hope to be able to write more extensively on these issues in future work.

14  Andrea Staiti Does it mean that “I have the preliminary conviction that the event that I will eventually call ‘my deed’ will occur as a causal consequence of my fiat” (ibid.)? In order to initiate an action I necessarily need to have some consciousness of the process that the action is meant to actualize. This process (for instance, moving a pen from A to B) must be conscious as empirically possible. The limits of this possibility are dictated by the empirical nexus of nature in which the process is expected to occur. For example, I can imagine to knock down a building with my bare hands. I can have a vivid fantasy of that action. However, I cannot seriously issue my fiat (‘so be it!’) and set out to initiate the process as an action because I am aware of the empirical limits that make the success of the process impossible. Husserl is adamant that: “every physical process belongs in such unities of motivational becoming and every action is also a physical process, standing under laws and peculiarities of physical processes” (Hua XLIII/3, 3). In this picture, one could imagine the work of the will as one of ‘intervention,’ i.e., the will ‘intervenes’ in the nexus of physical nature by giving an ‘impulse,’ which then initiates a chain of purely physical/natural events; however, this description would be phenomenologically problematic. When I decide, for instance to kick the ball in order to give a certain direction to it, to make it fly into the net, it is the whole movement of my leg that has to be described as ‘voluntary,’ and not just a mere impulse, of which the leg-movement would be a mere ‘causal’ appendage. If I consider the whole action, i.e., for instance, trying to score a goal in a soccer game, then there is a significant phenomenological difference between the two segments of the action, i.e., (1) from leg-movement to kick and (2) from kick to ball in the net. The whole process can be legitimately characterized as an action, because the physical event under consideration would not have occurred (the ball would not be in the net at the end of the process) if I hadn’t decided to initiate it. But while segment (2) is a mere physical-natural event that could have occurred also under other circumstances (a gust of wind could have moved my leg and made it hit the ball appropriately), segment (1) is, in Husserl’s terminology, the ‘primary action’ or the ‘creative action,’ the one that carries the property of ‘voluntariness’ in the eminent sense. This distinction leads Husserl to demarcate sharply the natural-causal component from the voluntary component of an action. While actions do have causal consequences in the world and they always occur also as physical events standing under natural laws, the initiation of an action cannot be described as a form of causation, in which something called ‘the will’ would ‘cause’ the action, in the same sense in which the kick ‘causes’ the ball to fly into the net.10 Here is how Husserl summarizes the distinction: The ‘if I want, I can’ pertains to the action both in its creative and in its secondary segments. If I want, I can raise the hand, sing a tune, etc., but I can also get that man over there to stand up (through my call) and such mediate consequences. And

10 As an anonymous referee pointed out in her/his comments, it would also be possible to cause the leg movement in (1) by inserting an electrode into the player’s brain. That is definitely true; however, just like the case in which the leg movement is caused by a gust of wind, we would simply not regard the whole process as an action, but as a natural event. Actions occur when the movement in (1) is experienced and apprehended as creative in Husserl’s sense, i.e., as something that cannot be construed as merely the causal consequence of some foregoing natural event.

Husserl’s account of action  15 how about ‘causation’? If I carry out the call, the consequence occurs secondarily; if I hit with the cue in such and such a way, the ball rolls to the corner of the billiard table, etc. These are empirically necessary consequences, that is, they are conditioned merely as natural consequences (empirical consequences in nature), through the hit, etc. As far as the primary action, the creative action is concerned, however, it may or may not be conditioned in whatever way according to natural necessity. From a phenomenological point of view, it does not manifest itself as a merely physical consequence of another process. By contrast, the primary action is creative and voluntary. (Hua XLIII/3, 5) These remarks entail a few interesting phenomenological insights. Husserl has criticized the view of the will as a causal ‘source’ of actions. According to this view, the will is a point-like source of inputs that initiate causal processes in the natural world. By contrast, for Husserl ‘will’ does not name the hidden source of actions, but rather the ‘extensional’ property of certain processes in the world, i.e., a characteristic that is spread over the whole action in each of its phases. For precisely this reason, actions must be carefully analyzed in terms of the primary/creative segment, which is the one that carries the original-creative voluntary force of the action, and the ensuing segments that are merely caused (in the empirical-natural sense) by the primary action. Causation describes well the relationship between the primary/ creative segment and the secondary segments but it does not describe well the way in which the primary/creative segment comes about in the first place. Perhaps the tendency to interpret actions as causal events depends on the tendency to extend the internal causal link between primary and secondary segment in a composite action to the action as a whole, including the primary/creative segment; however, closer scrutiny reveals that the experiential conditions to subsume an action as a whole under the category ‘natural event’ are missing. One could say that the intention ‘natural event’ is only partially fulfilled by the intuitive experience of an action. In other words, an action is definitely an event, and an event that happens in the nexus of nature, but it is not an event that is experienced as caused by an antecedent factor, thus violating the condition for direct apprehension in terms of natural causality. Husserl writes: The action appears, the will objectifies itself in it, but not in such a way as if an empirical relation between will and happening in terms of empirical necessity appeared . . . this is not an event apprehended in objective terms, to which another event follows in an empirically necessary fashion. (Hua XLIII/3, 48) Once this phenomenological difference has been clarified, Husserl still has to explain why, then, a causal apprehension of the relationship between will and action is nonetheless possible, in other words, why we tend to objectify the creative upwelling of the action in an antecedent cause. This possibility must be granted, otherwise it would be inexplicable why the tendency to interpret actions as causally dependent from something called ‘the will’ is so widely spread. Husserl’s answer is that the causal apprehension of actions is a matter of reflective ‘distortion.’ In other words, “it is possible to implement a gaze of intellectual reflection and thereby a positing of being, in which

16  Andrea Staiti ‘the will’ is posited . . . but this is not the stance that we take in volitions and in the production of the action” (Hua XLIII/3, 55). Another important consideration to explain our tendency to posit an antecedent cause (be it natural or non-natural) is the rise of the idea of all-encompassing determinism in modern science. According to this idea every event has a cause and the whole universe is a causally closed system of events that are necessarily generated by antecedent causes. Motivated by this idea, we feel a certain kind of intellectual discomfort to resist a causal construal of actions. Husserlian phenomenology can help alleviate such intellectual discomfort by pointing out that all-encompassing causality is an idea and that it has the status of a scientific “hypothesis” (Husserl 1970, 42), as Husserl’s puts it in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, rather than a hard fact. The world of experience does have a “causal style” (Husserl 1970, 31), i.e., we directly experience the dependence of a thing’s state from the foregoing and concurrent circumstances, but this kind of causality is not a rigid deterministic system. It leaves room for chance and for the unexpected. In a manuscript, Husserl writes on this point: “In this context, chance does not mean unknown causality, but rather an irruption that is not motivated by the circumstances” (Husserl 2012, 310). Thus, there is nothing in our direct experience of the world that precludes the possibility of interpreting actions as genuine beginnings within the nexus of nature, i.e., beginnings that do not have antecedent natural causes. The fiat initiates an action qua volitional movement that begins in the eminent sense of the word, i.e., a movement that is not merely the causal consequence of some other, antecedent movement. Actions unfold entirely within the empirical nexus of nature and as such they do stand under natural laws. Their coming about within the nexus of nature through a fiat, however, is genuinely new in a way that challenges deterministic assumptions. Furthermore, this point about actions being genuine beginnings that cannot be construed in terms of natural causality should not be considered incompatible with Husserl’s abovementioned theory of motivation as the causal principle regulating the life of consciousness. Actions are not caused by antecedent natural events, but they are motivated by antecedent and concurrent circumstances within the life of consciousness. Motivational causality makes actions intelligible as events within the unity of meaning of a life. It grounds the possibility of understanding actions and agents; however, motivational causality, unlike natural causality, does not necessitate. What brings the action about is not the sum total of its motivational antecedents or concurrent circumstances but a subject’s fiat which turns an empirically possible process within the nexus of nature into a specific kind of volitional movement that the subject commits to realize. It is admittedly difficult to integrate actions qua genuine beginnings in a narrowly naturalistic picture guided by the idea of all-encompassing natural causality. Whether this should lead us to revise our idea of all-encompassing natural causality or our idea of action is an intellectual decision that every philosopher must take for herself. To conclude this part, let us note that the will in the Studien undergoes the same treatment as reason in Ideas I. The will is no longer interpreted as a distinctive mental faculty whose workings bring about conscious acts called ‘actions,’ but rather as a property characterizing a certain class of conscious acts as such. Willentlichkeit as an extensive property inherent in actions replaces der Wille as the causal source of actions. Like Wittgenstein and Ryle after him, Husserl rejects volitionism and treats actions as intelligible occurrences in their own right.

Husserl’s account of action  17

3.  Bodily freedom as the source of willful actions The above analysis should not be taken to amount to a rejection of the simple and quite uncontroversial intuition that actions must spring from some subjective source. As I mentioned above, actions are integrated into the life of consciousness and they are connected to other subjective experiences through motivation. Motivationally connected subjective experiences, in turn, are the experiences of an embodied subject in a meaningful environment. In this part, I want to turn to Husserl’s characterization of the body as the source of willful actions, in particular, to his description of involuntary, and yet meaning-laden bodily movements as the ground for higher-level voluntary activity. It is plain to see that the primary/creative segment of an action (at least of a physical action, but I will leave aside ‘intellectual’ actions for the purpose of the present paper) is necessarily accomplished through the body. It is only through my body as part of the nexus of nature that I can act and thereby initiate causal processes in the world. So the ‘I can,’ which, as we have seen, is necessarily entailed in the ‘I will,’ has to be interpreted in a corporeal sense. ‘I can’ means necessarily, ‘I, this bodily subject, can.’ In other words, the ‘freedom of the will’ presupposes and flows from the ‘freedom of the body,’ which, as we will see, has the crucial function of pre-constituting possible paths for willful action. This view is far from obvious, considering that the relationship between bodily movement and movement of the soul has often been construed as antagonistic. This is how Kant famously characterizes bodily movements in the second Critique: “[i]f the freedom of our will were none other than the latter [. . .], then it would be at bottom nothing better than the freedom of a turnspit, which, when once it is wound up, also accomplishes its movements of itself” (Kant 2015, 79). Kant famously sets up against this kind of freedom, transcendental or absolute freedom, as “independence from everything empirical, and so from nature generally” (ibid.). Similarly, after defining action in terms of freedom and deliberation, Lotze writes: The most of our bodily movements, even where they have a purpose, – for example seek to attain or to avoid an object, – are nothing more than perfectly involuntary secondary effects, that are neither produced by a will nor always to be suppressed by it; that are attached to our preceding states in accordance with physiological or psychological laws; and that, therefore, happen through and from us, but are not wrought by us. (Lotze 1885, 24–25) Thus, for both Kant and Lotze there is a sharp contrast between the freedom characterizing agency and the natural mechanisms characterizing our bodily movements. Agency qua movement of the ‘soul’ is free, whereas the body is unfree in that its movement is, like the movement of a turnspit, merely caused by some antecedent movements. To put it in a nutshell: for Kant our noumenal self moves, whereas our phenomenal self (the body and its psychological annexes) is moved by other natural events. However, if freedom is the ability to consciously carry out goal-oriented actions that have been chosen by the subject, what is the ‘medium,’ so to speak, in which such ability is grounded? In other words, in order to choose a certain course of action and issue my fiat the course of action must be somehow pre-given to me, it has to be

18  Andrea Staiti pre-constituted as a practicable path that is consistent with my factual abilities. The world has to show up as the meaningful locus of various practical possibilities that are experienced as mine before the actual action-planning and acting take place. The source of this pre-constitution for Husserl is the body. Not so much the body as consciously governed and steered by a transcendental ego, but rather the pre-egoic lived body, whose meaning-oriented interactions with the world delineate possible paths for action, i.e., the consciousness of the I-can, which precedes and makes possible actual volitions. The body explores the world, as it were, and in so doing it brings into relief for the ego possible paths of action. The emergence of practical intentions is described as a kind of re-enactment of involuntary bodily movements that is not past-directed (as mere re-presentational recollection of a past bodily movement) but future-directed in the specific mode of willing. Husserl begins by describing the “play of originary, involuntary bodily movements” as the native soil of all agency. In a seminal paper on these issues Rudolf Bernet writes: “It is possible for a goal-oriented bodily behavior to seamlessly turn into a playful behavior, whose goal is fully accounted for by its own movedness” (Bernet 2006, 275). The reverse is also true. Bodily movements that begin as playful or unconscious can turn into goal-oriented behavior and assume the traits of a genuine action. Agency arises out of and returns to the original bodily motility that is already in play prior to all explicit, goal-directed action planning. Thanks to the work of self-affection, originally involuntary bodily movements can ‘knock at the door’ of the ego (as Husserl metaphorically puts the point) and urge it to turn its attention toward them. In other words, our experiences do not only present us with external, intentional objects. They also present themselves while presenting other objects. In experiencing, we are affected by both external objects and the experiencing itself, i.e., self-affection always necessarily accompanies affection.11 However, Husserl points out that affection (self-affection) comes in two fundamentally distinct varieties. There is an attentional self-affection, which simply generates the tendency to reproduce in memory the movement that has been just performed. I am struck by a particular movement that stands out from the flow of bodily movement, in which I am immersed, and I re-produce that movement ‘in thought’ in the mode of fresh recollection.12 But there is also a specifically practical kind of self-affection, which generates the tendency to transpose the movement just performed as a practical possibility in the future, thereby creating the conditions for actual intentional agency. Husserl specifies that this is not so much a transposition in the strict sense, as it is a kind of apperception of the present sensory situation ‘according to’ the sense arising from the past sensory situation. Let me give an example. Suppose I am sitting at my desk working hard on a paper that is long overdue. My attention is completely absorbed in the writing process, but while that happens my

11 I take the correctness of this claim to have been convincingly established by Dan Zahavi (see, for instance, Zahavi 1998), to whose work I refer for the relevant textual basis. 12 Here Husserl seems to adhere to the view that there is an innate Wiederholungstrieb (drive of repetition) that characterizes conscious life as such. We find this claim repeatedly in Max Scheler (e.g., Scheler 2008, 19, 55). I haven’t been able to find direct discussions of Wiederholungstrieb in Husserl’s writings on instincts but a number of his descriptions seem to presuppose the work of this particular drive. This would be the subject for another paper.

Husserl’s account of action  19 body does not stand still. Suppose I am unconsciously adjusting my sitting position on the chair, I ‘feel’ that I am not sitting comfortably, but I am not paying attention to it. Suddenly one movement strikes the optimal position, but this is just a moment in the continuous flow of unconscious bodily movement. The body keeps moving, but the movement leading to the optimal position ‘affects’ me, it stands out and catches my attention. It comes forward as a practical possibility, so I decide to ‘deliberately’ move in the right position and finally sit comfortably on the chair. Similarly, as I enter a new room at the museum my eyes ‘move around’; I inspect the room with cursory glances, but one particular area of the room stands out because of the bright color of the paintings hanging there. I then redirect my eyes deliberately toward that area before making the decision to actually go there and contemplate the paintings. Husserl comments situations of this kind by reference to the famous saying “where there’s a will there’s a way” (Hua XLIII/3, 102). He writes: Each will as decisional, affirmative and authentic will refers to a path of the will, which is represented together with the will. However, in general the path of the will is not just any even that is possible. . . . Rather the event must be conscious from the beginning as a practicable path. (Hua XLIII/3, 102–103) The spectrum of practical possibilities is grounded eidetically in the spectrum of bodily possibilities. It is the body in its myriad meaningful interactions with the world that pre-figures possible practicable ways or paths for actual acts of willing to occur. So, we could conclude that in these analyses the body emerges not so much as ‘the organ of the will,’ but as the matrix of agency itself, as the source of Willentlichkeit. The body replaces here the will as a distinct non-natural, purely mental source of free actions. Free actions flow from an intricate nexus of passive, pre-egological bodily interactions with the environment that are already characterized by a distinctive pre-deliberative kind of freedom.

Conclusion The broader philosophical lesson that we can learn from the above analyses is twofold. First, Husserl shows that both the naturalistic construal of actions as natural-causal events and the anti-naturalistic construal of actions as emanations of a non-natural entity called ‘the will’ are at odds with our experience. Actions are sui generis natural events that emerge from the originary free play of bodily movements in a meaningful environment. The pressing philosophical issue is thus no longer the ontological status of actions in a uniformly deterministic nature, but rather the ontological status of the body as the locus of freedom within the nexus of nature. Second, in so doing, Husserl is re-directing our attention from the problem of the position of actions within nature to the problem of the position of actions within consciousness. Once the proper ‘place’ of actions in the natural world has been re-described in such a way as to dispel the naturalistic tendency to equate actions with physical-natural events, the new horizon of questions pertains to the place of actions within the broader nexus of consciousness. The study of motivation and its multiple forms would shed much-needed light on how actions are integrated ‘causally’ (in the non-deterministic sense of motivation)

20  Andrea Staiti in the life of consciousness, while not being necessitated in the natural sense. In other words, a complete phenomenology of action should provide both a static description of actions by contrast to other acts of consciousness and a genetic description of the emergence of actions from other, more basic types of acts in the life of consciousness. In the Studien Husserl has laid the groundwork for these descriptions but he has not developed them in full. Returning to the issue mentioned at the beginning, i.e., freedom of the will as the traditional problem haunting Husserl’s analyses, one could conclude that for Husserl, as for contemporary ethical naturalists, “there is no such thing as ‘will,’ and thus no such thing as a ‘free will’ ” (Flanagan, Sarkissian and Wong 2017, 23). However, Husserl is neither particularly pedantic about terminology, nor particularly interested in stipulating what there is and what there isn’t. Husserl’s interest is rather in describing phenomena well enough to capture their essential features. Hence, we can continue to talk about will and volitions, provided that we are aware of the ‘metaphorical’ status of such talk and do not let it mislead us into applying a causal scheme to actions. We can definitely argue that ‘the will’ is free in that nothing in nature or the life of consciousness necessitates a subject to issue a fiat and thus carry out an action. There can certainly be movements that look like actions but are actually just natural events, like kicking a ball into a net just because a gust of wind or an electrode in your brain moved your leg. Genuine actions, by contrast, are movements whose empirical viability has been pre-constituted by the free movement of the body, that come forward as motivated practical possibilities within the nexus of conscious life and that a subject of consciousness (the ‘ego’ in Husserl’s terminology) elects to carry out as its own movement in order to bring about a desired event in the world. Natural causality is operative in regulating the empirical web of possibilities for bodily movement. Motivational causality is operative in letting certain possibilities of movement emerge as desirable and reasonably attainable within the life of consciousness. In order for such movements to become actions, however, the ego must issue a fiat, i.e., a genuine beginning that no antecedent cause could have deterministically generated. There is, thus, a sense in which Husserl’s analysis accommodates intuitions that can be traced back to traditional determinism, compatibilism, and libertarianism. However, trying to force Husserl’s analysis into any single of these philosophical alternatives would not do justice to the originality and richness of his phenomenological approach to action.

References Bernet, Rudolf. “Intentional Consciousness and Non-Intentional Self-Awareness.” In Passive Synthesis and Life-World, ed. Ferrarin, Alfredo. Pisa: ETS, 2006, pp. 269–289. Crowell, Steven. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Flanagan, Owen, Sarkissian, Hagop and Wong, David. “Naturalizing Ethics.” In The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, ed. K. J. Clark. Malden and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017, pp. 16–33. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. ———. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989.

Husserl’s account of action  21 ———. Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der eidetischen Variation. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1891–1935). Husserliana XLI. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012. ———. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014. ———. Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, Teilband III. Wille und Handlung. Husserliana XLIII/3, forthcoming. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Lotze, Rudolf Hermann. Outlines of Practical Philosophy. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1885. Melle, Ullrich. “Husserl’s Phenomenology of Willing.” In Phenomenology of Values and Valuing, ed. James Hart and Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Springer, 1997, pp. 169–192. ———. “ ‘Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins’: Husserls Beitrag zu einer phänomenologischen Psychologie.” In Feeling and Value, Willing and Action: Essays in the Context of a Phenomenological Psychology, ed. Marta Ubiali and Maren Wehrle. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014, pp. 3–11. Moran, Dermot. “Defending the Transcendental Attitude: Husserl’s Concept of the Person and the Challenges of Naturalism.” Phenomenology and Mind 7 (2014): 30–43. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Routledge, 2000. Scheler, Max. The Human Place in the Cosmos. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008. Staiti, Andrea. Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology. Nature, Spirit, and Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ———. “Husserl and Rickert on the Nature of Judgment.” Philosophy Compass 10 (2015): 815–827. ———. “Lotze and Husserl on First and Second Generality.” Discipline Filosofiche 26, no. 1 (2016): 47–66. ———. “Urteilstheorie.” In Husserl-Handbuch, ed. S. Luft and M. Wehrle. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2017, pp. 196–204. Zahavi, Dan. “Awareness and Affection.” In Alterity and Facticity, ed. N. Depraz and D. Zahavi. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998, pp. 205–228.

3 Essence, eidos, and dialogue in Stein’s ‘Husserl and Aquinas. A Comparison’ Mette Lebech

Abstract: This paper provides an analysis of the discussion of essence in Stein’s contribution to Husserl’s Festschrift for his seventieth birthday in the light of her later work on essence and eidos. It also makes, in the light of Stein’s early work on intersubjectivity, an eidetic analysis of the intersubjective occurrence of dialogue. It is argued that Stein’s understanding of essence, and of phenomenology as a collaborative enterprise, is rooted in the practical function of the eidos, which, by enabling dialogue about something and also about essence, despite differing worldviews and concepts of essence, renders eidetic analysis possible in any intersubjective setting. Keywords: Stein, Husserl, Aquinas, essence, dialogue, eidos, intersubjectivity

Introduction For Husserl’s seventieth birthday Stein wrote a dialogue, featuring the celebrant himself in conversation with Thomas Aquinas.1 At the request of the Festschrift’s editor,

1 Edith Stein, “Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison,” in Knowledge and Faith, trans. Walter Redmond, The Collected Works of Edith Stein (henceforth referred to as CWES), vol. 8 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000), henceforth referred to as ‘Husserl and Aquinas’. The original article in dialogue form is helpfully translated and published in columns side by side by Redmond, so that one can easily gain an overview of the divergences between them. The title is Redmond’s and refers to both. The two versions are also published together in ‘Freiheit und Gnade’ und weitere Beiträge zu Phänomenologie und Ontologie, Edith Steins Gesamtausgabe (henceforth referred to as ESGA), vol. 9 (Herder: Freiburg, 2014), 91–142, one after the other. See for an excellent analysis of the historical and systematic context in which the article was written: Beate Beckmann-Zöller, “Edith Steins Projekt zur Vermittlung von thomasischer und phänomenologischer Philosophie und die Spannung zwischen Philosophie und Theologie,” Edith Stein Jahrbuch (2017): 99–133. See also Part III of Magdalena Börsig-Hover, Zur Ontologie und Metaphysik der Wahrheit. Der Wahrheitsbegriff Edith Steins in Auseinandersetzung mit Aristoteles, Thomas von Aquin und Edmund Husserl (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006); Francesco Valerio Tommasi, “. . . Verschiedene Sprachen redeten . . .” “Ein Dialog zwischen Phänomenologie und Mittelalterlicher Scholastik im Werk Edith Steins,” in Edith Stein. Themen. Kontexte. Materialien, ed. Beate Beckmann-Zöller and Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz (Dresden: Text und Dialog, 2015), 115–140 and Robert McNamara, “Essence in Stein’s Festschrift Dialogue,” in “Alles Wesentliche lässt sich nicht schreiben”. Leben und Denken Edith Steins im Spiegel ihres Gesamtwerkes, ed. Andreas Speer and Stephan Regh (Freiburg: Herder, 2016), 175–194.

Essence, eidos, and dialogue  23 Heidegger, it was rewritten in treatise form, retaining the content, in particular a prolonged discussion of Husserl’s and Aquinas’ concepts of essence.2 The dialogue form, however, reveals a practical function of the eidos that can only be captured in treatise form if the intersubjective occurrence of dialogue itself is discussed.3 Whereas Beckmann-Zöller, McNamara, and Tommasi have all focused on the synthesis between scholastic and phenomenological thought prepared in Stein’s Festschrift article (Börsig-Hover has focused on truth), the present paper focuses on the preparation for this synthesis, i.e. on that which makes the dialogue between the two interlocutors possible and on the features that make it a dialogue. Stein’s understanding of essence in fact reveals itself in two complementary ways in the dialogue. On the one hand, the two interlocutors discuss essence and their respective understandings of these, at length. On the other hand, the eidos ‘behind’ essence (the eidos ‘essence’) is what allows the interlocutors to sustain their dialogue since it is by it that they identify what they talk about, despite having radically different concepts of it. In what follows, I shall argue that Stein’s understanding of phenomenology as a collaborative enterprise is rooted in her understanding of the practical function of the eidos, which allows us to identify things others are talking about, and thus enables translation between different concepts of the same ‘thing’. The eidos also makes eidetic analysis relevant despite differing worldviews, since it makes us identify the practical necessity of there being some intelligibility to the things we talk about, and of which we may give an account to enrich or further our dialogue. The possibility of eidetic analysis was, as Stein saw it, part of what gave to phenomenology its promise both as a science and as a project to found the sciences, including the humanities and the social sciences specifically dealing with the complexities of intersubjective constitution and its motivation. Since the eidos is available also when the dialogue is not, it always provides a critical potential for intersubjective constitution, no matter what might motivate it, and always keeps open the possibility of dialogue. Since the discussion of essence lies at the heart of the Festschrift dialogue, we shall, in the light of Stein’s later work on essence and eidos,4 first discuss how and why this discussion makes sense to the two interlocutors (1). This paves the way for an eidetic analysis of the intersubjective occurrence of dialogue which draws on Stein’s early work on the modes of intersubjectivity (2). The aim is to show that dialogue and essence belong together for Stein in the sense that there is no possibility of dialogue if there is nothing that allows us to identify the things talked about, and that there also is no need for essence, i.e. for an explicit and ponderable meaning of things, if it were

2 Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, X (Ergänzungsband) (Halle/ Saale, 1929), 315–338. 3 Jean Hering, “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee,” in Jahrbuch für philosophische und phänomenologische Forschung, IV, 495–543 sets out to examine the phenomenological understanding of essence and essentiality, which it claims is common to all phenomenologists. Stein explicitly relies on this work to clarify her own understanding of essence and essentiality in Finite and eternal Being (henceforth FEB), CWES 9 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000); in German ESGA 11/12 (Freiburg: Herder, 2006). 4 Stein: FEB, Part III.

24  Mette Lebech not for the need to explore them for what they are in dialogue, even if simply with oneself. Rendering explicit this insight completes Stein’s published article and makes up for what is lost in its transcription to treatise style.5

1. How and why the dialogue on essence makes sense to the two interlocutors That and how Stein could imagine Husserl and Aquinas in dialogue forms part of the meaning of the text, which portrays them searching for an understanding of each other’s viewpoints with an openness to the possibility of learning something about the things themselves (the phenomena, the eide, and/or the essences of things) from seeing the world from the other’s point of view. The dialogue makes sense to the two interlocutors because (a) they are both interested in what is being discussed and (b) because they are each of them able and willing to make sense of what the other says. a. Their common interest in what is being discussed The earlier dialogue version of the article was entitled ‘What Is Philosophy? A Conversation Between Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas,’ whereas the title of the published article is: ‘An Attempt to Contrast Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas’. The focus thus shifts between the dialogue version and the treatise version from a systematic discussion of philosophy to a contrasting of the two philosophers’ philosophy. This should draw our attention to the further layer of meaning present in the dialogue form. The dialogue allows the two philosophers to address the same subject, each from within their conceptual framework, marked by their historical context but not unintelligible outside of it. Their common interest in philosophy, i.e. in what philosophy is, allows for a dialogue about it, necessitating a clarification of their respective positions, without the focus being primarily on these.

5 As a literary genre, the dialogue was practiced infrequently in the writings of the phenomenologists. Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Metaphysische Gespräche (Halle: Niemeyer, 1921) was a dialogue, with which Stein engaged in Potency and Act and Finite and Eternal Being to clarify her own position, and she was probably familiar with the dialogue already when she wrote hers. Stein later wrote minor dialogues as well as plays for her sisters. ConradMartius’ dialogue is between the more experienced Montanus and the young Psilander, who seek each other out because of a deep interest in the matters discussed. Montanus affirms of the dialogue that ‘we do not wish to define, but to search’, an attitude portrayed as appropriate to the subject matter; fixation in definitions is not what the conversation is about, but rather insight, as this is how the essence manifests itself to the one looking for it. What is decisive in the process is not what is said, but what transpires or is revealed to the interlocutors through it, and thus it comes to a natural close when the interlocutors have reached a point of saturation: ‘But now, Psilander, it seems to me that we have sort of talked ourselves to the end of this road, and that we would have to start again completely from the beginning if we were to catch something new from the infinity of possible openings.’ As the dialogue progresses, it discloses the commitment of each to gain insight into something through the dialogue, of which neither, whether at the beginning or at the end, have a complete or definitive grasp. In all of these features it could well have served as a ‘Vorbild’ for Stein’s dialogue.

Essence, eidos, and dialogue  25 The clarifications serve the purpose of furthering the dialogue so it can unfold in its exploration of the topic. When the dialogue is broken off, it happens not because a conclusion has been reached, but because they have both learnt enough about the other’s understanding of philosophy for the day and it is time to go to bed.6 The two interlocutors have an interest in discussing the nature of philosophy with each other not only because they share this interest but also because their conceptions of philosophy are so different that each lends a new light to the other’s conception.7 Without either of them committing to an understanding of philosophy to which the other could agree, they are able to discuss philosophy because they are both directed by the eidos ‘philosophy’ in such a way as to be able to identify ‘philosophy’ and discuss their various conceptions of it. This directedness directs them to the things themselves and shapes in them an attitude, which in German would be called ‘sachlich’.8 b. The interlocutors’ ability and willingness to make sense of what the other says Motivation to learn about something is not enough to keep a dialogue going, skill is also required. This skill is on the one hand the ability to interpret what the other says, which in turn is intimately linked with the willingness to find meaning in it for oneself, a process by hermeneutics referred to as the ‘hermeneutic circle’.9 The skill, which in this circularity involves the self as well as the other, amounts to a consideration of, or an attention to, the meaning which the other expresses in such a way that it acknowledges

6 In a tribute to John Cleary, Brendan O’Byrne characterises the dialogue as standing in opposition to systematic philosophy by an open-endedness that need not rely on ‘true wisdom’ and a finished ‘view of the whole’ out of reach for mortals, such that it is a privileged means of portraying the human predicament as regards knowledge and wisdom. The fact that Stein did rewrite the dialogue in treatise form indicates that she also considered essays in systematic philosophy contributions to an ongoing dialogue. In this way her dialogue mediates the insight about essence that it is equally impossible to obtain a definitive view of the whole of it and to do without looking for it. Brendan O’Byrne, “John Cleary: A Philosophical Portrait,” in Studies on Plato, Aristotle and Proclus. Collected Essays on Ancient Philosophy of John Cleary, ed. John Dillon, Brendan O’Byrne and Fran O’Rourke (Leiden: Brill, 2013), xvi. 7 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Unfähigkeit zum Gespräch,” in Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register. Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993), 207–215, here 211: ‘Something has become a dialogue for us, if it has left something behind in us. Not the fact that we experienced something new made the dialogue into a dialogue, but the fact that we met something in the other, that we had not yet met in our own experience of the world’ (my translation). 8 Paul Friedländer sees it as a characteristic of Socrates to always pay attention to ‘die Sache’: “Dialog,” in Platon. I. Eidos, Paideia, Dialogos (Berlin-Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter et Co., 1928), 180–198, here 182. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Vom Zirkel des Verstehens,” Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register. Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993), 57–65, here 58: “Das Ziel alles Verstehens ist das Einverständnis in der Sache.” 9 Gadamer, “Vom Zirkel des Verstehens.” That one can understand the whole from the particular instances and the particular instances from the whole also means that the individual and his meaning-making can be understood from the meaning of the whole and vice versa.

26  Mette Lebech its meaningfulness both for me and in itself, independently of me.10 The attention to the meaning expressed thus reaches out to the essence of things to presuppose them, it finds meaning in things, as mediators of objective meaning, not simply expressions of the subjectivity of the other or of myself, the acceptance of which would abolish the distinction between him and me. Thus consideration relies on confidence in the non-transitional identity of myself and the other on the one hand, and on a lack of fear of adjusting one’s perspective to that of the other for reasons one can consider good on the other hand. Consideration thus reposes on a completed constitution of oneself as a human person, which is not susceptible to be affected by sentient contagion such that non-personal efficacy overrules personal response and responsibility. Such completed constitution includes the renunciation of recourse to any compensation mechanisms (e.g. projection, introjection, transference, or addiction), which compromises personal integrity.11 Both interlocutors are portrayed as being considerate in this sense, i.e. as being able to respond. Neither are aggressively imposing a point of view, and both are unafraid of casting their thoughts in unfamiliar terms and considering adjusting their ways of thinking to concepts proposed by the other.12 SAquinas proposes as point of departure for their discussion their common accord on the fact that philosophy ought to be done as a ‘rigorous science’.13 Having stated that they are both convinced that a logos stands behind all that is, and that it is possible to uncover aspects of this logos, he claims that they differ, however, on ‘how far this procedure of uncovering the logos’ can take them.14 Whether SAquinas thinks Husserl would allow for a higher degree of uncovering of the logos than himself or that SAquinas’ faith allows him to uncover the logos to a higher degree is left open. The discussion unfolds in fact between these two possibilities, without settling on any of them. Stein lets SAquinas continue his explanation: Neither you nor I ever had any doubts about the power of ratio [. . .] but for you ratio was never more than natural reason, while for me the distinction between natural and supernatural reason arises at this point. You are raising your hand defensively, meaning I have misunderstood you. I expected this protest. ‘Reason’ for you lies beyond its division into ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. Distinctions like this, you say, would be empirical. You were referring not to the reason of a human being or of a superhuman being, but to reason as such, to what must be the case – notwithstanding any empirical distinctions – wherever reason is meaningfully discussed.15

10 Paul Ricoeur, Du texte a l’action. Essais d’hermeneutique II (Paris : Seuil, 1986). 11 Mette Lebech, “Stein’s Understanding of Mental Health and Mental Illness,” in Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood. Essays on Edith Stein’s Phenomenological Investigations, ed. Elisa Magri and Dermot Moran (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017), 107–123. 12 It is possible that not all modern Thomists would be able to recognise Thomas’ ability to read modern philosophy this charitably. It represents Stein’s certain hope that it is possible to reach an understanding between medieval and modern philosophy, and that an adequately motivated, saintly philosopher would have acquired it. SAquinas (Stein’s Aquinas) seems more inclined to admit to not having thought about something than SHusserl (Stein’s Husserl). It is equally possible some contemporary Husserlians would find the portrait of Husserl embarrassing. It represents Stein’s intimate knowledge of him and her respect for his desire to enter into dialogue. 13 Stein, “Husserl and Aquinas,” 8. 14 Ibid., 9. 15 Ibid., 9–10.

Essence, eidos, and dialogue  27 SAquinas seems to perfectly understand SHusserl’s understanding of essence: for something to be discussed meaningfully (here ‘reason’), it must be assumed to be intelligible (identified in the light of the eidos as having an essence). Knowing the meaning of the word means grasping the intelligibility of that which it means as well as the essence of that which is meant by it, and thus ‘reason’ must mean something identical in its ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ versions, which can be addressed before discussing its factual (i.e. empirical) varieties. Yet: ‘transcendental criticism in your sense,’ SAquinas continues, ‘was not my cause. I was always dealing with realities – “naively”, as you would say.’16 But if he were to take SHusserl’s viewpoint – and why should he not?, as he says – a great deal can be said about the essence of reason as such, about the notion or ‘ratio’ of reason apart from how it is instantiated in the different kinds of knowing beings, human beings, angels, and God.17 But in this analysis, SAquinas complains, ‘you proceed as though our reason had no limits in principle’,18 and also as if there were no other way to know apart from natural reason, which will never reach its goal even if it can approach it step by step, the goal being infinitely removed. SAquinas could not ‘admit that this is the only way of knowledge’,19 nor that truth can only be actualised in an unending process and never fully. For him, full truth is, it is divine knowledge. Humans, however, do not naturally have part in it, although they can be made partakers in it supernaturally. The problem for SAquinas is that Husserl’s intuition of a priori essences seems to be more like divine insight into the absolute features of beings than it is characteristic of or obtainable by human knowledge. To SAquinas we are capable of such insight, but in this life only by means of faith; he is objecting that SHusserl is missing the distinction between natural and supernatural reason, resulting in a lack of awareness of the contribution of supernatural reason to the acquisition of insight into essences. At this point the reader is bound to be interested in knowing what this contribution of supernatural reason to essence intuition might be, and the rest of the dialogue does indeed revolve around this. But it revolves around this because the question is also of interest to SAquinas, who does not quite seem to have a ready answer. He is thus thinking out loud, in the confidence that SHusserl’s perspective might help him in the process to gain some clarity on the issue. SHusserl therefore now takes centre stage. He replies that it never occurred to him to contest the ‘right to faith’. But he claims that although it can be justifiably appealed to in religion, it cannot be so in philosophy: ‘what you were saying seems to be nothing short of giving faith a deciding vote on crucial questions in the theory of knowledge’.20 By stating simply how he perceives SAquinas’ criticism, without feelings of animosity reducing him to reacting, he gives SAquinas space to provide an equally simple answer. The dialogue continues because both interlocutors have confidence that the other is addressing the issues separating them in the light of the eide and is not using words with any other intention than to explain. They are both

16 Ibid., 10. 17 Stein here uses ‘ratio’ as Aquinas uses it, when he uses it as a means for carrying objective meaning (often translated with ‘notion’). She will later identify the species as something of which we, also according to SAquinas, have immediate intuition, such that SAquinas admits of the possibility of immediate (a priori) essence intuition and hence eidetic analysis, but this is the not the problem she deals with here. 18 Stein, “Husserl and Aquinas,” 11. 19 Ibid., 12. 20 Ibid., 15.

28  Mette Lebech confident that they are talking about something, about reason and its limits here, and in general about philosophy and the role of reason in it. SAquinas responds that he raised the issue of supernatural reason to reveal the limits of a philosophy based on purely natural reason. He explains: ‘A rational understanding of the world, that is, a metaphysics – in the end, surely, the intention, tacit or overt, of all philosophy – can be gained only by natural and supernatural reason working together’.21 The loss of the appreciation of this fact, he moreover claims, accounts for the mistrust of metaphysics felt by so many modern thinkers, among which he, no doubt, includes Husserl. SAquinas thus moves towards claiming, as Stein later will, that the work of human reason, issuing in an understanding of the world in its entirety, cannot be achieved by natural reason alone. It will rely, whether explicitly or implicitly, on faith, because human reason is limited.22 Still, the question we have been pursuing nevertheless remains: does essence intuition also rely on faith? The knowledge Husserl seeks may well be God’s own knowledge.23 This indeed is what metaphysics studies, according to SAquinas, but if inverted through ‘a shift of sign’ to transcendental phenomenology, now centred on the subject, SHusserl ‘could not succeed [. . .] in winning back from the realm of immanence that objectivity from which you had after all set out and insuring which was the point’.24 The more, in other words, SHusserl were to remove from the sphere of immanence any trace of transcendence, the more the impossibility of this enterprise would show, not because it was impossible in itself (it is possible for God), but because it is impossible for us, given the constitutional limits of human reason. Although SHusserl declines to discuss this point and instead proceeds to raise an issue he would need to have addressed before he could, the move is not a refusal to address SAquinas’ question, but rather an attempt to make meaningful for himself what SAquinas proposes. The turn brings us to the heart of our matter: You spoke of ontology or metaphysics. I am used to keeping the two terms apart. I wished to establish as sciences of essence – those making no use of empirical findings – what I called formal and material ontology: disciplines presupposed to all activity of the positive sciences.25 Metaphysics in SAquinas’ sense seems to SHusserl a science of this world. He therefore proceeds to ask how SAquinas views the distinction between essence and fact, between eidetics and empirics. SAquinas admits to not distinguishing these as a matter of methodological principle in his philosophy. He seems to consider whether this

21 Ibid., 19. 22 Although this position is Stein’s, it is one she thinks Aquinas would have come to, had he lived through the crisis of the Reformation and its ramifications for modern philosophy. And thus she lets SAquinas assure the reader and SHusserl in that one ‘will find scarcely anything of what I have just been saying about the relation of faith and reason in my writings. For me, it was all a self-evident starting-point. I am speaking now from a later reflection on how I actually proceed, as it is needed today for a rapprochement with moderns’. Stein, “Husserl and Aquinas,” 20. 23 Stein, “Husserl and Aquinas,” 23. 24 Ibid., 32. 25 Ibid., 34.

Essence, eidos, and dialogue  29 was legitimate on his part, and while thus engaged, he muses that faith’s contribution to eidetic intuition is ‘largely knowledge of facts’.26 This would imply that faith might not, for SAquinas, formally affect the intuition of essences, however much faith might influence the experience of facts (the believer experiences the world as created, fallen and redeemed). This could mean that eidetic intuition with its corollary of eidetic variation, is available as a method to the believer and the non-believer alike, even if they might well experience things differently, and hence contribute different things to an intersubjective eidetic analysis. Having thought about this, SAquinas seeks to account for his understanding of the distinction between essence and fact. ‘What applies to things according to their essence is as it were the basic scaffolding of the world. And what befalls them accidentally is already provided for in their essence as possibility’.27 In this way the distinction between essence and accident reflects the distinction between essence and fact without being identical to it. But he reiterates that ‘a play of free possibilities was not my concern’.28 Even so, ‘both senses [of essence as distinct from fact and essence as distinct from accident] are present in my writings, and we could follow up each one by itself, bringing together what belongs [respectively] to “ontology” and to “metaphysics” ’.29 SAquinas is thus granting SHusserl that it is possible to distinguish between what pertains to essence as such and what pertains to factual being, and that this distinction would give rise to a differentiation between ontology, investigating the former, and metaphysics, investigating the latter.30 He furthermore proposes that methodical essence intuition can be ‘summed up in three points on which there is complete agreement between your way of proceeding and mine, underneath a cover of apparent opposition’.31 These are: (a) all knowledge begins with sensation, (b) all natural knowledge is obtained through intellectual work on material provided by the senses, and (c) intuition is both active and passive. a SAquinas starts by considering what is meant by the claim that ‘insight into essence needs no basis in experience’.32 With this claim, SAquinas states, Husserl ‘only’ means that the philosopher, for his analysis of something, does not need an actual experience of it, but that a clear intuition of it might serve, such that the positing in existence of the thing is thereby not annulled, but merely suspended for methodological reasons.33 In this way, the phenomenological reduction does not alter the fact that the experience of the thing has begun in sense experience.

26 Ibid., 35–36. 27 Ibid., 37. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 38. 30 It is likely that some Thomists would object to the distinction being made by SAquinas. It is because Stein’s Aquinas understands and accepts this distinction as justified that Stein’s Thomism is compatible with phenomenology. Stein herself will retain the distinction and make use of it both in Potency and Act and in Finite and Eternal Being. It will give to her ‘attempt to ascend to the meaning of being’ a distinctly platonic dimension as she identifies the eide as the ideas of God and the essences a having both ideal and real being. 31 Stein, “Husserl and Aquinas,” 41, translation adapted, see ESGA 9, 109. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 41–42, see ESGA 9, 109.

30  Mette Lebech b Next SAquinas notes their agreement on the fact that knowledge is obtained through intellectual work on sense material. SHusserl denies that eidetic intuition is acceded to either through induction or abstraction, as the intelligibility of the thing, according to him, is not dependent on other things being similar to it. The only kind of ‘abstraction’ to which SHusserl admits is a disregarding of ‘what applies only “contingently” to the thing’, of whatever could be different in it without it ceasing to be this thing. Positively this means focussing on what belongs to the thing as such, to what SAquinas calls the ratio of the thing, the ‘notion’ of the thing or the thing’s idea. SAquinas claims to have made frequent use of this procedure. In so far as Aquinas has, it is clear he would have a means of distinguishing ontology and metaphysics as SHusserl does and of giving meaning to essence being a priori. SAquinas moreover affirms that essence intuition is a penetration of the objects and objective interrelations, an intus legere, not opposed to thinking, ‘as long as we take “thinking” in the broad sense required, and that this seeing is a contribution of the understanding’.34 c Finally, SAquinas explains his agreement with SHusserl concerning the active and passive aspects of understanding. What is at stake is the receptive contemplation of the essences, for SHusserl actively acquired through eidetic variation and analysis. SAquinas takes the position that ‘for human understanding, insight signifies the ideal limit of its performance capability. [. . .] at this point the human spirit touches the sphere of the higher spirits’.35 He grants that human beings have immediate insight into fundamental principles and is quite prepared to give them a priori status, as accessible to the mind through the performance of its own acts. To the charge that SHusserl claims ‘for what you call “truths of essence” that immediate insight that I grant to principles’, SHusserl answers that he does think that philosophy works with an open plurality of axioms of which there is immediate insight. Some of these have content, into which a specifically intellectual insight not derived from sense experience can be obtained. SAquinas agrees that there could possibly be truths of content had by insight, such as those that SHusserl would talk about when speaking of truths of essence. But if there were, these would not be known by immediate insight, although they might be known by eidetic analysis.36 There could be immediacy of knowledge in one further way. To the immediate knowledge of the good and of our own existence, there also comes knowledge of the external world and of the essences of things mediated through species. Knowledge of the species themselves is not knowledge through species. It is however still mediated in the sense of being acquired actively.37 Species (notions or concepts) is the material with which eidetic variation works, and our intuition of them is immediate in the sense that we can at any point turn to contemplate them, i.e. turn to contemplate what we think something is. What needs to be worked on to get to a unified view of that, is all of what we think about this thing, such that it is worked into one coherent notion, and this requires sustained rational effort. Again, the immediacy of the insight does not in

34 35 36 37

Ibid., 45. Ibid., 46–47, translation adapted, see ESGA 9, 111. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 56.

Essence, eidos, and dialogue  31 this instance mean that it is obtained without effort. There remains for SAquinas, however, ‘a discrepancy between the species of the things which the intellectus agens actively acquires and the essence of the thing as it is in itself.’38 Only the blessed and the angels see the essence directly and as it is in itself, because they see it in the Λογος, i.e. from within the knowledge that is God’s own since they inhabit His wisdom. That insight can only be had as mediated through faith in statu via, and then of course, darkly, as in a mirror. And thus we are back to the contribution of supernatural reason to the certain knowledge of things as they are in themselves. The quality of the dialogue portrayed has reached a sincere simplicity to sustain the highly complex, which only the very best of philosophical dialogues experience. SAquinas’ willingness to find meaning in Husserl’s idea of eidetic analysis reflects SHusserl’s desire to hear what Aquinas would want to make of it. The concentration on the things themselves reveals Stein’s understanding of the practice of philosophy, which presupposes the eidos (allowing the interlocutors to identify essence in the first place) and also the essence (of essence, which allows them to identify essence as identical, or not, to that which the other identify it to be). What insight is gained through such an eidetic analysis is this double presupposition, of the eidos on the one hand and of the essence on the other, which insight it is much easier to access if it is discussed with others. Intersubjective constitution may support eidetic intuition or pose a challenge to it without either completing, exhausting, or obliterating it: talking about it calls on the eidos in a way that prevents totalisation. Faith contributes its own original element to intersubjective constitution, even as eidetic analysis remains a tool accessible to the individual from within his or her experience. When practised in dialogue, intersubjective eidetic variation preserves respect for the discrepancy between the eidos and the essence’s intersubjective constitution; the dialogue’s open-endedness, its character of being never definitively ‘over’ or ‘finished’, which constitutes such joy to friends who like to talk, testifies to this. Taking leave of the other without the questions addressed having been fully answered seems possible because any answer obtained is context dependent in the sense that the perspective of the other itself seems to be part of the answer. Community, and therefore friendship, is valuable in themselves according to Stein. Quite a good bit more valuable than particular answers clarifying any particular understanding of anything, except that some understandings of essence facilitate community and others don’t. This is the insight we can gain from the form of the dialogue, and of which it facilitates the acquisition.

2.  An eidetic analysis of dialogue Since we have already, in the light of the eidos ‘dialogue’, taken Stein’s text to be a dialogue (i.e. regarded it as an example of it), we can proceed to make an eidetic analysis of dialogue from it, since we need only one instantiation to analyse its essence. We shall therefore first briefly sum up its essential features as a dialogue (a) and then vary this, its essence as a dialogue, by comparison first with specific types of dialogue,

38 Ibid., 59.

32  Mette Lebech ethical, pedagogical, dialectic, and therapeutic (b), and then in relation to the related intersubjective phenomena of negotiation, interrogation and interview on the one hand and to peer-pressure, seduction and manipulation, on the other (c). a. The essence of the dialogue, the essence of dialogue To the dialogue studied, the identity of the interlocutors, the setting in which it takes place, and the purpose for which it was written are all essential. When we look for the essence of dialogue, which the dialogue exemplifies, we need not take these features into account, since they are not essential to it. The features listed below are, in contrast, essential to dialogue. In the example we have seen, the dialogue relies: 1 On the light of the eide directing the interlocutors towards the things themselves so that they pay attention to them, appreciate them more adequately, or gain insight into them. 2 On the interlocutors’ ability and willingness to let themselves be so directed. 3 On the interlocutors having constituted their personal identity in such a manner that they can respond to each other. This response-ability places each interlocutor above social, psychological, or physical causality so that it, and sentient contagion in particular, is not allowed to undermine their personal integrity and awareness of their motivations, and thereby downgrade their responses to reactions. 4 On the interlocutors allowing the dialogue to unfold by proposing something for consideration, waiting for a response from the other, or providing or requesting an explanation to further the dialogue. 5 On the interlocutors each appreciating the perspective of the other. 6 On no violence or force being exerted. Each interlocutor is free to end the dialogue at any point: it is voluntary. This is not incompatible with the interlocutors feeling obliged to either initiate, enter into, cultivate, or end the dialogue and to act on the felt obligation. 7 On it having no results (and it having not been intended to have any) apart from mutual understanding and a deeper understanding of the things themselves, on the terms characteristic of each interlocutor. One could call these ‘fruits’ of the dialogue, to distinguish them from something intended and hence achieved by means of it.39 b. Types of dialogue Some dialogues are initiated because of the fruit they bear.40 This is the case for the ethical, the pedagogical, the dialectical, and the therapeutic dialogues. Despite their purposefulness, they do not instrumentalise the dialogue in so far as it forms part of what they are. They arise from the fact that in dialogue intentions are expressed in and through language, a fact which opens the possibility of there being a discrepancy

39 Gadamer ascribes to dialogue (the deepest meaning of conversation) a result, namely that friends find themselves and each other in it and remain themselves to each other. Gadamer, “Die Unfähigkeit zum Gespräch,” 211. 40 More precisely, the fruit they might bear.

Essence, eidos, and dialogue  33 between what is said and what is meant. We respond to expressions inadequately when we respond only to what is being said or only to what is being meant. In both cases we do not actually face up to what the other is saying. An adequate response to the expression of a sentence must respond to both what it means and to what is meant by it. In a dialogue, interlocutors check whether what is being said is what is being meant so as to be able to respond to both. If the dialogue ceases to be about something equally accessible to the interlocutors, it becomes a therapeutic dialogue or a monologue, depending on the degree of insight into the motivation of the other and ability to adjust to it in the understanding part, as well as the degree of causal submersion experienced by the less responsive part. The therapeutic dialogue attempts to bring the submerged interlocutor to insight into the discrepancy between what he is saying and what he intends, by helping him to unearth foreign causality or subconscious motives that hinder him from being motivated as he thinks he is or as he would like to be. In this way the therapeutic dialogue is intended by both interlocutors to heal an inability to dialogue.41 The dialectic dialogue can accomplish some of the same work, if the one whose meaning is sought clarified is psychologically strong and morally sincere enough to respond to confrontation, since it coaxes truth out into the open by means of the principle of non-contradiction. The dialectic dialogue is more often reciprocal than the therapeutic, as the ritualised one-sidedness in the therapeutic dialogue can be helpful to protect both parties from the interference of sentient contagion. The dialectical dialogue can also be infected by sentient contagion and take on features of combat, in which case it severs its link with the things themselves. The pedagogical dialogue integrates elements from both the therapeutic and the dialectical dialogues to help the student explore the meaning of the things themselves, inclusive of all those things that might hinder her in exploring them. The pedagogue frequently confronts the student in order to build up her self-reliance and ability to test her views independently and the student questions the teacher to test the width and reliability of her wisdom. The ethical dialogue takes its point of departure in the fact that our actions (what they mean and what we mean by them) affect a shared world, and thus appear to others as meaning what we did not intend them to mean. In this, the human condition, the interlocutors are equal, so unless other factors of power are in play, the situation is not asymmetrical as in the therapeutic and the pedagogical dialogue. The ethical or political dialogue is initiated so as to consider what it would be good to do, in so far as the doing affects both interlocutors, whether directly or indirectly.42 In all of these dialogues, as in our dialogue, the interlocutors address the subject in such a way as to attempt to take the other’s understanding of it into account; they present requests for clarification or attempt to meet such requests before they arise in the interest of continuing the dialogue. They all specifically address the meaning of some word or thing, so as to aid the formation of adequate concepts, or at least draw the attention of the interlocutor to differences in the conceptualisation of something. In our dialogue the suspicion that the meaning of what is being said is not what is being meant does not arise, and its interlocutors are careful to pre-empt such suspicion by taking insightful approaches and giving adequate explanations. As the

41 Gadamer, “Die Unfähigkeit zum Gespräch,” 213. 42 Peter Kemp, « le dialogue, » Théorie de l’engagement I. Pathétique de l’engagement (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), 231–235.

34  Mette Lebech interlocutors are not in need of doing anything together, their dialogue is not an ethical one. Whereas SAquinas might initially appear as having some educational intent, this is only to inform SHusserl of something he needs to know in order to understand how he understands SHusserl’s philosophy. Thus the dialogue is not a pedagogical one either. Nor is it a therapeutic one: The complications of unconscious motives are neither expected nor found in either of the interlocutors, although some positions show up as insufficiently motivated by the things themselves, and therefore leaving the one expressing them (either party in turn) with a question as to whether a better position could be found. As there is hardly any confrontation, characterising it as a dialectical dialogue seems superfluous. It is just a dialogue. c. Neighbouring phenomena to dialogue Dialogue is the mode of communication typical of community. It relies on, deepens, and explores common interests and motivation in general for its meaning. It can occur because of the openness to and appreciation of the other as a subject, whose perspective on the world has relevance because it is precisely that. Openness does not mean that one interlocutor necessarily likes the other, or thinks that his worldview is justified, but it means that one lives with the fact that this is how he or she sees things, differently from oneself. The openness and acceptance of the other as other and as another subject is the reason why community is the fundamental type of intersubjectivity, which the other types, that of the association and that of the mass, can modify, and to some extent cancel, but without which they cannot, ultimately, exist.43 There cannot be intersubjectivity without subjectivity, however much social and psychic causality might condition the former through the latter. A dialogue is characterised by at least one of the interlocutors responding adequately to the other most of the time, and the other, at least some of the time, trying to respond adequately. This entails that at least one of the personal subjects constitutes himself so as to contain by integration both his will and his psyche and thereby remains free. His awareness of psychic and social causality allows him, in principle at least, openness to the motivating powers themselves of the things discussed themselves. He is, in other words, not conjuring them up out of his own will, nor giving into peer pressure in his conceptualisation of them, but is in the light of the eide intuiting them, however vaguely. Where the roles of interlocutors are predetermined in a manner typical of the associational mode of intersubjectivity, conversation is likewise determined by social expectations. The conversation that occurs under such constraints may take the character of negotiation, as when the terms of a contract are discussed, or performance, as during an interview. Individual speech acts, such as raising a question, defending a procedure, asking for clarification, or criticising an idea subordinate themselves to the associational

43 Edith Stein, Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften, ESGA 6, translated as Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, trans. Mary Catherine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki, CWES 7 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000). In particular, the second treatise: “Individual and Community,” 129–314. Please also consult my “Study Guide to Edith Stein’s Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities,” Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society (2004): 40–76.

Essence, eidos, and dialogue  35 setting the telos of which is typically some type of function. The functionality of an association relies on the community it facilitates and therefore on dialogue for subjects understanding its meaning, but its efficiency, being sometimes conceived as a goal in itself, promoted as part of individuals’ ambition, frequently institutes a form of speech, where the link between meaning and what is being meant is purposefully severed for the sake of the efficiency. Here the dialogue with its openness to the things themselves becomes a threat and is frequently curtailed, as power affirms itself as valuable in itself to those who identify themselves with it and legitimises their actions by reference to it. Socrates had a predilection for challenging such to dialogue, and it is in particular here that the dialectic dialogue can challenge interlocutors to return to a more adequate use of language and a greater respect for the perspectives of those who see in the light of the eide. A conversation, also, may run along tracks established by psychic contagion, typical of the mass, such that emotion effectuates the outcome, often without either interlocutor being aware of what is happening. In this case, neither essences nor eide are regarded as meaningful in themselves, but are rather seen as arbitrary or decorative elements in a poetic result, since psychic contagion works by personal value response being overridden and without regard for agreements. In this case conversations hold their meaning, partly or entirely, from causal factors. In so far as an individual or a group has insight into the functioning of psychic or social causality and exploits it for a purpose, we can talk of seduction or manipulation. But it also happens that individuals do not understand how the psychic contagion spreads, and in this case we must speak simply of contamination and, if it is severe, of collective psychosis, spreading by means of a communication, which is neither dialogue, nor even conversation, since it is not about the things themselves, or even about a socially constructed idea.

Conclusion To Stein the eidos is the necessary presupposition for dialogue, the philosophical as well as the other forms, and is revealed in the dialogue precisely as its hidden and super-intelligible ground. It always remains a super-intelligible corrective to all of these and a reason to re-initiate dialogue about it, however well a theory to clarify it might already have been obtained. Science is dependent on this possible corrective and is for that reason never definitive. That Heidegger would not understand this intention would not have come as a surprise to Stein. His understanding of intersubjectivity was limited to Mitsein, which Stein could have classified as the form of intersubjectivity which is based on psychic contagion and therefore does not consider the eidos as anything but an element in a poetic affirmation of power. The possibility of dialogue is lessened to the extent that belief in intuitable, and therefore sharable, meaning is denied. If meaning itself is experienced as oppressive, dialogue is understood as a ‘power game’ and ceases to be. With it, also phenomenology, as a collaborative enterprise, ceases to be. However, the eidos is always open to the learner. This is part of the reason why Stein begins her foreword to Finite and Eternal Being with the statement that it is written by a learner for co-learners. This remark is not self-deprecatory in any other sense than

36  Mette Lebech Socrates’ insistence that he knows nothing: it is a statement of the human subject’s ‘place’ in relation to everything, which valorises the intersubjective setting, the meaning of which had occupied Stein in all her phenomenological works, as essential to the doctrines being developed in and through it.

References Beckmann-Zöller, Beate. “Edith Steins Projekt zur Vermittlung von thomasischer und phänomenologischer Philosophie und die Spannung zwischen Philosophie und Theologie.” Edith Stein Jahrbuch 2017: 99–133. Börsig-Hover, Magdalena. Zur Ontologie und Metaphysik der Wahrheit. Der Wahrheitsbegriff Edith Steins in Auseinandersetzung mit Aristoteles, Thomas von Aquin und Edmund Husserl. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006. Conrad-Martius, Hedwig. Metaphysische Gespräche. Halle: Niemeyer, 1921. Friedländer, Paul. “Dialog.” In Platon. I. Eidos – Paideia – Dialogos. Berlin-Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter et Co., 1928, pp. 180–198. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Die Unfähigkeit zum Gespräch.” In Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr: (Paul Siebeck), 1993a, pp. 207–215. ———. “Vom Zirkel des Verstehens.” In Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993b, pp. 57–65. Hering, Jean. “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee.” Jahrbuch für philosophische und phänomenologische Forschung IV, 1921, pp. 495–543. Kemp, Peter. “le dialogue.” In Théorie de l’engagement I. Pathétique de l’engagement. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973, pp. 231–235. Lebech, Mette. “Study Guide to Edith Stein’s Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities.” Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society 2004: 40–76. ———. “Stein’s Understanding of Mental Health and Mental Illness.” In Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood. Essays on Edith Stein’s Phenomenological Investigations, ed. Elisa Magri and Dermot Moran. Dordrecht: Springer, 2018, pp. 107–123. McNamara, Robert. “Essence in Stein’s Festschrift Dialogue.” In “Alles Wesentliche lässt sich nicht schreiben.” Leben und Denken Edith Steins im Spiegel ihres Gesamtwerkes, ed. Andreas Speer and Stephan Regh. Freiburg: Herder, 2016, pp. 175–194. O’Byrne, Brendan. “John Cleary: A Philosophical Portrait.” In Studies on Plato, Aristotle and Proclus. Collected Essays on Ancient Philosophy of John Cleary, ed. John Dillon, Brendan O’Byrne and Fran O’Rourke. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Ricoeur, Paul. Du texte a l’action. Essais d’hermeneutique II. Paris: Seuil, 1986. Stein, Edith. Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften, ESGA 6. Freiburg: Herder, 2010. Translated as Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, by Mary Catherine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki, CWES 7. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000a. ———. Endliches und ewiges Sein, ESGA 11/12. Freiburg: Herder, 2006, translagted as Finite and eternal Being, CWES 9. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000b. ———. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, X (Ergänzungsband) Halle/Saale, 1929, 315–338. Reprinted in ‘Freiheit und Gnade’ und weitere Beiträge zu Phänomenologie und Ontologie, Edith Steins Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9. Freiburg: Herder, 2014, pp. 91–142, translated as “Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison.” In Knowledge and Faith, trans. Walter Redmond, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 8. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000c. Tommasi, Francesco Valerio. “ ‘. . . Verschiedene Sprachen redeten. . ., Ein Dialog zwischen Phänomenologie und Mittelalterlicher Scholastik im Werk Edith Steins.” In Edith Stein. Themen. Kontexte. Materialien, ed. Beate Beckmann-Zöller and Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz. Dresden: Text und Dialog, 2015, 115–140.

4 Twenty-first-century phenomenology? Pursuing philosophy with and after Husserl Steven Crowell

Abstract: In Dermot Moran’s Introduction to Phenomenology he tells a story in which the phenomenology inaugurated by Edmund Husserl is subjected to a series of “transformations” during the twentieth century which seem radically to change its character, leading, on the one hand, to the “collapse” of the phenomenological method in Derridean deconstruction and, on the other, to various attempt to move away from Husserl’s transcendentalism and “idealism” toward something akin to a metaphysics. In this paper I try to extricate phenomenology from the twentieth century by examining Moran’s account of the Heideggerian “inflection point” – his critique of Husserl’s Cartesianism and idealism – and the opportunity Moran sees here for phenomenology in the twenty-first century. This involves a critical look at Moran’s account of Merleau-Ponty’s opening toward a “phenomenology of experienced nature.” Identifying a lacuna in that opening, I argue that twenty-first-century phenomenology ought to reconsider its hostility to the transcendental project and take another look at what is entailed by Husserl’s call for “ultimate philosophical self-responsibility.” Keywords: phenomenology, transcendental philosophy, metaphysics, normativity, meaning, nature, reduction

Introduction In the first year of the present century, Dermot Moran’s Introduction to Phenomenology appeared. A work of immense erudition and scope, it tells the story of phenomenology as one in which Husserl’s “breakthrough” is subjected to a series of transformations from within and criticisms from without, yielding an uncertain future. Toward the end of his opening pages, Moran offers the following: “Phenomenology, then, is in many ways inextricably linked to the twentieth century. It is a fractured movement, and its inspiration often appears to run like an underground stream enriching the ground rather than as an explicit and self-confident movement in its own right.”1 My question here will be: just how “inextricable” is this link to the previous century? What might a twenty-first-century phenomenology look like? Rather than pursue this question by narrating a history of the young century’s actual phenomenological offerings – “naturalized phenomenology,” the “theological turn,” “analytic” phenomenology, and so

1 Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (New York: Routledge, 2000), 18.

38  Steven Crowell on – I propose to revisit Moran’s Introduction and some of his subsequent writings, searching for clues about how to extricate phenomenology from the twentieth century, that is, from the disorienting “transformations” that should by now be well in our rearview mirrors.2

1.  Outline of the twentieth-century story In this first section, I will summarize the narrative arc of the Introduction. Husserl, a mathematician whose interest in philosophy was sparked by Brentano’s project for an empirical, anti-Kantian, descriptive psychology of consciousness, saw in the concept of intentionality a tool for tackling problems in the foundations of arithmetic and logic. His breakthrough to phenomenology came in the Logical Investigations (1900–01), when he recognized that a reflection on conscious acts and their contents could serve a broader role in the theory of knowledge. That text was prefaced by a long “Prolegomena” in which Husserl roundly criticizes psychologism in logic – the project of explaining the validity of logic by going back to its supposed empirical and evolutionary ground. Though logical psychologism inevitably succumbs to skepticism and relativism, a “phenomenology” of consciousness could avoid these consequences, since it is not an explanatory theory at all, but rather a clarification of the meaning of logical concepts such as truth, content, proposition, and inference. In this form, as Moran points out, phenomenology is akin to “conceptual analysis.”3 This breakthrough brought Husserl a good deal of fame, and philosophers in Munich and Göttingen followed its impetus in the direction of a “realistic” phenomenology. Husserl, however, came to feel that the position of the Logical Investigations remained caught in a certain form of psychologism, because it tacitly appealed to a picture in which consciousness is an inner subjective realm whose descriptive core leaves the problem of “transcendence” – the epistemic relation between consciousness and the real – unaddressed. To tackle this problem, Husserl introduced a “transcendental” version of phenomenology which, while highly critical of Kant, poses the question of how it is possible for consciousness to provide access to things that are not a real part of the stream of consciousness. Rather than address this question by means of a Kantian transcendental deduction, Husserl proceeded by way of a phenomenological reduction or epoché: by “bracketing” the “natural attitude” – our everyday pre-theoretical stance characterized by the “general thesis” of an existing world, the fundamental ontological commitment at the heart of all scientific explanation – phenomenological reflection could attain intuitive and descriptive access to “pure” consciousness, the intentional correlations in which all “transcendent” things are “constituted” as what they are. The key point of the epoché, for Husserl, is that it frees phenomenology from all “presuppositions,” and especially the presupposition of naturalism – roughly, the idea that nature (or the world) is the ultimate horizon for epistemological inquiry.4 An

2 This account extends some of the themes in Steven Crowell, “Is There a Phenomenological Research Program?,” Synthese 131/3 (2002): 419–444. 3 Moran, Introduction, 101. 4 To talk of “presuppositionlessness” in this context does not mean that the philosopher is able to set aside all the psychological influences that past experience has sedimented into her

Twenty-first-century phenomenology?  39 adequate theory of knowledge can be accomplished only on the ground of “absolute evidence,” and the natural attitude’s world-certainty does not measure up. We might have no reason to doubt our perception of a house, for instance, but the evidence of perception can be doubted in principle. The perceived thing is always given as a structure of presence (the side facing us) and absence (what remains hidden from that perspective), and in moving from one to the other it is always possible for my anticipation to be thwarted rather than fulfilled, thereby undermining the doxic claim of the original perception. Reflection on consciousness, in contrast, is not subject to this adumbrational disappointment: consciousness presents itself to reflection with a kind of “absolute” evidence. Since anything that purports to be real must be given to consciousness in some manner (else there would be no “purport” or claim at all), this sort of pure or reduced consciousness provides a philosophically ultimate field for clarifying how all forms of transcendent reality are constituted through the systems of Evidenz in which they are given. While this turn to pure consciousness thus provides the ground for clarifying the epistemic achievements of the natural sciences, consciousness itself “has nothing at all to do with nature, with space and time, substantiality and causality,” but instead has its own “thoroughly peculiar ‘forms.’ ”5 Phenomenology is the science of such consciousness, the method of a philosophy that “would leave no meaningful question unanswered.”6 Grounded in this epistemological project, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology became a version of idealism, which turned most of Husserl’s early followers against him. The nature of this idealism will concern us below, but its relevance for twentieth-century phenomenology lies in the fact that Husserl seemed to hold not only that consciousness is the locus of the “constitution” of the world, but that the being of the world is altogether “relative” to consciousness. In later works, this idealism blossomed into a philosophy of Spirit, the “transcendental life” of subjectivity whose full analysis involves an embodied instinctual striving toward fulfillment of its rational telos through an intersubjective communicative community. However, it also yielded what Husserl called the “paradox of human subjectivity”:7 the fact that a particular being in the world (the human being or historical human community) appears to be responsible for the constitution of the world, and so also of itself. Husserl attempted to address this issue by a distinction between “attitudes,” but Moran, echoing the opinion of twentieth-century philosophy, is not convinced that Husserl succeeded: Though Husserl often spoke as if “the transcendental ego is just a way of regarding the human ego revealed in the worldly sphere, [. . .] one cannot help thinking that perhaps Husserl thought of the transcendental ego as having a life of its own.”8 If that is so, then we have not merely a methodological distinction but a distinction between two entities, that is, a “metaphysical” distinction. Rejection of this

thinking; rather, it is to say that the philosopher will not bring to her reflection a set of epistemic commitments that express adherence to any ultimate explanatory framework. 5 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, ed. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 71–147, 108. 6 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 168. 7 Ibid., 178. 8 Moran, Introduction, 174.

40  Steven Crowell metaphysical outcome provides the backdrop for most twentieth-century responses to Husserl, but must twenty-first-century phenomenology embrace the interpretation of Husserl that leads to it? Be that as it may, it is in Heidegger that Moran finds the inflection point in twentiethcentury phenomenology.9 Though Heidegger claims to be practicing phenomenology, he rejects Husserl’s idea that epistemology is first philosophy and embraces an ontological project. And though he identifies with a version of transcendental philosophy, Heidegger rejects the idea that the transcendental subject, or Dasein, possesses a mode of being that could ground a rigorous science of the constitution of the world. Rather than explore “the intentional structures of consciousness,” Heideggerian phenomenology will reflect on and interpret “the relation between Dasein and Being itself,” that is, being-in-the-world.10 With this, according to Moran, Heidegger “reintroduced the historical and relative into phenomenology.”11 No more “pure description,” and no more “idealism.”12 But, we might ask, what exactly is world? Though Heidegger’s ontology is ontology in a “new sense” – i.e., it is not “some definite philosophical discipline standing in interconnection with the others” – 13it breaks decisively from Husserl’s “rationalism.”14 According to Heidegger, Husserl’s phenomenology suffers from adherence to a traditional prejudice – the idea of the human being as a rational animal – which brings with it certain damaging assumptions from the natural attitude. In Heidegger’s words, Husserl approaches the human being “zoologically”15 – namely, as a kind of layer-cake whose founding stratum is physicalistic, upon which dimensions of “animality” and ultimately “mentality” (Geist, spirit) are constituted.16 Starting with our practical engagements in the world, Heidegger proposes to set the traditional definition aside and reflect specifically on those “categories” of our being that prove necessary for encountering something as something (intentionality). The early Heidegger thus preserves a kind of transcendentalism: the categorial structure of Dasein (care) is the condition of possibility of intentionality. However, as Moran tells it, Heidegger ultimately came to reject the “strait-jacket” of transcendentalism and arrived, finally, at a poetic “mysticism” of one-sided pronouncements.17 Heideggerian ontology dominated the development of phenomenology throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Moran’s Introduction pursues the German part of

  9 Ibid., 4. 10 Ibid., 194. 11 Ibid., 22. 12 Ibid., 20. 13 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 49. 14 Moran, Introduction, 245. 15 Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 113, 125. 16 Dermot Moran, “Heidegger’s Transcendental Phenomenology in Light of Husserl’s Project of First Philosophy,” in Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 139. I borrow the term “layer-cake” from Mark Okrent, “On Layer-Cakes: Heidegger’s Normative Pragmatism Revisited,” in Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology, ed. Ondřej Švec and Jakub Čapek (New York: Routledge, 2017). 17 Moran, Introduction, 198, 247.

Twenty-first-century phenomenology?  41 this story with chapters on Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Arendt’s political thought, while the French story is traced in chapters on Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida. If, in Moran’s judgment, Derridean deconstruction represents the “collapse” of the phenomenological method,18 the chapter on Merleau-Ponty ends more positively by suggesting a return to the beginning. It thus provides a clue to Moran’s view of where twenty-first-century phenomenology might go. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is significant because it addresses the lacunae in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein – his supposed “forgetting of air” (Irigaray), or the fact that “Dasein never seems to get hungry” (Levinas) – by drawing upon resources found in Husserl’s late (and at that time unpublished) manuscripts. In particular, by developing Husserl’s descriptions of the body’s role in constitution, together with his concept of “transcendental intersubjectivity,” and by engaging with the empirical sciences of his time, Merleau-Ponty developed phenomenology into a kind of nonscientistic “dialectical naturalism.”19 As Moran emphasizes, the key concept here (one also drawn from Husserl) is that of an “intertwining” (Verflechtung, l’entrelacs) of body and world – not an identity, but an inextricable mutual implication. From such a perspective, the realm of the logos – of language, concepts, reason, and science – is not a telos toward which all life is striving, but rather an extension of the body’s original “motor intentionality” which is itself entwined with the “expressive” character of the perceptual lifeworld. In this way, transcendental phenomenology is left behind in favor of reflection on an originally “ambiguous mode of existence” emblematized by “the experience of one’s own body.”20 Husserl had already suggested that, from the “personalistic” attitude, “nature” is subsumed into “culture” or Spirit, and he had given this a metaphysical reading consistent with his idealism. Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, rejected the idealism and worked toward a phenomenology of nature that would avoid the paradox of subjectivity by undercutting the binary logic governing Husserl’s starting point. The entwining of body and world ultimately became, for Merleau-Ponty, the clue to a general ontology of the “flesh” (le chair) of the world, a move apparently demanded by the failure of dualistic schemata – empiricism and intellectualism, nature and culture, body and mind – to deal with the ambiguity of embodiment. Though this project remained speculative and tentative – and though, as Moran points out, it is hobbled by the fact that “literary language often appears at the very moment the reader seeks conceptual precision”21 – Merleau-Ponty’s neo-naturalism has been attractive to analytic philosophers of mind, to those who seek a dialogue between phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, to environmental philosophers, and many others. In contrast to twentieth-century phenomenology’s “post-modern” dénouement in Derrida, then, Merleau-Ponty’s writings provide Moran’s narrative with a bridge to the twenty-first century. Since I have a somewhat different view of the narrative arc of twentieth-century phenomenology – one that embraces, rather than

18 Ibid., 21. 19 Ibid., 403. 20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 204. 21 Moran, Introduction, 431.

42  Steven Crowell flees, Husserl’s transcendental turn – a consideration of Moran’s bridging proposal will illuminate something of what is at stake.

2.  Entwining: embodiment, intersubjectivity, and nature Since on Moran’s telling, the inflection point of twentieth-century phenomenology is found in Heidegger’s response to Husserl’s transcendental idealism, it behooves us to look more closely at what this idealism is supposed to entail. Moran himself discusses the obvious parallel with Kant: For Kant, transcendental idealism is meant to ground empirical realism by demonstrating its categorial conditions of possibility.22 In a similar way, phenomenological reflection on the transcendental “constitution” of entities would not be a theory of the first-order properties of entities, but an account of the necessary conditions thanks to which entities and their properties can show up for us as the things they are.23 The “as” here is crucial, since it signifies that phenomenology is Sinnkritik, concerned with the constitution of meaning, i.e., with what must be the case if we are to grasp anything – whether lifeworldly or scientific, whether artwork, electron, organism, or person – as it already presents itself in our experience. Transcendental phenomenology would thus be a methodological idealism, committed to refusing “speculation” and to reflecting on the necessary correlation between intentional “acts” and the “meanings” of being (Seinssinn und Seinsgeltung) they make experientially possible. But Moran is not fully satisfied with such a Kantian interpretation. He does recognize that Husserl’s is a “new kind” of idealism; indeed, it is “not a philosophical position at all,” since it does not arise from philosophical argumentation or dialectic.24 As Husserl writes: “This idealism is not the product of sportive argumentations, a prize to be won in the dialectical contest with ‘realisms.’ It is sense-explication achieved by actual work,” and so the “proof of this idealism is [. . .] phenomenology itself.”25 Nevertheless Moran, following A. D. Smith, holds that it is a metaphysical idealism. While Husserl may have started in a Kantian vein, he ultimately drew inspiration from Fichte and, as a “deeply religious thinker,” developed an “increasingly wide-reaching, even baroque [. . .] conception of the transcendental,” ultimately an “absolute” idealism of “transcendental life.”26 It is this that makes the paradox of human subjectivity more than a paradox. If the world and everything in it is metaphysically dependent on transcendental subjectivity27 – that is, if not just its meaning, the constitution of its givenness, but its very being (its “existing”) is a product of such subjectivity – then the human being, as

22 Dermot Moran, “Making Sense: Husserl’s Phenomenology as Transcendental Idealism,” in From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental, ed. Jeff Malpas (London: Routledge, 2003), 53. 23  The difference between Kantian and phenomenological transcendental philosophy is explored in Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Part I. 24 Moran, “Making Sense,” 57. 25 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 86. 26 Moran, “Making Sense,” 61, 51, 68. 27 Ibid., 65.

Twenty-first-century phenomenology?  43 one entity found in the world (a natural kind, an empirical person), must also depend metaphysically on transcendental subjectivity. But since the human being is transcendental subjectivity, it looks like the human being “depends” on itself, that is, must bring itself into being. How is that possible? Moran holds that Husserl “never clarified this idea sufficiently,”28 and he thinks that Husserl’s proposed solution – to distinguish between a “natural/personalistic” attitude and an “absolute” or transcendental one – does not work. According to Husserl, transcendental subjectivity necessarily “mundanizes” itself into the human animal and, ultimately, the person, whose expressive, embodied, and communal mode of being provides the bridge back, through the work of phenomenological reflection, to the recovery of its own rational teleology, its own metaphysical absoluteness. But no account is given of why such an Absolute Spirit must mundanize itself. Husserl seems left with a doctrine of Double Truth.29 According to Moran, the paradox of subjectivity is Heidegger’s motivation for “raising the question of being” anew.30 Heidegger addresses the perplexities in the subject–world relation by “radicalizing” Husserl’s phenomenology: the “world,” as a “universal phenomenon of validity” is not bracketed; rather, it belongs to the “being” of the subject itself.31 This yields a “new form” of ontology which rejects Husserl’s layer-cake or zoological picture of the human being and overcomes the implicit naturalism that still infects it. As Moran writes, “Heidegger was drawn to Husserl’s resolute antinaturalism,” but he thought that “Husserl retained a commitment to naturalism in his starting point, namely, the natural attitude and its supposedly inherent assumption that humans were to be construed as rational animals.”32 Thus Husserl’s transcendentalism is caught in a bind: how is it possible that “pure consciousness, which is supposed to be separated from every transcendence by an absolute gulf, is at the same time united with reality in the unity of a real human being”?33 Moran sees Heidegger’s move away from idealism as a kind of double-edged sword. On the one hand, constitution can now be understood as “letting the entity be seen in its objectivity,” rather than as a kind of metaphysical creation in which the physical world “supervenes” on consciousness.34 On the other hand, in rejecting the “separation” between pure consciousness and reality, Heidegger delivers phenomenology over to “the historicity or the facticity of human living,” and so to “the historical and relative,”35 thereby spelling the end of the transcendental project. We might put the problem this way: why isn’t Heidegger’s refusal to bracket the world simply another form of naturalism? What makes it phenomenological at all? Husserl held that Heidegger’s phenomenology was nothing but anthropology, and Moran seems to agree:36 the Heideggerian inflection point does not finally resolve the paradox in a philosophically satisfying manner.

28 Ibid., 48. 29 Moran, “Heidegger’s Transcendental Phenomenology,” 149. 30 Ibid., 148. 31 Ibid., 141. 32 Ibid., 139. 33 Ibid., 148. 34 Ibid., 143. 35 Moran, Introduction, 20, 22. 36 Moran, “Heidegger’s Transcendental Phenomenology,” 141.

44  Steven Crowell Moran argues that the way out of this impasse consists in a certain return to Husserl. Against Dreyfus’s (Heidegger-inspired) interpretation, in which Husserl’s idealism remains irremediably Cartesian, Moran argues that Husserl’s late philosophy must be understood as a series of attempts to “overcome Cartesianism from within.”37 This casts Merleau-Ponty’s thinking – to which Dreyfus also appeals – in an altogether different light. It is now recognized as a continuation of Husserl’s own attempts to move beyond classical transcendentalism. By showing just how much of MerleauPonty’s work derives from ideas that Husserl had already developed, Moran finds a path toward what was missing from Heidegger’s account of the “world,” namely, “something like a phenomenology of experienced nature.”38 If we start from the point at which Husserl had arrived – namely, with embodied subjectivity – phenomenology can focus on how the subject is “ontologically entwined” with the world. Husserl’s metaphysical idealism, then, is replaced by a position that cannot be captured in terms of traditional idealism or realism: an ontology of the “flesh.” The basic outline of this move can be appreciated through a brief consideration of embodiment, intersubjectivity, and nature. To begin with embodiment: in Ideas II Husserl brilliantly describes how the first stirrings of self-consciousness are found in the emergence of “aesthesiological” properties, and in particular the sense of touch. Touch is foundational for selfconsciousness because it is the way in which a “physical thing” is ontologically transformed into a “living body” (Leib). In the experience of my hand touching my arm, for instance, there is a “reversibility” of the touching and the touched that occurs nowhere else: touching my arm reveals its physical properties (smooth, pliable) while simultaneously giving rise to a set of sensations (pressure, tingling) in the arm that are not properties of the physical thing but of the being who is touching. As Husserl says, the localization of these latter properties “in” the arm does not mean “that the physical thing is now richer [in physical properties], but instead it becomes Body [Leib].”39 An embodied ego is thus constituted through a kind of “interwining” with a certain physical thing. Husserl’s term for this sort of entity is Leib-körper: the entity in question partakes of both the physical and the “psychical” in the unity of one body with “two faces.”40 The lesson Merleau-Ponty draws from this is that “a complete reduction [from world to consciousness] is impossible,” and the ambiguity of the Leib-körper becomes the model for his phenomenological ontology. In Phenomenology of Perception, for instance, Merleau-Ponty seeks to undercut both empiricism and intellectualism by a reflection on the body’s role in all constitution. Intentionality does not supervene on a non-intentional stratum of corporeality; rather, the body itself evinces a “motor intentionality” that requires no guidance from the intellect, which ontologically presupposes it.41 My gearing successfully into the world – my

37 Dermot Moran, “The Phenomenology of Embodiment: Intertwining and Reflexivity,” in The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity, ed. Rasmus Thybo Jensen and Dermot Moran (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 288–289. 38 Ibid., 298–299. 39 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 152. 40 Moran, “The Phenomenology of Embodiment,” 293. 41 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 113.

Twenty-first-century phenomenology?  45 skillful coping and habituated attunement to what is possible – is neither mere reflex nor a kind of implicit deliberation; it is an original “motor project.”42 The ground of such projects, of all “I can,” is the “body schema,” a “system of equivalences” between my embodied “motricity” and the “solicitations” of the world: the “body schema is not merely an experience of my body but rather an experience of my body in the world,” which “gives a motor sense” to what, for “idealism,” remains other than the body.43 This “intentional arc”44 is what Moran calls the “entwining” of body and world, with the result that neither consciousness nor the body are constitutionally autonomous. Regarding the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, Moran acknowledges that Husserl’s Cartesian starting point brought with it the need to clarify how another subjectivity is constituted within my own “monadic” ego. In Ideas II this constitution is not explored in detail, but in Cartesian Meditations Husserl tries to show how “empathy” – an original “pairing” between my Leib-körper and the Körper of a being in my perceptual field – accounts for the peculiar way in which another constituting subjectivity is originarily given in my experience while not being originally given. In addition to obscurities in the account of how this works, such an approach seems to entail – as Levinas would emphasize45 – that the Other is a mere modification of myself, of my own subjectivity. Husserl thereby fails to do justice to the radically different sort of “transcendence” or otherness that characterizes our experience of other subjects (monads) in contrast to our experience of material things. Levinas used this deficit as the starting-point for an “ethical” transformation of phenomenology, but Moran has little sympathy for this move, since it appears to go beyond phenomenology altogether.46 Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, in contrast, seems to provide a more promising way out. In his numerous manuscripts on intersubjectivity, Husserl developed an approach to social ontology grounded not in a Cartesian transcendental ego but in what Ideas II calls the “personalistic attitude.”47 This, the genuinely “natural” attitude in which persons conduct their everyday affairs, is communal and communicative from the start. The person is not first of all a Leib-körper; rather, the body is immediately registered as “expression,” as mind or spirit (Geist), its gestures are directly understood, with varying degrees of specificity, as (rationally) motivated rather than caused.48 Here we locate a different sort of “intertwining”: the world in which I find myself is possible only as the correlate of an always already communalized subjectivity. By engaging in projects together and communicating with one another, we constitute an objective surrounding world (including an objective “nature”), and this “we” is not merely a side-by-side togetherness but a kind of Ineinandersein of subjectivities.49 My perspective

42 Ibid., 113. 43 Ibid., 142. 44 Ibid., 137. 45 Moran, Introduction, 337. 46 Ibid., 352. 47 Husserl, Ideas II, 183. 48 For a concise explication of this distinction, see Mark Wrathall, “Motives, Reasons, and Causes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 49 Dermot Moran, “Ineinandersein and L’interlacs: The Constitution of the Social World or ‘We-World’ (Wir-Welt) in Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” in Phenomenology

46  Steven Crowell already includes yours and countless others; indeed, I cannot have a perspective without this “unique intertwining” of subjects through empathy and communication.50 Though in Ideas II Husserl simply juxtaposes the natualistic and the personalistic attitudes, his late work, according to Moran, decisively embraces the “primacy of the personalistic attitude.”51 Transcendental subjectivity is transcendental intersubjectivity. Not only is the solipsistic “sphere of ownness” of the Cartesian Meditations a “methodological abstraction”; the very idea of a “monadic” consciousness is thinkable only as a community of monads who from the beginning communicate through the “window” of empathy: “Husserl insists that every subjective stream is not only in principle ‘openended,’ but in fact implies other streams and is in turn ‘implied’ in every other conscious stream.”52 Merleau-Ponty will focus on the nature of this “implication.” For Merleau-Ponty, if consciousness and body are intertwined in a way that leaves neither of them constitutionally autonomous, this very same “ontological” principle is evident in the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. That it is the same principle is confirmed in the way Merleau-Ponty analyzes the phenomenon of the handshake. If touching my own arm exemplifies the birth of embodied self-consciousness, touching the other’s body, as in a handshake (or, as in Levinas, the amorous caress), is not merely an exploration of the physical world but an original entwinement with the other as person. Intersubjectivity is “intercorporeity.” Such intertwining is the basis for the Ineinander of subjectivities that Husserl emphasized, a mutual belonging or commerce that, already for Husserl, extends to the other animal.53 Merleau-Ponty’s major achievement, then, on Moran’s account, is to have developed the implications of the phenomenon of intertwining for a post-Cartesian version of phenomenology.54 The philosopher, reflecting on our experience of this “anonymous” world – 55as Husserl put it, “the obscure depths” which provides the “root soil” of Spirit – 56cannot get back behind the original form of embodiment and intersubjectivity to show how it is constituted. Phenomenology can only attest to where and how such “root soil” shows itself. Phenomenology thus establishes that “I experience myself just as I experience the other,”57 borne along by the “ambiguous” ontological ground that sustains all these movements and engagements in the world, an arche through which determinate meanings and concepts (the logoi) emerge, without a guiding telos, in the course of history. For Merleau-Ponty, “the only Logos that pre-exists is the world itself,” and phenomenology’s task is to “reveal the [. . .] mystery of reason.”58 This mention of reason brings us, finally, to the third moment in Moran’s argument: the subsumption of Husserl’s “naturalistic” nature into the realm of Spirit and the

of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, ed. Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran (New York: Routledge, 2016), 114. 50 Ibid., 114–115. 51 Ibid., 108. 52 Ibid., 115. 53 Ibid., 118–120. 54 Moran, “The Phenomenology of Embodiment,” 292. 55 Moran, “Ineinandersein,” 120. 56 Husserl, Ideas II, 292. 57 Moran, “Ineinandersein,” 121. 58 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxxiv.

Twenty-first-century phenomenology?  47 world of “culture.” In Ideas II Husserl recognized that, when seen from the personalistic attitude, the sciences of nature are themselves cultural formations. In his later work, this view informs the idea of the lifeworld which, as distributed into the structure of “homeworld” and “alienworlds,” includes a “nature” that is experienced in various culturally specific ways. The nature thematized in the natural sciences, however, seems to have nothing to do with this sort of lifeworld-nature. It is a meaningless domain which seems to underlie the nature we can access through cultural meanings. This yields a kind of metaphysical paradox in which what is phenomenologically foundational but relative (various cultural senses of nature) is the ontological ground of a meaningless nature which is metaphysically basic. There thus appears to be an intertwining of the two which is, however, “obscured under Husserl’s own neo-Cartesian methodology and ponderous terminology.”59 Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, begins from the personalistic attitude,60 arguing that the tension between lifeworld-nature and nature as the object of natural science is produced by a false intellectualism which fails to recognize how achievements of consciousness are rooted in the nature that is revealed in the body’s original motor intentionality. Such “nature” is another name for the ambiguous ontological dimension in which the distinction between nature and culture cannot be rigorously drawn. If culture is the world of meaning and expression, such meanings are not constituted by mind or spirit alone; rather, they draw upon an original expressiveness of things – of the body and its entwinement in the world of perception; of an intercorporeity that precedes every I and Thou. If “nature” in this embodied sense is already expressive, then “cultural” formations simply extend the “operative intentionality” that belongs anonymously to the ontological ground. All such formations – sciences, arts, political institutions, and indeed language itself – become part of that “phenomenology of experienced nature” which, for Merleau-Ponty, eludes both empiricism and intellectualism.61 If Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of such nature bottoms out, according to Moran, in something like a “mythical/symbolic order,” Moran himself holds that it is better understood in terms of Husserl’s phenomenology of sociality, “our finite rootedness in the social world.”62 How convincing is Merleau-Ponty’s attempt at a phenomenological ontology which yields this sort of non-scientistic naturalism? Why, indeed, should we call this ambiguous ontological ground nature? Though Moran embraces the direction of Merleau-Ponty’s solution to the various paradoxes yielded by Husserl’s metaphysically inflected transcendental idealism, he must finally confess that Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology is “deeply mysterious.”63 The mystery lies precisely in the ambiguity of the concept of intertwining. Coined as the name for what precedes the fixed metaphysical dualisms of modern philosophy, “intertwining” (or “chiasm”) nevertheless presupposes the distinctions it pretends to transcend. At the descriptive level, this poses no problem; such things can be judged in terms of whether they help us to grasp the

59 60 61 62 63

Moran, “Phenomenology of Embodiment,” 292. Moran, “Ineinandersein,” 109. Moran, “Phenomenology of Embodiment,” 292, 298–299. Moran, “Ineinandersein,” 120. Moran, “Phenomenology of Embodiment,” 300.

48  Steven Crowell phenomenon in question. But as a kind of anti-idealistic first principle, it might seem to outstrip the limits of phenomenological attestation. With regard to the phenomenon of embodiment, for instance, the reversibility of touch is a descriptively attested basis for the idea of an entwining of body and consciousness, and also for a “certain distancing or gap” in the self.64 However, if we elevate this entwining into a metaphysical principle, it becomes unclear just how we are to understand the possibility of such a “gap” – what Merleau-Ponty calls a “dehiscence,” or rupture, in being.65 Without at all denying the phenomenon of entwinement, for instance, Levinas held that Merleau-Ponty’s embrace of it as an ontological principle exemplifies a philosophy of “enrootedness” or “participation,” a kind of monism in which the possibility of determinate intentionality, which it is supposed to clarify (the “as”), remains mysterious.66 When Moran writes that “flesh is what joins us together as well as what separates us,”67 Levinas will insist that how such an ontological ground can achieve any “separation” is precisely the question. For Levinas, the fact that Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental ground is characterized by ambiguity simply means that the ambiguity infecting transcendental phenomenology, its “paradoxes,” has been read back into being itself. The significance of Levinas’s worry about Merleau-Ponty’s failure to account for the gap that must appear if entwining is supposed to be other than simple monistic identity (“the same,” in Levinas’s terminology) becomes apparent if we go back to phenomenology’s inaugural topic, namely, the meaning whose possibility is supposed to be clarified through phenomenological method. Intentionality, the experience of something as something, presupposes a normatively structured framework, or “horizon,” which allows for an experienced interplay between how the thing appears now and how it must subsequently appear if the original self-showing is veridical. If the thing subsequently appears differently than it is “supposed” to, my previous perception is not merely altered or supplemented; it is negated in a particular way, i.e., shown to be incorrect. This gap between the correct and the incorrect (confirmation and disconfirmation) is, as Husserl well knew, altogether other than the various differences between things that might, in turn, be subordinated to a monistic, even if ambiguous, ontological principle. What resources does a philosophy of participation or original ambiguity have to account for this (normative) “negation,” without which all determinate meaning – including any determinate meaning that the ontological principle itself (e.g., nature) might have – is impossible?68

64 Ibid., 302. 65 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1968), 145. 66 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 60–61. As he puts it, “the notion of truth marks the end of this reign [of rootedness or participation].” 67 Moran, “Ineinandersein,” 112. 68 In speaking of “normative frameworks” or “normative commitments” here, and elsewhere, I am employing the very broad sense of “norm” that I introduced in Normativity and Phenomenology: “anything that serves as a standard of success or failure of any kind,” whatever “measures our speech and behavior” (p. 2). Thus norms and the normative are not limited to (but do include) codified rules, maxims, and prescriptions. What is taken to be “normal” in a given community is “normative” in my sense; so too are cultural mores and

Twenty-first-century phenomenology?  49 Levinas himself offers an alternative, drawing upon the same descriptive evidence advanced by Merleau-Ponty and picked up by Moran. For him, “intertwining” characterizes the basic structure of life as “enjoyment.” Enjoyment is “an ambiguity of which the body is the very articulation,” namely, that “a being has detached itself from the world from which it still nourishes itself.”69 The living being belongs to a nature from which it also separates itself, “living from” it. This separation is exemplified in alimentary experience: the incorporation of what is “other” into the “same” in the form of nourishment. However, enjoyment “precisely does not reach [things] qua things”; alimentary otherness is “elemental” being, a “pure quality which lacks the category of substance.”70 Levinas’s point is that life as such, entwinement with nature, can establish no meaningful distinctions among things; the living being incorporates a dimension of “sensibility” without normative determinations, an apeiron of “powers” which Levinas describes as “mythical.”71 Life, then, is already “free” since its process of assimilating the element is unhindered by any normative constraints.72 While the animate being can be overwhelmed by the elemental (death), such a fate comes to it from afar as a negation that lies entirely beyond the horizon of life.73 Here Levinas identifies the phenomenological task: to show how such elemental being, with its ambiguous “participation,” can be brought to the point where an experience of things as things becomes possible. As is well known, Levinas finds the ground of such experience not in the world but in the “face” of the Other. The Other “breaks in” on life’s anarchic freedom by means of a kind of ethical interdict.74 Such an interdict does not contest my power to reduce otherness to my own being; rather, it calls it into question with a normative demand for “justice.” It is the normativity of this demand that is radically “other,” because it is manners, concepts, and ideals. Thus normative “frameworks” and “commitments” come in many different forms, whose variations can be studied both empirically and transcendentalphenomenologically. What I am arguing here, then, is that Merleau-Ponty’s ambiguous ontological ground trades on the effect of normative orientation in the constitution of meaning, but cannot account for it. In contrast, Levinas appeals to moral normativity specifically as an account of how normativity as such enters the world, while Heidegger appeals to an existential norm, autheticity, and Husserl appeals to an orientation toward the norm of reason. I cannot do more than gesture toward these points here. 69 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 116. 70 Ibid., 141. 71 Ibid., 142. 72 While from a third-person point of view it may be correct to say that a living being is oriented toward what is “good for” it (to eat, for example), and so is normatively “constrained,” such constraint is not experienced as normative constraint, but as instinct (“need” or aversion). However, such acting in accord with some norm is not sufficient to account phenomenologically for the kind of intentionality – meaning, determinateness, the “as” – whose possibility it is the task of phenomenology to clarify. What is required is the kind of normative constraint that involves acting in light of a norm as normative. See Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology. 73  Emmanuel Levinas, “The Ego and Totality,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 27: “But exteriority [death] can have no significance for instinct, since its entry into this system means the disappearance of vital consciousness.” 74 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 171.

50  Steven Crowell “beyond being”;75 it is a “gap” that does not arise from what is. Even where I exercise my power to kill the putative source of the demand, the demand itself, and so the “ethical impossibility of committing this murder,” remains.76 With this, my “murderous freedom” is not negated but “invested” with a normative orientation.77 Life thereby takes on a new dimension that it cannot produce for itself: in Levinas’s Kierkegaardian terms, life is “taught” what it means to attend to the normative as normative. Levinas locates the phenomenological origin of language in such attendance to the normative: instead of seeking to overpower or assimilate otherness, I “welcome” the Other. To speak is to “offer” my possessions to the Other by means of the “generality of concepts,” a generality that reflects the “generosity” of welcoming, i.e., my embrace of the Other’s normative claim. Language, in this sense, is a “primordial putting in common,”78 the condition of a world, or space of reasons, in which we can all share thanks to the generosity of meaning.79 Reason, language, meaning, intentionality: for Levinas all such phenomena require a “vertical” or “eschatological” intentionality that breaks with the philosophy of participation, with the ambiguous “nature” that Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, uncovered. Of course, from a phenomenological perspective, there are problems with Levinas’s view as well, and Moran is quick to point them out. Above all, Levinas admits that the face of the Other “escapes phenomenality” altogether: “it is neither seen nor touched.”80 Then who, or what, has a face? Citing Levinas’s statement that “I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called ‘face,’ ” Moran comments that “surely this is an extraordinarily serious admission,” and concludes that if “there is no account of this, it is hardly a philosophy of the face at all.”81 More generally, Moran suggests that Levinas is engaging in a “new dogmatism,” and argues that it is deeply unclear “how this phenomenology of alterity can be a phenomenology at all.”82 In the present context, however, the point is neither to defend the details of Levinas’s alternative description of life and nature, nor to assess fully the phenomenological challenge it poses to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of le chair.83 Rather, I have invoked Levinas’s alternative in order to suggest where Moran’s call for a “phenomenology of experienced nature” might still fall short of what is demanded of phenomenology in

75  Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 53. 76 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 171. 77 Ibid., 88. 78 Ibid., 173. 79 On the origin of reason in Levinas – the dependence of “justification” on what he calls “justice” – see Steven Crowell, “Second-Person Phenomenology,” in The Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, ed. Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2016). For a general account of Levinas as a phenomenologist, see Steven Crowell, “Why Is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context,” European Journal of Philosophy 23/3 (2015): 564–588. 80 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194. 81 Moran, Introduction, 350. 82 Ibid., 352. 83 For my own view, see Steven Crowell, “The Mythical and the Meaningless: Husserl and the Two Faces of Nature,” in Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, ed. Thomas Nenon and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996).

Twenty-first-century phenomenology?  51 the twenty-first century. Perhaps it is true that Levinas abandons phenomenology for a “dogmatic” metaphysics, yielding an arche or origin of meaning. But why wouldn’t that hold equally for Merleau-Ponty’s post-correlationist ontology of flesh, a concept that is motivated through a kind of transcendental phenomenology but supposedly cannot be contained by the latter? And if that is so, we might begin to suspect that any such move from transcendental phenomenology’s reduction to meaning, to a putative origin of meaning that precedes the reduction and conditions phenomenology from without, will end in something like antinomy. But is an undecideable contest of metaphysical principles the inevitable outcome of twentieth-century phenomenology? I think not. What if that century’s perception of the failings of transcendental phenomenology were itself based on merely “factic” and “historical” – that is, contingent – circumstances, circumstances that need no longer exert an intellectual pull on us: the fear of Cartesianism or idealism or rationalism or whatever?

3.  The return of transcendental phenomenology An alternative story for the twenty-first century might return to what Moran calls the “inflection point” in the history of twentieth-century phenomenology – namely, Heidegger’s rejection of Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Problems arise for Husserl because he embraces two commitments that later phenomenologists felt to be incompatible: a commitment to retaining the phenomenological reduction that defines phenomenology as transcendental, and a commitment to advancing from there to “metaphysics.” There is thus a clear fork in the road here: the path taken by twentieth-century phenomenology rejects the reduction and develops various forms of “ontology” which yield, as we have seen, metaphysical principles that show every indication of exceeding phenomenological Evidenz altogether.84 The sheer number of current proposals in this vein – appeals to revelation, desire, nature, flesh, the event, absolute immanence, and so on – suggests that the phenomenological descriptions they appeal to do not authorize the metaphysics projected on their basis.85 Another path, however, seems equally available: to embrace the reduction (understood as what opens phenomenology to its topic, meaning) and, in Heidegger’s words, “leave metaphysics to itself.”86 Has the “Kantian” version of phenomenology as transcendental Sinnkritik really exhausted its potential? A story of twentieth-century phenomenology that begins from this alternative will refuse the choice Moran’s story leaves us with – either a welter of undecideable

84 I should note here that I do not mean that phenomenological Evidenz is somehow “absolute” or incorrigible; rather, the term is just a way of invoking what Husserl calls “ultimate philosophical self-responsibility,” namely, that what I say can be backed up – corrigibily, and in exchange with others who might also have a view on the matter – by what I have actually seen. 85 A different sense of “metaphysics” might be attained by focusing on the transcendental aspect of transcendental idealism. See, for instance, Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Idealism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). But this was not the path of twentieth-century phenomenology. 86 Martin Heidegger, “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 24.

52  Steven Crowell metaphysical positions or else the deconstructive collapse of the phenomenological method – and will evaluate the inflection point with different eyes: though Husserl may have advanced phenomenology toward metaphysical idealism, metaphysics is not the unquestionable destiny of phenomenology. The new story returns to transcendental Sinnkritik in order to identify other possibilities for resolving its paradoxes without the expedient of metaphysical closure. If this is how we ought to approach Husserl’s idealism and Heidegger’s response to it, we will have to take issue with the way Moran (and twentieth-century phenomenology generally) understands Heidegger’s appeal to facticity and historicity, which supposedly reintroduces “the historical and relative into phenomenology.”87 Suppose we take seriously Moran’s acute remark that Heidegger “was drawn to Husserl’s resolute anti-naturalism.”88 How can that be, if we interpret facticity as a kind of ground that eludes the reduction and conditions phenomenological investigation from without? Isn’t that precisely the definition of “naturalism,” in the broad sense which Husserl came to call “objectivism”?89 On the story I want to tell, Heidegger does not push us in this direction because his analyses presuppose the reduction without invoking it.90 His fundamental ontology thus remains within the framework of Sinnkritik. Heidegger’s appeal to “being” and “world” must not be understood as (metaphysical) attempts to identify an “ontic ground” of transcendental phenomenology, but as contributing to a deeper understanding of what transcendental inquiry into meaning involves. In his lecture course of 1929/30 Heidegger emphasizes this point: “the ‘as’ and being have a common root.”91 This “common root” is not a non-phenomenological arche; rather, as Heidegger shows, it is the defining capacity of the (transcendental) subject: Dasein’s “comportment” (Verhalten), its “finite freedom” for “letting itself be [normatively] bound” in acting for the sake of being something (Worumwillen).92 On this view, Merleau-Ponty’s remark about the impossibility of a complete reduction would not mean that we must give up on transcendental phenomenology in favor of simply “attesting” to a metaphysical ground; rather, it would signify that transcendental phenomenology is itself a comportment – trying to be a

87 Moran, Introduction, 20, 22. 88 Moran, “Heidegger’s Transcendental Phenomenology,” 139. 89 Husserl, Crisis, 68–70. 90 Here I follow Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970), 262. See also Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology. 91 Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 338, 92 Ibid., 342. On the sense in which comportment is a transcendental category, see Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology, Part III. The argument, roughly, is this: things can show up as something only in a context or “horizon” – most often, but not exclusively, practical – where a standard of what they are supposed to be is delineated. This context, or “world,” depends on my acting “for-the-sake-of” being something (say, a teacher, carpenter, father, friend, philosopher). Such acting is “comportment” in Heidegger’s sense, and it is constituted by my commitment to the norms (however tacit or explicit) that “define” what being a father or friend should be. Such norms are not simply given but are at issue in my trying, and my commitment consists in letting such norms bind me, i.e., measuring myself against the possibility of success or failure. Comportment “discloses” a world of meaning.

Twenty-first-century phenomenology?  53 phenomenologist, committed to “ultimate philosophical self-responsibility” – and it is one that we, as finite, fallible philosophers, must continually take up anew. This is not to say that the twentieth-century reading of Heidegger as breaking with transcendental phenomenology is altogether unjustified; Heidegger’s relation to transcendental philosophy is certainly complicated. But on the story I am telling, Being and Time contains points of departure for a continuation of transcendental phenomenology that leads neither to paradoxes nor to the demand for (speculative or dialectical) metaphysical closure. On this view, notions like nature, event, culture, gift, and so on will gain whatever meaning they have from specific everyday and scientific normative contexts. Whether they also have a transcendental (i.e., constitutive) significance remains an open question, to be answered not metaphysically but through phenomenological reflection itself.93 For instance, various meanings of “nature” are at issue in the practices of the natural sciences. These practices can be explored historically and sociologically – as in science studies – but the determinate meaning of nature at issue in them can also be investigated transcendentally, i.e., in terms of the normative commitments of the scientists who engage in them, commitments which establish what “counts” as a “natural” phenomenon.94 And if we find quite different meanings of “nature” at issue in various cultural and historical lifeworlds, then phenomenology can reflect on the normative commitments – the “understandings of being” – that belongs to the practices or forms of life which involve such meanings. The same can be said of “human being.” In zoology or biology the human being is a natural kind, but in anthropology the human being is a cultural type, and in everyday situations we understand “humanity” in other ways as well. In each case, transcendental phenomenology can investigate how such meanings are constituted in specific practices (including cognitive ones) by identifying the normative commitments (material essences, understandings of being) that determine what counts as the human in them. In the absence of any such normative framework, however, there is just nothing (determinate) to be said.95 Of course, there may be relations of Fundierung between (say) scientific commitments and lifeworld practices, but does this mean that we must search for some

93 After Being and Time Heidegger turns, at least nominally, against his transcendental approach. Whether he also abandons phenomenology in favor of metaphysics or “poetic mysticism” (Moran, Introduction, 247) cannot be explored here. My own view on the continuation of phenomenology in the later Heidegger can be found in Steven Crowell, “The Challenge of Heidegger’s Approach to Technology,” in Heidegger on Technology, ed. Christoph Merwin, Christos Hadjioannou and Aaron Wendland (New York: Routledge, 2019). 94 This project is pursued in detail by John Haugeland in many writings. For a concise presentation see John Haugeland, “Letting Be,” in Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). For a criticism that remains within the orbit of Haugeland’s key insights, see Joseph Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 95 An anonymous referee suggests that there are significant parallels here with Wittgenstein’s notion of a “grammatical investigation,” and while I agree with this, these parallels cannot be pursued here. The phenomenologist will, of course, focus on more than linguistic practices, but Wittgenstein’s “bedrock” can fruitfully be understood, I think, in terms of the normative commitments that sustain everyday and scientific comportments.

54  Steven Crowell ultimate ground, a “transcendental life” from which they all emerge? Must there be an overarching metaphysical decision on such plural conceptions of nature or humanity? I don’t see how that follows; nor does rejecting such a decision entail an objectionable relativism or a deconstructive collapse of the phenomenological method. The transcendental category of comportment – to use this as a shorthand for the whole care-structure – is eidetically evident in all such meaningful “worlds,” and that is enough to unify them without there being a metaphysical ground that produces them.96 But what about the paradoxes to which the transcendental approach gives rise? Will not any appeal to transcendental subjectivity as the residue of the phenomenological reduction introduce a one-sided, idealistic, tenor in which the real world is either lost from view,97 or else recognized as the locus of a paradoxical selfconstitution? Isn’t it true, as Moran suggests, that such a view of subjectivity is “nothing but a secularization of the theistic approach to the world”?98 In conclusion, I would like to suggest how a transcendental reading of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein can address this question.

4.  Toward resolving the paradox We can approach such a reading by recalling the central paradox of Husserl’s approach to subjectivity: understood metaphysically, his idealism makes it appear that the human being, an entity in the world, must, as transcendental subjectivity, be self-creating. Let us begin by agreeing with Husserl that the personalistic attitude is the “real natural attitude.” In contrast to Merleau-Ponty, however – who holds that the embodied, intersubjective, and expressive dimensions of personalistic life derive from an ambiguous ground of being – a Heideggerian reading would see in such phenomena aspects of transcendental subjectivity itself. For the Heidegger of Being and Time, “Dasein” includes these moments of the person, but they are “formalized,” i.e., eidetically freed from the naturalistic assumptions that cling to the anthropological concept of “person” in Husserl and Scheler99 – and, I would argue, Merleau-Ponty as well. These formalized notions no longer have the sense of being properties of the human being as rational animal; rather, they are eidetic (functional) capacities that make up what Heidegger calls the “care-structure” of “Dasein” – that being “for which, in its being, that very being is essentially at issue.”100 Though Heidegger calls the care-structure the “being” of “human being,” it is not antecedently defined in terms of human being. Thanks to the reduction, it is “neutral” with regard to instantiation in some pre-given natural kind.101 The basic

 96 A related argument for an ontological pluralism of meaningful “worlds” without “one world” can be found in Markus Gabriel, Sinn und Existenz: Eine realistische Ontologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2016). See also Amie Thomasson, Ontology Made Easy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).  97 This reading of Husserl is forcefully advanced by Taylor Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 53–100.  98 Moran, Introduction, 208.  99 Heidegger, Being and Time, 72–74; History of the Concept of Time, 119–128. 100 Heidegger, Being and Time, 117. 101 See Martin Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 136–140.

Twenty-first-century phenomenology?  55 structures of Dasein (care) – Befindlichkeit, Verstehen, Rede – are nothing but conditions of possibility for the meaning (“understanding of being”) disclosed thematically through the reduction. How does this eliminate the paradox? If it is possible to identify such transcendental (or, in Heidegger’s terms, “existential”) conditions for meaning – i.e., if Dasein is not a metaphysical substance but a functional description of a capacity for meaning – then there is no paradox in saying that Dasein “constitutes itself.” In comportment – i.e., in acting for the sake of some possibility for being, as in trying to be a physicist, a shaman, a father, a citizen, friend, or, indeed a philosopher – Dasein constitutes itself as one. This sort of self-constitution does not entail a metaphysical creatio ex nihilo, nor does it mean that these possibilities for being emerge from my comportment as from an isolated ego-act. They are already there in the social-historical whole in which I find myself (das Man). But the capacities I exercise in taking them up are eidetically fixed; they are transcendental conditions of there being such a social whole. Self-constitution, in this sense, is a way of taking them up – namely, as meanings that are normatively at issue in my trying to be whatever it is that I am trying to be. Self-constitution is thus committing myself to what I take to be best in the matter of a certain way of being. Only in light of what is at stake in such a commitment is the “world” of such a way of being – and so also the meaning (being) of things as they show up in such a world – disclosed. Though such self-constitution can be described as “factic” and “historical,” such terms imply no epistemic relativism. Given the transcendental conditions for disclosing things as something, I can disclose myself as a human being – i.e., understand myself in light of a normative framework in which “human being” has a meaning (whether scientific or cultural) – just as I can disclose what it means for me to be in many other ways. But none of these ways is privileged; none point toward some primordial metaphysical arche of the transcendental capacity for opening up “world.” On this view, “embodiment” will not mean just one thing – say, the ontological locus of an entwining that inextricably links Dasein to nature. The body will be involved in all sorts of normative contexts in all sorts of ways (from labor to love, from dancing to dining, from mayhem to murder). But Dasein’s embodiment will not be equivalent to any one of these. In Husserl, this transcendental function of embodiment remains entangled in a certain equivocation on the notion of Leib. On the one hand, Leib is the “living” body – i.e., the “animate organism” (Leib-Körper) that shows up in the world as belonging to me, as it does to all animals. On the other hand, Leib is the “lived” body, which is uniquely mine as transcendentally constituting subjectivity and does not show up in the world. Heidegger’s much-noted “silence” regarding Dasein’s embodiment reflects his awareness of this equivocation. Granting that Dasein’s “ ‘bodily nature’ hides a whole problematic all its own,”102 Heidegger does not think that failure to pursue this problematic is fatal to an account of Dasein – any more than is his failure to pursue the “phenomenological problematic” of a “formal phenomenology of consciousness.”103 Dasein is both embodied and

102 Heidegger, Being and Time, 143. 103 Ibid., 151. To put it provocatively: whatever is genuinely phenomenologically attestable in Husserl’s analyses of consciousness or in Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the body can, without remainder, be incorporated into the transcendental framework of Dasein, but neither is independently foundational. This is the point of saying that transcendental phenomenology is a way of doing philosophy, not a theory.

56  Steven Crowell conscious, but Heidegger is after a set of transcendental categories that do not require taking a stand on the ontological particulars of embodiment or consciousness. When he does return to the question of the body, in the Zollikon Seminars, his descriptions reflect Husserl’s notion of the “lived” body: not a dimension of “nature” but a kind of functional capacity – leiben, bodying-forth.104 In contrast, for Heidegger, the “living” body belongs to nature, which “is itself an entity which is encountered within the world and which can be discovered in various ways and at various stages.”105 Hence the body, as nature, must be approached via the specific normative frameworks – scientific and everyday – that provide us access to such entities.106 A phenomenology of the body in this latter sense is neither foundational nor the model for a metaphysics. A story that proceeds from this sort of interpretation of the twentieth century’s inflection point fulfills what Moran identifies as “arguably [phenomenology’s] main contribution to contemporary philosophy,” namely, its “conception of objectivity-for-subjectivity” in the face of objectivism, scientism, and naturalism.107 But it extricates phenomenology from the twentieth century because it does not, out of fear of idealism, subordinate subjectivity to a metaphysical project that would posit it, dogmatically, as something like an element of all being. In this form, transcendental phenomenology would stand opposed both to a metaphysics of the flesh in Merleau-Ponty’s sense, and to the various forms of panpsychism that represent the analytic analogue of such a metaphysics. Transcendental phenomenology does entail that a distinction must be made between the “human being” and the “Dasein in us,”108 but this gives rise to no paradox since the “us” is understood functionally: it is not because we are human that the distinction is made; rather, the “us” stands for any Miteinandersein that exhibits a capacity for “world” or meaning. If brutes and infants do not exhibit this capacity, but only “analogues” of it, accessible to us only “privatively,” then they are not “us”; and if extra-terrestrials do exhibit it, then they are “us.” There is no reason to reject empirical-scientific investigation into the genesis of these capacities, but such genesis – as a meaning constituted through the normative commitments of specific scientific practices – will always presuppose what it purports to explain. This means that there is no phenomenological transition from Sinnkritik to a metaphysical account of entities in terms of an ultimate ground (world, nature, body, event) that would determine phenomenological reflection on meaning independently of the reduction to meaning. But why should twenty-first-century phenomenology go “back” to the transcendental project (embracing the reduction while abandoning the temptations of metaphysics) in order to go forward? Because it can. And if it does not, it will have a hard time laying claim to being a pursuit in which we can participate together in a self-critical way. As Moran reminds us, Husserl’s idealism is “not a philosophical position at all,”

104 Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Asky (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 86–89. 105 Heidegger, Being and Time, 92. 106 This is how Heidegger himself proceeds in his lecture course from 1929/30, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. See Steven Crowell, “We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism,” Études phénoménologiques / Phenomenological Studies 1 (2017): 217–240. 107 Moran, Introduction, 15. 108 See Crowell, “We Have Never Been Animals.”

Twenty-first-century phenomenology?  57 that is, not a theory.109 If its goal is the clarification of meaning, carried out on the basis of evidence that each of us can produce for him or herself, then what Husserl called “ultimate philosophical self-responsibility” is “our” responsibility. This, I think, is very much in the spirit of Dermot Moran’s intensive investigations into the phenomenology of intersubjectivity as the ultimate ground of philosophy. Like analytic philosophy, transcendental phenomenology is a certain practice, a certain “way of doing philosophy,”110 rather than some particular “system” (idealistic, realistic, whatever). Such a practice can only proceed through reflection, description, and argumentation – and that means, implicitly or explicitly, as an appeal to the critical judgment of others. Even if such an appeal does not provide the basis for a rigorous science of philosophy, and even if phenomenological reflection does not reveal a rational telos that supposedly informs life as such, reason is nonetheless “there” in the dialogical consequences of phenomenology’s ultimately ethical demand for evidence.111

References Carman, Taylor. Heidegger’s Analytic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Crowell, Steven. “The Mythical and the Meaningless: Husserl and the Two Faces of Nature.” In Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, ed. Thomas Nenon and Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996, pp. 80–105. ———. “Is There a Phenomenological Research Program?,” Synthese 131, no.3 (2002): 419–444. ———. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. “Why Is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context,” European Journal of Philosophy 23, no.3 (2015): 564–588. ———. “Second-Person Phenomenology.” In The Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’), ed. Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran. London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 70–89. ———. “We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism,” Études phénoménologiques/ Phenomenological Studies 1 (2017): 217–240. ———. “The Challenge of Heidegger’s Approach to Technology.” In Heidegger on Technology, ed. Christoph Merwin, Christos Hadjioannou and Aaron Wendland. New York: Routledge, 2019. Gabriel, Markus. Sinn und Existenz: Eine realistische Ontologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2016. Haugeland, John. “Letting Be.” In Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 93–103. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. ———. “Time and Being.” In On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1972, pp. 1–24. ———. Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984.

109 Moran, “Making Sense,” 57. 110 Moran, Introduction, 3. 111 I would like to thank two anonymous referees for some acute questions which helped me clarify the argument in important ways, even while I acknowledge that there is much more to be said in response.

58  Steven Crowell ———. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985. ———. Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. ———. Zollikon Seminars, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Asky. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. ———. “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, ed. Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 71–147. ———. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. ———. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. ———. “The Ego and the Totality.” In Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987, pp. 25–45. ———. “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity.” In Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987, pp. 47–59. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. ———. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes. London: Routledge, 2012. Moran, Dermot. Introduction to Phenomenology. New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. “Making Sense: Husserl’s Phenomenology as Transcendental Idealism.” In From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental, ed. Jeff Malpas. London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 48–74. ———. “Heidegger’s Transcendental Phenomenology in Light of Husserl’s Project of First Philosophy.” In Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 135–150. ———. “The Phenomenology of Embodiment: Intertwining and Reflexivity.” In The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity, ed. Rasmus Thybo Jensen and Dermot Moran. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013, pp. 285–304. ———. “Ineinandersein and L’interlacs: The Constitution of the Social World or ‘We-World’ (Wir-Welt) in Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” In Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, ed. Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran. New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 107–126. Okrent, Mark. “On Layer-Cakes: Heidegger’s Normative Pragmatism Revisited.” In Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology, ed. Ondřej Švec and Jakub Čapek. New York: Routledge, 2017. Rouse, Joseph. How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Thomasson, Amie. Ontology Made Easy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Tugendhat, Ernst. Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970. Wrathall, Mark. “Motives, Reasons, and Causes.” In The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark Hansen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 111–128. Zahavi, Dan. Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Idealism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

5 Merleau-Ponty and developing and coping reflectively Timothy Mooney

Abstract: For Merleau-Ponty, reflection is essential to developed perceptual life, with our acquired skills opening up the space for those activities in which we take a distance from things. Together with language, bodily skills facilitate the recognition and articulation of subject and object as the culmination of an integrated process of human development. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of objective thought nonetheless ensues in a dissociation of reflection from skilled coping. All reflections on the body are characterised as departures from practical perceptual engagement. Elsewhere, however, he points towards a rounder view of engaged perception that could accommodate what I describe as ‘little reflections.’ Keywords: body, skilled coping, objective thought, little reflections

Introduction A large part of Merleau-Ponty’s originality is to have shown that we often act intelligently without traversing mental representations. Our skill schema with its motor projections is not the mere servant of an image consciousness, transporting our bodies to places of which we have formed representations beforehand.1 On foot of this Hubert Dreyfus has developed an account of ‘skilled coping’ as a self-sufficient, ground-floor level of engaged experience. He takes it as non-cognitive, claiming that it need not involve reflective or conceptual activities and articulations. This lack of involvement is both original and derivative. Some forms of coping acquired in early childhood never bring in these higher activities, even when they are taken up in the service of the latter. Other forms involve the conscious learning of explicit rules, which is only possible if one is in possession of a language. Once these rules are put into practice, however, we can learn to recognise them more and more in aspects of action situations, and ultimately leave them behind altogether. They can “gradually be replaced by situational discriminations accompanied by associated responses.”2

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 173–174; English translation: Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 140. Henceforth cited as PP with French and English page references, respectively. 2 Hubert Dreyfus, “Intelligence Without Representation: Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Mental Representations,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1/4 (2002): 380. Hereafter cited as Dreyfus.

60  Timothy Mooney This view has been the subject of sustained criticism by John McDowell, amongst others.3 In a related line of critique, Joseph Berendzen has contended that MerleauPonty’s phenomenology of habitual movement cannot be assimilated to Dreyfus’s story.4 Merleau-Ponty’s worked-out position is that language plays a crucial role in the perception of other people and of things, and that the world we find is at root a human world permeated by objective spirit in the Hegelian sense. Even in our so-called bare nature we find intelligent behavioural patterns deposited in the form of a cultural milieu. It should be concluded that pragmatic coping skills and conceptual contents come to be sedimented together in human experience. The way that we perceive the world as meaningful runs with our perception of the world as soliciting actions, and there is no question of conceptual articulations dropping out of account when stages of situational discrimination are reached, like redundant ladders that get to be kicked away.5 But if Berendzen’s interpretation is correct in the main, it should not tempt us to put too great a distance between the respective narratives. Merleau-Ponty is uncomfortably close to Dreyfus in the way that he neglects our reflective commerce with our bodies and our implements inside engaged episodes of skilled coping. In this essay I begin by contending that, in The Structure of Behaviour and Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty already affirms that everyday reflection, with its objectifications and analyses and syntheses, is integral to developed perceptual life. Our acquired skills help open up the space for the reflective activities in which we take a distance as subjects from environing things taken as standing against us. Together with language, our habitualised bodies allow for the explicit recognition of objects and the thematic investigation of their properties, with the cognitive stage of awareness being the outcome and ultimate destination of an integrated process of human perceptual development. I go on to argue that Merleau-Ponty’s critique of objective thought nonetheless ensues in a dissociation of reflection from the skilfully acting body. Having characterised all reflections on the body as variants of objective thought which involve a departure from the world of practical engagements, he passes over the contribution of some of them to ‘coping in the flow.’ Yet this problem is not insurmountable, since elsewhere he points towards a rounder view of engaged perception that could accommodate what I describe as ‘little reflections.’

1. From the outset, Merleau-Ponty insists that the bodily existence running through me and without my complicity “is but the sketch of a genuine presence in the world,” though it at least grounds the possibility of such a presence, since it establishes “our primary pact with the world.”6 Keeping this in mind, he is adamant that developed perception must call on the explicit awareness of oneself as an enduring subject that is confronted by objects. The undeveloped and pre-reflective consciousness of the infant

3 See Joseph K. Schear, ed., Mind, Reason and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). 4 J. C. Berendzen, “Coping Without Foundations: On Dreyfus’s Use of Merleau-Ponty,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 18/5 (2010): 630. Hereafter cited as Berendzen. 5 Ibid., 637–638, 643. 6 PP, 204/168.

Merleau-Ponty and developing and coping reflectively  61 that conditions language is merely a global and inarticulate grasp of an environment.7 He or she encounters bare unities of value, configurations soliciting or discouraging the exercise of basic skills, whereas language “presents, or rather it is, the subject’s taking up of a position in the world of his significations.”8 In this regard Wai-Shun Hung has noted that Merleau-Ponty distinguishes his own view sharply from that of Bergson. To what is thought about in reflection, according to Bergson, we can oppose what is lived through immediately in inner and undivided experience. But in Merleau-Ponty’s eyes, such undivided experience would be meaningless and incommunicable.9 Though we must always find in the text of experience what discourse is trying to communicate, “[s]peech is already a separation. Moreover, there is no experience without speech; the purely lived is not even found within man’s speaking life.”10 For Merleau-Ponty, the final sense of the ‘I think’ is not to reveal a universal constitutive force, but to establish “this fact of reflection that simultaneously overcomes and maintains the opacity of perception.”11 Against Bergson once again “[t]he Kantian idea of synthesis is valid . . . and consciousness as the agent of this synthesis cannot be confused with any thing, even a fluid one.”12 What is rejected is any theory of intellectual synthesis in which empirical multiplicity is surmounted at the conceptual level alone, or in which a stable empirical order is assumed as a given. It is at an early stage of perceptual synthesis that perceptual unities of value are established, so that the connective function attributed to the understanding by Kantian philosophies is now shared across the entirety of intentional life. Acts of judging take advantage of work already done, and do not work over a neutral material, since they are motivated by the antecedent unities of value.13 We can discern the genesis of normativity in initial perceptual engagements, as we seek optimal purchase on solicitations to action. As Taylor Carman puts it, felt differences of better and worse bodily attitudes mark the difference between right and wrong appearances. “We have a feel for the kinds of balance and posture that afford us a correct and proper view of the world.”14 What underpins reflection only brings us so far. In The Structure of Behaviour, it is already stated that the determination of content is not to be denied to the judgement of existence, and that it is necessary “to describe the structures of action and knowledge in which consciousness is engaged.”15 In Phenomenology of Perception, it is added

  7 Ibid., 465/426.   8 Ibid., 235/199.   9 Ibid., 326–327n1/543–544n60. Quoted in Wai-Shun Hung, “Perception and Self-Awareness in Merleau-Ponty: The Problem of the Tacit Cogito in the Phenomenology of Perception,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 5 (2005): 219–220. See also Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 162–163. 10 PP, 394/353, translation slightly emended. 11 Ibid., 68/45. 12 Ibid., 326n1/543n60. 13 Ibid., 79/53. 14 Taylor Carman, Merleau-Ponty (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 110–111; PP, 355–357/315–317. 15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du Comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942), 177–178; English translation: The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1963), 164. Hereafter cited as SC with French and English page references, respectively.

62  Timothy Mooney that reflective attention is “the active constitution of a new object that develops and thematises what was until then only offered as an indeterminate horizon.” The empirical thing motivates the event of knowledge that transforms it in the unity of a new meaning.16 It is this event of conceptual work that we rely on in sedimented form. An explicit act of thinking has the power to outlive itself, to remain as a dimension of the present without being summoned up or reproduced. Though they were novel once, we can rely on concepts and judgements “without our having to repeat their synthesis at each moment.”17 When reawakened in developed perception they show their cognitively normative character. In such cases express recognition is not an immediate faith in what is presented. It presupposes “an examination, a doubt, and a break with the immediate, it is the correction of a possible error.”18 Merleau-Ponty does not just flag the role of reflection as the explicit awareness of objects in developed perception, but incorporates it into his characterisation of the perceiver’s phenomenal field.19 It is with the help of the habitual body, moreover, that we attain our reflective distance from things. As we build up our repertoire of skills, there are delimited ever more regions of silence – or of silent efficacy – in our anonymous or sub-personal existence. When we enter the wider environment, things of use are initially revealed as manipulatable objects for us, usually with the help of adults. Once they are mastered, they sink into the tacit background of the perceptual field, and are apprehended in advance as manipulatable in themselves. These are the solicitations and affordances for a more advanced awareness. In the human manner of proceeding, there is a ceaseless sublimation of so-called biological existence into cultural being. Personal acts mutate into dispositional sensori-motor tendencies.20 But this is not the end of the process, since Merleau-Ponty foregrounds the latter as relatively autonomous currents of existence that are the prerequisites of our comprehensive being in the world. Relatively autonomous because they are contingent on bodily health and integrity, and because they lie at the service of what goes beyond them: If man is not to be enclosed within the envelope of the syncretic environment in which the animal lives as if in a state of ecstasy, if he is to be conscious of a world as the common reason of all milieus and as the theatre of all behaviours, then a distance between himself and what solicits his action must be established. As Malebranche said, external stimulations most only touch him with ‘respect’; each momentary situation must for him cease to be the totality of being, and each particular response must cease to occupy his entire practical field. Furthermore, the elaboration of these responses must, rather than taking place at the centre of his existence, happen on the periphery and, finally, the responses themselves must no longer require, each time, a unique position-taking and must rather be sketched out once and for all in their generality. Thus, by renouncing part of his spontaneity, by engaging in the world through stable organs and pre-established circuits, man can acquire the mental and practical space that will free him, in principle,

16 17 18 19 20

PP, 55/33. Ibid., 163/131. Ibid., 348/309. SC, 188/174, translation emended. PP, 114, 182/86–87, 147.

Merleau-Ponty and developing and coping reflectively  63 from his environment and thereby allow him to see it. And, provided we put even the coming to awareness of an objective world back into the order of existence, we will no longer find a contradiction between it and bodily conditioning. It is an internal necessity for the most integrated existence that it provides itself with an habitual body.21 We see at a distance because our engagements do not typically swallow us up in the task of the moment. Malebranche has attributed to prelapsarian human awareness an apprehension of the divine order in which all things live and have their being. In this realm Adam’s senses never intruded in on him. They informed him respectfully of the approach of objects, and even this function could be silenced by an effortless act of will. When we fallen ones are alone in quiet surroundings and deep in thought, the light of truth may fill and delight us, and we can feel in ourselves a remnant of this long lost power. But all too soon some further sensations will break in, and none of our efforts of mind will free us from distraction.22 In Merleau-Ponty’s more secular narrative, the idealised state of repose outlined by Malebranche is approximated in its own fashion in everyday reflective awareness. The skilled and coping body is itself the doorkeeper against unwelcome irruption, letting us fasten on objects at a distance the better to reveal them. The body provides the darkness needed in the theatre, the background against which beings can come to light. It is on this background that the linguistic denomination of objects takes place, which does not follow express recognition, but is itself such recognition.23 Choosing and varying its point of view, developed perception opens up a world beyond the tools it makes for itself. Its orientation is towards possible environments in which objects are illuminated at several removes.24 Because of express acts of attention and judgement, we can posit objects at a distance, standing in definite relations to other objects, and having specific characteristics that are not currently being observed.25 Put another way, we can apprehend the internal complexity of perceptual wholes before we see their constituent details and parts. Developed awareness reveals a universe of articulatable objects, even if it is not responsible for them all. Not all of the relations foregrounded by the epistemological subject are founded on its own activity.26 We have seen that reflection is characterised as a fact that both surpasses and sustains the opacity of perception. In discussing the Schneider case Merleau-Ponty foregrounds its ordinary contribution to the phenomenal field. Consciousness develops visual data beyond their own specific significance, using them to express its spontaneous acts. The patient is lacking in the normal ability to survey simultaneous multiplicities, to grasp several perceptual complexes as comprising a situation in the one blow. Taking in at

21 Ibid., 116–117/89, translation slightly emended. 22 Nicholas Malebranche, “Dialogues on Metaphysics,” in Nicholas Malebranche: Philosophical Selections, trans. Willis Doney and ed. Steven Nadler (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 193–194. 23 PP, 130, 217/103, 183. 24 SC, 190/175–176. 25 PP, 400/358. 26 SC, 186/172.

64  Timothy Mooney a glance is an everyday way of positing the object or of being conscious.27 Furthermore, Schneider’s experience does not tend towards expression, for it never suggests questions to him. In Merleau-Ponty’s rendering, “it never ceases to have that this sort of evidentness and self-sufficiency of the real that stifles all interrogation, all reference to the possible, all wonder, and all improvisation.”28 Objects would not be what they are if the activity bringing about their appearance “did not also have as its meaning to reject and surpass them.”29 At a distance they continue to motivate acts of attention, such that analyses and syntheses are ongoing factors in experience.

2. Merleau-Ponty construes all these reflective episodes as moments of a single temporality that is engaged in making itself explicit from its birth.30 Nascent human perception is the infant’s emotional contact with centres of interest in its milieu, which are the most primitive unities of value.31 Such a terminology harks back to Husserl, who confines perceptual registration and activity in the earliest stages of life to interest formations (Interessengebilde). Nor is it difficult to find indebtedness to Husserl’s story of an emerging perceptual interest that transcends immediate bodily needs and that in turn leads towards a cognitive interest.32 For Merleau-Ponty, the thing is the goal of a bodily teleology, a norm for our psycho-physiological setting, and each new detail noticed provides a material a priori for re-launching the interest.33 In and through the things that attract its attention, every sense is a prospective and regional moment of a growing intersensory and sensori-motor unity.34 The development of intellectual synthesis starts to be explicated in The Structure of Behaviour. It is stressed that children must be in some way be predisposed to engage in linguistic activity, something already noted by Berendzen.35 Consciousness should not be compared with a plastic material that receives its developed structure from outside, solely by way of a sociological causality or the human world that surrounds the infant. If the adult’s gestural use of language did not interface with a predisposition for the act of speech in the child, “it would have no power over the mosaic of sensations possessed by infantile consciousness,” and it would be impossible to understand how

27 PP, 170–171/138. 28 Ibid., 238/202. 29 SC, 190/176. 30 PP, 468–469/429–430, translation slightly emended. 31 SC, 191/176. 32 Manuscripts C 13 I, 6, 10b; A VI 34, 35a, 36, cited in A. D. Smith, Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 152. For Husserl’s account of perceptual interest leading into cognitive interest, see Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg; Felix Meiner, 1999), 239–240; English translation: Experience and Judgement, trans. James Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 203–204. Hereafter cited as EU with German and English page references, respectively. 33 PP, 356, 379/316, 337. 34 Ibid., 356–357, 376–380/316–317, 334–338. 35 Berendzen, 641.

Merleau-Ponty and developing and coping reflectively  65 it could play its guiding role in the constitution of the perceived world.36 As Berendzen observes, Merleau-Ponty rejects a layer-cake view of perceptual life. Even prior to the advent of the linguistic stage of recognition and articulation, infant awareness is still specifically human. There are certainly elements that we share with animals, continues Berendzen, but there is no shared layer. It should be added, however, that the layer-cake and shared-layer views can be rejected without excluding human-animal continuities transcending bare elements.37 On Merleau-Ponty’s account we could not gain the skills that open our mental and practical space without having the senses and instincts that we do. These are the antecedent conditions of building up our habitual bodies. More than this, it is claimed that no animal perceivers could ever attain to properly epistemic perception. Thus Herder as well as Malebranche is cited directly with what has every appearance of complete approval: “[i]f man had the senses of the animals, he would have no reason.”38 It is also asserted – and again a little too quickly – that our perception can be clearly distinguished from the animal variants that are “sensitive only to concrete stimulus wholes, prescribed by instinct itself.”39 An animal can create an implement, but according to Merleau-Ponty, it will lose or immerse itself in the real transformations that it accomplishes. The monkey that competently uses a branch as a tool does not regard it as improvised, and cannot employ such a thing to create still further instruments. The human being does all of this, and in the seeing explicitly cognises

36 SC, 183–184/169–170. 37 Berendzen, 642. Ted Toadvine makes a convincing argument to the effect that Merleau-Ponty’s view of the animal in The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception is hindered by two incompatible approaches to nature. On the one hand, he sees in vital behaviour an immanent and self-organizing intelligibility. On the other, his commitment to phenomenological principles requires him to treat this immanent intelligibility as an object for human consciousness. But in his late lectures he takes nature as non-instituted, as preceding intentional activity, which allows him to develop his earlier insights concerning the melodic unity of animal life into an articulated ontology of perceived being. When he approaches the animal and the human by way of ‘natural being,’ he can then recognise an irreducible Ineinander or intertwining of animality and humanity. This ‘strange kinship’ shows an intertwining with ‘sensible Being’ such that even mind or spirit is penetrated by its corporeal structure. See Ted Toadvine, “ ‘Strange Kinship’: Merleau-Ponty on the Human-Animal Relation,” in Phenomenology of Life from the Animal to the Human, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Analecta Husserliana 93 (2007): 28–29. See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature, Notes, cours du Collège de France (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), 269, 335, 339; English translation: Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 208, 268, 271. 38 Quoted in SC, 196/181, translation emended. According to Herder “[i]f man had the drives of the animals, he could not have what we now call reason in him, for such drives would pull his forces darkly toward a single point, in such a way that he would have no free sphere of awareness. . . . If man had the senses of the animals, he would have no reason; for the keen alertness of his senses and the mass of perceptions flooding him through them would smother all cool reflection.” Johann Gottfried Herder, “Essay on the Origin of Language,” in On the Origin of Language: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder, trans. and ed. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 111. 39 SC, 178/165. See also 133/122.

66  Timothy Mooney the branch precisely as a tree branch that has become a stick “the same thing in two different functions and visible for him under a plurality of aspects.”40 If Merleau-Ponty is too precipitous in his characterisation of animal perception, however, we can concur with his view of the human to the extent that we know that we improvise and that we plan towards outcomes in environments at multiple removes from our present ones. We can also concur with his claim that we do not see as persons see because we or spirit, or that we are spirit because we see. To see as we see and to be spirit are synonymous.41 And from the start the autonomy of the earlier stages of experience is relative, since they are oriented towards stages beyond themselves. A person is never a body that is “surmounted with a mind which would unfold its proper acts over this infrastructure.” Human existence is integrated in development as well as outcome. Our somatic processes do not unfold by themselves, since they are “integrated into a cycle of more extensive action. It is not a question of two de facto orders external to each other, but of two types of relations, the second of which integrates the first.”42 Thus the appearance of reason does not leave intact a sphere of self-enclosed instincts, since the former comes to transform the earlier stages and qualify their autonomy further. The unity of consciousness is built up with that of the object in a transition synthesis between and within their successive stages.43 The acts of human work are therefore irreducible to means of attaining ends that a separate instinct would pursue in its own way, differing only in being more ingenious. Clothing is more than artificial skin, the instrument more than a replacement of an organ, and linguistic articulation more than the parsing of empirical details that are already there, since it expresses hypotheses about how things fit together and make up the world. Calling humans rational animals is a misdescription.44 All this helps to flesh out a passage in which Merleau-Ponty claims that it is impossible to superimpose on human beings a lower layer of natural behaviour.45 The human body is defined as a continuing power of appropriating significant cores that transform and transfigure its existing capacities, and the power of transcending oneself towards a new form of behaviour in acting and in speaking has to be recognised as an ultimate fact. On this account, what is operative and at our disposal “expresses, at each moment, the energy of our present consciousness.”46 Merleau-Ponty will never cease to stress that the fields and world of developed perception take advantage of an earlier groundwork. Underlying the express perceptions that allow us to posit objects at a distance as complex wholes, underlying perceptions “properly speaking” (proprement dites), there is the Urdoxa or perceptual faith without which they would lack the distinctive sign of reality.47 My adult affirmation of the world is nourished even now by the childhood certainty of one evident reality that we all experience in just the same way. Though as adults we know that there are different points of view with different articulations, “[t]he barbarous thoughts of the 40 Ibid., 189–190/175. See also PP, 383/341. The early Merleau-Ponty is nonetheless attentive to the abilities to abbreviate actions and transfer skills that are manifested by animals. His account of animal coping has been explicated adroitly and succinctly in Katherine J. Morris, Starting with Merleau-Ponty (New York and London: Continuum, 2012), 140–144. 41 PP, 171/138. 42 SC, 195/180–181. 43 Ibid., 196/181; PP, 55, 386/33, 344. 44 SC, 176, 188, 196/163, 173, 181. 45 PP, 230/195. 46 Ibid., 163/132. 47 Ibid., 400–401/358–359. See also EU, 44–45/46.

Merleau-Ponty and developing and coping reflectively  67 initial stage must remain like an indispensable acquisition beneath the thoughts of the adult stage.”48 Underlying the objects that I approached and acted on is my body as a sensori-motor system of anonymous functions. My ongoing and unconscious adherence to the world bears the trace of early life, such that all subsequent perceptions are the resumptions of a pre-personal tradition, of a communication with the world that is “more ancient than thought.”49 A concern with this immemorial past leads Merleau-Ponty to recommend what he calls “radical reflection,” the ancestor of the hyper-reflective procedure found in The Visible and the Invisible.50 To reflect radically is to be conscious of reflection in its operation, to grasp how it forms and determines the ideas of the conscious subject and object out of the terms of a relation. It is to understand that the unity of these poles through extensive time frames outside the living present is posited presumptively. One still has the experience of oneself and one’s objects in an ongoing reciprocity. The transcendence of things is still recognised as occurring in tandem with the ability to ascribe experiences to oneself. Thus the subject–object relation is not taken as the mere idealisation of originary perception. All that has been claimed is that there is no original awareness on the part of an absolute subjectivity. An archaeology of experience ends up unearthing the communication of a finite subject with an opaque being from which it has emerged and to which it remains committed.51 To reflect radically is to refer “to the pre-reflective fund it presupposes, upon which it draws, and that constitutes for it, like an original past, a past that has never been a present.”52

3. At this point it is tempting to claim that Merleau-Ponty’s positive account of reflection incorporates it seamlessly into perceptual development and mature coping. Once we put “the coming to awareness of an objective world back into the order of existence” as he has told us, “we will no longer find a contradiction between it and bodily conditioning.”53 But this would be to pass over his critique of objectivist reflection. In his genealogy of objective thought in Phenomenology of Perception he concurs with the Heideggerian claim that in everyday life (posterior to having a skilled habitual body and prior to scientific objectification) present at hand items of disengaged viewing are read as paradigmatic of perception in general. Such a view represses the original interweaving of body and world, for its horizon is one of primordial separation. Certain constituted objects appear as the ready-made sources of experiences of them, and are used as the models of perceived things. They are exemplary in so far as they can plausibly be taken as fully determinate.54

48 PP, 413/371. 49 Ibid., 302/265. 50 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 60–61; English translation: The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 38–39. 51 PP, 264–265/227–228. 52 Ibid., 289/252, translation emended. 53 Ibid., 117/89. 54 Ibid., 95, 97/69, 71. See also Sein und Zeit, 8th ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1957), 71–75; English translation: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 102–105.

68  Timothy Mooney Merleau-Ponty uses a favoured example of something often seen and explored, a house. Due to the horizon structure of temporal and spatial perception we retain previous profiles of this pole of attention and anticipate future ones in moving towards it and around it. Performative identification unifies whole and parts in a sliding transition of manifolds, so that we experience successive views and their interrelations. Meant identification reflectively isolates the whole as a type and thematises its parts in propositional articulation, though we pass over the harmonious sequence of perceptions in our assertions. The hidden harmony motivates us to affirm that the house exists in itself, that it has its visible walls and chimneys and behind them its invisible pipes and hairline cracks in the ceiling. They might not be present to immediate view, but it has them nevertheless. In the end all the features are available to all perceivers, however much they are attracted to different properties. Such a motivated idea of a thing in itself is more than that of an enduring and re-encounterable particular, since it is taken as capable of further and more detailed determination. What we posit is an existent in-itself that can be explored and articulated anew.55 In this attitude Merleau-Ponty finds the germ of objective thought. Original perception forgets itself, which is inevitable, and begins to reflectively freeze its objects beyond the bare supposition of independence. Interwoven in distant times with mythic consciousness, developed awareness had already opened a horizon of possible objectification. Perception understood mythically did not posit fully determined objects for us, and should not be read as an anticipation of science, but did crystallise things in its own manner, prefiguring the idea of the world as a totality where each element is related systematically to everything else.56 With the more recent notion of a divine and omniscient subject came the supposition that what only exists for us intentionally is realised somewhere else, in a higher consciousness enjoying a thoroughgoing comprehension of all things. This prefigures the idea of total objectification from a more refined standpoint in which everything is posited as a knowable element of a universe, itself conceived as a fixed totality of fully determined objects.57 In the modern era, according to Merleau-Ponty, the thing in itself came to be comprehended as the sum of all possible perspectives compressed into a single imaginary gaze, intersecting panoptically at its depths and leaving nothing hidden.58 For centuries, science and philosophy have been sustained by an uncritical faith in a particular view of perception. It has been understood as “oriented – as if towards its own end – towards a truth in itself in which the reason for all appearances is found.” What is indeterminable for us at our stage of understanding will someday be rendered determinate by a more complete knowledge. Science is the amplification of a certain understanding of perception; “[j]ust as the thing is the invariant of all the sensory fields and of all individual perceptual fields, the scientific concept is the means of fixing and objectifying phenomena.”59 Merleau-Ponty thus provides a qualified story of perceptual life as an intrinsically reflexive process in which the perceiver makes itself and its things explicit.

55 56 57 58 59

PP, 97–99/71–73. Ibid., 345/305–306. Ibid., 65, 99, 347/42, 73–74, 307. Ibid., 97/71. Ibid., 80–81/54.

Merleau-Ponty and developing and coping reflectively  69 Objectification does not inevitably issue in the objective thought that distorts perception so badly.60 But if original reflection need not lead to the latter, neither is it an utterly innocent forebear. Even prior to modern objectivism, the idea of a thing in itself occluded the constitutive and yet perspectival performances of the embodied perceiver.61 Hence the battle to be waged by radical or hyper-reflection must go all the way down, remaining attentive to the original past that has never been a present. But as we shall see, the downside of Merleau-Ponty’s critique is that it zones in on theoretical acts and passes over those small-scale and engaged acts of reflection that are operative in perceptual lives that are already developed. These are recurring features in adult perception that can and do develop it still further, functioning amidst and most often for our long-term planning and theorising as well as practical activities. Such small-scale reflections occur beyond the advent of skilled coping, a thesis that Dreyfus would reject out of hand. Once explicit rules are put into practice, as he has argued, we learn to recognise them in aspects of action situations and leave them behind. They are replaced by situational discriminations accompanied by associated responses, so there is no need for cognitive or reflective acts. He adds that attempts to revise expert practices, notably in coaching, disrupt the flow of action and cause regression to mere competence. Athletes do not regain expertise until they are drawn back into unreflective involvement.62 Berendzen has retorted that, once we take Merleau-Ponty’s view of sedimented capacities seriously, we can come to see that the ability to accept coaching, review past performances and continually adjust a skill is as much part of an athlete’s life as unreflective coping. The kind of rational revision that happens in coaching, and in numerous aspects of ordinary life, is an instance of an always-present though latent ability being put to work.63 Coaching and practicing more clearly involve reflective articulation. For much if not all of the time that they are honing their skills, athletes are objectified by their coaches, and objectify themselves and their environments. They explicitly project new ways of meeting coming situations. Yet explicit articulations also occur within competition situations. An example employed by Shaun Gallagher concerns an expert downhill skier. Amidst the activity, she reflectively anticipates changes in the condition of the snow further down the slope. For Gallagher, reflective deliberation, and our ability to know where and when to employ it, should be considered part of what it is to be an expert in the flow. In line with Komarine Romdenh-Romluc’s explication of Merleau-Ponty’s “power to reckon with the possible,” we can access motor skills beyond those currently in use. We have the ability to see beyond the present environment to possible affordances in a future one.64 Going with this is the ability to anticipate possible hindrances or obstacles.

60 Ibid., 347/307. 61 Ibid., 83/56–57. 62 Dreyfus, 355. 63 Berendzen, 644–645. 64 Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, “Merleau-Ponty and the Power to Reckon with the Possible,” in Reading Merleau-Ponty: On Phenomenology of Perception, ed. Thomas Baldwin (London and New York, Routledge, 2007), 57; and PP, 139–140, 383/111–112, 341; Shaun Gallagher, “Review of Reading Merleau-Ponty,” Mind, 118/472 (2009): 1106.

70  Timothy Mooney Objectifying articulation of the body as well as of the environment can be included in this description of reflection in the flow. Motor skills inform the representation of the situation further downhill, and in their turn can be informed by reflection. The skier is aware of a thaw, making the edges of the run slushier than at practice time. She reckons quite explicitly that, well before the next right-hand bend, she will lean a little more to the right and use her ankles to gingerly turn in her skies. Better to enter on a tighter line further away from the slush on the left. The alternative is a sudden correction that is very likely to end in disaster. But if the scenario set out by Gallagher and elaborated on above is persuasive, we should avoid putting too much clear blue water between Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus. In Phenomenology of Perception it reads as if we do take reflection out of skilled coping once we emerge from childhood, since our habitual bodies have come to take over everything relevant to successfully engaged perception inside a situation. When new judgements and reflective articulations come into play, Merleau-Ponty does not clearly integrate them into the flow. He states that we find judgement occurring where perceptual events involve confusion. The mistake of traditional theories of perception is to bring in intellectual operations “to which we resort only when direct perception flounders in ambiguity.”65 And he suggests that all reflection on the body is marked by objective thought, implying that every such operation converts it into another determined thing with fixed boundaries silhouetted against the world. Reflection is a disengagement from somatic life, and the real understanding of the body consists in being immersed in it: The body, then, is not an object. For the same reason, the consciousness that I have of it is not a thought, that is, I cannot decompose and recompose this consciousness in order to form a clear idea. Its unity is always implicit and confused. . . . Whether it is a question of the other person’s body or of my own, I have no other means of knowing the human body than by living it, that is, by taking up for myself the drama that moves through it and by merging with it. Thus, I am my body, at least to the extent that I have an acquisition, and reciprocally my body is something like a natural subject, or a provisional sketch of my total being. The experience of one’s own body, then, is opposed to the reflective procedure that disentangles the object from the subject and the subject from the object, and that only gives us thought about the body or the body as an idea, and not the experience of the body or the body in reality.66 It might seem that Merleau-Ponty is only referring to the objectivist version of reflection. Yet he goes on to say that perception in its original form so occupies me that I am unable to perceive myself perceiving. I am given over to the object and merge with this body that is better informed than I am about the world. My body and senses are “precisely this habitual knowledge of the world, this implicit or sedimented science.”67 In practical action “[w]e never move our objective body, we move our phenomenal body . . . since it is our body as a power of various regions of the world that already

65 PP, 400/358. 66 Ibid., 240–241/204–205. 67 Ibid., 285/247.

Merleau-Ponty and developing and coping reflectively  71 rises up toward the objects to grasp and perceive them.”68 And prior to creative action, our bodies are correlated with imaginary situations, but again without being objectified. We access motor skills beyond those currently at work, but nothing more, not ordinarily thinking of how to refine actions. When we do objectify our moving bodies for experimentation or amusement they shed their anonymity and are turned away from the world. Once we become aware of them we break with our ordinary involvements, carving subjective zones of reflection out of the worldly plenum.69

4. The foregoing portrait looks uncomfortably close to that of Dreyfus, and MerleauPonty’s example of an experienced organist confronted with a new instrument does little to ameliorate it. On his view the organist is not a being who imposes a representational map or plan from above, since he settles into the organ, pulls out the stops and works the pedals, and generally gets its measure with his body. In rehearsing and in performing “the stops, the pedals, and the keyboards are only presented to him as powers of such and such an emotional or musical value.”70 What is wrong here is not so much what is affirmed as what is ignored. It is true that there is no grand or overarching plan in mind, no intellectualist blueprint floating above the scene that the body would merely implement. But we cannot infer from this a total lack of representational and objectifying performances. Without distortion, we can imagine the organist reflecting on certain parts of the organ and of his body as soon as he sits down. Since he will be playing the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, he carefully alters the stop positions, and reflects on whether he has got them right during the first few bars. When checking his footwork he also pays great attention to the pedal feel, since he remembers that a sticking pedal return in the last church organ played havoc with his right foot. As with the skier, these modes of reflection objectify both poles of the situation through some of its course. And it is hardly difficult to think up examples from everyday existence, including academic life. As I approach a conference room to hear a paper, I realise that I am daydreaming and dawdling and had better take longer strides,

68 Ibid., 136/108. 69 Ibid., 141–142/113–114. One side of Merleau-Ponty’s view of bodily objectification as a turning away from the world is to be found in his interpretation of Husserl’s account of bodily reflexivity. Through tactile sensations, according to Husserl, my body experiences itself as both active and passive and from outside and inside, or in Merleau-Ponty’s words, as a subject-object. The active or the passive side of the overall experience will have sensuous prominence at any one time, but never both. Reflection in the ordinary or objectifying sense supervenes on this experiential structure, according to Merleau-Ponty, and cannot catch it unawares. To reflectively objectify the body’s tactile experience is to disrupt its active and exploratory role and hence its marginal presence with me. PP, 121–122/94–95; Edmund Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephen Strasser, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), 128; English translation: Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), 97. However, I will argue below that this does not preclude the objectification of my currently engaged bodily comportment so as to change it in the proximate future and allow me to better realise a more distant goal. 70 PP, 180–181/146–147.

72  Timothy Mooney and later on again I decide to run. The room has a creaky floorboard near the door and tightly bunched chairs, which makes it difficult to come in and find a free seat without making a commotion. Should accelerating into a run not be enough, I have a contingency plan of how to regain my breath, tiptoe around the floorboard and squat on the ground. It will be as if I were there from almost the beginning, and free from the disapproving stares of others. Here one could make more of Merleau-Ponty’s passing remark that there is a body for me and a body for others, and that it is not enough to say that the phenomenal body is for me, and the objective one for others, “since the ‘for self’ and the ‘for others’ coexist in the same world.”71 In the same vein, one could embellish his statement that “the customs of our milieu or the arrangement of our listeners immediately elicits from us the words, attitudes and tone that fit with them.”72 It is rare indeed for reflection to be absent in coming into a room of auditors or strangers or loved ones for all that. Others aside, we often chance upon ourselves approving or decrying our comportment or handiwork, and as a result we resolve to continue with greater care and a new finesse. Such reflections are not waiting on actual breakdown situations, since they are pre-emptive or rationalising strategies that we posit within the flow. For want of a better phrase, and with due apologies to Leibniz, these small-scale and engaged thoughts can be entitled ‘little reflections.’ They are not players in an extraordinary tale of confronting disruption or of turning away from the world completely, but characters in the ordinary story of negotiating it without sound and fury. If we allow for little reflections, we can see everyday life as an ongoing commerce of the personal and anonymous, akin to an account with a host of minor transactions. Some of them in correcting rude worldly interruptions to our fantasies bring us even closer to that world, instituting adjustments to habitual skill deployments to better serve their ultimate outcomes. They do so easily for at least two reasons. Most of our habitual skill deployments enjoy comparatively wide margins of error before they run off the rails completely, so that reflective strategies of correction can be rough and ready and still suffice. As I have argued elsewhere, moreover, many of the motor projections that these recalibrate have an inbuilt flexibility or plasticity, with our transposable skills subtending what is imagined.73 We are not usually threatened with immediate disaster in our daily comportment. Only for the athlete or craftworker or the like is a relatively small deviation from a proper course of movement and an imprecise strategy of correction likely to end in tears.74

71 Ibid., 136n1/517n20. 72 Ibid., 136/109. 73  See Timothy Mooney, “Plasticity, Motor Intentionality and Concrete Movement in Merleau-Ponty,” Continental Philosophy Review 44/4 (2011): 373–377. 74 This is not to claim that athletes or craftworkers cannot rapidly and reflectively micromanage movements. Following on Berendzen, facility with high-speed and engaged reflection is part of what it is to be an expert in the flow. In another study it has been argued that rapid yet ‘mindful’ operations do not always have to be reflective or considered, and can be inferred from some context-sensitive responses to situations. This also looks right, and Merleau-Ponty himself asserts that we exercise sedimented conceptual capacities unconsciously and tacitly. See PP, 163/131. The authors remark that phenomenologists from Merleau-Ponty onwards have often sought a middle ground between rationalist or ultra-cognitivist intellectualism on the one hand and mechanistic forms of pure empiricism

Merleau-Ponty and developing and coping reflectively  73 When we later draw on little reflections we may not remember how we acquired the relevant knowledge, or even that we did. These reflections may in principle be recalled because they are explicit crystallisations of situations, unlike the original past that was never a present, but they are scarcely less opaque to recollection. In this regard the reflection motivated by the creaky floorboard and bunched chairs is perhaps too memorable an example. Little reflections are commonly once-off responses to once-off situations, and humdrum for all that. Ordinarily they fade from awareness rapidly and let us return to acting and for that matter to theorising. In these last cases they follow on from interruptions to calm reflection and the skilled coping that anonymously allows for such reflection. They are then practical and productive interventions bridging larger and abstractive episodes of reflection, the kind that are involved when planning far into the future. As transitory ways of thinking our way around immediate obstacles, these small-scale strategies are needed to restore the bodily composure and correlative environmental stability required for long-term planning and theorising, which makes them more than psychological peculiarities. They are as essential to disengaged episodes as they are to continuous coping in the flow. The successive situations of daily living do not ceaselessly throw up problems demanding reflectively mediated revisions, minor though they may be. This being said, a situation of engagement is rarely quite the same today as it was yesterday. It has its own contours, its own particular details, and so does the body that has to deal with it. Now an early bus or an overfilled paper cup while commuting to work demand reflexive articulation, and then a sore elbow or an ever-straying lock of hair. Those passages in which sedimented acquisitions and anonymous discriminations are cast as enough for us are evocative of an adult world that is more or less frictionless, and of a coping body that is at the peak of health and fitness and general flexibility. Sheena Hyland has remarked that we are often subject to small hindrances and irritants and aches and pains, and are not eternally twenty-five years young.75 We do not have to be so ill or fragile that bodily events have become the events of the day to frequently objectify and articulate our bodies and surroundings. This brings us back to the lacuna in Merleau-Ponty’s view of bodily objectification that leads Dreyfus to conclude that he anticipates the exclusion of reflection from skilled coping. It is true that the experience of the body is opposed to that reflective procedure which disentangles the object from the subject and vice-versa. It is also true that when we objectify our bodies for experiment or amusement we turn away from the world of involvements. But this only holds with cases where such experiments or

on the other. Such figures have avoided that reactive emphasis on the completely anonymous and pre-reflective body to be found in existential phenomenology à la Dreyfus. See John Sutton, Doris McIlwain, Wayne Christenson and Andrew Geeves, “Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and Habits Between Dreyfus and Descartes,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42/1 (2011): 78, 80–81, 93, 95. On this reactive tendency in existential phenomenology see Elizabeth A. Behnke, “Edmund Husserl’s Contribution to the Body in Ideas II,” in Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, ed. Tom Nenon and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 154. As I argue below, however, Merleau-Ponty’s critique of objective thought strains against an account that can be reconstructed from his rounder claims. 75 Sheena Hyland, “Between Health and Illness: Positive Pain and World Formation,” in Dimensions of Pain, ed. Lisa Folkmarson Käll (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 91.

74  Timothy Mooney amusements are exclusively theoretical or self-directed. As we have seen with the skier and organist and ordinary commuter, there is another mode of reflection in which we objectify both poles of a situation through part of its course, but without thereby sundering them apart. What is objectified is an engaged area of the body precisely as it is or will be indexed onto this or that implement or affordance in a practical situation. The reflectively mediated alteration of a movement or of a hold allows us to restore or keep up momentum or even to increase it. Such reflective acts can be taken as breaks in absorption alone that do not hinder the actual coping. When Merleau-Ponty is not so worried about objectivism, we get a rounder take on our perceptual lives. For us, sedimentation runs with spontaneity. What is at our disposal is not a final gain, but “expresses, at each moment, the energy of our present consciousness.” What is acquired is only truly acquired and truly utilised “if it is taken up in a new movement of thought.”76 To what is thought about in reflection, we do not oppose something that could be lived through in an inner and undivided experience.77 We are lucky that we are not like Schneider, for our experience tends towards expression, suggesting questions to us. It does not have the self-evidence and selfsufficiency that stifles “all interrogation, all reference to the possible, all wonder, and all improvisation.”78 We find “an interlocking and a taking up of previous experiences in later experiences,” though every synthesis “is simultaneously taken apart and remade by time, which, in a single movement, puts it into question and confirms it because it produces a new present that retains the past.”79 In descriptive terms, the emphasis in Phenomenology of Perception is nevertheless on a smooth environment for an immersed body that does not stand in need of objectification. An example of worldly resistance from a barred subway door or of bodily failure from a forgotten amputation is not just conspicuous by its presence, but has an all-embracing character in its appearance.80 Beyond acts of turning away from the world, not much comes between smooth coping and breakdown. Yet it is also stated that situations are never quite comparable in the historical world we inhabit, and the reworking of the mountain crag example from Stein and Sartre goes a long way towards suggesting the need for small-scale acts of reflection. A crag can only appear as an obstacle within a project of climbing. But given the same project, stresses Merleau-Ponty, one crag will appear less negotiable than another, and in tackling it I consciously adjust to its specific contours. Choices are conditioned in calling on anonymous evaluations by the skilled body that runs ahead of them, but the particular outlines of the situations nonetheless summon such explicit acts.81 It turns out that situations of resistance are not everything if they are more than nothing. They do not always lead to breakdowns nor call up reflections producing regressions to mere competence, even if they stand at some distance from frictionless coping. Admitting little reflections does not entail that every particular response to a resistance situation will occupy one’s entire practical field, or that it will demand what Merleau-Ponty

76 77 78 79 80 81

PP, 163/132. Ibid., 326–327n1/543–544n60. Ibid., 238/202. Ibid., 288/250. Ibid., 111, 178/84, 144. Ibid., 113, 502–504/86, 464–466.

Merleau-Ponty and developing and coping reflectively  75 describes as a unique position-taking.82 But it does entail that some episodes in everyday coping will have the latter characteristic, however briefly. Happily some of his remarks about our human perceptual lives point towards a rounder view that could accommodate such reflectively mediated modifications of movements to maintain, restore or increase momentum. This would have the advantage of flagging the difference between Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus without our having to abandon the critique of objective thought.

References Behnke, Elizabeth A. “Edmund Husserl’s Contribution to the Body in Ideas II.” In Issues in Husserl’s Ideas II, ed. Tom Nenon and Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996, pp. 135–160. Berendzen, Joseph C. “Coping Without Foundations: On Dreyfus’s Use of Merleau-Ponty.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 18, no. 5 (2010): 629–649. Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. Carman, Taylor. Merleau-Ponty. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Dreyfus, Hubert. “Intelligence Without Representation: Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Mental Representations.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1, no. 4 (2002): 367–383. Gallagher, Shaun. Review of Reading Merleau-Ponty. Mind 118, no. 472 (2009): 1105–1111. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit, 8th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1957; English translation: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962. Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Essay on the Origin of Language.” In On the Origin of Language: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder, trans. and ed. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, pp. 87–176. Hung, Wai-Shun. “Perception and Self-Awareness in Merleau-Ponty: The Problem of the Tacit Cogito in the Phenomenology of Perception.” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 5 (2005): 211–224. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephen Strasser, 2nd ed. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963; English translation: Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960. ———. Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1999; English translation: Experience and Judgement, trans. James Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. Manuscripts C 13 I, 6, 10b; A VI 34, 35a, 36. Cited in Smith, A. D. Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Hyland, Sheena. “Between Health and Illness: Positive Pain and World Formation.” In Dimensions of Pain, ed. Lisa Folkmarson Käll. London and New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 84–93. Malebranche, Nicolas. “Dialogues on Metaphysics.” In Nicholas Malebranche: Philosophical Selections, trans. Willis Doney and ed. Steven Nadler. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992, pp. 146–253. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. La Structure du Comportement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942; English translation: The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1963. ———. Le visible et l’invisible, ed. Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard, 1964; English translation: The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

82 Ibid., 116–117/89.

76  Timothy Mooney ———. La Nature: Notes, cours du Collège de France. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995; English translation: Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. ———. Phénoménologie de la perception, 2nd ed. Paris: Gallimard, 2002; English translation: Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Mooney, Timothy. “Plasticity, Motor Intentionality and Concrete Movement in Merleau-Ponty.” Continental Philosophy Review 44, no. 4 (2011): 359–381. Morris, Katherine J. Starting with Merleau-Ponty. New York and London: Continuum, 2012. Romdenh-Romluc, Komarine. “Merleau-Ponty and the Power to Reckon with the Possible.” In Reading Merleau-Ponty: On Phenomenology of Perception, ed. Thomas Baldwin. London and New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 44–58. Schear, Joseph K., ed. Mind, Reason and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Sutton, John, McIlwain, Doris, Christenson, Wayne and Geeves, Andrew. “Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and Habits Between Dreyfus and Descartes.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42, no. 1 (2011): 78–103. Toadvine, Ted. “ ‘Strange Kinship’: Merleau-Ponty on the Human-Animal Relation.” In Phenomenology of Life from the Animal to the Human, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Analecta Husserliana 93 (2007): 17–32.

6 Grief and phantom limbs A phenomenological comparison Matthew Ratcliffe

Abstract: First-person accounts of bereavement often compare it to losing part of one’s own body. More specifically, the continuing presence of the deceased is sometimes said to be like a phantom limb. One might think that these are just metaphors or analogies that serve to convey the profundity of loss. However, this paper argues that the two types of experience can indeed be structurally similar, in a number of important ways. Another person, I argue, can come to shape how we experience and engage with our surroundings in a way that resembles the contribution of our own bodily capacities and dispositions. Furthermore, the boundaries between bodily and interpersonal experience are indistinct. Keywords: amputation, grief, habit, hallucination, interpersonal relations, phantom limb, world-experience

1.  Grief and amputation First-person accounts of grief often state that the experience resembles that of losing a limb. Bereavement is somehow like amputation, and grief is like learning to live without an arm or a leg.1 The following published interview excerpts are representative examples: It’s as though I have to live without my arms or something like that – without something, but I can’t put a finger on it because it’s not visible. . . . I have to try and learn to live without this vital you know like my sight or something, because that’s how integral my dad was. Something I’ve kept in mind is that I really feel like I’ve had an amputation and I can’t see which limb has gone and that it’s not a visible limb, but it most certainly is an amputation – there’s no other way I can describe it.2 Similar comparisons can be found in most published autobiographical accounts of bereavement. For instance, Adri van der Heijden writes, “What else is your child but

1 As I use the terms here, “bereavement” refers to the short-term recognition, reaction, and response to loss, whereas “grief” refers to a longer-term emotional process. 2 From Christine Valentine, Bereavement Narratives: Continuing Bonds in the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2008), 100.

78  Matthew Ratcliffe an external enclave of your own flesh and blood? . . . A part of me has been amputated, so how will I ever be able to say I feel at home with my body?”3 Comparing bereavement to losing a limb serves at least to convey the profundity and painfulness of loss.4 However, I will argue in what follows that there is much more to it than that. What we have here is not merely a set of culturally entrenched metaphors and analogies that people employ in order to stress how important somebody was to them. In fact, the two experiences can be structurally similar in more specific and philosophically interesting ways (which is not to suggest that they always are; both admit considerable diversity, and we should we wary of over-generalizing). In elucidating these similarities, my principal aims are to show that (i) another person can play much the same role in shaping experience, thought, and activity as one’s own bodily capacities and habitual dispositions, and (ii) there is no clear line between the phenomenological role of one’s own body and the roles played by interpersonal relationships – the two are inextricable. Phenomenologically speaking, the boundary between subjectivity and intersubjectivity is indeterminate. In a 1975 study, Colin Murray Parkes explores, in depth, the similarities and differences between grief and reactions to the loss of a limb. He concludes that the two have much in common and tend to follow a similar temporal course: This included an initial period of numbness, soon followed by restless pining with preoccupation with thoughts of the loss, a clear visual memory of the lost object and a sense of its presence. Defensive processes, reflected in difficulty in believing in the loss and avoidance of reminders, were also evident.5 Both responses, Parkes suggests, centrally involve a “psycho-social transition”, an adjustment process whereby one worldview (construed not just as a conceptual representation of the world but also a way of relating to and interacting with one’s surroundings) is replaced by another. Although there were some differences in responses to bereavement and amputation, Parkes notes that these had all but disappeared after the first thirteen months. The only exception was a “sense of the presence of the lost object”: while 56 per cent of amputees continued to have phantom limb experiences, only 14 per cent of bereaved subjects had comparable experiences of the deceased as present.6 Interestingly, twelve of his interviewees had experienced both amputation and bereavement, and they further emphasized the phenomenological similarities. Parkes’ comparison between phantom limbs and the felt presence of the deceased is dismissed outright by Ramachandran and Hirstein. A phantom limb, they maintain, is to be accounted for in principally neurobiological terms rather than in terms of a psycho-social adjustment process of the kind involved in mourning. So the claim that a phantom limb is analogous to a situation where someone is “unable to believe that her husband has died” and “has a strong sense of his presence” should not be taken

3 Tonio: A Requiem Memoir (London: Scribe, 2015), 286. 4 Valentine takes the comparison with amputation to convey both the “extreme nature of the pain of loss” and the “extent of the loss” (Bereavement Narratives, 100). 5 Colin Murray Parkes, “Psycho-Social Transitions: Comparison Between Reactions to Loss of a Limb and Loss of a Spouse,” British Journal of Psychiatry 127 (1975): 204–210, here 204. 6 Ibid., 207.

Grief and phantom limbs  79 seriously.7 In fact, their appraisal is rather unfair. Parkes explicitly acknowledges the obvious neurobiological differences. Indeed, he attributes the higher relative frequency of phantom limbs to the fact that bereavement is a matter of psychological adjustment, whereas both physiology and psychology contribute to the generation of a phantom limb. However, as I will make clear in what follows, this is to concede too much. The similarities that I will address are not restricted to the relevant phenomenology; the physiological effects of bereavement can also be similar, in certain respects, to the effects of losing a limb.

2.  Merleau-Ponty on grief and phantom limbs In comparing phantom limbs to the felt presence of the deceased, it is important to recognize that neither is adequately characterized in terms of a localized entity seeming to be present when it is actually absent; there are different ways of experiencing both presence and absence. To illustrate this, I will begin by considering Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of grief and phantom limbs in Phenomenology of Perception.8 Merleau-Ponty suggests that the two have a common structure, involving a kind of presence quite different from that of a perceived entity situated in an already given world. In contrast to Parkes, he rejects additive models that attempt to account for phantom limbs in terms of distinct physiological and psychological components. Instead, he suggests, they should be conceived of in a unitary way, in terms of the “movement of being in and toward the world”.9 To explain, when we think of a phenomenon in terms of physiological and/or psychological processes, we take for granted that the organism already finds itself in a world, where it can relate to features of its surrounding environment in one or the other way. However, the sense of being situated in a world is itself a phenomenological achievement, one that is overlooked by objective, scientific conceptions of cognition. For Merleau-Ponty, a phantom limb does not arise within a ready-made experiential world; it is integral to the constitution of a world that we take as given when we encounter localized entities as present or absent. This, he adds, applies equally to grief. Ordinarily, how we experience our surroundings reflects our bodily capacities and dispositions, along with our various projects, commitments, concerns, and values. Suppose one glances at a market stall and spots a book that one has been looking for. The book appears perceptually salient and practically significant. It may even have a certain practical allure, drawing one’s hand towards it. Its salience and significance do not just reflect a sense of one’s bodily capacities – what one can and cannot do; they depend equally on concerns that are to varying degrees idiosyncratic. Habitual ways of experiencing and interacting with one’s surroundings involve an amalgam of the two. Hence a change in one or the other will affect what appears significant and

7 V. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein, “The Perception of Phantom Limbs: The D. O. Hebb Lecture,” Brain 121 (1998): 1603–1630. 8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); English translation: Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012). Quotations and page numbers are from the English language edition, referred to hereafter as PP. 9 PP, 80.

80  Matthew Ratcliffe how. Merleau-Ponty suggests that phantom limbs arise when the habitual world is preserved despite a change in bodily capacities. After the loss of an arm, things may continue to appear salient, significant, and accessible in ways that they previously did. Although one can see that the arm is no longer there and one knows – in a reflective, propositional way – that it is gone, the surrounding world says otherwise: “To have a phantom limb is to remain open to all of the actions of which the arm alone is capable and to stay within the practical field that one had prior to the mutilation”.10 According to Merleau-Ponty, anosognosia (denial of paralysis) can be understood in the same way: a person may be unable to move one side of her body but her practical field remains intact. Its retention depends in part on her avoiding situations that would draw attention to the loss, something that applies to grief as well: We only understand the absence or the death of a friend in the moment in which we expect a response from him and feel . . . that there will no longer be one. At first we avoid asking the question in order not to have to perceive this silence and we turn away from regions of our life where we could encounter this nothingness, but this is to say that we discern them. The anosognosic patient likewise puts his paralyzed arm out of play in order not to have to sense its degeneration, but this is to say that he has a preconscious knowledge of it.11 In the cases of both bereavement and limb loss, the correlate of an enduring system of practical meanings is a continuing sense of presence. But this does not involve an entity appearing to be here, now, when it is actually not. Rather, it consists in a variably specific set of practical dispositions, which are implicated in how the surrounding world appears. Experience continues to be permeated by possibilities that depend on having specific bodily capacities or on being able to relate to and interact with a particular individual: The amputee senses his leg, as I can sense vividly the existence of a friend who is, nevertheless, not here before my eyes. He has not lost his leg because he continues to allow for it, just as Proust can certainly recognize the death of his grandmother without yet losing her to the extent that he keeps her on the horizon of his life. The phantom arm is not a representation of the arm, but rather the ambivalent presence of an arm.12 Merleau-Ponty also describes these experiences in temporal terms: they involve a “previous present that cannot commit to becoming a past”, a system of possibilities that continue to take the form “p is currently significant in this way”, and thus to specify patterns of activity, rather than being experienced as possibilities that have been extinguished.13 His discussion sometimes reads as though phantom limbs and

10 Ibid., 84. 11 Ibid., 82–83. I focus on phantom limbs here and do not consider the phenomenology of anosognosia. Even if it turns out that Merleau-Ponty’s analysis does not apply to anosognosia, I will suggest that it has at least some bearing on phantom limb experiences. 12 PP, 83. 13 Ibid., 88.

Grief and phantom limbs  81 sensed presence experiences are products of intention or choice: one actively strives to preserve a lost world, in a way that resembles psychoanalytic repression. However, Merleau-Ponty also emphasizes that they involve an aspect of experience that operates below the level of intention (conscious or otherwise). They are integral to the structure of a world within which we act and within which we form intentions of one or another kind. Even so, they are not merely mechanistic in nature and involve a kind of bodily purposiveness. Of course, neither grief nor phantom limbs can be understood solely in terms of striving to preserve an impossible world. The habitual world also changes over time. The speed, extent, and nature of adjustment vary considerably, and explicit, effortful choices plausibly have at least some role to play. Consider an essay by Oliver Sacks on experiences of losing sight and adjusting to blindness. These, he observes, can take a number of different forms. In the case of “deep blindness”, a person eventually forgets what it was to see; even visual imagination is lost, and he comes to inhabit a world bereft of the possibilities offered by sight. In contrast, others actively, willfully preserve visual imagery and even continue to utilize it in goal-directed activities.14 Merleau-Ponty makes some complementary, albeit briefer, remarks on differing experiences of blindness, thus acknowledging that the practical field can be preserved to varying degrees and reconfigured in different ways.15 Similarly, where grief and limb loss are concerned, it is not just a matter of “arrested time”. As we will see, the worlds of before and after interact with each other and are altered in the process.

3.  Varieties of phantom I agree with Merleau-Ponty that phantom limbs and felt presence experiences share a common structure. They can involve systems of significant possibilities that are integral to the experienced world. The limb and the person are present in an indeterminate, diffuse way – they are implicated in situations rather than being perceived constituents of situations. Nevertheless, this story is far from complete, and there is considerably more to be said about both. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between imagelike experiences (or, if you like, representations) of the body and the phenomenological role of the body as that through which we experience our surroundings. In other words, he distinguishes the body “image” from the body “schema”, from how the body structures practically engaged perception.16 Phantom limbs, he maintains, are to be understood in terms of the latter; they involve retention of habitual dispositions that manifest themselves in the guise of a significant environment. However, contrary to this, first-person reports of phantom limbs indicate that they can and often do have image qualities. In a 1997 exhibition entitled After Image, Alexa Wright interviewed amputees and then produced photographic images of what their phantoms looked

14 Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See,” in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 25–42. 15 PP, 81. 16 For a detailed discussion of the image/schema distinction, as employed by Merleau-Ponty and others, see Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

82  Matthew Ratcliffe like.17 These included quite specific characteristics, such as reduced diameter, partial retraction, or being frozen in a particular position. Of course, the relevant experiences are not themselves visual, but the point is that there can be a proprioceptive awareness of the limb that is sufficiently image-like for it to be described in fairly precise spatial terms. This is difficult to square with the proposal that phantoms consist of diffuse, ambiguous experiences of presence that permeate the surrounding world. It should be added, however, that phantom limb experiences are multi-faceted and diverse. So it could still be that Merleau-Ponty’s analysis captures some of them, or at least an important aspect of some of them. Ramachandran and Hirstein provide a fairly comprehensive account of the different variants.18 All phantoms, they observe, involve a vivid sense of presence, but this core experience accommodates considerable diversity. While between 90 per cent and 98 per cent of those who lose a limb experience a phantom almost immediately afterwards, the sense of presence may fade within days or persist indefinitely. When phantoms do fade, they sometimes become shorter and/or change shape. Phantoms can also involve pain or cramping. For some, the limb remains rigid, perhaps stuck in an uncomfortable position, while others report experiences of voluntary movement. Others describe habitual, unthinking responses to situations, such as reaching out with a phantom arm to shake somebody’s hand. To further complicate matters, phantoms are not specific to limbs; they can also occur after the loss of a breast, a part of the face, or the penis. Ramachandran and Hirstein offer an explanation that appeals to “plasticity in the somatosensory system” and processes of “remapping”.19 Parts of the cortex associated with the missing limb are taken over by sensory input from elsewhere in the body, making it seem as though the limb is still present. This is consistent with the finding that tactual stimulation of another body part often generates sensations in the phantom. The rapid onset of phantoms indicates that this process does not, or at least need not, involve neuroanatomical changes. Rather, patterns of synaptic activity that were previously eclipsed by input from the missing limb become more salient; they are “unmasked” by its loss.20 However, Ramachandran and Hirstein concede that this explanation cannot accommodate every aspect of phantom experiences. For instance, it does not account for experiences of voluntary and involuntary movement.21 In order to simplify my task here, I will exclude the phenomenon of phantom pain from further consideration. Many phantom limb experiences do not involve pain and, where there is pain, it is not clear that its nature has to be addressed in order to understand other aspects of the experience.22 In setting aside pain, I do not wish to assume

17 See www.alexawright.com/after-image. Last accessed 8 September 2017. 18 “Perception of Phantom Limbs.” 19 Ibid., 1608–1609. 20 Ibid., 1614. 21 For a complementary discussion of phantom limbs and cortical remapping, see also V. S. Ramachandran and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran, “Phantom Limbs and Neural Plasticity,” Archives of Neurology 57 (2000): 317–320. 22 Phantom pain is experienced by between 50 per cent and 80 per cent of amputees. It can have different qualities, such as “stabbing, throbbing, burning, or cramping”. See Herta Flor, “Phantom-Limb Pain: Characteristics, Causes, and Treatment,” Lancet Neurology 1 (2002): 182–189, here 182. It could be that the prevalence of pain is historically variably and that this is attributable, in part, to culturally changing interpretations of phantom limbs

Grief and phantom limbs  83 that there are no informative parallels between the pain of a phantom limb and the “pain” of grief. Perhaps there are. But, even if there are not, it remains the case that the two broad types of experience are similar in other philosophically informative ways. Even without a consideration of phantom pain, it looks as though Merleau-Ponty’s analysis is in trouble. A habitual world that is retained in the face of incapacity does not account for a limb that is frozen in position or a hand that is vividly experienced as protruding from one’s shoulder. Aplasic phantoms, which arise despite the congenital absence of a limb, pose a further problem. If phantoms involve the retention of bodily capacities, which are to some degree innate but also habitually entrained, how can we account for the appearance of a phantom where no such capacities were ever present? One response is to suggest that aplasic phantoms are different in kind from others. For instance, Gallagher suggests that they may not concern the body “schema” at all, whether innate or habitual. Instead, they are image-like phenomena.23 Consistent with this, aplasic phantoms, unlike post-amputation phantoms, often have a late onset. In addition, they do not involve experiences of forgetting that a limb is missing, as when trying to walk using a missing leg. Even so, Gallagher also allows for the possibility that observing and interacting with other people may somehow activate innate components of the body schema. So it should not be assumed that even aplasic phantoms consist exclusively of image-like bodily experiences. It could also be argued that phenomena such as phantom breasts and penises are principally image-based phenomena, given that breasts and penises are not integrated into “motor programs”. However, I am doubtful of this. Although one does not use a breast to act in the way that one uses an arm or leg, it is still integrated into habitual activities in all sorts of ways, shaping a sense of one’s capacities for action as well as one’s interactions with other people. The habit-body should be thought of as a unified whole, rather than as an assortment of motor capacities that are stuck together alongside inactive components. Consider a more mundane experience, which I take to be analogous in relevant respects. Most of the time during the day, I wear glasses. However, when I take them off, I usually “forget” within a few minutes that I have done so, where forgetting takes the form of habitually pressing the bridge of my nose with my index finger, in order to adjust my glasses. It is not that I first form an explicit “image” of the glasses resting on my nose. Rather, they are integrated into wider patterns of activity, habitually taken account of. Hence even artefacts can be incorporated into one’s activities and taken to be somehow present when absent, an observation that is consistent with reports of wedding rings on phantom fingers and watches on phantom wrists.24 If this much is conceded, then there are insufficient grounds for excluding body parts that are not directly involved in motor action from a schema-based account of phantoms. Although Merleau-Ponty does not provide a comprehensive account of phantoms, he does at least succeed in identifying an important aspect of many such experiences.

by the medical profession and, consequently, by patients as well. It seems that, as pleasant phantoms have become rarer, painful phantoms have increased in frequency. See Cassandra S. Crawford, Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 23 Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 92. 24 Ramachandran and Hirstein, “Perception of Phantom Limbs,” 1607.

84  Matthew Ratcliffe Indeed, influential work on phantom limbs by Marianne Simmel in the 1950s takes the body schematic component to be most central: we regard the phantom as the symptom and result of a discrepancy between the schema and physical reality. Reality can change – a leg may be lost in an accident – but the schema persists, and the phantom is the experiential representation of this persistence.25 Some phantoms clearly do involve retention of the practical field, as when the absence of a limb is forgotten during the course of habitual action: “Despite his knowledge that the amputation has been performed the patient may ‘forget’ and reach out with the missing hand to grasp something, or to steady himself, or he may step on the phantom foot and fall”.26 Retention of the practical field is also consistent with findings concerning the influence of prosthetic limbs on phantoms. Those who use them tend to experience more frequent phantoms than those who do not, suggesting that continuing use of the limb and thus retention of practice is somehow implicated.27 Furthermore, it has been observed that gradual loss of a limb and gradual loss of use prior to amputation are less likely to be followed by a phantom than sudden loss of a functional limb, again suggesting that the experience has something to do with the retention of practical dispositions.28 Where adjustment proceeds gradually, there is no sharp contrast between experience of a wholly intact practical field and recognition of its loss.

4.  Grief and the habitual world Some analogous observations apply to experiences of grief. Grieving processes cannot be understood exclusively in terms of what happens to the “practical field”. Nevertheless, it is an important aspect of grief. In both grief and loss of bodily capacity, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the preservation of a world that is no longer possible: The passage of time does not carry away impossible projects, nor does it seal off the traumatic experience. The subject still remains open to the same impossible future, if not in his explicit thoughts, then at least in his actual being. . . . New perceptions replace previous ones, and even new emotions replace those that came before, but this renewal only has to do with the content of our experience and not with its structure. Impersonal time continues to flow, but personal time is arrested.29

25 Marianne Simmel, “The Conditions of Occurrence of Phantom Limbs,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102 (1958): 492–500, here 493. 26 Ibid., 492. 27 See, for example, C. M. Fraser, et al., “Characterising Phantom Limb Phenomena in Upper Limb Amputees,” Prosthetics and Orthotics International 25 (2001): 235–242. 28 Ramachandran and Hirstein, “Perception of Phantom Limbs,” 1625. 29 P  P, 85. For a discussion of habit retention in the cases of grief and phantom limbs, which refers specifically to Merleau-Ponty’s work, see also Maria Talero, “Merleau-Ponty and the Bodily Subject of Learning,” International Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2006): 191–203.

Grief and phantom limbs  85 So far as grief is concerned, this description best captures predicaments that might be labeled as “complicated grief”, which involve continuing attachment to the deceased of a kind that prevents the formation of new meanings – a failure to fully acknowledge the death.30 As Martha Nussbaum puts it, “the pathological mourner continues to put the dead person at the very center of her own structure of goals and expectations, and this paralyzes life”.31 In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, a system of practical meanings is preserved, despite its impossibility in the face of loss. However, when we consider grief more generally, it becomes readily apparent that Merleau-Ponty’s account oversimplifies matters. Although grief can involve periods when the habitual world is retained in the face of loss, retention is not simply to be contrasted with loss. The two interact, in ways that incorporate both reflective, effortful and pre-reflective, habitual aspects.32 Importantly, the loss is not consistently denied, in the guise of a world that remains intact. It is also recognized, where recognition also takes the form of a pervasive, diffuse experience, rather than the simple acknowledgement that a specific entity is gone from the world. Things in general lack the significance they once had – everything appears strange and unfamiliar. As Carse writes, when someone whom we love dies, “we live in a universe that makes no sense. The cosmos has lost its fundamental order. As a result, our own lives lose their meaning”. We therefore face “the formidable task of reassembling a new universe”.33 Descriptions of meaning-collapse are to be found in almost every published firstperson account of grief. The relevant experience is conveyed in a range of different but complementary ways. For instance, Joyce Carol Oates describes it in terms of the once meaningful world being reduced to a collection of mere things, stripped of their previous significance: “Without meaning, the world is things. And these things multiplied to infinity”.34 Along with this, there is a pervasive sense of disconnection from the consensus world. While that world persists, one has lost one’s place within it and no longer finds oneself in the midst of meaningful, shared situations: “Planes still landed, cars still drove, people still shopped and talked and worked. None of these things made any sense at all”.35 Thus, in addition to the retention of habitual experience and activity, grief can involve a pervasive sense of habitual expectations as negated, as no longer capable of fulfillment. As C.S. Lewis writes, “I think I am beginning to

30 See, for example, Robert A. Neimeyer, “Complicated Grief and the Reconstruction of Meaning: Conceptual and Empirical Contributions to a Cognitive-Constructivist Model,” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 13 (2006): 141–145, here 143. 31 U  pheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 82–83. 32 As emphasized by Thomas Attig, grief consists of both “reactions” and “responses” to loss, where the latter involve agency rather than the passive experiencing of something. See his How We Grieve: Relearning the World, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 33 James P. Carse, “Grief as a Cosmic Crisis,” in Acute Grief: Counseling the Bereaved, ed. Otto S. Margolis et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 3–8, here 5. Complementing this, Attig, in How We Grieve, suggests that grieving involves “relearning the world”, revising habitual, practical assumptions. 34 A Widow’s Story (London: Fourth Estate, 2011), 176. 35 Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (London: Vintage Books, 2014), here 15.

86  Matthew Ratcliffe understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual”.36 Even when one faces meaning-loss of this kind, pockets of practice can remain relatively unscathed. For instance, Oates describes how she was still able to immerse herself in her teaching, a part of her life that was insulated from her marriage. Preservation and collapse can also oscillate.37 One might unthinkingly immerse oneself in a habitual routine that depends on one’s relationship with the deceased, and then come to recognize – in one or another way – its incompatibility with the reality of her death. A similar sense of discrepancy can also arise with memory, where memories involving the deceased appear in a different light after the death. Peter Goldie observes how, “in grieving, we relate to our past in a special way, realizing that things as they used to be, and as we remember them, can never be the same again”. He draws a parallel between grief and free indirect style in literature (a way of writing that combines internal and external perspectives on a situation, usually that of the author and a character): Autobiographical narrative thinking can reveal or express both one’s internal and external perspective on one’s tragic loss, so that these two perspectives are intertwined through the psychological correlate of free indirect style.38 The act of remembering unites a world that one habitually took for granted with the reality of bereavement, yet at the same time preserves the tensions between them. Similarly, we might add, the perceived world is not simply preserved or lost; its structure is in flux, and to some degree fragmented. Experience is simultaneously shaped by conflicting systems of expectation. This can involve an erosion of space-time cohesion, where some experienced situations and places are still permeated by a habitual, cohesive set of expectations that implicate the deceased, while other parts of the surrounding world incorporate recognition of loss. Consider this passage from Simone De Beauvoir, which refers to a time shortly after her mother’s death: As we looked at her straw bag, filled with balls of wool and an unfinished piece of knitting, and at her blotting-pad, her scissors, her thimble, emotion rose up and drowned us. Everyone knows the power of things: life is solidified in them, more immediately present than in any one of its instants. They lay there on my table, orphaned, useless, waiting to turn into rubbish or to find another identity.39 On the one hand, the knitting materials are experienced in terms of a coherent system of salient practical possibilities, which together imply the actual or potential presence of her mother. That system remains inherent in them. On the other hand, it no longer

36 A Grief Observed (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 41. 37 A Widow’s Story, 176. 38 Peter Goldie, The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 56, 66 39 A Very Easy Death, trans. Patrick O’Brien (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 98.

Grief and phantom limbs  87 fits into a world from which her mother is absent, and the patterns of activity that it points to conflict with this wider experiential context.40 Grief thus involves various relationships and interactions between retention and revision of practical meanings, and the two are not mutually exclusive. It seems plausible to maintain that some such experiences include a kind of presence, where anticipated or actual interactions with the deceased are integrated into practical configurations of the environment. However, this presence is not constant, unwavering in the guise of an unchanging but impossible system of meaning. It can be more pronounced in some situations than others, and it can be conflicted, as when certain aspects of a situation imply presence while others imply absence. It can also be more or less localized. While a system of meanings that shapes one’s world as a whole might presuppose someone in a diffuse, non-localized way, other experiences may more closely approximate the sense that he is right here, right now. For instance, when walking into a person’s office, where papers still lie on the table, books stand organized on the shelf, and so forth, one might experience a sense of presence involving fairly specific patterns of anticipated activity and interaction. Such an experience could be followed swiftly by a sense of negation. Or it could be recognized as discrepant even as it arises; a localized sense of presence co-exists with a more diffuse sense of absence. So, to reiterate, felt presence experiences such as these do not consist of experiencing something as there when it is not there. There is a less determinate sense of actually or potentially relating to a particular person, constituted by variably localized and sometimes conflicting systems of practical meanings. Such experiences are equivocal, ambiguous, and quite unlike mundane perceptual experiences of entities as present within an already given world. They are therefore difficult to express. These observations also apply to the interpretation of phantom limbs. Although many different types of phantom have been identified and distinguished, the empirical literature remains lacking in one important respect. For the most part, it is stated that a phantom appears as present or as vividly present, but nothing more is said about what this sense of presence actually consists of. It is just taken for granted that we have a sufficient grasp of what it is to experience something as present. However, we have seen that certain experiences, which might be described in terms of felt presence, are quite unlike perceiving a particular entity as here, now. Furthermore, these experiences are diverse, involving varying degrees of localization, specificity, conflict, and ambiguity. So it is not enough to observe that a limb seems to be present; too many questions remain. For example, Simmel states that a person may be “more aware of the phantom

40 The profound effect that interpersonal loss can have on one’s world is consistent with a wider emphasis in the phenomenological tradition on how the world of everyday experience (and – by implication – objective, scientific conceptions of the world that continue to presuppose it) depends for its sense on intersubjectivity or intercorporeality. However, it is important to distinguish ways in which particular individuals can shape world-experience from the roles played by other people in general or by a generic other. For a helpful recent discussion of intercorporeality in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, see Dermot Moran, “Intercorporeality and Intersubjectivity: A Phenomenological Exploration of Embodiment,” in Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World, ed. Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs and Christian Tewes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 25–46.

88  Matthew Ratcliffe extremity – even though painless – than of the contralateral intact limb”.41 But what does being “more aware” of it actually involve? Is one aware of it in the same way but to a heightened degree? Alternatively, does it appear as present in a qualitatively different way to the intact limb? Without more discriminating phenomenological analyses, it is unclear what an experience of presence or heightened presence actually amounts to in any given case. Nevertheless, it does at least seem clear that not all phantoms are principally a matter of retaining a practical field. Some are more image-like, more like encountering an entity perceptually. Or, at least, they include an additional image-like aspect. This, one could add, distinguishes them from experiences of bereavement. But it is again arguable that the same observations apply to bereavement. I have suggested that certain ways of experiencing the surrounding environment might also be conveyed in terms of the “presence of the deceased”. However, other felt presence experiences are different in kind, more like perceiving a person through one or another sensory modality, while others involve a less specific but by no means unfamiliar experience of somehow sensing that someone is present, in this room right now. Sensed presence experiences and so-called “hallucinations” in one or another modality are common among bereaved spouses. Rees interviewed 227 widows and 66 widowers in Wales, almost half of whom reported hallucinations or illusions involving the deceased spouse. These often occurred for many years and were not associated with social isolation or depression. A sense of presence was most common, but 14 per cent also reported visual hallucinations, 13.3 per cent auditory hallucinations, and 2.7 per cent tactual hallucinations. Most of those interviewed found these experiences helpful rather than distressing.42 Subsequent studies report similar findings, although it also seems that the frequency of bereavement hallucinations and sensed-presence experiences is culturally variable.43 Parkes notes that a sense of continuing presence (a phantom) is experienced more often by amputees than bereaved spouses. Even so, he adds, “a sense of the presence of the dead husband near at hand was described in very similar terms by over a third of the widows at the time of the first interview and three quarters (16) of them reported this phenomenon at some time after bereavement”. As with phantom limbs, the experience usually “stopped short of hallucinations” involving specific exteroceptive sensory modalities.44 It should be added that, where experiences of the deceased are described in terms of seeing, hearing, or touching, it may well be that indeterminate experiences are being conveyed in more determinate ways that render them easier to communicate. More generally, “hallucinations” in clinical and other contexts tend not to be modality specific in the manner they are often assumed to be. For instance, when a person refers

41 Simmel, “Conditions of Occurrence,” 492. 42 W. Dewi Rees, “The Hallucinations of Widowhood,” British Medical Journal 4 (1971): 37–41. 43 See, for example, Gillian Bennett and Kate Mary Bennett, “The Presence of the Dead: An Empirical Study,” Mortality 5 (2000): 139–157; Catherine Keen, Craig Murray and Sheila Payne, “Sensing the Presence of the Deceased: A Narrative Review,” Mental Health, Religion & Culture 16 (2013): 384–402; Anna Castelnovo et al., “Post-bereavement Hallucinatory Experiences: A Critical Overview of Population and Clinical Studies,” Journal of Affective Disorders 186 (2015): 266–274. 44 Parkes, “Psycho-Social Transitions,” 206–207.

Grief and phantom limbs  89 to “hearing a voice”, she may also state that the relevant experience involves receiving a communication from elsewhere in a way that is unlike perception via any familiar sensory modality.45 It is therefore unlikely that cursory descriptions of these experiences will serve to distinguish between perception-like experiences of something or someone and the kind of experience described by Merleau-Ponty. And, in some instances, the two might be better regarded as complementary aspects of a singular felt presence experience: the room suddenly takes on the air of significance it used to have when she had just walked in and, with this, one also feels that she is present in a particular location. In fact, I doubt that the phenomenological distinction between image- and schema-based experiences is a clear one, in this context at least. A practical configuration of the environment could be so specific as to imply a person’s location in a particular place, along with certain patterns of activity. Such an experience would have a gestalt structure – her presence is not merely implied by what appears salient and significant; she is also part of the scene, integral to how it is organized. When such configurations arise fleetingly, it may be like briefly seeing a silhouette of the person. Alternatively, such an experience might take the form of presence in absence. The room appears like a picture frame without a picture, a system of expectations in the context of which someone is set to appear in a certain way. Yet he fails to do so. Perhaps even this latter experience is also described, on occasion, in terms of the person’s presence. The environment is configured so as to specify his potential or even actual presence, something that at the same time conflicts with his visible absence.

5.  Bodily experience and intersubjectivity Although experiences of bereavement and losing a limb can be similar in several respects, it might be objected that some of the similarities are superficial. For instance, even if it is admitted that one can have a perception-like experience of the deceased and a perception-like experience of a missing limb, this is not necessarily illuminating. We have all sorts of perceptual and perception-like experiences in all sorts of different situations. Furthermore, the fact that phantom limbs are largely explicable in neurobiological terms, while grief is not, might be taken to indicate that they are importantly different. However, in this concluding section, I will show that the various phenomena addressed here are not only phenomenologically similar; there are physiological similarities as well. Of course, some of the sensorimotor processes involved in the generation of a phantom limb are anatomically distinct from whatever processes are at work during grief. Nevertheless, there are functional similarities between the roles played by other people in shaping our experiences and activities, and the roles played by our own bodies. I have noted that our surroundings appear practically significant in light of our bodily capacities and projects. This point applies equally to our relations with particular persons. Something may matter to me in one or another way because of my concern for you. In addition, what appears achievable reflects not just my own bodily and

45 Matthew Ratcliffe, Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).

90  Matthew Ratcliffe intellectual capacities but also what I can do in cooperation with you, what we can achieve together. So the loss of a particular individual could impact on what appears salient and how it appears significant in ways that are equally or more profound than the loss of a limb. There are also differences, of course. Losing a limb involves losing some very specific abilities, along with equally specific forms of adjustment. Loss of a person is likely to have a less selective, more diffuse impact on one’s world. But even contrasts like this are by no means clear. For someone whose life is focused around a particular type of bodily performance – perhaps a pianist or sportsperson – loss of a limb could amount to a pervasive loss of meaning from the world as a whole. And someone whose life is structured around particular projects involving another person, such as playing in a band or running a business together, may experience the loss of some quite specific abilities following bereavement. One might worry that similar points could be made about losing one’s accountant or bank manager (at least where one has become exceptionally dependent on that person’s services), but without the relevant experience adding up to one of grief. So it should be added that grief additionally reflects certain specific types of interpersonal concern and interdependence; one cares for the other person in ways that one does not ordinarily care for one’s bank manager. These kinds of concern can permeate one’s world, shaping – in often subtle ways – the perceived significance of almost every situation.46 Perhaps the similarities between grief and limb loss even extend to the relevant neurobiology. Hoffman offers an account of auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia, which appeals to the concept of “social deafferentation”. These hallucinations, he suggests, are functionally comparable to phantoms limbs – both are attributable to sensory deprivation. In the case of phantom limbs, an experience of continuing presence arises, in part, because of deafferentation (loss of sensory input). Analogous experiences are associated with sensory deprivation more generally. For instance, if a person is prevented from seeing for a day or two, complex visual phenomena usually start to appear. Hoffman suggests that we are similarly reliant on sensory stimulation from the interpersonal domain and that people with schizophrenia diagnoses are often socially isolated. Hence their hallucinations may arise in the same fashion: “high levels of social withdrawal/isolation in vulnerable individuals prompt social cognition programs to produce spurious social meaning in the form of complex, emotionally compelling hallucinations and delusions representing other persons or agents”. Such experiences thus involve the “repopulating” of a “barren interpersonal world”.47 Although Hoffman is concerned specifically with schizophrenia, his position is equally or more plausibly applied to bereavement hallucinations. Consider the case of a spousal bereavement, where the two partners’ activities have been closely integrated for many years. Here, sensory expectations involving the spouse will be multifarious, habitually entrenched, and cohesive. So bereavement

46 It should be added that, even if we restrict ourselves to grief, how, exactly, the habitual world is affected will depend more specifically on the nature and closeness of the relationship, and the circumstances of bereavement. A more detailed phenomenological analysis would need to address, among other things, the differences between losing a parent, spouse, child, or close friend. It is also important to consider the person’s wider interpersonal and social relations, including how other people respond and whether/how they offer support. 47 Ralph E. Hoffman, “A Social Deafferentation Hypothesis for Induction of Active Schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 33 (2007): 1066–1070, here 1066.

Grief and phantom limbs  91 plausibly involves a kind of sensory deprivation that is more sudden, extreme, specifically focused, and structured than what Hoffman refers to, thus disposing a person towards perceptual or perception-like experiences with more circumscribed contents. If this is right, then image-like experiences that follow bereavement and loss of a limb are partly attributable to a common process. Turning from image-based phantoms to habitual experience of the surrounding world, it is arguable that other people shape our experiences of salience and significance in ways that are not so different from the operations of our own bodies. What appears salient and how it appears significant depend on whether one is with other people and on what they are doing. For example, Bayliss et al. found that others’ reactions to the shared environment shape one’s own appraisals of it.48 Objects looked at with a happy expression by someone else are subsequently liked more than those looked at with disgust. A range of other empirical findings point to the conclusion that the value properties of perceived entities are shaped by interpersonal experience and interaction: Converging evidence from behavioural neuroscience and developmental psychology strongly suggest that objects falling under the gaze of others acquire properties that they would not display if not looked at. Specifically, observing another person gazing at an object enriches that object of motor, affective and status properties that go beyond its chemical or physical structure.49 It is not merely that perceived entities are appraised in a particular way when another person is present. The relevant properties can endure even after the person has left; they are experienced as inherent in objects. Similarly, the kinds of practical possibilities that things offer us depend not just on what our bodies are able to do but also on what can be achieved with others.50 There is even evidence suggesting that anticipating others’ actions can shape perceptual experience in a similar way to initiating an action oneself. For instance, when one presses a button to generate a tone, it is perceived as less intense than when the tone is produced at random. The same attenuation effect occurs when another person is observed pressing the button.51 To speculate further, the presence and intensity of such effects surely depend more specifically on the kind of social situation one is in and who one is with. The appraisals of a spouse in the context of sustained interaction are more likely to shape perception of one’s surroundings than a brief glance at the expression of a stranger. And repeated exposure to consistent appraisals is more likely to forge enduring evaluations. Unlike watching a stranger press a button, interacting with a spouse involves elaborate and

48 Andrew P. Bayliss et al., “Affective Evaluations of Objects Are Influenced by Observed Gaze Direction and Emotional Expression,” Cognition 104 (2007): 644–653, here 644. 49 Cristina Becchio, Cesare Bertone, and Umberto Castiello, “How the Gaze of Others influences Object Processing,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12 (2008): 254–258, here 254. 50 See, for example, Natalie Sebanz, Harold Bekkering, and Günther Knoblich, “Joint Action: Bodies and Minds Moving Together,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (2006): 70–76; Elisabeth Pacherie, “How Does it Feel to Act Together?” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (2014): 25–46. 51 Natalie Sebanz and Günther Knoblich, “Prediction in Joint Action: What, When, and Where,” Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009): 353–367.

92  Matthew Ratcliffe structured systems of expectation that continue to influence evaluative experiences and practical dispositions even outside of one’s interactions with her. To add to this, one’s sense of what is salient and how it is significant depends largely on projects, commitments, and concerns that are shared, many of which only make sense given the relationship. In many cases, projects are ours and, even when a project does not take this form, experience and activity continue to be shaped by concern for one’s spouse – things matter in the light of their potential implications for her. Furthermore, one’s sense of what is achievable integrates the anticipated presence and abilities of the spouse in a stable, habitual way. It is important to distinguish these points from the observation that a close personal relationship can involve “we-intentionality”, where things are experienced as “for us” rather than just “for me”, and where one has the sense that “we are doing this” or “we seek to achieve this”. It is debatable what an experience with the form “we experience/ act” amounts to and how it relates to “I experience/act”.52 However, while I accept that a close relationship will involve we-intentionality and that the relevant experience requires further clarification, the point I am making here is broader in scope. Even when a situation appears as significant in a certain way “for me”, and even when something appears achievable “for me”, the partner may still be implicated. Something appears significant for me in the light of projects and wider concerns that are ours; something matters to me given my concern for you; and something appears achievable for me in light of what I habitually anticipate from you. Hence, even what one experiences as one’s own perspective (in contrast to our perspective) is shaped by one’s relationship with the other person. This is consistent with research on interpersonal co-regulation and the kinds of dysregulation that often accompany bereavement. Hofer compares bereavement to the effects of infant separation. Other people, he proposes, play a range of important regulatory roles, even in adulthood. Interactions with a particular individual can come to regulate sensorimotor activities in ways that are functionally comparable to intrabodily regulatory processes. Certain effects of bereavement and infant separation are therefore to be understood in terms of “withdrawal of specific sensorimotor regulators hidden within the many complex interactions of the relationship that has ended”.53 Sbarra and Hazan likewise maintain that “multiple biological and psychological systems are regulated in the context of adult attachment relationships, dysregulated by separation and loss experiences, and, potentially, re-regulated through individual recovery efforts”.54 So, in the human case, not all homeostatic processes are wholly internal to the individual; some are interpersonally distributed.

52 For some recent discussions of this issue, see Joel Krueger, “Merleau-Ponty on Shared Emotions and the Joint Ownership Thesis,” Continental Philosophy Review 46 (2013): 509– 553; Hans-Bernhard Schmid, “Plural Self-Awareness,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (2014): 7–24; and Pacherie, “How Does It Feel to Act Together?” 53 Myron A. Hofer, “Relationships as Regulators: A Psychobiologic Perspective on Bereavement,” Psychosomatic Medicine 46 (1984): 183–197, here 188. 54 David A. Sbarra and Cindy Hazan, “Coregulation, Dysregulation, Self-Regulation: An Integrative Analysis and Empirical Agenda for Understanding Adult Attachment, Separation, Loss, and Recovery,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 12 (2008): 141–167, here 141.

Grief and phantom limbs  93 Pursuing the comparison still further, both grief and phantom limbs follow a number of different trajectories over time. As the “continuing bonds” literature plausibly emphasizes, grief is not a finite process that ends with “letting go”. And adjusting to a world without the deceased need not involve ultimately losing all those habitual ways of perceiving, thinking, and acting that involved her. The deceased can continue to be experienced as present in various ways, and the relationship is reconfigured rather than altogether abandoned.55 As Kathleen Higgins writes, “one’s realistic expectations regarding interaction with another person are irreparably altered by that person’s death; but one’s sense of identity continues to be constructed in part on the basis of one’s relationship to that person”.56 Perhaps phantoms can be thought of in a similar manner. Rather than retaining the experience of an arm, one might modify one’s relationship to it, in ways that are volitional to varying degrees. Taken together, all of this points to the conclusion that another person can come to play a similar role to one’s own bodily capacities in configuring the habitual world. Furthermore, the boundary between the experience-shaping contribution of bodily capacities and the contribution made by potential, anticipated, and actual relations with another person is blurred. What I take to be my own perspective on the surrounding environment does not incorporate a clear distinction between how the world appears to me and how it appears to us; the line between intra- and interpersonal is unclear. Given this, it is tempting to take utterances such as “it is like losing a part of myself” and “it feels like part of me has died” literally. What has been lost cannot be identified specifically, as when pointing to the loss of a limb. Even so, the loss is similar in kind. Something that was previously integral to one’s ability to experience and engage with the world, to perceive things in structured ways that reflect a coherent system of projects, cares, concerns, and abilities, is now absent. Valentine thus remarks on how narratives of grief point to the conclusion that “self-identity, personhood and agency” are “relational and intersubjective”, in ways that conflict with predominant emphases in certain cultures on “separateness, independence and control”.57

55 See Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman, eds., Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (London: Routledge, 1996); see also Valentine, Bereavement Narratives. 56 “Love and Death,” in On Emotions: Philosophical Essays, ed. John Deigh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 159–178, here 173. Higgins adds that there are also ethical aspects to continuing bonds. Severing the connection altogether involves a failure to respect the person and one’s relationship with her. She further suggests that the construction of narratives has a pivotal role to play in maintaining and shaping one’s relationship with the deceased. While it is less clear that retaining a relationship with a lost limb involves moral commitments, it is possible that narrative-construction has some role to play in shaping how phantom limb experiences develop. Furthermore, both kinds of experience are embedded in and shaped by wider interpersonal, social, and cultural contexts. 57 Valentine, Bereavement Narratives, 126. Thomas Attig makes some complementary claims concerning the extent to which we are permeable to each other. For example, “If our selves were self-contained social atoms, isolated in their development, impermeable and invulnerable, and truly independent, as so many commonly think, we would not be shattered by the loss of someone we care about or love. His or her death would simply be a matter of the disappearance of another nearby self-contained being. We would remain entirely intact. But

94  Matthew Ratcliffe We can also appeal to “mutual incorporation” here, as conceived of by Thomas Fuchs and Hanne De Jaegher.58 The idea is that, just as one can integrate various props into bodily activities, perceiving and acting on the world through them as though they were parts of one’s own body, interactions with another agent can involve a blurring of phenomenological boundaries between the two parties. In sustained, structured interactions, there is a “reciprocal interaction of two agents in which each lived body reaches out to embody the other”.59 Fuchs and De Jaegher place the emphasis on losses of interpersonal differentiation that arise during tightly coupled face-to-face interactions, where the two parties remain in close proximity to each other. But the point applies equally to habitual forms of incorporation, of the kind that might develop in the context of close, long-term relationships. Here, incorporation does not depend on ongoing interaction. Even when a partner is not physically present, one’s relationship with her continues to shape practically engaged perceptual experience. Indeed, the influence of “incorporation” in such a case will be much more profound, pervasive, and enduring than the kinds of incorporation that characterize one-off interpersonal interactions and episodic or habitual couplings with items of equipment. So it is important to distinguish the kind of incorporation involved in feeling connected to someone at a given time from the interpersonal permeability that I have sought to make explicit. Suppose Person A interacts with Person B and feels connected to B, somehow in unison with B. Even in a case of mutual incorporation, A continues to distinguish, to some extent, the perspective through which she experiences B from B as an object of her experience. In other words, she experiences herself as relating to B. However, at the same time, A’s perspective may be structured by her longer-term relationship with B, such that the boundaries between her own subjectivity and B’s are blurred from the outset. Two ways of experiencing B thus occur simultaneously: a sense of relating to B and a more subtle way in which A’s own attitude towards and experience of B is already permeated by her relationship with B. The latter continues to shape experience and activity even when B is absent, and can also feed into A’s interactions with other people. I concede that there remain important phenomenological and neurobiological differences between grief and losing a limb. In addition, both experiences are diverse and develop in various ways. Most importantly, love for another person is something that the comparison fails to fully capture. So my claim is that some central aspects of grief can be structurally similar to some central aspects of adjusting to the loss of a limb, not that the experiences can be mapped onto each other in their entirety. As Parkes writes: “You can’t get an artificial Dad”, said one amputee who had lost a father, and it was the irrevocable nature of the loss which was emphasized by another amputee, a woman whose husband had died six years previously, “If you lose a leg you can tell yourself you’re going to cope – but you never get a husband back”.60

the truth of the matter is that loss shakes our personal integrity and identity. Bereavement penetrates to the core of our being” (How We Grieve, xlvi). 58 “Enactive Intersubjectivity: Participatory Sense-Making and Mutual Incorporation,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (2009): 465–486. 59 Ibid., 474. 60 Parkes, “Psycho-Social Transitions,” 206. On the other hand, Dan Moller argues for the view that a spouse can, at some level of description, be functionally replaced and that

Grief and phantom limbs  95 It can be added that the enduring presence of the deceased, in many of its guises, involves continuing to care for that person, and feeling a sense of duty towards him.61 Nevertheless, the similarities suffice to illustrate a point that has much wider applicability: a sense of our own capacities, what matters to us, and what we might achieve can come to depend, in various ways and to differing degrees, on our relations with others. Comparisons between bereavement and losing part of one’s body are not mere analogies that convey the closeness of a relationship. The two phenomena are structurally isomorphic in a number of important respects. These serve to illustrate how the habitually taken for granted world is shaped by one’s bodily capacities, one’s projects, and one’s relations with other people in a unified way.62

References Attig, T. How We Grieve: Relearning the World, rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Bayliss, A. P., Frischen, A., Fenske, M. J. and Tipper, S. P. Affective Evaluations of Objects Are Influenced by Observed Gaze Direction and Emotional Expression. Cognition 104 (2007): 644–653. Becchio, C., Bertone, C. and Castiello, U. How the Gaze of Others influences Object Processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12 (2008): 254–258. Bennett, G. and Bennett, K. M. The Presence of the Dead: An Empirical Study. Mortality 5 (2000): 139–157. Carse, J. P. Grief as a Cosmic Crisis. In Acute Grief: Counseling the Bereaved, ed. O. S. Margolis, H. C. Raether, A. H. Kutscher, J. B. Powers, I. B. Seeland, R. DeBillis and D. J. Cherico. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 3–8. Castelnovo, A., Cavalloti, S., Gambini, O. and D’Agostino, A. Post-bereavement Hallucinatory Experiences: A Critical Overview of Population and Clinical Studies. Journal of Affective Disorders 186 (2015): 266–274. Crawford, C. C. Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology. New York: New York University Press, 2014. De Beauvoir, S. A Very Easy Death, trans. P. O’Brien. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965. Flor, H. Phantom-Limb Pain: Characteristics, Causes, and Treatment. Lancet Neurology 1 (2002): 182–189. Fraser, C. M., Halligan, P. W., Robertson, I. H. and Kirker, S. G. B. Characterising Phantom Limb Phenomena in Upper Limb Amputees. Prosthetics and Orthotics International 25 (2001): 235–242. Fuchs, T. and De Jaegher, H. Enactive Intersubjectivity: Participatory Sense-Making and Mutual Incorporation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (2009): 465–486. Gallagher, S. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Goldie, P. The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Higgins, K. Love and Death. In On Emotions Philosophical Essays, ed. J. Deigh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 159–178.

resilience in the face of loss is sometimes to be understood in this way. See his “Love and Death,” Journal of Philosophy 104 (2007): 301–316. 61 Higgins, “Love and Death.” 62 Thanks to Jonathan Cole, Kathleen Higgins, Line Ryberg Ingerslev, an audience at the conference “Affectivity and Embodiment” (Helsinki, February 2017), my research group at the University of Vienna, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.

96  Matthew Ratcliffe Hofer, M. A. Relationships as Regulators: A Psychobiologic Perspective on Bereavement. Psychosomatic Medicine 46 (1984): 183–197. Hoffman, R. E. A Social Deafferentation Hypothesis for Induction of Active Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin 33 (2007): 1066–1070. Keen, C., Murray, C. and Payne, S. Sensing the Presence of the Deceased: a Narrative Review. Mental Health, Religion & Culture 16 (2013): 384–402. Klass, D., Silverman, P. R. and Nickman, S. L., eds. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. London: Routledge, 1996. Krueger, J. Merleau-Ponty on Shared Emotions and the Joint Ownership Thesis. Continental Philosophy Review 46 (2013): 509–531. Lewis, C. S. A Grief Observed. London: Faber & Faber, 1966. Macdonald, H. H is for Hawk. London: Vintage Books, 2014. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. Landes. London: Routledge, 1945/2012. Moller, D. Love and Death. Journal of Philosophy 104 (2007): 301–316. Moran, D. Intercorporeality and Intersubjectivity: A Phenomenological Exploration of Embodiment. In Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World, ed. C. Durt, T. Fuchs and C. Tewes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017, pp. 25–46. Neimeyer, R. A. Complicated Grief and the Reconstruction of Meaning: Conceptual and Empirical Contributions to a Cognitive-Constructivist Model. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 13 (2006): 141–145. Nussbaum, M. C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oates, J. C. A Widow’s Story. London: Fourth Estate, 2011. Pacherie, E. How Does it Feel to Act Together? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (2014): 25–46. Parkes, C. M. Psycho-Social Transitions: Comparison Between Reactions to Loss of a Limb and Loss of a Spouse. British Journal of Psychiatry 127 (1975): 204–210. Ramachandran, V. S. and Hirstein, W. The Perception of Phantom Limbs: The D. O. Hebb Lecture. Brain 121 (1998): 1603–1630. Ramachandran, V. S. and Rogers-Ramachandran, D. Phantom Limbs and Neural Plasticity. Archives of Neurology 57 (2000): 317–320. Ratcliffe, M. Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Rees, W. D. The Hallucinations of Widowhood. British Medical Journal 4 (1971): 37–41. Sacks. O. The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See. In Empire of the Senses: the Sensual Culture Reader, ed. D. Howes. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Sbarra, D. A. and Hazan, C. Coregulation, Dysregulation, Self-Regulation: An Integrative Analysis and Empirical Agenda for Understanding Adult Attachment, Separation, Loss, and Recovery. Personality and Social Psychology Review 12 (2008): 141–167. Schmid, H.-B. Plural Self-awareness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (2014): 7–24. Sebanz, N., Bekkering, H. and Knoblich, G. Joint Action: Bodies and Minds Moving Together. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (2006): 70–76. Sebanz, N. and Knoblich, G. Prediction in Joint Action: What, When, and Where. Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2009): 353–367. Simmel, M. L. The Conditions of Occurrence of Phantom Limbs. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102 (1958): 492–500. Talero, M. Merleau-Ponty and the Bodily Subject of Learning. International Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2006): 191–203. Valentine, C. Bereavement Narratives: Continuing Bonds in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge, 2008. Van der Heijden, A. Tonio: A Requiem Memoir. London: Scribe, 2015.

7 Back to space Lilian Alweiss

Abstract: There is a general consensus in the literature that Husserl’s phenomenology prioritise place over space. While the tradition of modern philosophy and science holds that place merely ‘takes up space’ insofar as any representation of spatial relations or positions can only be determined within one absolute and infinite space, the claim is that phenomenology reveals the opposite: by taking our lived body (namely the place where we always find ourselves) as our starting point phenomenology, shows that our understanding of space is posterior to, if not even derived from our understanding of place. Against this reading this paper shows (1) that an appeal to embodiment does not question the priority of space and (2) that Husserl’s aim is not to question our scientific conception of space but to show that there is a conceptual continuity between intuitive and geometrical conceptions of space that has been severed by the modern outlook. Keywords: Husserl, Kant, Casey, phenomenology, space, place, incongruent counterparts, geometry, lifeworld, embodiment

Introduction There is a general trend in phenomenology to reduce our understanding of space to place. While the tradition of modern philosophy and science holds that place merely ‘takes up space’ insofar as any representation of spatial relations or positions can only be determined within one absolute and infinite space, the claim now is that phenomenology reveals the opposite: space is not an infinite given magnitude in which bodies can be located and through which bodies can move but space is a system of relations holding between things. Places taken together make up space. If there are no bodies occupying certain places, there is no space. It is not, as Newton or Kant hold, that we cannot think of bodies without space, but that we cannot think of space without bodies.1

1 Casey, for example, cites the pre-Socratic philosopher Archytas who maintained (as reported by Simplicius): that place ‘is the first of all things, since all existing things are either in place or not without place’ (Casey 1996, 47 n2). Casey maintains: ‘The power of the Archytian Axiom cannot be underestimated, to begin with in the ancient Greek world. Plato is cryptically quoting it in Timaeus when he writes that ‘anything that is must be in some place and occupy some room, and . . . what is not somewhere in earth or heaven is nothing’ (Timaeus 52B in Cornford 1995). Similarly Aristotle inscribes the axiom at the opening of his treatment

98  Lilian Alweiss In many ways Edward Casey’s work: Getting Back into Place represents such a trend. He believes that ‘in the past three centuries in the West – the period of “modernity” – place has come to be not only neglected but actively suppressed. Owing to the triumph of the natural and social sciences in this same period, any serious talk of place has been regarded as regressive or trivial’.2 Drawing on Edmund Husserl, Casey calls this our ‘natural attitude’: ‘One belief endemic to the natural attitude’, he says, concerns how places relate to what is commonly called ‘space’. Once it is assumed (after Newton and Kant) that space is absolute and infinite as well as empty and a priori in status, places become the mere apportionings of space, its compartmentalisations. Indeed, that places are the determinations of an already existing monolith of Space has become an article of scientific faith. (Casey 1996, 14) Casey attempts to reverse this trend by showing how our sense of place plays a central role in our lives and should not be understood as mere apportionings of space. For the purpose of this paper I am less concerned with Casey’s achievements and more with the manner in which he attempts to retrieve a sense of place. For Casey operates with the assumption that as soon as we emphasise the significance of our sense of place and, indeed, places, the scientific conception of space is questioned or undermined. Namely, we can no longer view space as a kind of empty container in which bodies are located and move, but rather à la Leibniz we should argue that ‘space is that which results from places taken together’ (Leibniz 1969: Leibniz’s Fifth Letter §47). Against this view I wish to show that the emphasis on place should in no way lead us to conclude that space is made out of places or that it is relative. I shall do this by focussing on the writings of Kant and Husserl. While both writers give credence to the notion of place and, indeed, show that we begin with a sense of place, neither of them will argue that our understanding of space is a posteriori or derived from our sense of place. This is diametrically opposed to Casey’s reading. Casey believes that both Kant and Husserl provide an ‘argument against authority’ (Casey 1996, 16) insofar as they argue against the modern scientific conception of space by showing à la Leibniz ‘that the very idea of space is posterior to place, perhaps even derived from it’ (Casey 1996, 16). Casey sees this reflected in Kant’s early writings of 1768 – which he believes Kant sadly later dismissed – and in Husserl’s writings on embodiment.

of place in his Physics, Book IV when, referring to Hesiod, he says that ‘he thinks as most people do that everything is somewhere and in place’ (Physics, 208b 32–33). 2 Casey (1993), xiv. Husserl already observed in Logical Investigations that in order to perceive an object from a particular angle we need to recognise that it is one of many possible angles of one and the same unitary object. I can only refer to a particular shade of red if, at the same time, I am aware that it is a particular instantiation of the idea of red, in the same way as I can only recognise the spine of a book if I see it as a perspective of a unitary object (the book as such). The unitary object is transcendent to all my acts. It is constituted as soon as I recognise my point of view as a point of view, namely, if I recognise that it is one among many, indeed, an infinite number of possible points of view. This is possible only when I detect an identity across various acts. A single act is insufficient. As Husserl puts it, it is only through a ‘synthesis of recollection’, namely, by comparing different perspectives that a unitary object manifests itself (Cf Alweiss 2009).

Back to space  99

1.  Casey’s position According to Casey, we find our way back to “place” by returning to the place where we always already find ourselves, namely, our lived body. Husserl’s account of kinaesthesia and embodiment is thereby central to his point of departure. Husserl argues convincingly that we live with a sense of place. While objects necessarily constitute themselves as standing opposed to me, as “over there”, I can only experience myself as being “here” in a particular place. However much I move around the world, I always experience myself as being “here”. I cannot be anywhere else but “here”. Husserl thereby seems to suggest that we cannot think of existing things without place. Everything that “is” or “can be”, can only be experienced as being opposed to me, i.e., as over “there”. Indeed, Husserl emphasises that objects necessarily have bodily based dimensionality. They present themselves as perspectival, they appear from a particular angle and as oriented around my embodied perspective: As Husserl says: ‘all spatial being necessarily appears in such a way that it appears either nearer or farther, above or below, right or left. . . . The lived body then has . . . the unique distinction of bearing in itself the zero point (Nullpunkt) of all these orientations’ (cf. Hua IV 158/166). The lived body is always “here”, and it is precisely because it is always “here” that spatial objects can constitute themselves as over “there”. Casey is not mistaken in his claim that through Husserl we can regain a profound understanding of place. Husserl is not merely concerned with our empirical sense of place. The point is not only that I am necessarily “somewhere” but that I also experience myself as occupying an absolute sense of place. I always find myself “here” no matter how much I move around. I thus also have an absolute sense of place or “hereness” which allows me to recognise that I can take up or inhabit different places. Knowing that perspectives change requires an awareness of something permanent – or unchanging – I can only experience myself as moving around the world and taking up different places when I am able to contrast the individual positions which I hold at each instance with an absolute one.3 My concrete and particular sense of place or “hereness” is thus relative to an absolute or unitary sense of place. My sense of being here is both particular and universal. It is particular insofar as I am aware that my sense of “hereness” is constantly changing; it is universal as I can never move away from myself. I am always “here” no matter how much I move around. My lived body is always the zero point of orientation. This absolute standpoint (“hereness”) discloses that the world is for me. For Casey such observations corroborate his position: phenomenology provides an argument “against authority”. Our lived sense of place has priority over against the abstract mathematical conception of space as the latter is a posteriori and derived from the former.4

3 To avoid misunderstanding the term “absolute” here means not qualified or in relation to other things. 4 This would pave the way to those who argue that phenomenology is limited in scope because it can only account for our common sense, or pre-scientific understanding of the world, and cannot say anything about such questions as ‘whether some bodies (such as the Earth) are absolutely at rest or in motion, or whether space is absolute, or whether it exists at all’? Roberto Casati puts forward such a view when he claims that ‘Questions about whether some bodies (such as the Earth) are absolutely at rest or in motion, whether space is absolute, or

100  Lilian Alweiss

2.  The fate of place Such a reading is highly misleading: Casey fails to realise that an appeal to embodiment does not question the Newtonian-Kantian assumption that space is ‘absolute and infinite as well as empty and a priori in status’ (Casey 1996, 14). We can glean this insight from Kant’s 1768 paper ‘Concerning the ultimate ground of the differentiation of directions in space’ (Kant 1992a), in which he shows that the (Leibnizian) relational view of space cannot account for the notion of orientation and direction so central to Casey’s account of embodiment. What is striking about Kant’s paper is that it shows (in line with Casey) how embodiment is central for our understanding of space. We are told that spatial relations cannot be understood only in terms of their relative position to each other, but necessarily specify a direction by reference to my body. Take the following passage from Kant’s text as an example: the most precise map of the heavens, if it did not, in addition to specifying the positions of the stars relative to each other, also specify the direction by reference to the position of the chart relative to my hands, would not enable me, no matter how precisely I had it in mind, to infer from a known direction, for example, the north, on which side of the horizon I ought to expect the sun to rise. The same thing holds of geographical and, indeed, our most ordinary knowledge of the position of places. Such knowledge would be of no use to us unless we could also orientate the things thus ordered, along with the entire system of their reciprocal positions, by referring them to the sides of our body. (Kant 1992a, AK II, 379) Like Casey, Kant argues that directions in space such as farness, nearness, right and left can only be understood with respect to my body. We cannot merely treat bodies as extended things located at a given position in space because there is something unique about the living body: it has a sense of place in accordance to which objects constitute themselves. Casey is familiar with this text and believes that in many ways it reflects the “Husserlian” position he is trying to promote. Indeed, he praises Kant for giving significance to the notion of place and showing that ‘the body is essentially and not contingently, involved in matters of emplacement’ (Casey 1996, 11). He believes that while this text affirms precisely his own and Husserl’s position, alas, Kant soon rejected it in favour of his absolutist conception of space. Kant thus quickly forgot what he had discovered ‘and it is what Husserl . . . rediscovered a century and a half later’ (Casey 1996, 22). Here Casey clearly misreads Kant (just as he mis-interprets Husserl, as I shall go on to show). He fails to realise that the above citation shows the exact opposite. According to Kant, it does not prove that place is fundamental but it provides a clear proof that ‘absolute space, independently of the existence of all matter and as itself the ultimate foundation of the possibility of the compound character of matter, has a reality of its own’ (Kant 1992a, AK II, 378). In a word, it is meant to prove that space

whether it exists at all, may be beyond the limits of phenomenology’ (Casati 1999: ‘Formal Structures in the Phenomenology of Motion’ in Naturalising Phenomenology, 372).

Back to space  101 cannot be relative. The reference to maps shows that to account for spatial facts, it is not enough to specify the relative distances between material bodies but, we also need to take into account, their orientation. And, contrary to Leibniz, and thus Casey, Kant believes that the phenomena of direction and orientation cannot be understood relationally. Kant quite explicitly states that direction does not refer: to places in the space – for that would be the same thing as regarding the position of the parts to the thing in question in an external relation – but rather to universal space as a unity. (Kant 1992a, AK II, 378) The ground of the complete determination of a corporeal form does not depend simply on the relation and position of its parts to each other; it also depends on the reference of that physical form to universal absolute space, as it is conceived by geometers. (Kant 1992a, AK II, 381 emphasis added) Casey thereby fails to see Kant’s argument, namely, that the problem of orientation questions a relationist view of space. The relationist view holds that space exists only between objects. If there are no objects there is no space.5 Somebody adhering to a relationist view of space thinks: ‘If two figures drawn on a plane surface are equal and similar, then they will coincide with each other’. For example, these two signs ≤ ≥ are intrinsically alike and are interchangeable. Although they point to different directions one can also make them coincide with each other. They are congruent insofar as they can be superimposed upon one another. However, Kant holds corporeal bodies such as my left and my right hand cannot be understood in terms of congruence. They can be exactly equal and similar, and yet still be so different in themselves that the limits of the one cannot also be the limits of the other. . . . The most common and clearest example is furnished by the limbs of the human body . . . the right hand is similar and equal to the left hand. And if one looked at one of them on its own, examining the proportions and the positions of its parts to each other, and scrutinising the magnitude of the whole, then a complete description of the one must apply in all respects to the other as well. (Kant 1992a, AK II, 381) A left and a right hand are formally identical with respect to their internal relations. They can have the same shape, extension and texture. However, there remains an inner difference [innerer Unterschied] that cannot be measured in terms of relation and positions of their parts to each other.6 Despite their similarity, they cannot be superimposed on one another and made identical to one another (i.e., they are not congruent).

5 Kant has particularly Leibniz’s analysis situs in mind which states that we can analyse spatial equalities in terms of congruence. Leibniz understands this in terms of equality or magnitude and similarity of form (Cf. Leibniz 1969, 251). 6 ‘the surface which encloses the one cannot possibly enclose the other’ (AK II, 382).

102  Lilian Alweiss They would only be congruent if we could turn them inside out like a glove which, at least in three-dimensional space, is not possible.7 As a result, hands constitute a primordial form of spatiality which exceeds a purely relational arrangement. Incongruent counterparts such as a left and a right hand point to facts about directionality and orientation that go beyond facts regarding relative distances. What holds for incongruent counterparts such as a hand, snail or screws equally holds for ‘spherical triangles from two opposite hemispheres’ (AK II, 403). Hence, geometry must employ principles that go beyond a relational conception of space. By appealing to our embodiment, Kant arrives at a conclusion that is diametrically opposed to that of Casey. The lived body does not give significance to our understanding of place, rather it provides a cogent proof that space must be absolute.8 The term “absolute” here only intimates that spatial relations cannot be understood in relational terms alone (i.e., it is far from proving a Newtonian concept of space). At first sight this conclusion may seem a bit fraught. Indeed, Kant appears to defend the opposite view when he says that ‘the ultimate ground, on the basis of which we form our concept of directions in space, derives from the relation of these intersecting planes to our bodies’ (Kant 1992a, AK II, 378/9).9 Yet Kant goes on to say that while “phenomenologically” we do make sense of directionality and orientation with respect to our lived body, we can nonetheless find real differences in the constitution of our bodies ‘which are grounded solely in relation to absolute and original space’ (Kant 1992a, AK II, 283).10 That is, a left hand is not only left because it is on the left side of my body (in the same way as my heart is on the left side), rather there is something about the left hand that makes it intrinsically left in orientation independently of relations to other bodies. To prove his point he proposes a thought experiment: imagine a solitary hand in the universe. A solitary hand, so Kant claims, is not ‘completely indeterminate’ (cf. Kant 1992a, AK II, 383) [gänzlich unbestimmt]; that is, it would not fit either side of the human body but it would still remain either a right or a left hand. It is precisely this thought experiment that leads Kant to conclude that the essential property of leftness or rightness that pertains to a hand is not due to, or relative to, my bodily standpoint. That a hand is left does not depend on how it is related to other material

  7 On the nature of incongruent counterparts in four dimensional space see van Cleve and Frederick (1991), 203–234.   8 Kant would clearly question James Dodd’s view that: ‘objective space the coordinate system of geometry, should not be confused with perspective. . . . Geometry, when it rids space of the sense of the distance between subject and object, also rids space of the sense of this “oriented” character’ (Dodd 1997, 47).   9 Woelert, for example, defends such a (mistaken) view when he argues: ‘Kant claims precisely that the three-dimensions which are essential for the construction of geometrical space alone do not allow us the possibility of distinguishing between regions as such (that is, oriented and directed spaces)’ (Woelert 2007, 143) and ‘the human body as a whole has to be regarded as an entity which does not merge into a homogenous extension of geometrical spaces’ (Woelert 2007, 144). 10 The full quote reads: ‘Our considerations, therefore, make it clear that differences, and true differences at that, can be found in the constitution of bodies; these differences relate exclusively to absolute and original space, for it is in virtue of absolute and original space that the relation of physical things to each other is possible’ (Kant 1992a, AK II, 383).

Back to space  103 objects, notably asymmetrical bodies like our human bodies, but ‘these differences relate exclusively to absolute and original space’ (Kant 1992a, AK II, 283). The point is thus not, as Casey maintains, that the lived body is ‘the pivot around which the three dimensions of spatial extension arrange themselves and from which they ultimately proceed’,11 rather we can only make sense of the phenomenon of orientation and directionality if we assume an absolute, that is, non-relational and original space.12 Kant’s essay points to something important. First, embodiment is central to our conception of space. This is a thesis that Casey would endorse. Second, an appeal to embodiment does not question the priority of space; rather it leads us to realise that space is not relational but original precisely because facts about directionality and orientation go beyond facts about relative distances. This is an insight that either Casey does not see, or chooses to overlook. Casey not only fails to see that the “discovery” of the lived body, or more precisely, of incongruent counterparts, leads Kant to argue that space is not relational but, furthermore, that this discovery is pivotal to his later critical position. He did not “quickly forget” what he discovered, rather the discovery led him to refine his notion of space by arriving at the conclusion that space must be a form of intuition and transcendentally ideal. In his Inaugural Dissertation (1770) he argues that space must be an intuition and not a concept since the phenomenon of incongruent counterparts cannot be explained ‘conceptually’, but can only be “apprehended by a certain pure intuition” (Kant 1992b; AK II, 403). In The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, in turn, he says that the left right distinction provides a good proof for the claim that space is not a property of a thing in itself, but is a subjective form of our sensible intuition of things (cf. Kant 1985, 23; AK IV, 483–484). While space is independent of all objects and relations, it needs to be known a priori if we wish to be able to locate bodies in space as the parts are only possible through the whole. It is the condition of possibility for the experience of objects. To this extent an appeal to our lived body is crucial to Kant’s claim that space is a form of intuition and that it is ideal and does not pertain to an autonomous reality. Casey thus cannot be right when he claims that Kant gave the fatal blow to the fate of place when he called space a ‘pure form of intuition’ (Casey 1999, 437–438).

3.  Back to space Casey draws on Husserl to develop his position which he regards as both pre-modern and post-modern (Casey 1996, 19), yet he fails to see that Husserl is at one with Kant insofar as he does not believe that embodiment in any way questions our scientific conception of space. However Husserl’s concerns are clearly quite different to those of Kant. First, his aim is not to prove that space is a form of intuition or transcendentally ideal. As we know Husserl rejects Kant’s two-world (phenomenon/noumenon) distinction and the view that sensuous material needs to be formed by our intuition. What is

11 Casey (1999), 208. 12 This claim is true even if we allow for the possibility that space may be four dimensional. Cf James Van Cleve and Frederick (1991): ‘Right and Left and the Fourth Dimension’ (203–234) and ‘Introduction to the Arguments of 1770 and 1783’ (15–26).

104  Lilian Alweiss given, according to Husserl, is necessarily already spatial in form and no form needs to be superimposed by us (cf. Hua VII, 358): ‘Space is the necessary form of physical entities [Dinglichkeit] not the form of experience, not even “sensuous” experiences’ (Hua XVI, 42–43). Second, Husserl as a twentieth-century thinker does not seek to validate Newton’s conception of space or Euclidean geometry. To the contrary, he accepts the (contemporary) view that there is no absolute real space13 and seeks to make sense of David Hilbert’s insight as developed in Grundlagen der Geometrie in 1899 that axioms of geometry are not sentences stating fundamental facts about spatial intuition but rather logical forms devoid of intuitive content.14 So the setting is quite a different one to Kant’s, and indeed to the one that Casey addresses. For the issue is clearly no longer what Casey calls ‘an article of faith, namely, that places are the determinations of an already existing monolith of space’. Husserl to this extent is far more “modern” than Casey.15 If the aim of phenomenology, “to return to the things themselves as they show themselves”, viz., to study what is given to consciousness, and thus what is open to intuition, then it seems that Hilbert’s scientific conception of space lies beyond the scope of phenomenology since we can no longer appeal to spatial intuitions to arrive at geometrical propositions. This is why some believe that phenomenology is limited in scope because it can only account for our common sense, or pre-scientific, understanding of the world. Yet it is precisely such a conclusion that Husserl wishes to avoid. Rather than limiting the scope of phenomenology, the aim is to show how phenomenology can make sense of an axiomatic conception of geometry even if it ‘cannot be intuited, but only thought’ (Hua XXI, 271). Indeed, the aim is to explain or better show how it is possible to move from an intuitive, extra-scientific understanding of space which we all – laymen, children and scientists alike – share, to a scientific conception of space that is not open to intuition without however reducing the latter to the former. This is precisely the task he sets himself in the Crisis. The aim is to show how geometry, like all modern science, is grounded in the practical and perceptual processes that take place in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), here understood as the everyday environment (Umwelt). We first begin with an intuitive conception of space which is imprecise (Husserl calls it “morphological”) and relative to our practices. The accuracy of measurement, for example, depends not only on the techniques that are available, but the very practice of measuring is oriented toward practical goals.16 ‘The “exact” [measurement, LA] is determined by the particular end in view, for which there can also be irrelevant differences which do not count’ (Hua VI, 289/311). As long as the measurement meets the demand of a given practical situation it is accepted as sufficiently accurate and satisfactory. The aim is to construct a round table, to provide a link between two

13 Stephen Toulmin has shown well that it is questionable whether Newton himself regarded space as real or it least there is room for a dynamical interpretation which regards space as objective and ideal. Mach’s famous accusation attack of Newton’s ‘conceptual monstrosity of absolute space’ (Mach cited in M. Jammer: Concepts of Space, third edition Dover) may therefore be well misplaced (cf. Toulmin 1959). 14 Jagnow (2006), 67. 15 This is as long as we don’t conflate the term “modern” with “modernity”. 16 ‘Measuring belongs to every culture, varying only according to stages from primitive to higher perfections’ (Hua VI, 384/376).

Back to space  105 points or to make sure that the frame is bigger than the picture to be framed. In these instances, we are not looking for a perfect circle, line or square; rather, we are thinking of the best way to construct a round table, to draw a line or to build a frame. Our concern is guided by practical interests. The table is meant to fit into the dining room, it is meant to look nice and it is meant to seat eight people; we build it since we need to sit somewhere to eat. Likewise, I need the frame so that I can hang up a picture. According to Husserl, it is only when we are no longer guided by such practical interests but wish to perfect our skills – for example, the ‘capacity to make the straight straighter and the flat flatter’ – that we come to aim at ideal limits (Hua VI, 22/25).17 What is of interest then is no longer the particular line or shape of a particular object but our attention focuses on the ideal of a perfect circle or a perfect line which can never be realised or constructed however much we succeed in perfecting our skills. The perfect line or circle is an ideal objective or standard toward which we strive but can never attain. Husserl thereby shows that is it is through an ‘infinitely perfectible’ measuring process, that we generate an ideal limit, or a limes toward which we move, which itself however can never be made present.18 In this way, [i]nfinity is discovered, first in the form of idealization of magnitudes, of measures, of numbers, figures, straight lines, poles, surfaces, etc. Nature, space, time become extendable idealiter to infinity and divisible idealiter to infinity. From the art of surveying comes geometry, from the art of numbers arithmetic, from everyday mechanics mathematical mechanics, etc. Now, without its being advanced explicitly as a hypothesis, intuitively given nature and world are transformed into a mathematical world, the world of the mathematical natural sciences. (Hua IV, 340/293) Casey is thereby not mistaken: we begin with our sense of place or at least with an intuitive conception of space which is grounded in our practices. Yet he draws the wrong inference: we should not infer from the fact that we begin with our lived sense of space and place that our geometrical knowledge is necessarily a posteriori or derived from intuitive space. Husserl quite explicitly states the opposite. Even though we begin with our lived understanding of space, geometrical space is a logical construct not derived from experience. Take the following passage from his early notes on space (Hua XXI) as an example: Intuition and the empirical conception of space contain points of departure and leading motives for the geometric formation of concepts. Yet, the abstract objects belonging to the concepts and the attributes of these concepts are not to be obtained simply through ‘abstraction’ (in the present common sense of attentively emphasizing singular features) from intuitions. The concepts are not embedded in intuition like the seen shape in the seen ‘plane’. The triangle as an intuited abstract concept is not a geometrical figure. The triangle serves the geometer as

17 ‘Out of the praxis of perfecting, or freely pressing toward the horizon of conceivable perfecting “again and again”, limit shapes emerge toward which the particular series of perfectings tend, as toward invariant and never attainable poles’ (Hua VI, 23/26). 18 On the process of idealisation see Jagnow (2006) and Held (2003).

106  Lilian Alweiss pure symbol whose characteristic type possesses dispositional connection in the geometer’s mind with the correlating pure concept and its ideal, merely ‘thought’, object.19 Here Husserl clearly argues that geometrical objects ‘are not embedded in intuition’, rather they refer to logical forms that can only be thought. Take the construction of a line as an example: However small the distance between two points, a distance remains which can be filled by another point and so ad infinitum (cf. Hua XXII, 287–289). The actual process can never be completed: we can always add further points. Although the process is infinite, one can nonetheless stipulate an ideal limit as the product of such infinite division and add them to a line. This then allows us to hold fast to the idea that points have no extension and that a line is continuous. However, to do so we need to depart from the actual (factual) object that can be perceived since the focus is on an entirely new object, one that can only be thought but never perceived. Idealised quantities, masses, numbers, figures, straight lines, poles, surfaces, space and time are not the most perfect measures one could conceive, but the theoretical ideals to which all relative measurements are more or less good approximations. Husserl thus explains the move from an extra-scientific to a scientific conception of space by means of a process of idealisation. This should not be read as an argument against authority. Nowhere does he claim that space is posterior to, or derived from place (Casey 1996, 16). Casey believes that because Husserl shows how knowledge arises out of experience, that phenomenology necessarily reverses the order and shows that knowledge is derived from experience (Casey 1996, 16). However Casey fails to see that Husserl in many ways follows Kant’s dictum that: ‘though all our knowledge begins with experience it does not follow that it all arises out of experience’ (CPR B 1). Even though all knowledge begins with experience, we can divorce ourselves from experience and conduct an a priori and transcendental inquiry.20 There are indeed passages where Kant, like Husserl, suggests in passing that mathematical concepts have meaning only if they are first constructed in concreto. To arrive at mathematical propositions such as 7 + 5 = 12, for example, he observes that ‘we have to go outside these concepts, and call in the aid of intuition which corresponds to one of them, our five fingers for instance’ (CPR B, 15).21 Elsewhere Kant says: ‘The concept of

19 Die Anschauung und die empirisch-räumliche Auffassung enthält die Ausgangspunke und leitende Motive für die geometrische Begriffsbildung, aber die den Begriffen zugehörigen abstrakten Gegenstände und deren Attribute sind nicht einfach durch ‘Abstraktion’ (in dem üblichen Sinn aufmerksamer Pointierung von Einzelzügen) aus den Anschauungen zu gewinnen, sie liegen in diesen nicht eingebettet wie die gesehene Gestalt der gesehenen ‘Fläche’. Das Dreieck der angeschauten Abstraktion ist keine geometrische Figur, es dient dem Geometer als blosses Symbol, dessen characteristischer Typus in seinem Geist dispositionelle Verknüpfung besitzt mit dem zugehörigen reinen Begriff und seinem idealen bloss ‘gedachten’ Gegenstand’ (Hua XXI, 237). Translation taken from Jagnow (2006), 81 n.19. 20 As Husserl says in EU: ‘Von jeder konkreten Wirklichkeit und jedem an ihr wirklich erfahrenen und erfahrbaren Einzelzuge steht der Weg in das Reich idealer oder reiner Möglichkeit und damit in das Reich des apriorischen Denkens offen’ (Husserl 1985, Sec 90, 428). Cf. Bernet (2003). 21 Man muss ueber diese Begriffe hinausgehen, indem man die Anschauung zu Hulfe nimmt, die einem von beiden korrespondiert, etwa seine fuenf Finger oder (wie Segner in seiner

Back to space  107 magnitude seeks its support and sensible meaning in number, and this in turn in the fingers, in the beads of the abacus, or in strokes and points which can be placed before the eyes’ (CPR B, 299).22 Yet this in no way questions the status of geometry or mathematics. Kant insists the ‘concept itself is always a priori in origin, and so likewise are the synthetic principles or formulas derived from such concepts’ (ibid). In a word, the a priori is not reducible to our practices; rather, it constitutes itself in and through our practices. So clearly Casey draws the wrong inference. That we begin with an intuitive understanding of place should not lead us to conclude that our scientific understanding of space is necessarily derived from place. Husserl, just like Kant before him, shows that even though we begin with experience it is possible to arrive at geometrical truths that cannot be demonstrated by actual measurements and are not relative to our subjective point of view.23 In this way phenomenology can account for the axioms of geometry that cannot be intuited but only thought. Although Casey draws the wrong conclusions, he is however right in observing that Husserl argues that insufficient attention has been given to our pre-scientific understanding of space. The reason why we need to study our pre-scientific understanding of space is, however, not in order to question the status of science as such, but in order to determine the precise sense and scope of scientific idealisations. For any idealisation is only justified or, better, meaningful insofar as it is the result of concrete experience.

4.  Making space for place The originality, and maybe therefore the difficulty, in Husserl’s position is that he is not a reductionist. He does not wish to argue that everything is derived from the lifeworld, nor does he wish to side with the modern scientific naturalistic outlook which seeks to show that mathematical science represents or mirrors the lifeworld. We go wrong when we argue that the natural sciences capture the true nature of things, yet equally do we go wrong if we do not study the original intentions (that lie in the lifeworld) that have led to the formation of various mathematical sciences and thereby study the lifeworld as if it were divorced from modern science. The task is to establish continuity between both outlooks and show how they have been both informed by one and the same telos, namely to arrive at knowledge claims. This leads Husserl to reject both the anti-modernist outlook as fostered by thinkers such as Casey and the naturalistic scientific outlook that has come to dominate our age. He argues that either position is untenable and dangerous.24

Arithmetik) fuenf Punkte, und so nach und nach die Einheiten der in der Anschauung gegebenen Fuenf zu dem Bergiffe der Sieben hinzutut. 22 Der Begriff der Groesse sucht in eben der Wissenschaft seine Haltung und Sinn in der Zahl, diese aber an den Fingern, den Korallen des Rechenbretts, oder den Strichen und Punkten, die vor Augen gestellt werden. 23 ‘Geometry does not exist as something personal within the personal sphere of consciousness; it is the existence of what is objectively there for “everyone” (for actual and possible geometers, or those who understand geometry). Indeed, it has, from its primal establishment, an existence which is peculiarly supertemporal and which – of this we are certain – is accessible to all men, first of all to the actual and possible mathematicians of all peoples, all ages; and this is true of all its particular forms’ (Hua VI, 376–378/356). 24 Cf. Alweiss (2007).

108  Lilian Alweiss Modern science goes wrong if it believes that it alone represents the true nature of reality. It thereby confuses methodological with ontological claims. As Husserl puts it: [it] dresses it up as ‘objectively actual and true’ nature. It is through the garb of ideas that we take for true being what is actually method which is designed for the purpose of progressively improving, in infinitum, through ‘scientific’ predictions, those rough predictions which are the only ones originally possible within the sphere of what is actually experienced and experienceable in the life-world. (Hua VI, 52/51–52) As I showed above, scientific idealisations are employed in order to improve our ability to predict and explain reality. Scientific constructs only make sense as idealised approximations to empirical phenomena. We go wrong when we try to “technize” them and construe them independently of their references to the lifeworld. It is then that mathematical sciences turn into purely formal inquiries that have no relevance beyond the pure theory of deductive science.25 This is why Husserl believes that we need to do ‘justice to the very subjectivity which accomplishes science’ (Hua VI, 342/295). As long as we ignore original intentions that have led to the formation of the various mathematical sciences, we regard scientific research as an autonomous and infinite activity for which we take no responsibility. We passively allow the natural sciences to control and shape our lifeworld. In Husserl’s light, the mathematisation of nature has therefore alienated us human beings. We see ourselves merely as one fact among many in the world. Our existence is of concern only as long as it is measurable. Yet if it is true that “to be means to be measurable”, then all the factors that inform human life, such as norms and ideas, become unintelligible. They are subjective or illogical.26 It is precisely for this reason that there has been a growing hostility against science which goes hand in hand with a hostility against reason. Yet, Husserl believes that this is not how we can escape the reification of man. The contempt to science and reason confirms the scientific worldview rather than undermining it. It accepts that what is true is what is measurable. All the irrationalistic and anti-intellectualistic tendencies – which Casey in many ways exemplifies – are merely a symptom of the malaise that has befallen European man and have to be seen as a direct response to our scientific worldview. Yet, according to Husserl, those who turn against science and reason fail to realise is that loss of faith in reason and science goes hand in hand with a loss of faith in what makes us human, namely the capacity to think and our desire for the pursuit of truth. The most urgent task is thus for us humans to find ourselves again. Yet this means to value precisely what Casey seems to try to escape: our capacity to reason. The critique of modern science should thus lead us to return to that which makes us truly human.

25 The question how we are meant to understand the continuity between both is beyond the scope of this paper. However, Rene Jagnow provides an excellent discussion of this in Jagnow (2006). Indeed, it is his article that has drawn my attention to Husserl’s 1890 notes on space in Hua XXI. 26 We only need to remind us of the logical positivists.

Back to space  109 Husserl’s reflection is thus both top down and bottom up. It is top down insofar as we need to reflect back onto our situatedness. What has been forgotten (or what has been sedimented) is the very process of idealisation that is made possible by the lifeworld and the evidence that is found in common experience. We should remember that every proposition, no matter how universal it is, has an implicit relation to a set of propositions that makes judgments about individual concrete objects.27 It is bottom up insofar as we need to turn the lifeworld itself into a science (i.e., a rigorous phenomenological study). The lifeworld initially appears to us as amorphous. Our practices are rooted in socio-historical conventions and seem culturally relative. Yet our lifeworld is much more than our surrounding world (Umwelt). We only come to realise this if we turn the lifeworld itself into a theme. Casey’s work has contributed much in uncovering the richness of our understanding of place-world, yet it has led him to ignore a question so crucial to Husserl: namely, how are we to understand the relation of our lived understanding of place to the scientific conception of space? It is precisely this question which leads Husserl to argue that we need to conduct a true “science of the life-world”. If we truly wish to overcome the mathematisation of the word, we need to study what life interests have led us to adopt the theoretical attitude in the first place and why we have turned our attention to certain tasks and not to others. In the same way as we are able to arrive at scientific truths through the process of idealisation, we need to overcome the pluralistic and relativist outlook which defines our modern age by finding out the telos that defines and unites European man (cf. Hua VI, 14–17/16–18), a telos which he believes was initiated with the ancient Greek conception of bewonderment, which allowed us to divorce ourselves from our practices and ask how they have been constituted. Husserl believes the telos which unites humanity is nothing other than the very idea of philosophy: namely the idea of achieving rational, theoretical knowledge of the totality of things (cf. Hua VI, 329/283). This ideal of theoretical knowledge is grounded in the resolve not just to accept what has been handed down but to inquire about what is true in itself. We should thus not see ourselves as simply delivered over to our time. Rather than being despondent, we should take responsibility for our situatedness by asking back into the origins of scientific endeavour which allows us to rekindle the norms that have informed our intentional life which have led us to pursue truth in the first place – for Husserl this means nothing other than rekindling the very idea of philosophy. To conclude, there are two ways to respond to the modern crisis. The first is by turning against reason and the rationalist spirit that has given rise to the natural sciences (a view that Casey develops). This, Husserl believes, leads to barbarism. The second is by rekindling the spirit and infinite goals of reason that have given rise to our theoretical attitude. This would allow for a new humanism because we would be fostering the practical ideals that originally guided mankind in the lifeworld.28 By gaining an understanding of how to arrive at a geometrical conception of space from our first-person point of view, we can establish the extent to which modern science has lived up to its primordial intentions that have given rise to the scientific attitude in the first place. By formulating a science of the lifeworld, we in turn can show how scientific endeavour itself is grounded in a lifeworld that is open to rational investigation.

27 Cf. Lohmar (2002), 244. 28 ‘Vienna Lectures’ in Hua VI, 347/299.

110  Lilian Alweiss Nowhere does Husserl question our capacity to reason, the achievements of modern science or the process of idealisation. What concerns him is what makes humans distinct and Casey ignores precisely what makes us distinct, namely, our capacity to transcend our sense of place, the possibility to see myself and the world around me from a third-person perspective.29 When Casey urges us to return to a sense of place, he only takes one aspect of Husserl’s phenomenology seriously, the fact that we have a sense of place. However, he fails to acknowledge that Husserl is not only worried about natural science ignoring its genesis, but he is equally concerned that we simply regard ourselves as formed and determined by the lifeworld and fail to ask about (Rueckfragen) its origins. In order for a transcendental inquiry to take place, we need to be able to free ourselves from our contingent worldview which has been passed down to us and ask how we ourselves have arrived at the position in which we find ourselves today. Only with a phenomenological “science of a lifeworld” can the modern naturalistic outlook be questioned. Casey, like many contemporary phenomenologists, disregards precisely those aspects which make us truly human. Embodiment, Husserl repeatedly argues, is something we share with other animals: ‘Men and animals are spatially localized; and even what is psychic about them, at least in virtue of its essential foundedness in the Bodily, partakes of the spatial order’ (Hua IV §14, 33/36). A dog experiences the world as orientated around his lived body. A dog has a sense of above, below, inside and outside. However, what he is unable to do, but we can do, is abstract from his situatedness.30 What marks us out as human beings is that meaning is not reducible to the habitus and the institutional practices in which we find ourselves involved. We can regard ourselves as responsible for our activity by seizing upon possibilities which pertain to the lifeworld. Rather than advocating an anti-modern position, Husserl remains Kant’s true heir by emphasising that we are responsible active subjects and not, as Casey would have it, ‘ineluctably place bound’ (Casey 1996, 19).

29 Husserl believes that I only recognise myself as a unitary self (ego pole), if I can present myself in various modes, i.e. as sitting in the room and asking myself what I shall be like in 10 years time, namely when I am both the imagining and the imagined ego. It is then that I experience myself as a self that remains identical across all these acts of imagining and presentification. 30 An animal lacks the possibility of imagination, which allows us humans to transcend the place in which we find ourselves: ‘Man kann hier fragen, haben die Tiere [. . .] anschauliche Phantasievorstellungen im selben Sinne wie wir? (183) ‘Beim Menschen vollzieht sich eben eine ständige Umwandlung der passiven Intentionalität in eine Aktivität aus Vermögen der Wiederholung’ 1933 184) Cited by Marbach (1974), 334.

Back to space  111

Abbreviations Texts by Husserl EU: Husserl (1985) Hua IV. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel. Dordrecth: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy; Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991. Hua VI. Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel, 2nd ed. The Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Hua VII. Erste Philosophie (1923/4). Erste Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. R. Boehm, 1956. Hua XVI. Ding und Raum (Vorlesungen 1907), ed. Ulrich Claesges, Husserliana XVI. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Hua XXI. Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie. Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Zweiter Teil: Philospohischer Versuch über den Raum (1886–1901), ed. I. Strohmeyer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.

Texts by Kant CPR: Kant (1933) AK: Kant (1902–)

References Alweiss, L. “Leaving Metaphysics to Itself.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15, no 3 (2007): 349–365. ——— “Between Internalism and Externalism: Husserl’s Account of Intentionality.” Inquiry 52, no. 1 (2009): 53–78. Bernet, R. “Desiring to Know Through Intuition.” Husserl Studies 19 (2003): 154–166. Casati. “Formal Structures in the Phenomenology of Motion.” In Naturalising Phenomenology, ed. Jean Petitot, Francisco Varela, Bernard Pachoud and Jean-Michel Roy, Standford University Press, 1999, Chapter 12. Casey, E. Getting Back Into Place: A Phenomenological Study (Studies in Continental Thought). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. ———. “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time.” In Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso. Santa Fé, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1996, pp. 13–52. ———. The Fate of Place; A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Dodd, J. Idealism and Corporeity; An Essay on the Problem of the Body in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. Held, K. “Krise der Gegenwart und Anfang der Philosophie. Zum Verhältnis von Husserl und Heidegger.” In Festschrift für Walter Biemel, ed. Madalina Diaconu, special edition of Studia Phænomenologica Humanitas Publishing House, 2003, pp. 131–145.

112  Lilian Alweiss Husserl, E. “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature.” trans. Fred Kersten. In Husserl; Shorter Works, ed. McCormick, P. et al. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, pp. 222–233. Husserl (1983). ———. Erfahrung und Urteil; Untersuchung zur Genealogie der Logic, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1985. Jagnow, R. “Edmund Husserl on the Applicability of Formal Geometry.” In Intuition and the Axiomatic Method, ed. Emily Carson and Renate Huber. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006, pp. 67–85. Kant, I. Akademieausgabe, 1902a. ———. Kants Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königliche Preußische (later Deutsche) Akadmie der und Wissenchaften. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter [Akademieausgabe], 1902b. ———. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan Press, 1933. ———. “Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.” In Philosophy of Material Nature, trans. James Ellington. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company. Book II, 1985. ———. “Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space.” In The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, ed. D. Walford and R. Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992a [AK II: 375–383], pp. 365–372. ———. “On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World [Inaugural Dissertation].” In The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, ed. D. Walford and R. Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992b. [AK II: 385–419], pp. 377–416. ———. Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. Beryl Logan. London: Routledge, 1996. Leibniz. “Studies in a Geometry of Situation.” In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. L. E. Lowemaker, 2nd ed. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969, pp. 249–253. Lohmar, D. “Elements of a Phenomenological Justification of Logical Principles, including an Appendix with Mathematical Doubts Concerning Some Proofs of Cantor on the Transfiniteness of the Set of Real Numbers.” Philosophia Mathematic 3 10 (2002): 227–250. Marbach, E. Das Problem des Ich in der Phänomenologie Husserls. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. Toulmin, S. “Criticism in the History of Science: Newton on Absolute Space, Time, and Motion.” The Philosophical Review 68, no. 1 (1959): 1–29. Van Cleve, J. and Frederick, R. E., eds. The Philosophy of Right and Left. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991. Woelert, P. “Kant’s Hands, Spatial Orientation, and the Copernican Turn.” Continental Philosophy Review 40, no. 2 (2007): 139–150.

8 Hating as contrary to loving Anthony J. Steinbock

Abstract: This article considers the relation hating to loving. After distinguishing feelings (i.e., loving, hating, etc.) and feeling-states (hatred, joy, anger, rage, sadness, etc.), I  describe how hating and loving as acts are related to one another. Following upon a phenomenological distinction between grounding and founding relations, I consider various relations of foundation. I suggest in the final analysis that loving and hating are not coeval or parallel acts. Rather, hating is founded in loving. More precisely still, hating is founded in loving as moving contrary to loving. Keywords: emotions, loving, hating, feeling, feeling-states, phenomenology, foundation

Introduction In this article, I have one fundamental concern that can be expressed in a few short questions: What is the relation of hating to loving? Are the two acts coeval? Do they stand in a dialectical relation? Or instead, is hating founded in loving, and if so, in what way or ways? Let me begin this article by introducing the context in which hating emerges (1), and then turn to the act of hating, describing some of its essential characteristics (2). I then consider the relation of loving and hating, and hating’s relation of foundation vis-à-vis loving (3). In a final section, I explicate an implicit distinction between relations of grounding and relations of founding, and then determine hating as a contrary movement to loving (4).

1.  The context of hating Systematically and phenomenologically, the problem of hating occurs within the larger problem of evidence that I have addressed in earlier works, and described in terms of different modes of givenness such as “epiphany” (peculiar to religious experience) and “revelation” (peculiar to interpersonal or “moral” experience).1 Loving and hating

1 See Anthony J. Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). And see Anthony J. Steinbock, Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014).

114  Anthony J. Steinbock (like some other emotions described in Moral Emotions) belong to the sphere of revelation or revelatory givenness. In this regard, the descriptions of loving and hating are primarily in service of articulating the phenomena of vocations and exemplarity as modes of personal revelation. It is within this framework that I investigate the relation between loving and hating and suggest how hating is founded in loving. Loving can be understood as the movement of verticality. By suggesting that loving is the “movement of verticality,” I mean it as the dynamic movement of givenness toward the emergence and flourishing of what is possible within this movement of being-becoming. Loving as an act is the improvisational free, creative positive affirmation of this movement, as generative of this movement in a personal manner. “Beloved” is another term for what is primordially given through loving, whether that given or “beloved” be inanimate, organic, or personal. Adapting a characterization of charity by Teilhard de Chardin, let me say that the vertical movement of loving carries things forward as they are, while inviting them to peer out beyond themselves, instead of simply leaving them behind. Loving is a movement toward the flourishing or enhancement of the beloved in its ownmost way, that is, within what I call its own “magnitude” or its value-range. Within that specific magnitude, the beloved can become ever-richer in its own sphere of value. Instead of denigrating or diminishing, loving “lets” all beings become who or what they are according to how they are, and enlarges its scope to become an upward-lifting force intrinsic to every form of human endeavor. It is the expansion of richness and diversity toward unity in a single operation. Only in this sense is loving to be understood as acquiescence to a loving situation, i.e., what the mystics call, “surrender.”2 The mystics can call this surrender because primordial “Loving” (the Holy) and finite personal “loving” (finite persons) are neither identical with nor different from each other. Yet finite, human personal loving can be said to “participate” Loving. As I suggest in the exposition below, hating emerges fundamentally as always already founded in loving. Even though this is the case, hating is a negative act in the sense that it negates the core of the other as bearer of value (whatever that “other” is). This affects all levels of value, from the Holy, the person, living things, to tools, since hating takes place within the movement of loving in relation to all “beloveds.” Because of this “ontological” or “metaphysical” dimension of loving, which is vertical and de-limiting, not only does loving go beyond a single act and beyond a particular value sphere, hating, too, ultimately affects all dimensions of reality.3

2.  The act of hating and hatred Hating carries the basic connotations of negativity, enmity, personal animosity, resistance or aversion, rejection or denial, denegation, but it is also associated with anger,

2 For something to be given as beloved, I am already moving within that openness of loving such that the evidence of the beloved is only given within that movement. 3 See Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism, “Introduction,” and “Conclusion.” See Anthony J. Steinbock, It’s Not About the Gift: From Givenness to Loving (Rowman and Littlefield, Int., 2018).

Hating as contrary to loving  115 rage, loathing, disgust, revulsion, contempt, or disdain.4 We might hear someone exclaim, “Oh, I hate all this rain,” “I hate to go to the gym,” or “I hate olives on my pizza,” but these are colloquialisms that in these contexts express something more akin to dislike, inconvenience, or even a matter of taste, rather than the movement of hating as an emotion in the sense I understand it.5 In this section, I make a preliminary distinction between hating and hatred within the more general category of feeling and feeling-states. I then describe some central characteristics of hating. A. Feeling and feeling-states The difference between hating and hatred is rooted in the more general phenomenological distinction between a feeling and a feeling-state. I take “feeling” as a general term that encompasses the entire schema of the heart, as it were, including personal and interpersonal emotions (shame, guilt, love, trust), attunements (such as anxiety, boredom, nostalgia), as well as psychophysical, anonymous feelings (erotic feeling, enjoyment, etc.).6 This is the case insofar as feelings have their own distinctive order of givenness and evidence as a relation with value – where value concerns the affective or emotional resonance or “coloring” as messengers of meaning or sense. Thus, when we live the situation as a whole (say, driving a car), the sense or meaning is given (the epistemic grasping of “car”), but the “value” dimension is given in a feeling (say, a spiritual, vital, or sensible feeling as “useful,” “comfortable,” “in service of another,” etc.), such that the value is already given as a messenger of the comprehend intellectual sense of it.7 A feeling-state in distinction to feeling is given on the basis of a feeling-givenness of the living experience. Rather than a dynamic movement, a feeling-state is precisely that, a “state,” which can be expressed as a passion (a felt-ness or sentiment), an affect, or a condition. Further, it can become an explicit object without losing its character as a feeling-state. In this sense, a feeling-state is “static,” whereas feeling as “act-movement” can never become an object as such. Examples of passions founded in feelings include rage, sorrow, hatred, joy, anger, pleasure, being blue, anxiousness, etc. Although experientially feeling-states can be given along with feelings, we can distinguish them phenomenologically, since they are lived differently. Furthermore, while I can hate “in” anger, love “with” sadness, repent “in” sorrow or joy. Affects include sensation, pain, tickling, itching, or where the whole body is subject to affects, a startle (as a startle reflex) or a paroxysm, which

4 See, for example, Aurel Kolnai, Ekel Hochmut Haß: Zur Phänomenologie feindlicher Gefühle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), esp. 100ff. 5 See Steinbock, Moral Emotions, esp., the “Introduction.” 6 I develop this “schema of the heart” in my current work, Beloved, Loving, and Hating in the Schema of the Heart, in preparation. 7 See my conclusion to Moral Emotions on the contribution of the moral emotions to social imaginary. See, too, Max Scheler, Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wertethik. Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 2. ed. Maria (Bern: Francke, 1966), 343; English translation, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 341.

116  Anthony J. Steinbock affects the whole body.8 Where affects are concerned, my-“self” not given in a feelingway, but rather a specific or global bodily localization is given as an affective feeling-state. Finally, I may not be aware of my feeling-state (in its disclosive capacity) as a feelingstate while I am living through it. I may be all the less aware of the feeling-source of the feeling-state.9 It is only subsequently that I can reflect on the feeling-state and ask, for example: “Why am I so angry?” Or the feeling-state can be called to my attention by a friend: “Why are you so sad?” or “What are you so excited about?” When the feeling-state is reflected upon in this way, it is given differently, namely, as a condition. A condition is not the feeling-state lived in its felt-ness, as a sentiment (we might think of lived sorrow, for example). Rather, a condition is the feeling-state objectified as state. I would like to make several brief observations concerning some main relations of feeling to feeling-states that are relevant here. (1) Feeling-states are structurally dependent upon or founded in feeling – as this feeling relates to another as bearer of value such that there is always a feeling-state that is given with feeling; (2) it is impossible to determine in advance what feeling-states might emerge from feelings. This is the case even if a particular feeling-state might be more commonly associated with the feeling (i.e., hatred with hating); (3) not only is it impossible to determine in advance what feeling-states might emerge from feelings, it is also not possible to exhaust the number of feeling-states emerging from feelings. This is for similar reasons as stated above that concern the dynamic nature of feelings; (4) while there is a wide open possibility of what feeling-states might be emergent from feelings, there are some feeling-states that are essentially excluded; that is, they “cannot” emerge from certain feelings (e.g., impatience from hoping; hatred from loving).10 Hating and hatred I use “hating” for the “act of hating,” and “hatred” to designate the feeling-state.11 Hating is not simply a feeling as an intentional structure with its own style of evidence, as a relation to being as a bearer of value. Hating takes place as an “emotional” dynamic act-movement within the locus of person (more on this point below). As an act in which the person is revealed and as such never becomes an object; as an interpersonal or what I call “moral” emotion, hating is phenomenologically distinguishable

8   For example, St. Teresa of Avila, The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Vol. 1, trans., Kieran Kavanaugh O. C. D. and Otilio Rodriguez O. C. D. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1976). 9 See Scheler, Formalismus, 262–263, Formalism, 26–57. 10 On the latter point, see my Moral Emotions, 5. 11 Further, while hating is an emotion, hatred, a feeling-state, can be justifiably referred as a passion – like both Kant and later Darwin do, though for different reasons. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 83. Further, Peter Hadreas describes hatred as a “passion” and not an emotion, though he does not consider what I am calling hating. See Peter Hadreas, A Phenomenology of Love and Hate (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), esp. ch. 3. And see Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer (Leipzig: Meiner, 1922), 119.

Hating as contrary to loving  117 from possible emergent feeling-states like anger, rage, jealously, Schadenfreude, etc., even hatred. While the latter are essentially dependent upon hating in some form, they are irreducible experientially to hating.12 There are phenomenological distinctions to be made between hating and hatred, which is to say, that they are irreducible experientially – this fact can be seen in three variations or implications of this feature: (1) The non-necessity of experiencing any feeling-state in order then to hate. A feeling-state is not a springboard to hating, just as a feeling-state is not a springboard to any emotional/personal act. It is not possible to experience hatred in order then to hate; or put differently, I could not put myself in the state of anger, say, in order then to execute an act of hating. Likewise, I do not have to experience joy in order then to love. In short, I do not have to feel hating as a movement of negation in order to hate. This is because feeling-states are founded in feelings, not the other way around. (2) The necessity of hating as feeling being accompanied by some feeling-state or feeling-states. Feeling-states are generated through the auto-affection of feelings, whether those feelings are on a personal or psychophysical level. I do not go into this process here.13 What is important to note is that the auto-affection only occurs in the feeling as relating to some other as bearer of value. There is not an immediate self-affection.14 It is through this “feeling-intentionality,” which has its own structures peculiar to a specific sphere of experiencing, that a feeling-state is given through auto-affection. (3) The non-necessity of the feeling-state being hatred or any negatively valenced feeling-state; for example, it can be a positive feeling-state. The feeling-state or states that accompany hating do not have to be hatred or have any negatively valenced feeling-state; for that matter; they can be positive feeling-states. Certainly, hating can be accompanied by thumos, or more specifically, by a despising, a wanting to destroy, desiring to negate; or it can be accompanied by or associated with other emotions and their feeling-states like anger or outrage; and more deeply perhaps, I can feel hatred in the hating with a peculiar intensity; I can feel being irritated by the beloved’s mere existence. But, I can also hate without having to experience hatred in this sense, namely, that I feel the negative movement with a positive passion. For example, hating can also be given with a joy – a feeling-state usually associated with loving, and it can be accompanied by Schadenfreude (taking pleasure in the misery of others). Accordingly, it is possible to hate or “to live” in and through the movement of hating while experiencing a delight in the negation of others. I could be cold and calculating, merely procedural, and utterly dispassionate while living in the movement of hating.

12 Hating is not to be confused with incredibly disliking, finding something or someone despicable, repugnant, disgusting, etc. See Michael Kelly, “Phenomenological Distinctions: Two Types of Envy and Their Difference from Covetousness,” in Phenomenology for the TwentyFirst Century, ed. J. Aaron Simmons and J. Edward Hackett (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 157–177. 13 See my Beloved, Loving, and Hating in the Schema of the Heart, in preparation. 14 Which would be for Michel Henry the process of absolute Life immediately affecting itself without distance in the mode of revelation. See my It’s Not about the Gift, ch. 3.

118  Anthony J. Steinbock So, while Ortega y Gasset thinks that loving and hating have “temperatures” and undergo variegations of warmth and coolness, depending upon the context, I do not think that hating necessarily has a valence in this way.15 In terms of the valence, unlike shame, guilt, or embarrassment – which are immediately and directly given with a negative valence (witnessed, e.g., bodily in terms of downcast eyes, etc.) – hating is not necessarily accompanied by a negative valence, even if we consider it a negative personal emotion. B. Some essential characteristics of hating I have suggested that hating is a movement, a personal, creative en-acting process of negating, diminishing, or restricting someone or something as a bearer of value. It is not, for example, just a more intense feeling-state, say of anger or rage; it is not even a modification of a feeling-state like hatred. Allow me to parse out this statement by observing some essential features of hating. Hating as an act Hating is an act, an “improvisational,” freely executed act that takes place on the level of “spirit,” and more specifically in the dimension of personhood. As a person, I exist in and through each act of hating intimately, fully, but inexhaustibly. Hating is a “creative” movement out of personal freedom. By “creative” I mean that it is an “expressive transformation,” generative beyond the givens. However, in its creative execution, hating is destructive, expressively transformative of the givens in a destructive manner – ultimately moving against generativity. This creative dimension is in part what Kolnai wants to evoke by calling hate a historical aspect of human life.16 Hating emerges in the movement of loving, but rejects that generative movement in human love and human freedom, and emerges as a destructive or rejecting force, or again, it reveals itself as negating or diminishing. Further, hating does not grow out of any other emotion genetically. Hating is not a more intense embarrassment, shame, guilt, sympathy, etc. Even if we see a temporal development from someone else growing angry to the point of destroying something, the latter does not produce hating. Hating is a qualitatively distinct act that is carried out on a personal level, and in this sense has “metaphysical” or “phenomenological” priority in terms of its status that does not, with essential necessity, map onto a genetic or historical unfurling of events.17

15 José Ortega y Gasset, On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme, trans. Toby Talbot (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 1957/ 2012 reprint), 17. 16 Kolnai, Ekel Hochmut Haß, 102. 17 By contrast, there are opposing psychoanalytic interpretations that differ from the phenomenological one that I am describing here. For example, in a perspective developed in 1936, Joan Riviere maintains that hate (as a destructive and disintegrating force, which tends toward privation and death) and love (as a harmonizing unifying force, tending to life and pleasure) originate in and are derivatives of the baby’s relation to the mother’s breasts. In particular, she maintains that in becoming aware of his dependence, the child discovers that

Hating as contrary to loving  119 Hating as directed Hating is oriented, and in its orientation it is directed toward some other, even if that other is “myself.” I mean by this that hating is a distinctive kind of intentionality that is related toward some other as bearer of value. However, just because it is a feeling, and more specifically, an emotion, and thus exhibits an intentionality of some kind, this does not mean that hating has the structure of an objectivating act or that it is founded in an objectivating act in order to allow an object to be given as sense such that it can acquire the status of a constituted object.18 Hating, like loving, does not exhibit the traditional noesis–noema correlation. This does not mean, in turn, that hating is non-intentional, as if it were a mood or atmosphere, like a toxic mist hovering over something or someone. We might sense hatefulness on the part of another, but this has to do with the discernment of a personal style or disposition. (See the section below on hating and self-revelation.) Hating as other oriented This is related to the former point, but whereas the former point emphasizes the oriented character, this point emphasizes the “otherness” dimension of hating, that toward which hating is directed.19 Hating takes place in a personal manner, but it can be directed toward any other as bearer of value, even though most radically hating is directed toward the person: It is not the value that I hate as an object, but directly the other insofar as the other is bearer of value.20 And even though hating can be directed toward any other as bearer of value, the deepest and most fundamental kind of hating is a person-to-person hating that denies or diminishes the person on an interpersonal basis. Thus, not only is hating an interpersonal or moral emotion because it is “oriented” toward an other, any other – which can be a person, it is a moral emotion because it presupposes the interpersonal nexus in which it negates or diminishes any other. Although there are qualitatively distinctive “objects” or “others” that can be hated, the hating of any kind originates from a personal dimension. All “hateds” have this in common, though again the most fundamental hating is the one that is directed toward the person as “absolute” value, as radically unique, as irreplaceable by any other,

he cannot supply all of his wants and desires, cries, screams, and automatically explodes with aggressive craving and hate. If feelings of loneliness and emptiness intervene, leading to pain and uncontrollable suffocating, choking sensations, the child will have the first inclination of loss and something like the experience of death. See Joan Riviere, “Hate, Greed and Aggression,” in Love, Hate, and Reparation, ed. Joan Riviere and Melanie Klein (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1964), 3–53. 18 See my Moral Emotions, “Introduction.” 19 The structure of loving is such that it is carried out as from the other. As essential to loving, this holds and must hold for all persons who love. I develop this point elsewhere. My point here is that there is nothing that “calls for” hating, essentially, and so it is appropriate here to speak of “orientation” or “directedness.” The issue of repulsion is a different matter, but again, this does not concern the act of hating. 20 Scheler, Formalism. See also, Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 7, ed. Manfred Frings (Bern: Francke, 1973).

120  Anthony J. Steinbock irreducible to any context, and who is capable of loving and hating from this center of personhood. Where other persons are concerned, my hating is directed at the very core of their existence; it does not matter what they say, do, or stand for in that movement of hating experienced at that time. For example, I can still hate the other person at his or her core even if he or she has qualities I admire, just as I can love the person, even if he or she exhibits qualities I detest or cause me discomfort. Accordingly, Kolnai can assert that what we are calling hating impinges not only on the “object” as such, but on its existential status in the world, thus on the world itself, and accordingly on the essence of the “subject,” the hated.21 While it is in and through the features that others “have” that I might hate, it is instead the person as a whole, the “personal core” whom I am hating. In hating, we have a presupposition of the interpersonal nexus in and through the denial, exclusion, or negating of the person. Needless to say, I not only can hate another person; I can hate myself, as person. The point I want to make here by citing Kolani’s observations where this explication of hating is concerned is that, for me, the hating as emotion and as a movement goes beyond the actual negation of the other. The hating can continue even after the factual absence of what is hated. The insight here is that hating is a movement toward the existential annihilation of the other, and can continue beyond its actual destruction, death, or murder. Hating is not just a single act in time, but reaches ontologically or metaphysically – in some cases including the intention that this other never to have existed at all – and in this way goes beyond its particular negation. This also holds for the possible feeling-state of hatred that is founded on the hating. Hating as self-revelatory and non-revelatory Hating, like loving, belongs to the distinctive sphere of givenness I call revelation.22 Loving is both self-revelatory and revelatory of “otherness.” Like loving, hating is a revelatory act – but hating is revelatory in only one respect: It is revelatory insofar as I am “given” or “revealed” as who I am becoming in the acts I live through. I intrinsically cohere as this person in and through the acts without “gaps,” without standing above or below them, as it were. In and through the acts of hating in which I exist, I am “revealed” personally – in this instance – as hating, in a personal, unique, identifiable manner even though I am not reducible to the acts in and through which I exist now. In this sense hating can never be anonymous, but is personal: “I,” Tony, hate. Accordingly, hating is self-revelatory, but also self-dissimulating, because it also negates what at root it presupposes. Therefore, even though I might be directed toward another in my hating, my hating is self-negating because it “distorts” or “de-creates” the interpersonal nexus in which I am ultimately given to myself. In distorting the context in which hating emerges, I become distorted through hating. However, in a different respect, hating is not revelatory, namely, of otherness – whereas loving is both self-revelatory and revelatory. For example, loving can be

21 Aurel Kolnai, “The Standard Modes of Aversion: Fear, Disgust and Hatred,” Mind 107 (1998): 583. See, Kolani, Ekel Hochmut Haß, 104. 22 For a distinction between kinds of givenness, see my Phenomenology and Mysticism, Moral Emotions, Limit-Phenomena and Phenomenology in Husserl.

Hating as contrary to loving  121 understood as the opening to what is other, as the letting appear of its own accord, inciting (not provoking) it to peer out a little further in terms of its being-becoming. Hating, however, takes up what is given in loving as toward its negation, and in manifold possible modes closes down what can appear as value. Hating is the act of decreation, even to the point of wanting the other no longer to exist, or even never to have existed at all.23 Hating as a negating movement One of the peculiar things about hating is that it is a dynamic or creative movement toward another given as value (I clarify some ways this occurs below). But, precisely as a dynamic, generative beyond the givens, “improvisational,” and directed movement, hating is destructive or restrictive of that very movement. This is most clearly evident when hating is directed toward another person, who essentially can never become an object. But it is also the case when hating is directed toward bearers of vital values (i.e., living organisms) and things such as toys (bearers of the value of pleasure or enjoyment) or tools (bearers of use value). Again, hating can occur in these ways because it takes up what is given in loving as toward its negation, and in manifold possible modes closes down what can appear as value. Most profoundly, hating unfolds on a personal (i.e., interpersonal) level. But all levels are at least indirectly affected since the variegated dimensions of being are interrelated through vertical de-limitation.24 Hating does not have to be oriented toward all out destruction; indeed, negating appears as a removing, excluding, diminishing, restricting, injuring, or as a discouraging from becoming who one is, for example, when it bears on the core of the hated. By contrast, I can be in competition with someone, like in a sporting event, and have an “enemy,” adversary, or rival, even nemesis; I may want to trounce my rival, beat her in a sprint, win the battle, all without hating him, her, or the group. Struggling against something or someone is not necessarily hating. For these reasons, (1) the negation of a negative value is not necessarily hating, and (2) hating a bearer of a negative value is not tantamount to loving. In other words, the negative of a negative is not necessarily a positive. For example, if I am confronted with a dilapidated building that is unfit for housing people, and if I negate it by tearing it down, I am not necessarily hating. However, if I hate the same building and raze it, I would be oriented somehow to still baser and baser values (perhaps doing it out of spite, etc.). Hating something as bearing a negative value (ugly) does not transform the hated or get us outside of hating. Here, the negation of a negation is not a positive. The negating movement of hating, therefore, presupposes itself as dynamic movement, but carries this out by negating or objectifying “all other” movement. Accordingly, hating is a “creative” originary (personal) negating movement directed toward something that is given as value. Because hating rejects or negates, it cannot remain slovenly (or even indifferent or apathetic) in relation to what gives itself.

23 This last observation bears on one temporal feature of hating, as a making present to negate – a feature that I cannot develop in detail here. 24 Hence, we see the sense in which Scheler portrays hating as a movement toward lower or more superficial values.

122  Anthony J. Steinbock Historical a priori of hating Hating is a freely en-acted movement and is a “possibility” for persons to initiate; it is not a “possibility” like something given in advance. Rather, looking back we can say that it was and is possible, given the openness of being. That is, we know that the negative movement of hating becomes possible because it has been historically carried out, becoming for the human person an essential possibility as a historical a priori.25 But I am not called forth by the other to hate that other. An implication of this, further, is that there is no absolute ought that “demands” or “invites” a hating.26 Hating the beloved The most basic movement of hating consists in a negating movement of what is given as value. I can only “hate” because loving, which is revelatory of the given as beloved, “reveals” or “gives” what can be hated. Accordingly, and primordially, I don’t hate the hated; rather, I hate the beloved.27 That is, through hating, what is given primordially as beloved is constituted as the hated. This should not be taken to mean that I first “love” something or someone, that he, she, or it is my “beloved,” and then I hate him, her, or it. It should not be taken to mean that I must experience feelings of joy or hatred in this negating movement. Rather, it suggests that on the basis of what is revealed (what we call the “beloved” in the most “giving” or “opening” act, namely loving), hating is a diminishing, restricting, or negating the other (which has already been given or revealed implicitly as “beloved”). The death of another is not the end of hating, just like the death of another is not the end of loving. In the case of the former, this is how revisionists can desire to bring the others back in and through their denial in order to destroy “them” again. It is a twisted, tortured temporality. Accordingly, there is no simple logic of intention and fulfillment where hating is concerned. In the case of interpersonal relations, the person can never be made into an object, so the reduction of the person to the fixed now of a static object can never be achieved. Hating can never succeed at its aim if its intention is to render the person an object completely, which is also to say, to reduce the absolute value of person to a relative value that can be manipulated or controlled as subject to my intentions. A more detailed analysis of the temporal orientations of hating developed elsewhere has suggested the following decisive character of the temporal meaning of hating.28 Hating reduces the other to a fixed, permanent present. Hating attempts to keep the other, whatever other, ever-now, without temporal past or future horizons. Likewise,

25 For a more detailed description of the meaning of this “historical a priori,” see my Moral Emotions, especially, chs. 1 and 7, described in relation to pride and humility. 26 See my Limit-Phenomena and Phenomenology in Husserl, especially, ch. 6. 27 However, this is not to be confused with the misleading Kierkegaardian sense of the Christian requirement “to hate the beloved” in the sense of sacrifice and self-sacrifice of particular interest or as tantamount to the putative “spirit’s” devotion. See Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Enda H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 108, 113–114, 147. 28 See my Beloved, Loving, and Hating in the Schema of the Heart, in preparation.

Hating as contrary to loving  123 it attempts to consolidate the past and future into the present so that it can be controlled and maintained as such. However, since hating anticipates no end to itself in the destruction of the other, the diminishing of the other can never be completed in the present. Hating is never fulfilled, not because it is always anticipating more to come, but because hating strives to keep the hated present as devalued. Thus, hating makes the hated present and keeps it present in order to deny it or negate it, which amounts to the temporality of a permanent, fixed present.

3.  Loving and hating We are accustomed to assume a symmetry between various affections, sentiments, and emotions that admit of positive and negative valences such as liking and disliking, pleasure and displeasure, appetite and repugnance, attraction and aversion, as well as loving and hating.29 Not only is a symmetry often presumed, but also sometimes a co-primordiality or dialectical relation between personal emotions. We can think of co-dependence or equi-primordiality presupposed, for example, in the case of trust and anti-trust as proposed in Annette Baier’s work.30 In a similarly problematic vein, Luc Ferry writes: “And love never comes without hatred; they are probably two inseparable passions, if only because love leads us to hate those who hurt the people we love, or even, sometimes, to hate those we have loved when they hurt us, leave us, or cheat on us.”31 Psychoanalytically, Eros and Thanatos are, on most accounts, understood to be coeval; in a genetic perspective, it is also suggested that the baby’s first love, the mother/mother’s breast, is disturbed at its roots by destructive impulses, such that love and hate struggle together in the baby’s mind, and that there is a constant interaction of love and hate in us all.32 Against such a symmetry, equi-primordiality, and dialectical relation where loving and hating are concerned, I argue that loving and hating are not coeval or parallel movements, and further, that hating is founded in loving.33 Phenomenologically, it is possible, seemingly, to justify two main possibilities of discerning the relation between loving and hating: one in which they are coeval and parallel movements, another in which hating is founded in loving.

29 Kolnai, “The Standard Modes of Aversion.” 30 See Annette Baier, “Trust and Anti-Trust,” Ethics 96/2 (1986): 231–260. See my Moral Emotions, esp., ch. 6 on trust. 31 Luc Ferry, On Love: A Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013). 32 See Melanie Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparations,” in Love, Hate, and Reparation, ed. Joan Riviere and Melanie Klein (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1964), 57–60, 65–66, 83. To say that the early attachment to the breast is the source of the child’s love is not to say that “love” is foundational for “hate.” 33 In her very thorough work on the emotions, Ferran does treat the two together in earlier phenomenology of the emotions, but does not do so in a reductive way. See Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, Die Emotionen: Gefühle in der realistischen Phänomenologie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), especially 256–261.

124  Anthony J. Steinbock Loving and hating as coeval and parallel movements The first option is to consider loving and hating as movements that are distinguished in terms of different value-apprehensions sharing the same value-content. This interpretation is attractive for various reasons, but is ultimately problematic. The attractive aspects of this are the following: Loving and hating are oriented toward the other (whatever “other”) insofar as the other is the bearer of value. In this respect, both loving and hating can be understood as “value-cognitions.” This is in part how loving and hating differ from what I term “slovenliness of spirit” or a kind of abject complacency. But whereas loving is oriented toward the affirmation of the value given, hating is oriented toward negating or denying the bearer of value (or affirming a negative value as positive or as negative). So far, this is unproblematic. On this coeval interpretation of the structure, however, in each concrete act of loving and hating we would have the following situation. Where loving is concerned, we would have (a) a cognition of value and (b) the affirmation of that bearer of value toward its flourishing. This is one concrete, unitary act. Where hating is concerned, we would have (a) a cognition of value (like loving) and (b) the denial of that bearer of value as the negation of its flourishing. (We would include here as well its modalizations such as the affirmation of a negative value as positive, etc.) This is one concrete, unitary act. The advantage of clarifying the relation of loving and hating in this way is that it accounts for how loving and hating can be so close in their (re)cognition of value – why radical loving and radical hating can be so close in some ways – and yet in their respective affirmation and negation are so diametrically opposed. The difficulty with this depiction, however, is that it relies implicitly on a static analysis of structure, and mirrors what we find in the presentational sphere of a form/content distinction. It erroneously presupposes that there is a neutral givenness of value and then an affirmation or denial, like the givenness of a neutral “stuff” empirically in a perception, and then an “apprehension” or “interpretation” that would overlay the former in order to be the concrete perception of something – as if a value would be given that we would then prefer, choose, or love. This portrayal is problematic – not because it adheres to any philosophical position – but because, as I show below, it can be misleading in terms of our experience of the phenomena. Hating as founded in loving In order to discern the relation of hating to loving in this way, let’s revisit the context of hating. Especially where loving is concerned, an act-phenomenology has to be grounded in the metaphysical reality to which phenomenology is open and as a reality that is also accessible phenomenologically. I have called this movement Generativity or Verticality, but in this context can also be called “Loving.” There are two interrelated dimensions or features here that suggest that hating is founded in loving. I

Loving is an opening to all that “is” as bearer of value in all of its distinctive value magnitude, without necessarily any preference or choice among the richness that flashes forth in its distinctiveness and irreducibility. This is because loving is “prior to” preferring (in which values are only given as in a hierarchy) and choosing (which is a volitional selection among those bearers of value given through

Hating as contrary to loving  125 preferring). Loving is “all-encompassing.” Thus, in loving, the bearer of “value” of what gives itself in the way that it gives itself is already an invitation to affirm, which is grounded in an “already affirmed” – or as we could also say, to love what is already generatively, in a religious context, beloved. This is another way of saying that the primordial movement is loving as an integrated movement, as a movement of already affirmed/affirming-further that “gives” what can be seen as value. Loving is an opening that is already a living out of what gives itself in loving. As we already might suspect, loving therefore already has a weight and priority that is not a mere counterpart to hating. It encompasses all levels of reality, and even though a hating act might be oriented to something as the bearer of one sphere of value, it impacts all spheres of reality as bearers of their unique range of value. Since the movement of hating gets its bearer-of-value-feed, as it were, from loving, in hating I close down or am destructive of what can appear as value, negating or diminishing “from” the movement of loving, which is a revealing-revealed movement. This means, then, that when one hates one has to do so already within the ongoing movement of loving; or again, I can only hate because as I am hating, I am more primordially and simultaneously moving within loving. Loving therefore already has a weight and priority that is not a mere counterpart to hating. I can only hate because loving, which is revelatory of the given as beloved, “reveals” or “gives” what can be hated. Accordingly, and primordially, I don’t hate the hated; rather I hate the beloved, which in hating, is constituted as the hated. II Related to this point, the essence of loving is such that any personal loving implies experiencing the compelling modality of a loving response. This is due to the fundamental interpersonal nature of loving, and the fact, more generally, that we are not self-grounding, that we do not start off as an isolated, neutral individual who putatively loves. This says two things. On the one hand, loving is an originary act in the sense that loving is not a reaction, not a motived feeling (like an affect), not a “receptive emotion” (like embarrassment, shame, guilt, surprise); rather, loving is (like trust) originary: initiatory, creative, improvisational, and may not depend upon a presentational temporal structure. On the other hand, loving is a responsive emotion in the sense that it is lived through and carried out in a generative framework. Thus, the reception of loving – in an infinite Personal sense or finite personal sense – is always already the compelling “cognition” of a loving response, before I could choose one way or another, on the one hand, or comporting myself as if nothing happened, on the other – all this without compulsion. Accordingly, as Scheler writes, I may indeed refuse any response of love – and I would qualify here, an originary or generative loving – but if I do, then I must deny this to the personal other, I must refuse.34 In other words, this denial, refusal, or negation, essentially takes place on the basis of loving; they are creative negative movements on the basis of an affirmation that is already functioning guidingly by being felt or received, no matter how vaguely. It is possible to state the problem differently: If there is loving as felt, then there is a demand of a response of loving. This is because loving is always already caught up in an interpersonal movement. The essential structure of loving is such that it is a call for loving. There is no gap, no neutral standing back, no “option,” no “choice” – which

34 Scheler, Formalismus, 524; Formalism, 536.

126  Anthony J. Steinbock would already come too late. It is not a mere “invitation,” but already an imposition and evocation to love. If this is the case, then how do we account for a “no” to loving? How do we account for this negativity? This “no” must be understood as already a denial or a rejection of (i.e., on the basis of) a positive movement. Here the negative is only possible on the basis of the positive. This does not mean, as Scheler cautions, that there is in loving an intention toward a response of love or any conditional act with a reservation (e.g., I will love you if you love me). He observes that even the inkling on my part of something like this going on by another completely destroys the “demand” for response in love.35 This is because the compelling quality for the response of love – originary or responsive – lies in the very meaning of loving as loving, not in my subjective intentions or desires.36 The creative, improvisational, personal nature of loving also precludes any putative “response” or reply by rote. In both regards, loving and hating are not parallel or coeval acts; rather, hating is founded in loving, such that hating takes place on the ground of loving, which is already taking place. When we examine hating, we are getting at the problem of the original and uncaused emergence of hating. In more traditional, ontological, and sometimes theological terms, we are getting at the problem of evil. While there is nothing absolutely compelling to hate, while there is no absolute ought to hate, the hated does appear in its own modality. Provisionally, let me suggest that the other as hated is given in the modality of the negatable, refutable, deniable, contravenable, refusable, or excludable.

4.  Hating as founded in loving and as contrary to loving If it is correct, then, that hating is founded in loving, we can ask after the way in which hating is founded in loving. I maintain that hating is founded in loving in a peculiar way as moving contrary to loving. In order to make this point, and in order to discern more generally the relation between loving and hating, allow me to distinguish between a relation of grounding and a relation of founding. I do this because we often speak ambiguously about the two relations in a variety of ways. I understand by relations of grounding, mundane relations of being or relations of essence. I understand by relations of founding “constitutive” relations: acts relations to acts, sense/meaning relations to sense/meaning, constitutive relations of essence to essential insighting, and (possibly) the relations obtaining between the “constituting” and the “constituted.” This would be a different kind of foundation in which the “sense” is founded in the “act” or “function.” Under relations of founding, I also understand relations of value. Finally, in the context of founding relations, it is possible to distinguish between positive relations of foundation and negative ones. A. Relations of grounding and founding A relation of grounding can mark an ontological relation. For example, one could speak of a grounding relation between Being and beings (Heidegger), whether Being is

35 Scheler, Formalismus, 524–525; Formalism, 536–537. 36 Scheler, Formalismus, 525; Formalism, 537.

Hating as contrary to loving  127 taken onto-theologically as a ground of being, or whether Being and beings are understood as co-grounding, as belonging-together.37 We could in a different register speak of the person as not self-grounding in an interpersonal nexus.38 It is also possible to describe the relation between formal and material essences, as well as regions of being as situated in a relation of grounding.39 For example, the lifeworld a priori, and more generally, a lifeworld ontology, can be said to ground the special or even the exact sciences.40 Where relations of founding are concerned, we can describe (i) relations of dependence, (ii) relations of hierarchical ordering, (iii) relations of embeddedness, and (iv) relations of explanatory or constructed postulates. i

In the first instance of a relation of founding, we can discern the way in which a simple perception is foundational for a categorial act, how objectivating acts are foundational for non-objectivating acts, or how a transcendental logic is founded in a transcendental aesthetic. In these cases, what is foundational is something so basic that the founded is dependent upon the elements of the founding in order to be what it is. The founded takes up the founding as elaborating upon it in the constitution, say, of a distinct act. But the new act, while having its own integrity, is such that one can strip away the accrued features and still reveal the basic founding structure. A founded categorial act, “that the pencil is sharp and is seen” is dependent upon “I see the sharp pencil” or the simple perception of “pencil” and “sharp.” Although this is a more problematic example, one could maintain that a categorial intuition of an essence is founded in a simple perception because the essence is only given in and through the concrete instance, and not outside of it.41 Similarly, rational truth is founded in perceptual sense, for Merleau-Ponty, as language is founded in speech, as sexuality is founded in erotic perception, etc.42 Likewise in Austin (and Habermas following Austin), a perlocutionary act (persuading, convincing, rhetorical character) is founded in an illocutionary act

37 See Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (1955–57). Gesammtausgabe 11, ed. FriedrichWilhelm v. Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006). 38 Steinbock, Moral Emotions. 39 For example, Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phanomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch, Husserliana, Vol. 4, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952). 40 See Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, Husserliana, Vol. 6, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954). See Anthony J. Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), esp., sec 2. 41 But this is more problematic, because that I see the chair as the chair presupposes that the essential structure is guiding the simple perception such that I can take it as a chair in the first place. See Anthony J. Steinbock, “Saturated Intentionality” in The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Donn Welton (London: Blackwell, 1999), 178–199. 42 Anthony J. Steinbock, “Erotic Perception: Intersubjectivity, History, and Shame,” in New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, eds., Rodney K.B. Parker and Ignacio Quepons, Vol. 16 (2018).

128  Anthony J. Steinbock (promising, ordering, performative force of the speech act), which is founded in a locutionary act (actual utterance of the speech act).43 ii Something that is agreeable is founded in a vital value, for example, in the value of health. It is founded in the sense that life-value governs all the qualities of the values of the “agreeable” felt by a being.44 At the extreme, the “lower limit” of the value of life, namely, death, necessarily coincides with the annihilation of the value of the agreeable, and indeed its entire sphere, encompassing the agreeable and the disagreeable. But the reverse does not hold. The eradication of the value sphere of the agreeable or disagreeable does not eradicate the value of life.45 In a similar manner, but with different consequences, vital values can be said to be founded in spiritual values. In fact, this is the basis of Marx’s critique of alienated labor with respect to the estrangement of species being. iii Further, we can describe how one sense can be embedded in another as founding or co-founding. For example, a figure can be said to be founded on a background and co-founding where the general sense of the object is concerned in relation to a perceiver. Depending upon the perspective, individuals might be founded in communities or communities might be founded in the composition of individuals. Further, communities that are constituted as a society (i.e., individuals recognized as such standing in a relations of contract) can be said to be founded in communities constituted through trust. This discussion relates mutatis mutandis to Husserl’s discussion of parts and wholes in the Third Logical Investigation.46 Stated only in a cursory fashion, moments, as nonindependent parts (parts that are not separately presentable in perception or the imagination), require other moments so that they can be presented. They are “founded” when they can only exist (or be given) in an encompassing unity or when such supplementation is necessary for their completion.47 In some respect, the world can be said to be founded in subjectivity (viewed constitutively), or the sense “other” can be said to be founded in an abstractive sphere of ownness; in another respect, however, homeworlds and alienworlds are essentially and constitutively “co-foundational.”48 iv Finally, we can describe an explanatory or constructed postulate as foundational for something else. A good example of this is the phenomenological notion of a retention. A retention, which is never given in direct experience, is a constructed postulate for what must be the case in order for there to be (a) a genetic concordance and possibly a discordance of sense, and (b) something remembered in a remembering, and even (c) a protention that unfurls from the couplet present-

43 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1962. 44 Scheler, Formalismus, 112; Formalism, 94–95. 45 Scheler, Formalismus, 112; Formalism, 95. 46 Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. II/1 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980), §§3–4. 47 Ibid., II/1 §14, §21. 48 See Steinbock, Home and Beyond, ch. 5 and sec. 4.

Hating as contrary to loving  129 retention. In all of these respects, a retention is “foundational for” (a protention, a remembering) although it is never experienced as such in a direct manner.49 Now I would like to examine some cross-sections of these distinctions. I do this in order to discern positive and negative relations of founding. As an example of a distinctive positive relation of founding and being founded, we can examine the relation obtaining between objectivating and non-objectivating acts. Those acts that allow an object to be given as sense such that it can acquire the status of a constituted object (in the process of object-giving or Gegenständlichung) are said to be founding, and those acts that are said to lack and therefore require this relation are said to be nonobjectifying acts. They are founded. However, together, they constitute a distinctive new act, but such that one could subsequently remove the adjunct feature or features, and still have the integrity of the basic act (e.g., “I see the painting” and “that it is a painting,” etc.). As another kind of positive founding relation, also alluded to above, we can observe the relation of founding that obtains between experiences that are more encompassing or more “profound.” For example, we can characterize affective processes of identification [Einsfühlung] that are peculiar to mass-consciousness as founded in acts of sympathy, even if temporally or historically, affective identification might have emerged “first.”50 This, too, would be a positive relation of foundation. But there are also possible relations of foundation in which the dependency in the founding-founded relation is not positive, but negative. There are at least two kinds of such a “negative” founding–founded relation. One is a “contrary” relation of founding, and another is an “antithetical” relation of founding. It is in the first instance that we can situate hating’s relation to loving; it is in the second instance that we can understand “slovenliness of spirit” in relation to both loving and hating (which I will not take up in this article). B. Hating as contrary to loving The determination of hating as founded in loving is dependent upon qualifying it further as a movement of dependence that runs “contrary” to the movement of loving. This is in distinction to a movement that is “antithetical” to both loving and hating. In terms of its phenomenological, constitutive content, I have already suggested above that loving is distinctive among movements in part by being revelatory of beings as bearers of value. This act is a movement in whose execution ever new and higher or deeper values flash forth, i.e., values that were wholly unknown to the being concerned.51 As such, loving is already “ahead of” or “prior to” the movements of preferring, to say nothing of choosing, serving as a guide or pioneer to the latter. It is in

49 Some experiences can admit of both relations of grounding and relations of founding. For example, the lived-body as animate organism can be both grounded in the earth, and the lived-body can be founding for the sense of left and right, while the earth is foundational for the senses of up and down. Loving, as “metaphysical movement” is both grounding for existence – taken in an ontological creative sense – and founding for other acts (such as sympathy, knowing, etc.). 50 See Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. 51 Scheler, Formalismus, 266–267; Formalism, 260–261.

130  Anthony J. Steinbock this sense, and this sense alone that we can attribute a “creative” role to loving to the extent that the range and nature of feelable and preferable values of a being – but not the existing values themselves – are concerned.52 Loving and hating, therefore, do not stand in a dialectical relation; further, loving is not dependent upon or co-dependent upon hating. Experientially, one does not need to hate in order to love; there is no experiential equi-primordiality.53 “Metaphysically” or “ontologically” hate does not have to be in order for loving to exist.54 This will be clarified by showing in what way hating is founded as contrary to loving. Hating already takes place within this movement of loving. More specifically, hating is founded in loving as moving contrary to loving. It does this by presupposing what is revealed through loving (the beloved), as taking it up by negating, diminishing, or rejecting it. Hating is not only the movement of negating the other person and the world as bearers of value, but the movement of negating, as Améry puts it, “its own better origins,” namely, loving.55 In this way, hating is founded in loving as contrary to loving by presupposing what it negates, as it negates. Phenomenologically, insofar as I grasp being loved in any way, that loving essentially “demands” a responsive loving. Or put differently, existentially, any beloved who “grasps” or in any way awakens to generative loving is constituted as person such that this grasping is already a loving movement, a loving “response” to loving in that movement. It belongs to the essence of loving already to be evocative of loving without intending a loving response. As suggested above, if I sense that there is an intention toward a loving response, I would rightly feel manipulated, which would be indicative of the act not being a loving one, but only presented as if it were loving. In any case, hating is a creative “denial” or “refusal” that arbitrarily limits loving against which it, hating, is moving. There is no gap or neutral space, but rather a direct reversal as loving is lived through. This points to the “contrary” and perhaps even paradoxical nature of hating. In his own way, Ortega y Gasset also observes this contrary movement in slightly different terms. He writes that in hate one goes toward the object but against it. In love, one also goes toward the beloved but on its behalf.56 But what happens if I sense hating? Is there a so-called equal demand to hate? What is given even in hating – as a contrary movement “on the basis of” or “through” loving – is still loving. There is no demand to hate – essentially speaking. This does not mean that hating is not possible. Or in a slightly different register, as Gandhi himself observes, if violence is in one’s heart, it is better to be violent rather than be “passive” or cowardly. At least with oppositional violence there is a chance to become non-

52 Scheler, Formalismus, 267; Formalism, 261. 53 Kolnai suggests that already prior to any consideration of an ethics and in a purely phenomenological regard, hate is more dependent upon love than love upon hate. This does not go as far as my contention here, but it certainly points in that direction. See Kolnai, Ekel Hochmut Haß, 140. 54 This relates in significant ways to the relation between pride and humility, and the nonnecessity but historical a priori character of pride. See chapters 1 and 7 in Steinbock, Moral Emotions. 55 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 78. 56 Ortega y Gasset, On Love, 16, 18.

Hating as contrary to loving  131 violent, which is another kind of force and conflict. But this is a different point. Here I am addressing the essential structures of loving and hating.57 Even hating grasps the possibility and demand of loving, since hating moves with and by virtue of loving by moving against it.58 In this way, hating is not merely founded in loving, but is a movement contrary to loving. Again, it is in part what distinguishes hating as a contrary movement from movement of the slovenliness of spirit, which lives in indifference and is antithetical to both loving and hating. It could be tempting to count hating as a “modalization” of loving. But as I understand it, a modalization is a falling away from or a problematizing of something that is counted as a standard givenness or experience, like a discordance in relation to a concordant experience. It can have a genetic development as well and be given as a challenge to an experience like a doubt can be a modalization of an unfolding affirmation of givenness. Hating, however, is a creative elaboration that presupposes loving, but on its own moves contrary to loving. Thus, hating is not a mere modalization of loving. Hating is a contrary movement because it is oriented toward the negation of the very basis that provides what is to be negated in the diminishing of the hated. At its core, it hates the beloved as bearer of value that emerges on the basis of primordial Loving (i.e., in a religious register, the Holy). But even this contrary movement to loving reveals the deep loving of primordial Loving because I “can” “en-act” myself in my freedom to restrict that loving. In that loving, the emphasis is positive, and is oriented toward who or what others are to be as who or what they can become. This entails the freedom to negate; because hating, as moving within or in the “updraft” of Loving/loving bears on all levels as interrelated and interrelating, hating on one “dimension” is a negating on all levels, at least implicitly. Hating is creative in its emergence from the dimension of person, and on the basis of already being beloved. The mystery is how – in an already loving nexus, already within the dynamic coursing movement of loving – hating “emerges.” The response undoubtedly points to “freedom,” personal freedom as creatively and spontaneously emergent. It is a creative de-creating. This opens to the problem of evil. But also because hating is precisely a contrary movement to loving, imbuing all levels of reality, all beloveds are also open to a recovery of the reversal. In the Abrahamic religious traditions, this is known as tikkun olam (reparation of the world) or as “redemption” – provided that we understand this in a dynamic, historical, personal sense. This is why hating can be decisive in many ways, but need not be definitive.

57 Given the “metaphysical” or “ontological” structure of loving, it is at least possible that I can pick up on loving even if another hates me. This would be to see the other him or herself as “beloved,” in their personhood, “humanity,” or “dignity,” myself as beloved, too, even in their hating. This concerns, again, the essential structures of loving and hating, not what may actually happen. 58 Perhaps Kierkegaard could be read the way suggested above when he writes: “Hate is a love that has become its opposite, a love that has perished. Down in the ground the love is continually aflame, but it is the flame of hate; not until the love has burned out is the flame of hate also put out.” “In the same way spontaneous love can be changed from itself and become unrecognizable, since hate and jealousy are still recognized as signs of love.” Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 34, 36.

132  Anthony J. Steinbock

Conclusion My attempt in this article has been to articulate the relation of the act of hating to loving. By distinguishing between feelings and feeling-states, I emphasized how it is important not to reduce the act of hating as an interpersonal emotion to the feeling-state of hatred. (Other precipitated feeling-states emergent from hating might result as well, such as anger, sadness, rage, or even joy or pleasure). Whereas hating as act is a movement, originating from the dimension of person, oriented toward a bearer of value as negating or diminishing that other, loving is a generative movement toward the flourishing or enhancement of the other as bearer of value in its ownmost way, opening to its ever-richer depth. Considering the ways in which hating and loving are related, and distinguishing between grounding and founding relations, I suggested in the final analysis that loving and hating are not coeval or parallel acts. Rather, hating is founded in loving. More precisely, hating is founded in loving as moving contrary to loving.

References Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits. Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Roseneld. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Baier, Annette. “Trust and Anti-Trust,” Ethics 96, no. 2 (1986): 231–260. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Ferran, Íngrid Vendrell. Die Emotionen: Gefühle in der realistischen Phänomenologie. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008. Ferry, Luc. On Love: A Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Hadreas, Peter. A Phenomenology of Love and Hate. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007. Heidegger, Martin. Identität und Differenz (1955–57). Gesammtausgabe 11, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm v. Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006. Husserl, Edmund. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phanomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch Husserliana ed. Marly Biemel, vol. 4. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952. ———. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, Husserliana, ed. Walter Biemel, vol. 6. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954. ———. Logische Untersuchungen: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. II/1. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer. Leipzig: Meiner, 1922. Kelly, Michael. “Phenomenological Distinctions: Two Types of Envy and Their Difference from Covetousness.” In Phenomenology for the Twenty-First Century, ed. J. Aaron Simmons and J. Edward Hackett. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Enda H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Klein, Melanie. “Love, Guilt and Reparations.” In Love, Hate, and Reparation, ed. Joan Riviere and Melanie Klein. New York: W.W. Norton & Company INC, 1964. Kolnai, Aurel. “The Standard Modes of Aversion: Fear, Disgust and Hatred.” Mind 107 (1998): 581–595.

Hating as contrary to loving  133 ———. Ekel Hochmut Haß: Zur Phänomenologie feindlicher Gefühle. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. Ortega y Gasset, José. On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme, trans. Toby Talbot. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 1957/ 2012 reprint. Riviere, Joan. “Hate, Greed and Aggression.” In Love, Hate, and Reparation, ed. Joan Riviere and Melanie Klein. New York: W.W. Norton & Company INC, 1964. Scheler, Max. Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wertethik. Gesammelte Werke. ed. Maria Scheler, vol. 2. Bern: Francke, 1966. ———. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973a. ———. Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Manfred Frings, vol. 7. Bern: Francke, 1973b. Steinbock, Anthony J. Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995. ———. “Saturated Intentionality.” In The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Donn Welton. London: Blackwell, 1999, pp. 178–199. ———. Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. ———. Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. ———. It’s Not About the Gift: From Givenness to Loving. Rowman and Littlefield, Int., 2018. ———. “Erotic Perception: Intersubjectivity, History, and Shame.” In New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, eds., Rodney K.B. Parker and Ignacio Quepons, Vol. 16 (2018). Teresa of Avila, Saint. The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh O. C. D. and Otilio Rodriguez O. C. D, vol. 1. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1976.

9 Do arguments about subjective origins diminish the reality of the real? Thomas Nenon

Abstract: This essay reviews the criticisms Tom Sparrow and Quentin Meillassoux level against transcendental philosophy in general and phenomenology in particular. Of particular concern is the allegation of “correlationism,” a philosophical approach that insists on “the irreducibility of subject and object, thinking and being” and on never considering either term apart from the other. It is argued that correlationism, as a criticism of phenomenology, falls flat for want of understanding the transcendental tradition. It does not accurately describe the phenomenological project, or any philosopher since before Kant. Keywords: phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, new realism, speculative realism, Quentin Meillassoux, correlationism, Tom Sparrow

Just as at least a few representatives of analytical philosophy are now starting to discover some positive sides of transcendental philosophy in general and phenomenology in particular – whether in its Husserlian, Heideggerian, or Merleau-Pontyan strains – it seems that the latest repudiations of phenomenology and transcendental philosophy are coming from within the continental tradition broadly conceived. Thomas Sparrow’s recent book, The End of Phenomenology,1 is a self-proclaimed polemic that expresses frustration with the lack of unanimity about the nature, methods, and topics of phenomenology in its various practitioners and in its tradition as a whole and rehearses some commonplace objections to its fundamental approach. The objections described in this book have been raised by several scholars who have come to be grouped together under the heading of “speculative realism” even though most of them have reservations about that title as a description of their own work, and even though Sparrow admits that it is in the end no clearer than the term “phenomenology” (20). As Sparrow points out, though, what the writers subsumed under each of the general headings “phenomenology” and “speculative realism” share most is that from which they differentiate themselves. For phenomenologists, it would be philosophers and other theorists who in their estimation orient themselves too narrowly and uncritically on methodologies modeled on modern natural science; for speculative realists, it

1 Tom Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Abbreviated in the following simply as “S.”

Arguments and subjective origins and the real?  135 would be phenomenologists and others committed to a version of what they, following Quentin Meillassoux, call “correlationism.”2 Roughly speaking, “correlationism” is a philosophical approach that insists on “the irreducibility of subject and object, thinking and being” (S 86) and on never considering either term apart from the other (M 5). It includes any philosophy that claims that “thought cannot get outside itself in order to compare the world as it is ‘in itself’ to the world as it is ‘for us,’ and thereby distinguish what is a function of our relation to the world from what belongs to the world alone” (M 3–4). Instead of describing how we have knowledge of real things, the things-in-themselves, it limits us to mere appearances, phenomena as the correlates of thinking, instead of as things that can and do exist independently of human thinking. In fact, Meillassoux claims, and Sparrow seems to agree, such philosophies lead to the paradox that our very common conception of the history of the world as predating human existence is incompatible with this approach because there would be no humans available at the time to whom the world could appear. Put in slightly different terms, if we take the necessary elements of our experience that are not derived from empirical knowledge, it’s a priori structures of consciousness, to be of subjective origin, would that not mean that they came into existence with the emergence of human consciousness and therefore not be applicable to entities or events that preceded the existence of consciousness? Meillassoux calls this the “ancestrality” problem. Even though it is not raised by every thinker who is commonly counted as a member, Sparrow suggests that it is a legitimate objection. Moreover, all of the figures Sparrow lists as speculative realists try to develop approaches that avoid the emphasis on consciousness, subjectivity, and forms of idealism that they all agree diminish the reality of the real and some see as limiting the kinds of things that we can and should talk about, things that on their readings seem to fall outside the limits of transcendental philosophy in general and phenomenology as one form of it. Interestingly enough, on Meillassoux’s broader and more ambitious reading, this general tendency infects almost all of modern philosophy including analytical philosophers like Wittgenstein for whom language plays a similar role to the one played by consciousness in transcendental philosophy. The centrality of the notion of “correlation” in phenomenology arises from the role it plays in the Third Section of Husserl’s Ideas I,3 but it becomes clear in Meillassoux’s After Finitude that he sees Husserlian phenomenology as just one more variation of transcendental philosophy in the tradition initiated by Kant. Whereas Sparrow concentrates almost exclusively on phenomenology, Meillassoux refers more often to Kant than to Husserl or any other phenomenologists in his critique of correlationism. For instance, Meillassoux stresses that one important consequence of Kantian correlationism, on his reading, is that the correct measure for truth, correspondence with the objects as they exist in themselves, no longer makes any sense for Kant

2 Quentin Meillassoux, Aprés la finitude (Editions du Seuil, 2006); English translation: After Finitude: An Essay in the Necessity of Contingency. trans. Ray Brassier (London and New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2008). Abbreviated in the following simply as “M,” with the page numbers referring to the English translation. 3 Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch. Husserliana, Band III (den Haag: Nijhoff, 1976), 202ff.

136  Thomas Nenon (and by implication for phenomenologists and other modern philosophers as well) and instead has been replaced by a mere consensus theory of truth. From my own standpoint as a fairly orthodox transcendental philosopher who still finds many insights from Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger compelling, I must confess that I find some of the characterizations of their positions, in particular those of Husserl, in Sparrow’s book, rather puzzling. Of course, it is not unusual for philosophers to present somewhat oversimplified views of their predecessors as the critical starting points for developing their own original positions. Aristotle’s treatment of Plato and the Presocratics can be seen as a classic example of that tendency, and Heidegger’s and Levinas’ depictions of Husserl’s views are examples within the phenomenological tradition as well. But if “correlationism” is supposed to be the view that only those things are real that are the correlates of actual human intentional experiences, and in particular actual human perceptual experiences, then according to my reading, neither Kant, Husserl, or Heidegger is anywhere close to being a correlationist. Kant certainly took himself to be providing a philosophical framework that is consistent with Newtonian physics, and physics along Newtonian lines posits all sort of entities that have never been the direct object of human perception. When Kant calls them appearances in a philosophical instead of an empirical sense, he is just making clear that we cannot conceive of them as not existing in space and time and without thinking of them in terms of categories such as causality. In fact, I cannot think of any major figure who has held a correlationist view since the 18th century and pre-Kantian philosophy. What transcendental philosophers, including Husserl, do believe is that whenever we have good reason to claim that something is, has been, or will at some time be actual, that belief needs to be founded on evidence. In everyday life, if I come home and see that things have been rearranged in my absence, I can reasonably conclude that someone else must have been there even though I did not see them enter or leave. Similarly, when we observe certain features of the earth or the universe and have learned something about the laws governing physical changes through geology or physics, then we can reasonably conclude things about what must have happened on earth and in the universe long before the time when we have good evidence to believe that there were any human beings around to witness those things. What transcendental philosophy asks is what fundamental assumptions we must make if we are going to undertake geology or physics as sciences at all to help us find out what kinds of things and events there are, have been, and likely will be, what laws govern their changes, and what would count as the best scientific evidence for beliefs about them. How does Meillassoux come to the view that this is what Kant and Husserl would perhaps like to maintain but that their philosophical positions will not support? I think a key part of the problem is how he understands Kant’s arguments about the subjective origin of the forms of intuition and the categories and how he implies that the problems with those arguments will apply to other philosophers like Husserl who appeal to structures of thinking or consciousness to explain a priori features of objects in general or certain kinds of objects. Meillassoux’s basic objection is that any argument that would support the notion of subjective origins of the a priori forms of intuition and thinking makes the objects relative to human cognition. It thereby seems to render the properties bestowed upon them by human cognition just as subjective and relative to human thinking as the secondary properties of perceptual objects that tell us more about the nature of embodied human perceivers than about the perceived objects themselves. Since Meillassoux reads the insight into the difference between

Arguments and subjective origins and the real?  137 primary and secondary properties as telling us that secondary properties of objects are subjective in a way that makes them not only unsuitable as scientific descriptions but also rules them out as in any way real properties of the object, he thinks that Kant’s arguments for the subjective origin of the pure forms of intuition and thinking imply that the objects experienced through them are not the real things either. I will explain below why I think that “secondary properties” can be understood in a way that makes them genuine properties too, but first we should see how Kant’s arguments for the subjective origin of the forms of intuition and the categories make them different from secondary properties of things. Let us recall for a moment the basics of how the Kantian arguments about the a priori necessity and hence the subjective origin of the forms of intuition and the categories proceed. The argument proceeds through an analysis of our knowledge of objects and tracing out the various elements involved in this process of coming not just to think but also to recognize an object. For everyday perceptual objects, this includes the kinds of information provided to us by our senses, i.e., colors, smells, textures, etc. that he calls the object’s material. Kant follows the modern tradition, in particular Locke and Hume, in his view that what Locke calls these “simple ideas” are related to one of the five senses with which human beings happen to be endowed. He also accepts the empiricist view that the knowledge the senses provide about the objects of experience is completely particular and contingent. This is what gave rise to Hume’s problem with causality. Some of the most basic features we attribute to physical objects are not derived from any of our specific senses and they seem to possess a necessity that the simple ideas to do not. The puzzle then is how we know them and why do we justifiably take them to be invariant and necessary features of the objects of experience? Take for instance Kant’s arguments for the “subjective origin” of space and time. In addition to the material, contingent features of perceptual objects, we also discover that there are predicates that seem to apply necessarily to them, predicates that are of a different kind, for instance, from secondary qualities: spatial predicates related to their location such as “above/below,” “next to,” “in front of/behind,” “right/left,” etc. and temporal predicates such as “before,” “at the same time,” or “after.” We can imagine that a physical object could have a different location than the one it happens to have or that we could be mistaken about its actual location, but we cannot imagine a physical object that actually exists but does not exist somewhere. Hence, these “formal” predicates are of a different kind than the material ones. They are not tied to one specific sense like color, smell, or sound; nor can we imagine a natural object that does not have spatial or temporal location, in contrast to material predicates that may or may not apply to specific objects (for instance, a sound without a color, much less a specific color, taste, or sound). One helpful way to think of the difference is the way that the material predicates apply to properties that are clearly adjectival in nature, e.g., “blue” or “loud,” whereas the temporal and spatial predicates are in a certain sense adverbial – they tell us the “when” or the “where” of the experienced object. Hence, Kant argues, these forms or “modes” of the way objects are intuited are “a priori” because they are universal and necessary predicates at the formal level – as opposed to the particular and contingent properties given to us as the appearance’s “matter.” Moreover, he argues, they cannot come to us “from the object” – his term is that they are not “of objective origin” – because then they would share those features of particularity and contingency that are shared by all the predicates that come to us through sensibility as

138  Thomas Nenon our only access to natural objects. However, we cannot imagine an object of experience that does not have a spatial or temporal location. Here he is building on Hume’s insight into the lack of strict predictability based on past experiences. For empirical properties, Kant agrees with him, but he thinks that the spatiality and temporality of sense experience are different. They cannot “come from” the object precisely because they do not share that feature of experiences derived from the senses, and so they must come from somewhere else. Since all there is, is either subject or object, Kant comes to the conclusion that they must be “of subjective origin.” Nonetheless, Kant claims they hold for and apply to all possible objects of experience (i.e., possess “objective validity” or “objective reality”) since any experiences of them will necessarily be in terms of these a priori dimensions of sense experience (A 326–329/B 42–44).4 Moreover, the claim that they are necessary and invariant features of the object comes not from an introspection into the hidden workings of the human mind, but from reflection on the necessary conditions of something’s being an object of experience and then working backwards to its origin based on an argument along the lines described above. Kant does not start with the premise that they are subjective in origin and then derive their objective validity from that premise, but rather starts with the premise (a premise based on conceivability) that they are necessary features of the objects and then comes to a conclusion about where they must come from for that premise to hold. Their a priori and formal character is what makes it possible to describe them in sciences that investigate these formal systems as such, namely in geometry which examines the formal characteristics of space as such; arithmetic, which is based on a system of ordered succession; and all of the other formal systems of mathematics that are derived from these two. The arguments for categories such as substance and causality have just this same structure. What is crucial to note here, though, is that the arguments are about elements of our knowledge or about our experience of the object. To say that our awareness of color comes from the object and is thus a posteriori implies also that we could experience an object that doesn’t have a color or that people can experience objects who are color blind or maybe even completely blind. There are people who have never encountered an object of a certain color or taste, and hence cannot know the specific nature of these characteristics since they follow from contingent experiences. Those of us who have those kinds of experiences know it could have been otherwise. But to claim that the forms of intuition or the categories are of subjective origin is a different matter and above all an epistemological question. It asks about how we know about objects at all, and Kant’s argument is that the a priori dimensions of our experiencing and recognizing objects must be there for us to have an experience at all, so that we bring them with us, so to speak. As Hume recognized for notions like causality and substance, we do not first have some experiences and then conclude that most or all of them involve space, time, substance, and causality; nor do believe that our next experiences might be very different in that regard if they are to be experiences at all. That does not mean that there cannot have been objects before there were human beings, but just very simply that they would never have been experienced or discovered by the various sciences if there were not some beings capable of experiencing them as such and thus of

4 My translation. Kant (1996)’s Critique of Pure Reason will be cited using the common convention of listing the page numbers of the original first (A) and second (B) editions.

Arguments and subjective origins and the real?  139 course also if the evidence for them were not experienced spatially and temporally and according to regularities that govern their existence and changes. When Kant nonetheless asserts that the a priori forms of intuition and thinking have objective validity, then that is the opposite of denying that they really are features of those objects. In fact, that is what that assertion claims, namely, that they have objective reality. To be real, or to use Kant’s word, “actual” something does not have to be a “thing-initself.” As a matter of fact, and contrary to Meillassoux’s claims,5 Kant does not recognize that there are or must be any “things-in-themselves,” at least not in the First Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. The famous passage where Kant seems to claim that we must believe that there are things-in-themselves behind the appearances in the same way that we must assume that we must assume some objective, primary properties of the objects that are the basis for the secondary properties along the lines of Galileo and Locke, for example, comes from A 249–250 that he left out of the Second Edition. Based on Meillassoux’s brief comments on the matter, it seems this is the passage he means. There Kant introduces the notion of a noumenal world (mundus intelligibilis) that would be of a fundamentally different kind than the phenomena that are given to us through the senses according to the unity of the categories. He describes a train of thought according to which one might conclude that the notion of appearances as described in the Transcendental Aesthetic would lead directly to a contrasting notion of the objective reality of noumena. One could be tempted to think that the notion of objects presented to us through our senses as appearances would imply the necessity of positing a different kind of object, known through pure thinking that somehow is the true source of that which merely appears and has genuine objective reality: For if the senses merely present things as they appear, then this something would also have to be in itself a thing and an object of a intuition not from the senses, i.e. from the intellect, i.e. knowledge must be possible that contains no sensibility, and that alone has absolutely objective reality, through which objects are presented to us as they are in contrast to the empirical use of our understanding through which things are known only as they appear.6 Meillassoux is not the only one who has failed to note that this entire passage is presented as a possible train of thought, in fact one that was close to Kant’s own at the time of his Inaugural Dissertation, but that Kant now takes to be naive from the standpoint of transcendental philosophy. That is why the verbs in that paragraph are in conjunctive mode. Kant’s own position in the sentences that follow is clear. The categories, pure thinking without the forms of intuition and sensibility are not capable of yielding knowledge of any kinds of objects at all, neither appearances nor things in themselves. By the time of the B edition, Kant has come to a positive notion of things-inthemselves, but these are far from the kinds of things that Meillassoux means by things-in-themselves. For Kant, we are thinking of ourselves as noumenal as well as phenomenal beings in a positive sense when we conceive of ourselves as persons, as moral agents. However, this is certainly not the kind of thing that Meillassoux means when he talks about things-in-themselves. In fact, that is one of the problems for

5 M 31–32. 6 A 249.

140  Thomas Nenon Meillassoux’s ontology, which seems to replicate all of the classic problems associated with traditional versions of physicalism, including how to handle freedom and moral agency. To understand just how much the notion of correspondence remains the measure of truth for Kant instead of coherence (as Meillassoux claims), it is important to take seriously what he says in the Transcendental Principles about the schemata of the categories. The schema for whether an object is actual or not is clear: if you wish to seek objects that correspond to the concepts, would it not be in the experience, through which objects are given to us? . . . The postulate for recognizing the actuality of things requires perception, hence impressions, although not just immediate ones of the object itself that one intends to recognize, but yet also in connection with it based on some actual perception according to the analogies of experience [i.e. causal connection] that lay out all real connections in one experience in general. (A 224–225/B 272) In non-Kantian language: For actuality, it is not enough to think the object, but rather our experiencing of it counts as experience if and only if it is directly or indirectly based on genuine experiences of the givenness of that object through perception. Moreover, to have good reason to take an object to be genuine, one does not have to have a direct experience of it but rather be able to infer its existence based on experiences we do have and our knowledge of things like causal laws. Hence it is true that our specific perspectives about spatial location, temporal order, substantial unity, and actual causal connections are subjective and fallible, but that does not mean that there is not a truth of the matter about the actual spatial and temporal location of events and objects and that there is not a fact of the matter about the substantial unities or the causal laws governing change for Kant. In fact, the analogies of experience make very clear that what we take to be the underlying causal order based on the temporal order of events that we as subjects have observed up until now, what he calls the “time of perception,” can be different from what the calls “time itself,” i.e., objective time so that there is still a robust notion of correspondence at work even with regard to the application of the categories and our perceptions of the a priori forms of intuitions. Or as I put it in a book-length study7 I did on this very topic a long time ago: There is still a robust notion of correspondence at work in Kant’s theoretical philosophy, which is why for him consensus is perhaps an indication, a “ratio cogniscendi” of truth, but the ratio essendi of truth for him is “objectivity” or “correspondence with the object.”8 What we can know a priori is that any object of a possible perception exists at a time, with some location, and subject to some causal laws. We can be mistaken about the actual time, location, or causal connections. Moreover, the realm of possible objects not only

7 Thomas Nenon, Erkenntnis und Objektivität: Kants transzendentalphilosophische Korrespondenztheorie der Wahrheit (Freiburg: Alber, 1986). 8 See A 820–821/B 848–849; see also Nenon, “Konsensus und Objektivität: Hat Kant seine Position aus der Kritik der reinen Vernunft nachträglich revidiert?,” in Akten des 5. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. Manfred Kleinschneider, Rudolf Malter and Gisela Müller (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981), 171–178.

Arguments and subjective origins and the real?  141 can but also always has and always does vastly exceed the realm of actually perceived objects. What tells us whether we are mistaken or not is not just what other people say, but what experience tells us, and experience is something we do not make but undergo. That is why, in the schematism chapter, Kant speaks of experience as “coercing” us (“nötigen” is the German term) to recognize how things are (A 197/B 242). Turning to Husserl, though, Kant’s emphasis on objectivity in the sense of Newtonian physics comes at a cost, and part of the reason that people like Meillassoux can simply dismiss the truth of statements involving secondary qualities is that the notion of objectivity he operates with is much too narrow. In this, Meillassoux’s take on knowledge is not inconsistent with Kant’s much narrower notion of experience and objectivity that was also oriented on Newtonian physics as the ideal of knowledge. Husserl by contrast follows in the tradition of Dilthey and others in the late 19th century who came to the conclusion that Kant had recognized the categories of nature, but failed to recognize the different categories governing history and life, or what Husserl would later come to call the “life-world.” Instead of dismissing all the other things that do not fit the model of mathematical physics as merely subjective and not real, Husserl introduces a philosophical approach that can accommodate our experiences of a whole range of different kinds of things that there are but which do not fit in the model of modern natural science, which is even more explicitly Meillassoux’s guiding model than it is Kant’s. Husserl breaks with modern reductive assumptions, for example, that everything there is, is either a mental or physical thing when he recognizes ideal objects in his criticism of psychologism. He subsequently comes to recognize a much broader spectrum of real things as well, for instance use-object and persons, that cannot be captured in the categories of modern mathematical science, but nonetheless have features we are capable of recognizing and that matter to us even though some of their features are only significant within a specific historical or cultural horizon. The richness of our experience for Husserl includes not just real objects, i.e. physical objects, but the kinds of items and relationships described in formal logic and mathematics, which was the point of Husserl’s critique of psychologism. That does not make real, spatio-temporally located objects any less real. To ascribe the kind of correlationism to him that Sparrow and Meillassoux attribute do would leave him standing accused not just of a fairly naïve form of idealism, but of psychologism as well, since numbers and the laws of mathematics would then be aspects of human thinking rather than the atemporal objects of human thinking. This clearly was not Husserl’s view in the Logical Investigations or in any major writings after that. The richness of the objects we encounter, their “concreteness” also involves much more than Meillassoux and other critics of phenomenology described by Sparrow would recognize. Part of the problem is what Sparrow seems to associate with the term “concrete.” “Concrete” for Husserl means not just that the objects we encounter in our daily lives are located in space and time and have some genuine properties that we as embodied agents discover in our perceptions of them, but that they also come endowed with practical and aesthetic predicates as well. The opposite of the concrete objects for Husserl in the Ideas II, for instance, is the strictly theoretical or naturalistically conceived “abstract” objects. In everyday human life, when we recognize things around us, we form intentions not just about their shapes, colors, weights, and temperatures, but also about whether they are likely to fit or obstruct our purposes, whether they are going to taste good or bad, lead to pleasant or unpleasant experiences, whether they are beautiful or repulsive, and many other things. Moreover, all

142  Thomas Nenon these intentions can be confirmed or disappointed in the further course of experience and this can happen either directly or indirectly, e.g., through the testimony or experiences of others or through causal inferences. So, in the end, I agree with Sparrow who – as opposed to Meillassoux – nonetheless maintains that Husserl remains a good place to start for a philosophical approach that can handle the richness of our encounters with all sorts of things that we discover really do exist and really do have specific kinds of properties, affordances, and aesthetic aspects and that never cease to surprise and often disappoint us. As more of the writings that were unpublished during Husserl’s lifetime have become available over the past few decades, some of the one-sided readings of him as a mere philosopher of reflection trapped in the theoretical attitude are receding, caricatures that critical readers of him within the phenomenological tradition such as Heidegger or Levinas have encouraged as well. What Husserl and transcendental phenomenology cannot claim to say as philosophers is which individual things are real or handy, delicious, or beautiful. In that regard, what Sparrow faults about transcendental philosophy is in a sense true. Transcendental philosophers reflect on what is involved in making those kinds of claims and what kinds of experiences would validate them. Those are what Husserl calls “eidetic structures,” what Heidegger in Being and Time refers to as “categories” for things that are not Dasein and “existentiales” for Dasein. This is the whole thrust of the phenomenological reduction, namely the recognition that philosophers can reflect on the structures of or invariant features of different kinds of experiences and of the contexts within which different kinds of objects can show themselves or seem to show themselves or even elude us. Examples of these kinds of objects include everyday use objects, artworks, other people as minded agents or persons, numbers, the laws of logic, and a whole range of other possible things, but our knowledge about which of them are genuine and what they are like comes to us not through philosophy but through various kinds of experiences – including both everyday and scientific experience. As human beings, we do have those experiences that we can reflect upon as philosophers, but as philosophers we reflect on the structures of those experiences and do not attempt to make claims that only the experiences themselves can ground. That is the whole point of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. That is not to deny their reality, but to recognize the limits of philosophy as such. The transcendental reduction does not deny the reality of all the kinds of things we experience in our daily lives or as scientists, but simply recognizes that it is not our job as philosophers to decide which of them is real or not, whether this meal really does taste good or whether this law really is just or not, but to reflect on the structures of the different kinds of objects experience presents to us and what kinds of experiences would count as evidence for them genuinely being the way we think they are or not. It is everyday experience that tells us about what things really are there, are pleasant or not, in our daily lives. Philosophers cannot substitute for physicists in telling us what kinds of forces really are at work in the universe or for mathematicians in telling us about mathematical states of affairs. If by the things-in-themselves, one means the underlying physical forces governing the universe, then it is the physicist and not the philosopher to whom we should turn. If we want to know if the sky is blue, then all we need to do is appeal to someone with normal eyesight in daylight conditions without overcast. Recognizing how things show up differently in different attitudes and what assumptions are at work in our

Arguments and subjective origins and the real?  143 everyday or scientific experiences is what the philosopher does. It is not clear how this in any way diminishes rather than simply recognizes the reality of the real – whether it be the kinds of things described in modern mathematical physics or the kinds of things we encounter in our daily lives. Now if this way of reading Husserl and some other phenomenologists is correct, then much of what they do is consistent with some of the aims of a least a couple of the speculative realists like Graham Harman, who is also cited extensively in Sparrow’s book, but many of the speculative realists’ critiques of phenomenology fall short. To be sure, there is still plenty of room to criticize Husserl with regard to the clarity of his writings and the terminology he used to characterize his positions. As Heidegger and others after him recognized, Husserl’s self-professed allegiance to transcendental philosophy in the Cartesian tradition and the terminology of modern philosophy he inherits to describe his position – terms like subjectivity, consciousness, selfconsciousness, idealism – can easily give rise to just the kinds of readings that I have tried to argue above fall short of the strongest way to understand his project. Sparrow is certainly also correct that there is no clear agreement among people professing to be phenomenologists about what phenomenological method exactly is, just as there is no clear agreement among philosophers in general about what exactly is and is not philosophy. If it is not clear what it is, then it is not clear what parts or aspects of it are over either. I think that, whether intentionally or not, one thing Sparrow’s book shows us is that there is still much that is worth thinking about and learning from many thinkers who have taken themselves to be involved in the phenomenological tradition, including some of the figures that Sparrow counts among the speculative realists. With regard to Meillassoux, one might note that he is a clear example of what Husserl in his later work calls “objectivism,” counting only that as genuine that fits the very narrow confines of modern mathematical physics. Sparrow says that the common aim of the speculative realists is finally to gain access to what he calls “the great outdoors.” How do we get outside of our heads and the limits of our own subjective thinking? Phenomenology believes that we have been there all the time and the role of the philosopher is to describe the various kinds of things that inhabit the great outdoors and the structures that underlie these various kinds of things. Meillassoux seems to think that the only things that truly inhabit the great outdoors are the kinds of things described in modern mathematical physics. When I think of the great outdoors, I think of the view from the top of the Schauinsland right outside Freiburg. Looking out, one sees villages and much of the city of Freiburg, the blue sky, white or grey clouds, the dark greens of the trees in the Black Forest and the lighter greens of the fields much of the year. I really do think that the greens, greys, and blues are real, that these really are villages, cities, fields, and trees, and that the people around me really are persons. None of those kinds of things fit in the constraints of modern natural science and only some of them, namely the colors, can be reduced to things that can, like wavelengths. So for me the problem is that if one starts with an approach like Meillassoux’s, there is no way to get back to the “great outdoors” or at the least kind of great outdoors that most of us think of when we think of the wonderful expanse and richness of the great outdoors that we do not just think about as philosophers but as living human beings experience all the time.

144  Thomas Nenon

References Husserl, Edmund. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch. Husserliana, Band III. den Haag: Nijhoff, 1976. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. ed. I. Heidemann, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun, 1996. Meillassoux, Quentin. Aprés la finitude. Editions du Seuil; English translation: (2008) After Finitude: An Essay in the Necessity of Contingency. trans. Ray Brassier. London and New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2006. Nenon, Thomas. “Konsensus und Objektivität: Hat Kant seine Position aus der Kritik der reinen Vernunft nachträglich revidiert?“ In Akten des 5. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. Manfred Kleinschneider, Rudolf Malter and Gisela Müller. Bonn: Bouvier, 1981, pp. 171–178. ———.Objectivität und endliche Erkenntnis: Kants tranzendentalphilosophische Theorie der Warheit. Freiburg and Munich: Alber Verlag, 1986. Sparrow, Tom. The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

10 God making An essay in theopoetic imagination Richard Kearney1

Abstract: This essay revisits the concept of theopoetics as a divine becoming human and human becoming divine. It develops an “anatheist” reading of poetic re-creation (God after God) in terms of theopoetic imagination in Western philosophy, literature and culture. It then applies this hermeneutic reading to the contemporary artwork of Sheila Gallagher. Keywords: theopoetics, imagination, anatheism, poiesis, art, hermeneutics Creation is a poem. – Ernesto Cardinal, Cosmic Canticle

Introduction Why is “making” considered a sacred activity for gods and mortals alike? Making something out of nothing. Making something in the image of something else. Creators making creatures while creatures in turn make their creators – in shapes and songs, paintings and poems, dreams and crafts. From the beginning to the end of time. One great game of holy imagination played with hands, mouths, ears and eyes. With bodies and souls. Art as divine–human interplay, again and again. Theopoetics names how the divine [theos] manifests itself as making [poiesis]. The term dates back to the early centuries, meaning both the making human of the divine and the making divine of humanity. As the poet scholar Ephrem of Syria wrote: “He gave us divinity, we gave Him humanity.” Or as Athenasius said in the 4th century: “God became human so that the human could become divine.” Catherine Keller puts it succinctly: “The term theopoetics finds its ancestor in the ancient Greek theopoiesis. As poeisis means making or creation, so theopoiesis gets rendered as God-making or becoming divine.”2

1 A more expanded version of this essay will appear in The Art of Anatheism, ed. Richard Kearney and Matthew Clemente (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). 2 These quotes are from Catherine Keller, Theopoetic Becomings: A Brief, Incongruent History (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming). Keller traces the origins of theopoetics from the participatory mysticism of Patristic authors and the cosmo-theology of Cusanus to a third millennium process cosmology inspired by Whitehead’s notion of God as “Eros of the universe.” In her recent, groundbreaking work, Cloud of the Impossible (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), Keller amplifies further theopoetic insights by Cusanus and Whitehead concerning the “creatable-creating” character of God in dialogue with ideas of infolding-exfolding from Leibniz, Deleuze and the contemporary physics of “planetary entanglement” (see especially 209–210 and 306–316).

146  Richard Kearney Theopoetics carries an attendant claim that first creation calls for second creation – recreation or creation again [ana]: a double act where humanity and divinity collaborate in the coming of the Kingdom. This play of recreation goes by the name of “ana-theism.” Most wisdom traditions involve an original story of creation – or cosmogony – which serves as paradigm for their subsequent spiritual narratives. In what follows, I will draw mainly on Abrahamic and Hellenic narratives to trace a short history of theopoetics before illustrating the notion of sacred play with reference to the work of contemporary Boston artist Sheila Gallagher. My overall suggestion is that certain expressions of artistic imagination offer ways of responding to the call of creation, which precedes and exceeds the abstract systems of philosophy and theology. Theopoetic imagination gives flesh to word and word to flesh. It works both ways.

1. Theopoiesis The use of the term poiein – to make, shape or form – occurs often in the Bible in relation to divine creation. This theopoetic motif features from the start in Genesis (1:1, 1:7, 1:27) where we read, famously, that “In the beginning God created [epoiesen] heaven and earth” (1:1); or, again, “Let us make [poiesomen] man” (1:26). In Proverbs 8, we witness the great primal scene of God’s creation [poiesis] of Wisdom: The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old; I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be [poiesis], When there were no watery depths, I was given birth, when there were no springs overflowing with water; before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth, before he made [epoiesai] the world or its fields or any of the dust of the earth. . . . Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day rejoicing always in his presence. (Proverbs 8: 22–29) In the The Wisdom of Solomon, the formative power of Sophia is even more explicit: God of my fathers and Lord of mercy, who by your Word (logos) made (poiesas) all things, and through your Wisdom (sophia) framed man . . . (Wisdom of Solomon 9: 1–2) These early panegyrics of the divine play of Sophia echo the first book of Genesis in which God creates humans in his own image and likeness. The original Hebrew term yzr plays on the mirroring between the divine Creator [yotzer] who creates [yazar] and the human power to form and shape [yetzer] according to the secret alphabet of creation [yetsirah].3 It is telling that the Lord did not make anything on the seventh

3 See my chapter on the “Hebraic Imagination” in Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination (London: Hutcheson, 1987). For recent pioneering work on theopoetics, in addition to Catherine Keller’s work cited above, see Callid Keefe-Perry, Way to Water: A Theopoetics Primer (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014); Roland Faber and Jeremy Frankenthal, Theopoetic Folds (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); John Caputo, The Folly of God (Salem,

God making  147 day of genesis, leaving it free for humans to complete. The unfinished Sabbath is a gap calling for perpetual recreation – in imagination and action. And Adam and Eve, as first creatures shaped from earth [adamah], deployed their power of “good imagination” [yezer hatov] to engender a human race capable of fashioning a Kingdom in the image of their God. This play of mutual recreation between human and divine is what we call theopoetics. It involves creatures co-creating with their Creator. In this view, God codepends on us so that the promissory word of Genesis may be realized in embodied figures of time and space, image and flesh, art and action. Or as Thomas Mann aptly observes in Joseph and His Brothers, “God created for himself a mirror in his own image . . . as a means of learning about himself. Man is a result of God’s curiosity about himself.”4 But greater than curiosity was desire. For in forming the human, God bore witness to a gap within divinity, a sabbatical crack or fracture from which the life-drive of eros could emerge as desire for its other. God created because he desired a playmate. Someone to consort with, as we know from Hosea and the Song of Songs. Or as the contemporary Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, put it, “Dieu a crée l’homme car on s’amuse mieux à deux.”5 Creation is a love affair. Theopoetics is theoerotics. It is important to repeat that both Genesis and Proverbs declare that God is relation. Not a self-subsisting remote substance but a relationship between two – Yahweh and Sophia, Elohim and Adam – through the medium of a third (the breath of language). Indeed the fact that the Creator is also called by a plural name, Elohim, itself reveals that God is originally a community rather than some autonomous Supreme Being. “Let us make man.” Divine creating is divine speaking from the start, as evidenced in the Hebraic word play on the first and last letters of the alphabet in Genesis 1:1.6 The first

OR: Polebridge Press, 2016); Amos Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Lima, OH: Academic Revival Press, 2001); Colby Dickenson, Words Fail: Theology, Poetry and the Challenge of Representation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Noirin ni Rian Theosony: Towards a Theology of Listening (Dublin: Columba Press, 2011); Patrick Hederman The Haunted Inkwell: Art and the Future (Dublin: Columba Press, 2001); and John Manoussakis, God after Metaphysics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009). It is worth noting here that there are three main terms used to designate “creation” in the Hebrew Bible: poiesis, ktizis and bara. It would require another work to explore fully the different nuances of these usages. 4 Cited in Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, 37. 5 Emmanuel Levinas, “Dialogues with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 47–71. 6 I am grateful to the biblical scholar Stephen Rugg for the following analysis: in the first line of the Hebrew text of Genesis, there is a Hebrew “word” that doesn’t translate. The “word” is constructed of two consonants: the aleph (first letter of the Hebrew alphabet) and the tav (the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet); it is like seeing AZ or AΩ. That “word” has a grammatical purpose in this sentence as the “direct object marker.” Hebrew does not have noun cases and word order is not absolute, so when a direct object needs to be specified, this “word” is placed before the direct object(s). Rhetorically (and theologically), every “jot and tittle” would also be significant. Here we could suggest that the grammatical marker is a sign. “In the beginning God created aleph-tav,” where aleph-tav is a merism for the alphabet and a synecdoche for language. The aleph-tav appears twice (because there are two noun objects).

148  Richard Kearney word of Genesis is dialogue, not monologue, and this is echoed in the opening of St. John’s Gospel, which declares that “In the beginning was the word [logos] and the word was with God.” The preposition “with” [pros] here actually means “toward” or “before,” revealing a relation of face-to-face or person-to-person [prosopon]: a dynamic liaison which mirrors the inaugural scene of Sophia (a feminine noun) playing before the face of the Lord in Proverbs 8. These Jewish and Christian claims to the primacy of relation between persons is later reinforced in the Patristic figure of creation as a Trinitarian dance [perichoresis].7 In Jewish Scripture, the leitmotif of theopoiesis extends well beyond Genesis and the Books of Wisdom to the Psalms and Prophets. Think, for example, of Isaiah 29:16 where the human creature is described as the clay of the potter, the handicraft of the craftsman, the art of the artist. Or, again, recall the Rabbinical and Kabbalistic commentaries on the making of Golems: human-like figures shaped from clay

In the second instance, it mediates (with the conjunction) “the heavens” and “the earth.” Language graphically “holds/pulls together” the merism of heaven and earth. Interpreted thus we could suggest that Eros/language operates primordially as a bridge between two oppositions stuck in thanatos. So to hazard a more contemporary interpretive translation we might read, “At the origins (of time), God created langue, and the heavens and the earth with langue.” (To expand the play of the aleph-tav in Hebrew: the word is sometimes a preposition, translated as “with.”) Langue is then creatively employed as God’s parole (because time and langue are in a sense simultaneous first-creations, langue participates with chronic force and can now be expressed as parole), where God speaks and “there is.” What follows in the story is then a series of distinctions that cannot be maintained separately; each separation is imbued with inherent boundary crossing – evidence of eros at work. I am very grateful to Stephen Rugg’s presentation at my “Eros/Thanatos” seminar at the Department of Philosophy, Boston College, Fall 2016. 7 Perichoresis, or the divine dance of Trinitarian relation, was there from the beginning (see Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance). In Christianity, Sophia – which Proverbs said was created in the beginning – was sometimes identified with Christ as the second person of the Trinity (viz., the famous Hagia Sophia basilica in Constantinople). Sophia was associated at times with the “word” [logos], for example, in the Wisdom of Solomon 9:1–2 as we noted above, where logos and Sophia are used synonymously as equiprimordial powers of creation (of the world and humans): a theme echoed in certain later commentaries on the Prologue of John’s Gospel. It should be noted, however, that in the Nicene Creed (381 AD), the church fathers spoke of the Father “engendering,” rather than “making” the Son – “genitus non factum [poiethenta].” And the later controversy over the “Filioque” of the 7th to 9th centuries, which hierarchically subordinates the third person of the Trinity [pneuma] to the Father “and” [que] the Son, further diluted the radical equity of face-to-face [prosopon] relations between the three divine persons. It is very revealing, nonetheless, that the term “pros” features in the opening sequence of John’s Prologue – “The Word was with [pros] God” – indicating that the Word–Logos–Christ–Son plays “before/in front of/face to face with” the Father (prosopon means face). I am grateful to John Manoussakis for his readings of Sophia and prosopon in his After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). I am also indebted to Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (London: SPCK Publishing, 2016) for his insistence that the human person see itself in continuity with divine creation, in perpetual personal face-to-face relation, and not as some isolated autonomous self. We are “chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world” (see Ephesians 1:4).

God making  149 according to the Book of Creation [Sefir Yetsirah]. One such version tells of how Abraham and his teacher, Seth, were invited by God to study the Sefir Yetsirah for three years “until they knew how to create a world.”8 But, lest they succumb to the temptation of ­idolatry – like Enosh who worshipped his own clay image – humans were admonished not to replace God’s creation but only to repeat it so as better to appreciate the power of divine making. It was good to experiment with the divine letters of creation as art, exploration and invention but not to substitute God with an idol. If one yielded to the temptation of literal imitation, the Golem risked becoming a monster who turns on its creator. And so to prevent such idolatrous destruction, the makers of Golems were exhorted to remove the “shem” (a parchment spelling emeth, meaning “alive”) from their creature’s lips so as to respect the difference between human and divine creation. The point was for humans to participate in divine yetsirah/poiesis in the right manner – namely, abiding by the Way [Torah] of the Creator [Yotzer] – rather than set themselves up as mini-Gods in their own right.9 According to Jewish wisdom, then, we are not divine makers but human makers – finite creatures called to collaborate with God in the completion of Creation. In the later Christian tradition, we find similar calls to cooperate in the coming of the Kingdom by joining the Trinitarian dance of perichoresis, thereby repeating the original act of genesis. Such a collaborative theopoetics between the divine Logos and human action seeks to follow Christ the God-Man in completing the “New Creation” (Galatians 6:15). We read in Ephesians 2:10 that “we are the handiwork [poiema] created by Jesus Christ for good works . . . that we should live in them.” As such, Christianity may be understood as the historical-cultural task of carrying on and carrying out this “poem.” Whence the notion of Christ as Lord of the Dance and Supreme Artist – echoed in the vibrant Christian culture of image-making, both in the iconography of Eastern Orthodoxy and the religious art of the Italian humanist Renaissance and after.10

  8 As cited in Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, 55.  9 On the Talmudic and Kabbalistic readings of the Golem, see Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, 46–48. See also the illuminating account of the Jewish literature of Golem-making in Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1974). Scholem does not hesitate to note the implications of this for contemporary cybernetics and the new technology of virtual simulation and cloning. His critical conclusion is that we should explore the power of making [poiesis] to experiment with “creations of imagination and mind” [tetsirah mahshartith] but not substitute ourselves for God. 10 Kearney, The Wake of the Imagination, 133–138. Since, for Christians, God is made man in the person of Christ, images are permitted and even encouraged, for there is now said to be a legitimate analogy or similitudo between the finite and the infinite, overriding Deuteronomy’s prohibition (“Thou shall have no graven images”). Image becomes the mediator or chiasm between word [logos] and flesh [sarx]. On the notion of Christ as artist–dancer–player see my hermeneutic analysis of the mystical tradition of deus ludens in Richard Kearney, La Poétique du Possible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 269–272. The notion of divine play has an important role in popular Christian culture also, involving different forms of public liturgies, pageants, processions and Passion plays on Holy Feasts and rituals (e.g., Mardi Gras, Corpus Christi, Good Friday, All Saints [Halloween], All Souls, Christmas, the Epiphany etc.), a common feature of many Latin Catholic cultures in particular to this day. We also find it in the notion of Christ as “Holy Fool” and “Lord of the Dance,” where in certain sacred

150  Richard Kearney It is worth noting briefly here that when, in the Greek philosophical tradition, Aristotle seeks a term for the divine mind, he chooses nous poietikos – the mind that “makes.” And in his Poetics [Peri Poietikes] – though now talking of human not divine making – Aristotle describes poetic creation as a mirroring-emplotting [mimesismythos] of life: an art of recreation involving, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, a radical “configuring” of our world. The term poiesis occurs in the very first line of Aristotle’s classic text and regularly thereafter, referring to the transformation of everyday haphazard events (one thing after – meta – another) into a meaningful configured plot (one thing because of – dia – another). And it is by means of such creative remaking of our experience that we achieve healing catharsis: namely, a poetic distillation of our basic drives of “pity” [eleos] and “fear” [phobos] into compassion and serenity. Poetics, in short, involves a “creative redescription” of experience, which replays our actions and sufferings in a storied way that issues in the pleasure and wisdom of art. Configured by the poetic work, we, the audience, refigure our own lived existence.11 We refine our

moments in the liturgical calendar – for example, Shrove Tuesday and the Feast of Saint John (June 21 summer equinox) – in which the faithful are invited to don masks and costumes in a time of Carnival, where the normal rules of time, space, gender, class and behavior are traversed and reversed in a divine comedy of fantasy experimentation and play, where the conventional logic of non-contradiction no longer applies. This gives popular currency to Samuel Colerigde’s definition of poetic imagination as “the yoking together of opposite and discordant qualities.” On this notion of Carnival as sacred time and space, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). See here also Simon Critchley’s fascinating reflections on Oscar Wilde’s account of Christ as supreme artist in Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London and New York: Verso Books, 2012). One finds similar accounts in the work of William Blake, for example: “Jesus and His Apostles and Disciples were all Artists. . . . A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect; the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art. Art is the Tree of Life. . . . The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination; that is God Himself, the Divine body (Hebrew) Jesus; we are His Members. It manifests itself in His Works of Art. . . . Prayer is the study of Art. Praise is the practice of art” (“Engraving on the Laocoon”). It is important to recall in this context that theopoiesis is not confined to works of high art but is also found in the most basic forms of everyday sacred making – of food into feast, of sound into chant, of wool into sacred weaving and couture, and of wood and stone into sacred architecture and furniture (from simple Shaker cabinets to holy chapels and cathedrals). In these forms of common sacred practice, making God is a making good and making beautiful of everyday existence. Religious culture as popular culture. The Sacred in the profane. 11 See Paul Ricoeur on Aristotle’s account of poetics as catharsis and narrative emplotment in Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, Vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2005), 31–51. Aristotle’s philosophy was to exert a considerable influence on Western Christian intellectual culture, especially during the great medieval Scholastic period following Thomas Aquinas in the 13th to 14th centuries; but his potential impact on a Christian aesthetics of poiesis was often overshadowed by the Platonic critique of imagination as a mimetic and mendacious act subordinate to reason. For Plato, the power of making (techne demiourgike in his dialogue, Protagoras) belongs properly to a quasi-divine maker or demiurge half way between the eternal Forms (which are not made but exist outside time and spaces) and human mortals, who are condemned to replicate mere copies and imitations, removing themselves further from the original truth of the Transcendental Ideas, which remain timeless, immaterial and immutable. See my account of

God making  151 passions [pathemata] and are invited to become, in Aristotle’s terms, more serene and compassionate citizens of the polis. Before concluding this preliminary note on theopoetics, let me recite what I consider to be a telling example from modern religious literature. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit poet who combined a Scotist-Aristotelian aesthetics of singularity [haeceitas] with a Biblical-Ignatian belief in the inherent divinity of all things. He describes the moment of literary epiphany as a recreation of creation, or as he puts it, an art of “aftering and seconding,” a motion of “over and overing,” which replays secular experience as sacred.12 Hopkins speaks of a retrieval of past time that, like Proust, repeats forward, proffering new life to memory, giving a future to the past. This poetic revisiting involves a detour of distance and disenchantment, after which we may return to our first experience in a new light, in a second naiveté, over and over. Freud calls this temporal retrieval nachtraglichkeit; although he is speaking of “trauma,” the same après-coup structure is operative in poetic “wonder”: both terms come from a “wound” of shock or surprise that explodes our normal sense of time and space. In Hopkins’s work, this wounding expressed itself in a series of dark sonnets that prefaced his poetic epiphanies: I wake and feel the fell of dark not day . . . Oh the mind, mind has mountains, sheer, frightful, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap may those who ne’er hung there . . . Traversing such dark nights of the soul, the poet returns, in “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection,” to a celebration of ordinary things as micro-theophanies: Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond (“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire”).

the Platonic and Aristotelian theories of imagination in The Wake of Imagination, and my analysis of narrative catharsis in Richard Kearney, “Narrating Pain: The Power of Catharsis,” Paragraph 30, 1 (2007): 51–66; Richard Kearney, “Writing Trauma,” in In the Wake of Trauma: Psychology and Philosophy for the Suffering Other, ed. E. Severson (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2016), 77–90; and Richard Kearney, On Stories (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 12 See my discussion of Hopkins’s anatheist poetics in Richard Kearney, Anatheism. Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 11–12; and in Richard Kearney, “God after God: an Anatheist Attempt to Reimagine God” in Reimagining The Sacred: Richard Kearney Debates God, ed. R. Kearney and J. Zimmerman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 6–18. See also my recent essay, Richard Kearney, “Secular Epiphanies: The Anatheistic Hermeneutics of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 54 (Winter 2015), 367–374.

152  Richard Kearney A Catholic author, Hopkins performs a sacramental reimagining of everyday experience. But this notion of holy repetition is not confined to any other particular religion. It extends to any poetic movement of returning to “God after God.” God again after the loss of God. As in the replay of a child’s game, “gone, back again.” “Fort/Da.” We learn young that what disappears as literal comes back again as figural – that is, as sign and symbol, as a second presence in and through absence. And by symbol here we do not mean untrue or unreal. The return of the lost one – in the case of religion the lost God – may well be the most “real presence,” theopoetically speaking. It may in fact be a more powerful and moving presence precisely because of the detour through separation and letting go. This involves a new notion of time – kairological rather than chronological – a time which traverses and reverses time, as in the Eucharistic formula: “we do this in memory of Him until he comes again.” Theopoiesis is about coming back again (ana) – creating again time-after-time. In a word: ana-poiesis. Theopoetics is anapoetics.

2. Anatheism “Ana” is a prefix defined in the Shorter Oxford English dictionary as: “Up in space or time; back again, anew.” So understood, the term supports the deeper and broader sense of “after” contained in the expression “God after God.” Ana opens a semantic field involving notions of retrieving, revisiting, reiterating, repeating. But, as already mentioned, repeating forwards not backwards. It is not about regressing nostalgically to some prelapsarian past. It is a question, rather, of coming back “afterwards” in order to move forward again. Reculer pour mieux sauter! So it is in this sense that I use the term anatheism as a “returning to God after God:” a critical hermeneutic retrieval of sacred things that have passed but still bear a radical remainder, an unrealized potentiality or promise to be more fully realized in the future. In this way, anatheism may be understood as “after-faith,” which is more than an “after-thought” or “after-affect.” After-faith is eschatological – something ultimate in the end that was already there from the beginning. And that is why the “after” of ana is also a “before.” A “before” that has been transposed, so to speak, into a second after. As Sophia says when she plays before the face of the Lord, “Before he made the world I was there . . . constantly at his side . . . filled with delight, rejoicing always in his presence” (Proverbs 8: 26–29). And this Hebraic sense of ana-chrony is echoed in Jesus’s claim: “Before Abraham was I am.” But let us be clear from the outset: anatheism is not a dialectical third term which supersedes theism and atheism in a sort of Hegelian synthesis or final resolution. True, anatheism contains a moment of atheism within itself as it does a moment of theism. Or to be more precise, anatheism pre-contains both – for it operates from a space and time before the dichotomy of atheism and theism as well as after. The double “a” of anatheism holds out the promise, but not the necessity, of a second affirmation once the “death of God” has done its work. But it differs radically from Hegel’s “negation of the negation” which sees the return as an ineluctable synthesis or sublation (Aufhebung). In contrast to such a theodicy, the “ana” of theopoetics is always a wager – a risk that can go either way. It is a matter of discernment and decision on our part. A replay of wisdom, again and again. The event does not take place behind our backs,

God making  153 irrespective of our agency, like Hegel’s dialectic of Absolute Spirit. There is no “Ruse of Reason.” Anatheism is not some predetermined dialectic leading to a Final Totality. It is not about uppercase Divinity. Au contraire! Anatheism has nothing to do with Alpha-Gods or Omni-Gods. It is about reimaging – and reliving – the sacred in the “least of these.” It is lowercase from beginning to end. Anatheism concentrates, therefore, on unrealized or suspended possibilities which are most powerfully reanimated, if one also experiences a moment of a-theism; the “a-” here being a gesture of abstention, privation, withdrawal, negation.13 A moment which is less a matter of epistemological theory than a pre-reflective lived experience of ordinary lostness and solitude – a mood of angst or abandon – an existential “dark night of the soul” which everyone experiences at some moment in their lives. Even Christ on the Cross, or weeping for Lazarus. This privative “a” of atheism is indispensable to anatheism. But in “a-n-a” we have two A’s, and the second “a” is the “not” of the “not.” The yes after the no, which repeats the first yes of creation. The double A-A of anatheism. A reopening to something new. A dance of twelve steps and more. After all. So, I repeat, the “ana” is not a guarantee of ineluctable rational progress. The end of religion brings us back to the beginning of religion – to a foretime preceding the division between theism and atheism. And in this respect, we might think of John Keats’s famous definition of poetic faith a “willing suspension of disbelief,” a returning again to Adam’s experience on the first day of creation when everything was fresh and up for grabs, when anything could happen, for better or for worse. Keats calls this originary moment of not-knowing “negative capability” – “the ability to experience mystery, uncertainty and doubt, without the irritable reaching after fact and reason.”14 And it has echoes, I think, of Kierkegaard’s famous “leap of faith” in Fear and Trembling. A sacred repetition, not to be understood as a regression to some original position, but as an originary disposition of openness to the radical incoming Other.15 Abraham has to lose his son as given in order to receive him back as gift; he has to abandon Isaac as possession in order to welcome him back as promise. Isaac is not Abraham’s (as extension, acquisition, property, projection); he is another’s, another, a gift of the Other (the return gift of what Kierkegaard calls the “Absolute”). In short, theopoetic faith is a retrieval of something after you’ve lost it. It involves the repeating of the former as latter, of the earlier as later – a replay which surpasses the model of liner time as one moment succeeding another in favor of a time out of time:

13 See my analysis of Paul Ricoeur’s “Religion, Atheism, Faith” in The Conflict of Interpretations, Anatheism: Returning to God After God, ed. Richard Kearney (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 71–81. 14 John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 193–194. 15 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de silentio, trans. A. Hannay (New York: Penguin, 1985).

154  Richard Kearney an epiphanic moment (Augenblick or Jetzzeit) where eternity crosses the instant.16 “Ana” is a prefix that seeks to capture this enigma of past-as-future, before-as-after.17 To say this is not, however, to deny that ana also involves historical time. Far from it. Infinite time is in-finite, as Levinas reminds us; it traverses finite temporality and cannot exist without it. As such, anatheism in its current manifestation does indeed coincide with a concrete historical situation that comes after the death of God culturally, socially and intellectually. It is marked by the announcements of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud – by the atheist exposés of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the modern critique of Ideology, and so on. It is something that very much expresses a typical modern anxiety in the face of what Max Weber terms the “disenchantment” of the world, the desacralizing of society, the general malaise of the abandonment of God and loss of faith. In this sense, anatheism is indeed an historical-cultural phenomenon that engages with our contemporary secular humanist culture. But not in any teleological manner, that is, in the sense that we were ignorant and have now seen the light – that all faith was delusion and we are finally free at last! For anatheism, losing the illusion of God (as sovereign superintendent of the universe) offers the possibility of reopening oneself to the original promise of the sacred Stranger, the absolute Other who comes as gift, call, summons, as invitation to hospitality and justice in every moment. In sum, as someone or something that was lost and forgotten by western metaphysics and needs to be recalled again.18 And here, I think, we can move from the historical formulation of the anatheist question – what comes after the disappearance of God? – to the more existential one: how do we experience this today in our concrete lived existence? This is why anatheism calls not for new theories but for new “examples” and “testimonies” of the anatheistic moment in art and action. It is why anatheism needs theopoetics: scriptural, literary, visual portraits of lived abandonment and disillusionment followed by a turning (what Socrates called periagoge, what Augustine called conversio). The negative moment of letting go is, let me repeat, indispensable to a proper appreciation of anatheism. Without it we have cheap grace – God as comforting illusion, quick fix, opium of the people. I often think here of Dostoyevsky’s sense of faith through radical alienation, “true faith comes forth from the crucible of doubt,” or of the “dark night of the soul” powerfully depicted in the mystical poetry of John of the Cross or Gerard Manly Hopkins, mentioned above – or of Christ’s

16 For philosophical interpretations of this epiphanic moment, see Kierkegaard’s treatment of the “Instant” (Augenblick) and “Repetition” (Wiederholung) in Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin, trans. A. Hannay (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2015) as well as the ontological readings of these terms in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010). One would also do well to see the later deconstructive readings of these terms by Derrida and Caputo. 17 For kairological and eschatological notions of ana-time, see Richard Kearney, “Epiphanies of the Everyday: Toward a Micro-Eschatology” in After God, ed. J. Manoussakis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); and John Manoussakis, The Ethics of Time: A Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Change (New York: Continuum, 2016). 18 On the critique of ontotheology as a double forgetfulness of Being and God see the deconstructive readings of Heidegger, Derrida and Caputo and my own hermeneutic treatment of this theme in Poétique du Possible and The God who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001).

God making  155 radical sense of abandonment on the Cross. These are all concrete moments of emptying (kenosis) which open the possibility of a return to the inaugural moment of anatheism: the wager of saying yes to the Stranger. This primal wager is first-and-foremost an existential one – not a purely logical one à la Pascal (which is more a wager of knowledge than of flesh, epistemological rather than ontological). The anatheist wager – to turn hostility into hospitality – signals the inaugural moment of all great wisdom traditions. And with respect to Abrahamic theopoetics specifically, it invites us to recall certain primal scenes of hospitality recounted in the Scriptures and illustrated in great works of religious art: viz., Abraham and Sarah as they encounter the strangers in Mamre, Mary faced with the stranger called Gabriel, the disciples meeting the risen stranger at Emmaus.19 Which brings us to the final part of our reflection: anatheism as theopoetic art.

3.  Theopoetic art: anatheist imaginings Here I will only consider one example of theopoetic art.20 Elsewhere (Anatheism and Reimagining the Sacred), I have explored the role of anatheism in a number of literary writings, from Hopkins and Proust to Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Here I propose to look at one artistic work which I believe powerfully illustrates this phenomenon: Sheila Gallagher’s Pneuma Hostis. My suggestion is that works of art and imagination are more likely to express the superabundance of meaning, seeded by the ongoing process of theopoiesis, than the purely conceptual systems of speculative metaphysics and dogmatic theology. The polysemantic excess of theopoetics epitomizes the continuous creation of God, which in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, “prolongs itself in history and culture.” Paintings are more embodied than doctrines. Art is more incarnate than dogma. Orthopoiesis – like its twin orthopraxis – precedes orthodoxy. Indeed, it is important to recall that theory is itself a derivation of poiesis and only retains its pedagogical force by acknowledging its creative origin in the latter.21 More simply put: images are more 19 On celebrated theopoetic paintings of hospitality and strangers, in addition to those analyzed in this essay, see also my treatment, in Anatheism, of Botticelli’s Cestello Annunciation (1490), Rembrandt’s famous etching series of Emmaus, and Chagall’s “Abraham and Strangers.” One might also include films here, citing such classic examples as Babette’s Feast (based on story by Karen Blixen) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. On the notion of artistic making (icon making and bell making) as a divine call to human co-creation – which excludes no one – see Jana Trajtelova and Anthony Steinbock, “Transcendence as Creativity: Vocation in Andrei Tarkovsky,” in The Yearbook on History and Interpretation of Phenomenology, ed. Jana Trajtelova (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016), 139–175. Theopoetic art is exemplary of human–divine co-creation, but it is not exclusionary (or elitist). Everyone is called to participate in the art of ongoing poiesis in many different mansions, great and small, sacred and secular, miraculous and banal. Every time anyone acts, speaks, or makes, one is participating, for better or worse, in the creation or decreation or recreation of the Kingdom. 20 Sheila Gallagher owns the copyright to the images of Pneuma Hostis and Jacob’s Ladder. They are included and used with her kind permission. On the derivation of intellectual concepts from imagination, see Kant’s argument for 21  the primacy of transcendental productive imagination in The Critique of Pure Reason,

156  Richard Kearney

Image 10.1  Sheila Gallagher: Pneuma Hostis

powerful than ideas because they are more sensible, more tangible, more down to earth. They invite us to a “carnal hermeneutics” of sight, sound, taste and touch. They move and mobilize our being. And here we should not forget that the Latin word for Sophia is sapientia, reminding us that primal wisdom originally comes from sapere, to savor and taste. The savvy of imagination precedes all speculative savoir. And it is important to recall that theopeoetic imagination is not confined to high art but more commonly manifests itself in ordinary ritual cultural practices around icons, statues, paintings and moving images. 3.1 Gallagher’s Pneuma Hostis Pneuma Hostis features in Gallagher’s 2013 New York show entitled Ravishing Far/ Near, a phrase borrowed from the French mystic, Margaret Porete, who burned at

Schelling’s claim that philosophy and theology are derived forms of an “unconscious poetics of nature,” or Nietzsche’s argument that metaphysics is a form of masked mythology – “an army of mobile metaphors” – that has forgotten its own mytho-poetic origin (a point later developed by philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida and Ricoeur).

God making  157 the stake for believing she was part of a divine love affair. Pneuma Hostis – meaning “Spirit Host-Guest” – is a flaming halo created out of gold-leafed cigarette butts. It is a circular maze mandala in the form of a commercial Lasko window fan modeled on the one installed in the artist’s Boston studio to clear smoke and toxic fumes from her workspace. The used butts – is there anything lower! – are combined with fan blades in the shape of a gold host – is there anything higher? And this combinatio oppositorum sets in motion a dance between life and death, inhalation and exhalation, celestial sky and downtrodden earth, the addict and the saint.22 Gallagher’s image is polycoded in both form and matter. It offers the viewer multiple possible readings. Here are some from a theopoetic perspective. The rotating icon-fan mimes a communion host. It takes the form of a gold monstrance used in the Catholic rite of Benediction to exhibit Eucharistic bread to the public. As such, Gallagher’s sacred-profane host replays the “exposition” of the inner core of divinity, namely the chora, which contains the uncontainble. The womb that incubates the holy. The flesh that grounds the Word in the smoke and ashes of incinerated butts. The mother host (hostis) who invites each viewer to become a guest (hostis) in the image-play of spirit (pneuma). Pneuma Hostis is hostess to the holy in the very least of things. It is the chiasmic crossing of the sacred and the secular, a maze of ladders moving upwards and downwards, sideways and backways. Like the ladder of Jacob’s dream featured alongside Pneuma Hostis in Gallagher’s New York show, another open-ended structure equally composed from gold-leafed butts, which extends the Christian communion host to the famous Jewish narrative. And this inter-iconic play between the two works performs the primacy of relation over self-enclosed substance, of open allusion over hermetic enclosure. Pneuma Hostis invites us to enter and leave its space, just as Jacob’s Ladder invites us to ascend and descend. Both works solicit movement and migration, not security and stasis. They beg for visual interpretation, again and again. This insistence on openness and incompletion is also embodied in the gaps between the four Lasko blades which make up the round circle. There are eight panels in the gold radius itself, four filling and four emptying. It is hard to tell which is which; but the negative spaces are unavoidable to the eye, suggesting there are cracks, fractures and differences in the most holy of things. The image is formed from both the rotator blades of the fan and the four spaces in between them where things (air, dust, wind, fumes) pass through. Faced with the play between positive and negative, figure and ground, we cannot tell which is which. The eye spins, the spirit breathes. Gallagher’s image play is material as well as formal. From a Christian perspective, one could say that Pneuma Hostis monstrates the Mater of matter: at once mater dolorosa and mater beatifica. Or as the Greek Fathers put it: the host-womb is both theodochos (bearer of the God who comes to it) and theotokos (bearer of the God who comes from it). Gallagher is no stranger to theology. Her golden hostis is a carrier of the more in the less, of the inexhaustible extra in the flesh of matter. It is a chora which serves as a chorus (same Greek root) mediating between the gods invoked on stage and the audience which beholds them.23 In provoking a multiplicity of readings, Gallagher’s

22 See Rohr, The Divine Dance, 28–31. 23 On the interreligious power of this work and other non-texual icons and rituals, see not only Rohr 2016 but also Patrick Hederman, Anchoring the Altar: Christianity and the

158  Richard Kearney

Image 10.2  Shelia Gallagher: Jacob’s Ladder

art icon serves as a material matrix for visitors always on the way, inviting viewers to return again and again (ana). So doing, it performs a play of anatheist welcome. It is as if Gallagher is offering us a cracked golden bowl – half-full, half-empty – where opposites convene. A meeting house between same and other, more and less, plenty and lack, grace and sin. Gallagher writes: The image points to the crossing of the sacred and the profane. This is a central notion of anatheism which informs the idea of returning to God “after” (ana) God, of rediscovering the holy in happenstance, the iconic in the ordinary, the highest in the lowest. Here the sacramental mingles with the banal, and transcendence can be found in the most base of everyday things. In short, ana-theism is a way of retrieving the sacred in the “least of these” – even in discarded smoked-out butts.24 Work of Art (Dublin: Veritas, 2002); and the recent work of Marianne Moyaert, “Toward a Ritual Turn in Interreligious Theology, ” Harvard Theological Review 111 (2017): 1–23. 24 See Sheila Gallagher, “Artist’s Note on Cover Art,” in Reimagining the Sacred, 259–260; see also Sheila Gallagher and Richard Kearney, Ravishing Far/Near (New York: Dodge Gallery Publications, 2013).

God making  159 Using terms of mystical theology, familiar to Gallagher, we might say that she combines the apophatic medium of pneuma (smoke, breath, air, spirit) with the kataphatic medium of hostis (matter, flesh, the communion bread of touch and taste). She plays ingeniously on the double entendres of her twinned title: Greek pneuma as natal and terminal breath; Latin hostis as guest and enemy. So doing, the artist mixes word-play with image-play in a way that is wry but not whimsical, mischievous but not facetious. Iconostasis and iconoclasm in one and the same breath. Gallagher’s host testifies to the wrestle between hostility and hospitality at the heart of every religion. She is bold. She does not shy from the wagers involved: We hear the age-old ambivalence of religion as both sacrificial violence and salvific healing. What are we to make of this double legacy today, when wars are still waged in the name of One True God? And where so many still search and work for healing and peace? No work of art ever stopped a tank, as Seamus Heaney said. But he added: “The end of art is peace”. Might that this little image of alchemical play be an intimation of such peace.25 Theopoetics is about making peace as well as making art. Gallagher’s anatheist imagination brings poiesis and praxis together.

Conclusion So let me conclude by repeating the question motivating my reflections throughout: why do we need art to recover God after God? Why look to poetry and painting rather than doctrine and theology? Why is Creation a matter of making as well as revealing? Because, we hold, poetics is the first bridge between word and flesh. Theopoetic imagination is the Janus-face looking back to Creation and forward to the Kingdom. It is the medium and membrane that moves us, that makes ideas of Triune divinity touch our lives, reminding us that abstract disputes about Filioque’s and other dogmas – dividing our churches for centuries – are but footnotes to the real work of theopoetics: us “making” God as God makes us. When it comes to divinity, poiesis, not theoria, has the last word. Orthopoiesis trumps orthodoxy. In the beginning, God creates Sophia. In the end, Sophia recreates God.

References Caputo, John. The Folly of God. Salem, Oregon: Polebridge Press, 2016. Critchley, Simon. The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. London and New York: Verso Books, 2012. Dickenson, Colby. Words Fail: Theology, Poetry and the Challenge of Representation. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Faber, Roland and Frankenthal, Jeremy. Theopoetic Folds. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

25 Gallagher, “Artist’s Note on Cover Art,” 259–260.

160  Richard Kearney Gallagher, Sheila and Kearney, Richard. Ravishing Far/Near. New York: Dodge Gallery Publications, 2013. Hederman, Patrick. The Haunted Inkwell: Art and the Future. Dublin: Columba Press, 2001. ———. Anchoring the Altar: Christianity and the Work of Art. Dublin: Veritas, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010. Kearney, Richard. La Poétique du Possible. Paris, France: Beauchesne, 1984. ———. The Wake of Imagination. London: Hutcheson, 1987. ———. The God who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion. Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001. ———. On Stories. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. ———. “Narrating Pain: The Power of Catharsis.” Paragraph 30 1 (2007): 51–66. ———. Anatheism: Returning to God after God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. ———. “God After God: An Anatheist Attempt to Reimagine God.” In Reimagining the Sacred: Richard Kearney Debates God, ed. R. Kearney and J. Zimmerman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, pp. 6–18. ———. “Writing Trauma.” In In the Wake of Trauma: Psychology and Philosophy for the Suffering Other, ed. E. Severson. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2016, pp. 77–90. Keefe-Perry, Callid. Way to Water: A Theopoetics Primer. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014. Keller, Catherine. Cloud of the Impossible. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. ———. Theopoetic Becomings: A Brief, Incongruent History. New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de silentio, trans. A. Hannay. New York: Penguin, 1985. ———.The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin, trans. A. Hannay. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2015. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Dialogues with Emmanuel Levinas.” In Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. 47–71. Manoussakis, John. After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009a. ———. God After Metaphysics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009b. ———. The Ethics of Time: A Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Change. New York: Continuum, 2016. ni Rian, Noirin. Theosony: Towards a Theology of Listening. Dublin: Veritas, 2011. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, vol. 1. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2005. Rohr, Richard. The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation. London: SPCK Publishing, 2016. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Trajtelova, Jana and Anthony Steinbock. “Transcendence as Creativity: Vocation in Andrei Tarkovsky.” In The Yearbook on History and Interpretation of Phenomenology, ed. Jana Trajtelova. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016, pp. 139–175. Wilder, Amos. Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination. Lima, OH: Academic Revival Press, 2001.

11 Husserl’s awakening to speech Phenomenology as “Minor Philosophy” Nicolas de Warren

Abstract: The aim of this essay is to outline a novel way of approaching and reading (and ultimately: writing about) Husserl’s phenomenological thinking. Although Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy is rarely considered from either the point of its materiality in language or as a form of discourse, this paper examines how Husserl conceived of his thinking as requiring an original form of writing and fashioning of philosophical discourse. Husserl’s legendary research manuscripts and the unique style of their composition (in his own kind of shorthand) are essential to his redefinition of philosophy as a modernist project of philosophical research. As this paper argues, when approached from the materialization of his writing and form of discourse, Husserl’s phenomenology can be seen as a type of “Minor Philosophy,” by which is here understood, a type of doing philosophy that struggles to create novel philosophical concepts within established – inherited and institutionalized – dominant languages of philosophy. Keywords: phenomenology, Husserl, Minor Philosophy, manuscripts, language Der eigentliche und zentrale Sinn der Philosophie Edmund Husserls ist heute immer noch unbekannt. – Eugen Fink Alle theoretische Forschung . . . terminiert doch zuletzt in Aussagen. – Husserl

1.  Husserl’s modernism Much as Heidegger writes, “through and from what is the artist that which he is? through the work,” so in the case of Husserlian phenomenology, Husserl is through and through his oeuvre.1 Ever since the first volumes in the early 1950s, the Husserliana has progressively expanded as well as complicated our view of the bracing magnitude of Husserl’s phenomenological enterprise, and especially during the past decade, the appearance of hefty volumes on eidetics, the reduction, and the life-world has provided more than ample evidence for the declaration that we are approaching

1 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1.

162  Nicolas de Warren a “level at which the ‘real’ Husserl can be received.”2 The question of the “real” Husserl, shorthand for question of Husserl’s philosophical identity and significance, remains a topic of dispute ever since the celebrated “breakthrough work” of the Logical Investigations. The subsequent transformation of Husserl’s phenomenology into a transcendental enterprise in Ideen I, indeed, whether there was such a profound transformation over the course of this thinking, further provoked intense divisions among Husserl’s students and permanently defined the fault lines of partisanship for successive generations of Husserl’s detractors and adherents. In assessing Husserlian phenomenology today, the question of the “real” Husserl is fraught with even more entanglements given the demand of tailoring Husserl’s image to the unilateral demand of contemporary relevancy and institutionalized status quo. Husserl continues to be a philosopher of many lives and after-lives, none of which seem to correspond exactly with the moving image of Husserl’s thinking. Within Husserl’s vast corpus of writings, his artistic oeuvre, where does the “real” Husserl take place? This question does not admit of any straightforward response as it compels us with its complexity to address directly what it meant for Husserl to speak (and thus think) “in phenomenology.” There is arguably a defining aspiration and characteristic historical self-awareness in Husserl’s thinking that qualifies his phenomenological enterprise as a project of modernism. Although to be sure, modernism in the arts and intellectual culture at the beginning of the 20th century took on different forms, with not all claims to modernism being equal, that peculiar combination of anachronism and emancipation which is detectable in Husserl’s phenomenological project makes for a philosophical form of modernism that was not just accidental or fortuitous. On the one hand, Husserl understood his philosophical life-work as a response to the modernist imperative, in Rimbaud’s celebrated declaration, “il faut être absolument moderne.” One must be absolutely modern. This drive towards a philosophical modernity spans Husserl’s thinking from the Logical Investigations to his unfinished Crisis of the European Sciences, and indeed, unlike other contemporaries whose faith in modernism flagged or failed after the First World War, Husserl’s conviction, at once philosophical and personal, only became more fervent. On the other hand, Husserl’s phenomenological modernism understood itself without any apologies or compromise, as Lev Shestov so acutely recognized in his essay Memento Mori. On Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Knowledge, as an attempt to realize the original Idea of Philosophy, as manifest in Greek philosophy, and, especially, in Plato.3 This Idea was not only to establish a theoretical foundation, as Husserl understands it, for knowledge, but, even more significantly, through such a theoretical foundation, to provide a basis for human existence in knowledge, and hence bring to maturity humanity itself. There is something at once revolutionary and anachronistic with Husserl’s thinking, as perhaps with all genuinely fruitful forms of modernism. This constitutive dimension of Husserl’s thinking as both “absolutely foreign” in its novelty and as absolutely traditional in its faitfulness to philosophy’s most primitive, historically and conceptually, Idea of itself finds numerous explicit expressions in his writings. As Husserl understands, “the transcendental

2 Sebastian Luft, Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 6. 3 Shestov’s essay is conveniently available in English translation on-line: http://shestov.phonoarchive. org/pc/pc32_1.html

Husserl’s awakening to speech  163 reduction is a kind of transformation of one’s whole way of life, one that completely transcends all life experience heretofore and that, due to its absolute foreignness, is hard to understand both in its possibility and actuality. The same holds correspondingly for a transcendental science” (EB, 133). This foreignness is evident from the envisioned form of transcendental philosophy as a science of transcendental subjectivity. When placed against the broader canvas of the history of philosophy, the proposal of transcendental subjectivity as the “original field of all reason and forms of reason” can be seen as a post-Kantian transformation of an original Socratic ideal of philosophy as self-knowledge (Hua VII, 28). As Husserl writes, “self-knowledge, but only radically pure or transcendental self-knowledge, is the source of all the knowledge that in the ultimate and highest sense is genuinely and satisfyingly scientific” (Hua VIII, 167). In the narrower confines of 20th-century philosophy, this bold claim, despite its Socratic allure, that “the all embracing science of transcendental subjectivity” is the one and only genuine philosophy, might strike our ears as anachronistic – as it should, in the sense of confronting us with a philosophical claim that appears remote from the current of the times and “all habits of thinking up to now” (die gesamte bisherigen Denkgewohnheiten), which, indeed, the inauguration of phenomenological thinking seeks to throw out of joint (Hua III, 5). The aim of these reflections is to propose a different way of approaching and reading (and ultimately: writing about) Husserl’s phenomenological thinking. The proposal of this essay is to consider Husserl’s phenomenology as a kind of “Minor Philosophy,” by which is understood, a form of doing philosophy that must struggle to create novel philosophical concepts within established – inherited and institutionalized – dominant languages of philosophy. Like other forms of modernism, Husserl’s combination of novelty and anachronism played itself out on the terrain of language, and specifically: phenomenology as a philosophical language, as both the medium and materiality of its thinking. The claim explored here is not that Husserl’s phenomenology is unique as a form of “Minor Philosophy.” Rather, the claim is to understand productively Husserl’s thinking as “Minor Philosophy” of its own unconscious making.

2.  Awakenings to speech Announced in the title of Husserl’s presentation of transcendental phenomenology in Ideen I, the question “What is phenomenology?” is inseparable from the question “What is philosophy?” In the title Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologische Philosophie, we are to discern two horizons: pure phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy. If Ideen I ushers a passage to pure phenomenology, pure phenomenology facilitates in turn a passage to phenomenological philosophy. As Husserl develops in his lectures, Erste Philosophie, phenomenological philosophy brings to fruition the idea of philosophy, as originally, albeit partially manifest in Plato and as identical to, as Husserl formulates in the Krisis, the idea of Europe. Contrary to the commonplace image of phenomenology (a term so diluted today as to be nearly empty), Husserlian phenomenology does not represent a new theory, or assemblage of theories, speaking to so-called “timeless” philosophical problems (mind-body, existence of the external world, first-person experience, etc.), but rather a new discipline of research, a new form of thinking. Much as with his Moravian contemporary Freud, Husserl claims to have discovered a new field of research (as Columbus discovered a

164  Nicolas de Warren new continent – a favorite analogy for Husserl borrowed from his mentor Brentano), for which he invents the new science of transcendental phenomenology. Both of these features of Husserl’s thinking – pure phenomenology as new field of research and phenomenology as passage to philosophy – are reflected in Husserl’s insistence that phenomenology is a method. In opening a new field of research, phenomenology is a method that follows its proper object of investigation; the method must be appropriate to its object. Husserl’s transcendental method of reduction thus reverses Kant’s reversal of Aristotle: if, for Aristotle, scientific method follows the object, for Kant, the object follows the method (e.g., Kant’s image of reason as tribunal). The phenomenological method of reduction, however, is not only the way in which the world opens itself to thinking. Method is equally an awakening of thinking to itself. In this regard, the method of suspension and reduction revitalizes and reinterprets the original image of philosophical thinking. As Husserl himself proposes, “the paradoxical situation of Plato’s philosophy repeats itself” in the paradoxical situation of the phenomenological reduction.4 As Eugen Fink echoes in his essay “Was will die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls?”: “The definiting paradoxical situation of Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy can be illustrated with Plato’s analogy of the cave.”5 If, as Merleau-Ponty insightfully writes, “the philosopher is the person who wakes up and speaks,” Husserlian phenomenology is an unprecedented historical awakening of philosophy to its own speech. Following Husserl’s suggestion, Fink considers Plato’s allegory of the cave as a fitting image for Husserl’s phenomenological conception of the “permanent situation of human existence in the world,” or, in Husserl’s own terminology, the general thesis of the natural attitude. Included within this embracing thesis are “all the habits of thinking up to now,” as historically deposited in grammars of philosophical discourse. Philosophical concepts are congealed reflex-actions of thinking or, more precisely, a reflex of thinking that truly does not think. The paradoxical situation of phenomenological thinking – much as with Plato’s speculative thought – consists in the dual problem of liberation from the world (from the cave of the natural attitude), and return to the world. The violence of emancipation from captivity to the world – recall that the prisoners are chained to the wall in Plato’s allegory – translates into a violence in and against language. As Fink stresses: “Those others who are chained in the cave will not be able to understand [the liberated and returning philosopher].”6 The price of the philosopher’s emancipation from the cave is his incomprehensibility to other human beings. This incomprehensibility is foremost registered with the unintelligibility of philosophical discourse for others. In terms of phenomenology’s repetition of the Platonic paradox of philosophy, the problem of phenomenology’s awakening in speech is acute. In Fink’s influential formulation, the paradox of Husserlian phenomenology is essentially threefold: the paradox of the situation of expression; the paradox of phenomenological statements; the paradox of transcendental determination.7 As

4 K, I 4. 5 Eugen Fink, Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 158. 6 Ibid., 160. 7 As Fink presents in his essay “Edmund Husserl in der gegenwärtigen Kritik,” Studien, zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 153–155.

Husserl’s awakening to speech  165 Fink writes, “all habits of thinking, ways of understanding, concepts, and words” are rooted in the “captivity” of the world, or natural attitude. This distance from the world necessarily condemns phenomenological discourse to being misunderstood by others but also, we might insist, by itself. As Fink writes in a letter to Gaston Berger: the phenomenological reduction “cannot be presented by means of simple sentences in the natural attitude. It can be spoken of only by transforming the natural function of language.”8 What would it mean to transform the “natural function of language” into a functioning phenomenological discourse? Can there even be a distinct philosophical and/or phenomenological function to language? For Fink, phenomenology can only speak in the form of “indications” (anzeigende Form) or “formal indications” (Heidegger’s tracks are here visible); for Merleau-Ponty, philosophical speech must take the form of an “indirect language.” At first glance, Husserl does not seem to share Fink’s heightened awareness of the paradoxical situation of phenomenological thought in terms of language – even if Husserl himself suggested the analogy with Plato’s famous allegory. Husserl opens his “General Introduction” to Ideen I with the statement that we are seeking the way into this science [pure phenomenology], we characterize its unique position, relative to all other sciences, and we aim to demonstrate it to be the fundamental science of philosophy [. . .] is an essentially new science, one that by virtue of its very distinctiveness, lies far afield of natural thinking.9 After introducing his readers to the aims and ambition of this new science, as well as retrospectively clarifying misunderstandings of his earlier Logical Investigations, Husserl concludes with a set of suggestive comments regarding philosophical concepts, technical vocabulary, and their contaminated heritage. Although these remarks on the discourse of phenomenology might at first appear inconspicuous, tucked away as an afterthought, if we ignore the full implications of these remarks, we fail to grasp a critical dimension to Husserl’s thinking, its originality, and significance. As Husserl writes, he wants to “close these introductory words with a brief consideration of terminology” (Hua III/1, 8), and he identifies a number of terms that he aims to avoid due to the “confusing obscurities and many significations clinging to them in general, and also because of the notorious philosophical doctrines that, as an evil heritage from the past, are combined with them.” A priori, a posteriori, Idea, and Ideal are here identified. As Husserl makes known, in order to keep the “supremely important Kantian concept of idea cleanly separated from the universal concept of (either formal or material) essence,” he has decided to introduce “a foreign word” with the “terminologically unspoiled name Eidos.” As a German word, Wesen, is “infected with harmless but occasionally vexatious equivocations.” By contrast, the Greek Eidos is “unspoilt” by a history of entangled equivocations. Most significantly, as Husserl

8 Letter of 11 May 1936 in: Gaston Berger, The Cogito in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. K. McLaughlin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern, 1972), 49. 9 Edmund Husserl, Ideas I, trans. D. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 2014), 3 [Hua III/1, 3].

166  Nicolas de Warren continues: “I would have preferred also to leave out the severely burdened word real, if only a suitable substitute has presented itself to me.”10 These remarks signal a first awakening of phenomenology to its own speech. With these remarks, Husserl tacitly sets into motion a phenomenological epoché of philosophical language, thus marking one of numerous stages of suspension by which Husserl opens the proper field of phenomenological inquiry.11 Phenomenology begins with an epoché avant la lettre: in the organization of the argument of Ideen I, these remarks quietly institute an epoché prior to the suspension of the natural attitude presented in §31. As Husserl more generally remarks: Because it will not do to choose technical expressions that fall entirely outside the frame of historically given philosophical language and, above all, because fundamental philosophical concepts are not to be defined by means of firm concepts identifiable at all times on the basis of immediately accessible intuitions; because, rather, in general long investigations must precede their definitive clarifications and determinations: combined ways of speaking are therefore frequently indispensable which arrange together a plurality of expressions of common discourse [. . .].12 The implications of these brief remarks cannot be stressed enough. Four features in the composition Husserl’s phenomenological discourse are here signaled: (a) the paradox of technical expressions at the margins, as it were, of technical discourse and its historical framework; (b) fundamental philosophical concepts cannot be defined in a fixed manner; (c) concepts must be created or “researched” through “long investigations” based on intuitive fulfillment, or evidence; (d) phenomenological discourse is an assemblage of “combined ways of speaking” and “plurality of expressions.” Let us first notice that eidos is baptized an “unspoiled name,” but for this very reason enters the nascent discourse of phenomenology as a sign, or empty intention, awaiting the fulfillment of its genuine meaning. Eidos is a “foreign word” bereft of historical sedimentations; it is as if the linguistic act of displacing the term Wesen with eidos would have the force of suspending the entire history of the concept of essence and the theory of essentialism, invented by Plato, and forever bearing his name: Platonism. The introduction of eidos thus marks a new beginning in the phenomenological re-constitution of a theory of essences beyond essentialism.13 In re-claiming the originality of the Greek term eidos, Husserl does not propose a return to an original and obscure “Greek experience of being”; instead, Husserl lays claim to the originality of the Greek term eidos so as to neutralize an historical chain of translations and sedimentations (eidos > essentia > Wesen), and thus open a phenomenological

10 Ibid., 7 [Hua III/1, 8]. 11 The list of philosophical terms in Husserl’s index verbum prohibitorum could easily be extended. In the preface to the Boyce-Gibson English translation of Ideen I, Husserl signals other terms as falling under his watchful caution regarding inherited concepts. 12 E. Husserl, Ideas I, 8 [Hua III/1, 9]. 13 Husserl’s discursive strategy is here blind, it would seem, to what Heidegger will come to fully exploit: a deconstruction of the original Greek term; thus challenging or calling into question the presumed innocent or uncritical innocence of the term as such.

Husserl’s awakening to speech  167 space for the renewal of the concept eidos. If by a technical term in philosophy we mean precisely what Husserl rejects of philosophical concepts, namely, a term whose definition can be fixed, then Husserl’s own “technical terminology” is technical only in appearance. Husserl’s language appears technical as long as we do not grasp the dynamic constitution of concepts in situ, i.e., through eidetic variation and fulfilling intuitions. If the spoiled term Wesen becomes replaced with the unspoiled eidos, Husserl adopts a different strategy for the vexing term Real. Even as he acknowledges the contamination of the term, the absence of a fitting substitute places Husserl in a double bind of a different kind than the double bind of displacing Wesen by eidos. In the latter instance, a double bind consists in canceling out a term (its tradition and meaning) with a new term – a new term that can only be at first understood in terms of the word it displaces, guided by the telos of its ideal meaning and signifier. In the former case, Husserl is compelled to retain a spoiled term in absence of any fitting replacement. It is as if the term Real functioned as the unreliable signifier of an empty intention – empty precisely of an indicative signifier of its own. The Greek philosophical lexicon does not provide an alternative signifier for the concept Real as it did for the concept Wesen. Husserl must thus retain a spoiled term he knowingly does not want to employ, thus condemning the term Real to misrecognition within phenomenological discourse given that Husserl really does not want to use the term Real to speak of “the real” within phenomenology. Husserl’s rejection of new terms falling “entirely outside the frame of historically given language,” even as he clearly recognizes the spoilt condition of philosophical terms, indicates a constituting tension within Husserl’s phenomenological discourse. Unlike Heidegger, who will seek to displace inherited philosophical terms through an internal deconstruction (Abbau) (substance with Anwesen, etc.), and thus open thinking from within its own history to a discourse outside the historical tradition (even as Derrida would question this Heideggerian transcendence of metaphysics), Husserl’s phenomenological discourse is organized around a different strategy. As Husserl writes, phenomenological discourse is composed of “combined ways of speaking” and a “plurality of expressions.” This composition of phenomenological discourse is “indispensable” due to the dynamic nature of philosophical concepts. By way of an assemblage of expressions drawn from a plurality of philosophical traditions, Husserl orchestrates a controlled anarchy within historical ways of speaking. This anarchy consists in displacing different historical vocabularies from their established grammars through a phenomenological de-territorialization and re-territorialization within the newly discovered field of transcendental experience. The discourse of this field, as the discourse of the new science of transcendental phenomenology, is conceptually multilingual: within this transcendental space of reflection, terminological veins from different philosophical traditions (Leibnizian: drive, monad, etc., Kantian: Idea, transcendental ego, etc., Brentanian, Cartesian, etc.) are transplanted and confronted with each other. Within this phenomenological assemblage, new terms (eidos, noesis, noema) displace established terms, while old terms receive new life and significance (monad, Trieb).

3.  The distributed object and multilingualism This multilingual assemblage of phenomenological discourse produces a creative dynamic across Husserl’s thinking (as if his thinking resembled a landmass of

168  Nicolas de Warren shifting tectonic plates) and reflects an indispensable characteristic of a philosophical enterprise committed to the creation of a new science through the forging of concepts. Hegel’s statement from the Phenomenology of Spirit takes on a new significance in Husserl’s phenomenology: phenomenology must shape itself as a science through “die Anstrengung des Begriffs.” Concepts cannot be defined through external reflection; they must be forged, or created, through the inner movement of transcendental reflection coming into its own. As Husserl argues through a contrast with mathematics: “In philosophy one cannot define as in mathematics; in this respect imitation of the mathematical procedure is invariably not only fruitless but perverse and leads to the most harmful consequences.”14 The term “fruchtbar” is here crucial. The term was current in mathematical thought at the end of the century, stemming from the influence of Riemann and his revolution in the conception of what mathematics is and what mathematicians do. In Husserl’s appropriation, the term “fruitful” highlights phenomenology as creation of concepts and research into eidetic structures. As Husserl writes in Ideen I, phenomenology investigates the structures of consciousness; not, in other words, phenomenal consciousness as “experienced” (and thus not today’s tired question of what it is like to “have” or “be” a consciousness). This principle of “fruitfulness” provides a criterion for the claimed scientific character of Husserlian phenomenology; its rationality depends on the fruitfulness its research. In addition, the creation of concepts by phenomenological means was closely connected to the invention of problems. As Bergson writes: The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the problem and consequently of positing it, even more than solving it [. . .] Already in mathematics, and still more in metaphysics, the effort of invention consists most often in raising the problem, in creating the terms in which it will be stated. As Deleuze adds: “True freedom lies in the power to decide, to constitute problems themselves” and this means a double movement: power: disappearance of false problems (revealing equivocations, false assumptions, etc.) and “creative upsurge of new ones.”15 As Husserl signals with his opening remarks on terminology, Ideen I is a creative upsurge of new problems, indeed, of a new science. This upsurge of phenomenology is nothing less than the realization or movement of a true freedom that Husserl would throughout his life identify with phenomenological thinking itself. The rationality of fruitfulness and method of phenomenological research is further realized in the materiality of Husserl’s thinking. Writing is the praxis of thinking; especially with his research manuscripts, the activity of writing allowed Husserl to fashion an experimental laboratory for the forging of phenomenological concepts. Husserl’s written oeuvre – finished and unfinished works, lecture courses, research manuscripts – can profitably be understood as a “distributed

14 E. Husserl, Ideas I, 8 [(Hua III/1, 9]. 15 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 15.

Husserl’s awakening to speech  169 object.” The English anthropologist of art Alfred Gell’s notion of artworks as “distributed objects” is here illuminating for a clearer appreciation of the materiality of Husserl’s work. Gell considers an artist’s oeuvre as consisting of the totality of “works,” finished and unfinished, produced over the course of an artist’s life and thus distributed over a temporal spread.16 Preparatory studies, sketches, unfinished works, and achieved works are “moments” within an unfolding temporal series, “not just because they are datable objects [. . .] but because they form lineages.” “Moments” within the distributed object of the work of art point forward and backwards in time (to other “moments” within the spread of work) as well as across to other moments within the work as a whole. Gell distinguishes between “two relatively ‘strong’ temporal relationships between works and two relatively ‘weak’ ones,” namely, between “precursor” and “sketch” and between “recapitulation” and “copy.” An artists’s oeuvre is thus constituted as a “distributed object,” or, in Husserl’s terminology, from which Gell draws his insights, a “temporal object” with strong/ weak protentions and strong/weak retentions. As Gell stresses: “The artist’s oeuvre is an object which, to so speak, is made out of time.”17 For Gell, an artist’s oeuvre is an extended “generate-and-test-sequence” in which repetition, recapitulation, and prospective experimentation, along different “lineages” are crucial; essential to this “model of creativity” is (once again drawing from Husserl) the concept of modification. “But where does ‘cognition’ take place? – in the artist’s head, or on his canvases?” as Gell asks. In both: “The poet writes down his lines, and then scratches them out altering and improving his verses in ways that crucially depend on the existence of the physical traces of his previous (mental) activity.” Unbeknownst to Gell, Husserl’s phenomenological account of time-consciousness and notion of “time-object” (“distributed object” for Gell) was not only a theory provided by Husserl’s thinking, it tacitly offered a theoretical account of Husserl’s own activity of thinking as materially realized through his oeuvre. Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness can thus be seen as an expression of the very thought process that produced it and, more generally, the entire thought process of Husserlian phenomenology as formed through the production of his oeuvre. From the distributed object of Husserl’s Archives, editions in the Husserliana were constructed, primarily from his research manuscripts, and these constructions represent a maximum intervention of editorial choice sequences such that the editor effectively imposed a map or path through a group of manuscripts, thus creating a new literary object. This manner of constructing discrete editions in the Husserliana (lecture courses and books represent a different kind of edition, however) was not only pragmatically required; it was also dictated by the medium of print. It was physically impossible to have the archive of Husserl’s thinking accessible as a distributed object given the two major constraints of physical print: linearity and fixity. Choice sequences for the assemblage of Husserl’s texts (each choice by an editor to include or exclude this or that transcription, etc.) became immortalized in the physical edition of the

16 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 232ff. 17 See also Gell’s discussion of Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness in The Anthropology of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

170  Nicolas de Warren printed volume; it thus imposed an actual edition from a range of possible virtual editions. Until the past decade, print technology was unable to publish the distributed object of the archive as such; instead, a series of new objects had to be created – most of the editions in the Husserliana. With the approaching completion of the Husserliana (a completion that does not represent the entire publication of Husserl’s writings) we are nearing the “real” Husserl in so far as we nearing a clearer grasp of the bracing magnitude and complexity of Husserl’s thinking as a distributed object.18

4.  The writing of phenomenology Within the formation of Husserl’s oeuvre of thought as a “distributed object,” the activity of writing was especially significant through his adaptation of Gabelsbergersche Kurzschrift, invented by Franz Xavier Gabelsberger in the early 19th century and widespread in German-speaking lands. As Iso Kern has perceptively observed: What Husserl writes while meditating was less what he is conscious of, as what he was not conscious of. He did not write in order to make note of insights, but rather he attempted to attain insights while thinking and writing. These research manuscripts are less about results as they offer paths and false paths of thinking.19 Writing is thinking. Thinking back to Husserl’s comments on his own phenomenological attitude towards technical philosophical vocabulary, one might say that Husserl literally re-inscribed or re-writes inherited grammars of philosophy by means of his phenomenological program of research into the concept – a program of research that requires the specific form of writing developed by Husserl with his “research manuscripts.” It was not only, however, a new form of writing; it was also a novel materiality of the written word. In contrast to the more established and legible form of writings in Husserl’s lecture courses and publications, the written style of his research manuscripts is more chaotic, telegraphic, and exploratory. Basic elements of syntax are often missing, or left unwritten; as Natalie Depraz notes, the “norm” that guides Husserl’s research manuscripts is the “power of discovery,” not an “intelligibility” and communicative act open to an anonymous reader.20 Husserl in fact considered his

18 The development of digital technologies now makes it possible to publish the distributed object of the archive as a disaggregated manifold. It is arguably only in a digital format that the original mission of the archives can thus finally be realized, as if the materiality of Husserl’s writing – his research manuscripts – were 100 years ahead of the technological revolution of digitization. “DigitalHusserl” – the accessibility of the totality of Husserl’s writings as a disaggregated manifold – was the implicit possibility of the archives: the concept for digital archives was already anticipated, as it were, in the materiality of the archive itself as a distributed object. 19 Zur Intersubjektivität I, XIX (editor’s introduction) (Den Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1973). 20 Natalie Depraz, “Gibt es ein phänomenologisches Schreiben? Die Ambiguität der husserlschen Schreibweise,” in Sprache und Pathos eds., E. Blattmann, S. Granzer, S. Hauke, and R. Kühn (Munich: Alber, 2001, 2001), 83–105; 84. See also Thomas Vongehr, “Sprache und Erfahrungsstil im Denken Edmund Husserls,” in Beiträge des 11. Internationalen Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Semiotik (Frankfurt (Oder), Viadrina, 2006), Band 24.

Husserl’s awakening to speech  171 research manuscripts as “monological” and developed an intellectual intimacy with the activity of writing in shorthand; he even speaks of “die Einigkeit mit meinem Schreibtisch” (Hua XV, 274).21 The absorption of Husserl’s specific form of thinking as “research” is so bound to his specific form of writing that, as Klaus Nellen insightfully asks: “Husserl’s phenomenology would most likely have looked differently, had he [Husserl] not been able to write in stenography.”22 Gabelsberg’s shorthand was distinguished by its cursive writing, which permitted a rapid protocol of a thought or verbal process (this form of shorthand was especially valued in juridical institutions). On Nellen’s hypothesis, Husserl’s use of Gabelsberger’s system of shorthand was not accidental: it allowed Husserl to capture the “living” act of thinking in the “solitary life of the soul” (einsamen Seelenleben). In Nellen’s words, shorthand allowed Husserl to have it both ways in combining “die Anschmiegsamkeit des Sprechens mit der Solidität der Schrift – sie [stenographie] ist sozusagen Direktaufnahme des Denkens.”23 The live capture, as it were, of each thought in “flesh and blood” in a shorthand notation (appropriately modified by Husserl for his phenomenological vocabulary) allowed for a progressive sedimentation of different lineages of thinking; it equally fostered a praxis of repetition and variations in physical form: shorthand gives written form to an experimentation in concepts.

5.  Phenomenology as “Minor Philosophy” If we had to search for a name and concept for Husserl’s phenomenological discourse and his awakening to his own speech, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri’s notion of une littérature mineure is here suggestive.24 For Deleuze and Guatarri, a minor literature is not the literature of a minor language but the literature a minority creates in a major language. One of the principle features of minor literature is its “strong coefficient of deterritorialization.” In Husserl’s case, this co-efficient of deterritorialization is methodologically performed through the reduction, which, as argued, operates through a displacement of traditional terms onto a newly opened field of transcendental experience. The deterritorialization of philosophical speech in phenomenology is evident in the ways in Husserl gives new meaning and force to traditional philosophical terms in “strange” phenomenological ways (i.e., “against all habits of thought up to now”). From a transcendental point of view, Husserl’s compulsion to write manifests the impossibility of not writing even as traditional philosophy is the impossibility

21 See Detlev Thiel, Husserls Phänomenographie, Prednaska na 18. workshopu Smyslovost v Husserlove fenomenologii, Praha, CFB/CTS, June 4, 2001. 22 Klaus Nellen has generously provided me with a copy of his unpublished paper “Sprache” und “Lebenswelt” bei Husserl, originally delivered at the conference “Die Hermeneutik und die Künste II. Das Problem der Sprache,” organized by H.-G. Gadamer, G. Boehm, and K. Michalski, in 1981 in Dubrovnik. 23 Nellen, “Die Hermeneutik und die Künste II,” 14. Nellen’s insight is on the mark: as Gabelsberger himself considered the novelty of his shorthand: “Idee und Wort im Flug der Zeit ans Räumliche zu binden, sucht’ ich mit ernster Tätigkeit ein Mittel zu ergründen.” My gratitude to Thomas Vongehr for bringing this quote to my attention. 24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

172  Nicolas de Warren of phenomenology, or, in other words, the impossibility of writing other than in the traditional grammar and vocabulary of philosophy (as with the example of the term Real). A further characteristic of minor literature is its political significance. With Husserl, the political dimension of his “Minor Philosophy” is of course not identical with the political character of Kafka’s writings; however, if for Deleuze and Guatarri everything in minor literature is political, it is because everything in minor literature has collective value. In minor literature, there is no master or subject who speaks: it is not a “literature of the masters” or a literature of the solitary genius, but “what the solitary writer says already constitutes a communal action, and what he says or does is necessarily political – even if others do not agree with him.”25 In Husserl’s case, this communalization of his singular utterances is apparent with the immediately social and cultural effect of Husserl’s writings, beginning with the Logical Investigations. The history of the development of the phenomenological movement has yet to be fully written, despite Spiegelberg’s classic study. Rather than consider Husserl as the solitary “master” who attracted around him a group of students, a more accurate picture of the effect of Husserl’s phenomenological thinking and the formation of the phenomenological movement must recognize the original “pluralization” of phenomenologies. We might even speak of the phenomenological movement as itself a “distributed object” with different lineages of concepts (intentionality, apprehension of values, essences) and directions of thought (Reinach, von Hildebrand, etc.). At the center of this vibrant intersection and cross-fertilization of the Göttingen and Munich schools stands Husserl, who struggles to master an event of discourse he cannot. In Deleuze and Guatarri’s conception, the writer of minor literature, who lives at the deterritorialized margins of a major community (i.e., Kafka, Jewish, in the milieu of German speaking Prague), forces “the means for another consciousness and another sensibility.” Is this not the profound co-efficient of what we might call the Husserl-effect on Heidegger, Scheler, and others? Recall that Husserl explicitly conceived of his transcendental phenomenology as both revolution and reform: as undoing Kant’s Copernican Revolution and as a reformation of the spiritual mission of philosophy and with it European humanity and culture.26 For Deleuze and Guatarri, “the literary machine functions as the relay for a future revolutionary machine – not at all for ideological reasons, but because it provides a collective utterance, missing everywhere else in this milieu: literature is the affair of the people.” Phenomenology is the affair of schools or movements (in the plural). Minor literature is a literature of resistance against the normalization of discourse and its major language of institutions of power and knowledge. In the case of Husserl, there is also a complex play of power and knowledge that runs throughout his phenomenological thinking. But if Husserl’s phenomenological thinking “deterritorialized” the institution of philosophy it was for the purpose of re-instituting and reterritorializing philosophy anew in a major language: the prospect of a phenomenological philosophy to come. Husserl himself intended to establish an archive for his writings, which would allow future generations of researchers to have access to his thinking. Moreover, Husserl circulated his research manuscripts to a small group of students; as opposed to the mass publication of books and articles, this closer group of students

25 Ibid., 34. 26  Die Umsturz der kopernikanischen Lehre. Die Ur-Arche Erde bewegt sich nicht – the title of Husserl’s 1934 manuscript on the constitution of space D 17.

Husserl’s awakening to speech  173 would have the privileged oral knowledge of Husserl’s thinking, thus allowing them to read and understand his research manuscripts (where, as noted, basic syntax was often missing). In this crucial respect, Husserl’s phenomenological enterprise of a “Minor Philosophy” is unlike minor literature; for Husserl’s reform of philosophy through phenomenology, the passage from pure phenomenology to philosophy, is the passage from a “Minor Philosophy” to a “Major Philosophy”: Husserl envisioned the science of phenomenological philosophy as the future “major” institution of philosophy. As Jean Cavaillès writes about his meeting with Husserl in 1931: His pride has something touching and something sad about it – he compared himself to Galileo and Descartes: “In fifty, maybe only in a hundred years. . . . I do not want to exaggerate – there will only be one philosophy that is studied, phenomenology, and every scientist will begin with phenomenology before entering into their specialized work, since as a universal knowledge [sagesse] it should provide the foundation for all sciences. What phenomenology has accomplished thus far is ridiculously small, but it is only a question of time and patience.”27 The relation between phenomenology and philosophy, and the reason for its enduring significance, resides in this tension between Husserl’s dream for phenomenology to realize the “major language function” of philosophy while critically developing itself as a “Minor Philosophy.” As Deleuze and Guatarri write: How many styles, genres, literary movements [. . .] have but one dream – to fill a major language function, to offer their services as the language of the state, the official tongue [. . .]. Fashion the opposite dream: know how to create a becomingminor. Is there a chance here for philosophy, philosophy which for so long has formed an official and referential genre?28 In Husserl’s awakening to speech, we find two dreams of speech at once that oddly cannot speak to the other without disruption of the other’s dream.

References Berger, Gaston. The Cogito in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. K. McLaughlin. Evanston, IL: Northwestern, 1972. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Depraz, Natalie. “Gibt es ein phänomenologisches Schreiben? Die Ambiguität der husserlschen Schreibweise,” in Sprache und Pathos. Munich: Alber, 2001, 2001. Ferrières, Gabrielle. Jean Cavaillès, Philosophhe et combattant 1903–1944. Paris: PUF, 1950. Fink, Eugen. Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, p. 158.

27 Letter of 4 August 1931, in Gabrielle Ferrières, Jean Cavaillès, Philosophhe et combattant 1903–1944 (Paris: PUF, 1950), 90. 28 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 27.

174  Nicolas de Warren ———. “Edmund Husserl in der gegenwärtigen Kritik.” Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, pp. 153–155. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Off the Beaten Track, trans. J. Young and K. Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Husserl, Edmund. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität I. Den Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. ———. Ideas I, trans. D. Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 2014. Luft, Sebastian. Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Thiel, Detlev. Husserls Phänomenographie, Prednaska na 18. workshopu Smyslovost v Husserlove fenomenologii. Praha, CFB/CTS, June 4, 2001. Vongehr, Thomas. “Sprache und Erfahrungsstil im Denken Edmund Husserls.” In Beiträge des 11. Internationalen Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Semiotik, eds., E. Blattmann, S. Granzer, S. Hauke, and R. Kühn, Frankfurt (Oder), Viadrina, 2006, Band 24.

Part II The imagination Kant’s phenomenological legacy

12 Editors’ introduction Maxime Doyon and Augustin Dumont

Western philosophy has an ambivalent relationship with the imagination. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that it has created some suspiciousness among philosophers, although sometimes not without generating simultaneously a kind of more or less overt fascination. Alternately condemned and praised, the imagination opens the mind to otherwise unfathomable possibilities concerning central philosophical questions, while at the same time making it at risk of falling into illusion or unreason. In his treatise On the Soul, Aristotle assigned to the imagination (phantasia) a definitive place in the architectonic of the mind. In spite of all the discussions and criticisms his treatise has prompted, the history of philosophy will retain the general contours of the definition Aristotle provided: the imagination is a faculty of the mind located between sensitivity and intellect. At first glance, it might seem that such a consensus would reflect a lack of debate. Yet, far from closing the discussions, the sustainability of Aristotle’s point of view constantly leads to new reflections, from Antiquity to contemporary philosophy through the Middle Age, Renaissance and Modernity. The impulse to these discussions lies invariably in the meaning of this “in between”, which calls for various interpretations and raises difficult questions and problems. Does the imagination have a domain of its own, or is it nothing else than a simple “appendix” of the faculties of the mind? For Aristotle, the question remains open: as “a movement resulting from an actual exercise of a power of sense” (De Anima, Book III, 3), Aristotle does not unequivocally hold that the imagination is more than the mere residue of sensation’s degradation. It is not even clear that we can distinguish the imagination from the senses. While it might sometimes seem to be an autonomous part of the soul, the imagination “contaminates”, so to speak, all the other parts of the soul (intellect, desire, etc.), such that its true powers (if there are any) are hard to pin down. If the imagination is not easy to define, it is also because of the extraordinarily wide semantic field it applies to. The product of the imagination, i.e. what we commonly and sometimes confusingly call an “image”, refers in Aristotle (as already in Plato) to things that do not necessarily coincide or easily overlap. The image of phantasia, which one could also translate by “fantasy” (phantasma), has no direct relation with image as creative imitation (mimèsis). The connection to the related notions of appearance as enactment or ghost (eidôlon) and icon (eikôn) is also indirect at best. From pictural representation to dreams and hallucinations through memory and futural projections, the philosophical concept of “image” is profoundly equivocal, and this is precisely what drives philosophers to seek for a unifying theory of image since, in every case, it is assumed (rightly or wrongly) that there is an “act of imagination” responsible for it. Hence, the problem of classification of the different types of images

178  Maxime Doyon and Augustin Dumont may not be the most important after all: there is, since Aristotle, a persistent need for a better understanding of the various functions of imagination in the overall economy of the human mind, particularly with regard to the question concerning the possibility of knowledge, which will soon take central stage. In this respect, Kant’s work represents a milestone in the philosophical history of the concept of the imagination. Located at the heart of the faculties of the mind, the imagination (Einbildungskraft) occupies a key place in Kantian transcendental philosophy as it makes possible nothing less than the cognition of objects (see A. Dumont, this volume). As the papers gathered in this special issue show, this can be shown in various ways, however, according to the different functions (synthetic, schematic) and statuses (productive, reproductive, creative) Kant grants to the imagination. The question gets even more complex if we take into account (as we should) its different presentations along Kant’s notoriously convoluted philosophical itinerary (beginning with the editions A and B of the Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, which all treat of the imagination in great details). Given the central role it occupies in Kant’s philosophical system, it is not surprising then that Kant’s theory of imagination has been tremendously influent on his immediate German successors (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and the Romantics) as well as for his more distant inheritors, from the Neo-Kantians (particularly Cassirer) to the phenomenologists (specifically but not uniquely Heidegger). Things have started to change in 20th-century philosophy as a split now characterises Kantian scholarship on this issue. While Kant’s transcendental imagination is still a topic of interest for some historians of Kantian philosophy,1 it is not an influent source of reflection for Kantians of more systematic orientation. Moreover, the imagination is virtually absent in most contemporary debates in philosophy of mind and perception, even when the debates are framed within a broadly Kantian perspective (as it is the case in the conceptualism and non-conceptualism debate in philosophy of perception, for instance). In the phenomenological tradition, a similar split can be observed: while Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (see S. Matherne, this volume) have both sought to positively reaffirm, each in their own ways, their Kantian filiation on the theme of the imagination, Husserl (see M. Doyon, A. S. Aldea and D. De Santis, all in this volume) and Sartre (see M. Summa, this volume) have famously taken their distance towards Kant’s doctrine, but not without inheriting a certain number of concepts and problems from him. In either ways, Kant’s imagination has left an enduring, but still under appreciated footprint on the phenomenological tradition. The desideratum of the present special issue is to address this lack and to contribute modestly to remedy to the situation. The papers gathered in this thematic volume were first presented at the Université de Montréal in May 2017. The workshop was co-organised by Maxime Doyon and Augustin Dumont, and financed by A. Dumont’s Canada Research Chair in

1 We say “some”, because even in this circle, an important number of contemporary Kant specialists notoriously neglect the topic of the transcendental imagination, or saw in it something of secondary importance. The works of Béatrice Longuenesse, Paul Guyer and Henry E. Allison are paradigmatic in this respect.

Editors’ introduction  179 Transcendental Philosophy. We thereby wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), thanks to which this Research Chair was established in 2016, as well as all the participants to the event, students and colleagues alike. Last but not least, we would like to thank the contributors, who kindly accepted our invitation to share their thoughts with us on this fascinating topic. When we started thinking about this project three years ago, we rapidly agreed on a list of young and promising scholars who do admirable work on both Kant and the various figures and problems of the phenomenological tradition. We had but five names on our list, and four of them have agreed to join us on this project: Andreea Smaranda Aldea (Kent State), Daniele De Santis (Prague), Samantha Matherne (Harvard) and Michela Summa (Würzburg). Maxime Doyon and Augustin Dumont Montréal, 1 August 2018

13 Kant and Husserl on the (alleged) function of imagination in perception Maxime Doyon

Abstract: In several of his works, Immanuel Kant insists on the transcendental role of imagination in perception. In the Kantian scholarship, this claim has been interpreted in at least three ways: it is believed that the imagination is necessary to solve the riddle of the amodal character of perception, to justify the possibility of perceptual identity across time and to explain the possibility of perceiving particular objects as such, that is to say as belonging to a specific class of objects. This paper aims to show how E. Husserl inherited these sets problems without however having recourse to the imagination at all. In the last section, I  will briefly analyse two types of mixed acts where perception and imagination unite, namely image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and what Husserl calls perceptual phantasy (perzeptive Phantasie). The argument here shows that these analyses do not contradict, but rather strengthen the argument defended throughout the paper, namely that in Husserl’s phenomenology, and contrary to Kant’s, the imagination does not assume a synthetic or transcendental function in perception. Keywords: Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, perception, imagination, identity, image consciousness, perceptual phantasy

A central, but yet underappreciated feature of Kant’s conception of perceptual experience concerns the crucial contribution of the imagination (Einbildungskraft). In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes this point in the context of his criticism of the psychology of his time by asserting that “imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself”.1 Despite the relative lack of attention it has aroused, this is an important claim in the overall economy of Kant’s critical project, notably because it serves as a reminder that if both sensibility and the understanding are necessary conditions of experience,2 their joint contribution still does not suffice to yield an object-experience. To enjoy a coherent experience of the external world, the imagination must assume

1 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV (1781 edition) and III (1787 edition), ed. Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1911); English edition: Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer, ed. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). According to convention, all references contain the letters “A” (for the 1781 edition) and “B” (for the 1787 edition) with their corresponding page numbers. Therefore, these “A”and “B” page numbers will be followed by the reference to the page in the Guyer translation, henceforth cited as CPR. Here, CPR, A120, 239. 2 I. Kant, CPR, A51/B75, 193.

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  181 its synthetic function and bring the contributions of sensibility and understanding together.3 Which role exactly the imagination assumes and how it performs its mediating function is a matter of controversy in the Kantian scholarship. On W. Sellars’ reading,4 the role Kant ascribes to the imagination makes him a defender of what we nowadays call a representationalist account of perception. According to this interpretation, which is now defended by S. Matherne,5 the imagination produces, through its synthetic activity, “images of objects”6 that should in fact be understood as some kind of “holistic representation[s]”7 of how things are. This reading is phenomenologically motivated, and it contains Kant’s sophisticated answer to what is commonly known as the problem of perceptual presence.8 The problem is rooted in the perspectival character of perception and refers to the fact that what is perceived does not coincide with what is given in intuition. We see more than what sensibly affects us, like when one sees a house while only its front is sensibly given. According to Matherne, this is not a problem for Kant, because the imagination has the singular capacity to bring the manifold of intuition together and yield a perceptual representation of the object across multiple perspectives, including those that are not intuited. The result of this operation is what Kant calls an image (Bild), which is a higher-order perceptual representation produced by the imagination “through the schema-guided synthesis of apprehension and reproduction”.9 On this representationalist reading, then, Kant’s theory of perception entails an implicit recognition of the amodal character of perception, and proposes a relatively clear, albeit complex solution to it.10

  3 Ibid., A124, 240. Whereas this insight brought Kant in the A Deduction to consider sensiblity, the imagination and the understanding as three distinct faculties, it is well known that Kant modified his architectonic of the mind in the B Deduction. The faculties – which are at the same time sources of cognition – are now reduced to two: sensibility and the understanding, the latter now being responsible for the kind of synthetic activity previously attributed to the imagination. However, it is clear that even in the B Deduction the imagination assumes a central function in Kant’s transcendental investigation of perception. Indeed, even if “the transcendental synthesis of imagination” is now presented as “an effect of the understanding” (CPR, B152, 257), Kant still distinguishes it carefully from the synthesis intellectualis, which operates exclusively at the level of concepts.   4 Wilfrid Sellars, “The Role of Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Experience [1978],” in In the Space of Reasons. Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. K. Scharp and R. Brandom (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 454–466.   5 Samantha Matherne, “Images and Kant’s Theory of Perception,” Ergo 29/2 (2015): 737–777.   6 I. Kant, CPR, A120, 239.   7 Matherne, “Images and Kant’s Theory of Perception,” 752.   8 Although the very formulation of this problem goes back to the early work of Edmund Husserl, Alva Noë is often taken as the standard reference in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is also the case in S. Matherne’s article (S. Matherne, “Images and Kant’s Theory of Perception”), which refers to Noë (Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004)).   9 Matherne, “Images and Kant’s Theory of Perception,” 742 note 16. 10 This interpretation stands in sharp opposition to the kind of strong realist reading of Kant put forward by philosophers like McDowell, who insists above all else on the sufficiency of empirical intuitions. Conceived as sensible representations (sinnliche Vorstellungen), intuitions (Anschauungen) refer “directly to the object” (CPR, A320/B377, 398–399), and this means that they have a capacity to establish an unmediated reference to the external world. Typical of this line of interpretation is the virtual absence of any meaningful reference to

182  Maxime Doyon Another, but closely related reason to attribute to the imagination an important role in perceptual experience concerns its purported role in the experience of perceptual objects as identical through different appearances. Whereas the claim about amodal perception is more immediately framed as an answer to the question of how various spatial perspectives are unified in experience, what I will call here the identity claim also concerns our capacity to perceptually recognize a particular object as identical through time.11 This is a point famously put forward by P. F. Strawson’s influential interpretation of Kant,12 according to which a temporally extended perceptual consciousness of an identical object requires “a certain sort of connection” of our occurring perceptions with “other past (and hence non-actual) perceptions, or the thought of other (and hence non-actual) perceptions of the same object”.13 One of the major arguments Strawson defends in his essay is that this connecting (or synthetic) function is assumed by the imagination, which he thus considers to be ultimately responsible for perceptual identity.14

the work of the imagination, however. To recall: the whole point of McDowell’s reading is to insist on the strict inseparability of the deliverances of sensibility and the discursive capacity of the understanding. We are told that experience would not even be conceivable if the conceptual content of our discursive activity were to be understood as derived or radically independent from the sensory manifold. But once we have recognized, with Kant, that “[t]he same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives the unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition” (CPR, A79/B104–105, 211), and identified this function with our conceptual power (as Kant does in the B Deduction), the recourse to the imagination appears to be superfluous. McDowell’s reformulation of this insight reads as follows: “There is only one unity, common to the Aesthetic and the Analytic; not two separate and independent unities” (John McDowell, Having the World in View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 74n). Given the orientation of this paper, I will spend more time considering the first, representationalist interpretation of Kant and its purported claim about amodal perception, as it bears more directly on the question I am pursuing here regarding the function of the imagination in perceptual experience. However, it should be noted in passing that McDowell’s reading is only apparently justified in the B Deduction. For even if the imagination is subsumed under the understanding (CPR, B152, 257), the distinctive accomplishment of the synthesis of imagination in perceptual experience is still cast into sharp relief in the Schematism chapter. I will return to this question later in the article. 11 In Strawson’s approach to the problem, the spatial and temporal sequences of appearances belong together, for the spatial exploration of perceptual profiles can only occur in time. 12 Peter Frederick Strawson, “Imagination and Perception [1974],” in Kant on Pure Reason, ed. R. C. Sutherland Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 82–99. 13 Ibid., 91. On the opening page of his seminal article, Strawson explains that he wants to show how “my taking what I continuously, or interruptedly, observe to be the same object, the same dog, throughout [. . .] owes something to the imagination.” Ibid., 83. 14 It should be noted that this interpretation is controversial. The problem is that Kant’s solution seems to involve more directly the third synthesis identified in the Deduction, namely the synthesis of recognition, which falls under the jurisdiction of the understanding, not the imagination (CPR, A78/B104, 211). Whether this conceptual synthesis precedes or follows the syntheses of apprehension and reproduction, and whether or not it is also involved in the production of images, is a distinctively difficult question that I won’t try to settle here. (See S. Matherne, “Images and Kant’s Theory of Perception,” 759ff. for a lucid discussion.)

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  183 Finally, and drawing again on Strawson, the above-mentioned problem of perceptual identity also concerns our ability to perceive particular objects as belonging to specific kinds or classes, e.g., this dog “as a dog”.15 The idea that perceiving a particular object as such would depend, too, on the contribution of our imaginative faculty comes to the fore in the so-called Schematism chapter, in which Kant explains that the imagination has the singular capacity to unify the manifold of sensibility, and thus to produce the unity of a determined object, by producing images (Bilder) that correspond to its concept. The production of such images requires schemata, which are the rules of this synthetic accomplishment. In Kant’s words: the schema is a “general procedure of the imagination for providing a concept with its image”.16 Thanks to this rule-governed image, the unity of the object is apprehended as falling under that concept, thus making it count as an object of a certain kind.17 All in all, there thus seems to be at least three claims circulating in the Kantian scholarship about the alleged role(s) of the imagination in perception. Let’s call them respectively the amodal perception claim, the identity claim, and the as-such claim. Although none of these theses is uncontroversial, there seems to be little doubt that, one way or another, Kant took perception and imagination to be continuous in experience. From a Kantian perspective, the reason for adopting this view is clear enough: it is a consequence of Kant’s conception of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit), which cannot by itself explain the possibility of perceptual identity (across perspectives, across time, and as exemplifying a general concept). Together with the understanding (Verstand), the imagination (Einbildungskraft) assumes a transcendental function in experience insofar as it makes perception possible in general. Specifically, its task is to unify the manifold given in intuition and produce an original presentation (Darstellung) of the object, thus making it fit for cognition.18 *** The aim of this paper is to critically assess these claims in light of Husserl’s phenomenology of perception. The reason why this strategy is philosophically instructive is that Husserl also recognized the importance of accounting both for the identity of the

For present purposes, it suffices to note that even within the Kantian framework, it is far from clear what role, if any, the imagination assumes in this context. 15 P. F. Strawson, “Imagination and Perception,” 83. 16 I. Kant, CPR, A140/B139, 250. 17 Again, it is not clear that Strawson’s reading is correct on that score either, and that “our perceptual appreciation” of “kind-identity” (P. F. Strawson, “Imagination and Perception,” 83) is due to the imagination, since it seems that it is the synthesis of recognition, realized by the understanding, that does the crucial work here. This is what Matherne argues for, and why, incidentally, she interprets the formation of images as bearing not on the problem of kind-identity, but on the amodal perception problem discussed above (S. Matherne, “Images and Kant’s Theory of Perception”). The point is that if only a conceptual consciousness can perceive categorially, and if our conceptual capacity depends on the understanding, then we are left to wonder what exactly is the role imagination undertakes in categorial perceiving. 18 As is well known, Kant distinguishes between the empirical and the transcendental levels of the imagination, and between its productive and reproductive functions. The claim we are discussing throughout this paper concerns the transcendental role of the productive imagination.

184  Maxime Doyon perceptual object across space and time, as well as for its belonging to a certain kind or type. Nevertheless, Husserl’s account differs importantly from Kant’s, and the result of Husserl’s transformation of Kant’s transcendental conception of perceptual intentionality is that there is no need to have recourse to the imagination to explain these experiences.19 The objective of this paper is to explain how Husserl came to reach this conclusion, and how he solved the three above-mentioned sets of problems. That Husserl reached this conclusion should not come as a surprise, however. Of all the differences between Kant’s and Husserl’s philosophies, perhaps the most striking one lies in Husserl’s unequivocal rejection of Kant’s “psychology of faculties”. The interplay of sensibility and understanding we find in Kant is replaced in Husserl’s conceptual framework by the notions of empty and full intentions. In this model, there is no need to resort to the imagination (Einbildungskraft) in order to synthesize their distinct contributions. In Husserl’s eyes, both types of intention come together in the experience of fulfilment. Fulfilment is a process that is complete in itself, such that contrary to Kant (or some interpretation of his work), it is not necessary to engage in an additional activity of unification. The key lies in Husserl’s enlarged conception of sensible intuition, which is not reduced to the deliverances of sensibility, but includes the object’s horizon. Contrary to Kant, Husserl does not think of imagination (Einbildungskraft) as a faculty or synthetic power either, but of imagining (Phantasie) as a distinctive type of intentional act beside and independent of perception. As a consequence, far from endorsing Kant’s continuity thesis, Husserl defended the view that perception and imagination are disjointed. In the Logical Investigations, he even detects a “parallelism between perception and imagination”.20 The parallelism, which Husserl explains in the context of an analysis of the apprehension of essences (eidos), is due to the imagination’s (Phantasie) intuitive character. Like perception, imagination represents its object intuitively (anschaulich), but it does so by suspending its doxic modality. For Husserl, perception is, quite literally, a taking for true or taking to be true (a Wahr-nehmung) inasmuch as perception posits its object as real or actual. Perception thus involves a belief in the existence of the object perceived just as it is perceived, and it is precisely this thetic characteristic that may change into the doubtful or the unlikely when the perceptual experience progresses in unexpected ways.21 On this score, perception stands in sharp opposition to the imagination, insofar as imagined objects or

19 There are, however, two classes of perceptual experiences that do involve the work of the imagination, and I will treat them in §4. 20 Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntni, Husserliana XIX (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984); English translation: Logical Investigations. Second Volume. Investigations III, IV, V, VI, trans. J. N. Findlay (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 285. Henceforth cited as LI followed by the number of the investigation, the section, and by, respectively, German and English page references. Here, LI 6, §47, 679/285. 21 Edmund Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten, 1918–1926, ed. Margot Fleischer, Husserliana XI (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), §5–9, 25–39; English translation: Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. A. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Springer, 2001), §5–9, 63–78. Henceforth cited as APS followed by the section number, the German page number and the corresponding page reference in the English translation.

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  185 events are experienced in the mode of ‘non-actuality’ or ‘irreality’ (Unwirklichkeit). For Husserl, imagined objects or events are both intuitive and immediate, but their reality has been ‘neutralized’. As it will be shown, this is an important difference, because it explains in the end why for Husserl imagination cannot assume a transcendental function in perception as in Kant. In the following, I’ll try to do justice to this claim by reconstructing Husserl’s position regarding the constitution of objective reference.22 I will proceed in three steps, echoing the three claims identified above in the reception of Kant’s work. In §1, I will outline Husserl’s account of Leervorstellungen in order to show that, after an initial hesitation at the time of writing the Logical Investigations, Husserl reached the conclusion that the occluded parts of perceived objects are neither imagined, nor indicated; they are emptily represented. In holding this view, Husserl clearly excludes the necessity of having recourse to mental images or representations to account for the unity of perceptual objects. Building up on this, I will show in §2 how Husserl provides a positive answer to the identity problems both across space and time by drawing on ideas found in Thing and Space and Active and Passive Syntheses, in which Husserl spells out the law of motivation. In short, Husserl argues that the so-called kinesthetic sensations have the unique capacity to motivate the flow of appearances, and for him, it is this lawlike regularity that governs objective constitution across multiple appearances, not the imagination. In §3, I will reflect on the source of perceptual meaning in Kant and Husserl. Whereas Strawson suggests that Kant draws on the imaginative faculty in order to justify the possibility of perceiving particular objects as such, Husserl thinks that this capacity comes from the passiveassociative accomplishments of sensory consciousness. Finally, in §4, my reflection will take a slightly different direction as I will briefly analyze two types of acts in which perception and imagination do unite, namely image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and perceptual phantasy (perzeptive Phantasie). We will then see how the recourse to the imagination in these situations does not violate, but rather confirms the general rule outlined in the previous sections, namely that perception and imagination are disjointed acts. Indeed, when Husserl holds that image consciousness involves both perceptual and imaginative intentions, he is not claiming that the imagination assumes a synthetic or transcendental function. His point idea is rather that the Bildsujet is something we imagine in (hineinphantasieren) the perceived Bildobjekt through our apprehension of the image as an image, that is to say, as depicting something else. The role that the imagination plays here is empirical, not transcendental.

1.  Husserl’s conception of empty representations In phenomenology and philosophy of mind alike, the so-called problem of perceptual presence refers to the basic fact that perception is only apparently limited to what is sensibly given in experience. As hinted at the outset of this text, it is possible to

22 In order to respect the word-limit of this volume, I will leave the question of the perception of other people (Fremderfahrung) aside, but the result of our investigation would be the same: there is no imaginative intentions involve in this process either. More on this in the conclusion of the paper.

186  Maxime Doyon read Kant as providing an answer to precisely this problem when he asserts that the “imagination (Einbildungskraft) is a faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition”.23 When it engages in synthetic acts and brings the manifold of intuition together, the imagination acts in a productive way and allows for the possibility to form a consciousness of the object beyond what is intuited hic et nunc. This is what Kant calls an ‘image’ (Bild). Nothing similar can be found in Husserl’s work, whose whole conception of intentionality has been edified precisely against an image conception of experience.24 In Husserl’s eyes, the problem of perceptual presence does not even surface as a problem when one realizes that the sensible is experienced as something that opens up the possibility of further exploration. This idea, which ties together Husserl’s notions of intuition, fulfilment and horizon, makes it unnecessary to appeal to a meta-act built upon the intentions themselves. Perception has a direct, presentational character. This needs to be fleshed out. When Husserl began to work on the Logical Investigations in 1898, he framed the problem concerning the unity of objective reference by introducing the notion of perceptual adumbration (Abschattung). An object is always perceived in a certain spatial perspective and under a certain aspect.25 Yet, although only a profile is sensibly given, I do not perceive this profile, but rather the thing itself. Husserl’s idea is that I am directed through the profile toward the object. Husserl puts the point in the following way: “[C]onsciousness reaches out beyond what it actually experiences. It can so to say mean beyond itself, and its meaning can be fulfilled”.26 As he would put it in later works, perception entails an ‘intending beyond itself’ (Über-sich-hinaus-meinen)27 or a ‘pointing beyond’ (Hinausdeutung),28 which is responsible for the fact that the unthematically co-intended profiles are integrated in perceptual consciousness. How exactly we are supposed to understand this ‘intending-beyond-itself’ is something we will return to shortly, but we can readily see why Husserl describes perception as ‘a mixture’ of different kinds of (fulfilled and unfulfilled) intentions. From the Logical Investigations to the Crisis, Husserl will never abandon that view, but he will offer various descriptions,29 which is one of many signs that the discussion of what we have

23 I. Kant, CPR, B151, 256. 24 For a first, strong criticism, see his phenomenological account of cognition in the Logical Investigations, where Husserl targets the so-called ‘Bildertheorie.’ See E. Husserl, LI 5, Appendix to §11 and §20, 436–440/125–127. 25 E. Husserl, LI 6, §14b, 589–592/220–222. 26 Ibid., LI 6, §10, 574/211. 27 Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, Husserliana I (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), §20, 84; English translation: Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), §20, 46. Henceforth cited as CM followed, in order, by the corresponding German and English page references. 28 E. Husserl, APS, §4, 19/56. 29 The word ‘mixture’, which Husserl used in the Logical Investigations, has been replaced by various other expressions over the course of his philosophical career, but the idea is fundamentally the same. Here’s an example of how this structure takes shape in Husserl’s late, genetic phenomenological descriptions: “Generally speaking, perception is original consciousness. We have, however a curious schism in external perception: original consciousness is only possible in the form of an actually and genuinely original conscious having of

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  187 identified above as the problem of perceptual presence evolved considerably throughout Husserl’s philosophical itinerary. In the Logical Investigations, perception is described as an act that includes two moments: there is, on the one hand, the “purely intuitive substance (Gehalt) of the act”, which corresponds to “the sum total of the object’s properties that ‘become apparent’ ”, and on the other hand, there is “the signitive substance of the act, which corresponds to the sum total of the remaining, subsidiarily given properties of the object, which do not themselves become apparent in the act”.30 What holds everything together is the apprehension (Auffassung), which stretches over and above what is intuitively present (viz., the “pure perceptual tenor”31) and provides at the same time perception with a “surplus [. . .] of sense”32 responsible for the appearance of the object (as a whole). Against this background, two questions have occupied Husserlian scholars over the years: the first question concerns with the relation between the intended and the co-intended profiles, and the second has to do with the specific character of what is co-intended in the act. The answer to the first question can be found in the theory of language Husserl laid out in the first Investigation. The non-intuitive aspect of the perceptual object is said to be given in signitive acts, namely in acts that refer to the object by way of a signitive representation.33 In Husserl’s own words: all that “is not presented (Nicht-Dargestelltes) in an intuitive presentation (Vorstellung)”, but is still “subsidiarily meant”34 in perception is “symbolically suggested by what is primarily apparent”35 in the act. Husserl does not univocally claim that the signitive component of the act is itself a signification (Bedeutung), but there is no doubt that he initially thought that there is something like an indicative structure at the heart of perception. While apprehending the sensory material, the Auffassung would at the same time refer to the co-intended profiles. Of course, this is just one operation, but it has two distinct functions, one for each of the two moments of perception distinguished above: the Auffassung accounts both for the interpretation of the sensory material and for the presentation of what is merely co-intended.36

sides and a co-conscious having of other sides that are precisely not originally there. I say co-conscious, since the non-visible sides are certainly also there somehow for consciousness, ‘co-meant’ as co-present. But they do not appear as such, genuinely.” (APS, §1, 3/40). 30 E. Husserl, LI 6, §23, 610/236. 31 Ibid., LI 6, §14b, 590/221. 32 Ibid., LI 5, §14, 399/105. 33 Ibid., LI 6, §23–26, 610–624/235–244. 34 Ibid., LI 6, §23, 611/236. 35 Ibid., LI 6, §14b, 589/220. 36 This is, in essence, what Husserl explains in the so-called ‘form and matter scheme’. More specifically, the scheme posits two distinct elements: sensations and the act of apprehension (Auffassung). During the flow of sensory experiences which occurs in the perception of a sensible object, I have a certain consciousness of the identity of the object and this is due, according to Husserl, to fact that I apprehend or apperceive the sensory matter (see E. Husserl, LI 5, §14, 394–401/102–106). By themselves, sensations have no intentionality and therefore no objectivity either. But the work of apperception adds such objectivity to sensations and thereby enables the constitution of objects in consciousness. Sensations “in

188  Maxime Doyon This is what changes in 1904/05. While Husserl was still presenting the position of the Logical Investigations in his lecture-course Hauptstücke aus der Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, in private, he began to doubt about its plausibility. In the margins to the text of the lecture-course, he writes: “Doch ist es besser, hier nicht vom Zeichen zu sprechen, da nicht ein ‘Gegenstand’ auf etwas hinzeigt”.37 At best, we could speak of an analogy here,38 but quite literally, there is no ‘indication’ whatsoever in perception.39 This view has to be abandoned, and this is precisely what Husserl does in in his 1907 Thing and Space lecture, which contains the first public sign of departure from the position Husserl espoused in the Logical Investigations. As a consequence, Husserl now sees much more clearly into the second problem as well: he now asserts that the occluded parts of objects are simply not represented at all. The absent sides are immediately and even intuitively grasped, but it is devoid of any representational content: The clear results of these considerations is therefore that improperly appearing moments of the object are in no way represented. Perception is, as I aslo express it, a complex of full and empty intentions (rays of apprehension). The full intentions or full apprehensions are the properly presentational ones; the empty are precisely empty of any presentational material. They actually bring nothing to presentation, although they have their direction toward the relevant moments of the object.40

their interpretations” have the “relation to corresponding objective determinations” (LI 6, §22, 609/234). Together with sensations, the “apprehending sense” (Auffassungssinn) thus yields a perceptual presentation of a worldly object. For this reason, Husserl explains that perceived objects “are meant unities (gemeinte Einheiten)” (LI 2, §10, 135/253), a phrase that suggests (but does not univocally ‘proves’) that there are significations involved in perception. For some interpreters, this is an indication that Husserl was a conceptualist of sorts. See Richard Cobb-Stevens, Husserl and Analytic Philosophy (Netherlands: Springer, 1990) for a reading along these lines. 37 Edmund Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893– 1912). Husserliana XXXVIII, ed. Thomas Vongehr and Regula Giuliani (New York: Springer, 2005), 36n.1. 38 “Offenbar haben hierbei die Leerintentionen Analogie mit den signitiven bzw. es hat die Verflechtung der leeren und intuitiven Intentionen innerhalb der Einheit der transzendierenden Dinganschauung Analogie mit der Verflechtung signitiver Intentionen und der die Sigma selbst konstituierenden Anschauungen.” (E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband. Erster Teil. Entwürfe zur Umarbeitung der VI. Untersuchung und zur Vorrede für die Neuauflage der Logischen Untersuchungen (Sommer 1913). Husserliana XX/I, ed. U. Melle (The Hague, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), §16, 91). See also, Id., §18, 94. 39 This only holds for indication as it was thought in the LI, namely, as a function of signs. For later, Husserl would claim that indication is at the heart of genetic phenomenology, but in ways that he didn’t recognize until 1918. We will return to this issue in §3 and see that this rehabilitated, genetic notion of indication has a quite prominent role to play in perception, alongside association and motivation. Thanks to Hayden Kee for pointing this out to me. 40 Edmund Husserl, Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907. Husserliana XVI, ed. U. Claesges (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973); English translation: Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. R. Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Springer, 1997), §18, 57/48, my

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  189 In the rewriting of the LI in 1913–21, Husserl will deepen this thought and mobilise the notion of ‘empty representation’ (Leervorstellung) to replace that of ‘signitive intention’, explaining in passing, this time very explicitly, that such representations are not ‘pre-views’ of the thing.41 These representations do not have a picture-like character, as if we would be mentally picturing (ausmalen) what we anticipate in perception.42 Instead, the occluded parts are emptily represented, and this just means that they open up the possibility of further fulfilment. In short, then, from 1904/05 onward, Husserl univocally affirms that that we don’t need some kind of images or mental representations to account for the amodal character of perception. Perceptual experience is a process of fulfilment of empty intentions, and the imagination does not assume any role in this process.

2.  Movement and kinesthesis While we now know why Husserl excludes any recourse to mental representations and images in his analysis of perceptual experience, we still have not provided a positive answer to the problem of perceptual presence, and thus, we still have not explained how Husserl accounts for the function Kant attributes to the imagination in response to this problem. This is the goal of the present section. Specifically, it will be shown that Husserl discloses the identity of perceptual appearances across both space and time by appealing to the law of motivation. Remember both sets of problems: a temporally extended perceptual consciousness of an identical object requires “a certain sort of connection” of our occurring perceptions with “other possible (and hence non-actual) perceptions of the same object”,43 for without such connection, which the imagination provides, the perceiver would not experience perceptual objects as persisting through the continuous flow of appearances. Husserl saw things differently, however. After what might be considered a false start at the time of the Logical Investigations,44 Husserl developed, in the 1907 lecture-course Thing and Space, a new and more intricate answer to the Kantian question of how we take several different appearances to be appearances of one and the

emphasis. Henceforth cited as TS followed by the section number and the German and the English page references respectively. 41 E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 89ff. 42 Cf. E. Husserl, APS, §19, 78ff. 43 P. F. Strawson, “Imagination and Perception,” 91. 44 In §47 of the sixth Logical Investigation, Husserl explains the possibility of achieving objective reference by affirming that each single percept is pervaded by the homogeneous unity of one and the same perceptual sense. This means that each single glance on the object yields the same perceptual object. Given this, a question emerges: how can several part-percepts constitute together a meaningful whole if they are not synthetically united to one another? Husserl’s answer is that they are fused to one another: “[A] continuous perceptual flux involves a fusion of part-acts in one act” (LI 6, §47, 678/284). Since all percepts have the same perceptual sense, they don’t add up, they rather fuse together. Hence, nothing new is objectively meant in the extended act; rather, the same object is continuously meant in it. As we will see in the rest of this section, Husserl’s view on this will considerably evolve when he will realize the importance of time and of the embodied nature of perceptual experience.

190  Maxime Doyon same object by stressing the key role of movement and kinaesthetic sensations. Schematically, Husserl sees the possibility of constituting objective reference as relying on two basic conditions. First, having a unified perceptual consciousness across multiple appearances requires that the appearances have certain sensible qualities in common. They must share, Husserl holds, the homogeneous unity of one and the same perceptual sense (Wahrnehmungssinn), namely that of the object. This is not enough, however. A qualitative matching between the appearances is a necessary, yet not sufficient condition for perceptual identity, for the front of a piece of paper and the back of another can match perfectly, but still belong to different objects.45 Agreement in sense only guarantees that similar objects are apprehended in similar perceptual experiences, but it is insufficient for objective identity.46 The second condition is that these similar appearances must be experienced as belonging to the same continuum. Different appearances are grasped as pertaining to the same object if and only if the appearances can be given in a continuous synthesis, that is to say, if there is a running transition between them. In Husserl’s words: only if a “continuous transition from one perception to the other is guaranteed is [. . .] identity given [. . .] an identical-unchanged spatial body can only certify itself [ausweisen] as such in a kinetic perceptual series that continuously yields appearances of its different sides”.47 Different appearances can present us with one and the same object if the appearances can be given in a continuous series, that is to say, if the appearances form a continuum.48 Building on the insights of Thing and Space, Husserl will explain in Active and Passive Syntheses that the kinaesthetic experience of a continuous series is important as it constitutes a distinctive type of experience that has the striking capacity to motivate the flow of appearances, and thereby to complete the constitution process. The co-intended, but not intuitively given profiles or “appearances are kinaesthetically motivated”,49 and this means that normal kinaesthetic sensations generate a more or less definite set of expectations. My horizonal awareness of the absent profiles is correlated to my kinaesthetic system, namely to the system of the relevant movements I am capable of doing, such that I am always implicitly aware (thanks to my kinaesthetic sensations) that if I perform a continuous bodily activity, then a corresponding series of appearances must unfold as motivated. Here is Husserl’s most explicit passage on this issue: By viewing an object I am conscious of the position of my eyes and at the same time – in the form of a novel systematic empty horizon – I am conscious of the

45 E. Husserl, TS, §44, 154–155/131. 46 For a more detailed analysis of this point, see John J. Drummond’s excellent piece “On Seeing a Material Thing in Space: The Role of Kinaesthesis in Visual Perception,” Philosophy and Phenomenologial Research 40/1 (1979): 19–32, especially 20–22. Also relevant in this context is Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston, IL: Northwest University Press, 1999), Ch. 6, 91–109. 47 E. Husserl, TS, §44, 155–156/131–132. 48 See J. J. Drummond, “On Seeing a Material Thing in Space,” 23–29. 49 E. Husserl, APS, §3, 15/52.

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  191 entire system of possible eye positions that rest at my disposal. And now, what is seen in the given eye position is so enmeshed with the entire system that I can say with certainty that if I were to move my eyes in this direction or in that, specific visual appearances would accordingly run their course in a determinate order. If I were to let the eye movements run this way or that in another direction, different series of appearances would accordingly run their course as expected. This holds likewise for head movements in the system of these possibilities of movement, and again for the movement of walking, etc., that I might bring into play.50 In brief, what counts in the perception of a spatiotemporal object is the correlation that holds between the kinaesthetic series, i.e. “the system of so-called ‘movement-sensations’ that run their course during perception”,51 and the corresponding perceptual appearances of the object. There is a covarying relation that holds between the sensations by which one is aware of the movements of one’s own body, and the appearances of the object, and the two sets form a unified system. This is what Husserl hints at when he mentions that the kinaesthetic series does “not simply run parallel to the flow of appearances there; rather the kinaesthetic series [. . .] and the perceptual appearances are related to one another through consciousness”.52 Consciousness is where both series converge and meet to form what Husserl calls an “objective sense” (ein gegeständlicher Sinn),53 which is an intentional synthetic unity.54 With this, we have struck the core of Husserl’s unity thesis. The whole point of Husserl’s analysis is that perception must be conceived as a process, not as something happening in a unitary act of synthesis. In his eyes, it is the law of motivation that governs this process and which is therefore responsible for the objective constitution of objects across multiple appearances. This is what Husserl means when he asserts that the appearances of the object are dependent upon kinaestheses.55 We perceive the various

50 Ibid., §3, 14/51. 51 Ibid., §3, 14/50. 52 Ibid., §3, 14/50–51. 53 This ‘gegenständlicher Sinn’ corresponds roughly to what Husserl called ‘Wahrnehmungssinn’ in the Logical Investigations. 54 This is a view that Steven Crowell does not find convincing at all insofar as the ‘if-then’ relation disclosed in this connection can’t establish the norm in perception. (Steven Crowell, Phenomenology and Normativity in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 124–146). I think Crowell is right about this. Still, I think the structure or organization of the flow of kinaesthetic sensations contributes to establish the norm. For an argument along those lines, see my “Intentionality and Normativity” (Maxime Doyon, “Intentionality and Normativity. A Critical Notice of Steve Crowell’s Phenomenology and Normativity in Husserl and Heidegger,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23/2 (2015): 279–295). 55 “The appearances form dependent systems. Only as dependent upon kinaestheses can they continually pass into one another and constitute a unity of one sense” (APS, §3, 14/51). See this passage as well: “To the possibility of experience there pertains, however, the spontaneity of the courses of presenting acts of sensation, which are accompanied by series of kinaesthetic sensations and which are dependent on them as motivated” (Edmund Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel.

192  Maxime Doyon appearances as belonging to one and the same object because we are (implicitly) aware of our capacity to motivate the flow of appearances as we move our Ego-Body (Leib). This is, in Husserl’s eyes, a key element of the fulfilment structure, for the flow of kinaesthetic sensations that accompany my bodily movements is structured in such a way that it allows for the transformation of empty intentions into expectations.56 What is expected or anticipated is associatively ‘demanded’, or motivated in that sense. Insofar as it allows the synthetic unification of intentional contents, the law of motivation thus provides for the kind of basic unity responsible for objective reference. Again, we reach the same conclusion as in the previous section: there seem to be no reason to have recourse to the imagination to explain the constitution of perceptual identity.

3.  The passive constitution of the kind-identity One of the ideas that came to the fore in the preceding section is that the motivational if-then relation structuring our sensorimotor relation to the outer world is rooted in kinaesthetic experience. Whereas Husserl thinks that the intentional ‘if-then’ is present at every level of constitution, from the most basic to the most elaborate strata of constitution,57 the view he espouses in the so-called genetic phase of his phenomenology is that the sequence of appearances is protentionally prefigured (vorgezeichnet) thanks to the contribution of our kinaesthetic system.58 It is true that the law of motivation does not furnish consciousness with full-blooded objectivity, but it is still a necessary feature of perception as it makes the eventual identification of perceptual objects as such possible. So contrary to Strawson’s interpretation of Kant, who explains the possibility of apprehending objects as objects of certain kinds or types by stressing the schematic activity of the imagination, Husserl’s idea is that conceptual or categorial seeing is grounded in what is already meaningfully structured in passivity. This insight can, in turn, be analyzed from two different, but related perspectives, because there is passivity both in (§3.1) and before (§3.2) spontaneity or activity. 3.1  Passivity in activity Husserl laid down the foundation of this view in Thing and Space when he affirmed that the above-mentioned intentional experience of transition opens up the possibility

Husserliana IV (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff; 1952), §18a, 56; English translation: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, second book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Springer, 1989), §18a, 61). Henceforth cited as Ideas II followed by the section number and the German and the English page references). 56 E. Husserl, APS, §3, 12/49. 57 “In all constitution and on all levels, we have, by necessity, ‘circumstances’ related to one another, and ‘that which is dependent on’ all the circumstances: everywhere, we find the ‘if-then’ or the ‘because-therefore’ ” (E. Husserl, Ideas II, §18a, 57/62). 58 Here is a passage that illutsrates this point: “As soon as I have an appearance of the thing [. . .] a system of internally coherent manifold of appearances of the same thing is thereby prefigured (vorgezeichnet) in the original consciousness of the sequence of appearances. [. . .] When I undertake a series of movements [. . .], the appearances that are arriving are already prefigured” (APS, §3, 14/51).

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  193 for a third synthesis, namely the ‘logical synthesis of identification’, which is built upon it: “this continuous transition must lie at the foundation in order for the logical synthesis, that of identification, to produce the evident givenness of the identity of the objects appearing in the various perceptions”.59 Unfortunately, Husserl is not very explicit about the proper achievement of this third synthesis, but the passage shows that there actually are not two, but three conditions for objective unity: founded upon the intentional experience of transition, the logical synthesis of identification would seal the object’s identity. We thus have the following picture: thanks to the kinaesthetic synthesis of transition, the object is given as unified across its appearances, and thanks to the logical synthesis, the object is given as identical (i.e. as this one and no other). In all of this, the foundational model Husserl works with unambiguously shines through: the logical synthesis of identification is built upon the kinaesthetic experience of transition (viz. the ‘continuous synthesis’) since the very possibility of identifying an object as such presupposes that it is already experienced as a spatial unity.60 3.2  Passivity prior to activity If Husserl recognizes in kinaesthetic experience a form of passivity in activity, in his late, genetic phenomenology, he went deeper still and also identified a form of passivity that precedes and triggers activity. Very generally, the idea is that in order to have a perceptual experience of objects at all, these objects must first be available to me. Intentional relatedness presupposes that objects first affect me and stimulate consciousness originally.61 It is true that there could be no relation to the object without consciousness’ receptivity, i.e. without consciousness turning-to (Zuwendung) the affecting object. And yet, even this elemental form of activity that Husserl calls ‘receptivity’ presupposes a prior affection.

59 E. Husserl, TS, §44, 155/132. 60 In this story, the passive achievement of the law of motivation acts as the ‘topsoil’ (Mutterboden) of reason’s work. Here’s a very revealing passage on this: “Wir können nun auch sagen: Die Motivation ist der Mutterboden der Vernunft und hat als solcher Empfänglichkeit für den intellectus agens und das Subjeckt der aktiven Vernunft in seinem Vernunftwalten. Eben damit ist sie potenzielle Vernunft, denn was der intellectus agens herauszeugt, das ist in dem Mutterboden schon angelegt. Nur er kann das Potenzielle aktivieren und ihm die Form der eigentlichen Vernunft erteilen. So bilden sich in der Passivität Apperzeptionen, es konstituiert sich passiv für das Ich eine Zeitwelt, räumlich ausgebreitet und mit kausalen Abhängigkeiten, die auf Motivationen beruhen und die Sache als reale Objekte apperzeptiv erscheinen lassen. Die Wahrnehmung, die Erinnerung, die Erwartung, und so alle intentionalen Erlebnisse der anschaulichen Klasse sind intentionale Geflechte und Geflechte passiver Motivation” (E. Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924. Husserliana XXXVII, ed. H. Peucker (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004) 331; my emphasis). What is important in this passage is Husserl’s emphasis on the deep continuity prevailing between the different constitution strata, from the most rudimentary to the most elaborated ones. 61 Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. L. Landgrebe (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1972), §7–16, 23–79; English translation: Experience and Judgment, trans. J. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwest University Press, 1973), §7–16, 28–76. Henceforth cited as EJ followed by the section number, and the Germand and the English page references respectively.

194  Maxime Doyon Husserl’s strategy with regard to what we have called the ‘as-such claim’ is to explain perceptual recognition by referring back to the basic work of association, the synthetic experience of sense-formation where consciousness establishes rudimentary connections between worldly items on the basis of contrast and similarity. These associative performances correspond to a pre-egoical organization of the manifold of appearances, and this in turn explains why Husserl refers to this level of constitution as a level of passive pre-givenness. Granted, the intended object has not yet been constituted at this level, so we can’t speak of full-blooded perceptual awareness just yet. But as it achieves the synthetic unification of intentional contents, association provides for the kind of unity necessary for objective reference and recognition. Here the object is perhaps only “pre-given, pre-constituted”, but it is ready to be apprehended “as this identical unity”62 because it is already structured in intentional consciousness according to rule-like formations that Husserl calls ‘types’ (Typen).63 Types are empirical generalities or proto-concepts that function as a priori rules in the process of perceptual recognition.64 On the basis of affections and associations, which Husserl identifies as the origin of empirical types, perceptual consciousness automatically categorizes what perceptually comes in on the basis of what was previously experienced. Experienced objects are passively recognized as instances or expressions of such vague generalities. This means for Husserl that, invariably, the perceived registers as such in intentional consciousness.65 It is true that a developed consciousness does not explicitly have worldly experiences that are even apparently like anything associative synthesis achieves. To the level of pre-predicative experience corresponds the stratum of constitution where perceptual objects are not ‘finished’ yet, but only ‘pre-given’. As Husserl puts it in Experience and Judgment, passive consciousness is Einheit vorkonstituierend, but it is not yet Gegenstände konstituierend.66 For there to be object-consciousness, there must be “an active believing cognizance”,67 coupled with the pragmatic potentiality of moving one’s own body appropriately.68 However, Husserl holds that there couldn’t be any kind of bodily or cognitive activity targeted at specific worldly objects if consciousness wasn’t intentionally related to these objects in the first place. Hence, the very possibility of

62 E. Husserl, EJ, §13, 62/60. 63 See Ibid., §8 and 83, 26–36 and 398–401/31–39 and 331–334. 64 For this reason, D. Lohmar argued that types assume in Husserl’s framework a function similar to Kant’s schemata. See Dieter Lohmar, Phänomenologie der schwachen Phantasie. Untersuchung der Psychologie, Cognitive Science, Neurologie und Phänomenologie zur Funktion der Phantasie in der Wahrnehmung (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008) and “Husserl’s Type and Kant’s Schemata: Systematic Reasons for Their Correlation or Identity,” in The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, ed. D. Welton (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003). 65 See Maxime Doyon, “The As-Structure of Intentional Experience in Husserl and Heidegger” in Phenomenology of Thinking: Investigations into the Character of Cognitive Experiences (London: Routledge, 2016), 116–133. 66 E. Husserl, EJ, §13, 64/62. 67 Ibid., §13, 64/62. 68 E. Husserl, TS, §44, 154–156/131–132 and APS, §3, 10–15/47–53.

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  195 identifying objects as such and such presupposes the availability of these objects, and this is precisely what Husserl’s theory of passive intentionality accounts for. In short, contrary to Strawson’s or Matherne’s interpretations of Kant, who respectively stress the contribution of the synthesis of recognition and apprehension to explain the possibility of apprehending perceptual objects ‘as such’, Husserl conceives of constitution as a process of sense formation rooted in passivity.69 The structural joining together of the manifold of appearances starts at the level of association, which already display the kind of lawful regularity upon which types and eventually full-blooded empirical concepts are based.70 This means that there are articulations of experiential sense before it reaches the semantic and conceptual levels. We find meaningful articulations in passivity (at the level of association), then some more in receptivity and kinaesthetic experience, and still more in the spontaneity of the predicative act of judgment. Articulations are present at every level of constitution, not only at the level of higher-order achievements such as judgments and abstraction. Even before experience acquires the requisite unity for coping skilfully with the world or making normative claims about it, it is structured or articulated, for otherwise we would never be in a position to act or make these claims at all. We could obviously argue about the plausibility of this claim, but this is, in any case, what Husserl’s account of genetic continuity implies. In a contemporary idiom, one could perhaps attempt to summarize Husserl’s analysis of passivity by asserting that he defends a radically ‘bottom-up’ model into the origin of norms and meaning. While Kant locates the unity of meaning in the transcendental unity of apperception, which he sees as the instance ultimately responsible of all synthetic activities of consciousness, Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of typeformation demonstrate that meaning, norms and unity originate in the passiveassociative work of intentional consciousness.71

4. Two types of mixed acts: image consciousness and perceptual phantasies In the previous three sections, a sketch of Husserl’s account of objective constitution has been provided and at each step we considered, and then rejected, the necessity to

69 For Husserl’s own self-interpretation of this matter in relation to Kant’s “profound but obscure doctrine of the synthesis of productive imagination”, see E. Husserl, APS, 275f/410. 70 As is well known, it is precisely this kind of passive-associative performances of the ego that D. Lohmar (2003) identifies as having a transcendantal function in perception. Since they all fall under the general heading of ‘weak phantasy’, Lohmar argues that imagination is at work in perception. Even though Lohmar urges us not to confuse weak and strong phantasy, I think that this terminology is misleading, for his thesis is not even incompatible with mine. Of course, the kind of syntheses Lohmar has in view are involved in the perceptual process, but only insofar as they explain the associative processes of retentional consciousness. The important point to keep in mind here is that this has nothing to do with how Husserl usually thinks of imagination. Throughout the paper, I therefore use the word ‘Phantasie’ (imagining) in the usual Husserlian sense (which corresponds to what Lohmar calls ‘strong Phantasie’). 71 For lack of space, I won’t attempt to compare the normative law of perception with what I would like to call the quasi-normative laws of imagination.

196  Maxime Doyon draw on the synthetic activity of imagination. And yet, Husserl does admit that imaginative acts can in certain circumstances be involved in perceptual experience: this is precisely what happens in image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) (§4.1) and in what Husserl aptly calls “perceptual phantasies” (§4.2), which involve a mixture of perceptual and imaginative intentions. We will see, however, that these types of ‘mixed acts’ do not contradict, but rather confirm the discontinuity thesis argued for in the three previous sections. 4.1  Image consciousness Of all the conceptual distinctions that Husserl works with in the Logical Investigations, the one between intuitive and signitive representations plays a pivotal role. The distinction is justified in the following manner: whereas the object itself or its image is said to appear in intuitive acts, signitive acts refer to their objects or state of affairs by way of meaning. Against this background, Husserl classifies intentional experiences in either one of these two groups: perception (Wahrnehmung), imagination (Phantasie), image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein), recollection (Erinnerung) and anticipation (Erwartung) all belong to the class of intuitive acts,72 whereas linguistic, symbolic, conceptual and every other kind of cognitive experiences are signitive types of intentionalities in that they all lack intuitive fullness. Intuitive acts are not all equal, however. Since it presents (gegenwärtigen) its objects directly, perception is the paradigmatic form of intuitive experiences, whereas all the others are mediate forms of intuiting that merely presentify (vergegenwärtigen) their objects. As such, they form a more or less homogenous group that Husserl initially (and somewhat confusingly) labelled ‘Phantasie’ (in the wide sense). At the time of the Logical Investigations, Husserl saw the specificity of these acts to lie in their depictiveness (Bildlichkeit), that is to say, he “understood this presenting to be depicting”,73 as he himself recognized in retrospect. As such, they stand in sharp opposition to perception, which is direct and unmediated. In the 1904/05 Hauptstücke aus der Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, a four-part lecture-course specifically dedicated to the phenomenological analysis of intuitive acts, Husserl started to have doubts about the reach of this conceptual division, notably because on this conception, intuitive acts seem to require two objects – namely the image (Bild) and what it depicts – while this does not seem to hold true of all intuitive representations. Take imagining (Phantasie). Imagining (this time in the strict sense of the term) is more akin to perceiving than to a consciousness of image (Bildbewusstsein) inasmuch as experiences of imagining are, just like perceptions,

72 Even if Husserl did not consider it at the time of the Logical Investigations, there is little doubt that empathy (Empathie) also belongs to this group of acts. 73 Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung (1898 1925), ed. E. Marbach. Husserliana XXIII (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 515; English translation: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898 1925), trans. J. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 616. Henceforth cited as PICM followed by, respectively, the German and the English page references. Here, PICM, 515/616.

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  197 simple acts by means of which one is intuitively aware of an object directly.74 Compared to the immediacy of imagining and perceiving acts, the intentionality involved in image consciousness is more complex. As Husserl notes, here “a number of apprehensions are accomplished”.75 In the experience of perceiving a portrait, which Husserl conceives as paradigmatic of image consciousness, a tripartite structure is in place: an image object (the brush strokes) depict or represent an image subject (say, the king), which is itself perceived on a material thing (the canvas). A web of intentional implications relates these moments to one another: the perception (Perzeption)76 of the image object (Bildobjekt) on the material thing (Bildding) intentionally awakens the image subject (Bildsujet). This means: on the basis of the perception of a sensible substrate, a subject (the king) is imaginatively presentified.77 Husserl brings this to the point succinctly when he mentions that image consciousness involves a “perceptual-imaginative apprehension”78 (perzeptiv-imaginative Auffassung). The key in Husserl’s analysis lies in the double function he ascribes to the sensible substrate: “The same sensuous contents, the same sensations, are apprehended as the image object and at the same time serve [. . .] as bearers of a phantasy consciousness”.79 Very simply, the idea seems to be that the visual sensations, in being perceived, allow at the same time imaginary consciousness to presentify its object through the perceived materiality. In this story, the role of the imagination is not synthetic or transcendental, however. Husserl’s idea is rather that the image subject is depicted in what is perceived. Only in that specific, empirical sense can he claim consequently that image consciousness is a moment of perceptual experience, or – better still – that it “is based on perception”.80

74 The distinction between perceiving and imagining is still clear, however, and it comes to the fore both from the noematic and noetic point of views. Contrary to perceptual objects, which actually exist as real, imagined objects are not actual but possible; and they are not real or existent but neutral (Husserl affirms that their positionality has been “neutralized”). Hence, we can define imagining as “a direct sensory awareness of objects” (Julia Jansen, “Husserl,” in Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, ed. A. Kind (London: Routledge, 2016), 70), or, more specifically, as a “simulation of possible experience” (J. Jansen, “Husserl,” 73). Despite the fact that perceiving involves a presentation (Gegenwärtingung), whereby the experiencing subject is aware of something present in her surrounding, and imagining a presentification (Vergegenwärtigung), whereby the subject is imaginatively aware of an object “that is not present” (PICM, 86/93), imagining and perceiving are very much alike with regard to their direct and intuitive character. And it is essentially for this reason – so important in Husserl’s eyes – that Husserl repeatedly asserts from 1904/05 on that imagining is a ‘quasi-perception’ (Quasi-Wahrnehmung): it is a perception in the ‘as if’ mode. 75 E. Husserl, PICM, 82/89. 76  Since image consciousness does not include the thetic character proper to perception (Wahrnehmung), Husserl sometimes uses the word ‘Perzeption’ to speak of the awareness of the sensible substrate. 77 Husserl writes in this sense that “the ‘phantasy image’ is a reproductive image, the seen image a perceptual [perzeptive] image” (PICM, 480/570). 78 E. Husserl, PICM, 79/85 (trans. mod.). 79 Ibid., 86/93. 80 Ibid., 82/89.

198  Maxime Doyon 4.2  Perceptual phantasies81 While image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) is characterized by its depictiveness (Abbildlichkeit) and the ensuing tripartite structure it sets in play, we have seen that imagining (Phantasie) is, just like perception, a simple, immediate, and intuitive act. Phantasy consciousness can still harbor a certain complexity, however, for sometimes it, too, can be infused with perceptual intentions. The result is what Husserl calls “perceptual phantasy”.82 Contrary to pure phantasies, which come about in free variation “without admixture of actual experiences”,83 experiences of perceptual phantasies do “involve the figment’s [Fiktum] having a relation to reality”,84 but since “depiction is obviously omitted”, it still count as a case of “immediate imagination”, claims Husserl.85 Comedies, dramas, operas, stories and fairy tales are among the examples that serve to illustrate Husserl’s point. In a theatrical performance, for instance, we are “phantasying a figment into a portion of intuitively experienced reality”,86 which functions as its material support. We see “the king” in the “actual human being” that plays his character on stage.87 Here “the figment [. . .] presents itself [. . .] in the real thing”,88 which is why Husserl considers these phenomena to be “mixtures” (Mischungen)89 of actual and quasi-actual, or perceptual and quasi-perceptual moments. The dual nature of the experience translates at the level of representation: while the actor is perceptually presented, the fictional character is imaginatively presentified in it. Just like our analysis of image consciousness revealed, what we have here is a peculiar form of consciousness where the presentative and representative acts are coordinated and constitute the specific intentionality of perceptual phantasies. What makes perceptual phantasies unique is the way both kinds of acts co-exist. Perceptual phantasies are experiences of conflict (Widerstreit) between the actual and the non-actual (or phantasized) moments of what is intuited. The figment presents itself “by means of [a] conflict”,90 but unlike illusory experiences, the conflict is enduring and “there from the beginning”.91 To be clear: the kind of conflict Husserl has in view here is unlike the kind of conflict that pertains to illusions and hallucinations, which never lasts and always results in the crossing out or transformation of belief. In perceptual phantasies, the conflict lasts as long as they play successfully carries us into another world. In this sense, Husserl holds that the work of art is lived through as an experience in which what is “actually experienced” is “concealed”92 by the phantasized object. We no longer see the actor, but only the king. The as-if content of the phantasized object “is

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

I wish to thank M. Summa, who drew my attention to this phenomenon. E. Husserl, PICM, 515ff./616ff. Ibid., 504/605. Ibid., 509/610. Ibid., 515/616. Ibid., 509/610. Ibid., 509/611. Ibid., 518/619. Ibid., 509/611. Ibid., 518/620. Ibid., 516/618. Ibid., 517/618.

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  199 only made easy by the inhibiting”93 of the actually perceived content, and this in turn explains why Husserl understands perceptual phantasies to be bound (gebundene), not pure, phantasies.94 As this series of examples show, there are experiences where imagination and perception come together in intentional consciousness. Unlike in Kant, however, this is not because the manifold of sensations stands in need of a further synthetic accomplishment, but rather because phantasy consciousness sometimes requires a material support to ‘project’ its content in it. This is what happens in the experience of a portrait or of any scene performance. Whether we conceive art works, as the early Husserl did, in terms of depiction, or whether we think of “Art” as belonging to “the realm of phantasy”,95 as the later Husserl did, the analysis remains essentially the same on this score: the coordinated function of both perceptual and imaginative apprehensions are necessary to make the object appear. Although aesthetic experiences are good candidates to convey Husserl’s idea, there is no principled reason to think that phantasy consciousness is limited only to the aesthetic realm, at least not in the narrow sense of the term. As Husserl himself writes, the same structural moments are at play the moment we look at something (anything) with an aesthetic eye: Perhaps one can say that precisely the same thing is not altogether impossible even in the case of uninterrupted and uninhibited actual experience – as when we contemplate a beautiful landscape aesthetically, and the landscape and even all of the human beings, houses, and villages that we see in our experience of it are ‘accepted’ by us as if they were mere figures in a painted landscape. We are, of course, actually experiencing, but we are not in the attitude of actual experience; we do not actually join in the experiential positing. The reality changes into reality-as-if for us, changes into ‘play’; the objects turn into aesthetic semblance: into mere – though perceptual – phantasy objects.96 It thus seems that Husserl thought, after all, that perception and imagination can be united quite regularly in everyday life, but the reasons why he came to endorse this view have very little to do with the kind of transcendental function Kant grants to the imagination.

93 Ibid., 513/615. 94 Besides aesthetic scene performances, which Husserl seems to consider to be paradigmatic in this respect, we can think of books or any other kind of “reproductive phantasies of narrative art”, which are also bound to a materiality, namely that of the “spoken or written words” (PICM, 519/620). The conflict described above reappears doubly. On the one hand, words that are understood in the context of a narrative have a fictional meaning (a quasi-meaning) that is in conflict with how they are used in normal, everyday life. On the other hand, the ideal content of the narrative is bound to materiality that instantiates it. For a more detailed analysis, see Michela Summa, “Experiencing Reality and Fiction: Discontinuity and Permeability,” in Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, ed. M. Summa, T. Fuchs and L. Vazango (London: Routledge, 2017), 7ff. 95 E. Husserl, PICM, 514/616. 96 Ibid., 513/615.

200  Maxime Doyon

Conclusion Historically, the phenomenological impetus for distinguishing between perception and the imagination does not have much to do with Kant. Husserl’s early motivation came rather from Brentano, who defended a broadly empiricist (viz. Humean) view of time according to which the association of past, present and future phases of our experience of objects relies on the imagination. Husserl found Brentano’s account both interesting and problematic. The proposed solution is interesting, because Brentano clearly saw the phenomenological unity of the past, present and future. At the same time, succession and change are not perceived within Brentano’s theory; they are rather represented “in the mode of phantasy”.97 This is problematic for Husserl because this amounts to denying the reality of succession. While Brentano thought that it is our imagination that allows perceptual consciousness to transcend the punctual now, Husserl thought that “the attempt to treat what is past as something unreal and nonexistent is [. . .] highly questionable”.98 What is problematic for Husserl is the unreal character of the succession, or more specifically, the continuously becoming unreal of the real present. The idea that we cannot literally perceive objects as having a temporal extension, but only imagine them so is implausible. According to Husserl, there is a fundamental distinction to be made between experiencing change (and duration) directly, and simply imagining or remembering it. While memory and imagination are modes of representation, perception presents its objects directly, and it is within the perceptual intuitions themselves that references to the past and the future are inscribed, not anywhere else.99 This is what sections 2 and 3 of the present paper have sought to account for in positive terms by spelling out the decisive contributions of the laws of motivation and association to experience. Against this background, it has been argued throughout the paper that, contrary to Kant, the imagination does not assume a synthetic or transcendental function in Husserl’s theory of perception.100 If I had had more space at my disposal, I would also have considered Husserl’s account of the perception of other people (Fremderfahrung), but only to show, again, that no imagination is involved. Except for some more equivocal passages in the fifth Cartesian Meditation,101 Husserl has always maintained that there is no room for any imaginative function within the perception of others (and their behaviors and expressions). To speak a contemporary language: Husserl has never conceived of empathy as a kind of simulation theory avant la lettre. And there are philosophical reasons for that. If the experience of others would amount to imagining

 97 Ibid., 16/17; also Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917). Husserliana X (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 16.  98 E. Husserl, PICM, 19/ 20 (trans. mod.); Hua X, 18.  99 Husserl’s criticism of Brentano’s approach to temporality in terms of phantasy-modification can be found in Hua XXIII, 92f/11f and Hua X, 10f/11f. For a discussion, see Robin Rollinger, “Husserl and Brentano on Imagination,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 75/2 (2009): 195–210 and Françoise Dastur, “L’approche phénoménologique du problème de l’imagination,” in Husserl, ed. J. Benoist (Paris: Vrin, 2008). 100 This does not mean, however, that perceptual and imaginative acts can never empirically unite, as we have seen in §4. 101 Cf. E. Husserl, MC, §53.

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  201 oneself as another, experience would not be precisely an encounter with the other. In short, the perception of others, too, is “direct”, and to that extent, it, too, does not normally involve the contribution of the imagination.102 Except from these circumstances where phantasy consciousness needs a perceived material support to project its content, Husserl holds that perceiving and imagining acts do not overlap. Apart from Sartre,103 who embraces Husserl’s discontinuous thesis by and large, most of the other phenomenologists thought, however, that Husserl over-determined the difference between imagination and perception. This is especially clear in Merleau-Ponty’s later works, for whom perception is a much more complex affair. In Eye and Mind,104 for instance, Merleau-Ponty claims that perception starts with ambiguity, and that experience is an unresolved or open process of disentanglement that reveals the “imaginary texture of the real”.105 In the contemporary enactivist tradition, there seems to be a consensus around the Merleau-Pontian idea that action, perception and imagination are continuous with one another and that “there is an aspect of imagination in perception itself”.106 On the enactivist idea of “perception as active or action-oriented”, imagination is conceived as a “projection/enactment of possibilities”.107 Importantly, these possibilities are not representational. In the spirit of Husserl, the enactivists think of imagining as a kind of simulation or “re-enactment of perception”,108 and since there is no representational content involved in perception, they insist that there need not be any representational content involved in imaginary practices either.109 This is, admittedly, a complex and controversial question that need not be settled here, but it shows that the question of the relation between imagination and perception is still very much actual and debated even within the phenomenological tradition.110

102 For a clear and systematic presentation of this view, see Dan Zahavi, Self and Other (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 112–152 (especially 132–137). 103 See Jean-Paul Sartre, L’imagination (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1936); English translation: The Imagination. A Psychological Critique, trans. F. Williams (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1962) and L’imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (Paris: Gallimard, 1940); English translation: The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. J. Webber (London: Routledge, 2005). 104 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, IL: Northwest University Press, 1964). 105 Ibid., 165. For a good overview of Merleau-Ponty’s take on imagination, see Annabelle Dufourcq, Merleau-Ponty: une ontologie de l’imaginaire (Dordrecht:Springer, 2012). 106 Shaun Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions. Rethinking the Mind (London: Oxford University Press, 2017), 196. 107 Ibid., 197. 108 Ibid., 193. 109 See Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Daniel Hutto, “Overly enactive imagination? Radically Re-imagining Imagining,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 53 (2015): 68–89. 110 I would like to thank warm-heartedly my colleague Augustin Dumont, who had the idea for this project and who made it possible through his SSHRCC-funded Canada Research Chair in Transcendental Philosophy. For the great feedback they provided me with, special thanks go to the other participants of this collective as well: Smaranda Aldea, Michela Summa, Samantha Matherne and Daniele De Santis. Finally, thanks to Claudio Majolino for his clarifying remarks at the 49th Husserl-Circle in Mexico, where I presented the final version of this paper.

202  Maxime Doyon

References Crowell, S. Phenomenology and Normativity in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013. Dastur, F. L’approche phénoménologique du problème de l’imagination. In Husserl, Dir. J. Benoist. Paris: Vrin, 2008. Doyon, M. “Intentionality and Normativity. (A Critical Notice of Steve Crowell’s Phenomenology and Normativity in Husserl and Heidegger).” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23, no. 2 (2015): 279–295. ———. “The As-Structure of Intentional Experience in Husserl and Heidegger.” In Phenomenology of Thinking: Investigations into the Character of Cognitive Experiences, Dir. T. Breyer and C. Gutland. London: Routledge, coll. Advances in Consciousness Research, 2016, pp. 116–133. Drummond, J. J. “On Seeing a Material Thing in Space: The Role of Kinaesthesis in Visual Perception.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40, no. 1 (1979): 19–32. Dufourcq, A. Merleau-Ponty: une ontologie de l’imaginaire. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012. Gallagher, S. Enactivist Interventions. Rethinking the Mind. London: Oxford University Press, 2017. Husserl, E. Hua I. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950; Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. ———. Hua VI. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1970. ———. Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1972; Experience and Judgment, trans. J. Churchill and K. Ameriks. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. Hua IV. Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952; Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, second book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Springer, 1989. ———. Hua X. Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917). Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966b; On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. J. B. Brough, Vol. IV, Edmund Husserl Collected Works). Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer, 1991. ———. Hua XVI. Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907, ed. Ulrich Claesges. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973; Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. R. Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Springer, 1997. ———. Hua XI. Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten, 1918–1926, ed. Margot Fleischer. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966; Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. A. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Springer, 2001a. ———. Hua XIX. Logische Untersuchungen. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984; Logical Investigations. First Volume. Prolegomena to Pure Logic. Investigation I, II.Second Volume. Investigations III, IV, V, VI, trans. J. N. Findlay. London and New York: Routledge, 2001b. ———. Hua XX/1. Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband.  Erster Teil. Entwürfe zur Umarbeitung der VI. Untersuchung und zur Vorrede für die Neuauflage der Logischen

Kant and Husserl on the imagination in perception  203 Untersuchungen (Sommer 1913), ed. U. Melle. The Hague, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. ———. Hua XXXVIII. Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893– 1912), ed. Thomas Vongehr and Regula Giuliani. New York: Springer, 2005a. ———. Hua XXIII, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung (1898 1925), ed. E. Marbach, Husserliana, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980; Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898 1925), trans. J. Brough, Dordrecht: Springer, 2005b. Hutto, D. “Overly Enactive Imagination? Radically Re-imagining Imagining.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 53, no. S1 (2015): 68–89. Jansen, J. “Husserl.” In Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, ed. Amy Kind. London: Routledge, 2017, pp. 69–81. Kant, I. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, III–IV, ed. Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences). Berlin: de Gruyter, 1911; Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer, ed. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. In The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Lennon, K. Imagination and the Imagery. London: Routledge, 2015. Lohmar, D. “Husserl’s Type and Kant’s Schemata: Systematic Reasons for Their Correlation or Identity.” In The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, ed. Donn Welton. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003. ———. Phänomenologie der schwachen Phantasie. Untersuchung der Psychologie, Cognitive Science, Neurologie und Phänomenologie zur Funktion der Phantasie in der Wahrnehmung. Dordrecht: Springer, 2008. Matherne, S. “Images and Kant’s Theory of Perception,” Ergo 29, no. 2 (2015). ———. “Kant’s Theory of Imagination.” In Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, ed. Amy Kind. London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 55–68. McDowell, J. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———. Having the World in View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Primacy of Perception. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Mooney, Thimothy. “Understanding and Simple Seeing in Husserl.” Husserl Studies 26 (2010): 19–48. Noë, A. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2004. Rollinger, R. “Husserl and Brentano on Imagination.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 75, no. 2 (2009): 195–210. Sartre, J.-P. [originally L’imagination, 1936] The Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. F. Williams. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1936/1962. Sartre, J.-P. [originally L’imaginaire, 1940] The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. J. Webber. London: Routledge, 1940/2005. Sellars, W. The Role of Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Experience.”In In the Space of Reasons. Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. K. Scharp and R. Brandom). Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, [1978] 2007, pp. 454–466. Strawson, P. F., “Imagination and Perception.” In Kant on Pure Reason, ed. R. C. Sutherland Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Summa, M. “Experiencing Reality and Fiction: Discontinuity and Permeability.” In Imagination and Social Perspectives. Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, ed. Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs and Luca Vanzago. London: Routledge, 2017. Thompson, E. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Zahavi, D. Self and Other. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2017.

14 Imagination and its critical dimension Lived possibilities and an other kind of otherwise1 Andreea Smaranda Aldea

Abstract: Following Husserl’s analyses of perception and imagination, the paper introduces two basic modes of intelligibility – the normalizing and the imagining – and argues that they are deeply intertwined, despite radical qualitative differences between them. What sets these two modes apart are their distinctive teleological orientations. To show this, the paper looks closely at the ways in which we experience difference in these respective modes. This discussion requires, however, that we challenge Husserl’s own framework for analyzing the imagination, which emerges as non-exhaustive, perhaps even misleading. What transpires is that imagining consciousness exhibits a unique critical dimension, a potentially powerful resource for socio-cultural critique. Keywords: imagination, perception, normativity, normality, possibility, conceivability, difference, critique

Wherein lies the freedom of imagination? Husserl had much to say on this topic in analyses spanning over two decades. His work on the imagination matches the pace of the gradual development of his methods of investigation. And while much of this work has yielded valuable insights, it has also unyieldingly pointed us in some directions as opposed to others. Most notably, Husserl’s work on the imagination unfolds indirectly, through a lens that relies heavily on a negative comparative approach that takes perception as its starting and measuring point. The manner in which he explicates the imagination is, in my view, unnecessarily restricted due to this methodological choice. In this paper, I will depart from this framework of analysis with an eye for doing justice, on its own terms, to the distinctive meaning-constitutive richness of imagining consciousness. This departure seeks to both correct and complement Husserl’s work on the imagination. To accomplish this, I introduce what I refer to as the two basic intelligibility modes – two non-theoretical stances through which we make sense of our lifeworld: the normalizing mode and the imagining one. I will argue that while the two are radically different, they are intricately intertwined. The radical, qualitative difference

1 I would like to thank Maxime Doyon and Augustin Dumont for making this volume and project possible. Special thanks also to Sara Heinämaa, Julia Jansen, David Carr, and Amy Allen for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this work.

Imagination and its critical dimension   205 between them lies primarily in their distinctive epistemic and normative teleological orientations – stabilizing and classifying in the case of the normalizing stance, subversive and exploratory in the case of the imagining one. One telling point, which captures the qualitative difference between these two stances’ orientation, is the manner in which, through them, we experience difference and the otherwise. Whereas in the normalizing mode, difference is a site of conflict, in the imaging one, difference is an opportunity for experimentation. This, I will argue, holds critical import both for how we might resist deeply seated exclusionary, marginalizing, and oppressive practices and for how we might analyze these everyday practices in theoretical endeavors such as transcendental phenomenology. What emerges is a robust model for explicating the imagination not solely as one intuitive presentation (Vorstellung) among many, but as basic (non-derivative) mode of consciousness that affords us unique resources for meaning, value, and possibility constitution. In order to make this case, I will look closely to imagining possibility constitution, which in turn has significant implications for understanding the imagination’s critical dimension, namely, its ability to break with or interrupt established epistemic and normative styles. To accomplish this, I will turn to Husserl’s analyses of perception, which are valuable in examining the normalizing stance. I will then delve into his analyses of the imagination, which, unlike his work on perception, are at best incomplete, if not, perhaps, misleading. I will finally turn to an alternative framework for analyzing the imagination in order to uncover its distinctive critical potential.

1.  The normalizing stance as basic intelligibility mode Husserl’s analyses reveal perception not solely as direct intuitive presentation, but as the most basic meaning-constituting level of consciousness. His work on typification and modality modification, along with his later Crisis discussions of the sedimentation of general styles of being, incisively uncover the distinctive teleology of this basic intelligibility mode, namely, its motivation and orientation toward epistemic and normative stability as well as its resistance when faced with that which is different, unexpected, or otherwise. But first, before delving into these matters, a few remarks on perception as direct intuitive presentation. I will restrict myself to what I consider key structural features of this type of consciousness for the purposes of my argument here. These key structural features are: (1) perception’s intentional focus on objects as individuals, (2) its intuition of individual objects as actual, real, and present, and (3) its doxic commitment to certainty and epistemic stability. I will touch on these three essential features as I consider the import of Husserl’s later work. According to Husserl, perception gives direct access to the world as real. The object of perception is directly given as present and actual – it appears in propria persona (Hua XXIII, 16–18).2 Perception grants direct access to reality and presence (Hua XXIII, 3–4, 12, 67–69, 822ff., 102–103). There is no mediating image at work – be it

2 E. Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung 1898–1925, ed. E. Marbach (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980). Hua XXIII throughout. English Translation: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. J. Brought (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). All Husserliana volumes referenced as Hua throughout.

206  Andreea Smaranda Aldea physical or mental (Hua XXIII, 64–71). There is no distinction to be made between an image and the original – all there is is the direct, unmediated givenness of the object. This is why Husserl viewed perception as the primary type of direct intuitive presentation (Hua XXIII, 16–18, 29–30). The object of perception is given as real and actual, but it is also given as presently existent. Perceptual consciousness is thus the most basic attitude toward the world, one in which we take its reality and certainty for granted. This attitude is the basis upon which all modified acts rely. Perceptual consciousness posits the existence of objects as real; it also presupposes their factual truth and certainty. I can will, judge, remember, or expect in the perceptual mode. The objects may not be given as present, but they are remembered as once having existed or expected to exist as real and actual. Perception is thus not merely an act, for Husserl – it is the most basic intentional mode through which we render our world intelligible. The world of perception is coherently spatially and temporally ordered (Hua XXIII, No. 1, Appx. 13, No. 3; also, Hua XI, §§26, 45)3. Each perceptually appearing object has a stable horizon or environment (Hua XXIII, No. 1, p. 33, 46ff., 65–69). This background is co-intended and co-intuited and it affects, along with out past experiences, our relation to perceptual objects.4 Spatio-temporal positioning is one of the essential features of perceptual consciousness. Thus, perception not only posits reality, actuality, and certainty. It positions objects by individuating them to the lowest differentiae of this here and now (Hua XI, §30; see also Hua XXIII, 505–506, 528). Given its interest in individuals understood in the strict sense as actual objects, perceptual consciousness articulates the order and holistic structure of reality in terms of identity and sameness. This conceptual and normative order guides our expectations, primarily in a practical sense. How we engage possibilities in perceptual consciousness likewise depends on this interest in identity and individuation. To get a better sense of how identity and sameness come into play in perceptual meaning-constitution, let us briefly turn to Husserl’s analysis of typification. Through mostly passive associational and memorial modifications and syntheses of likeness (Hua XI, §§26–27, 36–40; EU 385, 395–396),5 we constitute types – or empirical generalities – that reflect classes of objects sharing the same/similar properties (EU, §§80, 87d). The process is an abstractive and passive one. It is also habitual – the more we experience, the more well-delineated and established our types become. As the most basic process of concept constitution, typification is motivationally ‘in tune’ with the key meaning-constituting features of perceptual consciousness. It thus not

3 E. Husserl, Analysen zur Passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918–1926, ed. M. Fleischer (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966). Hua XI throughout. 4 For careful discussions of positional horizons of real possibilities and their determinable indeterminacy, see Held 2003a (“Husserl’s Phenomenological Method,” in The New Husserl. A Critical Reader, ed. D. Welton (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 3–31)), Held 2003b (“Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Life-World,” in The New Husserl. A Critical Reader, ed. D. Welton (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 32–62)), and Drummond 1990 (Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism. Noema and Object, Contributions to Phenomenology 4 (Dordrecht: Kluwer)). 5 E. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. L. Landgrebe (Hamburg: Claassen & Goverts, 1948). EU throughout.

Imagination and its critical dimension   207 only allows the coherent organization of individuals we experience as actual and real, but also feeds the motivational orientation toward factual truth and the validation of expectations. I will argue below that types also play a central role in the manner in which we engage possibilities. Types delineate the limits of the conceivable (Denkbar), which in turn determine our stance toward possibilities; they dictate our stance toward possibilities that defy the expectational and valuational norms types set. For now, let us note that types, as ‘world-organizers,’ play a normative as well as an epistemic role (EU, §§8–9). They are the gate keepers of what we deem normal and optimal – satisfactory for our everyday practical purposes (cf., Hua IV, §§15e, 18b;6 Hua XI, 23ff.; Hua IX, 120–123).7 As such, they function as guiding principles for what we come to deem valuable, worthy of epistemic and/or practical pursuit. In short, they do the all-important work of generating a well-delineated projective framework for understanding ourselves and others, for negotiating our lifeworld. What we see emerge through Husserl’s 1920s account of typification, especially in his Experience and Judgment, is a basic meaning-constituting process of central epistemic import in the personalistic/everyday attitude. Perceptual consciousness, while indeed primarily interested in individual objects, is always already universally oriented. Generalization and classification are core structures of perceptual meaningconstitution itself. It is worth noting, however, that this perceptual orientation toward the universal is of a distinctive kind: it is primarily driven by the classification of individual objects. Thus, when engaging possibilities in the perceptual mode, we remain tethered not only to that which we deem realizable given our experience of individual objects, but also to this inclination toward empirical generalization/classification itself. We are thus modally speaking, doubly bound: limited both with respect to the kinds of possibilities we are epistemically, normatively, and practically open to and with respect to the manner in which we are open to them. To get a better sense of the tight grip types hold over modalization and possibilization processes (i.e., the engaging and opening of possibilities), it will help to turn to Husserl’s 1930s teleological-historical reflections in his Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. These late analyses clearly reveal that while Husserl himself did not rely on the language of normalization and naturalization, nevertheless these were precisely the kinds of intelligibility-constituting processes he was interested in. What we learn here is that it is not only types that dictate the manner in which we render our lifeworld intelligible, but general styles of being (Hua VI, 28–29),8 too. These stylistically coherent, passively constituted systems of concepts and norms organize and delineate entire fields of lived possibilities (Hua VI, 71ff.); styles are sedimenting – receding in the background and covertly ever at work (Hua VI, 138–141). They become epistemic and normative grounds and establishments (Stiftungen) we take for granted (Hua VI, 178, 185) – a telling example of a style that Husserl extensively focuses on is the mathematization

6 E. Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. M. Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952). Hua IV throughout. 7 E. Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, ed. W. Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962). Hua IX throughout. 8 E. Husserl, Die Krisis de Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. 1954). Hua VI throughout.

208  Andreea Smaranda Aldea of the nature, which dictates how epistemic and normative processes unfold. World styles (Hua VI, §9), for the most part causal (Hua VI, 28), function as robust systems of validities and validity foundings (Geltungsfundierungen; Hua VI, 130, 170). They also exhibit a lively teleology (lebendige Fortarbeit) toward epistemic and normative stability and orient us and our interests accordingly, guiding courses of knowledge and action (Hua VI, 22–23, 181; Hua XXIII, 548). As such, they exert an irresistible, seductive pull. To put it in Husserl’s own words, these general styles ‘keep us under the spell of our situation’ (Hua VI, 59). The stylistic orientation types and norms exhibit is motivated by a distinctive teleology: a harmonizing, totalizing, resolution-seeking kind of teleology (Hua VI, 166–167). The personalistic attitude clearly exhibits this (Hua IV, §34), what with its stubborn orientation toward re-inscribing the unfamiliar – the different, the novel, the unexpected, the otherwise – into the familiar (Hua XI, 20). This motivation is a structural feature of the everyday, non-theoretical attitude, though theoretical attitudes likewise exhibit this teleology (see Aldea 2017).9 It is through what Husserl refers to as ‘modality modification’ that the normalizing teleology of types and styles comes squarely to the fore. The expectations types and styles articulate can always be disappointed and disrupted (Hua XI, §§22, 46). The ‘determinable indeterminacy’ (Hua XI, 6) of perceptual meaning-constitution, which entails an infinite possibility of future determination (Hua XI, 4ff.), is tightly linked both to perception’s protodoxic stance (Hua III/1, §§104, 114)10 and to the stylistically harmonious articulations types and norms pre-delineate. Should anything disrupt this orientation, a correcting and stabilizing process ensues (Hua XI, §§20–21). Certainty is the basic stance consciousness takes with respect to reality. The naïveté of this doxic stance lies in its unquestioned passivity, habituation, and sedimentation. It also lies in its ‘stubbornness’ – ‘voraciousness’ as Lohmar (2003, 117) puts it11 – to regain certainty should anything threaten it. The inhibition (Hemmung) of the protodoxa stems from conflicting apprehensions. The disappointment (Enttäuschung) can take several forms, the most common of which being the conflict between past and present apprehensions of objects (Hua XI, §22). Expectations are contested by present apprehensions of the object revealing properties and/or relations other than those initially supposed to pertain to it. This process of modality modification involves annulment and negation (Hua XXIII, No. 1, Appx. 11), which more often than not terminates either with the reaffirmation of the initial belief or its replacement. The perceptual stance does not suffer uncertainty – it is motivated toward resolving doubt. Reestablishing lost epistemic and normative balance through (passive) confirmation (Bewahrheitung) is the norm here.12 Let us take a closer look at the structure of the

  9 A.S. Aldea, “Making Sense of Husserl’s Notion of Teleology – Normativity, Reason, Progress and Phenomenology as ‘Critique from Within,’ ” Hegel Bulletin: Hegel and Phenomenology, 38/1 (2017): 104–128. 10 E. Husserl, Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, ed. K. Schuhmann (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). Hua III/1 throughout. 11 D. Lohmar, “Husserl’s Type and Kant’s Schemata: Systemic Reasons for Their Correlation or Identity,” in The New Husserl. A Critical Reader, ed. D Welton (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 93–124. 12  According to Husserl, in judgment as active synthesis reestablishing validity occurs through validation (Bewährung) rather than confirmation (cf., Hua XI, §12; cf., also

Imagination and its critical dimension   209 conflict at work in modality modification; this will lead us to the modal, possibilityconstituting structures at the core of the normalizing stance. It will also reveal that it is not only an interest in certainty that teleologically drives perceptual consciousness, but also an interest in maintaining the meaning, value, and possibility articulations already in place. The pervasive form modality modification conflict takes is deviation from or violation of essential properties and/or relations. This comes as no structural surprise, since the orientation toward individuals is nevertheless, as Husserl shows, always already oriented toward universalization through the typifying structure at work in all perceptual and perceptual founded experiences. If the perceptual thematic interest is in typifying classification, any deviation from the rule established by the type(s) and style(s) in question will be experienced as just such a violation. The commitment to metaphysical necessity is, in the everyday attitude, a naïve one. While it may overlap with what a philosophical perspective would deem logically and/or metaphysically necessary, what presents itself in everyday intelligibility processes under the guise of metaphysical necessity is actually naturalized contingency. This is a claim Husserl himself does not make, but his analyses of typification clearly point to it: types understood as passively constituted, classifying, abstractive empirical generalities become sedimented through historical, communal confirmation processes. Thus, what we come to deem ‘normal’ through the guidance of types, what we deem ‘optimal’ (satisfactory) for practical purposes, what we deem worthy of epistemic and/or ethical pursuit, is very much the product of historical, conceptual, discursive processes (cf., Hua IV, §§65–66; Hua VI, 166, 171).13 And yet, given the passive, habitual, sedimenting manner in which types and styles take shape and morph, the doxic stance they instill is oriented toward the ontic modalities of ‘being-certain’ and ‘being necessary’ – of ‘could not be otherwise.’ There is thus much reluctance to difference understood as deviation or violation of typical norms in this basic intelligibility mode; the normalizing stance is open very little to that which challenges its established articulations of meaning and value. Types understood as, to use a Merleau-Pontian term (2012, 366–368),14 ‘substantial concepts’ are naturalized contingencies parading under the guise of metaphysical necessity. Their hefty toll is not solely epistemic, but practical and ethical, too. Recognizing the semblance of necessity as well as its cost would require a veritable ‘breaking with a style,’ which Husserl deemed not only feasible, but critical to the phenomenological

Hua XI, §§16–25). For a difference between passive and active modalization, see No. 15, Appx. 47. 13 For discussions of embodied, perceptual interest and normativity, see Wehrle 2015 (“ ‘Feelings as the Motor of Perception’? The Essential Role of Interest for Intentionality,” Husserl Studies, 31: 45–64). For a discussion of perceptual optimality and normativity, see Taipale 2014 (Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity. Evanston: Northwestern University Press) and Doyon 2018 (“Husserl on Perceptual Optimality,” Husserl Studies, 34: 171–189). For an extensive discussion of normativity and meaning-constitution in Husserl and Heidegger, see Crowell 2013 (Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 14 M. Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012). Sara Heinämaa also relies on Merleau-Ponty’s insight and terminology here in her work on sexual difference (Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 41ff.).

210  Andreea Smaranda Aldea endeavor itself (Hua VI, 71ff.) – hence his turn to what he refers to as the method of ‘teleological-historical reflection’ (Hua VI, xiv). Unfortunately, he says very little about what makes possible just such a break. The Crisis proposes a new and puzzling phenomenological method. Setting aside issues of methodological coherence (see Aldea 2016),15 we should ask whether the feat of exposing and subverting sedimented intelligibility styles is something only transcendental phenomenology can accomplish. What I would like to propose is that the subversive potential is there already in the non-theoretical attitude. Resisting the totalizing, luring ‘spell’ of this stance is all but impossible from within the intelligibility and articulation framework of the normalizing stance. And indeed, Husserl’s analyses reveal as much. There is a strong inertia at work here, which only a unique intelligibility perspective can interrupt. Such a perspective, at once radically different and thus ‘without’ this luring framework, would also have to be intimately connected to it – potent ‘within’ these very articulations. The main condition for the possibility of subverting what seems an insuperable teleological orientation is ready access to a radically different basic (non-theoretical) intelligibility mode. This is precisely what the imagination understood as distinctive consciousness of possibilities grants us. Husserl recognized this; his programmatic references to the theoretical power of the imagination, to its freedom and neutrality in particular, show us as much. And yet, despite this insight, I will argue below that the model he opted for in his extensive work on the imagination obfuscates efforts to do justice to its subversive dimension. Before I turn to a discussion of Husserl’s key claims about the imagination and to my alternative proposal, a note on the impact of substantial concepts on possibilization (Hua IV, 258ff.) processes in the normalizing stance. Types and styles weave articulations of meanings and values. They delineate and articulate entire horizons of lived possibilities. It is thus not solely properties and/or relations we deem necessary (i.e., could not be otherwise) in our everyday commercium with our world and others. Possibilities, too, present themselves as practically, epistemically, and ethically necessary. The most basic possibilities at work in the personalistic attitude are practical, kinaesthetic possibilities. Both Husserl (cf., Hua IV, 139–142) and Merleau-Ponty (2012, 169ff.) have closely examined our manner of modally being in the world – i.e., our embodied sense of ‘I can.’ My sense of ‘I can,’ and, importantly, my sense of ‘I cannot’ both dictate what I deem practically feasible for myself as embodied in a world I share with others. This sense of practical conceivability, along with its rigid limits, is the sedimented and habituated product of stylized and typified modes of rendering my lifeworld intelligible. The stabilizing and harmonizing forces at work in modality modification very much dictate how I make sense and negotiate my lived possibilities/the possibilities I share with others (see Aldea 2017; also Al-Saji 2014).16 At this most basic kinaesthetic level and in higher-order processes of lifeworld negotiation, there are, broadly speaking, only two kinds of possibilities at work: (1) the expectational/futurally oriented possibilities, such as those seamlessly unfolding the horizon of determinable indeterminacy; and (2) what Husserl

15 A.S. Aldea, (2016) “Phenomenology as Critique: Teleological-Historical Reflection and Husserl’s Transcendental Eidetics,” Husserl Studies, 31/1: 21–46. 16 A. Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing,” in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, ed. E. Lee (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 133–172.

Imagination and its critical dimension   211 refers to as ‘problematic’ and ‘enticing’ possibilities – possibilities that either defy/ challenge/deviate from established types and styles or possibilities that speak in favor of them (cf., Hua XI, §§5–13; EU, §79). Going back to our previous discussion of conflict and difference understood as violation of essential properties and/or relations, we now see the motivational relationship at work between substantial, classifying, status quo–oriented concepts on the one hand and what we deem conceivable and possible on the other (in the manner that we do). Thus, to interrupt this limited modal Spielraum and its largely pre-delineated mode of normalized potentiability (cf., Hua I, §34),17 we would require both different kinds of concepts and norms and a different manner of relating to them. My contention is that the imagination comes through on both of these fronts. But why focus so intently on seeking tools for resistance and interruption? After all, the teleological orientation toward epistemic and normative stability and coherence makes possible efficient practice, the accumulation and communication of knowledge, the feasibility of communal efforts, to name but a few. Habituation, as Al-Saji rightly points out, is not in itself a problem (Al-Saji 2014). What ought to trouble us, however, are certain facets and implications of the normalizing stance, especially as they pertain to our interactions with others, especially since they are ethically loaded, as most – if not all – such interactions are. What is the cost of substantial concepts and of their tight hold on what we deem conceivable and worthy of pursuit when the difference we experience, here understood as abnormality, as deviation from the norm and violation of essential properties and/or relations, is another’s lived reality? Examples abound, but some timely ones include sexual, gender, racial lived differences to name but a few. Understanding the normalizing and naturalizing forces permeating the everyday attitude is necessary but not sufficient for evaluating this cost. The same goes for seeking ways to mitigate it. Hence the turn to the imagination, albeit in a vein Husserl himself did not pursue.

2. The imagining stance as basic intelligibility mode: challenging Husserl’s model While Husserl’s analyses of the imagination are extensive, his approach and overall framework of investigation ultimately preclude a robust understanding of the imagination on its own terms. This is largely due to his stubborn penchant, spanning more than two decades, to examine imagining consciousness comparatively, through the lens of perception. For Husserl, the imagination is the inverse mirror image of perception – from both epistemic and normative perspectives. It is not the comparative approach itself that poses problems here, but its negative dimension, thus turning the imagination into perception stripped of its core commitments. What he refers to as ‘phantasy modification’ (Phantasiemodifikation) captures this framework of analysis quite tellingly. According to Husserl, this modification is a radical shift in attitude, one we can seamlessly perform. It affects noetic-noematic correlations of all kinds, from the most basic perceptual presentations to higher-order, founded positional acts (Hua XXIII, 345, 513, 558–560; EU, §95). Wherein lies the shift? Phantasy modification

17 E. Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950). Hua I throughout.

212  Andreea Smaranda Aldea neutralizes the ontic and doxic commitments at work in perceptual/positional consciousness (Hua XXIII, 114, 352, 363, 416, 433, 577). The result? A negative freedom. In imagining consciousness, unlike perception, we engage objects – irrealities – in a manner free from epistemic and normative commitments.18 One can easily see the methodological appeal of just such a stance (if we were to be able to perform it)! Phantasy modification becomes a handy analytic tool driven by a negative comparative process. A direct result of this approach is what Husserl refers to as the ‘doubling’ of experiences (cf., Hua XXIII, No. 15h). The imagination gives access to its irreal objects ‘as if’ (als ob) they were real, or in the ‘as it were’ (gleichsam) mode (Hua XXIII, 187, 265–266, 571; EU, §96c). ‘For any’ perceptual, positional experience there is a neutralized version in the imagining, modified mode (Hua XXIII, 560–561, 566–567): Speaking from the noetic standpoint, it obviously signifies that actual experience and phantasy can coincide in a synthesis that we call the consciousness of equality, and that in principle a possible phantasy also corresponds to every actual experience (according to an ideal possibility), and conversely: a correspondence, however, that is itself again defined by the possibility of the coinciding of equals. (Hua XXIII, 507/608; italics mine) Not only is the imagination able to sustain all positional modes of meaningconstitution, it can do so at will. All it takes is a moment of ‘decision’ (Hua XXIII, 522–523, 548, 577) and the dis-interested imagining mode is at our disposal (Hua XXIII, 577). I have pointed out elsewhere why I find these claims problematic, especially in the context of the historical analyses of sedimentation and streaming-in we find in Husserl’s later work, but also in his extensive investigations of habituation (cf., Aldea 2016). They assume a purity and self-transparency of epistemic and normative stance that is anonymity and ambiguity defying – a feat, as Merleau-Ponty clearly shows (2012, 403–411) – beyond even the most self-reflective philosophical endeavors, never mind everyday ones. What matters here, for our purposes, is a quick yet clear glimpse into Husserl’s investigations’ modus operandi. The results of this approach are twofold. On the one hand, the imagination is like perception in significant ways that harken back to some of the key features of perceptual, normalizing consciousness. On the other, since Husserl is intent upon making a strong qualitative case for the intentional uniqueness of the imagination, the latter emerges, through the same approach, as unlike perception in notable ways also.19 I take no issue with this commitment to qualitative radical difference. I do, however, contend that the manner in which Husserl

18 I agree with Steve Crowell’s view here (cf., Crowell 2013), namely, that there is a basic sense of normativity at work in all intentional, meaning-constituting forms of consciousness. In so far as the imagination is intentional and oriented toward fulfillment, it does exhibit this basic normative dimension. Husserl’s position that the imagination is epistemically (and normatively) neutral refers to more robust normative commitments and motivations. It is with this view that I take issue in what follows. 19 This serves the important goal of avoiding empiricist pitfalls, which Husserl clearly delineates in his critique of image theory in the Second Logical Investigation. It also instantiates Husserl’s commitment to doing structural justice to distinct modes of consciousness.

Imagination and its critical dimension   213 seeks to explicate this qualitative difference, namely through a negative comparative approach, is non-exhaustive at best, misleading at worst. I will argue in the following section that this methodological approach fails to do justice to the complex ways in which the imagination constitutes meaning, especially possibilities. It is also bound to miss imagination’s subversive and critical core, namely its distinctive teleological orientation toward exploration and experimentation. But first, how the imagination is like perception . . . As in the case of perception, the correlates of the imagination are individual objects, which Husserl refers to as ‘irrealities.’ The imagination intends and intuits objects without any commitment to their positive or negative ontic status. Noematically, Husserl captures this through his usage of the term ‘quasi.’ Irrealities are ‘quasiindividuals’ (Hua XXIII, 506, 530–532, 547, 575). They are not individuated in Husserl’s strict sense: they do not exhibit the lowest (actual) differentiae of this here and now. They are quasi-determined in quasi-space and quasi-time (Hua XXIII, 544–549). The worlds of the imagination are thus quasi-worlds, whose structure and articulation mirror reality but for the latter’s ontic givenness and its stricter stability (cf., Hua XXIII, 534; EU, §40).20 Irrealities, too, exhibit the determinable indeterminacy that marks experiences of objects as real (Hua XXIII, 533, 551–552). There are descriptive concerns and limitations worth looking into here (cf., Aldea 2013).21 And yet, Husserl does not shy away from claiming, as he famously does in his Ideas I (Hua III/1, §70), that the imagination fuels all eidetic thought; surely it couldn’t if its correlates were bound to objects in principle externally perceivable? Another worry, however, takes center stage here: the imagination as basic (this time non-positional) mode of consciousness is, like perception, oriented toward individual objects and their classification, even their order and stability in correlate irreal worlds. Quasi-conflict and quasi-incompatibility (Hua XXIII, 549, 568) drive what cannot be mistaken as anything other than an abstractive process of classification in terms of essential properties and/or relations. Through this process, which structurally matches positional typification (though it may be more often than not active rather than passive), we attain quasi-substantial concepts. The orientation remains one toward accessing universals through individuals (Hua XXIII, 434; EU, §80) and toward fixing our conceptual grasp of them in a discursively stable manner (cf., Hua III/1, §§65–66; Hua VI, 111, 166, 366). Quasi-substantial concepts may not involve metaphysical commitments, but they do involve naïve, epistemic ones, since they are structured in the same way as positional types and concept: they are meant to capture

20 Husserl goes so far as to claim – notably very differently than Sartre, for whom the imagination is necessarily poor, incapable of granting any new information about its objects (The Imaginary, Routledge, 2004; see Part I.1 especially) – that quasi-fulfillment and Abschattung are also at work in imagining meaning-constitution. 21 A.S. Aldea, “Husserl’s Struggle with Mental Images – Imaging and Imagining Reconsidered,” Continental Philosophy Review, 46/3 (2013): 371–394. For instance, are all irreal correlates spatially determined objects or could the imagination engage objects that are not spatially determinable, not even in the ‘quasi’ mode? All of Husserl’s examples of irreal objects – centaurs, subjects of paintings, monuments and cities we experienced in the past or never at all . . . – they are all spatial (cf., Hua XXIII, 269, 529, 548–549). Also, Husserl’s steady reliance on the language of images when describing the imagination further reinforces this concern.

214  Andreea Smaranda Aldea essential properties (cf., Hua XXIII, 507, 548, 570, 580). In this ‘quasi’ mode, commitments with respect to properties and relations can still ‘speak in favor of’ some possibilities as opposed to others (Hua XXIII, 557–558). One further claim that reinforces this reading of Husserl’ model is his emphatic position that both real and irreal objects – both actualities/real possibilities and irreal possibilities – are governed by the same ideal possibility, or essence (Hua XXIII, 508, 569–570, 578). They are both instantiations of this eidetic universal.22 I do not contest that this may be the case; real and irreal objects can both be instantiations of the same ideal. However, this need not always be the case. The correlates of imagining consciousness – imagining possibilities – can challenge both our understanding and the very structure of what we deem necessary (more on this below). In other words, Husserl’s framework for analyzing irreality constitution is not exhaustive. If what guides our investigation is a negative comparative approach committed to structural parallelism, then we are bound to end up here. A different transcendental descriptive framework might point us in a different direction. What if the radical qualitative difference between perception and imagination did not merely amount to ontic and doxic neutrality? I agree with Husserl that perceptual and imagining consciousness are qualitatively different in radical ways; my position here is that they are structurally unlike each other in important senses Husserl overlooked as a result of his choice of analysis framework.23 Before we tackle these radical structural differences, however, a look at how Husserl himself deemed these two modes of consciousness unlike each other. Going back to the analytic import of phantasy modification, what transpires on Husserl’s model is not only a mirroring structural correspondence between the perceptual and the imagining: i.e., ‘for any’ perceptual experience there is in principle a neutralized, imagining counterpart (cf., Hua XXIII, 295, 330, 354). What Husserl also comes to hold is that perception and imagination, as basic modes of consciousness, are mutually exclusive (Hua XXIII, 68–69, 87, 147, 239, 557–560; EU, §§39, 41). Once more, no surprise here, if we commit to a negative comparative approach and if the neutrality commitment is in place; either we experience positionally or non-positionally,

22 For a discussion of Husserl on ideal possibilities, see Mohanty 1985 (The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy, Phaenomenologica 98 (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff)). 23 Husserl’s analyses of perception and imagination as direct presentations (Vorstellungen) showcase this negative comparative strategy as well. Unlike positional presentification (Vergegenwärtigungen), such as memory or expectation, imagination, understood as the most basic non-positional kind of presentification, exhibits a structure parallel to perception. Husserl sought to find a mediating/indirect structural moment at work in the imagination (see esp. Hua XXIII, No. 1, where he compares the imagination to image consciousness), but despite this work, the sense in which the imagination is a re-production, a re-presentation (i.e., making present that which is absent) remains unclear. There are interesting proposals in the literature on this front, but Husserl’s own account is nebulous (see esp. Bernet 2002 (“Unconscious Consciousness in Husserl and Freud,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1: 327–351), Jansen 2005 (“On the Development of Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology of Imagination and Its Use for Interdisciplinary Research,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4: 121–132), Marbach 2013 (“Towards a Phenomenological Analysis of Fictional Intentionality and Reference,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21(3): 428–447), and Shum 2015 (“The Evolution and Implications of Husserl’s Account of the Imagination,” Husserl Studies 31: 213–236)).

Imagination and its critical dimension   215 but not both (Hua XXIII, 560). To further reinforce this position, Husserl stresses the structural impossibility of doubt or any form of modality modification in the imagining non-positional stance (Hua XXIII, 509–514, 517). In other words, unless we are ontically and doxically committed to the reality and certainty of our object, we cannot experience doubt with respect to it.24 According to Husserl, there is further structural evidence that perception and imagination are mutually exclusive, beyond the mere either/or framework of positionality and non-positionality. Two additional points are worth noting here. First, once more following the negative comparative approach, Husserl stresses that the imagination, unlike perception, completely lacks motivation (Hua XXIII, 514, 581–582, 589). It is without teleology (cf., Hua XXIII, No. 15j). Thus, not only is the imagination not interested in the ontic status of its objects, it is also not interested in epistemic balance and knowledge accumulation; the quasi-conflict at work in imagining consciousness does not require resolution (Hua XXIII, 376, 394–395, 510ff.). Imagining consciousness can leave epistemic conflict undecided (Hua XXIII, 376, 547, 581). And yet, the classifying, conceptual structure of imagining constitution Husserl endorses points to a different epistemic picture. Here there may not be a binding commitment to epistemic stability; however, given the manner in which the imagination, according to Husserl, engages its objects (i.e., through conceptual processes focusing on essential properties and/or relations), the constitution of quasi-harmonious, quasi-correctable fields of meanings, values, and possibilities is structurally inevitable.25 That this may unfold as a manner of imagining meaning-constitution, I do not wish to challenge. That this is the main or sole manner in which the imagination engages its correlates, I am deeply suspicious of. Furthermore, while Husserl does not explicitly discuss the normative dimension of the imagination, given his claim about its lack of motivation and teleology (albeit in a primarily epistemic sense), we can safely assume that the imagination likewise lacks any normative interest – be it axiological or praxiological.26 This feature of the imagination is also methodologically handy, as is its neutral, ‘free from doxic commitment’ stance. The imagination can engage in a process Husserl refers to as ‘free variation’ – the completely arbitrary (beliebig), playful variation of properties and relations in a ‘pure’ manner, devoid from any positional ontic and doxic taints (Hua XXIII, 443, 451ff., 513–514, 536, 550–551, 561–562, 579, 585; cf., also Hua I, §§12, 34, 36). Thus, imagining possibilities (the correlates of this process of variation) exhibit a

24 The experience of a mannequin and the vacillation it ensues: is it a human being? is it a mannequin? . . . along with the need to resolve this epistemic dissonance. . . . All of this unfolds in the perceptual (not imagining) mode of consciousness (Hua XXIII, 406). This is, in my view, a narrow mode of understanding modality modification, and doubt especially. Husserl may be right on this narrow reading of the process, but unquestioningly agreeing with his position would foreclose the possibility of examining this epistemic process on terms other than ontic and protodoxic commitments. 25 Husserl notes as much himself (Hua VI, 166–167), though he stresses the stability here is more precarious precisely in virtue of the metaphysical and epistemic disinterest of the imagination. 26 Husserl seems to briefly consider the potential axiological import and orientation of the imagination; he does so, however, specifically in the context of aesthetic consciousness (Hua XXIII, 542–543).

216  Andreea Smaranda Aldea horizon of radical indeterminacy (Hua XXIII, 552). Free variation can continue in principle infinitely, ‘und so weiter . . .’ (cf., EU, 413–414; Hua IX, 76–77, 82–83; Hua XVII, 254–256)27,28 There is no necessary terminal point to the process precisely because there is no teleological interest at work. There is no epistemic pang in need of resolution. Thus, unlike perception, the second important point for our purposes here, beyond imagination’s lack of motivation and teleology, is that the imagination engages possibilities in a purely arbitrary, free, and neutral manner. The correlates of this process are not real possibilities, nor are they problematic or enticing ones. They are ‘pure’ in a negative sense: they lack precisely the ontic and modal (e.g., being-likely vs. unlikely) features that mark positional, perceptual possibilities (Hua XXIII, 534, 548–550, 561–563, 578). I have argued elsewhere against this view of imagining possibilities (Aldea 2016).29 What is noteworthy here, though, is the picture of possibility constitution that Husserl’s model of the imagination paints for us. Where does this picture lead us? The imagination emerges as a basic mode of consciousness able to mirror all positional meaning-constituting moves – a mirroring that also involves mutual exclusion. Like perception, it is oriented toward the classification of (quasi)-individual objects in terms of essential properties and/or relations, which unfolds as a process of concept constitution (passive or active). Unlike perception, however, it is ontically and doxically neutral, exhibiting a negative freedom with respect to these commitments (Hua XXIII, 549, 562–563). The imagination is without interest in certainty and epistemic stability (though it is structurally oriented toward generating quasi-stability) and sustains no modality modification. Furthermore, it is without epistemic and normative motivation; it lacks all teleology. Last but not least, its primary mode of possibility constitution is free variation – the arbitrary process of engaging pure, irreal possibilities in an entirely open and indeterminate manner, in principle ad infinitum, requiring no cessation (Hua XXIII, Nos. 19–20; Hua I, §§34, 41; Hua III/1, §§23, 69–70).30

27 E. Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik, ed. P. Janssen (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). Hua XVII throughout. 28 Unlike real possibilities, irreal possibilities can exhibit perfect repeatability – therein lies their purity, their distance from historical contingency (Hua XXIII, 551–552). 29 The gist of the concern goes back to our apparently fully transparent ability to bracket not just basic ontic commitments, but also deeply sedimented, anonymous, and ambiguous epistemic and normative ones. Husserl himself undergoes fleeting moments of doubt about his purity claims (Hua XXIII, 86, 509, 578). For a thorough taxonomic discussion of possibilities on Husserl’s model, which seeks to disambiguate some of Husserl’s less than clear claims about possibility kinds, see Zhok 2016 (“Possibility and Consciousness in Husserl’s Thought,” Husserl Studies 32: 213–235). My interest here is less taxonomic in nature and more interested in shifting the very framework of investigating the imagination as consciousness of possibilities. 30 For those familiar with Husserl’s all-important methods of phenomenological reductions and eidetic variation, all of these features of the imagination constitute handy tools in his theoretical hands. It is tempting to think, especially since Husserl was intensively pursuing the study of the imagination in these very terms already during the decade preceding Ideas I, that he was looking, explicitly or not, for powerful methodological resources. The process of free variation alone, along with the insight that both real and irreal possibilities share the same ideal, made room for Husserl’s development of transcendental eidetic variation. And

Imagination and its critical dimension   217 Assuming that something like free variation is possible in the manner Husserl describes it, I ask, is it the only (or even main) way in which we constitute possibilities in the imagining mode of consciousness? Husserl seems to think so (Hua XXIII, 580; Hua III/1, §§69–70). One other question comes to mind: how do we experience difference, the otherwise in the imagining stance? It seems the only kind of otherwise intended here is the opposite of the positional, normalized otherwise. Rather than being the harbinger of epistemic and normative conflict, the imaginative otherwise is simply without epistemic and normative bite – a playful, arbitrary sort of otherwise. Its only limit: ideal or essential properties and/or relations (Hua XXIII, 564–566). In short, at least as far as historical, socio-cultural lived experiences are concerned, imaginative difference is irrelevant – worlds apart, disconnected from lived possibilities (cf., EU, 167; Hua XXIII, 544, 552, 561–567). Imagining reflection and its engagement of possibilities amount to something like ‘mere thought’ (Hua XXIII, 338) without commitments of any kind (Hua XXIII, No. 15c–d & Appx. 40). One way to drive this concern home, is to consider how Husserl describes imagining conceivability. What is imaginatively conceivable is no different, according to Husserl, from freely and arbitrarily varying properties and/or relations pertaining to quasi-individual objects (Hua XXIII, 415–416, 547, 560). The only limits to conceivability here are essential, necessary – the same that bind real possibilities; however, unlike real possibilities, which are also passively and covertly limited by sedimented epistemic and normative accomplishments and grounds (Hua VI, 72–73), irreal possibilities are completely free from contingent, historical, conceptual, and discursive bonds – or so Husserl contends (Hua XXIII, 563–564). I have argued elsewhere against this structural view of pure possibilities (cf., Aldea 2016). What I would like to stress here is that this view of imagining conceivability further reinforces the socio-cultural irrelevance of imagining difference and its lack of subversive, critical bite. In what follows, I will part ways with this model. I will do so by shifting the framework of analysis away from Husserl’s largely negative comparative one to a positive account of the imagination on its own terms. And while I am not opposed to the comparative approach itself, I believe it should neither be overwhelmingly negative, inviting the either/or framework we have seen in Husserl’s account, nor should it take center stage in an unquestioned manner. A different picture will emerge, one that need not invalidate Husserl’s work, but complement and enrich it instead.

3.  Imagination and its critical dimension – an other kind of otherwise First, I should note that in my view, Husserl was right to explicate the imagination as the other basic, non-theoretical mode of meaning-constitution. And though, throughout his investigations, he remained wedded to the view that the imagination (Phantasie) was one type of presentification (Vergegenwärtigung) among many (with the important proviso that due to its distinctive modification, it was necessarily nonpositional; cf., esp. Hua XXIII, No. 1), he also came to clearly endorse the view that as basic level of consciousness (cf., Hua XXIII, Nos. 18–20), the imagination is much more than a distinct kind of intuitive presentation (Vorstellung). The reason I am

while we can recognize the incisiveness and value of Husserl’s work on the imagination, we can at the same time wonder about its shortcomings.

218  Andreea Smaranda Aldea opting here for the language of ‘basic intelligibility modes/stances’ lies with my interest in stressing the robust epistemic and normative dimensions of the imagination while preserving Husserl’s position that it can sustain (i.e., found and modify) lower- and higher-order acts, just like perceptual consciousness. Both imagining and normalizing stances are alike in so far as they are basic intelligibility modes. Furthermore, like the normalizing/perceptual stance, the imagination is distinctly motivated. The imagination exhibits a robust teleological orientation. And while I agree that some ‘doubling’ or ‘neutralization’ is indeed structurally possible, it amounts to nothing more than what Husserl refers to as ‘neutrality modification’ – the effacing of positive epistemic and normative commitments at work in perceptual, positional consciousness. Is this what we should refer to as the imagination? Husserl seems torn on this point, especially in his Ideas I (Hua III/1, §§109–111), where he seeks to draw a distinction between neutrality modification and phantasy modification. Unfortunately, it remains largely unclear what the distinction between the two is and what the evidence for why we should consider the latter a sub-species of the former amounts to.31 Beyond this lack of clarity, Husserl consistently describes, in work spanning decades, imagining meaning-constitution as nothing more than neutralized/non-positional consciousness. Since this is where the similarities between the imagining and normalizing stances end, onto the radically different, positive qualitative ways in which they are unlike each other. In what follows, by imagining mode or stance I understand imagining meaning, value, and possibility constitution that is not minimally (negatively) understood as non-positional consciousness. In order to make my descriptive case for the radically different quality of the imagination, I will stay on the conceivability topic. It will do nicely both as bridge and as point of contrast. The reason for this is that it only makes sense to positively explicate conceivability in light of epistemic and normative commitments and interests, which, according to Husserl, the imagination lacks. Unlike the normalizing stance, the imagining stance is neither solely interested in quasi-­individual objects (most definitely not solely spatially determined ones) nor is it oriented toward substantial concepts – quasi or otherwise. To quickly revisit this notion, substantial concepts have two important structural features: first, they capture classes of individual objects sharing the same essential properties and/or relations. As such, they come not only with a hefty metaphysical toll, which in the perceptual, normalizing mode is largely naïve, they also have wide epistemic and normative implications. Second, they determine and delineate the scope, limits, and articulation of what we deem possible. The possibilities we engage through them, either confirm the order they dictate or defy it. Should the latter occur, the prevailing stance is one of maintaining the pre-established order and harmony. The imagination’s interest lies elsewhere: its teleological orientation is driven by what I would refer to as ‘modal concepts.’ Unlike substantial concepts, which are meant to capture essential properties and/or relations, modal concepts function as indeces of entire fields of alternative possibilities. They nudge us to probe and explore. The important point here is that what makes these possibilities ‘alternative’ is

31 The difference seems to lie with what Husserl refers to as ‘iterability’ – or the nesting and founding of higher-order acts in the non-positional stance. According to Husserl, neutrality modification does not involve such iterability, whereas the imagination does (Hua III.1, §112; cf., also Hua XXIII, Nos .2g, 5, 15d). However, this distinction only holds if by imagination we solely understand one presentation type among many; Husserl however often equates the neutral stance with the imagination.

Imagination and its critical dimension   219 not variation on a properties/relations theme, as in the case of Husserl’s free variation. Their ‘alternative’ status stems rather from imagination’s possibility generation in a different intelligibility mode – one motivated by its primarily exploratory orientation. Rather than seeking to render intelligible through classification via essential properties and relations (which it can, but need not do), the imagination is primarily teleologically oriented toward rendering intelligible through the exploration of possibilities that may very well be radically other, unexpected, unfamiliar. Thus, the normalizing stance, through its substantial concepts, strives toward the stable, whereas the imagining stance, through its modal concepts, primarily strives toward the experimental. Furthermore, the universality modal concepts exhibit is not abstractive, but systemic. Rather than organizing by classifying, they map alternative venues and platforms for knowledge and action. They play an intelligibility role, but what they help us make sense of is not a harmonious and stable world. If anything, these concepts are driven much more by difference and the otherwise than by identity, sameness, and the familiar. Thus, the imagination does not primarily intend its objects as instantiations, the way perceptual/normalizing consciousness does. Its correlates are given as experimental. Nor does it experience difference necessarily through the lens of conflict. Since classification is not a necessary feature of its mode of meaning-constitution, imagining the otherwise need not unfold as (quasi) conflict. In short, given their focus on what is essential, substantial concepts are teleologically motivated toward stabilizing and reinforcing (and become naturalized as discussed above), whereas modal concepts are motivated toward subverting and interrupting (and are structurally less prone to naturalization). Their focus is also on how we come to deem certain meanings and possibilities valuable, optimal, practical, worthy of pursuit. Let us return to conceivability in light of all of this. The alternative model of imagination I am proposing here, departing from the non-positional model Husserl put forth, grants us powerful resources for positively explicating conceiving possibilities in the imagining mode. Rather than merely equating the conceivable with the freely/irreally possible, as Husserl does in the case of the imagination, we could examine it through the lens of how the imagination engages difference and the otherwise. This was an enlightening approach when examining conceivability in the normalizing mode. However, whereas in the normalizing mode, difference is a site of epistemic and normative conflict given the parameters set by types understood as substantial concepts, in the imagining mode, given its interest in modal concepts instead, difference is a site of exploration. My sense of possibilities in the normalizing mode, my sense of ‘I can’ and ‘I cannot’ is strictly bound by sedimented substantial types and styles. And while this, like habit, has profound implications for an efficient negotiation of our lifeworld, it is also precisely the culprit behind our deeply entrenched resistance to anything and everything departing from – defying – our expectations and our sense of normality. In the imagining stance, I am free to engage possibilities that depart from my normalized sense of I can/I cannot. What presents itself as inconceivable in the normalizing mode, I am open to in the imagining one. This is not mere variation in the free mode Husserl describes. This is not a process primarily driven by neutrality understood as freedom from ontic and doxic commitments. Possibilization32 in the imagining mode 32 I use this term broadly as possibility constitution, but it can also have the narrower sense of possibility opening – the emergence of possibilities, see de Warren 2009 (Husserl and the Promise of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)).

220  Andreea Smaranda Aldea relies on modal rather than substantial concepts; as a result, the possibilities we engage and the manner in which we engage them are structurally oriented and articulated by exploration and experimentation rather than classification. There is a modal asymmetry between normalizing and imagining possibilities. While there may by ‘doubling’ in Husserl’s sense of neutralization, this does not exhaust the intentional span of imagining consciousness. Nor does it suffice to introduce free variation to indeterminately expand this span, which would only broaden the modal horizon of the imagination without shedding light on its positive qualitative distinctiveness. What modal asymmetry captures, in my view, is imagination’s ability to constitute and open fields of possibilities organized and articulated by other epistemic and normative principles, namely modal ones. Let us consider the concept of sexual difference, for example. In the normalizing mode, this substantial concept, sedimented and naturalized, has come to strictly bind what we deem possible and conceivable. It dictates our sense of I can/I cannot in a stubborn, ossified manner. Its weight is not solely epistemic, but normative and ethical, too. By merely shifting to a neutral/non-positional mode of consciousness, likewise organized around a substantial concept of quasi-sexual difference (assuming we were able to self-transparently perform such a shift!), we manage very little. The framework for possibilization remains structurally the same. The unfolding articulations of, this time, ‘free possibilities’ do little to challenge and break the spell of the concept guiding the process. The situation is radically different in the imagining mode positively understood (i.e., not merely as non-positional consciousness). Here, a modal concept of sexual difference guides and orients my opening of possibilities. My exploratory stance not only safeguards me from experiencing difference as a site of conflict; it also allows me to articulate systems of alternative possibilities through difference as a site of experimentation. The kinds of possibilities I conceive and the manner in which I am able to conceive them are qualitatively different from what I am able to accomplish in the normalizing mode of consciousness. Conflict, stability, and familiarity – all classification-driven – hold limited sway. Epistemic and normative tension – even discomfort – are opportunities for exploration rather than threats to be swiftly resolved. Restlessness is here creatively productive. The possibilities I conceive come with a low metaphysical cost – they are not mere potential replacements for what I deem necessary. They may play this role but they need not. We could go so far as to say that in the imagining mode, necessity itself is in question. In other words, its tendency is not to naturalize the historically contingent, but to shed light on it. The openness that things could be otherwise colors imagining possibilization. This is an altogether different kind of freedom than the merely neutral/ negative one Husserl ascribes to the imagination. It is a richer freedom: a freedom to, not merely a freedom from. It is also not a pure freedom – completely immune from the deeply seated ways in which we have come to make sense of our lifeworld. Normalized types and styles seep into the imagining fabric; this is structurally similar to what Husserl refers to as ‘streaming-in’ (einströmen) in his Crisis discussion of the complex dynamic between the lived/everyday and theoretical attitudes (Hua VI, 52). What lends this mode its robust freedom is its other orientation and teleological beat. Its normative interests – what it deems worthy of pursuit, what it deems satisfactory – lie elsewhere. Teasing out the critical and subversive core of this basic intelligibility mode will further showcase this.

Imagination and its critical dimension   221 What we have stressed thus far about imagining meaning-constitution warrants the claim that this basic intelligibility mode exhibits a critical dimension, especially given its exploratory teleology. This teleological orientation toward exploration and experimentation becomes robustly critical when certain active normative commitments accompany it. Thus, while not all imagining processes are critical, they have the potential of becoming so. What are these normative commitments, then? It is here that we see the importance of departing from Husserl’s model and framework, or at least challenging its exhaustiveness. The imagination does exhibit distinctive epistemic and normative interests and orientations; it does not lack teleology altogether. Furthermore, if we put into question the exhaustiveness of Husserl’s comparative/negative approach, which also guided his analyses of the relationship between perception and imagination, it becomes clear that mutual exclusion and non-coordination need not be their only modes of relation.33 The normative commitments that render imagination critical are, first, a self-reflective interest in self and world experimentation,34 second, a suspicion surrounding the normalized and naturalized and an interest in exposing them as such, and third, an interest in self and world betterment and emancipation precisely through the means the imagination affords us. A question inevitably arises:35 what motivates these commitments? They are largely motivated by experiences of difference that blur the line between conflict and exploration, between being guided by substantial and by modal concepts, between blind commitment to naïve metaphysical necessity and glimpses into naturalized contingency. The two intelligibility modes are indeed radically different, but they are not mutually exclusive. Their intersections are potentially productive sites of discomfort. It is precisely these intersections, these ambiguities, that hold the critical diagnostic and prescriptive promise that imagination alone can fulfill. But the applicability of this fulfillment lies squarely in our embodied, perceptual, normalized experiences. Imagining possibility constitution can critically impact not only the substantial concepts, the types and styles we rely upon in the normalizing stance. They can also alter the manner in which we relate to them, so much so that they may very well lose their unquestioned metaphysical, epistemic, and normative lure – a veritable breaking with a style! I would refer to this impact – this critical fulfillment of imagining processes in the context of normalized everyday experiences – as conferring ‘modal plasticity’ to otherwise ossified concepts and commitments. Plasticity seems an appropriate term here precisely because it captures, in my view, the loosening of the substantial grip normalized types and styles exhibit. A subversive challenge from within the normalized matrix itself – radically different, yet not disconnected from it. This plasticity may or may not lead to a ‘breaking with a style’ understood as leaving behind naturalized

33 Had Husserl performed teleological-historical investigations of the imagination the way he did with perception and positional consciousness, he likely would have come to the same conclusion. 34 I avoid the language of ‘variation’ here given the distinctions I am attempting to draw throughout the paper. 35 I would like to thank Mirja Hartimo for challenging me to think more carefully about potential motivating factors in imagining consciousness.

222  Andreea Smaranda Aldea concepts (such as sexual difference) with their swarm of supposedly essential limits and articulations. But the possibility of just such a perspective, of just such an interruption and openness to radical difference is no longer inconceivable. Imagining possibilities are thus lived possibilities in this robust sense of the term. They are not divorced, disconnected from everyday praxis and endeavors. Nor are they irrelevant. They may be, but they need not.

4.  Concluding remarks To sum up, I have sought to introduce two basic modes of intelligibility, the normalizing and the imagining, and to argue that while they may seem mutually exclusive, they are in fact deeply intertwined, despite the radical qualitative differences between them, differences which stem from their distinctive epistemic and normative teleological orientations. I have also sought to show, departing from Husserl’s comparative/negative framework of analysis, that the imagination exhibits a unique critical dimension, which is not divorced from everyday lived experiences, but capable of interrupting and subverting them, suggesting alternative courses of action and knowledge. So where does this leave us? At the level of everyday life, this phenomenological framework for analyzing the two basic modes of intelligibility at our disposal has both diagnostic and prescriptive import. Such analyses can expose points of pressure where we can concretely break oppressive, exclusionary, marginalizing practices guided by normalized types and styles. They can also suggest, without predetermining the outcome, pathways for exploring alternative, emancipatory concrete practices. At the theoretical level, especially in the context of transcendental phenomenology, what transpires is the socio-critical potential of phenomenology. Many doubt that, given its eidetic commitments, phenomenology could do justice to the contingent, historical, conceptually and discursively layered dimensions of experience (cf., Oksala 2016).36 Some, given the invariant reading of essence, worry that possibilities are predetermined to the detriment of the novel or the unexpected, the radically other (cf., Scott 1991;37 Dastur 2000;38 Al-Saji 2012,39 2014). The approach this paper proposes can, in my view, address these challenges and more. Notably, beyond the resource of free variation, which remains at our disposal in the case of exact essences, the model of imagining possibilization I have sought to unpack here could shed light on resources phenomenology could employ when studying transcendentally necessary structures of meaning-constitution that are not ahistorical and invariant, for instance, when examining the necessary but historically volatile ways in which the body schema and sexual and gendered schemas (or, to use a Fanonian term, epidermal-racial schemas) are co-constituting.

36 J. Oksala. Feminist Experiences: Foucaultian and Phenomenological Investigations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016). 37 J. W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17/4 (1991): 773–797. 38 F. Dastur, “Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise,” Hypatia 15/4 (2000): 178–189. 39 A. Al-Saji, “Creating Possibility: The Time of the Quebec Student Movement,” Theory & Event Supplement 15/3 (2012).

Imagination and its critical dimension   223 Since imagining possibility constitution is not driven by substantial concepts, and since the imagining stance is structurally oriented toward the otherwise, it can grant phenomenology powerful resources to examine transcendental necessity itself in a historically, conceptually, and discursively robust manner – all while remaining true to its methodological commitments. It could also, with the aid of critical imagination, perform a radical self-reflective critique of what it itself deems transcendentally necessary, what could present itself as such under the guise of, here theoretical, naturalized contingency and traditionality. What emerges, contra contemporary concerns stemming from poststructuralist perspectives, is a view of transcendental phenomenology capable of engaging in a robust critique of oppressive practices in a manner that does not shy away from the contingent – all while remaining true to its core commitment to transcendental necessity.

References Al-Saji, A. “Creating Possibility: The Time of the Quebec Student Movement.” Theory & Event Supplement 15, no. 3 (2012). ———. “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, ed. E. Lee. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014, pp. 133–172. Aldea, A. S. “Husserl’s Struggle with Mental Images – Imaging and Imagining Reconsidered.” Continental Philosophy Review 46, no. 3 (2013): 371–394. ———. “Phenomenology as Critique: Teleological-Historical Reflection and Husserl’s Transcendental Eidetics.” Husserl Studies 32 (2016): 21–46. ———. “Making Sense of Husserl’s Notion of Teleology: Normativity, Reason, Progress and Phenomenology as Critique from Within.” Hegel Bulletin 38, no. 1 (2017): 1–25. Bernet, R. “Unconscious consciousness in Husserl and Freud,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1(2002): 327–351. Crowell, S. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Dastur, F. “Phenomenology of the Event: Waiting and Surprise.” Hypatia 15, no. 4 (2000): 178–189. de Warren, N. Husserl and the Promise of Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Doyon, M. “Husserl on Perceptual Optimality.” Husserl Studies 34 (2018): 171–189. Drummond, J. “Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism. Noema and Object.” Contributions to Phenomenology 4 (1990). Heinämaa, S. Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Held, K. “Husserl’s Phenomenological Method.” In The New Husserl. A Critical Reader, ed. D. Welton. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003a, pp. 32–62. ———. “Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Life-World.” The New Husserl. A Critical Reader, ed. D. Welton. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003b, pp. 32–62. Husserl, E. Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. L. Landgrebe. Hamburg: Claassen & Goverts, 1948. ———. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950. Hua I throughout. ———. Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. M. Biemel. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952. Hua IV throughout. ———. Die Krisis de Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. 1954. Hua VI throughout.

224  Andreea Smaranda Aldea ———. Phänomenologische Psychologie, ed. W. Biemel. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962. Hua IX throughout. ———. Analysen zur Passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918– 1926, ed. M. Fleischer. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. Hua XI throughout. ———. Formale und Transzendentale Logik, ed. P. Janssen. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. Hua XVII throughout. ———. Ideen zu Einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, ed. K. Schuhmann. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976. Hua III/1 throughout. ———. Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung 1898–1925, ed. E. Marbach. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980. Hua XXIII throughout. English Translation: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. J. Brought. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005. Jansen, J. “On the Development of Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology of Imagination and Its Use for Interdisciplinary Research.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005): 121–132. Lohmar, D. “Husserl’s Type and Kant’s Schemata: Systemic Reasons for Their Correlation or Identity.” In The New Husserl. A Critical Reader, ed. D. Welton. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003, pp. 93–124. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. Landes. New York: Routledge, 2012. Mohanty, J. N. “The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy.” Phaenomenologica 98 (1985). Oksala, J. Feminist Experiences: Foucaultian and Phenomenological Investigations. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Sartre, J-P. The Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2004. Scott, J. W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–797. Shum, P. “The Evolution and Implications of Husserl’s Account of the Imagination.” Husserl Studies 31 (2015): 213–236. Taipale, J. Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. Wehrle, M. “Normative Embodiment. The Role of the Body in Foucault’s Genealogy. A Phenomenological Re-Reading.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 47, no. 1 (2016): 56–71. Zhok, A. “Possibility and Consciousness in Husserl’s Thought.” Husserl Studies 32 (2016): 213–235.

15 The hidden art of understanding Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Kant’s theory of imagination Samantha Matherne Special issue of the New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy Abstract: In this paper I explore the influence of Kant’s theory of imagination on a specific aspect of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s thought, viz., their theories of understanding. I  argue that the theories of Verstehen that Heidegger presents in Being and Time and of comprendre that Merleau-Ponty presents in Phenomenology of Perception can be helpfully read as elaborations of Kant’s account of imagination. Key Words: imagination, understanding, Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology

1. Introduction There can be little question that one of the most phenomenologically fruitful notions in Kant’s philosophy is that of the imagination [Einbildungskraft]. Heidegger, for one, makes this concept the centerpiece of his interpretation of Kant in the late 1920s, where he treats Kant’s theory of imagination as a precursor of his theory of temporality.1 Meanwhile although in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty is often critical of Kant, in the Preface he praises Kant’s account of the “hidden art of the imagination” for anticipating the phenomenological theory of intentionality (PhP lxxxi/18).2 In light of this positive phenomenological appraisal, in this paper I aim to explore the influence of Kant’s theory of imagination on a specific aspect of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s thought, viz., their theories of understanding. I argue that the theories of Verstehen that Heidegger presents in Being and Time (1927) and of comprendre that Merleau-Ponty presents in Phenomenology of Perception can be helpfully read as elaborations of Kant’s account of imagination. In teasing out these parallels, I have three goals. One, I hope to highlight some of the more phenomenologically viable aspects of Kant’s theory of imagination. Two,

1 See Heidegger’s Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1927) and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929). 2 For the purposes of this paper, I focus on the influence of Kant’s theory of the imagination on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. For a discussion of its connection to Husserl, see De Santis, Doyon, Dumont, and Jansen in this volume.

226  Samantha Matherne I hope to elucidate important points of continuity between Kant, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Three, I hope to show that all three thinkers want to bring to light a unique way we have of finding meaning in the world, which makes more present to us than we are literally given through the senses, but does so without recourse to cognition and judgment. I proceed as follows. I begin in §2 by presenting Kant’s framework for imagination and four basic claims that he commits himself to. Next, in §3 I offer a reading of Heidegger’s theory of understanding [Verstehen] and interpretation [Auslegung] in Being and Time in light of Kant’s framework for imagination. In §4 I consider Merleau-Ponty’s variation on this theme, with his account of the understanding [comprendre] in the Phenomenology. I conclude in §5.

2.  Kant on imagination My aim in this section is to provide an interpretation of Kant’s theory of imagination that highlights the particularly phenomenologically productive aspects of it. To this end, I shall emphasize four claims Kant makes about imagination. First, I show that Kant is committed to the view that imagination is a capacity that makes more sensibly and perceptually present to us than we are literally given through the senses. Call this the ‘perceptual presence’ claim. Second, I underscore the fact that in addition to his analysis of the empirical operations of imagination, Kant accords imagination a transcendental role in making experience possible. Call this the ‘transcendental’ claim. Third, I stress that Kant allows for imagination to operate in ways that are prior to cognition. Call this the ‘pre-cognitive’ claim. Fourth, I attribute to Kant the view that imagination does this through know-how. Call this the ‘know-how’ claim. Let’s begin with the perceptual presence claim. In the first Critique, Kant offers the following definition of imagination: “Imagination is the faculty for representing an object in intuition even without its presence” [Einbildungskraft ist das Vermögen, einen Gegenstand auch ohne dessern Gegenwart in der Anschauung vorzustellen] (B151, transl. modified).3 Offering a variation of this definition in the Anthropology, Kant glosses the “power of imagination [facultas imaginandi]” as “a faculty of intuition without the presence of the object” (Anthro. 7:167). I want to highlight two features of this definition of imagination. First, in both of these passages, we find Kant characterizing the imagination as a ‘faculty of intuition’. On Kant’s view, intuitions are sensible, i.e., spatial and/temporal, representations. So, by describing imagination as a faculty of intuition, Kant is indicating that it deals with what we encounter in space and time. However, and this is the second point, by qualifying imagination as a faculty of intuition ‘even without the presence of the object’, Kant intends to distinguish it from another intuitive capacity, which he calls ‘sense’ [Sinn] (see, e.g., Anthro. 7:153). For Kant, whereas the intuitions of sense result

3 I here follow Stephenson’s translation (2015), 487–488 of this passage. References to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason are to the A and B pagination of the first (1781) and second (1787) editions (A/B). All other references are to the volume and page of Kants gesammelte Schriften. KU: Critique of the Power of Judgment, Anthro: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Bolded words indicate Kant’s emphasis in the original text.

The hidden art of understanding  227 from us being affected by an object given to us here and now, the intuitions of imagination can outstrip what is literally present to us. For example, when I visualize what the cover of my copy of Middlemarch looks like or I hallucinate a martini, although neither the book nor the drink is literally present to me, I can nevertheless form an intuition of each in imagination. This being said, Kant is clear that the imagination does not just operate in relation to objects that are absent. Kant has a wide-ranging theory of imagination, which allows for it to play a role as much in relation to objects that are absent, e.g., in hallucination, visualization, memory, and make-believe, as in relation to objects that are present, e.g., in perception and cognition.4 Given this range, it clearly will not do to read Kant’s above definition of imagination as indicating imagination is only responsible for representing objects that are absent. Instead we need a broader account of imaginative activity that can accommodate the various imaginative phenomena just listed. I believe that Kant points us in a helpful direction in the longer definition of imagination he offers in the Anthropology: The power of imagination (facultas imaginandi), as a faculty of intuition without the presence of the object, is either productive, that is, a faculty of the original presentation [ursprünglichen Darstellung] of the object (exhibitio originaria), which thus precedes experience; or reproductive, a faculty of derivative presentation [abgeleiteten Darstellung] of the object (exhibitio derivativa), which brings back to the mind an empirical intuition that it had previously. (Anthro. 7:167, my emphasis) Here Kant glosses the idea that imagination represents objects even in their absence with the idea that it does this through the ‘presentation’ [Darstellung] of the object. And this is not the only place Kant describes imagination in these terms: in the third Critique, Kant consistently characterizes imagination as the ‘faculty of presentation’.5 I take his idea to be that, as a faculty of presentation, imagination makes more present to us than we are literally given. Through presentation, then, imagination can represent things in intuition even in their absence. In light of these considerations, I suggest we think of the Kantian imagination as follows: it is a capacity that makes more perceptually present, in an extended sense, than we are literally given through the senses. The phrase ‘perceptual presence’ is one that I am drawing from contemporary philosophy of perception and it is used to refer to the phenomenon in which we perceive objects as having features that are not literally present to us. This happens in amodal perception when features of the object are perceptually present to us even though they are not literally given to us. For example, if I am looking at the front cover of my copy of Middlemarch, the backside of the book is still perceptually present to me.6 Although Kant indicates that imagination is responsible for perceptual presence in this sense,7 I think there are resources in Kant

4 See, e.g., A120fn, A124, KU 5:217. 5 See KU 5:232, 5:244, 5:366. 6 See Noë (2004), 33 for a formulation of the problem of perceptual presence. 7 See Thomas (2009), Kind (forthcoming), and Matherne (2015) for a discussion of how Kant addresses the problem of perceptual presence.

228  Samantha Matherne to extend this notion of perceptual presence to any situation in which the imagination makes something intuitively present to us, e.g., in hallucination, illusion, memory, visualization, etc. When I, for example, remember starting Middlemarch last December or visualize one of Dorothea Brooke’s dresses, on a Kantian analysis, my imagination makes that December night and that dress intuitively present to me. For this reason, I suggest that we treat the Kantian imagination as a capacity for perceptual presentation ‘in an extended sense’. And it is this view of the imagination that is at the heart of the perceptual presence claim. The second claim that I want to highlight from Kant’s account of imagination is the transcendental claim: in addition to its empirical exercise, Kant accords imagination a transcendental role in making experience possible. In the ‘A’ edition of the first Critique, for example, Kant attributes a ‘transcendental function’ to imagination: We therefore have a pure imagination, as a fundamental faculty of the human soul, that grounds all cognition a priori. . .  . Both extremes, namely sensibility and understanding, must necessarily be connected by means of this transcendental function of the imagination, since otherwise the former would to be sure yield appearances but no objects of an empirical cognition, hence there would be no experience. (A124) The sort of cognition Kant is concerned with in this passage is ‘empirical cognition’ or ‘experience’.8 And, on his view, this kind of cognition requires both intuitions and concepts (see A50–51/B74–75). However, given the difference between intuitions and concepts (the former are sensible, singular, and immediate representations, whereas the latter are intellectual, general, and mediate),9 Kant thinks that in order for cognition to be possible, there must be something that mediates between them. And in the above passage, he tasks the imagination with this mediating role. Although I cannot address the complexities here, in both editions of the first Critique, Kant offers an analysis of how the imagination performs this transcendental function. Part of this story turns on his account of ‘transcendental’ or ‘figurative’ synthesis in the Transcendental Deductions and the other part on his view of ‘schematism’, which he presents in the Schematism chapter.10 What is significant for our purposes, however, is the fact that Kant thus acknowledges that in addition to its empirical exercise in perception, memory, visualization, hallucination, make-believe, artistic creation, etc., the imagination also has a transcendental role to play in making experience possible in the first place. The third claim I want to bring out from Kant’s theory of imagination is the precognitive claim: the imagination can operate prior to cognition. Support for attributing

  8 Kant also aligns ‘experience’ with ‘empirical cognition’ at A124, B147, B165–166, B218. And cognition in this sense is to be distinguished from the broader notion of cognition that Kant discusses in the so-called Stufenleiter, which involves objective representations with consciousness (A320/B376–377).   9 See A320/B376–377. 10 Among the complexities I cannot address here are those pertaining to whether in the B edition of the first Critique Kant collapses imagination into understanding. Heidegger takes Kant to have done so and this is why he prefers the A edition over the B.

The hidden art of understanding  229 this claim to Kant can be found in both the first and third Critiques. Beginning in the first Critique, insofar as the imagination’s transcendental activities make cognition possible, it is ‘prior’ to cognition in this sense. Moreover, at the empirical level, at least on one reading of Kant’s account of perception, he attributes to the imagination pre-conceptual modes of synthesis and image-forming activities, which happen prior to cognition.11 Meanwhile in the third Critique, Kant’s theory of judgment in general and his aesthetic theory more specifically both make room for the imagination to operate pre-cognitively. To begin, Kant’s theory of judgment in the third Critique turns on a distinction between two types of judgment: determining and reflecting. A determining judgment is a cognitive judgment in which we apply a universal we already possess to a particular that is given to us, e.g., when I make the judgment, “The bartender is pouring my martini”. By contrast, in a reflecting judgment, all we are given is the particular, which we must, in turn, find the universal for, e.g., when I taste a gin I am unfamiliar with (KU 5:179, EE 20:211). The imagination will, in turn, have a different role to play in each type of judgment. In a determining judgment, the imagination is ‘constrained’ by the understanding, as it has to synthesize what we intuit in light of particular concepts, e.g., ‘bartender’, ‘pouring’, ‘martini’, etc. Meanwhile, in a reflecting judgment, since we do not yet have the concept needed for cognition, the imagination must operate pre-cognitively, as we search for the universal. Kant’s aesthetic theory in the third Critique also accords the imagination a significant pre-cognitive role. In his discussion of judgments of the beautiful, for example, Kant argues that unlike in cognition where the imagination is constrained by the understanding, the imagination and understanding engage in ‘free play’: a state in which “no determinate concept restricts them” and the imagination acts with “free lawfulness” (KU 5:217, 240). Moreover, in his account of genius, Kant continues in the vein of imaginative freedom, asserting, The mental powers, then, whose union (in a certain relation) constitutes genius, are imagination and understanding. Only in the use of the imagination for cognition, the imagination is under the constraint of the understanding . . .; in an aesthetic respect, the imagination is free to provide, beyond concord with the concept, unsought extensive undeveloped material for the understanding. (KU 5:317) Like in the judgment of taste, Kant’s account of artistic creation thus turns on the idea that it is possible for the imagination to relate to the understanding in a free way, distinct from how they interact in cognitive judgment. In both the first and third Critiques, then, we find Kant attributing to imagination activities that occur prior to cognition. The final claim I would like to attribute to Kant’s theory of imagination is the knowhow claim. In both the first and third Critiques, Kant appeals to the notion of ‘art’ [Kunst] to describe the activity of imagination. Though this claim is perhaps most familiar from his account of the fine art of genius in the third Critique, this is not

11 See, e.g., Young (1988), Pendlebury (1996), Longuenesse (1998), 116–120, Rohs (2001), Allison (2004, 187–189), Hanna (2005, 255, 267).

230  Samantha Matherne the only context in which he glosses imagination in artistic terms. In his discussion of schematism in the first Critique, he characterizes the imagination’s activities as a “hidden art in the depths of the human soul” (A141/B180–181).12 Although this may seem like a metaphorical way of saying schematism is impenetrable, Kant has a technical conception of art, according to which it is, in part, an activity that involves ‘skill’ [Geschicklichkeit] (KU 5:303).13 Kant thus contrasts art with science: whereas science requires theoretical knowledge, art requires skill and know-how. To illustrate this point, Kant offers the example of Pieter Camper, the author of the Treatise on the Best Form of Shoes, who, even though he was able to “describe quite precisely how the best shoe must be made . . . was not able to make one” (KU 5:304). Art, on Kant’s view, thus requires some sort of practical skill or know-how. And, on my reading, since in its pre-cognitive use, there is no science, but only art for imagination to rely on, we can conceive of it as engaging in art qua know-how in its non-aesthetic exercises. Putting these four claims together, the following framework for Kant’s theory of imagination emerges. The imagination is a capacity that makes things perceptually present to us in the extended sense, which outstrips what is literally given to us here and now. This capacity is one that we can, in turn, enact at the empirical level, e.g., in memory, visualization, hallucination, perception, empirical cognition, judgments of taste, and artistic creation. However, this capacity is one that also has a transcendental function: it mediates between sensibility and understanding in a way that makes experience, qua empirical cognition, possible. This ability is one that can, in turn, be exercised outside the context of cognition, e.g., in schematism, reflecting judgment, judgments of taste, and genius. And when it is so exercised, it relies on art, i.e., skill or know-how. What I would now like to argue is that if we look at the theories of understanding developed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, then we will find that Kant’s theory of imagination provides a helpful framework for reading their views.

3.  Kantian imagination as Heideggerean understanding When considering Heidegger’s relation to Kant’s theory of the imagination, what typically comes to mind is Heidegger’s interpretation of the first Critique, which he first presented in his 1927–8 lecture course, published as Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and his 1929 book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. In these texts, Heidegger defends a controversial interpretation of Kant’s theory of the imagination in the first Critique, according to which it serves as the ‘common root’ of both sensibility and understanding.14 So understood, Heidegger claims that the transcendental power of the imagination is to be identified with “original time”, where original time is what grounds sensibility and understanding (KPM 131).

12 See Matherne (2014a) for a more thorough discussion of the role art plays in Kant’s account of schematism and genius. 13 Kant also insists that it is an activity that involves “production through freedom, i.e., through a capacity for choice that grounds its actions in reason”; however, I shall leave this point aside here (KU 5:303). 14 See Henrich (1994) for criticism of this reading of Kant.

The hidden art of understanding  231 Though Heidegger thinks that Kant ultimately “shrank back” from this position, he takes this to be a promising phenomenological insight at the core of Kant’s view of imagination (KPM 112). Though Heidegger’s analysis of imagination in his Kant interpretation is a topic worthy of serious attention, this will not be my focus.15 Instead I am interested in the Kantian legacy in Being and Time. More specifically, I shall focus on Heidegger’s account of understanding [Verstehen] and interpretation [Auslegung] in §§31–32, respectively, and the extent to which this account parallels Kant’s theory of imagination. I address Heidegger’s analysis of both understanding and interpretation because, as I read his view, they are two aspects of a unitary phenomenon, viz., the phenomenon of seeing the world as a space of possibility and meaning in which we can work out our existence.16 And I hope to show that Heidegger’s treatment of the unitary phenomenon of understanding and interpretation can fruitfully be read as a variation of the Kantian imagination. In order to bring to light the Kantian underpinnings of Heidegger’s view, I want to look at the way in which the four Kantian claims about imagination explored above bear on Heidegger’s treatment of understanding and interpretation. However, I will proceed in a slightly different order and begin, as Heidegger does, with the precognitive claim. Heidegger presents his account of understanding as an alternative to cognitive accounts of it. To this end, he argues that understanding, in his sense, is more fundamental than cognition. More specifically, he claims that the kind of understanding he is interested in is a “fundamental existentiale”, i.e., a fundamental ontological structure or “basic mode” of Dasein’s being (SZ 143). As we shall see below, this structure is connected to Dasein’s ability to project possibilities, and insofar as this structure characterizes Dasein’s existence at the most fundamental level, Heidegger thinks it differs from cognition, which is something he thinks we only sometimes engage in. For example, while I could cognize the book on my coffee table as the Harper Perennial Legacy Edition of Middlemarch, I could also unthinkingly pick it up. And, on Heidegger’s view, both these experiences involve understanding. For these reasons, Heidegger asserts that, “[U]nderstanding in the sense of one possible kind of cognizing [Erkenntnisart] among others . . . must . . . be Interpreted as an existential derivative of . . . primary understanding” (SZ 143). For Heidegger, understanding is thus pre-cognitive in the sense that it is a basic structure of Dasein’s existence, which is more fundamental than cognition. Moreover, Heidegger’s account of ‘assertion’ [Aussage] and ‘judgment’ [Urteil] in §33 points in the pre-cognitive direction. For, there, he argues that “assertion (‘judgment’) is grounded on understanding and presents us with a derivative form in which

15 For broader discussions of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, see Blattner (1994), (1999), Ch. 5; Weatherson (2002); Han-Pile (2005); Golob (2013); Shockey (in progress). 16 In contrast to pragmatist readings of Heidegger (e.g., Dreyfus (1991), 169, 195; Blattner (2007), 11; Carman (2003), 21), which treat interpretation as an optional addition to understanding, I attribute to Heidegger the view that interpretation permeates understanding. Wrathall (2013), 180–181 calls this latter view the “interpretation pervades understanding-comportment” thesis.

232  Samantha Matherne an interpretation has been carried out” (SZ 153–154). On Heidegger’s view, then, understanding and interpretation is something that happens prior to us making cognitive judgments. However, if it is not through cognition and judgment that we understand and interpret things, then how does Heidegger think we do so? I hope to show that the answer to this question reveals Heidegger’s commitment to the perceptual presence claim. As I shall argue, in Heidegger, the Kantian claim that the imagination enables us to make present even what is absent transforms into the claim that understanding and interpretation enable us to make possibilities present. And I claim that, Heidegger, like Kant, thinks they do so in a way that involves ‘perceptual’ presence in a broad sense, i.e., presence through sight. Thus, according to Heidegger’s version of the perceptual presence claim, understanding and interpretation are ultimately responsible for making us see in terms of possibilities, thus for seeing in ways that make more present to us than we are literally given. This being said, as I shall now detail, although Heidegger maintains that both are needed for us to fully see in terms of possibilities, understanding and interpretation each enable us to see possibilities in a unique way. Understanding enables us to see in terms of possibilities in general, while interpretation enables us to see specific entities as embodying specific possibilities. In order to fill out this account of perceptual presence, I want to begin with Heidegger’s account of understanding and his claim that it has the structure of ‘projection’ [Entwurf] (SZ 145). According to Heidegger, the understanding does not just grasp what is present to us; instead, it grasps what is present to us by projecting it in terms of possibilities. There is, in turn, a question about what kinds of possibilities Heidegger thinks we project through understanding. According to some commentators, with his account of understanding, Heidegger intends to offer us an analysis of how we, in a specific scenario, understand something in terms of specific possibilities. For example, when I pick up Middlemarch and start reading, you might think I am understanding the book as ‘to be relished’ or myself as a ‘George Eliot fan’. And commentators who pursue this reading, tend to treat understanding as a mode of ‘absorbed coping’, in which we, without reflection or deliberation, project something in terms of its possibilities through our absorbed engagement with it.17 By contrast, on my reading, Heidegger intends his account of understanding to explain our projection of possibilities in general. That is to say, I take understanding, for Heidegger, to be responsible for projecting the whole suite of possibilities that we can grasp the world and our selves in light of. Support for this reading comes from the following passage: Projection always pertains to the full disclosedness of Being-in-the-world; . . . understanding has itself possibilities, which are sketched out beforehand [vorgezeichnet] within the range [Umkreis] of what is essentially disclosable in it. (SZ 146, my emphasis) Here, Heidegger indicates that projection involves a ‘full’ disclosure of Being-in-theworld, i.e., a full disclosure of how it is that we, as Dasein, are at grips with the world.

17 See, e.g., Dreyfus (1991), Ch. 11; Blattner (2006), 85; Carman (2003), 19.

The hidden art of understanding  233 And projection does this, he claims, by ‘sketching out’ the ‘range’ of what is ‘disclosable’ to us, i.e., the range of what we can make sense of and engage with in relation to our selves and the world. So construed, projection opens up the possibilities that pertain to our existence in relation to the world in general. However, this emphasis on the general orientation of the understanding should come as no surprise, given that Heidegger asserts at the outset of §31 that understanding discloses both the “ ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ and significance” (SZ 143). By the ‘forthe-sake-of-which’, Heidegger has in mind how understanding discloses Dasein to itself. And by ‘significance’, he means the significance of the world insofar as it involves the relational whole that encompasses the ready-to-hand, other Dasein we are with, and the present-at-hand.18 According to Heidegger, then, far from disclosing this or that possibility to us, understanding discloses the possibilities pertaining to our selves and the world as a whole. This being said, Heidegger maintains that the range of possibilities that understanding projects is not limitless. Rather he makes clear that the set of possibilities open to each of us is delimited by the over-arching factical situation we are ‘thrown’ into (SZ 144). That is to say, we cannot project every possibility there is, rather only those possibilities that can make sense to us given the unique historical, social, economic, personal, etc., circumstances that we find ourselves in. With this general scope of possibilities in mind, we can now turn to Heidegger’s claim that understanding enables us to see in terms of possibilities. In this vein, Heidegger connects his account of projection through the understanding to the notion of ‘sight’ [Sicht]: we project possibilities by seeing things in terms of them (SZ 146). Heidegger uses the language of ‘sight’ in this context because he wants to emphasize that the way in which we grasp the world and our selves in terms of possibilities is not something that involves ‘thematically’ grasping those possibilities, i.e., through cognition and judgment (SZ 145–146). Rather he claims that our grasp of possibilities is manifest in how we see our selves and the world, through the ‘circumspection’ [Umsicht] of the ready-to-hand, the ‘considerateness’ [Rücksicht] involved in our solicitude for others, our ‘transparency’ [Durchsichtigkeit] to ourselves, etc. (SZ 146). For Heidegger, then, is it not through cognition, but rather through sight that understanding allows entities to show up for us in terms of their possibilities. Yet, for Heidegger, our ability to see in terms of possibilities involves more than just seeing things in terms of possibilities in general. He claims that the understanding must, in turn, “develop itself” by seeing specific entities in light of specific possibilities (SZ 148). And, on his view, this task falls to interpretation. According to Heidegger, interpretation involves the ‘working-out’ [Ausarbeitung] of specific possibilities that the understanding has projected (SZ 148). In order to work out a possibility, Heidegger claims that we must interpret a specific entity in light of a specific possibility. When we do so, Heidegger claims we treat the entity “as something” (SZ 149). For example, when I see my martini as to be sipped, I am

18 For his discussion of significance in relation to the ready-to-hand, see SZ §18, and in relation to others, see SZ 123. Although he does not use the term ‘significance’ in relation to the present-at-hand, in §31 he indicates that the understanding can project the present-at-hand: “even the ‘unity’ of the manifold present-at-hand, of Nature, can be discovered only if a possibility of it has been disclosed” (SZ 144–145).

234  Samantha Matherne seizing upon the many background possibilities surrounding the martini (to be sipped, to be thrown, to be shaken, to be stirred) and I interpret it in light of this specific sipping-possibility. As Heidegger will sometimes make this point, when we do this, we make a particular possibility ‘express’ [ausdrücklich] (SZ 149). I take his idea to be that in seizing upon a particular possibility as that in terms of which we will interpret a specific entity, we bring that possibility into the foreground, pressing it out from the background of general possibility we are ‘familiar’ with through understanding.19 However, Heidegger insists that interpretation is not to be identified with making a conceptual ‘assertion’ [Aussage] or ‘judgment’ [Urteil]. To this end, he claims that the ‘articulation’ [Artikulation] of interpretation is something that happens prior to making a “thematic assertion [Aussage]” (SZ 150). Instead, he suggests, interpretation happens at the level of ‘perception’ [wahrnehmen] and “mere seeing” [schlichte Sehen] (SZ 149).20 Thus, when I see my martini as ‘to be sipped’, this is something that occurs at the level of sight: I perceive the martini as such. This is not to say that we cannot make assertions or judgments; rather Heidegger claims that when we do so, e.g., “That’s my martini!”, we are engaged in a “derivative [abkünftiger] mode” of interpretation, one that is parasitic on the perceptual mode of interpretation (SZ 153). As was the case in his account of understanding, then, Heidegger insists that interpretation does not happen at the level of thematic assertion or cognitive judgment; instead, it involves a mode of sight. However, unlike with the understanding’s orientation towards possibilities in general, Heidegger claims that with interpretation we see a specific entity in terms of a specific possibility. And between the interplay of understanding and interpretation, Heidegger claims that we are able to see our selves and the world in terms of possibilities: whereas the former enables us to see a general space of possibility, the Spielraum, in which we can exist, the latter enables us to seize upon specific possibilities as that which we can grasp specific entities in light of, as we work out our existence in concrete ways. Insofar as Heidegger thus attributes to understanding and interpretation ways of seeing that make more present to us than what is literally given, we can read him as taking on a commitment to the perceptual presence claim with regard to them. In addition to the pre-cognitive and perceptual presence claims, there is reason to think that Heidegger also commits himself to a version of the transcendental claim and the know-how claim.21 Regarding the transcendental claim, insofar as Heidegger identifies understanding as a fundamental ontological structure of Dasein’s being, it will serve as a ground of possibility for all of Dasein’s particular ‘ontic’ engagement with the world. More specifically, however, Heidegger emphasizes two ways in which understanding and interpretation make possible features of Dasein’s existence. In the first place, Heidegger claims that understanding makes possible the diclosedness, or accessibility, of our selves and the world. To this end, in discussing the

19 See, e.g., Heidegger’s claim that, “That wherein Dasein already understands itself in this way is always something with which it is primordially familiar” (SZ 86). 20 See Doyon (2015) for further discussion of the role interpretation and the ‘as-structure’ play in Heidegger’s account of perception. 21 Although I cannot pursue this topic here, there is a broader discussion of whether to read Being and Time as a piece of transcendental philosophy. For further discussion, see Crowell and Malpas (2007).

The hidden art of understanding  235 disclosure of the understanding, Heidegger maintains that through the sight of understanding, entities become ‘accessible’ to us: In giving an existential signification to “sight”, we have merely drawn upon the peculiar feature of seeing, that it lets entities which are accessible [zugänglich] to it be encountered unconcealedly [begegnen unverdeckt] in themselves. (SZ 147) And it is for this reason that Heidegger suggests that we can think of sight as what enables “access in general [Zugang überhaupt]” (SZ 147). Whether we consider something ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, our selves, or others, on his view, understanding is what makes these entities accessible to us at all. Understanding thus serves as a condition of the possibility of us being able to disclose, hence access entities at all. Second, Heidegger argues that understanding and interpretation together are the conditions of the possibility of ‘meaning’ or ‘sense’ [Sinn]. In general, Heidegger describes sense as the framework of ‘intelligibility’ [Verständlichkeit]: it is the space in which something can become “intelligible [verständlich] as something” (SZ 151). Although understanding is responsible for holding open the space of intelligibility in general, Heidegger claims that we do not experience an entity as meaningful unless we have also interpreted, i.e., articulated, it in light of some possibility: “That which can be Articulated in a disclosure by which we understand, we call ‘meaning’ [Sinn]” (SZ 151). For this reason, Heidegger claims that both understanding and interpretation are required for the possibility of meaning: “The concept of meaning embraces the formal existential framework of what necessarily belongs to that which an understanding interpretation Articulates” (SZ 151). For Heidegger, understanding and interpretation thus serve as the conditions of the possibility of experiencing meaning. Heidegger’s commitment to the transcendental claim is thus apparent not only in his commitment to understanding being a condition of the possibility of access to entities, but also in his view that understanding and interpretation are conditions of the possibility of the experience of meaning. The final claim to explore is the know-how claim. Toward the beginning of §31, as part of his effort to distance his account of understanding from cognitive views, Heidegger reminds us of the fact that we do not always use the term ‘understanding’ in cognitive terms: we sometimes use the expression ‘understanding something’ [etwas verstehen] with the signification of ‘being able to manage something’ [einer Sache vorstehen können], ‘being a match for it’ [ihr gewachsen sein], ‘being competent to do something’ [etwas können]. (SZ 143) Here, Heidegger draws our attention to the fact that sometimes when we say we ‘understand’ something, we mean that we understand how to handle something or we are competent with that thing, e.g., when I understand how to raise a martini without spilling or how to hold Middlemarch at an appropriate reading distance. Drawing on this usage, Heidegger then suggests that understanding, in his sense, can be understood as a kind of competence or ability, viz., a “competence [Gekonnte] . . . [with] Being as existing” (SZ 143). He calls this basic competence our ‘Sein-können’, our ability to

236  Samantha Matherne be (SZ 143). And he claims that what it is to have an ability-to-be is to have an understanding that projects possibilities. For Heidegger, it is this know-how, rather than cognition, that makes possible our access to entities and the experience of meaning. Stepping back, in this section, I have attempted to show that Heidegger’s account of understanding and interpretation parallels Kant’s account of imagination insofar as he takes on board the four Kantian commitments discussed in §2. On my interpretation, just as imagination, for Kant, enables us to make more perceptually present to ourselves than is literally given, so too do understanding and interpretation extend what we see beyond what is simply in front of us, to possibilities. Moreover, Heidegger claims that this is a condition of the possibility of any access to entities and the experience of meaning. And he insists that understanding and interpretation do so precognitively and through a basic know-how, viz., our competence with existing. Prior to cognition, then, Heidegger carves out space for understanding and interpretation to serve as moments of a unitary structure that enable us to see the world and our selves in terms of possibilities and meaning. And I take this Heideggerean space of sight, possibility, and meaning to map onto the space of imagination in Kant.

4.  Kantian imagination as Merleau-Pontyean understanding The role that Kant plays in the Phenomenology of Perception is a complicated one. At times, Merleau-Ponty treats Kant as the arch-intellectualist, who serves as one of Merleau-Ponty’s primary targets. In this vein, Merleau-Ponty is particularly critical of Kant’s account of the transcendental subject as the condition of the possibility of experience and the world.22 By Merleau-Ponty’s lights, Kant hereby misconstrues the subject: we are not transcendental subjects who condition the world, we are embodied subjects who are beings-in-the-world.23 Yet at other times, Merleau-Ponty treats Kant as a proto-phenomenologist, whose views he is sympathetic to.24 And, as we saw at the outset, it is in particular Kant’s account of the imagination that Merleau-Ponty takes to be on the side of phenomenology.25 In this context, Merleau-Ponty specifically highlights Kant’s aesthetic sounding

22 See, e.g., Merleau-Ponty’s claim that Kant treats the subject as “a condition of possibility distinct from our experience and . . . without which there would be no world” (PhP lxxii/10). 23 See, e.g., “Kant concluded that I am a consciousness who encompasses and constitutes the world, and, in this reflective movement, he passed over the phenomenon of the body and the phenomenon of the thing” (PhP 317/356–357). 24 For a lengthier discussion of Kantian themes in Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception, see Matherne (2016), and in his account of pathology, see Matherne (2014b). 25 It should be noted that the Kantian view of imagination, which Merleau-Ponty is drawn to is different from the Sartrean view of imagination, which he criticizes. Whereas Kant allows for imagination to operate in relation to both real and virtual objects, Sartre, who follows Husserl on this, restricts the imagination to operating only in relation to ‘irreal’ objects. Sartre, who follows Husserl on this, thus distinguishes sharply between imagining and perceiving, whereas Kant thinks imagination plays a crucial role in perception. Therefore, when Merleau-Ponty claims in “The Primacy of Perception”, that amodal perception is not the result of imagination, he is rejecting the Husserlian/Sartrean view, not Kant’s (PrP 13–14). For Merleau-Ponty’s own appraisal of Sartre’s view, see his 1936 review of Sartre’s

The hidden art of understanding  237 descriptions of the imagination, particularly, Kant’s claim in the schematism that imagination is a ‘hidden art’ (KrV A141/B181, PhP lxxxi/18, see also 453/493). And he claims that this aspect of Kant’s philosophy anticipates the phenomenological theory of intentionality (PhP lxxxi/18). In the spirit of this positive appraisal of Kant’s theory of imagination, in what follows I want to consider the ways in which Merleau-Ponty’s theory of understanding can be read as an appropriation of Kant’s theory of imagination. As was the case with Heidegger, I shall argue that Merleau-Ponty defends a pre-cognitive account of understanding, as something that makes perceptually present to us more than we are literally given, through projecting the world and our selves in light of possibilities and meaning. Moreover Merleau-Ponty accords imagination a role in conditioning the possibility of experience. However, unlike on the Heidegerrean view, we shall see that Merleau-Ponty thinks it is crucial to recognize that understanding is ultimately mediated through the body and our bodily know-how. As in my discussion of Heidegger, I think it will be helpful to begin by analyzing Merleau-Ponty’s endorsement of the pre-cognitive claim. Merleau-Ponty labels cognitive models of understanding ‘intellectualist’ models, and it is one of his primary goals in the Phenomenology to develop an account of understanding that serves as an alternative to the intellectualist view. In this spirit, he claims that we need to “rework our notion of ‘understanding’ [comprendre]” in a way that acknowledges that it has its seat not in cognition and judgment, but rather in our bodily engagement with the world (PhP 146/180). Indeed, one of his main aims in the chapter titled “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity” is to show that there is a zone of bodily understanding that lies between “automatic reflex” and ‘knowledge’ [connaissance] (PhP 145/179). This is not to say that Merleau-Ponty denies that we can have knowledge or cognition of the world; rather his point is that our cognitive activities are grounded in a more foundational way we have of understanding the world through our bodies.26 However, it is important to recognize that in defending this new bodily theory of the understanding, Merleau-Ponty does not just want to account for action and perception. Though action and perception are, no doubt, of central interest to Merleau-Ponty, he intends to offer a general account of understanding, which does justice to all our modes of our existence. In this vein, he indicates that his analysis of bodily understanding is meant to account for both our ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ engagement with the world: the normal subject . . . does not have his body available merely as implicated in a concrete milieu, he is not merely situated in relation to the tasks set by his trade, nor is he merely open to real situations. Rather, in addition he possesses his body as the correlate of pure stimuli stripped of all practical signification; he is open to verbal and fictional situations. . . . The normal subject’s body is not merely ready to be mobilized by real situations that draw it toward themselves, it can also turn

L’Imagination. For a discussion of the relationship between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s theories of the imagination, see Lennon (2015), Ch. 3. 26 See, e.g., Matherne (2018) for a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s account of abstract thought in mathematics and natural science.

238  Samantha Matherne away from the world . . . and be situated in the virtual. . . . The normal person reckons with the possible. (PhP 111–112/139–140)27 With his theory of the understanding, then, Merleau-Ponty aims to offer an analysis of both our ‘real’ encounters with reality through perception and actions and our ‘virtual’ encounters with possibilities through cognition, morality, sexuality, politics, art, etc. So understood, Merleau-Ponty present his pre-cognitive account of bodily understanding as a general account of our ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ engagement with the world. In clarifying how bodily understanding operates pre-cognitively, Merleau-Ponty also defends a version of the perceptual presence claim. Indeed, in a Heidegerrean vein, he argues that understanding involves projection and that, as a result of this projection, the world shows up for us in meaningful ways. In more detail, Merleau-Ponty argues that what enables the understanding to operate in this rich variety of ways is its ‘function of projection’ (see PhP 114–115/142–143). He claims that this function is a ‘fundamental’ function, which lies “beneath intelligence and perception” (PhP 137/169). And he defines this function, in general, as “the general power of placing oneself in a situation”, where a ‘situation’ is a space that is meaningful in some way, e.g., a perceptual situation, a sexual situation, a political situation, etc. (PhP 137/169).28 More specifically, he characterizes this function as, [the] power of marking out borders and directions in the given world, of establishing lines of force, of arranging perspectives, or organizing the given world according to the projects of the moment, and of constructing upon the geographical surroundings a milieu of behavior and a system of significations that express, on the outside, the internal activity of the subject. (PhP 115/143)29 For Merleau-Ponty, the understanding is thus something that projects around us a ‘milieu’ or ‘system’ that reflects our intentions and what is significant to us. While this may make it sound as if understanding simply imposes significance on a meaningless world, we must be careful here. Merleau-Ponty is clear that projection is something that is responsive to the meaning that is in the world.30 For this reason, he describes understanding in terms of “the accord [l’accord] between what we aim at 27 For discussion of the power to reckon with the possible see Romdenh-Romluc (2007, 2011), 93–102. My own reading differs from hers insofar as she tends to gloss this power in practical terms, i.e., as a way we reckon with the possible through bodily action, whereas I defend a more encompassing view of the power to reckon with the possible as something that is enacted whenever we engage with the world, through action, perception, or intellect. I discuss this difference at more length at Matherne (2014b). 28 See, e.g., Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of affective and ideological situations (PhP 159/194) and sexual situations (PhP 158–160/193–195). 29 Although the ‘internal activity of the subject’ might seem to suggest an intellectualist picture, Merleau-Ponty is clear that the subject he has in mind is an embodied subject who is a being-in-the-world (see, e.g., PhP 139–140/171–172, 454/493). 30 See PhP 62/88, 138/170. The imposition model of projection is one that Merleau-Ponty describes in terms of the “projection of the interior into the exterior” (PhP 62/88) and the “pure power of signifying” (PhP 138/170).

The hidden art of understanding  239 and what is given” (PhP 146/180). As he sometimes makes this point, understanding involves some sort of ‘communication’ or ‘communion’ between our intentions and what is significant to us, on the one hand, and the world with its meaning, on the other (PhP 334/376). So in projection, we do not simply throw meaning over meaningless objects; our projection is responsive to the meanings that objects themselves have.31 Though the notion of projection is one familiar from our earlier discussion of Heidegger, what is distinctive in Merleau-Ponty’s account is his emphasis on the role of the body. Emphasizing the bodily nature of projection, Merleau-Ponty says, Our body . . . is the origin of all [expressive spaces], it is the very movement of expression, it projects significations [significations] on the outside by giving them a place and sees to it that they begin to exist as things, beneath our hands and before our eyes. (PhP 147/182) For Merleau-Ponty, ‘expression’ is the activity by means of which we give significance to things (though, again, in response to the meaning things themselves have).32 And, as he indicates in this passage, he regards the body as the ‘origin’ of all expressive activities in which we project significance into the world.33 Moreover in this passage, Merleau-Ponty claims that expression makes the significations we project ‘exist’ ‘before our hands and before our eyes’. For Merleau-Ponty, then, this bodily projection is what makes those significations perceptually present to us. Merleau-Ponty, in turn, delineates three different kinds of bodily projection we can engage in. The first form of projection operates through “gestures necessary for the conservation of life”, which make present significations related to biological functions, e.g., seeing a cracker as ‘to be eaten’ or a glass of water as ‘to be gulped’ (PhP 147–148/182). Meanwhile, the second form of projection has its seat in “motor habits”, which allows us to make present significations related to habits, like typing, driving a car, or playing an organ (PhP 147–148/182).34 However, Merleau-Ponty claims that there is a further mode of projection that requires more than the body’s ‘natural means’: finally, sometimes the signification aimed at cannot be reached by the natural means of the body. We must, then, construct an instrument, and the body projects a cultural world around itself. (PhP 148/182) Although this final form of projection is still a bodily form of projection, Merleau-Ponty claims that it depends on the development of cultural instruments, e.g., through a painting, novel, mathematical proof, scientific experiment, etc. Thus,

31 For a discussion of the meaning objects have in terms of their ‘style’, see Matherne (2017). 32  It, in his words, involves “implant[ing] meaning”, “project[ing] significations” and “mark[ing] things with the trace of human elaboration” (IL 104, PhP 147/182, IL 96) 33 See a similar claim in “Indirect Language”: “All perception, all action which presupposes it, and in short every human use of the body is already primordial expression” (IL 67). 34 These examples are ones Merleau-Ponty mentions at PhP 144–145/178–179.

240  Samantha Matherne for Merleau-Ponty, the bodily projection involved in understanding is something that projects the world not just as a ‘physical’ world, but as a ‘cultural’ world as well, and the meanings it makes present to us are similarly variegated (PhP 139/171).35 Given Merleau-Ponty’s commitment to bodily understanding being the means through which we project significations and so make those significations perceptually present to us, we have reason to attribute to him a version of the perceptual presence claim. Turning now to the transcendental claim, there is also reason to read Merleau-Ponty as taking on board this kind of commitment in his theory of understanding.36 And, on this point, Merleau-Ponty himself highlights the continuity between his view and Kant’s. As I mentioned earlier, in the Preface to the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty lauds Kant for anticipating the phenomenological theory of intentionality: In the Critique of Judgment, Kant himself demonstrated that there is a unity of the imagination and of the understanding . . . which is itself without any concept. Here the subject is no longer . . . the positing power that imposes the law of understanding upon the manifold; rather, he discovers himself and appreciates himself as a nature spontaneously conforming to . . . the understanding. But if the subject has [such] a nature, then the hidden art of the imagination must condition the categorical activities; it is no longer merely aesthetic judgment that rests on this hidden art, but also knowledge, and this art also grounds the unity of consciousness. (PhP lxxxi/18) Here, Merleau-Ponty suggests that in the third Critique, specifically in his account of reflecting judgment and his account of beauty, Kant recognizes that there is a way for the imagination and understanding (on Kant’s definition) to engage with each other prior to cognition and concepts. Merleau-Ponty then suggests that Kant hereby recognizes that the ‘hidden art’ of imagination underwrites not only reflecting and aesthetic judgment, but also serves as the condition of possibility both knowledge and the unity of consciousness. While the idea that the hidden art of imagination underwrites knowledge or cognition is familiar from our discussion of Kant’s view, the claim that the hidden art of imagination grounds the unity of consciousness will take some more unpacking. By the ‘unity of consciousness’, Merleau-Ponty has in mind the unity of our various ways of intentionally relating to the world.37 Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty indicates that the sort of intentionality at issue here is not just “act intentionality”, i.e.,

35 See also PhP 307/347. 36 For transcendental readings of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, see Gardner (2015), the articles collected in Inkin and Reynolds (2017), and Matherne (forthcoming). 37 With this account of the unity of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty is less interested in how a subject synchronically unifies various conscious states together in a single instance and more interested in a structural account of how our various modes of intentionality involved in, e.g., perception, thought, affect, etc., are integrated together in a single consciousness.

The hidden art of understanding  241 the “intentionality of our judgments and of our voluntary decisions” (PhP lxxxii/18).38 Instead he claims that consciousness extends to our “operative intentionality [fungierende Intentionalität]”, which concerns our ‘pre-predicative’ relation to the world, through action, perception, affect, etc. (PhP lxxxii/18). For Merleau-Ponty, the unity of consciousness thus concerns what unifies the wide variety of ways we have of relating to the world, as much through action and perception, as through thought and deliberation. The reason that Merleau-Ponty thinks Kant’s account of imagination is promising with regard to accounting for the unity of consciousness is because he thinks of it along the lines of his account of projection. To this end, Merleau-Ponty suggests that, for Kant, the imagination ultimately involves “our power to figure [figurer] any intention whatever in the world” (PhP 198/233, transl. modified). However, the idea that we have the power to ‘figure’ the world in light of our intentions just is what Merleau-Ponty seeks to articulate with his account of the understanding. Merleau-Ponty thus regards Kant’s theory of imagination as resting on the same insight that his account of understanding does, viz., we have the ability to project our intentions, whether they be related to the real or virtual world, and that this is something that gives unity to all our intentional activity. Developing this point on his own view, Merleau-Ponty uses the function of projection to help clarify the unity of consciousness. To this end, he claims that the function of projection issues in an ‘intentional arc’, which he describes as follows: the life of consciousness – epistemic life, the life of desire, or perceptual life – is underpinned by an ‘intentional arc’ that projects around us our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and our moral situation, or rather, that ensures that we are situated within all of these relationships. This intentional arc creates the unity of the senses, the unity of the senses with intelligence, and the unity of sensitivity and motricity. (PhP 137/170)39 The intentional arc of consciousness thus encompasses the intentions that reflect the variety of ways we can project the world in meaningful ways, e.g., cognitively, volitionally, perceptually, physically, morally, aesthetically, etc. And he indicates that what gives unity to these various intentions is the fact that they issue from the same source, viz., the function of projection. Merleau-Ponty accordingly traces the unity of consciousness back to the function of projection, which underlies and unifies together all our intentions. In the spirit of the transcendental claim, Merleau-Ponty thus treats the understanding as the condition of the possibility not only of knowledge, but also of the unity of consciousness. The final claim left to consider is the know-how claim. Here, too, Merleau-Ponty endorses the view that bodily understanding is a matter of know-how. Like Heidegger, in order to motivate this account of understanding, Merleau-Ponty invites us

38 Merleau-Ponty here parenthetically remarks that act intentionality is the only kind Kant recognizes in the Critique of Pure Reason (PhP lxxxii/18). 39 As he describes the intentional arc a bit later, it is the “vital roots of perception, motricity, and representation”, as well as sexuality (PhP 160/195).

242  Samantha Matherne to consider examples in which we describe what we are doing as involving ‘understanding’, without this being a cognitive or intellectual matter. For example, he claims that when we learn a new dance, we understand the dance when our body “ ‘catches’ (kapiert)” the movement (PhP 144/178). Understanding, then, need not be a matter of having knowledge about something; it can be a matter of our body ‘catching’ how to do something. Extending this beyond his account of motor habits, Merleau-Ponty maintains that our body is ultimately a ‘knowing-body’ [corps-connaissant], which grasps possibilities and meaning through its know-how (PhP 431–470). Pivotal to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body’s know-how is his account of the body schema. Though I cannot consider the details of his view here, Merleau-Ponty argues that the body schema is something that generally attunes us to the world and enables us to experience the world in meaningful ways. As he makes this point, “there is a logic of the world” that we grasp through our body schema (PhP 341/383). Moreover he claims that there are various ‘annexes’ of the body schema, e.g., those that correspond to specific sense modalities and to specific motor habits, and that these enable us to grasp specific perceptual structures and patterns of meaning (PhP 49/74). The gaze, for example, is something that Merleau-Ponty claims understands the “logic of illumination”, such that it “ ‘knows’ [sait] what such a patch of light signifies in such a context” (PhP 326/368, 341/383). And he maintains that this knowledge of the gaze is what enables us to see objects as having particular colors (PhP 326/368, 341/383). He, in turn, extends this point to the other annexes of the body schema, arguing that the know-how involved in each enables us to experience the world, our selves, and others in meaningful ways. Stepping back, I have argued that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of understanding involves a commitment to Kant’s four claims about imagination. For Merleau-Ponty, the understanding is a pre-cognitive capacity that has its seat in the body. This bodily understanding makes perceptually present to us more than we are literally given: the understanding projects and so makes present significations into a world, which it is, at the same time responsive to. These projected significations reflect the whole suite of intentions that orient us toward the world in a rich variety of ways, e.g., through action, perception, intellect, affect, etc. This projection, Merleau-Ponty claims, is a condition of the possibility not only of knowledge and cognition, but also of the unity of consciousness. Finally, he maintains that this understanding manifests itself through our bodily know-how. In this way, Merleau-Ponty’s account of understanding involves a commitment to the know-how claim.

5. Conclusion My aim in this paper has been to explore the continuity between Kant’s account of imagination and the phenomenological theories of understanding developed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. To this end, I have argued that all three are committed to there being a basic human capacity that makes more perceptually present to us than we are literally given, which serves as a condition of the possibility of experience, which operates in a pre-cognitive way and on the basis of know-how. This, of course, is neither to say that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s theories of understanding map perfectly onto Kant’s account of imagination, nor to say that these phenomenological theories map perfectly onto one another. Even if Kant recognizes

The hidden art of understanding  243 that the imagination can operate in pre-cognitive ways, his overarching emphasis on cognition and the ‘I think’ in the first Critique stands in sharp contrast to Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s overarching emphasis on our status as beings thrown into a world that transcends us. And even though the phenomenologists agree that we must acknowledge our fundamental status as beings-in-the-world, while Heidegger proceeds by analyzing the basic ontological structures of Dasein, Merleau-Ponty insists that we must take into account the way our bodies serve as our vehicle for being-in-the-world. Though these and other differences deserve further treatment, I shall conclude with a note about the value of acknowledging the continuity between Kant, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty on these issues. It seems to me that what all three attempt to do justice to with their respective accounts of imagination and understanding is the insight that between mere sensory reaction and reflective thought, we have the ability to grasp our selves, others, and the world in meaningful ways. And what I hope to have shown is that it is a shared commitment to this hidden art that persists from Kant through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.40

References Allison, H. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Blattner, W. “Is Heidegger a Kantian Idealist?” Inquiry 37 (1994): 185–201. ———. Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. “Heidegger’s Kantian Idealism Revisited.” Inquiry 47 (2004): 321–337. ———. Heidegger’s “Being and Time”: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum, 2006. ———. “Ontology, the A Priori, and the Primacy of Practice.” In Transcendental Heidegger, ed. S. Crowell and J. Malpas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Carman, T. Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in Being and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Crowell, S. and Malpas, J., eds. Transcendental Heidegger. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Doyon, M. “The ‘As-Structure’ of Intentional Experience in Husserl and Heidegger.” In Phenomenology of Thinking. Investigations Into the Character of Cognitive Experiences, ed. T. Breyer and C. Gutland. New York: Routledge, 2015, 116–133. Dreyfus, H. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Gardner, S. “Merleau-Ponty’s Transcendental Theory of Perception.” In The Transcendental Turn, ed. S. Gardner and M. Grist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Golob, S. “Heidegger on Kant, Time and the ‘Form’ of Intentionality.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21, no. 2 (2013): 345–367. Hanna, R. “Kant and Nonconceptual Content.” European Journal of Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2005): 247–290. Han-Pile, B. “Early Heidegger’s Appropriation of Kant.” In A Companion to Heidegger, ed. H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall. London: Blackwell, 2005.

40 I am grateful to Andreea (Smaranda) Aldea, William Blattner, Anthony Bruno, David Cerbone, Steven Crowell, Augustin Dumont, Sacha Golob, Gabrielle Jackson, Julia Jansen, Leslie MacAvoy, Denis McManus, Irene McMullin, Joseph Rouse, and Michela Summa for feedback on this paper. Special thanks are due to Maxime Doyon for his careful, clarifying comments.

244  Samantha Matherne Heidegger, M. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962. Translated from Sein und Zeit, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Band VIII, 1927, reprinted in Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977a (GA 2). [SZ] ———. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, 5th ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997. Translated from Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977b (GA 25). [PIK] ———. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. R. Taft, 6th ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Translated from Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991 (GA 3). [KPM] Henrich, D. “On the Unity of Subjectivity.” In The Unity of Reason, trans. G. Zöller. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994, pp. 17–54. Inkpin, A. and Reynolds, J., eds. Continental Review 50, no. 1 (2017): Special Issue: Merleau-Ponty’s Gordian Knot: Transcendental Philosophy, Empirical Science and Naturalism. Kant, I. Kants gesammelte Schriften. Deutschen [formerly, Königlichen Preussichen], ed. Akademie der Wissenschaften. Walter de Gruyter, 1902. ———. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. [A/B] ———. Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [KU] ———. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. R. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. [Anthro.] Kind, A. “Imaginative Presence.” In Phenomenal Presence, ed. F. Dorsch, M. Nide-Rumelin and F. Macpherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Lennon, K. Imagination and the Imagery. London: Routledge, 2015. Longuenesse, B. Kant and the Capacity to Judge, trans. C. Wolfe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Matherne, S. “Kant and the Art of Schematism.” Kantian Review 19, no. 2 (2014a): 181–205. ———. “The Kantian Roots of Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Pathology.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22, no. 1 (2014b): 124–149. ———. “Images and Kant’s Theory of Perception.” Ergo 29, no. 2 (2015): 737–777. ———. “Kantian Themes in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Perception.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 98, no. 2 (2016): 193–230. ———. “Merleau-Ponty on Style as the Key to Perceptual Presence and Constancy.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55, no. 4 (2017): 693–727. ———. “Merleau-Ponty on Abstract Thought in Mathematics and Natural Science.” European Journal of Philosophy 26 (2018): 780–797. ———. “Toward a New Transcendental Aesthetic: Merleau-Ponty’s Appraisal of Kant’s Philosophical Method.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Special Issue: “Kant’s Method in Philosophy and Its Reception, ” ed. G. Gava (forthcoming). Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Primacy of Perception.” In The Primacy of Perception, trans. J. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 12–42. Translation of “Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques.” Bulletin de la société française de philosophie 49 (1947): 119–153. ———. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. Landes. London: Routledge, 2012. Translated from Phénoménologie de la perception. Gallimard, 1945. [PhP] Noë, A. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Pendlebury, M. “The Role of Imagination in Perception.” South African Journal of Philosophy 15, no. 4 (1996): 133–138. Rohs, P. “Bezieht sich nach Kant die Anschauung unmittelbar auf Gegenstände?” In Proceedings of the 9th International Kant-Congress (Vol. II, 214–228). de Gruyter, 2001.

The hidden art of understanding  245 Romdenh-Romluc, K. “Merleau-Ponty and the Power to Reckon with the Possible.” In Reading Merleau-Ponty: On Phenomenology of Perception, ed. T. Baldwin. London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 44–58. ———. Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 2011. Shockey, M. The Bounds of Self: An Essay on Heidegger’s Being and Time. (in progress). Thomas, A. “Perceptual Presence and the Productive Imagination.” Philosophical Topics 37, no. 1 (2009): 153–174. Weatherson, M. Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Wrathall, M. “Heidegger on Human Understanding.” In Cambridge Companion to Being and Time, ed. M. Wrathall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 177–200. Young, J. M. “Kant’s View of Imagination.” Kant-Studien 79, no. 2 (1988): 140–164.

16 Are fictional emotions genuine and rational? Phenomenological reflections on a controversial question Michela Summa Abstract: The aim of this paper is to discuss the status of so-called ‘fictional emotions’ and their relation to emotions in the face of what is real or taken to be real. Particularly, I consider whether we can take fictional emotions as genuine and rational. I begin with a discussion of a paradoxical characterization of fictional emotions, which introduces questions concerning their genuineness and rationality, and show how these questions are strictly tied to the problem of the existence of fictional objects, or of our disbelief in their existence. I then clarify in what sense emotions can arise independently of our belief in real existence and in what sense we can say that fictional objects ‘exist’ although they do not exist as real. Subsequently, I briefly address the normative implications of fictional experience. And finally, I consider how a phenomenological account of fictional emotions presupposes a discussion of the different modalities of our participation in imaginary and fictional context, and how these different modalities are correlated to different forms of self-consciousness. Keywords: imagination, fiction, fictional emotions, reality, irreality

When we read a novel, watch a play or a movie, we are often emotionally touched. We experience sympathy, fear, anger, etc. for fictional characters or in the face of fictional situations and we differently react to such feelings: sometimes unremarkably and sometimes with overt behavior (like tears, laugh, fright, etc.). This very common and familiar phenomenon provoked a large and complex philosophical debate on the status of so-called ‘fictional emotions’. This concept designates all those emotions which are related to something fictional or imagined, i.e., to something that we do not take to really exist, to have really existed, and to really exist in the future. Characteristic of this debate is the formulation of puzzles concerning fictional emotions, which touch on both descriptive and normative aspects. The descriptive puzzles are related to the status of fictional emotions compared to emotions in the face of something real. Particularly, they ask whether we can consider fictional emotions as genuine and rationally grounded, assuming that we do not believe in the real existence of what moves us.1

1 Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Tamar Szabó Gendler and Karson Kovakovich, “Genuine Rational Fictional Emotions,” in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 241–253; Tamar Szabó Gendler, Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical

Are fictional emotion genuine and rational?  247 The normative puzzles address several different issues, among others: the adequateness of our emotional reactions to fictions, the limits of what we can or are willing to imagine (for instance, in the so-called phenomenon of imaginative resistance), and the conflicts between different – apparently equally adequate – fictional emotions.2 In this article, I will mainly focus on the descriptive questions concerning the status of fictional emotions and their relation to emotions in the face of something real or taken to be real. Particularly, I discuss whether we can take fictional emotions as genuine and rational. To this aim, in the first section, I introduce a paradoxical characterization of fictional emotions, on which the debate in the aesthetics of fiction has been focusing in the last decades and which introduced the problems of genuineness and rationality. As we will see, the questions concerning the genuineness and rationality of fictional emotions are strictly tied to the problem of the existence of fictional objects, or of our disbelief in their existence. In the second section, I address these problems and clarify (i) in what sense emotions can arise independently of our belief in real existence and (ii) in what sense we can say that fictional objects ‘exist’ although they do not exist as real. In the third section, I will briefly sketch how I understand the normative implications of fictional experience and in particular of fictional emotions. Finally, in the fourth section, I consider how a phenomenological account of fictional emotions presupposes a discussion of the different modalities of our participation in imaginary and fictional context, and how these different modalities are correlated to different forms of self-consciousness.

1.  Fictional emotions: is there something paradoxical? In order to introduce the questions concerning the genuineness and rationality of fictional emotions, I will now address in some more detail one puzzle concerning fictional emotions, which has been often formulated as a ‘paradox’. The first discussion of this paradox dates back to a seminal paper by Radford, significantly entitled “How Can

Methodology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Kendall Walton, “Fearing fictions,” Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978): 5–27; Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990); Kendall Walton, “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime. On Being Moved by Fiction,” in Emotions and the Arts, ed. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 37–48; Kendall Walton, “Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality,” The Aristotelian Society. Supplementary Volume 68 (1994): 27–70. 2 Alexander J. Bareis “ ‘Empathie ist immer gut’ – Literatur, Emotion und Imaginative Resistance am Beispiel von Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita,” in Sympathie und Literatur: Zur Relevanz des Sympathiekonzeptes für die Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Claudia Hillebrand and Elisabeth Kampmann (Berlin: Erich Schmid, 2014), 128–152; Gregory Currie, “The Paradox of Caring. Fiction and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Emotions and the Arts, ed. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 63–77; Gendler, Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology, 203f.; Neil Levy. “Imaginative Resistance and the Moral/ Conventional Distinction,” Philosophical Psychology 18/2 (2005): 231–241; Richard Moran, “The Expression of Feelings in Imagination,” The Philosophical Review 103/1 (1994): 75–106; Kathleen Stock, “Imaginative Resistance and Empathy,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, ed. Heidi L. Maibon (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 327–338.

248  Michela Summa We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?”.3 Discussing several ways in which we can interpret the status of fictional emotions, Radford comes to the conclusion that we cannot consider them as rational, because they rely on inevitable inconsistencies that emerge in our experience of fiction. These inconsistencies derive from the fact that we do not believe in the existence of what moves us and nevertheless experience, at least prima facie a proper, genuine emotion. The paradox results from the joint assent to the following three assumptions: i We have genuine emotions toward fictions. ii We don’t believe that fictional entities exist. iii We can have genuine and rational emotional reactions only if we believe that what moves us is not purely fictional.4 Given that the paradox results from the joint assent to all of these three assumptions, the main attempts to resolve it are based on the rejection of either one of them. For instance, claiming that our emotional reactions are only make-believe emotions, Walton rejects the first assumption.5 With some differences, Currie also rejects this assumption. Endorsing a theory of emotions based on beliefs, feelings, and the causal connection between them, he argues that, in the case of fiction, make-belief is substituted to belief, and that this is what raises a quasi-emotion.6 Coleridge’s idea of a “willing suspension of disbelief” would imply – at least ideally, since such a suspension can never be complete7 – the rejection of the second assumption. Finally, particularly relying on the role of imagination in everyday reasoning and practical deliberation, which has also been highlighted in empirical research on practical reasoning, several authors contend that it is not true that genuine and rational emotions necessarily imply the belief in the existence of fictional entities.8

3 Colin Radford, “How Can We Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 49 (1975): 67–80. 4 Currie, The Nature of Fiction, 182f.; Stacy Friend, “Fiction and Emotion,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, ed. Amy Kind (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 217–229; Gendler and Kovakovich, “Genuine Rational Fictional Emotions”; Radford, “How Can We Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?”; Katherine Tullmann and Wesley Buckwalter, “Does the Paradox of Fiction Exist?” Erkenntnis 79 (2014): 779–796; Walton, “Fearing Fictons”; Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. 5 Walton, “Fearing Fictons”; Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. 6 Currie, The Nature of Fiction, 195f. Notice that this does not imply for Currie that we simply make-believe to have the emotion, as it seems to be the case, for instance, for Ryle. Although I do not fully endorse Currie’s account of emotions, I do agree with the idea that fictional emotions are grounded on what we may call ‘quasi-belief’, and I will argue that this is based on the diversity of our self-experience in imagination. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 222f. 7 Cf. Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 8 Gendler and Kovakovich, “Genuine Rational Fictional Emotions”; Gendler, Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology; Tullmann and Buckwalter, “Does the Paradox of Fiction Exist?.”

Are fictional emotion genuine and rational?  249 Some scholars have also emphasized that such an alleged paradox is actually no paradox at all.9 And indeed, as Moran writes, this formulation may give a “misleading picture of our relations to fictions in general”.10 He holds this for many reasons. Among others, the paradoxical formulation is based on a too narrow account of the work of imagination, reduced to the representation of states of affairs and of fictional truths; this seems to neglect that several aspects of imaginary experience and of the experience of fiction are not primarily concerned with fictional truths, and that imagining is very pervasive in our everyday life and activities. Also, the paradoxical formulation assumes a too strong nexus between emotions and actuality, thereby neglecting that many (if not most) of our non-fictional emotions (like nostalgia, hope, many cases of fear, etc.) are related to something that is not actual and share with fiction at least this aspect of non-actuality.11 While endorsing most of the arguments criticizing the so-called paradox of fictional emotions, I do think that the discussion of the implications of the just mentioned debate still requires our attention, particularly because they point to the complexity of our participation in fictional contexts. Endorsing the critique to the paradoxical formulation primarily means that I do not think it is satisfactory to just dismiss one of the three assumptions in order to provide a suitable description of fictional emotions. Indeed, even if on the basis of my argument I will eventually claim that we should dismiss the third assumption, my aim is not primarily to argue for this. Rather, I aim to reassess how we should understand the genuineness and rationality of emotions in general and, more specifically, in the experience of something imaginary or fictional. To this aim, we should first ask ourselves what is the relation between fictional emotions and our disbelief in the existence of imaginary or fictional entities.

2.  On the existence of fictional entities Let me try to specify the problems I wish to discuss with some remarks on the notion of ‘genuineness’. It should first be noticed that ‘genuine’/‘genuineness’ are ordinary terms that become rather vague once they are adopted in a philosophical context: they seems to cover a variety of meanings that range from ‘actually felt’ to ‘sincere’, from ‘real’ to ‘adequate’, from ‘authentic’ to ‘appropriate’. This ambiguity already indicates that these terms may not be the most appropriate ones in order to provide a proper characterization of emotions in general and fictional emotions in particular.12

 9 E.g., Moran, “The Expression of Feelings in Imagination”; Tullmann and Buckwalter, “Does the Paradox of Fiction Exist?.” 10 Moran, “The Expression of Feelings in Imagination,” 75–76. 11 Ibid. Walton responds to this observation by emphasizing that we should maintain the difference between the non-actuality of something possible and/or uncertain and the nonactuality of something purely fictional. But this answer still presupposes a too generalizing account of emotions and their relation to the positing of something real. Cf. Walton, “Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality”; Walton, “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime. On Being Moved by Fiction.” 12 This also has an impact on translations. For instance, as we will see, the translator of Sartre’s L’imaginaire translates ‘sentiments vrais’ with ‘genuine feelings’. This is, as we will see,

250  Michela Summa Yet, considering the literature on fictional emotions, we can try to better specify the concept of genuineness. Indeed, this concept seems to be particularly tied to two problems: (i) the disbelief in the existence of fictional or imaginary objects, and (ii) the motivational function attributed to emotions. I now address the former, while in the next section I will focus on the latter, which will also allow me to make a link between genuineness and rationality. As I mentioned, one of the main advocates of the view that fictional emotions are not genuine is Walton.13 To be sure, this claim should be qualified. For, as he writes in Mimesis and Make-Believe, our fear before a fictional slime in a horror movie is in fact genuinely or properly felt and it has the same phenomenal character as the fear in the face of something real. But, if this fear has to be genuine, then what we fear cannot be the fictional slime: My claim is not that Charles experiences no genuine fear. He does not fear the slime, but the movie might induce in him fear of something else. If Charles is a child, he may wonder whether there might not be real slimes or other exotic horrors like the one in the movie, even though he fully realizes that the movie slime itself is not real. He may genuinely fear these suspected actual dangers; he may have nightmares about them for days afterwards.14 We can thus conclude that either (a) one assumes that the genuine fear one experiences is not the fear in the face of something fictional, but rather of something potentially real, or (b) if the object is something merely fictional, we are not experiencing genuine fear – or possibly that it does not even make sense to speak about emotions for something merely fictional or imagined. For this reason, Walton argues that fictional emotions only have a ‘make-believe’ character.15 This observation is formulated within the framework of his more general view on fiction. Within this theoretical framework, fictions (and representational works in general) should be considered as analogous to games of make-believe and this is particularly important in order to understand how we participate in fictional contexts. In games such as make-believe, fiction relies on particular objects (which Walton calls ‘props’) that afford our imagination, i.e., that prompt us to imagine a certain scenario or a certain story. Props and the imaginative affordances that they give origin to also set the primal normative frame within which something can or cannot be imagined. In general terms, this view offers some fruitful insights in order to further investigate our engagement in

a sense of genuineness that rather differs from the one characterizing Walton’s remarks. See below. 13 Cf. Walton, “Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality”; Walton, “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime. On Being Moved by Fiction”; Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. 14 Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 202. 15 Currie defends a view that is partly similar to Walton’s, but he also emphasizes the differences. Whereas Walton adopts the operational notion of make-believe, related to propositional content (it is only make-believe that I have a certain emotions), Currie adopts an attitudinal notion, according to which the reason why we have quasi-emotions with regard to fiction is that there is a quasi-belief (and not a belief) underlying them. Currie, The Nature of Fiction, 210f.

Are fictional emotion genuine and rational?  251 imaginative activities and in fictions as based on imaginative activities.16 However, the conclusions Walton draws with respect to fictional emotions are questionable, for they seem precisely to overlook something crucial in our participation in imaginary and fictional contexts. These conclusions touch the notion of genuineness and can be summarized as follows. Although they have the same phenomenal character as emotions in the face of what is real, fictional emotions are characterized by a different propositional content, and for this reason they should be considered as make-believe emotions. Propositions about these emotions are true or false in the world of make-believe or fiction, and they can be true or false only insofar as we take ourselves as participating in this world. It does not make sense, however, to say that these propositions are true or false in the real world. This is why fictional emotions are eventually considered not to be genuine. According to this view, thus, at least one aspect of the genuineness of emotions is anchored in the belief in the real existence of what awakens the emotions. As Walton writes: Grief, as well as pity and admiration, would seem to require at the very least awareness of the existence of their objects. It is arguable that for this reason alone appreciators cannot be said actually to pity Willy [Loman] or grieve for Anna [Karenina] or admire Superman.17 One preliminary remark regarding this claim is that the relation between emotions and the belief in real – past, present or (potentially) future – existence should be qualified with respect to the emotion at stake. While Walton’s claim seems to be – at least prima facie – plausible for emotions like pity, joy, or admiration, one could ask whether this would also hold true for something like pure aesthetic enjoyment.18 This observation brings me to my first critical remark. At least some emotions – and certainly those emotions which belong to pure aesthetic enjoyment – bracket the belief in the real existence of what is represented (2.a). My second critical remarks concern a rather narrow understanding of the concept of existence, which seems to be presupposed by the previous remarks. Distinguishing existence from reality, I will argue that we should disentangle different senses of ‘existence’. According to this distinction, and to a connected broader understanding of ‘existence’, we can indeed say that fictional and imaginary entities do exist (2.b).

16 Michela Summa, “Experiencing Reality and Fiction: Discontinuity and Permeability,” in Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, ed. Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs and Luca Vanzago (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 45–64; Michela Summa “Is Make-Believe Only Reproduction? Remarks on the Role of Fiction in Shaping Our Sense of Reality.” Social Imaginaires, forthcoming. 17 Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 204. 18 I discuss this issue with reference to joy and enjoyment in Michela Summa. “Joy and Happiness,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Phenomenology of Emotions, ed. Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming), particularly referring to Geiger’s work. Cf. Moritz Geiger, “Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetifchen Genusses,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 1/2 (1913): 567–684.

252  Michela Summa 2.a Fiction, imagination and the bracketing of existence With regard to the bracketing of existence – leaving aside the objection that we do have emotions for something that is not actually existent (fear for terror attacks, earthquakes, pity for Jeanne D’Arc, hate for Hitler, etc.)19 – we should still distinguish the mere representation of the object and the belief in the actual, past, or possible existence of what is represented. ‘Mere representation’ is a concept Husserl introduces in the Fifth Logical Investigation,20 reformulating and partially criticizing Brentano’s claim that all psychic phenomena are either representations (Vorstellungen) or grounded on representations. Without developing a too technical discussion of this critique, what interests me here is that Husserl’s reformulation still assumes that non-objectivating acts (like emotions and desires) are grounded on representations; yet, what he means with ‘representation’ is not an act, but simply what is given as a correlate of an intentional act, considered in its particular mode of givenness.21 The pure representation, thus, only designates an abstract moment of the act, namely the appearing object, considered independently of the mode of accomplishment of the act itself and thus also of its doxastic modality (belief, disbelief, etc.). Noematically reformulated, and with specific regard to our main question concerning the status of fictional emotions, this means that the mode of givenness of the object entails some properties that awaken our emotional reactions independently of the positing of or the belief in its existence. In other words, the object has some properties that correlate with certain emotions22: if something is presented as pitiable, we should experience pity, i.e., the mode of

19 This is an objection to which, as I mentioned, Walton responds by distinguishing past and possible future existence from pure fictionality. 20 Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Untersuchunge zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer, Husserliana XIX/1 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 441f. Edmund Husserl Logical Investigations. Second Volume. Investigations III, IV, V, VI, trans. John Niemeyer Findlay (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Henceforth cited as Logical Investigations. Second Volume with German and English page references, respectively. 21 Eventually this corresponds to the matter of the act, or what Husserl will later call the noema. Yet, since the quality is suspended, Husserl also says that quality and matter fall together in the mere representation. 22 Notice that this holds only for certain emotions, since, as I mentioned above, there are also emotions that cannot abstract from the real existence of the object. This is also true in the case of desires and/or wishes. Husserl writes in this respect: “In phantasy I picture a beautiful woman and desire her love. I do not phantasy myself and my desire; I actually feel this ‘desire’. But I certainly cannot ‘actually’ desire that this woman, who does not even exist, love me. There is again a modification, and again in ‘adaptation’ to the phantasy. I can actually and without modification desire that this woman be actual and that she belong to me in reality, and so on”. Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, ed. Eduard Marbach, Husserliana XXIII (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 375; English translation: Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 448. Henceforth cited as Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory with German and English page references, respectively. Here the concept of existence is clearly restricted to real existence. See 2.b for a broader concept of existence.

Are fictional emotion genuine and rational?  253 appearance of the object requires us to feel pity. ‘Being pitiable’, in other words, belongs to the mode of givenness of the object independently of its existing or not. As Husserl writes in a later text: The miserably tormented person in the picture awakens my compassion. I actually have a feeling of compassion, just as I actually have a thing intuition, indeed, a thing perception. But it is a modified feeling. The ill person in the image is pitiable; he is the “poor” sick person. Being wretched belongs to him just as the illness belongs to him, just as these clothes seen in the picture belong to him, and so on. These are modifications of positing. They concern only this dimension. The “perception” (perception) [die “Wahrnehmung” (Perzeption)] is otherwise like any perception [Wahrnehmung], the feeling otherwise like any feeling. Like any feeling, it helps to constitute something about the subject matter that pertains to it “intuitively”.23 Yet, we should still clarify how precisely certain properties, like ‘being pitiable’, pertain to what is represented. In order to do this, we should also introduce a more nuanced concept of existence. 2.b Existence of the irreal as ‘intersubjective existence’ In most texts dealing with the paradox of fictional emotions, the concept of existence presupposes a rather narrow ontology,24 according to which fictional entities are not existent, because they are not (and have never been) part of the material/real world like the table I am working on, my mother, or Marilyn Monroe. Following Sartre, however, we can say that claiming that imaginary or fictional objects are simply not existent amounts to confusing ‘existence’ with ‘reality’. Criticizing this equivalence, in The Imaginary, Sartre emphasizes that the opposite of ‘reality’ is ‘irreality’, and that ‘irreality’ precisely designates the mode of existence of the imaginary: Actually, in reading as in the theatre, we are in the presence of a world and we attribute to that world just as much existence as we do to that of the theatre; that is to say, a complete existence in the irreal.25 This, according to Sartre, holds for all imaginary objects: they have, as imaginary, the ontological status of the irreal, and being irreal is their mode of existence. In What is Literature? Sartre also observes in the case of literature – but this remark could be extended to other forms of fiction (such as theater, film, etc.) – what is produced cannot be only the result of the author’s imaginative activity. The activity of the reader

23 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, 465–466/554. 24 Gendler and Kovakovich, “Genuine rational fictional emotions”; Summa, “Experiencing Reality and Fiction”; Tullmann and Buckwalter, “Does the Paradox of Fiction Exist?.” 25 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’imaginaire. Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (Paris: Gallimard, 1940), English translation Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary. A Philosophical Psychology of the Imagination, trans Jonathan Webber (New York: Routledge, 2004), 63. Henceforth cited as The Imaginary with French and English page references, respectively.

254  Michela Summa is also required in order to attribute a specific kind of existence to what is fictional. Reading a literary work means operating a synthesis between uncovering and creating. Uncovering brings reading close to perception, whereas creating is an imaginative activity.26 Like in perception, something is ‘given’ in the literary work. What is given is what projected by the author; yet, the accomplishment of such a project cannot lie in the hands of the author only. The activity of a reader is required in order to accomplish the work, and also to qualify the existence what is projected by the author. Similar to what he argues regarding the gaze in Being and Nothingness, the gaze of the reader confers to the work another kind of objectivity and existence. For this reason, Sartre conceives of the act of reading as an exercise of generosity27: the reader offers him/ herself to the work by following the author’s project and filling its gaps. Such free generosity is a response to the appeal of the author, which is directed to the reader’s freedom. I will return to this aspect of freedom below. What is important to retain here is that Sartre’s phenomenology of reading indicates that assuming the existence of the fictional presupposes not only the activity of one isolated consciousness, rather being an intersubjective accomplishment. Saying that fictional objects “exist” implies that (i) fictional objects exist as part of the fictional world or context to which they belong (and here one could speak about as-if existence or quasi-existence) and that (ii) they also exist, together with the fictional world as a whole, in our reality, as cultural artifacts and as objects of shared imagining.28 According to Thomasson, who develops an artefact theory of fiction based on the concept of dependence, the existence of fictional objects relies on two sorts of dependence.29 First, fictional entities need to be put into existence. This means that they depend on a creative act or, in our understanding, an act of bound imagining.30 This is true even in cases in which the author is not identified with one single person (for instance in collective authorship or in cases of transmitted myths or legends). Secondly, they depend on concrete reproductions, expressions, or linguistic practices in order to

26 Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce la literature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 45f. English translation: Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1966), 38f. Henceforth cited as Literature with French and English page references, respectively. 27 Sartre, Literature, 62f./51f. 28 Consider notably Ingarden’s proposal on the production of fictional entities and their intersubjective constitution and, more recently, Thomasson’s artefact theory, which comes significantly close to Ingarden’s work. Roman Ingarden, Das literarische Kunstwerk. Mit einem Anhang: Von den Funktionen der Sprache im Theaterschauspiel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013); Amy Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Some remarks in this sense can also be found in Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Meiner, 1999), 317–325. Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment. Investigations in a Geneaology of Logic, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 264–271. Henceforth cited as Experience and Judgment with German and English page references, respectively. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, 212f./261f. 29 Amy Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics, 24f., 35f. 30 Cf. Summa, “Experiencing Reality and Fiction.”

Are fictional emotion genuine and rational?  255 be maintained in existence. This implies that there is a community which is able not only to understand these expressions, but also to receive them and actively accomplish the connected acts of imagination. In order to better understand these observations, and in order to flesh out their implications for the question concerning the status of fictional emotions, we should connect them with a phenomenology of shared imagining. As Walton himself points out, what games of make-believe show is that imagining is often – and particularly when it is implied in the experience of fiction – no “solitary affair”, but rather a “social event”.31 Also, this activity, which Walton calls ‘collective imagining’ somehow results from the normative infrastructure of the fictional work: if works of fictions operate as props prescribing what one should imagine, and thus also set the limits for what one can and cannot imagine, we can say that, despite inevitable individual differences (which are maintained also in other forms of shared experience) there is something we share in following these prescriptions by imagining. Connecting these observations on collective imagining with research on collective intentionality, Szanto observes that one should not too strictly orient oneself to one singular model or set of criteria defining the sharing of imagination, but rather endorse what he calls a ‘multi-dimensional’ picture.32 What is essential for such a view is (i) the sameness of the intentional object, (ii) some form of mutual awareness of others participating in the imaginative activity, and in part also (iii) some form of normative joint commitment in the imagining.33 What most crucially qualifies acts of collective imagining is their normativity. While I believe that this remark is important to also understand the normative questions implied by the experience of fictional emotions (in particular why certain emotions are appropriate to a certain fictional context and why others are not), I will limit myself here to observe here that it is precisely on the basis of this tacit normative commitment that the idea of existence of fictional or irreal objects gains a more concrete meaning. We can again refer to Husserl in order to see this connection.34 Husserl’s approach to the status of fictional entities as intersubjectively constituted seems in fact to be consistent with this view.35 Expanding on the epistemic account of pure representation mentioned above, we can thus say that, although they are not materially/really existent, fictional entities have “intersubjective existence” as shared imaginative representations. And as such, they are also bearer of moral and/

31 Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 18. 32 Thomas Szanto, “Collective Imagination. A Normative Account,” in Imagination and Social Perspectives. Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, ed. Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs and Luca Vanzago (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 223–245. 33 Szanto, “Collective Imagination. A Normative Account,” 233–234. In several ways, this approach converges with Jansen’s, who distinguishes the sharing of imagining from a merely distributive activity. Julia Jansen, “Shared Imagining Beyond Extension, Distribution, and Commitment,” in Imagination and Social Perspectives. Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, ed. Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, and Luca Vanzago (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 247–263. 34 See also the passages from Stein’s and Walther’s works quoted by, which particularly emphasize the normativity of joint imagining. Husserl’s approach seems relevant here because he explicitly connects normativity and existence. Szanto, “Collective Imagination. A Normative Account,” 231f. 35 Cf. Summa, “Experiencing Reality and Fiction.”

256  Michela Summa or aesthetic values that are shared in a we-experience. This already hints at normative implications, as the ‘must’ in the following passage indicates: The novel, the play, in its determinate image stock and image nexus, has intersubjective ‘existence’ insofar as everyone who brings the ‘presenting’ experienced objects to appearance under suitable circumstances, who produces conflicts that are not dependent on accidental subjectivity, and who freely follows the artistic intention, and so on, brings and must bring the same novel, the same concrete part of a phantasised life, of a phantasised destiny, etc., to quasi experience. Accordingly, descriptive statements, judgments about the characters, about their expected development, and so on, have a kind of objective truth, even though they refer to fictions.36 The sharing of imaginative experience underlies not only the constitution of the intersubjective existence of the imaginary object in fiction, but also “descriptive statements, judgments about the characters”. If we connect this with what we have seen above concerning the assumption that emotion-eliciting characters are proper to the irreal, imagined, or fictional object, we can say that, given the specific mode of being of fictional objects, the attribution of qualities (included emotion-eliciting qualities) is not the result of an idiosyncratic apprehension or evaluation. Rather, it relies on an experience of emotions and values I share with others within a given community. This, as Husserl also emphasizes, has normative implications concerning what we imagine, i.e., concerning both what we simply imagine as pertaining to the fictional context or to the story and the emotional reactions we have in the face of what is represented.

3.  Remarks on the normative implications of fictional emotions How are these normative implications to be understood? Although the discussion of such implications would require a more detailed analysis than the one I can provide here – an analysis that would also depend upon the discussion of conflicts between different kinds and levels of normativity – I nevertheless wish to briefly sketch a line of reasoning in order to ground the discourse of normativity of fictional emotions. What I particularly think we should avoid is to conceive of normativity in the aesthetic domain in too strict terms, as this would prevent us from a proper consideration of, for instance, cultural or intergenerational differences concerning, among others, taste, the sensibility with respect to specific scenarios and the appreciation of what is represented. For this reason, I believe that Kant’s third Critique, anchoring the claim to subjective universality of aesthetic judgments on common sense, offers some important insights that can be fruitfully integrated in the present discussion. Notably, despite their different background and systematic priorities, Kant's observations can be useful in order to understand the specific kind of normativity that we can take to characterize collective imagining, and in this respect, I believe, they are consistent with the framework I have sketched.

36 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, 520/621.

Are fictional emotion genuine and rational?  257 Trying to outline in what sense Kant’s approach is relevant for our discourse, we need to first emphasize that the inquiry into fictional emotions should be connected to an inquiry into the way in which specific, emotion-eliciting qualities can be said to pertain to an object. One of Kant’s claims regarding the judgment of taste is precisely that we cannot attribute emotion-eliciting, aesthetic properties to something in the same way as we attribute physical/objective properties. In this sense, saying that something is one-meter long is crucially different from saying that something is beautiful. In the former case, our judgment claims for objective or logical universality or unconditionate necessity, whereas in the latter case we can only claim for subjective universality. Beauty is not an objective property of things – not even a property calculated to please. But nevertheless we demand universal, intersubjective, agreement (and therefore make a normative claim sui generis) on judgments of taste and thus concerning the emotions that underlie it.37 In fact, the difference between saying that something is agreeable and saying that something is beautiful precisely consists in the claim for subjective universality that is implied in the latter but not in the former case. For Kant, such universality is connected to the universality of reflecting judgment, i.e., to the subjective universality of judgment that should find a not yet given universal. Importantly, the subjective necessity, and thus the normativity, of reflecting judgments is also grounded on sensus communis. As Kant observes: One solicits assent from everyone else because one has a ground for it that is common to all; one could even count on this assent if only one were always sure that the case were correctly subsumed under that ground as the rule of approval.38 And further, he argues that judgments of taste – having neither an underlying objective principle that would grant unconditioned necessity like in scientific/logical judgments, nor lacking all principles like in judgments of mere sensory taste – must have a subjective principle, “which determines what pleases or displeases only through feeling and not through concepts, but yet with universal validity”.39 Common sense, in Kant’s specific understanding of this notion, is such a universal principle. What I want to retain from Kant’s approach to common sense is particularly the idea of communicability of feeling as grounding the normativity of aesthetic emotions. As Borutti observes, thus understood, common sense establishes a weexperience and a form of intersubjective sharing that do not presuppose either logical universals or some fusional kind of sharing, but rather the sharing of the contingency

37 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Akademie Ausgabe 05 (Berlin: Reimer, 1913), 211f. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96f. Henceforth cited as Kant Critique of the Power of Judgment with German and English page references, respectively. Cf. Hannah Ginsborg, “Aesthetic judgment and perceptual normativity,” Inquiry. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 49/5 (2006): 403–437; Hannah Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature. Essays on Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 38 Kant Critique of the Power of Judgment, 237/121–122. 39 Ibid.

258  Michela Summa of lived experience, and notably of the experience of feelings.40 Common sense, accordingly, is not the condition for all possible experience, not even for all possible emotional experience; it is rather the condition for the effective realization of experience, anchored in the contingency of actual circumstances and states of affairs. As Borutti emphasizes, this is also how we should understand the free play of the faculties, for common sense is an almost transcendental principle that does not concern the conditions of possible experience . . . but rather, the conditions for the altogether effective realization of experience for a subject. In fact, it amounts to the subjective capacity to join imagination and intellect, ordering a multiplicity, and it is a capacity that must be shared.41 The normativity implied in this sharing maintains the reference to the factual moments of experience, included the culturally and historically shared values and emotions that are open to transformation.42 For this reason, it does not have the same rigidity of the normativity of logical a priori laws or of the categorical imperative; it is the normativity of an implicitly accepted rule or of regularity, rather than of a norm. Although Kant focuses on the subjective universality – and thus the normativity – of pure judgments of taste, I believe that these observations would also apply to moral fictional emotions, like pity. This might seem an inappropriate extension, and it is an issue that would certainly deserve more detailed inquiry, particularly in relation to Kant’s account of moral emotions, their relation to moral judgment and to conventions. As it has been observed, although Kant’s ethics is an ethics of reason and not of emotions, moral sensibility does require an understanding of social conventions. Kant’s observations in the Metaphysics of Morals – for instance those concerning the distinction between condescending and kind acts of benevolence, or those concerning the distinction between friendly banter and disrespectful mockery – recognize that “[p]roper moral judgment in such circumstances requires attunement to the feelings of others, but also facility with the social conventions that shape the dynamics of personal interaction”.43 Although – different from aesthetic judgment – the attunement to the feeling of others does not ground the universality of moral judgment, I believe that such emotional attunement should not be understood trivially or as merely empirical, but rather also refer so the sharing of experience and thus to common sense. Even if, regarding moral emotions, our claim to universality is stronger than in the case of 40 Silvana Borutti, “We-Perspective on Aesthetic Grounds: Gemeinsinn and Übereinstimmung in Kant and Wittgenstein,” in Imagination and Social Perspectives. Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, eds. Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs and Luca Vanzago (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 287–303. 41 Ibid. 290. 42 This account of normativity, in other words, is not aimed at prescribing once and for all what is representable and what is not. As Feloj argues, if we take this notion of normativity, that we should conclude that Kant’s aesthetic is not normative. Serena Feloj, Estetica del disgusto. Mendelssohn, Kant e i limiti della rappresentazione (Roma: Carocci, 2017). 43 Eric Entrican Wilson and Lara Denis, “Kant and Hume on Morality”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/kant-hume-morality/

Are fictional emotion genuine and rational?  259 purely aesthetic emotions, we are not assuming in this respect the normativity of a moral imperative either. And this also because these emotions – particularly in the case of fiction, where moral emotions are always connected to aesthetic experience – are still bound to the sharing of experience.44 Finally, it should be emphasized that, in some important sense, emotional sharing certainly relies on common actual participation, so that, for instance, the fact that a plurality of subjects is simultaneously involved in acts of imagining or in the experience of a fictional context importantly impinges on the quality of the emotion – think for instance about the specificity of theatrical experience. Nevertheless, the concept of sharing that underlies the previous remarks is broader and – again following Kant – it can be considered as based on the communicability in principle of what we imagine and the respective emotions. Such communicability allows us to understand at least some levels of shared experience and their normativity as partly independent of actual common participation. And this seems to be important in order to understand some aspects of fictional emotions. Indeed, even in cases in which this claim might seem most contra-intuitive – like Walton’s case of a spectator watching a movie and experiencing fear in the face of a fictional slime, whereby we can assume that this person is watching the movie alone – I would argue that some experiential sharing along the just sketched lines is involved. The scene should be fearful for all spectators, or at least for all spectators that share, for instance, the same cultural and generational background. And this because the fearful reaction is communicable – such as, more broadly understood, the reference to the object, mutual awareness, and commitment are.

4.  Fictional emotions and the diversity of self-experience One of the reasons that underlie the puzzles of fictional emotions is that these emotions do not motivate us to act in the same way as emotions in the face of something real do. For instance, we would not run away from the cinema while assisting to a frightening scene, while it would be perfectly reasonable to do so if the scaring scenario was experienced as real. Similarly, while our pity for Anna Karenina does not move us to take any sort of action – at least not immediately and not toward Anna Karenina – if we have a close friend telling us his/her dramatic familiar vicissitudes and maybe hinting at suicidal tendencies, we would probably try to do something for him/ her. Such a motivational force is considered by Walton to be essential in order to have a proper, genuine emotion: Fear is motivating in distinctive ways, whether or not its motivational force is attributed to cognitive elements in it. . . . To deny this, to insist on considering. . . [a] nonmotivating state to be one of fear of [its purported object] would

44 This reading, it should be emphasized, is not aimed at providing a systematic interpretation of emotional sharing in Kant, but rather to draw from some of his insights on normativity and to extend them to the field of fictional emotions.

260  Michela Summa be to reconceive the notion of fear. Fear emasculated by subtracting its distinctive motivational force is not fear at all.45 In this respect, an implicit connection between genuineness and rationality comes to the fore: it is not enough for an emotion to be rationally grounded that it refers to something having some emotion-eliciting properties. An emotion rationally motivates to action, and this motivational force is an essential component of the emotion, so that, if the motivational force is lacking, we do not have the emotion at all – or we have a non-genuine, make-believe, surrogate of the emotion. How should we understand these remarks on the motivational role of emotions? In this respect, it has been observed that simulation/imagination, occurring through the experience of fiction, does indeed commonly play a role in the shaping of action. This is the line of thought pursued by Gendler and Kovakovich, inspired by Damasio’s and Harris’ empirical work.46 They thus seem to accept the main claim – i.e., that it is constitutive for the emotion to have a motivational force for action – but also to deny that fiction and imagination do not motivate action.47 Yet, even a more straightforward observation is that we should distinguish different kinds of actions or behavioral reactions to an emotion. Also, whether and how emotions motivate actions is something rather variable from individual to individual, and from situation to situation. In the simplest case of fear, one can run away, scream, or even remain stuck in fear or tighten the hand of a nearby person. Some of these reactions (e.g., remaining stuck, tighten the hand of a nearby person) are characteristic of both our fear in the face of something real and of our fear in the face of fictions. However, intuitively, there still remains something puzzling in Walton’s remarks on emotion and motivation: Why, if the emotion is genuine, at least some reactions are in fact inappropriate to the experience of fictional emotions? Why would it be inappropriate to run away from the cinema while assisting to a frightening scene, and not to remain stuck at your sit and maybe tighten the hand of your friend sitting nearby? Why would it not be appropriate to move toward the actress playing Desdemona and express her your pity and sympathy, or trying to save her, whereas it is appropriate to be moved to tears while watching the tragedy? One possible answer to these questions relies on the difference between merely behavioral responses and intentional or goal-directed actions. Walton’s answer follows this line of reasoning by making a difference between deliberate actions, which have reasons, and automatic responses, which are not based on reasons. According to this view, fictional emotions do not give us reason to act, i.e., they do not motivate deliberate action, but they can underlie behavioral responses. Being automatic, these responses would not need reasons or proper motivations.48 But this view either implies a very narrow understanding of

45 Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 201–202. 46 Gendler and Kovakovich, “Genuine Rational Fictional Emotions.” 47 One problem with this approach, if considered in relation with the authors I am referring to in this paper, is that it would also fall prey of what Sartre calls the ‘illusion of immanence’, because it eventually assumes that imagination is a continuous modification of our experience of reality. 48 Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 199.

Are fictional emotion genuine and rational?  261 behavior as a mere reaction,49 or it shifts the problem. Thus, we can ask: Why are behavioral reactions reasonable and appropriate and intentional actions are not? In order to answer these questions, we should look closer at the structure of our subjective involvement in fiction, and particularly at the diversity of our self-experience while we are involved in imagination and fiction.50 Walton’s remark concerning the lack of motivational force of fictional emotions is consistent with Sartre’s observations concerning the inactivity of the irreal and our own inactivity in the face of the irreal: For us, who have distinguished from the outset between the real imaging consciousness and the irreal object, it is impossible to admit a causal relation that would go from object to consciousness. The irreal cannot be seen, touched, smelled, except irreally. Reciprocally, it can act only on an irreal object.51 From this remark, it follows that, for Sartre, our emotional reactions in the face of the irreal or the imaginary should be considered as different in some important respect from our emotions in the face of what is real. Furthermore, Sartre also addresses the duality of experience in relation to emotions.52 Besides distinguishing “true” emotions in the face of the real and “imaginary” emotions in the face of the irreal, Sartre distinguishes two levels in our emotional attitudes related to the imaginary or the irreal, which he also associates to two levels of our self-experience. The difference between sentiments vrais and imaginaires,53 thus, should not be understood in terms of lack of rationality or genuineness. It is instead a difference that should be investigated in relation to the diversity of self-experience in imagination (and fiction). Such a diversity comes to the fore if we consider how Sartre addresses two levels on which emotional reactions occur: the primary level is the constituting one, while the secondary is constituted together with the imaginary scenario. Affectivity – understood in a broad sense – plays a role on both levels. On the primary level, our real emotional dispositions, our affections, and experiences of desire or fascination are active. These can be considered as the motor of imagining, or as the force that awakens the imaginary in the first place.54 On the secondary level, instead, we are confronted with the emotional reactions we properly have in the face of the constituted imaginative representation, i.e., the ones the debate

49 For a critique to such an understanding of behavior, see Michela Summa and Karl Mertens, “Shaping Actions. On the Role of Attention and Ascription in the Formation of Intentions Within Behavior,” Phaenomenologische Forschungen 2 (2018): 177-196. 50 Cf. Summa, “Experiencing Reality and Fiction.” 51 Sartre, The Imaginary, 262/136. 52 Sartre, The Imaginary, 261f./136f. 53 We should not be misled by this distinction and from the English translation of “sentiments vrais” with “genuine feelings”. As we will see, Sartre does not mean to say that “the feelings are themselves irreal, but that they never appear except in the face of irreal objects” (Sartre, The Imaginary, 280/145). Nor does he believe that these feelings are insincere (Sartre, The Imaginary, 277/143). He instead affirms that the crucial difference between feelings in the face of the real and the irreal should be differently conceptualized, namely, as we will see, as a difference in the degrees of freedom and richness. 54 Sartre, The Imaginary, 135f./68f.

262  Michela Summa on fictional emotions is focused on. These emotions, according to Sartre, presuppose that we ‘take part’ in the imaginary, and the only way in which we can do this is by ‘irrealizing’ ourselves: the object as imaged is an irreality. Without doubt it is present but, at the same time, it is out of reach. I cannot touch it, change its place: or rather I can indeed do so, but on the condition that I do it in an irreal way, renouncing being served by my own hands, resorting to phantom hands that will deliver irreal blows to this face: to act on these irreal objects, I must duplicate myself, irrealize myself.55 This is particularly true for actors, and more generally for those who act on the basis of the imaginary: the actor who plays Hamlet makes himself, his whole body, serve as an analogon for that imaginary person. This even settles the famous discussion of the paradox of the actor. We know, in fact, that certain authors insist that actors do not believe in their characters. Others, on the contrary, emphasizing numerous testimonies, show us actors taken with the play, victims in some way of the heroes they represent. It appears to me that these two theses are not mutually exclusive: if one understands by ‘belief’ the realizing thesis, it is evident that the actor does not posit that he is Hamlet. But this does not signify that he is not entirely ‘mobilized’ to produce Hamlet. He uses all his feelings, all his strength, all his gestures as analogons of the feelings and conduct of Hamlet. But by this very fact he irrealizes them. He lives entirely in an irreal world. And it matters little that he really cries in playing the role. These tears . . . he grasps them himself – and the public with him – as the tears of Hamlet, which is to say as an analogon of irreal tears. . . . It is not that the character is realized in the actor, but that the actor is irrealized in the character.56 Being actualized as self-irrealization, thus, our participation in fictional and imaginary contexts does not imply empathic identification; it rather implies the bracketing or the negation of one’s real self. It is on the basis of this irrealization – to which we will return – that we should also address the specific quality of fictional emotions. Sartre understands the differences between emotions in the face of the real and in the face of the irreal primarily as a difference concerning their freedom and richness. Emotions on the primary level still belong to my real experience and self-experience: they are those vague feelings like fascination, appetite, sexual desire, etc. that motivate our imaginary activity. As such “they obey a directing form, a primary intention and are absorbed in the constitution of the irreal object”.57 These emotional dispositions, together with knowledge (savoir) and memory, play a role in the formation of the imaginary.58 Yet, those feelings which the imaginary itself elicits as responses on the secondary level can only be the result of self-irrealization, which also entails the

55 56 57 58

Ibid., 240/125. Ibid., 367/191. Ibid., 263/137. Ibid., 261f./136f.

Are fictional emotion genuine and rational?  263 irrealization of the emotion. On this level, feelings and emotions are freer, because they relate exclusively to the imaginary. Also, they are the consequence of the fact that we freely irrelize ourselves in the imaginary. Yet, this does not mean that such feelings and emotions are different in their conduct with respect to the real and with respect to the imaginary. Connecting this with what we have seen he claims concerning the particular mode of existence of the irreal, Sartre writes: the irreal object exists, it exists as irreal, as inactive, of this there is no doubt; its existence is undeniable. Feeling behaves therefore in the face of the irreal as in the face of the real.59 Both levels are thus differently related to the imaginary. While on the primary level affectivity still depends on our real experience, on the secondary level we negate, through irrealization, the real conditions that gave rise to the imaginary activity. This does not mean that we are fully immersed in the imaginary, or that we lose all sense for the real. It only means that, as far as imaginary objects are concerned, we can only relate to them if we establish a contact, and this contact can only occur on the level of irreality, i.e., it can only happen if we negate our own reality. These remarks also allow us to more precisely assess the difference between emotions in the face of the real and in the face of the irreal. From what has just been said, indeed, it follows that emotions on the secondary level, corresponding to fictional emotions in the current debate, are at the same time freer and poorer than emotions in the face of what is real. Both characteristics are complementary. They are freer because in imaginary and fictional experience we do not encounter the same limitations and the same resistance we encounter in experiencing real objects and situations. If we imagine an object we desire, for instance, then this object is completely there for us in the imagination. And this because the imaginary object in general is “never anything more than the consciousness one has of it; it is defined by that consciousness”.60 We possess the irreal object completely, as we desire it, without taking into account the distance and the difficulties that precisely characterize our experience of what is real: The act of imagination, as we have just seen, is a magical act. It is an incantation destined to make the object of one’s thought, the thing one desires, appear in such a way that one can take possession of it. There is always, in that act, something of the imperious and the infantile, a refusal to take account of distance and difficulties.61 Also, such feelings are freer because imagining is an act of free irrealization. In the case of fictional (notably literary) works, Sartre observes that emotions in the face of fictions are “generous”, precisely because they have their origin in freedom; they are “never dominated by the object” and “no external reality can condition them, they have their permanent source in freedom”.62 In the case of reception, thus, the freedom

59 Ibid., 268/140. 60 Ibid., 27/10. 61 Ibid., 240/125. 62 Sartre, What Is Literature, 57/51.

264  Michela Summa of fictional emotions corresponds to the freedom of the generous act of the reader’s response to an author’s appeal. This response, as I mentioned, consists in following the “prescriptions” to imagine the text makes. For this reason, Sartre conceives of the act of reading as a “free dream”,63 which somehow sounds as an oxymoron, if one considers his own discussion of dream in The Imaginary. Yet, the freedom and apparent lack of the resistance that is characteristic of the real is also a sign of the poorness and degradation of fictional emotions.64 For the imaginary object remains absent and only passive.65 Discussing the feeling of tenderness experienced while imagining the beloved Annie, Sartre points out that the difference between this tenderness and the tenderness in the face of the real Annie is not a matter of genuineness or sincerity, but rather of richness: There results for our tenderness not a lack of sincerity, but rather a lack of casualness, docility, richness. The object does not sustain it, does not nourish it, does not communicate to it that force, that suppleness, that unforeseeability that makes for the depth of a feeling-passion.66 Finally, Sartre connects the presented diversity of emotions to the diversity of selfexperience. He argues that we should distinguish “two sharply contrasted persons [. . .]: the imaginary me with its tendencies and desires – and the real me”.67 Emphasizing that the two “cannot coexist”, he seems to indicate that there is a lack of interconnections between the two. However, I believe that this claim should be understood differently. What he thereby means is precisely that the imaginary me and the real me are correlated to two different and irreducible types of objects (imaginary and real). And this does not conflict with the claim that the two forms of self-experience are expressions of one consciousness. This claim is also essential in order to understand our conduct in the face of the imaginary. In fact, it seems that our real reactions (for instance tears) in the face of the imaginary or the fictional can only be explained if we assume that both ‘persons’ are moments of one consciousness. And the interplay between realizing and irrealizing consciousness – as we can see in the above quote on the tears of the actor playing Hamlet, where Sartre speaks of the real tears of the actor as analoga of the irreal tears of Hamlet – goes both ways.68 Such a relation between unity and diversity of self-experience can be perhaps better clarified if we consider Husserl’s approach. In imagining and in experiencing fiction – which for Husserl amounts to a specific kind of bound imagination – we are both aware of ourselves as imagining and as participating in the imaginary world.69 In the former sense, we are aware of ourselves as ‘real-I’ and the correlate of our experience is thereby the imagined world as imagined. In the latter sense, we are aware of

63 Ibid., 56–57/50. 64 Sartre, The Imaginary, 270f./141f. 65 Ibid., 276f./144f. 66 Ibid., 275/143. 67 Ibid., 281/146. 68 Ibid., 367/191. 69 Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, 347f./418f. Cf. Summa, “Experiencing Reality and Fiction.”

Are fictional emotion genuine and rational?  265 ourselves as ‘phantasy-I’, which is co-constituted together with the imaginary world, and for whom the imaginary world is the ‘real’ one.70 Husserl is clearer than Sartre in claiming that the two forms of self-awareness are expression of one and unique consciousness. Indeed, it is the unitary temporal stream of consciousness that is responsible both for the awareness of the difference between reality and irreality and/or fiction and for the possible shift between the perspective of the real-I and the perspective of the phantasy-I.71 While we can agree with Sartre in insisting on the discontinuity between the experience of myself as real-I and as phantasy-I and the difference of ontological status of their object, emphasizing that these two forms of self-experience belong to and are expression of one and unitary stream of consciousness allows us to how the two, in a specific sense, do coexist. While we are experiencing something imaginary or fictional, indeed, we oscillate between the two poles of self-awareness. We can describe this awareness of the diversity of our experience as a shift of perspective, or as a matter of focusing. We can certainly be extremely immersed in the fiction and thus accomplish to a high degree what Sartre calls an irrealization of ourselves. Yet, even in this case, our self-awareness as real-I does not get fully lost, nor does our sense for what it real. This process can be explained in terms of background and foreground awareness, or to take up a distinction Polanyi introduces in his account of illusionary and non-illusionary images, between accompanying and focused awareness.72 Transposed to our context, we can say that, when we are immersed in the experience of fiction, we still have an accompanying perception of ourselves as real-I living in the real world. At the cinema for instance, even if our focused awareness is on the fictional world, we feel that we are sitting on a chair, that there are other persons in the room who do not belong to the fiction, etc. And we are aware that, as real-I, we cannot interact with the fictional characters and situation. The perspective of our focused awareness is that of the phantasy-I, as participating in what happens in this world, whereas the perspective of our accompanying awareness is that of the real-I. The co-presence of this double focused and accompanying - awareness is what marks the difference between our experience of fiction and a hallucination, i.e., what allows us to preserve the consciousness of the ‘as-if’ characterizing imaginary experience.

70 Edmund Husserl Husserl, Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/1918), ed. Rudolf Bernet and Dieter Lohmar, Husserliana XXXIII (Dordrecht, Bostonand London: Kluwer, 2001), 341f. 71 Rudolf Bernet. Conscience et existence: perspectives phénoménologiques, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004), 75f.; Rudolf Bernet, “Wirkliche Zeit und Phantasiezeit. Zu Husserls Begriff der Individuation,” Phaenomenologische Forschungen 9 (2004): 37–56; Rudolf Bernet, “A Husserlian Analysis of Imagining What Is Unreal, Quasi-Real, Possibly Real, and Irreal,” Husserl Studies (forthcoming); Summa, “Experiencing Reality and Fiction.” 72 With a critical discussion on Pirenne, Polanyi’s observations are mainly focused on how we perceive the incompatibility between depth and surface in an illusory image. What is important for us is that he sharply distinguishes focusing and accompanying perception, and yet emphasizes that they are interdependent. For instance, in perceiving an image as a whole, I do not simply remove my consciousness of its parts, but rather have an accompanying awareness of the parts ‘as’ parts of the whole. Michael Polanyi, “What Is a Painting?,” British Journal of Aesthetics 10/3 (1970): 225–236.

266  Michela Summa This shift between focused and accompanying awareness of ourselves as real-I and as phantasy-I is only possible within the unity of consciousness addressed above. As I mentioned, the unitary stream of temporal consciousness, on the one hand, constitutively underlies the distinction and the discontinuity between the experience of reality and of fiction (a distinction that relies on the distinctive temporality of real objects and quasi-objects within the unitary stream). On the other hand, it also grounds the possible relations or even influences between the experience of reality and of fiction, which, since both experiences are expressions of a unitary consciousness, are indeed possible even if we assume the Sartean claim concerning the inactivity of the irreal. This can be shown with respect to the problem I phrased in relation to fictional emotions and to the concrete reactions when we experience such emotions. The diversity of self-experience within the unity of the self is what allows us to account for both the genuineness of our emotional reactions to fiction and the differences in our explicit responses. We experience in fact genuine fear, compassion, etc. in the face of fiction, since, when we are immersed in the fiction, our foregrounded experience is that of the phantasy-I, living in the fictional world. Although distinguished and discontinuous, the two layers of self-experience are permeable, so that there can be influences and even contaminations between the two. The experience of the phantasy-I is still my experience, as if I would live in an imaginary world. Also, the process of assuming the perspective of the phantasy-I – or irrealizing ourselves as real-I – can be so strong and pervasive as to elicit concrete but less controlled behavioral responses, such as tears or fright. Different from what Walton argues, these are still motivated responses, namely, they are motivated for our experience as phantasy-I by the fiction or the imaginary. Yet, these are not only imaginary tears, they are in fact real tears. But, as Sartre argues, they should be considered as the analogon of the irreal ones, i.e., of the one we would have if we were really experiencing something dreadful. This phenomenon – I would argue – precisely brings to the fore the permeability between the two levels of selfexperience. Conversely, even in cases in which the experience of the imaginary or the fictional is most focused or foregrounded – i.e., in cases in which the irrealization seems to be most fully accomplished – the experience of our real situation is still operating in the background and contributes to the regulation of our more controlled responses, such as intentional actions.

Concluding remarks Beginning with some critical remarks on the puzzles concerning the status of fictional emotions – notably expressed in the so-called paradox of fictional emotions – in this article I have tried to show how these emotions should be reassessed on the basis of the inquiry into the structures of our participation in fictional contexts. Particularly, our phenomenological analysis showed the following: i

ii

At least some of our emotional responses are independent of the positing of or the believe in the real, actual or possible, existence of their objects and these can differently rely on the content, the mode of presentation, and the aesthetic form of such objects, which can be real or irreal. We should conceptually and phenomenologically distinguish the question concerning the existence of imaginary or fictional objects from the question concerning

Are fictional emotion genuine and rational?  267 their reality. Irreality is the mode of existence of imaginary objects in general. In particular, concentrating on fictions as specific kinds of irreal objects, we have seen how they are constituted as correlates of shared imagining. The concept of sharing, as I mentioned, is here rather broadly understood, but it implies the sameness of intentional object, mutual awareness, and normative commitment. Also, this sharing can be understood in terms of communicability of the imaginary experience. This is why, following Husserl, we can say that fictional objects have a specific kind of ‘intersubjective existence’. The attribution of such existence relies on the sharing of imaginative experience, which also has important normative implications concerning fictional emotions. iii Properties that elicit emotional responses are also co-constituted with the irreal object. In the case of fictional objects, these properties have the same kind of intersubjective existence as their bearers. iv The status of fictional emotions can only be understood on the basis of an inquiry into the diversity of our self-awareness while we are participating in imaginary experiences or in the experience of fiction. These observations justify the claim that emotions in the face of what is imagined or fictional are genuine: they are neither insincere, nor merely make-believe emotions. They are instead concretely felt and motivated emotions. Furthermore, they are also rationally grounded on the structures of experience. Accordingly, among the assumptions that underlies the paradox of fictional emotions, we should dismiss the third, i.e., the claim that only emotions directed to something not merely fictional can be genuine and rational. What is important, however, are the reasons why we should dismiss this claim. Fictional emotions are not genuine because we suspend our disbelief in the real existence of what is imagined or because we bracket the problem of existence at all. They are genuine because irreal objects have specific, emotion-eliciting features that may be independent of their real existence and that should be intersubjectively recognized. Also, if we take a broader concept of existence, which not only includes real or material objects, irreal objects have their own mode of existence – and in case of fictions as products of shared imagining this existence is something that gains intersubjective recognition. Furthermore, these emotions are rational, if we understand the rationality of emotions as grounded upon the structures of imagining consciousness. These emotions, as well as our behavioral reactions, do have reasons: they are based on the mode of presentation of the imaginary or fictional content and they depend on the articulation of the different levels of our participation in the imaginary or fictional context. The diversity of self-experience, which also includes what Sartre considers as the negative moment of self-irrealization, are constitutive aspect of our experience of fiction and the imaginary and they justify our emotional participation in the represented contexts.

17 “Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität” Remarks on Husserl on Kant’s Einbildungskraft and the idea of transcendental philosophy (with a note on Kurd Laßwitz)1 Daniele De Santis Abstract: The present paper offers a reconstruction of Husserl’s understanding of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, notably, of the function of the “synthesis of reproduction” in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, based upon a series of 1907–1909 manuscripts now published in Hua VII. After clarifying the wider theoretical framework within which Husserl reads Kant here, the present paper makes the case for holding the distinction between two different forms of rationality (the transcendental rationality and the ontological one), hence their relevant articulation, to be the real issue at the center of Husserl’s Auseinandersetzung with the thinker of Königsberg. Keywords: Husserl, Kant, Lasswitz, synthesis of reproduction, rationality, transcendental philosophy

1.1 Back in January 1986, the research group Lessico Intellettuale Europeo of the University of Rome “Sapienza” hosted a three-day international symposium on the conceptual plexus “phantasia-imaginatio” (and their vicissitudes in the history of Western philosophy). Unlike the previous three meetings, which focused on the notions of ordo (1977), res (1980), and spiritus (1983) respectively, for the first time the colloquium decided to tackle a conceptual “pair”: the explicit intention being to investigate the translatio quaestionis involved, first, in the passage from the one to the other, then in their entering the conceptual space of modernity. To briefly emphasize the complexity of the issue, Jean Starobinski made the following remark: “Le doublet phantasia/imaginatio s’est transporté dans nombre de langues modernes. Ce qui était en équivalence, d’une langue à l’autre, du grec au latin, a ainsi perdu son aspect bilingual pour devenir, à l’intérieur d’une seule et même langue, un couple synonymique. Mai les couples synonymiques se prêtent à une différentiation, à une désynonymisation: ils accueillent des oppositions de pensée.”2 For the sake of the problems we are going to deal with here, two remarks bearing on this volume, and the “history” it narrates, impose themselves.

1 I want to express my personal gratitude to Thomas Vongehr for helping me get some of the precious information I use in the Intermezzo on Kurd Laßwitz. 2 J. Starobinski, “En guise de conclusion,” in Phantasia-Imaginatio, ed. M. Fattori and M. Bianchi (Roma: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1988), 565–585, here 571.

“Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität”  269 •

Bernd Küster’s concise essay on Einbildungskraft und Phantasie im deutschen Idealismus has the crucial merit of immediately bringing to the fore the “peculiarity” of Kant’s conception of the Einbildungskraft vis-à-vis what both Eugenio Garin and Starobinski dub la théorie “classique”3 of “imagination,” which (at least from Aristotle onward) ascribes to the latter an intermediate position and an intermediary role between sensibility and understanding, aisthesis and dianoia. In the words of the Stagirite (De anima, III, 3, 427b): “φαντασία γὰρ ἕτερον καὶ αἰσθήσεως καὶ διανοίας, αὕτη τε οὐ γίγνεται ἄνευ αἰσθήσεως, καὶ ἄνευ ταύτης οὐκ ἔστιν ὑπόληψις” (For phantasy is different from both sensation and thinking; it presupposes the former, and is it presupposed by the latter). As one could easily and bluntly put it, the history of the “classical theory” is first and foremost the history of all the conceptions of both the intermediate position and the intermediary role of the ontological, gnoseological, as well as psychological status of that “faculty” originally called φαντασία. In such a very long and tangled history, the peculiarity of Kant’s own stance derives, in the first place, from his Copernican revolution, that is, from his conception of transcendental philosophy, thereby from the transcendental understanding of both the intermediate position and the intermediary role of that Vermögen.4 In the words of Küster, Kant provides us with “eine erste transzendentalphilosophische Begründung der Einbildungskraft”5; or, better: Kant’s chief contribution to la théorie “classique” (for Kant belong to the tradition of the classical theory)6 does not amount to such and such a thesis bearing on the Einbildungskraft, but to the general transcendental seal he has impressed on it. • Although the volume contains contributions that cover a wide range of philosophers, from the Ancient and Medieval ones up to figures such as Coleridge, Freud, Jung, and Sartre (especially in Starobinski’s essay), Husserl and his phenomenology are nowhere to be found! Beside the factual reasons that could explain such puzzling absence (the Lessico Intellettuale Europeo mainly studying modern traditions of thought and their relations to the Ancient world), one should raise above the level of factuality, so as to immediately ask the question as to whether such an incredible fact does not contribute to disclosing something crucial about Husserl’s relation to la théorie “classique.” In fact, no matter how we understand the

3 Ibid., 583. See also the opening lecture by E. Garin, “Phantasia e Imaginatio fra Marsilio Ficino e Pietro Pomponazzi,” in M. Fattori and M. Bianchi, Phantasia-Imaginatio, 3–20. 4 See also the contributions by P. Pimpinella, “Imaginatio, Phantasia e Facultas Fingendi in Ch. Wolff e A. G. Baumgarten”; and N. Hinske, “Die Rolle der Einbildungskraft in Kants Logikvorlesungen,” in M. Fattori and M. Bianchi, Phantasia-Imaginatio, 379–414, 415–446. 5 B. Küster, “Einbildungskraft und Phantasie im deutschen Idealismus,” in M. Fattori and M. Bianchi, Phantasia-Imaginatio, 447–462, here 448. 6 Husserl himself writes: “In seinen Theoretisierungen ist er von traditionellen Begriffen und Vormeinungen bestimmt,” E. Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie. Vorlesungen 1916–1920, hrsg. von H. Jacobs, Hua-Mat IX (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York and London: Springer, 2012), 468. That the situation is more complicated than this, especially when it comes to the third Kritik, where the Einbildungskraft is no longer simply understood as a “third” faculty, is explained very clearly by C. La Rocca, “Schematizzare senza concetto. Immaginazione ed esperienza estetica,” in Id., Soggetto e mondo. Studi su Kant (Venezia: Marsilio, 2003), 245–266.

270  Daniele De Santis specific mode of working and functioning of the φαντασία, if Garin’s claim holds true, and la théorie “classique” is to be understood – by and large – as a series of re-elaborations and variations upon the theme “intermediate position & intermediary role,” then it should be no surprise that Husserl cannot be included in such a tradition! How could he be, if he has undermined the foundation itself upon which la théorie “classique” builds? In order to be able to talk of the φαντασία’s “intermediate position & intermediary role,” one has to accept the duality of αἴσθησις and δίανοια or Sinnlichkeit and Verstand: now, has not Husserl himself dismissed and abandoned that “duality” (construed as a “duality” of δυνάμεις or Vermögen) once and for all? As is known, the opposition between Sinnlichkeit and Verstand is replaced by the difference, and relevant articulation, between meaning intention and meaning fulfillment, categorial intuition, and categorial acts in general, and sensuous ones.7 It becomes then clear why, during the years that followed the Logische Untersuchungen, a great deal of lectures and manuscripts are dedicated to the description of the act of phantasy: the reason being the necessity of rethinking φαντασία (no longer understood as a δύναμις or Vermögen) outside the coordinates of la théorie “classique.”

1.2 If it is the case that Kant belongs to the tradition of the classical theory, while Husserl breaks with it once and for all, then any attempt at comparing them on the notion of phantasia/imaginatio seems to be “compromised” from the outset. As is almost always the case with Husserl’s relation to Kant, the thinker of Königsberg is the one to which the father of phenomenology is extremely close and from which, at the same time, he is extremely far away: Kant’s transcendental philosophy lies at the threshold of phenomenology (for it becomes accomplished in it8), and by standing at the peak of the history of modern philosophy, it concentrates in itself all those presuppositions that Husserl will explicitly reject (Hua-Mat IX, 468). Is there any way out then? Now, according to a remark made by Iso Kern in his famous Husserl und Kant, Husserl dedicates a great deal of his time and energy to the study of Kant, notably to the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in the years 1907–1909,9 i.e., during the crucial years in which his phenomenology assumes the shape of a “transcendental” philosophy. Some of the results of such a Husserlian Auseinandersetzung with Kant can be found in a series of manuscripts now published in Husserliana VII (Erste Philosophie. Erster Teil), notably Beilage XVI (Gegen Kants anthropologische Theorie), Beilage XIX (Hat Kant wirklich das Grundproblem der Erkenntnis getroffen?) and XX (Zur Auseinandersetzung meiner transzendentalen Phänomenologie mit Kants Transzendentalphilosophie). The importance of these texts should not be underestimated, for

7 E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Zweiter Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, hrsg. von U. Panzer, Hua XIX/2 (The Hague: Martin Nijhohff, 1984), 538–539. 8 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, hrsg. von W. Biemel, Hua VI (The Hague: Martin Nijhohff, 1962). 9 I. Kern, Husserl und Kant. Eine Untersuchung über Husserls Verhältnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus (The Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1964), 20–21; L. Di Pinto, Impronte kantiane in Edmund Husserl (Bari: Cacucci editore, 1988), 85–114.

“Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität”  271 they form a coherent whole and contain in nuce all the most crucial aspects of Husserl’s thought: the idea of metaphysics and its relation to phenomenology as a first philosophy; the problem of constitution; the relation between the eidetic and the transcendental side of his philosophy; the issue of the synthetic a priori and, last but not least, a confrontation with Kant on the very meaning of “transcendental” philosophy. This being acknowledged, the question turns out to be: what about the Einbildungs­ kraft? At a first look, one could easily rush to the conclusion that these reflections have nothing to do with the issue at hand: as a matter of fact, Husserl mentions the Einbildung only once, and in a very insignificant way.10 Yet, as we firmly believe, these manuscripts contain a highly significant meditation upon the role of the Einbildungs­ kraft as it operates within the context of the A-edition of the transcendental deduction. Even without any explicit mention of it, Husserl’s reflections testify to his attention to – and interest in – the transcendental operation carried out by the Einbildungs­ kraft. In a more precise terminology: according to Husserl’s distinction between three different “layers” that make up die Idee einer Natur überhaupt (Hua-Mat VII, 392), what Kant (in his system of “faculties”) recognizes as the chief “contribution” of the Einbildungskraft corresponds to the second “layer.” The Kantian Einbildungskraft is no longer understood as an intermediate “faculty,” but becomes the “index” of a series of problems involved in the intermediate “layer” of the process of transcendental constitution that eventually brings about “nature” or, better, what Husserl calls “exact nature.” The notion of Einbildungskraft – as Kant understands it – splits into two distinct thematic spheres, which very little have in common: the Einbildung, to which Husserl also refers by the Latin term imaginatio (as an intuitive and “founded” act in which an image is given to us upon the basis of an already perceptually constituted object11) is radically separated from the transcendental topic going under the label “Synthesis der Reproduktion.”12 In the following: • • •

The Husserlian manuscripts, and the problem they tackle, will be first presented (§2); We will then try to follow, and elaborate upon, some of the implications deriving from Husserl’s approach to Kant therein (§3); A conclusion will be provided bearing on the meaning of transcendental philosophy (§4).

10 E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie. Erster Teil. Kritische Ideengeschichte, hrsg. von R. Bohem, Hua VII (The Hague: Martin Nijhohff, 1956), 377. 11 E. Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung, hrsg. von E. Marbach, Hua XXIII (The Hague: Martin Nijhohff, 1980), 16. See also the explicit reference to Kant’s Einbildungskraft in the B-edition version of the appendix at the end of §21 of the Fifth Investigation, where it is understood based upon the distinction between “founded” and “founding” acts (E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Erster Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, hrsg. von U. Panzer, Hua XIX/1 (The Hague: Martin Nijhohff, 1984), 438). 12 E. Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (1918–1926), hsrg. von M. Fleischer, Hua XI (The Hague: Martin Nijhohff, 1966), 326–327. For an interesting analysis of some phenomenological interpretations of the Einbildungskraft, and its relation to time, see E. Ferrario, Il lavoro del tempo (Milano: Guerini e Associati, 1997).

272  Daniele De Santis

2.1 If the question were the one as to the framework within which Husserl approaches Kant here, the answer would be that of the Erkenntniskritik or, more bluntly: that of clarifying (zur Klarheit zu bringen) the essence or sense of knowledge (was Erkenntnis ihrem Wesen oder Sinn nach ist) (Hua VII, 377). Such a description, however, does not capture the full scope of these manuscripts, notably the way in which Husserl understands (i) the properly Kantian issue at hand, (ii) the transcendental (in the phenomenological sense) interpretation (transzendentale Interpretation) of it, hence (iii) the ultimate goal that he would aspire to achieve. In the order, they can be so described: i The idea of nature as a correlate of science of nature (als Korrelat der Naturwissenschaft)13; ii The reduction of the scientifically known being to the absolute, namely, “consciousness” (die Reduktion des wissenschaftlich erkannten Seins auf das Absolute, aus das Bewußtsein); iii The possibility of a “teleological metaphysics,” which – in the words of Lotze that Husserl quotes here – means “the true ‘reconciliation (Versöhnung) of the mechanical conception of nature with the teleological one’ ” (Hua VII, 382). Although these manuscripts never elaborate upon iii, it is important to keep in mind how stratified Husserl’s reading of Kant already is at this stage of his philosophical development (to be linked to the Die Idee der Phänomenologie lectures, with their emphasis on the erkenntniskritische question as die Bedingung der Möglichkeit der Metaphysik).14 Erkenntniskritik (Was Erkenntnis ihrem Wesen oder Sinn nach ist) (i) Natur als Korrelat der Naturwissenschaft

(ii) Die Reduktion des wissenchaftlich erkannten Seins auf das Absolute, auf das Bewußtsein

(iii) Teleologische Metaphysik

13 On page 386, Husserl succinctly recognizes that the Analogien der Erfahrung bring about “experience” in Form der Erfahrungswissenschaft (Hua VII, 386): soll also Natur im Sinne dieser Wissenschaft erkennbar sein, so müssen die und die Sätze gelten. 14 E. Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, hrsg. von W. Biemel, Hua II (The Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1950), 3. For an analysis of Husserl’s notion of metaphysics, see E. Trizio, “Husserl’s Early Concept of Metaphysics as the Ultimate Science of Reality,” Phainomenon (2017): 37–68.

“Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität”  273 If we leave aside iii, then Husserl’s line of reasoning in these manuscripts (in particular for what concerns the Beilage XX) can be described as a phenomenological assessment and “interpretation” (ii) – in light of a general erkenntniskritische concern15 – of the Kantian understanding of “nature” as a correlate of science of nature (i), that is, as exact nature. Now, if – according to this Husserl – i is precisely the theme around which the deduction revolves, then the interest in the Einbildungskraft takes the shape of an interest in a specific layer or stratum of the constitution of nature: i.e., the one that precedes, so to speak, and immediately leads to that of exact nature strictu sensu (or, as Husserl writes: in exaktem Sinn, dessen höchstens Ideal hier gemeint ist (Hua VII, 392)). Let us consider the following excerpt where the three “layers” – out of which die Idee einer Natur überhaupt is made – are singled out, thereby becoming visible per se: 1 The idea of an exact nature, in the most general sense, to be broken down into its possible specifications; 2 To define the idea of a world, of a thing-manifold (Dingmannigfaltigkeit) that still possesses a certain unity (. . .), and to investigate, once again, the possibilities that obtain when the idea of exactness is dropped; 3 Finally, to consider the possibility of a constitution of things representing a manifold without unity and the extent to which it is thinkable without a unity (dergleichen einheitslos). Exact nature in general, world in general, thing-plurality (Dingvielheit) in general; each further stage is a stage of greater generality. Now, these three possibilities obtain on the limiting condition that what is in question is a consciousness endowed with “our sensibility,” our perceiving, our remembering, etc., our thinking. In short: with the basic forms of acts (i.e., acts of consciousness) that can be distinguished phenomenologically (Hua VII, 392). Let us pause for a second to make a few remarks. By going from the bottom to the top, here the distinction presents itself as that between (3) “thing-plurality,” (2) “thing-manifold” (also referred to as “world”), and (1) “nature” or “exact nature” (which is also called, at the end of the manuscript, Kosmos or ein rationaler Kosmos (Hua VII, 395)). As is apparent from (3), the distinction between thing-plurality and thing-manifold, thus between Vielheit and Mannigfaltigkeit, amounts to the latter being provided with a unity, Einheit – thereby constituting a “world” – whereas the former lacks it. If we are on the right track, then in Husserl’s view (1), (2) and (3) correspond to the threefold structure of the first edition of the transcendental deduction, and such “correspondence” can be so framed: 1 Die Synthesis der Rekognition = Nature or Exact Nature, ein rationaler Kosmos 2 Die Synthesis der Reproduktion = eine Dingmannigfaltigkeit, i.e., a World 3 Die Synthesis der Apprehension = eine Dingvielheit, i.e., a Manifold Without Unity

15 Namely: that of the all-encompassing Korrelation zwischen Gegenstand und Erkenntnis (Hua VII, 381).

274  Daniele De Santis Accordingly, the question of the Einbildungskfraft – now understood in terms of its contribution to the emergence of ein rationaler Kosmos – corresponds to the problem of how a “world,” that is, a manifold equipped with a unity (which nevertheless is not yet a “nature”), comes to be constituted. That this is exactly the case is directly shown by the pages that immediately precede the excerpt recalled above and by the arguments that build up to it (notably Hua VII, 386–388). In particular, on page 388 of the Husserliana edition Husserl seems to directly quote Kant, but we have been thus far unable to actually find the textual “source;” here is the full passage in German: “Die Anschauungen müssen den Bedingungen des Denkens gemäß sein, sonst könnten sie nicht denkmäßig faßbar sein, sie könnten in sich nicht Dinge erscheinen lassen, die sich als Dinge einer Wirklichkeit, einer Natur denken und als objektiv gültig bestimmen lassen” (Hua VII, 388). Now, in spite of the appearance (for Husserl himself employs the “quotation marks”), it might be the case that Husserl is here only paraphrasing Kant, and that these few lines should not be deemed a “citation.” Considering also that Husserl speaks of “die Forderung einer Deduktion der Kategorien und speziell [ihrer] Einführung” (Hua VII, 387), the argument could hence be made that Husserl is only “indirectly” referring to – or summing up – §13 of the “transcendental analytics”: Von den Prinzipien einer transzend. Deduktion überhaupt. Here, where an introduction, or Einführung, to the problem of the deduction is outlined, quite similar, yet not identical, turns of phrase can be come across. A The categories of understanding, on the other hand, do not at all present to us the conditions under which objects are given in intuition. Therefore objects can indeed appear to us without having to refer necessarily to functions of understanding, and hence without the understanding’s containing a priori conditions of these objects. [. . .] For appearances can indeed be given in intuition without functions of understanding. B Let me take, for example, the concept of cause. This concept signifies a special kind of synthesis where on the occurrence of something, A, something quite different, B, is posited according to a rule. Why appearances should contain anything like that is not evident a priori. [. . .] For, while it is evident that objects of sensible intuition must conform to the formal conditions of sensibility lying a priori in the mind [Gemüt], since otherwise they would not be objects for us, it is not easy to see the inference whereby they must in addition conform to the conditions that the understanding requires for the synthetic unity of thought (A90/B122). C For, I suppose, appearances might possibly be of such a character that the understanding would not find them to conform at all to the conditions of its unity. Everything might then be so confused that, for example, the sequence of appearances would offer us nothing providing us with a rule of synthesis and thus corresponding to the concept of cause and effect, so that this concept would be quite empty, null, and without signification. But appearances would nonetheless offer objects to our intuition (A91/B123–124). What shows itself here is what has been called “the Kantian specter,” “a problem of Kant’s own making” as a direct “consequence of the way in which he separates the

“Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität”  275 contributions to cognition of sensibility and understanding.”16 Bluntly presented: “the problem is that Kant not only distinguishes sharply between these two faculties, but also insists that cognition requires their cooperation.” This specter, far more fearful than the “dreadful sight” (Hamlet, 1.1) haunting Elsinore, would consist in the intuitive Erscheinungen not conforming to the conditions of the understanding and its “unity.” Now, even if the quite succinct character of Husserl’s “quotation” makes it very hard to compare it with §13, a few observations can still be proposed bearing on how Husserl understands the issue. What leaps into view is that while for Kant (C) the Einheit is “imposed” by the understanding – in such a way that without it everything would turn into “confusion” (alles so in Verwirrung läge) – in Husserl’s re-elaboration of it the Einheit already characterizes what we called the second layer, that of the “world” as a Dingmannigfaltigkeit (2). In other words, and to look at it from the standpoint of Husserl himself: while in Kant the Einheit is the distinctive mark of nature (alone), in Husserl is the world to be already endowed with such a character. In contrast to what §13 is explaining, Husserl’s quotation is making the point to the effect that, were the intuitions not to conform to the conditions of thought, the result would be neither “nature” (ein rationaler Kosmos), nor the fall into the mist of Verwirrung, but the world sic et simpliciter. It is clear, however, that such differentiation between Verwirrung, Welt and Natur does not match with the duality of sensibility and understanding as it operates in both §13 and Husserl’s quotation (for it presupposes that the “intuitive Erscheinungen” have already obtained as the result of the joint operation of 2 and 3).

2.2 In order to grasp what “world” means in this context, we should drop “the idea of exactness,” as suggested by the long Husserlian excerpt recalled earlier: now, this is precisely what Husserl will do in §47 of Ideen . . . I. If we are on the right track, Husserl’s arguments here will help us elucidate in retrospect how he understands Kant in 1907. Let us point out that §47 is the one where Husserl “initiates,” so to say, that line of reasoning that will slowly lead him to the too famous or infamous Weltvernichtung of §49; by focusing upon the latter most scholars tend to forget that, de facto, the “annihilation of the world” is only the last step of a general gedankliche Destruktion der dinglichen Objektivität.17 It is to the more general operation that attention shall be paid.

16 H. E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. An Analytical-Historical Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9. About the problem concerning the alleged pre-critical nature of §13, firstly raised by Schopenhauer, see H. Vaihinger, Die transzendentale Deduktion der Kategorien (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1902), 31 and ff.; and P. Chiodi, La deduzione nell’opera di Kant (Torino: Taylor Torino, 1961), 53–58. A different hermeneutical framework can be found in the interpretation by G. Gigliotti, “Il rispetto di un tulipano. Riflessioni sul sistema kantiano delle facoltà,” Rivista di storia della filosofia, 2001, 25–61, notably 41. 17 E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Forschung. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, hrgs. von K. Schuhmann, Hua III/1 (Den Haag: Martin Nijhoff, 1976), 100.

276  Daniele De Santis Here is how Husserl first introduces the problem: “The factual course of our human experience is such that it constrains our reason to go beyond the intuitively given things (those of the Cartesian imaginatio) and base them on the ‘truth of physics’ ” (Hua III/1, 99).18 Nevertheless, as Husserl does not fail to immediately recognize: Er könnte aber auch ein anderer sein. In other words: the course of experience could turn out to be such that our reason does not go beyond the domain of intuitive things. Now, were this the case, then there would be no truth of physics lying under (unterlegen) die anschaulich gegebenen Dinge; no “exact nature” – to frame it in the words of the 1907 manuscript. The possibility (Er könnte aber. . .) envisaged here can be either a factual or a juridical one, so to say, and Husserl is explicitly interested in the latter alone: “It is not as if human development had never progressed, nor would ever progress, beyond the pre-scientific stage in such a way that, while the world of physics had its truth, we should never know anything about it”; nor is the problem that the world of physics could be “different and ordered according to laws different from the ones that factually obtain” (Hua III/1, 100). Before we expand on it, let us present all the possible scenarios: α The domain of intuitively given things rests on (untergelegt) the truth of physics. β The domain of intuitively given things does not rest on the truth of physics: γ

β′ De facto, the domain of intuitively given things does not rest on the truth of physics (e.g., humanity has not reached that stage of development yet19). β″ De jure, the domain of intuitively given things does not rest on the truth of physics (i.e., it excludes such a determinability). The domain of intuitively given things rests on a truth of physics different from the one that de facto (α) obtains.

If the factual course of experience is such that the current state of affairs corresponds to α, it could be the case (Er könnte aber . . .) that the truth of physics were factually different (γ); or it could be the case that de facto there were no truth of physics (β′); or, finally, it could be the case that – de jure – there were no truth of physics altogether (β″). In the language of the Kant manuscript, β′ and β″ stand for two possible ways of dropping “the idea of exactness.” As previously announced, Husserl is mainly interested in β″: Rather it is conceivable that our intuitive world were the ultimate one, “behind” which would be no world of physics whatever, i.e., that perceived things would

18 “with the establishment of natural science humanity made the discovery that the world of actual experience, the actual subjectively and inter-subjectively intuitive world, has a ‘true’ ‘nature,’ a nature in a new sense according to which this whole world of experience is the mere appearance of an objective nature solely determined by ‘exact’ mathematical-physical predicates, absolutely unintuitable, unexperienceable,” E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Forschung. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, hrsg. von M. Biemel, Hua V (Den Haag: Martin Nijhoff, 1971), 65. 19 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, hrsg. von W. Biemel, Hua VI (Den Haag: Martin Nijhoff, 1962), 304.

“Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität”  277 dispense with mathematical and physical determinability, that the givennesses of experience would exclude any physics of the same kind as ours. As a consequence, the concatenations of experience would be other and different in kind from what they factually are insofar as the experiential motives fundamental to the framing of concepts and judgments of physics were absent. But, on the whole, within the limits of giving intuitions that we comprehend under the label “direct experience” (perception, recollection, etc.), “things” can still be presented as they are now as intentional unities persisting continuously in multiplicities of appearances. (Hua III/1, 100) In such a scenario the world still holds as a series of Erscheinungs-Mannigfaltigkeiten (for the Welt-Vernichtung – where es keine Welt mehr gibt – has not been yet reached (Hua III/1, 103)), but it dispenses with, and avoids, any possible mathematical-physical determinability: as if it could not be mathematized and the level of the true objectivity, i.e., the level of the “in-itself,” ever reached.20 In the words of the 1907 manuscript: the Welt cannot be made into ein rationaler Kosmos. But Husserl does not stop here, and “the mental destruction of the thing-like objectivity” is taken a step further: It must always be kept in mind that what things are [. . .] they are as things of experience. It is experience alone that prescribes their sense; and, since we are speaking of factual things, it is actual experience alone that does so in its definitely ordered concatenations of experience. But if we can submit to an eidetic consideration the lived-experiences proper to experience [Erlebnisarten der Erfahrung], notably, the fundamental lived-experience of thing-perception, if we can discern in them essential possibilities and necessities [. . .], thereby eidetically tracing essentially possible variants of motivated experiential concatenations: then the result is the correlate of our factual experience called “the actual world,” as one special case among a multiplicity of possible worlds and surrounding worlds, which, for their part, are nothing else but the correlates of essentially possible variants of the idea “experiencing consciousness,” with more or less orderly concatenations of experience. (Hua III/1, 100) This passage entails a series of claims worth being singled out. • A very clear distinction is drawn between the transcendental dimension, which is the dimension of “sense,” or teleological dimension, and the eidetic one. More precisely: the first “two” sentences (from “It must always . . .” to “. . . concatenations of experience”) have an exclusive transcendental bearing: experience – and its relevant Erlebnisse – is what “prescribes” (teleological aspect) things their

20 “every ‘in-itself’ is a mathematical in-itself, and all causal laws must be mathematical laws” (Hua VI, 286–287). For the relation between the world, the Um-Welten and the in-itself true nature, see the manuscripts published in E. Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegung der vorgegebenen Welt und ihre Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), hrsg. von R. Sowa, Hua XXXIX (Dordrecht, Springer: 2008), Section X (Viele Umwelten und die eine wahre Welt).

278  Daniele De Santis

•

•

sense. If what things are, namely, their sense is prescribed by experience, one could then assert that: given such and such things, such and such a sense has already been prescribed by experience. As the second sentence points out by speaking of “factual things” (es sich um faktische Dinge handelt), this transcendental consideration is to be deemed “a posteriori,” and it will be raised to the level of the a priori by the argument initiated by the third sentence (“But if we can submit to . . .”). As the rest of the passage explains, by submitting to an “eidetic” investigation the “a posteriori” relation ascertained at the very beginning of the text, we will realize that the “actual world,” and the “sense” it transcendentally receives from such and such a type of Erlebnis, is only a possible variant of – or variation upon – the idea “experiencing consciousness” with its a priori structures.

In so doing, the “argument” set forward by the passage displays a specific structure; it goes from: (δ) the a posteriori ascertainment of a transcendental prescription of sense (“It must always . . .” to “. . . concatenations of experience”), (ε) which is submitted to an eidetic investigation (“But if we can submit to . . .” to “. . . experiential concatenations”), (ζ) thereby traced back to the a priori structure of consciousness (“then the result . . .” to “. . . orderly concatenations of experience”). In other words: by means of ε, δ turns out to be nothing else but a case of ζ. If, at this point, the just discussed sequence (δ, ε, ζ) is joint together with the previous distinction between α, β and γ, then an important result will be obtained: if the world stands for a certain sense transcendentally, that is, teleologically prescribed by such and such an experiencing consciousness, then the distinction between a “world,” whose sense makes the domain of intuitively given things rest on the truth of physics (α); a “world,” whose sense makes the domain of intuitively given things rest upon a different truth of physics (γ); and, finally, a “world,” whose sense makes the domain of intuitively given things rest upon no truth of physics (β) – such distinctions, we were saying, are to be deemed transcendental, yet purely a posteriori (δ) until they are eidetically investigated (ε), and thereby traced back to the “a priori” structures of consciousness (ζ). Such being the ultimate goal, if we can so designate it, of the gedankliche Destruktion der dinglichen Objektivität.21

3.1 If this is the case, then it should not come as a surprise if in the 1907 manuscript Husserl does reproach Kant for only addressing “a posteriori questions of a transcendental kind” (Hua VII, 383). In Husserl’s own words, these questions sound as follows: “How shall the world be structured or designed [beschaffen sein] in order to be accessible to human knowledge?”; “How shall the world be structured or 21 For the more general issue of the Welt-Vernichtung in Husserl, see C. Majolino, “La partition du réel: Remarques sur l’eidos, la phantasia, l’effondrement du monde et l’être absolu de la conscience,” in Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences. Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl, ed. C. Ierna, H. Jacobs and F. Mattens (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 573– 660; on the chaos-hypothesis in Kant, M. Summa, Spatio-Temporal Intertwining. Husserl’s Transcendental Aesthetic (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), notably 67–77.

“Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität”  279 designed in order to be accessible to a knowledge of the kind of natural science?” but also, to reverse the order: “How shall knowledge be structured or designed in order for the world to be known (namely, scientifically known)?”; “How shall a being be equipped [organisiert] [. . .] in order for a science of nature to come to exist [soll geben können] for her?”. If, according to Husserl, this is precisely the sort of questions that Kant’s criticism is about, then let us try to figure why they would be a posteriori, but also in what sense they would still be transcendental. To put it in a quite provocative way: it might be urged that that they are a posteriori precisely because transcendental. Why, exactly? Because if, as we showed in the previous section, transcendental means the same as teleological, then the “positing” of one of two “poles” of the correlation (the world or any being whatsoever, any experiencing consciousness whatsoever) implies the “positing” of the other: If a world is posited with such and such a structure, then it means that a prescription of sense has already taken place by a corresponding experiencing consciousness Experiencing Consciousness 

 World

By the same token: If an experiencing consciousness is posited with such and such a structure, then a prescription of sense takes place, thereby positing a corresponding world Experiencing Consciousness 

 World

It should be noticed that, in his line of reasoning, Husserl seems to have in mind the Prolegomena and their “analytic method.” Let us recall a quite famous passage from Kant’s 1783 work (§4): These Prolegomena, however, are designed for preparatory exercises; they are intended to point out what must be done in order to make a science actual if it is possible, rather than to expound it. They must therefore rest upon something already known as trustworthy, from which we can set out with confidence and ascent to sources as yet unknown [. . .]. The method of such Prolegomena [. . .] is consequently analytical.22 We should never lose sight of the fact that in the 1907 manuscript Husserl’s interest is in “the idea of nature as a correlate of science of nature.” As Kant himself writes in the Prolegomena: “though we cannot assume metaphysics to be an actual science, we can assert with confidence that certain pure a priori synthetic cognitions are actual

22 I. Kant, “Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können,” in Werke. Band III, hrsg. von W. Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 2011), 135.

280  Daniele De Santis and given, i.e., pure mathematics and pure physics.”23 If, as Husserl would assert by echoing the “analytic method,” we start out by: Positing an experiencing consciousness with such and such a structure (that is to say, a certain science of nature), then a prescription of sense occurs, thereby positing nature as a correlate Science of Nature 

Nature

Or, to go the other way around: The positing of nature transcendentally means that a prescription of sense has already taken place, and a relevant experiencing consciousness (a science of nature) already posited as well Science of Nature 

Nature

Accordingly, Kant’s transcendental enterprise would stick to δ, namely, to the mere “a posteriori” ascertainment of a “transcendental” prescription of sense. To make the same point once again, it is a posteriori precisely because transcendental: since Kant starts out by positing “nature” as it factually is, the “teleological” prescription of sense entails the co-positing of a corresponding factual Wesen equipped in such a way to be able to scientifically know it. If the questions is “How shall a being be equipped in order for a science of nature to come to exist for her?” and “nature” as the correlate of science of nature has already been posited, then also the being in question has already been posited. Such is then the true meaning and significance of Husserl “criticizing” Kant for his anthropologism: by positing nature as is de facto experienced by human beings (i.e., our nature), the transcendental and teleological “prescription of sense” necessarily requires the positing of a form of knowledge for which such nature is de jure accessible and (scientifically) knowable: a Wesen equipped in such and such a way, e.g., endowed with a certain sensibility and intellect. A human nature as a correlate of a human science of nature teleologically, i.e., retrospectively requires a human subjectivity. Now, if we go back to our initial problem (Husserl’s appraisal of the “synthesis of reproduction” and the constitution of ein rationaler Kosmos), it could be maintained that – for Husserl – the very idea of a “transcendental deduction” as Kant himself sets it up has only an “a posteriori” character, and the “Kantian specter” (i.e., the possibility for intuitions not to conform to the conditions of the intellect) is nothing but a false problem: nature having been posited, an experiencing consciousness (a specific science of nature) able to actually, and not only possibly, constitute it, follows therefrom. As Husserl would probably remark by recalling Shakespeare, Kant, too, just like Horatio, “will not let belief take hold of him” (Hamlet, 1.1). If, in other words, the “Kantian specter” is not a specter at all, it is because the positing of nature means that intuitions have already teleologically conformed to the “conditions” of the intellect, and that the “synthesis of recognition” has already successfully performed its operation upon the “synthesis of reproduction” by the Einbildungskraft. As we will soon see, however, this is not Husserl’s last word on the matter.

23 Ibid., 135.

“Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität”  281

3.2 To whoever argued that, in the end, this would be nothing else but a fair description of Kant’s “regressive” method, hence should not be deemed a dismissal of the “critical” project, the following could be objected. If the distinction between transcendental and eidetic holds true – and the former is necessarily a posteriori until it is submitted to an eidetic investigation able to bring to the fore its “a priori” character – then Kant, Husserl would contend, cannot claim what he actually writes in the introduction to the transcendental logic, that is, that “The distinction between the transcendental and the empirical belongs only to the critique of knowledge” (A57/B81).24 As long as the “correlation,” “transcendentally” ascertained and described – between a given “world” and a given “experiencing consciousness” – is not traced back to the a priori structures of consciousness, one remains confined to the level of the “empirical.” “Transcendental,” of course, but still “empirical.” Because a sharp distinction needs to be drawn between the concept of “empirical” (empirisch) and that of “factual” (faktisch) – on which Husserl himself relies (Hua VII, 390). When it comes to the “theory of knowledge,” all empirical elements have to be excluded (alles Empirische ausschalten), namely, “reduced to the absolute” (bzw. es auf das Absolute reduzieren): “Factual consciousness is a specific course of consciousness [Bewußtseinsverlauf] in phenomenological reduction. Of course, the laws of essence circumscribe the possibilities for a specific absolute consciousness in general, but they leave open infinitely many facts, infinitely many constellations of factual consciousness.” As far as we understand Husserl here, the empirical is reduced to the absolute (i.e., consciousness) and thereby turned into or, better, revealed as a fact, that is to say, and to employ a slightly different terminology, as a factual realization of “absolute consciousness.” A fact is the factual realization of some essential possibilities; or, to frame it better: das Faktum is das Empirische “unter apriorischen Gesichtspunkten,” to borrow an expression from Husserl himself (Hua VII, 390). The factual is the opposite of what is empirical, for it is the realization of some essential and necessary possibilities,25 and the teleological prescription of sense is itself rooted in the domain of “eidetic laws.” In terms of the argumentative sequence analyzed above (δ, ε, ζ): as long as a certain transcendental correlation is not eidetically investigated, traced back to the a priori structure of consciousness, thereby turning into a factual realization thereof, it remains merely and barely empirical. If this is the case, Kant’s transcendental critique of reason, notably, the transcendental deduction, is and remains of empirical nature. The correlation itself is only ascertained a posteriori, and the conformity of intuitions to the conditions of the understanding is and remains (until submitted to eidetic analysis) empirical. If, on the one hand, the “specter” seems to be a false problem, almost a scarecrow (see what was argued in §3.1), on the other hand, the intuition-understanding conformity (the demonstration of whose necessity represents the highest ambition of the deduction) cannot prove itself necessary.

24 I. Kant, “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” in Werke. Band II, hrsg. von W. Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 2011), 101. 25 “In solchem empirischen Überlegungen steckt aber auch Apriorisches, das man zu sehen bekommt, sobald man den Gesichtspunkt der transzendentalen Phänomenologie gewonnen hat” (Hua VII, 384).

282  Daniele De Santis As Husserl further explains, we could imagine a different world, a world structured in a way other than ours, a world knowable in such a way to correspond to a different form of cognition; we could dream of a science of nature different from the one actually corresponding to “our” nature, hence a Wesen equipped in such a way to experience it differently: “Based upon pre-given sciences, one can also playfully ponder over all kind of possibilities, and answer them scientifically (Lasswitz) [Auf Grund vorgegebener Wissenschaften kann man ja auch im Spiel allerlei Möglichkeiten erwägen und diese Möglichkeiten wissenschaftlich beantworten (Lasswitz)]” (Hua VII, 384). Just like Kurd Lasswitz, one could venture into the realm of science fiction and, based on the actual conditions of science, speculate on what nature would look like were the Naturwissenschaft different from what it factually is; one could speculate about how different beings provided with a science of nature more developed than ours would de facto experience things. We could playfully phantasize of course, just like Lasswitz did, but all the scenarios we could ever dream of would be nothing else but empirical possibilities; and as long as we stick to the empirical, Husserl goes on to point out, there is nothing philosophically relevant (ergibt das für die Philosophie nichts Erhebliches). But who is Kurd Lasswitz (also spelled Laßwitz)? And why is his name evoked here?

Intermezzo on Kurd Laßwitz Carl Theodor Victor Kurd Laßwitz (1848–1910) studied mathematics and physics at the University of Breslau and the University of Berlin; he spent most of life and career in Gotha, teaching physics, mathematics, philosophy and geography at the Gymnasium Ernestinum. As far as our problems are concerned here, there are two reasons why he is worth being mentioned and his writings recalled, which will explain why Husserl makes his name in a manuscript on Kant. Philosophically speaking, and as Husserl himself seems to acknowledge in a 1901 letter to Natorp, Laßwitz is a neo-Kantian,26 whose philosophical agenda consists in seeking in the Kantian “critical” philosophy the “theoretical foundation” for natural science. In this respect, it is worth recalling his 1878 Atomistik und Kriticismus. Ein Beitrag zur erkenntnistheoretischen Grundlegung der Physik, which assumes the doctrine of kinetic atomism as the “foundation for physics” based on “the nature of our sensibility.”27 In 1883 Laßwitz publishes another book on Kant worthy of our attention: Die Lehre Kants von der Idealität des Raumes und der Zeit, where a detailed and systematic discussion of both the transcendental aesthetics and analytics is worked

26 “Sind Lasswitz, Krause, Schmitz, Windelband, wohl auch Liebmann u.a. nicht Neukantianer? Und doch sämmtlich Psychologisten u. Relativisten” (E. Husserl, Briefwechsel. Band V. Die Neukantianer, hrsg. von K. Schuhmann, Hua-Dok III (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 84); see also Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1886–1901), hrsg. von I. Strohmeyer, Hua XXI (The Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1983), 400. 27 K. Lasswitz, Atomistik und Kriticismus. Ein Beitrag zur erkenntnistheoretischen Grundlegung der Physik (Braunschweig: Druck und Verlag von Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1878). Let me remark that Lasswitz is the author of a Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton (Hamburg und Leipzig: Verlag von Leopold Voss, 1890).

“Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität”  283 out, and whose ultimate intention is to dismiss the “materialistic world-view.”28 Now, at the beginning of the book (Erster Abschnitt), in a section dedicated to making the case for the insufficiency of the materialistische Weltanschauung, Laßwitz introduces the central theme of the book by the following two questions: The first question sounds: How is the world structured or designed [beschaffen]? Or, in a more laborious way: How is it possible that this manifold of events [Mannigfaltigkeit von Ereignissen], which we call world, runs in space and time [in Raum und Zeit ihren Verlauf nimmt]? And the second question is: How is our mind [Geist] structured or designed [beschaffen]? Or, again, in a more detailed way: How is it possible that we have the capacity to know something in general, and that the course of the world [Weltverlauf] is perceivable, explicable, and determinable by us?29 In light of the similar terminology (both Husserl and Laßwitz employ beschaffen), as well as of the way in which the Fragen are framed, it is difficult to resist the temptation of claiming that Husserl’s “a posteriori questions of a transcendental kind” refer back to Laßwitz’s. Of course, this would be only a hypothesis on our part; for in Husserl’s personal library at the “Husserl Archive” in Leuven there is no trace of the two books just mentioned, and only the following three volumes are present: • • •

Gustav Theodor Fechner (Stuttgart: Frommans Klassiker der Philosophie, 1896) (BA 1021) Seelen und Ziele. Beiträge zum Weltverständnis (Leipzig: Elischer, 1908) (BA 1022) Wirklichkeiten. Beiträge zum Weltverständnis (Berlin: Felber, 1900) (BA 1023)

This being recognized, there can also be a second reason why Husserl decided to include his name in the 1907 manuscript, notably, at the end of the passage recalled in the previous section: besides being a Kant scholar interested in the relation between “criticism” and “physics,” Laßwitz is usually considered the father of Germanspeaking “science fiction”! A first series of literary pieces, the two 1878 short stories Bis zum Nullpunkt des Seins (Erzählung aus dem Jahre 2371) and Gegen das Weltgesetz (Erzählung aus dem Jahre 3877),30 picture a futuristic and utopian humanity with strong Kantian colors; one of the characters, Reimert-Oberton, an excessive idealist and mushy romantic, lays claim to die Überwindung des Materialismus durch den Kritizismus,31 and also recognizes that a distinction between Sache and Person is to be made. It is a humanity, this presented by Laßwitz in his early science fiction stories, aware

28 K. Laßwitz, Die Lehre Kants von der Idealität des Raumes und der Zeit, im Zusammenhange mit seiner Kritik des Erkennens allgemeinverständlich dargestellt (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1883), here iv. 29 Ibid., 1. 30 Now in K. Laßwitz, Bis zum Nullpunkt des Seins und andere Erzählungen (München: Allitera Verlag, 2001). 31 Ibid., 36.

284  Daniele De Santis that nur durch die Bildung des Verstandes ein Fortschritt der Menscheit möglich sei.32 But it is with the 1897 two-volume novel Auf zwei Planeten33 that Laßwitz imposes himself as a literary author of success. The novel postulates intelligent life on Mars, whose inhabitants managed to arrive on our planet thanks to their advanced technology, establishing a sort of solar-space station in the North Pole. Their base is discovered by a German expedition led by the director of “the division for scientific airship travel” Hugo Torm, the astronomer Grunthe and the physicist Josef Saltner.34 The more transparent atmosphere on Mars allowed Martians’ telescopes to detect our cities and – after discovering how to control gravity – they have successfully traveled to Earth. At the very end of Chapter 7 (Neue Rätsel), after his first direct encounter with the Martians, Grunthe racks his brain to find a solution to the following enigma: “How is it possible for living beings to fly through the vacuum of space?”35 While Chapter 11 (Martier und Menschen) is devoted to presenting some of the cultural differences between humans and Martians, Chapter 8 (Die Herren des Weltraums) has already delved into Martians’ “technology.” What strikes the human expedition group is the Eigentümlichkeit der Kultur der Martier: the incredibly high level of social “equality” achieved by their culture – to which also corresponds eine große Mannigfaltigkeit und Freheit des individuellen Lebens.36 As our expedition group soon comes to realize, “the exploration of Earth, the discovery of the interplanetary travel, and the seizure of the North Pole represent a large and important chapter in the cultural history of the Martians.” Their mathematics and science of nature are more developed; hence they have an incredibly advanced Technik der Naturbeherrschung37: At the time when humans on Earth began to talk about a century of the natural sciences, the Martians not looked back upon a century of steam but also upon a century of electricity if they were an old and remote inheritance. At that time they completed a scientific discovery that was destined to effect a complete change of vast proportions: the discovery of the secrets of gravitation, which resulted in an enormous change in all technology and made the Martians masters of the solar system. Gravitation is that power that governs the movement of the stars in space; it connects the sun with the planets, the planets with the moons; it holds objects at the surface of the celestial bodies, and it makes these objects remain in the universe for ten thousands of years as consistent and uniform groups; it causes the stone which has been thrown to fall back to Earth and rivers to stream toward the sea. [. . .] If one would succeed in taking away from an object this particular energy, [. . .] if one would succeed in transforming its gravitation into another form of energy, then one would make the object independent of its gravitational power. Just this had been successfully done by the Martians.38

32 Ibid., 37. 33 K. Laßwitz, Auf zwei Planeten (Berlin: Karl-Maria Guth, 2016), originally published in Weimar by Felber Verlag. An incomplete translation of the book is available in English. 34 Ibid., 7. 35 Ibid., 58. 36 Ibid., 89. 37 Ibid., 59. 38 Ibid., 62.

“Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität”  285 Even if perhaps it would be too bold of a thesis to argue for a direct relation between Laßwitz as a Kant scholar and as a science fiction author, let alone a derivation of the latter from the former, the following observations can be proposed also bearing on Laßwitz’s relevance for understanding our 1907 Kant manuscript. • If – as a science fiction writer – Laßwitz imagines beings equipped with a science of nature other and more developed than ours auf Grund vorgegebener Wissenschaften, as Husserl would state, the Laßwitz who works on Kant, too, speculates about analogous scenarios. In his Die Lehre Kants von der Idealität des Raumes und der Zeit, notably Chapter 8 (Die Apriorität des Raumes und die mathematische Spekulation), §38, Laßwitz discusses, even if only as a “fiction” (Dichtung), the idea of beings (selige Geister oder Götter) endowed with a higher “intelligence,” and able to experience a four-dimensional space, and whose world would look accordingly. Of course, as Laßwitz does not fail to recognize, this would be a world completely “divorced” from ours: he speaks of von einander absolut getrennter Welten, deren Bewohner durchaus nichts von einander wissen können.39 In fact, the world as we perceive it, the three-dimensional intuition through which we actually experience it, is rooted only in der Natur menschlicher Erkenntnisthätigkeit. This is why we said that the scenario is analogous, yet not identical, to the one narrated in Auf zwei Planeten: for, one thing is coming up with beings, whose Erkenntnisthätigkeit and world are of a completely different species, another is conceiving of creatures, whose Erkenntnisthätigkeit and Wissenschaften are simply more developed than ours (as is the case with the Martians), yet basically of the same kind. • Although in his letter to Natorp Husserl accuses Laßwitz of relativism, it would be a mistake to reduce his position to crass “anthropologism.” As a matter of fact, Laßwitz oscillates between two views: if, on the one hand, the forms of sensibility and the Kantian categories are clearly understood as “humans” (he speaks of die Begriffe, durch die erst der Mensch zum Menschen und die Welt zur Welt wird40), thereby determining the axioms as well as the theorems of physics as “human,” on the other hand, he speaks of ideelle Geltung41 and the determination itself of the subject as a human one derives, as a result, from the transcendental apperception itself (Durch sie allein ist der Mensch).42 • It should be evident by now the reason why Husserl refers the reader to Laßwitz during his 1907 assessment of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, that is, immediately after criticizing him for raising and addressing exclusively “a posteriori questions of a transcendental kind.” As Husserl would say: based upon pre-given sciences, one could, just like Laßwitz, imagine and speculate over all kinds or sorts of possibilities and possible scenarios, imagine a different “science of nature” and “creatures,” whose intelligence is more acute and sharper than ours. Nevertheless, and as long as these possible scenarios are not investigated as factual realizations of some “essential possibilities,” one remains at the level of what is empirical, and das ergibt für die Philosophie nichts Erhebliches.

39 40 41 42

K. Laßwitz, Die Lehre Kants von der Idealität des Raumes und der Zeit, 163–164. K. Lasswitz, Atomistik und Kriticismus, 91. Ibid., 93. K. Laßwitz, Die Lehre Kants von der Idealität des Raumes und der Zeit, 108.

286  Daniele De Santis

4.1 It is now time to wrap up our results so far, and thus move toward the conclusion. Although it might seem that the main theme of this essay (the Einbildungskraft) has been left behind, what we have been trying to do is first drawing, then expanding upon some of the implications of Husserl’s stance on Kant in a couple of 1907 manuscripts. As explained at the outset, in these texts Husserl indirectly tackles the Einbildungs­ kraft from the angle of its transcendental “contribution” to the idea of “nature,” i.e., from the angle of the “synthesis of reproduction” it carries out in the transcendental deduction of the categories in the A-edition of the first Kritik. Rather than providing the reader with an analytic commentary thereupon, Husserl confines himself to a series of systematic observations, whose “core” revolves about the overall transcendental character of Kant’s endeavor. In particular, the discussion seems to bear on what might be designated as the necessary “transition,” so to speak, from the transcendental affinity brought about by the synthesis of reproduction to the unity granted by the synthesis of recognition performed by the understanding (die Einheit, welche der Gegenstand notwendig macht, nicht anders sein könne, als die formale Einheit des Bewußseins (A105)). As we tried to show and argue, for Husserl Kant’s transcendental approach remains confined to the level of the “empirical,” meaning this that he cannot raise above the “a posteriori” dimension. Of course, it might be objected that, compared to any of his later texts and manuscripts, this is not and will not be Husserl’s definitive view on the thinker of Königsberg. Now, were this the objection, it would not be an objection at all: for, what really matters in order to appreciate Husserl’s selfcomprehension in this decisive stage of his intellectual development is the sharp distinction, and relevant relation, that he establishes between the transcendental and the eidetic dimension of his phenomenology, whose conception he strongly and incisively oppose to Kant’s transcendental philosophy.43 In order for the importance of this “transcendental-eidetic” relation to come forward, we expanded on Husserl’s cursory mention of Kurd Laßwitz and his activity both as a Kant scholar and a science fiction author: the intention being to shed light on Husserl’s expression “a posteriori questions of a transcendental kind,” and why, as he himself asserts over the course of the manuscript, they do not suffice to actually address, let alone resolve, the problem of knowledge, here construed as the very problem of the transcendental constitution of nature. In a few, yet blunt words: doing transcendental phenomenology, i.e., transcendentally investigating the constitution of nature does not only amount to describing and ascertaining a certain correlation, or system of correlations, but to its reduction to the a priori structures of consciousness, without which such correlation stays “empirical.”

4.2 Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität – exclaims Husserl toward the end of the “Beilage XX” (Hua VII, 394). The wonder is not the transcendental correlation, the rationality of the prescription of Sinn which Husserl systematically designates by the German

43 For a more general assessment, see what we explain in “Synthesis and Identity. Husserl on Kant’s Contribution to the History of Philosophy,” in Husserl, Kant and Transcendental Phenomenology, ed. I. Apostolescu and C. Serban (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019 (forthcoming)).

“Das Wunder hier ist die Rationalität”  287 term Vernunft, hence Vernünftigkeit and vernünftig44; the wonder here is the rationality that Husserl refers to by the Latin sounding term Rationalität, hence ratio and rational: the rationality of Sein, whose laws investigated by the eidetic sciences are called Seinsgesetze and express “rational truths” (rationale Wahrheiten).45 If the former is the transcendental rationality, the teleological one, the latter should be considered an ontological form of rationality; the former is the rationality of Vernunft,46 which remains “a posteriori” until the corresponding eidetic science traces it back to its “a priori” principles: Alle Vernunft im Aposteriori hat ihre Prinzipien a priori,47 explains Husserl to his students in 1906. The “wonder,” then, is that there is a rationality immanent to being, in this case the being of consciousness: a domain of purely a priori principles, whose investigation is the task of the new a priori science called phenomenology that Husserl is trying to establish in these very same years. This being the major distinction between his conception of transcendental philosophy and Kant’s (at least according to the way in which the confrontation is set forward in the 1907 manuscript): the Vernünftigkeit, as Husserl would probably put it, the “rationality” governing the teleological prescription of sense is to be understood and seen as the factual realization of such and such an a priori structure, i.e., of such and such an ontological rationality inherent to consciousness.48 The Rationalität determines the Vernünftigkeit: this twofold conception of rationality being what is really at stake in Husserl’s 1907 assessment of Kant.

Acknowledgments This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).

44 “under the broadly understood titles reason and unreason [Vernunft und Unvernunft], as correlative titles for being and non-being, they are an all-embracing theme for phenomenology. By means of the ἐποχή, we effect a reduction to our pure intention (cogito) and to the meant purely as meant. The predicates being and non-being, and their modal variants, relate to the latter accordingly, not to objects simpliciter but to the objectual sense” (E. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, hrsg. von S. Strasser, Hua I (Den Haag: Martin Nijhoff, 1973), 91). 45 E. Husserl, Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie 1902/03 hrsg. von E. Schuhman, Hua-Mat III (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 11. On this twofold conception of “rationality,” see our “Le conclusioni della filosofia del conoscere. Appunti sul programma ‘razionalista’ di Husserl e Bontadini,” in Bolletino Filosofico, 2018, 185–207. 46 For an overall assessment of this aspect, see D. Pradelle, Par-delà la révolution copernicienne. Sujet transcendental et facultés chez Kant et Husserl (Paris: PUF, 2012), 199–258; R. Rizo-Patrón de Lerner, Husserl en diálogo. Lecturas y debates (Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2012), 77–151 (Últimos fundamentos y filosofía). 47 E. Husserl, Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie. Vorlesungen 1906/07, hsrg. von U. Melle, Hua XXIV (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984), 237. 48 “Indem nun aber die eidetische Phänomenologie das Transzendentale rationalisiert, ihm seinen Logos zueignet, schafft sie ein universales und rationales Verständnis alles möglichen Seienden (o.i.),” E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil, hrsg. von R. Boehm, Hua VIII (Den Haag: Martin Nijhoff, 1973), 361.

18 Imagination and indeterminacy The problematic object in Kant and Husserl Augustin Dumont

Abstract: The aim of this article is to test the hypothesis of an indeterminacy – initiated “originally” by the imagination – in our relation to the world. The article begins by examining the status of indeterminacy in the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on that of the object in general discussed by Kant in the Amphiboly as a “problematic object.” By way of an analysis of Husserlian Phantasia, it is then shown that the imagination necessarily allows the indeterminacy of this object, conceived neither as “something” nor as “nothing,” to enter “into the world.” The limits of the conceptual resources offered by Kant and Husserl for verifying this hypothesis are also discussed. Keywords: Kant, Husserl, imagination, phantasy, indeterminacy, problematic object

Introduction1 Through a comparative interpretation of Kant and Husserl, the present study examines the hypothesis that the relation of subjectivity to the world is characterized by an originary indeterminacy in which the imagination plays a primary role. Each of these philosophers, in his own specific way, seems to open up this possibility while at the same time hindering it from fully appearing, an issue that we shall have to examine closely. The inherent difficulties involved in any attempt to compare Kant’s critical philosophy with Husserl’s phenomenology are well known. Heir to the debates opposing psychologism and logicism that were prompted by the rediscovery of Kant during the second half of the 19th century, Husserl made clear on many occasions his rejection of the “faculty psychology” that Kant’s Critique had supposedly failed to overcome. Phenomenology is firmly opposed to the idea of a subjective faculty of imagination that would be nothing over and above a mental capacity to perform syntheses. As pure products of individual psychic activity, syntheses are seen, by Husserl, as having no epistemic value. From the Logical Investigations to the Crisis, he never ceases to denounce Kant’s psychologism, although as Iso Kern points out, there is a softening of

1 This article owes a great deal to the illuminating discussions that I have had with my phenomenologist colleagues. I should like to thank in particular Maxime Doyon for having made possible such an exchange.

Imagination and indeterminacy  289 this critical position after the genetic turn.2 Overall, Kant is portrayed as a prisoner of the naturalistic psychology of his time who mostly offers “mythical constructions.”3 Does this not mean that the present study is undermined by an overwhelming objection from the very start? No doubt it is too soon to draw any firm conclusions. Husserl was mainly preoccupied with completing his extraordinarily ambitious project to provide a pure description of intentional acts, and it is widely acknowledged that he had no natural bent for the history of philosophy. This means that there may be many ways to relativize his interpretation of Kant. For example, it seems possible to do so by stressing Kant’s efforts in the Critique of Pure Reason – efforts already manifest in the first edition version of the transcendental deduction – to leave behind the psychologism of Tetens or Wolff. Indeed, in many respects, the imagination of the 1781 edition can already be conceived more as a foundational activity than as a faculty or a mere source of representations. In addition, if the complete transformation of transcendentalism into a philosophy focusing on acts of consciousness could occur just a few years later (see Fichte’s first Science of Knowledge, published in 1794), it was because Kant had already provided fertile ground for such a transformation. In any case, the idea of a “pragmatic” reading of the transcendental deduction has nothing absurd about it,4 and centering such a reading on the dimension of acts would obviously be interesting from a phenomenological perspective. Therefore, although a dialogue seems possible, there is every reason to insist that any attempt to equate Kant’s and Husserl’s views on the imagination would be undesirable. As many commentators have pointed out, any comparison must be limited, if only because Kant gives a much different extension to the concept of the imagination, so that a fruitful discussion of their respective positions generally requires numerous more or less important adjustments to them.5 This will also be the case in the present

2 See I. Kern, Husserl und Kant: Eine Untersuchung über Husserls Verhältnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 39. 3 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie, ed. W. Biemel, Hua VI (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), 116; English edition: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 114. 4 See, for example, A. Makowiak, Kant, l’imagination et la question de l’homme (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2009), 84: “Therefore, the interest of the first deduction is clearly that it allows us to see how the progressive relinquishment of the psychological conception of the faculties plays out in the continuation of Kant’s pre-critical thought. Indeed, at first conceived as specific ‘sources’ of representations (the senses, the imagination, apperception), in other words, as the origin of knowledge, the faculties have been, by the end of the deduction, deprived of their power, and the possibility of each one has received a new basis in a fundamental activity of synthesis whose ‘effects’ alone, that is to say, the use of it throughout experience, can lead to the ‘origin’ of our knowledge. This fundamental activity is the ‘transcendental function of the imagination.’ ” 5 For example, this is the signification of the approach adopted by Nathalie Depraz, who concentrates on certain very specific experiential elements of consciousness: “The Kantian imaginative synthesis in the subjective deduction plays a constitutive role in what Husserl calls a ‘phantomatic synthesis’ in the context of his phenomenologically renewed transcendental aesthetics.” N. Depraz, “Imagination and Passivity. Husserl and Kant: A Cross-Relationship,”

290  Augustin Dumont study, for in what follows it will be necessary to develop the Auseinandersetzung between Husserl and Kant from a systematic rather than a historical perspective,6 in order to make full use of their conceptual resources in a philosophical confrontation centered on our initial question. The differences in “grammar” are considerable, and it is important to mention them from the outset, in order to underscore the goal of the present study. Kant gives the transcendental imagination a central role in cognition (most notably); however, he uses the concept of Einbildungskraft, which Husserl firmly rejects, preferring to use the concepts of Bildbewusstsein and Phantasie.7 Far from seeing imagination as an experience of phantasy, Kant conceives of it as the general power to achieve the unity of representations through various syntheses, and as the capacity to produce the schemata that allow judgments to apply to experience. Given these fundamental differences, it is clearly impossible to place Husserl’s and Kant’s concepts of the imagination side by side and simply confront them with each other. Thus, to provide a conceptually coherent basis for examining our initial hypothesis, it will be necessary to refer to a number of different sections of the Critique without focusing on what Kant himself calls the imagination, before discussing in greater depth the Husserlian imagination. This will entail proceeding in two steps: (1) The Critique of Pure Reason will serve as the starting point, for it provides a basis for thematizing the dimension of indeterminacy proper to the relation of subjectivity to the object in general. (2) From there it will be possible to examine Husserl’s position and, in particular, the specific intentional act that he describes as phantasy. This will involve asking to what extent the latter can meet certain philosophical expectations that will be deliberately formulated in explicitly Kantian terms. It will be a question of assessing the capacity of Husserlian phantasy to open up, inasmuch as it is free and untied, indeterminate possibilities that have a constitutive function with respect to reality. In other words, it will be necessary to determine whether the phenomenological understanding of Phantasie can disclose a type of “originary” consciousness of modification that indicates the primacy of the possible over the real. Such primacy should be understood not only as it is in Ideen I – as the preeminence of the pure and intangible eîdos over mundane objectivity8 – but

in Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl, ed. N. Depraz and D. Zahavi (Dordrecht: Springer, 1998), 39. 6 On the few occasions when Husserl positively associates his transcendental perspective with Kantianism, he sees above all in the Critique a systematic movement upward toward the a priori, notwithstanding the limitations of the means available to Kant at that point in the history of philosophy: “[I]n the essential results of our work, which moves upward systematically from the absolutely ultimate sources of all knowledge, we find ourselves, broadly speaking, in agreement with Kant nevertheless.” E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Erster Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. R. Boehm, Hua VII (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 235. 7 Sometimes Husserl uses the short form Einbildung, which is related to Phantasie by its meaning in ordinary German. It is a particularly appropriate term to the extent that it is free of the burdensome association with a Kantian “faculty.” 8 “The old ontological doctrine that the cognition of ‘possibilities’ must precede the cognition of actualities is, in my opinion, in so far as it is correctly understood and made useful in the right ways, a great truth.” E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Bd. 1, Hua III/I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977),

Imagination and indeterminacy  291 also as an imaginative modification capable of carrying out and indirectly accompanying all acts of consciousness.

1.  Kant and the indeterminate object This dimension of indeterminacy seems to set the course for Kant’s critical approach to philosophy. Indeed, it appears to haunt his conception of knowledge from start to finish in the Critique. First, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, he makes the primary encounter with sense data an irreducible moment of indeterminacy: “The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called appearance.”9 Only the concepts of the understanding can determine intuitions; conversely, the concepts remain undetermined without intuitions. Then, at the other end of the Critique, in the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant invites us to conceive of the objects of the ideas of pure reason as objects that are not only undetermined, but also – by definition – undeterminable. The cosmological idea of an unconditioned, and therefore unknowable, series of cause and effect relations makes it possible to conceive of an intrinsically undetermined world horizon, for example. From a modal perspective, these two indeterminacies, the one at the beginning and the other at the end of the Critique, are characterized by the fact that they have to do either with what is possible or with what is “not possible” (as opposed to “impossible”). In the first case, knowledge becomes possible as soon as there is a sense datum, for the first a priori condition of the possibility of experience is the existence of the pure forms of intuition, space and time, which provide the receptive horizon within which all sensation occurs. Thus it is clear that “the undetermined object of an empirical intuition” is – at least potentially – an object of knowledge. In the second case, the ideas of pure reason, which are “natural” remnants of rational syllogisms, serve as rules for possible experience, even if their value is strictly regulatory. The rational objects of these ideas are indeterminate offshoots of possible knowledge, but they are not themselves possible. Thus the principles of pure reason “have objective but indeterminate validity.”10 More intriguing and in a sense more complex, the concept of the object in general (Gegenstand überhaupt), the terminus ad quem of the Transcendental Analytic, represents a third type of indeterminacy. In the appendix to the Analytic of Principles, which is entitled On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection, Kant moves back to a point in thought that is prior to the division into the possible and the impossible. This division is presupposed, as it were, throughout the Analytic and the Aesthetic,

159; English edition: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book I, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 190.   9 I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV (1781 edition), 29, and vol. III (1787 edition), 50, ed. Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1911); English edition: Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer, ed. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). In accordance with convention, all references contain the letters “A” (for the 1781 edition) and “B” (for the 1787 edition) with the corresponding page numbers. These “A” and “B” page numbers are followed by those in the Guyer translation of the first Critique (henceforth cited as CPR). Here: CPR A, 20/B 34, trans. 155. 10 CRP A, 663/B 691, trans. 602.

292  Augustin Dumont which are both centered on the question of the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience. Required “for the completeness of the system,”11 the Table of Nothing at the end of the Amphiboly presents the higher concept that makes such a division originally possible, namely the concept of an object in general prior to the distinction between “something” and “nothing.” The latter are primitive notions that depend on the originary concept of an object “taken problematically, leaving undecided whether it is something or nothing.”12 The object “taken problematically” – the object understood in its widest conceivable extension – represents a form of ultimate support at the systematic level and has for this reason considerable importance, yet – strangely – it is introduced very late and even appears optional from the point of view of the exposition. Indeed, the starting point of the systematic exposition and deduction of the transcendental elements is not an object floating in a form of complete indetermination that cannot be characterized either as something or as nothing. Instead, Kant begins his exposition by introducing the concept of an object already possible in its very indeterminacy – the “something” that is given in empirical intuition – and he finishes it by orienting reason toward the “ens rationis ratiocinatae,”13 that is to say, toward objects that are nothing and therefore not possible, “although they must not on that ground be asserted to be impossible.”14 As for the object in general, it governs the differentiation into possible and impossible objects, which means that it is even more problematic than an idea of pure reason, since its indeterminacy has no epistemic function. However, Kant’s inclusion of a Table of Nothing in the Critique is in no way arbitrary. The appendix is necessary from a systematic standpoint, to the extent that it allows Kant to indicate the consequences of replacing the old ontology by a more modest analytic of pure understanding15 and to remind his readers, at the same time, of his desire to present the actual system of transcendental philosophy. From the Doctrine of Method of 1781 to the Preisschrift of 1791, Kant resolutely places this systematicity at the center of metaphysics (the elevation toward the supersensible in its full positivity being made possible by practical reason, not by the pure theoretical conceptuality of the older rationalism).16 However, although the problematic character of the object in general is “originary” from a strictly logical standpoint, the fact remains that transcendental philosophy only encounters this problematic character late in the day. By definition, the object in general cannot be “given” – since everything given already comes under a “possible” indeterminacy – but only elaborated in philosophical reflection when the latter is confronted by its own requirements for systematicity. The object in general, before its determination as nothing or as something, is in fact the ultimate product of transcendental reflection. This form of reflection is not

11 Ibid., 290/B 346, trans. 382. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.,681/B 709, trans. 611. 14 Ibid.,290/B 347, trans. 382. 15 “[The principles of the Transcendental Analytic] are merely principles of the exposition of appearances, and the proud name of an ontology, which presumes to offer synthetic a priori cognitions of things in general in a systematic doctrine. . ., must give way to the modest one of a mere analytic of the pure understanding” (CPR A 247/B 303, trans. 358–359). 16 See I. Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, op. cit., vol. 20, 292.

Imagination and indeterminacy  293 directed toward particular objects, but instead constitutes “the state of mind in which we first prepare ourselves to find out the subjective conditions under which we can arrive at concepts.”17 It consists in turning the mind’s focus back toward the mental functions as they relate to various types of representations. Kant describes transcendental reflection as an “action,”18 one whose aim is to think back to what lies behind all the determinations already established in ordinary knowledge, in order to let either the sensibility or the understanding emerge as the “transcendental place”19 to which it is necessary to assign concepts. What is the role of the imagination in the extreme and in the more intermediate forms of the indeterminacy of knowledge? According to the hypothesis under consideration, the imagination makes the relation to the object constantly problematic. In the present case, it does so either by bringing this relation back to a level of indeterminacy that is below the possible-impossible dichotomy, or by introducing a certain degree of “play” into the dimension of the possible, that is, into the sensibility. This would occur – to state this point hypothetically – if a first imagination could tear itself loose from the given representations, by attributing to them the total indeterminacy of the object in general, before redetermining them as belonging to specific transcendental places. This metaphysical imagination would operate closely with a second imagination, tethered to the work of synthesis, and the result would be that this second imagination could not constitute the manifold of sense data as such, except by exposing it from the outset – at the level of sense experience itself – to the indeterminacy of being as being. In other words, the synthetic imagination would not be able to perform its syntheses except by simultaneously undermining, and this at the very root of intuitive apprehension, the univocality of the sense of what is given, the latter’s signification being ultimately determined by the metaphysical imagination. In this way, the “place” of any representation whatsoever would be subject to a critical evaluation as a matter of principle, even in the case where the possibility of the representation seemed selfevident because intuition had occurred. Is this a plausible line of reasoning in a Kantian context? Not exactly. The first task of the Kantian transcendental imagination is to make possible, through its synthetic activity, the understanding’s determination of an object whose initial indeterminacy is due to intuition and intuition alone. This means that there is little or no justification for attributing to the imagination the power to intervene in the pure reflexio that Kant explains in the Amphiboly. If the imagination connects what is given in intuition to the concepts of the understanding in order to make possible a determination of an object, then it cannot be responsible for “disconnecting” and distinguishing them from each other by first subjecting them to the indeterminacy of the object in general. For Kant, only reflection is capable of accomplishing this. As for the first occurrence of indeterminacy in the order of exposition, it is important to ask whether it can be seen as an immediate consequence of the synthetic imagination. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant explains that the sensations that are primordially indeterminate are always “alterations (Veränderungen) of our subject.”20

17 18 19 20

CPR A 260/B 316, trans. 366. Ibid., 261/B 317, trans. 367. Ibid., 268/B 324, trans. 371. Ibid., 29/B 45, trans. 161.

294  Augustin Dumont For example, colors are “modifications (Modifikationen) of the sense of sight.”21 Here it is essential to remark that this use of the terms “alteration” and “modification” qualifies at the deepest level the givenness of appearances (Erscheinungen) as understood in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. At the very root of our capacity to know, there is a fundamental identity between our “modified” sensibility and the “given” object. Of course, as Kant indicates in Book I of the Dialectic, sensation is merely a subjective modification of our state. If it is to become a cognition, it must enter into a relation with an object in accordance with the conditions of intuition and the rules of the understanding, and it is important to stress that this occurs thanks to the imagination. Yet the fact remains that these principles of objectivity depend, nevertheless, on something being initially given in intuition and that, for this reason, the experience of sensibility is generally an experience of modification. Kant often insists on this point: “the modification (Modifikation) of our sensibility”22 is the only manner in which objects can be given to us. Without modification, there is no presence, but all modification necessarily involves a temporal series, and therefore a dimension of absence as well. It is essential to note that in the subjective deduction of 1781 Kant discreetly relates this notion of modification to the first synthesis of the imagination, “that, namely, of the apprehension of the representations, as modifications of the mind in intuition.”23 The a priori capacity to connect the manifold in a synoptic view goes hand in hand with a temporal synthesis of sensory impressions. Therefore, even before undertaking, in the second synthesis, the work of reproducing representations in the absence of sense data, the imagination sets about constituting the presence of the object by forming an image of what is given, which means an image of being as the modification or alteration of sensing, that is, the delimitation of a region where certain alterations are assembled and unified while others are rejected. For an experience to be possible, the imagination itself cannot bring about such mobility in the given. On the contrary, Kant maintains that the imagination is responsible for offering this alteration, which is inherent in givenness, spatial-temporal limits in the form of a stabilized image. Outside of this alteration, which the imagination neither “gives” nor encourages, but which it constitutes by its synthesis, there is literally nothing – there is no trace of anything that could be possibly understood as “something.” Thus it is clear that Kant does not accord any modifying or altering power to the imagination itself, at least not in its epistemic function. Admittedly, the Critique of the Power of Judgment associates the imagination with the more plastic dimension of “play,” but it does so without making the dimensions of “formation” and “deformation” truly concordant. Only the first is in fact valorized by Kant. As for the indeterminate character of the ideas of reason, Kant deliberately avoids giving their impossible objects to the imagination. Although he suggests, in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, that the imagination may be the “fundamental power”24 at the origin of all the other cognitive powers, which would mean that it would also be at the origin of their determinable or undeterminable objects, Kant prefers to accord to reason itself the power to imitate the schematism in the

21 22 23 24

Ibid., 28/B 44, trans. 161. Ibid., 139/B 178, trans. 272–273. Ibid., 97, trans. 228. Ibid., 649/B 677, trans. 593.

Imagination and indeterminacy  295 production of its “fictions.” Unfortunately, this interesting issue cannot be discussed here.25 This Kantian beginning to the problematic is essential for the following reasons: (1) It indicates that the transcendental project as such necessarily encounters an objective indeterminacy at all levels of its investigation, from the sense data of perception through to the thematization of the object as object. (2) It indicates that the “originary” object, understood at the systematic level, cannot be thought other than as a problematic object. In line with this, it makes clear that this originary object, which hovers between nothingness and concrete givenness, has in principle a universalizing signification. (3) It shows that transcendentalism must reserve the right to think back to what lies behind the object given “in person” (leibhaftig gegeben), in order to reopen objectivity to a form of topological latency that allows rationality to freely decide, using criteria instituted by itself, what is possible or impossible. (4) It shows that there is no sense experience that is not an experience of modification and alteration.

2. Husserlian phantasy: the consciousness of modification and the primacy of the possible Husserl’s phenomenology of the imagination appears to be capable of providing a particular density to each of the four points just mentioned. To bring it to bear on our problematic, it is necessary to change grammars and consider the very special power of Phantasie. In the Husserlian context, intentional life seems to have a continual need for phantasy to untie representations and free them from any determination that is overly fixed. In a sense, phantasy corresponds to the state of reflection that Kant discusses in the Amphiboly, the state of reflection in which representations become indeterminate with respect to possibility and impossibility before receiving (or in order to better receive) determinations. In addition, phantasy in the Husserlian sense can make it possible to “see” “objects in general” or, to be more precise, objects not yet specified or individualized by being given “in person.” Phantasy can only do this by assuming complete freedom with respect to all givenness “in person,” even though it remains closely connected to it, as we shall soon see. But by assuming this freedom, it gives back to the “world” what it does not have in Kant – and this is an essential difference between the two perspectives. In Husserl, the locus of representations is always the world, even if they are representations of an abstract object in general. Thus, although there is a certain wavering between “something” and “nothing” in Husserlian phantasy, it takes place in the world and the imagination is in fact responsible for this “worlding.” This is why Husserl retains the vocabulary of the possible while rejecting that of the impossible. Indeed, phantasy offers a view of unreal objects and objects reduced to nothingness, but from the new perspective that it opens up, even the Kantian nihil negativum belongs to the “possible world” as a correlate of intentional activity, for “the nothing” is no longer identified with the impossible. Several commentators have attempted to bridge the differences between Kantian imagination and Husserlian phantasy by treating them on the same plane. Julia Jansen, for example, has argued that in Husserl, “the possibility that is revealed in phantasy is

25 See C. Piché, “Les fictions de la raison pure,” Philosophiques 13/2 (1986): 292.

296  Augustin Dumont not theoretical or conceptual; it is – very much in the Kantian sense – a possible object of experience.”26 For Jansen, it makes no sense to speak of a Husserlian version of the “schematism” as long as phantasy is conceived as strictly neutralizing and disinterested. However, if phantasy first constructs possibilities, it can be seen as the modality through which the formation of a priori judgments is attested. From this perspective, “the object phantasized, for example a triangle, can be taken as ‘any possible triangle’ or the possibility of triangles as such. In this way, any judgment about the phantasized triangle becomes an a priori judgment about triangles in general.”27 Jansen maintains that phantasy makes possible the elaboration of “models” of experience in general, and she goes so as far as to claim the following: [W]hat becomes evident in Husserl’s phenomenological account of phantasy is that it fulfills a transcendental function, again very much in the Kantian sense: it deals with “our way of cognizing objects in general in so far as that way of cognizing is to be possible a priori.” Husserl thus clarifies phantasy as one of the crucial moments of his own method and as one of the assumptions on which the experimental sciences are based. A phenomenology of phantasy therefore truly is first philosophy.28 For Annabelle Dufourcq, too, the objects of Husserlian phantasy must be compared to Kantian schemata. For her, there is no doubt that the latter point toward Husserl’s notion of a non-conceptual grasp of ideal generalities.29 Although it is easy to concur with Jansen and Dufourcq in their desire to establish the phenomenology of phantasy as first philosophy, and although the type of convergence that they propose clearly has philosophical potential, it is not in fact the right approach to the problematic here. The Kantian and the Husserlian perspectives diverge in that Kant’s transcendental imagination makes possible the experience of the object understood as “something” (just as the schematism makes possible judgments of experience), whereas Husserlian phantasy is, first and foremost, a possible experience itself. Indeed, it is the specific experience of the possible – the latter understood as a wavering between “something” and “nothing.” This is a very significant nuance, but one which often appears to be overlooked. Thus, in Husserl, it seems impossible to demonstrate the phantasy’s constitutive character of every reality. Yet Dufourcq maintains that Husserl sees the possibilities of phantasy as unambiguously constitutive of reality, so that possibilities are necessarily objects of experience.30 But although it is true that precisely because they are objects of experience, the possibilities discussed by Husserl are constituents of reality, this does not mean that they are constitutive of reality. Once again, the nuance is very important.

26 J. Jansen, “On the Development of Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology of Imagination and Its Use for Interdisciplinary Research,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005): 126. 27 Ibid., 126–127. 28 Ibid., 127. 29 A. Dufourcq, La Dimension imaginaire du réel dans la philosophie de Husserl (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 128–129. 30 Ibid., 129.

Imagination and indeterminacy  297 This is why it seems preferable to show that the specific grammar of Husserlian imagination provides a means to highlight a dimension of objective indeterminacy that Kantian transcendentalism thematizes forcefully, but from various different perspectives that are not necessarily connected to the Kantian doctrine of the imagination. Moreover, the latter offers no description of what, among other things, an intentional experience would be. Instead, it has the goal of showing how knowledge is “made possible” by the imagination’s “management” of the consequences of an indeterminacy that it itself does not generate, but instead receives from elsewhere. The advantage of the Husserlian descriptive point of view is that it brings into the world, with the aid of the imagination, the encounter with the problematic object that Kant sees as an architectonic necessity only accessible through disembodied reflection. Husserl’s greatest strength is that he succeeds, again through the imagination, in placing the experience of alteration and modification at the heart of human experience. This is what now has to be shown. As early as the Logical Investigations (1900–1901), Husserl attributes a certain autonomy to the imagination by making it a type of intentional act distinct from perception. To be more precise, he describes the imagination as an “intuitive representation (anschauliche Vergegenwärtigung),” meaning by this that it makes what is absent present in images. To do this, the imagination must reproduce primary intuitive presentations, so that – through this mediating reproduction – it remains subordinate to the givenness “in person” (leibhaftige Gegebenheit) characteristic of what Husserl sees as the primary intentional act: perception. In this initial conceptualization, knowledge is seen as founded on the act of fulfillment. This means that perception and imagination are both types of intuitive fulfillment. However, this type of fulfillment does not suffice to produce knowledge, for a further act of signification must be synthesized with the act of intuition for a consciousness of identification to arise. Indeed, both in perception and imagination, the presence of the object given in intuition must be identified with the object of a pure intention of signification. In this way, Husserl escapes, right from the start, the Kantian dualism of sense and intellect. That being said, the way in which perception and imagination carry out their respective fulfillments differs in accordance with the type of “presence” belonging to the object originally given: Imagination (Imagination) fulfills itself through the peculiar synthesis of imageresemblance (Bildähnlichkeit), perception through the synthesis of identical thinghood (der sachlichen Identität). The thing establishes itself through its very “self,” in so far as it shows itself from varying sides while remaining one and the same.31 This passage from §14 of the Sixth Logical Investigation relies on the distinction that Husserl makes between the sign (Zeichen) and the image (Bild). In perception, the thing itself is given “in person.” The signification of this thing depends on signs that are correlated with it in a contingent manner, but this is not the case for the image of this thing, since it relies on the ancient analogon: it represents the thing analogically and, as a result, it must resemble it. Therefore, the image does in fact have an epistemic

31 E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Bd II, Elemente einer phänomenologischen Aufklärung der Erkenntnis, Hua XIX/2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 56; English edition: Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, Vol. 2 (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), 220.

298  Augustin Dumont function, but the mimetic power, in terms of which its capacity to generate a fulfillment must be measured, is completely dependent on the perception that has alone provided the object to imitate. It is precisely because of this dependence on the intuitive sphere that the imagination functions through adumbrations, sometimes even to the point of seeking to complete a fulfillment of perceptive syntheses that have remained unfinished. Nevertheless, there is already a place, in 1900–1901, for a more immediate and more independent imagination: Phantasie, although Husserl has not yet systematically distinguished between image consciousness and phantasy.32 Over time, Husserl’s description of the act of imagining is filled out considerably as he moves away from the approach to intentional acts that treats them as if they were static and cut off from the vital dynamic that drives them to connect together with each other. If the imagination constitutes a specific intentional structure, one that aims explicitly at absence, how could phenomenology be authorized to reduce the latter to an absence of any givenness “in person,” which would be to define imagination as a mere lack of perception? Is it not the case that the imagination has always already veered toward an objectivity that is structurally irreducible to perception and that it is necessary to see in this an essential dimension of the “life” of consciousness? The texts collected in volume 23 of the Husserliana add a great deal of complexity to the phenomenological approach to imagination. The three interconnected concepts of Bildding, Bildobjekt, and Bildsujet, which Husserl uses to characterize image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) in its specific form as a “consciousness of conflict (Widerstreitsbewusstsein),” will not concern us here.33 These concepts allow him to qualify the interlaced whole formed by the image as physical thing (the canvas), the image object as the support for an image world (the pictorial traits that depict the represented object), and the object that is signified as the “subject” of the work (the landscape), and to show that this whole embodies in itself a form of constant negotiation between the perceptual field and the image field with its unreal object. However, Phantasie is not at all affected by this conflict,34 for it is entirely free of any reference to a Bildding, so that only the image object and the image subject (the representation of the Berlin Palace that floats before one’s eyes and the

32 As John Sallis remarks, this absence of clarification paralyzes to a certain extent Husserl’s critique of Bildertheorie in the Fifth Logical Investigation. For Husserl, consciousness of anything like an image necessarily presupposes that something has been originally given in perception, but not that any consciousness of an object must be thought in terms of an internal image. That being said, “the image on which the image-theory would found perception would – if there were such – have a character like that of a phantasy image.” J. Sallis, “Spacing Imagination,” in Eros and Eris: Contributions to a Hermeneutical Phenomenology, ed. P. Van Tongeren, P. Sars, Ch. Bremmers and K. Boey (Dordrecht: Springer, 1992), 214. 33 E. Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung: Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen, ed. E. Marbach, Hua XXIII (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 88; English edition: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. J. B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 95. 34 However, reference must be made here to what Husserl calls “perceptual phantasies.” See Doyon’s paper in this issue (4.2) and M. Summa, “Experiencing Reality and Fiction: Discontinuity and Permeability,” in Imagination and Social Perspectives. Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, ed. M. Summa, Th. Fuchs and L. Vanzago (London: Routledge, 2017), 7.

Imagination and indeterminacy  299 palace itself as theme of this Phantasiebild) must be coordinated. This is the position that emerges in the first analyses of 1904–1905: [I]n phantasy presentation . . . we have two apprehensions, one built on the other, constituting two objects; namely, the phantasy image that appears and the object presented pictorially, the image subject, which is presented precisely by means of the image. The meaning belongs to the complete phantasy presentation, however, and is directed toward the image subject.35 Thus Phantasie has the advantage of a double apprehension (one that has in view both the image subject and the phantasy image). In this sense, it might be seen as superior to perception, for perceptual representation lacks the mediacy offered by phantasy presentation, which always has in view two objects at the same time. In the same way as perception – yet contrary to image consciousness – phantasy consists in a direct apprehension, but one that is just as dual as its object. Without a reference to immediately given sensations (the unique support for perception), Phantasie relies on phantasmata, that is, on sensations that are modified from the outset – which brings us back to the Kantian notion of Modifikation, although the form of modification in question occurs independently of perception. This is the reason that Phantasie is a non-positional consciousness. In short, relying on phantasmata instead of on sensations connected to something given “in person,” imagining consciousness is free to take as its theme either the Phantasiebild or the image subject, each one mediated by the other one and almost merging with it. However, Husserl is clearly hesitant with respect to the semantics and the structural frame that he uses to think the imagination. At the beginning of text no. 1 in Hua 23 (1904–1905), he describes the image object specific to phantasy (and to image consciousness) as a “nothing (Nichts),”36 that is, as an appearance without any ontological content, but since the image object, which “bears on itself the brand of nullity,”37 merges in the end with the image subject, he no longer needs to make reference to the tripartite structure of image consciousness. At the end of the 1904–1905 course and subsequently, Husserl attributes absolute immediacy to pure Phantasie and it is, on the contrary, image consciousness that becomes an enhanced form of Phantasie involving a physical thing as well as a particular reference structure. In chapter 5 of text no. 1, Husserl indicates that he has become persuaded of this point definitely: the conceptual range of the term Bild no longer appears adequate for treating phantasy (or even image consciousness in general). Thus it becomes clear that phantasy representation does not have an image object, not even in the sense of an evanescent fictum, and Husserl goes so far as to state that “the ‘phantasy image’ is not an image that establishes itself in the midst of the actual reality of the present.”38 This means that imagining consciousness is completely free to re-present its theme as it will, its autonomy guaranteed by its as-if intentional modality. Indeed, phantasy

35 36 37 38

Hua XXIII, 24, trans. 25. Ibid., 22, trans. 23. Ibid., 56, trans. 61. Ibid., 54, trans. 59.

300  Augustin Dumont representation is quasi-perception: in this form of representation it is “as if” perception actually occurred. Leaving behind the copy-image (Abbild) model, Husserl can now show that Phantasie does not have to reproduce the perceived object or even to resemble it, although the image subject apprehended through the image, whether it is purely mental or actually based on a physical thing, can resemble a worldly being in any way it likes. How is this possible given that this intentional act was described as a consciousness of reproduction? In reality – and this is an essential point for what follows – phantasy only reproduces possible sensations and perceptions. Since the subject also has a perceptual life, it can empirically distinguish between a plausible intuition (the table) and an implausible one (the unicorn). However, Phantasie itself is only responsible for determining what has the value of pure possibility for it. This is because a phantasy thing appears “in an entirely different world, which is completely separated from the world of the actual present.”39 Phantasy actually does “reproduce” perceptual consciousness, but this is in order to modify it, to distort it, and to disrupt it from the outset by substituting the possible for the real. Separated from any interest in an actual reality whose content has been neutralized, imagining consciousness pursues its explorations in the as-if mode, freed from any commitment to perception, which it is under no obligation to imitate. At first sight, such freedom appears to safeguard Phantasie against any possible conflict, but as Husserl progresses in his analyses, he begins to doubt whether it is in fact able to do so. Instead of disappearing, the conflict is displaced: the same consciousness is present here and now in its act of imagining and yet absent from the phantasy representation itself, which is freed from the spatio-temporality belonging to sensation. The present consciousness of what is not present splits subjectivity in two because of the intra-temporal conflict. Moreover, the as-if character can turn back on that which is actually given and contaminate it (something that necessarily occurs in mixed phantasy according to Husserl). Not only that, it also seems that phantasy is able – through its continual “shifting” and even if the latter remains completely immanent in the phantasy image – to force the entire life of consciousness to reorder itself constantly. This is precisely what Husserl suggests at the end of the last appendix to text no. 20 (probably toward the middle of the twenties): In a certain sense, I can view anything as an “image.” I inhibit all actual belief; I have no interest in the thing’s reality and take it as an image, as “mountain” – specifically in this mode of appearance, as valuable to me in this way . . . Here too I have conflict; I exclude reality. In mixed phantasy not everything turns into the as-if, but the as-if character does infect what is actually given, since it is to a certain extent existing and to a certain extent merely a semblance effected in reproduction, although not, of course, a present semblance. Is there not conflict in all phantasy, even in pure phantasy? With perceptions, with memories, with anticipations? I inhibit all world positing. But does not every phantasy have some place or other, something or other, that contests it?40

39 Ibid., 58, trans. 62. 40 Ibid., 593, trans. 713–714.

Imagination and indeterminacy  301 Discontinuity and even conflict characterize phantasy, whether it is in the experience of a pure image (with the subject aware of a sharp division between absence and presence) or in the experience of the articulation between the worlds of perception, remembering, and imagination. In chapter 5 of the third part of the 1904–1905 course, the philosopher dwells on this discontinuity, emphasizing the protean character of phantasy appearance. The unity of an image is never conserved through time and always remains a mere outline. Of course, consciousness strives to give synthetic unity to the representation, but this developing unity is continually interrupted because the object of the appearance constantly changes form. Here the issue is not the multiplicity of adumbrations making it possible to vary the apprehension of the perceptual object, for it is the primary phantasy object as such that is unstable. This is the reason that phantasy blocks out perception and vice versa. Indeed, because phantasy resists the chain of protentions, impressions, and retentions, and because it has to grapple with its unconstituted primary object, it is impossible for it to occur at the same time as perception, whose structure develops out of the “now” within which the primary object constitutes itself. Therefore, given that phantasy does not depend on any pre-constituted objectivity, Alexander Schnell is surely right to argue that it involves a constituting temporality and not the constituted temporality characteristic of perception.41 This result is of prime interest to the present problematic. A constituting – as opposed to a constituted – temporality is not mediated by a “now,” which means that it is only as an aftereffect of reflection that the phantasy object becomes present.42 It is precisely because phantasy apprehends its object immediately, without building on even the slightest originary presence, that Husserl stops using the schema “content of apprehension-apprehension.” When consciousness perceives a color or represents it in phantasy, it is not for consciousness a completely undetermined content waiting for an apprehensive structure to bring it to life and give it either a perceptive or an imaginative meaning, as if the color as an object of sensation were identical to the color as a phantasma. In reality, these two experiences are totally independent of each other, the one being founded on presence and the other on absence. The phantasy experience is completely founded on absence. Indeed, Husserl explains in text no. 8 (1909) that phantasy is “modification through and through,”43 that it is “reproductively modified consciousness of the present, consciousness of what is there itself as it were, of what is present as it were, of the phantasy present.”44 In phantasy, the consciousness of what is present is reproductively modified at the root; it is, in the absence of any sense datum, a consciousness that reproduces possible sensations and possible perceptions. In Kantian terms, the object of such a consciousness is neither something (in the sense of something given in intuition), nor nothing, for despite its unreality, Husserl sees it as entering the world (not to mention the fact that for him the phantasy object always remains a potential perception). In other words, although it is a problematic object

41 A. Schnell, Husserl et les fondements de la phénoménologie constructive (Grenoble: Jérôme Million, 2007), 140. 42 See Hua XXIII, 268, trans. 326. In this sense, it is perception that becomes a mediated consciousness, not imagination. 43 Ibid., 268, trans. 326. 44 Ibid., 266, trans. 323 (italics in the text).

302  Augustin Dumont that precedes the distinction between something and nothing, it is nevertheless in the world and, as such, does not precede the distinction between the possible and the impossible. On the contrary, it is radically possible. This notion of pure possibility finds support in the dimension of neutrality proper to the act of imagining: the possible is neither a type of being nor a type of non-being. As has been frequently emphasized, this dimension of neutrality makes phantasy similar to the phenomenological ἐποχή, although phantasy is invention and represents, on this account, a form of commitment to existence as well as a certain investment in it. Since it is the self-consciousness – the “radically modified” reproduction – of the very act of relating to the world in a sense perception mode, phantasy has always already transformed the perception of an individual object into a creation of an object that is “de jure” perceptible, that is, into an investment in an object whose status remains problematic. This creative dimension proper to Phantasie also allows Husserl to thematize the method of eidetic variation. The latter cannot be adequately treated here even though it is clearly related to imagination. It is important to mention, nonetheless, that for Husserl the eidetic laws of description are revealed through the exercise of variation as it functions in pure imagination. This methodological procedure allows phenomenologists to confront their apprehension of essences with imaginary counterexamples that have the potential to falsify them and thus to enrich eidetic description and make it more precise at the very same time. For some commentators, this imaginative exercise provides Husserl’s transcendental philosophy with a genuinely scientific approach to problems, one that even allows it to satisfy the Popperian criterion of scientificity: falsifiability.45 However, the primacy of perception reemerges as a fundamental issue in imaginative variation, for the latter must remain faithful to what Husserl calls, in Experience and Judgment, the “style” of the object. In other words, when practicing imaginative variation, we let ourselves be continually guided by the initial perception with the objective sense established in it – but established only in such a way that this sense, with its actually and properly intuitive content, prescribes the style of the subsequent content of intuitive experience in conformity with the horizon, in the mode of a general determinability which is not an arbitrary determinability but one according to rule.46 Therefore, there is in fact a form of creativity specific to the exercise of imaginative variation, but it is governed by the style of the perceived object. For our problematic, it will be necessary to push Husserl’s text to its conceptual limits by raising the possibility of an imagination that would be capable of giving impetus to a style in the actual perception of an object. At the same time, it will be necessary to explain the risks involved in such an interpretation.

45  R. Sowa, “Wesen und Wesensgesetze in der deskriptiven Eidetik Edmund Husserls,” Phänomenologische Forschungen (2007): 37. For imagination and eidetic variation, see also A. S. Aldea, “Phenomenology as Critique – Teleological-Historical Reflection and Husserl’s Transcendental Eidetics,” Husserl Studies 32 (2016): 21–46. 46 E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (London: Routledge, 1973), 361.

Imagination and indeterminacy  303 In any event, it is clear that by investing its representations with existence, imagination contaminates the entire conscious experience and upsets the flow of “nows” without, however, being structurally dependent on any particular “now.” This structural independence allows consciousness to constitute an object that is possible in itself, but in doing so, consciousness does not in fact constitute anything – for this object is the “nothing” of a quasi-now (a “nothing” that is nevertheless in the world). There is a presence – that of the object in its very unreality – but since this phantasy object has no impressional “weight,” Husserl characterizes it in a way suggesting that it is “weightless.” Indeed, whenever he describes the imaginative experience of this phantasy object, he uses a particularly vivid term: Vorschweben,47 which means “a hovering before.” Although in text no. 15 (1912) Husserl notes that it is “an ambiguous term,”48 he uses it constantly in Hua XXIII to refer to the specific mode of presence of the objects of imaginative experience. Later, when he attempts to characterize the crisis of contemporary civilization, he shows – perhaps reluctantly – that at its core the experience of the world is as an experience of continual crisis, for it involves a “hovering” of the world itself.49 This suggests that the entire world may be dependent on Phantasie, that is to say, on what Husserl calls a pure possibility in text no. 19 (1922–1923): A possibility is posited when anything at all with such and such a sense is posited as something that can be realized by phantasy intuition as correspondingly experienceable with that sense. The experience “in” phantasy is itself a possible experience. A pure possibility would be a possibility in which no individual reality is co-posited as actual; a pure possibility is therefore anything objective that becomes constituted exclusively by phantasying quasi-experience.50 Husserl stresses that the quasi-experience occurring “in” phantasy constitutes a possible experience whose distinctive feature is indeterminacy. This is because, contrary to perception, which progressively elaborates significations on the basis of an “original sense,”51 “the phantasy possibility is necessarily indeterminate as far as the degree of clarity and obscurity is concerned.”52 A process of clarification also takes place with phantasy, but it is not built up from the inherent meaning of what is given “in person.” In other words, the sense of phantasy is fulfilled by invention. Moreover, Husserl suggests that as a possible pure experience of an originally indeterminate sense

47 Husserl probably did not know that this was one of the most important concepts in Fichte’s first philosophy. Discreetly present in Kant, the schwebend character of the transcendental imagination is highlighted and developed in much greater depth by Fichte, and this led the first generation of Romantics to become keenly interested in it. See R. Loock, Schwebende Einbildungskraft: Konzeptionen theoretischer Freiheit in der Philosophie Kants, Fichtes und Schellings (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007). 48 Hua XXIII, 347, trans. 419. 49 See Hua VI, 159, trans. 156. 50 Hua XXIII, 548, trans. 661 (modified). 51 Ibid., 550, trans. 663. 52 Ibid.

304  Augustin Dumont that remains to be constructed and invented, phantasy may in fact be constitutive of time independently of the original impression, simply by virtue of its fulfillment of the protention. In giving a merely possible present, phantasy does not give any actual present, any individual present. Instead it gives an anonymous one.

Conclusion This reading of Husserl has established four key points: (1) Phantasy functions as a strictly “constituting” act, for it constitutes a “now” that is completely independent of anything given as presence, a “now” that is, as it were, a “hovering nothing.” In other words, although phantasy constitutes its “now,” it is not constitutive of “reality.” (2) Phantasy is a consciousness of reproduction – which means, at the same time, a consciousness of creation – whose very principle entails an autonomous modification that transforms the real into the possible, a modification that phantasy initiates by entering the mode of the as-if. The phantasy object always belongs, therefore, to the realm of the possible, but it does not constitute, in the Kantian sense of these terms, either something or nothing – for although it is not given “in person,” it is “in the world.” (3) The phantasy object is indeterminate, unstable, and by its very essence ready to receive any form. As a result, phantasy consciousness works at bringing unity to the representation; however, like its object, this representation always remains unstable. (4) The representation carried out by phantasy brings to self-consciousness the act itself of relating to an object through sense perception in general, the reproductive character of phantasy being similar to a reflection on the very possibilization of the object – to a reflection on that which constitutes a sense experience “by right” – when considered independently of any givenness (Gegebenheit). In other words, contrary to perception, which is completely incapable of this, the representation of phantasy makes it possible to list the elements that subjectivity itself freely puts into the representation, for example, speed, lability, conflict, unity formation and dissolution, and apprehension by adumbrations. In the above discussion of Husserlian phantasy, there was an appeal to the Kantian quaestio juris. Indeed, it seems clear that we should interpret this act of imagination as a form of spontaneous amphibolous reflection that allows natural consciousness to remind itself of a fundamental truth: although it is not master of the real, it always has the prerogative of the possible. These four points have been established. Nevertheless, it still appears impossible to find adequate support in Husserl to argue for the primacy of the imagination understood as the originally problematic possibilization of our relation to the world in general, where perception – from the perception of a color to the “perception” of a social injustice (for example) – would be, as it were, the stabilized deposit corresponding to this relation rather than its source. Reversing the order of priorities would be extremely difficult in a Husserlian context, as can be seen from the grammar of the as-if, and this limits from the very start the degree of autonomy that can be attributed to the imagination.53 Indeed, Husserl firmly adheres to a descriptive framework that

53 Marc Richir is one of the post-Husserlian phenomenologists who has pushed the critique of the primacy of perception the furthest while at the same time according unprecedented importance to the imagination. Phantasie allows Richir to conceptualize the originary

Imagination and indeterminacy  305 provides no way of showing that the perception of an object cannot be real if it is not first of all possible and thus imaginable, and no way of showing that as a consequence the consciousness of reproduction precedes by right – but in an apparently contradictory manner – the consciousness of presentation.54 On the other hand, Husserl shows that the experience of modification belongs by right to the imagining consciousness, which is an important gain with respect to Kant. However, he does not demonstrate that the modification transforming real perception into possible perception must be able to be thought as reversible. This reversibility would signify that real perception could occur as a result of such a modification. The imaginary projection of the possible would be modified to receive the real, and then the perceived object would be the end product of a process of stabilization begun in Phantasie, whose purely possible object “hovers” in its primary instability. Yet it is clear that Husserl would not tolerate such a position. For him, the quasi-experience of phantasy does not make possible sense experience in general. It constitutes a possible experience by constituting a “now” that is free of all sensation, but it does not constitute the possibility of experience as such. Nevertheless, in constituting a possible experience, it stands in sharp contrast to the Kantian transcendental imagination, which cannot bring about any alteration at all to primary sense experience. That being said, Husserl’s main conception of the imagination clearly indicates that it lacks real experience, just as its general temporality lacks actual individual temporality. There is no question that it would be possible to relativize this conception of the imagination by exploiting the tensions in the Husserlian corpus more than has been done here. These tensions testify to the fact that Husserl himself sometimes has difficulty accepting that perception and its object as present should retain their primacy. Thus it might be possible to draw on the Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, which reveal that despite its indifference to givenness “in person,” Phantasie is characterized by prospection, waiting, and anticipation. Although he does so hesitantly, Husserl indicates that there may very well be a teleological dynamic proper to pure phantasy, and this suggests that it may also be necessary to conceive of pure phantasy as “motivated” and not merely “neutral.”55 Moreover, all perception carries a halo of absence, so that sensation – the supposedly purest presence – has a fundamental dimension of absence corresponding to a “not-now,” as if all givenness were subject to a “shading off (Abschattung)”56 that might be shown to depend on Phantasie (although the dependence might remain discreet).

emergence of pure phenomenality, but this makes it necessary for him to place it outside the realm of intentionality. See M. Richir, Phénoménologie en esquisse. Nouvelles fondations (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2000) and Phantasia, imagination, affectivité (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2003). 54 Along with the primacy of the formal a priori, it is certainly possible to interpret Husserl as maintaining the primacy of signification over intuition, but the discussion here is focused instead on the question of the co-originarity of imagination and sense. 55 Smaranda Aldea argues for this position in her article in this issue of the New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. 56  Hua X, 47; English Edition: Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. J. B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 49.

306  Augustin Dumont Yet this type of amicable arrangement with texts runs the risk of failing to heed what can rightly be called phenomenology’s key teaching, namely that from the descriptive point of view, the sense of cognitive acts does not appear until their proximal and/or distant relation to what is given “in person” has been brought to light. If, when all is said and done, Husserlian phenomenology can only support our initial hypothesis to a limited extent, this is because the exercise of description “naturally” compels phenomenologists to start from experiences that are anchored in objective space and time, and to characterize fleeting, fluctuating, and/or constantly changing experiences as experiences that lack this grounding in the common world. The primacy of sensation over the phantasma could be understood as a kind of precaution – one that would be metaphysical in the end since it would not be phenomenologically justified – if Husserl did not have good reason to proceed as he does. Indeed, postulating the primacy of the phantasma would not be sufficient, for it would also be necessary to explain the origin of its material content. Of course, the phantasma is a sensation that has been modified “through and through” – one that has become a pure possibility – but this means that it is a modified sensation of “something” whose givenness “in person,” at some definite point in time, at least represents the horizon of the phantasy experience, for the phantasm “has the characteristic of the not now, of the not there itself”57 of a sense experience. As Peter Shum has noted, this plainly signifies that “every phantasm bears within it a relation to a particular sensation.”58 Beyond Husserl’s explicit positions, the path he follows over the course of three decades of phenomenological research shows that primary objectivity can only be conceived as fundamentally unstable if we assume that the imagination is involved in the relation to every object – from the perceptual object to the Kantian Gegenstand überhaupt – and that it has the capacity to modify “by degrees” any such relation. Moreover, this capacity to modify cannot be conceived as ontologically distinct from Husserl’s notion of givenness (Gegebenheit), which is rightly considered essential to any transcendental philosophy worthy of its name. But that is another story.

57 Hua XXIII, 169, trans. 204. 58 P. Shum, “The Evolution and Implications of Husserl’s Account of the Imagination,” in Husserl Studies 31 (2015): 228.

Part III Varia

19 Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics as the ultimate science of reality Emiliano Trizio

Abstract: This article reconstructs the development of Husserl’s definition of metaphysics as the ultimate science of reality in the courses and lectures written up to the year 1905. The analysis of these texts casts light on Husserl’s philosophical self-understanding in the wider context of late nineteenth-century German philosophy as well as on the fundamental role that metaphysical interests played in the development of his thought from its earliest stage. A particular attention is devoted to Husserl’s early views about the relation between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics, whose analysis is a necessary preliminary step to address the theoretical issue of the relation between transcendental phenomenology and metaphysics. Keywords: Husserl, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, phenomenology

1. Introduction The relation between Husserl’s thought and metaphysics has been approached in a number of different ways. The questions that, by far, have attracted more attention since Husserl’s own time revolve around the so-called metaphysical neutrality of phenomenology. In particular, readers of Husserl have tried to understand whether pre-transcendental phenomenology could be considered in some sense “metaphysically neutral”1 and whether and to what extent the transcendental turn implies forsaking such neutrality or, perhaps, even embracing a form of metaphysical idealism. Consequently, a number of publications address questions such as whether phenomenological idealism is itself a metaphysical thesis, or whether it has metaphysical implications at all.2 Directly related to this series of investigations, there lies the general theoretical issue of understanding whether Husserl’s phenomenology implies the adherence to the metaphysics of presence,3 as Heidegger maintained, and whether this is to be deemed as a fatal flaw undermining Husserl’s entire project. More recently, the metaphysical

1 See, for instance, Benoist 1997, Zahavi 2001. 2 For an earlier strong metaphysical reading of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, see Landgrebe 1949, and, more recently, Moran 2005. Attempts to underplay the metaphysical implications of phenomenology are to be found in Carr 1999, Crowel 2001. On this question, see also Zahavi 2002, 2010, and Zahavi and Boucher 2008. For a systematic criticism of the misunderstandings surrounding the notion of phenomenological absolute, see Majolino 2016. 3 See Bernet 1982.

310  Emiliano Trizio implications of Husserl’s phenomenology have been also explored in relation to the by now not so recent revival of metaphysics within analytic philosophy. In this sense, for instance, one has discussed the relevance of phenomenological descriptions for the analytic debates concerning the so-called “metaphysics of consciousness.”4 Since these investigations are often motivated by the desire to situate Husserl’s thought in the context of contemporary philosophy, thereby probing its relevance or fruitfulness for current debates, it is not surprising that the vast majority of the literature in this field should question the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics, so to speak, from the outside, i.e., by employing the word “metaphysics” in one or another among its pre- or extra-phenomenological senses. In this paper, I will second the choice of those who take the opposite path, and try to contribute to the exploration of Husserl’s own notion of metaphysics, as a preliminary step to any theoretical assessment of the metaphysical implications of transcendental phenomenology.5 More precisely, I will analyze the genesis of the chronologically first sense in which Husserl himself employed this term, namely, metaphysics as the ultimate science of reality. It is my hope that this kind of investigation will eventually help cast light on the general issues I have briefly outlined above, which will constitute the broader horizon surrounding this paper. Husserl often spoke about metaphysics at least in two different senses: (1) the conversion of the empirical sciences of nature and spirit into the ultimate sciences of reality by means of a systematic philosophical critique of their presuppositions as well as their results and (2) the reconsideration of the world of nature and spirit from an ethical, teleological and theological sense.6 In a famous and often quoted formulation, Husserl characterizes the second layer of metaphysical analyses, as the research concerning the problematic of “the irrationality of the transcendental fact that emerges in the constitution of the factual world and of spiritual life: thus, metaphysics in a new sense.”7 This problematic is connected with what, in a number of texts from the Cartesian Mediations to the Krisis, Husserl calls the “highest and ultimate questions” concerning morality, religion and the problems of the sense of human existence, of history and of the entire word.8 Now, the limited aim of this paper is to focus on the early versions of the first aforementioned concept of metaphysics, which Husserl develops in the unpublished lectures and courses up to the year 1905, i.e., at the time Husserl was moving away from the approach of the Logical Investigations and was developing the insights that would lead to transcendental phenomenology. A point of interests of these writings is that, in contrast with the Logical Investigations, where metaphysical problems are mentioned only in passing and without offering a general characterization of their nature, they contain explicit attempts to define the scope of metaphysics as a science. I will show that the first versions of this notion of metaphysics were already at work before the

4 See, for instance, Marbach 2010. 5 See, for instance, Bancalari 2010, and De Santis’ 2018 article on metaphysics in the Cartesian Meditations. On the relation between metaphysics and the crisis of European sciences, see Trizio 2016. 6 See, for instance, Hua XXVIII, 182; Hua VII, 187–188. 7 Hua VII, 188. 8 For instance Hua VI, 6–7.

Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics  311 Logical Investigations, and that in the years following the publication of this work, Husserl develops a complex (albeit provisional and still incomplete) account of metaphysics that allows us to appreciate the central role of this kind of researches for the elaboration of his entire philosophy.

2.  Husserl’s first formulations of the concept of metaphysics Some hints about the metaphysical problems arising from the critical analysis of empirical sciences are to be found as early as 1892–93 in the texts that Husserl wrote in view of the publication of a volume on the concept of space (the so-called Raumbuch), which never saw the light of the day.9 However, while these texts mention metaphysical problems in a way that is fully compatible with Husserl’s subsequent treatments of the problem, they contain no general and explicit formulation of the nature and task of metaphysics. For an early explicit statement concerning the nature of metaphysics, we can instead turn to the Logik Vorlesung 1896, in which, while characterizing the nature of pure logic as the science of science, Husserl evokes an issue that will play a fundamental role throughout his career, up until the Krisis, namely that of the incompleteness of the sciences, and, specifically of the empirical sciences. After claiming that those sciences are unable, by themselves, to satisfy our theoretical interest for reality,10 Husserl explains that they need, in the first place, a clarification of their metaphysical presuppositions. Among the latter, Husserl includes: that there is an external world, which is spread out in space and time, that all real change obeys the law of causality, that something contradictory could not exist in reality, etc.; presuppositions that are in part extraordinarily rich in content. I only recall the assumption of a real space having the character of tridimensional Euclidean manifold with that immense wealth of laws that the Euclidean Geometry teaches.11 This list of presuppositions looks, in the face of it, rather heteroclite, because it contains assumptions concerning the existence of the world (i.e., a matter of fact, albeit a singularly significant one), its causal order and the specific structure of its spatiotemporal form (which, in Husserl’s language will always count as synthetic a priori principles), as well as a purely formal principle stemming from the objective conversion of the principle of contradiction as it is formulated in the realm of pure significations, namely a formal-ontological principle (i.e., analytic). However, it is clear that these assumptions are needed in order to provide a general characterization of what all empirical sciences take for granted in their theoretical exploration of the totality of real being of which each of them investigates but a single portion. As Husserl’s preoccupation is to characterize metaphysics as a science, it follows that metaphysics must

  9 For instance, Hua XXI, 265 and 270–271 where Husserl defines the metaphysical problems of space as those concerning the reality corresponding to our representation of space. 10 “We have to acknowledge as an important fact that all sciences, as they exist now, lack the systematic completion, the adequate theoretical foundation that we must demand from them in the interest of a full intellectual satisfaction.” Mat I, 4. 11 Mat I, 5.

312  Emiliano Trizio consist in a unitary theoretical body corresponding to a unitary object-domain, rather than in a disconnected series of foundational/critical investigations that could be carried out in the framework of multiple already existing sciences. Accordingly, he adds that the mere fact that those presuppositions lie at the basis of all empirical sciences and thus concern the whole of reality, and, further, that they cannot become an object of investigation by adopting the same methods used by those sciences entails that a science of a new type is called for.12 However, the fact that these presuppositions are not studied by the different sciences, while implying that investigations based on new methods are called for, does not already establish that a unitary discipline will encompass the study of this cluster of presuppositions. In the next sections, we will see that clarifying the scope and unity of metaphysics will constitute a significant challenge in the following years of Husserl’s philosophical activity. Husserl’s characterization of this science in the Logik Vorlesung 1896 will provide the real starting point of this study: Nowadays it is usually called theory of knowledge, but it is essentially identical, or identical in part to the time-honored metaphysics, to Aristotle’s First Philosophy. One only gladly avoids a name that has gained a bad aftertaste through the empty heresies of our century. The sciences need, thus, in the first place a metaphysical foundation. By this, one does not mean in the least a dialectical elaboration of the results of these sciences out of an abstract mysticism of the concept, rather, one means, much more modestly and fruitfully, a sober clarification and examination of those general presuppositions that the sciences of reality put forward about real being, and in a progressive scientific work, the production of the most mature and ultimate knowledge of real being, of its elements, forms, and laws, which the current state of the individual sciences, of the deutera philosophia, as Aristotle calls them, allows.13 Husserl claims that this sought-for science is, in his time, habitually referred to as the theory of knowledge, although it is either identical or identical in part with the time-honored metaphysics, that Aristotle called first philosophy. It is important to stress that while this passage seems to suggest that the theory of knowledge is in fact identical or partly identical with metaphysics (the latter, as we shall see, will indeed be Husserl’s own position, at least in some sense and for some time), when taken literally, it actually contains a weaker claim. This claim is that the science dealing with the aforementioned presuppositions of empirical sciences concerning real being is today named theory of knowledge, while that science is identical or partly identical with good old metaphysics or first philosophy. In point of logic, this claim is even compatible with a restrictive redefinition of the theory of knowledge that would altogether expunge metaphysical questions thus understood from its scope. What is still missing, in other words, is an explicit delimitation of the fields of the theory of knowledge and metaphysics. Instead, Husserl makes the following terminological point that is functional to his intention of rescuing the term metaphysics from the disrepute brought

12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.

Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics  313 upon it14: without yet providing a full account of the actual relations existing between the theory of knowledge and the science whose task is to clarify the presuppositions about real being underlying the sciences of the world, one has to acknowledge that that science deserves to be called metaphysics, no matter how much its questions tend to be regarded today as belonging to the theory of knowledge. We will have shortly the opportunity to see to what extent Husserl does not share the disdainful attitude of many of his contemporaries for the word metaphysics, and for what it evokes. For the moment, it is important to stress that this metaphysical foundation of science does not consist in what Husserl calls “dialectical elaboration” (“dialektische Herausspinnung”) of the results of the sciences, but to the already mentioned clarification and grounding of “those general presuppositions that the sciences of reality put forward about real being,” followed by a critical work that, so to speak, distills from the results of the special sciences the implications for the portions of being they investigate, in other words, what is their current contribution to the ultimate knowledge of reality. This being said, we still need to come to a better understanding of the notion of metaphysics thus understood, as well as of its unity as a science, and, on the basis of the passage just quoted, we know that this can be accomplished only by clarifying the relations between metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. Husserl’s solution to this problem will be the main subject of the next two sections.

3. Theory of knowledge and metaphysics in the years preceding the publication of the Logical Investigations A text dated 1898/99 and reproduced in the third of the Materialbände under the title Aus der Einleitung der Vorlesung “Erkenntnistheorie und Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik” is of fundamental importance to reconstruct the evolution of Husserl’s attitude towards metaphysics as well as to begin addressing the issues mentioned at the end of the previous section. Furthermore, it provides precious elements to trace the remarkable continuity with which this connection has hiddenly motivated so much of Husserl’s intellectual development. In addition, we find here succinct and clear, albeit unoriginal sketches of the philosophical moods dominating German speaking philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century, supplemented by emphatic statements of Husserl’s own attitude towards it, which cast light of what his goals were already before the publication of the Logical Investigations. The aim of these lectures is explicitly declared a few pages after the beginning, namely to present the theory of knowledge as the most fundamental philosophical discipline and to clarify a number of key-points of metaphysics (“Hauptunkte”) that stand next (“nächststehender”) to the theory of knowledge, and that constitute, at present, the parts of metaphysics more accessible to a rigorous treatment.15 However, toward the end of this text, Husserl

14 Which, of course, does not mean that, at that time, Husserl had not already worked out the main traits of his position concerning the relations between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics. 15 “My lectures set themselves the task to present the theory of knowledge as the philosophical science that precedes all other scientific disciplines and provides them with their foundation, and in connection with it, to clarify a series of key-points of metaphysics that stand next to

314  Emiliano Trizio specifies that explaining why and how the fundamental questions concerning the relation between knowledge and being determine our entire conception of reality and, thus, are connected to the above mentioned key-points of metaphysics, allows him to exemplify and illustrate how little our empirical sciences are able, by themselves, to satisfy our theoretical interest concerning reality, and to what extent metaphysics, as a supplementary science is necessary to this end.16 This exemplification is, throughout the text, accompanied by several other examples of more specific unquestioned presuppositions underlying empirical sciences, which help flashing out the entire scope of metaphysics thus understood. In other words, this text revolves around two interrelated issues: (1) the relation between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics and (2) the characterization of the incompleteness of empirical sciences as a way to assert the legitimacy and necessity of a scientific metaphysics that goes “beyond them,” while being built on them.17 While discussing these two issues, Husserl provides at least a partial clarification of his notion of metaphysics. Let us take up these two issues in turn, beginning with the problematic relation between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics. Several important claims are made in the introductory remarks (pp. 226–330): (1) the theory of knowledge (“Erkenntnistheorie”) and metaphysics are two deeply intertwined fundamental chapters of philosophy (“Hauptgebiete”), whose definition, reciprocal delimitation and even fundamental distinction are still much disputed.18 Husserl identifies two main parties: those who believe that the theory of knowledge and metaphysics make up only one discipline, and those who believe that they are two “essentially different disciplines having equal rights.” Within the first party, he further distinguishes between, on the one hand, those who believe that this single discipline is metaphysics, and that the theory of knowledge is only a part of it, and, on the other, those who believe that this single discipline is, instead, the theory of knowledge, which would also set itself the task to show the impossibility of metaphysics in the traditional sense (i.e., presumably, the kind of metaphysics criticized by Kant).19 (2) Not only

it. I can straightforwardly say: ‘the’ key-points of metaphysics; namely of metaphysics, in so far as it is at present developed as a science.” Mat III, 230. 16 Mat III, 251. 17 Husserl, while reminding the reader of the classical anecdote about the fortuitous origin of the name “metaphysics” (which, according to a certain tradition, was invented by Andronicus of Rhodes), observes that, in some sense, also in light of his own characterization, this science goes “beyond” the science of nature (Mat III, 233). 18 Mat III, 225. 19 “Many researchers are willing in this case to accept only one discipline; some, because they accept the theory of knowledge only as a chapter of metaphysics, the others, because they downright identify both disciplines. The latter position concerns all philosophers who dismiss the original root of the metaphysical problems, about which philosophy has struggled for thousands of years, as unsolvable, as essentially exceeding the human cognitive capacities, and are willing to admit only a critical discipline of knowledge, whose task would include showing the principled unsolvability of these problems, thus the impossibility of a metaphysics in traditional sense. On the other side, though, there is a series of thinkers, who regard the theory of knowledge and metaphysics as essentially different disciplines having equal rights.” Mat III, 225–227.

Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics  315 their mutual demarcation (“gegenseitige Abgrenzung”20), but also their relations to other scientific disciplines is the object of widespread controversy. More specifically, it is debated whether “beside and beyond the special sciences of physical and psychic reality also a metaphysics could enjoy an autonomous legitimacy. In addition, there is disagreement as to how the relation of the theory of knowledge to logic and psychology is to be intended.”21 (3) In spite of the uncertainty surrounding these issues, the theory of knowledge is the discipline fundamental not only to metaphysics, but also to the totality of philosophy and to the worldview stemming from it, in the sense that it is instrumental for them, to the point that Husserl does not hesitate to claim that the theory of knowledge also functions as a “Werkzeug” for metaphysical research.22 (4) Again, in spite of the aforementioned points of disagreement, the entire modern philosophical tradition has been unanimous in acknowledging the foundational role of the theory of knowledge within the universe of philosophical disciplines, while German idealism has represented a failed attempt to lead an assault on “the Olympus of philosophy with dialectical arts” undertaken by a race of philosophical “titans” thereafter precipitated into the “dark Tartarus of disagreement and unclarity.”23 The end of the romantic metaphysical adventures has thus led to the return to Kant as the great “theorist of knowledge, who had set limits to the claims of an uncritical metaphysics and placed the critique of knowledge as the true foundation of all philosophy.”24 The current situation is largely the same, adds Husserl, and after recent waves of new metaphysical work that Husserl dismisses without specifying what he is referring to, the theory of knowledge is back on center stage, facing the new challenge represented by the positivism of Mach and Avenarius. As for point (1), it is important to notice that Husserl, in this text, does not explicitly endorse any of the three alternatives he considers. To be sure, Husserl would not have sided with those who think that the theory of knowledge absorbs what is left of metaphysics once it has shown the impossibility of its traditional version (the second sub-option). An entire portion of this lecture reasserts that, if the demise of the metaphysics of German idealism has been by itself a positive thing, the positivistic dismissal of metaphysics à la Compte has hindered the development of a necessary and rightful aspiration to metaphysical knowledge, without the satisfaction of which, the fall into irrationalism is inevitable.25 Husserl, thus, vehemently proclaims that, once the

20 Mat III, 226. 21 Ibid. 22 “But we want to have a philosophy; we want to acquire it through the most careful analysis and critique. Following the principle that only the fullest clarity and distinction of the concepts makes certain knowledge possible, we will declare war from the outset on any vagueness and ambiguity. We want to dig down to the ultimate, absolutely certain foundations of knowledge, in order to build upon them a genuine and reliable theory of knowledge, and to acquire thereby also a dependable instrument for metaphysical research.” Mat III, 228. 23 Mat III, 229. 24 Ibid. 25 “The metaphysical needs remain unsatisfied, metaphysics itself is regarded, according to Compte’s procedure, as a remnant of backward scientific eras, on a par with alchemy and astrology; but for that Spiritism and occultism thrive, superstition of all kinds dares to spread – exactly as Beneke has prophetically foreseen it.” Mat III, 232. It is noteworthy that Husserl quotes a long passage from the work of the Nineteenth Century German

316  Emiliano Trizio concept of metaphysics is clarified, it will appear that such science lies within the scope of what our cognitive capacities can achieve.26 Furthermore, given that Husserl here characterizes the theory of knowledge also as an instrument for metaphysics, it would seem that the first sub-option is ruled out too: how can the theory of knowledge be a chapter of metaphysics if it is to be used as an instrument for it? Furthermore, it is a claim reiterated several times in these years, that the fatal flaw of all modern theories of knowledge (including Kant’s) is that they were not able to establish a theory of knowledge free from metaphysical presuppositions, i.e., an authentic pure elucidation of lived-experiences of which our knowing ultimately consists.27 It would, thus, appear that Husserl’s position is represented by the third option: the theory of knowledge and metaphysics are two distinct disciplines. However, as we are about to see, things are more complicated than that. Once more, as it will happen in many subsequent texts, Husserl undertakes the elucidation of the concept of metaphysics using Aristotle’s classical definition of first philosophy as a starting point. For Aristotle, first philosophy was the discipline dealing with what characterizes being in general (being as such), and preceding all other sciences that investigate only a portion of being.28 Although Husserl, this time, adds immediately that Aristotle’s definition “is too narrow and in the need of a certain clarification,”29 it does build on what he deems to be Aristotle’s key-insight, namely that the first principles of being in general must be common to all special sciences and logically precede their own experimental and theoretical developments. We find here the same claim about the existence of metaphysical presuppositions of natural science contained in the Logik Vorlesung 1896 and subsequently in §7 of the Prolegomena, but spelt out in a more detailed way and with a different emphasis. Let us delve into the details of this analysis. All special sciences, we read, take for granted a host of presuppositions inherited from the prescientific, natural (natürlich) standpoint: not only that the world exists, but that it contains things and processes standing in mutual causal connections and, furthermore, a multiplicity of subjects likewise causally interconnected with one another

metaphysician Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798–1854) System der Metaphysik und Religionsphilosophie aus den natürlichen Grundverhältnissen des menschlichen Geistes abgeleitet, published in Berlin in 1840, in which metaphysics is characterized in a characteristically modern way as dealing with knowledge of ourselves, the world, and “das Übersinnliche,” Ibid., 230–231. Once more, it appears that Husserl, while adopting a cautious step-by-step strategy in the exploration of metaphysics, holds on to the broadest interpretation of its scope. 26 “That a science of the kind of metaphysics is possible and legitimate, that it falls within the scope of human cognitive capacities will immediately appear to be the case, as soon as we take into consideration the concept of metaphysics and the problems pertaining to it.” Mat III, 233. 27 As is well known, already in those years, Husserl reasserts several times over the principle that the theory of knowledge must be free from any metaphysical presupposition. See, for instance, Mat III, 84. 28 Ibid., 233. 29 Ibid., 234.

Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics  317 and with other components of reality.30 To be sure, scientists step-by-step modify the assumptions of the layman, but they never radically question these general presuppositions.31 In a close and problematic connection with these assumptions, scientists are likewise oblivious of the riddles affecting their own theoretical operations, i.e., of the difficulties laying in the possibility for our mental operations to secure access to such reality. The fundamental question of the theory of knowledge is here touched upon: how can a subjective process such as perception or judgment gain the right to yield objectively valid knowledge?32 In his more mature writings, and especially after the transcendental turn, Husserl often asks this question in order to develop the basic ideas of the theory of constitution and to highlight how transcendental phenomenology embraces all meaningful problems traditionally ranked under the heading of the theory of knowledge.33 Husserl’s strategy, here, differs in a significant, and I would say, interesting way, which the introductory and programmatic nature of this text can explain. Husserl shows that different answers to the problem of the possibility of objective knowledge lead to completely different conceptions of the being of reality, which, in turn, deeply affect the ultimate value of scientific knowledge itself, while leaving untouched its prima facie theoretical content. What we find here is the idea of a fundamental interdependence between the essence of knowledge and the interpretation of the being of reality as such, exemplified through a variety of classical positions. The aim is to highlight that scientists, because of their uncritical acceptance of the natural standpoint, and because of their predominant interest in the practical mastery of nature, leave the fundamental epistemological questions open, from which the entire conception of the being of reality ultimately depends.34 This point will always provide the core of the phenomenological “critique” of science.

30 “[The natural scientist] actually confronts the things and the scientific questions as naively as the natural man before all science does. As we saw earlier, he just assumes the intellectual effort of natural consciousness. He finds already before him the surrounding world with its things, processes, relations, regularities of succession and coexistence, and follows only the motives laying in what is given for the modification of his initial or gradually acquired beliefs.” Mat III, 235. This passage anticipates the famous pages of Ideas I describing the natural attitude even in the use of terms such as “Umgebung” to refer to the different spheres of taken-for-granted objects (Hua III/1, 56–58), “vorfinden” to designate the uncritical acquaintance with the world characterizing the natural attitude (Hua III/1, 56–61), and “Vorfindlichkeiten” to indicate the posits of the natural attitude themselves (Hua III/1, 61). 31 “They borrow the concepts with which they operate from the prescientific conception of the world, from which they too take their point of departure. They go about modifying them step by step, they adapt the concepts as much as they need for their goal, for the knowledge of the law; but also not more.” Mat III, 251. 32 Mat III, 241. 33 The article of 1917 Phänomenologie und Erkenntnistheorie, reprinted in Hua XXV, 125– 205, contains particularly clear statements of this relation (see, in particular, Hua XXV, §§32–39). 34 “indeed the various empirical sciences always speak about reality, teach about it, and formulate hypotheses and laws concerning it, and yet they do not investigate what reality ultimately is, because their tendency is directed towards the orientation in the world and its practical mastery, rather than towards the innermost investigation of its being.” Mat III, 245.

318  Emiliano Trizio Husserl mentions solipsism, consciousness-idealism (“Bewusstseinidealismus”), and positivism: i.e., a doctrine, or, better, a whole family of doctrines, which denies the existence of material reality independently of all mental life.35 The subsequent position considered by Husserl is Kant’s, which he interprets as one close to idealism, but with the addition of the assumption of unknowable things in themselves corresponding both to what we experience as our internal life and to the external world.36 Again, we have here an ontological picture of reality deeply intertwined with an attempted solution of the riddles of knowledge. Beneke and Arthur Schopenhauer are briefly mentioned as original developments of Kant’s philosophy.37 Once more, their ways of departing from Kant’s conception of “reality” stem from their different appraisal of our capacity to access the inner nature of things, and, more specifically, the being attested in our own inner life.38 The last point of view mentioned by Husserl is realism, which in this list we find, not by chance, at the opposite end side of solipsism. Realists are characterized as the thinkers closer to common sense, of course, but, more interestingly, as those who believe that the doubts about the objectivity of knowledge can be solved, without thereby essentially affecting the main features of the conception of the world, as they have already developed in the ordinary life.39 Realists, thus, admit the possibility of the knowledge of the material world and the existence of two kinds of reality: psychic and physical.40 The way Husserl closes this list of examples perfectly illustrates its real aim: The examples suffice to show how the difficult fundamental questions concerning the objectivity of knowledge tend to determine our entire conception of the being of the world, and that the possible opinions here are many.41 We begin with a certain natural conception of reality, which is also taken for granted by all special sciences; we then realize that this conception, when critically scrutinized, leads back to the questions of the theory of knowledge. Finally, we realize that different solutions to these questions imply different conceptions of the being or reality. Thus, the answer to question concerning the objective validity of knowledge acts as a field of force capable, so to speak, of deforming the metaphysical scaffolding of the world, i.e., our entire conception of the being of the world. Realism appears precisely

35 Mat III, 238. 36 Ibid., 239. 37 Ibid., 239–240. 38 Schopenhauer’s views about the relation between natural science and metaphysics, while not explicitly playing a significant role in the epistemological debates of the end of nineteenth century, deserve to be recalled because they provide a post-Kantian redefinition of the boundaries between these two disciplines, and, thereby, of the distinction between appearance and reality itself. 39 Mat III, 240. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 241.

Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics  319 as that position that altogether rejects, or tries to minimize, the deformation of everyday worldview produced by the riddles concerning the possibility of objective knowledge. This interdependence between the theory of knowledge and the interpretation of being is much more interesting than the trivial repercussions of a theory of knowledge on the worldview based on it, which are due to the fact that one’s theory of knowledge determines what the possible objects of reliable knowledge are. This is of course true: for instance, different degrees of skepticism about the range of objects accessible to our knowledge would indeed result in worldviews whose “ontological population” varies accordingly. However, here, the problem does include, but also reaches far beyond than that of determining what counts as an object of possible knowledge, for it concerns the interpretation of the being of everything we believe to exist and to be knowable at any level of objectivity and in any sense. An obvious example is, once more, Kant’s theory of knowledge, which makes the entire natural world, inasmuch as it is studied and determined by the natural sciences, “degrade” to a phenomenal being, beyond which, if one is to follow the most common reading of Kant, as Husserl does, there lies the unknowable thing in itself. This kind of considerations allows Husserl to connect his analyses to the epistemological status of the existing empirical sciences. In few paragraphs, Husserl shows that those sciences do not in fact and cannot in principle completely satisfy the theoretical interest from which they themselves stem, i.e., they cannot come to an ultimate understanding of the being they investigate, and this precisely because they do not question the natural standpoint within which they operate.42 This must be, therefore, the task of a different science: This science, needless to say, is metaphysics. It has to investigate what ultimately pertains to what is; and in very close connection with this there lay, as we just saw, the questions concerning the highest principles of knowledge that should enable us to reach the real truth, and on the solution of which the determinations that we ascribe to real being so essentially depend.43 This passage contains an explicit definition of metaphysics as a science that investigates what ultimately “pertains” to what is, and whose investigation must be carried out in connection with the questions concerning the highest principles of knowledge. After this brief characterization of the relation between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics, and, in particular, of the dependence of the key-points of metaphysics on the kind of answer that one gives to the problem of knowledge, let us now turn to the above mentioned second fundamental theme of this text, namely to a more explicit and detailed characterization of the incompleteness of empirical sciences, and, consequently, of the thematic horizon of metaphysics as the science completing them. Given that such incompleteness always consists in the uncritical acceptance of presuppositions on the part of the empirical sciences, an account of at least the main different

42 “In the course of these difficult and successful efforts, though, the questions concerning the essence of knowledge and of being, the questions on which the objective value of knowledge rests and what the known being ultimately is remain altogether foreign to the empirical scientist.” Mat III, 242. My emphasis. 43  Mat III, 245, my emphasis. Husserl also calls metaphysics “Wirklichkeitswissenschaft kat’exochen,” the science of reality par excellence, ibid.

320  Emiliano Trizio kinds of such presuppositions is necessary. Since Husserl discusses over and over this theme on the basis of different examples,44 it is advisable to sum up what results from his various incomplete expositions. At the most general level, Husserl distinguishes between those assumptions on reality that are common to all sciences, and those explaining specific groups of phenomena and, thus, pertaining to a special science.45 The former are “tacit and wholly unproved”46 assumptions, while the latter are explicit. In the first group we find presuppositions that are easy to make explicit, such as “the world exists” or one or another formulations of the principle of causality; however Husserl, much more often, lists, under the heading of general assumptions about reality, concepts, or better fundamental concepts (“Grundbegriffe”).47 What he means is that such concepts stand in need of clarification and elaboration, which will show us, in the first place, “what in consideration of reality we are entitled to assume and what we are not.”48 In other words, these concepts are fundamental components of implicit assumptions about reality that are not critically scrutinized. The following is the most comprehensive list of fundamental concepts in this text: “Thing and property, cause and effect, matter and energy, being and appearance, to come into existence and to decay, unity and multiplicity, space and time, etc.”49 Some of these concepts are purely formal in character and, hence, belong to the field of pure logic. And indeed, Husserl immediately adds that the value for the exploration of reality of a great quantity of general propositions belonging to pure logic and pure mathematics is taken for granted in the scientific exploration of reality.50 What Husserl does not explicitly say is that the assumptions of this last type concern the whole of reality and yet they are not tacit. Hence, they should form a group apart, as indeed they do according to Husserl himself. Husserl spends some words to illustrate questions connected to the classical Aristotelian problem of a clarification of the different senses of being,51 to the notion of substance and change,52 and to the paradoxes of movement.53 After these fundamental concepts and presuppositions concerning the whole of reality, Husserl considers the second group of assumptions, namely the explicit hypotheses

44 Ibid., 234–235, 246–251, 251–252. 45 Ibid., 246. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 249, 251–252. 48 Ibid., 252. 49 Ibid., 251–252. 50 Ibid., p 252. 51 Ibid., 247. 52 “Some then identify this supporting substrate or this essence of the appearances with the matter of physics, other, instead, with the forces, which they regard as something soul-like, but in humans as the soul itself; it is the hidden substance of the thing that we call human being. (. . .) While thus we find, on one side, subtle and very spun-out researches about the essence of substance as the unknown bearer of the properties and as the inner being of things, we hear on the other side that all these researches are futile, that there are no substances, but only complexes of properties.” Mat III, 249. 53 Mat III, 250–251.

Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics  321 pertaining to the individual sciences.54 A question that presents itself at this point is the following: why would the elucidation of such hypotheses belong to metaphysics, as Husserl maintains, if the thematic space of metaphysis is opened up precisely by the existence of unquestioned assumptions concerning the whole of reality? In other words, is there a tension between the quasi-Aristotelian way in which Husserl introduces the concept of metaphysics, and his claim that also the elucidation of the special sciences’ conceptual material falls within the scope of metaphysics?55 The answer lies, presumably, in the nature of the metaphysical elaboration of the conceptual material of the special sciences. Metaphysics is not called for to replace existing scientific theories with new ones, but only to clarify their sense on the basis of the deeper and more general insights into the nature of reality that are gained in the critical elucidation of the first group of assumptions. In other terms, this second, more applied part of metaphysics is edified in light of the results of the first, more classically Aristotelian part of metaphysics that deals, one could say, with reality qua reality. Thus, the kind of elucidation that is here in question is one that is made possible by the integration of those sciences (of “second philosophy”) into the unitary edifice of the ultimate science of reality and receives its sense only in virtue of it. Under this interpretation, thus, the aforementioned tension is eliminated. It is now possible to conclude this analysis of the 1898/99 lecture, by drawing some general conclusions about Husserl’s early notion of metaphysics. This text shows that, before the publication of the Logical Investigations, Husserl already believes that the theory of knowledge functions as an instrument for a metaphysics consisting in the ultimate clarification of reality as investigated by the empirical sciences. In light of this, it would be a mistake to think that, in contrast with what will happen after the transcendental turn, at the time of the Logical Investigations, Husserl saw phenomenology (that is the discipline that, for Husserl, takes up the fundamental questions of the theory of knowledge) as an enterprise disconnected from metaphysics (let alone anti-metaphysical). Precisely the opposite is true: already at the time of the Logical Investigations Husserl considers that the gigantic task of the elucidation of knowledge that phenomenology has undertaken is motivated by the desire to build a philosophy in the most general sense, a philosophy in which metaphysics as the ultimate science of reality is a fundamental chapter. However, the relation between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics is still affected, at this stage, by a certain unclarity and so is, therefore, the identity of metaphysics as a science. This unclarity is reflected by some of Husserl’s claims concerning precisely the key-points of metaphysics that are so intimately connected to the theory of knowledge. In particular, if adjudicating between what Husserl calls “metaphysical convictions”56 (such as idealism, positivism, Kantianism and realism) or ruling

54 This passage contains a list of useful examples taken from the natural sciences of the time: “On the other side, there are particular assumptions of the individual empirical sciences, for instance, the different genera and species of molecules and atoms in their substantial particularities and groupings, the manifold types of longitudinal and transversal waves, the aether with its wonderful properties, in older time, die different fluids etc. Here belong the particular laws of physics, chemistry, physiology, and so forth, insofar they really are, as they are said to be, laws claiming to reach the real world.” Mat III, 247. 55 A claim that, as we have seen, Husserl had made already in the Logik Verlesung 1896. 56 Mat III, 255,

322  Emiliano Trizio all of them out, in favor of a radically different general account of being (which this texts leaves open as a possibility and which will indeed be Husserl’s own solution, once transcendental idealism is in place) is something carried out within the theory of knowledge, then the mutual delimitation between the former and metaphysics stands in need of further clarification. As we have seen, Husserl characterizes the key-points of metaphysics as those metaphysical issues that stand closer to the questions of the theory of knowledge. Towards the end of the text, however, we find two passages that connect them to the theory of knowledge in an even more intimate way: Given the brevity of the time available to us, it will be better, to delve right away as directly as possible into the fundamental questions that, under the name of questions belonging to the theory of knowledge, in part constitute a general presupposition of all sciences, and, in part, once conceived in particular relation with being in itself, must also count as fundamental questions of metaphysics.57 Opinions belonging not merely to the theory of knowledge, but also already metaphysical arise from that, of the kind of those we have mentioned in the introduction, the doctrines of consciousness idealism and positivism, which confines all knowledge to the subjective phenomena in contrast with realism, which admits a knowledge of transcendent realities as possible and achievable for us.58 This first passage (which, to be sure, is not terribly clear) states that the “Grundfragen” that go under the name of “erkenntnistheoretisch” in part form the epistemological background of all the sciences, in part, in so far as they are grasped in specific relation to being in itself, must also be reckoned among the fundamental questions of metaphysics. I take the expression “all sciences” to refer to the empirical as well as the logical and mathematical ones. Under this reading, Husserl is here referring to the fact that there are fundamental questions of the theory of knowledge such as “what is truth?”, “how can a subjective lived-experience grasp an objective content whatsoever?”, “how can an ideally identical judgment be reiterated at different times and by different subjects?”, which, in their generality, refer to the possibility of knowledge of any object whatever, including numbers and purely logical objects. In this generality, these questions are not directly metaphysical in character, because metaphysics is, for Husserl, concerned solely with real being and not with ideal objects. On the other hand, there are “other” fundamental questions of the theory of knowledge that result from narrowing down the same aforementioned general questions to the knowledge of the real-transcendent being (“Sein an sich”) investigated by empirical sciences.59 The second passage refers exclusively to the problem of real transcendence and states that the already mentioned general positions such as idealism and realism are,

57 Ibid., 252. 58 Ibid., 255. My emphasis. 59 It should be added that, as we have seen, also mathematical and logical principles belong to the uncritically accepted presuppositions of empirical sciences (obvious example, the principle of contradiction that Husserl had evoked already in the 1896 lecture), and, consequently, also the part of the theory of knowledge that focuses exclusively on these principles can be apprehended as a contribution to the metaphysical clarification of reality as posited by the empirical sciences.

Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics  323 by themselves, not only epistemological, but also already metaphysical. In sum, these two passages suggest that the theory of knowledge is either already a part of metaphysics (when it deals with the problem of real transcendence), or, (when it deals with the possibility of knowledge in general) a discipline that, in virtue of a redirection of its focus on real being, can be apprehended as a part of metaphysics. To be sure, this claim does not conflict with the aforementioned metaphysical neutrality of the theory of knowledge, for Husserl assigns to the theory of knowledge the task of establishing the first general principles of metaphysics. In other words, its results would also constitute the first chapter of metaphysics, in such a way that no metaphysical claims would count as a presupposition for the work of the theorist of knowledge. Yet, there is indeed a tension between these claims and the thesis that the theory of knowledge functions as an instrument for metaphysics, because, now, the theory of knowledge appears to be also the first level of the edifice of metaphysics. Under this interpretation, among the three alternative conceptions of the relation between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics considered at the beginning of this section, Husserl would seem, surprisingly, to opt for the one that makes the theory of knowledge, as a unitary discipline, a part of metaphysics. We will see that the courses written in the years following the Logical Investigations cast some light on this issue as well as on other aspects of Husserl’s “early” concept of metaphysics.

4. Formal and material metaphysics in the years preceding the transcendental turn Some useful, if cursory remarks on the nature of metaphysics can be found in the course Logik 1902/03,60 in the Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie Vorlesung 1902/03,61 and in the Urteilstheorie Vorlesung 1905.62 Those remarks are in line with the position so far outlined, but provide further insights into Husserl’s views about the subject as well as conceptually significant terminological novelties that can help clarify the relation between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics. In the course Logik 1902/03, Husserl outlines the task of metaphysics in a very succinct and effective way. Once more, Husserl begins by recalling that “Metaphysics is, as Aristoteles puts it, ‘First Philosophy’ ”63 and that, for Aristotle, it is the science of “what pertains to being in generality.”64 This time, however, he explicitly explains why he believes that Aristotle’s definition is too narrow: granted that the polysemy of the general concept of being, and the particular problems connected to “being in the sense of reality”65 raises many difficulties, the very nature of the problem at hand requires a broader interpretation of Aristotle’s definition. It is such broader science that, according to Husserl, corresponds to the modern conception of metaphysics.66 In light of our results, the nature of the problem in question is the ultimate determination

60 Mat II. 61 Mat III. 62 Mat V. 63 Mat II, 11. 64 “was dem Seienden in Allgemeinheit zukommt.” Ibid. 65 “Sein im Sinne der Realität. ” Ibid. 66 Ibid.

324  Emiliano Trizio of reality that goes beyond the provisional and relative one offered by the empirical sciences. Indeed, Husserl identifies the broader scope of metaphysics with the already mentioned assumptions that are common to all the sciences, and whose elucidation makes possible the ultimate interpretation of the being they investigate. Although Husserl does not repeat it here, we now know that the problem of the polysemy of the word “being” defines only a portion of these questions. Finally, Husserl reformulates the opposition between metaphysics and the special sciences of physical and psychical nature as the opposition between “the science of absolute being and absolute determinations of being” and the sciences in relative sense.67 It is noteworthy that what is here meant by “absolute being” is nothing but the being that attests itself as real in light of the critique of the unexamined principles underlying the special sciences.68 The Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie Vorlesung 1902–03 briefly mentions again the problem of the mutual delimitation of the theory of knowledge and metaphysics and the aforementioned disagreement as to whether they should count as one and the same discipline or as two distinct ones. Once more, Husserl does not explicitly endorse either of the conflicting views, nor does he name any of their advocates. However, the thesis that one should maintain the distinction between the two is formulated in a way that, to say the least, resonates with Husserl’s general approach: While metaphysics, they say, wants to provide the ultimate knowledge of the being and of the world that is accessible to us on the basis of the individual sciences, but is not given in themselves, real being is taken into consideration in the theory of knowledge only in hypothetical, general way, namely only as the correlate of knowledge and science; it has to deal with the necessary relations grounded in the ideas of knowing and being, but not with what factually and ultimately is.69 Both the theory of knowledge and metaphysics, according to this point of view, deal with real being, but real being becomes thematic within the theory of knowledge only in so far as there obtain necessary relations grounded in the ideas of knowledge and being that set general conditions for any real being whatever. The real being in question in the theory of knowledge is, thus, considered ex hypothesi, whereas metaphysics aims to determine what in fact exists, based on the results of the special sciences. That this is, at bottom, Husserl’s own view is indicated by that fact this distinction between metaphysics and the theory of knowledge reflects the distinction between fact and essence, and that, according to Husserl, the theory of knowledge must investigate and elucidate the essence of knowledge. Under this reading, Husserl would now side with the view that the theory of knowledge and metaphysics are actually two distinct disciplines. This seems to contradict the conclusion of the previous section, where it 67 “Accordingly, metaphysics can also be defined as the science of absolute being or of absolute determinations of being, in contrast to the individual sciences, which are sciences only in the relative, i.e., provisional sense, sufficient for the practical orientation in the world of appearances and for the practical mastery of mature.” Mat II, 12. 68 “Obviously, one should not think, under the title of absolute being, of any mystical extravagances. What is in question, rather, is, quite soberly, the being that turns out for us as the real one, on the basis of the critique of the individual sciences and of the principles on which they uncritically rest.” Mat II, 12–13. 69 Mat III, 9–10.

Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics  325 appeared that the theory of knowledge is already the first stage of metaphysics, and, hence, it can be included in it. However, as we shall now see, the terminology of the Urteilstheorie Vorlesung 1905 is finally able to dissolve these tensions and to highlight the unitary approach that surfaces throughout the different texts so far analyzed. In this lecture, Husserl gratifies us with a detailed series of definitions of the various disciplines that we have encountered so far. (1) Pure logic is the “science of the ideal constituents and laws of theory in general, or [. . .] the science of truth and objectivity in general. Conceived so broadly, as it must be conceived, pure logic is identical with the mathesis universalis.”70 Note that formal ontology is included in the mathesis universalis and results from a conversion of the logical truths to the realm of pure objectivity. (2) The theory of knowledge is the discipline intimately connected to pure logic that studies the relations between “truth and objectivity, on one side, and judging and knowing truth and objectivity respectively on the other.”71 Given that pure logic already sets general laws that must be valid for any object whatever, and given that the theory of knowledge determines the sense of knowledge, but also the sense of the being grasped in knowing, pure logic and the theory of knowledge jointly make up formal metaphysics72 or the formal science of being,73 i.e., the part of the ultimate science of being that does not make assertions about (nor presupposes) any factual being.74 Indeed, the expression “Sinn des Seins,” which will be of fundamental importance for Husserl’s transcendental idealism, already appears in this lecture as a problem title for formal metaphysics.75 (3) Rooted in formal metaphysics is material metaphysics76 or metaphysics in the authentic sense,77 which determines “what now factually, in categorial sense, is, what pertains to real being not only in general and as such, but de facto according to the results of the specific sciences of being.”78 (4) The text also adds that phenomenology of knowledge, as “the descriptive discipline of the essence of thought” is the only possible terrain for the solution of the problems of the theory of knowledge.79 With the aid of these definitions, we can now try to dissolve the tensions that we have previously pointed out. What is the relation between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics? Are they one or two disciplines? At this stage, Husserl appears to

70 Mat V, 41. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 29. 73 Ibid., 41. 74 In this text, Husserl already stresses the difference between his understanding of the theory of knowledge (and of the “skeptical” attitude inbuilt in it) and Descartes’. A consequence of the purely “formal” character of Husserl’s theory of knowledge is that the solution to its problems would in no way modify the theoretical content of the special sciences (whether a priori or empirical), Mat V, 35. This prefigures another overarching theme of transcendental phenomenology, i.e., the opposition to any metaphysics positing “metaphysical substructions” (Hua VII, 235) and its replacement by the elucidation of the sense of being of reality accomplished by the theory of transcendental constitution. 75 Ibid., 29. 76 Ibid., 29. 77 Ibid., 41. 78 Ibid., 41–42. 79 Ibid., 42.

326  Emiliano Trizio answer along the following lines. If one defines metaphysics as the science of what ultimately pertains to real being in full generality, then one must admit that the theory of knowledge (as well as pure logic) is a part of metaphysics, and, more specifically, the formal part of metaphysics. In particular, the theory of knowledge, by investigating the sense of being of reality, addresses problems that in a misguided way (at this point one is entitled to add) have traditionally motivated metaphysical positions such as idealism and realism. However, metaphysics in the authentic sense, for Husserl, is only the one that investigates what, based on the empirical sciences, is in fact true, and not only the “formal” or “general” structure of being. The difference in both object and methodology between this authentic a posteriori metaphysics and the theory of knowledge fully justifies the claim that we are confronted with two different disciplines. Furthermore, the theory of knowledge can also be considered as an instrument for authentic metaphysics in this sense. In sum, Husserl adopts a nuanced intermediate solution between the two opposing parties mentioned already in the 1898/99 lecture, because, while acknowledging that the theory of knowledge and metaphysics are two thematically and methodologically distinct disciplines, one of which is fundamental to the other, there is also a sense in which they both directly contribute to the understanding of what real being ultimately is. Let us however notice that, in spite of its clarity, the classification of disciplines presented in Urteilstheorie Vorlesung 1905 fails to specify what discipline would deal with some of the unclarified presuppositions on which empirical sciences rest. In §2, the list of such presuppositions mentioned in the Logik Vorlesung 1896 appeared heteroclite and in need of clarification. Such list was expanded and, to an extent, clarified in the 1898/99 lecture, as we have seen in §3. In the Urteilstheorie Vorlesung 1905, some of these assumptions, being the object of pure logic, fall in formal metaphysics, some others, such as the existence of the world (or better, at this stage, the sense of its existence), must be clarified by the theory of knowledge and, hence, belong to formal metaphysics too, finally, the properly empirical ones, which are dealt with in the process of clarification of the content of the empirical sciences, pertain to material metaphysics. However, general a priori presuppositions about reality such as those of geometry or those pertaining to the notion of causality do not find a place here. They are a priori, but not purely formal, and they by no means belong to the theory of knowledge, nor to the broader field of phenomenology. Thus, the characterization of metaphysics presented in the Urteilstheorie Vorlesung 1905, while clarifying the relation between the theory of knowledge and metaphysics remains incomplete. In the Einführung in Logik und Erkenntnistheorie 1905/06, a course in which Husserl already presents a version of the phenomenological reduction, we find an attempt to fill this gap by introducing the notion of an a priori ontology of the real, which deals precisely with these a priori truths about reality.80 Regretfully, the terminology introduced there clashes with the one of the Urteilstheorie Vorlesung 1905, for this a priori ontology of reality is called [sic] “formal metaphysics,” although Husserl immediately specifies that the term is inappropriate. The a priori ontology of the Real is, we could again say, formal metaphysics, though, the term is better avoided. Metaphysics in the authentic sense is material

80 Hua XXIV, 95–102; 1984, 93–99.

Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics  327 metaphysics. The former, we could further say, is a priori, the latter, a posteriori metaphysics. The former is prior to all empirical sciences; the latter comes after the empirical sciences.81 An analysis of this course, however, would already lead us beyond the limited scope of this study, as does the subsequent developments of Husserl’s thought, whereby the a priori ontology of the real will be in turned articulated in the a priori ontological disciplines pertaining to the different ontological regions.

5.  Conclusion: metaphysics as the horizon of Husserl’s thought We have enough elements to draw some conclusions concerning Husserl’s notion of metaphysics before the so-called transcendental turn. Husserl’s thought was motivated from the outset by the project of developing a philosophy corresponding to the highest ambitions of the European tradition. In this programmatic framework, metaphysics presents itself as the crowning discipline, the one dealing with the fundamental questions concerning the totality of the real being of the world and of anything that might lie “beyond it.” Within this approach, Husserl does not appear to be preoccupied by the complex historical evolution of the concept of metaphysics from Aristotle’s characterization up to its Kantian and post-Kantian developments. Rather, as is typical of his method, he appropriates a motive from the tradition and elaborates it in light of the theoretical developments and the resulting constraints characterizing his philosophical situation. The situation in question is one marked by the collapse of German idealism, by the rise of the anti-metaphysical stance of various forms of positivism, and by an often-exclusive focus on the theory of knowledge in name of a one-sided return to Kant. To use a term that, for better or worse, will play a significant role in Husserl’s philosophy only several years later, the situation of metaphysics is one of crisis. Husserl’s reaction to this crisis consists in the first place in fastening metaphysics in the strongest possible way to the soil of the theory of knowledge, conceived de jure as the fundamental philosophical discipline, and yet, at the same time, as a discipline de facto motivated by metaphysical interests. Further, it consists in provisionally restricting the thematic focus to the parts of metaphysics that are contiguous to the theory of knowledge. Finally, it consists in turning to the empirical sciences for the conceptual material on which an authentic science of real being must be built. The result of these three moves is the project of developing, first of all, a metaphysical foundation of the sciences of nature and of the psyche grounded in the parallel development of a mathesis universalis and of a pure theory of knowledge. As we have seen, a more precise characterization of this project implies an uneasy redefinition of the relation between the theory of

81 Ibid., 102; 1984, 99. The use of the expression “formal metaphysics” in this context is certainly motivated by the fact that the a priori ontology of the real, while not purely formal in the sense of pure logic, can be said to investigate “the a priori form of reality.” Note also that the material metaphysics here mentioned coincides, instead, with that of the Urteilstheorie Vorlesung 1905. Finally, note that the term “material” does not refer to the Husserlian notion of material a priori. What Husserl calls “material a priori disciplines,” such as geometry, here fall, instead, in the a priori ontology of the real.

328  Emiliano Trizio knowledge and metaphysics, a redefinition that forces Husserl, at times, to struggle with his terminology and to modify it in ways whose underlying substantial significance should not be overestimated. The more Husserl tries to be faithful to the spirit of what he regards as the Aristotelian notion of first philosophy, the more it appears that also the mathesis universality and the theory of knowledge should count as metaphysics, i.e., as the formal or a priori part of it. The former contains laws that are a priori valid for any being, while the latter determines the sense of being of the world, and rules out its wrong metaphysical interpretations. On the other hand, the more Husserl identifies the proper aim of metaphysics with the determination of what in fact exists in an ultimate and irrelative sense, the more metaphysics appears to be only the factual science of reality that results from elucidating empirical sciences by means of the essential insights gained by the mathesis universalis and by the theory of knowledge.82 Husserl moved decidedly towards the second solution, by stressing that the authentic metaphysics can only be the one that speaks of what in fact exists. And, indeed, the solution outlined in the Urteilstheorie Vorlesung 1905 will not enjoy an enduring fortune in Husserl’s corpus. Already in the in course Einführung in Logik and Erkenntnistheorie 1905/06, Husserl introduces significant terminological changes. Neither formal logic, nor the theory of knowledge are now treated as the a priori part of metaphysics, not even in a non-authentic sense,83 while the theory of knowledge is, nonetheless, characterized as first philosophy,84 signaling that Husserl is abandoning the traditional identification between first philosophy and metaphysics.85 Let us add, that in the lecture delivered in Göttingen in 1909 Einführung in die Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis, Husserl will be even more adamant in sharply distinguishing the theory of knowledge from metaphysics and in claiming that the former is not metaphysics, but only the foundation for it.86 In turn, the denomination of first philosophy will be coherently used for phenomenology itself.87 In short, after the transcendental turn, the characterization of metaphysics in terms of knowledge of the ultimate facticity will become even stronger. By that time, however, transcendental phenomenology will provide a clearer sense in which a factual being can be said to be ultimate.

82 Subsequently, Husserl will add the different material ontologies to the stock of eidetic sciences that take part in the foundation of empirical sciences. 83 Only in a footnote Husserl still refers to formal-ontological truths as belonging to formal metaphysics, see Hua XXIV, 100, 1984, 97. As we have seen at the end of the previous section, the expression “formal metaphysics” appears once more in that course, but as a synonym of a priori ontology of the real. 84 Hua XXIV, 157; 1984, 155. 85 It is indeed worth mentioning that in the 1905/06 course the usual reference to Aristotle’s notion of metaphysics is followed by an almost dismissive programmatic statement: “Today, we shall understand metaphysics itself differently, and more broadly.” Hua XXIV, 96; 1984, 93. 86 “The theory of knowledge as science refers to knowledge in general. It is not itself metaphysics, but the foundation of all metaphysics. ” Mat VII, 37. 87 Mat VII, 92–99.

Husserl’s early concept of metaphysics  329

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure Aldea, Aldea Smaranda 179, 204, 208, 208n9, 210, 210n15, 212 – 213, 213n21, 216 – 217, 243n40, 302n45, 305n55 Al-Saji, Alia 210, 211, 222 Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie Vorlesung 1902/03 323, 324 Alweiss, Lilian 6, 97, 98n2, 107n24 amputation: and grief 77 – 79; postamputation phantoms 83 – 84; see also bereavement; grief anatheism 7, 145, 152 – 155, 158 – 159; see also Gallagher, Sheila anosognosia 80 Aquinas, Thomas 22, 150n11; in dialogue with Husserl as imagined by Stein see Stein, Edith Aristotle 151, 164, 178, 269, 327; De Anima 177; First Philosophy of 312, 323; On the Soul 177; treatment of Plato 136; Poetics 150 art and artistic creation 42, 142, 169, 256; and hermeneutics 7, 145; in Kant 228 – 230; see also Gallagher, Sheila Aus der Einleitung der Vorlesung “Erkenntnistheorie und Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik” 313 – 323

46; phenomenological role of 78, 81, 97; space and the lived body 97, 99 – 103, 110, 129n49; and world 41; in the world 45; see also Casey, Edward; habitual body; Leib; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Burns, Timothy 3

Being and Time 53m 93, 54, 154 bereavement 6, 77; and dysregulation 92; experience of 88, 89; compared to losing a limb 78 – 80, 91 Bild 181, 183, 186, 299; Abbild 300; Phantasiebild 299; see also image and image consciousness Bildding, Bildobjekt, Bildsujet 197, 298 body: as source of action 8, 9; and amputation see amputation; bodily freedom as source of willful action 17 – 19; consciousness and 48; intentionality 47; “mutual incorporation” 94; as Nullpunkt 99; ontological status of 5,

Dasein 5, 52, 54; as constituting itself 55; Heidegger’s analysis of 41, 54 – 57, 231 – 234, 243; relation to Being 40 Deleuze, Gilles 145n2, 168, 171 – 173 Derrida, Jacques 41, 156n21, 167 Depraz, Natalie 170, 289n5 De Santis, Daniele 178 – 179, 225n2, 268, 310n5 Descartes, René see Cartesianism de Warren, Nicolas 7, 161, 219n32 dialogue 5; between phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 41; essence of 32; Genesis as dialogue not monologue 148; imagined between Husserl and Aquinas

Cardinal, Ernesto 145 Carman, Taylor 61 Cartesianism and Descartes 51, 167, 173, 325n74; Husserl’s Cartesianism 37, 44 – 47, 143, 200, 276 Casey, Edward 97n1; on Husserl and place 98 – 99; on Husserl and space 103 – 110; on Kant 100 – 103; on the “lived body” 99 Chardin, Teilhard de 114 correlationism 7, 134 – 136, 141; postcorrelationism 51 Critique of Pure Reason 268, 290 – 295; see also Kant, Immanuel Crowell, Steven 5, 11, 37, 38n2, 40n16, 42n23, 49n72, 50n79, 50n83, 52n90, 52n92, 53nn93 – 94, 56n104, 56n108, 191n54, 209n13, 212n18, 234n21, 243n40

332  Index 24 – 25; intersubjective occurrence of 23; neighbouring phenomena to 34 – 35; in Plato’s Protagoras 150; types of 32 – 34 Doyon, Maxime 177 – 179, 191n54, 194n65, 204n1, 209n13, 225n2, 234n20, 243n40, 288n1, 298n34 Dreyfus, Hubert 44; on skilled coping 5, 59 – 60, 69 – 70, 73; see also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; Stein, Edith Dufourcq, Annabelle 201n105, 296 Dumont, Augustin 177 – 179, 204n1, 225n2, 243n40, 288 eidos 5, 22 – 23, 25, 27, 31, 35, 165 – 167, 184; see also Husserl and Eidos; Stein, Edith Einbildungskraft 178, 180, 183 – 186, 225 – 226; Küster on Kant’s conception of 269; Husserl’s reading of Kant’s understanding of 268, 271, 273, 280, 286, 290; and the perceptual presence claim 226 Einführung in Logik und Erkenntnistheorie 1905/06 326, 328 embodied, embodiment 39, 97; ambiguities of 41; Casey’s appeal to 100; embodied subjects 17, 136; and entwining 42 – 51, 54, 55; Husserl’s writings on 98, 99, 110, 141, 210; Kant’s appeal to 102, 103; ontological particulars of 56; phenomenology of 6; persons as embodied 8; see also body Ephrem of Syria 145 Erkenntnistheorie 314; see also theory of knowledge essence 5, 222, 272; apprehension of 184, 302; dialog on 24; “essence of dialog” 32; intuition of 28; of knowledge 317, 324; laws of 281; material essences 53; meaning of 35; relations of essence 126; “SAquinas’s” understanding of 29 – 31; “SHusserl’s” understanding of 27; Stein’s understanding of 22 – 23; theory of 166; see also eidos; Stein, Edith feeling-states 115; and hatred v hating 116 – 118, 120; as distinct from feelings 115 – 116, 132 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 42, 178, 289, 303n47 fiction: and the bracketing of experience 252 – 253; emotions towards 248 – 248; see also fictional emotions fictional emotions 146, 267; and diversity of self-experience 259 – 266; paradox of 247 – 249; in relationship to the real 247, 251, 254 – 267 Fink, Eugen 164 – 165

freedom: anarchic 49; of the body see body; of emotions 262, 263, 264; “finite” 52; handling of 140; freedom from ontic and doxic commitments 219; “freedom to” v “freedom from” 220; of the imagination 204, 210, 229; “murderous” 50; negative 212, 216; and Phantasie 300; personal 118, 131; “true” 168; of the will 10, 17, 20; Freud, Sigmund 151, 154, 163 fruchtbar 168 Gabelsberger, Franz Xavier 170 – 171 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 41 Gallagher, Shaun 69 – 70, 83 Gallagher, Sheila 7, 145, 146; anatheism in the work of 155; Jacob’s Ladder 157, 158; Pneuma Hostis 155 – 159, 156 Gegebenheit 297, 304, 306 Gegenstand überhaupt 291, 306 Geist 40, 45, 283, 285 Gell, Alfred 169 geometry, geometers 101, 105; axioms of 104, 107; Euclidian 104 geometric: conceptions of space 6, 102, 109; formations of concepts 105 genuineness 249 – 250; see also rationality grief 6, 89; and amputation see amputation; and “arrested time” 81; as distinct from bereavement 77n1; “complicated” 85; and the habitual world 84 – 89, 90n46, 93; Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of 79 – 80; pain of 83; process of 93; and reactions to loss of a limb 78, 94; as a reflection of interpersonal concerns 90 Guattari, Félix 171 – 173 habitual body 62 – 63, 65, 67, 78, 79; and skilled coping 70 habitual world 80, 81, 83, 93, 95; and grief see grief hallucination 77, 177, 198, 227; and the imagination 228, 230, 265; comparable to phantom limbs 89; and sensed presence experiences 88 Harman, Graham 143 hating 6 – 7, 113; act of 114, 118; of the beloved 122 – 123; as coeval with loving 124; connotations of 114; context of 113 – 114; as contrary to loving 125 – 131; definition of 116; as directed 118; and feeling-states 115 – 123; founded in loving 124 – 125; v hatred 115; as contrary to loving 129 – 131; as a negating moment 121 – 122; as other oriented 119 – 120; as self- and non-revelatory 120 – 121 see also loving

Index  333 Hegel and Hegelianism 60, 168, 178; dialectic of Absolute Spirit 153; synthesis 152 Heidegger, Martin 5, 10, 23, 35, 134, 136, 142, 172; on art 161; on Being and beings 126; break with transcendental phenomenology 53; and Dasein see Dasein; influence of Kant 178; “inflection point” 37, 40, 42 – 51; see also theory of the imagination hermeneutics 7; “hermeneutic circle” 25; “carnal” 156; and Gadamer 41; hermeneutic retrieval of sacred things 152; see also Gallagher, Sheila Hilbert, David 104 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 151 – 152, 154, 155 Husserl, Edmund: anti-naturalist views of 8; influence of Cartesianism on see Cartesianism; and empty representations 185 – 189; and movement and kinesthesis 189 – 192; and passivity in/prior to activity 192 – 195; and perceptual phantasies see perceptual phantasies; and Phantasie see Husserl and Phantasie Husserl and Eidos 165 – 166; and eidos 167 Husserl and metaphysics: definition of 309 – 311; first formulations of 311 – 313; formal and material metaphysics 323 – 327; implications for the transcendental turn 327 – 328; phenomenology and metaphysical idealism 52; and theory of knowledge 313 – 323; see also metaphysics; theory of knowledge Husserl and Phantasie 298 – 303, 305 Husserl and Real 167, 172 Husserl and transcendental philosophy 161 – 163; as transcendental phenomenology 163 – 167; see also Einbildungskraft Husserl’s manuscripts 16, 41, 161, 172, 173; as “distributed objects” 167 – 170; as “monological” 170 – 171; importance to phenomenological concepts 168, 170; on intersubjectivity 45; understanding of Kant’s transcendental philosophy in 268, 270 – 287 image and image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) 185, 196, 198, 290, 298; as product of the imagination 177, 196 – 197 imagination, imagining: ambivalent relationship of Western philosophy to 177; artistic 146; and its critical dimension 117 – 222; Kant’s work on the philosophical concept of 178; imagining stance as mode of intelligibility 211 – 217 lacking

in animals 110n30; and normativity see normativity; and perpetual recreation 147, 149n9; Platonic critique of 150n11, 151n11; poetic 150n10; theopoetic imagination see theopoetics; visual 81; see also Husserl; image and image consciousness; irreality; Kant, Immanuel incongruent counterparts 97, 102, 103 indeterminacy: “determinable indeterminacy” 208, 210, 213; Kant and the indeterminate object 291 – 95; objective indeterminacy 297; in phantasy 303; radical 216; and subjectivity 288 interpersonal relations 18, 77, 115, 119, 122, 132; and bereavement 92; line between intra- and interpersonal 93; loss of differentiation 94; and the nature of loving 125; and the phenomenological role of the body 78; and “revelation” 113; and the value of perceived entities 91 intersubjectivity 4, 5, 6, 36, 54; and bodily experience 89 – 95; eidetic analysis of 22, 29, 31; in dialog 23, 34; Husserl’s approach to 255, 267; and intercorporeality 87n40; irreal as intersubjective see irreal; and Mitsein 35; and subjectivity 78; transcendental 41; see also Moran, Dermot; transcendental phenomenology Irigaray, Luce 41 irreal 212, 246, 267; as understood by Husserl 213 – 214, 216, 217, 219, 236n25; as “intersubjective existence” 253 – 256; and real 212 – 217; Sartre’s observations on 261 – 266; as Unwirklichkeit 185; see also real; unreal Jansen, Julia 197n74, 255n33, 295 – 297 Kafka, Franz 172 Kant, Immanuel 7, Kearney, Richard 7, 145, 145n1, 146n3, 147nn4 – 5, 148n7, 149nn8 – 10, 151nn11 – 12, 153n13, 154n17, 158n24 Keller, Catherine 145, 146n3 Kern, Iso 170, 270, 288 – 289 Küster, Bernd 269 Laßwitz (Lasswitz), Kurd 268, 282 – 286 Lebech, Mette 5, 22, 26n11 Leib 44, 55; Leiben 56; Leib-Körper 44, 45, 55 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 72, 98, 100, 101 Levinas, Emmanuel 41, 45 – 46, 49 – 51 lifeworld (Lebenswelt) 42, 97, 104, 204 207; in Husserl’s thought 47, 108 – 110; in contrast to “nature” 53; modes of

334  Index rendering intelligibility of 210, 220; negotiation of 219; ontology 127; perceptual 41 “little reflections” 5 – 6, 59, 73, 74; description of 72, 77 Logik Vorlesung 1896 311 – 312, 316, 326 logos 41, 146; Logos (divine) 46, 149; and telos 46 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann 10 – 11, 12, 13, 17, 272 loving: existential and phenomenological understandings of 130; as interpersonal movement 125 – 126; metaphorical and ontological structure of 131n57; as “movement of verticality” 114; primordial Loving 131; see also hating manuscripts see Husserl’s manuscripts Matherne, Samantha 178 – 179, 181, 181n5, 181nn7 – 9, 182n14, 183n17, 195, 225, 227n7, 230n12, 236n24, 237n26, 238n27, 239n31, 240n36 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 5, 37, 41; critique of objective thought 5, 59, 67 – 71, 73n74, 75; on skilled coping 59 – 63, 67 – 69 Merleau-Ponty and the body 59 – 66; 70 – 75 Meillassoux, Quentin 7, 134 – 143 metaphysics 154, 168, 271; of the flesh via Merleau-Ponty 56; Kantian 279, 292; in Levinas 51; as “mythology” per Nietzsche 156n21; as understood by “SAquinas” and “SHusserl” 28 – 30; speculative 155; as Hauptunkte 313; Heidegger’s possible turn toward 53n93; teleological 272; transcendence of 167; see also Husserl and metaphysics mimesis 150, 177, 298; see also Walton, Kendall “minor literature” 171 – 173; see also Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix “Minor Philosophy” 7, 161; Husserl’s phenomenology viewed as 163, 171 – 173 Miteinandersein 56 Modifikation 211, 294, 299; and Phantasie 211 Mooney, Timothy 59, 72n73 Moran, Dermont: life and career of 3 – 5; critique of Cartesianisn and idealism 37 – 38; Introduction of Phenomenology 38 – 42; on Heideggerian “inflection point” 51 – 52, 56; investigations of intersubjectivity 57; on “intertwining” 41; on Husserl’s anti-naturalism 8 – 9; on Husserl’s idealism 56; and embodiment, intersubjectivity, and nature 42 – 51, 57; and “our relations to fictions in general” 249

naturalism 12, 56; Husserl’s anti-naturalism 9, 43, 52; dialectical 41; non-scientific 47; presupposition of 38 Naturwissenschaft 272, 282 Nenon, Thomas 7, 50n83, 134, 140nn7 – 8 new realism 134; see also correlationism; Sparrow, Tom; speculative realism normativity 11, 27; and collective imagining 255, 256; and consciousness 212n18; definitions of 48n68; and the demand for justice 49; existential 49n68; genesis of 61; meaning and 13; as mode of intelligibility 204 – 211; moral 49n68; see also imagination Nussbaum, Martha 85 objective thought see Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Ortega y Gasset, José 118, 130 Parkes, Colin Murray 78 – 79 “perceptual phantasy” (perzeptive Phantasie) 180, 185, 195 – 196; 198 – 199; 298n34 phantasie184, 290, 295, 298; in contrast to perceptual phantasy 198 – 199; phantasy modification (Phantasiemodifikation) 211; reliance on phantasmata 299; as type of “presentification” 217; see also imagination; Husserl and Phantasie phantom limb 6, 77, 93; experienced by amputees 88; and deafferentation 90; and grief see grief; and the habitual world 80; image-based 91; interpretations of 87; neurobiological v psycho-social explanations of 78 – 79, 89; Merleau-Ponty on 79 – 84; Simmel’s study of 84, 87 – 88 place 6; of actions 19; Casey’s position on 98 – 99, 105, 106; fate of 100 – 103; intuitive understanding of 107; sense of 110; Socratic insistence on 36; and space 97 – 98; “transcendental place” 293; in the world 85 Phenomenology of Spirit 168; see also Hegel poiein, poiesis 145, 147n3, 149, 150, 159 Proust, Marcel 80, 151, 155 Ratcliffe, Matthew 6, 77, 89n45 ratio 26, 27n17, 30 rationality: of emotions 167; of fruitfulness 168; genuineness and 246, 247, 249, 250, 260, 261; and irrationality 310; ontological rationality 287; Rationalität 287; rationale Wahrheiten 287; transcendental rationality 287, 295; two different forms of 268 real: belief in 242, 247; burden of the term 162, 167; v fiction see fiction; “reality of the real” 7, 134, 143, 246; perceptions

Index  335 of 184 – 185, 197, 198 – 201, 205 – 207; v phantasy see phantasy; question of the “real” Husserl 162, 170; and virtual 237 – 238, 241; see also irreal; new realism; Husserl and Real Richir, Marc 304n53 Ricoeur, Paul 150, 156n21 Rimbaud, Arthur 162 Romdenh-Romluc, Komarine 69, 238n27 Ryle, Gilbert 9, 16, 248n6 sachlich 25, 297 Salice, Alessandro 3 Sartre, Jean-Paul 41, 269 Scheler, Max 18n12, 54, 121n24, 125 – 126 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 156n21, 178 Schnell, Alexander 301 Shestov, Lev 162 Shum, Peter 306 Simmel, Marianne 84, 87 – 88 Sinnkritik 42, 51 – 52, 56 skilled coping 5, 10, 13, 44 – 45, 59; see also Dreyfus, Hubert; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice solipsism 46, 318 Sophia (as Wisdom) 146, 159; playing before the face of the Lord 148, 152; and sapientia 156; and Yahweh 147 space: as potentially absolute 99n4, 100, 101, 102; centrality of embodiment to conceptions of 103; Husserl on geometrical space 105, 172n27; Newtonian concepts of 104; Spielraum 211, 234; in relationship to phenomenological concepts of place 6, 97, 109; and time in Kant 136, 137, 184; see also Casey, Edward; place; Thing and Space Sparrow, Tom 7, 134 – 143 “speculative realism” 7, 134 – 135, 143; see also correlationism, Meillassoux, Quentin; Sparrow, Tom Staiti, Andrea 4, 8, 9n2, 10n5, 11n7 Starobinski, Jean 268, 269 Stein, Edith 5; background to her imagining Husserl and Aquinas in dialog 22; eidetic analysis of the dialog 31 – 35; how and why of the dialog 24 – 31, 255n34; see also eidos Steinbock, Anthony J. 6 – 7, 113, 113n1, 114n3, 115n5, 127n38, 127nn40 – 42, 128n48, 130n54, 155n19, 184n21 Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins 4, 9 – 10, 20; actions and practical possibilities 13 – 17; agency in 10 – 13

Summa, Michela 178 – 179, 198n81, 199n94, 243n40, 246, 251n16, 251n18, 253n24, 254n30, 255nn32 – 33, 255n35, 258n40, 261nn49 – 50, 264n69, 265n71, 278n21, 298n34 “synthesis of reproduction” 268, 280, 286, 300, 305 Szanto, Thomas 3, 46n49, 50n79, 251n18, 255, 255nn32 – 34 theopoetics 7, 145 – 152, 155 – 156; see also anatheism theory of imagination 225; four claims made by Kant 226 – 230; in relationship to Heidegger’s theory of understanding 230 – 236, 242 – 243; as understood by Merleau-Ponty 236 – 243; see also Einbildungskraft theory of knowledge 316n27, 39, 162, 313 – 323; see also Husserl, Edmund Thing and Space 188 – 190, 192 tikkun olam (reparation of the world) 130 transcendental freedom in Kantian thought 17 transcendental phenomenology 5, 16, 28, 37, 41 – 42, 53, 210, 222 – 223; paradoxes of 48; perceptions of the failings of 51, 142; return of 51 – 54, 56 – 57 transcendental philosophy 7, 37 – 38, 40, 136, 162; Husserl’s self-professed allegiance to 143; limits of 135; Kantian 178, 180, 199, 226 – 230; see also Husserl and transcendental philosophy transcendental subjects and subjectivity 43 – 46, 54 – 57, 236, 240 – 243 Trizio, Emiliano 272n14, 309, 310n5 unreal: as untrue 152, 200; and phantasy 295, 298, 301, 303 understanding (Verstehen) 55, 225, 226, 231, 235; see also theory of understanding Urteilstheorie Vorlesung 1905 323 – 328 Vorstellung 22, 187, 205, 214n23, 217; Leervorstellung 185, 189; sinnliche Vorstellungen 181 Walton, Kendall 248, 249n11, 250 – 251, 255, 259 – 261, 266 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 16, 53n95, 135 Woolf, Virginia 155