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Husserl’s motivation and method for phenomenological reconstruction

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Abstract

In this paper I present an account of Husserl’s approach to the phenomenological reconstruction of consciousness’s immemorial past, a problem, I suggest, that is quite pertinent for defenders of Lockean psychological continuity views of personal identity. To begin, I sketch the background of the problem facing the very project of a genetic phenomenology, within which the reconstructive analysis is situated. While the young Husserl took genetic matters to be irrelevant to the main task of phenomenology, he would later come to see their importance and, indeed, centrality as the precursor and subsoil for the rationality of consciousness. I then argue that there is a close connection between reconstruction and genetic phenomenology, such that reconstruction is a necessary component of the program of genetic phenomenology, and I set out Husserl’s argument that compels one to enter into reconstructive territory. With that impetus, I schematically lay out the main contours one finds in Husserl’s practice of reconstructive techniques. We find him taking two distinct approaches, that of the individual viewed egologically (through the abstract lens of a single individual’s consciousness) and as embedded in interpersonal relations. Husserl occasionally calls these the approach “from within” and “from without,” respectively. Ultimately, the two approaches are not only complementary, but require one another. In closing, I argue that these considerations lead to a blurring of lines between the genetic and generative phenomenological registers, which challenges the prevalent view that there is a sharp demarcation of the two.

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Notes

  1. Reconstruction is actually a broader subject. Here we will only consider one, albeit a fundamental, part of the reconstructive program. Besides inquiring about one’s own (individual) immemorial past, to give just two examples, one could also probe reconstructively into the unconscious or the motivations for a significant socio-historical event (e.g., the emergence of Galilean science, as Husserl treats it in the Crisis.). For a discussion of the former, see Bernet (2006) (although Bernet is not especially concerned with the problem of method), and, for the latter, see Soffer (1996) and Dodd (2004).

  2. Husserl (2008a, p. 485). My translation. All further translations from this text are my own.

  3. Husserl (1973b, p. 612).

  4. See, for instance, Husserl (1970, §§11, 22).

  5. See Jacobs (2010, p. 334).

  6. Locke (1975 [1689], p. 335).

  7. Husserl (2004a, p. 204).

  8. Husserl (2008b, pp. 440–441/452).

  9. Husserl (2008b, pp. 204–209/200–204). Besides being irrelevant, any appeal to the physical, physiological, or psychophysical origins of a phenomenon would be tantamount to a petitio principii. Given the epistemological constraints of the phenomenologist, whatever causal antecedents in the world one might take recourse to are “just as much in question as any perception,” that is, as the primary explanandum (Husserl 2008b, p. 208/203). The same has to be said of personality and association, to the extent that these are meant to causally explain the phenomenon in question, since phenomenology cannot presuppose anything about causation, and because, in principle, no causally governed fact has any bearing on the properly normative characteristics that make up a phenomenon’s essence and validity, if Husserl’s polemic against psychologism in the Logical Investigations and call for a phenomenological grounding of scientific concepts in “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” (Husserl 1965) are correct. Further, Husserl excludes any dispositional tendencies within conscious life from the realm of genuine phenomenological evidence (Husserl 2004a, §24, 1989b, p. 209/204). When we merely postulate association, for instance, as a principle based on regularly occurring mental events as the effects of a tendency, the postulated principle itself has no strictly phenomenological evidence.

  10. Husserl (2001a, p. 187).

  11. Husserl (2001a, p. 114).

  12. Husserl (2001a, p. 184).

  13. As Steinbock (1998, p. 128) reports, it may have been shortly after his 1906 declaration, perhaps between 1908 and 1910, that Husserl began to seriously reconsider genetic matters, according to a letter from 1918.

  14. Husserl (1969, pp. 275–283/313–323).

  15. Husserl (1970, p. 52 (§9(h)); p. 74 (§16)).

  16. However, it is a curious fact that in the ethical sphere [at least in the early and mid 1920s, e.g., in Husserl (1989a, 2004b)], Husserl retains his earlier negative attitude toward the sub-rational. See Biceaga (2010, pp. 73–74).

  17. Husserl (2001b, pp. 163–165).

  18. If this only seems to support the emergence of logical judgment (in the strict sense) from proto-rational experience, that is not so. See Husserl (2000, pp. 5–9), where Husserl suggests a similar basis for the development of the intentionality of feeling and willing.

  19. Husserl (1989b, pp. 223/234).

  20. Husserl (1999, §§38–39, Husserl 1989b, §56).

  21. See Husserl (2000, e.g., §65 and Husserl 1973c, Part II).

  22. See Husserl (1989a, 29–35 and Husserl 2004b, pp. 244–255).

  23. On the notion of “primal institution” in Husserl, see Dodd (2004, pp. 61–78).

  24. Husserl (2001b, p. 339/627).

  25. Husserl (1999, §38).

  26. Expanding on this point, it is interesting to observe how in the brief, programmatic treatment of genetic themes in the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl puts front and center questions about the sequential compatibility of the consciousness of early childhood and that of maturity (Husserl 1999, p. 108/74), the problem of “ultimate genesis” as answering to the traditional problems of the “psychological origin of the ‘idea of space,’ … the ‘idea of a physical thing,’ and so forth” (p. 110/76), development in “early infancy” (p. 112/79), the primal institution of the experience of “an environment of ‘objects” (pp. 113/79–80), and the “realm of the ‘innate’ a priori, without which an ego as such is unthinkable” (p. 114/81). These very same problems are also taken as paradigmatic in the early manuscripts on static/genetic phenomenology (Husserl 2001b, pp. 338/626, 345/634, 1973a, pp. 38–39/640–641). Reconstruction clearly forms a central area of concern within genetic phenomenology and transcendental phenomenology more generally.

  27. Husserl (2006, pp. 241, 350, 353, 2008a, pp. 460, 227).

  28. On the concept of passivity, see Biceaga (2010, especially pp. xvi–xxi).

  29. Husserl (2008a, pp. 438–449).

  30. Husserl (2008a, pp. 413–415).

  31. Husserl (1997, §36, 2008a, pp. 204–205, 380–1, 661).

  32. Husserl (1997, §49).

  33. Husserl (1989b, p. 261/273; cf. pp. 258/270–271, 329–330/341–342).

  34. See also Lohmar (2003, pp. 115–116) and Bejarano (2006, p. 157), who have both hit upon roughly this same conundrum, but without reference to the Lebenswelt manuscripts and the problem of the genesis of the world-horizon per se.

  35. Husserl (2008a, p. 444; cf p. 448).

  36. Husserl (2006, text 46, 2008a, text 43).

  37. See especially Lee (1993, pp. 155–160).

  38. Husserl (2008a, p. 476).

  39. Husserl (2008a, p. 500).

  40. Husserl (2008a, pp. 474–477; p. 17). On Husserl’s phenomenology of the instincts, see Lee (1993) and Mensch (2010).

  41. Husserl (2008a, p. 583).

  42. Husserl (1989b, p. 257/270).

  43. Husserl (2006, p. 241).

  44. Husserl (2006, p. 353). My translation. All further translations of this text are my own.

  45. Husserl (2008a, p. 470).

  46. Husserl (2008a, pp. 492–493).

  47. Cf. Walton (2010, pp. 135-136).

  48. Husserl (1999, p. 109/175).

  49. Husserl (2001b, pp. 338–339/627). Husserl (1973a, p. 41), in the English translation of Husserl (2001b, p. 644): “But attending to constitution [i.e., cognitive engagement with the world] is not attending to genesis, which is precisely the genesis of constitution.”

  50. Husserl (1973a, p. 41/644). My translation. All further translations are my own.

  51. Husserl (2006, p. 336).

  52. Husserl (2008a, pp. 501–502, 508).

  53. Husserl (2008a, p. 467).

  54. Husserl (2008a, pp. 503–504).

  55. Husserl (2006, pp. 439-441).

  56. Husserl (2008a, p. 501).

  57. This seems to be the upshot of Husserl (2008a, p. 479). There Husserl argues that whatever I discover in a construction will still be within the constraints of what I can conceivably be like, i.e., within the limits of an eidetic variation of myself as “the transcendental ego of a world that is my environing world.” Incidentally, this passage is also important because it suggests that phenomenological constructions are also in line with transcendental phenomenology in being eidetic disciplines.

  58. Husserl (2006, p. 167, 2008a, p. 501).

  59. This seems the be the meaning of the following remarks about the accessibility of a past that cannot be remembered from Husserl (2006, pp. 440–441): “But even if I appresentatively take over the past of another and of everything that I gain through it in worldly terms [weltlich], [I] gain, I possess [habe] in a normal manner the unity of harmoniousness [Einstimmigkeit] and [I possess] what [is included] in the ability to have a conviction again, the ability to verify or even to correct.”

  60. Husserl (2008a, p. 411).

  61. Husserl (1973b, pp. 608–609, 2006, p. 108).

  62. Husserl (2008a, pp. 467, 505).

  63. Husserl (2008a, pp. 476–477; cf. pp. 479–480); see also Lee (1993, p. 156).

  64. Husserl (1973b, pp. 329–330, 599–602, 2006, pp. 225–226, 252–254, 283–284, 326–329, 2008a, p. 316).

  65. See, for instance, Husserl (2006, pp. 169–170), where Husserl also approaches this problematic conjointly “from without” and “from within.”

  66. Husserl (1973a, pp. 335–336).

  67. Lee (1993, p. 158).

  68. Steinbock (1995, p. 171).

  69. See, e.g., Husserl (1973b, texts 14 and 35, and supplements XI-XII, XLVIII, 2008a, text 48 and supplements XL, XIL), Steinbock (1995), Donohoe (2004).

  70. Steinbock (2003, p. 303).

  71. Husserl (2013, p. 222); my translation, emphasis added.

  72. See Steinbock (1995, 2003).

  73. Husserl (2013, p. 429); my translation, emphasis added. See also Husserl (1973b, pp. 406–407, 511, 601–602, 2008a, p. 371, 2013, pp. 108, 470).

  74. Husserl (1973b, pp. 433, 182). There are numerous other passages that call into question the strict demarcation of the genetic from the generative. See, for instance, the following: Husserl (2008a, pp. 330, 390–391, 582, 585, 662).

  75. Steinbock (2003, p. 303; cf. p. 314).

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    Matt Bower

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Bower, M. Husserl’s motivation and method for phenomenological reconstruction. Cont Philos Rev 47, 135–152 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-014-9291-3

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