Abstract
At a crucial juncture in the first draft of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, Husserl attempts to introduce the constitutive problematic in the following way:
If it is the case that whatever is experienced, whatever is thought, and whatever is seen as the truth are given and are possible only within ≺the corresponding acts of≻ experiencing, thinking, and insight, then the concrete and complete exploration of the world that exists and has scientific and evidential validity for us requires also the universal phenomenological exploration of the multiplicities of consciousness in whose synthetic changes the world subjectively takes shape as valid for us and perhaps as given with insight. {Hua IX, p. 239)
Exactly this crucial transition, indicated by the words “then...requires,” provokes Heidegger to ask: “Why?” (Hua IX, p. 239n) This question of Heidegger’s sets the stage for the present section. Why is it that we need to enter into the constitutive problematic, why do we need to pose the question concerning constitution?
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References
Again, I do not think Husserl would be in any fundamental disagreement with Wittgenstein, when the latter tries to demonstrate how attempts to “secure” the existence of worldly objects — as if it were something we could meaningfully doubt to begin with — are in fact nonsensical. See, e.g., the witty § 467 of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Where I think Husserl and Wittgenstein would fundamentally disagree, however, is on the question of whether, granted the meaninglessness of skeptical questions (as well as the attempts to “secure” what the skeptic doubts), there is, after all, a meaningful positive task left for philosophy, or whether only the negative job of dissolving all such meaningless questions remains.
For Kant’s distinction between “regulative” and “constitutive” principles, cf. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 536 ff., A 508 ff.
There is a famous passage from the penultimate appendix to Kris is, where Husserl writes: “Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous, science — the dream is over” {Hua VI, p. 508). I used to think that Landgrebe was right in interpreting this as having become Husserl’s sincere conviction in his last years (see Landgrebe’s Der Weg der Phanomenologie, p. 187), whereas interpreters such as Herbert Spiegelberg (cf. his The Phenomenological Movement Vol. I, p. 77n) and Gadamer (“Die phanomenologische Bewegung,” p. 129) were wrong to dismiss the passage as “bitter irony.” I am now convinced that, in view of other texts from the mid-thirties (e.g., Hua XXVII, pp. 238–239), as well as the further development of the Krisis-Beilage itself (notice how Husserl describes a current of philosophy that dismisses Wissenschaftlichkeit as “flooding” European humanity {Hua VI, p. 508)), Husserl can not be expressing his own opinion. My interpretation — that although Husserl never gives up the idea of an apodictic scientific philosophy, he realizes that apodicticity is hardly realizable in practice - basically follows that of John J. Drummond in his Husserlian Intentionalitv and Non-Foundational Realism, p. 248.
Elisabeth Stroker even argues that Husserl at some point realizes that final and irrefutable evidence even for phenomenology itself is “ruled out as a matter of principle” (Husserls transzendentale Phanomenologie, p. 67n. Cf. p. 126n). However, the references that she gives seem not quite sufficient to substantiate the claim. Hua VIII, p. 398, for instance, only states that no Tatsachenerkenntnis, whether mundane or phenomenological, could ever be apodictic. Since Husserl intended his phenomenology to be eidetic, i.e., not a science of facts, but of essences, it in no way follows that apodictic and final evidence is ruled out for phenomenology. The second reference Stroker gives, which is to Hua XVII, p. 284 (it is not p. 245, as Stroker indicates; the passage is found on p. 245 in the Niemeyer edition of Formale und transzendentale Logik, but not in the Husserliana edition), comes closer. It certainly lends support to the claim I am advancing, viz. that Husserl recognizes final and irrefutable evidence as a regulative principle, as an “idea” whose realization would be an infinite task. Insofar as it is ruled out “on principle” that one can ever complete an infinite task, then Stroker would appear to be right after all. Unfortunately, I know of no place where Husserl himself draws this conclusion unambiguously.
Thus, Heidegger’s undeniably mocking criticism, under the title of “Sorge der Gewifiheit” of Husserl and Descartes in the first Marburg lecture course, fails to hit the mark as far as the former is concerned. It is not correct to say that Sicherung is what Husserl’s phenomenology in the last analysis is after (cf. GA 17, p. 60), as Fink already demonstrates in his VI. Cartesianische Meditation (HuDo 11/1, pp. 50–51).
Thus, Husserl, as far as I can see, never counters skepticism directly the way Descartes does when he tries to “prove” the existence of the material realm, or by way of “retreat” the way Berkeley does, when he declares the non-existence of that which presumably could be doubted (see his Principles of Human Knowledge, §§ 87–88). As is well known, Husserl does try to show that skepticism contradicts itself (e.g., in the Prolegomena; cf. Hua XVIII, pp. 118–130). But his main “positive” contribution to the “struggle” against skepticism seems to me to be his constitutive explanation of the existence of what skeptics claim is doubtful, thereby not really refuting skepticism, but rather rendering its points uninteresting.
A number of attentive commentators notice these “hermeneutic” strands woven into the fabric of Husserlian phenomenology (cf. John D. Caputo, “Husserl, Heidegger, and the Question of a ’Hermeneutic’ Phenomenology”; Jean Grondin, Sources of Hermeneutics, pp. 35–46; and, though he is more reserved, John Sallis, Delimitations, p. 78). However, none see their fundamental importance more clearly than does J. N. Mohanty. Husserl’s phenomenology, Mohanty says, is a “phenomenology of respect” in that it "does not judge, but seeks to understand” {The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy, p. 233). Therefore, Mohanty concludes that in Husserl’s thought “[h]ermeneutic and phenomenology coexist” (ibid., p. 243). See also Husserl’s illuminating comments on Kant, cited in the section on the transcendental reduction below.
See Fink’s excellent article (explicitly sanctioned by Husserl himself), “Die phanomenologische Philosophic Edmund Husserls in der gegenwartigen Kritik,” in Fink’s book Studien zur Phdnomenologie 1930–1939, especially p. 145.
Indeed, if that were so, we would be compelled to say that much of Husserl’s work — such as the lectures on Ding und Raum (Hua XVI), the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, as well as volumes XIII-XV of Husserliana, dealing with, respectively, the spatial object, and other subjectivities — is not phenomenological at all.
Although Husserl sometimes expresses critical opinions on the natural sciences, e.g., when he claims that all they do is “calculate” (berechnen) the world, without understanding it (Hua VIII, p. 247; cf. Hua VI, p. 193).
Ullrich Melle makes this case convincingly in Das Wahrnehmungsproblem und seine Verwandlung in phanomenologischer Einstellung. As he neatly puts it, the causal account places us in the “dilemma that, if the causal account and its implications are true, we will remain caught in the sphere of effects, i.e., perceptions and their real components; on the other hand, we could only demonstrate the truth of the account and its implications if we could succeed in breaking out of the sphere of effects and establish contact with the causes” (p. 14). See, as well, Gottlob Frege, “Der Gedanke,” pp. 45–46.
See, e.g., the texts assembled in Merleau-Ponty’s The Primacy of Perception, Part I. Merleau-Ponty was professor of psychology at the Sorbonne for a few years. it is best to avoid talking of the phenomenological “residue” and of”switching off the world.“ This [kind of talk] easily seduces one 0into believing that the world would drop out of the phenomenological theme from now on, and that instead of the world, only the “subjective” acts […] would be thematized. (Hua VIII, p. 432)
For just a few references, see Herbert Spiegelberg, “The ’Reality-Phenomenon’ and Reality,” p. 93n; Horst Gronke, Das Denken des Anderen, p. 96; Robert O. Schneider, “Husserl and Heidegger,” p. 371. Some of these speak of the phenomenological “reduction” instead of the epoche, but in fact the “bracketing” is done by the epoche.
Klaus Held expresses this point most lucidly: “Ultimately the transcendental phenomenologist is only interested in consciousness as the place where the world appears” (“Einleitung,” p. 41). See the similar remark by Walter Biemel in “Husserl Encyclopaedia-Britannica Artikel und Heideggers Anmerkungen dazu” (p. 264). This phrase (Ort des Erscheinens der Welt) is extremely well suited to capture what both Husserl and Heidegger are after, and I use it more than once in the course of this study.
In this context it is very interesting to observe Husserl’s uneasiness with Fink’s equation of the mundane with mere “appearance” in VI. Cartesianische Mediation. Husserl is, e.g., clearly unhappy with Fink when the latter calls mundane truths “appearance-truths,” as if only transcendental phenomenological truths were “real” truths, and not those of the natural attitude (cf. HuDo 11/1, pp. 133n, 143n).
The expression “dative of manifestation” seems to have been coined by Thomas Prufer. See his article “Heidegger, Early and Late, and Aquinas,” p. 200.
Heidegger is clearly aware of the danger of misunderstanding phenomenology as expressing nothing but tautologies (cf. GA 58, p. 18). Interestingly enough, the later Heidegger himself refers to phenomenology as “tautological thinking” (GA 15, p. 399).
A position that one should not immediately associate with Kant either, as David Carr argues in his recent book The Paradox of Subjectivity. Cf. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 155.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 11–12: “this duplication of sense must correspond to no ontological double. Husserl specifies, for example, that my transcendental ego is radically different from my natural and human ego; and yet it is distinguished by nothing, nothing that can be determined in the natural sense of distinction. The (transcendental) ego is not an other.”
It is significant - if one wants to contrast Husserl’s notion of transcendental subjectivity to that of Kant - that Husserl speaks of “we,” and “us,” in this context. I touch upon this all-important Husserlian idea of a transcendental inter subjectivity in Chapter V of the present study. For a recent treatment of the range of problems grouped under this heading of “transcendental intersubjectivity,” see Dan Zahavi, Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivitdt. With its emphasis more on the ethical aspects, the account of James G. Hart in The Person and the Common Life is also valuable.
Concerning the problem of “Einstromung” — the problem of the influence that transcendental discoveries can have on subsequent life in the natural attitude — cf. Hua VI, pp. 213–214.
Daniel C. Dennett’s brief remarks on Husserl in Consciousness Explained show that there are some who hold that phenomenology is a type of philosophy or science based on introspection. On p. 44, Dennett writes: “the philosophical school or movement known as Phenomenology (with a capital P) grew up early in the twentieth century around the work of Edmund Husserl. Its aim was to find a new foundation for all philosophy (indeed, for all knowledge) based on a special technique of introspection, in which the outer world and all its implications and presuppositions were supposed to be ’bracketed’ in a particular act of mind known as the epoche”
One aspect of Husserl’s phenomenology that I do not discuss in any detail in this study is his insistence that phenomenology should be an “eidetic science” rather than any “science of fact.” Being an eidetic science, phenomenology can of course not be interested in the particulars of introspection. But more important in this regard, I think, is the fact that Husserlian phenomenology wants to investigate the constitution of the world, which is accordingly what I emphasize in the main text above. As to the natural objection, whether I do not rob Heidegger of one of his best arguments against Husserl by “ignoring” the eidetic dimension in Husserl’s thinking, I do not believe this is so. Heidegger, after all, has no interest in the particular person as such, but only in the essentials of that person. Heideggerian phenomenology of being is no “science” of facts: even “facticity” is an essential component in the being of Dasein (cf. GA 26, p. 217). So when Heidegger does claim that the “eidetic variation” in Husserl’s hands effects a biased (and in part faulty) understanding of the being of beings (cf. GA 20, p. 152), it is more a criticism of Husserl’s general approach to the problematic of being — i.e., his forgetfulness of that problem — than of Husserl’s desire to describe essentials rather than particularities. For a general argument that Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology does not concern the phenomenon or phenomena of “facticity,” see Steven Crowell, “Facticity and Transcendental Philosophy.”
Gadamer convincingly argues that an author is generally not an authority on the interpretation of his own work. In so far as the author interprets his own work, he becomes his own reader, and as a reader he might not be better than are most others (cf. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 196). Many things are said about Husserl’s qualities as a reader. W. R. Boyce Gibson, e.g., reports how Levinas told him that Husserl’s reading was very limited because “after 2 pages the impact on his own thinking will be such that he must put the book aside” (Boyce Gibson, “From Husserl to Heidegger,” p. 67). The abundance of marginal notes in Husserl’s copy oiSein undZeit hardly corroborates this claim, and although Husserl, to be sure, cannot be said to have understood the basics of Heidegger’s thinking in that book, this is not surprising given the fact that Husserl had no precise knowledge of Heidegger’s teaching throughout the Marburg years, and probably expected to find in Sein und Zeit an unambiguous continuation of his own thinking. With regard to the specific question of Husserl’s qualities as his own interpreter, I do believe that there is something right in Heidegger’s suggestion (with explicit reference to Husserl) that “where something is really accomplished [gemachi], it is mostly the case that the one who accomplishes it doesn’t even know what it is all about” (GA 17, p. 81).
Heidegger’s claim that according to Husserl one never encounters “experiences” while in the natural attitude (GA 58, p. 251) is therefore completely false. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann also neglects the distinction between natural and transcendental reflection in his criticism of Husserl’s “reflective” phenomenology. Cf. his Hermeneutik und Reflexion, pp. 80–85, et passim. This latter book clearly overemphasizes the reflective character of Husserl’s phenomenology, obviously in order to contrast that phenomenology more markedly with Heidegger’s “hermeneutic” phenomenology.
Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, § 5.64: “Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.” Wittgenstein’s argument is explicitly directed against “solipsism,” but it applies to the present discussion as well. Indeed, in his Notebooks 1914–1916, p. 85, Wittgenstein makes the same point about “idealism.”
See Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity, p. 94. It should be emphasized, however, that this does not mean that transcendental subjectivity has no “content” whatsoever, that it simply is the pure “negation of the world,” as Sartre seems to think (Being and Nothingness, pp. 181–185). It means, rather, that the “content” of transcendental subjectivity (its manner of being) can only be caught sight of indirectly, via the manifested world.
Adomo’s critique that by taking the constituted thing as a guiding clue, Husserl’s epistemology presupposes precisely what it had to deduce (Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, p. 175) would only be valid if Husserlian phenomenology did in fact want to prove or deduce anything, which, as we have seen in detail, it does not.
For references, see the note on the interpretations of the epoche above.
Cf. Hua VI, pp. 154–155, and Hua IX, pp. 340–341. See, too, Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart, p. 17.
It is well known that Husserl intended to widen the notions of “perception” (Wahrnehmung) and “intuition” {Anschauung) considerably, so that they would encompass much more than they do in the tradition, where they are largely equivalent with sensory perception. Cf., e.g., Hua XIX/2, p. 649; Hua VII, p. \38;HuaXl,p. 291.
In the beginning of the thirties, Husserl still holds that phenomenology has direct experiential access to subjectivity, despite the fact that we only unveil this subjectivity through the reduction. But it is important to emphasize that what Husserl has in mind when he says such things is the contrast with “speculative constructions” (Hua V, p. 141). Husserl clarifies his position in the Krisis. Here, he says that we have a “mute” evidence for the concrete ego (experiencing subject and experienced world). The muteness is only replaced by phenomenological descriptive clarity of the ego when we “inquire back” (zuriickfrageri) from the world to the subject (Hua VI, § 55, p. 191).
Fink, Studien zur Phdnomenologie 1930–1939, p. 220.
Cf. Studien zur Phdnomenologie 1930–1939, p. 221.
See Dagfinn Follesdal, “Husserl’s Notion of Noema.”
Varieties of such an interpretation are proposed by, e.g., Robert Sokolowski (“Intentional Analysis and the Noema”), and John J. Drummond (Husserlian Intentionality andNon-Foundational Realism, esp. Part
Cf. Follesdal, “Husserl’s Notion of Noema,” p. 684.
In the thirties, Husserl still defends this passage from Ideen I. Cf. Hua VI, p. 245, and Hua XXIX, p. 128.
A question that naturally comes to mind here, is whether it is simply the case that the “real” object is richer than the noematic, since the noematic object is always the correlate to a specific type of act that picks out a specific type of feature of the real object (e.g., its aesthetic qualities). As the matter is presented above, this seems to be the case. But it could be that the noematic object could tell us something about the so-called “real” object that could not possibly surface as long as we are precisely directed at “real” objects, i.e., as long as we are in the natural attitude. It could be, for instance, that the noematic object could tell us something about the being of objects. I argue later in this study that in fact the noematic object is indispensable for any phenomenological investigation of being.
The quotation marks indicate that it hardly makes sense to speak as if one could literally discern a number of simple intentions in each act. Rather, we are faced with an intentional whole that cannot be divided up into discrete intentional “rays.” The notion of “ray,” however, helps to illustrate the point I am trying to make.
Gadamer, “Die phanomenologische Bewegung,” p. 135.
In fact, this is what goes on in the so-called genetic phenomenology. Thus, in so far as one does not interpret the Wiederaufbau as the process of constitution itself, Gadamer’s characterization has a certain legitimacy after all.
But again, in his phenomenology of history, and in genetic phenomenology in general, Husserl does have a notion of deconstruction (Abbau) in play (cf., e.g., EU, p. 47), and thus also the idea of reconstruction (cf. EU, p. 48). But this re-construction, at least generally, is of something that is already there, as a “finished” product, already constituted. Our “reconstruction” is therefore not the constitution of the object, but precisely a reconstruction of its genetic constitution.
Maurice Natanson is therefore perfectly right in emphasizing that “when we speak of phenomenological reduction, we are pointing to philosophy itself rather than some limited technique” {Edmund Husserl, p. 75).
See Richard Schacht, “Husserlian and Heideggerian Phenomenology,” especially pp. 295, 304; Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 3. Jean-Luc Marion claims that according to Husserl, ontology simply is not phenomenology (Reduction and Givenness, pp. 40, 43, 46).
Consequently, the later Husserl abandons the notion of “residue” that he uses in Ideen I to describe transcendental subjectivity (Hua VI, p. 81).
Husserl’s idealism is often severely criticized by commentators. But in fact, if one tries to place Husserl within the realism-antirealism discussion of contemporary so-called analytic philosophy, he turns out, on a number of important points, to be rather sympathetic towards the realist view. For instance, with regard to inaccessible regions of space and time, Husserl is — because of his theory of “horizon intentionality” -much closer to the realists than to the antirealists. Ultimately, however, Husserl does belong in the idealist camp if one understands by idealism “the position that what there is must be possibly conceivable by us, or possibly something for which we could have evidence” (Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, p. 93).
This seems to be the interpretation of Hans-Georg Gadamer in Wahrheit und Methode, p. 252. Similarly, Nam-In Lee, EdmundHusserls Phdnomenologie der Instinkte, p. 237.
Cf. Walter Biemel, “Die Entscheidenden Phasen der Entfaltung von Husserls Philosophic,” p. 200.
For a few places in the early Husserl where “constitute” appears in the reflexive form (sich konstituieren\ see Hua II, pp. 12, 13, 71, 73, 75; Hua XVI, pp. 8, 20, 154, 284. For the later Husserl, cf. Hua I, pp. 97, 117, etpassim.
Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution, p. 216.
Ibid.
Thus, Gethmann’s analyses of the relation between Husserl and Heidegger are misleading, since the former is constantly accentuated as the one claiming that subjectivity is what constitutes (cf. Verstehen und Ausiegung, pp. 123, 126, and Dasein: Erkennen und Handeln, pp. 26, 32). Hubert Dreyfus goes as far as to claim that Husserl attempts to “ground all forms of intentionality in the meaning-giving activity of a detached transcendental subject” {Being-in-the-World, p. 141).
Cf. Rudolf Boehm, Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phanomenologie, pp. xvi-xvii; and “Zur Phanomenologie der Gemeinschaft,” p. 92. Similarly, Dan Zahavi, Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivitat, p. 89; and Husserl’s Phenomenology, pp. 12–74.
Boehm, “Zur Phanomenologie der Gemeinschaft,” p. 92.
See Fink, “Die phanomenologische Philosophic Edmund Husserls in der gegenwartigen Kritik,” in Studien zur Phanomenologie 1930–1939. The reference is to p. 143 in that volume. Cf. Fink, Ndhe und Distanz,p. 201.
Fink, Studien zur Phanomenologie 1930–1939, p. 143. It is worth noting that Fink’s text “Die phanomenologische Philosophic Edmund Husserls in der gegenwartigen Kritik” originally appeared (in an issue of Kantstudien) with a preface written by Husserl, in which the latter declares that there is no sentence in the text that goes against his own sincere conviction (cf. Studien zur Phanomenologie 1930–1939, p. viii). Ronald Bruzina attempts to show that Husserl is not quite right in that assessment (see Bruzina’s thorough “Translator’s Introduction” to Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation), but I think he does not succeed. I find it surprising that Bruzina can declare his basic agreement (despite his preference for a less sharp formulation) with Van Breda’s claim that the article in Kantstudien is an attack on the very foundations of Husserl’s thought (cf. “Translator’s Introduction,” p. lxxxiii, n. 119). My argument in the present chapter follows Fink’s reasoning fairly closely at the same time that it contains many references to Husserl; thus it constitutes, in a sense, an attempted refutation of Bruzina’s claim.
This is not as original a claim as some might think. Heidegger already interprets Husserl thus (cf. GA 20, pp. 136, 157), and Fink consistently claims that Husserlian phenomenology is in fact only interested in the being of the world (cf. Studien zur Phdnomenologie 1930–1939, pp. 119, 189). Similarly, Rudolf Boehm, “Zijn en tijd in de filosofie van Husserl.” Levinas even goes as far as to declare that the problem of constitution is ontological in Heidegger’s sense (The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, pp. lvi, 124, 154). A similar view is defended by Timothy Stapleton in his book, Husserl and Heidegger (see pp. 88, 115, 117).
See, e.g., James C. Morrison, “Husserl and Heidegger: The Parting of the Ways”; Jacques Taminiaux, “From One Idea of Phenomenology to the Other,” p. 36; and Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness, p. 43.
Indeed, Husserl dismisses the Heideggerian concept of being as “mythical” (RB, p. 59).
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Overgaard, S. (2004). The Question of Constitution. In: Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World. Phaenomenologica, vol 173. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2239-5_3
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