Abstract
We have seen in the last chapter that a phenomenological understanding of truth effectively undercuts the extreme skepticism engendered by Cartesian objectivism, a skepticism which holds any rational justification of belief to be impossible. However, in the absence of a further demonstration that at least some Evidenz is absolute, Husserl’s theory of truth remains compatible with a more moderate skepticism, one according to which all our beliefs are or might be false, even if rationally justified to some limited degree. Moreover, this potential weakness of Husserl’s analysis in relation to skepticism will necessarily weaken it in relation to relativism as well. For unlike a formal approach (which, as we saw in Chapter One, can show only that relativism is inconsistent, and not that relativism’s opposite is correct), a positive overcoming of relativism requires a justification of the possibility of knowledge of non-relative truth. This in turn presupposes a justification of the possibility of knowledge as such. Thus any positive overcoming of relativism can be no stronger than the overcoming of skepticism which supports it.
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Notes
I do not mean to imply here that Husserl is a realist throughout the Logical Investigations. While the Prolegomena is clearly realist, the second volume of the Logical Investigations is generally neutral or ambiguous.
Regulœ ad directionem ingenii, 362 (Rule 2).
See, for example, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 92-4/ß 124-6, and A 387.
Hua XIX/2 751ff. (LU A 694/B 222ff.).
Itshould, however, be noted that Descartes and Locke do not themselves identify inner perception as here defined as the ultimate and infallible source of knowledge.
For Brentano’s own statement of this distinction, see Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, second edition (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1924), especially Book One, Chapter 1, and Book Two, Chapter 1.
See Chapter Three, sections three and four.
Husserl is actually much closer to Descartes on this point than he suggests in this text. For Descartes too notes that a pain sensation is an inner experience and certain only insofar as it is not referred to a part of the body or anything else existing outside the mind. See Principia philosophiæ, 22 and 32 (Part One, Articles 46 and 66-67). However, Descartes still differs from Husserl in believing that in at least some cases we can be absolutely certain about the nature of the external cause of a perception (e.g., in the case of primary qualities). It is this belief that allows him to draw the inner/outer distinction in terms of real causes rather than purely immanently, in terms of intentional reference.
Hua III 78/85–6 (Id I § 38).
Ibid., 91-2/100-1 (Id I § 44). Where Husserl equates immanence with adequacy, the new concept begins to take on all the ambiguity and relativity of the old. Thus we find Husserl speaking of a reduced physical phenomenon (the noema, as opposed to the noesis) as an immanent transcendent, by which he seems to mean: a phenomenon which is given adequately in some respects and some relations, but inadequately in others. The pure ego is another example of something asserted to be a ‘transcendence in immanence.’ See ibid., 124/138, 226-8/244-5 (Id I §§ 57, 97); Hua I 134-5 (CM § 47).
Hua III 203–4/220 (Id I § 88).
This point is stated by Husserl in a particularly clear way in Hua III 63-4/64 (Id I § 31). See also Hua I 60 (CM § 8).
Hua III 93–4/103 (Id I § 44). (“Auch ein Erlebnis ist nicht, und niemals, vollständig wahrgenommen, in seiner vollen Einheit ist es adäquat nicht faßbar. Es ist seinem Wesen nach ein Fluß, dem wir, den reflektiven Blick darauf richtend, von dem Jetztpunkte aus nachschwimmen können, während die zurückliegenden Strecken für die Wahrnehmung verloren sind. Nur in Form der Retention haben wir ein Bewußtsein des unmittelbar Abgeschlossenen, bzw. in Form der rückblickenden Wiedererinnerung.”)
See Hua XIX/2 597–8 (LU A 537/ß 65); and Chapter Three, p. 77-8 above.
Hua III 202/218 (Id I § 88). (“Auf der einen Seite haben wir also die Teile und Momente zu unterscheiden, die wir durch eine reelle Analyse des Erlebnisses finden, wobei wir das Erlebnis als Gegenstand behandeln wie irgendeinen anderen, nach seinen Stücken oder unselbständigen, ihn reell aufbauenden Momenten fragend. Andererseits ist aber das intentionale Erlebnis Bewußtsein von etwas, und ist es seinem Wesen nach, z.B. als Erinnerung, als Urteil, als Wille usw.; und so können wir fragen, was nach Seiten dieses ‘von etwas’ wesensmäßig auszusagen ist.”)
Hua IX 284. (“Z.B. die Phänomenologie der Körperwahrnehmung ist nicht ein Bericht über faktisch vorkommenden oder zu erwartenden Wahrnehmungen, sondern Herausstellung des invarianten Strukturensystems, ohne das Wahrnehmung eines Körpers und eine synthetisch zusammenstimmende Mannigfaltigkeit von Wahrnehmungen als solchen eines und desselben Körpers undenkbar wären.”)
Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 197/B 242. (“Wir haben Vorstellungen in uns, deren wir uns auch bewußt werden können. Dieses Bewußtsein mag so weit erstreckt, und so genau und pünktlich sein, als man wolle, so bleiben es doch immer nur Vorstellungen… Wie kommen wir nun dazu, daß wir diesen Vorstellungen ein Objekt setzen, oder über ihre subjektive Realität, als Modifikationen, ihnen noch, ich weiß nicht, was für eine, objektive beilegen? … Wenn wir untersuchen, was denn die Beziehung auf einen Gegenstand unseren Vorstellungen für eine neue Beschaffenheit gebe, und welches die Dignität sei, die sie dadurch erhalten, so finden wir, daß sie nichts weiter tue, als die Verbindung der Vorstellungen auf eine gewisse Art notwendig zu machen, und sie einer Regel zu unterwerfen; daß umgekehrt nur dadurch, daß eine gewisse Ordnung in dem Zeitverhältnisse unserer Vorstellungen notwendig ist, ihnen objektive Bedeutung erteilt wird.”)
See Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 233–40. In this argument Kant claims not only that if we subordinate the succession of apprehension to concept of causality, then our experience takes on a reference to an objective succession; but also that (1) our faculties actually do employ this concept; and (2) this is the only way that our experience of succession could take on an objective reference. It is these two latter claims that are particularly subject to the Husserlian charge — to be discussed in what follows — that Kant’s procedure is ‘hypothetical’.
Hua VI 116 and 118 (K § 30). (“In der Tat gerät Kant in eine eigene Art mythischer Reden, deren Wortsinn zwar auf Subjektives verweist, aber eine Weise des Subjektiven, die wir uns prinzipiell nicht anschaulich machen können, weder an faktischen Exempeln noch durch echte Analogie.… Hierzu bedürfte es einer grundwesentlich anderen regressiven Methode als der auf jenen fraglosen Selbstverständlichkeiten beruhenden Kants, nicht einer mythisch konstruktiv schließenden, sondern einer durchaus anschaulich erschließenden…”)
Ibid., 93-100 (K §25).
Ibid., 99-100 (K §25). For the view that Kant naïvely presupposes the validity of formal logic, see also Hua XVII 264ff. (FTL §100). That Kant does indeed presuppose the validity of mathematics is clear from his ‘transcendental’ argument for the ideality of space in the Transcendental Aesthetic (the third of the five ‘metaphysical’ arguments in the A edition, made into a separate section and entitled ‘transcendental’ in the B edition). Here Kant argues that if space were not ideal, we could have no necessary knowledge about it, and therefore the principles of geometry (e.g., there is always one and only one line connecting two points) would themselves be contingent, empirical truths, verified in experience up until now but not for all time. However, argues Kant, since the principles of geometry are necessary truths, space itself must be an a priori representation. This argument clearly just takes the validity of geometry itself (the necessary truth of its principles) to be beyond question. See Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 24/B 40-1.
This is an interpretation at least suggested by David Carr. In a footnote to his translation of the Crisis, Carr holds that according to Husserl, Hume is the more radical transcendental philosopher because Hume understands that the Seinssinn of the lifeworld is a subjective construction, whereas Kant does not, because his transcendentalism does not penetrate to the lifeworld. See The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated with an introduction by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) 69, n. 1.
Husserl frequently asserts that for Kant even the intuitively appearing world — the world prior to scientific knowledge — is a construct of the subjective faculties. See Hua VI 97-8, 102, 105 (K §§ 25, 27, 28). It is clear that this is also Kant’s own meaning: his own example in the Second Analogy of something ‘objective’ (and hence ‘constituted’ or subordinated to the rules of the subjective faculties) is the event of a boat moving downstream — hardly something from the world of mathematical physics.
It is difficult to judge on the basis of the Second Analogy alone whether Kant presupposes that at least some of our experience of objective events is valid, in the specified phenomenological sense of validity. However, I think a clue to Kant’s general position regarding the reality of the phenomenal world is to be found in the Refutation of Idealism. Here Kant attempts to provide a decisive proof that there really are objects and not merely subjective representations which are ‘as if’ of objects; or, in the language employed by us earlier, that we have some valid experience of objects. He does this by holding that consciousness of something ‘outer’ (i.e., of a phenomenal object) is a condition for ‘inner’ or subjective consciousness. (See Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 275-9.) Although this argument for the reality of the world could seem to show that Kant does not merely presuppose the validity of the world, I think that the very fact that Kant attempts a demonstration of the existence of the phenomenal world is actually an indication that he does presuppose its reality — for otherwise he would not be so thoroughly convinced that such a demonstration is possible. By contrast, Husserl maintains that the existence of the phenomenal world or any worldly object cannot be made certain, and correspondingly that any demonstration of the sort attempted in the Refutation of Idealism is bound to fail. Further, contrary to Kant’s position in the Refutation of Idealism, Husserl asserts that a consciousness which is not intentionally directed to a world is possible (or in Kantian terms, that there could be inner consciousness without consciousness of anything outer). See Hua III 103-6/114-7 (Id I § 49); Hua XVII 258 (FTL § 99).
Hua VI 117 (K § 30). Husserl generally interprets Kant as conceiving of the faculties as causal agencies, an interpretation which is questionable, especially in light of the Kantian arguments against rational psychology in the Paralogisms. However, Kant’s own language of ‘faculties’ and ‘affection’ makes it difficult to understand how the faculties are to be interpreted. For if the language of faculties is to be understood only functionally, as referring only to (phenomenally evident) activities which follow certain patterns, then it would be less misleading not to use this language at all.
See, for example, Hua III 133-4/148 (Id I §62), where Husserl holds “thus, for example, the Transcendental Deduction of the first edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft already really moves on phenomenological ground…” (“So bewegt sich z.B. die transzendentale Deduktion der ersten Auflage der Kritik der reinen Vernunft eigentlich schon auf phänomenologischem Boden … “) This opinion is repeated in the Crisis, Hua VI 106 (K § 28).
In his insistence that the foundation itself must be established purely by intuition, Husserl is actually closer to Descartes than to Kant. And in general, Husserl’s first principle that intuition is the ultimate source of all knowledge is a Cartesian and not a Kantian one.
For a similar analysis of the Husserlian a priori as grounded in meanings rather than subjective faculties, see Tugendhat, 164.
For Husserl’s characterization of his own method as a ‘questioning-back’ (@#@ ‘Rückfrage’) set Hua VI 170-1 (K § 49).
In agreement with this general interpretation, Tugendhat notes: “It is true that the Kantian a priori is relative to the human ego, but it holds good universally for this ego. By contrast, Husserl’s a priori — considered in itself — does indeed hold good absolutely, but then only relative to the given state of affairs, which is not itself necessary.” (“Kants Apriori ist zwar relativ auf das menschliche Ich, aber für dieses gilt es universal, während Husserls Apriori an sich zwar absolut gilt, aber nur relativ auf die jeweilige Sachhaltigkeit, die selbst nicht notwendig ist”), Tugendhat, 165.
Hua VII 356. (“[Kant] übersah, daß die Transzendentalphilosophie nichts anderes will und nichts anderes wollen darf, als den Sinn der Erkenntnis und ihrer Geltung aufklären und daß Aufklären hier nichts anderes heißt, als auf den Ursprung, auf die Evidenz zurückgehen, also auf das Bewußtsein, in dem sich alle Erkenntnisbegriffe intuitiv realisieren.”) In a similar vein, Husserl writes in the Crisis: “No objective truth, whether in the prescientific or in scientific sense, that is, no claim about objective being, ever enters into our scientific sphere, whether as a premise or as a consequence.” (“Keine objektive Wahrheit, ob in vorwissenschaftlichem oder wissenschaftlichem Sinne, bzw. keine Feststellung für objektives Sein tritt je in unserem Kreis der Wissenschaftlichkeit, ob nun als Prämisse oder als Folgerung ”), Hua VI 178-9 (K § 52]).
The treatment in Ideas I suggests but does not unequivocally state that adequacy and apodicticity entail one another. See Hua III 317-8/337-8 (Id I § 137). Mutual entailment is emphatically asserted in Erste Philosophie, Hua VIII 35, 334.
See, for example, Hua XVII 195-6 (FTL § 74).
Hua I 55 (CM § 6).
However, this detaching of apodicticity from adequacy should not be interpreted as a complete abandonment of adequacy as an epistemic desideratum. Intuitive givenness continues to remain an essential source of clarity and insight, even after the realization that complete givenness in the limit sense is impossible. The results of phenomenology have a high degree of adequacy, and a notably higher degree than those of other disciplines, and this constitutes one important sense in which its results are ‘absolute’. Further, it is with the means of phenomenology itself that the impossibility of perfect adequacy is demonstrated, and this stands as a proof of the strength of the method in establishing its own limits, rather than relying on other disciplines or approaches to do so. Thus after the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl’s claim that phenomenology is absolute must be interpreted as a claim both for the unusually high degree of its adequacy, and for the certainty of its results.
See, for example, Rorty, 166-9.
See, for example, Levin (op. cit.); Tugendhat (op. cit.); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1943); and Ludwig Landgrebe, “Husserls Abschied vom Cartesianismus,” Philosophische Rundschau 9 (1962), 133-77.
Hua XVII 164 and 165 (FTL §§ 58 and 59). (“Selbst eine sich als apodiktisch ausgebende Evidenz kann sich als Täuschung enthüllen und setzt doch dafür eine ähnliche Evidenz voraus, an der sie ‘zerschellt’.… Der beständige Anstoß, der bei dieser Darstellung empfunden werden dürfte, liegt nur an der üblichen grundverkehrten Interpretation der Evidenz vermöge des völligen Mangels einer ernstlichen phänomenologischen Analyse der durch alle ihre Formen gemeinsam hindurchgehenden Leistung.”)
This is the view of Landgrebe as well as Merleau-Ponty, who interprets the Formal and Transcendental Logic passage as follows: “The substance of what is said in Formal and Transcendental Logic (p. 142) is that there is no apodictic evidence.” (“Il n’y a pas d’évidence apodictique, dit en substance la Formale und transzendentale Logik, p. 142”), Phénoménologie de la perception, xi, n. 2. Tugendhat suggests that Husserl verged upon and should have abandoned apodicticity as an actual attainment, although he never quite could bring himself to do so. See Tugendhat, 195-6.
David Michael Levin, “A Critique of Husserl’s Theory of Adequate and Apodictic Evidence,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1967, 200–1. For a more cursory explanation of this distinction by Levin, see his Reason and Evidence in Husserl’s Phenomenology, 109-10.
Hua VIII 380. (“Eine apodiktische Erkenntnis vollkommen wiederholbar, in identischer Gültigkeit. Was einmal apodiktisch evident ist, ergibt nicht nur mögliche Wiedererinnerung, diese Evidenz gehabt zu haben, sondern Notwendigkeit der Geltung auch für jetzt, und so für immer: Endgültigkeit.”)
Levin, “A Critique of Husserl’s Theory of Adequate and Apodictic Evidence,” 183.
Levin, Reason and Evidence in Husserl’s Phenomenology, 84–5.
For a further discussion of the difference between psychological and ideal impossibilities of imagination, see Chapter Three, pp. 85 ff. above. For the issue of the role of the subjective faculties, see section 1.2 of this chapter, especially pp. 118 ff., and section 3.1 below.
Levin, Reason and Evidence in Husserl’s Phenomenology, 109.
See note 6 on page 24.
Perhaps the archetypical example of such a realist student of Husserl’s phenomenology is Färber, who protests as follows against Husserl’s unrelenting refusal to admit without bracketing into the phenomenological realm what stand for empiricism as basic truths: “To retort that this is ‘naïve’ or a ‘dogma’, as Husserl insisted, is an indication of the astonishing length to which a philosopher confined to his special ‘cave’ could go. Surely it is not naïve or dogmatic to refer to Husserl’s own parents as antedating his revered ‘phenomenological reduction’” (Farber, viii). However, Färber refuses to recognize that Husserl’s epistemic requirements are far more stringent than those of empiricism. In light of these requirements, the simple belief asserted above, while reasonable in its own way, is indeed naïve.
A similar objection to the Husserlian account is raised by Heidegger in his notes to the Encyclopedia Britannica article, although in a phenomenological rather than an empiricist or objectivist form. Here Heidegger argues that the self is always and everywhere really a human self, even where this self carries out the epoché or employs other special methods of self-interpretation. Thus, for example, where Husserl writes of the non-humanity of the self after the epoché: “If I carry out [the epoché] in relation to myself, then I am not a human self…” (“Tue ich so für mich selbst, so bin ich also nicht menschliches Ich …”); Heidegger objects: “Why not? Is not this activity a possibility of a human being?” (“Warum nicht? Ist dieses Tun nicht eine Möglichkeit des Menschen … ?”). See Hua IX 274-5 and 275, n. 2 Heidegger’s objection differs from the empiricist one in that his notion of the human self (Dasein) is allegedly won purely phenomenologically, from an ‘eidetic’ analysis of what it is to exist as a self, rather than being dogmatically taken over from anthropology, biology, or history. Heidegger claims that a phenomenological analysis of the ‘constituting’ self itself reveals that traits such as mortality, facticity and historicity belong to Dasein’s essence, traits which therefore cannot be removed by the epoché. However, there is clearly a paradox in attempting to derive a relativist conclusion from the Heideggerian position: if the results of phenomenology are only relatively true, then so is his existential analytic of Dasein, phenomenological demonstration of facticity, and all the rest. The question of whether transcendental subjectivity is indeed conditioned and contingent even considered purely phenomenologically will be taken up in greater detail in the next chapter (see pp. 181 ff. below).
Or more precisely, to ‘be’ intersubjective is to be capable of maximally evident constitution as intersubjective, independently of whether this intersubjectivity is in fact intended or not.
See especially Hua I 138–41,143-5 (CM §§ 50, 52).
Scheler challenges the view (defended by Husserl) that the self and its experiences are what are given primarily, and my apprehension of the thoughts and feelings of others are constituted only on the basis of my own. Rather, Scheler maintains that at the most basic level of experience — the level which forms the constitutional foundation for experience of the other — there is no differentiation between ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. Thus at this level all thoughts and feelings (including those which may eventually be assigned to another self) are given with equal immediacy. Further, to the claim that all of these thoughts and feelings, including those eventually assigned to another, must also be assigned to me, as my experience of the thoughts and feelings of another, Scheler replies that this ‘me’ is a purely formal unity of consciousness, not something experienced, nor my ‘own’ self, which latter can be constituted only in contrast to some ‘other’ self. See Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, edited with an afterward by Manfred S. Frings, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7 (Berlin and Munich: Francke Verlag, 1973), 238-40, especially the note on page 240. I think Scheler is actually in agreement with Husserl in his claim that at the ‘ultimate’ level, the level at which all others and references to others have been bracketed, there is no distinction between ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. This is the implicit meaning of the assertion in the Crisis that the transcendental ego (the ego after the others have been bracketed) is called T only by equivocation — i.e., because there is no ‘Thou’ to whom it could be contrasted. (Hua VI 188 [K § 54 b]). However, contra Scheler, this T is not merely a formal unity and nothing experienced, nor is there no self or self-experience without experience of the other. Rather, even without the experience of other subjects, the self is experienced as the unitary awareness persisting through the flow of perspectival presentations, and which grasps these as presentations of something which endures. Thus intentionality itself, as directedness towards objects rather than Erlebnisse (the cogitata rather than the cogitatio) is sufficient to give an ego-experience. (See Hua I 134-5 [CM § 47] and Hua VI 173-5, 188-9 [K §§ 50, 54 b].) Of course, this is not a full ego-experience in the sense of ‘one ego among many’, much less ‘a person in the world, a possible object of experience for others’. These latter ego-experiences are possible only on the basis of the (constitutionally prior) experience of the other. However, Husserl’s point is asserting the priority of the self to the other is to claim that ego-experience in the former, less complete sense is prior to other-experience. This claim is not refuted by Scheler’s critique.
Hua I 139 (CM §51).
A complete pessimism about the possibility of knowledge of the intentional life of the other is characteristic of Sartre. According to Sartre, I apprehend the other-as-subject (as opposed to the other-as-object) solely as an absence, a ‘hemorrhage’ in the world. See L’être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), especially 312-4 and 354. But Sartre is not able to show that simply because the mode of givenness of the other’s intentional life is different from the mode of givenness of objects or of my own intentional life, this givenness always amounts to no more than the registering that something (i.e., the thoughts of the other) is not given. This could sometimes be the case, as when, for example, another person is speaking a foreign or unintelligible language. However, in general the intentional life of others is given with far more content than this, and this content is also reasonably evident.
Ofcourse Kant maintains that space and time are forms of intuition for human subjectivity and not necessarily for other types of subjectivity, such as God. (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 27/B 43, B 72.) Husserl’s objection against this position is that not only do we not have the intuitive insight into the allegedly atemporal divine subjectivity necessary to justify claims that it is indeed atemporal (as Kant himself admits), but it can be shown that the givenness of an atemporal experience is in principle impossible. Where all intuitive givenness is impossible, assertions are too speculative to be admissible in the light of critical thinking.
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Soffer, G. (1991). Phenomenology and the Absolute. In: Husserl and the Question of Relativism. Phaenomenologica, vol 122. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3178-0_4
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